Wizardborn, p.8
Wizardborn, page 8
Naked desire showed in the flameweaver’s face, as if he had craved this moment for years.
The flames of the bonfire crept out further, as if hungrily licking the snow.
Raj Ahten lurched away, stared at his right hand. It did feel better where the flames had touched him—as if he had applied a salve.
Binnesman had warned Raj Ahten that he was under the sway of flameweavers. It was true that they used him for their own ends, just as he used them.
In abject horror, Raj Ahten realized that a choice lay before him. He could continue as he was, wasting away until not even his endowments could save him. Or he could step into the fire and lose his humanity, become one of the flameweavers.
He staggered backward, retreated from the campfire out into the snowfield.
Feykaald and his Days got up and made as if to follow, but Raj Ahten waved them off. He wanted to be alone. His heart was racing.
Rahjim warned, “The fire beckons. It may not always do so.”
Raj Ahten turned and jogged for several minutes, then stopped on a switchback and stood panting. He studied the road in the valleys below. It twisted among trees and a few miles ahead was lost beneath a thin blanket of clouds. Beyond, darkness reigned over the great desert.
A shadow flitted above the woods, an owl on the hunt. He followed it with his eyes until it winged into the stars. To the northeast, a few mountains loomed like islands of sand in a sea of mist. It was a beautiful sight.
The starlight struck the snow-covered ground around him. Trees were black streaks against the snow, the wan light draining all color from them.
Like a face drained of blood, he thought. All of his thoughts revolved around death. He closed his gritty eyes, blinking back the image of Saffira crushed on the battlefield of Carris, blood trickling down her forehead and from her nose.
She is dead, yet I live on.
He clenched his teeth, resolved not to mourn. But he could not turn aside his thoughts. She’d ridden down this road yesterday. With his endowments of scent, he could discern a trace of her jasmine perfume in the air, could smell the sweat of her horse. Saffira had died for her courage and compassion.
Saffira had died. Better if it had been Gaborn.
“Why?” Raj Ahten whispered to the Earth. “You could have chosen me to be your king. Why not me?”
He listened, not because he expected an answer, but by habit. Wind sighed through the forests below. Nearby, mice rustled beneath a crust of snow in dry mountain grasses; the sound would have been inaudible to any other. Nothing more.
Raj Ahten had been raised on tales of men who had cheated death. Hassan the Headless was a king who’d lived eighty years ago, and had taken a hundred and fourteen endowments of stamina. In a battle, his enemy decapitated him. But just as a frog will live on after its head is removed, so did Hassan.
Hassan’s body crawled about and even wrote a message in the sand, begging for a merciful death. But his enemy mocked him and put the undead corpse into a cage. Raj Ahten’s mother said that Hassan had escaped, and at night on the desert one could still hear his fingers scratching in the sand as Hassan the Headless lurched about, seeking revenge.
It was a tale to horrify children.
But Raj Ahten had studied the matter, knew the full tale. Hassan had only lost part of his head—from the roof of the mouth up. His body had lived because part of the lower brain remained attached. So Hassan had survived for three weeks, tormented by hunger and thirst, until he burst with maggots.
Raj Ahten had performed a similar experiment with a highly endowed assassin named Sir Rober of Clythe. Raj Ahten felt convinced that his own endowments could keep him alive far longer than most would suspect.
Now a terrible choice lay before him, but in the end he feared he might not have any choice.
Raj Ahten clutched his fists. Blood raced through his veins. He vowed, “Gaborn, the Earth will be mine.”
As Raj Ahten opened his eyes, downhill in the trees he spotted a silvery sheen that only his eyes could have detected—the color of heat from a living body. A moment of squinting revealed two huge bucks, antlers locked. One was already dead, worn from combat. But the living animal could not disengage.
It happened sometimes in the fall. The big bucks would fight, and their antlers would tangle hopelessly, leaving both animals locked in a death grip.
Even the victor looked only half alive.
I do not have to choose now, Raj Ahten told himself. I do not have to step into the fire and give away my humanity. Hassan had a small fraction of the stamina that I do.
From the misty canyons below, an Imperial stallion came galloping up the road. Raj Ahten studied the rider with keen eyes. A desert boy of nine or ten rode the huge mount, weaving from fatigue. He was dressed in a white burnoose, dark cape, and had his head wrapped in a turban. A message case was tied to the pommel of his saddle. The glint of gold embossing identified it as an Imperial message case. Raj Ahten knew that he bore ill tidings.
He stalked back to the fire, beneath the hovering spy balloon.
The boy whipped his horse as he neared. The stallion eyed the graak-shaped balloon, eyes rolling in terror. It danced about, thrusting its ears backward and flaring its nostrils. The beast was wet with sweat. Its breath came hard.
“O Great Light!” the boy cried when he recognized Raj Ahten. “Yesterday at dawn, reavers took the blood-metal mines in Kartish! The very Lord of the Underworld led them.”
Feykaald gasped. “If the attack was like the one in Carris…
Raj Ahten had never fully comprehended how dangerous a reaver horde could be. His perfect memory replayed images of the fell mage crouched on Bone Hill, her citrine staff pulsing with light, issuing her incantations through scents while her minions huddled nearby. Her curses had blasted every living plant, had blinded and deafened his troops, had wrung the water from men’s flesh.
The reavers in Kartish could do untold damage. The destruction of crops alone would lead to famines throughout all of Indhopal.
“Everyone went to battle,” the boy panted, “except your servants at the Palace of Canaries in Om. They’re taking your Dedicates north. They sent me—”
“You say the Lord of the Underworld led them?”
“Yes,” the boy said, eyes growing wide and panicked. “A fell mage, very big. No one has ever heard of her like.”
Of course, Raj Ahten realized. The reavers would have sent their best troops to Indhopal. It was more populous than Rofehavan, more powerful. Only their most fearsome lord would have dared come against him.
Raj Ahten’s course was decided. His people needed him desperately.
He yanked the boy from the horse, leapt onto its back. “Follow me as you can,” Raj Ahten shouted at the flameweavers.
Feykaald looked up at him for orders. Raj Ahten thought swiftly. He felt ill, as if his very soul were waning. He needed to be strong. “Go back to Carris,” he commanded. “Find out what the Earth King has done with my forcibles. I’ll need them.”
“He will not trust me,” Feykaald objected.
“He will if he believes that you are there against my will,” Raj Ahten said. He pulled out the gold message case, tossed it to Feykaald. “Tell him of the reavers in Kartish. Tell him that the Lord of the Underworld leads them. Say that you came to beg him to come to the aid of Indhopal.”
“You think he will come?” Feykaald asked.
“He will entertain the notion.”
“As you command, O Light of the World,” Feykaald said.
Raj Ahten wheeled the stallion, raced for Kartish.
9
WIZARDBORN
I don’t have a father. Like all Earth Wardens, I was born of the Earth.
—The wizard Binnesman
As the slow light descended from heaven, spreading across the blasted fields thirty miles north of Carris, Myrrima asked Averan, “So, you know nothing more?”
“I’ve told you everything,” Averan said. She had told how she’d first met Roland Borenson, Myrrima’s father-in-law, on the way to Carris, along with Baron Poll and the green woman. Averan had taken Myrrima up through the time that she’d left Roland and Baron Poll, only to be rescued by Myrrima’s husband in company with Saffira. She told Myrrima how she’d helped Sir Borenson enter Carris to hunt for his father.
Averan could tell that her story hurt Myrrima.
In the back of the wagon, Sir Borenson slept deeply. A burning fever seemed ready to consume him. Myrrima had done all that she could for him last night. She’d applied balms from the healers, had poured libations of wine over him and whispered incantations to Water. They’d had to stay at Carris at night, for fear that they’d meet a reaver in the dark. But Myrrima had fled that foul place with her husband at the first crack of dawn, hoping that the king’s wizard in Balington might heal him.
A force horse pulled the wagon, and the wheels nearly sang as they spun down the road through the deadlands.
Averan had secured a ride with Myrrima by claiming that she had an “urgent message” for the king. But Averan had left out a few details in her story.
The sun had begun to rise far beyond the oak-covered hills, like a cold red eye. Averan squinted at it, then pulled her hooded robe over her face.
She didn’t like the burning sensation that the sun caused. Her skin tingled at its touch. Her hands were itching, as if she’d handled poison ivy.
But she felt glad that she wasn’t Borenson. Myrrima had pulled up his tunic, looked beneath his armor, and Averan had glimpsed how he’d been wounded.
The wound would have been ghastly under any circumstances, even if it hadn’t gotten infected. Averan had had no idea that people could do that to one another.
“Myrrima,” Averan asked, “when you take the walnuts off a bull, he’s called a ‘steer.’ And when you take them off a stallion, he’s a gelding. What do you call it when they take them off a man?”
“A eunuch,” Myrrima said. “Raj Ahten made a eunuch out of my husband.”
“Oh,” Averan said. “That means he can’t have babies, right?”
Myrrima’s dark eyes filled with water, and she bit at her lip. After a moment she said, “That’s right. We can’t have babies.”
Averan didn’t dare ask another question. It was too painful for Myrrima.
“I saw how you cried over Roland,” Myrrima said.
“He’s dead,” Averan said. “Everyone I know is dead: Roland and Brand and my mother.”
“I was at Longmot when the wight of Erden Geboren came,” Myrrima said. “He blew his warhorn, and men who had died that day rose up and joined him on the hunt. They were happy, Averan. Death isn’t an ending. It’s a new beginning. I’m sure that Roland is happy, wherever he is.”
Averan said nothing. She couldn’t be sure what the dead felt.
“You didn’t know him long,” Myrrima said, as if she should feel better because of it.
Averan shook her head. “He said—” She sniffled. “He said he was going to petition the duke, so that he could become my father. I’ve never had a father.”
Myrrima reached out and took Averan’s hand. She looked in Averan’s eyes and said, “If the duke had granted that petition, then I would have been your sister in-law.” Myrrima squeezed her hand. “I could still use another sister.”
Averan clenched her jaw, and tried to put on a bold face.
She trembled. Her guts were still cramped and twisted in terror. She’d fed on reaver brains last night, but she didn’t dare tell Myrrima what she’d done. She didn’t dare tell a stranger how the reaver’s memories now haunted her.
Averan crawled off the buckboard, into the wagon, and curled up in the hay. The new hay smelled of sweet clover, fescue, and oat straw. She buried her face in it, but it could not keep out the memories.
In her mind’s eye, Averan beheld an enormous reaver mage, stalking uphill through a windy cave. The image and smells came preternaturally clear, like a waking dream, or as if the memory were more real than the life that she lived.
Averan did not see the scene as a person would. Reavers have no eyes; instead, their philia sense life in ways she couldn’t understand. To a reaver, living animals glowed in the darkness the way that lightning glows.
Now, Averan recalled the reaver mage glowing, speaking to her in scents. “Follow my trail.”
In memory, Averan had no choice but to follow. Yet she felt terrified, and knew that she was marching to a place where she didn’t want to go. She detected scents in the air, the cries of reavers in supreme torment.
The philia near the One True Master’s anus began excreting words, and Averan scuttled forward to taste them.
“Do not fear,” the One True Master said. “You smell pain, but you shall not be subjected to it. The Blood of the Faithful will be sweet to you.”
The image faded. Averan realized that she’d blacked out.
She must have slept for a few minutes, because her eyes felt more rested. But her stomach still hurt from eating so much. She clutched it.
Averan fought a dull sense of panic. She remembered snatches of what had happened next. She recalled forcibles and an incantation.
The One True Master had given her servant an endowment. But Averan couldn’t figure out exactly which. Averan hadn’t been able to eat much of the monster’s brains—not even a tenth of them. She didn’t know all that the mage had known, couldn’t make much sense of most of the reaver’s thoughts and memories.
And it was the things that she didn’t know that scared Averan most.
She tried not to fret, held an image of the reaver in her mind, wondered why the reavers saw living creatures as if they glowed like lightning. Averan supposed that it was because there is lightning inside of people. On warm summer nights when clouds used to roll low over the graak’s aerie at Keep Haberd, she’d pull off her wool blanket and see small flashes of light against her skin. Beastmaster Brand had said that it was because there was lightning inside her.
Averan lay down next to Sir Borenson and rested her head on her hand. She noticed some pale green things—roots—woven into her robe.
She pulled a couple off, threw them into the hay. It had been raining all night, so her robe had been wet and then gotten covered in seeds.
Now the seeds were sprouting. They were everywhere in her robe, like little green worms. She decided to pick them out later.
The wagon passed under a tree, and Averan saw the shadows of leaves. She took a deep breath, inhaled the scent of fields and hills.
She sat up excitedly. They’d left the deadlands! Her head still ached. She squinted in the sunlight, pulled her robe close.
After a night of storm, the sun had surged into the sky, hurling splintered shafts of silver through broken clouds to dash against the emerald hillsides. The roosters at a nearby cottage celebrated by crowing as if it were the first sunrise in a month, and the whole land was filled with the cries of larks and the peeping of sparrows from under every bush.
To her left the round hills seemed to bow to the mountains. The night’s rain had soaked into summer-dried grass and left the land smelling drenched and new. The leaves of maples and alders turning on the lower slopes made them shimmer in shades of scarlet, russet, and gold.
To the right, a silver stream wound through a stand of alders. White ducks gabbled as they fed along the stream banks downhill.
Ahead lay a village with thatch-roofed cottages squatting by the road. Honeysuckle and ivy trailed over the garden walls.
Everything here seemed so alive—everything but Sir Borenson. He had gone from pale to a feverish red. Sweat streamed from his forehead.
“Where are we?” Averan asked.
“Balington,” Myrrima said. “You’ve been asleep for more than an hour.”
Averan looked at the cottages. Yesterday, she’d been able to sense Gaborn’s presence in battle. She’d seen the Earth King as a green flame that stood before her even when she closed her eyes. The Earth King was supposed to be here.
Now, she reached out with her feelings, tried to discern his location. But the flame had gone.
Still, there was something about Balington. She felt a power here, old and immense. She could not detect its center, could not tell if it meant her well or ill. She felt as if she were riding toward her destiny.
They drove into the village, past forty fine horses that stood all blanketed and barded outside the stables. Averan spotted a wagon there with several burly guards hovering nearby—keeping watch over the king’s treasure. It looked as if the king were getting ready to ride.
A village boy in leather pants, green smock, and feathered cap led a milk cow along the road. Cream leaked from her swollen udders.
Myrrima stopped long enough to ask the lad, “Where’s the king’s wizard?”
“Round the back,” he said, pointing toward the inn.
Myrrima drove the wagon to the back of the inn. She skirted a stone fence covered in jasmine and golden hop vines until she reached a wooden gate. She climbed down, unlatched it.
“Are you coming?” Myrrima asked. “You said you had a message for the king’s ears only.”
Now that she was here, Averan felt uneasy about the ruse. She feared that if she told Gaborn her story, he would think her mad. A dull pain throbbed at the base of her skull.
She summoned her courage. “I’m coming.”
She hopped out of the wagon on stiff legs and entered the garden gate. Brown and white pigeons strutted atop the thatch of a dovecote, cooing softly. A gray squirrel went leaping up a nearby cherry tree, its tail floating behind.
Gaborn’s Days stood at the top of the garden in a patch of sunlight. The skeletal scholar, with his close-cut hair and rust-colored robes, stood quietly with his hands clasped behind his back, merely observing.
