Tavi seized it, took a steadying breath, and drew on the weapon. It didn’t move at first, but he didn’t dare turn this into an exercise of brute strength. He increased the pressure slowly, gently, until the weapon abruptly slid free of the stone behind him. It raised sparks from his armor as Tavi pulled it carefully from his flesh.

He gave the vordblade a little toss so that it landed on the far side of the pit. Then he focused on his own body, finding the wound, a narrow and reasonably minor injury in its own right. But the tissues around the wound, all the way through his body, were swelling as though they meant to burst.

Tavi ground his teeth, focused his will, and stopped them from growing any worse. To some degree, the swelling was an advantage—it kept him from bleeding too hideously, for the moment. But he could feel his body’s own unwitting rebellion in progress, a toxin-induced physical frenzy in his blood that would kill him in minutes if allowed to run its course.

Minutes suddenly seemed an endless amount of time. If he could move fast enough, he could end the Vord War in seconds.

Tavi reached for more strength from the earth beneath him and used it to spring from the pit in a single leap, taking in his surroundings as he did. There was a circle of blackened, smoking earth around the top of the pit, the ground glazed to dirty glass, presumably from the firecrafting launched at the Queen when she appeared. There were dozens of other pits in sight, and the sounds of desperate struggle. Corpses, clad both in chitin and Legion armor, littered the ground. The earthcrafters had attacked like ant lions, opening a sinkhole beneath their targets and drawing them down into close combat, where the enslaved Citizens would have all the advantages. The loose soil would slow Tavi’s people and make them vulnerable to the vicious physical strength of the attackers. Old Maestro Magnus stood on his wooden stool, beating frantically at his beard, which had somehow been set on fire—but, rendered invisible to the subterranean attackers by his precarious perch, he was thus far unhurt.

Tavi landed lightly, on his toes, just as a chitin-armored man wielding an enormously oversized sword swept it in a deadly arc toward Varg.

The Cane caught the fury-assisted blow with a perfect deflection parry, redirecting the vast power of the strike, sliding it away at an angle instead of pitting the raw strength of his bloodred steel directly against the Aleran’s greatsword. The Cane flowed forward and to one side in the wake of the huge sword’s passing, graceful for all his tremendous size and weight, and struck cleanly, once.