Wizardborn, page 7
She turned, took the lead rope, and guided him up to the loft where the straw was warm and dry.
6
LOVE LOST
Treasure the memory of good times, and cast away the bad.
—Adage from Heredon
“I’d like you to meet my father.” Borenson’s words reverberated in Myrrima’s mind, and she thought for a moment that he must be mad. “Roland. Roland is his name.”
In the guttering light of the little girl’s lantern, Myrrima peered at the corpse. Surely the dead man at their feet looked very much like Borenson, but he was younger by several years. The fellow lay on the ground, staring skyward. A gaping wound in his shoulder had been crudely bandaged, but blood blackened his tunic everywhere. The girl wiped tears off her face with her sleeve. A cool drizzle was falling.
“Your father?” Myrrima asked.
“He was a Dedicate,” Borenson said. “He gave his metabolism to House Orden. For more than twenty years he slept in the Blue Tower. He woke only a week ago. I… have never met him before.”
Myrrima nodded, too shocked to speak. Borenson had never met his own father until now?
Borenson’s voice was formal and strained, lacking inflection. “It is interesting that you can grieve the death of someone you never met. When I was a child, I knew that my mother hated me. I used to dream that my father would waken, and he’d discover that he had a son. I used to dream that he would save me from my mother. Now, it appears that he did indeed come to see me. But I could not save him. Ah, well…”
The knights of Mystarria were said to be harder than stone. They were taught to make light of pain and death. It was said that in battle, Borenson’s laugh unnerved even the strongest men. Now, though Borenson hardly acknowledged his torment, Myrrima knew it was ripping him apart.
Myrrima recalled her mother once telling her that when a strong person spoke honestly about his pain, it was often because he could not hold any more, and therefore sought to share the burden with others.
Every expression of consolation that came to Myrrima’s mind seemed trite, inappropriate. Borenson looked up.
She’d never seen such pain in a man’s eyes. They were bloodshot, and the lids were rimmed in red. The eyes themselves looked to be glazed with a yellow film. She realized that what she’d thought was rainwater on his face turned out to be beads of sweat standing out on his forehead. She remembered the words of an old rhyme that children in Heredon sometimes called out during games of hide-and-seek.
Let us go to Derra. Run away. Run away.
Let us frolic in pools at Derra,
Where the madmen play!
“Can I help?” Myrrima asked.
He turned away.
“You’re not an easy one to leave behind,” Borenson said. His voice was tight with emotion.
“No,” Myrrima agreed. “I won’t be left behind. I came for you too.”
Myrrima climbed down off her horse, stood over her husband. The air between them was so charged that she somehow dared not put an arm around him.
“It would be better if you go,” Borenson said as if to the ground, still trembling. “Go back to your home and your sisters and your mother.”
She knew how his deed this past week tormented him. He’d slain King Sylvarresta and two thousand Dedicates on the orders of Gaborn’s father. For the murder of a friend, his mind was filled with torment.
She couldn’t comprehend the anguish of someone who had been forced to slay idiots and children—people whose only crime was to love their lord so much that they were willing to share their finest attributes with him.
But now she saw something even darker in his eyes. There was a gulf of misery between them that words could not describe.
“What happened?” she asked as gently as she could.
“Ah, well,” he said solidly. “Nothing much. My father’s dead. I found Saffira, and now she’s dead. Reavers got them both.”
“I know,” Myrrima answered. “I saw her body.”
“You should have seen her,” Borenson offered, and his eyes suddenly blazed as if he beheld her glory in the distance. “She shone like sunlight, and her voice was so… beautiful. I thought that surely Raj Ahten would listen.”
For a moment, he fell quiet. Then Borenson looked up at her again and said sharply, “Go home! I’m not the man you married. Raj Ahten made sure of that.”
“What?” she asked. His eyes lowered, and Myrrima’s gaze went to the oozing and crusted blood on his surcoat, there by his thighs. She imagined that he’d been stabbed, had taken a gut wound and was slowly dying. “What?”
“I succeeded in the task Gaborn set for me,” Borenson explained. “I convinced Saffira to come here. I got her killed. I got us all killed.”
Borenson gripped the handle of his battle-ax and pulled himself to a standing position. He wavered for a moment, and Myrrima realized that he was on his last legs. Suddenly his complete dispassion made sense: she’d seen the wounded here in Carris, sometimes taking ill with gangrene from even the slightest scratch. The fell mage’s curses made sure of that. Borenson had been down in the thick of the battlefield where the curses were strongest.
And now he stood trembling, with sweat beaded upon his brow and eyes covered in film.
He turned his back, began to hobble painfully away from them in the night, still using his battle-ax as a crutch. The rain had begun to fall more earnestly, and the cool drops hissed into the dead leaves all around. The little girl with the lantern let out a gasping sob. Borenson stumbled and fell in the muck there among the dead. He lay unmoving.
The child let out a shriek, and Myrrima said, “Run and find a healer.”
The girl handed Myrrima a lamp, and Myrrima went to her husband, flipped his body over. With her endowments of brawn, it was easily done. Borenson’s eyes were open to slits, rolled back in a faint. She touched his forehead, and it felt as if he were on fire.
The child didn’t run for a healer. Instead, she watched as Myrrima pulled up Borenson’s surcoat and ring mail, looking for the source of the blood and pus that oozed down his legs.
When she discovered the wound, it was far more horrifying than any that she’d imagined. Truly, Borenson was not the man she had married.
Raj Ahten had made sure that he was a man no more.
7
VOICES
When a storm sings through the trees, one often hears the voices of men far off. But those are the songs of the dead. Wise men do not listen.
—Proverb of Rofehavan
In Mystarria a cold wind sang above the village of Padwalton near the Courts of Tide an hour before dawn, shoving clouds through the sky. It stripped the brown leaves from the chestnut trees and let them drop on the hillsides to lie among the bones of leaves left from the preceding fall.
The wind moaned through barren branches, and a gust made the laundry hanging upon old lady Triptoe’s clothesline dance and flutter as if it would come alive, while the bucket above her well swung slowly in the breeze.
A milkmaid felt the wind’s prickly touch on her back. She squinted and turned to see if something had brushed against her. She drew her cloak tight and hurried her cow to the barn.
Then a finger of wind went skittering along the village street, dancing over the dark surface of puddles left from the night’s rain.
It slapped against the door at the Red Stag, then slithered through a crack beneath.
The lady of the inn was just pulling a platter of savories out of the oven—lightly toasted crusts stuffed with morel mushrooms in venison and red wine. She inhaled the scent as she carried them into the common room to cool, then noticed the chill.
The fire beneath the oven gave the only light in the room, and had kept it warm and cozy for the past hour.
The lady frowned at the draft, turned to see if the door was open.
In an upstairs room several Runelords lay abed after a hard ride. Word had reached them that trouble was brewing in Carris. They were racing from the western provinces to the far eastern borders.
One lord, Baron Beckhurst, lay sleeping soundly when the air brushed his neck.
“Kill the queen,” a voice whispered in his ear, “lest Iome’s son become greater than the father.”
Beckhurst rolled over and his eyes came open. He whispered, “At once, milord.”
Without waking his companions, he got up. He briskly dressed in his ring mail, and went to the store of weapons that one of his fellow travelers had carried.
He selected a lance, well balanced and of a comfortable heft. Iron bands bound it in a dozen places. As he raised it to the sky, he pointed it high. Long ago, his mother had taught him a rune of the Air. He drew it with the lance tip, and a flickering blue bolt of lightning curled along its length. He grinned, rode from the inn.
The wind traveled on.
8
IGNITING HEAVEN
After the battle at Engfortd, asked I of gud Sir Gwellium, “How fared ye with yon forcibles?”
His demeanor became very thoughtful. Said he, “No mytier weapon hath man devised! Forty-five strong knichts cleaved I ’twixt cock’s crow and eventide, yet weary not. By my beard, such devices shall let courteous men put down every barbarity!”
Then said his wife, “Nay, but with them methinks cruel men shall perfect barbarity.”
—On the discovery of forcibles,
from the Chronicles of Sir Gwellium of Seward,
as recorded by his Days
An hour before dawn, the stars above Raj Ahten blazed in a cold sky as if intent on igniting heaven. He raced over the Hest Mountains down toward the deserts of Indhopal, sweat drenching him, his blood crusting from wounds at his knee and chest. His shirt of black scale mail, torn from battle, rang like shackles with every step.
His serpentine trail twisted over the tortuous ridges and through the crevasses, curling among black pines that struggled up to bristle like spears through cracked rock and a thin crust of snow.
It was bitterly cold, and Raj Ahten clung to his warhammer. After the rout at Carris, reavers had fled blindly in every direction. Twice Raj Ahten had stumbled upon the monsters in the woods and brought them down.
Worse than reavers hunted in these woods. Gaborn had turned many of Raj Ahten’s own Invincibles against him. A troop of them had ridden over the pass recently, leaving hoof prints in the fresh snow.
So Raj Ahten traveled over paths that horses could not follow, bypassing his armies in the mountains.
Wolves howled in the shadowed pines. They’d caught his blood-scent, and now loped behind, trying to match his pace. Raj Ahten could smell his own vital fluids, cloying amid the competing scents of snow, ice, stone, and pine.
He found himself breathing hard; the muscles in his chest were knotted. The air so high in the mountains was thin, pricking his lungs like needles.
His armor seemed suffocating; its metal leeched the warmth from his bones. He’d carried it all night, but finally he stripped off his torn shirt of mail and threw it down. Black scales broke off and scattered on the snow as if he’d tossed a carp against a rock.
Raj Ahten’s stomach clenched from hunger.
With so many endowments of brawn and stamina to his credit, he should have felt vigorous, filled with endless energy.
He wondered at the strange illness that assailed him. Eleven hours past, Binnesman’s wylde had attacked him, breaking the ribs in his chest. Perhaps they’d not healed properly. All night long, Raj Ahten had felt rising pain—in the wounds in his chest, in his muscles, as if he suffered from some wasting disease.
He feared that some Dedicates had died, causing him to lose stamina. But a Dedicate’s death brought a sudden nausea and a wrenching sense of loss as the magical connection severed. He had not felt that.
Raj Ahten silently stalked over a small rise, and beheld an oddity: half a mile ahead, in a shadowed valley, his spy balloon rested in a clearing, a great balloon shaped like a graak.
On the ground beneath it a fire burned, reflecting flames off the snow into the silk wings of the graak.
Some of his men huddled beside the fire brewing tea—his counselor Feykaald, along with his flame weavers: Rahjim, Chespot, and Az. The Days that chronicled Raj Ahten’s life was also in the group.
Feykaald was old, his gray burnoose pulled up over his head, a black cloak wrapped around him like a blanket. The flameweavers wore nothing but loincloths, and luxuriated near the blaze. The flames of many fires had long ago licked the hair from their brown skins. Their eyes glowed like mirrors, perfectly reflecting light from the campfire.
Raj Ahten’s most loyal followers sat quietly, as if awaiting him—or as if they were silently summoning him.
He thrust his warhammer into its scabbard, strode to the camp. “Salaam,” he said. Peace. The men acknowledged him, each mumbling “Salaam” in turn.
“Rahjim,” Raj Ahten asked the most powerful of the flameweavers, “did you see a patrol pass by?”
“Riders came down the trail just as we landed, judges of the the Ah’kellah, led by Wuqaz Faharqin. He carried the head of his nephew, Pashtuk, in a bag. He will try to raise the Atwaba against you.”
“Troublemaker,” Raj Ahten said. “I’m glad that not all of my men follow the Earth King.”
Rahjim shrugged. “The Earth King could not Choose me any more than he could Choose a water buffalo.” Smoke puffed out from his mouth as he spoke.
Raj Ahten grunted, but merely stood gasping in the campfire’s glow, warming his hands in its pale smoke. A log crackled; cinders shot into the sky.
The fire felt good. It burned away the cold and the pain. Flames fanned out along the ground, as if to lick him, though no wind blew. He suspected that the sorcerers manipulated the flames to his benefit.
All three flameweavers watched Raj Ahten curiously.
Rahjim ventured, “O Great Light, do you feel… well?”
“I feel—” There was no word for it. Raj Ahten felt noticeably weak, frail, and disoriented. “I am not myself. I may have lost some endowments.”
Rahjim studied him with that penetrating gaze. Flameweaversz were often discerning healers, capable of diagnosing a man’s most minor ailment.
“Yes,” Rahjim said. “Your light is very dim. Please, breathe the smoke of the fire, and blow it out for me.”
Raj Ahten bent low to the fire, inhaled the pine smoke, blew it out slowly. The flameweavers studied the way that the smoke moved, traced its path through the sky.
Suddenly Rahjim’s eyes widened. He looked to the others as if for confirmation, but dared not speak.
“What is it?” Raj Ahten asked. He wondered if he had contracted some illness due to the fell mage’s curses.
“There are changes in you—” Rahjim admitted. “This is no common illness. Wizardry is involved—Binnesman’s curse. Remember Longmot?”
“Yes!” Az said, his own eyes wide. “I see it too!”
“See what?” Raj Ahten demanded.
Rahjim said, “The Earth Powers are withdrawing from you. That is causing … the changes.”
“What changes?” Raj Ahten demanded.
“You have lost stamina—a single endowment. And one of wit, one of brawn…”
“Only one? It feels like more.”
“You’ve lost your key endowments,” Rahjim said.
“Key endowments” was a term used by facilitators. It meant the endowments a man was born with. Like the keystones in an arch, they held a man together. The news was baffling.
“You are dying,” Chespot said plainly. “In some sense, perhaps you are dead already.”
“What?” Raj Ahten demanded.
Raj Ahten had heard of dead men who still breathed, of course. As a child, he’d been raised on such tales. Just as a senile man can often mask his condition with endowments of wit—effectively remembering much even as his brain slowly withered inside his head—a slain Runelord with many endowments of stamina could sometimes survive for hours or days in a morbid state.
“What am I?” Raj Ahten asked, numb.
Rahjim said, “You … are something that has never been before.”
Chespot eyed him critically. “To live beyond your allotted hour is not a small thing. Your life is ended, but the endowments you’ve taken have not returned to those who gave them. You have taken a great step. I believe that you are the Sum of All Men. You are eternal.”
Am I? Raj Ahten wondered. For years he had gathered endowments, sought to become the Sum of All Men, that mythical creature that could become immortal. He’d hoarded the strength, stamina, and wit of thousands of men, and grown in might until he felt as if he were one of the Powers, like the Earth or Air.
Yet Raj Ahten felt diminished. This morbid state was not what he’d sought. Chespot was wrong. He did not feel like an eternal power. His senses warned that he was failing still—caught like a moth in a web somewhere between life and death.
Raj Ahten’s Days asked, “Your Highness, do you recall the precise moment that it happened?”
Raj Ahten scowled. Part of him had died with Saffira. She had been the most beautiful and the rarest of flowers.
And when he had called his Invincibles together and ordered them to help destroy Gaborn, they’d fought him instead. It was a grim struggle. He’d emerged from the battle only half alive.
“I don’t recall,” Raj Ahten lied.
No one spoke for a long moment.
The flames from the bonfire spread out low to the ground, fanned toward him. Raj Ahten reached out until his right hand was nearly in them. The flame licked it, and in such piercing cold he felt no heat, only a warmth that seeped into his bones, easing the pain. Its golden curls were like sunlight shining through the trees, soft and glorious. The flameweavers nodded knowingly.
Az said, “See how the Fire seeks him?”
Raj Ahten had imagined that the sorcerers moved the flames. Now he watched them curl toward him in awe.
Chespot reassured Raj Ahten. “The Earth Powers withdraw from you. But not all who walk upon the face of the Earth need its sustenance. You have served our master well in the past. The forests of Aven are ash now, at your command. If you feel ill, if you continue to fade, my master will serve you. Step into the fire, and let it burn the dross from you. Give yourself to it, and it will sustain you.”
