“So I have gathered,” Riva said. He looked at Bernard, and said, “I have to admit, I think he’s probably the right choice for running the defenses here. He knows them better than anyone else in the Realm, after all.”

“Yes, he does,” Amara said.

“Rather remarkable man, really. Do you know, he’s never once said, ‘I told you so.’ ”

“He isn’t the sort to think such things are important,” Amara said, smiling. “But, Your Grace... he told you so.”

Lord Riva blinked at her, then let out a rueful chuckle. “Yes. He did, didn’t he?”

“Riders!” cried a lookout at the corner of the tower, pointing.

The Aleran pickets who had been watching for the approach of the vord appeared at the top of a distant hill, riding their horses hard down its slope and onto the open plain. Vordknights swarmed over them like night insects around a furylamp, sweeping down to strike and rake, while arrows leapt up from the scouts, with only limited success in warding away the attackers.

“Those men are in trouble,” Riva said.

Bernard raised his fingers to his lips and let out a piercing whistle. He lifted his hand to the Knights Aeris waiting behind the wall and gave them the flier’s hand signals for “lift off,” “escort,” and with a slashing movement of his wrist indicted the direction they were to travel.

In a roar of wind, thirty Knights Aeris swept into the sky and shot toward the riders, to begin herding the vordknights from the fleeing horses with the blasts of their windstreams. They sent the enemy fliers tumbling for a moment or two, not closing to weapons range when they could simply scatter the enemy through the sky like so many dry leaves. They took up position over the scouts, circling protectively above them in an airborne carousel.

Bernard grunted satisfaction. “Like what Aquitaine did at Ceres. No reason to fight the bloody things and lose valuable Knights Aeris. Just get them out of the bloody way.”

The vordknights retreated after a desultory pursuit in which they were simply cast back and completely neutralized by the windstreams of the fliers. The riders came thundering in through a gate crafted into the wall near the command platform. The leader of the riders, a man wearing a woodsman’s green and brown and grey leathers, swung down from his horse and moved with quick purpose toward Bernard, throwing him a crisp Legion salute though he wore neither armor nor sword. Rufus Marcus had been part of the cohort of legionares who had first encountered the vord, years ago, as well as being a survivor of Second Calderon. Like Giraldi, he wore two stripes of the Order of the Lion on his breeches, though they had been so thoroughly muddied that one could hardly tell that they had originally been red.

Bernard returned the salute. “Tribune. What are we looking at?”