Lowicker knew himself to be corrupt beyond all hope.
“I pity you anyway,” Iome told him.
Lowicker cackled insanely. Tears began to cut streams down his dirt-crusted face. Obviously his pain coupled with the hot sun was affecting his mind.
What an evil man, Myrrima thought. He deserves no pity, yet Iome offers it. He deserves no water, yet Iome would give it.
“Your Highness,” Sir Hoswell asked after a long moment, “shall I do him?” He dared not use such an indelicate word as “kill.”
Myrrima thought that Iome would consent, would give in and kill the man now, release him from his pain.
“No,” Iome said, suddenly furious. “That’s what he hopes for.” She spurred her horse past Lowicker, and Myrrima felt a thrill of relief.
46
A HERO BY NECESSITY
In the west tower of Duke Paldane’s Keep, Raj Ahten stared from the windows and studied the workings of the reavers.
For now, he was biding his time. His shore party had not yet returned from the east side of the lake, and so he still did not know for certain whether they could flee the castle by water. The fact that they were so long overdue suggested to Raj Ahten that the shore party had been slaughtered to a man.
In the back of his mind, he knew that Gaborn’s troops would be heading to the aid of Carris. Perhaps even the Earth King himself would come do battle with the reavers, and he imagined the satisfaction watching that fight might bring.
Raj Ahten was here with Paldane, the men who had served as Wits to King Orden, and Raj Ahten’s counselor Feykaald. His three flameweavers stood at his back before a roaring blaze in the hearth, peering into the smoke and the writhing flames. They were drawing the heat into them, trying to regenerate their powers, but they were so drained, Raj Ahten doubted they’d be able to fight for the rest of the day. He dared not engage the reavers until the flameweavers could stand beside him.
After dawn Raj Ahten had quickly set up formations for defending the castle gates. Yet the reavers merely ignored them, continued to build.
“What are they up to?” Raj Ahten wondered aloud. “Why don’t they attack?”
“It may be that they fear to try a frontal assault,” Duke Paldane ventured. “But they dig well, and might tunnel into the castle, like monstrous sappers.”
The reavers had obviously come here for a purpose.
But for the moment the reavers did not seem interested in taking the castle. Perhaps they were not fully aware of the danger that his men presented. It even seemed remotely plausible to Raj Ahten that the reavers had forgotten that the castle was here; they were after all strange creatures that danced to a pipe that no man could hear.
He glanced toward Bone Hill. The fell mage worked there near its crown, glittering from the fiery runes tattooed on her carapace. Once, her massive head swiveled toward the castle, but then she resumed her work.
Perhaps the fell mage felt secure with her minions guarding the plains. The land was now pocked with openings to subterranean caverns, laced with moats, decorated with that stinking rune that covered the hill. He studied Bone Hill, secure behind its barrier of hardened mucilage, partially wrapped inside its cocoon.
The glue mums had quit towering the walls higher. Raj Ahten suspected that the fell mage’s curious defenses might be complete.
Was it merely a coincidence that they came to this place, now, where Raj Ahten planned to face the Earth King? Raj Ahten wondered. Could it be that they prepared this battle-ground for the Earth King?
It seemed more probable that their plans had nothing to do with any of them. The reavers seemed content to ignore Raj Ahten and his armies, as if he were beneath their notice.
Raj Ahten shook his head in dismay. For the past hour he had been assaulted by strange and distressing emotions for reasons that he could not quite understand.
I should not be dismayed, he reasoned. I am the most powerful Runelord to grace the earth in millennia. My facilitators in Indhopal have drawn brawn and stamina from thousands of subjects, have taken grace and wit from thousands more. A sword driven through my heart cannot slay me. I should not feel apprehensive.
Yet he did. In recent months, he had begun to believe that he was invincible, that he was on the verge of becoming a creature of legend, the Sum of All Men—a Runelord so charismatic that he would no longer need forcibles to draw attributes from his Dedicates. He hoped to become a Power, a force of nature, like the Earth or Fire or Water.
Daylan Hammer had accomplished it in days of old, if legend spoke true.
Raj Ahten had stood on the brink of attaining that distinction; until ten days ago it seemed that nothing could hinder him. Then old King Mendellas Orden had stolen his forcibles.
Surely if the reavers knew that a man like me confronts them, Raj Ahten thought, they would fear me.
Raj Ahten glanced toward the foul rune that the reavers were shaping at Bone Hill. The stink of it had become appalling, and now the odor hung above the hill in a spiral of brown haze.
Death emanated from that place. Raj Ahten felt the pain and rot and decrepitude. To even look at it made the eyeballs twitch, want to turn away. Dim lights flickered beneath the roiling smoke, like the phantom ghost lights that formed when gas bubbles rose from a swamp. It seemed to Raj Ahten that the whole rune was precariously close to bursting into flame.
I feel dismay. Somehow, that rune is the key.
The reavers focused too much attention on it. Their mages swarmed the hill, patiently digging great trenches so that the odd rune took shape in bas-relief, then decorated it with their stench.
Raj Ahten had endowments of scent from thousands of men. He breathed deeply. It was not a single odor. He could detect myriad undertones and flavors. It was a complex medley: a bouquet of rot, of moldering flesh, mixed smoke and death and human sweat, a rich symphony teeming with competing smells. He felt as if he were almost on the verge of revelation, of recognizing the entirety of it.
Certainly the reavers had come to Carris for the sole purpose of shaping that rune.
Reavers scurried about on the rune’s walls, and one of them slipped, causing a slide. To Raj Ahten’s delight, part of the rune collapsed. Reaver mages raced to build it back up, hold it together, and spray the protuberances with new scents.
The rune was tantalizingly close. A child with a hammer could knock it down.
On a sudden impulse, Raj Ahten slammed a mailed fist through the window of the Duke’s Keep, stood for a moment and inhaled the subtle texture of odors coming from the rune.
Raj Ahten closed his eyes in concentration. As he inhaled deeply, he became aware that some scents did not translate simply as smells. Instead they assaulted the emotions. Yes, dismay was the scent that he smelled.
He’d never considered the possibility that a scent might arouse an emotion.
The sour sweat of someone who toiled near death. Raj Ahten tasted the scent, and felt with it that man’s despair.
Smoke, and agony. The salty taste of human tears. The greasy scent of charred flesh, and with it another smoky odor: fields of crops rotting under a blight.
Decay. A corpse bloated like a melon to the point of bursting.
Despair and terror assailed him. The coppery scent of blood, a woman’s broken water, and decay—a mother giving birth to a stillborn child. Fatigue.
The sour taste of old skin. Loneliness so deep it was an ache in the bones.
After a long moment, Raj Ahten smiled and almost laughed in pain. He recognized that complex scent now: It was a symphony of human suffering, the tally of all mankind’s misery.
“It’s an incantation,” Raj Ahten realized. He startled himself by speaking aloud.
“What?” Duke Paldane said, staring hard at him.
“The rune,” Raj Ahten said. “It’s an incantation written in scent—an incantation to call a curse upon mankind.”
He suddenly yearned to dash the rune and its makers into oblivion, to drown the thing
in water and wash it clean.
Yet he doubted he could accomplish that feat. The reavers were too wise to give him access to his objective, too powerful to be defeated so long as they comprised such vast numbers. A cocoon blockaded much of his path to the rune, although a trail had been left for the workers.
Raj Ahten had to try.
“The reavers may build,” Raj Ahten said, “but we do not have to let them build in peace. I may not be able to take that hill, but I can surely spoil their party.”
47
WAITING FOR SAFFIRA
High in the Hest Mountains, Borenson’s mount clambered down a narrow trail through a flurry of snow. He was leading Saffira and her guards down from the precipitous high passes.
He gazed over a small valley and saw a herd of elephants floundering in the drifts. Most of them had died already, and they lay like elephant-shaped boulders covered in ice. But a couple of big old bulls looked up toward Saffira’s entourage and feebly raised their trunks, trumpeting.
These were domestic elephants, with tusks sawed off and capped with copper. But they looked so starved that they would probably never succeed in climbing out of this valley. Their mahouts had abandoned them.
Apparently, the Wolf Lord had tried to bring war elephants over the Hests late in the season—and he had failed. Three times in the night, Borenson’s party had passed Raj Ahten’s armies of commoners as they tried to make it over the mountains. These were archers and footmen, washwomen and carters by the hundreds of thousands. Not in his wildest dreams had Borenson imagined that Raj Ahten would try to bring such troops over the mountains so late in the autumn. Up so high in the Hests, the narrow trails offered little forage: a few rough grasses and low bushes to eat, snow to quench one’s thirst. There was no fuel to burn, and so men burned ox dung in their small fires.
A journey that Borenson made in an hour on a force horse might take these men and women a day. The journey he made in a single night would take weeks of hard work for a commoner. Many of the horses Borenson saw in the last army were in terrible shape. They were beasts whose hides hung limp over skeletal frames. The commoners riding them would likely get stranded in the snow and die up here before midwinter, just as these elephants would die.
Raj Ahten had taken a deadly gamble, with both the lives of his people and his animals.
But he doesn’t care, Borenson told himself. The lives he gambles with are not his own.
The mountain air was thin. A biting chill blew through it, piercing his cloak. Borenson wrapped it around himself and waited for Saffira to catch up. He hoped that when she saw the beautiful elephants, she might see her lord’s folly. Evidence of it was everywhere. Rumor said that Raj Ahten had taken more than a thousand endowments of wit. With so much wit, he would recall in vivid detail every waking moment of his life. Yet endowments of wit only let a man store memories, not reason more clearly.
So he has a thousand endowments of wit, Borenson thought, and he’s still dumber than my ass.
Last night, when Saffira had said that Raj Ahten was the greatest man in the world, and would surely save mankind from the reavers, Borenson had believed her. But now he was not looking at her, and the seductive power of her Voice did not sound as reasonable when he replayed it in memory.
No, Raj Ahten was not all-wise. Only a fool would have sent so many commoners into these mountains.
A fool or a reckless and desperate man, a voice whispered in the back of Borenson’s mind.
Perhaps Raj Ahten had been a Runelord too long. Maybe he’d forgotten what a frail thing a commoner could be. A man with a couple of endowments of brawn and metabolism could rush through a battle line and cut down commoners as if they were scarecrows.
They died so damned easily. Last night had brought a thin snow, and it had kept falling all morning. If it held, Raj Ahten’s troops would get bogged down. Their animals would die in a fortnight, and without fuel for fires, the people would freeze in a matter of days.
What had made Raj Ahten hope that the fair weather would hold? Certainly he’d studied Rofehavan, knew what a risk he took.
Raj Ahten is a fool, Borenson thought, and Saffira does not see it.
He knew that Indhopal was an enormous realm, comprised of many kingdoms. And though Borenson had ridden through parts of Deyazz and Muttaya, he’d not been farther south, had not numbered the teeming hordes of Kartish or old Indhopal. It was said that before Raj Ahten conquered all of his neighbors, the old kingdom of Indhopal, with its lush jungles and vast fields, had fed more than a hundred and eighty million people. Certainly Raj Ahten commanded two or three times that number now. Yet even Raj Ahten could not afford to throw away half a million of his best-trained footmen and archers.
No, Raj Ahten was a fool. Or he might be a madman, deluded by his own fair face, the power of his Voice.
The horror of it now was that Saffira in her naivete could not see Raj Ahten’s excesses, his vices.
Saffira was a tool in Raj Ahten’s hand, and if she could not twist him to her will, then he most certainly would twist her to his.
Borenson waited several long minutes for Saffira. When she arrived, Borenson moved to her windward side, so that his body might shield her better from the stinging wind.
“Ah, look at my lord’s elephants,” Saffira said as she stopped, giving her horse a breather. The poor beast put its head down and bit into the snow, began chewing it for refreshment. “We must do something to save them.”
Borenson looked helplessly at the starving elephants. In the morning light, Saffira’s beauty had become a terrible and breathtaking thing to behold. All through the night, the facilitators at Obran must have been working to transfer the concubines’ glamour and Voice into Saffira’s vectors. Saffira had garnered thousands of endowments. When Borenson glanced at her face for only a moment, her beauty smote him like a furnace, and he felt unworthy to be so near her.
A couple of vultures flapped up from an elephant’s carcass.
“What would you suggest, O Star of Indhopal?” Borenson begged. When she did not answer, he looked to Pashtuk and the guards. He could see no way to save the elephants, short of spending the day hauling in hay and food for them from Mystarria.
If Saffira asked him to cart feed for the elephants, he knew that he would obey, but he feared the consequences if he delayed his quest. He needed to deliver Saffira to Raj Ahten, to convince him to turn aside from pursuing this self-destructive war.
“I… I don’t know what we can do for them,” Saffira said.
“They have grazed this valley to stubble, O Greatest of Stars,” Pashtuk said. “Perhaps if we drove them down to a lower valley where there is more grass, the elephants would regain enough strength so that they might live.”
“That’s a fine plan!” Saffira said in delight.
Borenson glanced at Pashtuk, hoping to convey in his scowl how displeased he was with the idea. But he saw Pashtuk’s face, and knew that the big man felt as much in thrall to Saffira as did Borenson himself. Pashtuk only hoped to please her.
“O Bright Lady,” Borenson said, “your lord tried to bring the elephants across the mountains too late in the season. We cannot save them.”
“It is not my lord’s fault if the weather does not cooperate,” Saffira said. “The weather should be warmer this time of year. It often stays warm, does it not?”
“It does,” Borenson admitted, and Saffira’s Voice was so seductive, he could not help but wonder. Surely she was right. The weather often remained warm this late in the year.
“Still,” Borenson said, “he brought them too late.”
“Do not seek fault with my lord,” Saffira said. “Blame is easy to give, and hard to take. My lord does only what is necessary to stop the depredations of the Knights Equitable. If anyone is to blame, it is your kind.”
Her words were a hot whip that slashed his back. Borenson cringed, unable to frame an argument, unable to say anything. He tried to recall his thoughts a moment earlier, b
ut Saffira had ordered him not to seek fault with Raj Ahten, and so persuasive was her command that his mind slid away from any ill thoughts.
So Borenson and Pashtuk left Saffira with her guards and made their way down to the starving elephants. The herd had contained fifty beasts, but only five remained alive. The narrow valley had no water flowing through it, and Borenson suspected that the other elephants had died of thirst as much as from hunger.
Borenson and Pashtuk slowed their pace through the morning and spent most of a long day herding the elephants eight or ten miles down the mountains to safety. Two miles of travel took them down to the tree line.
After that, Pashtuk drove the elephants down a side trail to a narrow valley. Here the light snow turned to a cold drizzle. The valley had good water and enough grass so that the elephants might forage for a couple of days before they moved down to the lowlands, but Borenson had no real hope for them.
The grass here was merely straw that would not give the elephants energy. Without men to push them on, the elephants most likely would be too weak to leave this place.
Still, he’d done all that he could.
Saffira’s entourage rode down out of the mountains. Borenson now took the lead. Duke Paldane’s soldiers would be guarding this road; though a large party might pass unmolested, Saffira and her entourage would be easy targets.
Borenson didn’t know where the ambush might come, but he didn’t doubt that he would be challenged.
So he rode at the van of the group, a hundred yards ahead of the others. All the while, he watched for sign of an ambush. But with the loss of endowments, his eyes were not as sharp as before; his ears seemed dull of hearing. Without his stamina, he seemed to tire more easily than ever before.
Still, having endowments wasn’t everything. Knowing what to look for was as important as having sharp eyes. So he watched the dark folds of valleys where the pines were thick, and he studied outcroppings of rock that might hide a horse, and he worried each time he came to a new fold in the ground and had to look over a rise.
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