He did not watch the fall of Carris, but he heard it, smelled the acrid scent of stone dust in the air. The people wailed as Carris collapsed. Towers toppled. Shops disintegrated.
With six endowments of metabolism, Raj Ahten fought swiftly and furiously, daring attacks he’d never have tried if not for Saffira. He leapt on reaver heads and sought to crush them with his hammer. He raced past one monster, pausing to shatter its leg so that men behind would have an easier time with it. For long moments, his existence became an obscene dream of death and maiming, while Paldane’s men and his Invincibles fought at his side.
Behind him, he could hear hundreds and thousands of commoners charging toward Saffira, racing to do battle in the midst of the reavers. To do so was suicide, Raj Ahten thought. But in his heart he knew that to do less was also suicide.
In the midst of the city, several towers flamed. As they crumbled, they spewed burning wood and cinders up into the evening sky.
As Paldane’s men slaughtered a reaver, Raj Ahten climbed atop it to get his bearings. Behind him in the castle people fled for their lives: warriors and merchants, women with babes in arms, lords and paupers.
Raj Ahten marveled at how many had survived the quake, for if he’d not seen it, he’d have thought that not more than a few hundred would escape the fall of Carris.
For what seemed a long hour, Raj Ahten fought on, though it could not have been more than ten minutes of commoner’s time. Paldane’s lords and Raj Ahten’s Invincibles fought at his back, while the commoners of Carris streamed into the battle lines.
Their effect astonished Raj Ahten: Many reavers began a careful retreat, balking at the challenge. Confronted by a dozen men, most reavers backed away.
Until now, none of his tactics had impressed the reavers. But so many people—a mass of people attacking as one—gave the reavers pause. It was easy to guess why: The reavers could not distinguish a commoner from a Runelord. All men smelled the same. To a reaver, any man who dared attack presented a potentially devastating challenge.
We are wasps to them, Raj Ahten realized, but they can’t tell whether we have stingers.
Pockets of resistance grew around his Invincibles and among Paldane’s most powerful lords. But though many reavers balked, they did not flee.
Blade-bearers waded into the commoners and commenced a truly horrific slaughter, cutting down men and women by the thousands and tens of thousands.
The people of Carris threw themselves against the reaver lines, commoners wielding pickaxes and hammers. They gave themselves for their Earth King in ways that they’d never have given themselves for Raj Ahten.
The commoners’ efforts were almost futile, except that they provided some diversion for those warriors who had the grace and brawn and metabolism needed for the melee.
So their struggle was not completely in vain. But Raj Ahten would never forget the spectacle that presented itself before the gates of Carris: human blood by the barrels, the splintered bones, mangled flesh, the expressions of horror in dead women’s eyes.
He battled on, fighting an endless host toward an unseen goal. Twice he took wounds that would have killed another man, and wasted precious seconds waiting for his great stamina to perform its miraculous healing.
Ironically, it was the voice of a child that led him to Saffira.
Behind him, lords fought on thirty or forty different fronts. Added to this chaos was the sound of Gaborn’s knights somewhere to the north of Bone Hill—men yelling and dying.
Even with his endowments of hearing, Raj Ahten could barely discern among the hissing and rattling of reavers a girl wailing over and over again, “Help! Help!”
He heard the child and raced through the battle lines to reach the girl. With six endowments of metabolism, he burst past several reavers before they could even react.
Dead and wounded reavers lay everywhere ahead, forming a grizzly maze. The smell of putrescence, the fell mage’s last spell, was overwhelming. He leapt between the limbs of two tangled reavers, squirmed through a narrow chasm.
In moments he reached a clearing. A dozen reavers lay dead in an irregular circle, forming a ghastly little chasm between the reaver corpses.
When he leapt down into the clearing, a dead horse and knight littered the ground at his feet. Raj Ahten could hear men skirmishing with a reaver around a little bend.
The girl herself was trapped in the mouth of a dead reaver. Raj Ahten left her shrieking in terror.
But the wound on the reaver she hid in intrigued him. Someone had bashed the reaver’s skull. Aside from a frowth giant wielding an enormous maul, Raj Ahten could not imagine any weapon that would so decimate reaver bone.
He raced round the bend to find Pashtuk, bleeding from a bad leg, still fighting like a berserker while Mahket joined the fray beside him.
A reaver was trying to wedge its way between two dead comrades in an effort to charge the men. Raj Ahten could not see Saffira, but with so many endowments of scent, he found her easily. The delicate scent of her jasmine perfume drew him to the spot, in a little chasm off to his right.
She lay crushed beneath the paw of a fallen reaver. King Orden’s man, Sir Borenson, lay with her, his arms wrapped around Saffira, seeking to protect her. Borenson struggled to breathe with the weight of the reaver’s paw so heavy upon him.
A huge gash crossed Saffira’s forehead. Blood flowed from it freely.
Raj Ahten grasped the reaver’s paw by one long talon. The paw weighed seven or eight hundred pounds. He dragged it from atop Saffira, pushed the red-haired knight away.
Behind Raj Ahten, all around Carris, thousands of people battled. But the dead reavers formed a solid wall that would hedge commoners out. Those who sought Saffira would likely bypass this place.
Saffira’s eyes stared fixedly upward. She breathed erratically. He knew that she would die soon.
“I’m here, my love,” Raj Ahten said. “I’m here.”
Saffira grasped his hand. She had but three endowments of brawn, and so her touch seemed feather-light to him.
Saffira smiled. “I knew you would come.”
“The Earth King made you do this?” Raj Ahten asked. His Voice was hot with wrath.
“No one forced me,” Saffira said. “I wanted to see you.”
“But he bade you come?”
Saffira smiled secretively. “I heard… I heard of an Earth King in the north. I sent a messenger….”
It was a lie, of course. None of the palace guards were to speak openly of the wars and conflicts. None would have dared.
“Promise you will not fight him! Promise you will not kill him!” she begged.
Saffira began to cough. Flecks of blood spattered out as she did. Raj Ahten held silent.
He wiped blood from her chin and held her close. The sounds of battle seemed distant, as if monsters roared in a faraway wilderness.
He was not quite aware of when Saffira died. But in the coming darkness, he glanced down and saw that she had gone still. With her death, the endowments of glamour she had borne returned to her Dedicates.
Saffira faded like a rose petal wilting away in a blacksmith’s forge, so that soon the young woman in his arms seemed only a pale shadow of herself.
The greatest beauty of all time was no more.
Gaborn’s consciousness swam in a place where there was no present, no pain, and no understanding.
It was a place with violet skies of a remembered sunset, a field of wild flowers he might have roamed in childhood.
The scent of summer grass was profound, rich, buttery, full of roots and soil and leaves drying in the sun. Copious daisies spread their golden petals. They smelled bitter compared to the grass, but only served to intensify the earthy atmosphere.
Gaborn lay in a daze. Distantly, he thought he heard Iome calling, but his muscles had gone slack, would not respond.
Iome. He wanted her desperately, craved her touch, her kiss. She should be with me, he thought. She should be at my side.
She should see this perfect sky, touch this perfect ground. Gaborn had not seen anything so lovely since he’d visited Binnesman’s garden.
“Milord?” someone called. “Milord, are you all right?”
Gaborn tried to respond, could think of nothing.
“Get him on his horse, he’s injured! Get him out of here!” someone shouted. Gaborn recognized the voice now. Celinor. Celinor Anders was shouting, worried about Gaborn.
“All right.” Gaborn tried to comfort him. I’m all right. He tried to raise his head, fell back—and recognized something amazing. His fatigue, the sense of illness and the pain he’d felt for hours, had almost totally departed.
Instead he felt as if he stood in a fresh spring wind, totally invigorated. As he lay still, the sensation grew more potent.
Earth power. He felt earth power, as he’d felt it in Binnesman’s garden, or at the Seven Standing Stones of the Dunnwood. It was growing stronger. Stronger. He could almost turn his face toward it, as a flower turns its leaves toward the sun.
Iome is coming, he reasoned deliriously. That is it.
The sensation grew suddenly intense, until he could feel it warm against his cheek, like a sunbeam caressing him.
His eyes came open.
In the semidarkness stood a woman who wore only a bearskin coat. Not Iome.
Yet he recognized her instantly. Her face was beautiful, innocent, immaculate. Her small breasts sagged forward beneath her coat. Her skin was a delicate green. Gaborn could feel the power blazing inside her. She reached down and grabbed his throat gently. With her touch, all weariness and pain fled.
He knew her at once: Binnesman’s wylde.
The wizard had raised her from the dust of the Earth a little more than a week ago, raised her in the night, giving her a form taken from his own mind. Binnesman had said that he’d hoped to form a great warrior, like the green knight who had aided Gaborn’s forefathers. But upon creation, the wylde had leapt high into the air and disappeared.
Now Gaborn’s eyes flew wide as the wylde lifted him with one hand, pulling him to his feet. “Go get the Earth King!” she blurted.
Dimly, Gaborn realized that the green woman wanted him, wanted him to follow her somewhere. Or perhaps the Earth itself had sent her.
Gaborn looked around him. He lay on the battlefield about a hundred yards back from his previous position. Prince Celinor, Erin Connal, and several other knights had all backed away from the green woman, staring at her in shock.
Gaborn’s knights had abandoned their mounts and now skirmished furiously with reavers in a ragged front. The reavers were pushing his men back. Everywhere he looked, a sea of reavers crawled atop one another in an effort to break the line, hunting men as dogs might hunt hares. His people fought valiantly, but in vain. Even as his glance swept across the battlefield, he saw a dozen men hurled into oblivion as blade-bearers swung their enormous swords.
On Bone Hill, surrounded by minions, in her protective cocoon the fell mage raised her citrine staff to the sky, prepared to utter another curse. The air was already filled with an unspeakably foul scent. But ghostlights flickered at the base of the rune, suddenly blazing like never before.
“Get the Earth King,” the wylde said, pulling Gaborn toward the battle line.
He understood. Someone had sent the creature to him. But Gaborn had been present at her creation, knew the wylde’s true name.
Now Gaborn grabbed her wrist and summoned the wylde for his own purposes. “Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer: Stand with me.”
The green woman stood panting, as if she’d forgotten her previous errand.
“Strike now,” the Earth warned.
Gaborn knelt. Taking the wylde’s finger, Gaborn concentrated as he began to trace a rune of Earth-breaking in the grime.
Yet as he studied the foul hill before him, he could see no flaws, no way to break that thing.
Curiously, an image came to mind. Not a rune of Earthbreaking, but a rune nonetheless. A strange coiled shape within a circle, and single dot above.
He drew the rune, and then he gathered the wylde’s hand into a fist.
He looked up. Staring at the fell mage atop her monstrous creation, Gaborn imagined annihilation. He imagined the soil blasting upward in total ruin, the hill and the rune ceasing to exist—scattered so far on the winds that they utterly perished, never to be rebuilt again.
He did not know if he could do it. Can earth destroy earth? he wondered.
Gaborn shouted, “Be thou dust!”
For two long seconds Gaborn held his fist clenched, waiting for the Earth to respond.
Far below him the ground began to tremble, slowly at first, a distant rumble that grew steadily more powerful, as if a quake were building, far huger than any he’d felt before. He could feel the might there, struggling for release. Soon the ground pulsated as if shaken by a mighty fist.
The fell sorceress raised her staff in the air, the runes in her flesh glittering like a garment of sunlight, and her citrine crystal flashed with inner fire.
She issued a hissing roar that resounded from the heavens, that bounced from the walls of Castle Carris and rebounded from the near hills. An impenetrable black cloud began to form at her feet, joining with the corrosive mists that swirled out from the Seal of Desolation—a curse that Gaborn imagined his men would not survive.
Still Gaborn let the earth power build, a measureless force surging toward him. He held the image of destruction in his mind, letting it grow and expand until he could hold it no more.
Gaborn opened his fist, releasing his power.
64
THE SHATTERED EARTH
Iome Sylvarresta was still forty-two miles from Carris. She had stopped with Myrrima and Sir Hoswell to eat some bread and drink a draught of wine while the horses took a rest. The wind was blowing softly through the leaves of the live oak above her, whispering through the grass as it surged downhill.
She felt the Earth trembling long before she heard the end. The ground ripped and snarled beneath her feet, and she looked south in wonder and horror.
From Iome’s vantage, she saw only a vast dust cloud that thundered into the evening air, rumbling as it hurtled upward mile after mile.
Though the sun had fallen moments before, the dust cloud rose so high that the evening light slanted off its top, while lightning forked around it.
“By the Powers!” Myrrima said, leaping to her feet, spilling wine from her wineskin.
Iome grabbed Myrrima’s arm, for though she had endowments of brawn, she suddenly felt weak with fear. She knew that her husband was in Carris, and that no one could survive such a blast.
Many long seconds later, the sound of the explosion came. Even at such a distance it shook the Earth, making it rumble beneath her feet, then the echo sounded from the distant mountains. She was not quite sure if there had been a single explosion or more than one.
In later days, she would always imagine that there had been two explosions: one when Gaborn cast his spell, and a second explosion a moment later when the world worm surged upward, creating a vast hole where the Seal of Desolation had been.
But witnesses closer to the blast said, “Nay, there was but one explosion as the world worm burst from the ground at the Earth King’s summons.”
The Earth snarled as the world worm ascended. Erin Connal fought at Gaborn’s side when it came, and that is how she would always describe the sound: “the Earth snarled.”
Dust exploded upward from the Seal of Desolation and the world worm reared so high that for a moment a full half of its body shot skyward hundreds of yards in the air, blotting out the last rays of sunlight. It spewed dust in its wake.
The ground snarled at the blast site, and some walls of Carris that had not yet fallen now tumbled into Lake Donnestgree.
Erin hardly remembered anything for a long time after that. She stood gaping up at the vast worm, a hundred and eighty yards in diameter, her heart nearly frozen within her brea
st, awed by its complex musculature, the magma streaming from the crevasses in its skin, the spectacle of its scythelike teeth. The air was suddenly awash with the odors of sulfur and the metallic tang of dust.
She could only have seen it for a moment, yet time seemed to stand still.
When she came to her senses again, she became dully aware that men and women had begun to cheer. The world worm was receding into its vast crater, where Bone Hill had once stood. Dust was falling everywhere.
Lightning bolts ringed the sky as dust shot through the cloud ceiling.
The reavers began to flee.
It seemed too much to hope for—a full rout. But with the destruction of Bone Hill and the fell mage who led them, the reavers saw no reason to remain.
They began fading into the night, racing back to their dark tunnels, until the time when they would return in greater force.
“Flee,” a distant voice called. Sir Borenson struggled to obey. “Run now, while you may.”
The Earth rolled and bucked beneath him, throwing him two feet in the air. A vast rumble sounded, far louder than the snarl of any thunder. Lightning crashed overhead, while dust and pebbles rained down.
The Earth is broken! Borenson thought dully.
Borenson’s legs kicked almost of their own volition, and he reached out for Saffira. He’d found her bleeding and half-dead here on the battlefield. Pashtuk and Mahket fought ferociously to protect her, and when the reavers came in full force, Borenson had no recourse but to throw himself atop her, try to shield her with his own body, even as a dying reaver collapsed upon them, crushing the air from his lungs.
He would not leave her now.
He coughed, struggled to breathe, though dust clogged his nostrils.
“Flee now!” Gaborn’s Voice warned once again.
It did not come more clearly, but Borenson realized whose voice he heard, and he struggled to obey. The air was filled with the stench of rot.
Borenson reached for Saffira, searched nearby. “O Bright Star, we must go!” he mumbled, struggling up. He tried to focus his eyes, but everything had gone black. Night was swiftly falling, and with dust filling the air here in the shadows of the reaver corpses, he could see almost nothing. He looked up. A vast cloud of dust hung overhead, though some light still silvered the north and south horizons. He crawled to his knees. Lightning flashed overhead.
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