In three seconds the monster reached the top of the wall and reared, ready to leap over.
The reaver perched on the merlons, its enormous talons raised in the air. It grabbed its great blade and swiped down at the young fellow nearby.
The blade crushed the pasty-faced boy against the stone floor in a spray of blood. Roland drew his small half-sword and shouted a battle cry.
Gathering his courage, he rushed forward. The monster was balanced precariously atop the wall, holding itself to the merlons with clawed toes. Roland could see the joints that held the toes together, knew where to cut so that his blade would separate a toe from the foot.
With all his might, he thrust his blade deep into the joint of the reaver’s toe, heard it hiss in pain.
The half-sword buried itself to the hilt, and Roland struggled to wrench it free again. At his side, Meron Blythefellow leapt forward with his pickaxe and hit another joint.
“Watch out!” Baron Poll shouted. Roland looked up to see an enormous clawed talon swipe toward him.
The talon caught Roland’s shoulder, ripped into his flesh, and carried him into the air. For half a second he was thirty feet in the air above the tower, looking into the maw of the reaver, row upon row of crystalline teeth.
He was aware that men below were using this moment of distraction to attack the beast. One huge fellow went racing underneath, threw himself against the monster in a shield rush.
Then the reaver fell, and Roland fell with it. He landed upon some defenders below and stared in horror at blood spurting from his right shoulder. The fiery pain was excruciating.
Men cheered as the reaver tumbled from the wall, went splashing into the water. “Surgeon! Surgeon!” Roland cried.
But none came forward. Roland grasped his arm, tried to hold the gaping wound closed, to keep his lifeblood from flowing out. He shook uncontrollably.
In a daze, he crawled backward against the stone of the wall-walk, tried to clear out of the path of other castle defenders.
He stared hard for a moment at the merlon where Baron Poll had sat for the past day, but the Baron was gone. Other men rushed to defend the wall. Roland looked all around, still fighting the tears and the black fog that threatened his eyesight.
Suddenly in his mind’s eye, he recalled the fellow making the shield rush, knocking the reaver into the lake. No commoner could have performed such a feat—only a man with endowments of brawn.
And he knew where Baron Poll had gone.
Roland’s heart seemed to pound in his throat; he pulled himself up. To the east and west, reavers gained the top of the wall. Commoners struggled to repel the monsters.
But here the attack had stopped for now. Roland gazed into the lake. The water was choppy, for the reavers were still trying to land. But the ship beneath his post was sinking.
The bulk of a falling reaver, weighing more than a dozen tons, had been too much for the stone ship. The prow had shattered, and the reavers sank with their vessel.
Sank the way Baron Poll had, in his armor.
Roland shouted to Meron Blythefellow, “Baron Poll! Where is he?”
“Dead!” Blythefellow shouted in reply. “He’s dead!”
Roland floundered to his knees in a faint. Cold sleet pelted his neck. Gree wriggled overhead painfully.
The skies went black though the fell mage all dressed in light had not yet uttered another curse.
51
STRANGERS ON THE ROAD
“Flee!” Gaborn’s Voice rang through Borenson’s mind. For half a second he drew rein on his horse and peered down the road west toward Carris, squinting to pierce the gloom. He raised a warning hand for Pashtuk, Saffira, and her bodyguards.
Borenson was in the lead. Pashtuk rode up next to him.
“What is it? An ambush?” Pashtuk squinted ahead, trying to pierce the darkness thrown by the shadows of the mixed oaks and pines along the hillside to their left. For the past few minutes, Borenson had been exceedingly ill at ease. Five miles back, they’d crossed some sort of invisible line.
The plants there had been steaming and wilting, blasted by some strange spell. Grass hissed as if it were full of snakes. Branches drooped in the trees. Vines in the ground had been writhing as if in pain, and all of this was accompanied by an odd stench of premature decay.
The farther they rode, the more decrepit the land became. Nothing was left alive. Low brown fumes clung to the ground.
The vegetation here had been blasted with a curse more dire than anything he’d ever seen. It left him feeling anxious, anticipating trouble.
“I… don’t know if it’s an ambush,” Borenson answered. “The Earth King warns of danger ahead. Perhaps we should turn aside and go cross-country.”
Suddenly, down the road at the corner of the bend, a girl ran beneath the barren limbs of a hoary oak. Distantly her voice could be heard as she raised a hue and cry. “Help! Help! Murder!”
She turned the corner, saw Borenson, and relief transformed her face. She was a small girl, with long red hair the same color as Borenson’s, wearing the dirty blue tunic of a skyrider.
Borenson had been galloping hard for the past hour, hoping to make Carris by sunset. He’d feared reavers along the road, and he’d hoped that if he rode fast enough, he could outrun them. But now they’d slowed the horses to let them cool.
“Help!” the child cried, and a woman came loping behind her. The two raced under blasted trees, over limp grass, as if running from out of some nightmare of desolation. The fading rays of the afternoon sun showed full on their faces.
The woman seemed to have fallen into a vat of green dye. She wore a black bearskin robe that flapped open as she ran, revealing the fact that she wore nothing else beneath that single garment. She had small breasts and a slim figure, and the green dye seemed indeed to cover every part of her body. Yet something about her gave Borenson pause, made him feel unaccountably distracted. It was not the fact that she was beautiful and half-naked. Rather that, even at two hundred yards, she looked familiar.
His heart hammered. Binnesman’s wylde! Though he’d never seen the creature, every lord in Heredon had been told to look for it. Borenson wondered how it came to be here.
Pashtuk tensed, and Borenson reached behind his saddle for his horseman’s warhammer.
“Flee!” the Earth King warned again.
“Damn it, I hear you,” Borenson shouted back at Gaborn, knowing full well that Gaborn could not hear.
“Is this an ambush?” Pashtuk asked. In Indhopal, women or children were sometimes used as decoys to lure warriors to their deaths, though no decent lord of Rofehavan had ever done this.
“Let’s go!” one of Saffira’s guards, Ha’Pim, ordered. He grabbed the reins to Saffira’s mount, turning her horse, prepared to gallop south across the open fields.
At that moment, a reaver raced round the bend, huge and monstrous, bearing an enormous glory hammer.
“I’ll get the girl, you take the woman!” Borenson shouted to Pashtuk.
Borenson slammed his heels into horseflesh, raised his weapon high. He held no illusions. He had no endowments left, no brawn or grace or metabolism, and he wasn’t likely to ever get close enough to the reaver to even take a swing. Still, the reaver wouldn’t know that. He hoped that the beast, upon sensing two warriors racing toward it, might at least pause long enough so that Borenson could grab the child and make a clean escape.
He shouted a war cry and Pashtuk’s mount raced beside him.
“Wait! Leave them!” Ha’Pim shouted at Borenson’s back. “We are here to guard our lady.”
Pashtuk did not resist. The Invincible drew reins for half a second, and Borenson glanced back to see him racing to his Queen.
Borenson did not know if Pashtuk acted well or ill. He’d heard abject terror in Ha’Pim’s voice.
Borenson ducked low, raised his warhammer. His mount had two endowments of brawn, and could easily carry him, the wylde, and the child. But it would be a clumsy
ride, and he doubted he’d have time to save them both. Indeed, the wylde was running in the rear, running too slowly, glancing back from moment to moment as if eager to turn and embrace the monster.
Borenson raced for the child, slowed his mount just enough to reach down and grab for her, try to yank her up.
But he no longer had endowments of brawn, and Borenson misjudged the effort it would take. The child leapt up, as if to help him pull her onto the horse.
Borenson had meant to swing her onto the saddle in front of him. Instead, he caught her arm off balance. He tore a muscle in his shoulder, and for half a second the burning pain was so great that he feared he might cripple himself.
Yet he managed to swing the child onto the horse behind him, then race toward the green woman.
But as he glanced toward the wylde, three more reavers raced round the bend. Borenson could not reach her in time. The reaver raised its glory hammer, sprinted toward her, its great crystalline teeth flashing like quartz in the sunlight.
Borenson tried to wheel his mount, leaving the wylde to die.
The girl riding behind Borenson shouted, “Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer: blood, yes!”
The green woman stopped in her tracks, spun to face the reaver, and leapt at the beast as she aimed a punch at its giant maw.
Her deed seemed to catch the reaver by surprise. It had been racing for her at full speed. Now it swung its glory hammer.
The blow fell long and wide. It pounded the road with a loud thwack, like the sound of a tree crashing in the woods.
What happened next, Borenson could not quite believe.
The reaver’s head was as large as a wain. Its maw could have swallowed Borenson and his horse whole. Had the monster landed on him, its fifteen tons of bulk would have ground him into the dirt like a miller’s wheel pulverizing barley.
Yet the green woman twisted her hand as she punched, some weird sort of little dance that baffled the eye, as if she were a mage drawing a rune in the air.
And when her blow landed, it was as if she wielded a glory hammer herself.
Crystalline teeth shattered and flew out like droplets of water, catching the sun. The huge gray reaver’s flesh ripped from its face, exposing the skeleton just beneath. Foul blue blood as dark as ink sprayed everywhere.
The reaver collided with the green woman’s blow as if it had hit a stone wall. Its entire body lifted into the air six or eight feet, and its four huge legs convulsed in exactly the same way that a spider’s would when it tries to protect its belly.
When it landed with a thud, the thing was dead.
Borenson wheeled toward the green woman, but he need not have bothered. Pashtuk acted the part of a man even though Saffira had taken his pearls, and now he galloped toward the green woman at full speed.
But the green woman was not satisfied to have killed the monster. Though three of its fellows raced toward her, she leapt atop the dead reaver’s head, slammed her fist into its skull, and brought out a piece of brain, black with blood, to shove into her mouth.
Borenson gaped in surprise and reined in his horse. Pashtuk reached the green woman, grabbed her from behind.
Borenson spun his mount and raced north toward Saffira and her guards. He glanced over his back to make sure that Pashtuk got clear before the other reavers arrived.
Pashtuk did not take time for niceties. He grabbed the wylde around the waist as if she were a bag of oats. She did not struggle as she feasted on a handful of reaver’s brain.
“This way,” Pashtuk shouted, wheeling southeast as he passed Borenson. Borenson glanced back. More blade-bearers thundered round the hill. A reaver mage charged in their midst, but the monsters would never catch force horses such as these. A reaver’s top speed was forty miles per hour, and then only in short bursts.
“You saved me!” the girl at Borenson’s back shouted in glee. “I knew you’d come for me!” She hugged him hard.
Borenson had never seen the child before, felt surprised by her tone.
“Well, you seem to know more than I,” Borenson said sarcastically. He had no patience for fakirs who pretended to prescience, even if they were only children.
They raced in silence for a few minutes, and Pashtuk managed to plant the wylde in the saddle in front of him. Behind Borenson, the girl kept leaning forward, trying to see Saffira, as if unable to stop staring.
Finally the child asked, “Where’s Baron Gobble Gut? Didn’t he come with you?”
“Who?” Borenson asked.
“Baron Poll,” the child said.
“Hah! I hope not,” Borenson said. “If I ever see him again, I’ll spill his guts all over the road!”
The child pulled on Borenson’s cloak, tried to peer up into his face. “Are you mad at him?”
“No, I merely hate the man as I hate evil itself,” Borenson said.
The girl gazed up at him questioningly, but remained silent.
The sky above filled with a snarling sound that reverberated like a distant hiss. It sounded as if all the heavens drew in a breath at once. Far away, the red of firelight glowed from columns of rising smoke.
“Quickly!” Pashtuk shouted, racing ahead over the dead landscape as fast as his mount would carry him. “My lord battles at Carris!”
52
IN THE THICK OF BATTLE
Less than an hour from the time Raj Ahten had emerged from the castle gates, Carris stood on the brink of ruin.
In the first moments of battle, reavers drove Raj Ahten’s knights back along the causeway, then exploded against the west wall of Castle Carris before men could raise the draw-bridges.
They beat the stone arches above the gates with glory hammers, pounding into dust the runes of earth-binding engraved there.
With the walls of Carris thus weakened, the reavers began to batter through the walls as easily as if they were made of twigs.
In less than five minutes they demolished the gate towers and opened a chasm into the bailey.
Raj Ahten could only respond by throwing men into the breach, hoping to drive the reavers back. A wall of corpses—both human and reaver—piled up at the breach some eighty feet, until the reavers were able to leap from their dead onto the castle walls.
Many reavers scuttled over the piled corpses, came sliding down on the dead, their enormous carapaces rumbling as they slid through slick gore. They hurled themselves into battle in such a fashion that the flesh and bones of any man who dared stand before them were ground into mangled ruin.
Might alone could not stop the reavers.
In minutes they butchered a thousand Invincibles before the breach.
Meanwhile, reavers raced up on the south wall of Carris from their stone ships. They decorated that wall with blood and gore. At least twenty thousand commoners died before Raj Ahten’s Invincibles managed to slay the intruders.
In desperation, Raj Ahten brought his exhausted flameweavers into the fray and lit several inns and towers afire so that the burning buildings might lend the sorcerers energy to do battle.
For ten minutes his flameweavers had stood on towers to the north and south of the gates, hurling fireballs as best they could into the ranks of reavers that lumbered down the causeway. The flameweavers drove the reavers back, but only for a few moments.
The reavers soon rushed forward over the causeway bearing enormous slabs of dark shale in their great paws, as if they were shields, then set them on each side of the cause-way, forming a ragged wall that baffled the flames.
Then some reavers scuttled forward under cover while others lobbed huge boulders against the castle walls in a crude artillery barrage. One tower collapsed so that a flameweaver plunged to his death in the lake.
Fifteen minutes into the battle, Raj Ahten could see that he would lose Carris, for he fought not just the blade-bearers alone, but also the fell mage that drove them.
Six times she cast spells against the men who defended Carris. Her curses were commands, simple in nature, astonishing in eff
ect.
“Be thou deaf and blind,” had been her first refrain. Three times a black wind had issued from her. But after three sweeps, she commanded, “Cower in fear.”
Six curses, at odd intervals. Raj Ahten was horrified by their effect. Even now, some brave men huddled in mindless terror a full ten minutes after the last curse had blown from the east.
Raj Ahten felt mystified by the spells. No chronicle ever told of reaver mages that uttered such curses.
Now, as Raj Ahten fought in the midst of battle, out on Bone Hill the reavers’ fell mage raised her citrine staff to the sky and hissed, uttering a seventh curse. Her hiss was a violent sound that seemed to crawl away in all directions as it echoed along the cloud ceiling between earth and sky. Men on the castle walls cringed or cried in terror.
Raj Ahten listened, but knew that the curse that issued from her could not be understood until he smelled the dark wind that roiled away from her. He could almost count the number of milliseconds it would take for the command to reach him, down here in the castle’s bailey.
He led a charge into the reavers’ front rank, blurring in his speed, bearing a battle-axe in each hand. With six endowments of metabolism to his credit, he could work fast, but needed to make every heartbeat count.
A reaver slid down toward Raj Ahten on the backs of the dead, glory hammer high overhead. It came with a rumbling roar, for its carapace ground over the dead with a sound like a huge log rolling down a hill.
As it slid to a halt, a frowth giant behind Raj Ahten roared and slammed its huge staff at the reaver’s maw, thrusting upward, forcing the reaver to stop and fall back a pace.
The reaver had little time to choose its mode of attack. It raised its hammer overhead. Raj Ahten hesitated an eighth of a second while the frowth held the reaver back, then he lunged to strike. His first blow was a vicious uppercut that took the reaver behind the spur of its raised left arm. Raj Ahten’s axe bit deep into the flesh, pried between the monster’s joints, weakening the limb without severing it.
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