Brotherhood of the Wolf

34 Anders

Years of worry had gnawed at King Anders. Those years had left the flesh hanging slack on Anders’s tall, spare frame.

Yet as he lay abed, his eyes staring past the canopy above him, he felt no fear. A deep calm coursed through him, like a refreshing drink of water from a mountain stream. The world was about to change.

Anders stepped out of bed, threw off his robes, and stood naked for a moment. His rooms were in the highest tower of his keep, and the balcony door and windows were all wide open. A cool, titillating breeze breathed through the room, stirring the thin summer curtains.

Anders’s wife reached out, pawed at his pillow, as if she sought to find him in her dreams. He brushed back the dark hair from her right temple and whispered, “Sleep.”

Immediately her whole body slackened, and she dropped into a heavy slumber.

A strong gust of wind lashed at the curtains, entered the room and began to circle. Though the wind was invisible, its movements were palpable.

Anders spread his arms wide in welcome, felt the wind encompassing him, brushing under his arms, delicious to the senses.

He let the wind move him, lead him out to the balcony of his keep.

There, gargoyles splotched crimson, yellow, and metallic green with lichens hunched on the merlons and stared down to the courtyard two hundred feet below.

King Anders leapt lightly to the nearest merlon, teetered upon it a moment, then caught his balance.

He stared out at the night sky until—sure enough—he saw three shooting stars streak overhead in rapid succession.

He took it as a sign. He was not sure of its meaning, but he felt comforted by it, just as he felt comforted by the wind gushing around the tower.

Here, so high above the city, the wind was stronger than anywhere below. It moved forcefully, pleasingly, stirring the hair of his body, tightening his nipples. It seethed across the distant plains below, buffeted him and teased him.

The city just outside the castle gates was silent at this time of night. The streets down in the merchant quarter were empty tonight.

Aroused, King Anders began to circle the tower, leaping lightly from merlon to merlon. Some dark corner of his brain knew that he must look mad. If any of his guardsmen were to spot him, or some inhabitant of his realm up late of night, they would have been astonished to see him leaping in the darkness upon the merlons of his tower, braving death with every step.

He did not care.

Sensation had its own logic. He liked risking death at every step. For years he had been consumed by worry, but in the past few months, he’d begun to overcome all fear.

Now he leapt swiftly, running ever faster. For a king with endowments of brawn and grace and metabolism, it was not a particularly dangerous feat

Yet as he ran, he felt the danger. For often his feet scraped the lichens from the bare stone, so that his footing felt slippery and unsure, or the power in his legs brought him teetering on the edge.

Ah, to plunge! he thought in those moments. Ah, to be surrounded by air!

The urge was strong in him, so strong that King Anders could deny it no longer.

He raced to a merlon, stepped on the hunched back of a gargoyle, and threw himself with all his might from his tower.

He plummeted, his legs still pumping, arms spread wide like an eagle’s wings, his eyes half-closed in ecstasy.

And then he recognized his peril.

What of it? he thought. What of death? Even if he died, this taste of Air, this liveliest of breaths, was worth the price.

He looked to the west as he fell. The wind there stiffed the fields, heaved toward him.

It rushed over the hills at a hundred miles per hour, perhaps two hundred, and then screamed above the city roofs.

King Anders closed his eyes, prepared to meet doom. His stomach rose into his chest as he fell.

Five feet from the ground, the wind caught him. It swirled around his torso, lifted him. It fondled his hair and his skin.

Anders opened his eyes, grinning fiercely.

He stared into a whirlwind. A veritable tornado was taking shape before him. Yet its base did not shift and writhe Nor did it roar in its fury, but instead breathed as quietly as a sleeping babe.

Silently it whirled, drawing dust up from the city streets. Near its crest, Anders could see stars through the maelstrom as if they were eyes. The monstrous wind held Anders in its hands, lifted him high overhead.

Over the past months, Anders had dreamed of this possibility, had yearned for it. He’d hoped for it only distantly.

Anders cried aloud, “Well met!,” and he laughed with sheer pleasure.

35 The Food That Satisfies

Averan clawed her way up from her shallow grave: Night lay thick on the village. Her stomach ached for want of food, but something more pernicious assailed her.

As a child of three, when the King decided to make her a skyrider, she’d been granted an endowment of brawn, one of stamina, and one of wit.

She’d always felt strong and tireless, and been able to remember things well. Now, she felt weak in both body and mind. Her thoughts seemed clouded.

I’m a commoner, she realized. Someone killed my Dedicates today.

It must have been horrible. Averan had flown over the Blue Tower on her way to the Courts of Tide many times. The enormous castle sitting out there in the ocean had always seemed so vast, so strong. She couldn’t imagine anyone overthrowing it.

But she knew in her heart that someone had taken the Blue Tower, and in the darkness she felt forlorn and desolate, more than ever in her whole life, more even than when she’d had to leave Brand and everyone else at Keep Haberd.

I’m just a girl now, she thought. I’m a commoner, like everyone else. I’ll never ride a graak again.

At the age of nine, her life had just ended.

Without her endowments, she imagined that she had no future.

She wanted to lie in the dirt and cry, but remembered something Brand used to say. “Riding a graak isn’t easy. If you fall off, the first thing to do is to make sure that no bones are broken. Even if they are, you might have to get up and climb back on to fly to safety. If you can’t do that, you’ll never be a skyrider.”

Averan had fallen from her graak on landing a dozen times. She’d always gotten up.

Now, though she felt more desolate than ever, she merely bit her lip and looked around.

The dark, deserted village seemed much changed. The walnut trees lining the road hunched like sinister old men, and Averan worried about what might be hiding in their shadows. The cozy cottages, with their thatch roofs and hide windows now seemed as stark as tombs in the starlight.

The girl rose, and the air carried the scent of cool dampness. A strong wind lashed the ground. She pulled on her clothes.

The green woman climbed from her shallow grave and searched the sky longingly, squinting at the wind. “Blood?” she begged.

“I don’t know where you can get any blood,” Averan said. “You can’t have mine. Here, let’s find something to eat.”

Averan gave the green woman her bearskin coat so that she wouldn’t be naked.

Then Averan began looking through the garden for something to eat. As she got down on her knees, she told herself, Don’t worry if you’ve lost your endowments. Just count yourself lucky. After all, you’re not the one who died.

The garden soil was loose and well tended. Though the folks who had planted the garden had dug up the vegetables and carted them off, they’d done so hastily.

Earlier, Averan had seen a few small carrots and turnips still in the ground; the grape vine that climbed the stone fence still held a few grapes. She felt sure that so long as she stayed in the village, she’d be able to forage for enough food to keep her going for a day or so. She imagined that she’d find a few apples, pears, and plums on the ground by the trees.

Averan got on her knees, looking in the starlight for sign of the carrot leaves. As she crawled through the soil, she felt for the carrots rather than looked for them, since she knew the touch of their feathery leaves. She brushed the top of one carrot, but somehow knew without grasping its base that it was too small to eat. It would be stunted, thin and bitter.

Yet a moment later, she felt the urge to grasp in the soil at a spot where no carrot top protruded. When she did, she found a nice big carrot, hidden there in the dirt. Someone had tried to pull it from the ground and had only managed to rip off the top leaves. With a bit of wiggling, she pulled out a carrot as long as her forearm.

She held it, wondering how she’d known it was there.

For her part, the green woman gaped fearfully up at the sky. Each time the wind buffeted her, the green woman gasped in surprise and whipped about, as if afraid that some invisible hand had touched her.

Averan showed her prize to the green lady. “Carrot,” she said. “Carrot. Tastes pretty good, like blood, but it doesn’t run away when you try to catch it.”

She held it for the green woman to see in the thin starlight, then took a big bite. The carrot was still dirty, but to Averan the dirt tasted as sweet as the carrot She offered the green woman a bite.

The green woman bit off the end, then knelt on her haunches, chewing thoughtfully like a pup that has just discovered its first shoe.

Averan swallowed her prize quickly, and wanted more. She closed her eyes, crawled ahead in the garden half a second, trying to sense another carrot.

In moments, she found another with its top torn off, just as big as the first. She pulled it. The green woman inched over, looked at Averan’s carrot. In near total darkness, she pulled another that had been hidden from Averan’s view.

Of course she can find them, too, Averan realized. We are creatures of the Earth now, and the Earth knows where its treasures are hid. “All the fruits of the forest and of the field” are ours.

Something odd was happening. Though she’d lost her endowments, she’d gained something else.

I’m not a commoner, she decided. Not with green blood flowing through my veins.

Averan added some parsnips to her hoard, then walked under the trees at the side of the house, where she quickly “found” figs that had fallen in tall grass where others couldn’t see them. She soon added to her repast some mushrooms and hazelnuts.

When she had enough food, she led the green lady in the darkness to a large building at the center of town, some kind of guildhall or storehouse. Perhaps in the winter it served as a marketplace sheltered from the wind and rain. Or it may have been a songhouse built with a high roof so that the singer’s voices would echo and fill the room. Now the building was empty, its huge doors thrown wide.

The green woman padded quietly behind Averan until they reached the open door. The doors were large enough so that a pair of hay wagons could easily drive through them into the building.

Averan peeked in. She could see nothing. But immediately she heard the desperate shrieks and whistles of ferrin. In moments, twenty of the hairy little man-shaped creatures raced from the building, seeking escape, afraid that Averan might try to kill them.

One ferrin ran over Averan’s foot and tripped, rolled head over tail, spilling some crumbs that it carried in a scrap of cloth. Averan could have booted it across the street, but though she’d never liked ferrin, she’d never wished one dead, either.

“If the ferrin like it here, then this place should be safe,” Averan assured the green woman.

“If the ferrin like it here, then this place should be safe,” the green woman repeated.

Averan crept into the huge building. In its rafters high above, pigeons cooed querulously.

“I’ll bet the ferrin were after those birds,” Averan said In the pale light slanting in from the door, she spotted a pile of feathers on the floor. “Looks like they got one.”

The green woman prowled over to the pile of feathers, sniffed at it “Blood, no?”

“I wouldn’t eat it,” Averan agreed: “Blood, no.”

The green woman looked mournful. She squatted on the floor and began munching a parsnip.

Averan sat next to her and gazed all about. Averan really had no idea what to do with her life, or where to go. She knew only that she wanted to get north.

She closed her eyes, imagined the big maps in the graak’s aerie back home.

She felt the Earth King now, blazing like a green gem. But when she felt for him, her voice caught in her throat. “The Earth King is coming south!” she said. “He’s come a long way already!”

Averan tied to eat some mushrooms. Even though they were fresh and nutty-tasting, they didn’t satisfy. Her stomach craved something else. Aside from a crust of bread that Baron Goutgut had spared her last night, she hadn’t eaten in two days. The mushrooms seemed somehow dry and without substance.

Averan nibbled at a fig, but didn’t much care for it, either. She wanted better food. She craved a steak, sweet and juicy.

Averan reached into the little purse at her side and got out her wooden comb, began combing the garden soil from her hair. The green woman watched her with unabashed curiosity. When Averan finished her own hair, she took the comb to the green woman.

“Comb,” Averan said, showing her the item. “I’m going to comb your hair.”

“My hair,” the green woman said. Averan grinned. The green woman had more than repeated, she’d showed that she understood the difference between “mine” and “yours.”

“You are a smart one,” Averan said. “Beast master Brand used to have a crow that could talk, but it only repeated foolishness, and it died anyway. I don’t care what Baron Roly-Poly says, you’re smarter than a crow.”

“I are a smart one,” the green woman agreed

Averan began trying to comb the green woman’s hair, but the green woman kept moving her head around, trying to look up at the comb.

“Keep still,” Averan said, holding the green woman’s head for a moment.

She tried to distract the creature. “I think we should name you something, don’t you? My name is Averan. And Roland’s name is Roland, and Baron Poll is Baron Poll, even if I like to call him nastier things. Everyone has names. Would you like a name?”

“What...name?” the green woman asked. Averan stopped combing, wondered if the green woman really understood the question. It seemed impossible that she could understand.

“I don’t know what to name you,” Averan said. “You have green skin, so I suppose I could call you Greenie.” It was the first thing she thought of.

When Averan was little, she used to play with a five-year-old girl named Autumn Brown who lived down in Keep Haberd. Autumn had a white cat named Whitey and a red hound named Red. And Autumn’s hair was brown, so the last name Brown fit her well enough. But Averan thought it was really stupid to name everything after its color.

“How do you like the name Olive, or Emerald? I know a woman named Emerald. If you squint, you can sort of see that she has greenish skin. But you’re a much prettier green than she is.”

The green woman listened to each name, and tried them on her tongue, but did not seem impressed

“How about Spinach?” Averan joked.

“Spinach?” the green woman said thoughtfully.

“It’s a plant, a kind of lettuce.” Averan finished combing the snarls from the green woman’s hair. The green woman hadn’t yelped or complained even once. “There, I’m all done. Don’t worry, we’ll come up with a name that fits you true.

The green woman grabbed Averan’s hand “True name?” the green woman asked in a strange tone, as if she had just remembered something. “True name?”

Averan paused. Magical creatures had true names, names that must never be spoken in public, lest an enemy learn it.

“Yes, true name,” Averan said. My true name is Averan. Your true name is...?” The green woman looked up, but in the shadows, Averan could not really make out her features. The green woman chanted in a commanding tone, “Arise now from the dust, my champion! Clothe yourself in flesh. I call you by your true name: Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer.”

Averan stepped back. The green woman’s tone, her whole demeanor, had changed so completely as she spoke that she seemed to be another person. Averan knew the green woman was repeating something she had heard, repeating it exactly. If Averan had doubted that the green woman was magical—if she’d thought even for an instant that she was but an oddly colored woman from some distant realm beyond the Caroll Sea—that doubt was now erased.

Averan didn’t want to look afraid, so she stepped close again and stroked the green woman’s hair. She didn’t particularly like the sound of the green woman’s name: Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer.

If the green woman was indeed a “Foul Deliverer,” a “Fair Destroyer,” whom was she meant to deliver, and what would she destroy?

“That’s a nice true name,” Averan assured the green woman. “But I think we should come up with something shorter. I’ll call you Spring from now on. Spring.” Averan touched the green woman as she spoke the name.

A strong gust of wind slammed the huge building, and one vast door swung on its squeaky hinges. Averan hadn’t known the building had a chimney, but suddenly she heard the wind moan up its stone throat.

The green woman leapt to her feet and shouted wordlessly in rage or terror.

“It’s only the wind,” Averan said. “It won’t hurt you. I think a storm is coming.”

“Wind?” the green woman asked. “Wind?” She backed to the far side of the room. Averan followed, found the green woman huddled in a corner.

“Good girl,” Averan said calmly. “This is a good place. The wind won’t find us here.”

Averan put her arms around the green woman. The powerful creature felt as if her muscles were made of iron, yet she shook from terror.

Averan had nowhere to go and nothing to do. She held the green woman and sang a lullaby. Averan’s mother used to sing lullabies when Averan was young, so Averan now sang:

“The wind blows wild tonight,

sweet and wild tonight.

It shakes the trees,

but don’t let it shake your knees.

It’s only the wind, my child, good night.”

The green woman didn’t go to sleep. Averan felt more hungry than tired herself, so she talked to the green woman long into the night, telling her stories and the names for things, trying to teach the green woman to speak, while keeping her calm and distracted.

Near dawn, the green woman slapped her hand over Averan’s mouth, as if warning her to shut up.

Every muscle in the green woman’s body tensed, and she climbed to one knee and sniffed the air. “Blood, yes,” she whispered longingly.

Averan’s heart began thumping.

Raj Ahten’s men are outside, Averan thought. The green woman smells Invincibles.

Averan looked all around the building. It was huge and empty. It offered nowhere to hide, only shelter from the wind.

But the building’s support posts were made of thick oak, and heavy beams crisscrossed the posts every few feet. The beams formed a sort of ladder that led up to the rafters where the pigeons roosted.

If a ferrin can climb those beams in the dark, Averan thought I can, too.

She went to the wall, put her hands on the nearest beam, which was chest high, and climbed on top of it, then continued up to the next and the next.

She was surprised at how hard it was to climb, without her endowment of brawn. It was dangerous work. Muddauber wasps had built nests on some of the beams, and cobwebs were everywhere. The rough-hewn beams had big splinters in them.

Averan worried that she might get stung by a wasp, or bitten by a spider, or cut her hand.

Worse yet, she could lose her grip and fall.

In less than a minute she scurried thirty feet up the wall to the juncture of the rafters.

Here, no starlight made its way into the building at all. She felt secure in such total darkness, though she had to find the rafters and climb onto them by feel alone.

“Spring,” Averan whispered, “come up here.”

The green woman remained crouched on the floor, like a cat ready to spring. If she understood Averan’s plea, she did not show it. She looked instead as if she would hunt, and this frightened Averan.

How strong could the green woman possibly be? Averan wondered. The green woman had fallen thousands of feet from the sky without getting killed or badly hurt—but she did bleed.

If she met one of Raj Ahten’s Invincibles, would she stand a chance against him? What if she met a whole bunch of them?

The green woman might be as strong as an Invincible, but she was not a trained warrior with endowments of metabolism.

Against a faster opponent, she’d be killed in seconds.

“Please, Spring!” Averan whispered. “Come and hide.”

But Spring remained wary. “Blood, yes,” she growled fiercely.

The green woman’s hunger made Averan’s mouth water: She’d wanted the taste of blood yesterday morning, when she’d looked at the assassin’s corpse on the hillside. Now, though carrots and parsnips partly filled Averan’s belly, Averan thought longingly of the assassin, and hoped that the green woman would kill someone.

No, I don’t hope that, Averan told herself. I don’t want blood.

“Spring, get up here right now!” Averan whispered. But immediately Averan heard a sound that made her blood chill. Outside the building a hissing erupted, a dry buzz deeper in tone than that of a rattlesnake, a sound she’d heard only once before—the sound a reaver makes as air rattles through the chitinous flaps under its abdomen. At Keep Haberd, Averan had flown low over the reavers. She had heard tens of thousands of them making that rattling all at once.

Now she heard only one, exhaling slowly, just outside the door.

It must have followed me from Keep Haberd! Averan thought wildly. Then, more reasonably, she reminded herself that it couldn’t possibly be true. I rode most of the way on old Leatherneck, she told herself. Even reavers couldn’t have trailed me. No, this has to be some sort of scout.

Averan had heard that reavers often sent out scouts. She also knew that reavers preferred to hunt on warm, sultry nights, when the weather most closely mimicked the conditions of their lairs in the Underworld. Tonight it was moist and cool, not reaver weather at all.

She’d also heard that reavers hunted by sound, scent, and motion. If she stayed here in the rafters and did not speak or move, she might be safe.

She yearned to yell a warning to the green woman below, but dared not so much as whisper.

Outside the building, the reaver hissed.

The green woman raised her head and shouted in delight; then she leapt up and raced to meet it.

The reaver charged to the huge open doors.

It stood some twenty feet at the shoulder, so that even though Averan hid in the rafters above it, she could have leapt on its back without getting hurt.

Its huge leathery head was as big as the bed of a large wagon, and rows and rows of crystalline teeth filled its mouth. Reavers had no eyes or ears or nose, but along the back of its head, feelers fanned out like snakes. Runes of power were tattooed onto its head, on its forehead and in columns near its leathery upper lips. The runes shone silver in the darkness, glowing with their own ghostlight.

The reaver’s four long legs were dark and thin and gleamed like bone. Its huge forearms had three-toed hands with great claws, each claw curved like an assassin’s khivar and just as long.

The reaver bore a weapon in its foreclaws, an enormous blade with a hilt of crystal, as if carved from reaver bone. The sword’s thick blade was slightly curved and three times the length of a man.

The reaver hissed and swung the blade overhead in a great arc, as if to bring it crashing down upon the green woman, but the blade bit deep into a rafter beam just a few yards from Averan, then stuck, hanging over the green woman’s head.

The green woman shouted in glee and raced toward the reaver.

Involuntarily, Averan shouted, “Spring, stop!”

But the green woman did not stop. She merely drew a rune in the air, a couple of quick movements of the hand, and then raced forward.

When she slapped the reaver’s jaw, the effect was astonishing: there was a clap like thunder, and shards of crystalline bone exploded through the reaver’s flesh.

Averan gasped. Nothing should do that, she told herself. No warhammer or maul—even if it were wielded by a warrior with twenty endowments of brawn—could have dealt a reaver such a fearsome blow.

But Averan had seen it clearly in the starlight.

The reaver hissed in pain and tried to lurch backward, but could hardly move.

The green woman leapt at it, and, slapped the reaver’s face again, to the same effect. The sound of the blow echoed from the rafters.

This time the reaver shuddered and dropped lifeless to the ground.

The green woman climbed atop it, stuck a slender arm deep into the reaver’s leathery head, and pulled out a handful of its brains.

Ichor streamed from the reaver’s wounds.

It was said that a reaver had no scent of its own, but only tried to mimic the scents of those things around it

Yet as Averan stood clinging to the rafters in terror, she realized that the green woman had smelled the reaver.

In the closed room, the stench of the reaver’s ichor was overwhelming, and now Averan could smell it, rich and sweet. She had not eaten much for days. Even the food she’d tried had not satisfied her, and she’d thought she craved a nice juicy steak.

Now her mouth watered as if she were a starving thing who had seldom seen a crust of bread.

She knew what she needed, what she craved.

Averan scrambled down the support beams of the huge shed, too excited to sit still. She wanted to wet herself in terror, for the scent of reaver blood was so alluring that she knew she could not resist, not now, not ever again.

Reavers. She needed to eat reavers. But unlike the green woman, Averan had no way to kill her own.

She raced to the corpse.

“Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer,” the green woman had called herself. Now Averan knew what she had been created to destroy.

And dimly Averan understood a bit more of her own destiny. The green woman’s blood now flowed through Averan’s veins, and somehow they had become one in nature. Averan could not resist the impulse to climb atop the reaver, thrust in her own hands and eat greedily from the sweet meat that rested warm and juicy inside the reaver’s crystalline skull.

“Mmm...mmm,” the green woman crooned as she fed. “Blood, yes.”

“Blood, yes,” Averan agreed as she shoved meat into her mouth.

She knew some lore about reavers. Averan knew that when a reaver died, its kinsmen consumed it. As they did, they took upon themselves the reaver’s lore of magic, and its strength, so that the oldest reavers, those that had fed most on their younger kin, became the greatest: the most powerful sorcerers, the most valiant warriors.

Finally Averan had found a food that satisfied, that sent the blood quickening through her veins. Even as Averan sated herself with the sweet meat of her first reaver, she felt herself responding to it.

This shouldn’t happen, Averan told herself. People don’t get strong from eating reavers. People don’t get anything but sick from eating reavers. I’m not a reaver.

Yet she glutted herself and thanked the earth powers for this gift.

36 Targets in the Dark

As the watchman blew the horns calling for Gaborn’s troops to prepare to mount up, Myrrima felt restless. She felt eager to ride to Carris. The midnight ride would be stimulating, and she was glad she would have to carry only two pups with her now, rather than four.

So she saddled her mount, then began doing the same to Iome’s. Her pups played in the stable as she worked, running about, sniffing at each horse’s stall, chasing one another’s tails.

She had just bridled and blanketed Iome’s mount when Jureem entered the stables. “Do not bother,” he said in his thick Taifan accent. “Her Majesty pleases not to ride tonight, but instead will wait for tomorrow.”

“Dawn?” Myrrima asked. That would waste six hours.

“Later,” Jureem answered. “At dawn she plans to eat, then take endowments from her pups. She will not want to carry dogs with her into battle, and her horse is fast enough so that it can overtake the main body of the army.”

Myrrima and Iome had claimed their pups at the same time. If Iome was right, Myrrima might also take endowments from her last two pups by dawn. It would be better to take those endowments before traveling. Iome couldn’t, very well ride into Fleeds with four pups in her saddlebags, lest everyone in Rofehavan mark her as a Wolf Lord.

Myrrima hated the idea of waiting. It had, very nearly cost her life to wait for Iome yesterday.

Yet she couldn’t very well leave without Iome. The Queen needed a woman to escort her, and Iome thought of Myrrima as her Maid of Honor, though Myrrima hoped to be more than that.

“Very well,” Myrrima said, vowing that she would not waste the night. At least she could take her bow and practice some more.

She untied the bow from its sheath, grabbed her pups under one arm, and headed toward the stable door, just as Gaborn entered.

She smelled him before she saw him, and what she smelled was death most foul, a stench that made her want to howl in fear and to vomit.

It seemed to stretch from one wall to the other, a vast specter of death that groped toward her. Her vision went black, and her senses reeled.

Myrrima dropped her bow and puppies. She cried out in shock, “Back! Get back! ”

The pups yelped in terror and ran into an empty stall where they began to bark and howl mournfully.

Myrrima cowered on the floor, crouched in a fetal position, and wrapped her hands over her head. Every muscle of her body seemed to spasm in pain.

“Back, my master!” she cried. “Please, go back!”

Yet Gaborn stood in the doorway not forty paces off, wearing an expression of alarm. “What?” he asked. “What have I done? Are you ill?”

“Please!” Myrrima cried, looking about for some means of escape. But this stable was no ordinary stable. Force horses were kept here, and they needed protection. The only entrance was the front door, and guards who held the portcullis secured that. “Stay back! You bring the scent of death with you.”

Gaborn stared hard at her for a long moment, then smiled. “You’re a wolf lord now?”

Myrrima nodded mutely, heart pounding, unable to speak.

Gaborn reached into his pocket, pulled out a single dark green spade shaped leaf. “It’s dogbane you smell, nothing more. I found it growing down the street.”

The smell came fifty times stronger now that he held the horror in his hand, and the terror that it inspired in Myrrima was like a hot branding iron burning into her guts. She cried out and turned her face against a wall, shaking.

“Please, milord,” she begged. “Please...” She could see the leaf, and she knew that Gaborn’s powers as Earth King caused him to magnify its normal properties. She knew that the single leaf was the source of this horrible dread that assailed her.

Yet now that she’d taken an endowment of scent from a dog, knowledge meant nothing. The unspeakable terror that the scent inspired to a dog’s nose could not be rationalized away.

Gaborn backed off, retraced his steps. As soon as he had left the stable, Myrrima grabbed the squirming pups, bolted out the door.

She saw Gaborn at the far side of the street, where he was setting the horrible leaf on the ground.

“I hoped it would help drive off Raj Ahten and his assassins,” he said. “I’m sorry it did not occur to me to consider how it might affect you or Duke Groverman.”

“I fear it will protect you from me now—and from your wife.”

Gaborn nodded. “Thank you for the warning. I will throw this robe away and wash the scent from my skin with parsley water, so that when next we meet, you will not find my presence so unbearable.”

“You do me honor, Your Highness,” Myrrima said, finally remembering her manners.

“Everything comes with a price,” Gaborn said. “May your endowments serve you well.”

Myrrima took her bow and left the King’s presence, recovering enough so that after twenty minutes, she no longer trembled. She went out to a green behind the Duke’s Great Hall and there found; the archery field.

She set her pups down, and let them gambol on the grass.

A steep dirt embankment rose high to the north, and a couple of straw men had been set up before the embankment.

Myrrima measured off eighty paces, studied the straw men. She had only three blunted practice arrows. The rest were sharp instruments of war.

Absently, Myrrima strung her bow. She had purchased the bow only two days before. She loved the feel of its oiled wood, the strength of it. It was no weak thing made of elm or ash or laburnum. Instead, it was a war bow made of yew, which Sir Hoswell had assured Myrrima had the right proportion of red heartwood in the belly of the bow to white sap wood at its spine. The bow was six inches taller than herself, and pulling it was hard.

Only two days ago, Hoswell had warned her to properly care for her bow so that the wood would not warp from exposure to dampness, or become weakened from idly staying strung for too long.

He’d told her how to work lacquer deep into the grain, rubbing it in circular motions clockwise, then counterclock wise. He’d taught her the proper way to apply beeswax onto the catgut strings.

As she strung it, Myrrima checked the string, to make sure it had dried during the day. She feared for her bow, for it had fallen into the water.

On each bow, a bit of hollow cow’s horn was glued with a mixture of birch pitch and charcoal dust over the nock where the bowstrings met the bow’s wings. The horn kept moisture from entering the wood if the wing idly touched wet soil, but Sir Hoswell had warned Myrrima that the horn should be dried by fire once or twice a year, then soaked in linseed oil; so that the horn itself would keep out moisture. As a matter of precaution, he had warned that she should never let the end of the bow rest on the ground Myrrima felt each of the horns, to make sure that they were also dry.

When the bow was strung, Myrrima took out a practice arrow, felt its smooth shaft.

All of the lords of Rofehavan used a common method for honing a straight arrow, but Hoswell warned her against using any arrow made within the past few weeks. The arrowsmiths of Heredon had been working day and night straightening green wood that was likely to warp. Such arrows might not fly straight and would more likely bend on impact with armor than to penetrate it.

Hoswell had taught her the styles of bodkins, the long arrowheads used for war, and warned her to employ only those that had a blue sheen to them, for they were made of the hardest steel and could puncture an Indhopalese helm. He warned her to sharpen each individual arrow in her quiver before battle, and to apply pitch to its tip, so that it, would better hold to and pierce armor.

Myrrima nocked a blunted practice arrow, drew it full to the ear, and steadied her breath before she released it. She watched where the arrow fell—high and to the right—then tried a second shot, adjusting her stance in an effort to aim more true.

The second shot also went high and to the right, but not so high.

Myrrima bit her lip, sighed in exasperation. She felt inadequate to the task. She’d shot much better yesterday. A small part of her almost wished that she had Erin Connal here to instruct her.

Releasing her third arrow; she hit the straw man’s shoulder.

Once she launched her arrows, she could not see where they landed. She managed to find them in the embankment by scent, along with an extra arrow someone else had lost. Without her endowment of scent, she’d never have found the arrows in the dark. The starlight was not strong enough to illuminate the white feathers.

When she returned to her place, she heard the horn call the troops to mount. She heard creaking armor, the muffled shouts of men ordering their anxious force horses to steady. The fields were awash in starlight, a satin glow. The half-moon struggled over the hills to the east.

She wished she could leave with Gaborn and the other warriors.

A voice from the darkness greeted her.

“Very good. You are taking time to practice.” She looked over her shoulder.

Sir Hoswell walked toward her from the shadows of the Duke’s Great Hall.

Myrrima suddenly realized that she was alone with him, here in the darkness, where no one could see.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. Myrrima reached into her quiver, pulled out an arrow, a good straight shaft with a heavy bodkin, for piercing armor. She quickly nocked the arrow and drew it full, ready to shoot Hoswell down, if need be.

Sir Hoswell stopped, studied her frankly, almost daring her to shoot.

“We are going to war tomorrow, and I am an archer first and foremost,” Hoswell said easily. “I came to practice. I didn’t know you were here. I am not following you.”

“Why don’t I believe you?” Myrrima asked.

“Because, quite frankly, I have not earned your trust,” Hoswell said. “Nor your respect, nor your friendship. I fear I never shall.”

Myrrima searched her feelings. Yesterday when she’d been in danger, Gaborn had warned her by using his powers. Now she felt no fear, no warning.

But she didn’t trust him. Myrrima’s heart was hammering, and she watched Hoswell carefully. The man had endowments of metabolism, and could have covered the eighty yards in seconds, but not before she loosed an arrow. Even in the starlight, she could see that his face was still swollen from where Erin Connal had hit him.

“Get out of here,” Myrrima said, drawing back her arrow, taking steady aim.

Sir Hoswell raised his bow and quiver high, regarded her coolly. He smiled as if in appreciation. “It’s hard to shoot a man, isn’t it?” he said. “You have nice control. You’re holding your breath, keeping a steady hand. You’d make a fine assassin.”

Myrrima didn’t say anything. She didn’t want his compliments.

“I’ll give you to the count of three,” she warned.

“When shooting at night,” Hoswell taunted, “the tired eye does not judge distance well. Lower your aim a bit, Myrrima, or you’ll never hit me.”

“One!” Myrrima said, dropping her aim a tad

“There,” Hoswell said “That should skewer me nicely. Now, practice shooting quickly. If you cannot take fifteen shots a minute in a pitched battle, you will be of little use.”

“Two!” Myrrima said coldly.

Hoswell caught her eye half a moment, his weapons still in the air. Myrrima’s fingers felt sweaty, and she decided to loose the arrow just as Hoswell turned his back and began to amble away.

“We are on the same side, Lady Borenson,” Hoswell said with his back to her. He had not taken a pace yet, and Myrrima wasn’t sure whether to drill a hole through him or not. “Tomorrow, night we may be in battle together.”

Myrrima did not answer. He glanced over his shoulder toward her.

“Three!” Myrrima said.

Hesitantly, Sir Hoswell began to stalk away. She kept her eyes trained on him. He walked twenty paces then stopped, spoke loudly over his shoulder. “You were right, Lady Borenson. I did follow you here tonight. I came because honor demands it—or perhaps dishonor. I came to offer my apology. I did a vile thing, and I am sorry for it.”

“Keep your apology. You’re afraid I’ll tell my husband,” Myrrima said. “Or the King.”

Sir Hoswell turned toward her, raised his weapons. “Tell them if you wish,” he said. “They might well kill me for what I’ve done, as easily as you may kill me now. My life is in your hands.”

The very notion of forgiving him came hard. She didn’t know if she had the stomach for it. She’d as soon forgive Raj Ahten himself.

“How can I trust you?” Myrrima said

Sir Hoswell shrugged slightly, still holding his weapons out so that she could see. “What happened two days ago. I’ve never done anything like that before,” Hoswell said. “It was foolish, impulsive—the act of a lout. I thought you comely, and I hoped that you would want me as I wanted you. I was terribly wrong.

“But I can make it up to you,” Hoswell said with certainty. “My life is yours. Tomorrow, when you ride into battle, I will stand beside you. I swear that so long as I live, you will live. I will be your protector.”

Myrrima searched her feelings. Yesterday when she’d been in danger, Gaborn had warned her using his earth power. Now she heard no warning Voice. Only her own natural fear of the man tore at her. She suspected that Hoswell’s offer was sincere. She did not want his apology, nor his service, and in the end, perhaps only one thought kept him alive. If Gaborn can forgive Raj Ahten, she reasoned, can I not forgive this man?

Sir Hoswell walked away.

Myrrima stood for a long while, until her heart quit hammering.

By the time the dawn sun came into the sky, Myrrima had practiced for hours.

37 After the Feast

The reaver’s leathery head was slippery with gore by the time that Averan finished gorging upon its brain. Sated, she lay back upon its skull, her stomach heavy, and sat for a long while feeling muzzy.

Dawn was but a few hours away. She could hardly keep her eyes open.

Flashes of dreams assailed her, terrifying visions of the Underworld, overwhelmingly vivid.

She dreamt of long lines of reavers, marching up from the Underworld, desperately seeking something. A powerful mage drove them where they would not go, a horrid beast called the One True Master.

But the visions showed nothing as she’d ever seen it. For the dreams were revealed not in sight, but in powerful odors and in a sense of quivering movement and the shimmering aura of energy fields that surrounded ah living things. The dreams were cold, ghostly, showing energy as waves of blue light, like the evening sky reflecting from snow. Everything in them was preternaturally clear. And the reavers sang songs, eloquent arias emitted in scents too subtle for a human to detect.

For a long while, Averan lay torpid, trying to remember what she searched for in her dream. Then it came:

The Blood of the Faithful.

Averan’s eyes snapped open, and she lay for a moment trying to stifle a scream. For deep in her gut, she knew that she’d not experienced any common dream. These were memories, memories from the reaver she’d eaten.

The reavers were coming. They were coming and would march right through this town.

Full of reaver’s brain, still muzzy, Averan began to recognize her own precarious situation.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Averan told the green woman as she crawled from atop the reaver’s head “A fell mage is coming. We might already be too late.”

Averan crawled off the dead reaver, and prepared to begin her race north.

Desperately, she tried to conjure the images she’d seen in her dreams. The reavers could not “see” far with their sense of energy fields—a quarter of a mile was their limit. Things close by could be discerned with great detail, while objects a hundred yards out were often fuzzy and indistinct.

So long as Averan stayed ahead of the scouts, she would be safe. But the reavers had a supreme sense of smell.

And the green woman had killed a blade-bearer, one that would soon be followed by countless thousands. The reavers would get Averan’s scent, and would hunt her down.

Averan had to escape—quickly. A force horse would be best. It could run fast and far.

But Averan didn’t have a horse.

The Earth King could protect us, Averan though

She closed her eyes, consulted the map in her heart. The emerald flame was coming, had traveled nearly two hundred miles. But the Earth King was still far away, in southern Heredon.

At the rate he traveled, he wouldn’t make it here until tonight or tomorrow. Averan didn’t have anywhere near so much time.

A reaver was over twice as tall as a horse. She’d seen how fast the reavers ran.

She looked at the reaver, lifeless in the darkness.

Down near its bunghole it secreted its scents, leaving a trail for others to follow. The monster had been terrified before it died, to feel the green woman’s hand crushing its skull. She could smell it dimly now, the reaver’s last emitted garlicky scent.

An hour ago, she’d never have noticed the scent. Now, it seemed to whisper volumes.

Averan raced around to the monster’s bunghole, and came up close to it. Her human nose was not nearly as sensitive as a reaver’s philia, but she smelled the reaver’s last secretion, and the odor hit her not as a flavor, but as if it shouted words: “Death is here! Beware! Beware!”

The green woman came beside. Averan, sniffed. She drew back and shouted wordlessly, flailing her arms. For, like Averan, now that she had fed upon a reaver’s brain, the green woman reacted to the reaver’s scent as if she herself were a reaver—with abject terror.

Clouds were racing above. In the starlight, Averan looked until she found a long stick that might work as a staff, then she shoved one end into the reaver’s bunghole, until the scent of the monster’s dying warning lay thick upon her stave.

“Come on, Spring,” Averan called to the green woman. “Let’s go.”

But the green woman could smell death on Averan’s staff, and merely backed away. Spring looked about for someplace to escape, held her hands in front of her face. In moments Averan feared that the green woman would bolt.

Averan suspected that if Spring did run away, the reavers would track her down and kill her. Spring had managed to slay a single reaver, but she might not fare so well against dozens of them. Certainly she’d never kill a fell mage.

“Spring!” Averan shouted. But the green woman would have none of it. She turned to run, flailing her arms wildly as she sprinted through the village street toward some cottages that huddled like frowth giants, throwing dark shadows everywhere.

Averan tried to get her attention the only way she knew how. “Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer, follow me!”

The effect was astonishing. It looked almost as if Spring had an invisible string attached to her back. When Averan spoke, the green woman abruptly jerked to a halt, turned and stared at Averan in dismay. She began walking back.

“That’s right,” Averan said. “I’m your master now. Follow me, and be quiet. We don’t want to attract any more reavers.”

Spring’s face fell, but she turned and followed Averan obediently.

Averan sprinted along the road north. The night was cold, and the wind blew wild in the lane between the walnut trees. Brown leaves skittered in her path, and clouds raced overhead, carrying the smell of rain.

Averan thought she might be able to run for only a few minutes. Ever since the Blue Tower had fallen, she’d felt weak.

But to her surprise, the warm meat of the reaver that she’d eaten suffused her with unexpected energy. She felt stronger—although not strong enough to crush a man’s skull with a single blow, or anything fancy like that. It wasn’t the same as getting an endowment of brawn. But she did feel more...energetic, more invigorated.

The meat of the reaver seemed to work as a strangely powerful tonic for her body.

Averan raced tirelessly for nearly an hour, running faster than any child her age should, with the green woman loping beside her.

Every two hundred yards or so, Averan would turn and swipe her staff across the ground, and she would imagine with delight how the shout of “Death! Beware! Beware! would frighten the blade-bearers on her trail.

Without their protects, they’ll have no choice in how they react, she thought. They’ll be forced to close ranks, take defensive formations, and crawl ahead at a snail’s pace.

Averan stopped dead in her tracks. How do I know that? she wondered She couldn’t recall anything specific from her dreams, her borrowed memories, that let her know how the reavers would react, how the blade-bearers would be forced to react. But she knew.

Yet many questions continued to puzzle her. Who was the One True Master? What did it want? She knew that it wanted the Blood of the Faithful, and that it was human blood, but what would it do with it?

An image flashed in her mind: an enormous reaver, the One True Master, crouched upon a bed of the crystalline bones of those she had vanquished, resplendent among the holy fires, instructing her inferiors how to create the runes that would usurp and dismay the Earth.

Averan knew that the reavers were heading for Carris. The Blood of the Faithful was near there.

Poor Roland, she thought. I hope he gets out of there quickly.

Her best hope of reaching the Earth King would be to go into the mountains. Maybe then the reavers wouldn’t follow her. When she reached a crossroads, she turned east, taking a mule trail along a canal.

Since the reavers couldn’t “see” more than a quarter of a mile in any direction, she could evade them by keeping far enough ahead of them.

She also knew that when she walked across the ground, she left an energy trail that reavers perceived as a ghostly glow. But half an hour after she crossed a field, the glow would dissipate. And the reaver’s depth perception was too poor to let them easily detect her footprints.

Which meant that they’d have to hunt her by scent alone.

When Averan was small, beast master Brand used to tell her stories about how he’d helped the Duke outsmart foxes on the foxhunt.

Duke Haberd had been the kind of man who would pay a huntsman to trap a wild fox, then pour turpentine on its back to make sure that his hounds never lost the fox’s scent,

So for a fox to survive it had to be crafty.

Whenever the dogs got close, the fox would race ahead and run in circles and curlicues, letting its scent get so twisted that the dogs behind wound up barking at their own tails.

Then the fox would find some low hill and lie behind a bush, watching the dogs, just to make sure that none ever came close.

The reavers were much like hounds, and Averan had to outfox them. So as she ran along the canal, she sprinted here and there for nearly two hours, often circling.

She was still on the flatlands east of Carris, but the towns had thinned out. She knew this place from maps, and had even flown over it on her graak.

Farther west were a few hills and valleys, then the Hest Mountains. She hoped to make it there, for she doubted that the reavers would follow her into the Hests, where it was so cold.

When she judged that she had neared the end of the canal, she took a brief trip through some woods, racing about in circles, doubling back over her own steps, climbing in trees so that her scent would be lost overhead. She painted every tree with the words “Beware!”

A cold drizzle began to fall. Averan doubled back to the canal and jumped in, swam for the far shore.

The green woman followed Averan faithfully, if somewhat clumsily, through all of this. But as soon as Spring leapt into the canal, it became obvious that Averan’s plan had gone astray.

The green woman didn’t know how to swim. She thrashed about, kicking and squealing and bobbing under. She looked about desperately, swatting the surface of the water.

Averan tried to swim back to save her, but without her endowment of brawn, Averan swam slowly, sluggishly. When she finally did reach Spring, the green woman climbed atop Averan, pushing her under.

She fought to get to the surface, but Spring was too strong. Averan realized that it was no use, that Spring would merely hold her. So Averan dove desperately, until she touched the muddy canal bottom, then pushed up and away.

She broke the surface. The green woman went under, thrashing.

Averan caught her breath. The green woman quit splashing; she had gone down for the last time.

Averan’s heart pounded. “Spring!” she called. “Spring!”

But the surface of the canal remained calm.

For several heartbeats, Averan wondered what to do.

Then Spring floated to the top.

Averan swam to her, grabbed the woman’s bearskin cloak from behind, and pulled the unconscious form to the far bank. She dragged Spring’s head from the water, turned her over.

The green woman coughed and gagged and cried like a child. When she quit throwing up muddy canal water, Averan helped her up the bank. She looked around in the darkness.

Averan had lost her staff in the struggle to save Spring. Even though the water was sluggish, Averan judged that the current had carried them both a quarter of a mile downstream. She’d wanted the staff to help scare off the reavers, but doubted that she’d be able to find it in the dark.

Averan staggered to her feet. By now, she imagined that she was still eight miles west of Carris, and another six miles south. She wanted to turn north, but felt afraid. She could see fires burning on the hills south of Carris.

The wind blew wild, and the clouds had thickened so that Averan could hardly see. Rain pelted her in heavy droplets. There was no way she could get her staff.

Maybe if I’m lucky, we’ll get lightning, Averan hoped. Everyone knew that reavers were afraid of lightning, though no one knew why. But Averan had feasted on a reaver’s brain and learned its secrets. Now she understood better. Lightning did not frighten reavers so much as it blinded them and caused them pain. To be near lightning was like staring into the sun.

I’m the only person in the world who knows this, Averan realized. Somehow, she had done something no one else ever had: she’d eaten a reaver’s brain and gained its memories, just as if she were a reaver herself.

Unfortunately, though rain fell, there was no sign of a thunderstorm.

Wearily, after hours of running, Averan limped west, jogging for an hour while the green woman began to lag behind. An hour before dawn, she heard an odd noise in the distance toward Carris, a strange groaning that shook the earth. A bit later, birds in the meadows began to chirp as they wakened. She thought it odd that the birds would make such joyous noise on such a dismal day.

Near dawn she found a wooded hill on the north side of the road, and decided to play the part of the fox.

So she hunkered down in some scrub oak and tall ferns, in the lee of a huge pine, She waited for sunrise. From her perch, she imagined that she’d be able to see the giant reavers coming for miles, if the monsters didn’t lose her trail.

Spring lay beside Averan, in her bearskin cloak. Averan pulled Spring’s cloak open enough so that she could crawl under it. The cloak was still damp, but Averan lay warm against the green woman’s breast.

38 A Cold Wind at Carris

The wind at Carris had shifted an hour before dawn, driving from the northeast and becoming bitterly cold. With the fog beneath and lowering clouds rushing in overhead, it became darker rather than lighter as morning approached.

The greatest source of light came from Raj Ahten’s flameweavers, clothed in living flame, who had driven back the fog at the end of the causeway. Raj Ahten stood between those pillars of light, gazing up at the men on the walls. Frowth giants, war dogs, and Invincibles glowered at his back.

“If it is battle you want, then come against us!” Duke Paladane called valiantly. “But if you hope to find refuge in Carris, you hope in vain. We will not surrender at any cost!”

All around Roland, men raised their weapons, began beating sword and hammer against shield in brutal applause.

Raj Ahten gauged and dismissed Paladane all in a glance. Instead, he looked up at the men along the castle walls, and as he did so his gaze strayed to Roland. Roland tried to hold his eyes, but could not. The challenge there, the look of supreme confidence, cut Roland to the quick, and for the first time in his life he realized what a weak, pitiable thing he truly was. One by one, the men on the walls quit banging weapon to shield.

“Brave sentiments,” Raj Ahten said to Paladane. Distantly, from the far edges of the predawn fog below, Roland began to hear distant battle horns, the high horns of Indhopal blowing wildly. With it came a faraway beating of drums, a thunderous boom, boom, boom. A giant at Raj Ahten’s back glanced to the south, while warhorses minced their feet nervously.

“They’re blowing full retreat,” Baron Poll said in wonder at Roland’s side. Somewhere out in that fog, perhaps five miles off, Raj Ahten’s troops were in flight. Had the Knights Equitable come? Or warriors from the Courts of Tide?

In rash hope, someone on the wall shouted, “The Earth King is coming! That’s put the fear into them!”

A trio of dark creatures rippled up from the fog, whipped past Roland’s ear. At first he thought they were bats. But they were too small, and the things writhed in the air like pain given form. He recognized them as gree, creatures of the Underworld seldom seen aboveground.

“Begone!” Paladane shouted at Raj Ahten. “You’ll find no shelter here! Archers!”

Raj Ahten raised his hand toward the archers, commanding them without words to belay the order. While other mounts shifted about in fear, his gray Imperial warhorse stood calmly.

“It is not the Earth King who comes from the south;” Raj Ahten said loudly enough for every man on the wall to hear. Indeed, the words seemed to slide into Roland’s subconscious, piercing him like a knife blade, so that they aroused a subtle fear. “Nor is it salvation for you in the form of reinforcements. Duke Paladane knows what hails from the south; his messengers passed through our lines. Reavers are boiling from the Underworld by the tens of thousands. They’ll be here within the hour.”

Roland’s heart hammered and his mouth felt as dry as dust. Reavers, he thought in mounting horror. In sixteen hundred years, men and reavers had not fought a major surface battle. From time to time Roland heard stories of men who lived on the borders of the Alcair who were slaughtered by reavers or dragged to their lairs to be eaten later.

But reavers had never in living memory attacked a castle at full strength—not until they hit Keep Haberd.

Roland would have rather fought Raj Ahten twice over than face a reaver horde. After all, a lucky blow might bring a force warrior down, but a reaver stood taller than an elephant. No damned little commoner with a half-sword was likely to even pierce its skin.

Still the fog hid everything in the fields around Carris. Distantly Roland began to hear a hissing roar, like the pounding of surf against sand. Minutely, the walls of the castle trembled.

Raj Ahten said, “You don’t have the force soldiers to defend this rock against reavers. But I do.

“Kneel to me now!” Raj Ahten called. “Kneel to your lord and master. Open your gates! Kneel to me, and I shall protect you!”

Without thought, without willing himself to, Roland found himself dropping to one knee. The command was so persuasive that he could do nothing else. Indeed, he had no desire to do anything else.

Men began to shout and cheer. Many drew weapons and shook them in the air, offering themselves into his service.

Roland’s heart pounded. Duke Paladane stood atop the battlements defiantly, his hand clutching the pommel of his sword, a small man, contemptible in his impotence. It looked as if he alone would stand against Raj Ahten, while everyone else embraced him.

Can’t the fool see that Raj Ahten is right? Roland wondered. Without the Wolf Lord, we’re all dead.

Roland found a cheer ripping from his own throat.

Then the drawbridge came down with a rattling of chains.

Amid the cheers Raj Ahten strode victoriously into Carris. He began shouting orders. “Secure the causeway. Banish this fog so that we can see what we’re up against.”

His flameweavers turned and began to draw fiery runes in the air at the end of the causeway.

The thick fog collapsed around the flameweavers for a moment, floated back in, so that in seconds the frowth giants that marched into Carris strode waist-deep through the mist, while men on warhorses had their heads barely bobbing above it.

Miles back, Roland could hear men shouting, the sound of horses neighing in fear as Raj Ahten’s troops raced for Carris. Warhorns blared retreat.

With it, another distant sound floated over the fields, the buzzing whir that reavers made as air hissed from their abdomens, mingled with the crashing of their thick carapaces against stones as they thundered across the earth.

Reavers were coming, and Raj Ahten’s troops raced through the mist to beat them, swelling the castle. The troops came in long lines, mounted knights begrimed and weary, riding their proud chargers. Row upon row of spearmen. Cheers thundered above the clamor of hooves and the clang of armor.

Roland looked over the battlements. Though the flameweavers had begun to banish the fog, it was not something that could be accomplished in a moment. In the early morning, with the wet earth all around it, the fog had grown to the point that it smothered the ground for miles in every direction.

For long minutes Roland waited, his guts tight with terror. A cold heavy rain began to batter Roland’s brow, soak his thin tunic. Men nearby huddled beneath their capes and hunkered under their shields as if the raindrops were a hail of deadly arrows. But the small target that Roland had been given just covered his head. It barely kept the rain off his neck.

More gree whipped overhead as if hurled by slings, a flock of hundreds. With the magical fog beneath and the natural clouds above, Roland’s perch seemed strange and exotic. In the dim mist, gulls and crows and doves all began to flap about the battlements, disturbed by the commotion, lost between clouds above and fog below.

As the thrill of the moment began to fade, as the power of Raj Ahten’s Voice seemed to dim, Roland found himself shaking.

He suddenly realized, like one waking from a dream, that he was forsworn, that he had let Raj Ahten take the city without a fight.

“What does this mean?” Roland asked Baron Poll. “What if the Earth King comes? Will we be forced to fight him?”

“I guess,” Baron Poll said. He spat off the edge of the castle, into the fog. The Baron’s calm demeanor showed that he had already reached this realization, and that it did not disturb him.

Roland grumbled to Baron Poll, trying to sound confident, “I’ll not do that. I’ll not fight the Earth King!”

“You’ll do as you’re ordered,” Baron Poll said. “You’ll be Raj Ahten’s man when he puts you under oath.”

That was the way of it. If Raj Ahten secured the castle, he’d give the soldiers here the choice: swear fealty to me, or die.

“I’m Orden’s man. I’ll not forswear myself!” Roland said. “I’ll not bear sword against my own King.”

“But it will be your oath or your life!” Baron Poll said pragmatically. “Believe me, a smart man will swear fealty quickly and take his oath back just as quick.”

“I never claimed to be a smart man,” Roland answered It was true. He couldn’t read, couldn’t do numbers. He’d never had an answer for the arguments of his shrewish wife. He’d hardly been able to find his way through the fog here to Carris.

But he’d always been loyal.

“Listen,” the Baron said fiercely. “Take your oath for Raj Ahten. But once the Earth King comes, no one says you have to fight fiercely. If his troops come against the wall, you can just growl and wag your halfsword in a hostile manner, demanding that they all go bugger themselves. You don’t have to draw blood!”

“Raj Ahten can go bugger himself,” Roland said, gripping his sword.

But when Raj Ahten’s warriors began to come up on the walls, Roland dared not draw steel.

Instead he hunkered against the battlements and wished anew that he had not given the green woman his bearskin cloak. The cold now seemed more biting than it had been the night before. It pierced all the way to his heart, left him feeling numb and dazed.

After nearly half an hour, Raj Ahten’s troops were still not all in, but his flameweavers had drawn mystic fiery runes in the air at the end of the causeway in a great circle. Symbols hung in the fog like tapestries upon a wall until the flameweavers pushed them. Then the fiery runes dissolved The fog began to back away at about the pace that a man could run, opening a little window to the land

All during that half hour, the sound of reavers approaching became louder, the dull roar of heavy carapaces dragged across the ground rising like an approaching thunderstorm.

Under the cover of fog, reavers converged around Carris from everywhere—from the north and south and west.

Warhorns blared in the fog, two miles out. Horses began to scream in panic, and Roland could hear horses charge first to the south, then to the west, then reel madly back north.

Men on the walls began to shout, “They’re lost! There’s men lost out there!”

“Cut off.”

Roland empathized with them. He knew how maddening that fog could be, how easily one might get lost in it.

The flameweavers had just begun to dispel the mist, and Roland waited breathlessly on the battlements as it began to peel backward, exposing the green folds of earth, the whitewashed cottages with their thatch roofs and abundant gardens, the haycocks and apple orchards and pastures and serene little canals all about Carris. A single mallard duck beside a bricked well looked up at the sky and flapped its wings in delight at being able to greet the light again.

It was such a stunningly beautiful landscape that Roland found it all the more macabre to be standing here on the battlements in the misting rain, straining to hear sounds of engagement.

On the castle walls, men began to blow warhorns, signaling to the armies of Indhopal lost out in that damnable fog, trying to steer them to safety.

The troops responded by wheeling their horses and racing toward the castle. Every moment or two, Roland could hear a horse trip and fall in that impenetrable mist, armor clashing as some knight met the ground.

And then the first troops appeared at the edge of the fog, about half a mile from Carris.

These were not fierce force warriors. They were archers with hornbows, wearing white burnooses with a little leather armor; or artillerymen with wide bronze helms and nothing more than a long knife to protect themselves; or young squires who were more used to polishing armor than wearing it.

In short, this was the rearguard, the dregs of Raj Ahten’s army, all common support troops out of Indhopal come to hold Carris if it was taken. Most of them marched on foot.

Only their leaders rode horses, and once those leaders spotted the castle, they wheeled their mounts and charged for safety in blind panic, leaving the footmen to whatever fate they could manage.

The commoners of Indhopal began shouting, fled through the villages and fields toward Castle Carris. Everywhere around them rose the thunderous roar of reavers rushing through the fog.

The smell of dust and blood began to saturate the air, along with cries of terror, and though Roland had still not seen a reaver, he knew that out in the fog men were fighting for their lives.

All along the castle walls, warhorns blared. Soldiers shouted encouragement The troops of Indhopal sprinted toward Carris, perhaps twenty thousand strong.

Then the reavers came.

One monster raced from that damnable fog, trailing mist as if it were afire. Roland stared in horror at his first reaver.

It looked like no creature that had ever taken form in the Overworld. It was a blade-bearer in rank, a warrior without the glittering fiery runes that distinguished a mage.

The reaver ran on four legs, reserving its massive front paws to carry its weapon. In shape, the monster might best have been described as formed like an immense crab. The reaver’s thick outer carapace looked to be the gray of granite from above, but had muddy highlights beneath the legs.

Its head was enormous, the size of a wagon, something of a shovel-shaped thing, with rows of waving feelers called “philia”—along the back of its skull and down, its jaws. Its teeth shone like quartz crystals, and the monster had no eyes or ears, no nostrils.

Aside from its breathing, it made no noise, no hissing roar. It merely ran among the fleeing warriors, racing past them at three times the speed a commoner could run. It sped past warriors like a sheepdog trying to head off a flock, as if it would not bother to kill a man, but sought only to beat their retreat.

But it wisely stopped well short of the castle. When it reached a point near the front ranks of the warriors, it wheeled and went to work.

It held in its paws a glory hammer, a pole made of black reaver steel with six hundred pounds of metal at its head. According to tradition it was called a “glory hammer’” because “it makes a glorious mess of a man when it hits him.”

The first swing of its glory hammer swept low over the ground without touching it, like a farmer with a scythe cutting through straw. The stroke knocked five men into oblivion, and Roland saw bodies tossed a hundred feet. One poor fellow’s head whipped through the air and landed in Lake Donnestgree with a splash a hundred yards from the battle.

Some men drew weapons and tried to fight past the reaver. Others sought to surge past it. Others turned and fled madly or sought refuge in cottages or under bushes.

The monster’s glory hammer rose and fell so swiftly, with such astonishing grace and surety, Roland could hardly comprehend it. For such a large beast, the reaver moved with incredible grace. In ten seconds fifty men lay dead, yet the monster’s work had just begun.

Roland’s mind blanked in horror, and he found himself gasping for breath, heart hammering so loudly that he feared men would think him a coward. He turned to see how others reacted. A lad next to him had gone pale in terror, but stood stiff, his jaw clenched stoically. Roland thought the boy was holding up quite well, until he saw pee streaming down the fellow’s right leg.

From the barbicans came the whonk, whonk of artillerymen loosing ballista bolts. Shaped like giant arrows, the huge bolts were made of thirty pounds of steel. The first two shots fell short of their mark, tearing into the ranks of fleeing warriors. The sound of cranking gears followed as artillerymen struggled to reload.

Their marksman shouted, “Hold your shot until the reaver comes in range.”

By then a hundred men had died, and on the walls people began to shout, “Look! Look!”

At the edge of the fog, reavers charged forward, trailing mist. Not by the dozens or hundreds, but by the thousands. They bore giant blades, glory hammers, and knight gigs—long poles with enormous hooks on the end.

In their midst were mages, glittering creatures so covered with fiery runes that they looked as if they were clothed in flames. They bore crystalline staves that glowed with their own inner light

The thunder of carapaces bouncing over the ground made the castle walls tremble. The terrified cries of common soldiers became a roaring in Roland’s ears. His legs felt so weak, they probably could not hold him up much longer.

Roland felt urine stream down his own leg.

“By the Powers!” Baron Poll bellowed.

Men began to leap from the castle walls out into the lake rather than face the reavers.

Some nearby fool with a voice like a town crier’s shouted, “Please remain calm! Please remain calm! Please remain vigilantly optimistic, and I’m fairly certain we’ll all come out of this...intact ”

Roland wondered if the fellow was trying to reassure him, or if he only sought to face death like the legendary knights of old—in a spirit of good humor.

If ever there was a time in Roland’s life to panic, it was now.

Baron Poll glanced back, his face lit by dawn’s first light. The fat knight tried to make a jest, speaking loudly to be heard over the clash of arms and death cries in the background. “Take a deep breath, lad It may be your last.”

39 A Separate World

When the clubfooted boy fetched Myrrima from the archery range an hour after sunrise, she expected the lad to tell her that it was time to mount up.

Instead, he told her simply that Iome wanted her at the Dedicates’ Keep.

She hurried to meet Her Highness. The morning sun came bright here at Castle Groverman. It was rising in a perfect blue sky, spreading the day before it. Fish eagles wheeled in the distance.

From the courtyard of the keep, Myrrima could see out on the plain for twenty miles: the Wind River winding like a silver thread through the heather, the ranches and cottages at every little hillock by the river’s side, the herds of cattle and horses dotting the heather.

Outside the keep proper, doves and pigeons pecked by the hitching posts on the green. Myrrima went to the wall that surrounded the Dedicates’ Keep. Its brown sandstone walls could not match the height of the keep at Castle Sylvarresta. Though the keep was large, with a huge open courtyard, it was not designed to hold more than a couple of hundred Dedicates.

As Myrrima approached the keep, she felt surprised to hear something odd: music.

Inside the Dedicates’ Keep—even at this early hour—she could hear a song played on pipes, drums, tambour, and lute, accompanied by singing. The Dedicates, those not too weakened from granting endowments, were making merry.

Just inside the portcullis, she found a knot of curious folk standing there in a crowd, looking off onto the green.

As Myrrima passed them, one old woman whispered, “That’s her, the one who slew the Darkling Glory.” Myrrima felt her face turning red. “They’re calling her ‘Heredon’s Glory,“ ‘ the old woman continued.

“She’s been out all night practicing with that bow,” a young lad said. “I hear she can knock the eye out of a diving hawk at two hundred paces. Now she’s off to kill Raj Ahten himself!”

Myrrima ducked her head, tried to ignore the rumors. “Knock the eye out of a diving hawk, indeed!” she wanted to protest “I’m lucky if I don’t get all tangled up trying to string my own bow.”

Myrrima entered the green and felt astonished to see every Dedicate in the keep out on the grass. Tables were filled with drink, and the cooks had made savory pies and tarts by the score. Those Dedicates who had given brawn, grace, or metabolism—and thus could not easily move, lay shaded beneath a huge oak in the courtyard while all other Dedicates celebrated.

Blind men and women danced close together, careful not to step on one another’s toes, while the deaf and mute romped to a merry jig. Witless fools capered madly.

Myrrima stood a moment just inside the gates gazing into the courtyard, baffled

One old blind fellow sat cross-legged on the ground nearby, eating tarts and drinking from a jug of wine. He had weathered features and stringy hair.

“Why are they dancing?” Myrrima asked. “Hostenfest ended two days ago.”

The blind man smiled up at her, proffering his bottle of wine. “Tradition!” he said. “Today we revel, for our lords go to war!”

“Tradition?” Myrrima asked. “Dedicates always do this when their lords go to war?”

“Ayuh.” The fellow nodded. “Have a drink.”

“No, thank you.” Myrrima was perplexed. She’d never heard of this tradition. On the other hand, in all of her life, Heredon had never gone to war.

She looked up at the keep, with its sandstone chambers to house the Dedicates, its broad walls and the watchtowers above.

Once a man entered this place, he forsook the wider world—until either the lord or Dedicate passed away. Myrrima had seldom considered before how this place became its own separate world, untouched by outside affairs.

Amazed, she saw that some Dedicates were now dancing.

“Will this go on all day?” she asked.

“Ayuh,” the blind fellow said. “Until the battle.”

She wondered. “Ah, I son...Today, if your lord dies, your sight will be restored. What better reason to celebrate?”

The blind fellow gripped his wine bottle fiercely, as if it were a cudgel, and snarled, “What a rude creature you are! We celebrate because today we”—he thumped his chest for emphasis—“are going to war. Today, my lord Groverman will use my eyes, but I would gladly fight at his side if I could.”

He sloshed wine onto the ground. “And by this libation, I implore the Earth: may Groverman come home victorious, to fight another day! Long live Duke Groverman!”

The fellow raised his wine bottle in the air and took a long swig, toasting the Duke’s health.

Myrrima had spoken thoughtlessly. She understood that she had insulted the fellow, but she’d meant no harm.

Near one wall, in the shadows apart from the revelers, Myrrima saw Iome encircled by three dozen peasants, men and women of various ages and backgrounds. They held hands and circled slowly as Iome spoke. In the background, two minstrels played a soft march on flutes and drums. It was an ancient tune.

Myrrima recognized immediately what was happening. When a warrior sought endowments, he went to the facilitator, who kept a list of all those who had ever offered to act as Dedicates. The facilitator would then gather candidates, and because it was imperative that the Dedicates offer themselves freely and completely, the warrior often would need to speak. He’d tell the candidates of the need that drove him, promise to serve well if granted endowments, and offer support to the Dedicates and their families.

Thus Myrrima was not surprised to hear Iome speaking intently: “I ask not for myself alone. The Earth has spoken to my husband, and warned that the end of the Age of Man is upon us. Thus if we fight, we fight not for ourselves, but for all of mankind!”

One man in the circle called out, “Your Highness, forgive me, but you’re not trained for war. Might my endowment not serve another lord better?”

“You’re right,” Iome countered. “I have some good training with the saber, and if I had an endowment of brawn, I could bear a warhammer as Well as any man. But I don’t pretend that I’ll fight with great wining and skill. To fight with great speed is as deadly as to fight with great skill. So I’ll want metabolism instead.” There was a gasp of surprise from the potential Dedicates.

“Why? Why would you want to die young like that?” one older woman in the group asked as she plodded along slowly in the circle.

Myrrima pitied Iome. Myrrima had never engaged in a ceremony like this. She doubted that she could do it. She knew she didn’t have a way with words. She’d never be able to talk a stranger into giving her the use of his or her most precious attribute.

“I carry the King’s son within me,” Iome explained. “Yesterday when the Darkling Glory came to Castle Sylvarresta, it sought the child’s life, not mine. If I carry him to term, the Prince will not be born until midsummer. But if I take enough metabolism now, I can deliver in six weeks.”

Good girl, Myrrima thought. All, of the potential Dedicates could see what she wanted. Iome would become a warrior, give her life to buy a life for her son. Iome’s love for her child might sway these people.

The old woman stared at her intently and broke from the circle, taking a step inward and bowing on one knee. “My metabolism is yours, and your child’s.” But the others continued circling, asking questions.

Someone tapped Myrrima on the back. She turned and looked up into the face of one of the largest men she’d ever encountered. He threw a shadow that could darken a small crowd, and he looked as if he’d more likely be seen carrying a horse about than to have it carry him. He was a woodsman by the smell of the pine on him. He wore a leather vest with no shirt underneath, so that she could see his muscular chest He looked to be in his midthirties. He grinned down at her, his bearded face filled with awe. “Are you the one?”

“Which one?” Myrrima asked.

“What killed the Darkling Glory?”

Myrrima nodded dumbly, unsure how to speak to someone whose face revealed such awe.

“I sawer it,” the fellow said. “Flew right overhead, it did. Blackened the sky for miles. Never thought anyone could kill it”

“I shot it,” Myrrima said. She realized that she was clutching her bow defensively, holding it close to her breast. “You’d have done the same if you were there.”

“Hah! Not bloody likely.” The big man grinned. “I’d have turned tail and still be running.”

Myrrima accepted his compliment. He was right after all. Most men would have run.

The fellow nodded, as if too shy to speak. She could tell that he was none too bright. “You’ll need a new bow,” he said.

She glanced at her bow, wondering if she’d damaged it “What do you mean?”

“You’ll need a steel bow,” the fellow said, “cause I could crack that one in two, no problem.”

Then she understood. Her reputation—however undeserved—preceded her. This monster meant to give her an endowment of brawn. Many a knight would have gladly paid fifty gold eagles for such an endowment, ten years of a workman’s wages. By the Powers, he was big!

“I see,” Myrrima murmured in wonder. She dared not say that she thought his admiration undeserved, for if she had the brawn of a man like this, she suspected that she could become the kind of hero he believed her to be.

Several other peasants standing at this big fellow’s back rushed forward. And Myrrima had a second realization. The knot of people waiting at the gates had all been waiting for her. They’d come to offer endowments.

Unlike Iome, “Heredon’s Glory” did not have to talk them into giving her their finest attributes.

40 Tales of Madness

Daylight found Gaborn deep in the lowlands of Fleeds. The northlands had been hilly, filled with shepherds’ cottages and narrow roads bordered by stone fences. Huge rocks crowned with twisted pines had stood along the road like ancient sentinels. The starlight fell over the countryside as heavy and palpable as if it were silver coins.

Gaborn had not dared ride hard in the darkness, no matter how great the danger he felt arising at Carris, and so the vast majority of his troops kept pace through the night. Though he had begun to receive endowments, a fall from his horse could break his neck as easily as it could any other man’s.

Yet even as he rode, he felt himself swelling, growing in power. He’d taken less than an hour to receive endowments at Castle Groverman. He’d taken one each of brawn, metabolism, grace, and stamina. Then he’d fled, leaving Groverman’s facilitator to find others willing to Vector endowments through his new Dedicates.

He’d warned the facilitator that he’d need forty endowments by nightfall, and the facilitator had promised to have it done.

So as he rode that night, he grew more refreshed with each passing hour. He grew stronger, faster.

Though the deed repulsed him, he could not deny that the taste of evil was sweet, and unwittingly on one occasion he even found himself wondering, If Raj Ahten sought to use forcibles to become the Sum of All Men, could I not do the same?

Yet he cast the thought away quickly, for it was not worthy of a king.

He rode now with the wizard Binnesman at his side, along with five hundred lords out of Orwynne and Heredon. Gaborn had provided a fast force horse so that his Days could accompany the party.

At dawn Gaborn gazed down from a hill trail that looked over the rolling plains. A cold sun dawdled on the horizon, and a hazy mist hovered over the fields of Fleeds.

In preparation for a race over the plains, he stopped to water and feed the horses by a placid finger lake where wild oats and purple vetch and golden melilot grew thick. The icy water was marvelously clear; fat trout swam lazily among the humped stones beneath its surface.

Yellow larks sang in the willows beside the road; at his approach they flew up like sparks from a smith’s grindstone.

“Feed and water here for fifteen minutes,” Gaborn called out. “If we race, we can reach Tor Doohan within the hour. From there we’ll strike south quickly, in hopes of reaching Carris by mid-afternoon.”

Gaborn was raising the time scale. The sense of impending doom at Carris was becoming overwhelming, and the Earth bade him to strike.

“Midafternoon?” Sir Langley asked. “Is there some great hurry?”

Carris was so far away that no messenger could have brought him any news that was less than a day stale. But Gaborn surprised them with some. “Yes,” Gaborn admitted

“I believe that Raj Ahten is at the walls of Carris. Five minutes ago, my messengers were in mortal danger....The feeling passed for a moment. Yet now once again I feel a staggering sense of danger rising around my Chosen messengers there.”

The lords began talking to one another loudly, discussing strategies. Raj Ahten was notorious for taking castles quickly. Few believed that Carris would hold out through the day. If it did, then chasing him off might be an easy matter.

But no one believed that they’d find him crouched before the walls of Carris.

The consensus was that if Gaborn laid siege to the castle, he would likely be successful in the short term. But how long could he sustain such a siege? With Raj Ahten’s armies spilling across the borders, the Wolf Lord would not have to wait more than a week for reinforcements. Which meant that Gaborn would either have to attack Raj Ahten in his stronghold quickly, or stave off armies that came to give him aid.

Either way, Gaborn might well be setting the stage for a battle of epic proportions.

It all sounded so simple. Lords from all across Rofehavan would gather to his banner. Already he had Beldinook and Fleeds, the Knights Equitable, Heredon, and Mystarria. With so many troops, taking Raj Ahten should not be hard. In fact, Gaborn almost hoped that Raj Ahten did take Carris, for it would leave him trapped, like a rat, there on the peninsula.

Yet Gaborn still felt deeply troubled. He felt death stalking every single man and woman in his retinue. There would be a battle royal at Carris, and it would not wait for a week. He feared that Raj Ahten was setting some sort of trap.

He worried that even with Lowicker’s aid, and the aid of Fleeds, he would not gather enough troops to do battle.

Gaborn went to the edge of the lake, hoping to be alone with his thoughts. Little yellow posies sprouted between the rocks at the shore’s edge. He plucked one, stood holding it. As a child he’d always thought posies to be such treasures, though now he saw how common they really were.

Like people. Men and women and children everywhere. Gaborn still treasured every one of them, though the Earth warned that he could save only a few.

His Days went to the water’s edge, drew back the hood of his riding robe to expose his close-cropped hair. His skeletal features looked haggard, marred by worry. He knelt and cupped his hands to draw forth a drink.

“What is happening at Carris?” Gaborn asked.

The scholar dropped his handful of water, startled. He did not turn to Gaborn to answer. “All in good time, Your Highness.”

“You cannot simply record the deaths of men,” Gaborn said. “No matter how hard you try to conceal it, you feel for them. Yesterday, when the Blue Tower fell, I saw the horror in your face.”

“I am Time’s Witness,” the Days said. “I do not get involved.”

“Death stalks every man and woman in our party. There are hundreds of thousands of people at Carris, and I believe that death stalks them also. Will you merely witness it?”

“There may well be nothing I can do to stop it,” the Days answered. He turned to look at Gaborn. The morning sun showed a tear glistening in his eye.

What is he saying? Gaborn wondered. That he will not stop it, or cannot?

Cannot, Gaborn decided. But if that was true, what trap had Raj Ahten set that was so diabolical that it could not be thwarted? Gaborn needed to know more.

“You asked me last night if I would ever Choose a Days,” Gaborn said. “My answer is yes, I will. But only if the Days will give himself in service to his fellow men.”

“You seek to buy my allegiance?” the Days asked.

“I seek to save the world.”

“It may be that you seek in vain,” the Days said.

“How comfortable it must be, to simply remain a voyeur,” Gaborn chided, to pretend that indifference is a virtue, and that our fates are all seed by time.”

“You hope to anger me into breaking my vows?” the Days said. “That is a deed that I would have thought beneath you. My opinion of you is lowered. It will be noted in the book of your life.”

Gaborn shook his head. “Beg, ridicule, badger, blackmail. If I ask hard things of you, I do not ask for myself alone. I warn you: I will not Choose you. I am riding into battle with you at my side, and I will not Choose you. You will most likely die today if you do not name the threat at Carris.”

The Days trembled, tried to keep a firm jaw as he turned away. But his trembling demeanor told Gaborn much. There was a danger at Carris, a threat so enormous that the Days really believed he would die today.

Yet he chose oblivion rather than to break his vow of noninterference in the affairs of mankind.

As Gaborn stood waiting beside the lake, Erin Connal came to him. She’d warned him last night that she wanted to speak to him alone, and now she sat down beside him and said, “Your Highness, I have news of a plot against you.”

She then gave him the bare bones of King Anders’s plot to subvert Gaborn’s claims to his throne.

Gaborn felt overwhelmed. He could hardly imagine why Anders would do it: For another lord to fight him was...so wasteful.

He’d imagined that people would have rejoiced to hear that the Earth had chosen a new king. Instead, it seemed to Gaborn that the land sprouted enemies like...like the banks of this cold lake sprouted posies.

Gaborn spoke to Erin for a few minutes, then she fetched Prince Celinor so that he could get closer to the heart of the matter.

Gaborn sat him down and questioned him. “Erin has warned me that your father plots against me. How serious is his plot, do you think? Would he go to war, or send assassins against me?”

Celinor answered frankly, as if he’d been worrying about the possibility himself. “I...don’t know. My father has never sought war against or tried to assassinate a fellow lord of Rofehavan. He never spoke to me about the possibility. However...my father has not been himself lately. Not for the past month, at least. I think he is going mad”

“Why would you think him mad?” Gaborn asked.

Celinor looked all about, in order to make certain that no one else was close enough to hear.

“About three weeks ago, while all the castle was asleep, he crept to my room with nothing but a candle in his hand.

“He was naked, and wore nothing at all but a beatific smile such as I’d never seen on his face. His voice was soft and dreamy, and he woke me and announced that he had seen a sign in the heavens, and knew of a surety that he was to be the next Earth King.”

“What sign had he seen?” Erin asked.

“He claimed that he saw three stars falling from the heavens, all at once, bright and flaming. Then these stars, he says, as they neared the horizon, suddenly veered from their course and wheeled about, circling the castle, creating a flaming crown that encompassed all of South Crowthen.”

Gaborn wondered at such a story. Meteors did not figure at all in any legend dealing with the earth powers. “He thought this an Earth sign?”

“He did,” Celinor said. “But I took it merely for a sign that he’d had some waking dream, and told him so. As proof I went to speak to the far-seer upon the castle walls, and to the guardsmen there, so that I could convince my father of his error.”

“What did they say?” Gaborn asked

“The guardsmen in the Dedicates’ Keep had seen nothing, for they’d been making their rounds down below inside the keep. Four men were found to be missing. The far-seer upon the watchman’s tower was dead.”

“Dead?” Erin asked. “How?”

“He’d fallen from the tower. Whether he was pushed or had slipped or merely decided to jump, I don’t know.”

“The missing men?”

“My father refused to say where they’ve gone. He hints that they are on some mission. He said merely that ‘They had duties elsewhere’”

“You think your father murdered his own far-seer, and sent the others away?” Gaborn asked

“Perhaps,” Celinor said “I had men check the borders of South Crowthen, looking for the four men. After a week we found a peasant who says that he did indeed see one of the missing knights racing south. He said he hailed the man, but the knight rode as if in a dream...without seeing him, without speaking.

“On a hunch, I looked harder, and found that indeed all four knights had left the kingdom—one riding north, another south, a third east, and the last to the west. Each man rode away without speaking a word”

“This reeks of sorcery,” Gaborn said. He did not like it. This had nothing to do with the earth powers. It hinted at something dark and dangerous.

“So I thought,” Celinor said. “We had an herb woman in the hills nearby, a lady called the Nut Woman, for she was always collecting nuts. She was a witch who lived in the woods and cared for the squirrels. I went to her cave to seek her counsel, to learn if this was the Earth’s doing...but though I’ve heard that she’d lived in that cave for a hundred years, she had suddenly gone.

“And this is the odd part: every squirrel in those woods disappeared with her.”

Erin licked her lips nervously. This Nut Woman obviously served the Earth. She was an Earth Warden, like Binnesman, but with a different charge. “Have you asked the wizard Binnesman about this?” Gaborn asked.

Celinor shook his head. “I have had little evidence for my concerns. After this one night, my father has not spoken of his delusion again, though it seems to me that his delusion guides every deed.”

“How’s that?” Erin asked.

“He very calmly and systematically contacted his lords and began strengthening his defenses, doubling and quadrupling his guard. This did not seem a bad thing, for three days before Hostenfest, he managed to slaughter a group of Raj Ahten’s assassins.

“Indeed, my father’s demeanor, his reasoned response to his belief, almost convinced me that his fantasy was a good thing, that if he was deluded, this might be a helpful delusion. And I confess that even I began to wonder if perhaps the sign was true.

“Then, something else happened, last week. My father flew into an indescribable rage upon learning that another claimed to be the Earth King. He screamed and threw things about. He ripped tapestries with his bare hands and toppled his own throne. He beat the servant who’d brought the news. When he finally calmed after several hours, he claimed that he should have seen it, that he should have known that pretenders would claim his throne. It was then that he began to plot how he might discredit Gaborn’s title. Indeed, his stories seemed so convincing that even I wondered if Gaborn might be a fraud. Yet my father has suddenly become...unstable. He will be talking about one thing, and suddenly change the subject or shout some unrelated command. He...moves oddly.”

“The man sounds daft and dangerous,” Gaborn said. “Why haven’t you told others? Why did you wait until now?”

Celinor folded his hands and stared hard at Gaborn. “When I was a child of ten, my grandfather went mad, suffering from grand delusions and hallucinations. For his own safety, my parents locked him in a cell beneath our keep.

“As a child, I used to listen to him mutter and laugh long into the night, in his cell down below my bedroom.

“At the time, my father told me that it was a curse in our family. He sought to keep his own father comfortable as he lived out his last days. We Vectored metabolism to him through four servants, so that he would grow old and die quickly, while we spread the news abroad that my grandfather had passed away.

“My father made me vow that if he should ever show the same symptoms, that I would treat him no better and no worse.

“I have always been loyal. If my father is mad, I would hope that he merits our compassion.”

“As do I,” Gaborn said. Yet he had to worry. It sounded as if a madman haunted the borders of Heredon. He’d hoped to find an ally in Anders, as he had in Kings Orwynne and Lowicker.

At that, Gaborn called for his men to mount up, and he raced for Tor Doohan with renewed vigor. With the clear morning light and dry roads, they made good time. As they raced, the troops began to spread thin, those on the fastest horses taking the lead while others fell miles behind.

An hour later, Gaborn, the wizard Binnesman, and a few lords thundered over Atherphilly Trail into Tor Doohan. The “palace” at Tor Doohan had stood far longer than anyone knew. It was no palace at all, by modern terms. It was instead only an enormous crimson tent pitched within a circle of crude white stones.

The stones atop Tor Doohan were roughly hewn from the earth. Some were planted in the hillside as pillars so that they rose up like jagged teeth, eighty feet tall and forty feet wide. Atop the standing stones, others had been placed crosswise between each pillar, and these stones too were each over eighty feet long and weighed hundreds of thousands of tons.

Who had placed the stones together, or when, or why, no one rightly knew. Ancient tales called it the “Place of the White Mare,” for it was said that a race of giants had built the stones as a corral to hold the Star Mare, before she escaped and became a constellation.

Of course, only giants could have placed the stones in the circle, yet even for hill giants like those still living in Inkarra, it would have been a monumental task.

But as for the stones’ purpose? Certainly they did not hold a giant horse. To the horse clans, any such stack of stones would have seemed like a corral.

Gaborn suspected that the stones marked the tomb of some ancient hill giant king, though no one had ever dug for his bones.

The horse clans of Fleeds had gathered for annual games and war counsels atop Tor Doohan for nearly three thousand years, until it had become the permanent camp of the High Queen.

The nomadic horsesisters of Fleeds had long sneered at folk who settled in one place. Thus the Queen’s palace at Tar Doohan was an enormous tent that had remained erected within the stones now for thirty generations. While the tent stood on the hill, villages had grown up along the Roan River to the west, and eighteen fortresses now dotted the valley. Yet the palace pavilion remained the symbolic heart of Fleeds.

Gaborn felt thankful when they rounded the hills on the Atherphilly Trail and at last saw the Red Queen’s great pavilion of scarlet silk pitched inside the ring of stones. Two enormous bronze statues of mares, their hooves pawing the air, rose above the palace entrance.

On the grounds outside the circle, hundreds of clan lords had pitched their own tents in the shadow of the palace, preparing for war. Yet they were remarkably few in number, and Gaborn was concerned. He’d hoped that Queen Herin the Red would offer some troops to ride at his side. But too many men and women had died in the battle against Raj Ahten, and many more had already gone south to retake the fortress at Castle Fells.

Fleeds was a poor land, and it looked as if Herin the Red would have few troops left to offer him. She was a proud woman, and Gaborn could see that she had no one at all to spare.

Still, hundreds of young warriors wildly raced their horses around the palace, for legend said that any warrior who raced his mount seven times around the great stone circle while blowing his or her warhorn would have good luck in battle.

As Gaborn and a few dozen lords rode up to the pace, he listened to those who had never seen it make appreciative sounds of surprise.

The racing young riders now drew in their reins, and stared back in equal wonder to see the Earth King.

Many young women—lancers and archers—urged their mounts to rear up and paw the air as a sign that they were willing to give themselves and their mounts into Gaborn’s service. Yet he dared Choose none until he spoke with Queen Herin the Red

Gaborn, Binnesman, Gaborn’s Days, and the various lords rode under the statues of the war mares and dismounted; servants rushed forward to take their weary horses down to the royal stables.

Few things made Gaborn feel quite so humble as to walk beneath the great statues and standing stones of the palace. A cool morning wind blew across the hills, beating against the tent, so that its red silk outer walls billowed and rolled. The sentries posted outside the pavilion pulled back the flaps.

The lords went into the antechamber of the pavilion, into a room that had a ceiling eighty feet high, while a servant went to announce the party to Queen Herin the Red. The sun shining through the top layers of silk cast a scarlet glow, so that even the golden urns along the walls were bathed in a ruddy hue.

Many lords stood gaping about at the vast tapestries on either wall to the left and right. Both tapestries showed the emblem of Fleeds, a great roan mare pawing the air, while flames issued from its nostrils. The tapestries showed the mare upon a green field, and on that field, one could see every blade of grass, every dandelion, every posy, every ant.

Outside, the young knights resumed their race around the palace, blowing their warhorns.

“Well,” Sir Langley joked, “I don’t know how we’ll ever hold a council here with all of this racket.”

His ignorance of course was excusable. The Queen’s Sanctum at the heart of the palace was virtually soundproof.

The palace was enormous. Its roof consisted of three layers of cloth, one above another, but each nearly five hundred feet across. The interior was divided into rooms by great curtains and tapestries that formed the walls.

Furthermore, wooden ramparts fashioned of logs had been built beneath the great awnings of the tent, forming floors and stairs, further dividing the pavilion into three separate levels. The framework of these logs allowed tapestries to be hung as walls. Thus, the Red Queen’s palace was less secure than a palace of stone, yet far more serviceable than a simple pavilion.

Queen Herin soon entered the antechamber. The Queen had red hair and pale skin, eyes as dark blue as bachelor’s buttons. She was tall, strong. She smiled; but her smile did not hold any joy at this meeting,

She knows that I must beg for troops, Gaborn thought, and she knows that she can spare me none.

Queen Herin wore scale mail, with a silver buckler at her waist that displayed the symbol of Fleeds in red enamel. In her hand she bore the royal scepter of Fleeds, a rod of gold made like a horseman’s crop, with a red horsetail at one end.

“Your Highness,” Queen Herin greeted Gaborn, and did the unthinkable. She dropped to both knees before him and bowed her head.

Then she offered her scepter.

Among the horsesisters of Fleeds, no high queen had ever bowed to a man.

Gaborn had hoped to beg Queen Herin for the use of a few knights and some food for his men and horses.

Instead she offered Gaborn her realm.

41 The Smell of a Rising Storm

In the late morning, Iome spurred her charger onward toward Fleeds, riding hard, with Myrrima and Sir Hoswell at her back. Having no charger that could match her pace, Iome’s Days was left behind.

Iome had taken endowments at Castle Groverman—more than she’d expected, but in the end not so many as Myrrima did. She had two endowments of brawn to her credit now, one of grace, one of wit, one of sight, and four of metabolism. With that, she also bore endowments from dogs: one of hearing, two of stamina, two of smell. She felt like a wolf lord indeed, powerful, tireless, and deadly. It was a heady pleasure, one that filled her with a renewed sense of responsibility.

Yet Myrrima had bested her. The villagers had heard how Myrrima had slain the Darkling Glory, and they heaped endowments upon her. So many that Iome had felt obligated to give Myrrima more forcibles from her private horde. Sixteen men and women went under the forcibles for Myrrima, so that between those endowments and the ones from her dogs, she now had nearly as many endowments as did any captain in Heredon’s guard.

Myrrima had always been large, beautiful. Now her endowments lent her an air of fierceness. So the three Runelords now rode without any other guard but their own strong arms. Yet as they rode, Iome noted that Sir Hoswell remained a respectful distance behind the women, and Myrrima avoided his presence. She did not welcome his company.

Wind rippled over the grass in steady waves, gusted at Iome’s back, pushing her south. Though the sky was blue, the wind smelled of a rising storm. The heather had sprouted tiny purple flowers after last week’s rain, leaving the distant fields awash in their odd gray-blue hue. Iome ran her mare, for the morning felt cool and her mount seemed eager to outrace the wind. Though it raced at forty miles per hour, Iome felt as if it were hardly testing its pace.

In the past when riding a force horse, Iome had never been able to follow the movement of its hooves with her eyes. Now, with so much metabolism to her credit, she could follow her horse’s movements easily.

The rest of the world seemed to have slowed dramatically. A crow beating its wings against the wind seemed to hang painfully in the air. The sounds of thudding steel-shod hooves on the road were too deep, more like a frowth giant pounding on a huge drum.

Even more disturbing, Iome’s thoughts seemed to race. Before, without her endowments of metabolism, riding all day would have seemed a short journey. But now her journey of one day would seem like five.

She’d seldom had so much time to merely sit and think. And after the long day’s ride, she would have to live through the night. With all of her metabolism, thirteen hours of darkness would seem like sixty-five. In the dead of winter, force soldiers with high metabolism often became irascible and despondent, for the nights could seem interminable to them. Iome steeled herself to face the coming winter.

She raced past a few solitary oaks whose leaves had mostly blown away, the bones of trees, clothed only in ivy twined high in their branches.

Ahead lay a shallow, muddy creek winding across the prairie, and there where the road dipped, a fellow sat on a narrow log bridge watering his horse in the spare shade of an oak.

Even half a mile away, Iome recognized his tunic. He wore a courier’s colors, the blue of Mystarria with the green man emblem embroidered on the right side of his chest. In addition he bore a saber on his hip and wore a steel helm with a long visor. A common courier. The fellow was small, with long silver hair, as if it had gone gray prematurely.

Iome raised her hand in signal for Myrrima and Sir Hoswell to slow. There was something odd about this one. Myrrima had met several of Gaborn’s messengers before, and she could not quite name her concern.

The messenger saw them, climbed up from his spot on the bridge, dusted off his tunic. The fellow mounted his horse, rode out of the shadow of the oak, letting his horse plod along. He studied them intently, as if he feared they might be outlaws.

Iome reined in her mount as the fellow approached.

He was a strange one, Iome decided. He was grinning, but not shyly or fearfully. Instead she decided that he had an impish grin, mischief in his eyes.

She urged her own mount forward, until she felt close enough to hail him. “Where are you going, sirrah?”

The courier stopped his mount. “I bear a message for the King,” the fellow answered.

“From whom?” Iome asked.

“Funny,” the messenger smirked. “The King did not have tits, last that I saw.” It was his crude way of rebuking her for asking too much about the King’s business, yet Myrrima had never heard such comments from even the roughest Mystarrian.

“But the Queen did—last I saw,” Iome said, trying to keep the rage from her voice.

The messenger’s smirk disappeared, yet his deep brown eyes glittered as if he laughed at some private joke. “You’re the Queen?”

Iome nodded. His tone suggested that she somehow disappointed him, did not live up to his expectations. Iome had taken several endowments, but none of glamour or of Voice. She did not look like a queen. She was trying to decide whether to have the man beaten, or merely dismissed from service.

“A thousand apologies, Your Highness,” the messenger said. “I did not recognize you. We have not met before.”

Though he mouthed an apology, there was none in his tone—only mockery.

“Let me see the message,” Iome demanded.

“My apologies,” the fellow said. “It is only for the King’s eyes.”

Iome found her pulse racing. She was angry, yet suspicious.

This man spoke quickly. She knew that he too had more than one endowment of metabolism. That was not common for a courier. She smelled him, but could not detect anything amiss. He smelled of horse and the road, of linen and cotton and perhaps some liniment that he’d used to service a wound on his horse’s leg.

“I will carry the message,” Iome said. “You’re going the wrong way, and doubtless your mount is fatigued. You’ll never catch the King.”

In consternation, the messenger glanced behind along the road he’d been traveling.

Surely if he’d come from Tor Doohan, he’d have spotted Gaborn on the road. Which meant that he’d not ridden the most direct route last night, but had traveled along some side road.

“Where can I find him?” the courier asked, looking back.

“Give me the message,” Iome demanded.

The fellow caught her tone, turned and studied her with one eyebrow cocked. Sir Hoswell caught her tone, too. She heard him slide his horseman’s hammer from the sheath at his saddle.

Still the courier did not hand her the message pouch. “I demand it,” Iome said.

“I...I only meant to spare you the trouble, Your Highness,” the messenger said. He reached to his pouch, pulled out a blue lacquered leather scroll case, and handed it to Iome. “For the King’s eyes only,” he warned.

Iome, reached for the thing, and the Earth King’s warning rang clear in her mind, “Beware!”

She hesitated for a moment, studied the messenger. He did not lunge at her or draw steel.

Yet she knew for certain that he presented some danger. From a distance she examined the pouch’s exterior. She’d heard of southern assassins who placed poison needles on implements. Perhaps something like that might be at work.

But she could see nothing ominous on the exterior of the case. The pouch was sealed with wax, but no signet ring marked who might have sealed it.

The messenger leaned forward, stared hard into her eyes. A taut smile turned hs lips upward as he offered the case.

He’s daring me to take it, Iome thought.

She reached out and snatched—not for the case, but for the fellow’s wrist. His eyes went wide.

He shouted and spurred his mount so hard that flecks of blood flew from the horse’s flanks.

He was a small man, hardly taller than Iome, and without quite as many endowments as she had. He struggled to urge his horse past her, and Iome clamped down hard on his wrist.

As she did, her own forearm brushed the surface of the message pouch. The sensation she felt on doing so was almost impossible to describe—she felt movement over the surface of the pouch, as if thousands of invisible spiders skittered across its surface, bumping into her arm.

In horror she squeezed the courier’s wrist and twisted, hoping to force him to drop the case.

To her surprise, the fellow’s bones snapped. She had taken endowments of brawn hardly more than an hour ago, and so had not learned her own strength.

The message case went flying to the ground.

The fellow’s mount surged forward, but Myrrima had already reacted. She charged to Iome’s defense. Sir Borenson’s massive warhorse slammed into the messenger’s smaller mount.

The courier’s horse floundered backward and stumbled.

Torn from his horse, the courier rolled to the ground.

Myrrima fought to remain in her saddle, ended up clinging to her horse’s neck.

Iome wheeled her charger, fearing that the courier would leap on Myrrima. Though Gaborn had warned her to beware, she saw that they were three against one, and she felt confident.

“Hoof!” Iome commanded her mount. The warhorse reared and pranced forward, pawing and kicking.

The courier leapt up, wild-eyed. He laughed maniacally. Sir Hoswell shouted and spurred his horse forward, wielding his horseman’s hammer.

Seeing that he was outnumbered, the courier suddenly leapt into the air—and flew!

He did not flap his arms as if they were wings. Nor did he make any other odd motion. He merely cackled and spread his arms wide, as if he were a flying squirrel, and let the wind take him.

A sudden burst of air whirled around him, battering his blue cloak, lifting him unexpectedly. He soared over Iome’s head. His leap carried him a hundred feet in the air and two hundred yards downwind.

He came to rest like a crow in the huge oak tree above the stream where Iome had first seen him. The upper branches bobbed and swayed under his weight.

“By the Powers!” Sir Hoswell swore, racing to the base of the tree. He reached around behind his back; pulled his steel horsebow, and such was his uncommon strength that he actually strung it while in the saddle. He prepared to send a shaft up to hit the fellow.

The courier settled between three branches and chortled like a madman as Iome and Myrrima approached. Iome advanced toward him warily, wondering why this fellow had changed his demeanor so dramatically—from the grinning assassin to the chortling manic.

“He’s a Sky Lord!” Myrrima cried in wonder.

“Nay,” Sir Hoswell growled angrily, “a Sky Lord would have flown away from here. He’s just a damned Inkarran wizard!”

Now that Hoswell, said it, the fellow did look somewhat Inkarran. He had the silver hair, which was a rare enough trait here in the north. But his skin wasn’t quite pallid enough, and his eyes were a dark brown rather than silver or gray. Not Inkarran, Iome thought, only a half-breed.

Hoswell sent a shaft into the tree, blurring upward from his steel bow, but the assassin merely dodged aside, or perhaps a sudden gust of wind moved the arrow.

“Greetings,” Iome called to the fellow, raising a hand to warn Hoswell not to shoot again. The courier continued to cackle.

Iome studied him. She could feel it, now that she tried. She had always been sensitive to the Powers, and now she could feel the Power that drove him. The fellow was not a cold, calculating assassin. He was passionate, chaotic, and utterly fearless—one who had given himself to the wind. Iome had recognized this wrongness in him almost immediately, even when she’d first seen him from a distance.

The courier continued to snicker. Iome tried to smile in return, catching his mood, feeling the power that drove him. She knew little of Air magics. Air was an unpredictable raster, wild and variable. In order to harness it, one had to learn its moods, and mirror them.

Certainly the gibbering, cackling creature before her could not have acted the assassin like this. No, I see what he is doing, Iome thought. He adopts this mood to curry favor with the Air. But the wind is an unstable master, as likely to give a man ten times the power he needs as to let him down.

She thought of the Darkling Glory, of the elemental of Air that had escaped it. Could it have sent the assassin? she wondered. Could it have initiated this subtle attack?

Sir Hoswell glowered at the courier. “Who sent you?”

“Who? Who?” the fellow shouted. He gaily flapped his arms as if he were an owl. His broken wrist left one hand flopping. He looked at it and winced, gazed accusingly at Iome. “That hurt.”

“Why don’t you come down?” Iome said.

“Down?” the fellow shouted. “Down to the ground? Down to the ground?” he cried in alarm. “Nay! Goosedown. Eiderdown. Spiderdown!”

The fellow’s eyes suddenly lit up as if he had an idea “Thistledown!” he screamed. “Thistledown. Pissle down. Why don’t you turn to thistledown and fly up? You could, you know! You could if you would. You would if you could. In your dreams!”

Iome’s heart pounded. She’d dreamt of thistledown last week, of turning to thistledown and flying over Castle Sylvarresta, drifting up, into the air away from her problems

The courier opened his eyes wide, stretched out his good hand and beckoned to her. “Come to me, O cumbrous Queen of the Sky, you need no feathery wing to fly!”

He’s serious, Iome realized. He wants me to join him.

A powerful blast of wind slammed into Iome’s back, halfway ripping her from her saddle. Iome grabbed the pommel and clung to it. She remembered Gaborn’s warning, and wondered now at her own stupidity.

If she let go, the wind would tear her from the saddle, and she feared where it might carry her. She screamed for help

Hoswell let a shaft fly. The arrow lodged in the tree near the assassin’s head, breaking his concentration. The wind around Iome died.

The assassin spun and snarled like some vicious dog, angered at the unexpected attack.

“No?” he cried. “No? No! She won’t go! She won’t grow. Not like the son within her grows!” He snarled as the Darkling Glory had. “Give me the King’s son. I smell a son in your womb. Give it or I’ll take it!”

The assassin grasped the arrow, wrung it from deep in the oak where the bodkin was buried, and hurled the bolt back at Hoswell. The arrow flew with astonishing speed, blurring as it whipped toward Hoswell, soaring left and right as no arrow should.

It struck Hoswell on the shoulder, merely to bounce off his armor and go blurring toward the grass.

“Beware!”

“Beware!” Gaborn’s Voice warned Iome.

Iome ducked just as the arrow soared upward and whipped around. It drove past her head, blurring as it picked up speed. Then it sailed off into the distance, lost to sight. Without her endowments of metabolism, she’d have been skewered.

“Damn him!” Hoswell shouted. “I’ll go into the tree after him if I must.”

“Wait!” Iome warned.

She stared up at the assassin. He looked down at her, gibbering in laughter.

She felt the Power that moved him. She’d never met a wizard of the Air.

She felt confusion around him, indecision, a great buffeting wall. The man had no mind of his own, no will of his own. He moved as the wind moved him. He gave himself to it even further now, hoping that it would preserve him.

She felt his instability. The Air was taking him.

He was no longer human in this state, could hardly think sequentially. He was a gibbering lunatic blown by the wind. A wretched creature bereft of will. The horror of it settled into her as she realized that he wanted her to join him, to become like him.

Her dream of turning to thistledown. She remembered now that she’d dreamt it during a storm, with the wind blowing all around.

No, the wizard didn’t want her to become like him. The wind did. The Powers of the Air.

Throw yourself into the sky. Let me take you away.

“So, good fellow,” Iome asked in an effort to divert his attention, “do you think you can teach me to fly?”

“Fly? Sky fly? Fly. Walk like a fly? Talk like a fly. Talk to the sky? Why? Why? Does she ask why?” the assassin began to gibber. He raked his good hand nervously over the bark of the oak, and Iome was amazed at his strength, for he absentmindedly began to rip huge shreds of bark away.

Iome calmly walked her mount over to Sir Hoswell. He’d nocked another arrow but was unsure whether to shoot. His last shaft had come within an inch of skewering the Queen.

Iome licked her lips and kissed the arrow’s point, shaft, and fletching, wetting it in the same way that Myrrima’s arrow had been wetted when she slew the Darkling Glory.

“Shoot him now,” Iome whispered.

The assassin shrieked, searched about for some means of escape. His sudden terror let her know that she had guessed right. Hoswell brought up his steel bow.

The fellow leapt into the air, and the wind shrieked around him, howling as if the wind itself were in fear. It beat his robes, so that they flapped around him like wings.

Hoswell loosed the shaft. The arrow became a dark blur and caught the assassin in the shoulder.

The assassin spun half a dozen times in the air.

Then the strange winds that held him suddenly dissipated, and his body hurtled downward as if he’d fallen from a limb. He landed with a dull thud.

But a groaning sound escaped his throat and moved off through the sky, whirling overhead, circling the great oak.

In horror Iome gazed upward.

The wizard’s body might be lying at their feet, but something of him was left still: a swirling expanse of air that circled overhead and moaned of its own accord.

Hoswell dropped from his mount and rolled the corpse over. Hardly any blood flowed from the fellow. The arrow in his shoulder provided a minor flesh wound that should not have killed him.

Yet the Inkarran lay unmoving, unbreathing, his eyes staring fixedly.

We did not kill him, Iome realized Not the way that Myrrima slew the Darkling Glory. This wizard had chosen to leave his body.

Hoswell wrapped one hand around the throat of the corpse and squeezed then grabbed a handful of dirt, gouged it from the soil, and began shoving it in the dead man’s mouth and nose. He glanced about fearfully as he worked.

“I’ve heard it said that if you disembody a Sky Lord, you should put him in the ground quickly,” Hoswell said to Myrrima and Iome. “That way he can’t take his body back. It’s best to sew his mouth and nostrils closed, too, but a little dirt shoved up there should hold it for a while.”

Iome knew little of such things. She was not a soldier of the line, had never imagined that she’d find herself battling magical creatures. Yet she had to wonder. She’d not done these things to the corpse of the Darkling Glory. Could it come back?

A strong gust of wind roared from the sky with a sound like a cry, slammed into Hoswell’s back and drove him to the ground. The wizard’s body suddenly bucked and heaved about as if in its death throes.

Hoswell threw a handful of soil in the air, and the magical wind whirled away in retreat. As if in frustration, it roared up into the heights of the tree and shot through the desiccated leaves, sending them raining down all around.

“Wait!” Iome said, horrified at the gruesome pains that Hoswell was going through to kill the man.

Hoswell looked up at her curiously.

“I want to know what he’s after. Why did he attack us?”

“You’ll not get any sane answers by questioning one of the wind-driven,” Hoswell said.

“Search the body,” Iome ordered.

Hoswell went through the fellow’s purse, but found nothing.

Hoswell pulled off the man’s right boot. His foot and calf were covered in blue tattoos, in the style of the Inkarrans, but the image there was not of the world tree, as was common, but instead bore the symbol of the winds among his family names. Iome knew a little of Inkarran glyphs, could barely read what was written there.

Hoswell scratched his jaw, studying the fellow’s tattoos. “He’s an Inkarran, all right. His name is Pilwyn. Zandaros is his patriarchal line, but the bitch who sired him is named Yassaravine,” Hoswell said meaningfully. He looked up into Iome’s eyes.

“Yassaravine coly Zandaros?” Iome asked. “The Storm King’s sister?” The Storm King was perhaps the most powerful lord in all of Inkarra. Legend said that his line descended from the Sky Lords, but that his forefather had fallen from their grace.

Hoswell was telling her that this wind wizard she had at her mercy was a powerful lord in his own right.

The Inkarrans did not fight wars. Their leaders settled disputes by battling among themselves. But Inkarran methods of battle were often subtle and perverse. Seldom did two lords actually bear weapons against one another. More often, a victim might be poisoned or humiliated, or driven to madness or suicide.

As Iome considered this man’s actions, she gaped in wonder.

He’d probably taken great delight in dressing as a messenger of Mystarria. He’d have enjoyed the irony of riding as a courier of the land he sought to destroy.

Iome understood that creeping sensation she’d felt when she’d touched the message case. Magical runes were written on it, written with wind. Iome had no doubt that if Gaborn had touched that message case, the “message” written there would have destroyed him.

More than that, this fellow had either sent Iome dreams to trouble her mind, or he’d peered into her dreams.

“Is this what I think it is?” she asked Hoswell

“Aye, I fear so,” Hoswell said. “For the first time in history, the Inkarrans have come to war against Rofehavan, milady, and they’re going to teach us a whole new way to do battle.”

In frustration, Iome clenched her fists and gazed up into the sky. She didn’t want to kill another lord, especially not a foreign lord with family members who would seek retaliation. Why would the Inkarrans want war? She wondered if she could reason with him.

The wind was moaning around the upper branches of the tree. She called to it now. “Pilwyn coly Zandaros, speak to me.”

The mass of whirling air quit thrashing through the branches, stood quivering above the tree, as if listening to her.

We have not attacked your people,” Iome shouted. “Nor do we seek battle with Inkarra. We hope to be allied with you in the dark times to come.”

The wind did not answer. She did not know if the Inkarran lord could speak to her in his present form. Perhaps it was too complex a task, Iome reasoned.

“Sir Hoswell, take the dirt from his mouth and nose.”

“Milady?” Hoswell asked.

“Do it,” she said.

Hoswell did as she commanded, but the corpse did not move. It merely lay smiling mysteriously up into the tree. Iome noted that its eyes had not glazed.

Iome rode her horse back up the road a couple of hundred yards, until she reached the leather scroll case. She dared not touch it. Instead she threw dust on it by the handfuls. For a moment two runes written there in wind whirled about, then at last dissipated, drowned in dust.

Only when they were gone did Iome open the case and read the message that fell out, scripted on yellow parchment.

Ah, to taste the lively air—

no more!

The scroll had carried a curse, then. One that would have strangled her husband, had he dared to touch the scroll case.

She ripped the paper in half and trampled the message case, then rode back to the tree. “We’ll take his horse as a palfrey,” she told the others. “I don’t want him following us. But leave him with money and food, so that he can make his way home as best he can.”

“You’ll leave him alive?” Hoswell asked. He did not hide the incredulity in his voice. She was taking a dangerous risk.

“The Storm King may want to wage war against us, but we desire peace,” Iome said. “Let Pilwyn coly Zandaros bear that message back to his uncle.”

With that, they gathered the Inkarran’s horse and left his body beneath the tree. The fellow still had not moved, had not drawn a breath. Hoswell left the arrow in his shoulder.

The three of them had not ridden more than two hundred yards when an arrow whizzed past Iome’s head.

Iome looked back. The Inkarran stood with his white hair blowing in the wind. He’d pulled the arrow from his shoulder, sent it over her head.

“Honor dictates that I repay your kindness, Your Highness,” he shouted at her. “I give you your life, for mine.”

Iome nodded curtly, as ladies of the court were taught to do, and said, “Let there be peace between us.”

But the Inkarran shook his head. “Though the Earth King may shake his fists and cry out against it, the wind blows him war.

“There is no hope for him, or for the vast hordes of mankind. The earth powers weaken. But my offer to you stands, milady. The Storm King will offer you a haven—”

He pointed off to a distant cloud, a great cumulonimbus on the horizon.

Iome turned and rode south.

42 A Lord of the Underworld

The walls around Carris shuddered as the reaver horde raced from the mists.

Out in the fields before the city gates, the common troops of Indhopal ran for their lives, even as the castle guards began to crank up the drawbridge. Many of those troops sprinted up the causeway to where the drawbridge had stood open, then threw themselves into the water and swam for safety, relying upon those at the barbicans to pull them from the lake. The water became thick with splashing sounds, pleas for help, and the cries of the drowning.

Others were too slow to escape, and reavers herded them or hunted them mercilessly. To Roland’s amazement, many of the men, when confronted by a reaver that blocked their way, merely fled in terror back out onto the plains, into greater danger, or lay down and huddled, afraid to even move. Thousands of men were thus stranded, cut off from Carris.

Roland clung to the castle wall. The crows and gulls all began to wing away from their roosts in the city, so that only gree filled the air, writhing like tormented things.

Nine reaver mages raced toward the castle, heads held high, staves thrust forward, as if drawn by the scent of its men. Soldiers on the walls shouted in terror.

Raj Ahten’s flameweavers ran to the wall-walk above the city gates. Soldiers backed away from the flameweavers, who burst into flame and were clothed only in living fire. One flameweaver raised a hand, drew light from the sky so that for a moment he stood in gloom as sunlight whirled and funneled down into his palm.

He traced a shape in the air: A fiery rune took form before him, a magnificent green shield of living fire that glowed like the sun. The flameweaver shoved it forward. The rune floated down to the end of the causeway and hung in the air two hundred yards from the castle gates. In rapid succession, two more flameweavers did the same, and then the first flameweaver created a fourth rune.

The temperature around Carris plummeted by ten degrees as flameweavers drew heat from the sky. The cold drizzle that had been falling turned to sleet.

But within thirty seconds a wall of four fiery shields blockaded the causeway, cutting off the retreat of men, or the reavers hopes for attack.

All the while, behind the mages, the main army of reavers marched northward, as if they cared for Carris not at all.

A wild hope began to rise in Roland’s chest.

We are nothing to them, he realized. Whatever the reavers intend, Carris is nothing to them.

But out on the plain, the reaver mages formed ranks, a group of nine, so that they charged over the battlefield like geese in formation, with the largest mage at their head.

No, Roland suddenly understood. We are not nothing to them. They merely think so little of us, that they only feel the need to dispatch these nine.

The leader of the nine was a huge thing, over twenty feet tall at the shoulder, with fiery runes tattooed across its entire face and along its forearms. It held its head up fearlessly and approached the causeway, its staff high. As it charged, the dull azure glow within its staff began to blush to crimson, and the rod itself began to trail black smoke.

The artillerymen cut loose with a volley of ballista bolts, the whonk, whonk, whonk sounds punctuated with shouts of “Reload!” and the cranking of gears.

At such close range, one of the artillerymen should have pierced a reaver. But mysteriously, every bolt seemed to veer wide of its mark.

Magic! Roland realized. We can’t shoot them. There’s no stopping them.

The great reaver mage reached the end of the causeway and halted momentarily before the green shields of flame. It moved its head this way and that, as if studying them. Then it reached out experimentally with its staff and touched the whirling green wheel of living fire.

It will dispel them, Roland imagined. The shields will collapse harmlessly.

The shields exploded with the sound of an avalanche, tearing at the castle’s foundations. Roland fell backward on his butt. Bolts of green flame slashed skyward. Hot air surged over Roland in a violent concussion, and he felt as if he were leaning over a blacksmith’s forge, even though the flames were over two hundred yards off. Men nearer the inferno cried out in pain and dropped for cover.

Flames blasted Carris. The heat was so intense that the water wards oft the castle wall took effect.

A steam cloud geysered upward, surging into the air, forming a vast curtain that obscured Roland’s view. Water condensed on his brow, filled his eyes, and he wiped it away with his sleeve.

Roland looked up for one heart-stopping moment and saw the most beautiful rainbow above him.

He climbed up. The clouds of steam rose, darkening everything, and for several minutes he saw nothing.

Though the walls of Carris were bound and strengthened with Earth runes, the explosion had punished the walls, caused stones to shift. Great slabs of white plaster fell from both the inner and outer castle walls, stripping away the bone-white exterior to leave the stone naked to the cold sleet.

Then the men upon the walls nearest the reavers began to shout and cheer and whistle.

Roland spotted the mage at last, lying two hundred yards back from the mouth of the causeway, black as a cinder and uglier than any nightmare he’d ever had.

It lay dead, unmoving. Green smoke issued from its wounds, where the fiery lances had pierced it. Behind it, other flame-blackened mages were canted sideways, feebly pawing the ground with broken limbs.

Four of the reaver mages near the rear wheeled and scurried from the castle, limping or dragging broken limbs.

Roland whistled and gaped at the dead behemoth. He found himself breathing hard in relief. We’ve beat them, he thought. We’ve beat their attack. Men clapped and cheered.

Out on the plains, a few thousand footmen had become trapped. Only three dozen reavers bothered to herd them. The reavers stalked among them, slaughtering them wholesale, but hundreds of men made into the causeway, threw themselves into the water.

For along moment, Roland gazed across the countryside. The fog was still receding steadily; a mile from the castle, reavers marched northward in great lines.

The rattling sound of their carapaces smashing against stone could be heard everywhere, like roaring surf. On nearby hills Roland spotted reavers by the thousands.

There are many kinds of creatures that men call reavers, Roland knew, but men rarely saw different varieties. Mostly when men painted images of reavers, they showed the most common breed: the hordes of dreaded blade-bearers and the fearsome mages that led those hordes.

But other species existed. Now for the first time, Roland saw some of those among the blade-bearers: the many legged worms that men called “glue-mums,” each some eighty feet long, and the smaller urine colored spidery creatures that men called “howlers” because of the queer howls that they emitted from time to time.

Though these beasts did not look like the more common reavers, they somehow fit within reaver society. Whether they were intelligent species that the reavers had subverted or whether they were dumb animals trained to slave away in the reavers’ behalf, no, man knew.

Then, from out of the fog, the reaver horde’s leader came.

She was the stuff of legend, a reaver lord unlike any to have been seen above ground for thousands of years.

“A fell mage!” men shouted in dread as she issued from the fog. A hundred reaver mages bore her on a vast palanquin over their heads. Though a reaver stood taller than an elephant, she dwarfed her companions. Thirty feet at the shoulder, and a full length longer than a normal reaver, her entire body was clothed in runes that glimmered like a garment of light. She did not ride upon the palanquin alone, but sat among a pile of glowing crystals so brilliant that at first Roland thought them to be a bed of glimmering diamonds.

But no, he realized, they were merely reaver bones, eaten free of flesh and licked clean by tongues of fire. These were her vanquished foes.

In her paws she held an enormous staff that glowed a sickly citrine hue.

She is beautiful, Roland thought.

Any reaver so terrified him that he did not know how to feel about this one. He looked to see others’ reactions, for he suspected that the warriors here would know enough lore to gauge the threat better than he could. The face of Baron Poll, who had joked at the sight of lesser mages, now looked chiseled and bloodless in terror. Raj Ahten himself gaped at her, eyes wide and nostrils flaring.

A moment before, Roland had breathed a sigh of relief. Now hair rose on the back of his head, while goose pimples formed on his arms.

Here was a veritable Lord of the Underworld..

The reaver mages that had tasted the sorcerous fires of Carris, raced toward the palanquin.

“Uh-oh,” Baron Poll grumbled dangerously.. “If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s a tattletale.”

Perhaps the fell mage won’t care, Roland hoped desperately. Perhaps she has more urgent work to the north.

The four mages reached the palanquin, and to Roland’s surprise they dropped their shovel-shaped heads into the ground and did obeisance, almost exactly as if they were knights presenting themselves before their lord; their leader raised her tail in the air as if she were a stinkbug. The mages bearing the palanquin stopped.

The fell mage swiveled her broad head toward Carris, then did something that Roland had never heard of before. She rose up on her back legs, the way that a marmot might do at the front of her burrow, so that her forepaws and middle legs dangled uselessly.

She shimmered in the gray morning. The philia along the top of her head stood up and waved like the spicules on a sea anemone as it grasps for food in a tidal pool.

“She can’t see us from there, can she?” Roland asked, hoping that at such a distance, he might be overlooked.

“She’s smelling us,” Baron Poll said. “Smelling all eight hundred thousand of us.”

The fell mage took her great staff in both hands, then leapt from her palanquin and came loping toward Carris.

At her back, her whole army, thousands upon thousands of reavers, followed in a dark tide.

Down above the castle gates, the flameweavers had just vanquished the mages. Now they desperately began pulling fire from the sky, setting down more of their infernal wards before Carris. As they worked, the air grew colder, and the flameweavers leached heat even from the stone walls, until frost rimed them. The falling slush turned to drifting snow.

Rapidly the flameweavers set nine more wards, and in the process exhausted themselves. The fire curling over their skins died, so that soon all three men stood naked in the cold. All of their hair had burned cleanly away long ago. Snow hissed to steam when it touched their hot skin. Roland could see that the flameweavers did not believe that their wards would hinder a fell mage.

As the reavers raced forward, many of them stopped to pick up the ruined corpses of Raj Ahten’s foot soldiers in their teeth. These they bore gingerly in their maws, as if to make an offering of them on the causeway, the way that cats might leave dead mice on a doorstep for their master. Some of the men in the reavers’ mouths were only wounded, so that they cried out in pain or pleaded for help in Indhopalese.

The cries wrung Roland’s heart, but there could be no rescuing those lost souls.

The fell mage closed upon the castle, but at four hundred yards, she halted. A hundred lesser mages, scarlet sorceresses, spread out and flanked her on either side. Tens of thousands of reavers now gathered at her back, a grim horde that covered the fields; nearly every reaver held a man between its crystalline teeth.

The reavers were still far back from the fiery green wards of the flameweavers.

The fell mage raised her citrine staff and played it over the walls of Carris, as if to unleash some dire spell Men shrieked and dropped for cover.

Now she’ll show us what she can do! Roland thought.

43 On Human Frailties

Gaborn took little rest at Tor Doohan. He felt the need to hurry south, to fight the Earth’s battle. The facilitator at Castle Groverman must have been working all night, for by early morning Gaborn had the full complement of fifty endowments that he’d asked for. He felt his muscles straining beneath his armor, and his blood pounded in his veins, pounded for battle.

So he let the horses feed and rest for only three hours that morning, until he could restrain himself no more.

Before noon he rode south. Only a few hundred men and women rode with him: a hundred lords of Orwynne and Heredon, another hundred and fifty from Fleeds. But they were a stout war party in many ways, the best to be had from three kingdoms, and hope swelled in Gaborn’s chest. For soon he would unite with King Lowicker’s vast army, and as he approached Carris he hoped to band together with the Knights Equitable and lords from Mystarria.

He imagined that he might well have half a million men under his command when he reached Carris, and their attack would be spearheaded by some of the most powerful Runelords in the world.

Time and again he thrilled to realize that old King Lowicker of Beldinook would ride beside him. He’d not expected Lowicker to bestir himself.

Some called Lowicker a “frail” man, though the description was overly nice.

His frailty was more mental than physical. Over the past couple of years, his reasoning skills had begun to diminish. Some hinted that he’d grown quite senile. Only the fact that Lowicker had taken endowments of wit from three different men—and thus could store memories in their minds—allowed him to obscure the severity of his ailment.

Yet Lowicker had always been one of King Orden’s staunchest allies. Not three weeks ago, Lowicker had organized a grand reception in his father’s honor as Gaborn journeyed north.

Lowicker had praised Gaborn roundly, hinting that the Prince would make a fine match for his own daughter—a plump girl who had not one single distinguishing virtue but also seemed to lack any vice.

Gaborn recalled a night of drinking mulled wine beside the hearth while Lowicker and his father told hunting stories, since years before, Lowicker had often accompanied Orden north on the autumn hunt.

But three years past, Lowicker had taken a fall and broken his hip, and now the old man rarely rode a horse at all, and then only in considerable pain. He’d never hunt again, and Gaborn’s father had lamented the fact.

As Gaborn headed south, he knew that Iome would be angry with him. He had hastened his departure from Tor Doohan in part because of the rising sense of danger that assailed him to the south, the sense that he needed to attack swiftly. But even more than that, he hurried because he hoped to discourage Iome from following.

He knew that she’d confronted some danger on the borders of Heredon once this morning. And as he rode he began to suspect more and more that men in his care were going to die today. He didn’t want Iome to be among the casualties.

Kriskaven Wall spanned a hundred and fourteen miles of the border between Fleeds and Beldinook. The bastion of black stone stood twenty feet tall, and was twenty feet wide at the base. Beyond that, a trench had been dug in ages past all along the north face of the wall, so that now a shallow river flowed there at all times of the year except in high summer.

Two horses could run abreast atop the wall, but the lords of Beldinook had not felt the need to keep Kriskaven Wall properly manned in the past two hundred years.

When Gaborn rode near the wall early that afternoon, toward Feyman’s Gate, he felt somewhat gladdened to see Beldinook’s warriors thick along the battlements, to see horses galloping atop the wall, to hear welcoming warhorns blowing from it. He estimated that a thousand warriors held this gate alone.

The wall would be a formidable barrier to Raj Ahten’s troops, if any sought to ride through here again.

But as Gaborn in company with a hundred knights drew close to the wall, he felt a familiar prickling sensation, as if a shroud dropped over them all.

The Earth whispered of danger.

Gaborn called a halt two hundred yards from the open gate, while he studied the sentries ahead. The men wore Beldinook’s uniforms, tall silver caps with square tops, and heavy breastplates. Their shields bore the dun-colored field with the white swan. They carried Beldinook’s characteristic wide bows. They flew Beldinook’s banners. Atop the wall, a captain waved Gaborn ahead.

But something was not right. Feyman’s Gate opened wide and inviting, as it had for hundreds of years. The gate itself stood forty feet across, and the top of the wall spanned over it, brimming with archery slots and kill holes by the score.

Silently Gaborn warned the Chosen in his retinue of an impending ambush. The air around him suddenly filled with the clank of metal on metal as lords lowered their visors and unstrapped shields from the backs of their mounts. The chargers knew the sounds of war. Though Gaborn’s own mount stopped, it capered to the side, eager to charge.

Prince Celinor rode beside Erin Connal, two horses down from Gaborn. The Prince looked about nervously, wondering what was happening.

“Who opposes us?” Gaborn shouted across the distance. The ride had been long and dusty, and the dust choked his throat. Though Gaborn felt battle ready, he had not taken a single endowment of voice. Now the wind blew northwest into Gaborn’s face, hurling his own words back at him, so that he felt unsure if the men on the wall even heard. The men of Beldinook watched Gaborn’s forces uneasily. Many reached for arrows and stepped behind the battlements on the wall.

“Who dares oppose the Earth King?” Queen Herin shouted; and her Voice cut across the distance far better than Gaborn’s ever could.

Suddenly the thunder of hooves rose from the far side of the wall. A row of horsemen wheeled from both the left and the right, and the knights converged before the open gate, blocking Gaborn’s passage. Through the gate, Gaborn could only see the front ranks, but estimated that more than a thousand knights rode together.

At their head rode old King Lowicker himself. Lowicker was white-haired, with a narrow face and pale blue eyes that were going gray with age. His long hair was all in braids and slung over his shoulder. He wore no armor, as if to say that he held so little regard for Gaborn as a warrior that he needed none.

He frowned as he sat in his saddle, pained at his old injuries.

“Go back, Gaborn Val Orden,” King Lowicker shouted. “Go back to Heredon while you may! You are not welcome on my soil. Beldinook is closed to you.”

“Your messenger told another tale two days ago,” Gaborn shouted. “For what reason have you become inhospitable? You and I have long been friends. We can be friends still.” Gaborn tried to sound calm, to keep his demeanor friendly, but inside his blood ran hot. He felt confused and betrayed. Lowicker had falsely pledged support and urged him to ride here quickly, to fight at his side. Yet Lowicker himself had plotted to cut Gaborn down like a dog. Though Gaborn struggled to remain calm, in his heart he knew that Lowicker would be a friend no more.

“Your father and I were friends!” Lowicker raged. “But I am no pawn to a regicide.” He stabbed a finger toward Gaborn as if he’d caught a young scoundrel. “You appropriated your father’s crown as soon as you were able, but found it too small! Now you call yourself the Earth King. Tell me, Earth King, are these hundred men the only ones silly enough to follow you to your doom?”

“Others follow me,” Gaborn said.

But Lowicker studied Gaborn severely and shook his head, as if he pitied those who rode at his side. “When you began to practice in the Room of Faces, young man, I was dubious. I thought that if you did not want to learn to be a king, at the very least you would learn to act the part.

“But now I see you strutting and preening like a great monarch, and I am not impressed. Ride along north, young imposter, while you still can.”

Gaborn felt a rising sense of danger. Lowicker was not voicing idle threats. Erin and Celinor had warned Gaborn that King Anders had hoped to sway Lowicker and others with his lies, and apparently Anders had managed to do it quite well.

Lowicker had planned to ambush him, and even now was seconds from ordering a charge. Yet Gaborn hoped that he could persuade Lowicker to see the truth.

“You accuse me of regicide, yet plot my assassination?” Gaborn said, hoping to reveal to Lowicker his own error. “I fear you are but Anders’s pawn. How Raj Ahten would laugh to see this!”

“It is not regicide to execute a criminal,” Lowicker insisted, “even if that criminal is a man I have always loved as if he were my own son. I wish that I could believe you are the Earth King.” Yet his tone was cold, and Gaborn wondered at Lowicker’s sincerity.

“I am the Earth King,” Gaborn warned. He stared hard into Lowicker, using the Earth Sight.

He saw a man who loved his position; who loved wealth and acclaim more than he loved the truth. He saw a man who had always felt jealous of King Orden’s greater affluence, jealous enough so that he’d always greeted Orden with great pomp—but had schemed to grab a piece of Mystarria for his own.

Here was a man who had married a woman he detested so that he could gain greater position.

Gaborn remembered years ago how his own father had mourned the death of Lowicker’s good wife. But Gaborn looked into the aging King’s mind and saw how Lowicker had feigned love so well that when the Queen took a fall from a horse and died during a hunting accident with no witness other than Lowicker, no one questioned the manner of her death.

He saw a man who thought himself wise, and secretly congratulated himself often for how he’d accomplished his wife’s demise.

This was a man who was frustrated because Gaborn had not married his own homely daughter, for he’d hoped that Gaborn would love wealth as much as he did, and Lowicker had long calculated how to arrange both Gaborn’s marriage and death at an early age.

As Gaborn searched King Lowicker’s soul, the soul of a man he’d always thought a friend, he found only a shriveled husk. Where Gaborn had once believed that he’d seen decency and honor, now he saw only a fair mask that hid a monstrous avarice.

Lowicker was not acting as Anders’s pawn. At the very least he was Anders’s conspirator.

Gaborn felt ill in his stomach.

“So then,” Lowicker said, grinning falsely. “If you are the Earth King, show me a sign so that I might believe, and thus become your servant”

“I shall,” Gaborn shouted. “This is the sign: All men who refuse to serve me shall perish in the dark times to come.”

“An easy thing to claim, a hard thing to prove,” Lowicker chortled.

“And as all men shall perish whether they serve you or not, I see no advantage in scraping my arthritic knees to you.”

“If you will not accept that sign,” Gaborn said, “then let me offer another: I have looked into your heart, and found it wanting. I know your secrets. You call me a regicide, but on a hunt eight years ago, you broke your wife’s neck with the butt of your spear. In your heart, you felt no more regret than if you had taken down a pig.”

King Lowicker’s smile faltered momentarily, as if he considered for the first time whether Gaborn might really be the Earth King.

“No one will believe your lies,” Lowicker said. “You are a nothing, Gaborn Val Orden—not a king, nor even a fair mimic. You are not even a has-been. You are a never-shall-be. Your nation is at the mercy of the merciless.

Archers!”

Upon the wall, hundreds of men raised their bows. Gaborn stood two hundred yards from Kriskaven Wall. Any arrows shot from such a distance would find it hard to pierce his armor, but few of the mounts in his retinue had barding. A rain of arrows would be devastating, and at this moment, Lowicker craved blood.

Yet the vile old King hesitated.

“Wait!” Gaborn called, raising his left hand. “I give you one more fair warning! I am the Earth King, and as I serve the Earth, so it serves me.

“I have been called to Choose the seeds of mankind, and those who raise their hands against me do so at their own peril! I bid all of you, let me pass!”

On the wall, Lowicker’s men began to laugh him to scorn, and Gaborn stared at them, amazed at how one man’s evil could subvert so many.

“Go back!” Lowicker said. Gaborn perceived suddenly that something restrained Lowicker, kept him from releasing his hail of arrows even now.

Since Lowicker had carefully pared away his own conscience with the precision of a skilled surgeon, Gaborn imagined that only one thing could stay his hand, fear.

Gaborn glanced from side to side. Binnesman rode beside Gaborn, along with Sir Langley and many other lords from Orwynne, as did Queen Herin the Red and Erin Connal of Fleeds, and Prince Celinor of South Crowthen.

Shooting at this company would have repercussions that Lowicker did not want to deal with—perhaps most of all because Lowicker feared how King Anders would react to the murder of his own son.

Indeed, Lowicker’s eyes flickered across Celinor for half a second giving the lad an evil look, as if begging him to depart.

Gaborn almost laughed inside. With sudden clarity he saw that the Earth would serve him well right now.

Gaborn hopped down from his horse.

Before making a cut in stone, masons would draw upon it a rune of Earth-breaking, and thus Weaken the stone so that it conformed better to their, will. Only a week ago, Binnesman had destroyed the old stone bridge across Harm’s Gorge in a similar manner.

Gaborn knew that he could wield such power now. Using the Earth Sight, he gazed not at Lowicker, but at Kriskaven Wall itself. The wall was a great expanse of stone, held together by mortar and gravity.

Yet as he studied it, he saw flaws within the stone. A splintering crack here where a root had pried the stone, a weakness there. It was not so much a wall that he beheld, as a network of small fissures.

The wall was so weak that with a little pressure here, and some there, and over there, it would come down.

“If it is a sign you seek, so be it!” he shouted to Lowicker. “I will give you a sign that you cannot deny.”

Now Gaborn glanced at the wizard Binnesman. The wizard, astride his horse, whispered, “Milord, what are you doing?”

“I reject King Lowicker and any man who stands with him,” Gaborn replied. “Lend me your staff.”

The wizard handed Gaborn his staff, saying, “Are you sure this is wise?”

“No, but it is just.” He looked up. Lowicker still sat his horse, smirking across the distance, confident. But to Gaborn’s satisfaction, Lowicker’s Days nervously began backing his own horse away.

Gaborn took the staff and carefully traced a rune of Earth-breaking on the dusty road. The rune looked to Gaborn like a mantis with two heads and three claws, all trapped within a circle.

“Is this how it’s drawn?” Gaborn asked the wizard, to be certain he had done it right.

“The earth powers are not used to kill,” the wizard warned.

“The Earth permits death,” Gaborn said, “even our deaths. I will spare all those I can.”

Yet he wondered if he dared spare Lowicker. Gaborn needed to protect his people, and the Earth had not forbidden him from taking the lives of his enemies. Killing an enemy as vicious as Lowicker was no worse than killing a reaver.

Gaborn raised the wizard’s staff overhead and shouted a command: “By the Earth I serve, I command this wall: Be thou broken stones and dust!”

With his mind he reached out to a hundred pressure points on the wall, and then he smote the rune of Earthbreaking with the staff, and felt the impact at his feet as the ground began to roll and buck. The earth rumbled as if it would split apart, and suddenly all the smirking bowmen on the wall began to shout in terror.

The command that Gaborn uttered came not from a weak-willed mason who served the Earth only enough to get something in return. It was the command of the Earth King, and so carried more force than that of any other.

King Lowicker’s horse reared, tossing the old man from his saddle. The knights in his retinue broke rank, turned, and began to flee. The men atop the wall raced for the stairs or tried leaping to safety.

The breastwork of Kriskaven Wall had stood for a thousand years. Now with a booming of thunder and a screaming protest of stone, the Earth King’s power wracked it. The wall shuddered and twisted for half a mile in each direction, writhing like a snake.

Yet Gaborn could not lightly kill those who defied him.

He felt the wall ready to buckle and shatter, according to his will, but for a moment longer he sought to hold it together until the men atop could leap to safety.

Then, even he could no longer hold it, and the wall snarled like an enraged animal, and exploded. Stones shot high in the air, then dropped like hail, pinging on Gaborn’s helm. Dust rose into the air in acrid clouds, and was captured by the wind and blown to the north.

Archers who had leapt for safety raced from the base of the wall, trying to cover their heads with their hands.

When the dust settled, a mile of Kriskaven Wall had crumbled. Even in ruins, it was an impressive pile of rubbish. Where Feyman’s Gate had stood wide, now there was but a tangle of broken stone from the fallen arch.

A few men had leapt from the wall and injured a leg or arm. Another dozen knights had been unseated from their horses.

As far as Gaborn could discern, he had not slain a single man.

Now, beyond the low pile of rubble, Lowicker’s knights fled, hundreds of men racing from destruction.

Erin, Celinor, and a dozen other knights raced to the fallen Lowicker. Their mounts circled the old King, cutting him off from any escape.

Gaborn rode forward with his company over the pile of gravel and cracked stone that had once been the arch to Feyman’s Gate, up to where his former friend lay on the ground. King Lowicker’s face was contorted with pain, and his right leg askew. It looked as if his hip had broken yet again.

“Damn you!” Lowicker shouted. “I hope you and Raj Ahten kill each other!”

“A likely scenario,” Gaborn said. He gazed down at Lowicker, full of concern. He did not want to kill the man, to kill any man. Yet Lowicker was such a great evil, such a powerful king, Gaborn knew not what else to do.

Gaborn still dared hope that he could lead Lowicker’s troops to war.

“I’ve given you a sign,” Gaborn said. “Will you swear fealty to me? Will you repent of your crimes?”

Lowicker merely laughed in derision. “Of course, milord. Allow me to live, and I swear by the Powers, I’ll clean your bedpans every morn!”

“Would you rather die, then?” Gaborn asked. “Would death be preferable to a life of service?”

“If I am to live, let me live to be served,” Lowicker roared.

Gaborn had expected no better. He shook his head sadly. He looked back at his knights. To slay a king even in the heat of battle was a hard deed, for it might easily bring retribution from another lord. Few in Gaborn’s company would dare risk it. But to execute a king in cold blood was more perilous still, for it would incite Lowicker’s allies to rage,

Though it was a deed best done by a man of equal rank to Lowicker, Gaborn was loath to do it. He turned to the lords accompanying him and asked, “Will any of you put him down?”

“I will,” High Queen Herin the Red said in a hard tone. “I always admired Lowicker’s wife. I will avenge her now.”

When Celinor heard Queen Herin’s threat, he said, “You should make the cut, milady. But it would please me if you would do the honor of using my sword.”

She leapt from her gelding, took Celinor’s sword.

King Lowicker shouted, “No, please!,” and feebly tried to crawl away as Queen Herin advanced.

Though Lowicker lay wounded, he was not defenseless. He was a Runelord still, with endowments of brawn and metabolism to his credit.

As Queen Herin drew near, he blurred into motion. From somewhere in his robes Lowicker produced a knife, hurled in expertly.

Queen Herin sought to parry with her sword, but the knife blade took her full in the chest.

Her mail blunted the impact, and the heavy quilting of her underjerkin held the point.

Lowicker’s eyes went wide as Queen Herin rushed in with the sword.

In Fleeds the penalty for regicide was the removal of the criminal’s hands and feet. Thereafter he would be left to languish. Lowicker did not die quickly from his wounds. He had so many endowments of stamina that he could not die quickly.

According to those who followed, Lowicker lived on in torment until sunset, when the cold leached the heat from his body, so that he died like a snake.

44 The Stalemate

The fell mage merely stood before the walls of Carris, her sickly citrine rod throbbing with light, the gleaming runes tattooed into her carapace glowing dimly. She played it over the walls, and Roland imagined that at any second she would cast a horrid spell and the barbicans would melt into slag or crumble to ruin.

Instead, she merely pointed her staff toward the castle gate, and for along time, nothing happened.

Roland was a good swimmer. Given the chance, he would throw off his clothes and dive from the castle wall. He could probably swim south a mile or more, then cut for the shore. From there he might be able to escape.

Then, at last, he saw her plan.

She cast no spell.

Instead, from the ranks of ten thousand reavers, a single reaver strode forward. It was diminutive compared to its companions. Small, wretched, and covered with old scars.

It marched toward the castle alone, toward the nine fiery green shields that the flameweavers had set as wards.

Everyone in the castle saw the reaver’s plan at once. The captain of the artillery shouted for his men to fire at the wretched creature, and fire they did.

But as before, the ballista bolts careened away from their target, and the miserable little reaver trundled forward to the mouth of the causeway, into the midst of the green glowing shields.

Roland did not see what happened. He dropped for cover before the small reaver triggered the flame wards. He merely felt the castle walls buck, the roiling heat blast overhead. Light and dust swirled up into the air.

And then the castle’s protective wards were gone.

The flameweavers that guarded Carris had spent their power in vain. When Roland got up, he glanced down toward them. Two of the Flameweavers, naked now even of flames, began slinking down the steps, as if seeking retreat, while the third merely stood studying his ruined wards in defiance.

With the wards gone, the fell mage turned and began to stride north, as if she were no longer concerned herself with the castle.

But a cohort of a thousand blade-bearers remained in place, forming a long wall before the castle, just a few yards out of artillery range.

Their intent was clear. There would be no escape from Carris.

The fell mage led her horde north, and Roland was glad to see her go. But she did not travel far.

Just north of the castle was a small rise called Bone Hill, where lords had fought for centuries as they sought to take Carris.

The fell mage stopped at the foot of the hill and dropped her head close to the ground, like a hound eagerly catching a scent. Slowly she began to tread in a circle around the base of the hill, while minions stayed back a hundred yards.

When she had circled it completely, the fell mage dropped her head and trotted round it again, more quickly—so that her shovel shaped head scooped out a perfect circle.

Then she galloped around a third time, widening the furrow.

As she did, all of the other reavers began to hiss.

Moments later the wind brought a scent from beneath the snow and ash unlike anything Roland had ever smelled before. It was sweeter than the nectar of a rose, more fragile and exotic.

Of anything he’d witnessed that day, the scent alone seemed the most wondrous. He breathed deeply, sought to fill his lungs with the heady perfume.

“What’s that smell?” a farmer asked Baron Poll in a whisper.

“Something the reavers are making,” Baron Poll said.

“But...I’ve always heard that reavers don’t have a scent, that they can’t be tracked even by dogs!”

Baron Poll shook his head in wonder. “Sirrah, the smartest man in the world could fit everything he thinks he knows about reavers into a ten-page book, and once you read it you might as well throw it straight in the jacks.

“Some say that reavers don’t have a smell, and others say, that they mimic the scent of their background, and I’ve heard some say that they can manufacture any scent at will. But...it’s been two thousand years since we’ve fought a surface war with reavers. Most of what men once knew is lost. All that’s left are exaggerations and half-truths.”

When the fell mage had paraded the hill six more times, she climbed to its crown.

Reavers pulled crystalline skulls from the mage’s palanquin and used them to decorate the crown of the hill, so that eyeless reaver skulls stared from it in every direction.

Then the fell mage raised her staff overhead. Lesser mages formed a circle at the base of the hill. Each carried a dead or dying man in its jaws, and now the mages grasped the carcasses and wrung each man as if he were a rag. Blood and guts and bodily fluids squirted into the trench. Then the corpses were thrown over the top.

When the reaver mages had wrung their victims dry, a new scent began to arise—a ghastly odor that seemed a mixture of smoke and putrefaction.

Then the howlers and blade-bearers left Bone Hill and began to spread over the countryside. They began dismantling every artifact of human manufacture, tearing down fortresses and cottages, uprooting trees and orchards, crashing through stone fences that had stood for hundreds or thousands of years.

They demolished everything, spared nothing, and worked with terrifying speed and efficiency.

The Glue-mums began eating every plant in sight, masticating whole trees and the thatch from cottages, then spitting it out in the form of sticky saliva. Howlers grabbed the masticated pulp and pulled it into ropes, as if it were taffy that quickly hardened. The howlers dragged the lines to the base of Bone Hill and twined it about, forming a rigid cocoon around the hill, a screen behind which the reaver mages continued to work. They began excavating the hill, forming strange and sinuous patterns in the ground.

At the base, of the hill, blade-bearers dug burrows for fortifications.

Within an hour, all of the low-lying wizard fog had at last dissipated, and Roland could see into the distance for several miles. When he did, his heart fell.

To the south was an unending line of reavers, all marching from the mountains down to Carris. These twenty thousand or so that held Carris had only been the vanguard of a vast army.

Roland had dared hope that the reavers would head north. Now it seemed they had found what they were looking for: a new home.

Raj Ahten stood on the ramparts of the gate tower and watched the hills to the south. Every quarter mile or so, he could see reavers by the threes and nines, forming a long line that reached from Carris down to the Brace Mountains and beyond. It was a maddening sight.

The wall of blade-bearers outside the castle gates would block any attempt to sally forth and attack.

Raj Ahten’s flameweavers and counselors stood beside him, while his Days stood at his back. As he watched the fields below, Lord Paladane the Huntsman climbed up the tower.

“My lord,” Paladane said softly, solicitously, “may I please have a word with you?”

Raj Ahten studied him curiously. The man’s demeanor bespoke utter humility: But Duke Paladane was a brilliant man, a duplicitous man, and a famed strategist. In Raj Ahten’s opinion, in a drawn-out war Paladane would have been Raj Ahten’s most fearsome opponent. Now, he had come like a dog with its tail between its legs.

“Yes?” Raj Ahten asked.

“I have been considering a plan to abandon the castle,” Paladane said humbly. “There is a gated aqueduct on the north wall.”

“I know,” Raj Ahten said. “Seven hundred and fourteen years ago, during the Siege of Pears, Duke Bellonsby pretended to abandon the city by boating men through it night and day. But when Kaifba Hariminah’s men entered the city at last, and drank themselves silly in celebration, Bellonsby’s men came up from the King’s cellars and slaughtered them.”

Raj Ahten let Paladane know that he’d anticipated him. “You of course have a large number of boats.”

“Yes,” Paladane said. “I’ve nearly eight hundred skiffs at hand. We can begin evacuating women and children to the east shore of the lake now, at ten thousand people per flotilla. I estimate that we can make one journey every two hours.

“More than a hundred thousand people per day. If by some miracle the reavers did not attack for five or six days, the whole castle could be emptied.”

Raj Ahten stared hard at Paladane, considering. Women and children. Saving them would of course be the first priority of these soft northerners.

He almost laughed. These people were his ancient enemies.

Besides, had the northerners ever considered the welfare of Raj Ahten’s own women and children? In the past five years, northern assassins had struck down most of his family his father and sister, wives and sons. The war between Raj Ahten and the lords of Rofehavan had been bloody and personal. By invading the north, Raj Ahten had escalated it to the level of being bloody and impersonal.

Raj Ahten could easily evacuate his own Invincibles in a single flotilla, abandoning the people of Carris to fend for themselves. Or he might begin moving all his warriors from the castle now, and be gone by day’s end.

“What makes you think that it will be safe on the east shore?” he asked Paladane. “Isn’t it likely that the reavers have set guards around the lake?”

Lake Donnestgree was large, forty miles from north to south, nearly three and a half miles from east shore to west.

“Perhaps,” Paladane said cautiously. “But my far-seers in the tower cannot make out any guards there.” Raj Ahten could almost see the doubts whirling in Paladane’s head, the worries and fears.

Raj Ahten nodded toward the line of reavers marching from the mountains to the south. “It may be that the reavers are still waiting for reinforcements,” he said, “or that they’ve secreted troops behind the hills. I would not underestimate the fell mage. It would be foolish to send women and children into greater danger.”

He knew that villages were scattered to the east of Lake Donnestgree, even some minor fortresses that his people could defend. But the shore was so rocky, the land so mountainous, that only a few sheep farmers and woodsmen inhabited it. Raj Ahten turned to his old counselor; Feykaald. “Get twenty skiffs and fill them with mixed troops from our company and from Paladane’s. Have them check the east shore of the lake for signs of reavers, and then march inland for several miles to make sure that the shore is secure. When they finish, have them hold a fortress and bring me word.”

Feykaald studied Raj Ahten with heavy-lidded eyes, hiding his smile. He understood Raj Ahten’s game. Scouting the shore and securing a beachhead was worthwhile, for Raj Ahten would need it if he did evacuate his men. “It shall be done, O Light of the Universe.”

Immediately Feykaald shouted to some of the captains, began assembling his shore party.

“My lord,” Paladane said, “we also have plenty of wood here for hoardings, beams from homes and corrals in the city. We could put men to work on the east wall of the castle, lashing together rafts. With enough rafts, we could evacuate perhaps a hundred thousand more people with a few moment’s notice.”

Raj Ahten studied Paladane briefly. Paladane was a thin man with a hatchet face, dark hair that had almost completely gone white. His dark blue eyes showed superior cunning. “Not yet,” Raj Ahten objected: “If we begin lashing together rafts prematurely, it will turn men’s minds toward flight, rather than on how to better defend themselves. Defending Carris is our first priority.”

“My lord,” Paladane said, “considering the number of reinforcements the reavers have coming from the south, I suspect that flight is our best—if not the only—alternative.”

Raj Ahten smiled a practiced smile that included more than just a simple movement of the lips. He tightened the muscles around his eyes. “You are dismissed.”

After the fog dissipated, news spread along the castle wall that Raj Ahten was sending shore parties to the east, so that the castle could be evacuated.

The news buoyed Roland’s spirits. It was then that he took his first real view of the city of Carris itself. There were homes below him, and an almond tree that grew against the wall so high that if he dared he could have leapt into its topmost branches without injury. He was right behind some lord’s garden, and the city stretched to the north all around.

Down in the inner bailey to the west he could see thousands of townsfolk, and the horses that Raj Ahten’s knights had ridden tied in lines along the street.

Against the west wall of the outer bailey hunkered some forty frowth giants, each twenty feet tall. The tawny yellow fur beneath their ring mail looked darker than normal, for it was wet and matted by rain. The giants gazed about with their huge silver eyes, looking doleful and ill-used. The giants needed fresh meat often, and Roland did not like the way they eyed the peasant children of Carris, who peered at the monsters from doorways and windows and from beneath the eaves of inns.

Every bit as fearsome as the giants were Raj Ahten’s war dogs, mastiffs that wore armor masks and harnesses of red-lacquered leather, and collars around the neck with huge curved spikes in them. These were force dogs, bred to war and granted endowments of brawn, stamina, and metabolism from other dogs in their packs.

Yet as fearsome as these beasts were, Roland knew that Raj Ahten’s warriors were more fearsome still. Each Invincible had at least twenty endowments to his credit. In battle, the Invincibles were unmatched by any other soldier in the world.

Beyond these forces, the walls of Carris were bolstered with over three hundred thousand common soldiers out of Mystarria, Indhopal, and Fleeds. Indeed, men crowded the wall-walks and were stuffed in every tower like meat in sausage skins. The baileys and streets of the city were replete with spearmen.

A force so large would have seemed enough to repel any attack. Yet Roland realized that if the reavers attacked, all the men in the castle would not be enough.

As he watched the small flotilla of twenty boats row east, he earnestly hoped that they would return soon, that the evacuation would begin. He considered his own best route into the water if the need arose.

Reavers blackened the land and continued marching from the south all morning. The number around Carris was impossible to count, but, surely tens of thousands raced over the countryside, toiling feverishly.

No man alive had ever seen a reaver work, had ever seen their cunning or efficiency or astonishing speed.

The wind blew fiercely, and a thin rain began pouring two hours after dawn. A watery sheen covered the reavers’ leathery hides. The rain and clouds above offered the people of Carris some hope, for all men knew that if lightning began to flash, the reavers would likely depart.

Howlers grubbed about everywhere, throwing up defenses in the muck. Burrowing holes. They excavated trenches to the south and west, flooding them with waters from Lake Donnestgree, forming a series of four oddly winding moats.

The sounds that arose from the fields west of Carris were odd, alien the rumbling and rasping of reavers, the apparently unprovoked and inexplicable bawls of the howlers, the smacking sounds that Glue-mums made as they worked. Beneath it all was a tittering, like the squeaking of bones, that emanated from gree flying among the horde. The sounds made Roland feel as if he’d been transported to another world.

To the north, reaver mages and Glue-mums worked at Bone Hill, molding ridges of rock to form an arcane design in bas-relief, a design that was strange and sinuous and somehow evil. As they worked, the mages sprayed certain knobs and protrusions on their sculpture with fluids from their bungholes, creating a nauseating stench of decay like something from rotting corpses.

Meanwhile, a mile to the south of Carris, the reavers began to form an odd tower black and twisted, like a narwhale’s horn,

yet tilted at an odd angle, as if pointing toward Bone Hill

Beside the tower on the shore of the lake they built several huge domes made of stone bound with glue-mum resin.

Some conjectured that these were egg-laying chambers or some sort of hothouses.

But the reavers did not attack Carris.

They dismantled hamlets that had grown over the centuries. They plundered fortresses and converted the stones to their own purpose. They tore up roads and gardens.

But the reavers did not attack. So long as the blade-bearers blocked the only road in and out of Carris, no man could hope to flee that way or sally forth to attack. But then so long as the reavers did not storm the castle gates Roland felt...mollified by the arrangement.

As the day wore on, he was able to forget the creeping sense of menace and horror of the morning, the cries of Raj Ahten’s foot soldiers as they were carried to their deaths. He dared hope. For long hours as the day wore on, the men on the walls held remarkably silent. By noon they began talking animatedly, easily.

The shore party had been gone for hours, and would surely return soon. Who could blame the men if they did not hurry back to Carris?

But minute by minute, hour after hour, men scanned the waters, and saw no boats return from the east.

45 Frail King Lowicker

Until a week ago, Myrrima had never been more than ten miles from home; and as she rode through Fleeds, she felt as if everything she’d known were slipping away.

Myrrima had left behind her family, her country. The land was changing subtly as she rode south. First she passed through the plains of southern Heredon, into the canyon lands of northern Fleeds, and now she was moving farther south. Here, the plains were richer and more fertile than back home, a bit more wet. She did not recognize some of the trees at the roadside, and even the people were different. The sheep men of Fleeds were often shorter and darker than people at home, the horse clans taller and more fair Cottages were no longer made of mud and wattle, but of stone. Even the air smelled different, she thought, though it was hard to tell, given that she had an endowment of scent from a dog.

Most of all, Myrrima had left herself behind She had the strength of three men in her arms now, the grace of four, the stamina of her dogs, the speed of five.

She’d never been so cognizant of her own power.

Yet she felt an unsettling sameness to her. In her heart she still loved in the same way, still, felt her own inadequacies. Even with her new endowments, Myrrima felt impotent. Though she was a wolf lord, she felt all too common still.

She did not know whether Borenson would welcome her on his quest south, but by nightfall she hoped to reach Carris and present herself to him. She hoped he’d think she’d earned the right to accompany him to Inkarra, though she could not pretend to have his skills in battle.

But her encounter with Lord Pilwyn had left her shaken, uncertain. What kind of enemies would she find in Inkarra? How could she hope to fight them? Endowments would not be enough to fight wizards like the Storm Lord and his kin.

At Tor Doohan, Myrrima found everything in disarray. Gaborn’s knights were strung out for miles. Some were just reaching Tor Doohan, while a passerby told them that Gaborn himself had ridden south an hour ago.

A knight rode out of the shadows of the great white stones that circled the crimson pavilion and addressed Iome. “Your Highness, His Majesty King Orden bade me inform you that he has had to ride on to Carris in great haste. He left this letter in my care.”

Iome read the letter, sniffed the paper to make sure that Gaborn’s scent was upon it, then wadded it angrily and stuffed it in her pocket.

“Bad news?” Sir Hoswell asked. “Can I do anything to help?”

Iome glanced at him distractedly.

“No,” she answered. “My lord is in great haste to reach Carris. He bids us hurry. We won’t be able to rest the horses long if we are to catch him before nightfall.”

“Is it wise even to try, milady?” Sir Hoswell inquired. “You’ve ridden over four hundred miles since dawn yesterday. Even your fine mount cannot easily bear such punishment!”

It was true. Sir Borenson’s force horse had been plump when Myrrima set off for the south, but in the past two days it had lost seventy or eighty pounds of fat.

The lords of Rofehavan fed their force horses special diets when traveling in haste, using a mixture called “miln.” Miln consisted of rolled oats and barley coated with dried molasses, often with alfalfa or melilot thrown into the mix. For a horse, miln was a heady pleasure, and a force horse fed well on it could run for hours, while a horse fed on grass alone was said to have “legs of straw,” for they would not hold the mount long.

But even miln would not allow a force horse to race endlessly. Myrrima’s mount had three endowments of metabolism. With so many endowments, a few hours of rest would seem like a day to the beast, allowing it to recuperate.

“Gaborn is racing his horse,” Iome objected to Hoswell.

Hoswell shook his head. “It’s not my place to counsel the Earth King,” Hoswell said, “but Gaborn knows the danger he’s riding into. Half of the mounts he’s driving to Carris will die at this pace.”

“We’ll take two hours rest,” Iome said to Hoswell. “We can feed the horses here, and carry extra miln to keep them along the way until we reach Beldinook.”

Hoswell looked at his own mount. It was in far worse shape than Iome’s mount or Myrrima’s. The beast had been skinnier than these in the first pace, and so had been hard pressed to keep pace with the stouter mounts. Myrrima knew full well that when Hoswell objected to the pace of the ride, he objected mostly for the sake of his own beast.

If the horse lived to reach Carris, it would most likely be in poor condition for battle. Nor would it carry a man far in case of a forced retreat.

“So be it,” he said heavily. He leapt from the mount and led his horse to the stables, intending to give it as much rest as he could. With it he took the palfrey from the Inkarran assassin.

Myrrima watched Hoswell go.

“Why do you give him such a black look?” Iome asked. “Is there something between you?”

“Nothing,” Myrrima said. Hoswell was Lord of the Royal Society of Archers, a master bowier who had spent years in the south, studying the making of hornbows. He was a man of sound reputation, in the good graces of the King. Myrrima did not want to have to confess that she detested the man.

Myrrima sat astride Borenson’s big warhorse and fought the urge to continue south now. Iome must have noted her mood.

“Gaborn begged me to stay here in his note,” Iome confessed weakly. “He does not think the road ahead will be safe. He says that he fears that ‘Doom lies upon Carris,’ and even now the Earth bids him to strike and flee with equal fervor. He’s confused. I thought I should warn you.”

“He’s probably right,” Myrrima agreed. Iome sounded as if she felt unsure what to do. “Milady,” Myrrima said. “If you wish to stay here, I understand....But I’m not riding to war at Carris. I hope to accompany my husband to Inkarra. I must take the road south.”

“You sound driven,” Iome said warily. “I fear that you will never forgive me.”

“Forgive you, milady?” Myrrima asked, surprised by the Queen’s tone.

“I’m the one who sentenced your husband to perform his Act Penitent,” Iome said. “Had I known that I was driving you south, too, I’d not have done it. Perhaps I should lay aside the quest....It’s a hard thing I’ve done.”

“No,” Myrrima said. “It was a generous thing. You’ve given him a way to earn forgiveness, and in Mystarria I’ve heard that there is a maxim ‘Forgiveness should never be given—it must be earned.’ I fear that in my husband’s case, he cannot even forgive himself until he has earned it.”

“Then I hope he can earn it, with you at his side,” Iome said. “You have a warrior’s spirit. I’m surprised that no one noticed it sooner.”

Myrrima shook her head, glad to change the subject. She’d always been strong of will, but she’d never seen herself as a warrior—not until a little over a week ago.

“It’s said that when the Earth King Erden Geboren was crowned, he Chose his warriors. I know full well that Gaborn Chose me in the market of Bannisferre on that first day we met. Even though neither he nor I knew that he was the Earth King. He thought me brash and said he wanted me in his court, but he was really Choosing me.

“But do you know what I was thinking when he Chose me?”

“What?” Iome asked.

Myrrima hesitated, for she’d not told this to anyone, had not even recalled the thought until now. “I was thinking, even when I saw him standing there at the tinker’s booth, all dressed like some fop of a merchant prince, that I would fight for that man. I would die for him.

“I’d never thought that about a man before. The notion gave me the courage to take his hand, though he was a total stranger.”

Iome was bemused. “Gaborn told me how you met, how you took his hand there in the market. He saw it as only an attempt at seduction, a poor woman looking for a good marriage.”

That was true, but now Myrrima recognized that there was also something more. Myrrima tried to express the odd notion that was growing in her. “Maybe Gaborn did not Choose me, so much as we Chose each other. Last week, you mentioned that one could not be so near his creative powers without wanting a child. I...there’s more to him than that. Ever since we’ve met, I look at the earth, and time and again I’m stunned by its beauty—by the yellow of a daisy, or the blue shadows cast by rounded stones, or the rich smell of moss. He makes me feel more awake and alive than ever before. But there’s something else He makes me want to fight.”

“You’re a frightening woman, Myrrima.”

“I told you that I’d understand if you wanted to stay here. I know that it will be dangerous in Carris. But I want to go,” Myrrima said, hoping Iome would understand.

“Neither you nor I have enough training to go into battle—yet,” Iome warned. “It wouldn’t be wise.”

“I know,” Myrrima said. “But that doesn’t stop the craving.”

Iome bit her lip, spoke thoughtfully. “I think...that your intentions are good. As a Runelord, you should act upon them. With your stamina you can work ceaselessly; with your brawn, you can strike mighty blows. Our people deserve our best efforts.

“But it frightens me, Myrrima. You have been given so much so quickly. I would not want to see you get killed.”

Myrrima’s mount bent low. The ground here below Tor Doohan was beaten, hardly a blade of grass left, but Myrrima’s mount snatched at a few blades of clover close to the ground.

“We’ll ride fast,” Iome promised. “Maybe we can reach Carris before sundown.”

“You’re too kind, milady,” Myrrima said, climbing down from her mount. She stood a moment, stretching her legs.

Two hours later, as they were having a meal at an inn, a courier brought word from the south. Lowicker of Beldinook had sought to ambush the Earth King, and had been defeated at Beldinook’s border.

Iome reeled from this ill news.

Lowicker had promised to ally himself with Gaborn, had promised to send knights to ride at his side. Lowicker had promised to lead hiss own troops against Raj Ahten, and to provide supplies for Gaborn and his knights.

What would happen now that Gaborn had slain the King of Beldinook? One by one, Gaborn’s allies were fading away. It was nearly two in the afternoon. King Orwynne had died about this time yesterday while fighting the Darkling Glory. Now Lowicker had turned traitor and been slain.

With Lowicker dead, his daughter would either have to go to war with Gaborn or offer terms of surrender. Gaborn was in such a hurry that he would want neither.

Whether Lowicker’s daughter offered battle or reconciliation, Gaborn would merely have to ride through her lands.

It might be dangerous to continue on to Beldinook. Gaborn’s knights would be spread thin between here and Carris. Gaborn and a few hundred men were racing toward Carris, probably never more than a dozen in a group.

With his ranks spread thin, Gaborn’s men would be in no position to fight. Indeed, they offered fine targets for Beldinook’s wrath.

No, Iome suspected that Lowicker’s daughter would not surrender, but instead would press the attack. She might be on the hunt for anyone caught in her lands.

Gaborn had hoped that Lowicker would spend hundreds of thousands of troops in his defense. Now it looked as if Gaborn might have to fight through them.

Iome sighed, looked from Myrrima to Hoswell, and said in a firm tone, “We’ll need extra food for ourselves and our mounts.”

Myrrima was not prepared for what she saw when she reached Kriskaven Wall. The courier in Fleeds had said that Gaborn had defeated Lowicker’s ambush. He had not mentioned that the Earth King had cursed and blasted the wall.

Nor did Myrrima realize that Lowicker would still be alive. The three riders reached the wall and found Lowicker pinned to the ground a hundred yards on the other side, with a dozen of Gaborn’s knights in attendance.

A spear had been thrust through his belly, pinning his torso to the ground, and a banner affixed to the spear named Lowicker as a regicide. Lowicker’s arms and legs had been hewn off and dragged away, so that only the stump of a man, all still dressed in kingly apparel, lay in the hot sun.

But Lowicker had so many endowments of stamina that he had not yet died. Only a king or one of Raj Ahten’s Invincibles, a man with many endowments of stamina, could have survived such mutilation. Blood had pooled about him, and flies swirled around in a swarm. But with so many endowments of stamina, the horrid wounds had begun to heal swiftly.

Myrrima felt astonished to see him lying in agony, still clinging to life. She doubted he could last long, knew for a fact that he must yearn to die.

Such was the penalty prescribed for those who had committed regicide. As they rode near the site, Myrrima gasped involuntarily, for she recalled that Sir Borenson was also a kingslayer, and by rights, Iome could have demanded this penalty from him.

The scent of blood in the air was cloying, now that Myrrima had an endowment of scent from a dog. It smelled surprisingly enticing.

As they reached the spot, King Lowicker turned his head and watched Iome, sweat dripping from his brow. He took one look at Iome, and King Lowicker began to laugh. “So, Spawn of Sylvarresta, have you come to gloat?” Lowicker asked. He spoke painfully.

Iome shook her head. “Give him a drink, at the very least,” she commanded one of the knights in attendance.

The Baron shook his head. “It would only prolong his suffering, Your Highness. Besides, a creature like this—he’d give none to you.”

She fixed the husk of King Lowicker with a gentle look. “Would you like water?”

“Ah, she feels sentiment for the damned,” Lowicker snarled. “Do not pity me. I want it less than your water.”

Myrrima could not believe that Lowicker could be so cold, so hard, even now when he faced death. Yet she’d seen that look of contempt on other faces. At Castle Sylvarresta, when the city guard had caught thieves looting as the Darkling Glory carne, she’d seen such expressions on the faces of hardened criminals, men who had hidden from the Earth King lest he look into their hearts and know them for what they were.

Now she saw Lowicker’s dilemma. While many kings might search Gaborn out, hope to ally themselves with him and thus save themselves and their people, other kings would be like this—like Lowicker of Beldinook and Anders of South Crowthen—men so corrupt that they felt no choice but to strike out at Gaborn.

Lowicker knew himself to be corrupt beyond all hope.

“I pity you anyway,” Iome told him.

Lowicker cackled insanely. Tears began to cut streams down his dirt crusted face. Obviously his pain coupled with the hot sun was affecting his mind.

What an evil man, Myrrima thought. He deserves no pity, yet Iome offers it. He deserves no water, yet Iome would give it.

“Your Highness,” Sir Hoswell asked after a long moment, “shall I do him?” He dared not use such an indelicate word as “kill.”

Myrrima thought that Iome would consent, would give in and kill the man now, release him from his pain.

“No,” Iome said, suddenly furious. “That’s what he hopes for.” She spurred her horse past Lowicker, and Myrrima felt a thrill of relief.

46 A Hero by Necessity

In the west tower of Duke Paladane’s Keep, Raj Ahten stared from the windows and studied the workings of the reavers.

For now, he was biding his time. His shore party had not yet returned from the east side of the lake, and so he still did not know for certain whether they could flee the castle by water. The fact that they were so long overdue suggested to Raj Ahten that the shore party, had been slaughtered to a man.

In the back of his mind, he knew that Gaborn’s troops would be heading to the aid of Carris. Perhaps even the Earth King himself would come do battle with the reavers, and he imagined the satisfaction watching that fight might bring.

Raj Ahten was here with Paladane, the men who had served as Wits to King Orden, and Raj Ahten’s counselor Feykaald. His three flameweavers stood at his back before a roaring blaze in the hearth, peering into the smoke and the writhing flames. They were drawing the heat into them, trying to regenerate their powers, but they were so drained, Raj Ahten doubted they’d be able to fight for the rest of the day. He dared not engage the reavers until the flameweavers could stand beside him.

After dawn Raj Ahten had quickly set up formations for defending the castle gates. Yet the reavers merely ignored them, continued to build.

“What are they up to?” Raj Ahten wondered aloud. “Why don’t they attack?”

“It may be that they fear to try a frontal assault,” Duke Paladane ventured. “But they dig well, and might tunnel into the castle, they are monstrous sappers.”

The reavers had obviously come here for a purpose.

But for the moment the reavers did not seem interested in taking the castle. Perhaps they were not fully aware of the danger that his men presented. It even seemed remotely plausible to Raj Ahten that the reavers had forgotten that the castle was here; they were after all strange creatures that danced to a pipe that no man could hear.

He glanced toward Bone Hill. The fell mage worked there near its crown, glittering from the fiery runes tattooed on her carapace. Once, her massive head swiveled toward the castle, but then she resumed her work.

Perhaps the fell mage felt secure with her minions guarding the plains. The land was now pocked with openings to subterranean caverns, laced with moats, decorated with that stinking rune that covered the hill. He studied Bone Hill, secure behind its barrier of hardened mucilage, partially wrapped inside its cocoon.

The Glue-mums had quit towering the walls higher. Raj Ahten suspected that the fell mage’s curious defenses might be complete.

Was it merely a coincidence that they came to this place, now, where Raj Ahten planned to face the Earth King? Raj Ahten wondered. Could it be that they prepared this battleground for the Earth King?

It seemed more probable that their plans had nothing to do with any of them. The reavers seemed content to ignore Raj Ahten and his armies, as if he were beneath their notice.

Raj Ahten shook his head in dismay. For the past hour he had been assaulted by strange and distressing emotions for reasons that he could not quite understand.

I should not be dismayed, he reasoned. I am the most powerful Runelord to grace the earth in millennia. My facilitators in Indhopal have drawn brawn and stamina from thousands of subjects, have taken grace and wit from thousands more. A sword driven through my heart cannot slay me. I should not feel apprehensive.

Yet he did. In recent months, he had begun to believe that he was invincible, that he was on the verge of becoming a creature of legend, the Sum of All Men—a Runelord so charismatic that he would no longer need forcibles to draw attributes from his Dedicates. He hoped to become a Power, a force of nature, like the Earth or Fire or Water.

Daylan Hammer had accomplished it in days of old, if legend spoke true.

Raj Ahten had stood on the brink of attaining that distinction; until ten days ago it seemed that nothing could hinder him. Then old King Mendellas Orden had stolen his forcibles.

Surely if the reavers knew that a man like me confronts them, Raj Ahten thought, they would fear me.

Raj Ahten glanced toward the foul rune that the reavers were shaping at Bone Hill. The stink of it had become appalling, and now the odor hung above the hill in a spiral of brown haze.

Death emanated from that place. Raj Ahten felt the pain and rot and decrepitude. To even look at it made the eyeballs twitch, want to turn away. Dim lights flickered beneath the roiling smoke, like the phantom ghost lights that formed when gas bubbles rose from a swamp. It seemed to Raj Ahten that the whole rune was precariously close to bursting into flame.

I feel dismay. Somehow, that rune is the key.

The reavers focused too much attention on it. Their mages swarmed the hill, patiently digging great trenches so that the odd rune took shape in bas-relief, then decorated it with their stench.

Raj Ahten had endowments of scent from thousands of men. He breathed deeply. It was not a single odor: He could detect myriad undertones and flavors. It was a complex medley: a bouquet of rot, of moldering flesh, mixed smoke and death and human sweat, a rich symphony teeming with competing smells. He felt as if he were almost on the verge of revelation, of recognizing the entirety of it.

Certainly the reavers had come to Carris for the sole purpose of shaping that rune.

Reavers scurried about on the rune’s walls, and one of them slipped, causing a slide. To Raj Ahten’s delight, part of the rune collapsed. Reaver mages raced to build it back up, hold it together, and spray the protuberances with new scents.

The rune was tantalizingly close. A child with a hammer could knock it down.

On a sudden impulse, Raj Ahten slammed a mailed fist through the window of the Duke’s Keep, stood for a moment and inhaled the subtle texture of odors coming from the rune.

Raj Ahten closed his eyes in concentration. As he inhaled deeply, he became aware that some scents did not translate simply as smells. Instead they assaulted the emotions. Yes, dismay was the scent that he smelled.

He’d never considered the possibility that a scent might arouse an emotion.

The sour sweat of someone who toiled near death. Raj Ahten tasted the scent, and felt with it that man’s despair.

Smoke, and agony. The salty taste of human tears. The greasy scent of charred flesh, and with it another smoky odor: fields of crops rotting under a blight.

Decay. A corpse bloated like a melon to the point of bursting.

Despair and terror assailed him. The coppery scent of blood, a woman’s broken water, and decay—a mother giving birth to a stillborn child. Fatigue.

The sour taste of old skin. Loneliness so deep it was an ache in the bones.

After a long moment, Raj Ahten smiled and almost laughed in pain. He recognized that complex scent now: It was a symphony of human suffering, the tally of all mankind’s misery.

“It’s an incantation,” Raj Ahten realized. He startled himself by speaking aloud.

“What?” Duke Paladane said, staring hard at him.

“The rune,” Raj Ahten said. “It’s an incantation written in scent an incantation to call a curse upon mankind.”

He suddenly yearned to dash the rune and its makers into oblivion, to drown the thing in water and wash it clean.

Yet he doubted he could accomplish that feat. The reavers were too wise to give him access to his objective, too powerful to be defeated so long as they comprised such vast numbers. A cocoon blockaded much of his path to the rune, although a trail had been left for the workers.

Raj Ahten had to try.

“The reavers may build,” Raj Ahten said, “but we do not have to let them build in peace. I may not be able to take that hill, but I can surely spoil their party.”

47 Waiting for Saffira

High in the Hest Mountains, Borenson’s mount clambered down a narrow trail through a flurry of snow. He was leading Saffira and her guards down from the precipitous high passes.

He gazed over a small valley and saw a herd of elephants floundering in the drifts. Most of them had died already, and they lay like elephant-shaped boulders covered in ice. But a couple of big old bulls looked up toward Saffira’s entourage and feebly raised their trunks, trumpeting.

These were domestic elephants, with tusks sawed off and capped with copper. But they looked so starved that they would probably never succeed in climbing out of this valley. Their mahouts had abandoned them.

Apparently, the Wolf Lord had tried to bring war elephants over the Hests late in the season—and he had failed. Three times in the night, Borenson’s party had passed Raj Ahten’s armies of commoners as they tried to make it over the mountains. These were archers and footmen, washwomen and carters by the hundreds of thousands. Not in his wildest dreams had Borenson imagined that Raj Ahten would try to bring such troops over the mountains so late in the autumn. Up so high in the Hests, the narrow trails offered little forage: a few rough grasses and low bushes to eat, snow to quench one’s thirst. There was no fuel to burn, and so men burned ox dung in their small fires.

A journey that Borenson made in an hour on a force horse might take these men and women a day. The journey he made in a single night would take weeks of hard work for a commoner. Many of the horses Borenson saw in the last army were in terrible shape. They were beasts whose hides hung limp over skeletal frames. The commoners riding them would likely get stranded in the snow and die up here before midwinter, just as these elephants would die.

Raj Ahten had taken a deadly gamble, with both the lives of his people and his animals.

But he doesn’t care, Borenson told himself. The lives he gambles with are not his own.

The mountain air was thin. A biting chill blew through it, piercing his cloak. Borenson wrapped it around himself and waited for Saffira to catch up. He hoped that when she saw the beautiful elephants, she might see her lord’s folly. Evidence of it was everywhere. Rumor said that Raj Ahten had taken more than a thousand endowments of wit. With so much wit, he would recall in vivid detail every waking moment of his life. Yet endowments of wit only let a man store memories, not reason more clearly.

So he has a thousand endowments of wit, Borenson thought, and he’s still dumber than my ass.

Last night, when Saffira had said that Raj Ahten was the greatest man in the world, and would surely save mankind from the reavers, Borenson had believed her. But now he was not looking at her, and the seductive power of her Voice did not sound as reasonable when he replayed it in memory.

No, Raj Ahten was not all-wise. Only a fool would have sent so many commoners into these mountains.

A fool or a reckless and desperate man, a voice whispered in the back of Borenson’s mind.

Perhaps Raj Ahten had been a Runelord too long. Maybe he’d forgotten what a frail thing a commoner could be. A man with a couple of endowments of brawn and metabolism could rush through a battle line and cut down commoners as if they were scarecrows.

They died so damned easily. Last night had brought a thin snow, and it had kept falling all morning: If it held, Raj Ahten’s troops would get bogged down. Their animals would die in a fortnight, and without fuel for fires, the people would freeze in a matter of days.

What had made Raj Ahten hope that the fair weather would hold? Certainly he’d studied Rofehavan, knew what a risk he took.

Raj Ahten is a fool, Borenson thought, and Saffira does not see it.

He knew that Indhopal was an enormous realm, comprised of many kingdoms. And though Borenson had ridden through parts of Deyazz and Muttaya, he’d not been farther south, had not numbered the teeming hordes of Kartish or old Indhopal. It was said that before Raj Ahten conquered all of his neighbors, the old kingdom of Indhopal, with its lush jungles and vast fields, had fed more than a hundred and eighty million people. Certainly Raj Ahten commanded two or three times that number now. Yet even Raj Ahten could not afford to throw away half a million of his best trained footmen and archers.

No, Raj Ahten was a fool. Or he might be a madman, deluded by his own fair face, the power of his Voice.

The horror of it now was that Saffira in her naïvete acute; could not see Raj Ahten’s excesses, his vices.

Saffira was a tool in Raj Ahten’s hand, and if she could not twist him to her will, then he most certainly would twist her to his.

Borenson waited several long minutes for Saffira. When she arrived, Borenson moved to her windward side, so that his body might shield her better from the stinging wind.

“Ah, look at my lord’s elephants,” Saffira said as she stopped, giving her horse a breather. The poor beast put its head down and bit into the snow, began chewing it for refreshment. “We must do something to save them.”

Borenson looked helplessly at the starving elephants. In the morning light, Saffira’s beauty had become a terrible and breathtaking thing to behold. All through the night, the facilitators at Obran must have been working to transfer the concubines’ glamour and Voice into Saffira’s vectors. Saffira had garnered thousands of endowments. When Borenson glanced at her face for only a moment, her beauty smote him like a furnace, and he felt unworthy to be so near her.

A couple of vultures flapped up from an elephant’s carcass.

“What would you suggest, O Star of Indhopal?” Borenson begged. When she did not answer, he looked to Pashtuk and the guards. He could see no way to save the elephants, short of spending the day hauling in hay and food for them from Mystarria.

If Saffira asked him to cart feed for the elephants, he knew that he would obey, but he feared the consequences if he delayed his quest. He needed to deliver Saffira to Raj Ahten, to convince him to turn aside from pursuing this self-destructive war.

“I...I don’t know—what we can do for them,” Saffira said.

“They have grazed this valley to stubble, O Greatest of Stars,” Pashtuk said. “Perhaps if we drove them down to a lower valley where there is more grass, the elephants would regain enough strength so that they might live.”

“That’s a fine plan!” Saffira said in delight.

Borenson glanced at Pashtuk, hoping to convey in his scowl how displeased he was with the idea. But he saw Pashtuk’s face, and knew that the big man felt as much in thrall to Saffira as did Borenson himself. Pashtuk only hoped to please her.

“O Bright Lady,” Borenson said, “your lord tried to bring the elephants across the mountains too late in the season. We cannot save them.”

“It is not my lord’s fault if the weather does not cooperate,” Saffira said. “The weather should be warmer this time of year. It often stays warm, does it not?”

“It does,” Borenson admitted, and Saffira’s Voice was so seductive, he could not help but wonder. Surely she was right. The weather often remained warm this late in the year.

“Still,” Borenson said, “he brought them too late.”

“Do not seek fault with my lord,” Saffira said. “Blame is easy to give, and hard to take. My lord does only what is necessary to stop the depredations of the Knights Equitable. If anyone is to blame, it is your kind.”

Her words were a hot whip that slashed his back. Borenson cringed, unable to frame an argument, unable to say anything. He tried to recall his thoughts a moment earlier, but Saffira had ordered him not to seek fault with Raj Ahten, and so persuasive was her command that his mind slid away from any ill thoughts.

So Borenson and Pashtuk left Saffira with her guards and made their way down to the starving elephants. The herd had contained fifty beasts, but only five remained alive. The narrow valley had no water flowing through it, and Borenson suspected that the other elephants had died of thirst as much as from hunger.

Borenson and Pashtuk slowed their pace through the morning and spent most of a long day herding the elephants eight or ten miles down the mountains to safety. Two miles of travel took them down to the tree line.

After that, Pashtuk drove the elephants down a side trail to a narrow valley. Here the light snow turned to a cold drizzle. The valley had good water and enough grass so that the elephants might forage for a couple of days before they moved down to the lowlands, but Borenson had no real hope for them.

The grass here was merely straw that would not give the elephants energy. Without men to push them on, the elephants most likely would be too weak to leave this place.

Still, he’d done all that he could.

Saffira’s entourage rode down out of the mountains. Borenson now took the lead. Duke Paladane’s soldiers would be guarding this road; though a large party might pass unmolested, Saffira and her entourage would be easy targets.

Borenson didn’t know where the ambush might come, but he didn’t doubt that he would be challenged.

So he rode at the van of the group, a hundred yards ahead of the others. All the while, he watched for sign of an ambush. But with the loss of endowments, his eyes were not as sharp as before; his ears seemed dull of hearing. Without his stamina, he seemed to tire more easily than ever before.

Still, having endowments wasn’t everything—Knowing what to look for was as important as having sharp eyes. So he watched the dark folds of valleys where the pines were thick, and he studied outcroppings of rock that might hide a horse, and he worried each time he came to a new fold in the ground and had to look over a rise.

He hoped only that Gaborn would use his powers to warn him if any danger should present itself.

By midafternoon, the rain poured. Borenson was desperate to pick up his pace, but Saffira commanded otherwise.

As they rode down a forested slope, they came upon an old wayfarer’s cottage at the edge of a glade. Its thatch roof was sagging and full of holes, but by now Borenson was thoroughly soaked, and any roof looked as inviting to him as it did to Saffira. Besides, overhanging limbs from pine trees offered some added shelter for the cottage.

“Sir Borenson, help Mahket build a fire while Pashtuk and Ha’Pim prepare dinner,” Saffira said. “All of this travel has left me famished.”

“O Great Star,” Borenson said. “We are—We must hurry.”

Saffira fixed a reproachful gaze on him, and Borenson raised a hand to shield his eyes.

He went to work building the fire and did not object, for he told himself that a short rest would give their mounts time to forage, chewing viciously at the grass outside as force horses will. Besides, the cold rain had left them all thoroughly chilled. They needed rest.

For the moment, he felt too weary to argue further.

Borenson entered the cottage, found a dry corner where the roof still kept out the rain. Fortunately, the corner was near the fireplace. Dry pine needles and cones littered the cottage floor, and Borenson and Mahket set these in the fireplace. Soon they had managed to get a small blaze going.

As he worked, Borenson remained constantly aware of Saffira so near him. Since he knew there would be no dry wood outside, he went to the far end of the cottage and pulled some dry thatch out of the roof. He used the thatch for fuel while Pashtuk and Ha’Pim fetched water to boil rice and warm the lamb cooked in coconut milk that they’d brought from the Palace of the Concubines.

After dinner, Saffira ordered the men to stand guard while she took an afternoon nap, for she said that it would not do for her to “appear before the Great Light with baggy eyes from lack of rest.”

So Borenson let Saffira lie in the warm dry corner while he took a guard post nearby.

He could not rest. The day was wasting, and as he turned away from Saffira he soon found that he merely seethed.

He dared not voice his frustrations to Saffira. He feared her rebuke, but he was dismayed by the delays she caused. It was almost as if she did not want to see Raj Ahten, he decided.

Saffira slept, breathing deeply and softly under a brightly embroidered quilt on the floor, the picture of perfect repose.

Borenson wondered if he would have to kill her. With so many endowments of glamour and Voice, she would be dangerous—as dangerous in her own way as Raj Ahten.

He stared into her glorious face, saw the beauty and innocence there, and knew that to kill her, to take her life, would be as impossible as cutting out the heart of his own child.

Borenson left Saffira to Ha’Pim, and Mahket. He went outside to Pashtuk, who stood atop a nearby rock beneath, the shelter of a low hanging pine limb.

They’d come out of the higher mountains. Dark pines stood straight along the road below, forming an impenetrable barrier to his gaze. In an hour, they would reach the warmer lowlands, where oak and elm thrived.

Borenson looked down the trail.

“How are your pearls feeling?” Borenson asked Pashtuk. He’d noted how the warrior sat uneasily in his horse, using his thighs to hold himself off the saddle.

Borenson could not stop worrying about what it would cost him to have looked upon Saffira’s face.

“I fail to understand,” Pashtuk said, “how body parts that I no longer have can cause me so much pain.”

“That bad, eh?” Borenson said.

“When we near Carris,” Pashtuk said, “Raj Ahten will certainly demand his ounce of flesh from you.”

“Ounce of flesh?” Borenson jested. “I’m more of a man than that.”

Pashtuk did not smile. “I suggest that you turn your horse and escape,” he said. “Neither Ha’Pim’s nor Mahket’s horse can catch yours. I might be able to give a good chase...but I will not catch you.”

“Why not?” Borenson asked.

Pashtuk shook his head. “My lord’s decree was made to keep men from idly seeking out Obran, and to make sure that palace servants did not dally with the concubines. I do not believe it was meant for men like you, men of honor who would not betray a trust.”

Borenson felt truly grateful. “Thank you,” he said. “But what kind of escort would I be if I ran off before I saw my charge to safety?”

In his heart, he suddenly knew he could not run, could never leave Saffira’s side. He had to stay beside her now, and he wondered if he would be able to leave even when his journey was done; when it was time to ride for Inkarra. Part of him yearned to stay at her side because to leave would be painful. But he also knew that at the very least, he had to be there to plunge a knife in her back if she decided to betray the Earth King.

Pashtuk shook his head. “I only warn you for your own sake. I would understand if you ran. And if the chance presents itself, I beg you to do so.”

Borenson gazed off down the road. He wanted Pashtuk to believe that he considered this option, that he had no ulterior motive for remaining close to Saffira. “Perhaps you’re right. It looks as if you may not need me. We should have run into a Mystarrian patrol by now at least within the past twenty miles—but none seem to be about.”

He did not need to say more. With the Blue Tower destroyed, few men would be capable of acting as scouts for Mystarria, and most of those would be hiding in Carris.

“This is pointless,” Borenson breathed at last. “You don’t need me to protect you. Why is Saffira traveling so slowly? What is she afraid of?”

Pashtuk bit his lip and whispered, “She is more cunning than you give her credit for. There is a danger in displeasing our lord. It is said in Indhopal, ‘No one ever displeases our king twice.’”

“When she delivers her message and sues for peace, she will have only one chance. She must do her best Be patient. You gave her a thousand forcibles. How soon do you imagine that her facilitators can drain them?”

“I don’t know,” Borenson said. “How many facilitators does she have?” He’d imagined that Saffira would have a dozen facilitators at her call.

“Two,” Pashtuk said. “A master and an apprentice.”

Borenson licked his lips. Only two. They would each be hard pressed to drain a forcible every five minutes. The two might be able take twenty-four endowments in an hour, two hundred and forty in a ten-hour day, perhaps four hundred if they drove themselves for eighteen hours.

Saffira’s beauty had been growing night and morning. She grew fairer and more radiant by the minute.

Her facilitators had to be working overtime, exhausting themselves. Yet they could not possibly take a thousand endowments in less than two days.

Saffira had been traveling now for only about twenty hours. Borenson calculated that if they rode hard, they could reach Carris in another four hours or less.

But Saffira needed to wait.

“She can’t hold us here another day!” Borenson said. “By now, Raj Ahten has certainly besieged Carris. Tomorrow, the Earth King will fall upon him.”

“And if Carris falls, is that such a great matter?” Pashtuk asked. “You seek to divert a single battle. Saffira hopes to end all war.”

“But...another day!”

Pashtuk shook his head. “She will not wait another day. Yesterday while you slept, I spoke to the chamberlain of the Palace of the Concubines. The palace holds fewer than five hundred women and guards, plus a few servants. Saffira’s facilitators swore that by sunset tonight, they would drain every person of endowments who is worth a forcible. If their calculations are correct, by then Saffira will have vectored to her over twelve hundred endowments of voice and twenty-four hundred endowments of glamour.

“After that, in the Palace of the Concubines, the only creatures that the facilitators will have left to take endowments from will be the camels.” Pashtuk laughed at his own jest.

Borenson smiled. Certainly Raj Ahten himself did not have half so many endowments of glamour. In all history, Borenson had never heard of a queen who had taken more than a tenth of what Saffira hoped to garner.

She had one chance to persuade Raj Ahten. One chance.

Borenson quietly squatted next to Pashtuk and let Saffira get her rest.

In late afternoon, Saffira wakened, and after several long minutes she said in a voice far sweeter than any song, “I have good tidings. The facilitators have stopped adding endowments to me. Their work is finished, for good or ill.”

With that news Borenson and Pashtuk saddled up the five force horses.

The roads were muddy, and they would have to ride slower than Borenson wanted. He hoped to make Carris before sunset.

For twenty miles they rode hard and fast, until at last they found the Mystarrian patrol that Borenson had feared.

A dozen knights wearing the green-man emblem lay by the roadside, torn asunder. The body of a horse dangled in the branches of a tree forty feet overhead Most of the men were hacked into several pieces: a torso trailing guts lying over here, half a leg over there. Some body parts were clearly just missing. The ground around the corpses was scored and trampled by heavy feet, but the knights had not managed to slay a single foe. Seldom had Borenson seen such a slaughter. And it had happened not more than an hour ago. The dead men’s guts still vented steam.

“It looks as if one of your Mystarrian patrols has run into my lord’s men,” Saffira said innocently. She covered her fair nose with a silk cloth, to clear the air from the smell of blood and bile. Her voice was calm and she did not tremble, as if the sight of dead warriors hacked to pieces could not daunt her.

Borenson wondered what kind of sights she could have seen at her tender age, to be so hardened.

Perhaps it does not concern her, he thought, because these warriors are her enemy.

Pashtuk merely shook his head, as if weary of Saffira’s naïvete acute. “They did not meet our patrol, O Great Star. No human would tear apart another man so savagely. Reavers did this.”

“Oh,” Saffira said without emotion, as if the thought of reavers stalking the woods around them did not alarm her in the least. Her guards let their mounts edge closer.

Pashtuk glanced at Borenson, and his dark eyes spoke volumes. “With reavers on the road, we are in trouble.”

48 The Reavers Send a Message

Roland stood on the castle walls and cheered as Raj Ahten emerged from the Duke’s Keep and began shouting orders to his men, instructing them to prepare for a charge.

Proud Invincibles raced down the ramparts to their horses, squires began carrying barding and lances from the armory. It would take a good hour for the men to effect a charge, and Roland could do nothing but wait.

Over on Bone Hill, the reaver mages were hard at work; the fell mage near its crown was a blur of glittering motion. As they labored, a roiling brown haze began to swirl off the rune.

The odor of death and decay rising from Bone Hill left Roland feeling sick. His stomach churned, and his muscles ached, while his eyes burned so badly that he hardly dared look toward the hill any longer.

As Raj Ahten’s men armored their horses, Roland noticed subtle changes out on the plain. The huge Glue-mums had been chewing grass and trees, continuously excreting a thick, sticky resin that howlers used to fuse stone together—stone that formed walls and barricades.

They’d been working on the south shore of the lake, creating several large domes.. Men had conjectured that these domes might be nesting sites, but now the reavers flipped the domes over and pushed them toward the water, and Roland recognized that the domes were rely ships, enormous vessels without oars or sails, shaped like the halves of walnut shells.

The howlers now began toiling desperately, building up the sides of the ships stone by stone.

A cold terror struck at the pit of Roland’s stomach. Until now the reavers had seemed content to ignore the men of Carris.

But now it was evident that, like Raj Ahten in the courtyards below, they were preparing to attack.

To the west, reavers continued to burrow. The barren earth had become pocked and cratered with openings that were strangely taller to the north than to the south.

As afternoon wore toward evening, Roland grew steadily more ill. The air around Carris felt oppressive, with its scent of decay. His head ached, despair settled into his stomach, and a deep-seated fatigue made him feel so worn that he could hardly stand. Some of the men around him tried to hide the fact that they had begun weeping.

In an effort to keep their humor up, some stout warriors began to hurl insults at the reavers, while others laughed and assigned names to the new landmarks that the reavers created.

The huge stone tower to the south rose higher and higher, resembling a twisted narwhale horn or a giant thorn. By midafternoon it was over eight hundred feet tall, and still the reavers kept on building. The fell mage twice went to check the progress atop the tower, and men noted that it looked something like a male reaver’s genitals, so they called it the “Love Tower.”

To the east of the tower, along the shore of Lake Donnestgree, Glue-mums and howlers continued to work on their ships in the Stone Shipyards.

The pile of discarded wood from homes and trees and fences was called Mount Woody. The men delighted in calling the multitude of burrows to its northwest “Lord Paladane’s Slum.”

Yet of all the foul things created that day, the evil rune on Bone Hill was the most appalling. No mere howlers executed the masonry work. Roland half-glimpsed them behind the walls of their cocoon. While howlers carted off dirt from the trenches and dragged deadwood to the Glue-mums, mages with runes tattooed along the ridges of their heads above their philia built the wall of the horrific rune.

So the great rune grew—an obscene badge that slowly began to emanate smoke and power. The lines of it beneath the brown haze were marvelously sinuous, like garter snakes all mating in a ball, or like a plate of hummingbird tongues. Like reaver magic itself, the rune was twisted and vile.

If Roland tried to look at it, his eyes literally throbbed. The knotty cords that controlled the movement of the eyes would all convulse, so that he could not focus. Yet if he turned away, the burning sensation against his skin felt so intense that at times he sniffed the air, fearing that he would smell his own flesh cooking.

But the dismay that the fell mage’s rune caused the men was not the only manifestation of its power. For as the rune neared completion, it began to wreak a monstrous change around Bone Hill: The few shrubs and grasses at the foot of the hill began to steam and die.

The grass turned gray and wilted. On the inside wall beneath him, Roland could see the branches of the almond tree slowly begin to writhe The leaves blistered and fell.

By the time Raj Ahten’s troops had barded their horses and donned their own armor, Roland looked out beyond the walls. North, south, and west of the castle grass and trees steamed as they died, miles away.

The men of Carris renamed Bone Hill the “Throne of Desolation.” As for Castle Carris itself, some men grimly whispered that it might best be called the “Butcher’s Playpen.” Roland imagined that the city held enough people to feed the reavers for a couple of months or more. It was hard to tell, with so many reavers still marching north. Certainly, every man in Carris felt destined to grace a reaver’s dinner table.

For a time, Roland searched hopefully off to the east, where the weak sun shone on the choppy waves. Still no sign of boats returning. Roland clutched his half-sword, practiced drawing it.

The reavers built. But they did not attack.

“Maybe they’re not going to attack,” Roland ventured hopefully. “Maybe they’re after something else....”

“It’s Bone Hill that draws them,” a man behind Roland said. He was a wretchedly skinny farmer with the wiry hair of a goat for a beard. He’d introduced himself earlier in the morning as Meron Blythefellow, and he guarded the wall with nothing more than a pickaxe.

“Why do you say that?” Roland asked.

“All the dead men up there,” the farmer said. “More knights have led charges and died on that hill than anywhere else in all Rofehavan. There’s been maybe a hundred battles fought, and all that blood on the ground poisons the soil, making it ripe for dark enchantments. The blood is so thick that the Duke has even tried to mine it, looking for blood metal. That’s why the reavers are here, I think—to build that rune on ground rich in human blood.”

As Blythefellow voiced this thought, Baron Poll frowned. “I don’t think that’s it at all. Maybe they’re just sending us a message.”

“A message?” Roland asked, incredulous. It was obvious that the reavers were poisoning the people of Carris, sickening them with their twisted magics. “Reavers can’t talk.”

“Not usually,” the Baron argued, “at least not so that we can understand. But they talk nonetheless.”

“So what are the reavers saying?” Roland asked.

Baron Poll waved is arms across the landscape. As far as the eye could see, the land around Carris was scarred and barren. Cities, farmhouses, fences, and fortresses alike had all fallen and been carted away. Trees steamed on hills five miles distant.

“Can’t you read it?” Baron Poll said. “It’s not as hard to decipher as high script: ‘The land that was once yours is ours. Your homes are our homes. Your food—well, you are our food. We supplant you.“ ‘

Down in the bailey, Raj Ahten’s troops had mounted. The knights sat astride their chargers, war lances held upright, pointed like glistening needles at the sky.

“Open the gates!” Raj Ahten shouted at their head. Chains creaked as the drawbridge lowered.

49 Hue and Cry

Averan didn’t know that she’d fallen asleep until she felt Spring lurch up, ripping the warm cloak from her grasp. The green woman shivered with excitement, sniffing the air.

All night long, Averan had suffered from strange dreams, unreal visions of the Underworld.

The day was cool. The sun lay behind thick clouds. A thin drizzle rained down. Averan had been dreaming that one of the graaks had brought a rotten goat to the aerie, as they sometimes did, and Brand was making her drag it away.

She cleared her eyes. While she’d slept, the ferns above her had all died. They hung wet and sullen, like limp gray rags. Indeed, every bit of moss at her fingertips, every tender vine, every tree overhead, all had wilted as if blasted by the worst hoarfrost ever seen. The scent of decay lay heavy in the air.

Worse than that, whatever had cursed the ground seemed also to affect her. Averan felt nauseous, and her muscles were weak. A dry film coated her mouth.

If I stay here, I’ll die, she thought.

In mounting curiosity and horror, Averan glanced up at the sky. Sunrise had come and gone hours ago. Soon the sun would set.

She’d run most of the night. In her exhaustion, Averan had slept the entire day. In that time, a horrible change had been wrought upon the land.

Now the green woman lifted her nose so that her olive hair fell back on her shoulders, and she said softly, “Blood, yes. Sun, no.”

Averan leapt to her feet in the evening drizzle, glanced down the long hill. A mile away, a group of huge reavers raced on her side of the canal, following her scent.

The air issuing from their thoraxes made a dull rattle, and they scurried about in a defensive formation called “nines.” A scarlet sorceress led them, bearing a staff that glowed cruelly with obscene runes.

A reaver mage, Averan realized dully, fighting panic. In dull wonder, Averan realized that the scout she had eaten had known this monster and the blade-bearers at her back. These were no common troops. These were some of the fell mage’s most elite guards.

Averan’s shouts of “Beware” must have frightened the reavers, causing them to send some of their most deadly warriors.

Desperately, Averan sprinted through the wilted ferns surrounding the hill, sliding on their slimy surface, hardly daring to make an occasional loop, knowing she could never outrun the monsters, knowing that in moments she would be within their field of vision.

The green woman loped beside her, curious; glancing back like a dog eager to hunt squirrels, unsure whether to fight or flee.

Overhead, the leaves of every tree had fallen. There was no foliage, nothing she could hide behind. With nowhere to go and nothing to lose, Averan did what instinct bade her. She raised a hue and cry: “Help! Help! Murder!”

Even as she screamed, she thought, If I yelled “Reavers!” no one would be dumb enough to come to my rescue.

50 Ride of the Mice

“Open the gates!” Raj Ahten shouted from the bailey. Five hundred force soldiers gathered behind the castle gates, the knights and horses gleaming in armor, painted lances prickling toward the sky.

The only monument left to mankind within sight was Carris itself, still tall, its white plaster walls still proud in the fading afternoon light. Rain had fallen on and off all day long, misting everything. Now a bit of sunlight beamed from a break in the clouds.

The walls of Carris gleamed preternaturally, contrasting with the dark wet mud outside.

The drawbridge dropped; and everywhere within the walls, men began to cheer wildly. Raj Ahten led the foray himself, bearing a long white lance of ash, riding his great gray Imperial force horse.

He swept over the causeway at an astonishing speed, and in seconds thundered over the plains toward the Throne of Desolation. Blade-bearers waiting well, back from the causeway charged to meet him.

He swept past the first few of the great monsters as if they were but islands in a stream. His troops flowed behind. Each horse had endowments of brawn and grace and metabolism, and thus even in armor could race over the downs like a gale.

Raj Ahten’s face shone like the sun. Even at this distance, he drew the eye like no other man could, as if he bore beauty with him.

Now the knights took formation, five columns charging north toward the Throne of Desolation. Reavers rushed to block them, their carapaces gleaming darkly from the afternoon rain. From such a distance, Raj Ahten and his men looked to Roland like a great herd of mice, charging out to make war upon overfed cats.

Their horses were marvelous and speedy, their lances gleamed in the sunlight like needles. The men shouted war cries that were lost on the wind.

And the reavers towered above them, sickly gray and bloated.

Lances struck home. Some knights sought to strike the reaver’s brain by aiming at the soft spot in its skull, or by driving a lance through the roof of its mouth. A reaver so struck died almost instantly.

But others opted to try to drive a lance into the reaver’s belly, a maiming wound.

Thus the Invincibles charged and began to strike, but almost as often as a lance went home, it exploded harmlessly against a reaver’s hard carapace. The unfortunate warriors who failed to strike a deadly blow were often borne backward off their horses, left weaponless to scurry for refuge while hoping that their fellows would slay their foes.

Roland watched one horse slip on the slick mud and crash into a reaver as if it were a stone wall, so that both horse and rider were broken instantly. Elsewhere a blade-bearer swung a great blade and sliced the legs from beneath a charging force horse.

Half a dozen reavers went down in seconds, along with several men. As each column of knights met resistance, its men would veer away from the foe, so that the columns quickly became irregular snaking seams.

And once a lancer met his target, his lance would be destroyed. Either it would become hopelessly impaled into the reaver, or it would shatter. In either case the lancer was forced to turn his horse and retreat.

Raj Ahten and a few knights bore down on the Throne of Desolation, his mount racing through the brown clouds that continuously swirled out from it, between wide columns of hardened mucilage that formed the cocoon.

He’s charging like a fly into the spider’s web, Roland feared.

The few dozen enormous blade-bearers rose up to meet him. Atop the throne, Glue-mums like ugly grubs reared in wonder at the threat, while mages took defensive positions behind the walls of the rune itself. Howlers fled for cover. The fell mage whirled to look at him from her eyeless head, then dismissed the threat and went back to work.

As the Invincibles charged, at the edge of the cocoon, reavers reared up on their back legs, great talons gleaming as they clutched their enormous blades or glory hammers.

Then the forces clashed. A dozen reavers were thrust through by the fury of the charge. Lances shattered. Blades whipped through the air faster than the eye could see; Invincibles and their horses were slashed asunder.

In that single charge at the lip of the cocoon, Raj Ahten lost a full dozen men. Those who met the reavers forfeited their lances. Raj Ahten himself brought a reaver down, plunging his lance into its mouth.

But even as it fell, its tonnage blocked the path to Bone Hill. Raj Ahten turned his mount and raced back for the castle, a few knights at his heel.

From the warrens at Lord Paladane’s Slums, reavers issued from their burrows in fury, scuttling from the shadows, while others raced from the western shore of the lake. Along the roads to the south, reavers still marched in an unending line.

Raj Ahten saw the threat, wheeled toward the castle. His men retreated for their lives.

Reavers from the west lumbered up to block the causeway—and Raj Ahten’s escape.

On the castle walls, men began to shout, encouraging Raj Ahten’s troops to better speed, cheering for men who had been their enemies a few hours before.

But Roland merely stood with his mouth agape.

Is that the best we can do against them? he wondered.

Shall we halt their work for three seconds and then flee, like a child pelting a knight with rotten figs?

To do so was folly.

No more than sixty or seventy dead reavers littered the plains; Raj Ahten was forced to retreat, and now he would be chastised by the fell mage and her minions.

As if she had been waiting for this moment all along, the fell mage struck.

The huge mage perched atop Bone Hill raised her great staff to the sky, and an odd hissing roar issued from it. Even now, she wore her fiery runes like a coat of light.

There was a noise like a peal of thunder, and a blast of wind surged from her, sweeping across the hill as if an invisible stone had dropped into a pool, sending out a ring. Roland would not have been able to see it at all if not for the gree that writhed through the air. When the wind struck them, it sent them swirling like leaves.

Down on the plains below, the wind smashed into war-horses. It looked as if they had merely been hit by a blast of air, but the mounts suddenly lost their footing and crashed over the stony land, armor clanging. Warriors cried out as they fell to their deaths. Some got up and feebly began to crawl about, while reavers raced in and finished them.

Raj Ahten and his men neared the causeway, a ragged company of three hundred men and chargers. The knights’ mounts staggered about blindly, as if stricken, while a wall of blade-bearers charged to meet them.

Then the wind hit Roland with a vengeance. He felt the icy kiss as if it were fear itself, an unmanly fear that sent his heart racing and made him wish to hide. The smell of the air was like burning hair, but a hundred times more intense. A roaring sound raged in his ears, far louder than a thundering waterfall. His eyes burned painfully and, in that moment, everything went completely black.

Suddenly stricken blind, with a roaring like the sea blocking all sound, Roland cried out and clutched the battlements on the castle walls. A disorienting dizziness assailed him, so that he grasped the wall but could not tell which way was up or down.

All about him, men began to scream in terror. “Help! I’m blind! Help!”

But there would be no help. Such was the power of the fell mage’s curse that Roland merely lay in terror, gasping great breaths, struggling to stay alive.

No wonder the reavers do not fear us! Roland thought.

His eyes burned as if a hot drink had scalded them, and the knotty cords within throbbed in pain. He gasped and wiped copious tears from his face. He felt utterly unmanned.

For a long minute he lay thus, until the hammering in his ears began to subside, and through his tears he could see the sun riding dim as the moon through the gray sky. He made it to his knees, peered through his blindness, blinking rapidly. Black clouds seemed to obscure all sight. All along the wall-walks, men around him huddled, wiping their faces, squinting to pierce the darkness.

In moments he realized that reavers must have reached the causeway, coming within artillery range. The marksmen called for the artillery to shoot, and from the castle walls men cut loose with ballistas. Loud whonk sounds filled the air as ropes thudded against the steel wings of the ballistas, then giant metal bolts whooshed through air, landing with loud whacks as the bolts pierced reavers’ carapaces.

Roland blinked into the gloom over the wall, until he could see reavers, gray shapes writhing in the dark. Raj Ahten’s cavalry looked as if it would be overwhelmed.

But Raj Ahten was no common lord, and his men were no common warriors. They’d recovered enough from the fell mage’s blast so that they could fight.

They charged manfully into the fray. Lances pierced reaver flesh. Horses screamed when blade-bearers slashed through them. Glory hammers rang against armor.

Dozens more reavers died in the onslaught as Raj Ahten tried to win his way back to Carris. Men with great endowments of brawn and metabolism leapt from dying mounts, charged into battle, long-handled horseman’s warhammers rising and falling, chopping into the thick skin of reavers.

At the ballistas on the castle wall, artillerymen shouted and struggled to rewind the winches that drew back the ropes on the enormous bows, while boys lifted the heavy bolts and slid them into their grooved channels.

Raj Ahten himself, the most powerful human lord, screamed a war cry that shook the castle, dislodging plaster from the outer walls. As the pain in his eyes eased, Roland could make out reavers falling back, briefly stunned by the sound, but then they attacked more fiercely, as if enraged

Roland heard men shout in dismay; down at the Stone Shipyards, five dozen ships cobbled from rock and glue-mum resin had been launched into the water.

They bore no sails, sported no oars. Instead, reavers thrust long steel war blades into the water, using weapons to row.

Roland blinked and fought back tears. The strange craft with their high prows looked like black halves of walnuts floating in a pond. Except that these ships raced toward him with reavers by the hundreds.

Terror seized him. He’d hoped that he would not have to face the enemy. He was on the south wall, after all, and everyone knew that reavers could not swim, but sank like stone.

Besides, he reasoned, the plaster walls of Carris were far too smooth for man or reaver to get a toe-hold, and though the plaster had been damaged, no one could hope to scale the walls.

He clutched his little half-sword, which had seemed adequate protection from highwaymen just two days ago, and wondered what use it would be in the battle to come.

It was folly for him to be here, folly for a commoner to fight a reaver.

Out on the causeway, Raj Ahten shouted again, hoping to stun the reavers. Roland glanced his way, saw that the reavers not only ignored his cry, but scurried toward him all the faster, as if recognizing that he was a threat.

“Get ready!” Baron Poll shouted. “Get ready!” Howlers began emitting their weird cries in an unearthly chorus.

Everywhere around Roland, men rushed to and fro, hoisting shields, grabbing battle-axes. Some men bellowed for Roland to move, and they came and perched a heavy stone on the merlon next to him, went back for another.

“Damn!” Roland found himself shouting excitedly for lack of anything else to say. “Damn!”

“Look,” some fellow behind him cried. “They’re at the gates!”

Roland glanced west. Blade-bearers rushed behind Raj Ahten’s retreat. They raced in before the gatekeepers could raise the drawbridges, and thus burst past the first two barbicans. Roland could not see if reavers made it into the castle proper, for the gate tower hid his view.

Again the fell mage atop Bone Hill raised her great staff to the sky, and the hissing roar issued from it. All along the castle walls, men cried out, for none wanted to be stricken by the fell mage’s curse again.

“Close your eyes! Cover your ears! Don’t breathe the fumes!” men shouted.

Roland glanced back; toward the gates, watched men fall as the reaver’s curse struck them down.

He crouched down by the wall, clutched his ears and squinted his eyes tightly, held his breath as the second curse washed over him.

It struck like thunder, and the cords in his eyes twitched despite his care. He dropped to the ground, kept his eyes closed for several long seconds, dared not unstop his ears.

To his relief, his efforts helped him somewhat. He felt no disorienting dizziness.

Roland opened his eyes, and though they burned painfully and his sight was somewhat dim, he was not completely blind. He found himself face-to-face with a lad who was so frightened that the boy seemed leached of blood. The boy’s teeth chattered, and Roland knew that he was too afraid to fight, that the boy would lie here and die in exactly this position.

And as he huddled by the wall, Roland also knew that the fell mage was uttering her curse in an effort to keep him from defending Carris.

Roland had always been a man that life happened to. He’d steered the course of his life by a plan that his parents had set out for him, responded to every prodding from his wife with a snarl of his own. He’d ridden north to find a son he’d never known, not because he felt much for the lad, but simply because he knew that it was the right thing to do.

Now he gritted his teeth, filled with regret for all that he’d never done, for all that he’d never be able to do. He’d promised to be a father to Averan, wanted to be a father to his son. Now he doubted that he would ever get that chance.

Either I can lie here and die like this dumb lad, or I can get up and fight! he thought.

He heard a thud as one of the odd stone ships below collided against the castle wall. He could wait no longer.

“Come on,” he growled to the frightened lad. “Let’s get up and die like men!” Roland rose, grabbing the boy and giving him a hand. He leaned between two merlons, tried to peer through foul vapors that made him weep uncontrollably.

A hundred feet below, a reaver ship nuzzled the walls of Carris. One monster thrust its huge claws into the wall of the castle, piercing the thick layer of white plaster that lay over the stone.

A crow went cawing just over Roland’s head as the reaver leapt from the ship. To Roland’s astonishment, the reaver thrust its great blade between its teeth, like a dog fetching a stick, and climbed upward, raking the walls with its enormous foreclaws.

We are all commoners on this wall, Roland thought. No man here could stand against a reaver, even if it was unarmed.

Behind Roland, someone shouted, “Get some pole-arms up here!” Shoving the monsters from the walls with pole-arms sounded like a good plan, but there would be no time to fetch such weapons. Most of the halberds and falchions would be in use down below, by the castle gates.

Roland plunged his half-sword into its scabbard and grabbed for the huge stone nearby. He was a strong man, and large. But the stone he grabbed weighed upward of four hundred pounds.

With all his might, he strained to lift the damned boulder and drop it over the battlements.

It landed with a thud, hitting the reaver solidly on its eyeless head, some sixty feet below. The reaver halted for a second, stunned, and clung to the wall, as if it feared another rock.

But to Roland’s distress, the huge boulder was not enough to dislodge the beast from the castle. Instead it hooked the bonespurs at the juncture of each elbow into the stone and continued scrabbling more carefully. The bone spurs dug into the plaster, finding holds that no human could see.

In three seconds the monster reached the top of the wall and reared, ready to leap over.

The reaver perched on the merlons, its enormous talons raised in the air. It grabbed its great blade and swiped down at the young fellow nearby.

The blade crushed the pasty-faced boy against the stone floor in a spray of blood. Roland drew his small half-sword and shouted a battle cry.

Gathering his courage, he rushed forward. The monster was balanced precariously atop the wall, holding itself to the merlons with clawed toes. Roland could see the joints that held the toes together, knew where to cut so that his blade would separate a toe from the foot.

With all his might, he thrust his blade deep into the joint of the reaver’s toe, heard it hiss in pain.

The half-sword buried itself to the hilt, and Roland struggled to wrench it free again. At his side, Meron Blythefellow leapt forward with his pickaxe and hit another joint.

“Watch out!” Baron Poll shouted. Roland looked up to see an enormous clawed talon swipe toward him.

The talon caught Roland’s shoulder, ripped into his flesh, and carried him into the air. For half a second he was thirty feet in the air above the tower, looking into the maw of the reaver, row upon row of crystalline teeth.

He was aware that men below were using this moment of distraction to attack the beast. One huge fellow went racing underneath, threw himself against the monster in a shield rush.

Then the reaver fell, and Roland fell with it. He landed upon some defenders below and stared in horror at blood spurting from his right shoulder. The fiery pain was excruciating.

Men cheered as the reaver tumbled from the wall, went splashing into the water. “Surgeon! Surgeon!” Roland cried.

But none came forward. Roland grasped his arm, tried to hold the gaping wound closed, to keep his lifeblood from flowing out. He shook uncontrollably.

In a daze, he crawled backward against the stone of the wall-walk, tried to clear out of the path of other castle defenders.

He stared hard for a moment at the merlon where Baron Poll had sat for the past day, but the Baron was gone. Other men rushed to defend the wall. Roland looked all around, still fighting the tears and the black fog that threatened his eyesight.

Suddenly in his mind’s eye, he recalled the fellow making the shield rush, knocking the reaver into the lake. No commoner could have performed such a feat-only a man with endowments of brawn.

And he knew where Baron Poll had gone.

Roland’s heart seemed to pound in his throat; he pulled himself up. To the east and west, reavers gained the top of the wall. Commoners struggled to repel the monsters.

But here the attack had stopped for now. Roland gazed into the lake. The water was choppy, for the reavers were still trying to land. But the ship beneath his post was sinking. The bulk of a falling reaver, weighing more than a dozen tons, had been too much for the stone ship. The prow had shattered, and the reavers sank with their vessel.

Sank the way Baron Poll had, in his armor.

Roland shouted to Meron Blythefellow, “Baron Poll! Where is he?”

“Dead!” Blythefellow shouted in reply. “He’s dead!”

Roland floundered to his knees in a faint. Cold sleet pelted his neck. Gree; wriggled overhead painfully.

The skies went black though the fell mage all dressed in light had not yet uttered another curse.

51 Strangers on the Road

“Flee!” Gaborn’s Voice rang through Borenson’s mind. For half a second he drew rein on his horse and peered down the road west toward Carris, squinting to pierce the gloom. He raised a warning hand for Pashtuk, Saffira, and her bodyguards.

Borenson was in the lead. Pashtuk rode up next to him.

“What is it? An ambush?” Pashtuk squinted ahead, trying to pierce the darkness thrown by the shadows of the mixed oaks and pines along the hillside to their left. For the past few minutes, Borenson had been exceedingly ill at ease. Five miles back, they’d crossed some sort of invisible line.

The plants there had been steaming and wilting, blasted by some strange spell. Grass hissed as if it were full of snakes. Branches drooped in the trees. Vines in the ground had been writhing as if in pain, and all of this was accompanied by an odd stench of premature decay.

The farther they rode, the more decrepit the land became. Nothing was left alive. Low brown fumes clung to the ground.

The vegetation here had been blasted with a curse more dire than anything he’d ever seen. It left him feeling anxious, anticipating trouble.

“I...don’t know if it’s an ambush,” Borenson answered. “The Earth King warns of danger ahead. Perhaps we should turn aside and go cross-country.”

Suddenly, down the road at the corner of the bend, a girl ran beneath the barren limbs of a hoary oak. Distantly her voice could be heard as she raised a hue and cry. “Help! Help! Murder!”

She turned the corner, saw Borenson, and relief transformed her face. She was a small girl, with long red hair the same color as Borenson’s, wearing the dirty blue tunic of a skyrider.

Borenson had been galloping hard for the past hour, hoping to make Carris by sunset. He’d feared reavers along the road, and he’d hoped that if he rode fast enough, he could outrun them. But now they’d slowed the horses to let them cool.

“Help!” the child cried, and a woman came loping behind her. The two raced under blasted trees, over limp grass, as if running from out of some nightmare of desolation. The fading rays of the afternoon sun showed full on their faces.

The woman seemed to have fallen into a vat of green dye. She wore a black bearskin robe that flapped open as she ran, revealing the fact that she wore nothing else beneath that single garment. She had small breasts and a slim figure, and the green dye seemed indeed to cover every part of her body. Yet something about her gave Borenson pause, made him feel unaccountably distracted. It was not the fact that she was beautiful and half-naked. Rather that, even at two hundred yards, she looked familiar.

His heart hammered. Binnesman’s wylde! Though he’d never seen the creature, every lord in Heredon had been told to look for it. Borenson wondered how it came to be here.

Pashtuk tensed, and Borenson reached behind his saddle for his horseman’s warhammer.

“Flee!” the Earth King warned again.

“Damn it, I hear you,” Borenson shouted back at Gaborn, knowing full well that Gaborn could not hear.

“Is this an ambush?” Pashtuk asked. In Indhopal, women or children were sometimes used as decoys to lure warriors to their deaths, though no decent lord of Rofehavan had ever done this.

“Let’s go!” one of Saffira’s guards, Ha’Pim, ordered. He grabbed the reins to Saffira’s mount, turning her horse, prepared to gallop south across the open fields.

At that moment, a reaver raced round the bend, huge and monstrous, bearing an enormous glory hammer.

“I’ll get the girl, you take the woman!” Borenson shouted to Pashtuk.

Borenson slammed his heels into horseflesh, raised his weapon high. He held no illusions. He had no endowments left, no brawn or grace or metabolism, and he wasn’t likely to ever get close enough to the reaver to even take a swing. Still, the reaver wouldn’t know that. He hoped that the beast, upon sensing two warriors racing toward it, might at least pause long enough so that Borenson could grab the child and make a clean escape.

He shouted a war cry and Pashtuk’s mount raced beside him.

“Wait! Leave them!” Ha’Pim shouted at Borenson’s back. “We are here to guard our lady.”

Pashtuk did not resist. The Invincible drew reins for half a second, and Borenson glanced back to see him racing to his Queen.

Borenson did not know if Pashtuk acted well or ill. He’d heard abject terror in Ha’Pim’s voice.

Borenson ducked low, raised his warhammer. His mount had two endowments of brawn, and could easily carry him, the wylde, and the child. But it would be a clumsy ride, and he doubted he’d have time to save them both. Indeed, the wylde was running in the rear, running too slowly, glancing back from moment to moment as if eager to turn and embrace the monster.

Borenson raced for the child, slowed his mount just enough to reach down and grab for her, try to yank her up.

But he no longer had endowments of brawn, and Borenson misjudged the effort it would take. The child leapt up, as if to help him pull her onto the horse.

Borenson had meant to swing her onto the saddle in front of him. Instead, he caught her arm off balance. He tore a muscle in his shoulder, and for half a second the burning pain was so great that he feared he might cripple himself.

Yet he managed to swing the child onto the horse behind him, then race toward the green woman.

But as he glanced toward the wylde, three more reavers raced round the bend. Borenson could not reach her in time. The reaver raised its glory hammer, sprinted toward her, its great crystalline teeth flashing like quartz in the sunlight.

Borenson tried to wheel his mount, leaving the wylde to die.

The girl riding behind Borenson shouted, “Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer: blood, yes!”

The green woman stopped in her tracks, spun to face the reaver, and leapt at the beast as she, aimed a punch at its giant maw.

Her deed seemed to catch the reaver by surprise. It had been racing for her at full speed. Now it swung its glory hammer.

The blow fell long and wide. It pounded the road with a loud thwack, like the sound of a tree crashing in the woods.

What happened next, Borenson could not quite believe.

The reaver’s head was as large as a wain. Its maw could have swallowed Borenson and his horse whole. Had the monster landed on him, its fifteen tons of bulk would have ground him into the dirt like a miller’s wheel pulverizing barley.

Yet the green woman twisted her hand as she punched, some weird sort of little dance that baffled the eye, as if she were a mage drawing a rune in the air.

And when her blow landed, it was as if she wielded a glory hammer herself.

Crystalline teeth shattered and flew out like droplets of water, catching the sun. The huge gray reaver’s flesh ripped from its face, exposing the skeleton just beneath. Foul blue blood as dark as ink sprayed everywhere.

The reaver collided with the green woman’s blow as if it had hit a stone wall. Its entire body lifted into the air six or eight feet, and its four huge legs convulsed in exactly the same way that a spider’s would when it tries to protect its belly.

When it landed with a thud, the thing was dead.

Borenson wheeled toward the green woman, but he need not have bothered Pashtuk acted the part of a man even though Saffira had taken his pearls, and now he galloped toward the green woman at full speed

But the green woman was not satisfied to have killed the monster. Though three of its fellows raced toward her, she leapt atop the dead reaver’s head, slammed her fist into its skull, and brought out a piece of brain, black with blood, to shove into her mouth.

Borenson gaped in surprise and reined in his horse. Pashtuk reached the green woman, grabbed her from behind.

Borenson spun his mount and raced north toward Saffira and her guards. He glanced over his back to make sure that Pashtuk got clear before the other reavers arrived.

Pashtuk did not take time, for niceties. He grabbed the wylde around the waist as if she were a bag of oats. She did not struggle as she feasted on a handful of reaver’s brain.

“This way,” Pashtuk shouted, wheeling southeast as he passed Borenson. Borenson glanced back. More blade-bearers thundered round the hill. A reaver mage charged in their midst, but the monsters would never catch force horses such as these. A reaver’s top speed was forty miles per, hour, and then only in short bursts.

“You saved me!” the girl at Borenson’s back shouted in glee. “I knew you’d come for me!” She hugged him hard.

Borenson had never seen the child before, felt surprised by her tone.

“Well, you seem to know more than I,” Borenson said sarcastically. He had no patience for fakirs who pretended to prescience, even if they were only children.

They raced in silence for a few minutes, and Pashtuk managed to plant the wylde in the saddle in front of him. Behind Borenson, the girl kept leaning forward, trying to see Saffira, as if unable to stop staring.

Finally the child asked, “Where’s Baron Gobble Gut? Didn’t he come with you?”

“Who?” Borenson asked.

“Baron Poll,” the child said.

“Hah! I hope not,” Borenson said. “If I ever see him again, I’ll spill his guts all over the road!”

The child pulled on Borenson’s cloak, tried to peer up into his face. “Are you mad at him?”

“No, I merely hate the man as I hate evil itself,” Borenson said.

The girl gazed up at him questioningly, but remained silent.

The sky above filled with a snarling sound that reverberated like a distant hiss. It sounded as if all the heavens drew in a breath at once. Far away, the red of firelight glowed from columns of rising smoke.

“Quickly!” Pashtuk shouted, racing ahead over the dead landscape as fast as his mount would carry him. “My lord battles at Carris!”

52 In the Thick of Battle

Less than an hour from the time Raj Ahten had emerged from the castle gates, Carris stood on the brink of ruin.

In the first moments of battle, reavers drove Raj Ahten’s knights back along the causeway, then exploded against the west wall of Castle Carris before men could raise the drawbridges.

They beat the stone arches above the gates with glory hammers, pounding into dust the runes of earth-binding engraved there.

With the walls of Carris thus weakened, the reavers began to batter through the walls as easily as if they were made of twigs.

In less than five minutes they demolished the gate towers and opened a chasm into the bailey.

Raj Ahten could only respond by throwing men into the breach, hoping to drive the reavers back. A wall of corpses—both human and reaver—piled up at the breach some eighty feet, until the reavers were able to leap from their dead onto the castle walls.

Many reavers scuttled over the piled corpses, came sliding down on the dead, their enormous carapaces rumbling as they slid through slick gore. They hurled themselves into battle in such a fashion that the flesh and bones of any man who dared stand before them were ground into mangled ruin.

Might alone could not stop the reavers.

In minutes they butchered a thousand Invincibles before the breach.

Meanwhile, reavers raced up on the south wall of Carris from their stone ships. They decorated that wall with blood and gore. At least twenty thousand commoners died before Raj Ahten’s Invincibles managed to slay the intruders.

In desperation, Raj Ahten brought his exhausted flameweavers into the fray and lit several inns and towers afire so that the burning buildings might lend the sorcerers energy to do battle.

For ten minutes his flameweavers had stood on towers to the north and south of the gates, hurling fireballs as best they could into the ranks of reavers that lumbered down the causeway. The flameweavers drove the reavers back, but only for a few moments.

The reavers soon rushed forward over the causeway bearing enormous slabs of dark shale in their great paws, as if they were shields, then set them on each side of the causeway, forming a ragged wall that baffled the flames.

Then some reavers scuttled forward under cover while others lobbed huge boulders against the castle walls in a crude artillery barrage. One tower collapsed so that a flameweaver plunged to his death in the lake.

Fifteen minutes into the battle, Raj Ahten could see that he would lose Carris, for he fought not just the blade-bearers alone, but also the fell mage that drove them.

Six times she cast spells against the men who defended Carris. Her curses were commands, simple in nature, astonishing in effect.

“Be thou deaf and blind,” had been her first refrain. Three times a black wind had issued from her. But after three sweeps, she commanded, “Cower in fear.”

Six curses, at odd intervals. Raj Ahten was horrified by their effect. Even now, some brave men huddled in mindless terror a full ten minutes after the last curse had blown from the east.

Raj Ahten felt mystified by the spells. No chronicle ever told of reaver mages that uttered such curses.

Now, as Raj Ahten fought in the midst of battle, out on Bone Hill the reavers’ fell mage raised her citrine staff to the sky and hissed, uttering a seventh curse. Her hiss was a violent sound that seemed to crawl away in all directions as it echoed along the cloud ceiling between earth and sky. Men on the castle walls cringed or cried in terror.

Raj Ahten listened, but knew that the curse that issued from her could not be understood until he smelled the dark wind that roiled away from her. He could almost count the number of milliseconds it would take for the command to reach him, down here in the castle’s bailey.

He led a charge into the reavers’ front rank, blurring in his speed, bearing a battle-axe in each hand. With six endowments of metabolism to his credit, he could work fast, but needed to make every heartbeat count.

A reaver slid down toward Raj Ahten on the backs of the dead, glory hammer high overhead. It came with a rumbling roar, for its carapace ground over the dead with a sound like a huge log rolling down a hill.

As it slid to a halt, a frowth giant behind Raj Ahten roared and slammed its huge staff at the reaver’s maw, thrusting upward, forcing the reaver to stop and fall back a pace.

The reaver had little time to choose its mode of attack. It raised its hammer overhead. Raj Ahten hesitated an eighth of a second while the frowth held the reaver back, then he lunged to strike. His first blow was a vicious uppercut that took the reaver behind the spur of its raised left arm. Raj Ahten’s axe bit deep into the flesh, pried between the monster’s joints, weakening the limb without severing it.

More importantly, the ganglia there in the elbow sent a numbing jolt that left the reaver hissing in fury, briefly stunned.

In that infinitesimal portion of a second, Raj Ahten’s work began. He had to find a second target. If the monster roared, it would open its mouth wide enough so that he might leap in between its deadly teeth, strike up through the soft palate into the reaver’s brain.

On the other hand, if the reaver backed away in panic, he’d get a blow between the thoracic plates at its soft underbelly, where he might disembowel the beast.

The monster did neither. The reaver lowered its head and struck blindly through its pain. It swung the glory hammer down viciously, lurching, trying to win past Raj Ahten.

Raj Ahten ducked aside as fifteen tons of monster surged overhead. Even with thousands of endowments of brawn, he could not afford to take a hit from a reaver, for though his endowments of brawn strengthened his muscle, they did nothing to strengthen bones. Even the most casual blow from a reaver would shatter his bones like kindling.

The reaver slammed down its glory hammer, cutting a vicious arc, putting all the power of its good right foreclaws into the blow. The frowth giant shoved harder on its great staff, trying to press the reaver back, and the frowth turned its head and blinked.

In that moment, Raj Ahten glanced up at his giant. The thing was spattered with the red blood of men and the inky blue-black blood of reavers, fouling its fur. It had taken a hit from a reaver’s blade earlier, so that a rent showed in its chain mail, and the frowth’s own blood added to the mix, matted and fly-covered in its golden fur.

Perhaps blood loss had weakened the frowth, for though the giants were normally tireless, this one saw the blow coming and did little to avoid it, merely shoving meekly with its staff and blinking its great silver eyes as it turned aside.

The glory hammer swiped down, smashing into the frowth’s snout, shattering bones and teeth. Blood and gore rained upon Raj Ahten.

Enraged, Raj Ahten struck down with his battle-axe, taking off the two front toes of the reaver’s left foreleg. As the reaver’s head spun to snap at him, Raj Ahten leapt past its jaws into its mouth, rolled once over its raspy tongue, and aimed a savage blow up into the monster’s soft palate.

His axe blade met flesh, scored deeply as it ran between two plates of bone, slicing a cut as long as a man’s arm deep into the cleft above the jaw. As the blade cleared, Raj Ahten pulled it back up and in. The long spike on the reverse side of his axe scored deep into the monster’s brain.

Raj Ahten was already diving from the reaver’s mouth before the blood and brains began gushing from the wound. The monster would die, but so would Raj Ahten’s giant.

The frowth reeled back from the battle, staggered into some warriors behind, and fell upon half a dozen men, crushing them.

Raj Ahten glanced about to see if his men needed help. Most of his men fought in teams—four or five men to a reaver. Dressed as they were in yellow surcoats, they looked to Raj Ahten like wasps trying to bring down larger prey with their multitude of stingers.

Now, on Bone Hill, the fell mage’s snarling curse ended, and her dark command rolled toward the city. Raj Ahten wondered briefly if the fell mage merely toyed with him.

If she can force us to cower in fear, or strike us blind, why does she not kill us outright? It could not be harder to make a wind that would poison men than to utter these commands.

Raj Ahten could only wonder. It had been sixteen centuries since her kind last attacked. He imagined that she was enamored of her new spells, sought to learn which was most effective.

The fell mage’s dark wind struck. Atop the walls, men cried out and covered their noses, and Raj Ahten could not immediately see any effect.

It was not until the scent hit him that he understood. His mouth went dry, and as one, every pore in his skin began to exude sweat. Tears streamed from his eyes. He fought an overwhelming urge to urinate, and around him he saw weaker men lose control of their bladders.

He felt her command, even as he fought it: “Be thou dry as dust.”

A hundred yards behind Raj Ahten, Feykaald stood behind the battle lines on the steps of an inn and croaked, “O Great One, a word!”

Raj Ahten called to his Invincibles to close ranks and raced out of the battle, across the green, to the steps of the inn.

He glanced back. Reavers had crawled atop the mound of their dead, and now one prepared to slide into battle. Raj Ahten glanced at the walls, estimated that three quarters of his Invincibles had already died in this slaughter. He had fewer than four hundred left.

Atop the walls, reavers were battling men. Raj Ahten pulled out a file and began to sharpen his axe blade. He needed no oil for his file. Reaver’s blood worked well enough.

“Speak,” Raj Ahten said to Feykaald.

The old counselor worked his mouth, as if fighting back a choking dust. A sheen of sweat dripped from him as he spoke furtively in Raj Ahten’s ear. “Boat arrived. East shore...secure. Our men found reavers, but slew them.”

Raj Ahten wiped the sweat from his brow. It was pouring from him, making a sop of his tunic, slicking his hands. Rivulets threaded down his cheeks and into his beard. He drew the file over his axe blade, top to bottom, half a dozen times. As he worked, he studied his crumbling defenses on the walls.

His vassals fought in vain.

The rent in the wall was growing quickly. Half of his artillery outposts were gone. Reavers fought atop the wall. One flameweaver was dead, the others were dwindling from exhaustion despite the fact that Carris was in flames.

His tawny-furred giants fought savagely, but only thirty had survived the retreat from Longmot. They were dying fast. Even as he watched, a blow from a reaver’s blade split the skull of one giant, caught another in the back above his stubby tail.

And as the reavers battered the walls of Carris, they widened the breach, so that Raj Ahten’s forces were now spread too thin to effectively block the reavers’ efforts. Few of Paladane’s lords had enough endowments left to fight a reaver. They struggled beside Raj Ahten’s men, but their feeble efforts availed little.

Carris would fall despite all that he could do. It was not a matter of hours—it was a matter of moments.

Commoners cried out as the black wind wrung tears and sweat from them. Some fainted.

Ten minutes of this might leave a man dead, Raj Ahten feared. In only one way had his luck held. A light wind was blowing from the east, across the lake, and it seemed to Raj Ahten to ameliorate the effects of the fell mage’s spells.

Raj Ahten finished sharpening his axe. A reaver came barreling down, sliding over the slope of carnage. A frowth giant nearby bellowed as the reaver’s greatsword struck through its neck. The giant lurched sideways and collapsed on a pair of Invincibles, and the reaver leapt into battle, the first swing of its blade striking through four men.

Raj Ahten made his grim choice. His men were dying. He had fewer than four hundred Invincibles left with which to fight, and fighting at all was in vain.

This battle would be lost, but he dared not lose the remnants of his army with it.

There would be other battles, other days.

It was not cowardice that drove him to the decision, but the cold certainty that he did what—in the long term—was best. He’d not sacrifice his men to save the lives of his enemies.

“Prepare the flotilla,” Raj Ahten told Feykaald. “My flameweavers and Invincibles will take the first boats, my archers next. Spread the word.”

Raj Ahten sprinted back into the fray.

53 The Earth’s Pain

How can I save them all? Gaborn wondered for what seemed the hundredth time that afternoon as he rode for Carris. He galloped fast now. A cool drizzle fell from leaden skies. Few lords rode horses that were able to keep pace: the wizard Binnesman, Queen Herin the Red her daughter, Sir Langley, and two dozen others.

He felt the fist of doom closing upon the messengers he’d sent to Carris. The Earth warned Gaborn of danger not just for himself, but for everyone who rode to Carris.

The force horses had thundered across the green fields of Beldinook. Gaborn made excellent time—he’d traveled nearly three hundred miles in six hours. But not everyone was able to follow at Gaborn’s pace. He’d ridden into Beldinook with hundreds of lords at his back. Now, many of them had dropped from the race. His troops were strung out for hundreds of miles behind. The few who remained close rode horses that were spent. Some mounts were dead on their feet, but Gaborn dared not slow. His own Days had fallen behind hours ago, and Gaborn wondered if the man’s horse had wearied, or if he feared to travel where Gaborn was heading.

The overwhelming aura of death that surrounded so many of Gaborn’s people was suffocating. Gaborn had ridden over the battlefield at Longmot a week ago, seen thousands of good men that Raj Ahten had killed. He’d smelled the charred corpses, the blood and bile. He’d found his own father dead, cold as the snow he’d clutched in his empty hands.

Yet he’d not felt those deaths waiting to happen. He’d not been aware of the final moments of those men in the way he now felt the final moments of those around him.

How can I save them all? he wondered.

He felt Borenson riding into danger now, and Gaborn spoke a warning for Borenson’s ears. “Flee!”

As he rode fifteen miles north of Carris, the wizard Binnesman raced beside him and shouted, “A moment’s rest, milord. It won’t do us any good to reach Carris on mounts that cannot fight.”

Gaborn could hardly hear the man over the thundering of horses’ hooves.

“Milord!” Langley shouted, adding his plea to Binnesman’s. “Five minutes, please!”

Ahead, a pond beckoned to the right of the road. Fish were rising, snapping at mosquitoes. Cattle had come here to drink often, had churned the bank to mud near the road.

Gaborn reined in his horse, let it go to the water.

A pair of mallards began quacking and flew up from some cattails, circled Gaborn and the pond, then winged to the east. In no time at all, mosquitoes were gathering around Gaborn and he slapped them away from his face.

Sir Langley let his horse drink not twenty paces off, on the far side of Binnesman. Langley grinned at Gaborn. “By the Powers,” he said. “If I’d known that I’d have to contend with so many mosquitoes, I’d have worn plate!”

Gaborn was in no mood for jests. He looked back as a few lords straggled to a stop, made a quick count.

Gaborn had no army at his back. Just twenty knights. Worthy lords out of Orwynne, Fleeds, and Heredon. Gaborn’s Days was nowhere to be seen.

He did not have an army—just a few people brave enough and foolish enough to follow him to their deaths.

Gaborn felt certain that Castle Carris and its inhabitants could not stand another hour.

Gone were the troops he’d hoped to gain from King Lowicker. The men behind him would be of no use. He’d hoped to find one of his own armies, or perhaps the Knights Equitable that High Marshal Skalbairn had promised.

It does not matter, Gaborn told himself. I do not know what Raj Ahten is up to, but I will ride to him and demand surrender or give him his death.

Binnesman’s mount stood and drank, taking draughts of water in great gasps. Gaborn got out his feed bag and held up a last double handful of miln for his horse to eat. The warhorse whickered gratefully at Gaborn. It chewed the sweet oats, malt, and molasses quickly. Its eyes looked dull and tired.

Gaborn wiped his sticky hands on his tunic afterward, and Binnesman must have seen Gaborn’s worried expression, for he asked softly, “What troubles you, milord?”

Night was falling, the last full rays of sunlight streamed through some broken clouds. The wind off the pond blew cold in Gaborn’s face.

He spoke softly, not wanting to be heard by the lords who were still converging on the watering hole. “We’re riding into great danger. I have been wondering: How can I set a value on the lives of others? How can I Choose one man above another?”

“Choosing isn’t hard,” Binnesman said. “It’s not Choosing that pains you.”

“But how can I set a value on the lives of others?”

“Time and again you’ve shown me that you hold life precious,” Binnesman answered. “You value most people even more than they value themselves.”

“No,” Gaborn said. “My people love life.”

“Perhaps,” Binnesman said. “But just as you try to shield your weaker subjects with your own life, any man in this company” he nodded to those lords who were closing in behind—“would give his life for another.”

He was right. Gaborn would gladly give his life in service to others. He’d die nobly for them in battle, live nobly for them in times of peace.

“What is really bothering you?” Binnesman asked.

Hoping that no one else would hear, Gaborn whispered, “The Earth came to me in a dream, and has threatened to chastise me. It has warned that I must Choose the seeds of humanity, and nothing more.”

Binnesman focused completely on Gaborn now, frowning in apparent horror. The Earth Warden drew close. “Beware, milord. If the Earth chose to speak to you in a dream, it is only because you are too preoccupied to listen when you are awake. Now, tell me exactly, what did the Earth warn you against?”

“Against...Choosing too widely,” Gaborn said. “The Earth appeared in the form of my dead father, and warned me that I must learn to accept death.”

Gaborn dared not admit that he had not yet come to terms with his father’s death. The Earth asked something that was impossible for him.

The Earth had warned Gaborn that he needed to narrow his scope, to Choose only the best seeds of humanity to save through the dark season to come.

But who were the best?

Those he loved the most? Not always.

Those who contributed most to the world? Was one man’s art of more value than a baker’s skill at baking bread, or a humble peasant woman’s love for her children?

Should he Choose those who could fight best in his behalf, and thus best defend his people?

How could Gaborn set a value on life? He’d seen into the hearts of his people, and now it seemed that the gift of Earth Sight was as much a burden as a boon.

He’d seen into the hearts of others, and knew that old men loved life more fiercely than youths who should have treasured their days.

He saw into the hearts of others and seldom found men to be as virtuous as he hoped. The best soldiers, the men he most wanted as warriors, often did not value life. Too many of them were brutal creatures who loved blood and domination. Far too seldom did a virtuous man wield a sword.

Far too often Gaborn looked into the hearts of men and, as with King Lowicker, found the sight unbearable.

How then could he turn away from a simple person who deserved life, but had little to offer: babes and clubfooted boys and grandmothers tottering on the edge of doom.

Binnesman said solemnly, in a whisper that no one else nearby would hear, “You are in grave danger, milord. Those who serve the Earth must do so with perfect complicity. If you do not serve the Earth, it will withdraw your powers.”

Binnesman studied Gaborn for a long moment, frowning. “Perhaps I am at fault,” he said. “When you gained the power of Choosing, I told you to be generous. I should have warned you that a great danger also lies in being too generous. You may have to give up some that you have Chosen....Is that what you feel?”

Gaborn closed his eyes, gritted his teeth. At this moment, he could not accept death.

“Milord!” Sir Langley shouted, and he pointed toward the crest of a rounded hill a couple of hundred yards to the south.

Up there, a brown vapor stole over the fields, creeping over the hill like a grass fire, moving at about the pace that a man could walk. But no smoke rose from that fire, no flames burned within it.

Instead, grasses and low shrubs hissed and wilted in gray ruin. The creeping line of brown smoke hit a great oak, and part of the bark on it shattered and split. Its leaves turned a sickly hue and began to drop. Even the mistletoe hanging in its limbs hissed and writhed. The bachelor’s buttons at the oak’s base went from vivid blue to dullest gray in seconds.

Then the fog of destruction blew downhill.

Binnesman frowned, stroked his short beard.

Gaborn stared at the lurking mist in growing horror. “What is that?” he ventured.

“I...don’t know,” Binnesman said. “It may be a blasting spell of some kind, but I’ve never heard of one so powerful.”

“Is it dangerous to people?” Gaborn asked. “Will it kill the horses?”

Binnesman mounted his horse and rode toward the hill. Gaborn hurried to the wizard’s side, loathing the touch of that desecrating fog.

When Gaborn reached the brown haze, he smelled death and putrefaction. He immediately felt corruption around him. Even with his endowments, breathing that mist weakened every muscle. His head reeled, and Gaborn sat in his saddle, sickened to the core of his soul. He could only imagine how the mist would affect commoners.

“Ah!” he cried as he drew near Binnesman.

He looked at the wizard to see its effect on him; and Binnesman suddenly seemed older than before, the creases in his face etched more deeply, his skin grayer. He bent over in his saddle, like a frail and devastated man.

Behind Gaborn, his men left off caring for their mounts and rode up behind the King. Gaborn watched their reaction to the mist. To his surprise, they did not seem as devastated by the mist as he and Binnesman were.

“Forgive me for doubting you, my King,” Binnesman said hoarsely before the others could arrive. “You were right to insist on riding to Carris. Your powers of perception are growing, and have surpassed even mine. We must strike down whatever is causing this defilement.”

Gaborn crested the hill and stared south in apprehension. In the distance, whole forests lay denuded. Skeletal branches raked the sky. Steam curled in thin wisps from gray mounds of grass.

The Earth was in torment. Gaborn could feel it in every muscle and bone.

Three warriors sat ahorse half a mile in the distance, gazing back at Gaborn. One wore the horned helm of Toom, another carried the long rectangular shield of Beldinook. The third wore full plate in the elaborately decorative style of warriors from Ashoven.

Such disparate styles of armor would only be worn by Knights Equitable. The three peered at Gaborn a moment, and the warrior from Toom raised his right hand in a sign of peace, as he urged his horse toward the hill.

A huge man with an enormous axe strapped across his back and a deadly gleam in his eyes, he raced to Gaborn’s side. Horror showed in his countenance. He studied the twenty men at Gaborn’s back. “Is this all, Your Highness? Is this all the army you bring?”

“A few others follow, but they will not be here in time to save Carris,” Gaborn said frankly.

“That I can see;” the warrior said.

“King Lowicker betrayed my trust,” Gaborn explained. “None will come from Beldinook, only Queen Herin and a few others from Fleeds, Orwynne, and Heredon. We did not ride soon enough, I’m sorry to say.”

“Can you stop this devastation?” the man asked, motioning toward the tide of dead foliage, the putrid haze that covered the land.

“We must try,” Binnesman answered.

The big warrior grunted. “I was sent to wait back here, in hopes of reinforcements. High Marshal Skalbairn awaits your command. Our troops are moving south, not eight miles down the road, but even the Righteous Horde is no match for so many reavers.”

“Reavers?” Sir Langley asked in astonishment, and the twenty lords who had followed Gaborn abruptly laid propriety aside as they began shouting. “How many? Where? When did they attack?”

Astonished, Gaborn sat in his saddle, unable to speak. Even with all his powers—his recognition that his Chosen were in danger, his often precise knowledge of how to save them—he still could not tell whether his Chosen fought against bandits or lords or reavers—or were simply in jeopardy of falling off a stool.

He’d expected to find Raj Ahten storming Carris.

The three Knights Equitable all began to answer at once. “Our far-seers reported the castle taken by Raj Ahten before dawn, but reavers rode in on his heels. There are some twenty thousand blade-bearers, we estimate, plus many reavers of other kinds. Raj Ahten led a charge against them not an hour ago, and lost some men. The reavers are at the castle walls, but Raj Ahten is making them pay dearly for their conquest.”

Gaborn studied Sir Langley. The young lord was full of power. Langley wore scale mail and a helm, yet in some ways seemed not to wear armor at all. He’d been receiving endowments for two days as the facilitators of Orwynne sought to raise him to become Raj Ahten’s equal. The man wore his armor now as lightly as a farmer would don his tunic, and the profound strength and power in him seemed to overflow, as if it could not be held within a metal skin.

Now Sir Langley proposed that they should attack. “We can charge into their flanks, take the reavers by surprise.” He was eager to fight, over eager.

“Charging a horde of reavers should not be considered lightly,” Binnesman argued. “We don’t have nearly enough troops for such a feat.”

“We have the Righteous Horde,” the big knight of Toom said, “and four thousand decent spearmen who defected out of Beldinook.”

Gaborn weighed what the men had to say.

“Consider well,” Binnesman cautioned Gaborn.

Gaborn glanced at the wizard. Binnesman had an odd green metallic tint to his face and eyes. His service to the Earth had drained him of his humanity decades ago. As an Earth Warden, he was in some ways Gaborn’s senior. He’d given himself in service, and fulfilled his duties honorably, for hundreds of years. Gaborn had vowed to serve the Earth only a week ago. Gaborn respected Binnesman’s counsel, but he did not want to follow it now.

“The wizard may be right, Your. Highness,” High Queen Herin the Red said. “Against so many reavers, I would think we are too few.”

“I never took you for a coward,” Langley growled at her. “Did not the Earth command him to strike?”

The Earth has also been warning me to flee, Gaborn thought.

“Think on this,” a lord from Orwynne said. “Of course Paladane and his people are in Carris...but so is Raj Ahten. Perhaps the reavers will do us a favor and kill the bastard. If the people of Carris die, too, it may not be an easy trade to stomach, but it might not be a bad trade.”

“You forget yourself,” Gaborn warned the knight. “I can’t let hundreds of thousands of good people die just to be rid of one man.”

Though Gaborn spoke of riding to Raj Ahten’s defense, he was weary of trying to decipher the message of his dream from last night.

“Be forwarned that if we go forward, every man among us will stand at death’s door today,” Gaborn warned them. “Who will ride with me?”

As one, the lords around him cheered. Only Binnesman watched Gaborn skeptically and remained silent..

“So be it,” Gaborn shouted. Putting his heels to horseflesh, he raced off for Carris. Every bone in his body ached with the Earth’s pain.

Twenty lords followed him.

For now, that seemed enough.

54 Foul Bargains

Gaborn reached a low valley three miles north of Carris, and came upon the rearmost contingent of High Marshal Skalbairn’s troops trudging across the ruins of a blasted land, through the reeking low mist that infused men with a profound feeling of illness.

Farthest away from him, Skalbairn led a couple of thousand knights at the van, followed by eight thousand spearmen marching in formation. Thousands of archers trailed near their rear.

Last of all came the camp followers: carters with huge wains full of armor and arrows and food; artillerymen who skulked behind knowing that they would be of little use in the coming battle; squires, cooks, washwomen, whores, and boys seeking adventure who had no business marching to war.

How can I save them all? Gaborn wondered.

Scouts at the rearguard blew battle horns, and the people turned to look back at the Earth. King and his “reinforcements.”

If the sight dismayed them, they did not show it. The men in back suddenly raised their fists and their weapons and shouted in triumph.

Mankind had waited two thousand years for an Earth King. Now an Earth King had come to these few at last.

On the horizon, the cloud ceiling above Carris was red with flame.

The sound of a distant hissing roar rumbled over the ruined earth. The Knights Equitable continued cheering, but now the camp followers began to cry out. “Choose me, milord! Choose me!”

They turned toward him and some began to run forward to plead for the Choosing. Gaborn realized that if he did not act soon, he might be crushed in the press.

Gaborn raced his charger to a roadside farmhouse. Near the house, a sod barn for storing tubers lay next to the ground with its low roof of thatch rising like a small hill. Gaborn rode up to the barn and leapt from his horse, then sprinted to the rooftop and stood holding an iron weathervane shaped like a racing dog.

He gazed out over Skalbairn’s Righteous Horde. He knew it would be no match for the reavers. Not if these men fought with nothing more than their own strong arms to defend themselves. Yet Gaborn needed this army desperately if he was to strike a blow.

Gaborn raised his left arm to the square and begged to the Earth Powers he sought to serve. “Forgive me for what I must do.”

He gazed over the army and shouted in a voice loud enough so that all could hear. “I Choose you. I Choose you all, in the name of the Earth. May the Earth hide you. May the Earth heal you. May the Earth make you its own.”

Gaborn did not know if it would work. In the past he’d always sought to look into the hearts of men—to judge them fairly to see if they were worthy before offering his gift.

He’d never sought to gather so many at once.

He only hoped it would work. The Earth itself had told him in Binnesman’s garden that he was free to Choose whom he would, but Gaborn did not know if he was free to Choose men he thought unfit.

Far away, at the very van of the cavalry near the hilltop, rode High Marshal Skalbairn.

He sat ahorse, in his full black plate mail, and turned toward Gaborn. He lifted his visor and tapped the side of his helm beneath his right ear, as if begging Gaborn to repeat what he’d said.

Gaborn had not used the Earth Sight to gaze into the hearts of every man and woman in the horde. He’d looked into the heart of only one. Marshal Skalbairn—and had sworn never to Choose him.

Now he repented of that vow, but not for the sake of Skalbairn. He hoped only that if Skalbairn fought valiantly, his deeds might save the lives of a few hundred or a thousand common folk who were more worthy of life than was Skalbairn.

As the lines of power formed between Gaborn and thousands of new subjects, Gaborn silently whispered words that only the High Marshal could hear.

“That is right,” Gaborn said, shame making the blood rise hot to his face. “I Choose you, though you have slept with your own mother and fathered your own crippled, idiot sister. You have committed abomination and have loved the deed as you love your own child. Though I abhor what you have done, I Choose even you.”

I am free to do this, Gaborn told himself. I am free to Choose. He felt in his own heart, wishing that he could know the Earth’s will in this matter.

If the Earth objected, Gaborn was not aware. He did not feel his power drain from him or notice some other sign of the Earth’s reprisal. All he felt was death’s heavy hand waiting to smite every man, woman, and child in the valley before him. And with it he felt the Earth’s command, still vague and as yet undefined: “Strike! Strike now!”

Gaborn spoke to the heart of every man and woman in his army, relaying his message.

High Marshal Skalbairn nodded, signifying that he had heard Gaborn. Then he turned and blew his greathorn, sending his warriors to charge into battle.

Gaborn’s eyes look haunted, Erin Connal thought as she rode for Carris. Erin had often seen that same expression, that same heavy weight on her mother’s brow. Everyone thinks Gaborn is invincible because he is the Earth King, she realized. They don’t know how many nights he sits awake, worrying for them.

Erin guessed from his expression of horror that little good would come from this battle. She resolved to stay at his side, to protect him to the last. I could use my body to shield his, she thought, if I have to. I might be able to trade my life for his.

Erin glanced from Gaborn to her left, to the wizard Binnesman at his far side. Binnesman rode a great gray Imperial warhorse that he’d stolen from Raj Ahten more than a week ago. The beast had so many endowments of wit and brawn that it hardly looked like a creature of flesh and blood. Fierce intelligence shone in its eyes, intelligence equal to a man’s in measure but not in kind. No, his mount looked not at all like an animal. It looked like a force of nature, or like a creature of granite.

Though the brown mists that smelled so much of rot made Erin feel weak, she still wanted to kill something. Not one something, she told herself. Many somethings. Raj Ahten, her father’s assassin, for one. She wanted to slay reavers, enough reavers to wash away her cold anger.

The sky overhead was leaden, the sun fading like a cinder over the hills. Her mount breathed deeply, its nostrils flaring, its breath coming out cold. It wanted to run, knew it was time to fight.

Yet she had to keep the pace slow to accommodate the footmen of the Righteous Horde. She had not yet seen a reaver.

The smell of horseflesh came strong all around her, and the knights trotted along wordlessly, the ching of ring mail singing in the wild autumn air, the sound of the occasional lance or shield clacking against armor, the thud of hooves, the snorting and neighing of horses.

Erin bore no lance, for she’d not wanted to carry one all the way from Fleeds to Mystarria only to have it break on her first pass with some knight.

Now, with all the reavers ahead, she wished she were better armed. A reaver’s crystalline bone was hard as rock, and many a weapon would shatter on impact with one of the monsters. But it would be hard to kill a reaver with anything smaller than a heavy lance.

She wheeled her mount, headed back toward the carters’ wagons, looking for a wain with a long bed. “Lance?” she cried.

Ahead, a boy in a long-bedded wagon got up from his seat and jumped into a wagon bed to get a lance while the driver at his side continued to drive.

Erin grabbed the heavy lance.

Prince Celinor raced close to her on a mount borrowed from her mother’s stables.

The young man was ashen-faced, his jaw set. “Lance?” he called to the boy, getting a weapon of his own.

He glanced Erin’s way, patted a sheathed Crowthen war axe with its six-foot-long handle and huge single spike. It was a clumsy weapon for fighting men, but it had never been designed for men. The great prong was ideal for cracking a reaver’s carapace.

“Don’t worry,” Celinor said. “I’ll protect you.”

His sentiment astonished her.

You’ll protect me? she wanted to mock. He was not Chosen, after all. Of the entire horde racing toward Carris, she realized, he alone had not been Chosen. Gaborn had raised his hand, Chosen every last blacksmith’s helper and whore in the company. But Gaborn’s back had been to Prince Celinor at the time.

No, if anyone would be needing protection it was, Celinor.

It will be up to me to watch out for him, Erin thought. Her loyalties were divided. She gritted her teeth and nodded toward Gaborn. “Stay by him!” she begged.

Celinor smiled wryly, adopted the tone of a patron dickering with a street vendor. “So, I have been wondering, Horsesister Connal, what deed today would convince you that I’m worthy of a night in your bed?”

Erin merely laughed.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“I’d not be worrying about it, if I were you. How could your head be so woolly as to think of such things now?”

“War and women: I find them both exciting. Is it valor you want? I’ll be fearless. Is it strength and cunning you seek in a man? I’ll give it a try. What if I, saved your life today? Would that earn me a night in your bed?”

“I’m not some serf from Kartish. I’d not be your slave just because you save my life.”

“Not even for a night?”

Erin studied his eyes. Celinor smiled at her as if he jested, but behind that smile she saw concern, as if she looked into the eyes of a child.

He did not jest: He wanted her desperately, and he feared her rejection. He was not a bad man, she knew. He was handsome, and strong enough. He had fine composition. If she’d been looking for a man to sire a child on her, she’d have considered him.

So she dared not reject him out of hand. But although she found his looks and build captivating, it impressed her more that he understood the political consequences of what he asked, yet asked it anyway. He was not seeking a mere night of diversion; he wanted to court her as best he knew how. She was not some tender flower of a girl, after all, she was a horsewoman of Fleeds.

“All right,” Erin said. “Prove yourself in battle today—save my life—and maybe I’ll have you for a night.”

“Agreed,” Celinor said. “But that brings to mind another question. What does it take to prove myself worthy as a husband? If perhaps, let us say, I saved you three times?”

Erin laughed aloud, for she thought that unlikely. “Save me three times, and you will be having three nights in my bed,” she teased. But then she spoke softly, provocatively. “But if you want to be my husband, you must prove yourself not on the battlefield...but in my bed.”

Erin turned her gelding and drove on into the gloom. Her face burned with embarrassment. She watched the leaden skies fade as the sun rode down in the west. It was not a beautiful sunset, not a roaring sky of flame or gold just a dimming of the day into night.

She glanced back at Celinor, who hurried to keep up.

Their horses crested a small hill. Across a valley stood a tall wall with an arched gate beneath it. “The Barren’s Wall,” someone said.

Beyond the wall, she glimpsed Carris, two miles distant. Its white towers stood tall and proud, but a great black rent marred its western facade. Boats were issuing from a floodgate in the south wall, bobbing on the waves as people fled for their lives.

On the castle walls, men cheered and cheered to see Gaborn’s army. Warhorns blared, calling for help.

To the south of Carris, atop a dark leaning tower that twisted up like black flames, she could see reavers working feverishly.

Reavers were visible everywhere now. Tens of thousands of them swarmed on the plains and at the gates of Castle Carris. More marched northward in a line down from the mountains, each reaver taller than an elephant, but looking nothing like any creature to roam the surface of the earth.

Seeing them, she felt loathing.

On a hill north of Carris was a strange thing—a cocoon of fibers that looked like silk from this distance, wrapping the whole hill. At the hill’s peak, a fell mage glimmered, clouds of brown fog whirling away from her. As Erin watched, the mage raised her staff and hissed, a roaring noise that filled the valley. A wave of dark wind issued from her in all directions.

In response, a thousand Knights Equitable suddenly raised voices in song. Many warriors spurred their mounts forward, toward the gate in the Barren’s Wall.

Her horse began running. Erin had not willed it, had not pounded her mount’s flank with her heel, but the horse suddenly surged forward beneath her, eager to race with the other knights.

The knights erupted into song, and Prince Celinor sang clearly at her side.

“We are born to blood and war,

Like our fathers were, a thousand years before.

Sound the horn. Strike the blow!

Down to grief or glory go!”

Erin began racing, and the bloodlust was so strong in her, she cared not whether she raced for her life or to her death. She couched her lance and spurred her horse, screaming in defiance.

55 The Huntsman Strikes

Raj Ahten had endowments from thousands of men, could recall in detail nearly every moment of his life. It had been six months since he had glanced at a diagram of Carris, but he knew precisely where to find Paladane’s boats.

The courtyard around him was glutted with reavers and Invincibles, locked in a grim struggle. The city burned, and his men were drenched in sweat even as the fell mage uttered another curse. The news of boats that could take them to safety had spread among Raj Ahten’s men. Here and there, Raj Ahten saw teams of men dive out of battle, giving ground before the reavers, while the men of Mystarria were left to fill the breaches as best they could.

But he doubted that many of his men would be able to find the boathouse, hidden as it was down in the business district.

Raj Ahten gutted his last blade-bearer, and wheeled back out of the fray.

“Follow me!” he shouted to his men, leading the way to the boats.

As he fled south, toward a narrow street clogged with oxcarts and barrels of tar and nails that commoners had set up as pitiful barricades against the reavers, cries of dismay arose from the people of Carris.

He glanced up to see the cause. Commoners up there—men of Rofehavan that he would leave to their fates watched him retreat, and their faces were ashen, twisted in grimaces of fear. The mage’s spells had so wrung me sweat from them that many had fallen to the wall-walks.

Throwing away the lives of himself and his few remaining Invincibles would not save them.

He hurried away.

Land in Carris had always been at a premium, and that was apparent in the city streets, which were as narrow as the alleys in most northern castles. The buildings canted nearly together.

The fell mage’s black wind struck once more, and Raj Ahten stopped a moment and knelt, holding his breath, squinting his eyes, trying his best not to absorb the scent of her curse.

When he breathed again, the mage’s command wrung sweat from him more fiercely. He hurried to escape this benighted place.

He had not retreated half the distance to the boats when he turned a corner down a steep hill toward the merchants’ quarter and met Duke Paladane the Huntsman, ambling toward him through the narrow alley, with half a dozen of old King Orden’s Wits marching at his back.

Paladane raised a hand, signaling Raj Ahten to stop, then wiped the copious sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.

The triumphant grin on Paladane’s lips gave Raj Ahten pause. Raj Ahten halted warily.

“Good news!” Paladane greeted him. “You’ll be happy to hear that the first flotilla is off! The first load of women and children are being rowed to safety.”

“What?” Raj Ahten asked. He imagined that it must be a ruse. Paladane could never have loaded the boats so quickly.

“Indeed,” Paladane said. “I took the liberty of assembling the refugees this morning. The boats have been laden since noon. When my far-seer brought word that he saw a boat returning on the horizon, our first load of women and children shoved off.”

To emphasize his victory, Paladane said, “Every boat is gone. Every one.”

Raj Ahten thought to run to the north wall to verify Paladane’s word, but Paladane’s tone of triumph was pure and honest. Clearly, Paladane had launched the boats. From be wall, Raj Ahten would only see a thousand skiffs bobbing on the whitecaps of Lake Donnestgree.

Paladane knew precisely what he had done. He had stranded Raj Ahten’s men here in the castle. Raj Ahten decided to wipe that superior grin from his face.

With a mailed fist, Raj Ahten swung swiftly for the bridge of Paladane’s nose. The blow landed with a crunching sound, and the bone in Paladane’s skull shattered with a satisfying schunk. Flecks of blood spattered all over Raj Ahten’s face, even as the Huntsman of Mystarria dropped like so much meat.

How due me little man? Raj Ahten thought, as he wiped the flecks of blood from his face.

The King’s Wits who had been following Paladane all drew back in a little knot, terrified. They awaited his punishment; and he held it back, knowing that a feast always tastes better on an empty belly.

Raj Ahten considered his options. His Invincibles did not need boats. As a last resort, they could abandon their weapons and armor and swim across the lake.

In that moment, there was an odd, unexpected sound. The wails of pain and despair on the castle walls erupted into cheers and the wild blowing of warhorns.

Raj Ahten glanced up to see the cause of the excitement. People on the walls were waving and pointing to the north, leaping in celebration. “The Earth King is coming! The Earth King!” men began to shout.

Raj Ahten smiled grimly at Paladane’s corpse. With a sudden certainty, he realized, he might yet pull off a strategic victory here.

“So,” Raj Ahten said, addressing King Orden’s Wits, doddering old men who trembled before him. “Your King comes at last—comes to throw himself against the reavers and die. He should offer quite a spectacle. I would not miss this.”

56 The One Rune

Sweat glazed Gaborn’s forehead, drenched the leather jerkin beneath his chain mail. As he drew near Carris, the sensation of illness that had assailed him ever since he’d begun to cross the blasted lands grew more potent. He clung to the reins of his mount, and without his endowments of stamina, he knew that he would have succumbed in his saddle.

He stared ahead, almost blinded by perspiration, as his mount raced the warriors beside him. Only dimly did he hear the Knights Equitable raise their war songs.

In a daze, Gaborn rode to battle, crossing under the stone gate in the Barren’s Wall. He felt only vaguely aware of his situation as he drew within a mile and a half of Carris and watched the towers burn. Gree flew about his army, wriggling darkly.

Ten thousand threads bound him to the men and women under his charge. He felt death stalking them all. The weight of the invisible shroud overwhelmed him.

He gazed downhill at the castle, across the blasted earth. He’d never imagined such a scene of ruin, the land so dead and torn, with hordes of reavers scuttling about.

“Where to, milord?” Sir Langley shouted near Gaborn’s side. “Where to strike?”

Dazed and ill, Gaborn peered about, tried to collect his thoughts. His father had been a master strategist, and in his youth Gaborn had learned much from him. He needed to quickly develop a plan.

A few reavers a quarter of a mile away sensed the presence of his knights and cautiously began to scuttle forward At this distance, as they ran by lunging forward in short bursts, they reminded him of kelp crabs creeping along the shore of some desolate beach.

Gaborn surveyed the reavers’ defenses. Directly to the south, the enormous menacing tower leaned like a black flame toward the castle. At the castle gates the reavers had opened a huge rent in the western wall, and now clambered into the city over hills formed by the carcasses of men and reavers. Aided by the light of burning towers, he could clearly see Paladane’s men fighting valiantly to defend the walls, but reavers had breached into the city so far that there was no hope of repelling them.

To the north of Carris squatted a strange little hill on an easy slope, entirely encircled by a cocoon of whitish threads. Bone Hill. He knew the place from his studies of ancient battles.

At its crown a fell mage labored, while lesser mages slaved beneath her. Around her, roiling dirty clouds emanated in spirals from the hill. Ghost lights flickered beneath the rust-colored haze.

Gaborn’s breath quickened. Bone Hill immediately repulsed him and drew him.

It repulsed him because the hill was engraved with a rune that itself was loathsome to his sight, was the source of illness and pain. To look at its warty knobs and sinuous lines burned his eyes and made the muscles in them twitch and try to turn away. The rune atop the hill was like a vast heart, pumping poisoned blood to every finger and toe in a human body.

Yet the hill drew him, it was his target. “Strike!” the Earth silently begged. “Strike before it is too late!”

Gaborn appraised the rune using his Earth Sight, as if he stared into the heart of a man. What he saw filled him with terror.

Ancient lore said that all runes were but parts broken from one great master rune, the rune that controlled the universe. Gaborn save now a vast portion of the master rune.

The Earth held sway over growth and life and healing and protection. But in that rune he saw laid bare the end of all earth powers:

Where there is growth, let there be stagnation.

Where there is life, let there be desolation.

Where there is healing, let there be corruption.

Where men hide, let them be revealed.

Gaborn knew the name of that rune, knew it in his bones: the Seal of Desolation.

The rune was incomplete, like a sword newly forged and not yet tempered, but it tortured the land for miles in every direction.

In wonder Gaborn studied his target. The hair rose on the nape of his neck. He’d ridden hundreds of miles hoping to fight Raj Ahten. He’d promised his warriors that he would lead them to battle.

Now he knew that he had been called not to fight reavers or men or any living thing. He needed to destroy this construct, this weapon. And it was a task that no army could hope to accomplish.

Only a wizard with vast earth powers might destroy that hill. Only Gaborn could do it.

He had to draw a rune of Earth-breaking.

A sense of doom assailed him. Gaborn’s powers were limited. He had to get close, so that he could focus his spell.

Yet the stench that exuded from Bone Hill became more overwhelming the nearer he approached.

Gaborn addressed High Marshal Skalbairn. “I’m going to attack Bone Hill, and I need diversions. Take a thousand men and head down into the valley, then ride hard toward the Black Tower, skirting the reavers’ army at a hundred yards. Make sure that you’re close enough for them to sense you. If they do not take up the chase immediately, kill a few of them. But don’t engage their main force! Don’t waste men. I want you only to draw them off! And if I should be killed, you’ll need men to bring down the fell mage. Is that clear? She cannot leave this battlefield alive!”

“As it pleases milord,” Skalbairn said, clearly affronted to be used as a mere diversion for someone else’s attack. He immediately whirled his mount and shouted orders, drawing the dregs of his cavalry into service.

“And me?” Langley asked. Gaborn needed to send Langley into far greater danger than he had Skalbairn. Langley’s great strength would be needed if he were called upon to fight.

“Take another five hundred knights along the shore toward Carris proper. Charge their flanks by the causeway, then retreat. As with Skalbairn, your task is not to slay reavers, but to open their ranks. And if I die...”

“I understand, milord,” Sir Langley said, no happier to be a diversion than Skalbairn. Yet it would be a difficult task. The reavers were thick near the causeway, with little room for retreat.

Langley raised his hand, summoned his men.

“What of us?” Queen Herin asked.

“You’ll ride with me,” Gaborn answered, “to face the fell mage.” He was not overly gratified by the cruel smile of approval that she offered.

“I will give it the death blow myself, if it please you,” she said.

Gaborn only shook his head. “We’ll need to fight our way close to the hill, so that I can destroy it. Nothing more. The rune that she’s drawing must be destroyed. Afterward, we can regroup and consider how to deal with the mage.” The High Queen nodded. “So be it” She turned to the knights behind her, called out orders calmly.

“What of the spearmen and foot soldiers?” Erin Connal asked. “Could we use them to some advantage?”

Gaborn shook his head. Sending foot soldiers against reavers would accomplish almost nothing. “Order them to stay behind the Barren’s Wall. They can hold it against any reaver that climbs over.”

With that, Skalbairn rode off, charging to the right. A ragged line of a thousand knights raced downhill toward the plains, charged the western slope of Bone Hill.

As they rode, they began to sing. The pounding of hooves and the ring of metal kept time with their deep voices.

Against Gaborn’s orders, Skalbairn drove his troops right against half a dozen reavers. With a crash of lances against carapaces his knights left the monsters impaled, then veered away at slow speed, forcing the horses to lope.

The effect of his diversion was astonishing. The plains were pocked with odd burrows—lopsided craters with dark maws. To Gaborn it had seemed that the plain was almost black with reavers, but now hundreds more boiled up from underground, giving pursuit. In moments, perhaps two thousand reavers were chasing Skalbairn’s men south.

At Gaborn’s back, men began to cheer and raise their weapons. “Well done!” Queen Herin and others whispered, obviously pleased.

Gaborn sensed little danger to Skalbairn’s men. Indeed, they were not in great peril, yet they accomplished much.

Gaborn nodded toward Sir Langley, sent his lancers charging left.

Langley, too, advanced on Bone Hill at slow speed, this time from the north. But Gaborn felt a pall over the man. Langley was in far greater danger than Skalbairn.

As Langley neared Bone Hill the reaver mage raised her staff to the sky and hissed. Her voice echoed from low-lying clouds like thunder.

A dark wind roiled from her, and Langley’s men shouted in fear, turned their mounts and galloped east toward the lake, fleeing the dark wind of her spell, the burnished metal of their helms and armor limned red from the burning citadels of Carris. Hundreds and hundreds of reavers gave pursuit.

The black wind caught the men near the lakeshore, and suddenly the air filled with cries. Knights began to topple from saddles, stricken. Gaborn could not tell why.

Whatever effect the fell mage’s spell had upon them, Gaborn was too far away to feel it himself. Langley’s men fought to stay ahorse as reavers closed in.

“Get up,” Gaborn sent to the men. “Fight now or die!”

After a heart-stopping moment, Langley himself roused in his saddle, shouted, and spurred a charge south. Dozens of men followed, though most of his force remained inactive. Their horses milled about or fled from advancing reavers.

Thirty of his men lanced through the charging reavers, losing less than a dozen knights in the clash. The survivors wheeled their mounts and fled north along the lakeshore, with seven or eight hundred reavers giving chase.

The repercussions of Gaborn’s feints shuddered through the reaver horde. Reavers near the causeway backed off, fearing an attack on their flank, giving the defenders of Carris some relief. Others continued to race south after Skalbairn.

To Gaborn’s relief, the north slope of Bone Hill was momentarily left with few defenders. He saw only some hundred reavers above their burrows, but a hundred reavers were not to be trifled with—especially not when a fell mage stood at their backs.

He had only seconds to strike.

57 In the Shadowed Vale

“Prepare the charge!” Gaborn cried. “Staggered pinwheel formation! Single line! Ho!” He raised his hand in the air, whirled it; letting the men know that they should pinwheel from left to right.

The staggered pinwheel, or the knight’s circus, as it was sometimes called, had proven an effective formation against reavers in ancient times.

Rather than charge forward in a line, as they would against human opponents, the knights rode in a giant pinwheel that gravitated forward as it circled. Deadly lances bristled along the pinwheel’s edge, so that fresh men and mounts were constantly racing at an angle to the enemy’s line.

Getting the proper angle and attack speed was vital when lancing a reaver. The trick of using a lance to kill a reaver, Gaborn had learned from those who had tried, was to strike the reaver solidly and skewer the damned thing without killing yourself in the process.

Above all, speed was essential. A force horse with many endowments charged at forty to eighty miles per hour. At such a speed, a knight had to take care not to slam into a reaver haphazardly, for in doing so he would break his bones.

Nor could a knight make a pass at a reaver in the same way as he did a man. The reaver was too massive. Besides, even if a knight did make a pass at the front lines of a reaver horde, he would lose his lance in the process, only to find himself behind enemy lines. Consequently, he had to race parallel to the reavers’ lines, only daring to touch briefly before he pulled back.

As Heredon Sylvarresta had shown so many centuries ago, the art of lancing a reaver required the lancer to lean toward the beast in such a way that he did not slam into the monster after his charge. While leaning thus, his best hope was to thrust the lance into the reaver’s head, into the “sweet triangle,” an area the size of a man’s palm where three bony plates met. A second such area could be found in the reaver’s upper palate, if the monster opened its mouth.

And if a lance entered at the right angle, then the knight could send it home to the reaver’s brain with a gentle and powerful shove.

Thus, in the staggered pinwheel, lancers rode fast enough so that reavers could not adjust to the knights’ breakneck pace. At the same time it allowed the knights the chance to engage the reavers in a viable formation, one that would let a knight escape the clutches of a reaver if he missed his target or let a man who was unhorsed escape while the knight behind pressed the attack.

Gaborn spurred his mount. It leapt downhill, thundered ahead.

As Gaborn neared that odious hill, he glanced to each side and found that he rode alone. Such was the speed of his mount that no others could match pace with him.

“Beware,” the Earth whispered, and its Voice took him by surprise. Gaborn was so used to warning others, he felt unprepared to take warning himself.

He glanced back. Behind him, the hill was dark with lords and knights. They came singing; firelight from Carris reflected in their shields.

Erin Connal screamed a war cry. Celinor Anders glowered near her side, with High Queen Connal not far behind. The wizard Binnesman’s face was rigid with terror. Gaborn’s cavalry charged ahead, streaming out from the Barren’s Wall.

Ahead, Bone Hill rose, wrapped in its cocoon. Tendrils of white were strung from it like threads from a spider’s web. Dirt and rock gouged from its slopes made it look a horrid ruin, scarred and maimed.

Warned by the front ranks, blade-bearing reavers suddenly issued from the crevasses in the ground on that hill, climbed atop the cocoon as if it were a fortress wall. Behind the blade-bearers, mages continued their foul work.

The rust-colored mist grew heavy in the vale beneath Bone Hill, lying in thick folds. It seared Gaborn’s eyes and made them water. He blinked away tears, saw ghost lights flicker back under the cocoon.

Gaborn grimaced as he tried to draw a breath. Fatigue and illness slammed into him like a fist. His stomach wrenched; his gorge rose. Every muscle in his body strained as sweat coursed down his forehead.

Gaborn galloped past a blade-bearer that spun, swinging its glory hammer too late. He ducked beneath its blow, knowing that he’d be dead by now if he’d not taken endowments at Castle Groverman.

Gaborn heard the crack as a lance exploded into the monster’s unprotected side, piercing the beast.

Queen Herin the Red had scored her first kill.

Though his charger carried him toward the foul rune, all Gaborn’s effort could barely keep him ahorse. He slowed his mount a third of a mile from Bone Hill, close to the ranks of the reavers, and gripped the pommel of his saddle.

Reavers raced down the slopes of the cocoon to do battle.

Gaborn dared charge no closer. Here in the vale, the sour-smelling mists lay over the ground like a suffocating quilt, and no commoner could have abided the stench. His muscles flamed, aching as if every fiber would rip asunder. Sweat poured from him like a drenching rain. Gaborn reeled, fell hard on the earth.

The very soil beneath him burned; it was almost as hot as a skillet. He writhed upon it, could not breathe

Silently he wished that he’d taken more endowments of stamina.

He glanced up through the rust-colored mist. His knights were forming their pinwheel, racing ahead of him in a line to cut off reavers that thundered into battle, their thick carapaces crashing against the stony ground.

Several knights caught up to him, circling him protectively. He glimpsed Erin Connal and Prince Celinor, their faces frozen in dismay to see the Earth King fallen.

Gaborn lay sweating on the ground, gasping in the cruel haze, afraid that he might suffocate, for he could hardly draw a breath for the pain that assailed him.

Desolation lay all around him, a smoke that choked the soul.

Atop Bone Hill, the fell mage raised her citrine staff to the sky and hissed so loudly that the sound echoed from the clouds. With a boom like thunder, black smoke roiled off her.

Gaborn tried to climb to his knees as the mage’s curse swept downhill

Erin Connal rode behind Gaborn, choosing to guard him rather than help form the staggered pinwheel. Almost instantly she was glad that she had.

A reaver sped through the lines as a knight broke his lance against its side, then lumbered through the rust-colored mist toward Gaborn, an enormous behemoth swinging its head from side to side.

Erin shook the streaming sweat from her forehead, shouted a battle cry, and charged the beast. She raised her lance overhead and to the side, preparing for the thrust. She squinted against the haze, for it pained the eye, then leaned out from her saddle.

She thrust home her lance, just as the reaver spun its head back toward Gaborn. The tip penetrated the monster’s sweet triangle at a slant.

She felt the lance tip drive shallowly into the reaver’s crystalline skull. She suspected that she had the wrong angle, that the lance would merely catch in bone and shatter, but she hurled it anyway, hoping to shove the tip home with brute force.

The lance snagged on bone and snapped at the point.

Suddenly Erin was caught still thrusting the damned thing without any resistance. Off balance, she pitched from her horse and sprawled to the ground, just beneath the reaver.

It reared above, raised its greatsword protectively to fend off a charging knight.

“Flee!” Gaborn’s Voice spoke in Erin’s mind as she tried to gain her feet.

As if I couldn’t guess, she thought, knowing she was too late. The reaver hunched its massive head and lunged, its crystalline teeth gleaming like quartz.

A dark blur sped past her. Celinor’s lance pierced the monster’s sweet triangle and heaved into its brain as if it had been shot from a ballista.

In amazement, Erin realized he’d thrown the damned thing like a javelin!

The reaver collapsed at Erin’s feet.

Celinor galloped near, as if he’d planned to block the dying reaver from further attack with his own body. Then he whirled and drew his Crowthen battle-axe.

Erin ran for her own horse.

“One!” Celinor shouted, then pointed toward the Earth King. Gaborn had fallen from his mount.

Gaborn lay in the dust. Several knights leapt from their mounts to fight at his side; prepared to die if necessary. Celinor Anders rode near and stood guard over him, screaming and waving his battle-axe as if daring any reaver to come close.

As Gaborn struggled to get up, the thought streaked through his consciousness: I should Choose him.

Reavers surged down from Bone Hill like living monoliths, and the thought was driven off as Gaborn sent warnings to hundreds of warriors. In moments Erin Connal and others reached Celinor’s side.

The black wind struck, and it carried with it an unnamable stench—a smell similar to burnt cabbage, but that affected Gaborn profoundly. He felt suddenly as if his muscles had turned to jelly, and he experienced the most profound fatigue he’d ever imagined.

He dropped to the ground, as weak as if he’d just given an endowment of brawn. Everywhere around him, dozens of others did the same, even Queen Herin the Red.

A hundred yards back, Binnesman had stopped his mount. He struggled to sit up, slumped as if in pain. “Jureem!” he warned. “Get Gaborn away from here! Get the Earth King away! We’re too close.”

Jureem rode hard among the knights, leapt from his horse. The fat servant held a silk scarf over his nose to keep from breathing the stench. He grabbed Gaborn’s elbow and shouted, “Get up, milord! Let us flee!”

With muscles flaccid and mind swimming in pain, Gaborn struggled to fend off his own man, tried to push Jureem back. “Not yet. I can’t go! Help me!” he cried. “Help!”

Gaborn had to destroy the rune. It was still nearly half a mile off. He had destroyed Kriskaven Wall half a mile out. It was near the limit of his power—yet the cloying mists in the vale were so devastating that he dared not ride closer.

He fought to draw with his finger in the hot dirt, to trace a rune of Earth-breaking.

Jureem tried to grab his elbow, to pull him toward his horse. Jureem shouted to Celinor, “Hold our master’s mount! Help me get him in the saddle.”

“No!” Gaborn pleaded. “Leave me! Binnesman, help!”

He glanced back. As he did, Binnesman collapsed under, the influence of the fell mage’s spell, lay draped over his own horse. The mount must have sensed that its rider had fallen, and now spurted north, bearing its master out of battle.

To Gaborn’s astonishment some knights around him were less affected by the reaver mage’s spells. Some lancers still charged. Some men withstood the weakness. Perhaps I need more stamina? he wondered. Yet Queen Herin had fallen, and she had as much stamina as any other.

“Jureem,” Gaborn gasped as he struggled to trace his symbol precisely on the ground. He felt as if he were trying to write on fire itself. His finger was so weak, he could hardly stir the dust.

Jureem stopped struggling to pull him away. The servant gazed at Gaborn wide-eyed and distressed, as if being unable to help caused him physical pain.

Gaborn finished drawing his rune, studied for a moment to make certain that he’d made every curlicue properly, then he looked fiercely at the hill where the Seal of Desolation desecrated the Earth. The fell mage continued to labor atop it. Strange lights flashed behind the cocoon in shades of palest turquoise. Reavers were boiling up from the south side of the hill.

He gazed at the hill, and used the Earth Sight to look beneath it. There; far below the ground, he could sense a weakness—a place where tons and tons of stone grated together in a fault.

It would take only the merest breath to push it all toward ruin, to split the ground beneath the rune.

Gaborn focused on the object of his spell and shouted, “Be thou riven!”

He slammed the ground with his fist, and envisioned the soil beneath him heaving, splintering that foul rune and shattering its every wall.

The earth responded.

The ground heaved beneath him, and the knights who surround him all gaped, trying to stand as the earth shuddered.

Horses whinnied and floundered. Reavers stumbled. The earth roared like an animal.

The ground rolled in all directions. Knights shouted, and reavers atop their foul cocoon scuttled back in dismay, clinging to their webs.

Gaborn had not imagined what devastating power he would unleash. Knights toppled from their chargers, crying in terror.

But as Gaborn gazed at the Seal of Desolation, his hopes went dry. The ground beneath it trembled, the soil around bucked, but the Seal of Desolation held as if it were a bit of flotsam riding the waves of the sea.

Only powerful runes of binding could have held it. He studied the construct again with his Earth Sight as he had Kriskaven Wall, searching for weaknesses.

Indeed it was bound. Every knob and protuberance was encased in runes of binding—perversions that did not call upon the Powers so much as twist them against themselves. Gaborn was astonished to find that the reavers had so twisted their powers that they could use the Earth against him.

Even as Gaborn focused on the foul rune, men all around began shouting, “Look! Look there!”

Gaborn gazed toward Carris.

Reavers crawled over the plain before the fortress. They’d burrowed pits everywhere, but the earthquake had tossed rocks and reavers into the air, throwing monsters from their hidden lairs, or just burying them.

Disoriented, some reavers raced about on broken legs.

Above these monsters, Gaborn saw a tower fall, heard thousands of people cry out.

Sheer horror coursed through him as he saw that his tremor had not struck completely without effect. The walls of Carris, a mere half mile to the southeast, swayed like a willow frond. The white plaster on the walls fell off in sheets, and merlons went splashing into the lake.

The tremor could not destroy the bound rune, but it tore asunder more common structures. Towers toppled. Walls began to crumble. Dust rose in the city as inns and homes collapsed.

Even as Gaborn watched, something unexpected happened. The ground beneath him began to roll once again as a new, more powerful tremor made the castle walls shift and sway. The people of Carris cried in terror.

Gaborn’s horse staggered to keep its footing. And in Carris dust and fire rose as more buildings began to collapse.

An aftershock.

He did not need his Earth Sight to warn him that he had unleashed a monster. He could feel the power building. This fault ran deeper, farther, than he’d expected. Just as a shout will trigger an avalanche, so had his small tremor triggered catastrophe.

Gaborn stared at the hapless inhabitants of Carris clinging to its walls. Two minutes ago I sat here congratulating myself, he thought. But by my actions I might have doomed the people I hope to save.

Guilt swept through him. Guilt for what he had done, and for what he knew he now must do.

Gaborn raised his left arm and looked to the castle, to men by the scores who now were crying out in despair.

He shouted to the people of Carris, though at such a distance few men would have had enough endowments of hearing to discern his voice. “I Choose you. I Choose you for the Earth!”

Surely the Earth will allow it, Gaborn reasoned. I was given the gift of Choosing in order to save mankind, and those at Carris need saving.

He had never sought to Choose a man he could not see. Now he tested the utmost limits of his powers. He stared at the castle walls and hoped that with this one Choosing he could protect all those within.

If Choosing Skalbairn would let Gaborn save a thousand, he hoped that Choosing Raj Ahten would let him save hundreds of thousands.

He gaped at the broken walls of the city and whispered, “Even you, Raj Ahten. I Choose you!”

He felt the threads of his consciousness, lengthen, grasp men who fought in Carris, along with women and babes and elderly who only huddled in its dark corners, fearing for their lives.

He reached out even to Raj Ahten.

Gaborn held the Wolf Lord in his mind and whispered, “I Choose you,” as tenderly as if Raj Ahten were his brother. “Help me save our people.”

He felt the tendrils of communication connect, felt overwhelmed by Raj Ahten’s danger. Death lay thick upon the Wolf Lord, heavy and nauseating. Gaborn had never felt a man lingering so near it. Even now he wondered if his own powers would be sufficient to save him.

“Flee!” Gaborn whispered to Carris.

Out on the plains, Sir Langley and Marshal Skalbairn saw how the earthquake struck the reavers, leaving them dazed and wounded. Being farther from the fell mage, these knights were not so profoundly affected by her curses.

Skalbairn wheeled into the reavers, led a charge, hoping to draw more of them from Gaborn. A thousand mounted knights raced across that plain, lances bristling.

58 The Unworthy

Raj Ahten was not surprised to learn that the boy Gaborn sought to rescue Carris even from the reavers. It was an ill-considered move, as foolish as it was daring and chivalrous—an act of self-sacrifice from a weak-minded idealist.

He sprinted up the steps of a tower, looked to the north.

On the plains, Knights Equitable pinwheeled at the base of Bone Hill. Elsewhere, some thousand knights charged across the downs to the south, drawing away the reavers’ forces, as did another contingent to the north.

Raj Ahten almost wanted to congratulate Gaborn. He’d done a fine job of spreading the reavers thin and baffling their lines.

He watched Gaborn’s knights struggle toward Bone Hill, saw the world shiver around them, tearing stumps from the ground, hurling dirt and stones in the air, burying some reavers, tossing others from their burrows, and raising a sound a hundred times louder than the rolling of thunder.

For some reason that he could not understand, Raj Ahten had never been able to see Gaborn. A spell lay on the lad, one that hid him from Raj Ahten’s view. But the Wolf Lord knew that he was out there.

He felt the quake strike Carris, set the walls to weaving like a drunkard, while those around him cried out.

Only the Earth King could have loosed such a monstrosity. In the space of a heartbeat, Raj Ahten saw the danger. It would level the city.

Almost as soon as the quake struck, Raj Ahten heard Gaborn’s voice ring through his mind as he performed the Choosing.

So, Earth King, Raj Ahten wondered; you bless me and curse me in the same breath?

Gaborn’s troops began to advance on Bone Hill and the fell mage. He rode with two thousand knights at his back, as if hoping that such a desperately small force might, by good fortune, strike a lucky blow.

A black wind rolled over Carris, bringing the fell mage’s latest curse.

Raj Ahten tasted the scent, felt fatigue sap his strength like never before, and translated it thus: “Be thou weary unto death.”

Yes, it was a powerful spell. If it were uttered against commoners at close range, Raj Ahten did not doubt that men would collapse with hearts too weak to beat, lungs too exhausted to draw another breath.

On the castle walls around him, many commoners dropped, too stricken to stand.

But Raj Ahten was no commoner.

As Gaborn’s knights in their pinwheel slowly gravitated south, blade-bearers began to amass against Gaborn. Perhaps dismayed by the earthquake, they had turned and charged round both sides of Bone Hill. Indeed, the reavers close to Carris itself were wheeling to meet this new threat.

Gaborn would never repel the attack, Raj Ahten could see. The reavers’ lines were too thick. In the battle for Carris, Raj Ahten imagined that no more than five hundred reavers had died so far. Twenty thousand reavers were still left to charge north. In moments they would crush Gaborn’s troops, rend him to pieces.

“Flee! Flee Carris,” Gaborn’s command rang through Raj Ahten’s mind. “Flee for your lives.”

Even as the Earth King spoke, Raj Ahten recognized the folly in listening. The walls of Carris would come down, true, and many men would die. But they’d die regardless of whether they charged the reavers.

“The clever bastard,” Raj Ahten hissed. He saw the lad’s ploy now: Gaborn merely sought to use Raj Ahten and his men as pawns, as a distraction, to draw the reavers from himself.

Raj Ahten was far too cunning to fall for such a ruse.

Raj Ahten’s Invincibles had already withdrawn from the battle. “Stand fast!” Raj Ahten shouted to his men. To Paladane’s men, he called, “Hold the breach!”

The Earth King will die here, Raj Ahten told himself, and I...I will idly watch.

Yet as Raj Ahten glanced down at the breach, he realized that Paladane’s men suddenly fought as fiercely as reavers themselves. At first he imagined that desperation lent them strength. But it was obvious that an unseen power guided them. These were commoners and warriors of unfortunate proportion. He watched one commoner bait a reaver, stand for it to take a whack with its sword, then leap aside instantly. In the brief opening, two better men lunged forward with axes and took off the reaver’s arm. As, the monster screamed, one quick fellow jumped into its mouth and thrust a longsword through its palate, into its brain. Before the beast ever fell, Paladane’s men rushed forward to take on the next comer.

His men lunged quickly to take advantage of exposed targets, avoided reaver’s blows. They choreographed thrusts and parries, so that the battle suddenly became something more than a frenzied free-for-all.

Now it seemed a macabre and deadly dance.

To Raj Ahten’s wonder, Paladane’s men began fighting so effectively that the reavers at the gates hesitated, withdrew in confusion, unwilling to withstand the slaughter.

Paladane’s men closed ranks. Along the walls, men leapt down atop the mound of carcasses and raced forward, forced reavers back to the causeway.

Everywhere in the castle, commoners staggered down the wall-walks, heading for the bailey, trying to obey Gaborn’s command to flee the castle. Others threw themselves over the walls into the lake.

Carris was enormous, with nearly four hundred thousand troops on the walls and as many commoners within the city proper. Now these people spilled out into every narrow street, fleeing the quakes.

“Hold!” Raj Ahten shouted to them. “Stand fast, I say!” His Voice was so powerful and seductive that his words slipped like a dagger into the subconscious minds of Paladane’s men, and soon most of them began to hold their positions.

I will not be ill-used, Raj Ahten told himself..

He smiled grimly and shouted across the distance, with a voice so powerful that even Gaborn could not fail to hear. “We are enemies still, son of Orden!”

Roland thought he heard dogs barking and snarling. He found himself in a tree carved of stone, perched high above the ground.

In a daze, he struggled to raise his head, saw huge reavers racing through the branches above, teeth flashing. An overwhelming fatigue smote him. He fell back. The tree shuddered below, and he heard its great bole snap under so much weight.

“The walls will come down! The walls are coming down!” someone shouted distantly. Raj Ahten’s Voice rolled through the woods, “To me! To me!”

Men screamed and died, and nearby Roland heard a woman shouting for help. He glanced down from his perch of stone and saw Baron Poll’s familiar face, leering up at him.

“Help,” Roland called weakly.

The Baron laughed. “Help? You want the help of a dead man? What would you give me?”

“Please...” Roland said.

“Not until you call me ‘sirrah,“ ‘ Baron Poll said smugly.

“Please, sirrah,” Roland begged.

“Now if only your son would say that word,” Baron Poll laughed. He turned his horse and rode away through a misty field.

Distantly he heard men screaming, heard the rattling breath of reavers. He felt in great pain, almost past caring.

Light flashed overhead, flames dancing in a burning tower.

Roland opened his eyes, lay for a long time looking at his arm. It was wrapped in a bloody bandage. Men lay dead all around; gore splattered the merlons above him. The white plaster walls of Carris were turning crimson.

Gloom filled the sky. Feathery flakes of snow fell like ashes. No, he realized, they were ashes: Roland closed his eyes, for it pained him to look. It was nearly dark. Roland judged that he’d been unconscious for an hour or more.

He heard a baby crying, lolled his head to the side. Down in the courtyard just below, a young woman in a gray-blue robe had come out of the back of the manor, and she clucked softly as she tried to shush her fretting child.

Painfully, Roland gathered his strength and rolled to his stomach. Blood began to leak from his bandaged arm. He climbed to his knees and held his arm for along moment, stanching his wound, trying to make sense of what he saw.

No one was left alive on the south wall with him. Bodies by the thousands lay strewn along it, nearly all human, though a few reavers lay in the mix. Ashes and soot fell from the cold air.

The castle walls were swaying, stones grinding against stone. “I Choose you. I Choose you for the Earth,” a voice whispered in Roland’s mind. “Flee!”

Roland heard the call distantly, through the tattered remnants of a nightmare of pain. He struggled to comprehend it.

He glanced around. Everyone’s killed, he thought. But no, he decided, the wall had been abandoned. The walls were bucking, plaster and stones falling from them.

He looked into the castle. The front gates were down, along with both gate towers. Reavers had broken into the castle. The men of Carris struggled for their lives down in the bailey; clambered up a mound of dead reavers in an effort to retake the causeway. A few frowth giants fought ferociously at their backs.

The plain before Carris was black with bodies—gray reavers by the dull thousands. At the foot of Bone Hill, a human host fought. Hundreds of knights whirled their mounts in a slow-moving pinwheel, lances bristling.

Lances shattered as men met reavers. Horses stumbled with their knights. Blades and glory hammers rose and fell in deadly arcs.

In the midst of the pinwheel, a flag blew in the stiff wind: the green man of Mystarria, King Orden’s standard.

At the center of a tiny knot, Roland saw the Earth King himself, Gaborn Val Orden, staggering toward the fell mage at Bone Hill. Guards circled him in a knot, and Roland’s heart swelled to imagine that his son would be among them. Ah, if only Averan were here to see this!

It’s true, Roland realized. The voice I heard in the dream...the Earth King has Chosen me.

Why? Roland wondered. Why me? Surely I am not worthy. I am a murderer: A worthless commoner. I am no warrior.

Roland was not given to fantasies. Even if he had been a fantasist, he’d not have imagined the Earth King Choosing him.

Suddenly he found tears streaming down his cheeks, and Roland wondered how he might best repay the gift. “Thank you,” he whispered, unsure whether the Earth King could hear him.

In that moment a gray wind swept over the castle walls, sending gree swirling like ashes in a flume, bearing the odor of the reaver’s curse.

Roland felt weak from his wounds, had hardly made it to his knees. Now the curse wracked him with a lethargy that sapped all his will.

He succumbed atop the wall-walk, felt it swaying. He could not muster the energy to cry for help, to draw a breath, or even to blink.

59 Unexpected Relations

Four miles from Castle Carris, Averan clung to Roland’s back as she rode, afraid that she might fall. One of the men from Indhopal had wrestled the green woman into his saddle, though she struggled against him, trying to climb down.

They’d outpaced the reavers that chased them, left the monsters far behind.

But something was wrong. Averan could not understand why Roland was here with the beautiful woman from Indhopal and her bodyguards: Nor could she understand why Roland was dressed in clothes that were different from those he’d worn yesterday, or why he rode such a grand horse.

With some embarrassment, she realized that this wasn’t Roland at all. It was more than the clothes or the horse, this man smelled wrong. His clothes smelled of desert sage and greasewood and sand, not the green grass of Mystarria.

“Who are you?” she asked. “I thought you were someone else, my friend Roland.”

The big man glanced back at her. She saw that this truly wasn’t Roland. This fellow had the same red hair, the same laughing blue eyes. But some of his hair had begun to turn gray.

“You know someone named Roland?” the fellow asked. “From the Blue Tower?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “He gave me a ride on his horse. He was riding with Baron Poll to Carris. He wanted to go north to see the Earth King, and his son—you. He was going to see you. Wasn’t he?”

The big man nodded. “Roland is my father’s name. You can call me Borenson.” He didn’t look happy to learn that his father was coming to see him.

“You don’t like your father?” Averan asked.

“My mother detested him,” Borenson answered “and since I look like him, in time she grew to detest me.”

“I like Roland,” Averan offered. “He’s going to petition Paladane so that I can be his daughter.”

“The man is a lackluster,” Borenson said. “He’ll be no more of a father to you than he was to me.”

The cold way that Borenson spoke of his father unnerved Averan, and she was angry that he dismissed everything she said. It was true that she was only nine years old, and that she had lost her endowments, but she wasn’t a stupid child. She’d just told Borenson that she was going to be his sister, and she expected some kind of acknowledgment from him. But Borenson seemed intent on dismissing her.

They charged up along narrow hill, over dry rye stalks, bent and broken and as gray as ash.

At me top of the hill, an ancient granite sun dome lay in ruins. The perfect orb-shaped crematorium had rolled from its pedestal and cracked. Now it rested on the hill like a broken egg.

Averan could see the lay of the land to the north and south. They were far enough from any cover that no reaver could ambush them.

But as they crowned the hill and wheeled around the ruined dome, they gazed down on Carris, and Averan gasped in dismay.

Below in the distance, fire burned the white towers of Carris, reflected in the Waters of Lake Donnestgree.

The barbicans lay in ruins and the western wall of the castle was shattered. The smooth plaster everywhere was stripped.

Reavers blackened a land shrouded in dirty mist. One Indhopalese guard stared hard at the burning castle. “Our Lord Raj Ahten defends that fortress,” he said grimly, “along with many men of Mystarria. The Earth King fights in the fields.”

“Perhaps we are not needed,” a eunuch said. “It seems that our lord has already called a truce.” Averan thought him cowardly, the way his voice trembled.

The fields below were a wasteland. It looked as if Carris might never be fit for human habitation again—not even if men tried to rebuild their homes, replant their crops.

Averan watched the Earth King ride through the thick haze toward the foot of Bone Hill. Her eye was, drawn to him. She recognized him instantly, but felt surprised. Gaborn looked like an ordinary man, not the emerald flame she’d seen in her mind when she closed her eyes.

Averan glanced over at the green woman. She sat in the saddle in front of Pashtuk and watched the Earth King, but she watched him with her eyes closed. She smiled wistfully.

The green woman sees it, too, Averan realized. She sees, his power. Averan closed her eyes and watched Gaborn. He looked like an emerald flame that glided and bounced with every jostle of his mount.

One Indhopalese guard suggested, “If we go down to that hill, we can skirt north along the aqueduct to reach the Earth King,”

“I don’t like it,” Borenson groused. “The burrows at the end of the canal won’t have gophers in them.” He pointed north. “We should take the trail up around the Barren’s Wall—come in from behind.”

“That’s too far!” the Indhopalese fellow argued.

Averan watched Gaborn fight his way to Bone Hill. He had so many endowments of metabolism, that to her the deed seemed swift, almost a race as he crouched and cast a spell that made the whole earth tremble. She saw the walls of Carris begin to tremble, and Gaborn stare off toward it with mouth agape. He raised his left hand and cast a second spell.

“There,” Borenson said “He’s Choosing. He’s Choosing the whole city!”

If Gaborn spoke, Averan could not hear his words. They were lost in the hissing sound of thousands of reavers, in the trembling of aftershocks. But she marveled at the notion that Gaborn would Choose this whole city, even his enemies.

The men atop the walls of Carris cheered and fled the falling city, while reavers raced to attack the Earth King. Reavers thundered over a barricade at Bone Hill. They scurried up from burrows.

The Earth King urged his cavalry forward, doggedly trying to fight.

“What does he hope to accomplish?” one eunuch asked.

“He’s trying to save Carris,” Borenson said with some certainty. “He hopes to draw off it attackers.”

But even from here, Averan could see that Gaborn could not make it. There were too many reavers, attacking too swiftly. Gaborn would be cut off, surrounded.

Across the valley, the Voice of Raj Ahten roared, magnified by his many endowments. “We are enemies still, son of Orden!”

Raj Ahten stood atop the city wall, waving his battle-axe in defiance, even as slabs of plaster cascaded around him,

And atop Bone Hill, the fell mage raised a pale yellow staff to the sky and hissed. Thunder sounded and rolled down over the hill to Carris.

The beautiful Woman from Indhopal said softly, “So, it is true. My husband rejects the Earth King, his cousin by marriage, and will leave him to the reavers.”

Her tone was one of solemn revulsion, as if she’d never imagined that Raj Ahten could be so heartless.

“I am afraid so, O Great Star, my Saffira,” Borenson said gently, trying to ease the blow.

Another aftershock made the ground rumble, the horses dance to keep their feet.

Saffira shouted and spurred her mount downhill. It ran with speed and grace and purpose as only a force horse could, racing due west toward Carris as if to reach the city, though ten thousand reavers blocked her way.

Borenson shouted, and Averan clutched his back tightly as their mount shot forward.

Saffira rode east, and at first Averan thought she rode blindly. But she changed course, veered south, and Averan saw where she headed.

The reavers had broken into several fronts. One front directed its attack against Carris, while a second raced for the Earth King. A third chased after the cavalry that had struck south.

As the reavers split, they left an empty field in the midst of their forces. Into this field Saffira charged.

“Wait!” the eunuchs shouted. “Hold up!”

But it did no good. Saffira galloped for Carris, until she came within half a mile of its walls, and the reavers down the slope ahead were so thick that she could ride no farther.

Sensing her at their backs, blade-bearers nearby all began to wheel. The rasping at their thoraxes became louder.

For a moment Saffira charged alone to a small hillock, in the last light of day. She wore a riding robe of fine red cotton, embroidered with exquisite gold threads to form curlicues like the tendrils of vines that wrapped about her arms and breasts. On her head, she wore a thin red veil beneath a silver crown.

Now she unbuckled a narrow golden belt, tossed it on the ground, and pulled off her robe. She withdrew her veil, so that for one moment she sat proud atop a gray Imperial charger, wearing only a sheer dress of lavender silk that accentuated the exquisite dark hues of her skin.

At the edge of the horizon, the sun was falling, and a few small rays slanted from the broken clouds.

Many other hillocks were scattered through the wasteland, but now Averan saw that Saffira had chosen this one because she’d seen the wan light upon it and knew it was the best place to display herself.

To Averan, Saffira seemed to be perfection given form. The graceful lines of her neck and shoulders would have kept a proper minstrel writing lines for a lifetime, yet even Behoran Goldentongue himself could not have composed a tune and words that would have captured her grace, or the light in her eyes, or the courage in her stance.

It seemed to Averan that even then Saffira knew she would die. She’d ridden too close to the reavers. The nearest of them wheeled not a hundred yards down the slope, taking a defensive stance. Reavers are easily surprised, and often hesitate when trying to determine the nature of a threat, but it would only take a moment for the monster to recognize that Saffira stood alone.

But one moment was all Saffira wanted. In that moment, she began to sing.

60 Bone Hill

How do I save them all? Gaborn wondered. He’d connected to hundreds of thousands of people in Castle Carris, and he felt overwhelmed by the sense of danger around them. A third aftershock began to make the ground swell and buck.

At the castle gates, thousands of men were fighting for their lives. Gaborn concentrated on them, for their situation was gravest. Yet in Castle Carris, Raj Ahten refused Gaborn, smugly chose to hinder his troops from advancing. Surely, his Invincibles could hack a path over the causeway.

Fatigue wracked him as he doggedly advanced toward Bone Hill, a deep-seated lethargy that worried the bone. The closer he drew, the more paralyzing it became.

I have Chosen too indiscriminately, he realized. He led a ragtag band of warriors. Desperately, his men forged on. Unhorsed and without their long deadly lances, they were not as effective as mounted knights, yet they advanced manfully, as if moved by his will alone.

Gaborn climbed down from the saddle and tried to lead them a few paces closer, but the effect of the fell mage’s spell was so powerful he could hardly hold the reins of his own mount.

To the south, High Marshal Skalbairn sought to make an ill-fated charge. Gaborn sent the message “Turn back! Save yourselves if you can!”

He focused on the job at hand, hoping that the warriors who guarded him now would be able to fend off the impending attack.

Two hundred yards ahead was the great cocoon, with the fell mage atop the hill. Reavers were racing round both sides of Bone Hill. They’d be here in seconds.

When he could go no farther from weariness, Gaborn numbly dropped in the dust and began to draw a second rune of Earth-breaking.

Desperately he searched the rune itself, looking for weaknesses, flaws in its binding.

A wave of reavers rushed toward his battle lines, fifty yards ahead on each side. Near his foot lay a strand of cocoon, a line that ran two hundred yards.

Gaborn glanced up at Bone Hill, trying to see the object of his spell. Reavers blocked the way, climbed the cocoon in droves. A reaver’s head was larger than a wagon bed and its paws were longer than a man’s body. As monsters surged closer, surrounding him, he could not see over them.

Yet his men held their line, prepared to fight with the strength of desperation.

A reaver charged the Earth King, not even slowing as it barreled over two men ahead, crushing them with its bulk. Erin Connal cried out in dismay, lunged to meet it.

“You take it low, I’ll take it high!” Celinor shouted at her back.

She ran at the beast. It raised its glory hammer overhead. Erin shouted and struck her own warhammer into the monster’s elbow, biting deep into the joint just beneath its protective bone spur.

The jolt should have frozen the reaver in pain for a moment, or perhaps enraged it.

Instead the reaver struck with its glory hammer—eight hundred pounds of steel at the end of a twenty-foot pole. She heard no warning from the Earth. King.

The pole slammed into her shoulder, throwing her to the ground, pinning her for a moment. The reaver raised a massive paw in a fist, ready to pound her into the dust.

Celinor leapt over Erin, lunged in, and struck the beast between its thoracic plates. His blow was not powerful enough. No guts gushed from the monster.

The reaver hissed in fear and lurched back a pace, trying to escape.

Celinor leapt in and delivered a second blow. The reaver’s guts spilled down in a gruesome rain, and the monster leapt away, slamming into another of its kind.

The Prince of South Crowthen spun, dodged out of battle, and grabbed Erin’s hand, helping her up. “Two!” he warned.

Erin felt her face redden with chagrin.

Gaborn finished drawing his rune of Earth-breaking, raised his fist, and looked up.

All around him, reavers thundered forward in a terrifying wall of flesh, pounding into the ranks of his men, overwhelming them.

To his left a reaver smashed a fellow with a glory hammer. The body somersaulted in the air twice, arced toward him.

Celinor raised his shield, threw himself before Gaborn, but the force of both bodies slammed into Gaborn, smacking him to the ground.

Everything went black.

61 In the Fading Light

Saffira sang in the voice of her homeland, in Tuulistanese, and because she had thousands of endowments of Voice, her aria rang louder than any sung by a commoner.

So beautiful was her song that Raj Ahten looked up from a wall of Castle Carris where he had been watching Gaborn’s debacle of a charge.

Time seemed to freeze.

So loud was her song that even on the causeway, many reavers drew back, philia waving in the air, as if trying to decipher whether her Voice presented some new threat that they must confront.

For a moment, the tumult of battle dimmed, as men listened to Saffira’s golden Voice.

Certainly, most of the men of Rofehavan could not have understood Saffira’s words. Tuulistan was a small nation in Indhopal, insignificant. One could walk across its borders in a fortnight. Yet the pleading tone of the young woman’s voice struck Raj Ahten to the soul, made him yearn to...do anything, anything to placate his bride.

She sat in the saddle on some ruined mound, and all beneath her the land was black with reavers. In the last light of day, her lavender dress seemed but a veil that lightly covered her perfect beauty.

She shone like the first and brightest star in the nighttime sky, and all around him, Raj Ahten heard the rush of indrawn breath as thousands men gasped in astonishment.

Immediately Raj Ahten saw what Gaborn had done. He saw the glamour of all his concubines, of the loveliest women from every nation he conquered, all bound into one.

He heard the sweetness of every melodious voice in his harem.

Saffira sang a common lullaby.

She’d sung it to her firstborn son, Shandi, when she’d first held him, five years ago—before a Knight Equitable slaughtered the child in an effort to rid the world of Raj Ahten’s progeny.

The tune was not profound, neither was its message. Yet it moved Raj Ahten to the core of his soul.

“There is no you. There is no me.

Love makes us one. There is only we.”

Of all the men who heard that song, only Raj Ahten understood its message. “I understand your hatred and anger,” she said. “I understand, and I feel it too. I have not forgotten our son. But now you must lay your anger aside.”

Saffira then called in her imperfect Rofehavanish. “My Lord Raj Ahten, I beg you to put aside this war. The Earth King asks me to bear this message: The enemy of my cousin Is my enemy. Men of Mystarria, men of Indhopal unite!”

She beckoned to Raj Ahten, and in the silence, the reavers near her suddenly responded, surging uphill, as if at her summoning.

Saffira’s eunuch guards—the finest of Raj Ahten’s Invincibles—rushed to her side and followed her downhill as she raced now to the north, toward Gaborn’s forces half a mile distant.

She had far too many reavers ahead of her. The great monsters stood back to back around the Earth King’s pitiable army, forming a solid wall. Even with all the speed of her mount, Raj Ahten knew that she would not be able to break those lines.

Certainly she understood that. Yet she rode into danger, into the heart of the maelstrom.

She would force his hand. If you will not come to save him, then at least come to save me, her actions said.

With a shout of horror and dismay, the men of Carris responded to Saffira’s plea.

For several moments now, Paladane’s men and the frowth giants had been shoving the reavers back, had managed to scrabble over the pile of dead reavers to the causeway in Lake Donnestgree, then shove them back a hundred yards toward the mainland. The causeway itself was littered with dead reavers.

Now the people of Carris all heaved forward as one. With a great roar they charged for the mainland. The fell mage’s spells of fatigue seemed to be forgotten temporarily.

All along the walls and all through the city streets, men picked up whatever arms they could carry and hastened to join Saffira and the Earth King.

Raj Ahten watched in amazement.

This was a mistake, he knew. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in Carris would race to attack; the vast majority of them were only commoners.

The reavers would have them for dinner.

Yet they charged.

He could not say what drove them. Whether it was a belief in their Earth King or the desire to heed Saffira’s call. Perhaps, it was neither. Perhaps they fought only because there was nothing left for them to do.

He himself raced down the tower steps, shoving aside slower men so that he could join the battle. His heart hammered and pulse quickened. Invincibles surged from alleys to back him.

62 Chasms

On the road to Carris, time and again Borenson had wondered about Saffira. Would she have the courage to stand up to Raj Ahten? Did she truly want peace? Would she betray Gaborn and his people?

Yet now, with danger all around, this woman—hardly more than a child really—rose to Gaborn’s defense.

Saffira finished her song. For a breathless moment Borenson sat enthralled, unable to think, unable to do anything but mourn the fact that her song had ended.

Cheers arose from the city, thunderous cheers like the voice of a distant sea, assuring that the people of Rofehavan would heed her call.

Saffira’s courage had been sufficient. In that moment, Borenson loved her as fully and innocently as he could love a woman. His heart pounded, and he wanted nothing more than to stand in her shadow, to breathe her sweet perfume, to gaze at her ebony hair.

She sat tall in her saddle, breathing hard. The fight in her eyes was a marvel, and as she sat listening to the cheers from Carris, she bowed her head in silent exultation.

“Come, my friends,” Saffira called, “before it is too late.” She spurred her mount north, galloping downhill toward Gaborn, but not making a direct charge.

She was angling west, away from the main force of the reavers.

Smart girl, Borenson thought. She’s pretending to charge, hoping to divert the reavers’ forces from Gaborn, even as she races west past Bone Hill. From there she would angle back around from the north, come at Gaborn from behind.

Ha’Pim and Mahket struggled to catch up, to ride at her side. Ahead lay Bone Hill, the fibrous cocoon around it gleaming dully like icicles in the evening, the fell mage at its crown gleaming from the opalescent runes tattooed into her carapace.

The great reaver stood with her citrine staff raised to the sky; the philia on her broad head rose and waggled as she sought to catch a scent.

Suddenly her enormous head swiveled toward Saffira, as if she’d taken notice. She pointed her staff toward Saffira’s entourage.

She thinks we’re attacking! Borenson realized almost too late. He did not know if anyone else saw her response. “Veer left!” he cried.

The fell mage hissed and light pulsed in her crystalline staff. The air around it exploded as a dark green cloud issued from its tip.

Saffira charged sharply left as the green haze pulsed out and slammed into the ground on her previous trajectory. The cloud carried an odor of rot so foul, so abominable, that Borenson did not merely smell it, he could feel his body struggle to respond, as if his skin would slough away and flesh decompose as he watched.

Saffira covered her face with a golden silk scarf, weaved a course perilously close to the nearest reaver. The ground trembled.

Pashtuk and the green woman were unceremoniously dumped from their mount.

Pashtuk grabbed the wylde and quickly tried to remount. The wylde struggled lightly in his grasp, as if eager to battle the reavers.

Saffira looked back, saw his predicament, and stopped her own horse, waiting for him.

“Watch out!” the child behind Borenson cried out. A blade-bearer rushed Saffira’s back. Her guards shouted, warning her.

Saffira lowered her head, wheeled and spurred her charger, as if hoping to draw the beast away from Pashtuk.

Almost casually the reaver swung its great talons, talons that gleamed wickedly on a forepaw that was as long as a horse.

The reaver smacked Saffira’s mare, breaking the horse’s neck and slapping it backward. Saffira tumbled over the top of her horse, bounced against one great claw, and vaulted into the dark recesses behind the reaver.

Three other reavers raced toward the spot.

Ha’Pim shouted in dismay and drew rein, leaping to dismount. A blade-bearer smacked him with a glory hammer as he landed. Blood and gore spattered Borenson’s face.

Mahket rode full of furor into the reavers, swinging a great battleaxe. He leapt into the mouth of the reaver that had struck Saffira, delivered a tremendous blow through its upper palate, and danced back out, swinging at another monster’s leg. His body was a blur of motion.

Pashtuk quit trying to mount his horse—simply hurled himself toward the closest charging reaver. He leapt up several feet in the air, struck down with his battle-axe at the base of the monster’s neck.

Borenson reined in his horse. There was a slim chance that Saffira would live. The blow she’d taken might only have broken a few bones.

Yet if she lived, she was now behind three reavers—or under them.

If they did not kill her outright, she’d be crushed.

“Get us out of here!” the child behind Borenson cried, clutching Borenson’s waist. The odor of rot that the fell mage had exuded was filling the area, gagging him.

He gritted his teeth in frustration. He was Saffira’s guard. She owned him more completely than he could ever imagine himself being owned again.

Yet he was also bound to Gaborn. He knew where his duty lay. Borenson had the wizard Binnesman’s wylde at hand. She was a potent weapon. Borenson needed to deliver her to Binnesman.

Weakly, Borenson heard Saffira cry out in Tuulistanese, “Ahretva! Ahret!”

Though he could not understand her plea, he now knew that she lived. The power of her Voice was more compelling than cold logic. The woman who had so courageously charged into the midst of the reavers to deliver her message now held his heart too firmly for him to resist.

So, Borenson thought dully, this is where I will make my battlefield. This is where I make my stand. It is not a battlefield I would have chosen.

With no endowments to aid him and with no apology to the child who rode behind, Borenson leapt from his mount and charged into battle.

Averan sat on her horse for half a second in dismay. Borenson and Saffira’s bodyguards had abandoned their mounts—all to defend Saffira.

The green woman remained in her saddle. A reaver’s blade arced overhead as two monsters raced toward her.

Averan shouted, “Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer: blood, yes! Kill!”

The green woman leapt from her horse onto the nearest reaver so swiftly that Averan almost did not see it. Spring slammed a fist into the reaver’s brain, shattering its skull, as if she’d finally figured out that this was the quickest way to get some of the goo that she liked.

Ahead of Averan, the two Indhopalese guards lopped the forearms off a reaver. The creature reared; tried to back away, while with terrifying slowness and clumsiness—or at least compared to warriors with endowments—Sir Borenson rushed up under its belly and started trying to chop between its thoracic plates. The guards turned to a reaver at their backs, trying to hack a path to Saffira.

To Averan’s left and behind her, reavers all raced to converge. “Help!” Averan screamed. “Help!”

But no one came to her side. She didn’t have Saffira’s allure. She was only a little girl.

She dropped from her horse. A reaver swung a glory hammer behind her, bludgeoning Borenson’s fine mount into a spray of blood and guts.

Averan scampered, hunched over, and tried to make herself small. Desperately she sought someplace to hide.

Ahead, the green woman had just slaughtered a reaver. It lay gasping mechanically, mouth open, its raspy tongue nearly two feet wide hanging from its mouth. Averan wanted to roll under the monster, to hide in the crook of, its legs, but the beast had fallen to the ground.

Its mouth, she realized. I could hide in there.

She leapt into the monster’s cavernous mouth. Its palate formed a hollow nearly as tall as a man, but the sides were covered in slime. The warty flesh of its gums was nearly black, and the reaver’s teeth around her, row upon row of them, were all as clear as crystal knives. She clung to two of the longest teeth, hanging on, lest she fall down.

The reaver’s breath smelled fetid, added to the horrid stench of decay that the fell mage had created. Averan almost imagined that the beast was rotting apart in her hands. Her own hands itched, and dark blotches were forming on them.

The reaver’s mouth convulsed mechanically, and the tongue she stood on shifted. Then the reaver’s maw slowly began to close.

Averan’s stomach clenched in terror. She pushed on its gums with all of her might, struggled to keep the mouth open. She feared that even though the reaver was dead, it might swallow her still. She’d seen how dying animals sometimes moved by reflex. “Help!” she screamed. “Help!”

“I’m coming!” Borenson shouted. He’d sliced cleanly between the reaver’s thoracic plates and now backed away as the reaver came crashing down, its forepaws landing almost atop him.

He’s coming for me, Averan thought.

But now as the eunuchs continued to fight a blade-bearer to Borenson’s left, he lunged beyond them, into a dark gorge formed of reaver corpses. Borenson raced to Saffira.

But I thought you were going to help me! Averan wanted to shout.

The evening sky was going dark. The land was covered in a cloying, sickly mist, and in the deep shadows, reavers rose up black and monolithic. As a new attacker scaled the bodies of the dead, the light above Averan was nearly cut off.

Averan cringed in terror, struggled to push the reaver’s mouth open again. As she did, she squinted, and in her mind’s eye she could see the emerald flame burning brightly.

It’s so close now, she thought. I could almost touch it. She’d been drawn to it for days. Now, she thought she understood why.

Safety. I would be safe with the Earth King, she told herself—safe as his Chosen. A wild hope thrilled through her.

“Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer,” Averan cried on sudden impulse, “go get the Earth King! He’ll help us.”

Then the reaver’s mouth closed, despite all that she could do.

Averan screamed.

63 The Brightest Star in Indhopal

Raj Ahten raced down from the stone walls of Carris, struggling to be the first to reach Saffira. He shoved aside some slower men on the stairs, then leapt from them onto the back of a dead frowth giant, catching his foot in the beast’s chain mail. He pulled his foot free.

Once released, he leapt from the back of one dead reaver to another, using the dead beasts as if they were ghastly stepping stones. Thus he reached the fallen castle gates well before most of his people did. Only a few of Paladane’s men were ahead of him out on the causeway.

For half a heartbeat, he stood on a reaver’s corpse above the causeway and felt the tremors of an earthquake. It shook the very foundations of Carris, with a roar far louder than the surf. As it hit the shore, it caused a mighty wave to ripple out.

Paladane’s finest men fought ahead down the causeway, embroiled in a melee.

He could imagine how they would fare.

He raced now, leaping along the backs and bellies of dead reavers.

As the quake rocked a reaver beneath him, Raj Ahten vaulted into the air, then landed in the fray atop a living reaver’s head. He slammed his warhammer deep into its sweet triangle, killing it instantly.

A hundred thousand human voices cried out as one as the earthquake surged beneath the castle. Raj Ahten glanced back just as the west wall of Carris sheered away in thunderous ruin, spilling outward.

He dared not hesitate. He climbed the reaver’s sloping head, raced toward Saffira.

He did not watch the fall of Carris, but he heard it, smelled the acrid scent of stone dust in the air. The people wailed as Carris collapsed. Towers toppled. Shops disintegrated.

With six endowments of metabolism, Raj Ahten fought swiftly and furiously, daring attacks he’d never have tried if not for Saffira. He leapt on reaver heads and sought to crush them with his hammer. He raced past one monster, pausing to shatter its leg so that men behind would have an easier time with it. For long moments, his existence became an obscene dream of death and maiming, while Paladane’s men and his Invincibles fought at his side.

Behind him, he could hear hundreds and thousands of commoners charging toward Saffira, racing to do battle in the midst of the reavers. To do so was suicide, Raj Ahten thought. But in his heart he knew that to do less was also suicide.

In the midst of the city, several towers flamed. As they crumbled, they spewed burning wood and cinders up into the evening sky.

As Paladane’s men slaughtered a reaver, Raj Ahten climbed atop it to get his bearings. Behind him in the castle people fled for their lives: warriors and merchants, women with babes in arms, lords and paupers.

Raj Ahten marveled at how many had survived the quake, for if he’d not seen it, he’d have thought that not more than a few hundred would escape the fall of Carris.

For what seemed along hour, Raj Ahten fought on, though it could not have been more than ten minutes of commoner’s time. Paladane’s lords and Raj Ahten’s Invincibles fought at his back, while the commoners of Carris streamed into the battle lines.

Their effect astonished Raj Ahten: Many reavers began a careful retreat, balking at the challenge. Confronted by a dozen men, most reavers backed away.

Until now, none of his tactics had impressed the reavers. But so many people—a mass of people attacking as one—gave the reavers pause. It was easy to guess why: The reavers could not distinguish a commoner from a Runelord. All men smelled the same. To a reaver, any man who dared attack presented a potentially devastating challenge.

We are wasps to them, Raj Ahten realized, but they can’t tell whether we have stingers.

Pockets of resistance grew around his Invincibles and among Paladane’s most powerful lords. But though many reavers balked, they did not flee.

Blade-bearers waded into the commoners and commenced a truly horrific slaughter, cutting down men and women by the thousands and tens of thousands.

The people of Carris threw themselves against the reaver lines, commoners wielding pickaxes and hammers. They gave themselves for their Earth King in ways that they’d never have given themselves for Raj Ahten.

The commoners’ efforts were almost futile, except that they provided some diversion for those warriors who had the grace and brawn and metabolism needed for the melee. So their struggle was not completely in vain. But Raj Ahten would never forget the spectacle that presented itself before the gates of Carris: human blood by the barrels, the splintered bones, mangled flesh, the expressions of horror in dead women’s eyes.

He battled on, fighting an endless host toward an unseen goal. Twice he took wounds that would have killed another man, and wasted precious seconds waiting for his great stamina to perform its miraculous healing.

Ironically, it was the voice of a child that led him to Saffira.

Behind him, lords fought on thirty or forty different fronts. Added to this chaos was the sound of Gaborn’s knights somewhere to the north of Bone Hill—men yelling and dying.

Even with his endowments of hearing; Raj Ahten could barely discern among the hissing and rattling of reavers a girl wailing over and over again, “Help! Help!”

He heard the child and raced through the battle lines to reach the girl. With six endowments of metabolism, he burst past several reavers before they could even react.

Dead and wounded reavers lay everywhere ahead, forming a grizzly maze. The smell of putrescence, the fell mage’s last spell, was overwhelming. He leapt between the limbs of two tangled reavers, squirmed through a narrow chasm.

In moments he reached a clearing. A dozen reavers lay dead in an irregular circle, forming a ghastly little chasm between the reaver corpses.

When he leapt down into the clearing, a dead horse and knight littered the ground at his feet. Raj Ahten could hear men skirmishing with a reaver around a little bend.

The girl herself was trapped in the mouth of a dead reaver. Raj Ahten left her shrieking in terror.

But the wound on the reaver she hid in intrigued him. Someone had bashed the reaver’s skull. Aside from a frowth giant wielding an enormous maul, Raj Ahten could not imagine any weapon that would so decimate reaver bone.

He raced round the bend to find Pashtuk, bleeding from a bad leg, still fighting like a berserker while Mahket joined the fray beside him.

A reaver was trying to wedge its way between two dead comrades in an effort to charge the men. Raj Ahten could not see Saffira, but with so many endowments of scent, he found her easily. The delicate scent of her jasmine perfume drew him to the spot, in a little chasm off to his right.

She lay crushed beneath the paw of a fallen reaver. King Orden’s man, Sir Borenson, lay with her, his arms wrapped around Saffira, seeking to protect her. Borenson struggled to breathe with the weight of the reaver’s paw so heavy upon him.

A huge gash crossed Saffira’s forehead. Blood, flowed from it freely.

Raj Ahten grasped the reaver’s paw by one long talon. The paw weighed seven or eight hundred pounds. He dragged it from atop Saffira, pushed the red-haired knight away.

Behind Raj Ahten, all round Carris, thousands of people battled. But the dead reavers formed a solid wall that would hedge commoners out Those who sought Saffira would likely bypass this place.

Saffira’s eyes stared fixedly upward. She breathed erratically. He knew that she would die soon.

“I’m here, my love,” Raj Ahten said. “I’m here.”

Saffira grasped his hand. She had but three endowments of brawn, and so her touch seemed feather-light to him.

Saffira smiled. “I knew you would come.”

“The Earth King made you do this?” Raj Ahten asked. His Voice was hot with wrath.

“No one forced me,” Saffira said. “I wanted to see you!”

“But he bade you come?”

Saffira smiled secretively. “I heard...I heard of an Earth King in the north. I sent a messenger...”

It was a lie, of course. None of the palace guards were to speak openly of the wars and conflicts. None would have dared.

“Promise you will not fight him! Promise you will not kill him!” she begged.

Saffira began to cough. Flecks of blood spattered out as she did. Raj Ahten held silent.

He wiped blood from her chin and held her close. The sounds of battle seemed distant, as if monsters roared in a faraway wilderness.

He was not quite aware of when Saffira died. But in the coming darkness, he glanced down and saw that she had gone still, With her death, the endowments of glamour she had borne returned to her Dedicates.

Saffira faded like a rose petal wilting away in a blacksmith’s forge, so that soon the young woman in his arms seemed only a pale shadow of herself.

The greatest beauty of all time was no more.

Gaborn’s consciousness swam in a place where there was no present, no pain, and no understanding.

It was a place with violet skies of a remembered sunset, a field of wild flowers he might have roamed in childhood

The scent of summer grass was profound, rich, buttery; full of roots and soil and leaves drying in the sun. Copious daisies spread their golden petals. They smelled bitter compared to the grass, but only served to intensify the earthy atmosphere.

Gaborn lay in a daze. Distantly, he thought he heard Iome calling, but his muscles had gone slack, would not respond.

Iome. He wanted her desperately, craved her touch, her kiss. She should be with me, he thought. She should be at my side.

She should see this perfect sky, touch this perfect ground. Gaborn had not seen anything so lovely since he’d visited Binnesman’s garden.

“Milord?” someone called. “Milord, are you all right?”

Gaborn tried to respond, could think of nothing.

“Get him on his horse, he’s injured! Get him out of here!” someone shouted. Gaborn recognized the voice now. Celinor. Celinor Anders was shouting, worried about Gaborn.

“All right” Gaborn tried to comfort him. I’m all right. He tried to raise his head, fell back—and recognized something amazing. His fatigue, the sense of illness and the pain he’d felt for hours, had almost totally departed.

Instead he felt as if he stood in a fresh spring wind, totally invigorated. As he lay still, the sensation grew more potent.

Earth power. He felt earth power, as he’d felt it in Binnesman’s garden, or at the Seven Standing Stones of the Dunnwood. It was growing stronger. Stronger. He could almost turn his face toward it, as a flower turns its leaves toward the sun.

Iome is coming, he reasoned deliriously. That is it.

The sensation grew suddenly intense, until he could feel it warm against his cheek, like a sunbeam caressing him.

His eyes came open.

In the semidarkness stood a woman who wore only a bearskin coat. Not Iome.

Yet he recognized her instantly. Her face was beautiful, innocent, immaculate. Her small breasts sagged forward beneath her coat: Her skin was a delicate green. Gaborn could feel the power blazing inside her. She reached down and grabbed his throat gently. With her touch, all weariness and pain fled.

He knew her at once: Binnesman’s wylde.

The wizard had raised her from the dust of the Earth a little more than a week ago, raised her in the night, giving her a form taken from his own mind. Binnesman had said that he’d hoped to form a great warrior, like the green knight who had aided Gaborn’s forefathers. But upon creation, the wylde had leapt high into the air and disappeared.

Now Gaborn’s eyes flew wide as the wylde lifted him with one hand, pulling him to his feet. “Go get the Earth King!” she blurted.

Dimly, Gaborn realized that the green woman wanted him, wanted him to follow her somewhere. Or perhaps the Earth itself had sent her.

Gaborn looked around him. He lay on the battlefield about a hundred yards back from his previous position. Prince Celinor, Erin Connal, and several other knights had, all backed away from the green woman, staring at her in shock.

Gaborn’s knights had abandoned their mounts and now skirmished furiously with reavers in a ragged front. The reavers were pushing his men back. Everywhere he looked, a sea of reavers crawled atop one another in an effort to break the line, hunting men as dogs might hunt hares. His people fought valiantly, but in vain. Even as his glance swept across the battlefield, he saw a dozen men hurled into oblivion as blade-bearers swung their enormous swords.

On Bone Hill; surrounded by minions, in her protective cocoon the fell mage raised her citrine staff to the sky, prepared to utter another curse. The air was already filled with an unspeakably foul scent. But ghost lights flickered at the base of the rune, suddenly blazing like never before.

“Get the Earth King,” the wylde said, pulling Gaborn toward the battle line.

He understood. Someone had sent the creature to him. But Gaborn had been present at her creation, knew the wylde’s true name.

Now Gaborn grabbed her wrist and summoned the wylde for his own purposes. “Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer: Stand with me.”

The green woman stood panting, as if she’d forgotten her previous errand.

“Strike now,” the Earth warned.

Gaborn knelt. Taking the wylde’s finger, Gaborn concentrated as he began to trace a rune of Earth-breaking in the grime.

Yet as he studied the foul hill before him, he could see no flaws, no way to break that thing.

Curiously, an image came to mind. Not a rune of Earth-breaking, but a rune nonetheless. A strange cone shape within a circle, and single dot above.

He drew the rune, and then he gathered the wylde’s hand into a fist.

He looked up. Staring at the fell mage atop her monstrous creation, Gaborn imagined annihilation. He imagined the soil blasting upward in total ruin, the hill and the rune ceasing to exist—scattered so far on the winds that they utterly perished, never to be rebuilt again.

He did not know if he could do it. Can earth destroy earth? he wondered.

Gaborn shouted, “Be thou dust!”

For two long seconds Gaborn held his fist clenched, waiting for the Earth to respond.

Far below him the ground began to tremble, slowly at first, a distant rumble that grew steadily more powerful, as if a quake were building, far huger than any he’d felt before. He could feel the might there, struggling for release. Soon the ground pulsated as if shaken by a mighty fist.

The fell sorceress raised her staff in the air, the runes in her flesh glittering like a garment of sunlight, and her citrine crystal flashed with inner fire.

She issued a hissing roar that resounded from the heavens, that bounced from the walls of Castle Carris and rebounded from the near hills. An impenetrable black cloud began to form at her—low joining with the corrosive mists that swirled out from the Seal of Desolation—a curse that Gaborn imagined his men would not survive.

Still Gaborn let the earth power build, a measureless force surging toward him. He held the image of destruction in his mind, letting it grow and expand until he could hold it no more.

Gaborn opened his fist, releasing his power.

64 The Shattered Earth

Iome Sylvarresta was still forty-two miles from Carris. She had stopped with Myrrima and Sir Hoswell to eat some bread and drink a draught of wine while the horses took a rest. The wind was blowing softly through the leaves of the live oak above her, whispering through the grass as it surged downhill.

She felt the Earth trembling long before she heard the end. The ground ripped and snarled beneath her feet, and she looked south in wonder and horror.

From Iome’s vantage, she saw only a vast dust cloud that thundered into the evening air, rumbling as it hurtled upward mile after mile.

Though the sun had fallen moments before, the dust cloud rose so high that the evening light slanted off its top, while lightning forked around it.

“By the Powers!” Myrrima said, leaping to her feet, spilling wine from her wineskin.

Iome grabbed Myrrima’s arm, for though she had endowments of brawn, she suddenly felt weak with fear. She knew that her husband was in Carris, and that no one could survive such a blast.

Many long seconds later, the sound of the explosion came. Even at such a distance it shook the Earth, making it rumble beneath her feet, then the echo sounded from the distant mountains. She was not quite sure if there had been a single explosion or more than one.

In later days, she would always imagine that there had been two explosions: one when Gaborn cast his spell, and a second explosion a moment later when the world worm surged upward, creating a vast hole where the Seal of Desolation had been.

But witnesses closer to the blast said, “Nay, there was but one explosion as the world worm burst from the ground at the Earth King’s summons.”

The Earth snarled as the world worm ascended. Erin Connal fought at Gaborn’s side when it came, and that is how she would always describe the sound: “the Earth snarled.”

Dust exploded upward from the Seal of Desolation and the world worm reared so high that for a moment a full half of its body shot skyward hundreds of yards in the air, blotting out the last rays of sunlight. It spewed dust in its wake.

The ground snarled at the blast site, and some walls of Carris that had not yet fallen now tumbled into Lake Donnestgree.

Erin hardly remembered anything for a long time after that. She stood gaping up at the vast worm, a hundred and eighty yards in diameter, her heart nearly frozen within her breast, awed by its complex musculature, the magma streaming from the crevasses in its skin, the spectacle of its scythelike teeth. The air was suddenly awash with the odors of sulfur and the metallic tang of dust.

She could only have seen it for a moment, yet time seemed to stand still.

When she came to her senses again, she became dully aware that men and women had begun to cheer. The world worm was receding into its vast crater, where Bone Hill had once stood. Dust was falling everywhere.

Lightning bolts ringed the sky as dust shot through the cloud ceiling.

The reavers began to flee.

It seemed too much to hope for—a full rout. But with the destruction of Bone Hill and the fell mage who led them, the reavers saw no reason to remain.

They began fading into the night, racing back to their dark tunnels, until the time when they would return in greater force.

“Flee,” a distant voice called. Sir Borenson struggled to obey. “Run now, while you may.”

The Earth rolled and bucked beneath him, throwing him two feet in the air. A vast rumble sounded, far louder than the snarl of any thunder. Lightning crashed overhead, while dust and pebbles rained down.

The Earth is broken! Borenson thought dully.

Borenson’s legs kicked almost of their own volition, and he reached out for Saffira. He’d found her bleeding and half-dead here on the battlefield. Pashtuk and Mahket fought ferociously to protect her, and when the reavers came in full force, Borenson had no recourse but to throw himself atop her, try to shield her with his own body, even as a dying reaver collapsed upon them, crushing the air from his lungs.

He would not leave her now.

He coughed, struggled to breathe, though dust clogged his nostrils.

“Flee now!” Gaborn’s Voice warned once again.

It did not come more clearly, but Borenson realized whose voice he heard, and he struggled to obey. The air was filled with the stench of rot.

Borenson reached for Saffira, searched nearby “O Bright Star, we must go!” he mumbled, struggling up. He tried to focus his eyes, but everything had gone black. Night was swiftly falling, and with dust filling the air here in the shadows of the reaver corpses, he could see almost nothing. He looked up. A vast cloud of dust hung overhead, though some light still silvered the north and south horizons. He crawled to his knees.. Lightning flashed overhead.

“Where would you take her, little man of the north?” Raj Ahten asked, his voice soft and melodious but seething with subdued rage.

Borenson blinked, trying to focus, to see Raj Ahten in the flicker of lightning, to hear his Voice above the pealing thunder.

He could see them now in the deep evening gloom. Raj Ahten’s saffron-colored surcoat gleamed in the darkness. Saffira lay gently in Raj Ahten’s arms, as still as the waters of a pond on a windless morning, her pale teeth and eyes hardly visible. She did not move. The glamour had dissipated from her.

For one eternal moment, Borenson knelt. All the air left his lungs. All the willpower seemed to drain from his heart, and he wondered that he could even remain on his hands and knees.

She was gone forever, and he feared that because she was gone, his mind would break.

Not all beauty is gone—he tried to console himself—only the greatest. Life is not empty. It only seems that way.

Yet he felt as if a great void suddenly yawned open inside him, and he could not breathe the dusty air, and he did not care that he could not breathe

He’d known Saffira only for a day, and if it had been but a short time, it had been...He found no words for it.

Every breath he’d breathed had been for her. Every thought in his mind had revolved around her. In that day, he had been completely devoted, had become her creature. His devotion might have been short in duration, but it was intense.

To go on living now would be...fruitless.

“Run,” Gaborn called to Borenson.

He was safely encircled by dead reavers, as if in a narrow canyon. Beyond them, on the shadowed battlefield, Borenson could hear sounds of war amid men shouting and cheering in the distance. Some reavers still fought, but none fought nearby. The battle had turned.

Borenson gazed warily at Raj Ahten. The Earth King had warned Borenson to flee, but now Borenson realized that he was not meant to flee from reavers.

“Answer me, man of the north,” Raj Ahten said calmly. “Where would you take my wife?”

“To safety,” Borenson managed to croak. He licked his dry mouth; grime came thick on his tongue.

“Yet you brought her here, didn’t you? You brought her to her death, at your master’s insistence. The most exquisite and finest woman in the world. You brought her here.”

It was not an empty accusation. Blood rose hot to Borenson’s cheeks. Even if Raj Ahten had not been struggling to convey Borenson’s guilt through the power of his Voice, Borenson would have felt ashamed, damned beyond all hope.

“I did not know that reavers would be here at Carris,” Borenson apologized more to himself than to Raj Ahten. “She didn’t fear them. We wanted her to stay back, but she would not listen....”

Raj Ahten growled low in his throat, as if mere words could not express his rage.

He hates me, Borenson knew. The lies I told pried him loose from Castle Sylvarresta, and I slaughtered his Dedicates there when he left. My deceptions caused him to retreat from Heredon at Gaborn’s ruse. I delivered his wife to her death.

“You were a worthy adversary,” Raj Ahten whispered.

Borenson tried to lurch to his feet, to run, but he was no match for Raj Ahten with his endowments of metabolism.

Raj Ahten had taken brawn from more than two thousand men. Borenson could not fight him or escape his grasp any more than a newborn could withstand the wrath of its father.

The Wolf Lord of Indhopal caught Borenson’s ankle, jerked swiftly and brought Sir Borenson down hard upon his back.

“I found you cradling her like a lover,” Raj Ahten whispered fiercely. “Were you her lover?”

“No!” Borenson shouted.

“Do you deny that you loved her!”

“No!”

“It is forbidden fruit to look upon my concubines. There is a fee that one must pay!” Raj Ahten said. “Have you paid your toll?”

Borenson did not need to answer. The Wolf Lord swiftly pulled him near, ran his hands up Borenson’s leg beneath his coat of ring mail and his tunic, to explore his private region.

Sir Borenson howled in outrage and grasped for his dagger, but Raj Ahten was swifter still.

He pinched hard with fingers as strong as a blacksmith’s tongs, and he pulled.

The incredible burning pain that assaulted Borenson caused him to black out for a moment, to drop his dagger.

When Raj Ahten brought his hand away, Sir Borenson was much less of a man.

Raj Ahten shoved Borenson hard into the ground, wrenching his back and scraping his face.

Sir Borenson writhed in pain and horror, barely able to retain consciousness. Raj Ahten climbed to his feet.

“Thus,” Raj Ahten said, flicking a gobbet of flesh on the ground beside Borenson’s ear, “I dismiss you.”

Averan cried for help and tried to pry open the dead reaver’s mouth. Lightning pounded, and now a gree whipped past her head, wriggling in the air, having also decided that the dead reaver’s mouth was a fine dark place to hide. The cloying scent of decay filled the air, and it was so powerful that her hands and, face were blistering wherever the air touched them.

“Help me, please,” she cried, trying to be heard above the thunder. Only the dimmest rays of evening light filtered through the dust clouds.

But her heart leapt. Through the flickering lightning she saw Raj Ahten suddenly enter a clearing between the dead reavers, not twenty feet away. He’d gone back there a minute before, to where Saffira and Borenson were, and he had exchanged some harsh words with Borenson.

Borenson’s cries filled her with fear. Raj Ahten shouted now in some language of Indhopal.

Averan did not know what he said, but obviously he was calling orders to his men. He held his face up, so that dirty rain seamed over his helm, down his cheeks. Lightning flickered, and Averan could see him clearly. With so many endowments of glamour, he was the most handsome man that Averan had ever seen. He carried himself so proudly, with such grace, that it made her heart flutter.

“Please!” she cried, trying to pry open the reaver’s mouth.

Raj Ahten glanced at her distractedly, as if he wanted nothing to do with a child.

But to her relief, he strode to her.

Averan had imagined that it would take several common men with pry bars to open the reaver’s jaw, but Raj Ahten sheathed his warhammer on his back, then pulled the reaver’s mouth wide with his fists. He gave Averan his hand, let her step out daintily, as if she were a lady of the court.

He had blood all over his gauntlets.

In seconds, half a dozen Invincibles leapt into the clearing between the dead reavers. Raj Ahten jabbered at them, talking so fast she was hard-pressed to follow.

Averan understood only one word: “Orden.”

Then Raj Ahten and his men all raced north. They ran so swiftly that it seemed almost as if they merely vanished For one moment they stood still in the shadows, then she heard the ching of ring mail and the Invincibles fled in a blur.

In the sudden silence, Averan stood. Dust and mud fell from the sky. Thunder boomed. Lightning split the sky.

Reavers fear lightning, Averan recalled. It blinds them and fills them with pain. They’re all going to run away. At least that’s what I’d do, if I were a reaver.

Nearby, she heard gagging; someone was in pain.

The sound came from where she had last seen Sir Borenson.

Averan crept toward the sound, huddling close to the body of a reaver, until she could see past its head. There in the shadows lay Saffira and Sir Borenson.

But only Borenson was still alive. He was curled on his side like a baby. He’d vomited, and tears were streaming from his eyes. Saffira’s glamour was gone from her, so that now she seemed to be only a pretty girl.

Averan feared that Borenson would die from his wounds, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “What’s wrong?” Averan asked timidly. “Are you hurt?”

Borenson gritted his teeth, wiped tears from his face. He didn’t speak for a long minute, until finally in a strange voice, all filled with pain and fierceness, he said, “You’re going to grow up to be a beautiful woman—and there’s no way that someone like me would ever be able to do anything about it.”

65 The Earth Betrayed

“Flee!” the Earth warned Gaborn.

He was sitting on the ground, looking skyward in astonishment. He’d never imagined that he had the power to summon animals to his aid.

The world worm had hardly risen from the ground. Dust and stones and pebbles gushed skyward above it. The vast beast towered there, twisting and writhing half a mile in the air.

The force of the blast had propelled Gaborn backward. The green woman sprawled beside him.

Lightning flashed amid the dust, creating a crown around the great cloud, a crown of light that for a moment seemed to Gaborn to be his own. All around him, the reavers were turning, fleeing from the battle in terror.

“Go!” the Earth insisted.

Death was coming. Gaborn’s own death. He’d never felt the overwhelming presence of the shroud so completely.

Darkness hovered above him, an immense black cloud of dust and falling debris that hid any remnant of daylight.

In that unnatural darkness, split time and again by lightning, Gaborn lurched to his feet and raced for his horse, calling for his troops to retreat.

Of course, he realized. He’d felt it all along. Strike and flee, strike and flee. That is what the Earth had wanted of him at Carris.

“Come!” he shouted to the green woman, offering his hand. She leapt twenty feet to land at his side, and Gaborn reached down, pulled her onto his horse.

“This way!” Gaborn shouted to his men. He began racing for his life.

He felt inside him.

In seconds, the entire course of the battle had shifted. Tens of thousands of people had fled Carris, and hundreds of thousands more had not yet even exited the city gates, but were still rushing out as fast as possible.

Much had changed for the better.

The reavers fled. Lightning strobed the sky, and reavers abandoned the field Everywhere the threat to his people suddenly diminished.

Galloping past two living reavers, Gaborn careened north filled with a sense of dull wonder and terror—wonder at his victory here, terror at the rising sense of personal danger that assailed him.

The Earth no longer bade him to strike. Now the Earth bade him flee with all haste. He raced past reaver and man alike. He was no longer needed at Carris.

Thus he rode through the dust cloud thrown by the world worm, half-blinded, until he found his way north to the gates of the Barren’s Wall.

The wall was a twisted ruin. Though Gaborn had focused all his attention to the south during the battle, the quakes had struck here, too. Much of the wall had fallen. The parts left standing leaned at precarious angles.

Miraculously, the arch above the Barren’s Wall held, and as he rode toward it, Gaborn glanced back toward Carris.

Several castle towers had collapsed, and others were still burning. Clouds of dust filled the valley. Dead men and reavers littered the plain. Every bit of soil was churned and ruined. Every plant had been blasted and destroyed. The great Black Tower had collapsed in the distance, and a fire raged there. The world worm was slithering back down into the hole where the Seal of Desolation had been. Lightning bolts played overhead, striking through clouds of dust. A sickly brown mist still wreathed the field, carrying a marvelous stench of rot and illness.

No scene of destruction that Gaborn had ever imagined could begin to rival what he now beheld.

A few hundred yards across the battlefield, the wizard Binnesman spotted him. The old man had apparently retreated from the front line; now he galloped toward Gaborn, shouting.

Gaborn felt such a desperate need to escape that he dared not wait for Binnesman.

With only Jureem, Erin, and Celinor still at his back, he wheeled and raced on beneath the Barren’s Wall.

“Milord,” Pashtuk called. “There he is!” Raj Ahten had swiftly gathered a dozen Invincibles and ordered them to help find the Earth King.

Raj Ahten peered through clouds of dust, while thunder pounded overhead. The rising dirt had mingled with the clouds; now a muddy sleet fell. Raj Ahten stood atop a hill formed by two dead reavers and peered through the grit to where Pashtuk pointed.

Now he studied the horse that Pashtuk pointed toward. As for the Earth King, Raj Ahten spotted his mount—an unassuming roan—but he could discern nothing of Gaborn himself, only a green-skinned woman sitting oddly atop it and a piece of oak brush that appeared to be caught before her on the saddle. He rode north with several knights at his side. The wizard Binnesman raced to catch up with him.

Where do you think he is going?” Mahket asked.

It seemed odd for the Earth King to retreat so swiftly when the victory here seemed secured. Lightning flashed overhead, and everywhere the reavers scattered, leaderless and without purpose.

“I don’t care where he is going,” Raj Ahten answered simply. “I’m going to kill him.”

“But...O Great Light,” Pashtuk said. “He is your kinsman....He seeks a truce.”

Raj Ahten glanced at Pashtuk and recognized the face of an enemy.

Raj Ahten had no words that could adequately express his rage. Gaborn had evaded his assassins since youth, had repelled him from Longmot with a humiliating ruse, had stolen his forcibles. Gaborn had brought Saffira to her death, turned her against him. Now Gaborn turned Raj Ahten’s most loyal followers against him.

He wanted revenge.

“The reavers are fleeing,” Raj Ahten said as if speaking to a slow-witted child. “The danger is past, and the truce may now safely be put aside.”

“A battle may be won, but not the war,” Pashtuk replied.

“What makes you think the reavers will return?” Raj Ahten offered in a reasonable tone. “We can’t know that they will return.”

“O Great One,” Pashtuk said, “forgive me. I do not mean to offend, but he is the Earth King. He has Chosen you.”

“I, too, came north to save mankind,” Raj Ahten reminded Pashtuk. “I, too, can destroy reavers.”

Raj Ahten heard Gaborn’s warning in his mind: “Beware!”

Pashtuk raised his warhammer and lunged forward to swing, but the man could not have had more than three or four endowments of metabolism.

Raj Ahten dodged Pashtuk’s blow and struck him in the temple with his mailed fist. The blow shattered Pashtuk’s skull and drove bone into his brain.

“Beware!” Gaborn’s Voice warned again.

Raj Ahten spun. Two Invincibles at his back had drawn weapons, intent on murder. He briefly engaged them, and two others who joined the fray.

But Raj Ahten was no fool. Though his Invincibles might seem awesome to the common man, he had always known that some would turn against him.

He dispatched the four men swiftly, taking only a few light wounds. With his thousands of endowments of stamina, the wounds healed over before the last man fell.

He stood a moment, panting, watching eight other Invincibles who surrounded him. Lightning flickered, thunder pounded. None of the eight dared try to withstand him, yet he wondered dully if he should kill them anyway.

Gaborn’s Voice rang in Raj Ahten’s mind. “Men lie dead at your feet, men whom I have Chosen. Your own death hovers nearby. One last time I offer you protection and hope....”

“I did not Choose you!” Raj Ahten screamed. The force of his Voice was so great that the words rose up louder than the thunder.

As Gaborn galloped from Carris, rivulets of sweat poured down his face. A thousand tiny battles raged around him at once. Sir Langley and Skalbairn slaughtered the reavers mercilessly, attacking to good effect. Though many reavers fled Carris, not all were discouraged.

Yet Gaborn was aware that one intense battle raged nearby. Raj Ahten stood among his Invincibles. Gaborn had thought them all in danger, perhaps from some reaver mage.

But in warning Raj Ahten of danger, Gaborn had unwittingly aided in the slaughter of other men.

Appalled and hurt, Gaborn made one final attempt to make peace with the man. But Raj Ahten’s rebuff rose.

Save whom you will, it had declared, and now Gaborn found himself trying to kill one that he had Chosen.

He’d violated the Earth’s will.

Now his powers were stripped away, and Gaborn gaped in wide-eyed horror, awaiting the moment when they would extinguish completely.

Lightning flashed above Carris, and by its light Gaborn saw when the Invincibles’ struggles ceased: A single man rolled from that gruesome fray.

Gaborn spurred his mount, galloping north as fast as he could. He shouted to those nearby, “Raj Ahten is coming! Run!”

66 Apologies Due

Invincibles lunged at Raj Ahten from eight directions. Some struck low, some high. Some swung at his face while others tried to slip in from behind. They came with warhammers, daggers, fists, and feet.

Even his superior speed and decades of training would not allow him to leave such a row unscathed.

A warhammer caught Raj Ahten cleanly in the right knee, ripping ligaments and shattering bone. A dagger slipped through his scale mail and pierced a lung, while a half-sword sliced his neck, severing his carotid artery. A mailed fist dented his helm and probably fractured his skull. Other wounds were not so dire.

Raj Ahten managed to survive. Thousands of Dedicates in Kartish channeled stamina to him. Raj Ahten clung tenaciously to life as he fought.

In moments, he cut the eight down, and Raj Ahten slid from the back of a dead reaver, struggling to heal.

The wound to his neck closed quickly, the flesh knitting, though blood had sprayed everywhere. His head ached, and when he pulled his helm away, the dent in it drew flesh off with it.

The knee wound caused him the most agony. The hammer had chipped deep into bone, breaking the patella and twisting it sideways, so that the wound healed quickly but improperly.

When he tried to stand on the leg it ached so much he wondered if the head of the warhammer had broken off inside.

So Raj Ahten found himself in great pain as he ran north.

With so many endowments of metabolism, grace, and brawn, he should have been able to run fifty or sixty miles per hour. Under normal circumstances he could keep up that pace all day. Perhaps in the short term, Gaborn’s mount could outrace him. But Raj Ahten could run forever. In time he could catch the lad.

So he ran through gloom over the blasted lands. He sprinted hard past the Barren’s Wall, north along the highway through the villages of Casteer and Wegnt and Breakheart, until he left the sounds of battle far behind.

Sweat poured from him. He had fought for a long while. Though the melee had lasted for only the last two and a half hours in common time, with six endowments of metabolism it seemed to him that he had fought for fifteen. Since noon, he’d had little to drink, nothing to eat. The fell mage’s ghastly spells had left him weak and dazed, and now he’d been sorely wounded.

It was folly to chase Gaborn under such conditions. He was no force horse fed on rich miln and fattened by a week of idleness.

He’d been on short rations now for weeks, marching first north to Heredon, fighting his campaign there, only to have to flee south.

In the past month, he’d grown lean. Then he’d been forced to battle all day long. Though his wounds healed quickly, even that took energy.

So as he ran, a tremendous thirst plagued him. He’d sweated out far too much of his life’s water.

It had rained on and off all day. Ten miles north of Carris he dropped beside the road and slurped from a puddle.

The grass around lay wilted, as if it had baked in the hot sun. He marveled at how the fell mage had so cursed this land, and he wondered if it was safe to drink from such a pool. The water tasted odd...of copper, he decided. Or maybe blood.

He rested for a few minutes. Got up and raced on. After five more miles, he still had not seen Gaborn. But amid the acrid haze he could taste the scent of horses, and of those who rode with Gaborn.

He kept running. He had made a mistake in wearing his mail, he decided. It was too heavy; it wore him down. Or maybe it was the painful wound to his knee.

He wondered if he’d lost stamina, somehow, if maybe some of his Dedicates had died.

Or perhaps the Earth King or his wizard has cast a spell on me, Raj Ahten thought. He found it oddly difficult to keep running.

Or maybe it is this land. The land itself was cursed why not the people in it?

He raced until he smelled a change ahead. All along the route from Carris, the grass and trees had been dead, smelling of rot and decay.

But now he detected the cool scent of lush grasses, ripened in summer fields, and of mint; the taste of autumn leaves and of mushrooms growing wild in the woods; the honeyed aroma of vetch and other wild flowers that one did not notice until they were gone.

Twenty-eight miles north of Carris, he reached a barrier. In a single pace it seemed as if a line of demarcation had been drawn. To the south, every blade of grass was blasted and dead.

But on the far side of the line, the hills were rich and vibrant. Trees thrived. Bats fluttered in the night. A burrow owl called out.

On the other side of the line, Gaborn sat on his mount, though Raj Ahten still could not see his face. Instead, it looked very much as if a gourd balanced precariously on his saddle. Two lords rode at his side: a princeling wearing the livery of South Crowthen, and a young woman of Fleeds. And behind them were gathered perhaps sixty other knights of Heredon and Orwynne. It looked as if Gaborn had happened on a party of his own knights, a party that had seen the devastation and feared to cross over the boundary into the blasted lands. Men and women in that group brandished bows and axes. He recognized his cousin Iome among the lords.

Binnesman the wizard sat atop Raj Ahten’s own great gray Imperial warhorse. He held his staff high in his right hand. Fireflies swarmed round it in a cloud, lighting his face. In his left hand, he brandished a few leaves.

At his side stood his wylde, a woman in a bearskin robe with skin as green as the flesh of an avocado.

Raj Ahten halted. He’d seen her from behind earlier, had seen Gaborn flee with her. He had not recognized what she was then. Had he known that the wylde was here, he might not have dared follow.

Raj Ahten tried to feign unconcern as he drew close.

A strange and disconcerting numbness began to steal over him, over his face and hands, anywhere that his flesh was exposed. It became difficult to draw a breath. Everything felt cold.

He did not know what spell so dismayed him, what herb the wizard used, until Binnesman warned, “Stay back. You cannot resist the monkshood. Your heart will stop if you advance much farther.”

Raj Ahten knew the herb now. He had brushed against it as a child and felt it numb his skin, but it had not been in the hands of an Earth Warden then, had not been magnified by his powers.

“Far enough,” Binnesman said. “So, Raj Ahten, why do you follow the Earth King? Have you come to do obeisance at last?”

Raj Ahten halted, gasping for breath, his whole body numb and tingling. Even with all his endowments, he could not fight an Earth Warden—especially one guarded by a wylde and sixty lords. The wylde now raised her nose in the air, sniffed. “Blood—yes!” she cried in delight. She smiled, fangs gleaming.

Raj Ahten had never before looked into the face of someone who intended to eat him, yet he did not doubt the meaning behind her beatific expression.

“Not yet,” Binnesman whispered to the wylde, “but if he advances, then he is yours to play with.”

Raj Ahten swallowed hard.

“You have my forcibles,” Raj Ahten said to Gaborn, as if to dismiss the ward. “I want them back—nothing more.”

“I want my people back,” Gaborn said “I want the Dedicates you killed at the Blue Tower. I want my father and mother, my little sisters and my brother.” To Raj Ahten, it seemed a singularly odd moment, to hear that gourd speak. Raj Ahten studied the Earth King’s Voice warily.

“It’s too late for them,” Raj Ahten said. “Just as it is too late for my wife Saffira.”

“If it’s vengeance you’re after,” Gaborn said, “take it from the reavers. If any man here has been injured, I have the greater claim, and if it was vengeance I wanted, I could take it even now.”

Raj Ahten smiled. “Is this why you stopped, Gaborn Val Orden—to make petty threats?” he asked. “Do you need the comfort of wizards and knights at your back just to snivel at me?” Raj Ahten stood panting, determined to hide how much the monkshood affected him. He wished he could see a face, to learn what the lad might be thinking.

“No, I did not come to make threats. I hoped to warn you that you are in grave danger. I felt such danger myself, yesterday, just before you destroyed the Blue Tower. It was a cloying, indefinable rot. I tell you that Mystarria is not the only land where reavers are massing. I fear that your Dedicates will be next.”

He sounded sincere, though the lad had no cause to wish Raj Ahten well. “So, you want me to flee home?” Raj Ahten said. “To chase phantoms while you strengthen your borders?”

“No,” Gaborn answered “I want you to go home and save yourself. If you do, I will use all the powers at my command to aid you.”

“Not half an hour ago, you tried to kill me,” Raj Ahten pointed out. “What has brought about so great a change of heart?”

“I Chose you,” Gaborn said. “I did not want to use my powers against you, but you forced me to it. I ask you one more time, join with me.”

So the boy seeks an ally, Raj Ahten realized. He fears that he cannot stop the reavers on his own.

Raj Ahten wondered if Gaborn still might be persuaded to return the forcibles.

“Look around you, Raj Ahten,” the wizard Binnesman cut in. “Look at the land behind you, the death and ruin! You faced the fell mage. Is that the world you want? Or would you come with us, to this land, to a land that is fair and green, hail and living?”

“You offer me land?” Raj Ahten said, genuinely disappointed. “That is gracious: to offer land that I could so easily take, land that you are incompetent to hold.”

“The Earth bids me warn you,” Gaborn said. “A pall lies over you. I cannot protect a man who does not want my protection. If you stay in any of the kingdoms of Rofehavan, I cannot save you.”

“You cannot put me out,” Raj Ahten said. He glanced back toward Carris, toward his own troops.

In that moment, something changed in Gaborn. He began to laugh. Not a mere nervous chuckle, but a laugh of such deep and profound relief, a laugh from so deep in the gut that Raj Ahten wondered at the source. He wished he could see the boy.

“You know,” Gaborn said in a cordial tone. “Once, I might have feared you and your Invincibles. But I have just realized how I could defeat you, Raj Ahten. All I need do is Choose your people—man by man, woman by woman, child by child—and make them my own!”

Beside Gaborn, the wizard Binnesman smiled and also burst into laughter as he realized Raj Ahten’s predicament

Raj Ahten cringed inwardly as he saw the truth. He himself no longer had an army at Carris. He doubted that he could bring any men against Gaborn at all.

“Go back to Carris if you dare,” Gaborn suggested coldly. “You defeated twelve Invincibles, but I have hundreds of thousands of followers there: your men. Will you fight them all?”

“Give me my forcibles;” Raj Ahten demanded calmly, hoping that through the persuasive power of his Voice, he still might reach some settlement. But Gaborn Val Orden shouted, “No bargaining, you foul cur! I offer you your breath, nothing more! Begone, I order you one last time—or I’ll take even that!”

Raj Ahten’s face flushed with rage, and his heart began to pound in his chest.

He shouted and charged.

A dozen knights loosed arrows. He whipped his hands around, tried to knock them aside, but one lodged in his injured knee. He fought the bone-chilling numbness that sapped energy from his heart.

And then the green woman rushed to meet him. She took him by his coat of mail and lifted him, her nails digging so powerfully that bits of scale mail scattered from his coat like scales from a trout.

He tried to grapple with her, aiming a punch at her throat with his mailed gauntlet.

The force of his blow shattered his right arm, though it also knocked the green woman backward a pace. She seemed surprised to be affected at all—surprised, but not injured.

She screamed and drew a small rune in the air, her right hand twisting in an intricate little dance that baffled the eye.

Then she slugged him in the chest. His ribs shattered, ripping into his lungs and heart. Raj Ahten flew backward head over feet a dozen yards, lay gasping for a moment, staring up at the evening sky.

He had not noticed until now that the clouds had begun to scatter, that brilliant white stars pierced the heavens. With his thousands of endowments of sight, he could see more stars than a common man could, infinitely more stars—swirling masses of light, dazzling orbs—all very pretty.

He lay choking on his own blood, heart beating erratically. Every fiber of his chest seemed to burn, as if each individual muscle were demolished. Sweat broke upon his brow.

They’ve killed me, he thought. They’ve killed me.

Blood pounded in his ears, and the green woman rushed to him, grabbed his throat, and prepared to yank nut his windpipe.

“Hold!” the wizard Binnesman shouted.

The green woman merely held him. Her dark-green tongue darted out, slowly played over her upper lip. In her eyes, he could see an endless longing. “Blood?” she pleaded.

Binnesman rode his mount up close to Raj Ahten, and several knights surrounded him, bows drawn. Fortunately; the wizard had dropped his leaf of monkshood. The wizard asked Gaborn in mock sincerity, “What say you, milord? Shall we do him now?”

Raj Ahten was healing. The shattered bones in his chest were knitting askew; his right arm throbbed from fingertip to shoulder. He began healing, and in a few minutes he felt sure that he’d be able to fight. He needed to stall them.

Yet he healed slowly. More slowly than he’d have thought possible. Even with thousands of endowments of stamina, he could not heal.

He lay at their mercy while they ringed him like hounds.

Myrrima looked over at Gaborn, studied the Earth King. She could see the righteous anger flaring in his eye, could see how livid he was. His muscles were taut, hard. She’d been astonished that he’d asked the Wolf Lord’s forgiveness, sought an alliance even now.

But that was past. Gaborn fumed, and she thought that Gaborn would kill him himself, though she yearned for the honor.

Myrrima had not lied a few hours’ past, when she’d told Iome that the presence of the Earth King made her want to fight something. Gaborn was someone whom she would willingly die for.

No man on the face of the earth deserved an execution more than did Raj Ahten. She felt fortunate to have met Gaborn here, this fine evening, so that she would be present to see the demise of the Wolf Lord.

Yet with pain and regret and a tone of finality, Gaborn answered Binnesman. “No. Leave him.”

“Milord!” Prince Celinor shouted in outrage, as did Erin Connal and a dozen other lords, though Celinor’s voice rose above the rest. “If you will not kill him, give me the honor!”

“Or me!” other men shouted.

Iome tried to remain calm. “My love, you make a mistake here,” she told Gaborn through clenched teeth. “Let them have him.”

Rage burned in Myrrima’s veins. She’d seen Gaborn’s father alive at Longmot five hours before the castle fell, and he’d refused her entry to the fortress, knowing that in doing so he probably saved her life. She’d seen him cold dead, along with thousands of other warriors, later that night.

She recalled Hobie Hollowell and Wyeth Able and a dozen other boys from Bannisferre who had died in that battle, while closer to home the farmers all around her house had been decapitated by Raj Ahten’s scouts as his army sought to slip unnoticed through the Dunnwood. Even her neighbor, ninety-three-year-old Annie Coyle who couldn’t have hobbled to town to save her life, had been butchered.

Gaborn’s own wife had been robbed of her glamour, had watched her mother die at Raj Ahten’s hand. She’d been present when her own father was assassinated because of Raj Ahten’s deeds, and her armies had been decimated.

Yet Gaborn had the audacity to forbear.

And as Myrrima gazed around at the hard faces of the knights in that company, she knew that not a man among them had lived a life untouched by Raj Ahten’s evil. All of them had lost their kings and queens to his assassins, seen friends or brothers or parents die at his hand.

To think that Raj Ahten should live another minute seemed unbearable. The blood sang in her veins, demanding vengeance.

“As you love me,” Gaborn said to his lords, “as you love your very lives, I beg each of you to spare him. The Earth bids me to let him live.”

In outrage Myrrima studied Gaborn’s eyes. Every muscle in her was tense. She reached into her quiver and drew another arrow, nocked it. The first shaft she’d fired was still lodged in Rah Ahten’s knee, though she’d hoped to hit the bastard in the chest.

“This is unconscionable!” Sir Hoswell shouted. “To let him live is—”

Other men roared agreement.

But Gaborn merely raised his hand, asking for silence.

Gaborn said solemnly, “I Chose Raj Ahten in desperation, and sought afterward to use my powers to slay him. For my sin, the Earth has withdrawn. My powers have diminished, and it may be that I cannot make amends.

“I only know that for the sake of the world, I must lay my wrath aside. No man here wants to see him dead more than do I...”

Gaborn trembled with impotent rage. He groaned in despair. He put the spurs to his charger and fled south toward Carris as if he no longer trusted himself to remain and let Raj Ahten live.

He raced half a mile ahead, and stopped at the brow of the hill, on the blasted earth, looking back. “Come!” Gaborn cried: “Get away from there!”

Aspen leaves whispered behind Myrrima in the evening wind; the grass rustled. She gritted her teeth and waited.

Binnesman climbed down from his own mount, touched the green woman’s shoulder. “Come,” he whispered into her ear. “Leave him for now.”

The wylde backed away, though no one else did. The knights held steady on their horses in the gloom, weapons bristling. Myrrima could hear the hard breath of their anger, smell their sweat.

Raj Ahten sat up, pulled the arrow from his knee. The wylde had torn his surcoat and so decimated his kingly scale mail that the coat now looked a ragged mess, ripped and shredded in the front.

The Wolf Lord of Indhopal stared at the lords, regal and imperious even now. He wheezed as he breathed, as if something inside him were torn. “Were I the Earth King,” he said softly, “I would not be such a pathetic little man.”

“Of course not my cousin,” Iome said, “for you so need to show yourself to be every man’s superior, you would of necessity be both much larger, and far more pathetic than he.

Iome turned from the odious Raj Ahten and spoke to the lords. “Come. Let us go.” She turned and followed Gaborn. Other lords began to file off after her, slowly at first, but then faster, for they feared to be alone with Raj Ahten.

Myrrima stayed, determined to be the last to leave, to show no fear. Sir Hoswell stayed at her back, while Binnesman kept his wylde at his side.

When the others had all fled, Myrrima held Raj Ahten with her glare. Still seated on the ground, he stared up at her as if amused.

“I’ll thank you for the return of my arrow,” Myrrima said, nodding toward the shaft in Raj Ahten’s hand. She wanted him to know that it was her shaft that had scored on him, for all the good it had done.

Raj Ahten climbed to his feet, presented the arrow and answered in a seductive tone. “Anything for a beautiful woman.”

She took the arrow and surreptitiously sniffed at him, to catch his scent, so that if she ever needed to track him, she’d be able to do so.

Raj Ahten said, “I have but three words for you, young woman: Wolf...Lord...Bitch.”

Raj Ahten turned southwest, headed off through the blasted lands.

Myrrima left the blood on her shaft and dropped it back into her quiver. She turned her horse and followed her King, though leaving Raj Ahten alive was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

She did not suspect how much she’d come to regret it.

67 In the Blasted Lands

Averan stayed with Borenson after the battle. Some healers from Carris came and looked at him, learned the nature of his wounds, and then left him in search of others who were closer to death.

She could only vaguely guess what was wrong with the big knight. Though the healers said he would not die of his wound, one woman offered nightshade anyway.

Borenson only growled angrily and lay on the ground, still curled up like a babe.

Averan found herself a cloak from a dead man to keep her warm. She looked for the green woman, but Spring had apparently run off during the battle—or gotten herself killed. Averan didn’t know which, and she found herself worrying, constantly listening for the sound of feet squishing through the mud.

By an hour after nightfall she realized she was hungry, so she took Borenson’s knife for protection and began wandering through the maze of dead reavers toward Carris, searching for the right piece of meat.

Up in Carris, buildings were still afire, and she managed to pick her way among the dead reavers by this faint light.

The causeway was well guarded by thousands of men: warriors of Carris, Invincibles, and footmen from Indhopal. They’d cleared most of the reavers’ corpses from the causeway, shoving them into the lake. The men seemed terrified that the reavers might return under the cover of darkness. They sat beside campfires and swapped tales, sometimes laughing apprehensively. Theirs was still an uneasy peace, but Averan could never have imagined that they would have formed a truce at all.

But she heard little laughter in the camp. Instead, the men spread nasty rumors that the Earth King had died, or had forsaken them all. Others related nervously how they had discovered in the midst of battle that their leader had fallen silent.

Averan tried to conjure up a vision of the Earth King, but when she closed her eyes, she could not see him.

He was dead, she decided.

At the head of the causeway, the warriors had just dragged up part of a huge reaver mage all wet and blackened. Flaming runes still burned all around its head, and As mouth had been propped open with a fence post so that one could see how wide its jaws were.

“What’s this?” Averan asked the men camped nearby.

“The fell mage, or what’s left of her,” one man replied. “We fished it from the lake. Be careful now, she’s still twitching, and she might bite you!” The men all laughed at their stupid joke. Even a little girl of nine could see that the corpse of the fell mage wasn’t twitching.

She was by far the largest reaver killed today, ancient and venerable in her way.

Averan stared at the mage in amazement. She climbed into the mage’s mouth, and outside the men hooted and cheered. “There’s a brave one,” one of them said.

Averan walked to the far back of the reaver’s mouth, until she found the soft spot in the mage’s upper palate. She plunged her knife up into it and sliced quickly, afraid that someone would stop her.

She was hungry, and this was the only food that would satisfy.

When the blood gushed out, she reached her arm up as high as she could and grasped some of the reaver’s brains. The fell mage was so huge that her brain was still hot and steamy.

For a long time Averan gorged, then she lay down in a groggy stupor on the reaver’s palate as strange dreams assailed her, carrying her through unimagined realms.

From the fell mage, Averan began to learn much about the One True Master’s magic. What Averan learned terrified her to the core of her soul.

She desperately wanted to tell someone, especially the Earth King. But when she closed her eyes and tried to visualize him, she still could not see him.

“Hey, little girl, what are you doing in there?” some fellow asked. Averan looked up. She still had some bloody meat in her hand, and she wiped it on the reaver’s tongue.

A man stood outside the reaver’s mouth, bearing a torch. He was not a knight, just some common fellow. “Here now, you can’t eat that. In me get you some real food!”

The look of wide-eyed horror in the man’s eyes let her know that she should not touch him. He thought she was mad, and if she got close enough, he’d try to put her in a cage.

Averan grabbed her knife in both hands and held it up for him to see. “Back!” she shouted.

“Here now,” the fellow answered, backing away cautiously. “I won’t hurt you. I only want to help.”

Averan got up and darted past, dodged away from him and raced down the causeway between the campfires.

When she reached the end of the causeway, she turned for a moment and shouted to the frightened warriors camping there. “The reavers won’t return—not here, not tonight! Don’t you see, they won this battle! They’ve destroyed all of the blood metal in the ground, they have no reason to come back here.”

Everyone looked at her as if she were crazed. “I mean it!” she said. “The One True Master is preparing the Seals of Desolation. If you don’t stop him, no place will be safe!”

But of course everyone just stared at her as if she were mad. No one would listen to a crazy girl. She turned and fled.

“Milady,” Myrrima begged Iome. “I would like to go on into Carris. There will be other wounded to attend.” She realized belatedly that she used the words “other wounded” because she saw the wounds so deeply in Gaborn.

“Of course,” Iome said, releasing her from service: The sixty warriors had gathered in a circle not far from where they’d fought Raj Ahten.

Gaborn looked up in the starlight “Your husband is about a third of a mile northwest of the castle,” he said. “He is alive, but has not moved in a long time. I regret that I cannot come with you. I need...I need to speak to the Earth, and the soil here is dead and powerless.” He glanced toward the north, as if he would ride that way.

Gaborn did not say more. His tone warned her that Borenson would be wounded, that she needed to steel herself for what she might find. She could not imagine her husband, one of the most powerful warriors in Mystarria, lying wounded, near death. She imagined that all his bones were shattered, or that his neck was broken.

“Please go with her,” Iome begged the lords. “There will be many wounded. We must do what we can.”

“I will accompany you north,” Erin Connal said to Iome.. “I’ve business in my own lands to attend.”

Myrrima and the rest of them turned and rode south, leaving Gaborn, Iome, Binnesman, the wylde, Jureem, Erin, and Celinor alone. The lords rode in silence for several minutes, until they were far out of earshot, and at last one lord of Orwynne asked, “What do we do now?”

In order to fill the uncomfortable silence that followed, Myrrima said, “We’ll do what we have to. We fight on.”

“But what of the ‘dark times to come’ that Gaborn spoke of? He said he Chose us to save us through the dark times to come.”

“The times grow darker still,” Sir Hoswell answered

“If we stay close to the Earth King, he can still warn us of danger,” one man said. His voice was full of fear.

Myrrima tried to imagine her future, to see herself at Gaborn’s side, a wolf lord with a few hundred other men and women, hiding in the woods, struggling to survive the incursions of the reavers.

But as she rode through the blasted lands, the smell of decay rising from the dust all around her, she realized that there would be no woods to hide in.

Rocks, then. We will hide under rocks, she consoled herself.

We will do as we must, Myrrima told herself silently.

She gritted her teeth, drew reins on her mount, and since she was in the lead, the lords behind all did the same, looking at her expectantly.

“I’m a wolf lord now,” she said, examining the men’s faces. Their expressions were dulled by grief. “There is no one who will save us. But Raj Ahten’s forcibles lie hidden in the King’s tombs in Heredon, and perhaps with them we can save ourselves.”

The men looked up at her, uncertain. One proud knight of Fleeds said, “What are you saying? Do you want to be our lord? Is that not presumptuous?”

Myrrima held up her bow for all to see. “I’d not ask to be your leader. No one should ask such favor. I forswear all kings,” Myrrima said, “until the Earth King comes again.

“But I tell you this: I swear fealty to you all. I swear fealty to mankind—heart, might, mind, and soul! Wherever one stands in need, you will find me fighting beside him, using whatever weapons I may find—the endowments of dogs, my own teeth and nails if I must. I swear fealty to you all, for mankind, and for the Earth!”

The lords looked up at her bow in dull wonder, while the blood sang in Myrrima’s veins. She was making herself a Knight Equitable, sworn to protect mankind. The men she rode with were powerful Runelords, noblemen with a long history of service to Heredon, Fleeds, and Orwynne. She did not expect them to follow suit, but was astonished and gratified when one by one, each man brandished his own weapon and raised it to the sky, shouting, “For mankind, and for the Earth!”

Thus the Brotherhood of the Wolf was forged on that dark day.