Brotherhood of the Wolf (77 page)

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 facilitators 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 skinny 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.”