Brotherhood of the Wolf (90 page)

Then the reaver's mouth closed, despite all that she could do.

Averan screamed.

63
THE BRIGHTEST STAR IN INDHOPAL

Raj Ahten raced down from the stone walls of Carris, struggling to be the first to reach Saffira. He shoved aside some slower men on the stairs, then leapt from them onto the back of a dead frowth giant, catching his foot in the beast's chain mail. He pulled his foot free.

Once released, he leapt from the back of one dead reaver to another, using the dead beasts as if they were ghastly stepping stones. Thus he reached the fallen castle gates well before most of his people did. Only a few of Paldane's men were ahead of him out on the causeway.

For half a heartbeat, he stood on a reaver's corpse above
the causeway and felt the tremors of an earthquake. It shook the very foundations of Carris, with a roar far louder than the surf. As it hit the shore, it caused a mighty wave to ripple out.

Paldane's finest men fought ahead down the causeway, embroiled in a melee.

He could imagine how they would fare.

He raced now, leaping along the backs and bellies of dead reavers.

As the quake rocked a reaver beneath him, Raj Ahten vaulted into the air, then landed in the fray atop a living reaver's head. He slammed his warhammer deep into its sweet triangle, killing it instantly.

A hundred thousand human voices cried out as one as the earthquake surged beneath the castle. Raj Ahten glanced back just as the west wall of Carris sheered away in thunderous ruin, spilling outward.

He dared not hesitate. He climbed the reaver's sloping head, raced toward Saffira.

He did not watch the fall of Carris, but he heard it, smelled the acrid scent of stone dust in the air. The people wailed as Carris collapsed. Towers toppled. Shops disintegrated.

With six endowments of metabolism, Raj Ahten fought swiftly and furiously, daring attacks he'd never have tried if not for Saffira. He leapt on reaver heads and sought to crush them with his hammer. He raced past one monster, pausing to shatter its leg so that men behind would have an easier time with it. For long moments, his existence became an obscene dream of death and maiming, while Paldane's men and his Invincibles fought at his side.

Behind him, he could hear hundreds and thousands of commoners charging toward Saffira, racing to do battle in the midst of the reavers. To do so was suicide, Raj Ahten thought. But in his heart he knew that to do less was also suicide.

In the midst of the city, several towers flamed. As they
crumbled, they spewed burning wood and cinders up into the evening sky.

As Paldane's men slaughtered a reaver, Raj Ahten climbed atop it to get his bearings. Behind him in the castle people fled for their lives: warriors and merchants, women with babes in arms, lords and paupers.

Raj Ahten marveled at how many had survived the quake, for if he'd not seen it, he'd have thought that not more than a few hundred would escape the fall of Carris.

For what seemed a long hour, Raj Ahten fought on, though it could not have been more than ten minutes of commoner's time. Paldane's lords and Raj Ahten's Invincibles fought at his back, while the commoners of Carris streamed into the battle lines.

Their effect astonished Raj Ahten: Many reavers began a careful retreat, balking at the challenge. Confronted by a dozen men, most reavers backed away.

Until now, none of his tactics had impressed the reavers. But so many people—a mass of people attacking as one—gave the reavers pause. It was easy to guess why: The reavers could not distinguish a commoner from a Runelord. All men smelled the same. To a reaver, any man who dared attack presented a potentially devastating challenge.

We are wasps to them, Raj Ahten realized, but they can't tell whether we have stingers.

Pockets of resistance grew around his Invincibles and among Paldane's most powerful lords. But though many reavers balked, they did not flee.

Blade-bearers waded into the commoners and commenced a truly horrific slaughter, cutting down men and women by the thousands and tens of thousands.

The people of Carris threw themselves against the reaver lines, commoners wielding pickaxes and hammers. They gave themselves for their Earth King in ways that they'd never have given themselves for Raj Ahten.

The commoners' efforts were almost futile, except that they provided some diversion for those warriors who had
the grace and brawn and metabolism needed for the melee.

So their struggle was not completely in vain. But Raj Ahten would never forget the spectacle that presented itself before the gates of Carris: human blood by the barrels, the splintered bones, mangled flesh, the expressions of horror in dead women's eyes.

He battled on, fighting an endless host toward an unseen goal. Twice he took wounds that would have killed another man, and wasted precious seconds waiting for his great stamina to perform its miraculous healing.

Ironically, it was the voice of a child that led him to Saffira.

Behind him, lords fought on thirty or forty different fronts. Added to this chaos was the sound of Gaborn's knights somewhere to the north of Bone Hill—men yelling and dying.

Even with his endowments of hearing, Raj Ahten could barely discern among the hissing and rattling of reavers a girl wailing over and over again, “Help! Help!”

He heard the child and raced through the battle lines to reach the girl. With six endowments of metabolism, he burst past several reavers before they could even react.

Dead and wounded reavers lay everywhere ahead, forming a grizzly maze. The smell of putrescence, the fell mage's last spell, was overwhelming. He leapt between the limbs of two tangled reavers, squirmed through a narrow chasm.

In moments he reached a clearing. A dozen reavers lay dead in an irregular circle, forming a ghastly little chasm between the reaver corpses.

When he leapt down into the clearing, a dead horse and knight littered the ground at his feet. Raj Ahten could hear men skirmishing with a reaver around a little bend.

The girl herself was trapped in the mouth of a dead reaver. Raj Ahten left her shrieking in terror.

But the wound on the reaver she hid in intrigued him. Someone had bashed the reaver's skull. Aside from a frowth giant wielding an enormous maul, Raj Ahten could
not imagine any weapon that would so decimate reaver bone.

He raced round the bend to find Pashtuk, bleeding from a bad leg, still fighting like a berserker while Mahket joined the fray beside him.

A reaver was trying to wedge its way between two dead comrades in an effort to charge the men. Raj Ahten could not see Saffira, but with so many endowments of scent, he found her easily. The delicate scent of her jasmine perfume drew him to the spot, in a little chasm off to his right.

She lay crushed beneath the paw of a fallen reaver. King Orden's man, Sir Borenson, lay with her, his arms wrapped around Saffira, seeking to protect her. Borenson struggled to breathe with the weight of the reaver's paw so heavy upon him.

A huge gash crossed Saffira's forehead. Blood flowed from it freely.

Raj Ahten grasped the reaver's paw by one long talon. The paw weighed seven or eight hundred pounds. He dragged it from atop Saffira, pushed the red-haired knight away.

Behind Raj Ahten, all around Carris, thousands of people battled. But the dead reavers formed a solid wall that would hedge commoners out. Those who sought Saffira would likely bypass this place.

Saffira's eyes stared fixedly upward. She breathed erratically. He knew that she would die soon.

“I'm here, my love,” Raj Ahten said. “I'm here.”

Saffira grasped his hand. She had but three endowments of brawn, and so her touch seemed feather-light to him.

Saffira smiled. “I knew you would come.”

“The Earth King made you do this?” Raj Ahten asked. His Voice was hot with wrath.

“No one forced me,” Saffira said. “I wanted to see you.”

“But he bade you come?”

Saffira smiled secretively. “I heard… I heard of an Earth King in the north. I sent a messenger….”

It was a lie, of course. None of the palace guards were
to speak openly of the wars and conflicts. None would have dared.

“Promise you will not fight him! Promise you will not kill him!” she begged.

Saffira began to cough. Flecks of blood spattered out as she did. Raj Ahten held silent.

He wiped blood from her chin and held her close. The sounds of battle seemed distant, as if monsters roared in a faraway wilderness.

He was not quite aware of when Saffira died. But in the coming darkness, he glanced down and saw that she had gone still. With her death, the endowments of glamour she had borne returned to her Dedicates.

Saffira faded like a rose petal wilting away in a blacksmith's forge, so that soon the young woman in his arms seemed only a pale shadow of herself.

The greatest beauty of all time was no more.

Gaborn's consciousness swam in a place where there was no present, no pain, and no understanding.

It was a place with violet skies of a remembered sunset, a field of wild flowers he might have roamed in childhood.

The scent of summer grass was profound, rich, buttery, full of roots and soil and leaves drying in the sun. Copious daisies spread their golden petals. They smelled bitter compared to the grass, but only served to intensify the earthy atmosphere.

Gaborn lay in a daze. Distantly, he thought he heard Iome calling, but his muscles had gone slack, would not respond.

Iome. He wanted her desperately, craved her touch, her kiss. She should be with me, he thought. She should be at my side.

She should see this perfect sky, touch this perfect ground. Gaborn had not seen anything so lovely since he'd visited Binnesman's garden.

“Milord?” someone called. “Milord, are you all right?”

Gaborn tried to respond, could think of nothing.

“Get him on his horse, he's injured! Get him out of here!” someone shouted. Gaborn recognized the voice now. Celinor. Celinor Anders was shouting, worried about Gaborn.

“All right.” Gaborn tried to comfort him. I'm all right. He tried to raise his head, fell back—and recognized something amazing. His fatigue, the sense of illness and the pain he'd felt for hours, had almost totally departed.

Instead he felt as if he stood in a fresh spring wind, totally invigorated. As he lay still, the sensation grew more potent.

Earth power. He felt earth power, as he'd felt it in Binnesman's garden, or at the Seven Standing Stones of the Dunnwood. It was growing stronger. Stronger. He could almost turn his face toward it, as a flower turns its leaves toward the sun.

Iome is coming, he reasoned deliriously. That is it.

The sensation grew suddenly intense, until he could feel it warm against his cheek, like a sunbeam caressing him.

His eyes came open.

In the semidarkness stood a woman who wore only a bearskin coat. Not Iome.

Yet he recognized her instantly. Her face was beautiful, innocent, immaculate. Her small breasts sagged forward beneath her coat. Her skin was a delicate green. Gaborn could feel the power blazing inside her. She reached down and grabbed his throat gently. With her touch, all weariness and pain fled.

He knew her at once: Binnesman's wylde.

The wizard had raised her from the dust of the Earth a little more than a week ago, raised her in the night, giving her a form taken from his own mind. Binnesman had said that he'd hoped to form a great warrior, like the green knight who had aided Gaborn's forefathers. But upon creation, the wylde had leapt high into the air and disappeared.

Now Gaborn's eyes flew wide as the wylde lifted him with one hand, pulling him to his feet. “Go get the Earth King!” she blurted.

Dimly, Gaborn realized that the green woman wanted him, wanted him to follow her somewhere. Or perhaps the Earth itself had sent her.

Gaborn looked around him. He lay on the battlefield about a hundred yards back from his previous position. Prince Celinor, Erin Connal, and several other knights had all backed away from the green woman, staring at her in shock.