He hoped only that Gaborn would use his powers to warn him if any danger should present itself.
By midafternoon, the rain poured. Borenson was desperate to pick up his pace, but Saffira commanded otherwise.
As they rode down a forested slope, they came upon an old wayfarer’s cottage at the edge of a glade. Its thatch roof was sagging and full of holes, but by now Borenson was thoroughly soaked, and any roof looked as inviting to him as it did to Saffira. Besides, overhanging limbs from pine trees offered some added shelter for the cottage.
“Sir Borenson, help Mahket build a fire while Pashtuk and Ha’Pim prepare dinner,” Saffira said. “All of this travel has left me famished.”
“O Great Star,” Borenson said. “We are—We must hurry.”
Saffira fixed a reproachful gaze on him, and Borenson raised a hand to shield his eyes.
He went to work building the fire and did not object, for he told himself that a short rest would give their mounts time to forage, chewing viciously at the grass outside as force horses will. Besides, the cold rain had left them all thoroughly chilled. They needed rest.
For the moment, he felt too weary to argue further.
Borenson entered the cottage, found a dry corner where the roof still kept out the rain. Fortunately, the corner was near the fireplace. Dry pine needles and cones littered the cottage floor, and Borenson and Mahket set these in the fireplace. Soon they had managed to get a small blaze going.
As he worked, Borenson remained constantly aware of Saffira so near him. Since he knew there would be no dry wood outside, he went to the far end of the cottage and pulled some dry thatch out of the roof. He used the thatch for fuel while Pashtuk and Ha’Pim fetched water to boil rice and warm the lamb cooked in coconut milk that they’d brought from the Palace of the Concubines.
After dinner, Saffira ordered the men to stand guard while she took an afternoon nap, for she said that it would not do for her to “appear before the Great Light with baggy eyes from lack of rest.”
So Borenson let Saffira lie in the warm dry corner while he took a guard post nearby.
He could not rest. The day was wasting, and as he turned away from Saffira he soon found that he merely seethed.
He dared not voice his frustrations to Saffira. He feared her rebuke, but he was dismayed by the delays she caused. It was almost as if she did not want to see Raj Ahten, he decided.
Saffira slept, breathing deeply and softly under a brightly embroidered quilt on the floor, the picture of perfect repose.
Borenson wondered if he would have to kill her. With so many endowments of glamour and Voice, she would be dangerous—as dangerous in her own way as Raj Ahten.
He stared into her glorious face, saw the beauty and innocence there, and knew that to kill her, to take her life, would be as impossible as cutting out the heart of his own child.
Borenson left Saffira to Ha’Pim and Mahket. He went outside to Pashtuk, who stood atop a nearby rock beneath the shelter of a low-hanging pine limb.
They’d come out of the higher mountains. Dark pines stood straight along the road below, forming an impenetrable barrier to his gaze. In an hour, they would reach the warmer lowlands, where oak and elm thrived.
Borenson looked down the trail.
“How are your pearls feeling?” Borenson asked Pashtuk. He’d noted how the warrior sat uneasily in his horse, using his thighs to hold himself off the saddle.
Borenson could not stop worrying about what it would cost him to have looked upon Saffira’s face.
“I fail to understand,” Pashtuk said, “how body parts that I no longer have can cause me so much pain.”
“That bad, eh?” Borenson said.
“When we near Carris,” Pashtuk said, “Raj Ahten will certainly demand his ounce of flesh from you.”
“Ounce of flesh?” Borenson jested. “I’m more of a man than that.”
Pashtuk did not smile. “I suggest that you turn your horse and escape,” he said. “Neither Ha’Pim’s nor Mahket’s horse can catch yours. I might be able to give a good chase … but I will not catch you.”
“Why not?” Borenson asked.
Pashtuk shook his head. “My lord’s decree was made to keep men from idly seeking out Obran, and to make sure that palace servants did not dally with the concubines. I do not believe it was meant for men like you, men of honor who would not betray a trust.”
Borenson felt truly grateful. “Thank you,” he said. “But what kind of escort would I be if I ran off before I saw my charge to safety?”
In his heart, he suddenly knew he could not run, could never leave Saffira’s side. He had to stay beside her now, and he wondered if he would be able to leave even when his journey was done, when it was time to ride for Inkarra. Part of him yearned to stay at her side because to leave would be painful. But he also knew that at the very least, he had to be there to plunge a knife in her back if she decided to betray the Earth King.
Pashtuk shook his head. “I only warn you for your own sake. I would understand if you ran. And if the chance presents itself, I beg you to do so.”
Borenson gazed off down the road. He wanted Pashtuk to believe that he considered this option, that he had no ulterior motive for remaining close to Saffira. “Perhaps you’re right. It looks as if you may not need me. We should have run into a Mystarrian patrol by now—at least within the past twenty miles—but none seem to be about.”
He did not need to say more. With the Blue Tower destroyed, few men would be capable of acting as scouts for Mystarria, and most of those would be hiding in Carris.
“This is pointless,” Borenson breathed at last. “You don’t need me to protect you. Why is Saffira traveling so slowly? What is she afraid of?”
Pashtuk bit his lip and whispered, “She is more cunning than you give her credit for. There is a danger in displeasing our lord. It is said in Indhopal, ‘No one ever displeases our king twice.’
“When she delivers her message and sues for peace, she will have only one chance. She must do her best. Be patient. You gave her a thousand forcibles. How soon do you imagine that her facilitators can drain them?”
“I don’t know.” Borenson said. “How many facilitators does she have?” He’d imagined that Saffira would have a dozen facilitators at her call.
“Two,” Pashtuk said. “A master and an apprentice.”
Borenson licked his lips. Only two. They would each be hard-pressed to drain a forcible every five minutes. The two might be able take twenty-four endowments in an hour, two hundred and forty in a ten-hour day, perhaps four hundred if they drove themselves for eighteen hours.
Saffira’s beauty had been growing night and morning. She grew fairer and more radiant by the minute.
Her facilitators had to be working overtime, exhausting themselves. Yet they could not possibly take a thousand endowments in less than two days.
Saffira had been traveling now for only about twenty hours. Borenson calculated that if they rode hard, they could reach Carris in another four hours—or less.
But Saffira needed to wait.
“She can’t hold us here another day!” Borenson said. “By now, Raj Ahten has certainly besieged Carris. Tomorrow, the Earth King will fall upon him.”
“And if Carris falls, is that such a great matter?” Pashtuk asked. “You seek to divert a single battle. Saffira hopes to end all war.”
“But… another day!”
Pashtuk shook his head. “She will not wait another day. Yesterday while you slept, I spoke to the chamberlain of the Palace of the Concubines. The palace holds fewer than five hundred women and guards, plus a few servants. Saffira’s facilitators swore that by sunset tonight, they would drain every person of endowments who is worth a forcible. If their calculations are correct, by then Saffira will have vectored to her over twelve hundred endowments of voice and twenty-four hundred endowments of glamour.
“After that, in the Palace of the Concubines, the only creatures that the facilit
ators will have left to take endowments from will be the camels.” Pashtuk laughed at his own jest.
Borenson smiled. Certainly Raj Ahten himself did not have half so many endowments of glamour. In all history, Borenson had never heard of a queen who had taken more than a tenth of what Saffira hoped to garner.
She had one chance to persuade Raj Ahten. One chance.
Borenson quietly squatted next to Pashtuk and let Saffira get her rest.
* * *
In late afternoon, Saffira wakened, and after several long minutes she said in a voice far sweeter than any song, “I have good tidings. The facilitators have stopped adding endowments to me. Their work is finished, for good or ill.”
With that news Borenson and Pashtuk saddled up the five force horses.
The roads were muddy, and they would have to ride slower than Borenson wanted. He hoped to make Carris before sunset.
For twenty miles they rode hard and fast, until at last they found the Mystarrian patrol that Borenson had feared.
A dozen knights wearing the green-man emblem lay by the roadside, torn asunder. The body of a horse dangled in the branches of a tree forty feet overhead. Most of the men were hacked into several pieces: a torso trailing guts lying over here, half a leg over there. Some body parts were clearly just missing. The ground around the corpses was scored and trampled by heavy feet, but the knights had not managed to slay a single foe. Seldom had Borenson seen such a slaughter. And it had happened not more than an hour ago. The dead men’s guts still vented steam.
“It looks as if one of your Mystarrian patrols has run into my lord’s men,” Saffira said innocently. She covered her fair nose with a silk cloth, to clear the air from the smell of blood and bile. Her voice was calm and she did not tremble, as if the sight of dead warriors hacked to pieces could not daunt her.
Borenson wondered what kind of sights she could have seen at her tender age, to be so hardened.
Perhaps it does not concern her, he thought, because these warriors are her enemy.
Pashtuk merely shook his head, as if weary of Saffira’s naivete. “They did not meet our patrol, O Great Star. No human would tear apart another man so savagely. Reavers did this.”
“Oh,” Saffira said without emotion, as if the thought of reavers stalking the woods around them did not alarm her in the least. Her guards let their mounts edge closer.
Pashtuk glanced at Borenson, and his dark eyes spoke volumes. “With reavers on the road, we are in trouble.”
48
THE REAVERS SEND A MESSAGE
Roland stood on the castle walls and cheered as Raj Ahten emerged from the Duke’s Keep and began shouting orders to his men, instructing them to prepare for a charge.
Proud Invincibles raced down the ramparts to their horses, squires began carrying barding and lances from the armory. It would take a good hour for the men to effect a charge, and Roland could do nothing but wait.
Over on Bone Hill, the reaver mages were hard at work; the fell mage near its crown was a blur of glittering motion. As they labored, a roiling brown haze began to swirl off the rune.
The odor of death and decay rising from Bone Hill left Roland feeling sick. His stomach churned, and his muscles ached, while his eyes burned so badly that he hardly dared look toward the hill any longer.
As Raj Ahten’s men armored their horses, Roland noticed subtle changes out on the plain. The huge glue mums had been chewing grass and trees, continuously excreting a thick, sticky resin that howlers used to fuse stone together—stone that formed walls and barricades.
They’d been working on the south shore of the lake, creating several large domes. Men had conjectured that these domes might be nesting sites, but now the reavers flipped the domes over and pushed them toward the water, and Roland recognized that the domes were really ships, enormous vessels without oars or sails, shaped like the halves of walnut shells.
The howlers now began toiling desperately, building up the sides of the ships stone by stone.
A cold terror struck at the pit of Roland’s stomach. Until now the reavers had seemed content to ignore the men of Carris.
But now it was evident that, like Raj Ahten in the courtyards below, they were preparing to attack.
To the west, reavers continued to burrow. The barren earth had become pocked and cratered with openings that were strangely taller to the north than to the south.
As afternoon wore toward evening, Roland grew steadily more ill. The air around Carris felt oppressive, with its scent of decay. His head ached, despair settled into his stomach, and a deep-seated fatigue made him feel so worn that he could hardly stand. Some of the men around him tried to hide the fact that they had begun weeping.
In an effort to keep their humor up, some stout warriors began to hurl insults at the reavers, while others laughed and assigned names to the new landmarks that the reavers created.
The huge stone tower to the south rose higher and higher, resembling a twisted narwhale horn or a giant thorn. By midafternoon it was over eight hundred feet tall, and still the reavers kept on building. The fell mage twice went to check the progress atop the tower, and men noted that it looked something like a male reaver’s genitals, so they called it the “Love Tower.”
To the east of the tower, along the shore of Lake Donnestgree, glue mums and howlers continued to work on their ships in the Stone Shipyards.
The pile of discarded wood from homes and trees and fences was called Mount Woody. The men delighted in calling the multitude of burrows to its northwest “Lord Paldane’s Slum.”
Yet of all the foul things created that day, the evil rune on Bone Hill was the most appalling. No mere howlers executed the masonry work. Roland half-glimpsed them behind the walls of their cocoon. While howlers carted off dirt from the trenches and dragged deadwood to the glue mums, mages with runes tatooed along the ridges of their heads above their philia built the wall of the horrific rune.
So the great rune grew—an obscene badge that slowly began to emanate smoke and power. The lines of it beneath the brown haze were marvelously sinuous, like garter snakes all mating in a ball, or like a plate of hummingbird tongues. Like reaver magic itself, the rune was twisted and vile.
If Roland tried to look at it, his eyes literally throbbed. The knotty cords that controlled the movement of the eyes would all convulse, so that he could not focus. Yet if he turned away, the burning sensation against his skin felt so intense that at times he sniffed the air, fearing that he would smell his own flesh cooking.
But the dismay that the fell mage’s rune caused the men was not the only manifestation of its power. For as the rune neared completion, it began to wreak a monstrous change around Bone Hill: The few shrubs and grasses at the foot of the hill began to steam and die.
The grass turned gray and wilted. On the inside wall beneath him, Roland could see the branches of the almond tree slowly begin to writhe. The leaves blistered and fell.
By the time Raj Ahten’s troops had barded their horses and donned their own armor, Roland looked out beyond the walls. North, south, and west of the castle grass and trees steamed as they died, miles away.
The men of Carris renamed Bone Hill the “Throne of Desolation.” As for Castle Carris itself, some men grimly whispered that it might best be called the “Butcher’s Playpen.” Roland imagined that the city held enough people to feed the reavers for a couple of months or more. It was hard to tell, with so many reavers still marching north. Certainly, every man in Carris felt destined to grace a reaver’s dinner table.
For a time, Roland searched hopefully off to the east, where the weak sun shone on the choppy waves. Still no sign of boats returning. Roland clutched his half-sword, practiced drawing it.
The reavers built. But they did not attack.
“Maybe they’re not going to attack,” Roland ventured hopefully. “Maybe they’re after something else….”
“It’s Bone Hill that draws them,” a man behind Roland said. He was a wretchedly s
kinny farmer with the wiry hair of a goat for a beard. He’d introduced himself earlier in the morning as Meron Blythefellow, and he guarded the wall with nothing more than a pickaxe.
“Why do you say that?” Roland asked.
“All the dead men up there,” the farmer said. “More knights have led charges and died on that hill than anywhere else in all Rofehavan. There’s been maybe a hundred battles fought, and all that blood on the ground poisons the soil, making it ripe for dark enchantments. The blood is so thick that the Duke has even tried to mine it, looking for blood metal. That’s why the reavers are here, I think—to build that rune on ground rich in human blood.”
As Blythefellow voiced this thought, Baron Poll frowned. “I don’t think that’s it at all. Maybe they’re just sending us a message.”
“A message?” Roland asked, incredulous. It was obvious that the reavers were poisoning the people of Carris, sickening them with their twisted magics. “Reavers can’t talk.”
“Not usually,” the Baron argued, “at least not so that we can understand. But they talk nonetheless.”
“So what are the reavers saying?” Roland asked.
Baron Poll waved his arms across the landscape. As far as the eye could see, the land around Carris was scarred and barren. Cities, farmhouses, fences, and fortresses alike had all fallen and been carted away. Trees steamed on hills five miles distant.
“Can’t you read it?” Baron Poll said. “It’s not as hard to decipher as high script: ‘The land that was once yours is ours. Your homes are our homes. Your food—well, you are our food. We supplant you.’”
Down in the bailey, Raj Ahten’s troops had mounted. The knights sat astride their chargers, war lances held upright, pointed like glistening needles at the sky.
“Open the gates!” Raj Ahten shouted at their head. Chains creaked as the drawbridge lowered.
49
HUE AND CRY
Averan didn’t know that she’d fallen asleep until she felt Spring lurch up, ripping the warm cloak from her grasp. The green woman shivered with excitement, sniffing the air.
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