Wizardborn

39 Asgaroth

Erin and Celinor rode through the day without event. Their journey around Beldinook had slowed them to a crawl, for even their fast force horses could not negotiate the rocky streambeds and steep trails easily. By nightfall they’d skirted the southern tip of Beldinook and reached the plains of Fleeds. Clouds were rolling in, and now darkness and an approaching storm slowed them once again.

They stopped at a good roadside inn and had their first decent meal of the day—rye bread and a trencher of gravy made of stewed starlings in rosemary. On the side were scallions and parsnips cooked in butter and honey.

After dinner they went to bed and lay in one another’s arms. Celinor held Erin for a long while, and she wondered at it. She’d never slept in a man’s arms before. She loved his touch, but knew that it would not make for a restful sleep. She wondered how long men and women needed to sleep together before they got used to it.

Celinor seemed distracted, Erin more so.

“Tomorrow is the day,” he whispered. She knew what he meant. Tomorrow they would reach South Crowthen, probably late in the afternoon. They would meet his father, and try to discover how deep his madness went.

“Promise me that you won’t do anything rash,” Celinor asked. “My father has always been a good man. He treated me well as a child. If he has gone mad, let me deal with it in my own way.”

She knew what he wanted. Celinor had said that his grandfather had gone mad, and had to be locked away beneath the castle, until he finally died of old age. It was a family curse, apparently. Celinor had promised his father that if the curse ever struck, he would lock him away. Erin did not envy Celinor his duty.

“All right,” she conceded. “But be careful. Some men, you can see the madness in their eyes. Others can hide it. Your father is dangerous.”

Celinor nodded. His father was plotting against the Earth King, and had already gained some support. Anders claimed that Gaborn had masterminded the death of his own father in order to gain the throne.

“My father isn’t a danger to us,” Celinor said. “He’s just...so confused. I’ll talk to him.”

“Be careful what you say,” Erin said. “Your father is a smart man, a cunning man.”

Celinor seemed to think a moment, then said, “He would think it a compliment if you told him so. Why do you call him cunning?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. Your father told you that I was Gaborn’s sister...”

“It’s an interesting deduction,” Celinor said. “Given the habits of the horsesisters, it makes sense that your mother would choose a sire from a noble line. You look as if you could be Gaborn’s sister. And you were born nine months after old King Orden’s hunting party passed through Fleeds....”

“I know who my father is,” Erin said. She did not know if she dared tell him. The truth was as bad as the lie. “I’ve seen the genealogy. My mother chose a sire from House Orden, but it was not Mendellas. She thought there was a better man in the party—Paldane.”

“Of course—you’re not his sister, but his cousin!” Celinor said. “Better breeding, but without the title.”

He saw her dilemma. Paldane was Gaborn’s uncle. As Paldane’s only offspring, Erin was still his heir by Mystarrian law. So even though she wasn’t Gaborn’s sister, her predicament remained.

Celinor held silent for a long moment. She knew what he was thinking. By the laws of her people, they were wed. Celinor was a prince of South Crowthen, and now he had married into the family of House Orden. If Gaborn died, Celinor could assume the throne of Mystarria.

She wondered if he was tempted by the prospect.

At last he whispered, “You must never reveal that to anyone, especially to my father.” Erin didn’t plan to, but she wondered just how much Anders knew, or guessed at.

Erin tried to sleep, but her mind could not rest. She kept recalling her dream during the afternoon, the great owl of the netherworld summoning her.

She knew that dreams were often just bits and pieces of memories. Could it have been that alone? It had seemed so real. Yet some things did not quite make sense, if the dream came only from memories. The owl had called a “warrior of the Shadow World.” Erin had heard that the netherworld was sometimes called “the One True World,” but she’d never heard of her world referred to as a shadow world. And the details of the place were like nothing she’d ever conceived.

For a long time, she lay, afraid to sleep, but finally slipped off to slumber....

She woke in the owl’s lair. It was daylight now, and an early morning sun streamed under the branches of the tree. It barely lit the burrow. The owl sat high up on its perch, as it had before. Beneath it lay a pile of bones: squirrel, rabbit, and fawn. Her dagger still sat there, piercing the skull of some froglike creature.

The owl’s eyes were closed, and it breathed softly. She could smell it more strongly now, its oily feathers, the scent of blood and old bones.

The burrow descended farther into the ground, a tunnel. Sconces in the wall suggested that it had been dug with human hands, but had long lain unused. Arcane symbols were carved into the living wood of the tree, runes unlike any that Erin had ever seen before.

“You have returned. Thank you for coming in our hour of need,” the owl whispered. Erin glanced up. The owl still breathed softly. The beast did not speak in her tongue, yet its words pierced her, filled her with understanding and communicated emotion all at once. She felt its deepest gratitude.

“I didn’t come,” Erin said uneasily. “You brought me. I don’t deserve your gratitude.”

“Don’t you wish to be here?” the owl asked. “You answered the summons. Is this not your dagger?”

Erin blinked, looked around in the shadows for some avenue of escape. “I only thought of coming because I was looking for help.”

“Ah, you have troubles in your world?” Erin sensed amusement in the question.

“To put it mildly,” she said.

The owl shifted on its limb, peered at her. “The hope of our world may rest on you.”

“The hope of your world?”

“Perhaps the hope of both our worlds. Asgaroth has come to your realm.”

The name Asgaroth struck Erin like a mace. The owl’s words were heard by the heart more than the ears. They conveyed knowledge, seemed to inscribe it upon Erin’s bones. Asgaroth was the Darkling Glory that had attacked Castle Sylvarresta. He was a lord of tremendous power. His name struck terror into the hearts of Bright Ones and Glories alike.

“Asgaroth!” she said. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?” the owl asked. “A mighty warrior you may be, but even a Fury Blade could not kill a locus.”

Erin bolted awake, sat up in her bed. Celinor stirred beside her, tried to hold her close. But her heart still hammered. She could not rest, could not sleep. She felt certain that if she slumbered, she would only awaken in the netherworld.

And right now, her head felt near to bursting. The owl’s words had pierced her so. This was not the stuff of dreams. The words that the owl used were unfamiliar. In all of Rofehavan, there was no word for a being called the “locus.”

Yet in a flash she understood. A locus was a creature that housed itself within the mind of a vile man or beast. It entered like a parasite, but soon assumed control of its host.

Asgaroth was a great ruler among them, an evil that had existed from time immemorial. He was not a Darkling Glory. He was something much more, a powerful servant of a darker master. A thousand, thousand Shadow Worlds he had helped to destroy in a war that would rage through eternities.

40 A Mighty Wind

As King Anders took dinner, the dying screams of men suddenly filled his castle.

They came in through the uppermost tower and whirled down the stairwell. The wind carried the sound down to the Great Hall, then swirled up again through the chimney.

To an ear that was not attuned, it sounded like a simple moaning wind. But Anders had been listening for that sound all afternoon.

For a moment, the fire flared.

Ander’s wife felt the draft and said, “Oh my.”

Anders had hoped to hear a woman’s dying cry. But only five voices mingled in that scream, and all were male.

Anders raised his head and held a goblet of wine up to his latest guests: a Duke Stote from Lonnock, and Prince Grunensen from Eyremoth.

The prince was talking. He was a big strapping lad with soft dark hair and the mannerisms of a girl. “I can’t abide travel by ship,” he was saying. “The last time I rode one, the galley was full of rats. They spread diseases, you know. That’s why I travel by land. At least in the inns, the ferrin keep their number down.”

“I thought it was too cold in Eyremoth for either rats or ferrin,” Duke Stote jested.

“Milord,” Ander’s wife hissed into his ear, dismayed at the turn in conversation at the dinner table.

He smiled. The conversation would surely turn to grimmer matters than rats. “A toast,” King Anders said, “to friends from far lands.”

The guests smiled coldly, drank. It was a quiet dinner, filled with clumsy conversation and long silences. Anders excused himself between courses and climbed his tower.

There he stood looking far to the south. Iome was so far away. He could do little from here.

His attack had been clumsy, inelegant. His master was not pleased. Perhaps...

For a long while he thought about rats. Huge rats, black as coal, burrowing beneath houses. Fat rats on the wharf, feeding on fish heads. Sleek rats in the woods climbing the trees. Rats that carried pestilence and disease.

A notion took him. There were few men so susceptible to his spells that they would fight in his behalf. He had used up three already. But wars did not always need to be fought with men and arms.

Still, to send rats? To call down a plague upon a whole nation—the old, the infirm, women, and children?

In some bright corner of his mind, the man that Anders had once been cried out, The notion is monstrous!

Anders thought himself to be a hard man. He was a king after all. He’d ordered the execution of a highwayman when he was twelve. He’d fought men in battle.

He’d thought little of sending men to kill Iome.

But he’d never brought death upon innocents in such a wholesale fashion.

A cold wind tugged at the hair around his ear and whispered, It would please me.

“No!” he said aloud, shaking his head vehemently.

A cold gust slapped his back. The iciness took his breath. His head seemed to reel, and for a moment he felt dazed, as if he were drunk and spinning.

He suddenly trembled in fear, realizing that the rough paving stones stretched wide below, so close, so very close. He clung to the merlons as the wind rushed at his back. It would take so little to push him over.

Please me, a voice whispered in his ear.

For a second, Anders felt desperate. He’d sought to serve the wind, hoping that it would serve him in return. To some degree it did. Now, he saw that it could turn on him at any moment. He was in its thrall, would either do its bidding, or be discarded.

The cold wind pummeled him, slashing at his thin robes and tunic like a blade. It pierced his heart.

He suddenly stood tall and let the coldness seep into him. “Come, my warriors,” he whispered. “Come.”

The wind had been blowing from the south all day. Now the wizard on the weather vane of the highest tower turned and pointed to the west.

The wind beat down with a new ferocity.

Presently, Anders could hear sounds in the streets, the patter of tiny feet, the squeaking of small voices. He looked down in the deepening shadows, saw dark shapes darting across the cobblestones.

A terrier leapt out, barking, grabbed one of the small beasts. It shrieked in pain as the terrier broke its back.

But the rats continued to rise up from beneath the city. They scuttled out of drains and sewers, came leaping out of barns. They scurried down from trees and crawled up from beneath rotting floors. They went racing over the rooftops in furry little packs, flowing out the castle walls in a dark tide, casting off dank turds in their wake.

Here and there in the city below, a woman would cry out as she discovered a pack of rats scampering beneath her feet.

People would talk about it for days, Anders knew, the mysterious exodus of rats. But he needed them, the dirty little beasts, with their penchant for spreading disease.

They fled the city under the cover of darkness, traveling east with the wind.

Anders whispered softly to the south, “Iome, come home. Your land needs you.”

He had hardly finished when his wife came up to the tower. “Are you going to stay here all night? You have guests, you know.”

King Anders smiled.

41 Farion’s Father

Stars smoldered in the cold heavens above Mangan’s Rock. Sunset was gone an hour ago, and still the reavers sat on their pile of stones, casting their spells.

Wains filled with supplies had arrived from Castle Fells, and Gaborn’s army was well fed for the night. Many lords lay in their bedrolls, taking the first real slumber they’d had in days.

Everything seemed quiet, yet Gaborn sat beside his campfire, poised, pensive. He could sense danger approaching his perimeter guards.

Baron Waggit, who was acting as a sentry, called out to Gaborn from the edge of his campfire, “Milord, Skalbairn says that there’s something you should see.”

Immediately Gaborn came alert, sensing for danger. Yes, he could feel trouble brewing along the perimeter. He got up, with his Days in attendance, and followed Baron Waggit. The big man’s yellow hair shone like silk in the starlight, and his back looked broad enough to ride. Watch fires burned steadily in a ring around Mangan’s Rock, every two hundred yards.

Sounds carried preternaturally in the cool night air. Gaborn could hear the rasping of the reavers’ breath, as if the monsters had crawled closer in the darkness. Smoke still roiled from the top of Mangan’s Rock, and blue lights crackled around the Rune of Desolation.

As Gaborn followed, he spotted other sentries out on the plains in their pale livery, starlight reflecting from arms and helms.

He came upon Skalbairn. The big High Marshal had saddled his mount, and stood in the darkness bearing a lance in one hand, the reins of his horse in the other. He gazed longingly over the plains. Marshal Chondler stood watch at his side. They were nearly a mile from the base of Mangan’s Rock.

Chondler was whispering, “You are either the bravest man I ever knew, or more of a fool than I’d have given you credit for.”

“He’s no fool,” Waggit boomed. “You have the word of an expert on that.”

Skalbairn slapped the baron on the back in a friendly greeting.

Gaborn strode up behind the men. “What’s going on?”

“A reaver, Milord,” Skalbairn said. “A monstrous big one, behind those rocks. I want to kill her.”

Gaborn followed his gaze. Behind three humped rocks, a scarlet sorceress ambled on the valley floor. The huge creature glimmered softly, her entire body covered in fiery runes. She circled as if in a daze, dragging her rear legs like one wounded. She was less than half a mile off, about midway between the men and Mangan’s Rock.

“How did she get there?” Gaborn asked.

“We saw her climbing down the cliff,” Chondler said. “She was about a hundred yards up when she slipped and fell. Since then, she’s been wandering all over the field, much as you see her now.”

Gaborn considered attacking, felt inside himself. The notion aroused a sense of near panic.

“Leave her,” Gaborn said. “She’s not as helpless as she seems.”

“Ah, if only I had a ballista out here,” Chondler said, “I’d plant a bolt through her gizzard.”

“We have ballistas,” Gaborn told him. “They came on the wains about an hour ago.”

Chondler and Waggit looked at each other gleefully. Gaborn felt inside himself...yes, it would be safe to get in range of the monster. He urged, “Go get the ballistas.”

Chondler and Waggit hurried off into the darkness, leaving Gaborn alone with Skalbairn.

“You’ve taken a liking to Waggit,” Gaborn observed.

Skalbairn grunted. “He’s a good man, I think. Perhaps good enough for the likes of my daughter, Farion. I’ve long thought that she’d need a kind man, someone who will not condemn her for her weakness. She’s a bit simple, you see.”

Gaborn said nothing.

“You know,” Skalbairn said, nodding toward Chondler, “that man may serve you yet.”

“You mean he doesn’t now?”

Skalbairn shook his head. “He’s sworn to the Brotherhood of the Wolf. He doesn’t completely trust your judgment. He thinks you...too much a gentleman.”

Gaborn chuckled at the notion.

“He’s serious, milord,” Skalbairn said. He related Chondler’s tale of the charitable mother and her grasping son, then said, “Chondler claims that there is only one virtue, milord: moderation. And even that is not a virtue when practiced to excess.”

“By his argument,” Gaborn countered, “I should account myself worthy so long as I give as much as I steal, or tell the truth as often as I lie.”

“He’d say that a good man gives more than he steals,” Skalbairn said, “and rescues more than he butchers.”

“That seems a damned convenient argument.”

“Very convenient,” Skalbairn said. “It saves the mind a good deal of contemplation and assuages much guilt.”

Gaborn felt angry. He saw Chondler’s points: men do train themselves to see their vice as virtue; and a virtue carried to excess can become a vice.

But Gaborn believed that wrongs were more solid, like rocks jutting in a harbor. Any man of conscience could steer the course between them. To do anything else led to guilt and suffering. Chondler’s arguments were not merely circular, they seemed contrived to deceive. “What do you think about this?”

“I can’t very well fault you for your kindness,” Skalbairn said. “After all, I am the recipient of your generosity.”

“I was wrong to Choose Raj Ahten,” Gaborn said. “I see that now. Was I also wrong to Choose you?”

Skalbairn shook his head. “I don’t know. Obviously, I wouldn’t think so. You saved my life six times yesterday in the battle for Carris. I’m in your debt. I intend to repay you.”

Gaborn looked at the man. He stood holding his lance, gazing out toward the scarlet sorceress on the plain. A falling star flashed through the heavens above Mangan’s Rock, blazing a trail of light.

During the height of the battle yesterday, Gaborn had sent warning to many people, so many thousands of times, that he could not guess how many lives he’d saved.

Out in the fields behind Skalbairn, there was a sudden whunk—the sound of falling dirt and stones. Gaborn turned, saw a plume of dust rising. Not a hundred yards west of a watch fire, the ground had caved in, leaving a gaping hole some thirty feet wide.

“What’s that?” Skalbairn shouted.

Instantly, Gaborn realized what had happened, why the feeling of portent around his guards kept rising. The reavers were digging underground, trying to flank his men! But they’d tunneled under a rock that could not hold.

He saw their plan. Averan had said that none of the reavers here could build a Rune of Desolation. The reavers had stopped because they were thirsty, terrified, and desperate.

Now he suspected that she was right.

A plan blossomed in Gaborn’s mind. “Strike,” the Earth said. “Strike now!”

“Blow retreat!” Gaborn shouted. “Get our men away from the watch fires. Have our troops form up by the creek.”

Gaborn turned and raced into the darkness. “What?” Skalbairn called, “are we going to flee?”

“No!” Gaborn shouted. “We’re going to attack. I know how. I should have thought of it before.

“We have seen wonders today. Wait a moment, and I will show you one more.”

42 Crow’s Bay

Iome had sometimes tried to imagine the Courts of Tide, but imagination had failed her.

She knew that the city was set upon a number of islands, and she’d heard of the famous bridges that spanned them. The bridges were carved of crystal shipped from the Alcair Mountains on huge barges.

The stones did indeed vault from island to island, and though she’d fairly imagined the bridges to look as pale and translucent as ice in the moonlight, she had never envisioned their fine pillars. Each was cut in the form of a heroic figure that represented some virtue that the Runelords of Mystarria aspired to. Nurture was a woman who nursed a daughter in her arms. Courage was a stout warrior with a wavy-bladed dagger in hand, straddling a serpent that sought to entangle him. Charity was a lord hunched beneath a sack full of fruits and wheat, bearing it to the poor.

The sheer scale of the works was impressive. Ships could sail beneath the soaring bridges.

Though Iome had heard of the king’s Great Tower in Mystarria, the tallest edifice in all Rofehavan, she’d never visualized a tower that was three hundred feet tall. Even now she could make out the tiny figures of Mystarria’s vigilant far-seers, making their rounds on its highest ramparts.

Yet upon entering the city, she also saw the price that Mystarria’s king paid for this haven. Land was at a premium, and though the streets were free of clutter and well tended, they were also remarkably narrow. She rode as if through a chasm. In many places overhead, marble walkways and plazas spanned from building to building, so that as Iome’s retinue neared Gaborn’s palace, they traveled through tunnels where crystalline lanterns hung from black iron rungs. The sea wind cut through with its chill breeze.

Iome gaped up at the soaring citadels and remarkable stonework and tried to keep from gasping at each new fountain or frieze or hanging garden.

Sergeant Grimeson and the knights of Mystarria tried to keep from looking too pleased by her reaction.

But over and over again, she found herself letting her mouth fall open no matter how hard she tried to keep it shut. She didn’t want to look like some bumpkin who’d never strolled beyond the border of his village, but that is precisely how she felt.

“You should have seen it first in the morning,” Sergeant Grimeson said, “when the rising sun colors the towers gold.” They had to ride slowly now, and he seemed thoughtful, as if the words did not come easily to him. “The sunlight slants down through those towers, and fills the streets. You’ll see hummingbirds and sunbirds in shades of emerald and scarlet and streaks of blue streak through the hanging gardens to search for nectar. It’s like—By the Powers, it can be pretty.”

Hummingbirds were the pride of Mystarria. Before the Toth wars, they’d never been seen here. But after Fallion destroyed the invading armies, he sent ships to far lands beyond the Carroll Sea to hunt down the last of the Toth. In those far lands his men had found many wonders, and King Fallion himself brought back the hummingbirds as a gift for his people. They first began nesting here at the Courts of Tide.

I am the queen of this realm, Iome had to remind herself, the richest and finest in all of Rofehavan. Yet I feel like some barbarian from the frozen north.

She fell in love with the Courts of Tide, and just as quickly knew that she could never belong.

So she rode to the palace at midnight, and entered. Sergeant Grimeson ordered servants to “throw together a feast” in the grand reception hall while his men delivered the forcibles to the treasury.

Iome pulled out Gaborn’s instructions. He’d given her a note commanding Grimeson alone to contact a certain Abel Scarby so that he could secure the dogs that he needed. Gaborn wrote directions for finding the man’s house down an alley near the docks. But a cryptic message near the bottom warned Grimeson never to reveal where Scarby lived.

“Who is this Scarby fellow?” Iome asked Grimeson. “Why would Gaborn want to keep his whereabouts secret?”

“He’s the best damned dogfighter in the realm. He spends most of his time evading the King’s Guard. I can handle him.”

A dogfighter. He sounded thoroughly disreputable, as disreputable as Grimeson looked.

“And my husband knows this man well?”

“Well?” Grimeson said. “Of course! Why, they’re old friends.”

Iome was astonished that Gaborn knew either man on a first-name basis.

Gaborn needed good dogs. Though she suspected that Grimeson could handle this Scarby fellow, curiosity drove her to say, “If he’s Gaborn’s friend, I’d like to meet him. I’m coming with you.”

“But Your Highness, dinner is cooking!”

“It can wait until we get back. This is far more important.”

Grimeson nodded reluctantly, for there was nothing more that he could do.

In moments they were on fresh horses, and Grimeson let them canter through the city. The streets were empty so late of the night, except for the occasional alley cat or ferrin.

In minutes they reached the seamy side of the city, in Crow’s Bay, where cramped shanties and inns perched along the sea wall, and the smell of dead fish, whale oil, urine, and boiled crab hung heavy in the air. Soot blackened the stonework on ancient buildings.

Though it was late at night, music and raucous laughter escaped the open doors of the hostels. Everywhere, bandy-legged men lounged about on ale kegs, and painted whores laughed and advertised their wares. Old women cleaned and mended fishnets by lantern light, while seagulls wheeled and cried in the night as they scavenged for scraps. Children scampered to and fro like wharf rats.

This part of the city never slept. Near dawn, the boats would go out with the tide, and so long as no leviathans were sighted, they’d not return until sundown.

From time to time Iome could glimpse between various shops, inns, and fisheries out to the thousands of fishing boats—coracles and trimarines—moored in the horseshoe-shaped bay. They bobbed like bits of cork bark on the star-dusted water. Many boats had serpent heads carved at the prows, with white runes of steadiness and wayfinding painted on as eyes.

Sergeant Grimeson slowed his mount and entered one dark alley where sooty buildings leaned together. Iome had the good sense to know that she should never go in there alone—at least not if she were a commoner.

But she was Runelord, and rode with a guardsman. That lent her courage.

The hooves of their horses clattered over salt-crusted cobblestones. Swarthy men slouched on narrow porches, and the only light in the alley spilled from an open door far up the street. A pair of mastiffs with spiked collars lunged from behind a crate, barking and snarling at the horses.

Grimeson’s mount reared and pawed the air while Iome’s danced backward. In the confusion, as she struggled to regain control of her horse, half a dozen men swarmed from dark doorways.

One man began shouting at the mastiffs, aiming rough kicks into the flanks of the dogs while he cursed in language so amazingly coarse that Iome had never heard the like. Another young man jumped out, and with grimy hands took the reins to Iome’s mount and stood staring at her, his gap-toothed face hardly visible in the wan light.

Other men closed behind. One big fellow with white streaking his beard separated from the shadows. He held a spiked cudgel in hand. While the mastiffs barked, he challenged Grimeson, “Here now, lad, that’s a fine horse you’ve got, and a fine woman! And I’m sure you’ve gold in your purse besides. So tell me one reason why I shouldna slit your weasand and take them all?”

Iome fought her horse as the mastiff growled and snarled, barking at its feet. The gap-toothed man holding her reins didn’t let go, even when Iome reached down and drew the dagger from her boot. With her endowments, she could have gutted him like a fish, but she held back.

“You couldn’t handle either the woman or my horse,” Grimeson replied, “but you can have some gold, for ‘Much wealth is surely a curse.’ ” He pulled out his purse and tossed it to the scoundrel. Iome stifled a cry of outrage.

The scoundrel aimed his cudgel at one of his dogs and sent it yapping into the shadows, then began to laugh deeply.

“Grimeson,” he said, “what are ya doing down here among the galley rats? Surely ya can find men of lesser character to hobnob with? Or has Gaborn finally decided to arrest me?”

“It’s not men of character I’m looking for tonight,” Grimeson said easily. “For if I did, I wouldna be down here with you.”

As he spoke, a door opened in a nearby shanty. A trio of curious children dressed in rags peeked out to see the cause of the commotion.

The rogue hefted Grimeson’s purse curiously, then tossed it back to him. “How can I do for you?”

Grimeson threw the purse back, and the villain’s eyes went wide. “The king is in need of some dog flesh. And he says that Abel Scarby always knows where to find the best pit dogs in the city.”

Abel grinned broadly. “Fighting dogs, is it? Mastiffs? Bulls?”

“No, a peculiar breed,” Iome said. “Yellow dogs, and small, but known to take a liking to man quickly, and have certain other valuable assets. Some lords would take exception to such animals, but perhaps you know of them?”

Abel Scarby peered up at her. Iome had her hood pulled up to hide her face, but he could not fail to notice the quality of her mount, or of her clothes. She could tell that he was used to dealing with rogues, for he did not ask her name.

Abel spat on the cobblestones. “Na a popular sporting dog, but they can be had. And pound for pound, there’s na a more vicious dog in the pits. I remember one unlikely bitch—as treacherous as a sack of weasels—”

“Can you get some dogs?” Iome asked. “Tonight? Now? They’re not for me. They’re for the king. We’ll want thirty at least, more if you can find them.”

Abel said, “I’ll have ‘em for ya by sunrise.”

Iome bit her lip. “One more thing. The men who sell the dogs must take endowments of scent, and vector them to the king’s agent. I will pay well for this service.”

Abel Scarby swallowed hard and suddenly realized whom he was talking to. He bowed to one knee. He growled at the fellow who held Iome’s reins, “Kador, take your paws off the queen’s horse.”

Kador backed away and raised his hands, as if to ward off a blow.

“Excuse us, Your Highness,” Abel said. “We’re hard men, used to guarding our own backs. We keep the law in this alley. We meant no offense.”

“None was taken,” Iome said. “Any friend of Gaborn’s is a friend of mine.”

Abel stared up at her with solemn eyes and a troubled expression. “Is’t true, Your Highness? Gaborn is really the Earth King?”

“It is.”

“An’...dark times are ’pon us?”

Iome nodded.

Abel tossed the purse up to her and said loudly, “Yer Highness, I’ll want na coin.” He rested the knob of his cudgel on the ground in parody of a lord offering his sword, and his bright eyes shone with a mixture of hope and fear of rejection as he explained. “Milady, I’m na a fancy-pantser. Ya won’t find me wearing silk hose on feast days, and if ya ventured into my hovel, ya’d find it smelly as a bear’s den, and na a chair at the table clean enough for the likes of you to sit at. But my heart is as right and proud as any lord’s who ever bent a knee to ya. I’m na a knight, but I’ve got as much gristle in me as any animal what ever lived. An’ I’ve seventeen sons and daughters to my credit. So, I’m beggin’ you to ask the king—him what’s called me a friend—to Choose me an’ me kids.”

The young thugs around Iome all looked up at her expectantly, like dogs begging for scraps at their master’s table. The children in the doorway, wearing grime instead of cloaks and rags instead of clothes, timidly stepped out and crept to their father’s side. He threw his arms around the young ones. Iome hesitated.

Gaborn had no power to Choose the man, yet she dared not tell him. The man looked hopeless, forlorn.

Seventeen children. She thought of the one in her womb. Could she bear to have it torn from her?

“Gaborn is far away,” she said, “fighting reavers. I’m sure that he would Choose you, if he could.”

“When he comes, then?” Abel said. “Ya’ll ask him for us?”

There is a chance he will get his powers back, Iome assured herself. Yet she suspected that he never would.

“I’ll ask him,” she promised.

Abel’s lips were quivering, and his eyes shone dully from tears of gratitude. He stifled a sob, and his children all stood with wide eyes, till one young girl ran back into the house shouting, “Ma! Ma!”

Abel said through a tight throat, “Thank ya, milady. I’ll try ta be worthy of ya.”

Iome tossed back the purse. “Please, keep the money too. If not for your own sake, then for your wife and the little ones.”

Abel dropped his head, bowed lower. “My condolences for your father. He was a great king, from all I hear.”

“Thank you,” she said. Iome no sooner began turning her mount than Abel shouted, “Ya heard ‘em, boys, look lively!”

Iome spurred her horse from the alley, and for a moment Grimeson was hard-pressed to keep up with her as she fled. Half a mile up the road she left the squalid waterfront at Crow’s Bay.

Iome reined in her mount and dropped to the street, then stood for a moment, looking out to the water.

Her hands would not stop shaking.

“Will you be all right?” Grimeson asked.

“By the Powers, I have never felt so dirty and ashamed,” Iome said, shaking. “I couldn’t tell him no. I couldn’t tell him that his children might die, not with the little ones standing there. What can I do? I never imagined I could feel—”

Suddenly she realized how Gaborn must feel. Only for him it had to be a thousand times stronger.

She leaned against the wall of a fishery and emptied her stomach. Grimeson said nothing. There could be no consolation.

Iome wept for her people.

43

Averan and Binnesman sat on the hillside under the starlight. The sun had fallen hours ago, and a horned moon lingered on the horizon. In the distance Averan could see fires winking around Mangan’s Rock.

Deer had come down from the hills to feed in the meadow. They walked around Averan on dainty hooves, as unmindful of her as if she were a dandelion.

Binnesman had planted his staff in the ground, left it sitting upright, and explained to Averan that an Earth Warden always did so, that the staff might draw power from the soil.

Afterward, he fell silent. He did not take Averan aside and show her plants in the dark, fretting about how little time he had. For once he merely sat, resting, gazing across the fields, as if he could see to the ends of the world. He’d done nothing more for hours.

Perhaps he only remains silent to keep from frightening the deer away, Averan thought.

“Are you casting a spell?” she asked at long last, afraid to disturb him. The doe that grazed beside her did not so much as twitch an ear at the sound of her voice.

Binnesman turned his head, glanced at her from the corner of his eye.

Binnesman pondered a moment. “Yes, I am casting a spell of sorts,” he said. “I’m taking time to renew. The touch of grass, the smell of pines in the wind, the taste of soil—they invigorate me. Sometimes, rest can feel magical, can’t it?”

“I suppose.”

She said nothing more for a long minute, then asked, “Binnesman, what happens when people die?”

“Their bodies go back to the Earth, and their spirits...do whatever spirits do.”

“You saw Erden Geboren,” Averan said. “Was he happy?”

“About as happy as wights get,” Binnesman grumbled. She could tell that he turned aside hard questions. In her experience, adults seldom liked answering hard questions. In time, they even learned never to wonder about things at all.

“But...not all spirits rise, do they? What happens to the others?”

Binnesman glanced at her. “No one knows, really. It is said that some are reborn in the netherworld, or perhaps are born into worlds that are shadows of ours, just as our world is but a shadow of the one world. But not all spirits go away, it seems—for some remain behind as wights.”

“I think I’d rather be a wight,” Averan said. “I like it here.”

“Why?” Binnesman asked. “Do you want to cheat death?”

“Of course,” Averan said.

Binnesman smiled. “You can’t cheat it, but some people learn to face it calmly. Some even embrace it as a friend.”

“That’s just conquering fear,” Averan objected. “Anyone can do that. I want to cheat death too.”

“Well,” Binnesman said. “So you want to know how to come back as a wight. I’m not sure I know the answer. I think that the dead may hear our thoughts. It’s almost as if we can summon them by thinking about them, or wishing them near. Or maybe by thinking about them, we merely lend them greater form. I don’t know....”

He fell silent a moment, then added, “I’ve noticed that wights are almost always creatures of great will in life. By far, most of them are people who desired to do good, who sought to create rather than to tear down.”

“But not all?”

“Not all,” Binnesman said. “Some were people or creatures of great will alone, beings with black hearts.”

“What else makes a wight?” Averan asked.

“Who knows?” Binnesman said. “You see the stars in the sky. There are millions of them, and all of them have worlds like ours whirling around them. Or at least they have bits of world like ours.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Averan said. “Beastmaster Brand sang that—part of the Creation Saga.”

“Really?” Binnesman asked. “He must have been a wise man. Few know it nowadays.”

“He only knew part of it,” Averan said.

“Then I will tell you what I know. You see, once there was only one world, and one star, and beneath it grew the One True Tree.

“And One Rune bound them all together. But an enemy sought to change it, to take control. The enemy smashed the rune, and the pieces flew apart. They dashed out like shards of glass, and scattered through the cosmos.

“Now there are a billion, billion worlds or more, each one spinning around its own sun. Each a broken piece of the One True World, each one more or less true in its own way.”

“So there are people like us on those worlds?” Averan asked.

“Not exactly, I think. We are all distorted reflections of something greater, of what we once were. We might not pass for human on their worlds; they might not pass for human on ours. But we are similar in our hearts, if not in appearance. We all yearn to return to the One True World. Some say that our spirits, our wights, are pieces of our true self, longing to return home.”

Wizards had traveled to the netherworld, Averan knew. Raj Ahten’s flameweavers had summoned a Darkling Glory from the One True World, as it was sometimes called. And she’d heard of other creatures from that mystic realm.

Binnesman furrowed a brow. “Averan,” he said. His voice suddenly sounded choked. “Averan, the Earth...needs us to be strong now. The future is rushing toward us. I can feel it like a rising storm,

“I created the wylde to fight the Earth’s battles, but I have not had time to finish her, to train her. There will be no time. I can see that now. Though I cannot unbind her, we’ll take her with us. I’m sure she’ll be of use.”

“What are you talking about?” Averan asked. She was afraid that he would take her into the Underworld at that very moment, just lead her down into some cavern.

Suddenly the ground began to tremble and rock beneath Averan. There was a hissing from the forest, and Averan imagined that some world worm was about to rise, like the one she’d seen at Carris.

But no, it was only an earthquake.

She looked at Binnesman for comfort, but the wizard stood up and pointed to the sky. Eight stars fell in rapid succession.

“What’s wrong?” Averan asked. “What’s happening?”

He jutted his chin down toward the grasslands, toward Mangan’s Rock. Averan gaped in surprise.

The watch fires around the rock all suddenly blazed. They were coming together in a huge crescent.

Gaborn’s men were setting fire to the plains!

“Come now,” Binnesman said. “We’ll get no more rest. Let us join the battle.”

As Binnesman’s mount galloped down from the hills and over the grasslands, Averan watched the flames shoot higher, filling her vision.

Gaborn had sent horsemen charging over the fields, spreading logs from watch fires upwind from Mangan’s Rock.

Now the flames leapt skyward, the fire spreading. They roared palpably, and rose a hundred yards in the air. Firelight smote against clouds of smoke, making them glow a ruddy orange, and through those glowing clouds Averan could glimpse the reavers on Mangan’s Rock, beginning to pace, their philia waving frantically.

What is he doing? Averan wondered. The fire could never climb the rock. The sides were too steep, too high. The few vines and grasses along the slopes would not catch.

But the reavers might well have sealed their own doom. They’d pushed the vast old oaks from the top of the rock, hurled them over its sides. The dry bark of the trees would burn, sending up clouds of smoke.

Did Gaborn hope to suffocate the reavers?

The very idea somehow terrified her.

She had smelled the world as a reaver, knew something of the beasts’ darkest fears. The smell of smoke loomed huge among those fears.

More than that, Fire itself scared her. It was the enemy of Earth, the antagonist to her Power.

“Can you feel that?” she shouted at Binnesman.

“What do you feel?” he demanded.

“The Fire. It’s aware of us. It’s angry that Gaborn seeks to use it against itself.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Binnesman said. “Fire consumes. Its appetite overwhelms its intellect. It destroys, and will spread devastation when it can. It cares nothing for life, either human or reaver. But that is also its weakness. Remember that. Fire will consume everything around it, until it burns itself out.”

She’d never sensed Fire as a power, at least not as strongly as she did now. Her growing Earth senses made her aware of the rising danger. “What’s he doing?” Averan cried, even when they were two miles away.

She could see men outside the line of flames, knights mounted on chargers, bearing down with lances. The firelight gleamed on burnished mail.

A scarlet sorceress suddenly came thundering out of the wall of fire, her runes glowing fiercely, her staff held in a great foreclaw. Smoke roiled around her, came rushing with her.

She strode out of the fumes and blaze, and brought her staff to bear as knights charged her from three directions.

One fellow lanced her side, and she spun to meet him, hissing furiously. Suddenly other sorceresses came loping out of the inferno in her wake. Clouds of noxious fumes hovered around them.

“They’re coming from underground!” Binnesman shouted.

Averan saw it now. The reavers had been digging under the men, hoping to ambush them from beneath. Gaborn must have discovered it, broken into their tunnel. So he had lit the fires, thus filling their caverns with smoke.

The reavers burst up from a single chasm, just beyond the wall of flames, and made straight for Gaborn’s warriors.

Binnesman wrapped his arms tight around Averan’s waist, spurred his charger on.

As they drew near, she saw that not all of Gaborn’s troops rode. Hundreds of men now manned smaller blazes at the edge of the creek. They stood there over the logs, cooking huge slabs of meat.

In rising horror she realized what they were doing: they had cut the philia from the bungholes of dead reavers, and were throwing them onto the burning logs.

Even now she could smell the garlicky scent of them cooking, a stench that sent words shrieking in her mind. “Death, beware! Death! Death!”

She glanced back toward Mangan’s Rock. The wall of flames blew quickly to the east, had just begun to engulf the base of the cliff. It struck the wood and dry leaves, sent a tower of flame soaring up three hundred feet along the sheer walls.

She had no sooner realized what Gaborn was up to than it started: the reavers panicked.

All along the top of Mangan’s Rock, they scurried to escape.

A moving mass of monsters stampeded to the south, heading for the lowest cliffs, and began to rush down.

Reavers slipped from the top, pushed by their fellows behind. Black crablike monsters flailed their arms and legs as they fell.

Some of the plunging reavers slammed into their fellows below, knocking them from the cliffs. Rocks crumbled beneath their mighty claws. Some of the reavers’ carapaces shattered as they met stones below. Others flailed about on broken legs.

Another tremor struck, and Averan wondered if Gaborn had suddenly regained his powers. Was he making the earth shake?

An entire escarpment collapsed, and the resulting avalanche hurled two thousand reavers into a pile. Those on the bottom died, while those on the top scurried off. Walls of flame shot up along the eastern slope of Mangan’s Rock, sending clouds of smoke billowing.

And all through it, Averan could hear the death screams of the reavers in her mind. The scent of the burning philia nearly overwhelmed her.

Binnesman rode to Gaborn, who sat on his mount. Gaborn stared at the destruction with eyes that gleamed from reflecting fires. His charger stamped its feet nervously.

“Isn’t it beautiful!” he shouted. “The reavers were bluffing, like Averan said. They couldn’t build another Rune of Desolation. They only hoped that we would spend ourselves trying to dislodge them.

“Once I figured that out, and thought of setting fire to the plains, the rest was easy. Not a man will die!

“Knowledge!” he shouted. “Knowledge is better than a fine warhammer!”

Reavers threw themselves from the rock. Instead of merely climbing down, some dared to try leaping a hundred yards to safety, only to shatter legs under the impact.

From out of the smoking tunnel, the last few scarlet sorceresses and blade-bearers fled.

Averan had given Gaborn the weapons he needed to dislodge the reavers. A sense of horror welled up in her. She had not meant to cause such mindless slaughter.

A sound like rising thunder rose on the plains south. The surviving reavers formed into columns and began to retreat. The earth trembled at the sound of the stampede.

Gaborn glanced at her and jutted his chin toward the cliffs. “Let’s go see if we can find the Waymaker.”

44 Prayers in the Dark

Raj Ahten and his men hurried along the Old Fortress Trail south of Maygassa. He’d hoped to get fresh horses, but rode his camel still.

The trickle of fleeing humanity had become a flood—a surging tide of bodies that could not fit within the confines of the trail, but which spilled out on both sides, so that hundreds upon hundreds marched abreast through the jungle. For long hours Raj Ahten had to ride slowly along the side of the road to make it through the throng.

Overhead, in the dark of night, monkeys leapt through the trees shouting in panic and hurling bits of fruit and leaves, until the very jungle seemed to shake.

On the banks of the Kelong River he stopped near a bridge an hour past midnight and watched his people all in one sweep. The Kelong was wide, with rice paddies planted along both banks, and afforded him a good view of the exodus. What he saw made him tremble:

The people hurried along the river by torchlight. At any moment, he saw tens of thousands of them—men with walking sticks and immense bundles on their backs, struggling forward like oxen, wearing only loincloths and a thick coating of sweat. Women carried baskets on their heads or babes strapped to their chests.

Too many men and elephants had tried to cross the bridge at once.

Now the bodies of elephants lay among the shattered timbers in the shallows.

So the people slowed to wade across the river.

All of humanity was there—a proud lord rode beneath a silk canopy upon a white elephant, arrayed in a coat made of cloth of gold. His guards sported fine red silk trimmed with otter fur. They surged through a throng of peasant women adorned only in shifts of crudely dyed cotton. Wealthy merchants traveled as merchants will—in rickshaws pulled by poor laborers so blunt faced and brutish that they seemed more animal than human.

Whole families rode in rugged flatbed wagons drawn by water buffalo. One man pulled a handcart, with his infirm wife loaded in the back as if she were a sack of gingerroot on its way to market. An old philosopher had students, their heads all shaved except for their scholars’ knots, carrying cases of scrolls. Elsewhere, caretakers used bamboo rods to herd madmen and fools who were naked and chained together at the ankle.

The waters of the Kelong flowed slowly. Burning torches reflected from its surface, while smoke hovered above it in a blue haze.

Fathers and mothers groped for a foothold as they bore their young. Raj Ahten spotted a small girl who looked much like Saffira’s eldest daughter, riding in a pack on her mother’s back.

The mother stumbled and slipped beneath the muddy waters of the Kelong. When she surfaced, her child was gone. Peasants nearby shouted and peered into the depths of the river. Some dove under the dark water, seeking the girl by feel alone.

But their panicked search yielded nothing. Soon the child would surface, Raj Ahten knew. She would float facedown for a while, perhaps, until she washed up on the shore with the others that failed to make the passage.

The people kept coming. The exodus stretched beyond the horizon.

A peasant who had nearly crossed the river spotted Raj Ahten’s camel. He pointed and began to shout, “O Great Light, protect us! O Sun Lord, we beg of you!”

Other men and women heard the call, spotted Raj Ahten in the darkness. They began struggling to reach him, staggering in the muddy water. Soon a vast throng began shouting, clasped hands raised before their faces.

Distantly, he could smell death—the familiar stench of reaver’s blight.

He ordered his men to bypass the throng, and quickly forged the river, while pleas for his aid rose up as if on dark wings into the night.

An hour later he reached a hillside that looked over the plains. Three miles off, the jungles and grasslands steamed, turning gray before his eyes.

Masses of humanity snaked over the road in a vast throng. Their lanterns shone like a river of light. They would never outrace the reaver mage’s curse.

On each side of the road, an ancient city carved of white stone lay like broken bones upon the jungle floor.

The air filled with hissing, as if wet flesh sizzled in a fire. Not half a mile downhill the reaver’s curses struck: leaves instantly curled inward, then fell from the trees, leaving branches naked. Vines and smaller limbs dropped or writhed under the onslaught. Entire trees cracked as if lightning had taken them.

Clouds of parrots, weavers, and finches rose up and wheeled above the destruction.

The horizon showed an empty landscape of blight for as far as the eye could see. He was still a hundred and eighty miles north of Kartish.

“There will be famines this year,” Bhopanastrat said, “no matter what we do.”

The enormity of the destruction overwhelmed Raj Ahten. It would take days to truly settle into his bones.

Raj Ahten swatted his camel’s nose with his riding prod, forced it to kneel. He climbed down. “Let the animals forage,” he told his men. “It might be the last food they get for days.”

The eyes of Bhopanastrat and his men bored into his back. He could tell that they all wanted to know what he would do. But no man dared ask.

All day long, his muscles had felt weak somehow. Now his left hand was trembling.

Despite all that he could do, despite his endowments, Binnesman’s curse threatened to destroy him.

He rode through the night, past vacant cities over a landscape that was a surreal horror.

Creatures still lived. Tarantulas crept through the ruins, feeding on mice and linnets. But the trees were down. From horizon to horizon, not a blade of grass survived. The stench of rot filled his nostrils.

His people fled, but not all could make it. Raj Ahten found the dead along the roadsides—men who had worn their hearts out in a single day of running, the old, the infirm. Some of the dead had had their throats cut for a morsel of bread or the use of an ox.

The utter desolation drove out all worries of Wuqaz Faharaqin crying for his blood in the streets, or of Gaborn plotting his downfall. Nothing that men could do would ever compare to the malice of the reavers.

Hours later, just before dawn, he came upon one of his armies—three hundred thousand common soldiers twelve miles north of the Palace of Canaries.

They’d camped in a deserted city for the night to chew their rations and make peace with themselves. Their sullen faces stared up as he rode through the city, men in straw hats or turbans, eyes clouded with despair.

Even if they managed to drive back the reavers, there would be no food for man or horse for more than a hundred miles in any direction. Judging by the grim expressions on their faces, the warriors knew that they went to die. Here and there he heard men muttering solemn prayers in the dark.

When they saw Raj Ahten, some raised a shout of triumph, but most just gazed at him with sullen curiosity.

Hovering over the midst of the camp was a silken balloon shaped like a graak.

Beneath it, his flameweavers sat cross-legged before a campfire, along with his Days. The hairless flameweavers gazed up expectantly as he neared.

“What news from the front?” Raj Ahten asked.

“Aysalla Pusnabish leads your men,” Rahjim answered. “All day yesterday he probed the reavers’ defenses. Many men died.”

“How many?” Raj Ahten asked.

“Most of the knights in your cavalry, O Great One,” Rahjim said.

Raj Ahten breathed out a curse. The mines at Kartish were an open pit with steep sides and tailings piled haphazardly. Such terrain favored reavers, not cavalry.

“How can this be?” Raj Ahten asked.

Rahjim shrugged. “The reavers have built a fortress. The fell mage who guards it is mightier than the beast you faced in Carris. But all is not lost. Pusnabish has prepared well for the battle tomorrow.”

Raj Ahten stood rubbing his numb left hand, trying to increase the circulation.

The flameweaver Az nodded toward it. “You are feeling worse?”

“I’m well enough,” Raj Ahten said.

“I can heal you,” Az offered. But Raj Ahten wanted none of his healing—not at the price of his humanity.

Raj Ahten cast a cold eye on his army. These were troops of old Indhopal, dressed in simple breastplates with spiked helms on their heads, and round targets clamped to their left forearms. They bore weapons fit to kill reavers—oversized longspears, warhammers, and axes. But men without endowments would not fare well with such weapons. Even if a man could swing these warhammers, he’d tire quickly.

Three hundred thousand common troops would be ineffectual against the reavers. But Raj Ahten could think of some use for them. At the battle for Carris, when confronted by masses of men, the reavers balked. They could not detect which men might be Runelords and which were commoners.

The reavers’ ignorance might be his best weapon.

Raj Ahten called upon the powers of his Voice and his glamour, and shouted. “Honorable warriors of Indhopal, I salute you! Now is the hour we have feared. Desolation is upon us. Only your strong arms and brave hearts can save the day. Tonight the kingdoms of Indhopal live or die by our valor. Tonight I will lead you in a war like none that mankind has ever known! Ride with me now, ride for Indhopal!”

The power of his Voice surprised even Raj Ahten. The weary men raised their weapons and cheered like berserkers.

He leapt on his camel and raced before them so that even the wind could not catch him.

In the winter, snow fell heavily in the Alcairs, leaving the mountains white. It melted throughout the summer, feeding the rivers that tumbled over the green slopes. In the Valley of Om on the southern verge of Kartish, twelve waterfalls spilled down from the hills.

It was Raj Ahten’s favorite place in the world. Every year on the first day of the month of Poppies, he would journey to Om. Always the pecan blossoms were in bloom, and the new grass grew lush and fragrant, and the red poppies covered the valley while the waterfalls spilled from the freshets into languid pools, misting the air above the Palace of Canaries.

The grounds around the palace were pristine. No man or animal was allowed to trample them, and the palace itself was a gem.

Its walls were made of thin slabs of yellow marble, and at night when the lanterns were lit within, the whole complex shone like burnished gold beneath the starlight. On such nights the palace earned its name: for the palace took its name not from canaries, as some supposed, or even for its yellow walls—but rather from the songsters who vied for the honor of performing within its great arching acoustic hall.

Many were the pleasant nights that Raj Ahten had spent listening to songsters in the jasmine-scented hall, wandering the pristine poppy fields, gazing at the waterfalls and the palace in the moonlight, seducing young women.

He’d lain with Saffira here.

Raj Ahten shook the memories away. There was nothing for it. The joy of his life was gone.

Among the Jewel Kingdoms, blood-metal mines had always made Kartish the richest. The kaifs of the land had grown fat over the centuries. They had controlled the blood metal, and could set the prices they saw fit. Beyond that, they knew precisely how many forcibles each lord purchased over the years, and thus by regulating shipments ensured that no one ever built a force powerful enough to strike against them.

Over centuries they acted as puppetmasters, orchestrating the rise and fall of nations that they knew only by rumor. The fat old men had kept their knives to the jugular vein of the world, and congratulated themselves on their cunning.

Of course, they made mistakes. From time to time, shipments would fall into the wrong hands, and the kaifs of Kartish would be slaughtered wholesale. The world hardly noticed, for the sun set on one despot only to rise on another.

Raj Ahten had killed them all easily enough.

When Raj Ahten reached the Palace of Canaries, the palace itself shone as usual, and the falls tumbled like a silver mist in the starlight.

But on his pristine grounds, an army had settled, blackening the land with tents and bodies. The valley would never heal from the double curse of the reavers’ blight and the damage done by the troops.

Dingy fires guttered in the vale. No fewer than two million men bivouacked for miles around the palace. The stench of men, horses, and elephants was unbearable. All through the camps, horses whinnied and elephants trumpeted in hunger while men short of rations sounded loud and raucous in turn. So the valley filled with a noise of pandemonium.

Raj Ahten rode down through the hills while an army of three hundred thousand men raced to keep up.

As he did, heralds bore torches on either side of him, both ahead and behind. Men beheld his countenance, and were cowed by his glamour.

He shouted to the common troops huddled below, his voice a roar. “Men of Indhopal, how can you sit here idle while the reavers call us to war? Rise now! Grab your weapons and armor. We go to battle at dawn. I promise you victory!”

He met Warlord Aysalla Pusnabish at the palace gates. Pusnabish dropped to his hands and knees and did obeisance.

“O Great Dawn of Our Lives,” he said, “we thank you for delivering us.”

“My Dedicates are safe?” Raj Ahten asked.

“We hastened them away at the first sign of trouble, O Great One. By now they have reached the coast, and are sailing north for the Palace of Ghusa in Deyazz.”

Raj Ahten felt weak, disjointed. His left hand trembled.

“What of my forcibles?”

“They are in the treasury, O Sun of Our Morning,” Pusnabish said.

Raj Ahten did not want to hear more. His troops were preparing for battle, and he had enough men that he suspected he could swarm the hills, take the reavers in their lair.

He pushed past Pusnabish and strode through the gilded halls of the Palace of Canaries, up toward his treasury.

“I’ll need my facilitators,” Raj Ahten said, “and men to grant me stamina.”

Pusnabish snapped his fingers at a servant, and the man ran to get the facilitators.

“There is some good news,” Pusnabish insisted, running in his wake. “Our miners struck a new vein of blood ore. It is quite promising, as you will see.”

Raj Ahten smiled grimly.

45 The Nightriders

Myrrima didn’t fancy being followed. It was doubly worrying that she wasn’t sure whether the creature tracking them was human or not.

Borenson did not speak as they rode. He peered about, his bright blue eyes alert. Each time she started to open her mouth, he would raise a hand, begging her to be silent. So she held her tongue.

She was a wolf lord now, with endowments of scent from a dog, and sight from a man. Borenson’s nervousness kept her wary, and she strained her senses, sniffing the air and keeping her eyes open for signs of danger.

In the Westlands, the barren plains gave way to woods where hoary trees grew among craggy rocks, limbs heavy with moss. The trees were tall and dark, with only a few ragged gray leaves clinging to them. The earth smelled of mold and fungus. Toadstools thrust up from the detritus in the fens.

It was not hard to envision the wars fought here against the Toth so long ago, or to imagine that the dark pools still held traces of blood.

She wanted to ride through quickly. But the muddy roads forced them to slow their horses to a walk.

It was a stagnant land. In spite of the yawning emptiness, time and again she found herself reaching for her steel bow, slung in its case on her saddle pack.

The forest was dead. No squirrels danced round the sides of the trees to hide when they passed. No deer were startled from the grass if they happened on a glade. Only once in a great while would she catch sight of some dark-winged bird as it darted for cover in a shadowed glen.

She strained for any sound—the buzz of a locust, the pattering of a woodpecker, or the caw of a crow.

But the woods held little in the way of life, and none of it was pleasant. Myrrima imagined that nothing much could live here. Biting flies and mosquitoes swarmed in clouds over brackish pools, and in places they seemed so thick that she imagined that they’d simply strip the hide off any animal that held still long enough.

She did not hold still.

Wights haunted this place, Myrrima knew.

That’s why Borenson shushed her every time she wanted to speak. Wights were drawn to sound, to movement. They hid in shadows. Their icy touch would kill a man.

The shrouded bogs where oily water gave rise to night mists, the creepy woods with their folds and hollows, both were the perfect abode for such creatures.

And while the wights of the Dunnwood back home protected the realm, the same was not true of the Westlands. Sixteen hundred years ago, nomen and Toth had died here by the uncounted score. Their revenants craved vengeance. At times it was said that the shades of men could be seen fighting them still, as if reenacting their deaths on old battlegrounds.

Once, they came upon a hill and heard the rush of wind through the trees in the valley to their left, a distant sigh like the beating of waves upon an endless shore.

Myrrima imagined that the wind heralded a coming storm, and that soon all of the trees would begin bobbing and creaking in the gale.

Instead, the wind merely passed—as if it were an invisible rider heading south through the forest.

When it was gone, Borenson whispered, breaking an hours-long silence, “What was that, do you think?”

“Wights?”

“There are wights here,” he admitted, “and they’re aware of us. But that wasn’t one. Something else passed by.”

Myrrima’s mind returned to the Darkling Glory, to the howling tornado that had issued from it. Binnesman had warned that it was capable of great evil still.

“If we ride slowly,” Borenson whispered, “we won’t reach Fenraven by sunset, but if we ride fast, we might catch up to whatever passed us by.”

Myrrima bit her lip. “Ride fast,” she whispered.

Myrrima glimpsed another rider just before sunset, and knew for sure that they were being followed.

They’d been cantering through the hills, and had come down for the hundredth time into another marsh. They let their horses forage for a few short minutes, and had then ridden on for half a mile, until they reached a bog so wide that the road itself was submerged.

The forest ended here. A few gray skeletal trees struggled up from fetid pools, but otherwise there was no cover for nearly a quarter of a mile. In midwinter the bog would have been a lake.

So Myrrima slowed her horse and let it pick its way through the water, wading through muddy pools where it sank up to its withers. With every step, the smell of rot rose from the depths, and the splashing of the horse obscured any other sound. Myrrima had to lug her saddlebags on her own shoulder, lest her provisions get wet. Mosquitoes buzzed around her in a starving cloud.

As her horse waded through the pools she saw someone—or something. She happened to glance over her shoulder, checking the road behind, when she glimpsed a horseman on the hill three quarters of a mile back.

A dark, hooded figure sat ahorse under the trees, peering toward her intently. In the gloaming woods, she couldn’t see the color of his horse. So well concealed was he that at first she wasn’t sure if he was real or simply an unhappy confluence of sticks and shadows, an invention of her fears.

But a moment of squinting through the cloud of mosquitoes convinced her otherwise.

It was a man, hiding in the trees just off the road.

Myrrima swallowed hard, thinking, Assassin? Or the wight of some long-dead wolf hunter?

It could be anyone. Perhaps it was only a fellow traveler who had been frightened to hear a force horse riding through these lone woods, and had decided to exit into the trees.

She haltingly waved at the fellow in greeting. But he didn’t move. He held as still as a deer as it tastes the air for the scent of the hounds.

“Who are you waving at?” Borenson hissed.

“There’s a man in the trees,” Myrrima said.

“Are you sure it’s a man?”

She suddenly realized that she hadn’t seen fresh-cut tracks in the road. Nor had she smelled warm horseflesh along the trail either. Which meant that the fellow had not been ahead of them on the road.

That left only two possibilities. He might have been riding cross-country through the bogs—something only a madman would try—or he might be following them.

Only a man on a fast force horse could have kept up.

Muyyatin assassins rode force horses.

She reined in her mount, and sat for a moment, braving the mosquitoes, pointedly staring at the fellow. At last he turned his head and urged his horse forward, onto the road, spurred it north into the shadowed woods, and was gone.

His horse made no sound as it trotted through the trees.

“I saw him,” Borenson whispered. “Can’t tell if he’s alive or dead.”

A wight, she decided, one that has no interest in us. Or perhaps it was still too light yet, and he would come after them in the full darkness.

Her heart was pounding. She suddenly recalled a tale of Muyyatin assassins who booted the hooves of their horses with layers of lamb’s wool, so that they could ride quietly.

“Water and cold iron can sometimes turn a wight,” Borenson whispered. “But if that fellow is alive, just give him cold iron.”

Myrrima reached into a pouch, pulled out an iron spear tip that Hoswell had once showed her. It had a flaring blade, and fit nicely onto the end of her steel bow. She twisted it in place.

She spurred her horse through the fetid swamp, and rode on for five miles. The woods grew darker as night thickened, and in many places the roots of huge trees snaked out into the road, creating a hazard for any who dared ride at night.

A dim haze covered the sky, muting the stars, and Borenson convinced her to abandon their journey for a while as they waited for moonrise.

They reached a dark copse on a hillside, where the roots were especially thick, and turned off the road. They led their mounts into blackness under the trees. Myrrima’s horse lowered its head, then sniffed at molding leaves as it sought forage. She’d ridden far, and the mount had got nothing to eat for the past two hours. It whickered in consternation.

“Quiet,” Myrrima whispered. The beast had endowments of wit from other horses, and was well trained. It suddenly went still as a statue, ignoring even the mosquitoes that eagerly settled on its rump.

For long minutes, Myrrima and Borenson waited.

She hated the silence, wished that they could speak. She occupied herself by watching the heavens. Almost immediately a trio of shooting stars arced across the sky. One was a fireball that left a guttering trail of ash. She’d seldom seen such a display. No crickets chirped. No frogs croaked.

The night seemed perfectly still.

Until a wailing cry arose that was like nothing human. Goosepimples formed on her arms immediately, and the sound sent a shiver down her spine. Her horse pawed the ground nervously, and Borenson’s danced forward.

On a windswept hillside not a mile away, she saw the gray ghost light of a wight—incredibly thin and tall. At first glance, it seemed vaguely human in shape, until one made out its impossible form. Its gangling arms were as thin as branches, a crepuscular white in color, like a warty fungal growth, that ended in scythelike talons. Its four legs were also inhumanly long and slender. The rearmost legs were attached to flaring hips that tilted up like a grasshoppers’, with an inverted knee. But the rear hips were set no more than two feet from the forelegs, so that it squatted oddly. Its narrow skull tapered so that the protracted muzzle looked almost like a bill. The flaring at the back of the skull was not from bone, but from philia.

Though from a great distance one could almost mistake it for a human in shape, the beast was far more closely related to a reaver than a human.

A Toth.

Myrrima’s heart hammered in her throat. Sweat spilled down her forehead. She dared not move, lest she attract its attention.

The Toth enchanters from beyond the Carroll Sea were all but legend now, and most of their specters had faded. This could only be the shade of a powerful sorcerer.

Water and cold iron wouldn’t be enough to ward it. Only a great wizard might drive the monster away.

The wight stood upon the hillside, its head tilted upward, as if it were a hound tasting the air. As it did, the philia hanging like a thick beard beneath its long jaws quivered. It swayed on its legs, an incredibly graceful gesture, then went striding northwest with a determined gait.

He’s caught the scent of something, Myrrima realized. And given that I’m riding from the north, it could be me.

She was about to leap on her horse when Borenson stopped her.

Almost immediately she heard hoofbeats. A rider came galloping along the road behind them, whipping his mount with his reins.

A heavy warhorse charged past, its cloaked rider hunched low in the saddle, wheezing in terror. She heard the muted ching of studded mail. Even the heavy sheepskin slippers that quieted the horse’s pounding hooves couldn’t silence it completely.

Muyyatin. And the wight was after the assassin.

The only problem was, she was hiding in these woods too. The wight wouldn’t care who it caught first.

Which do you want to risk, she asked herself, Death from an assassin, or death from the wight of a Toth?

Borenson decided for her. He gouged his horse’s flanks with his heels and was gone.

Myrrima reined her mount around. She kicked his flanks harder than she’d wanted, and the stallion lurched beneath her in a dead run.

It was nearly all that she could do to hang on. She grabbed her steel bow anyway, hoping against hope that its iron spear tip might keep the wight at bay.

The force horse galloped under the trees. Behind her, a quarter mile back, Myrrima heard that inhuman cry. It was not a wail of sorrow, but more of an ululating shriek, like the sound an eagle makes as it stoops for the kill.

Her force horse redoubled its speed in blind panic, and Myrrima bent low in the saddle, clinging tightly. Borenson’s mount set the pace ahead. His robes flapped behind him.

She came up on a strait where the trees thinned. She spared a glance backward.

Her blood froze in her veins. The wight was leaping toward her on incredibly long legs. It glowed with its own inner light so that she could see it clearly now, only a couple hundred yards behind. Its skin shone pale as polished ivory, and its huge eyes glowed a deep, deep crimson. Upon its arms, faint blue runes burned, ancient wards against death. Philia swayed from its narrow chin like a beard, and scythelike teeth glimmered in its lipless mouth. It made grasping motions with its right paw, as if grabbing for her. Its paws were incredibly long, each with three talons that had many joints.

“Fly!” she shouted at her mount, and the force horse redoubled its effort again, shooting through the shadowed copses, leaving the wight to flounder in its wake. Her beast had four endowments of metabolism, and two of brawn. With those endowments it could attain incredible speeds. Given the choice, she’d not have dared a run like this even in daylight.

Myrrima suspected that she was racing at eighty miles an hour when she heard Borenson’s horse stumble.

He was galloping through a copse ahead when its forehoof clipped a root with a report like a lance shattering.

As the beast floundered, Myrrima’s first thought was for her husband.

He’s as good as dead, she thought. Yet she saw Borenson jump or fall free of the saddle, roll to the grass.

Myrrima reined her own mount, leapt from her saddle while the horse continued to run. She tried to land on her feet, but they slipped from beneath her on the slick road and she fell on her right hip. She skidded over some roots or rocks, then flipped onto her chest.

Pain wracked her, surging from hip and arm.

She climbed to her feet, ignoring the agony. Her horse was gone. But during the fall she’d managed to cling to her bow.

She spat on the iron spear tip. Water and cold iron, she thought hopefully, the same as she’d used against the Darkling Glory.

A shriek sounded as she looked up.

The wight was nearly upon her, mouth gaping as if to swallow. It was too late to stand still like a terrified rabbit, too late to hope that it might pass her by.

She lunged with her bow, sent its spear tip into the sweet triangle between the monster’s eyes.

The Toth shrieked, and there was a blinding flash. Invisible shards of ice seemed to fly through the air, sending pinpricks of cold that rushed through her.

Myrrima stared at the Toth. Its runic death wards suddenly blazed into blue fire, and for a brief second she had a vision: she thought she stared into a blinding haze, and in that light she saw warriors dressed in the ancient mode, with rounded helms and round shields. They surrounded the Toth on all sides, and plunged their spears into its flanks. She could hear them shouting, “Ahten! Ahten da gaspeilten!”

The vision faded, and Myrrima was thrown backward by the icy blast. The world went bitter cold. She’d never faced such cold.

Myrrima felt as if a glory hammer had slammed into her chest. Every single muscle in her body ached. In a daze she struggled to sit up, but her head reeled too much, and she fell backward.

Borenson grabbed her, picking her head up. “Are you alive? Can you hear me?”

“Wha—?” Myrrima managed to blurt.

His breath steamed in the icy air. Her right hand felt as if it had frozen at the knuckles.

“By the Seven Stones!” he swore. “That—that’s not possible!”

She pulled herself up, ignoring the ache in her bones.

For fifty yards in every direction, the ground was blasted with hoarfrost. White crystals glistened under the starlight.

The wight was gone.

Yet her right hand ached, as if it blazed in a cold fire. She held it up, realized belatedly what had happened. She’d plunged her spear tip into the wight so hard that she had struck the beast with her hand. Her fist was as white as ice, and crystals shone brightly on the pale skin.

46 The Days

While the world slept, Iome retreated to the palace at the Courts of Tide, there to wait while Abel Scarby gathered the dogs that Gaborn needed.

The guards ushered her in and called a chambermaid who would have waked the whole staff in a panic if Iome had not forbidden her to do so.

The immensity of the palace overwhelmed Iome. Her father’s entire keep back at Castle Sylvarresta would have fit in the Great Hall. Sixteen huge hearths lined its walls.

Around the room hung dozens of lanterns backed by silver mirrors, their bright flames subdued beneath rose-colored crystal. The oil that they burned gave off a pleasant scent of gardenias. Enormous windows facing south would have lit the room throughout the day.

The tapestries on the walls, depicting scenes of ancient kings in love and in battle, each looked as if they might have kept a village full of women weaving for a year.

The postern and lintel above each doorway had been intricately carved to show scenes of foxes and rabbits racing over trails in an oak forest.

The king’s table was set with golden plates, brightly polished. Iome took one gasping look, and just stared in amazement. She’d never grasped how wealthy Gaborn might be. She’d never imagined how insignificant Heredon’s splendor must seem to him.

Before one great hearth, a girl in a plain scholar’s robe sat hunched on an elegant couch. Her brown hair was long and braided in cornrows, then tied together in back.

Upon hearing footsteps, she turned to look at Iome.

“Oh, there you are!” she said in a pleasant voice. The girl’s face was freckled, her eyes an ordinary brown. Iome took one look, and felt as if she’d known her all her life. She was perhaps sixteen, a little younger than Iome.

“Are you my new Days?” Iome asked.

The girl nodded. She had a pimple on her chin. “I heard that you had arrived. Did you have a good ride?”

“It went without incident,” Iome said, sure that the girl wanted only the historical details.

The girl’s face fell a little, as if she’d expected more. “But—it was pleasant, I hope?”

Iome’s mind did a little twist. She’d never had a Days inquire as to whether something pleased her.

“Very pleasant,” Iome said. “I have to admit, I’d never imagined how vast Mystarria was. The land here is so rich and fertile, and this castle overwhelms me.”

“I was born not far from here,” the Days said, “in a village called Berriston. I know everything about Mystarria. I can show you around.”

Iome had never had a Days offer to show her anything. Most of them were cold and aloof. But she recognized immediately that this girl felt just as lonely as Iome did, just as overwhelmed by her responsibilities.

“I would like that,” Iome said. She took the girl by her hand, squeezed her fingers.

It felt distinctly odd. At home, friends had always surrounded Iome. Whether they were dried-up old matrons or other young women in waiting, she’d always had a female companion nearby. She’d come to the Courts of Tide knowing that she would feel out of place.

Now she wondered what it would feel like to have a Days as a friend. “Do you know the castle?” Iome asked. “Can you show me to the tower?”

“Indeed,” the Days said. “I’ve been here all afternoon.”

The girl took Iome to the base of the tower. Together they climbed the long stairs until they reached the room where Gaborn’s father had slept.

A guardsman in Mystarria’s colors stood at the door, opened it with a key. Upon opening the door, Iome smelled King Orden’s scent—his sweat, his hair—all so strong that it seemed impossible that her husband’s father had been slain only a week ago. The scent belied his death, made Iome expect that at any moment old King Orden might appear on the parapet outside the window, or stir from an antechamber.

At the very least, his shade ought to be here, she thought.

The room was overlarge, with rich furnishings and a huge canopied four-poster bed draped with woolen curtains. Iome went to it, patted the firm mattress. This is where I am destined to sleep, she thought. This is where—the Powers preserve us—I’ll bear my son. This is where Gaborn will get more sons upon me.

Iome’s Days went to a window, opened it wide. “I’ve heard that the view of the city here is beautiful,” she exulted. “We should see it from the promenade.”

Iome wouldn’t be able to sleep, she knew. With so many endowments of stamina and metabolism and brawn, she needed very little of it. From now on when she did take rest, she would take it as powerful Runelords were wont to do—by standing quietly and staring off at private dreams. She still felt rested, and the Days’ tone was infectious.

Iome went out to the promenade. It was three stories beneath the very topmost ramparts of the tower, where the far-seers kept their vigil. The promenade was well lit. A huge red lantern hung just beneath the far-seers’ outlook.

“That wasn’t lit a while ago,” Iome remarked.

“The queen wasn’t in residence a while ago,” the Days replied. “It is lit in your honor.”

In her castle back home, there had been no such practice. Castle Sylvarresta served as the bastion of defense, and Iome had seldom left it. But Mystarria was another matter. Gaborn’s family maintained half a dozen castles that could serve as resorts during time of war, along with palaces that had sometimes served as homes during times of peace.

Below Iome the various buildings of the Courts of Tide hunched in the darkness—lordly castles with their proud towers raised high, manors and estates squatting in their splendor. Markets cascaded to the west, the light of the horned moon glinting on their slate roofs; while beyond them, in the poorer quarters, the pitched roofs of thousands upon thousands of shanties jutted up like sharp stones.

Beyond it all was the vast ocean, placid. Salt tang tickled her nostrils. It was not a cold night.

“It’s beautiful up here,” the Days said. “Just as I always imagined.”

She went on. “When I was young, my mother told me a child’s tale. She said that there was a castle filled with giants on each edge of the world, and that those of the east are making war with those of the west. Each day, the giants to the east load their catapult, and send a flaming ball high overhead, to smash against the roofs of the castle to the west. And each night, those same giants send a great stone hurtling overhead. The ball of flame is the sun. The ball of stone is the moon. And when the day comes that the sun no longer rises, you’ll know that the war has ended.

“The commoners in their shanties in town say that the King’s Tower is so high,” the girl continued, “that a far-seer standing here can look across the ocean, and spot the giants working to load their catapults.

“It was from this very tower that Fallion’s far-seers spotted the gray ships.”

Iome smiled. Overhead, several stars lanced through the sky at once. One, in particular, was a huge fireball that hurtled slowly, leaving a flaming trail. She teased. “It looks as if your giants must have run out of rocks. They’re hurling shot tonight.”

The Days laughed. She turned, her eyes sparkling. She knew her history and she loved it. The girl’s dream was to stand at the side of a queen and watch history unfold. But assuming that Gaborn even could stop the fell mage that led the Underworld, Iome would be stuck in this tower for weeks, doing nothing. The notion wrung her heart.

How long, Iome wondered, before this girl grows bored with me and regrets her choice of occupations?

Iome scanned the far horizon where water sparkled in the night. She couldn’t discern any ships, or even a pod of whales. “No giants,” Iome said. “No ships either.”

At that, the girl stiffened involuntarily just a bit, and her fingers tightened on the stone rail around the parapet. She laughed again, but her laugh sounded forced.

Ships are coming, Iome realized. The Days knows it. Ships are coming to attack the Courts of Tide.

But whose ships?

Iome began to think furiously. To the south were the Inkarrans, who had never made war upon the north, though they were doing so now. Still, sending fleets was not how they practiced war. To the north were half a dozen countries that could muster a fleet—Lonnock, Toom, Eyremoth, Alnick, Ashoven, and Internook.

I’m jumping to conclusions, Iome thought. Yet she had to wonder. This Days was young, perhaps the youngest she’d ever seen. The rest had always been far more mature. Perhaps she wasn’t fully trained.

For long centuries there had been rumors that Days sometimes acted as spies. Could this be the source of such rumors—a Days who involuntarily twitched an eye or looked away nervously when the conversation strayed to dangerous topics?

“So,” Iome said. “You said you grew up here, in Berriston?”

“Yes, it’s nearby,” the girl answered.

“Can we see it from here?”

The Days took her to the north side of the tower, pointed up along the coast four miles. “You see the village there, the one with just a few lights.”

“Ah, so close,” Iome said. “You could see the towers here from your home every day.”

“Not in the winter,” the Days said. “Not when the fog rolls in.”

Iome had never known a Days who spoke so much. “Does your family still live there, your mother, father, brothers, sisters?”

“My mother died years back,” the Days said. “But my father is here, and my older brothers. They’re twins. I never liked my stepmother.”

“Have you visited them recently?” Iome asked.

Now the girl clutched at the railing again, nervous. “No.” Was she worried for her family, or did the idea of visiting them make her nervous?

“Would you like to?” Iome said. “Perhaps I could take you.”

“No!” the Days answered. “Time does not roll backward. We should not try to make it do so.” She did not speak this last with full conviction.

“I suppose not,” Iome said. “I shall certainly never see my parents again, and nothing I can do will ever bring them back. It seems a shame, though, that your family would be so close, and you not able to see them.”

The Days clutched at the railing again, then looked away to the northwest, avoiding the subject.

Iome strolled around the promenade, until she faced west. Overhead, a star streaked across the sky, followed almost instantly by another.

“My husband is out there,” Iome said, “fighting the reavers. He fears that the end may be coming, three or four days from now. But I suppose you know all that.”

The girl fell silent and leaned forward, gazing west.

Iome continued. “He’s facing so many enemies. It’s not just the reavers. It’s the Inkarrans to the south, now, and Raj Ahten. And mad King Anders. I worry for him.”

The Days did not clench the rail. She merely stood gazing out. Iome read her reaction: Gaborn is safe. Don’t worry.

Iome’s head felt near to bursting. She suspected that she was on to something. This girl was not fully trained. So long as she did not suspect that Iome could read her, she would continue to reveal what she knew in her reactions.

Iome circled the promenade. “It’s getting late. You’ll probably want some sleep. I hope that your quarters are adequate?”

“They’re wonderful.” To a girl of peasant stock, any quarters here would seem luxurious.

“And you’ve had dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Iome said. “I’ve never given it much thought before, but I suspect it must be hard for a Days at first, to be stuck here without any friends.”

“Oh, I have friends,” the Days answered.

Iome knew of them. She knew that the girl had given an endowment of wit to another, a friend who granted the endowment back, so that now they were of one mind. Gaborn had spoken of how he himself envied those who had such deep relationships.

Beneath Iome, the tower began to sway slightly, and stones bucked under her feet.

At first she thought that she imagined it, and she reached for the railing more worried that she would look silly than from any concern about the safety of the tower.

Then the tower really did sway, and the ground trembled and shook, Iome’s heart pounded.

“Earthquake!” the Days cried.

Her mouth opened in surprise, just as a rumbling sound rolled through the city.

The great tower began to thump up and down as the soil rolled beneath it in waves. Of all the places in the world that Iome would want to be during an earthquake, this tower was the last.

She heard glass shatter down in the palace as the huge windows in the Great Hall burst.

Throughout the Courts of Tide, people began to scream in alarm. Dogs barked and horses whinnied. In a castle on an island nearby, a whole tower collapsed, went sliding into the sea.

The Days grabbed the railing around the parapet, as if afraid that she might fall.

“Let’s get out of here!” Iome shouted. She grabbed the girl’s hands and pulled her through the door, into the tower proper. The king’s books tumbled from a shelf, along with a helm that clattered loudly. The canopy above the bed swayed.

Iome pulled the Days into the room just as a sound of cracking rock split the night air. The parapet outside splintered and fell.

The Days shouted and grabbed Iome, clutching her for support.

Still the tower swayed as if it might topple any second.

“Come on,” Iome said. She began dragging the girl from the room. Overhead, Iome could hear shouting as the far-seers raced for safety.

She leapt into the stairwell. Lamps were hung along the wall, and they swayed, spilling flaming oil. As the tower leaned, plaster on the walls buckled and fell in heavy chunks. The air inside the castle filled with dust and smoke.

Iome ran downstairs with her hand shielding her head from the debris. With her endowments of metabolism, the plaster seemed to slough off slowly. With her endowments of brawn, she was able to knock chunks of it aside, protecting herself and the girl.

She leapt past a wall of fire.

Enormous slabs of plaster skittered down the steps, and Iome had to fight for decent footing. The farther down she ran, the more it felt as if she were negotiating a landslide.

She felt inside her. Gaborn did not warn her of any danger as he had at Castle Sylvarresta. She felt only panic. At any moment the whole tower might collapse.

She had not reached the bottom of the stairs when the first tremor stopped.

The Days halted for a second. “Wait. Wait. It’s over.” She wiped tears of terror from her eyes and began to sob.

But Iome had seen more than one quake in Heredon, and she knew better. “You can’t know that!”

She grabbed the Days and urged her down the stairwell, out of the castle. It was good that she did.

Iome had just fled the building when a stronger tremor began to humble the Courts of Tide.

47 Searching for the Waymaker

At the base of Mangan’s Rock the ground lay scorched for a mile around. Here and there, small shrubs still burned, so that the land grew blacker than a night sky, even though a thousand small fires lit it.

To the east, Gaborn’s fire raged, blowing into the foothills of the mountains. In all likelihood, it would continue to sputter and blaze into the forests for days.

With each step that Averan took, ashes stirred in the air, clogging her lungs. Averan, Binnesman, Gaborn, his Days, stalked toward the dead reavers that lay in sordid humps, each monster taller than an elephant.

Thousands had leapt or fallen from Mangan’s Rock in a grisly hail. Some had actually died. The land was covered with them at the south end of the cliff. In a few places, bodies lay three or four deep.

Thousands of the wounded retreated over the plains, legs broken or carapaces cracked. The rest of the horde outran them. Most of Gaborn’s knights went to hunt down the injured, but he’d sent some scouts with torches in hand to search among the grim carcasses for the Waymaker.

Averan did not want to eat another reaver. The last one had wrung sweat from her, sickened her, caused her profound pain. Her nerves still jangled, and her muscles ached. It was too soon to eat again.

But dead reavers lay everywhere, and Gaborn didn’t dare waste an opportunity.

Averan stalked through the ashes. A falling star streaked above her.

She looked up, saw another almost immediately, and noted that only a few gree remained with the dead reavers. Either the smoke had killed them, or they’d flown off after the rest of the horde.

The ground shook again, and a few stones tumbled down from Mangan’s Rock, bouncing among the reavers.

“Did you make the earthquake?” Averan asked Gaborn.

“No,” he said. “It’s none of my doing.”

She recognized a dying glue mum ahead. It lay on its back, gasping, drawing air in massive gulps. The sacs beneath its jaws excreted oozing mucilage.

“Don’t go near,” Gaborn warned her.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Its philia aren’t even moving.” She stared at it. “This one was called Maker of High Things. It built the nesting hall for the One True Master.”

She went to it. This glue mum had been a fine beast. Many glue mums were trained to use their mucilage to reinforce ceilings in caverns and tunnels, but this one had excelled. Her vaulted arches and buttresses were a marvel of strength and grace.

“You feel sympathy for the monster?” Gaborn asked.

Averan closed her eyes, peered into a snatch of memory. “They’re alive,” she answered. “This one—was an artist. It should have stayed where it belongs.”

Binnesman said, “Good, child. You are learning. All life is precious. All must be revered.”

For a long while Averan and Gaborn hunted, along with a hundred scouts. Word came to them after an hour that more than a thousand reavers had died in the stampede, and Skalbairn’s men were still lancing the wounded, having made another two thousand kills. The main body of the horde was heading south, running along their trail to their bolt-hole in the Underworld.

So Gaborn and Averan hunted among the dead.

At Mangan’s Rock the bodies lay thick against the cliffside, stacked to a depth of five or six deep. The corpses rose in morbid piles. The scouts searched as best they could, climbing down through little gaps where a reaver’s leg or head wedged open a crawlspace.

But in some cases, it was simply impossible to see what might lie beneath the pile. Even Runelords with force horses couldn’t easily move the massive carcasses of the reavers, and Gaborn was left to worry that the Waymaker would lie forever hidden.

“Milord!” a scout shouted. “I think I’ve found him!” The scout appeared three hundred yards down the cliff, and stood atop a pile of dead reavers, waving his torch eagerly.

Averan jogged to the pile of corpses against the cliff. “He’s a big brute,” the scout said as she neared, “just like you told us. And he’s got thirty-six philia, and big paws. It’s hard to see much down there, but there’s a rune on his right shoulder, just like you said. The rest of him is buried down where I can’t see it.”

Averan scampered up a jagged rock, the lichens on it rubbing her hands raw.

She climbed up on the corpse of a reaver with Gaborn’s help. The pile of dead reavers here was deep, and to get to the one that she wanted, she had to go up and over. She was on a sorceress when the reaver twitched, and for one heart-stopping moment she dared not move, thinking it was alive.

She watched the scout crawl into a little cave formed by dead bodies. He squeezed under one reaver’s leg, into a grotto. The torch lit the way.

Averan followed him down. The path was precarious—step on this reaver’s leg here, watch out for the spike on that one’s elbow, climb onto that one’s head, don’t let the torch burn you. And try not to worry that one of the reavers might twitch or shift, and the whole pile of them collapse on top of you.

Gaborn and Binnesman followed her down.

The scout reached the bottom, stepped back into a smaller space, and stopped. Averan followed. Smoke swirled in the still air, and the torch burned hot. She looked up in the torchlight and saw a reaver’s head. She stifled a cry.

That’s him! she thought immediately. Four dead reavers covered much of the corpse. But one huge paw protruded near his muzzle, and part of his shoulder could be made out between the legs of another reaver.

In size and shape, it looked like the Waymaker. Averan closed her eyes. Her only memories were seen from a reaver’s point of view. They didn’t see the world exactly like people do. To a reaver, the whole body glowed in different shades of blue light. So it was hard to tell.

“Yeah,” Averan said, her voice coming out rough with anticipation and dread. “It could be him.” After hunting through thousands of reavers today, she felt skeptical.

The body of another reaver squashed the Waymaker’s face so that the bony plate on its skull angled back, distorting the reaver’s visage. “Maybe if it wasn’t squashed, I could be more sure.”

“What of the rune?” Gaborn asked. The reaver had a rune on his shoulder, still glowing in smoldering colors.

“I don’t know,” Averan admitted. “Reavers can’t see those colors. To them, the runes are just smells, magical incantations written in smells.” Averan ‘s memory didn’t let her see the shape of the rune, and she couldn’t tell if it was placed properly on the body.

She stared for long minutes. She couldn’t smell anything but smoke. If she’d had a reaver’s strong nose, and if she’d been able to get at its bunghole, she would know. “I just can’t be sure.”

“Will you eat from this one?”

Averan looked up. Fear made her breath come out ragged, and she found herself clenching her fist, so that her nails bit into her palm. “I’m not sure. It might not be him.”

“But it’s the closest match you’ve seen?”

Averan’s stomach cramped in fear. “Yes,” she said. “But I can’t do it.”

Gaborn took her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. “Listen, the world needs you to be strong. We may have driven the reavers from the rock, but already I sense a rising threat. Men are going to die in battle tomorrow, hundreds of men, maybe thousands. And tens of thousands more are at risk.”

“Is that supposed to make it easier?” Averan asked. “I’m afraid. I got so sick last time—”

“Men are taught to give their lives,” Gaborn said. “They give them in war. They wear themselves out working to support their wives and children.”

“Women wear themselves out, too,” Averan said, thinking of her mother.

“Agreed,” Gaborn said. “I’m not asking you to do anything more than what every man and woman does. When you grow up, you have to give yourself away. Sometimes you give your life all in a moment, but mostly you give yourself away laboring one minute at a time. I need you to grow a lot now.”

Binnesman hugged her close, offering comfort. Gaborn could give her none. He couldn’t let her back down from her duty.

“My men have searched most of this pile in the past two hours,” Gaborn urged. “We’ve found no other match.”

Averan swallowed hard. Gaborn was only asking her to grow up. That would happen whether she wanted to or not. “I’ll eat.”

As soon as she agreed, relief overwhelmed her. She’d only have to do it this one more time.

Gaborn let out a heavy sigh, knelt down, and put his arms around her. “Thank you,” he said.

Gaborn felt exhausted—not just physically exhausted, but mentally and emotionally drained in a way he’d never felt in his life.

“Get her what she needs,” he told the scout. The reaver’s sweet triangle was exposed enough so that a man ought to be able to get some of its brains out.

He patted Binnesman on the shoulder, and whispered, “Stay with her. Give her what comfort you can. I need some rest.”

He went to his horse, rode his mount north for a mile along the cliff face. His Days followed, until they reached the fallen statue of Mangan.

The warrior had broken into a dozen chunks when he fell. Gaborn dismounted, scaled the side of Mangan’s pitted head, and just sat with his hand against the rock, feeling a sort of reverence.

Little was known about Mangan—a few sayings, this statue. Over a thousand years ago he had built a fortress here. He had stopped the warriors of Muttaya from overwhelming western Mystarria. He’d built his castle and withstood enemy forces in a dozen fierce battles. He died young in some ignoble skirmish, and fifty years later his son had artisans carve the cliff face in his honor. Now the weathered stone felt rough under Gaborn’s hand. The lichens grew thick.

Gaborn gazed up as a star streaked across the horizon. He’d seen a hundred in the past three hours.

Gaborn sat wondering. Things were changing, he realized. He sensed the rising danger to the wounded of Carris, who were floating down the river Donnestgree, along with some of his warriors.

He was becoming more adept at discerning such things. Sometimes, he could sense the danger well in advance. Other times, it seemed to flare up suddenly. It was like trying to stare into a pot of boiling water and decide which of the bubbles forming inside the cauldron would rise next. It seemed an inexact science, and Gaborn suspected that it had to do with agency, with the choices that he and his enemies made.

Out of nowhere, he could sense great jeopardy to Borenson and Myrrima. He desperately tried to warn them to hide, but could not reach them. He wondered how long this might go on. Would the Earth punish him forever? Would it really let his Chosen die? Or dared he hope that his powers might be restored in his hour of need?

He could not bear the thought that his Chosen might be torn from him. It wasn’t just others’ lives that were lost. In some small way, when one of his Chosen died, a part of him was lost also.

But it isn’t just me, he realized. If a man dies, then perhaps a wife loses a husband and child loses a father. A whole village might feel the blow. Perhaps he was a breadmaker, or someone who could ease another’s pain with a joke—make them feel lighthearted. The loss of one man’s skill weakens his whole community, and in a small way his nation suffers, and his world.

We are all one fabric, humankind. To tear out a single thread unbinds us.

And, oh, how many threads have been torn.

Gaborn felt pangs of loss for his own father, for Iome’s parents, for the hundreds of thousands who had already died, and for the millions that stood now on the threshold of death.

He sighed. “Raj Ahten is near Kartish,” Gaborn quietly informed his Days. “He is fading. He killed more of my Chosen today—a dozen men.”

“You spend a great deal of time worrying about the welfare of your adversary,” the Days pointed out.

Gaborn turned and looked at the skeletal scholar. The man sat on the cold rock, his knees drawn up to his chin, his robe pulled low over his face. Gaborn said, “I would not have any man for my enemy, if I could choose it. Do you know what Raj Ahten faces in Kartish?”

“Time will reveal all things,” the Days answered.

Gaborn said, “I sense a great danger rising. I suspect that Kartish is already destroyed.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny such suspicions,” the Days said.

After a lifetime of living with a Days, Gaborn expected nothing more. Gaborn had tried his best to evince aid from this man, to no avail.

Gaborn had memorized the drawing made by the Emir of Tuulistan. It revealed the Days’ secret teachings from the Room of Dreams in the House of Understanding. As Gaborn studied the scholar before him, the image flashed through his mind.

The Three Domains of Man

The drawing detailed how each man saw himself as the lord of his own realm. It showed how men gauge good and evil based on whether another person enlarges one’s territories or tries to diminish them.

Gaborn struggled inwardly, and suddenly had an insight. It seemed to him that a man could not truly be good in isolation. To develop such virtue, he had to recognize that he was inextricably tied to his community, to the brotherhood of mankind.

A truly good man, he reasoned, could not live for himself alone. Like some of the mystics in Indhopal who refused to wear clothes or to eat food that others might need, he gave himself in service.

Gaborn keenly felt the need to become that kind of man. Though he was born to be a lord, he wanted to dedicate every waking moment to protecting his people. He wanted to consecrate every thought in their behalf, every deed. Yet...nothing that he did seemed enough.

There was something in the nature of good and evil that he did not yet comprehend, some mystery that still eluded him.

He blinked his eyes. They felt gritty, overused. The Days merely sat on the rock.

Why? If the Days understood the nature of good and evil, why did they not act?

Was the Days even human anymore? Had he no compassion? Suddenly connections seemed to weave together through Gaborn’s mind, like lightning weaving across the clouds. He considered the diagram. Everything about it seemed to converge. He felt as if he were on the verge of revelation.

“Time!” he whispered in triumph. Perhaps the diagram wasn’t about good and evil at all. Perhaps it was about Time.

The Days claimed to be servants to the Time Lords. Yet, who had ever seen a Time Lord? They were only legends, personifications of a force of nature.

Now he saw something more clearly. The Days’ teachings said that when a man seeks to take your money, or your wife, or your place in the community, you think him evil. But if he enlarges your stature, if he gives you praise or wealth or gives of his time, you think him good.

But a thought struck Gaborn: what do I have that Time won’t take from me? My wife, my father, my family? My wealth, my life? All that I am, Time will steal from me. I have nothing!

Obviously, the Days recognized this. But something about the recognition ate at Gaborn. One could deduce by this argument that Time was the ultimate evil, for it would surely strip a man of all pride and pretentiousness.

Gaborn wondered about his Days. He could not expect one of them to elaborate on his observation, or even to verify his suspicions. The order that they belonged to required them to remain aloof from the lords, to watch only, and never to influence the course of events that Time decreed.

So they merely watched events unfold. But to what end? Why would they give themselves in service to Time if it was the ultimate villain?

He had to be missing something.

If it was true that Time strips a man of everything that he thinks he owns, Gaborn wondered, then perhaps the Days see ownership as an illusion? Perhaps they believe that good and evil are mere phantasms?

Or maybe, Gaborn wondered, his thoughts coming in a rush, they recognize that Time also gives us all that we have. It brings us our homes, our wealth, our loved ones. Time gives us every precious second to enjoy.

So Time may ultimately be a paradox: creator and destroyer, bringer of joy and sorrow.

Perhaps the Days saw themselves as enlightened, standing aloof from that paradox. It certainly fit with their actions—and inaction.

But what could they hope to gain from their service? Time. The Days served the Time Lords. Could they hope to gain more Time for their service? Binnesman had lived for hundreds of years. The Earth had extended his life. Water wizards also were known to live for long ages.

Could his Days hope to similarly extend his life? It was a curious thought.

A nagging suspicion took hold of Gaborn. In all of the chronicles of the lives of various kings, nothing was ever said of the Days. The authors did not name themselves, remained completely anonymous. From time to time, they were reassigned. Gaborn’s own Days had come to him when he was still only a child. He had looked then much as he did now—skeletal, fiftyish. His hairline had not receded farther, no age spots had appeared in, what, fifteen years?

Yet Gaborn could not credit the notion. If the Days did live to a long age, someone would have noted it before—unless, like other wizards, the Days each had varying degrees of power.

Perhaps there really were Time Lords. If one of them stood before Gaborn, would he even know?

“How old are you?” Gaborn asked the Days.

The Days’ head swiveled. “How old do I look?”

“Fifty years.”

The Days nodded. “That would be about right.”

The answer was imprecise, an obvious evasion. “Whose life did you chronicle before you began writing my history?”

“Picobo Zwanesh, a prince of Inkarra,” the Days replied.

Gaborn had never heard the name, or even one similar to it. Nor had he known that his Days could speak Inkarran. “He was the first person you chronicled?”

“Yes.” It was spoken slowly. Another evasion?

“How long do you hope to live?”

“From all that you say, anything beyond a week would be a great boon.”

There was a puzzle here. Something was still missing. For a moment he’d thought he was on the verge of a revelation. Now he wasn’t sure he’d come any closer to the truth at all.

His Days certainly would not provide him with any clues. Gaborn couldn’t afford to ponder it anymore. He was too appreciative of how every precious second passed. The future rushed toward him. He needed to rest. The time was coming when he’d not be able to afford the luxury.

Every couple of minutes, a falling star would arch through the sky like an arrow shot from the bow of the heavens. Shortly after midwinter, for three days after Bride’s Feast, it was normal for the heavens to put on a display like this, but not now.

“When you write the book of my life,” Gaborn asked, “will you tell the world that it pained me to use my friends? Will you write that I wished evil upon no man, even my enemies?”

The Days answered, “It is said that ‘Deeds reveal the inner man, even when he would cloak himself in fine words.’ ”

“Yet sometimes deeds tell only half a tale,” Gaborn said. “I don’t like using this child, Averan. She should be allowed to grow into a beautiful woman, with sons and daughters of her own, and a husband that loves her true. Your book will only tell that I used her badly. It shames me that I must use her at all.”

“Your sentiments will be added as a footnote,” the Days said.

“Thank you,” Gaborn said sincerely.

A shout rose in the distance, hailing Gaborn. Gaborn looked south. A knight rode hard toward him, a flaming brand in his hand. He recognized the scout who had been with Averan and Binnesman.

“Yes?” Gaborn called.

“Milord,” the knight said, riding closer, “I’ve been looking for you.

I thought you should know: the girl Averan ate of the reaver. She’s very ill.”

Gaborn went cold. “How ill?”

“She cried out a few times, and sweat began to pour from her. Then she fell to the ground and began to convulse. She bit her tongue badly, and swallowed some blood. She was choking on it—”

“By the Powers!” Gaborn swore. What have I done?

“I got a knife between her teeth and pried her mouth open, but we had to put her on her belly lest she smother in her own blood. We can’t get drink down her at all.”

Gaborn leapt down from the rock, ran to his horse.

“Binnesman and his wylde are doing their best to keep her alive,” the scout said.

He swung up onto his mount, urged it galloping back to the south. He came up on a small knot of men all in a circle.

Two lords held Averan pinned to the ground, so that she wouldn’t hurt herself as she convulsed. Her eyes were rolled hack in her head, showing white, and her eyelids quivered. Her breath came out in great wheezes.

Binnesman stood over her, swinging his staff slowly, as he finished a higher incantation.

The stench told Gaborn that she’d retched, and wet puddles in the ash showed the remains of her meal.

He turned away in disgust. After long minutes, Binnesman came to his side, put a hand on his shoulder.

“The reaver she ate must have been near death. It was suffering greatly. She had hardly finished eating, when she cried out, ‘I’m dying. I’m dying.’ ”

Gaborn dared not say anything.

“She regurgitated most of the meal,” Binnesman said. “In doing so, I suspect she saved her life.”

Gaborn shook his head, confounded, unable to think what to do next. “And perhaps because of it, we have lost ours.”

48 Matters of the Heart

Borenson stared by starlight at Myrrima’s right hand. The knuckles and middle three fingers were icy and almost as white as the hoarfrost that blasted the ground for fifty yards in every direction.

He touched her flesh, found it so bitter cold that it felt hot. Her teeth were chattering, and she trembled from the chill.

The Toth wight had cast some sort of spell on her.

“Damn,” he swore. Her fingers were as good as gone. She’d lose them for sure—maybe the whole hand.

Borenson’s heart was still pumping frantically. The wight’s dying scream echoed endlessly in his mind. His thoughts were racing. His wife had banished a wight. That couldn’t happen. Only a powerful mage might have done it. And it looked as if she would lose her hand.

She did it for me, he realized. She stood over me and fought the monster, just as she fought the reavers near Mangan’s Rock.

He couldn’t think clearly. He breathed on her hand, trying to heat it.

“Let’s wrap it and try to keep it warm,” he offered, pulling off his own cloak. He gingerly bundled the cloak around the injured hand.

“There’s no warmth left in it,” Myrrima said. “The cold is spreading.”

The touch of the air around him was surprisingly bitter, as if this place might not thaw in a week. Ice clung to his beard. The very air felt as brittle as the crust of ice at his feet.

A fire? he considered. But his fire kit was in his saddlebags. He looked down the road. The horses had both run off. With a wight on their tails, they’d probably keep running until dawn.

“Can you walk?” Borenson asked. “Fenraven can’t be far.”

“I can walk,” Myrrima said through chattering teeth. “But can you keep up with me?” She was a Runelord now, with more endowments of brawn and metabolism than he, and endowments of stamina to boot. She could run farther and faster than he.

“No,” he said. “There’s bound to be a healer in Fenraven, a midwife at least. Maybe you should go ahead.”

Myrrima climbed shakily to her feet. Even with all of her endowments, the effort seemed to drain her. She grabbed her bow, used it as a staff, and began to hobble forward. In his mind, Borenson recalled how Hoswell had fled the battlefield only hours ago using the same bow in just such a manner. He’d not survived.

Borenson jogged along beside her.

She looked down the road determinedly. “We’ve got to find the horses,” Myrrima said between chattering teeth. “I put some of Binnesman’s healing salve in my saddlebags.”

Passing out of the blasted area was a relief. The warm night air seemed to surge around Borenson. He felt refreshed by it, more hopeful. He realized that moments before he’d felt...depleted of some vital essence. He hoped that Myrrima would feel it too.

Starlight shone overhead, a powder in the heavens that barely pierced the gauzy clouds. Soon they topped a small rise, and he looked eagerly along the road ahead. Night vapors spread over the muddy trail in patches. Black trees raked the sky with leafless limbs.

He could see no cheering lights for miles ahead, and no sign of his horses.

It looked like a good patch of road in which to find another wight.

There is a rider ahead of us, he recalled. Most likely he is an assassin out of Muyyatin.

Borenson had few endowments. His warhammer remained sheathed on his horse’s back. His only weapon was the long knife strapped to his leg.

Myrrima took a look at the horizon, groaned in despair. “How big is Fenraven?” she asked as she stood panting.

“Not big,” he said. He’d never been there, but knew it by reputation.

“So, maybe—maybe we just can’t see its lights. It could be close ahead.”

Borenson knew that Fenraven was situated just beyond the bogs on a small island. The flowing water around it was a bane to wraiths, but the people of Fenraven also kept lanterns outside every doorway, to make doubly sure.

If we were even close, he knew, we’d see those lights, or smoke rising from the town. But there was nothing. “You could be right,” he lied, trying to offer some comfort. “It could be anywhere.”

Myrrima nodded, hobbled on.

For nearly half an hour he jogged to keep pace with her. He pulled off his armor, threw it to the ground, along with his helm.

Myrrima’s breath came in quick, shallow gasps. She held her wounded arm cupped against her chest like a claw, Borenson’s cloak wrapped around it. He could tell that she was in great pain.

They ran through the fog-shrouded woods, and Borenson listened for the sounds of danger or for his horses. Water dripped from tree limbs, landing in the mud with sucking sounds. The wind blew softly, making leaves skitter nervously. Borenson recalled the elemental of the Darkling Glory that had attacked Gaborn’s camp earlier in the day, and the gale that had raced ahead of them inexplicably this afternoon.

Was this some kind of vengeance? he wondered. Myrrima had done the creature great harm, after all. He only wished that she could have killed it.

Myrrima slowed and began to move erratically after the first half hour, scampering forward in little starts and stops. He could walk as fast as she could by then.

He was winded. He figured that they had covered nearly three miles. He felt numb all over. He kept watching her. She seemed more drained with each passing moment. He feared that she would collapse with nearly every step.

They reached another hillock, looked down the road below. Stars fell, as if to empty the heavens.

The hills were rising, becoming a bit taller. The fog lay thicker in the folds beneath. Finally, a horned moon began to climb above the horizon, limning it with light. In the distance to the south, he could make out the jagged white peaks of the Alcairs. No sign of horses, no sign of town.

He glanced at Myrrima, and what he saw made chills lance through him. Her face had a deathly pallor and she breathed roughly, shallowly. With every breath, fog rolled out of her mouth and hung round her face in a little cloud.

Yet it was not so cold that his breath did so.

The Bright Ones protect her! he swore inwardly.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Weakly, she shook her head no.

“Let’s have a look at that hand,” he said.

Myrrima shook her head no, pulled back, but he took her gingerly. Her right arm would not move. It felt as if it were frozen at the elbow. He began gently unwinding his cloak from around her arm. The folds of cloth had frozen to her flesh.

He got it off, and found that more than her knuckles and fingers were white now. The ice reached all the way up her arm, and was spreading to her shoulder.

It was as if death crept through her flesh.

He stared at her, stricken with horror.

Myrrima nodded, as if the sight only gave her visual confirmation of how she felt.

“It will kill me,” she said.

Borenson looked about, bewildered. There was no fighting otherworldly powers. He was no sorcerer, had no weapons.

“Maybe...if we cut it off...” The very notion horrified him. He had never performed an amputation. He had no bandages, nothing that would relieve her pain. And from the look of it, the arm would have to come off at the shoulder. He wouldn’t be able to control the bleeding.

Myrrima shook her head. “I don’t...I don’t think it will work.”

“Here,” he said, “lean against me for a moment.” He still wore the padding that he’d had beneath his armor, and his sweat was slick beneath it. He unlaced the front of it, along with his tunic, then put her arm against his side. Her touch was like bitter ice, and he wondered for a moment if the wight’s curse would take him too.

He no longer cared if it did.

Early in the morning, he’d asked Gaborn what more he might be required to give. Borenson had already lost his manhood, and his virtue. Now he realized that he was about to lose something more, something so precious he had never even guessed at its worth: his wife.

Myrrima leaned against him heavily, as if to steady herself, as her breath came quick and frightened.

This isn’t how it was supposed to be, he thought. When he’d left Castle Sylvarresta four nights ago, he’d imagined that he was leaving Myrrima forever.

I was the one taking the road to Inkarra. I was the one who was never supposed to return.

He’d been protecting himself from that knowledge. He’d refused to give himself to her in hopes that he would protect her too. He saw that now, all in flash. Myrrima was right.

He’d tried to divorce himself from any feeling for her. But he’d loved her from the moment he saw her.

He began to suspect that he knew what that meant. He’d stood at Gaborn’s back as he studied in the House of Understanding. Borenson had never been a student, had kept his eyes and ears open for danger. But he had learned some things.

Now, he tried to recall something he’d heard once while Gaborn listened to a lecture in the Room of the Heart. The memories came slowly, and Borenson wondered at that. Perhaps they came slowly because he’d lost endowments of wit when Raj Ahten destroyed the Blue Tower. Perhaps they came slowly because he’d never paid much attention to Hearth-master Jorlis. Who could take a man seriously who spent his whole life thinking about emotions?

In the Room of the Heart, Hearthmaster Jorlis had taught that every man has two minds, the “scant mind” and the “deep mind.”

Jorlis had said that the scant mind was cold, logical, and rational. It knew little of love. It was the part of the mind that fretted about numbers and accounts.

But Jorlis said that every man has another mind, a deep mind. It was the part of the brain that dreamed and struggled to comprehend the world. It was the creative mind that made unexpected insights. It was the part of the mind that assured you when you’d made a right choice, or that warned against danger by sending feelings of uncertainty or fear.

Borenson had always felt skeptical of such teachings. After all, Jorlis was a bit of a pansy—a big-boned man with red cheeks and soft flesh.

But Jorlis claimed that the deep mind would ponder problems for weeks or months, independent of the scant mind, until it discovered solutions that the scant mind could never fathom. Thus, he believed that the deep mind was far wiser than the scant mind.

Jorlis had said that when a man fell in love with a woman at first sight, it was a warning from the deep mind that the woman before him matched his vision of an ideal mate.

The deep mind created that image. It told a man that his perfect love would have the kindness of his aunt, and the eyes of his mother. She might treat children as tenderly as a neighbor did, and have his father’s sense of humor. All of these traits were then bound into an image, woven from borrowed threads into a crude tapestry.

“The recognition you feel when you meet the woman of your dreams, that rush of dizziness and thrill of discovery,” Jorlis had taught, “is merely the deep mind speaking to you. It is warning you that it recognizes in someone some virtues that you’ve long sought. The deep mind is not always right, but it is always worth listening to.”

Nonsense, Borenson had thought. Jorlis had always seemed to be a touch off.

But with Myrrima, everything that she had done was beginning to convince Borenson that in his case, the deep mind was right.

She was everything that he’d ever hoped for in a woman. She was full of warmth and compassion and endless devotion. All his life, he’d felt as if he were but half a man.

Myrrima completed him.

So he held her.

The cold of her wound seeped into his side, and if his attempt to warm her did any good, he could not tell. He bore it for long minutes, as her face went pale and her trembling increased. The fog around her mouth came out thicker with every breath.

“Hold my hand,” she begged weakly, through chattering teeth. He took her frozen right hand in his, but she shook her head. “Not that one. I can’t feel anything.”

He gripped it anyway, took her left hand too. The cold from her right hand was like a fire, burning up his arm. It could not easily be borne.

He wondered if he could divert the cold, let himself become a conduit for her death.

Take me, he begged of the Powers. Take me instead.

She leaned against him heavily, her head resting against his shoulder.

“I love you,” he whispered into her ear.

She nodded slightly. “I know.”

In the distance, a lone wolf howled at the rising moon out in the woods, while stars streaked through the night sky.

He kissed her brow, and Myrrima fell into him, a dead weight. He held her up for a moment. She was breathing still, but he could not guess how much longer she might hold on.

It was late, past midnight, he figured. He felt hungry and exhausted. He had few endowments to help him, none of stamina, and he had no idea how far Fenraven might be. Miles, he suspected.

He considered abandoning Myrrima while he went for help. She was a large woman, and he didn’t know how far he could carry her. But the wolf was howling, and he dared not leave her. Besides, he knew that she would not want to die alone. He carried her.

49 Starfall

At the Courts of Tide, yet another tremor struck. Messengers from all over the countryside carried reports of the damage to Iome. In the hours since the quakes first hit, towers in a dozen castles had collapsed, along with a bridge that joined two of the larger islands in the city.

More frightening were reports of damage in the poorer quarters. There, cheap shanties collapsed and caught flame, so that even now the people of the Courts of Tide battled fires on a dozen fronts. Worse, huge waves beat the northern shores after the first temblor. The waves capsized boats and swept more than a thousand cottages into the sea.

The death toll would not be known for days.

So fires lit the city, while pillars of smoke rose.

Servants and guards from Gaborn’s palace all took refuge outside, bringing blankets and furs to lie on.

No one slept.

Lanterns brightened the courtyard. The cooks carried out stores of bread, huge hams, and slabs of beef. In an attempt to lighten the mood, the king’s minstrels decided to play.

It made for a macabre carnival.

Iome felt almost as if she were accursed by the Earth.

But as reports came in, she realized that the tremors had nothing to do with her. Apparently the devastation was worse a dozen miles north, where whole villages had been flattened.

Messengers inundated the castle, requesting men to help in rescue efforts. Chamberlain Westhaven, who handled the normal duties while the king was gone, deferred judgment on such matters to Iome.

For hours Iome sat in the open courtyard while the minstrels played and couriers bore tales of woe. With the help of various scribes and minor lords, she levied lords for men to help with the rescue efforts and to feed and shelter the homeless. She appropriated funds to begin rebuilding.

In one night she spent twelve times as much gold as her father would have in a year, until she began to worry whether she squandered Gaborn’s wealth.

She had no experience running such a large kingdom. The problem threatened to overwhelm her. Time and again, Chamberlain Westhaven offered advice at crucial moments. He was a competent man and knew the realm far better than she did.

As she worked, her Days curled up on the ground and merely watched, trying not to sleep. A dozen times after Iome had brought the girl out of the tower, the Days thanked her profusely. For long minutes, the girl could not help crying, and Iome longed to give her comfort.

Obviously, the Days worried for her family, a few miles to the north.

Yet Iome could not feel any comfort herself. There had been strange tremors in Heredon before she left. She’d felt them again south of Carris, and now here at the Courts of Tide. Were they related?

Gaborn claimed it was a message: The Earth was in pain. But if the minor tremors had been a sign of its pain, Iome wondered, what could this devastating quake mean?

Intuition told her that these matters were related. She tried not to worry about it.

Thus the ground shook and fires raged throughout the city when a tall, gaunt scholar came through the crowd that had gathered in the courtyard around the King’s Keep.

He wore a blue robe with silver stars sewn upon it, marking him as a stargazer. He had a long silver beard and piercing eyes.

Chamberlain Westhaven leaned close and whispered, “Hearthmaster Jennaise, from the Room of Stars. I suspect that his watchtower has fallen. But may I remind Your Highness that we do not spend funds repairing their buildings. The House of Understanding has always been supported solely by its patrons.”

Iome nodded.

The stargazer strode to Iome and said in a Ferecian accent, “Your Highness, I beg the queen’s ear. We have a great problem, an unprecedented problem.”

“How may I help you, Hearthmaster Jennaise?”

“I’m not sure where to begin,” the stargazer said in a befuddled tone. Of course not, she thought. Ferecians never know where to begin, or how to finish, or when to get to the point.

“Your watchtower has sustained damage?”

“The observatory? It’s a mess—charts and scrolls everywhere. And there was a fire! My assistant nearly died trying to save the maps. It will take weeks to clean it. I’m sure the water we threw on the fire did as much damage as the flames themselves—but, er, uh, that is not your concern, is it? Indeed, I’m not sure if any of this is your concern.”

“Nor am I,” Iome said quite frankly, for she had no more idea what his problem was than when he had first opened his mouth.

He looked at the crowd of servants and whispered, “Your Highness, may we speak privately?”

Iome nodded, and together they strolled through the courtyard over to the shadows beneath a pair of pecan trees, in a dark corner by the castle wall.

“Milady,” he said, “what do you know of the stars?”

“They’re pretty,” Iome said dryly.

“Yes,” Jennaise said. “And you may also know that as the seasons progress, the constellations rotate about the sky. At the first of the year, Elwind rides over the mountains of the north. But at high summer he is almost straight overhead.”

“I know,” Iome said.

“Then it is with great...bewilderment that I must report that the stars are wrong.”

“What?” Iome asked.

“The stars are wrong tonight. It is all very baffling. Tonight is the third of the month of Leaves. But by our charts, the stars read as if it were the twentieth of the month of Harvest—off by two weeks.”

“How can that be?” Iome asked. “Could the charts be wrong? Perhaps—”

“The charts are not wrong. I’ve been over them a hundred times. I can think of only one explanation,” Jennaise answered. “The world is taking some new path through the heavens. Even the moon—by my preliminary measurements—”

A moment before Iome had felt overwhelmed. Now she was staggered. She stared at him with her mouth open, and finally managed to ask, “What can we do?”

Jennaise shook his head. “I—perhaps no one can help. But your husband is the Earth King.”

Suddenly she recalled Averan’s words. The One True Master was binding the Rune of Desolation to the Runes of Heaven and the Inferno. She planned to make a new world, where mankind would not survive.

Could she wrest the Earth from its appointed course? “Of course,” Iome said. “I’ll—send word immediately.”

Even if the One True Master had done this, how could Gaborn stop her? He’d lost most of his own powers.

The stargazer turned to leave, and Iome desperately cast her eyes over the courtyard. She called for a courier, thinking to pen a message to Gaborn.

But even as she began thinking how to frame the words, she realized that she wasn’t telling Gaborn anything that he didn’t already know.

He’d warned Iome that if he did not destroy the reavers’ lord, his people would all die. He knew the danger as well as she did.

Or did he? she wondered. Gaborn could sense danger, but he could never tell from what quarter it might come. And nearly all of his Chosen in Mystarria were still near the city of Carris. He couldn’t sense danger to those outside the city. She wondered what Gaborn would say if she warned him of her suspicions of an impending attack here at the Courts of Tide. Would he ask her to go, or to stay? She wondered what he would say if he knew that the world was out of its course.

Just then, Grimeson came into the courtyard with a facilitator in tow. “Milady,” he shouted. “We got them endowments that Gaborn wanted.”

Iome’s thoughts had been a jumble. She’d forgotten about the endowments. Gaborn had ordered the facilitators to prepare vectors for Averan. Now, the facilitator would need to escort the vectors to Gaborn.

“Get horses and set off immediately,” Iome told Grimeson. “Every second counts.”

“Milady,” Grimeson said, “these vectors have been up all night. I wouldn’t want one of them to fall off his horse. There’s royal carriages that would be almost as fast as a horse.”

“By all means then, we’ll take carriages.”

“We?”

Iome felt as if the world were falling apart around her. Gaborn had sent her here to be “safe.” But the quakes had struck and towers collapsed and the stars were falling. The world was out of its course.

No place was safe.

Her place was beside Gaborn, but she couldn’t follow him into the Underworld. There, she would only be a liability to him. He was the Earth King still, and though his powers were diminished, he alone might stand against the reaver lord.

Yet there had to be something more that she could do than wait here at the Courts of Tide. She glanced back over her shoulder, saw Chamberlain Westhaven taking a few moments to advise half a dozen lords in her absence. He knew this realm better than she did.

“Grimeson,” she said with finality. “Get my escort. I’m coming with you. I need to speak to Gaborn.”

She penned a note to Chamberlain Westhaven, warning him to prepare for an attack from the sea, and handed it to a page.

In moments she was gone.

50 Remembering Summer

Borenson staggered through the dark moors, carrying Myrrima in his arms. She was a big woman, and even with an endowment of brawn, he could not carry her easily—he tired too quickly.

As he carried her, he clung to her right hand, gripping it for life, hoping that by some miracle he could help her hold on for a while longer.

It made little difference, he suspected.

In fact, after an hour, he knew that it made no difference. The bleak cold from her hand froze his bones, making them hard as iron. His own right hand became locked to hers.

He did not regret his decision to hold her, to warm her. He regretted only that he could not feel her hand anymore, for his own flesh seemed to have frozen as solid as midwinter ice.

So he bore her over uneven ground. He listened to her teeth chatter, and each time a puff of icy air came from her mouth, he thought it a small miracle.

It became a chore to walk. Sweat poured from him and his legs burned. Without an endowment of stamina, he tired as quickly and deeply as any other man. He dared not rest, for fear that if he stopped, then he would not regain the will to move again.

So he staggered on beneath the dripping trees and starlit skies over a land so dank it was fit only for newts and worms. The wolf continued to howl. He no longer feared assassins or wights. He knew his own death would not be far away. The cold of the Toth’s wight stole the heat from his own hand, had worked its way down to his elbow. His prayer had been answered in part.

Myrrima would die. He could not stop it. But he also knew that he could not live much longer. He had taken her death into himself as well.

So it was that as he walked, he felt an odd sensation between his legs as his testicles suddenly dropped.

He had had no premonition, no tingling or warning. Indeed, he had forgotten that little boys are not born with hanging walnuts. Instead, they ripen in small sacs between their legs, and drop after a couple of years.

The wizard’s balm had worked its miracle. There could have been no more natural way for it to happen.

“I’ll pay that damned wizard no more than a pint for the both of them,” Borenson choked, and laughed at fate’s cruel jest.

He kept walking. Lift a foot, plod forward. Lift a foot, stagger on.

He could no longer hold his head up. With every step, the world seemed to swim, and his eyes would not focus.

He lost consciousness, and walked for a while in a dreamscape where Myrrima’s shade floated beside him.

“I’m coming with you to Inkarra no matter what,” she said. “Leave my body here, and I’ll follow. It’s all gone cold anyway.”

An overwhelming sadness took him, and he looked down to discover if it was true. He couldn’t see whether she was breathing anymore. Icy cold ran up the length of his own arm, pierced his shoulder now.

He wanted nothing more than to lie down with Myrrima to die.

He thought about the message for King Zandaros. He wasn’t sure that he could deliver it any longer. He’d always tried to be faithful to Gaborn. It hurt to find that he had failed him at last.

It was bound to happen, Borenson told himself.

And Daylan Hammer, that mythical figure, was still supposed to be in Inkarra. What of the Sum of All Men? Did he even exist?

He kept walking, and must have slept as he did. He stumbled into a streambed, slipped on round wet stones. One of them drove into his knee, waking him. It was hazy. Mist rose up from the brook, filling its channel with a thick fog. He got up, waded in water up to his hips across the stream, under the dark trees.

I must be getting close to Fenraven, he thought.

He heard a horse whicker. He jumped, realized that he had passed it in the dark, or fog, or perhaps in his sleep.

His own warhorse, the one he’d let Myrrima ride, stood beside the brook, its reins tangled in a limb. He went to it, held Myrrima still as he dug into the saddlebags.

He found the wizard’s balm, as she’d said.

He pulled it out, managed to open the tin with one hand. He looked at Myrrima for a long moment. It was dark and foggy. He could hardly see for the burning sweat that stung his eyes. He could not tell if she breathed anymore. If her chest rose and fell, he could not detect it.

He gazed up at the sky, saw a pair of stars plunging through the night. The horizon seemed to be lighter. Soon dawn would come. He wondered if he would live to see it.

He sat down with Myrrima, and smeared the wizard’s balm up her arm, over her wrist, and between each finger on her right hand.

He spared only the tiniest bit for himself. There was precious little of it left.

Then he lay down with her beside the stream. He tried to listen to the plink of water as it tumbled over stones. He gazed at the odd way that fog coursed along the channel. He sniffed the scent of moist ground. A cricket chirped in a thicket of brambles, adding a lonely serenade to the music of the water. He could feel nothing in his right hand. He lay against Myrrima, hoping to warm her.

His thoughts came muzzily. He felt weary nigh to death, but could not sleep.

For a long hour he remained as the stars began to fade, and if his wife breathed, he could not see it, could not feel it. He caressed her chin. It was cold to the touch.

She’s dead, he finally admitted, his mind reeling in a daze.

The balm had warmed his hand, brought some life back to it. He pried it loose from Myrrima’s frozen grasp.

There was no use pretending any longer, or hoping that she might live. On the Isle of Thwynn, where Borenson was born, the dead were not consigned to the earth, but to the sea.

So he kissed Myrrima goodbye, and begged her forgiveness for loving her poorly. Then he carried her back to the brook, and waded in to his hips. The water seemed warmer than the night air. It still remembered summer.

Somewhere in the distance, a cock crowed. His mind was a muddle from fatigue. He gave his wife to the stream and to the mist, let her float along the brook. Part of him could not believe that she was gone. It is that way with death. He stared into the mist, listened to the stream’s music. “Let her find peace in your embrace,” he whispered to the brook, “as you carry her to the sea.”

He felt as if he had somehow betrayed his wife. But in his spent and confused state, he couldn’t figure out why. He turned and staggered to his mount. There would be an inn at Fenraven, but he doubted that he would find comfort there.

51 The Point of No Return

Dawn found Averan lying in a fetal position beside Spring in the back of a wagon as it thundered along a road, heading south from Carris. Averan’s tongue had quit bleeding where she’d bitten it, but sweat soaked her thin robe. A large praying mantis rode on the buckboard above her, having turned as gray-brown as the wagon. It stood perfectly still.

Averan lay trembling in pain, wrung out. But the convulsions had mostly stopped an hour ago. She knew that she would live.

Worst of all, she knew that she had failed. She’d fed upon the wrong reaver again. The Waymaker was still out there in the reaver horde, waiting for Gaborn to hunt him down. Waiting for Averan.

She shook her head in despair. The reavers were suffering more than men could suffer. She knew that now. Their capacity to endure pain far exceeded that of a man. Averan feared that if she tried to eat again, she’d die. Yet if she found the Waymaker, she couldn’t refuse to try.

She knew little of the blade-bearer she had eaten. Cunning Eater was its name. His few memories tormented her.

Cunning Eater had often tunneled beneath enemy hives and masterminded his queen’s wars of genocide. The visions Averan faced were atrocious—charging through enemy tunnels, tearing off the sweet meat of enemy corpses and gulping them down with a ravenous appetite. In her memory, none were spared. Even the eggs of enemy queens became food for Cunning Eater’s horde. No human lord had ever been as rapacious as the monster Averan had eaten.

He had been a master of war, one who had studied ancient battles against mankind and sought to devise new stratagems.

Averan closed her eyes against the rising sun, tried to forget.

Still the wagon raced on, chasing the reavers’ trail. In the still dawn the high clouds blanketed the skies like a sheet of white silk, while behind it the sun was a rose-colored lamp, all incandescent. A morning mist roamed the fields.

The reavers thundered over the plains, black in the wan morning light, like a vast stampede of elephants as they rocked across the golden grasslands, stirring up dust and sending starlings to wheel through the sky in fretful clouds.

But the reavers plodded slowly now. In five hours during the night they had traveled fewer than forty miles.

The reavers had spent themselves. Averan could feel it from Cunning Eater’s every memory. Sweat still squeezed from her every pore. A ravenous thirst still assailed her. She drank, but water did not satisfy. She craved more, but when men offered it to her fresh, she sniffed at it and panicked. She wanted sulfur in it.

The reavers themselves had begun to show signs that they were failing. In the night, first one reaver and then another dropped from the marching line. They did not stop, just simply began loping in circles. Their left legs kept marching while their right could not, so that they spun around on the ground like water beetles on the surface of a pool.

Gaborn himself had ridden up to her wagon in the predawn darkness an hour ago, pointed out the afflicted reavers by moonlight and asked, “Do you know what it means?”

“They’re dying of thirst,” she confirmed.

“Let’s hope for a warm day then,” he’d said. “Maybe a bit of sun will hurry their end.”

Now, Averan’s left arm spasmed in a cramp. She cried out. Spring crept up beside her in the bed of the wagon and began stroking Averan’s hair.

A memory carried Averan back to when she was small. She remembered a picnic with her mother at Kellysbrook, just outside the Boar and Stag back home.

She must have been very small. It was the first time she remembered ever really seeing a stream.

The water of Kellysbrook tumbled down from the hills, burbling over round stones pounded as smooth as porcelain by the waves. Water so cold that it should have been ice spilled upon the gravelly banks. The taste of the freshet was like freezing rain in the air, and the jingle and chink of water on rock became a soothing music. The water misted her face.

In places the stream slowed and dropped into languid pools. There, minnows darted in the shadows of moss-laden logs, and water striders danced upon the deep.

For hours she had searched among the pools for shy crayfish that walked about with their bouncing gait.

Afterward, Averan lay beneath a willow in a patch of sunlight as her mother told her stories, stroking her hair. But Averan was a long way from Kellysbrook now. It seemed like forever ago.

As Averan shivered in the green woman’s arms, she looked up into the creature’s eyes. Spring’s touch was soothing, and Averan could feel Earth Power in her, but it wasn’t soothing like a mother’s touch.

Something enigmatic, wild and feral, gleamed in Spring’s eyes. The green woman was not a woman at all, not her mother or a friend. Spring was not even an animal.

“Can you help me?” Averan asked. “Can you help me find the Waymaker?”

The green woman made no answer. She didn’t even understand the question.

Suddenly, from the wagons and men all around, a cheer arose.

Averan climbed up, looked around. The soldiers were riding slowly across the plains, the Frowth giants following in their trail. The reavers kept to their formation. She could see no cause for celebration.

“What’s going on?” Averan asked the wagon driver.

He glanced back over the buckboard. “We’ve passed the point of no return. It’s closer for the reavers to head to the Underworld now than to turn back for Carris.”

The men cheered as if it were a great victory.

Gaborn spurred his mount past the line of wains, and a wounded knight in a wagon ahead called, “Are we going to make another charge?”

“Not yet!” he warned. Gaborn studied the reavers pensively, looked to Averan as if for advice, but asked nothing. Instead, he continued to ride alongside her wagon.

The reavers dragged themselves homeward at a plodding pace as Gaborn’s armies rode their flanks.

The sun had just topped the horizon when Gaborn suddenly blew his warhorn, calling retreat. He shouted to the wagon drivers. “Turn the wains around, quickly! Go back!”

“What is it? What’s going on?” Averan’s driver asked. He studied the reavers uncertainly. Nothing had changed. They still moved south. He slowed the horses, wheeled the wagon. He snapped his whip over the horses’ heads, and the wagon began to bounce over the highway as the force horses gathered speed.

Still, he couldn’t give the animals their heads. These were big draft horses used for carrying goods swiftly, but few had more than a single endowment of metabolism. The train could move along the road only as fast as the slowest team.

“Get off the road!” Gaborn shouted to the drivers. “Give your horses their heads. The reavers are going to charge!”

Averan climbed up from her blanket, and watched the reavers for any sign of danger.

She could see no hint of it. Her driver pulled off the road and snapped his whip. The wheels sang and the wagon bounced over rocks and roots. The wagons and their drivers threw long shadows in the early morning light.

After two or three minutes, suddenly the whole horde halted in their march, and a hissing erupted from the reavers’ lines.

Thousands of the behemoths rose up on their back legs and stood for several long seconds. They faced east into the morning light, philia waving excitedly.

The hissing grew louder and louder. The reavers seemed agitated, or maybe frightened.

Averan’s driver cursed his horses and asked, “What’s going on?”

“They smell something,” Averan warned. Gaborn’s men had been riding their flanks. Averan’s wagon was perhaps two miles up the side of their lines.

It looked almost as if the reavers were trying to catch a glimpse of something, or to taste an elusive scent.

Averan turned east, but could spot nothing on the horizon—only golden plains with oaks rising here and there, some distant hills.

Do they smell another war party? she wondered. Were they hoping for reinforcements, or was an army riding to Gaborn’s aid? She doubted it.

She searched the skies for sign of thunderclouds on the horizon.

As she did, the reavers charged straight toward Gaborn’s troops. The lords on their force horses easily outpaced the monsters, but the Frowth giants were hard-pressed. They loped along the field, swinging their arms hugely in a bouncing gait. The frowth’s nostrils flared, and they called out to one another in their own tongue.

Now the wagon drivers whistled and cracked their whips, shouting, “Haw, there! Haw!”

Horses whinnied in terror.

She saw one team of horses swerve into another. Their lines tangled and a horse tripped. A wagon spilled lances to the ground, throwing the drivers down like dolls.

One driver limped up to grab the back of the closest passing wain. The other driver did not move.

Reavers thundered toward Gaborn’s flank. They ran with renewed vigor, faster than she’d have thought possible, their teeth flashing in the morning sunlight.

Averan couldn’t understand why the reavers suddenly took the offensive.

Gaborn’s knights wheeled northeast. The men on chargers could easily outpace the monsters. But her wagon was another matter. It bounced over the plains, and threw Averan into the air each time a wheel hit a rock. She heard a crack as an axle split.

She clutched the sideboards. The Frowth giants raced along now, almost to the wagons. The reavers closed the gap. Her heart hammered.

Spring stood up in the wagonbed. The Wylde watched the monsters intensely, as if she would pounce on the first one that drew near.

A reaver close to the front ranks grabbed a fair-sized boulder and hurled it. The stone streaked ahead two hundred yards and slammed a nearby wain.

The wain shattered. Its driver and horses disintegrated without a scream, becoming a bloody spray. Splinters of the wood hurtled dozens of yards in the air, and spokes and bits of metal rained down over the plain, among gobbets of flesh.

Other reavers quickly repeated the feat, demolishing another dozen supply wains.

Averan’s driver cracked his whip, sent his wagon bouncing over the prairie even faster. It hit a dip, and Averan heard the axle crack again.

A reaver roared, went striding past her wagon.

One reaver galumphed forward, an enormous blade-bearer with a knight gig in its front paws. She recalled from Cunning Eater’s memories how brutally effective such a weapon could be in experienced hands.

“Help!” Averan screamed.

She needn’t have bothered. Her driver was snapping the whip at the horses’ ears, shouting for them to hurry. He urged the team east, nearly tipping the wagon, but effectively racing from the monster’s path.

The enormous blade-bearer cut off the retreat of the wagon behind them.

Averan saw the driver’s face. He was an old man with silver hair and a worn leather coat over his ruddy tunic. He screamed in panic, tried to veer east too.

The blade-bearer’s huge paw snaked out, and she feared that the monster would impale the man before her eyes. Instead its knight gig snagged the lead horse by the neck. The reaver jerked hard, tearing the horse away. But it was tied to its traces.

The whole wagon jerked violently, and the second horse went down as the single tree snapped. The wagon’s front wheel hit a falling horse, and the wain bounced high in the air. Then the whole wain came down hard, flipping end over end.

Averan closed her eyes, didn’t want to see what happened to the wagonmaster.

Suddenly she realized that her driver was pulling away from the reaver’s lines.

The reavers could have turned to press the attack, wiping out another thirty or forty wagons, but they didn’t. Instead the horde flowed together, taking a new formation, as they rushed to the east.

Huge blade-bearers joined ranks in a pentagon nearly a mile to each side, while smaller reavers made up a star at its center. Within each arm of the star, a few scarlet sorceresses gathered in an elongated triangle. A fell mage and her escorts took up the center of the star. Averan recognized the formation, dredged it from Cunning Eater’s few memories.

The reavers called it the Form of War.

It was not a formation designed for speedy flight. It was designed for a military charge.

She clung to the side panels of the wagon, heart pounding in terror, thinking furiously. Her stomach knotted. She fought to calm herself.

The driver let his wagon slow. The reavers had passed them now, were charging away.

Averan had flown over these plains before, knew every city, every hamlet. To the east lay only hills for a bit, and beyond that the Donnestgree River twisted lazily over the plain. Villages and farms were everywhere along its banks. But the only city of import was Feldonshire, forty-five miles east.

Feldonshire was a sprawling tangle of cottages, shops, wheat mills, farms, and breweries set in wooded hills. From the sky it didn’t look like a city quite so much as a cluster of villages strung together.

Averan could think of nothing there that the reavers might want—no fortresses, nothing.

Gaborn shouted as his charger raced up, paced beside the wain. “They’re attacking Feldonshire.”

Gaborn, riding hard, watched the reavers’ lines in confusion. He could feel danger rising rapidly in Feldonshire, some forty-five miles to his east. Many of the wounded from Carris had floated downriver in the night. Now they were bivouacked in the city. His Earth senses screamed a warning to his Chosen, “Flee! Flee!”

The horde stampeded in a strange new formation over the golden plains. Dust and chaff thrown in the air during their passage rose for thousands of feet. The morning sun arching through the clouds cast a strange, yellowish pall.

But why Feldonshire?

“Water!” Averan said. “They’re going to water!”

“In Feldonshire?” Gaborn asked.

“No, to the ponds at Stinkwater, just three miles past the city!” Averan said. “I’ve seen them from the air—like green gems. The water has sulfur in it!”

Gaborn knew of the ponds. The hot mineral water that flowed up from the ground was a curse to those who lived nearby. No one farmed for miles around, and on cold winter mornings, vapors from ponds sometimes blew all the way to Feldonshire.

Could it be? he wondered. “But Feldonshire is forty-five miles from here!”

Averan nodded vigorously. “We know it’s forty-five miles, but maybe the reavers don’t. To them the water is just a smell in the air.”

Could a reaver scent water that far away? he wondered. Wolves could smell blood at four miles, and the Stinkwater probably had an odor stronger than blood.

So the reavers charged east, straight into the wind. A line of oak-covered hills rose up. The reavers would bull through the woods, blazing a trail of devastation a mile wide.

Gaborn licked his lips. Some reavers had already fallen out of the ranks, too weak to keep up the grueling pace. Several hundred lancers chased after them.

Forty-five miles. How long could they run before they exhausted themselves?

One way or another, he was determined to kill the Waymaker. He’d have to move quickly to head them off.

“Skalbairn,” Gaborn shouted. “Send a dozen of your fastest riders to Feldonshire. If it’s water that the reavers want, make sure that they don’t get it.”

“Milord?” Skalbairn asked.

“Poison the ponds,” Gaborn ordered.

“Poison them?” Binnesman demanded.

Gaborn frowned. He was the Earth King, and the Earth was allied with Water. For generations, his forefathers had allied with Water.

“It’s not a choice I make lightly,” Gaborn said.

“What should we use?” Skalbairn asked.

“Anything at hand,” Gaborn said. “Go to the woodcarvers’ guild. Ask Guildmaster Wallachs for help.”

“Aye,” Skalbairn said. He called out to some men, sent them racing off for Feldonshire. Baron Waggit rode with them.

But poisoning the water wouldn’t be enough. The reavers would head through Feldonshire.

Gaborn sensed danger to thousands of refugees. He could imagine what the banks of the river must look like, with the camps of the wounded there.

He would need to turn the horde if he could, block their path—or at least delay them long enough to save his people.

At the rate the horde was running, they’d reach Feldonshire in two hours. Even his fastest couriers would have to ride up the road nine miles to Ballyton, then cut southeast. Their trail would be sixty miles. Even on force horses, that would take the better part of an hour.

That would leave the people of Feldonshire only an hour to evacuate.

“You men,” Gaborn called to another dozen Runelords. “Go get the philia from some reavers’ bungholes. We’ll set another fire against them! Perhaps we can scare them off again. Does anyone here know Feldonshire?”

A young lord answered from the ranks. “Your Highness, my family is from there. I grew up in Darkwald.”

Darkwald was a forest of black walnut north of Feldonshire. The local craftsmen used the wood for carving tables, placards, wooden howls, fine chests and wardrobes, decorative mantels, and ornate doors. Many of Mystarria’s finest treasures had been carved in Feldonshire.

“Then you’ll know where to start the fire?”

The lord glanced at the reavers’ trail. “Shrewsvale.”

“You’d burn a village?” Gaborn asked.

“I don’t want to—I have a sister who lives there. But that’s where the reavers are heading, if I have my guess.”

Another lord spoke. “He’s right. The hills rise up on either side, and Shrewsvale is in the midst of the pass. There’d be no better place to stop the reavers.”

Gaborn had heard that there was a good inn at the top of the pass.

He jutted his chin at Langley. “Take a thousand lancers on slow mounts, along with the Frowth, and follow the reavers. Cut down any that fall behind, but don’t engage the main force. Be sure to note the position of any that might be the Waymaker.

“I’ll take the thousand fastest men to Shrewsvale.”

52 The Fortress

The slow dawn rose above Kartish, painting a pink haze above the gray and blasted lands. Raj Ahten prepared for his attack on the reaver fortress. No birds sang. No cattle walked the fields. Not even a lonely wind sighed.

Shadows puddled in the hollows, while sunlight gilded the hilltops. Overhead, a single flameweaver rode the spy balloon, along with two common troops. The graak-shaped balloon hovered in the still air like a seagull.

Raj Ahten stood on a ridge, glaring down. Below him, the reaver fortress was a monstrosity. A vile brown haze circled the place, swirling in a vast circle as if it were a slow tornado. Through wisps of fog he could see hundreds of thousands of dead men lying on the battlefield. Pusnabish had led his men to war, but the fell mage’s curses were so strong that no commoner could survive that swirling mist. Men and mounts with as many as three endowments of stamina stepped into the nebula and could only stagger a dozen yards before collapsing.

Worse than that, Raj Ahten’s sorcerers warned him that the mist was bound to its course. Even a driving wind at sunset had not diminished it. Instead, the haze circled maddeningly, as if it occupied its own space and time.

Raj Ahten would not be able to send commoners into this fray. They would only avail if the reavers sought to escape.

At Carris, Raj Ahten had seen glue mums erect a single black tower that leaned at an odd angle. The tower had twisted around like a narwhale’s horn.

Here, the reavers had constructed nine such spires in a circle, each leaning out. It reminded Raj Ahten of a glistening black crown of thorns.

Within that circle was a nest, or fortress, concocted of strands of blue-white mucilage laid out in a bizarre and complex pattern. Smaller black spikes and spires shot out of the fortress like the spines of a sea urchin, and everywhere were diminutive holes—similar to kill holes and archery slots in a human castle.

Raj Ahten could see no exterior guards. Yet through the kill holes he spotted an eerie sheen the color of life, a color that only his eyes could see.

Reavers hid inside their fortress in vast numbers.

Around the fortress, steep trenches would prevent a charger from drawing near. The trenches looked to be twenty feet deep or more. Even a Runelord in armor would be hard-pressed to climb their sides.

Beyond the fortress itself, amid the piles of tailings from the mine, was a reaver city. The entrances to burrows reared up by the thousands.

This is folly, Raj Ahten told himself. At Carris his knights had fought to hold the walls of a sturdy castle with only one entrance. It had proven to be nearly impossible. Here he would have to attack the reavers in their own fortress, a stronghold of unknown design.

Strange looking reavers clung to the top of each black spire. He had not seen such reavers at Carris. They were a new subspecies, never described in the old bestiaries.

The bony plates of their heads jutted back at a peculiar angle, making their muzzles exceptionally long. Each of these reavers had thirty-six philia. Their forearms also seemed to be longer than those on a blade-bearer. Their hides were a tannish-gray. They stood atop their spires, and their heads swiveled.

Though Raj Ahten crouched on a ridge nearly two miles away, the reavers swung toward him and waved their philia questioningly.

A common reaver would not have spotted him.

Even reavers have their far-seers, he realized. This breed must be rare indeed, if only these few keep guard here.

He took it as a sign. Truly, the legendary Lord of the Underworld had surfaced. Now Raj Ahten would battle the monster.

He studied the reaver’s fortress in mingled wonder and confusion. No castle had ever survived Raj Ahten’s attack.

A fortress is merely a shell for the cornered enemy to hide in, he reminded himself.

Raj Ahten squinted, checking the strange building for signs of weakness. He could see none, but he was not dissuaded. He had shattered fortresses with his Voice alone, and though it had proven ineffective when he tried it with the reavers’ construct at Carris, he felt certain that he would find some weakness in the reavers’ defenses.

Pusnabish had served him well in preparing for this battle. For the past two days, he’d kept his troops busy. Force horses had brought ballistas from every fortress within two hundred miles, raiding the defenses of the richest castles in all of Indhopal.

Pusnabish had sent to Aven and retrieved the volatile powders that Raj Ahten’s flameweavers had been experimenting with.

He’d gathered ten thousand elephants, including fourteen war elephants that had endowments of brawn, metabolism, and stamina.

More than that, Pusnabish had recognized that fire might be the key to driving out the reavers.

Kartish was not known for its many trees, but figs and citrus grew along the creek beds. The blight had devastated the orchards. So his men had scavenged every dead tree for thirty miles and piled them north of the reavers’ fortress. The hot sun had dried them over the past two days.

So it was that from the moment Raj Ahten arrived at the Palace of Canaries, his men were ready for war.

Now Raj Ahten blew the winding horn of a ram, and his men prepared the attack.

A mile behind him, two hundred thousand men began dragging twenty-five thousand pieces of artillery in place. With them marched a million well-armed common troops as escorts.

Beyond that, two million more men and ten thousand elephants began to drag dead trees toward the fortress.

Raj Ahten held to the ridge, and four thousand Invincibles—every lord in Southern Indhopal—rode up to join him.

They were a glorious band, wearing the riches of Indhopal. For this battle, they abandoned the heavy splint mail and scale mail that men wore into battle in northern climes. Instead, they donned armor in the styles of the ancients—tight-woven silk a dozen layers thick. It was both lighter and stronger than lacquered leather, and it would still breathe in the heat.

So the lords of Indhopal rode to war in bright silk long-coats dyed crimson and gold. Their turbans were pinned with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds as large as hens’ eggs. Their horses and war elephants were caparisoned as if for a parade. They bore bright lances, richly carved and decorated with gold foil, and their scabbards glittered with gems and silver.

Never in all the history of Indhopal had such an army gathered. Raj Ahten rode proudly at their head, dressed in armor of shining white silk, as befitted his station.

The ground rumbled from the feet of Raj Ahten’s troops, while clouds of dust rose over the plains, thrown up from dragging logs and artillery.

The reavers did not stir.

For an hour the commoners approached the swirling mists, and began laying down their logs. Raj Ahten watched the fortress, saw reavers frantically scurrying about near the kill holes. But they did not flee, did not seek to attack. He’d expected some form of resistance, but the reavers did not so much as hurl a stone against his men.

As he considered, the reason seemed obvious. The swirling nebula of vapors extended for nearly a quarter of a mile outside the fortress. The reavers couldn’t see his army.

So their horde elected to wait.

Hills of logs began to rise. The flameweavers supervised the commoners and their elephants. They set the logs in two piles, one to the east of the reaver fortress, one to the west.

Raj Ahten had expected the sorcerers to pile the dead trees in simple mounds, but there were copious logs, and the flameweavers ordered each pile to be arranged in a vast rune nearly a quarter of a mile across. To the east was the Rune of Fire. To the west was the Rune of Night.

Tens of thousands of workmen still toiled among the logs when the flameweavers reached up into the heavens. Night fell from horizon to horizon as they drew fire swirling from the sky and sent it sizzling through the logs.

The screams of burning men filled the air, and they began the lurid dance of the dying.

Raj Ahten took it stoically. He did not like to watch his people die, but Rahjim had assured him that a sacrifice was necessary. “A few thousand men will die. But it is better that a few thousand men are lost, than all of us.”

The smell of singed hair and cooking fat filled the plains. Now Rahjim and Az stood in the runes, glowing in flame.

Raj Ahten had seldom sacrificed to the greater Powers. But he felt desperate. Despite the fact that he’d taken endowments of stamina last night, the numbness in his left arm was spreading.

Raj Ahten’s sorcerers, clothed in fire, began to dance among the flames, twisting and writhing until they almost seemed to become flames themselves. Heat from the burning runes smote Raj Ahten on the hillside even half a mile away. Logs screamed in protest and sent up a cloud of smoke.

Atop the spires of the fortress, one of the reavers’ far-seers collapsed, while the others began to back from the heat.

Pusnabish held his hand before his face, and called, “O Great One, the fire is too hot. Even men with many endowments will not be able to charge the fortress.”

“Perhaps the reavers will do us a favor and bake in an oven of their own design,” a second lord chimed in.

Raj Ahten’s heart hammered. He felt the heat, but did not fear it. The coldness in his left hand eased a little. It felt more alive.

Az had promised him again and again that fire would heal him, but only if he let it burn away his humanity.

Raj Ahten’s pulse quickened.

For several moments the inferno grew more murderous. Flames danced hundreds of feet in the air, and billowed up in clouds.

“There is a great rune carved in the ground at the center of that fortress,” Raj Ahten shouted to his nobles. “I will grant a chest full of rubies to the first man who buries his warhammer in it.” He blew his horn again, preparing his men for attack.

His lords shouted their war cries.

Above the reaver fortress, the commoners in the graak began dumping bags of volatile powders into the air. The powders fell in dirty streaks—curtains of red, gray, yellow. The heat was so intense that the men themselves succumbed. One man tumbled over, unable to throw the bag. For a moment, one of the silk wings of the graak began to smolder, but the flameweaver Chespot quickly drew the heat to himself, kept hurling out the powders.

Suddenly a ball of fierce white light came screaming from the west, ignited the fell powders.

The resulting fireball erupted high in the air, sent out a deep boom that went echoing for miles. The ground trembled, and three black spires on the reavers’ fortress shattered. The reavers could endure it no more.

From the warrens to the south, thousands of reavers came streaming from their burrows, weapons in hand.

Meanwhile, from the fortress, the fell sorceress hurled a counterspell. A thundering gasht sound erupted, and noxious fumes billowed from every kill hole in the fortress. The flames near the fortress sputtered and died.

“Attack,” Raj Ahten screamed, filling the hills with the power of his Voice.

The artillerymen south of the flames loosed volleys of rocks and ballista bolts into the onrushing horde. His army of commoners did not balk. They split into two wings and raced to meet the reavers.

Raj Ahten did not concern himself with the battle on the plains. He spurred a great Imperial warhorse toward the fortress, drew his hammer. Men charged around him and ahead.

Flanked by burning runes, he felt a sudden sense of serenity. There was a presence here in battle that he had never sensed before. It had no body or form, only a vast appetite. He felt as if it were a cloud, hovering above the battlefield, like an eagle waiting to feast.

It did not speak, yet he felt certain that it was mindful of him.

He hit the swirling mists, held his breath as his charger plunged through. His eyes and nose burned at the very touch of the air.

His mount reached the pits, and Raj Ahten leapt down. The sky went black as he scrambled up the other side. The flameweavers drew fire from the heavens. In moments they would begin hurling massive fireballs toward the kill holes of the fortress.

Screams filled the battlefield as his armies clashed with the reaver horde.

The sky brightened again, filled with fiery light and a whooshing sound. A fireball streaked from Az.

Half a dozen warriors gained the entrance to the fortress, ran inside. The reavers’ lair was painfully dark.

Kill holes were set above and below the entrance. The first warrior who raced inside halted for half a second as a knight gig dropped down, hooked him beneath the chin, and jerked him upward.

A second man took a reaver’s blade through the crotch. The force of the blow drove him upward a dozen feet into the ceiling. He rained a spray of blood as he fell. A third man saw the danger and leapt through quickly, dodging past a blow from above, another from a side slot. The entrance became a deadly gauntlet.

The tunnel sloped up along a sinuous curve into perfect blackness. Raj Ahten smelled the rising danger of a reaver’s curse back at the end of the tunnel, and it issued forth before he could warn his men.

He leapt from the entrance. A cloud of green-gray shot from the gullet of the lair. Twenty men disappeared.

Raj Ahten leapt through before the sorceress could hurl another spell.

He realized that he might well be the only man in the world fit to breach the reavers’ fortress. He had endowments of sight that let him see the reavers’ shimmering forms even in perfect darkness. His metabolism and grace let him leap past deadly blades faster than the reavers could move.

In less than a second after the sorceress had cast her spell, he was up the tunnel.

He leapt into her open mouth, thrust his warhammer into her soft upper palate before she knew he had even charged. Brains and blood rained down as she opened her mouth in alarm, staggered back.

He rolled from her mouth, ducked beneath her legs. He felt a rush of peace and comfort. There was something deeply satisfying about killing reavers.

The walls around him shuddered as a fireball slammed against the fortress, spilling light through a thousand kill holes. Up ahead he saw his next target, another sorceress.

He had gained ingress to the reavers’ fortress.

53 The Head of the Black Queen

“Hear me! Hear me, O People!” a man shouted in the dawn, filling the streets with the sound of his voice.

The Emir Owatt woke from his slumber in the Dedicate’s tower at his palace in Bel Nai, a city near the sea in the small country of Tuulistan, just north of Kuhran.

The emir was blind. He had given the use of his eyes to Raj Ahten. And because the emir was beloved by his people, he had been made Raj Ahten’s vector.

As such, he was pampered here in Bel Nai, like some woman’s old cat.

The emir did not stir, did not stumble out to the balcony to better hear. The fellow who shouted had great endowments of voice, so that his words flew above the dusty streets and trumpeted above the noise of the city—the bawling of camels, the crowing of roosters, the first morning cries of vendors in the bazaar. “Hear the words of Wuqaz Faharaqin, Warlord of the Ah’kellah, as I raise the Atwaba against a murderer most despicable: he who calls himself ‘Lord of the Sun,’ Raj Ahten.”

It had been but six short years ago that Emir Owatt was captured in the Palace of Weeping Vines at Ma’al. At the time, Raj Ahten’s Invincibles had surrounded the entire city. By surrendering, the emir had hoped to save his people from outright slaughter.

Now he climbed from his bed and hobbled to the small open window, grasping the bars with both hands. The cool night air off the ocean slapped him like a woman’s open palm.

Nine-year-old Messan came rushing up the tower stairs. “Father! Father! Do you hear?”

“Yes, I hear very well,” the emir said. “Come, be my eyes. Tell me what you see?”

The boy grabbed the elbow of his father’s burnoose, and stood on tiptoe. The smell of dust, camels, and smoke hung over the city, along with the scent of wet hemp, which women in the markets wove into rope and baskets.

Emir Owatt could hear the scuffle of feet as people went running. Guards shouted at the gate.

“There is a great crowd gathering outside the keep,” Messan whispered. “Three Invincibles sit on their horses in the square.”

“You are sure they are Invincibles?”

“They are sitting on Imperial warhorses, and all wear the surcoats of Invincibles among the Ah’kellah. One man has wings on his breast and helm. He is holding something—the head of a man. He has it by the hair!”

Owatt could hear the ring of mail, the scuff of boots over stone down below him.

“What are our guards doing?”

“Some are running to the gates, others are taking posts on the towers. Some have strung their horn bows, and look as if they will shoot.”

“Our guards will not shoot,” the emir predicted. “Wuqaz Faharaqin has great respect. They must listen to what he has to say.”

“Hear me!” Wuqaz shouted. “In Rofehavan, an Earth King has arisen, Gaborn Val Orden. He has wed Iome Vanisalaam Sylvarresta, and is now our lord’s own cousin by marriage. The Earth King has warned that we are in great danger, and begs Raj Ahten to put aside his conflict until the enemies of mankind are laid low. But Raj Ahten dishonors our nation. He champions the reavers’ cause by battling his own kin!”

At that there were shouts of horror and cries of disbelief from the square. Some people shouted, “Liar. This man is lying.”

“Wuqaz is holding up the head, to show the people,” Messan said.

The boy fell silent as Wuqaz relayed what had befallen Carris. Wuqaz told of a battle, with reavers surrounding a castle. He told how his men fought to defend Carris, for in doing so they defended all mankind.

But Raj Ahten tried to flee the city by boat, leaving women, children, and his own common troops to suffer the ministrations of reavers.

And when the Earth King charged from the hills, Choosing for his army Raj Ahten and all of his Invincibles, Raj Ahten sought to restrain his troops from giving aid, leaving the Earth King to die.

“Even when his favored wife, Saffira, appeared and bade our king lay aside his war,” Wuqaz shouted, “Raj Ahten withheld aid. She had endowments of glamour and voice from thousands, and only the strongest being could have resisted her. Raj Ahten resisted.

“He let the reavers slaughter his own wife, as the Earth King faced the reaver horde alone!”

At this news, Emir Owatt gasped, then dropped to his knees, leaning against the wall for support. Messan grabbed him.

The emir had long feared this. He’d feared it ever since that dreadful night when Raj Ahten laid his siege at Ma’al. He had known then that he in his tiny kingdom would never be able to fight Raj Ahten.

His mind flashed back to that night. He could not fight, but he’d devised another plan, one that offered hope that he might yet vanquish the Wolf Lord.

He took all of the forcibles in his treasury, and had the facilitators forge them anew, so that each held a rune of glamour or voice. Then he’d used them on his tender daughter, Saffira.

Raj Ahten was a man of fierce appetites. The emir had suspected that the Wolf Lord would not be able to resist the child. “Beg him not to kill us,” Owatt had warned Saffira. “He will spare us for your sake. Ask him to prepare a place of honor among his Dedicates.”

After the surrender, Raj Ahten demanded the use of the emir’s tongue, believing that the emir must have great endowments of voice with which to beguile his people. After all, how else could a lord be so beloved by the commoners?

But a search of the emir’s scars showed that he bore no endowments of voice. Owatt offered instead his eyes, saying to Raj Ahten, “Take them, for I do not wish to see how you will make my people suffer.”

It had been a poor choice. Too often Owatt had heard the cries of his people in the markets.

He’d long suspected that Saffira would die by violence. He’d been afraid that in some petty fit, Raj Ahten might strike her. With his endowments of brawn, any blow he delivered would destroy the girl.

But Raj Ahten became fond of Saffira—as fond as his nature allowed. He’d pampered her, conceded to her wishes, sired her children, and showered her with gifts. She was as much a wife as he would ever know.

Now, the emir learned that, indeed, Raj Ahten had murdered Saffira—pretty little Saffira.

In the square, an old woman began to cry out angrily, “Liar! Tongue of the snake!”

Always, the emir felt surprised to hear any common person rise in defense of Raj Ahten. To speak against him was outlawed, and so one could go for months without hearing a single whisper of discontent, yet he often imagined that others kept their discontent hidden inside, as he did.

I am a blind man, the emir thought, and even I can see his evil.

Wuqaz shouted, “I do not lie. Let me tell you all: Here is the head of an Invincible—Pashtuk by name—whom Raj Ahten slew in an effort to kill the Earth King.

“By the Atwaba, I call upon all good men: Throw off the yoke of Raj Ahten! There must be only one king—the Earth King!”

The emir’s heart pounded fiercely in his chest. He knew that Wuqaz spoke to him. True, he was in the market more than a hundred yards below, but he had come here to shout outside these walls, knowing that the emir was here, knowing that Owatt might be cowed, but would never surrender.

As Wuqaz cried these last words, bowstrings twanged and arrows hissed through the air. From the streets below a roar of panic rose.

Emir Owatt did not need eyes to know what was happening. Archers in the tower fired at the Ah’kellah. Arrows struck among the crowd, skewering men, women, and children. From the sounds of it, fighting broke out even among the crowd—some going to battle against Raj Ahten, others fighting to protect him.

“Father!” Messan cried. “One of Wuqaz’s men is hit. He took an arrow in his eye. He has fallen from his horse. Wuqaz and one other are trying to ride away.”

Now a battle raged. A woman shrieked in pain, a horse whinnied, accompanied by the sound of hooves smacking flesh. Men roared. Children cried in terror.

People shouted as horses broke into the streets, and fled.

His son said, “Wuqaz is gone!” But the sound of fighting continued.

“Who is winning?” the emir asked.

“The guards who fight for Raj Ahten,” his son confirmed.

In that moment, a realization struck the emir. He had always thought of the throng below as “his” people. But by surrendering to Raj Ahten, he had given those people away—given them to a man without conscience, a man without honor, who would use them as cattle.

He had not saved himself, his daughter, or his people. He had surrendered them.

Now was the time to take them back.

“Hurry,” the emir said. He went to a box and pulled out a bag of coins that held a particularly large ruby. “While the guards are busy at the front gate, I want you to slip out into the streets by the back. If the guards there try to stop you, tell them that today is my purifam, and you are going to buy me some figs for breakfast.” He handed the coins to the child and urged, “Once you leave the palace, go to my sister’s villa. Do you remember the place?”

“On the hill?”

“Yes. Beg her to hide you. Do you understand? You must never come back! I will not be here.”

“Why?” his son asked. “Where are you going?”

“I am going to war,” the emir said.

Down below, in the Dedicates’ Keep, Raj Ahten kept his most valued vectors. The air here at Bel Nai was especially healthy, and so over the years Saffira had convinced Raj Ahten to house here in abundance those who vectored stamina.

The emir was well prepared for this day. He’d long known that he could not strike a meaningful blow against the Wolf Lord of Indhopal from the front lines. But here, from behind the lines, he could be devastating.

He’d have struck a year ago, if not for his children. He’d once held great hopes that his daughter might persuade Raj Ahten to turn away from his evil. Later, the emir knew that Raj Ahten kept Messan here as a veiled threat. If Owatt moved against him, the life of his son would be forfeit.

“What do you mean?” his son asked. “I want to stay with you.”

The emir did not dare tell his son what he was about to do. Instead, he went to the chess set where he and his son had played now for years. Over and over he had warned his son that he must sometimes make sacrifices if he hoped to win a game. He hoped that his son would understand. He twisted the head off the black queen, pulling out a poisoned needle. The body of the queen was like an inkpot, filled with the deadly stuff.

The guards would kill Emir Owatt for what he would do. He only hoped that he could save his son.

“Go quickly now,” he whispered. “Keep your head up and your manner easy.”

54 Small Sacrifices

Gaborn’s troops began racing north in hopes of cutting off the reavers. Langley led the other half, along with the Frowth giants, on the reavers’ trail, to slaughter any that fell behind.

Binnesman rode to Averan’s wagon, took her by the arm, and scooped her up into his saddle. In the skirmish, a lord had fallen from his horse. Binnesman pointed at a white mare, a mile off, standing over her dead master.

“Would you dare ride a warhorse without help?” Binnesman asked.

“It’s easier than riding a graak,” Averan assured him. “And if you fall, the ground isn’t a mile below.”

“I daresay,” Binnesman agreed.

They galloped over to the animal, Spring following on her own gray stallion. Binnesman hopped down, and Averan held the mount’s reins. She tried not to look at the dead knight while Binnesman used his knife to cut the leather straps of the horse’s heavy chaffron.

But she had to look, if only to be sure he was dead.

He’d surely never ride again. He’d fallen badly, snapped his neck and scraped his head against the rocks. The flies were already at him.

In moments Binnesman stripped the animal of its precious barding, leaving only its saddle beneath a quilted blanket. Now the horse was ready for a quick ride.

By that time, Gaborn’s troops had all fled north, and the wagons followed. Averan imagined that she’d be eating trail dust for lunch.

Instead, Binnesman swung onto his mount, got her on the white mare, and spurred east, in the wake of Langley’s men.

“What are we doing?” Averan asked.

“We’ll carry a warning to Feldonshire,” Binnesman said.

“You mean we won’t take the road?” Averan asked.

“We can make it through the forest faster than Gaborn’s men can travel the roads.”

Averan found that hard to credit. The huge Imperial stallion that the wizard rode was built for speed on the plains, not in the hills. Her own mount, with its small hooves and sturdy legs, might do better in the mountains, she thought. Yet she knew that earth mages had an uncanny gift for finding trails in the forest.

“All right,” Averan said. “But won’t Gaborn disapprove? He’ll want me at his side, to give him counsel.” The thought of riding with him terrified her. He’d ask her to eat another reaver if they found one that looked anything like the Waymaker.

“Hmmm...” Binnesman said, frowning in concentration. “I’ve never seen the Stinkwater. How large did you say the pools are?”

“Not large,” Averan said. “They get bigger in winter when the rain fills them, shrink in the summer.”

“I have an idea,” Binnesman said. “It may be that I can heal the Stinkwater, cleanse it rather than poison it. But we must hurry. It’s a slow magic.”

“Do you think?” Averan asked. “You’re no water wizard.”

Binnesman sighed uncertainly. “I can only try.”

So they rode hard for the hills, the horses racing over plains beneath a yellow cloud. They bypassed Langley’s troops.

The wizard spurred his mount up a steep ridge. He stopped a moment, while Averan and the wylde caught up. The forest ahead was a tangle, with only a few wild game trails. Boars had been rooting for acorns here recently. The ground looked as if it had been plowed.

Just to the south, the reavers had gained the woods. Trees began to snap under the onslaught of their charge. A hart came bounding down the trail in a frenzy, its huge antlers clacking against the brush. It saw the wizard, leapt away.

Binnesman raised his staff and chanted, “The road is long, and short the day. Make for us now, a swifter way.”

Ahead a rustling sound broke from the trees, as if a great beast trudged through the woods, scraping against boughs and papery leaves. Suddenly Averan spotted a trail that she’d not seen before. The branches on each side were bobbing.

“There!” she shouted.

“Indeed,” Binnesman said wryly.

He spurred his mount up the trail, galloping like the wind. Averan let him take the lead, followed by Spring. She didn’t want to meet any low branches.

But she noticed after the first mile that there were no low branches. The trail remained clear ahead, and almost straight. Though leaves covered the forest floor, the game trails they rode over seemed as free of rocks and limbs as if it were a well-traveled road.

Yet when she looked behind, she could see no trail at all. Branches flung backward like arms, blocking her retreat.

Averan’s heart hammered, and she rode in awe. She’d seen the fell mage in battle, casting her destructive spells, and she’d seen Spring kill a reaver with a single blow. But she suspected now that Binnesman was far more powerful than the wylde or any reaver mage.

Thus they raced. The mounts galloped tirelessly, until they gained the main road. Long before Gaborn’s men arrived, Binnesman reached the village of Shrewsvale.

She saw it when they came up out of the woods. White cottages with thatch roofs dotted the green meadows along the northern slope of the vale. Stone fences that had stood for a thousand years sectioned off acreage: here was a meadow speckled with sheep, beyond spread a field of barley. There lay a garden where sunflowers grew tall. Along the southern ridge of the valley, the road wound up to town. A huge inn with a tile roof loomed over the main street, while shops with stone walls squatted to either side.

Binnesman raced to the first shepherd’s cottage. Red chickens scrambled from their path as they neared the door. He shouted, “Flee from here, the reavers are coming!”

A shepherd’s wife rushed out, wiping her hands on her apron. She was a blunt woman with graying hair and a wide mouth. “What?” she asked gruffly. “What are you yelling about out here? I’m baking.” Obviously she thought that some madman called.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, madam,” Binnesman said in a tone of mock formality. “But reavers are coming, and King Orden is about to fight a war on your doorstep. I suggest that you warn your neighbors, and prepare to flee.”

Averan watched the woman in pity.

The same reavers had destroyed her home at Keep Haberd, and had laid Carris to waste. Now they would tear through this valley, destroying cottages that had stood for generations.

The old woman finished wiping her hands, gave Binnesman a stern look. “You’d best not be telling tales,” she warned. Even as she did, she gaped up at the wylde in confusion. It obviously wasn’t every day that she’d had a green woman and wizard show up on her doorstep, warning of imminent peril.

“You’d best run,” Binnesman said.

Then they spurred their horses onward, onto the cobblestone streets of Shrewsvale itself.

It was a pleasant town. Averan could tell by the architecture that they were nearing Feldonshire. The doorposts and lintel of the inn were intricately carved of fine oak. The post on the left depicted a minstrel with a lute under his arm. The one on the right was a lord talking to him amiably. The perspective was skewed, so that it looked as if both were walking through the door. A carved frieze overhead showed a table filled with fine foods: grapes and apples, bread and a rabbit.

The sign above the inn was gorgeously carved to show travelers on their journey. The sign itself named the place as the Loaf and Brew.

Binnesman’s shouting soon drew every shopkeeper in town. The mayor of Shrewsvale owned the inn. He rang the city bell.

Averan said little, only nodded vigorously to second Binnesman’s warnings. She caught the eyes of a dark-haired girl who held a doll woven of reeds in one hand, and the chubby fist of her little brother in the other.

The girl could not have been seven years old, and Averan suddenly realized that in the next hour she’d face terrors that many a graybeard had never met.

They left Shrewsvale and raced along the dirt road through village after village. Binnesman stopped in each hamlet, relating his tale. At every stop, the village bells began to ring, so that one could listen to the path that they followed. With each stop, the people were already gathering, waiting for the news.

They were only halfway between Shrewsvale and Feldonshire proper when Gaborn’s messengers passed them on the road.

By the time they reached the city, the bells were already ringing out in warning. Word of the attack had raced ahead.

People scattered to and fro in the streets. Horses whinnied and snorted and pranced with ears back and nostrils flaring. They could smell their masters’ terror. Eight miles to the west, smoke could be seen rising from the hills.

Averan imagined that Gaborn had already set fire to the woods at Shrewsvale.

The citizens of Feldonshire fled from their shops and cottages, and became a steady stream, heading north out of town, across the bridge that spanned the Donnestgree.

Peasants in plain hooded frocks ran along with all their belongings stuffed into tote sacks made by trying four corners of a sheet together. Farmers thundered away in wagons filled with grimy children. A wealthy merchant rode through town with his family in a carriage, shouting in his hurry and snapping his whip over the heads of anyone who dared to hinder his escape.

Commoners all. Without force horses or endowments, they would travel slowly. Worse, they were taking time to pack their things. Husbands at work in their shops had to run about fetching children. There was food to gather, belongings to save.

Loaded under the weight of their goods, the peasants would not be able to run fast or far.

Already the bridge was turning into a bottleneck.

Worst of all, on the banks of the Donnestgree camped thousands of wounded refugees from Carris. The tents lining the river were a city to themselves, and the wounded lay attended by their healers. Fires hugged the riverbank, and most of the cooking pots there were not for food, but for boiling the dressings for wounds. Rags and cloths were draped over every bush to dry.

Averan had never seen a sickyard, as the soldiers called them, where the battle-torn lay in the open air like this. Between the drying bandages and the gray canvas tents, and smoke smudging everything, the sickyard looked like a city formed from rags.

Most of the wounded were heavily bandaged. Few could yet rise or walk on their own, and their was no way to move them easily. The boats that had brought them downstream had all departed—returned north for another load.

Evacuating these people on foot was not something that could be done in hours. It was a labor that would take days.

They knew what would happen.

Wounded men and women cried out in terror and pain. Pleas of “Help me! Help!” and “Have mercy!” rose from dozens of throats, adding to the general din of people scurrying for shelter.

Some invalids climbed to their feet in heroic efforts, and staggered across the bridge. They shuffled slowly, blocking the exit for those who followed. Staves or canes might have helped speed many of them, but every stick along the riverbank had already been salvaged. Two men dressed in the bright red of the City Guard stood on the bridge, pleading with everyone. “Help the wounded. Grab someone and help him across! There’s plenty of time!”

But everyone knew that time was far too short.

Among the rows of tents, healers and townsfolk sought to save many of the injured. Wains from farmhouses lined the river roads. But the healers were taking only the children and the women, the vast minority of the wounded, leaving the men to die.

She saw one fellow nearby lying on a cot before his tent, curled into a fetal position, merely waiting.

She recalled Gaborn’s words last night. He’d tried to tell her that men did most of the dying in this world, that they wore themselves out. She hadn’t wanted to believe it. Now she saw the proof of it, and wondered how it would be.

As Binnesman rode up to the woodcarvers’ guildhall, Averan sat on her white mare and stared down at the men, and felt the most profound pity and sense of desolation.

I’m not like them anymore, she realized. Her horse could carry her away fast. She didn’t feel their terror, felt only pity.

Once, when Averan was small, Brand had picked up an old door that lay in a field below the graaks’ aerie back at Keep Haberd. Averan had seen a family of mice scurry about in a panic, blinded by the sunshine.

Three generations of mice lived there—a mother and five children, along with six little pink babes. Neither Averan nor Brand meant the mice any harm. Yet they watched them scurry in panic for a moment, before setting down the door.

That’s how Averan felt now, distanced from the turmoil, high and above it all. Yet the loud noises and confusion made Binnesman’s wylde jumpy. The green woman’s eyes darted this way and that, and she flinched at every nearby noise, as if she were a caged fox just captured from a field.

Binnesman had come to the guildhall to speak to the officials. He dismounted, saying, “Watch the horses while I speak to Guildmaster Wallachs.” Wallachs was more than just the guildmaster of the woodcarvers here in Feldonshire. He served as mayor of the city, and though he had no endowments, his people held him in as high estimation as if he were a lord.

Binnesman led his spooked wylde into the guildhall. Averan held the reins to the mounts, sat alone outside.

The guildhall of the woodcarvers dominated the center of Feldonshire. The massive building was an advertisement for the guild’s wares. It stood five stories high and was made of finely cut multicolored stone set in mortar. The high ceilings of the upper stories were supported by abutments, with flying buttresses made of black walnut, all elegantly chiseled to show woodland scenes from the Darkwald: wild bears and stags in the forest, geese winging majestically over the Donnestgree.

Every gable, every panel on every door, every lintel and every shutter was a minor miracle of precision and detail. The carvers had carried their motif of the woods throughout the building. Perfectly sculpted squirrels raced over pine boughs carved into the gables and support beams. The front doors were carved to look like a path leading into the woods, with a pair of grouse preening beside a rock not far ahead. A gallery near the top of the building boasted wooden statues of renowned carvers at work with chisels, hammers, and saws.

The guildsmen had taken great pains to care for the exterior. The dark wooden surfaces all gleamed, as if the craftsmen had applied a layer of shellac only days ago. With winter coming, Averan realized that this was likely true.

The building served as a monument to the beauty of wood in all its forms. Walnut trees bordered its front, and wrapped around the east lawn along the river. The leaves had gone a dark brown with the coming of winter.

Too bad the building is all coming down, she thought. I’d best admire it while I can.

She was staring up at the guildhall when someone said, “Here, girl, let me help you down from there.”

A man put his hands around her waist, and yanked. She turned to see a fellow with a grizzled face and a mouth full of rotting teeth. His hood was pulled up over his head.

“What?” she asked. She gripped her reins, but he had her off her horse so fast, she hardly had time to wonder what happened.

He set her on the ground near her mount, taking the reins in his hand as he did, and said urgently, “Here, now. These aren’t your horses. They’re worth a lot of money. What do you think you’re doing with them?”

She thought that maybe he knew the owner of the white mare, and had some fair argument. She was about to object when he slugged her. One moment she was standing there, and the next his fist came up in a quick jab, and Averan went reeling.

The world spun and went dark for a moment. Pain lanced through her head and jaw. Everything seemed to go cold.

She found herself lying on the cobblestones, while people shouted, “Thief! That man stole her horses.”

She could hear the fellow shouting, “Haw!” as he raced away. Hooves clattered over the stone.

Averan looked up to see where he’d gone, but a crowd was closing in on her. ” ‘Ere now, poor dear,” some old woman said, bending close to pull Averan to her feet. Averan could smell cooked vegetables on her woolen shawl.

Averan’s jaw stung, and she worked it experimentally, trying to see if it was broken. Her stomach churned, as if she would lose her breakfast. She’d slammed the back of her head on the cobblestones when she fell. Averan reached up and touched it, winced, and stared blankly at the blood on her fingers.

A moment ago she’d felt so smug and self-contained. Now she was no different from everyone around her.

Averan felt furious at the stranger who had stolen her horse. She felt furious at herself for letting him do it.

Almost without realizing it, she cast a spell.

She pictured Binnesman’s big Imperial stallion and focused on it. She saw it running down the road, its new master dragging it in tow.

The horse’s mind was frenzied. It could sense the fear of the people around it, could hear the distant thunder of the horde. It longed to escape, to reach the open plains of Indhopal.

It dreamed of sweet grass, and running through fields at night, nostrils flaring while its mane and tail floated out behind it. It remembered the mares of its herd, and the sweet taste of streams that flowed from the mountains.

The thrill of it all was marvelous, and utterly alien. Averan touched the horse’s consciousness, and immediately realized that she felt almost no kinship to this magnificent beast.

Averan called to it, and immediately the image slipped from her mind. She could not hold it. Binnesman’s charger would not respond to her summons. It wanted to get away from here.

She tried another tactic. She considered instead her attacker. She focused on his face. She could envision his grizzled beard, his rotting teeth, the warty mole just beneath his left eye.

He was racing from town, leading the spare horses, glancing behind to make sure that no one followed. He chuckled in glee, thinking he had escaped.

Averan reached out with her mind, tried to touch him more fully. She inhaled with his inhalations, exhaled as he did. She could feel that his bladder was full. He felt so excited, he really had to take a pee.

She delved deeper into his mind, could hear the whisper of his thoughts. “Fine horses. Sell ‘em in Gandry—and this time, won’t settle fo’ no pint of ale, neither!” She glimpsed flashes from his imagination—the thief cavorting with naked wenches.

His mind was a seething place, full of filth. She almost dared not touch it.

She summoned him, commanded him to turn the horses. “Go back,” she sent the warning. “You may be leaving a child to die.”

For an instant the thief caught his breath.

Where’d a thought like that come from? he wondered. He muttered in a prissy voice, “You may be leaving a child to die!”

Then he cackled in delight and spurred Averan’s white mare on.

Averan withdrew, snapped back into her own consciousness, and her legs nearly buckled beneath her. Her attempt had drained her, and drawn beads of perspiration on her brow.

Maggots would be easier to summon than that piece of filth, she realized. And they would be a whole lot cleaner, besides. Binnesman had warned her that it was harder to reach a complex mind.

Maybe I should have stuck with the horses, she thought regretfully.

Averan went to the guildhall. Just inside, Binnesman was coming down a grand staircase, talking urgently to Guildmaster Wallachs, an imposing man who wore wooden chains of office and bore himself with great authority. Spring walked behind them.

The guildmaster was saying, “I understand your concerns, but my men left fifteen minutes ago. I suspect that the first wagons full of poison are already in the water.”

“What did you send?”

“Nothing much—lye soap and lacquer. I thought to use ale. Not all of it that comes out of Feldonshire is fit for consumption. I’d rather see it used to poison a pond than to affront my gut.”

The men were so deep in conversation, neither of them even noticed Averan. “Binnesman,” she called, grabbing a nearby wall for support. “We’ve been robbed: a man took our horses!”

“What?” Wallachs demanded. “What man?”

“A stranger,” Averan said, searching for a way to describe him. “His...his breath smelled like rye bread and...fish.”

“Where is he?” the guildmaster demanded.

“Long gone!” Averan said. Outside, the noises of the city could be heard, the shouts of people, the tumult of horses.

The guildmaster sighed deeply. He apologized. “Don’t worry. You can ride out of town on my wain. I’m sorry about your horses. We’re good people in Feldonshire. But—”

Binnesman looked to Averan. “Did you try to summon the beasts?”

“I...tried that, and the thief, too. He won’t come back.” Averan crossed the room and collapsed into a chair in defeat.

55 A Fire in the Hills

An unending thunder rumbled through the hills beneath Shrewsvale. With it came a sound as if a million dry leaves hissed to the forest floor at once.

The horde forged onward.

Crows flapped up from the old forest, black pinions groping the sky as they sought to escape the onslaught. They winged about in a dirty haze amid the gree. A cold sun glared down through a thickening yellow brume. Huge oak trees, browned by autumn, shivered and cracked, leaving holes to gape in the canopy.

The reavers advanced in a formation that men had never seen, the strange new Form of War. Gaborn stopped his mount on a hilltop and peered at the forest. He saw the reavers scurrying forward, glimpsed gray carapaces beneath the trees. They loped with a newfound fury. A hundred times he considered sending men to ambush the reavers, but his Earth Powers warned against it. No lancers dared attack. To even send men within archery range was futile. Something had happened to the horde.

The hope of water lent the reavers new heart. They were learning, surely. Averan said that they knew his name, and feared him.

Gaborn had beaten them easily enough at Carris, when the lightning threw them into a panic. But he’d lost so many of his powers. Now, he dared not attack.

Perhaps they sensed his weakness.

The very fact that they were learning how to defend themselves alarmed him. What if they taught other reavers their secrets?

With each minute, Gaborn more strongly suspected that he could neither stop the horde nor turn them from their destination.

He worried about whether his men could reach the ponds at Stinkwater in time to poison the pools. A cold terror seized him.

He’d passed through his ranks on the way up, and had expected to find Binnesman near the lead, riding his fine gray warhorse. But the wizard was nowhere in sight.

He reached the green fields and meadows of Shrewsvale barely half an hour in advance of the reavers. When he arrived, he found Baron Waggit ringing the town bell.

“Have you seen Binnesman?” Gaborn asked Waggit.

“He’s gone to warn Feldonshire,” Waggit offered.

Gaborn breathed a sigh of relief.

In the village, peasants and merchants had already harnessed horses to wagons. They were pulling goods from their homes and barns—pillows, food, blankets, piglets, and lambs. One woman outside the inn stood beating a pan, shouting frantically for her son. Another man was not fleeing at all. Instead he had opened the door to a root cellar, and Gaborn watched him usher his wife and eight children down into it; then he came back up and started carrying a lamb down in one hand, and a rooster in another.

Gaborn shouted to Waggit, “Go and get that man and his children out of there!”

He could not hide his despair. He was not just a king, he was the Earth King. Yet his subjects would not always follow his counsel, even to save their own lives.

Gaborn sized up the terrain, decided where to set his battle lines. No one had ever built a siege wall here at Shrewsvale. A sheep stockage bordered the woods, and would have to serve as the only barricade. The low wall would not hold back reavers, wouldn’t even slow them down. The carefully piled slabs of gray stone were no more significant than a line drawn in the sand.

He went down into a field where an old haycock sat, the straw in it having grayed with mold over the past year. He fumbled with flint and steel to get a fire going. In five minutes the haycock was ablaze.

The wind worked against him. Down on the plains the wind had gusted to the east. But here in the vale at midmorning, the air grew still. He’d not have a driving fire.

He’d hardly got the haycock to blaze when the main force of his army began to ride in, just over a thousand men, with lances held high. Lords hurried down to the vale and formed up in ranks behind the sheep stockage, as if they would hold fast if the reavers charged.

Skalbairn reported, “Milord, the reavers are less than six miles off, and they’re running faster now. They know that they’re close to water. We got word not half an hour ago that Langley’s men are making a good accounting. Many reavers can’t keep up the pace.”

Gaborn nodded, numb. He looked uphill. “Where are those men with the philia?”

Skalbairn just shook his head in consternation. “They’ll be here soon.”

Gaborn couldn’t wait. “Put a torch to the trees,” he ordered. Fifty lords came forward in a rush. They tied cords of twisted straw to their lances, then set them afire. The mounts leapt the low stone wall and charged into the trees.

The autumn leaves had begun piling in the woods, and the ground here had been dry for a couple of days. Yet the fire did not rage as Gaborn had hoped. It fumed and sputtered, filling the sky with a dim gray.

Still the reaver horde marched. The mass of bodies running and heaving themselves over the rocks and trails became a dull roar.

Baron Waggit rode down the hill, pick in hand. Gaborn looked at the young man, felt deeply troubled. Waggit was in danger, might not survive the battle.

“So,” Gaborn said. “You’ve decided to join the fight?”

“If I may. I’ll give it a go. But...I’m really not sure what to do.”

“You rang the bell in town, and already saved a man and his family,” Gaborn said. “You don’t have to give yourself in battle. Certainly not in this battle.”

“I...I want to stay.”

“I’ll see that you begin training for knighthood soon.”

“Thank you,” Waggit said softly.

“Stick close to me,” Gaborn said. “Move when you see me move.”

Waggit nodded.

Skalbairn caught sight of the baron, rode up and shouted, “Good man! Good man!” He looked out over the Knights Equitable gathered in the ranks, and shouted, “Did I tell you that he’s going to marry my daughter?”

Waggit shook his head at Skalbairn’s jest. “I said no such thing!”

But the knights all cheered as if it were a made match.

Gaborn’s senses screamed in warning. A few miles west, the wounded refugees were still puttering around in Feldonshire. He struggled to send the message, “Flee!”

But if his people heard, none obeyed.

The thousand knights had all joined ranks across the field. Gaborn shouted, “Gentlemen, we’ll hold here as long as we can. We’ve got to make the reavers believe that we’ll fight, in hopes that they’ll retreat. But be ready to fall back on my command.”

Even as he spoke, gree flapped overhead, squeaking with a sound like aging joints. The ground began to tremble, and he looked down the valley to the south. Two miles off, trees creaked and toppled.

On the slopes of the vale, a couple of fires had begun to rage. Pillars of red and yellow twisted up, enveloping oaks whole. The heat smote Gaborn’s face, and the smell of it came drier than before. Limbs crackled and branches hissed. Yet the center of the valley floor merely smoldered.

We should have been here an hour ago, with barrels of oil and pitch, Gaborn realized.

For a moment he dared wish that he had a flameweaver in his retinue.

The reavers were two miles away, and then one. The front of their formation filled the valley from north to south. Distantly to the northwest, beyond the thunder of the reavers’ pounding feet, a single warhorn blared, signaling that troops had been cut off behind enemy lines.

Gaborn realized what had happened.

The men who bore the philia were cut off, surprised at the reavers’ pace, no doubt. Gaborn sniffed at his own hands. He could still smell the garlicky mildew scent that Averan told him was a reaver’s death cry. He hoped that there was enough residue on his men’s hands so that the reavers would feel some trepidation.

“Hold your positions, men,” Gaborn shouted. “Hold your positions.” The warriors were ranged on horseback about fifty feet behind the stone wall. If Gaborn ordered a charge, the force horses would merely leap the wall.

Among his troops, lords began to lower their lances. Others had already strung bows. Now they nocked arrows.

The faintest breath of a breeze swept down from the hills, teasing the flames, raising Gaborn’s hopes. A flickering wall of incandescence licked the forest floor in some places, making a low curtain of fire beneath the trees.

Just as quickly, the wind dropped off.

In the distance he glimpsed reavers between the boles of oaks now. They had been traveling in a loose pack, but they smelled trouble ahead. The reavers closed ranks, making a wall half a mile wide. Blade-bearer walked shoulder to shoulder with blade-bearer.

Charging into those lines would be suicide. Reavers with stones behind that wall would provide artillery cover, while mages cast their noxious spells.

The reavers came slowly, philia waving. When they reached a tree, the blade-bearers merely lowered their massive heads and rammed. Thus they cut a huge swath through the forest.

The reavers were a quarter of a mile away now. Gaborn sought to put on a bold face, yet his Earth senses warned, “Flee! Flee!”

Every man under his charge was at risk.

“Not yet,” Gaborn whispered to his master. In Feldonshire, his Chosen still lay abed, while others puttered over the bridge of the river Donnestgree. He hoped to buy them time. Every minute that he slowed the reaver horde might win him another hundred souls. “Not yet.”

Then the reavers were two hundred yards ahead, almost to the smoldering woods.

The reavers did not slow. In fact, they seemed to lope faster as they neared the flames, as if in welcome.

When they reached the fire, they lowered their heads into the dirt, bowling over and burying the burning leaves. Even trees that crackled with flame fell back under the onslaught.

The horde marched forward, irrepressible, trampling the flames. Reavers hissed in warning to their neighbors.

“Retreat!” Gaborn shouted.

The reavers began to hurl a hail of stones. Boulders that weighed as much as a man came soaring overhead, falling into his front ranks.

“Dodge,” the Earth warned, and Gaborn spurred his charger to the left. A great boulder slammed into the stone sheep wall, toppled it. Flaming debris and flakes of stone hurtled past Gaborn and into the ranks of his men behind. Horses and riders burst into a spray of bloody gobbets. Gaborn felt sickened to the core as half a dozen men were ripped from him.

He glanced over his shoulder, Baron Waggit rode on his tail. The young man had followed his instructions precisely, and it saved his life. The pasty color of Waggit’s face showed that he knew how close it had been.

To the left of the battlefield, another boulder hurtled from the reavers’ ranks and slashed through Gaborn’s lines.

His men wheeled their mounts and raced for safety.

56 Lord of Darkness, Lord of the Sun

In the reavers’ fortress, darkness reigned. Fireballs hammered the outer walls, and briefly illuminated the reavers’ kill holes. The hive shuddered under their impact. But deep in the heart of the lair, no outside light could pierce.

With his keen ears, Raj Ahten heard the cries of war out on the plains.

He raced through a tunnel, a string of dead sorceresses and blade-bearers strewn behind him.

There were no kill holes so deep in the lair. Only a little light issued from the flickering blue runes tattooed on the dead sorceresses.

Darkness was the reavers’ element. They did not need light to hunt by. Even the watery lights of the runes were most likely an accident. The reavers would not know that their tattoos glowed.

But ahead of Raj Ahten, a room seemed to be filled with fire. He raced to an entrance and looked down from a parapet to a floor twenty-five feet below.

The Seal of Desolation spread before him, pulsating with color, throbbing. It was nearly two hundred yards across. A dozen scarlet sorceresses filled the room. At the center of the seal, like a great spider in its web, hunched a great mage.

Indeed, she was larger than the one at Carris.

Raj Ahten dared not give the reavers time to react. His left arm was still numb, and he could not hold his breath much longer. Soon he would be forced to take the foul air, and learn just how vile it tasted.

He ran several paces, leapt from the parapet, vaulted onto the head of the great mage. His right leg snapped from the impact, just below the knee.

He bore the pain, slammed his warhammer into the mage’s sweet triangle. He feared that for such a huge monster, the blade itself was too short. He reversed the weapon and plunged the handle into the hole as if it were a lance.

She seemed unaffected by the wound. The mage shook her head and tossed him. Even with all his metabolism, all his stamina, Raj Ahten’s leg had not yet healed when he slammed painfully to the ground.

The Seal of Desolation itself looked to be made of molten glass, but felt as solid as stone. The mucilage of the glue mums had hardened into knobby shapes. Ghost fires in shades of deepest purple flickered through the thing, bursting out in actinic flashes. A sorcerous smoke filled the room.

The Rune of Desolation was powerful.

Raj Ahten swung his hammer, broke off a knob. A blinding flash of white light burst from the broken rune.

The great mage wheeled to confront him. Gree flew up from her bloated body in a swarm, and her staff blazed a sickly yellow.

Raj Ahten leapt aside as a bolt of pure night shot from the staff. It slammed into the rune where he’d stood, demolishing a wide swath.

The rune simply shattered. A scarlet sorceress caught in the blast hissed in agony, was bowled over on her side. The left half of her body had disintegrated or been blown away, as if it had been eaten by acid.

Raj Ahten dared not give the mage time for a second attack. He raced across the Rune of Desolation, darting left and right.

The huge mage reared back in alarm.

She stood a full six feet taller than the monster at Carris. Never in legend had a reaver grown to such a size. Surely, he told himself, this is the great Lord of the Underworld.

He would never be able to leap high enough to slam his hammer into her massive brain, and she had the wisdom to close her mouth so that he could not strike up through the palate.

His best target was the soft spot of her thorax, but he would have preferred a lance to pierce so deeply.

He reversed his warhammer. The handle was nearly six feet long. With his endowments of brawn, it was no great feat to leap high in the air. He hurled the hammer with all his might, wrenching his shoulder from its socket as he did.

The warhammer buried itself into the monster’s thorax, and the fell mage reared higher, trying to escape. Raj Ahten hit the ground, scurried out of danger.

The fell mage threw down her staff, reached up with her huge clumsy paws and began trying to yank the warhammer out. She got it between two claws, thrust it away from her. It rang against the roof, then clattered a dozen yards off.

She reached for her staff. Raj Ahten lunged for his warhammer.

He had not struck deeply enough. A sound hit to the thorax should have caused her to die almost instantly, similar to a blow to a man’s kidneys.

All around, scarlet sorceresses rushed to join the fray. The great mage lowered her head and charged him, gaping her jaws wide at Raj Ahten.

That was what he needed. He gripped his warhammer, and vaulted into her mouth. The dry, raspy surface of her tongue felt as if it were made of gravel.

Her jaws snapped closed around him, and she tilted her head back in an attempt to swallow. He jumped, plunging the warhammer deep into her soft palate, raking a long gash.

He pulled out the hammer in a rain of gore. Blood and brains cascaded down, spattering.

The fell mage staggered a few feet, wobbled.

Raj Ahten slammed has hammer against the back of her throat to make her gag.

As she coughed him out, a dozen other Runelords in fine silks came leaping into the room. Bhopanastrat shouted, “Kill them all, secure the fortress!”

The scarlet sorceresses backed away, tried to retreat. But there would be no escape. The fortress was surrounded. Raj Ahten had already cleared a path into it, and ripped out the heart of the reavers’ defenses.

Pusnabish entered seconds later. Runelords swarmed into the fortress by the hundreds.

Raj Ahten ran for the open air, leaving lesser men to complete the job.

He imagined how the world would now sing his praise. There would be parades at Maygassa as he ascended the Elephant Throne. The people would carpet the road beneath his feet with petals of rose, gardenia, and lotus. The enormous golden gongs outside the city’s western gate would pound night and day for a month. The most beautiful women in the realm would seek him out, hoping to bear his sons, while wealthy lords and merchants showered him with gifts.

His victory would far outshine any deeds that Gaborn Val Orden had accomplished. He, Raj Ahten, had killed the greatest of reaver mages, had saved the Earth.

Songs would be sung about him for a thousand years. Children as yet undreamed of would sit around the campfires at night and hear how Raj Ahten stood against the Lord of the Underworld. Their mouths would gape in wonder, and they would try to hide from their fathers how they shivered in fear.

All of this, and more, Raj Ahten envisioned as he cleared the mouth of the fortress, came back into the daylight. The poisoned air swirled round the reavers’ hive in a dingy cloud.

He plunged down the ridge into the reavers’ dry moat and suddenly felt a nauseating wrench.

He knew the sensation far too well.

His Dedicates were dying.

At the palace in Bel Nai, the markets were awash with morning light. White doves fluttered about the spires of the citadels, or strutted along rooftops, cooing contentedly.

In the bazaar, a merchant cried as always, “Fresh roasted pistachios, still hot!”

Camels lay in the street, chewing lazily.

Here, a thousand miles north of Kartish, word had not yet reached the city of a reaver attack in far lands. Raj Ahten’s ministers had not wished to alarm the populace.

Yet in the deepest heart of the Dedicates’ Keep, four men lay dying. Three were men who vectored stamina to Raj Ahten. The Emir Owatt knew them by voice. One was Korab Manthusar, a Dedicate who had acted as a vector for nearly twelve years. Another was Jinjafal Dissai, who had vectored stamina for less than five.

Between them, they accounted for hundreds of endowments. They had been sipping tea as they played chess when the emir came upon them and jabbed each with his poisoned needle.

The resin of the malefactor bush paralyzed the lungs, and would leave the men gasping on the floor. Without stamina, they would not resist death for long.

But though the poison promised to make quick work of them, it did not do so soon enough. Both men managed to cry out a brief warning.

The emir spun and stabbed a third dedicate.

A nearby guard heard the noise, rushed into the common room, and sliced the emir in half.

As the old king died, the guard held his hand.

For a moment, the emir imagined the man sought to offer him comfort. But only in his final seconds did he realize that the guard held him to keep the poison needle from piercing another victim.

Raj Ahten gasped outside the reavers’ stronghold, choking on the fetid air. Even now he could taste the great mage’s curse: “Breathe no more.”

The power of it was undeniable.

The curse reached into his lungs, its decimating grip clutching them like a vise. He fought it desperately, but all his remaining endowments of stamina would not keep him alive.

Dedicates were dying, his vectors. His defenses were crumbling. Binnesman’s curse had undone him. He was not the Sum of All Men.

He struggled for air, and his heart beat wildly. Moments before he had imagined the praise that would be his as savior of the world. Now, he lay beneath clouds of darkness, gasping in the pit.

Over Raj Ahten’s head, a fireball hurtled toward the fortress, slammed into its side. Delicious heat spilled out in a hundred directions. Flames roared nearby.

He felt the warmth like a soothing balm, recalled how delicious it had felt against his skin at the campfire high in the Hest Mountains.

“I can heal you,” Az whispered in his memory.

The skies went dark as Az enticed fire from the heavens again. It swirled down into his hands, a brilliant maelstrom, a webwork of light piercing the darkness.

Unable to walk, Raj Ahten crawled toward it. His frame shook. Despite all his endowments of brawn, he trembled like an old woman, and gasped in the fetid air. He gained the lip of the pit, and looked up at the burning rune only three hundred yards away.

A wave of nausea rushed over him. He gasped as if he felt his own heart had been ripped away. Another vector gone.

There is an assassin at Bel Nai, he realized.

I will never live to reap my reward. I will not hear the songs I have earned.

He tottered up the lip of the pit, began stalking toward the great fire.

Az stood at the heart of the Rune of Night, drawing flames to himself, stealing the very light from heaven.

“Az!” Raj Ahten shouted with the last of his strength. His voice rang over the battlefield. He collapsed to his knees, struggled to even hold up a hand, pleading.

Az glanced down at him, saw his failing condition, and hurled the fireball.

It expanded as it roared near, until it filled Raj Ahten’s vision.

In one instant, the white silks on his back seared to ashes. The fire pierced him with a thousand burning fangs. The flesh of his face bubbled. Ears and eyelids roasted to nothingness.

Old parts of him, unneeded parts, the dross of his humanity, melted away.

An intense light burned into his mind, expanded his vision. In an instant he saw that he had been traveling toward this destination all his life. He had imagined that he fought to serve mankind by becoming the Sum of All Men, while others said that he only served himself.

But at every juncture in the path of his life, he had chosen to serve Fire.

Even as a young man, he had appropriated for himself the title Sun Lord.

Now his master seized him and, like precious ore, purified him in the flames. The dross melted away, and that which remained was hardly flesh at all—only a vessel that veiled an immaculate light.

Raj Ahten was no longer human. He was the power that he had served so faithfully, and now, all of the lesser flameweavers of this world would bow before him and call him by his secret name.

Burned, naked, transformed, and trailing glorious clouds of smoke, he climbed to his feet. The flames hissed his new name: Scathain.

57 Feldonshire

Guildmaster Wallachs led Averan, Binnesman, and the wylde out the back of the guildhall to a cobbled square bordered on one side by shops.

Here, draftsmen designed the works to be created while young wrights cut the timbers and master carvers did the detail work. Averan was surprised to see two blacksmith forges for the smiths that fashioned the carvers’ myriad tools.

In a finishing shop where pieces were stained and varnished, four burly men were loading wooden barrels into the back of a wagon. The team was already in its traces. The odors that arose from the wagon were noxious—the barrels were filled with spoiled linseed oil, denatured alcohol, poisonous lac, bags of salt crystals, and colored powders that she didn’t even recognize. All of them seemed to be ingredients for various types of varnishes and wood preservatives. The woodcutters were carting off virtually anything that they hoped might poison a reaver.

“Are the other wagons gone?” Wallachs asked.

“Aye,” one of his men muttered. He wiped an arm across his sweaty face.

“Leave the rest,” Wallachs told the laborers, indicating the poison. “Go save your families.”

The workers leapt from the wagon. Binnesman and Wallachs sat on the driver’s seat. Averan and the wylde climbed in.

As they left the stable, Averan could hear a distant roar, like the pounding of the sea. The reavers were coming.

She tried to judge her distance from the reavers by sound alone. Over the past two days, she’d become good at it. “They’re maybe three miles out, I think. They’ll be here in five minutes, maybe less.”

Her words seemed to have caught Wallachs by surprise. “So soon?”

“Maybe less,” Averan emphasized.

Wallachs glanced at Binnesman for verification. The wizard arched a brow. “Less than that, I’d say. The reavers are racing full tilt.”

Wallachs snapped his whip over the heads of his mounts, whistled and shouted. The horses erupted from the stable, went charging up the hill.

They’re slow, Averan realized. So slow.

These weren’t force horses. They were common animals, and big. Pulling logs and heavy loads over the years had strengthened them. But even with a light wagon racing at full speed, they’d be hard-pressed to outrun a reaver.

So Wallachs went stampeding south along the road, shouting, “Clear the way,” when anyone dared stand in front of him. “Five minutes. In five minutes the reavers will be here!”

Only then did Averan begin to see the danger. Heading east of town, where workmen’s cottages lined the dirt road, she still saw people everywhere. Many were emptying their houses, packing goods onto horses. One old woman quickly tried to pick an apple tree clean. Another young mother was grabbing laundry off a drying bush while her children tugged at her apron strings.

Dogs yapped at the wagon as it passed.

The road climbed a small hill, and for a couple of minutes Averan could see all of Feldonshire spread out below her. To the northwest the Darkwald was a brown blot along the silver waters of the Donnestgree. To the south lay a dozen hamlets in the folds of the hills. Boats plied the river, floating downstream on a glimmering road. Everywhere on the east of town, the highway was black and cluttered with travelers. Many of them were folks from Shrewsvale and villages to the west. They raced across the country on horse, on wagon, on foot.

Beyond them, three miles away, a cloud of dust rose in the hills where the reavers raged. From up here, the sound of their advance was louder, a continuous thunder.

People screamed across the miles.

“They’re all going to die,” Averan whispered. She climbed to the back of the wagon and stared out, feeling helpless.

She’d thought that she and Binnesman had done some good. They’d given the people all the warning that they could. But it wasn’t going to be enough.

“Not all of them,” Binnesman said. “We’ve saved some. Perhaps many.”

But as the buckboard topped the hill, she saw the reavers’ front ranks charging over a distant rise. Wagons and people fled before them.

A man’s legs would not carry him fast enough. Hiding would do no good. Men were less than mice before the reaver horde.

Gaborn’s troops fled in a long column, their armor flashing in the sun. They headed south into the hills, helpless before the onslaught.

Binnesman pulled Averan back. “Come away,” he warned. “Watching doesn’t do any good.”

But it does, Averan thought. Watching made her angry, and anger made her strong.

On a bald hill above Feldonshire, Gaborn tried to decide whether to make another stand. Hundreds of commoners had ridden up here on horseback. Most were young men who bore bows or spears. They were eager to prove themselves, hoped to earn the Choosing. Thus, Gaborn’s small army had begun to swell.

Still, he could do nothing for Feldonshire.

Below him lay his last hope: a stream cut through a narrow defile, and would provide some small distance between men and reavers. Farmers had built stone walls to keep their sheep from wandering into the ravine. Perhaps a hundred local men had taken position behind the eastern wall, and now stood with bows ready.

The reavers advanced on Feldonshire.

Too few people had left the city. Gaborn’s men could see the peasants down in the valley, still loading food and wagons. Their hearts went out to the commoners preparing to die down there.

“Milord?” Skalbairn asked.

Gaborn warned, “Stay back. We can’t do any more good. The cover is inadequate, as anyone can see.”

Gaborn dared not tempt fate. He knew that he could not turn the horde.

Skalbairn’s men chafed at his command.

Beside him, Baron Waggit was breathing heavily, almost unable to restrain himself from riding down into the valley, to join the doomed men. The minutes stretched interminably, though the wait was short.

Nearly a mile below, the reavers marched in the Form of War. The ground trembled from their passage.

He could not stop them.

When the reavers neared the far side of the ravine, the hundred archers rose up and let loose a volley of arrows.

Few men had bows powerful enough to penetrate a reaver’s hide at a hundred yards. Fewer still had the skill to use them effectively at such a distance. Yet three or four men managed to make kills before the reavers retaliated.

Blade-bearers hurled stones, then leapt through the ravine. Mages blasted with their staves.

Some of Feldonshire’s archers raced for their horses. A few lucky ones ran fast and lived. But most of the commoners died by the droves.

Then the horde was beyond the ravine, into the borders of Feldonshire itself.

Reavers knocked down orchards in their path, smashed cottages that had stood for centuries, demolished fields and flocks.

People fled—peasants running as fast as their legs could carry them, mothers with babes in their arms and children in tow.

Their screams rose above the thunder of the reavers.

Those that ran clear of the reavers’ path would live. Those who failed would never fail at anything again.

The blade-bearers at the front fed on sheep and peasants until they could stomach no more. Then they regurgitated their meals and moved on, feeding anew.

Gaborn felt numb. To the west, Langley’s knights rode behind the reavers, slaughtering the laggards. The men’s lances were all broken, so they resorted to horsemen’s warhammers.

But to the east, peasants and wagons darkened the road. The highway through town served as a bottleneck for those who fled. People shouted in terror but could not move fast enough. At least ten thousand people still remained in the reavers’ path.

One of Skalbairn’s men peeled off from his ranks, came riding up from the valley below. When he drew near, he raised the visor of his helm. It was Marshal Chondler.

“Good news!” Chondler cried. “The reavers couldn’t keep the pace. We rid ourselves of thousands in the hills!”

No one cheered. The warrior looked over his back, to see why the others stared. His smile turned to a scowl.

“Milord,” Chondler asked. “What can we do?”

Gaborn did not answer for a moment. In the past hour, he had considered every option—archery barrages from the hillsides, charges with lances, holding fast behind the stone wall and braving the worst that the reavers could bring against them. All paths led to disaster. Only one answer sufficed.

Gaborn whispered angrily, “Stay out of their way. Kill any that fall behind.”

A part of him refused to believe that this could ever happen. He was the Earth King, and could still hear its voice. He’d felt certain that in his hour of greatest need, the Earth would respond. Yet now he watched the slaughter, and could not stop it. Most of all, he mourned the sick and wounded still trapped beside the river. Their fate was sealed.

Now the reavers neared the heart of Feldonshire. They slowed as they pushed over cottages and shops, took a few seconds to ferret people from their hiding holes and gobble them down.

Gaborn reached out with his senses. Many of his people had fled. Some were on the far side of the river to the north. Others had gone south into the hills. The reavers’ course would lead straight through Feldonshire. His people to the north and south should have been safe.

Yet Gaborn felt a rising danger, even for those who had left the reavers’ path. It could mean only one thing. Once the reavers reached the pools at Stinkwater, they would swing back to hunt the people of Feldonshire.

Yet something even more profound had happened. Gaborn reached out with Earth senses. The Earth warned him that now the danger had risen tenfold. The world’s peril had increased. Gaborn wondered what might have changed.

Then he felt it. Raj Ahten was gone. Gaborn could only surmise that the reavers in Kartish had killed him. With his death, everything seemed ready to fall apart.

Gaborn felt staggered.

Chondler watched the reavers spread their decimation and argued, “Milord, I’m sworn to the Brotherhood of the Wolf. I’ll not stand here idle while people die.”

Gaborn shook his head sadly, tried to make the man understand. “You see their formation? If you attack their lines, the front ranks will retreat a few steps while those at your side move up. Then the arms of the star will swing round and close on your position, circling you. You’ll die!”

“All men die,” Chondler said. “I’m sworn to protect mankind.”

Couldn’t he see? Couldn’t he see that Gaborn acted in their best interests?

“Damn you, Marshal Chondler,” Gaborn shouted. “What do you think I’m trying to do? If you go down there, the reavers will have you and destroy Feldonshire anyway.”

“I’m sworn—” Chondler began to say.

Gaborn drew his sword ringing from its sheath. “For mankind,” he said solemnly, “and for the Earth.” Around him, the men of the Brotherhood of the Wolf cheered.

Chondler stared at him in surprise, unsure how to take this. The king would join the Brotherhood of the Wolf? Was he renouncing his kingdom?

Gaborn knew that his deed put Chondler off balance. But in his own mind, he was only reaffirming the commitment he’d made to his people long ago.

He looked out over the crowd. “So, good sirs, it’s a fight you want?” he asked. “I assure you, this battle has only begun.”

58 Three Kills

Guildmaster Wallachs’s wagon rounded a corner too fast, slewed as if it would leave the road. They’d left Feldonshire, and as she topped a hill Averan spotted two disreputable warehouses on the flats below. Hides stretched on racks in the sun outside one building identified it as a tannery.

Wallachs slowed his wagon, whistled to some men loading barrels outside the tannery. “Reavers will be here in five minutes. Get to safety!”

The men left off loading their barrels and Wallachs was off again. The horses heaved with every breath, and they frothed now. Wallachs shouted as he sent the whip whistling over their tails.

Wallachs eyed the second building as he passed. Averan could smell the pungent, greasy odor of lye soap cooking.

After that, there was no true road. No cottages bordered the Stinkwater, not even the lowest hovel. Here on the east of town, the only businesses had been those that smelled so bad that no one would want them near.

To the west of town the land had been rich and fertile, covered with cottages and gardens, orchards, vineyards, and fields of hops and barley.

But here even the ground seemed defiled. The land flattened out. During the winters, rain would swell the Stinkwater Ponds, flooding their banks. In summer the water receded, leaving a yellowish-gray crust where almost nothing could grow. Coarse grass thrust up from sandy patches along with a few black, stunted trees that were so twisted they might never have been alive.

Averan could smell the Stinkwater, a stench like rotten eggs.

The ponds, green with scum, boiled out of the ground not far ahead. A thin haze rose up from the steaming waters. A dozen wagons were there, with twenty or thirty men offloading barrels.

Wallachs drew near, shouted, “How do you fare?”

“We’ve got enough lye in there to eat the flesh off your bones,” one man shouted, “and with all the turpentine, I’d not get a flame close to it for any woman’s love!”

Averan looked at Binnesman’s face. He seemed unprepared for how large the ponds really were. They looked larger down here than they did from up in the sky. Each one covered several acres. Kegs of poison floated in them.

In the distance, the earth thundered as the reavers approached. Binnesman’s countenance was pale.

“By the Powers,” he whispered, “I can’t heal those waters—not in an hour, not in a day!”

Wallachs grunted and nodded, as if his suspicions had been confirmed. He shouted to his men. “You’ve got three minutes to clear the ponds. The reavers are coming!”

He snapped his whip over the ears of his team, and raced ahead.

“The road gives out just east of here,” Wallachs apologized to Binnesman in a worried tone. “Not more than a mile, and you’re in the woods.”

He left much unsaid. If the reavers came after them, there’d be no place to run.

“A mile should be far enough,” Binnesman said. “Take us to yonder rise, and let’s see what happens.”

Wallachs urged the horses on, and the buckboard bounced mercilessly over the bumpy trail, rattling Averan’s teeth. Behind them, a cloud of dust rose from where Feldonshire had stood, and the faint screams drifted over the plain.

Averan’s stomach knotted. The horses were tiring. They couldn’t keep up this pace for mile after mile. Even if the road had kept going, the horses couldn’t.

Now the wagon rolled up a small knoll where a few black trees thrust from the sparse grass. From there, Averan could see the hills above town and look out over the Stinkwater.

She’d seen the ponds before from the sky. Up high, they looked like three bright green gems with white edges. But she knew that it was just a trick of the light.

Now the wagons pulled away from the ponds, with men whipping their horses. Broken barrels bobbed on the water, spilling scum. The steam rising from the ponds’ surface made them look like bubbling cauldrons.

Averan’s heart pounded. They had barely stopped, when the reavers crowned the hill above Feldonshire, stampeding for the Stinkwater.

The horde thundered across the plain, teeth gleaming wickedly in the sunlight. For hours they had been running in the Form of War.

Now they broke ranks. The largest and greediest blade-bearers surged ahead, making for the ponds.

But even half a mile from water, most reavers sensed something wrong. Many rose up on their back legs, philia waving madly, and drew back from the stench. Others merely slowed, stalked forward cautiously.

A few thousand reavers, so crazed that their senses were gone, galloped forward and threw themselves into the ponds, dipping their heads down deep in the water, then throwing them back up as they drank in a strangely birdlike fashion. They crowded together, cheek to jowl, a solid mass of gray leathery hides and flashing teeth.

It was a horror to watch.

Behind the reaver horde, Gaborn’s knights advanced over the hills.

With the breaking ranks and their loss of hope, many reavers floundered. They dropped and lay insensate, unwilling to move.

Knights on their force horses raced to take them while they were down. Their silver mail flashed as horses wheeled and turned, darting after the slowest gray reavers. Through half-closed eyes, the knights reminded Averan for all the world of silver minnows in a pool, flashing in the sunlight as they struck at a bit of food.

The knights brought down a few hundred reavers, then wheeled their chargers south to a small hill nearly a mile and a half away. They formed ranks there. Lances bristled as they aimed at the sky. Local farmers and merchant boys rode up to meet them, swelling their ranks to thousands.

Closer to hand, the reavers that had reached the Stinkwater and drunk the most began to die. Muscle spasms caused them to flip to their sides, kicking dust in the air as they spun.

Those that drank only a little drew away from the fouled water after a swallow or two, and simply heaved the contents of their stomachs onto the ground. They groped about, almost too weak to move.

By far the vast majority of the reavers merely retreated from the ponds and stood, dazed with dehydration. Their philia drooped in exhaustion, hanging from their heads like dead vines. The rasping of their heavy breathing filled the air, becoming a dull rumble.

Dozens of reavers began to trudge in aimless circles, no longer cognizant of where they went.

From the south, a hundred force horses came charging over the plains out of the wooded hills. Gaborn led them, riding with Knight’s Equitable, as if to race the wind. He’d circled the reaver horde. Now he rode up toward Averan on the hillock. Skalbairn rode with him, along with Baron Waggit and many other knights.

Gaborn nodded at Averan and leapt from his horse, gazing west at the reavers. “What’s happening?” he demanded. His countenance was grim, determined.

“Their run to water has left them broken,” Binnesman answered. “I suspect that over half of the horde has succumbed.”

“Not quite half,” Gaborn said. “I estimate nearly forty thousand reavers left in the horde.”

“They’re dying,” Averan added. “They won’t make it back to Keep Haberd.”

“I think,” Wallachs said hopefully, “I think we’ve done it. I think we’ve won!”

Averan watched Gaborn as he licked his lips and stared hard at the reavers. Eventually they would all die, and Gaborn would lead her to the Waymaker. There she would feed, and learn the path to the One True Master.

“We haven’t won,” Gaborn told Wallachs. “They may die, but not without a fight.”

Even as he spoke, a great hissing erupted among the center of the horde.

A mage rose up high on her legs, began casting her scent far and wide.

The glowing runes on her body glimmered in the sun, and her staff suddenly blazed like white lightning.

Three Kills was her name. In Averan’s memory, she was young and fearsome, easily the most cunning mage in the horde. Only her relative youth and small size had kept her from leading the band before. Three more reavers rose up, faced Three Kills and began hissing in return.

“What’s happening?” Gaborn demanded.

“It’s an argument between lords,” Averan said. “They often argue.”

“Which one is their leader?” Gaborn asked.

Averan was astonished by the question. It was so obvious. “The one with her butt highest in the air. See how the others keep theirs lower? She’ll kill them if they don’t.”

Gaborn watched them so intently that Averan felt guilty for not being able to tell him more. He went to the lip of the hill, drew his warhammer and planted it in the ground, much as Binnesman did his staff. Then he held the handle, and peered at the reavers, as if trying to read their thoughts.

If I had the senses of a reaver, she knew, I’d be able to smell what they said. I’d know what they were arguing about.

But she only knew that an argument like this might last for an hour or more.

The sunlight seemed so bright, so painful. As the reavers held their council, Averan half closed her eyes.

Down in the valley below, Three Kills’s argument ended abruptly. A rival raised her tail slightly, and Three Kills leapt, thrust her crystalline staff through the sweet triangle of her adversary. There was a dull explosion, and the sorceress’s head ripped into ragged chunks.

She had had her say.

Now Three Kills snatched gobbets of her brain, while others in the horde ripped out the sweet glands below her legs.

The remaining reavers drew back, began rushing about, taking up new formations. They separated into nine camps, each led by a scarlet sorceress, each in the Form of War.

They turned and began stalking east, spreading to the north and south as they went. It was a distinctly odd maneuver for a reaver.

Reavers lived in tunnels, and tended to walk in single file through the Underworld—head to tail. That way, orders could be relayed backward easily.

Spreading their forces went against the reavers’ most fundamental instincts. More than that, the horde was heading downwind. They wouldn’t easily be able to smell adversaries in front of them.

“What are they doing?” Gaborn asked. “Is this what I think?”

Averan began shaking. She could see it all so clearly. The nine armies would create a front perhaps eight miles wide. Already Gaborn’s troops on the far hill recognized the danger and began to retreat. “You’re right. The reavers know they’re going to die,” she said. “But there are a lot of people in Feldonshire. They’ll hunt down as many peasants as they can. After that...”

“They’ll keep hunting,” Gaborn said. “I can sense ripples of danger everywhere. They’ll circle and head downriver, through city after city until they reach the Courts of Tide.

“Averan, how can I stop them?”

The reavers loped off to the east.

Averan thought quickly. Each time they’d killed a leader, the new mage had changed tactics. Even now, the other sorceresses questioned Three Kills’s wisdom. She’d led them to water, only to find it poisoned. The reavers were on the verge of mutiny.

“You must get rid of Three Kills...”

“Of course!” Gaborn said. But he’d lost sight of her. “Where is she?”

“The middle formation,” Averan answered.

His face paled. She knew that he was considering strategies, counting the potential cost. He looked grim, lost.

59 Brotherhood

Skalbairn sat on his charger as Gaborn studied the reavers. Skalbairn could see the wheels of the lad’s mind turning as he considered how to best the reavers. The reavers were stalking toward Feldonshire.

The boy had no time to plot any elegant strategies. The main force of his cavalry held the hill to the west. But if Gaborn raced to them now, he would have to skirt the reavers’ lines. By the time he reached his men, the reavers would be into Feldonshire, hunting.

“Gentlemen,” Gaborn said firmly. “I believe we can stop the slaughter before it begins—but only at great cost.”

Gaborn looked up at the hundred men who had ridden with him, staring each in the eye. “I’m for the Underworld, and cannot lead the charge. And any man who rides now must consider his life forfeit. Will you ride?”

The lad was serious. Skalbairn had never seen an expression like Gaborn wore now. There was suffering and pain in his eyes, and sorrow in his brow, and a consuming need.

Skalbairn’s blood went chill. As a child he’d dreamt of being a warrior, and in his fondest dreams he’d imagined that an Earth King would arise someday, and Skalbairn would fight at his side.

But he’d never dreamt of it like this. The Earth King never asked him to die.

There was a moment of silence from the lords. Skalbairn knew that his men would ride, but none wanted to be the first to speak.

“In the world to come,” Skalbairn inquired, “may I ride beside you in the Great Hunt?”

“Aye,” Gaborn said. “Any man who rides now will ride with me then.” It was an empty promise, Skalbairn knew. Not all men rose as wights.

Skalbairn spat on the ground. ” ‘Tis a bargain, then!”

A cheer rose from the men at Skalbairn’s back. Some drew their war-hammers and beat them against shields, others waved their lances.

The only man who did not cheer was Baron Waggit, who sat silently on his mount, thinking. It was a capacity new to him, Skalbairn reasoned, an unfamiliar tool.

Gaborn raised a hand, warning them to silence.

“We’ll need a diversion,” Gaborn said. He drew a hexagon on the ground. “You’ll break into three squadrons. We’ll send fifty men on a charge here to the left, another fifty to charge to the right. As the reavers’ move to attack, it should thin the line here at the front. A small force of men on fast horses can race through the lines and lance the mage.”

“Milord,” Skalbairn asked, “may I volunteer to strike the blow?”

The lad’s face was pale. He took a deep breath, nodded.

Skalbairn was sure then that he would die. Marshal Chondler said, “I’ll ride with him, as should any man of the Brotherhood of the Wolf.”

With that, a third man made the offer, Lord Kellish, and Gaborn nodded, and said, “That’s enough.”

Gaborn stared evenly at the hundred Knights Equitable who were going to ride into battle, said in a solemn tone, “Thank you. I’ll need each of you to fight like reavers now.”

Gaborn pulled out his warhorn and said, “The left wing charge on my command, two blasts quickly. The right wing will go on one blast long. Skalbairn, I’ll ride with you part of the way.”

Skalbairn and the knights quickly dismounted, checked their girth straps. Not every man had a lance, but every man wanted one. He quickly checked his charger’s hooves. The heavy war shoes were all in place. The leather bindings for its barding were tight.

For years, Skalbairn had lived as a moral failure. For years he had believed that only death might bring him some release.

He pulled off his purse, looked up at Baron Waggit. The young man sat on his horse, looking grim and thoughtful. He was big, handsome in a brutish sort of way, with a color of blond hair favored back in Internook. He wasn’t riding into battle, and that was good. He knew that this fight was beyond him. Maybe he’d never be a warrior. He’d make a fine farmer, or perhaps someday go back to the mines. With any luck, he’d live to a ripe old age. Right now, that was all that Skalbairn wanted from the man.

Damn it, Skalbairn thought. A day ago we all thought him a fool, and now he’s wiser than all the rest of us put together.

“Waggit,” Skalbairn called. The young man turned, his pale blue eyes piercing in the midmorning sun. “Some gold. I’d be grateful if you’d take it to my daughter, Farion. See that she’s well cared for.”

Waggit considered the request.

Skalbairn felt certain that if Waggit saw the girl, he’d feel for her plight. Waggit knew better than any man the world his idiot daughter was trapped in. He’d recognize her virtues and her goodness. His daughter was as kind as she was simple, and her smile was as infectious as a plague. She’d never make another man a proper wife. She could do small chores—bring in firewood or pluck a chicken for dinner. All she needed was a good man, capable of loving her. He’d need to be a patient man to care for her, to buy goods at the market, and help her rear her children—one forgiving of her weaknesses.

Skalbairn whispered to the Powers, Let him be that man.

Waggit nodded. “I’ll give it to her.”

“May the Bright Ones protect you,” Skalbairn said softly.

Skalbairn climbed on his horse, spurred the mount down the slope, leading the way. There was no more time for niceties.

In moments, Gaborn and the others all gathered around him, and the assault began without fanfare, a hundred men against more than three thousand reavers.

The reavers were running fast, heading toward Feldonshire, loping over the plains with their backs to him, each reaver like a gray hill.

Skalbairn let his huge black charger race. He dropped his lance into a couch. Beside him, a hundred men fanned out. The sulfur and alkali crusting the plains muted the sound of the horse’s hooves, and went flying as they charged.

The plain was as flat and barren of stones as it could be. There were painfully few trees or bushes, hardly even any grass.

He’d never had a better surface for a cavalry charge.

Langley veered to the right, leading fifty men to the far side of the hexagon. Lord Gulliford guided another fifty left.

“Ranks three deep,” Gaborn said to Skalbairn, Marshal Chondler, and Lord Kellish. “Make sure that you cut through the lines!”

Gaborn sounded two blasts short. Gulliford’s riders gave their chargers their heads.

Gaborn sounded one blast long, and Langley’s men swept to the right, driving hard.

Gaborn held his three champions back. Baron Waggit rode beside them.

Skalbairn reined his mount, watched the enemy lines.

Gulliford’s men swept into the reavers, lanced dozens from behind, then veered away from the front, riding as if in a Knight’s Circus. The reavers spun to face them, blade-bearers closing ranks to form a wall of flesh while sorceresses leveled their staves and hurled dire spells. Clouds of green smoke rained down on the fifty. In the mountains the reavers had thrown stones, but the sandy soil here left their artillery with nothing at hand. Only half a dozen men fell under the onslaught.

Almost immediately, Langley’s men hit the reavers’ right flank.

As Gaborn had predicted, the untrained reavers broke rank on both flanks, rushed to do battle.

Thus the front before Skalbairn thinned.

“Fare thee well!” Gaborn shouted.

“Till we meet in the shadowed vale!” Skalbairn roared, and spurred his mount. The ground blurred beneath his charger’s feet. Skalbairn’s black stallion had three endowments of metabolism, and would rank among the fastest in the world. Many better endowed mounts could hit speeds of eighty or ninety miles an hour, but his outraced them.

To hit a reaver at that speed would surely leave him dead. To fall from his horse would break every bone in his body.

Skalbairn held his lance steady. He glanced back, saw Chondler a hundred yards behind him, followed by Lord Kellish.

He spurred his mount and shouted, “Faster!”

Many of the blade-bearers held no weapons at all. He aimed his mount between two of them.

At two hundred yards he drew close enough so that the reavers could sense him. But with his mount racing at over a hundred miles an hour, the reavers barely had time to spin. Without a glory hammer or a blade for the reavers to defend themselves, he darted easily between the first ranks.

A hiss of warning rose from reavers all around.

Off to his right, a quick-thinking sorceress hurled a spell.

A billowing stench flowed out behind him, bowled into the lines ahead, staggering a blade-bearer.

He swerved left now, into the second rank of reavers, never slowing. These were smaller beasts, without weapons. A reaver off to his right did not even spin to meet him. It was loping along, philia dangling, dead on its feet.

He aimed his mount toward it.

He heard the clatter of armor behind him—a shattering lance and a man shouting a war cry. A horse screamed. Reaver spells exploded in the air.

Baron Waggit’s horse walked beside that of the Earth King, and he watched the Runelords charge into battle. He’d witnessed a hundred deaths in the past day, but would never grow used to it.

He felt loath to lose Skalbairn. As High Marshal of the Knights Equitable, the huge warrior had the respect of every lord in Rofehavan, and to Waggit’s surprise, the man had taken him under his wing. He’d taught him a little of how to use the staff yesterday. Miraculously, he’d even sought to match him with his daughter.

In all his life, Waggit could not remember any man ever wishing him as a son-in-law. No woman had ever desired him as a lover. No man would have wanted him as a brother.

The gift of memory was such a many-faceted thing. Now, for the first time in his life, he was desired. Yet his memory was unstable.

For the past day, he’d troubled himself in idle moments, trying to recall his real name. From time to time, it had come to him in the past, but he’d never been able to hold it for more than a few minutes. He did not want to go through life called by the name Waggit, for he felt sure it had been foisted on him derisively.

Yet his real name would not come to him, and the few memories he dredged up were full of pain. He recalled his father beating him as a child, for he had put too much wood in the hearth and the whole house nearly caught fire. He recalled sitting up in a tree one night, feeling lonely as he watched a V of geese wing past the rising moon, while children taunted him below. Of his mother, he could remember nothing at all.

It seemed that the memories he was making now were all darker still. He’d watched from afar as the horde destroyed Feldonshire. He’d heard the muted death cries on the banks of the river Donnestgree as the reavers fell among the wounded from Carris. Even now, they echoed in his memory. He suspected that they would forever.

Thus Gaborn’s blessing became a curse.

“Skalbairn’s going to die, isn’t he?” Waggit asked Gaborn.

“Yes,” Gaborn said. “I believe so.”

There must be an end to the dying, Waggit told himself.

“Am I going to die today?” Waggit asked.

“No.”

“Good,” Waggit said.

He spurred his mount toward the reavers’ battle lines.

Skalbairn glanced back. Chondler had tried to cut past a huge blade-bearer armed with a knight gig, but it darted in front of him. The monster snagged Chondler’s charger out from beneath him, ripping open the mount’s belly. The horse’s gut spilled to the ground, and Chondler went down with it.

Behind him, Kellish veered and slowed. A sorceress hurled a dark yellow cloud that swallowed man and horse. Lord Kellish screamed and his horse never made it from under the shadow of that foul curse.

There would be no second chance, not in this charge.

Skalbairn burst past the second rank, neared the mage’s escorts—a dozen large blade-bearers. Their ranks drew tight around her. Several of the monsters shifted to meet him.

But the mage was larger than her escorts, towered over them. He could see her well, marching away from him, ass high in the air.

In the distance ahead, he heard warhorns blowing. The foothills that hid Feldonshire rose in brown humps, and suddenly two thousand Knights Equitable topped the nearest rise, not half a mile ahead.

They had heard Gaborn sound the charge, and thought that he called to them!

A blade-bearer swung his knight gig and Skalbairn knew he would never evade it.

Yet the great mage was tantalizingly close. He wouldn’t get a quick-killing’ blow, not one to the sweet triangle.

“Farion!” he cried, as he hurled his lance over the escort’s head.

It lofted up twenty feet, and began to descend in a graceful curve toward the mage’s back. He never got to see it land.

His horse whinnied in terror, tried to turn. The emerald staff hit its breastplate, and searing flames erupted from it, cutting the horse in two. Skalbairn’s weight bore him over as the charger stumbled, and he knew no more.

Waggit raced through the reavers’ ranks. The monsters hissed in seeming astonishment as two thousand knights charged the far side of the field. Sorceress’s spells welled up in dark clouds, sweeping the front ranks. Dozens of lords died under the onslaught.

Suddenly, the reavers’ attention was diverted.

Waggit rode through the horde with no weapon drawn. He dodged past a huge blade-bearer that swiveled its head as if looking for other prey. He rode past a second, using its bulk to shield him from the spell of a nearby sorceress.

He’d had little time to reason it through, but suspected that without a lance, the reavers would not consider him much of a threat. And of all the men in Gaborn’s retinue, he was the least able to bear a weapon here.

Desperately Gaborn sounded his warhorn, blowing retreat.

Waggit had lost track of Skalbairn, but saw the fell mage rear up and whirl about. Skalbairn’s lance had skewered her through the abdomen, and now she tried to pull it out. It was a deadly blow. She’d not last an hour under normal circumstances. But among her faithless companions, she would not last fifteen seconds.

Around her, a few young sorceresses saw her grim wound and rushed in for the harvest. Blade-bearers followed in a grotesque knot.

They tore the mage from limb to limb.

“Skalbairn!” Waggit called.

There was no answering cry. But Waggit spotted Skalbairn’s remains on the field, beneath the legs of a reaver. The reavers had made doubly sure of him. There was nothing left to save, nothing he could do.

Waggit spurred his charger away from the bloodbath, and the poor mount wheezed as it set off through the horde.

He guided it swiftly through a knot of smallish reavers that all fled as if a Glory had appeared among them, and in moments he was racing away from the horde altogether, his horse’s hooves blurring as it sped over the sandy soil.

He charged toward the Stinkwater for a hundred yards, then wheeled back toward Gaborn. Langley and his men raced before him in full retreat.

Waggit looked up, saw a flock of geese in a V above the hills. The sun shone on the sparse fields and the woods beyond, making them shine in shades of wheat and vermilion.

From the dim recesses of memory, he recalled a time long ago, when he watched the geese fly over his father’s barn during the bleak midwinter, and his mother called out warning him to put on his cloak. The memory rose like a clear bubble, and it burst within him.

In the memory, his mother called him by a truer name.

60 The Waymaker

Dust rose in the vale below Averan—the dust of reavers marching to war, the dust of men charging into battle. From her vantage, the dust obscured the details of the fight. Gaborn’s men swept into the horde on their force-horses, their actions a blur.

The lords pounded into the reavers on four fronts, providing the much needed diversion. Skalbairn rode in and died as he skewered Three Kills.

When it was done, fewer men rode back.

Averan thought that she should mourn, but no tears would come. Too many friends had died already.

The reavers hissed, sending their undetectable words across the field, and at once the nine Forms of War began to merge into one. Under new leadership, the reavers marched back west toward Feldonshire.

When Gaborn’s army fled to the south, the reavers did not give pursuit.

The horde was leaving, thundering across the earth in dwindling numbers, hissing like the waves of a retreating tide. The reavers were heading back for their lair, though few had the stamina to survive the arduous journey.

In the distance Gaborn’s men began to cheer. They rode to the hilltops south of Feldonshire and gave a rising shout as the reavers passed. She saw men leaping, hugging each other.

In the hills and in the woods across the river Donnestgree, cheers also arose from villagers.

At Averan’s back, Gaborn’s Days had been studying the battle in silence. Now he whispered, “A great victory.” But Gaborn merely sat on his charger, his lance balanced across the pommel of his saddle, head hanging. He had lost dozens of troops in the fray.

“I’ve warned him,” Binnesman said. “Erden Geboren did not die of a mortal wound, but of a broken heart. Gaborn will do the same.”

“How can we help him?” Averan asked.

But she already knew what Gaborn would want. He’d dog the reavers for the day, and have her search for the Waymaker. He’d want her to feed again.

“Listen...” Binnesman said. He looked off to the north and then south. Beside him, the green woman cocked an ear, as if Binnesman had given her the command to listen.

Averan could hear nothing unusual. “What?”

“The silence is profound. It spreads for miles.”

Averan wasn’t quite sure what he meant. People were still cheering. The reavers rasped and the earth seemed to groan beneath their weight.

“No birds sing, no crickets,” Binnesman whispered. “No cattle bawl—not a sound other than man and reavers for miles and miles. What is the Earth telling you?”

Averan didn’t know what he meant. To her, it felt as if...suffering. The earth could be suffering.

She felt tired. She wanted to end this war.

On the hills across the valley, Gaborn’s knights gathered in a great circle. Now they held up their shields in unison and began to flash them, sending news of their victory in every direction as far as the eye could see.

The sunlight was too bright. Averan raised her hands to protect her eyes.

Downhill a hundred yards she noticed a black tree that thrust from the ground—a small, gnarled thing. It wasn’t really a tree. It was hardly taller than a man—more of a bush, with a dozen twisted branches. Stunted, vile-looking.

Yet she sensed life within it. It had managed to survive beside the Stinkwater where no other tree could. It was noble and hardy.

She didn’t think about what she was doing.

She merely leapt from the back of the wagon and walked down to the tree.

It looked at first as if it had never had leaves, but as she neared she saw that they had already fallen for the winter. They lay upon the ground, broad and brown.

Up close, the bark was shiny, a deep gray that almost seemed charcoal. A few wrinkled seedpods still clung to the limbs.

She had never seen a tree like it, could not have named it. Yet it held her spellbound, enthralled.

She reached out experimentally, grabbed the central branch, and gave it a tug.

The limb pulled away so easily she almost thought that the tree must have died long ago, and the wood had all gone to rot. But she could feel power beneath the bark, could feel its vital essence.

No, the tree had given itself to her.

It was a good staff, strong and powerful and dangerous. It was her staff. She began breathing hard with excitement, shaking.

At her back, Binnesman broke her reverie. “Hmmm...black laburnum—a strange choice.”

“What is its nature?” Averan asked. “What does it tell you about me?”

“I don’t know,” Binnesman said. His tone was thick with suspicion, and he peered at her closely from beneath his bushy brow. “No one has ever chosen it before. I have never heard of an Earth Warden who chose his staff from a poisonous tree.”

“Poisonous?”

“Every part of a laburnum is deadly—root, bark, leaf, berry, nut. The black laburnum is the most poisonous of all. In the hills of Lysle, where most of them grow, the locals call it poisonwood.”

“Poisonwood,” Averan repeated. The name had an ominous ring. Yet it seemed fitting that she should choose her staff from such wood, here, where so many of the reavers lay poisoned.

She looked into his eyes. Averan had never been good at reading people, at knowing when they lied. But she wondered about Binnesman now. He was studying her narrowly, suspiciously. He knew something about her, or guessed something from her choice of staff.

Gaborn had turned his mount, now he raced back up to the hillside. He looked distraught. He bore sad news. He called up to his Days, “Queen Herin the Red died a few moments ago in the charge.” He shook his head wearily.

“Averan,” he begged, “I saw a reaver with thirty-six philia, down by the pools. It has big forepaws. Will you look at it?”

Averan swallowed hard. She could not bear to feed again, not from a reaver that had knowingly drunk its own death.

She raised her staff, held it defensively as if she were Spring, ready to parry a blow. Then she realized that she really was trying to parry a blow.

She raised the staff, holding each end overhead, as Binnesman had done when blessing Carris. She did not know why she held it thus. It merely felt as if the staff needed to be held that way.

As she did, an image came to mind: the Waymaker, with his thirty-six philia and his huge paws. She could see him in her mind’s eye—still running among the horde, racing toward the Underworld. He had a scar on his flank, a lance wound by the look of it. His philia drooped from fatigue. Around him, reavers marched by the weary thousands, and he could smell the scent trails of those who marched before, the whispered mutterings of pain and despair that reverberated through the horde. There were thousands of them speaking, thousands of voices that humans had never heard. The scents overwhelmed Averan.

“He’s alive!” she told Gaborn. “The Waymaker is still alive.”

Gaborn gazed at her, mouth open.

She glanced back at the wylde, eager to try something. “Spring, come help me!” she said. The green woman came and Averan said, “Grab my staff. Help me summon.”

Spring stood at Averan’s back, so that Averan could lean back and feel her taut body against her shoulder blades. The wylde reached up, grasped each end of the staff.

Averan closed her eyes and held the reaver’s image, until she found herself breathing in rhythm to the Waymaker’s rasping, felt as if she ran each step with him.

He was weak, burning from thirst. The muscles in his four legs were worn. Each loping stride was a jarring blow to his knees. He knew that he was dying.

He felt too weary to keep up with the horde much longer. Yet he ran in measured terror, counting his fluttering heartbeats.

Averan felt his mind, the vast intellect. It was overpowering. She could never have reached him, could never have touched him, without the help of her staff, and of the wylde.

But now shadowy fingers seemed to form in the air, and it grew cold around Averan. Tendrils snaked out through the sky, grasped the Waymaker’s weary mind. She seized his consciousness, called to him desperately. “Come to me.”

Far across the valley, a lone reaver stopped, as the others marched on. After a long moment it turned and began loping wearily toward Averan. Gaborn’s troops had all topped the hill. There was no one down on the plains seeking to slay the beast.

He was coming! Averan tried to stifle her excitement. She took the staff in hand, held the Waymaker on her own, now that he had turned.

Averan looked up to Gaborn on his mount. “See the Waymaker coming toward us? Take me to him.”

Gaborn grabbed her arm, and swung her up before him into the saddle.

Averan held her staff high, and together they rode over the scarred plains, past Gaborn’s troops, past Langley and Baron Waggit, past the sulfurous ponds and the dead reavers that lay black around them, out over the battlefield.

Sweat began to drench Averan. Holding the contact was hard work.

The Waymaker loped toward them at a sluggish pace, and stopped.

Averan could sense his consternation. He had answered her call, felt overwhelmed by her. Yet he began to panic in the presence of a human wizard. She wasn’t sure that she could hold him for long.

Averan sat in the saddle, and peered into his mind.

“Show me the way,” she begged. “For the good of both our people, show me the way.”

His consciousness unfolded to her, as gently as a flower opening, laying his thoughts and memories bare.

The Waymaker was a powerful reaver, his intellect deep, and his memories vast. He had fed upon the brains of Waymakers before him—an endless line of them that spanned thousands of years. The knowledge came to her in a blur.

Reavers recall scents far better than men recall words or images. So the map of the Underworld that began to take shape in Averan’s mind was a map of scents.

The map revealed the meanings of various warning posts that would tell how to open secret doors, or find hidden tunnels, or avoid dangerous beasts.

The Waymakers had traveled far in the Underworld, had even sailed the Idumean Sea in boats made of stone. They had followed paths that other reavers feared to tread. Averan recalled wonders and horrors and the positions of ancient duskin ruins and other historic sites.

She climbed from her saddle, stood before him.

The great reaver merely knelt, overcome by exhaustion. He was huge, towering above her, peering at her with philia that merely twitched.

She stared into his mind, sifting his thoughts.

He had come to the Overworld to begin mapping it, to study its paths and blaze new trails. It had been a grand adventure, a journey that promised danger and excitement. He knew now that it led to death.

61 Passages

Borenson stumbled upon Fenraven shortly after setting Myrrima adrift in the stream. His mind was reeling with fatigue, and his sight was blurry. He stood looking for a long moment. The dilapidated village sprawled on a small hill, open so that morning sunlight played upon the thatch roofs of its cottages. Around the village, the fog still held thick upon the moors, so that the hill rose up like an island in a sea of mist. It had a gate that stood halfway open, and beside the gate were braziers where dwindling watch fires burned. Silver mirrors behind the braziers would reflect their light, focusing it onto the road.

Borenson staggered forward, feeling as if every muscle in his body were slowly transforming into pure weariness.

The inn at Fenraven was a small affair, with nothing more than a single room. It was in the process of being vacated by a pair of gentlemen from the south.

The mistress of the inn was cooking breakfast, morning savories with mushrooms and chestnuts. Borenson was worn to the bone, and heartsick. All of his thoughts were on Myrrima. But he had a job before him still, and he knew he had to keep focused for a little while, at least until he went to sleep. He sat on a stool, and solemn pain settled into his back, between his shoulder blades.

As he waited for breakfast he asked, “So you’ve just the two boarders? No one came through in the night?” His voice felt rough, as if from disuse.

“In the night?” she asked.

“A man—a lone rider with sheepskin boots on his horse?”

“No!” she said, in exaggerated horror. “He sounds like a highwayman, maybe, or worse! There’s assassins on the road, I hear. They found the body of Braithen Towner nine miles down the road yesterday morning.”

Borenson wondered at that. Assassins on the road still. Raj Ahten’s troops down here probably hadn’t heard about the fall of Carris. It might only have been a random assassin. But Borenson wondered. He couldn’t escape the feeling that the fellow had been searching for him.

He rubbed his gritty eyes, all done in, and ate a small bite of pastry while the other guests vacated the inn.

Afterward, he told the mistress that he would be leaving when he woke, and asked her to go about town purchasing supplies for his trip to Inkarra. Here at Fenraven, he was but a hundred miles from the mountains at the border, with few cities between.

He went to the single room and found it more than adequate. It was clean and cozy. The straw beneath the mattress was fresh, and the mistress’s daughter took out the old blankets and brought in new. He didn’t have to worry about fleas or lice.

The food had been good, and the stableboy knew his business. Borenson felt well provided. It was his first chance for some real rest in days, and without an endowment of stamina, he needed it sorely.

He lay down on the cot, and began trying to think about the coming journey. Tomorrow he would have to go in search of some endowments of stamina. An upwelling of sadness took him. He couldn’t think about anything but Myrrima, the taste of her lips, the feel of her cold body beneath his arms as he placed her in the water.

He ached not for himself, nor even quite for her. He felt that the world had lost something beautiful and needful and glorious.

His eyes were so gritty, he closed them only to ease the pain, and fell into a deep slumber.

He woke hours later, and came awake only slowly.

He became aware that there was a guest in his bed, and that it was night already. It was common for guests at an inn to share beds when necessary.

But it wasn’t common for a woman to share a man’s bed, and he could tell by the smell of her hair and by the light touch of the arm that wrapped around him that a woman lay beside him.

He came full awake with a start, bolted up.

Myrrima was lying next to him.

“What?” he began to ask.

Myrrima climbed up on an elbow, stared at him. Outside, there was a slim moon, and stars filled the night, shining through an open window. No one else was in the room.

“Are you awake, finally?” Myrrima asked.

“How—”

“You put me in the water,” Myrrima said. “I was weak and nearly dead, and you gave me to the water.”

“I’m sorry!” he said, horrified. He’d thought her dead for sure. But she sat here looking as healthy as ever. Her clothes were dry.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve discovered something. Averan isn’t the only one around here who was wizardborn.”

Borenson was filled with a million questions.

I should have seen it before, he realized. I should have known it from her every manner, the way she’s gentle when she needs to be hard, the way her touch soothed me, just as the touch of the undine soothed me after I slaughtered the Dedicates at Castle Sylvarresta.

He’d sensed something in her. But only one word came out of his mouth. “How?”

“The water took me,” Myrrima said. “I dreamt of it—of clouds heavy with moisture and waterfalls that misted the air, and of brooks that tumbled over clean stones. I’ve always loved water. I dreamt of the great wizards in the ocean depths, and the strange and wondrous things there. The water healed me, and would have taken me out to sea, out beyond the Courts of Tide. I could have let it take me.

“But I realized something,” Myrrima said. “I realized that I love you more. So I came back, to be your wife.”

Borenson stared at her in dumb amazement. She had not truly died, he could tell. She had been near it. But she still had her endowments of glamour. Belatedly, he realized that he had put her in the water knowing that, on some level. His mind had been muddled from exhaustion, so weary that it could think no more. He’d been watching her face for some sort of transformation, for that moment when her endowments departed, but it had never come.

That’s why he’d felt that placing her in the water was an act of betrayal.

More than that, he realized how truly she loved him. She didn’t just want to follow him to Inkarra. She’d just given up a chance to serve the Powers, to become a wizardess and live in the sea. Few who were born to such a fate could resist the call of the oceans.

Myrrima leaned into him then, and kissed him. Borenson felt his body respond to her. Binnesman had healed him, beyond his wildest hopes or imagining.

The room was empty but for the two of them, and finally he felt ready to love her in return.

“I guess I ought to pay that wizard more than a pint of ale after all,” Borenson teased. He held her passionately for a long moment, and pulled her close.

As afternoon waned toward night, Erin and Celinor rode out of Fleeds, through southern Heredon, and into the borders of South Crowthen. As they went north, the land got drier, and the colors of autumn leaves lit up the countryside.

Erin had not slept last night, dared not sleep again. Yet all day long she considered the words of her dreams, the talk of the dangerous locus Asgaroth who had come to destroy her world. She did not speak of it to Celinor, for she considered that if she did, he might think that she was raving.

Yet the owl’s words had pierced her, inscribed knowledge on her heart. She suspected that the owl had summoned her, that perhaps some part of her even now was trapped in the netherworld, awaiting further instruction.

She believed that something more than a mere Darkling Glory was on their world—that a locus had come among them. She craved to know more about it, yet dared not succumb to fatigue.

Guards met Erin and Celinor at the border, several hundred knights and minor lords who had set bright pavilions along the roadside. The borders here were hilly, and filled with bracken. A few dozen carts and horses had stopped as merchants tried to pass the roadblock.

As Erin and Celinor rode past, one old man recognized Celinor and shouted, “Prince Celinor Anders, speak to your father for me. I’ve traded with him for years, eaten at his own table. This is madness!”

Celinor made to ride past the roadblock himself, but pikemen blocked the way. A young captain led them. He was dark of hair, like Celinor, and nearly as tall. His eyes had a fanatical gleam to them. “Sorry, your lordship,” he said. “I have orders to let no one cross.”

“Gantrell?” Celinor asked. “Are you going blind? Or have I changed that much?”

“These be dangerous times,” Gantrell apologized. “My orders are clear: no one in, no one out.”

“Even your crown prince?”

Gantrell gave Celinor an appraising look, said nothing, Erin could imagine the turmoil in the man’s mind. If he let Celinor through, he would be violating orders. If he didn’t, Celinor would hold it against him for the rest of his life—and King Anders was rapidly getting old, declining in health.

“I’ll let you pass,” he said cautiously, “with an escort.”

Celinor nodded. “That would be appreciated.”

“But not the woman,” Gantrell said, glancing at Erin. She wore a horsesister’s simple attire—a woolen tunic stained from the road over her leather armor.

” ‘The woman,’ ” Celinor said, “is my wife, and will someday be your queen!”

Gantrell tilted his head to the side and cringed, as if he had just recognized that he’d made a mistake that would cost him a career.

“Then,” he said, “welcome to South Crowthen, milady.”

He bowed curtly, and Erin rode into South Crowthen under heavy guard. Knights rode at every side—a dozen ahead, a dozen behind, a dozen to their left and another to their right. Gantrell rode beside them, and kept sneaking sly looks at Erin.

“Am I under arrest?” Erin demanded when she could take it no more.

“Of course not,” Gantrell replied. Yet he did not sound sure of his answer.

Sweat poured from Averan. She held the Waymaker with her mind, absorbed his knowledge. Without having tasted the brains of other reavers, she would not have been able to make sense of it all. She concentrated on building a mental image, a map of the Underworld. As she did, all other sights and sounds were gone. She was not aware of the scents of the day, or of the noises, or of the time that passed.

When Averan broke contact, she collapsed in a swoon.

In a daze she looked around her, saw that night had descended. With the sun departing, the air had cooled. She had searched the Waymaker’s memory for hours.

The Waymaker lay before her, dehydrated, rasping its last. Its mouth gaped with each breath, and the philia around its armored head hung like rags. The creature would not survive the night.

Gaborn had stayed beside her all this time.

Now he picked Averan up, held her in his strong arms. “Come,” he said, “let’s get away from this monster. It’s still dangerous.”

He won’t eat me, Averan wanted to tell him. But she didn’t know if that was true. Besides, she could hardly work her throat. Her mouth was dry, and she felt so weary, so drained, that it wasn’t worth the effort to speak.

Gaborn carried her a dozen yards, to a cart. A driver sat atop it, rubbing his eyes, fighting sleep. The team of horses stood dozing in their traces.

“What happened? Where is everyone?” Averan managed to croak. Her head was spinning.

“You’ve been standing over that reaver for hours, for the whole day,” Gaborn said. “The rest of the knights are following the horde south. But Binnesman is here, and his wylde.”

“Good,” Averan said. She always felt comforted in Binnesman’s presence. Overhead a fireball raced across the sky. It left a churning red trail of smoke behind. Almost immediately she saw another flash of light, and another. Everywhere in the sky, the stars were falling. Dozens came in the space of a few heartbeats.

“What’s going on?” Averan asked, as Gaborn put her on a seat. He climbed up beside her. The driver cracked his whip, and the cart lurched forward.

“The One True Master has bound the Seal of Heaven to the Seal of Desolation and the Seal of the Inferno,” Gaborn answered. His jaw was tight. “We must break those seals.”

“You mean it’s already done?”

“Already,” he said. “And there’s something else. I suspect that the reavers defeated Raj Ahten at Kartish. Now the danger is...far more immediate, and growing by the minute. Do you know the way now to the Place of Bones?”

“Yes,” Averan said with conviction.

“Can you tell me how to get there?”

“No,” she said. “Not if we had a month.”

“Will you lead me then? While you were busy, Iome brought some men—a facilitator and some vectors. I’ve already taken endowments of scent. I can smell the reavers’ words here, thick on the ground. But I can’t make sense of them.”

Averan shuddered. She had glimpsed the Underworld through the eyes of reavers, through the eyes of the Waymakers who knew it best. The journey would be long and perilous. Worse things than reavers lay before them.

Her thoughts seemed muddled.

The darkening skies yawned wide, and stars dropped from the firmament. What happens when they all fall down? she wondered. Will the night go dark?

She shuddered again. This is not what she’d have wanted from life.

“Take me to the vectors,” she said. “I’ll lead you the best that I can.”