Wizardborn, page 3
“I don’t understand. Raj Ahten has committed injustices against a hundred of your lords before this. Why should his people care if he commits one more?”
“Because,” Akem said forcefully, “now there is Earth King.”
Everything fell into place. This wasn’t about Raj Ahten. This was not just about a small injustice. It was about self-preservation: Raj Ahten had not been able to drive the reavers from Carris. But Gaborn had proven himself. So Wuqaz would seek to overthrow his lord.
She felt as if she had stepped into great events. Her testimony today, however small, would start a civil war.
Myrrima stayed for a moment longer, watched as the slender form of Saffira was consigned to the funeral pyre. She studied Saffira’s lovely face, tried to imagine the girl in life, with a thousand endowments of glamour. Imagination failed her.
She turned her horse to leave. Akem folded his hands before his face and bowed low, out of respect. “Peace be with you. May the Bright Ones protect you.”
“Thank you,” she said. “And may the Glories guide your hand.”
She rode into the thick of the reaver bodies, into the darkness.
She found Borenson’s horse, smashed like a melon. A search revealed only her husband’s helm, a few bodies. But in the ground she found a man’s handprints, and near them, knee prints. Big hands, like her husband’s.
He’s crawled off, she thought. He might be making for the city even now, or maybe he crawled away and fainted.
Myrrima climbed from her saddle, retrieved Borenson’s helm. She sniffed the ground for his scent, but the rain and stench from the reavers’ curses confounded her. She could not track him. She considered where she might find the best vantage point from which to look for her husband. The mound around the worm’s crater on Bone Hill seemed perfect.
She climbed to the lip of the crater. It was hard to imagine a living thing that could have bored such a hole.
Firelight reflecting from the clouds showed only a yawning pit. By inclining her ear, Myrrima could hear water churning somewhere in that void. The worm’s course had cut through a subterranean river, forming a waterfall. But it was far below. If she stepped away from the hole, the sound faded.
Myrrima walked among the scree, sinking into loose soil with every step.
The ground was wet and unsettled. Bits of dirt cascaded into the crater. Myrrima’s footing shifted as if the mound might suddenly slide beneath her, carrying her to her doom. Instinctively she eased back to safety.
The destruction of Carris was doubly apparent from atop the mound. But the view revealed nothing of her husband.
“Borenson!” cried Myrrima, as she scanned the plain. Wuqaz Faharaqin and his men left the bonfire, riding east toward Indhopal.
She glanced toward Carris. Her heart leapt. Guards had set watch fires against the return of any reavers. At the broken entrance of the city, she saw a warrior with red hair like her husband’s, leaning upon the shoulder of a red-haired girl. He limped toward the city. Between the falling rain and lingering smoke, she could not be sure if it was him.
“Borenson?” she shouted.
If it was him, he could not hear her, so far off. He hobbled into the shadows thrown by the barbicans.
Carris was a bedlam as Myrrima rode beneath the broken barbicans, searching for her husband.
A week ago Myrrima had celebrated Hostenfest at Castle Sylvarresta. There, for the first time in two thousand years, an Earth King had arisen. The people of Heredon had hosted by far the finest celebration she’d ever witnessed.
As she had strolled through the concourses outside Castle Sylvarresta, brightly colored pavilions had covered the fields like gems in a copper bracelet, greened with age. The entrance to each pavilion was decorated with wooden icons of the Earth King all arrayed in finery.
The smell of sweetmeats and fresh breads wafted through the air. Music swelled from a hundred sites around the city.
It had seemed a feast for the senses.
At the turn of each corner she had met some new wonder: a jester in parti-colored clothes, carrying a wooden fool’s head on a stick, came riding past her on a huge red sow. A young flameweaver out of Orwynne drew the flames of a fire until they rose up and burst into flowing shapes like golden lilies in bloom. A woman with five endowments of voice rendered an aria so beautiful that it left the heart aching for days afterward. She’d seen Runelords joust at rings on chargers caparisoned in colors so bright that they hurt the eyes, and dancers from Deyazz wearing lionskins.
She’d tasted rare treats—eels kept alive in a pot and cooked fresh before her eyes; a dessert made of sweetened cream and rose petals cooled with ice; and confections stuffed with coconut and pistachios from Indhopal.
It had been a day to delight even the most downcast heart.
Now as she rode through Carris, her ride provided the dark antithesis of that day.
Instead of fair provender, her keen nose registered the stink of animals, spoiling vegetables, cloistered humanity, blood, urine, and war—all made more abominable by the lingering residue of the reavers’ curses.
Instead of seductive music, she was haunted by the entreaties and sobbing of the wounded, mingled with the cries of those who mourned the dead and those who called out for loved ones.
Instead of celebration, there was horror. Myrrima rounded one corner to find half a dozen children, the youngest a girl of two, whispering words of encouragement to a mother that they thought was grievously wounded. A glance told Myrrima that the woman was dead.
A girl of twelve wandered in front of Myrrima’s horse. She had gray eyes, dulled by shock, and her dirty face was cleaned only by the tracks of her tears.
That’s how I looked at that age when my father died, Myrrima realized. Her stomach knotted in sympathetic pain.
She searched for Borenson among thousands of grisly wounded scattered throughout inns, private homes, stables, the duke’s Great Hall, and blankets in the street.
Many wounded struggled near death. The reavers’ curses set wounds to festering in unnatural ways. Gangrene set into abrasions that were only hours old.
The search was a foul chore. Nearly every private household had taken in one or two wounded. The stench of the place assaulted her senses. She could not pick up her husband’s scent among so many competing odors.
“Borenson!” she shouted again and again as she rode through the streets, her throat going raw. She began to doubt her own senses, wondered if she’d only imagined that she’d seen her husband heading into the city.
He could be asleep, she thought. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t answer.
Volunteers worked the battlefield, hauling the dead to the bailey outside the duke’s palace. She worried that Borenson might be among them. Gaborn had said that her husband was wounded. Perhaps he’d died in the past few hours. Or perhaps someone had mistaken him for dead, and even now she might find him barely alive. She made her way toward it, and finally caught her husband’s scent.
She rode with rising trepidation up to the bailey. Thousands of corpses were laid out. Whole families marched among them, carrying torches.
The blasted grass was a gray mat. The dead lay arrayed on blankets in rows. She could smell Borenson now.
Myrrima knew that dead loved ones never look quite as you expect them to. The faces of men that die in battle become pale, leached of blood, while the countenances of strangled men turn bluish-black. The eyes of the dead glaze over, so that it is difficult to tell whether a man had blue eyes or brown. A corpse’s facial muscles can either contract horribly or relax in perfect repose.
Many a woman who has slept with a man for years doesn’t recognize her own husband’s corpse.
In the same way, when Myrrima found Sir Borenson, she did not know him by sight, only by scent.
He knelt over a dead man beneath the remains of a gnarled oak that had dropped all its leaves. His face was leached as pale as cream, and he stared down, his expression so twisted in pain that she would not have known him. Dirty rain matted his hair and covered him with grime, so that he looked like a squalid wild thing. Clotted blood from a groin wound stained his surcoat down the legs. His right hand gripped the handle of a horseman’s battle-ax as if it were a crutch.
He looked as if he had been kneeling like this for hours, as if he might never move again. He had become a statue, a monument to pain.
Only his attire identified him. He wore the same clothes as he had two days past, including the yellow silk scarf that he’d chosen to sport into battle as a sign of her favor.
A little red-haired girl knelt above him, lantern in hand, weeping savagely. They stared down at a dead man who looked so much like Borenson that he might have been a brother.
“Borenson?” Myrrima called hesitantly. All the words of comfort that she’d imagined would come so easily suddenly caught in her throat. She could not imagine a wound that would cause the unadulterated agony she saw in his face. She asked softly, “What’s wrong?”
He did not look at her. Did not answer. She wasn’t sure that he even heard. His left hand clutched at his belly, as if he’d just taken a blow to the stomach.
Acorns crunched under her horse’s hooves as she approached. Now she saw that Borenson was trembling all over.
She’d heard tales of men who had seen some great horror and retreated so far into themselves that they never spoke again. Borenson was a warrior. He’d been forced to butcher two thousand Dedicates at Castle Sylvarresta. The deed had so demoralized him that afterward he had quit his service to his king.
Before her knelt a man wounded both in body and spirit. He trembled, and his mind was blank. He was so far gone in pain that he could not weep.
“Myrrima,” he said in a stiffly formal voice as he gazed down on the dead man. “I’d like you to meet my father.”
2
COMMUNION
He who would walk the wizard’s path must abandon roads that common men tread.
—Mystarrian Proverb
On the road north from Carris, Gaborn still smelled of war. The curses of the reavers’ fell mage clung to him like the smoke of a cooking fire, and sweat soaked the padding beneath his ring mail.
The road was quiet, spooky. Night did not seem to fall from above so much as to rise up like vapors from the hollows of the fields. No birds chirped in the twilight. The hooves of the horses thudded dully on the muddy ground. Though seven people rode in the party, there was barely a creak of harness.
They came to a village. Once, Gaborn had known the name of every hamlet in his realm, but his memory had faded with the loss of his Dedicates in the Blue Tower.
It did not matter. The village was empty; not so much as one yellow dog roamed the streets, wagging its tail. He would offend no one by forgetting its name.
The village was old, cramped, with buildings made of cut stones. Some innkeeper in the distant past had built a hostel that nearly blocked the highway, perhaps imagining that riders were more likely to stop than try to forge their way around it. A few shops had sprung up next to the inn, and cottages next to the shops.
The horses’ steps rang louder in the streets. Gaborn heard the ching of his ring mail thrown back from stone walls.
The village lay silent, accusing. No children played in the dirty streets. No washwomen railed at one another over a fence. No cattle bawled, calling the milkmaids to their stools. No one swung an ax, chopping wood for the evening fire. No smoke carried the mouthwatering scent of a roasting hen.
No hammers rang. No stars pierced the cloudy heavens. No children sang.
This is the way the world will look, Gaborn thought, when we are no more.
“We should have been for killing Raj Ahten,” Erin Connal said in her thick Reeds accent, her voice weary.
“The Earth will not allow it,” Gaborn answered.
“Perhaps if we move against his Dedicates,” Prince Celinor offered. “It would not be the same as attacking him personally.”
The thought of attacking Dedicates sickened Gaborn. The Dedicates were innocent, in most cases. Raj Ahten’s beauty was as irresistible as lightning, his voice as overwhelming as thunder. In order for a Runelord to take an endowment from a vassal, the vassal had to offer it up freely. But no one could predict how he might react to Raj Ahten’s sublime entreaties. It was said in Rofehavan that “When you look upon the face of pure evil, it will be beautiful.” Truly, Raj Ahten was beautiful.
Some thought him so persuasive that he deluded himself with his own voice. Certainly he had gulled others often enough—even his own enemies. Women loved him on sight, men honored him. They offered their endowments and their lives in his service, for he told them that serving him would be to their benefit.
The world was heading toward a catastrophe, an all-out war with the reavers. Raj Ahten had already persuaded tens of thousands of people that mankind might survive the coming war only by pooling their attributes, their strength and stamina and wit, into one man who would be their champion. This one man would be immortal, the mythical Sum of All Men.
Of course, not all men were swayed by Raj Ahten’s argument. So he waged war on Rofehavan, seeking to convert its people to his own use.
It was a vile act. Raj Ahten had grown so powerful that Gaborn despaired of whether he could be brought down. With such a rapacious lord, the best way to attack him was indirectly—as Erin said—by killing his Dedicates. For each time a Dedicate died, the lord lost the use of the attribute that the Dedicate provided.
Thus, by slaying a few thousand Dedicates, Raj Ahten could be weakened to the point that he might be defeated in battle.
But who could murder innocent Dedicates? Certainly not Gaborn. The men and women who gave themselves to Raj Ahten were simply too weak-minded to see beyond his exquisite mask. Others loaned Raj Ahten their endowments only through coercion. Yes, Raj Ahten managed to put the forcibles to them and take their attributes, but only because they feared him more than his forcibles.
“He took children as Dedicates at Castle Sylvarresta,” Gaborn chided. “I’ll not spill the blood of children.”
“He often did so as well in Indhopal,” Jureem said. “Children and beautiful women—he knew that men of conscience would not easily strike them down.”
Gaborn felt sickened to the core.
Gaborn could bear no more talk of Raj Ahten. The Wolf Lord’s rapaciousness repulsed him. Gaborn thought, I should never have tried to turn him. I should never have hoped to make him an ally.
In the eerie streets, Gaborn stretched out his senses, used his Earth Sight to feel for any danger to his Chosen. For the past day, he’d focused all his attention on Carris.
The Earth had charged Gaborn with Choosing people, selecting a seed of mankind to “save through the dark times to come.” At the same time the Earth had bestowed upon him the power to sense the danger to his Chosen warriors.
Now, however, he had lost the power to warn them of danger, even though he could still sense it.
Thus weakened, in the event his people were assailed, he might be able to do little more than sense their danger before they died. But he hoped for more. His powers had dwindled, but he had to hope that if he could sense danger, he might be able to avert some disasters.
So he groped like a blind man, pushing the limits of his gift.
Danger seemed to be lurking everywhere. In Carris battles still raged. Skalbairn’s Knights Equitable fought the reavers, driving them south. Within seconds of each other, two men died. Gaborn felt the loss keenly.
To the west, Raj Ahten fled through the wilderness, retreating toward Indhopal. Strangely, he seemed more dead than alive, and Gaborn could not help but wonder at the situation.
But to Gaborn’s consternation, he sensed … dangers that were far more personal and far-reaching than any before. None were imminent. Instead, he could sense … layers beneath layers of impending doom. Close at hand, he sensed a threat to his wife, Iome. It would not come soon. Over the past few days, he had begun to learn how to gauge when threats would arise simply by the strength of the warning. He suspected that Iome would not face any danger until tomorrow. Yet he had to wonder at its source, for though he could sense peril, he could not always guess at its cause.
Beneath that lay larger portents. Tens of thousands of people at Carris seemed to be in jeopardy still. From a second attack? he wondered. But the trouble brewing in Carris was farther off than the danger facing Iome. He suspected that it would not strike until tomorrow night or the day after.
Beyond that, a cloud loomed over Heredon again. Gaborn imagined the dangers to be like peeling the layers of an onion. Iome’s danger was great, and nearest at hand. Once it passed, there loomed a larger threat—the tens of thousands at Carris. Later in the week, hundreds of thousands in Heredon might die….
Yet at the “core of the onion,” at the kernel of the matter, he discerned one final catastrophe. It seemed to encompass every single man, woman, and child that he had Chosen—a million people spread over half a dozen nations.
The Earth Spirit had warned Gaborn that the fate of mankind was upon him. Gaborn had accepted the role of becoming mankind’s protector. He’d imagined that the threat would be years in the making. He’d imagined long wars and drawn-out sieges.
But the end of man was nigh. Five days? he wondered—certainly no more than a week. His mouth grew dry, and Gaborn could not catch his breath.
It can’t be! he told himself. I’m imagining it.
But cold certainly began to creep into his bones.
In the streets, shuttered windows stared at him, like vacant eyes. He felt trapped in a hamlet of shadows.
Gaborn spurred his horse, taking a long lead. Iome, Celinor, Erin, Jureem, Binnesman, and the wylde all hurried to keep up. Thankfully, none of them drew near or spoke.
Just north of the village, Gaborn turned left on the track toward Balington. He remembered the village fondly from his youth, and had decided to spend the night there. He recalled its serenity, its lush gardens. It was a place strong in the Earth Powers, a place where he could commune with his master. The village lay only three miles off the road.
