The Lair of Bones (61 page)

It would take more Earth Power than Averan could ever hope to have. To even think about it pained her mind.

“I can't,” Averan said plaintively.

“Hold up your staff,” Gaborn told her.

She raised it slightly, felt the Earth Power within it. No. She was too tired even to try.

Gaborn suddenly reached out and grabbed the black staff of poisonwood.

At his touch, the wood seemed almost to burst into flame. Earth Power surged through it, as warm as the breath of a newborn babe, as sure as stone.

Averan looked into Gaborn's weary eyes with renewed awe. Nothing in his manner suggested that he had such reservoirs.

“Thank you,” was all she managed to say.

She knelt and cast a spell, by drawing a rune on the ground, and the earth began to tremble.

Sir Borenson clutched his warhammer and dove for cover in a wrecked wine merchant's shop. Reavers had collapsed the roof, so that it stood even with the front windows. Flames sizzled along every beam. He dropped to the floor on his hands and knees, just below the sill, while reavers raced into the city unimpeded. Hundreds of them flashed past his hiding spot.

His heart hammered. Reaver gore covered his hands and face. Fierce heat battered him from fires on every side. Black ash and cinders swirled around like falling snow. Borenson spotted a bottle of wine lying unbroken on the floor, pulled its cork, and relieved his thirst.

In the fields north and west of Carris, he could hear Raj Ahten's and Lowicker's horns blowing the charge. Men screamed wildly.

The reavers were in for a bloody row by the sound of it. But here in Carris, the city was becoming ominously quiet.

How many have died? Borenson wondered.

He wanted to get a view of the battle. He only needed a little height to see over the city walls. A set of stairs in the shop led up to what had once been a second-floor apartment. Now the stairs conveniently opened to the sky, and only a few flames licked their base.

Borenson crawled through rubble—stones and splintered boards and broken wattle—making his way to the stairs. He gripped his battle-ax and climbed to the top. He heard the distant
thwonk, thwonk, thwonk
of ballistas.

Near the shores of Lake Donnestgree, longboats plied the waters, thou-sands of them. One could hardly see the lake for all of the masts. The war-lords of Internook, in their horned helms, fired a hail of ballista bolts from longboats, lancing into reavers that waded along the shore.

To his north, Lowicker's knights surged into the reavers' lines, horses whinnying as riders drove lances home.

To the northwest, the frowth giants waded among the reavers, their huge iron-bound staves rising and crashing down. The reavers had no choice but to fight.

And fight they did. A wall of reavers surged north toward the Barren's Wall, and west toward Raj Ahten, even as their fell mage and her companions raised their staves and sent bolts of ice whirling into the elementals.

The reavers were boxed in, Borenson realized.

He looked for a sign of Myrrima. Below him, reavers thundered down the road unimpeded. The north tower, where Myrrima had been, lay in ruin. The reavers were climbing over it, cracking its beams, knocking down the ramparts. A tower that had stood sixty feet was now crushed down to thirty. Part of it had spilled outward into the lake.

He peered into the shadows at its base, hoping for some sign of Myrrima, but he could see nothing.

If she had been on the third floor when the reavers attacked, the chance that she still lived was slim.

“Myrrima?” he called hopefully, but heard no answer. There was no
movement there at the base of the rubble, except for one young reaver that seemed to be digging, like some monstrous beagle, digging for rats in their burrow.

“Attack!” Raj Ahten bellowed above the sounds of battle. His voice, amplified by reason of thousands of endowments, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and so compelling was it that against all reason, Borenson felt constrained to leap from the roof onto the nearest reaver.

Heart hammering, he ducked, trying to keep good stone between him and the reavers below, lest they see him.

“Into battle now,” Raj Ahten shouted. “Let your rage light the way. Teach them to fear us for another thousand years.”

The words were like a spell that ignited Borenson's rage. A nervous chuckle sprang unbidden from his throat, and against all reason he longed to throw himself into battle.

Raj Ahten's command seemed to compel every man within its range. To the west, Raj Ahten's men screamed like berserkers as they bore down on the reavers. The armies collided in a boiling mass. Horses screamed and died. Men disappeared in a spray of gore as reavers clubbed them with blades and hammers. Reavers reared up, lances buried in their faces.

Reavers and men hurled themselves into battle, dying by the score with no sign of any clear winner.

To the north, Rialla Lowicker urged her cavalry downhill beneath skies a brighter red than any dawn. The light of elemental flameweavers reflected from clouds of smoke. Her men drove into the ranks of the reavers, and great was the slaughter on both sides.

To the east, the warlords of Internook blew their horns and fired ballista bolts into the reavers with renewed fury. The reavers continued hurling a hail of boulders toward the ships, and to Borenson's horror, the warlords responded by steering toward shore, as if to do battle. They too were fully under the sway of Raj Ahten's voice.

To the northwest, frowth giants cried out in renewed fury, as if heartened by the efforts around them. The elementals of fire raged, while reaver sorceresses fought grimly.

But the reaver hordes seemed endless, and for each reaver that died, three more scrabbled forward to take its place. They washed down from the hills in a tide that did not end for a hundred miles.

Borenson glanced east, uphill toward Castle Carris, and his heart nearly stopped. Below in the streets, reavers raced through the dead city unimpeded, surging up Garlands Street in a black flood. At its end they were digging up the streets, trying to get at the men who hid in the maze of tunnels below.

How did so many get in here so fast? Borenson wondered. It can't have been twenty minutes since they first breached the castle wall!

Rialla's soldiers suddenly began shouting, and some blew retreat while others blew the charge. Borenson glanced east just as her banner faltered. Thousands of knights had formed a knights' circus, a huge circle with lances bristling along its outside. They raced in circles and whirled about within this construct, felling every reaver that entered. But Borenson saw how it all would end. The knights had hemmed themselves in. Each knight would use his lance, killing a reaver or two. But Rialla's knights had nowhere to retreat. The reavers formed a ragged wall, like a canyon, and living reavers were crawling over the dead to get at the warriors.

Rialla herself was dead, and her men had doomed themselves. Footmen and archers who had been charging at her back suddenly turned and fled.

The frowth giants cried out in horror as the reavers lunged into their lines.

Raj Ahten's men continued to advance, but their war cries had turned to wails of pain and despair. “Onward,” he cried, forcing them into battle like beasts of burden. From here it looked as if every foot they purchased, they bought with barrels of blood.

A meteor blazed overhead, sputtering so brightly that it shone even through the haze of war.

Borenson dropped to a crouch, and leaned against the stone wall of the shop. His mind whirled. He clutched his warhammer.

It's the end of the world, Borenson thought.

41

Learn to love all men equally, the cruel as well as the kind.

—
Erden Geboren

The path before Raj Ahten's troops was black with reavers. Their blades and staves reflected firelight from the elementals at their backs. The philia on their heads waved like cobras. The colored smoke of their spells drifted through the battlefield in toxic clouds.

Their dead formed lurid mounds. He had spent many men to create those hills, hills that his troops could not easily climb. So they fell back and let the reavers come to them, slowing as they climbed over their own dead. His archers fired with their finest horn bows, piercing the sweet tri-angles of many of the reavers. Those that made it alive over the wall would have to face the most powerful lords of Indhopal.

Raj Ahten merely sat ahorse and watched. Hot blood thrilled through his veins, making him eager for battle. His men were fighting well, but he could see that they would not hold out long. His men were spending their lives too fast.

Only one thing could save them: Raj Ahten himself.

He needed them to know that. He needed to confront them with their own weakness, crush their hopes for the future, leave them debased and adrift. He needed their despair.

For only when they were bereft of hope would they begin to venerate the horrible light that filled him.

His common foot soldiers on the left flank had begun to fall back, weakened by spells and facing a particularly fierce counterassault by a dozen reaver mages that hurled blasting spells from behind their dead.

“Onward, you curs,” Raj Ahten shouted at his men. They jerked like
marionettes, driven forward by virtue of his endowments of glamour and voice. “Climb over the dead, kill those mages.” Gree whipped over their heads like bats. His soldiers held their breath and charged to their deaths.

Raj Ahten surveyed the battle. Carris was destroyed. Reavers could be seen racing the length of its walls. The inhabitants had thrown themselves into the lake in a last-ditch effort to escape.

Queen Lowicker's army to the north was nearly destroyed. King Anders's flag flew safely behind the Barren's Wall, while his men rushed in and threw themselves on the reavers.

Even the frowth giants roared in pain, and had begun a slow retreat.

The
thwonk, thwonk, thwonk
of ballistas from the lakefront now grew quiet, for the warlords of Internook had nearly spent their bolts, to little effect.

At the front lines, one great lord turned from the battle and called, “O Great One, save us! The battle is hopeless.”

“Fight on,” Raj Ahten insisted.

In the moments that followed, first one and then another lord took up the cry. “Help us, O Great One!”

He could hear the rising panic in their voices, the despair.

My time has come, he realized at last.

Ahead, the elementals of his flameweavers towered above the reavers. Clouds of fire-lit smoke billowed above them. They had lost all manly form, becoming mere monsters, mindless with pain, ravaged by the need to consume. They struck at the reavers blindly, hurling fireballs, lashing with whips of flame. Soon they would lose form altogether, becoming aimless in their desires.

Lust is a powerful force when skillfully focused. But these creatures wasted their strength.

Raj Ahten stretched out his hand, as if beckoning the elementals. With that gesture, he drew the heat from them in crimson cords that swirled about, whirling toward him like a tornado.

Thus he took their fire into himself.

It was too much for any man to hold. In an instant, heat blazed from every pore, and wrapped itself around him like a brilliant robe. His body armor melted like slag.

The huge gray imperial warhorse screamed beneath him and died. It fell to the ground instantly, its boiled guts gushing out beneath it.

Raj Ahten stepped lightly to the ground. He felt as if he had no weight at all. He was only brightness and flame now.

He stalked toward the reavers' lines, and his men whirled. He could see them everywhere, their dark faces frozen in astonishment, like pebbles on the ground.

“Fear not,” he told them, “for I will vanquish all of your foes. My sword will fall upon the Earth, and night shall be no longer.”

Raj Ahten's light was whiter than sunlight, and he strode easily now toward the battlefront, as if all of the stars in heaven had combined, and now a creature of starlight took shape.