Brotherhood of the Wolf

by David Farland

  King Lowicker’s horse reared, tossing the old man from his saddle. The knights in his retinue broke rank, turned, and began to flee. The men atop the wall raced for the stairs or tried leaping to safety.

  The breastwork of Kriskaven Wall had stood for a thousand years. Now with a booming of thunder and a screaming protest of stone, the Earth King’s power wracked it. The wall shuddered and twisted for half a mile in each direction, writhing like a snake.

  Yet Gaborn could not lightly kill those who defied him.

  He felt the wall ready to buckle and shatter according to his will, but for a moment longer he sought to hold it together until the men atop could leap to safety.

  Then, even he could no longer hold it, and the wall snarled like an enraged animal, and exploded. Stones shot high in the air, then dropped like hail, pinging on Gaborn’s helm. Dust rose into the air in acrid clouds, and was captured by the wind and blown to the north.

  Archers who had leapt for safety raced from the base of the wall, trying to cover their hands with their heads.

  When the dust settled, a mile of Kriskaven Wall had crumbled. Even in ruins, it was an impressive pile of rubbish. Where Feyman’s Gate had stood wide, now there was but a tangle of broken stone from the fallen arch.

  A few men had leapt from the wall and injured a leg or arm. Another dozen knights had been unseated from their horses.

  As far as Gaborn could discern, he had not slain a single man.

  Now, beyond the low pile of rubble, Lowicker’s knights fled, hundreds of men racing from destruction.

  Erin, Celinor, and a dozen other knights raced to the fallen Lowicker. Their mounts circled the old King, cutting him off from any escape.

  Gaborn rode forward with his company over the pile of gravel and cracked stone that had once been the arch to Feyman’s Gate, up to where his former friend lay on the ground. King Lowicker’s face was contorted with pain, and his right leg askew. It looked as if his hip had broken yet again.

  “Damn you!” Lowicker shouted. “I hope you and Raj Ahten kill each other!”

  “A likely scenario,” Gaborn said. He gazed down at Lowicker, full of concern. He did not want to kill the man, to kill any man. Yet Lowicker was such a great evil, such a powerful king, Gaborn knew not what else to do.

  Gaborn still dared hope that he could lead Lowicker’s troops to war.

  “I’ve given you a sign,” Gaborn said. “Will you swear fealty to me? Will you repent of your crimes?”

  Lowicker merely laughed in derision. “Of course, milord. Allow me to live, and I swear by the Powers, I’ll clean your bedpans every morn!”

  “Would you rather die, then?” Gaborn asked. “Would death be preferable to a life of service?”

  “If I am to live, let me live to be served,” Lowicker roared.

  Gaborn had expected no better. He shook his head sadly. He looked back at his knights. To slay a king even in the heat of battle was a hard deed, for it might easily bring retribution from another lord. Few in Gaborn’s company would dare risk it. But to execute a king in cold blood was more perilous still, for it would incite Lowicker’s allies to rage.

  Though it was a deed best done by a man of equal rank to Lowicker, Gaborn was loath to do it. He turned to the lords accompanying him and asked, “Will any of you put him down?”

  “I will,” High Queen Herin the Red said in a hard tone. “I always admired Lowicker’s wife. I will avenge her now.”

  When Celinor heard Queen Herin’s threat, he said, “You should make the cut, milady. But it would please me if you would do the honor of using my sword.”

  She leapt from her gelding, took Celinor’s sword.

  King Lowicker shouted, “No, please!,” and feebly tried to crawl away as Queen Herin advanced.

  Though Lowicker lay wounded, he was not defenseless. He was a Runelord still, with endowments of brawn and metabolism to his credit.

  As Queen Herin drew near, he blurred into motion. From somewhere in his robes Lowicker produced a knife, hurled it expertly.

  Queen Herin sought to parry with her sword, but the knife blade took her full in the chest.

  Her mail blunted the impact, and the heavy quilting of her underjerkin held the point.

  Lowicker’s eyes went wide as Queen Herin rushed in with the sword.

  In Fleeds the penalty for regicide was the removal of the criminal’s hands and feet. Thereafter he would be left to languish. Lowicker did not die quickly from his wounds. He had so many endowments of stamina that he could not die quickly.

  According to those who followed, Lowicker lived on in torment until sunset, when the cold leached the heat from his body, so that he died like a snake.

  44

  THE STALEMATE

  The fell mage merely stood before the walls of Carris, her sickly citrine rod throbbing with light, the gleaming runes tattooed into her carapace glowing dimly. She played it over the walls, and Roland imagined that at any second she would cast a horrid spell and the barbicans would melt into slag or crumble to ruin.

  Instead, she merely pointed her staff toward the castle gate, and for a long time, nothing happened.

  Roland was a good swimmer. Given the chance, he would throw off his clothes and dive from the castle wall. He could probably swim south a mile or more, then cut for the shore. From there he might be able to escape.

  Then, at last, he saw her plan.

  She cast no spell.

  Instead, from the ranks of ten thousand reavers, a single reaver strode forward. It was diminutive compared to its companions. Small, wretched, and covered with old scars.

  It marched toward the castle alone, toward the nine fiery green shields that the flameweavers had set as wards.

  Everyone in the castle saw the reaver’s plan at once. The captain of the artillery shouted for his men to fire at the wretched creature, and fire they did.

  But as before, the ballista bolts careened away from their target, and the miserable little reaver trundled forward to the mouth of the causeway, into the midst of the green glowing shields.

  Roland did not see what happened. He dropped for cover before the small reaver triggered the flame wards. He merely felt the castle walls buck, the roiling heat blast overhead. Light and dust swirled up into the air.

  And then the castle’s protective wards were gone.

  The flameweavers that guarded Carris had spent their power in vain. When Roland got up, he glanced down toward them. Two of the flameweavers, naked now even of flames, began slinking down the steps, as if seeking retreat, while the third merely stood studying his ruined wards in defiance.

  With the wards gone, the fell mage turned and began to stride north, as if she were no longer concerned herself with the castle.

  But a cohort of a thousand blade-bearers remained in place, forming a long wall before the castle, just a few yards out of artillery range.

  Their intent was clear. There would be no escape from Carris.

  The fell mage led her horde north, and Roland was glad to see her go. But she did not travel far.

  Just north of the castle was a small rise called Bone Hill, where lords had fought for centuries as they sought to take Carris.

  The fell mage stopped at the foot of the hill and dropped her head close to the ground, like a hound eagerly catching a scent. Slowly she began to tread in a circle around the base of the hill, while minions stayed back a hundred yards.

  When she had circled it completely, the fell mage dropped her head and trotted round it again, more quickly—so that her shovel-shaped head scooped out a perfect circle. Then she galloped around a third time, widening the furrow.

  As she did, all of the other reavers began to hiss.

  Moments later the wind brought a scent—from beneath the snow and ash—unlike anything Roland had ever smelled before. It was sweeter than the nectar of a rose, more fragile and exotic.

  Of anything he’d witnessed that day, the scent alone seemed the most wondrous. He breathed deeply
, sought to fill his lungs with the heady perfume.

  “What’s that smell?” a farmer asked Baron Poll in a whisper.

  “Something the reavers are making,” Baron Poll said.

  “But… I’ve always heard that reavers don’t have a scent, that they can’t be tracked even by dogs.”

  Baron Poll shook his head in wonder. “Sirrah, the smartest man in the world could fit everything he thinks he knows about reavers into a ten-page book, and once you read it you might as well throw it straight in the jacks.

  “Some say that reavers don’t have a smell, and others say that they mimic the scent of their background, and I’ve heard some say that they can manufacture any scent at will. But… it’s been two thousand years since we’ve fought a surface war with reavers. Most of what men once knew is lost. All that’s left are exaggerations and half-truths.”

  When the fell mage had paraded the hill six more times, she climbed to its crown.

  Reavers pulled crystalline skulls from the mage’s palanquin and used them to decorate the crown of the hill, so that eyeless reaver skulls stared from it in every direction.

  Then the fell mage raised her staff overhead. Lesser mages formed a circle at the base of the hill. Each carried a dead or dying man in its jaws, and now the mages grasped the carcasses and wrung each man as if he were a rag. Blood and guts and bodily fluids squirted into the trench. Then the corpses were thrown over the top.

  When the reaver mages had wrung their victims dry, a new scent began to arise—a ghastly odor that seemed a mixture of smoke and putrefaction.

  Then the howlers and blade-bearers left Bone Hill and began to spread over the countryside. They began dismantling every artifact of human manufacture, tearing down fortresses and cottages, uprooting trees and orchards, crashing through stone fences that had stood for hundreds or thousands of years.

  They demolished everything, spared nothing, and worked with terrifying speed and efficiency.

  The glue mums began eating every plant in sight, masticating whole trees and the thatch from cottages, then spitting it out in the form of sticky saliva. Howlers grabbed the masticated pulp and pulled it into ropes, as if it were taffy that quickly hardened. The howlers dragged the lines to the base of Bone Hill and twined it about, forming a rigid cocoon around the hill, a screen behind which the reaver mages continued to work. They began excavating the hill, forming strange and sinuous patterns in the ground.

  At the base of the hill, blade-bearers dug burrows for fortifications.

  Within an hour, all of the low-lying wizard fog had at last dissipated, and Roland could see into the distance for several miles. When he did, his heart fell.

  To the south was an unending line of reavers, all marching from the mountains down to Carris. These twenty thousand or so that held Carris had only been the vanguard of a vast army.

  Roland had dared hope that the reavers would head north. Now it seemed they had found what they were looking for: a new home.

  Raj Ahten stood on the ramparts of the gate tower and watched the hills to the south. Every quarter mile or so, he could see reavers by the threes and nines, forming a long line that reached from Carris down to the Brace Mountains and beyond. It was a maddening sight.

  The wall of blade-bearers outside the castle gates would block any attempt to sally forth and attack.

  Raj Ahten’s flameweavers and counselors stood beside him, while his Days stood at his back. As he watched the fields below, Lord Paldane the Huntsman climbed up the tower.

  “My lord,” Paldane said softly, solicitously, “may I please have a word with you?”

  Raj Ahten studied him curiously. The man’s demeanor bespoke utter humility. But Duke Paldane was a brilliant man, a duplicitous man, and a famed strategist. In Raj Ahten’s opinion, in a drawn-out war Paldane would have been Raj Ahten’s most fearsome opponent. Now, he had come like a dog with its tail between its legs.

  “Yes?” Raj Ahten asked.

  “I have been considering a plan to abandon the castle,” Paldane said humbly. “There is a gated aqueduct on the north wall.”

  “I know,” Raj Ahten said. “Seven hundred and fourteen years ago, during the Siege of Pears, Duke Bellonsby pretended to abandon the city by boating men through it night and day. But when Kaifba Hariminah’s men entered the city at last, and drank themselves silly in celebration, Bellonsby’s men came up from the King’s cellars and slaughtered them.”

  Raj Ahten let Paldane know that he’d anticipated him. “You of course have a large number of boats.”

  “Yes,” Paldane said. “I’ve nearly eight hundred skiffs at hand. We can begin evacuating women and children to the east shore of the lake now, at ten thousand people per flotilla. I estimate that we can make one journey every two hours.

  “More than a hundred thousand people per day. If by some miracle the reavers did not attack for five or six days, the whole castle could be emptied.”

  Raj Ahten stared hard at Paldane, considering. Women and children. Saving them would of course be the first priority of these soft northerners.

  He almost laughed. These people were his ancient enemies.

  Besides, had the northerners ever considered the welfare of Raj Ahten’s own women and children? In the past five years, northern assassins had struck down most of his family—his father and sister, wives and sons. The war between Raj Ahten and the lords of Rofehavan had been bloody and personal. By invading the north, Raj Ahten had escalated it to the level of being bloody and impersonal.

  Raj Ahten could easily evacuate his own Invincibles in a single flotilla, abandoning the people of Carris to fend for themselves. Or he might begin moving all his warriors from the castle now, and be gone by day’s end.

  “What makes you think that it will be safe on the east shore?” he asked Paldane. “Isn’t it likely that the reavers have set guards around the lake?”

  Lake Donnestgree was large, forty miles from north to south, nearly three and a half miles from east shore to west.

  “Perhaps,” Paldane said cautiously. “But my far-seers in the tower cannot make out any guards there.” Raj Ahten could almost see the doubts whirling in Paldane’s head, the worries and fears.

  Raj Ahten nodded toward the line of reavers marching from the mountains to the south. “It may be that the reavers are still waiting for reinforcements,” he said, “or that they’ve secreted troops behind the hills. I would not underestimate the fell mage. It would be foolish to send women and children into greater danger.”

  He knew that villages were scattered to the east of Lake Donnestgree, even some minor fortresses that his people could defend. But the shore was so rocky, the land so mountainous, that only a few sheep farmers and woodsmen inhabited it. Raj Ahten turned to his old counselor, Feykaald. “Get twenty skiffs and fill them with mixed troops from our company and from Paldane’s. Have them check the east shore of the lake for signs of reavers, and then march inland for several miles to make sure that the shore is secure. When they finish, have them hold a fortress and bring me word.”

  Feykaald studied Raj Ahten with heavy-lidded eyes, hiding his smile. He understood Raj Ahten’s game. Scouting the shore and securing a beachhead was worthwhile, for Raj Ahten would need it if he did evacuate his men. “It shall be done, O Light of the Universe.”

  Immediately Feykaald shouted to some of the captains, began assembling his shore party.

  “My lord,” Paldane said, “we also have plenty of wood here for hoardings, beams from homes and corrals in the city. We could put men to work on the east wall of the castle, lashing together rafts. With enough rafts, we could evacuate perhaps a hundred thousand more people with a few moment’s notice.”

  Raj Ahten studied Paldane briefly. Paldane was a thin man with a hatchet face, dark hair that had almost completely gone white. His dark blue eyes showed superior cunning. “Not yet,” Raj Ahten objected. “If we begin lashing together rafts prematurely, it will turn men’s minds toward flight, rather than on how
to better defend themselves. Defending Carris is our first priority.”

  “My lord,” Paldane said, “considering the number of reinforcements the reavers have coming from the south, I suspect that flight is our best—if not the only—alternative.”

  Raj Ahten smiled a practiced smile that included more than just a simple movement of the lips. He tightened the muscles around his eyes. “You are dismissed.”

  After the fog dissipated, news spread along the castle wall that Raj Ahten was sending shore parties to the east, so that the castle could be evacuated.

  The news buoyed Roland’s spirits. It was then that he took his first real view of the city of Carris itself. There were homes below him, and an almond tree that grew against the wall so high that if he dared he could have leapt into its topmost branches without injury. He was right behind some lord’s garden, and the city stretched to the north all around.

  Down in the inner bailey to the west he could see thousands of townsfolk, and the horses that Raj Ahten’s knights had ridden tied in lines along the street.

  Against the west wall of the outer bailey hunkered some forty frowth giants, each twenty feet tall. The tawny yellow fur beneath their ring mail looked darker than normal, for it was wet and matted by rain. The giants gazed about with their huge silver eyes, looking doleful and ill-used. The giants needed fresh meat often, and Roland did not like the way they eyed the peasant children of Carris, who peered at the monsters from doorways and windows and from beneath the eaves of inns.

  Every bit as fearsome as the giants were Raj Ahten’s war dogs, mastiffs that wore armor: masks and harnesses of red-lacquered leather, and collars around the neck with huge curved spikes in them. These were force dogs, bred to war and granted endowments of brawn, stamina, and metabolism from other dogs in their packs.

  Yet as fearsome as these beasts were, Roland knew that Raj Ahten’s warriors were more fearsome still. Each Invincible had at least twenty endowments to his credit. In battle, the Invincibles were unmatched by any other soldier in the world.