Kitai glanced aside, her eyes focused on nothing. “Yes. For now. And... pleased with his own cleverness, may The One help us.” She blinked and looked back at Fidelias. “Quick. What is the absolute worst place in this Valley one could go? The most insanely suicidal place to be found? The place where only a great fool would venture—and only an insane fool would follow?”

Fidelias responded at once and found himself speaking in chorus with the Ambassador as they both said, “Garados.”

“He is there,” Kitai said. And without another word she turned, leapt into the air, and vanished behind a veil as she raised a windscreen and shot off into the open sky. Half a dozen vordknights dropped into her flight path, hoping to intercept her even though they couldn’t see her.

Their wings burst into flame, and they went plunging to their deaths on the ground below.

Fidelias exhaled slowly. Then he turned back to the business of battle, redeploying their new assets, though he knew that their position could not long be held against such numbers, not for more than a few hours.

But he had a feeling he had done all that he could.

His eyes drifted in the direction of Garados. Somewhere on the cold, hard slopes of that mountain, a young man was pitting all the strength and cunning and brilliance of a thousand-year dynasty against the intelligence and remorseless power at the heart of the world-eating vord.

And, like everyone else, all Fidelias could do was wait to see what happened.

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 56

From a distance the mountain was undeniably beautiful: tall and imposing, crowned with snow and ice. But the closer one got to it, the more a sense of malevolent, hostile presence seemed to grow. Tavi had encountered the mountain’s ire once before—and what he had felt that day had been nowhere near this oppressively bleak. Garados wasn’t simply surly and resentful this time.

The vast fury was absolutely enraged.

The thunderclouds gathering around its peak were growing darker by the moment, as though they had drawn the night into themselves as it waned. Thana Lilvia, the vast wind fury that came sweeping down off the Sea of Ice and over the Calderon Valley, was making a show of force today, gathering her herds as usual near her husband. Flashes of lightning in wildly varying colors lashed constantly through the clouds, and even from miles away, Tavi could see the gliding, looping, sinister forms of windmanes, windmanes by the score, prowling the mountain’s slopes.

A low thread of fear ran down Tavi’s throat, and he swallowed it as manfully as he could. He had seen windmanes kill, and it had been terrifying. But for a stroke of good luck, they would have torn him to shreds as they had that luckless deer.