Brotherhood of the Wolf (88 page)

But even from here, Averan could see that Gaborn could not make it. There were too many reavers, attacking too swiftly. Gaborn would be cut off, surrounded.

Across the valley, the Voice of Raj Ahten roared, magnified by his many endowments. “We are enemies still, son of Orden!”

Raj Ahten stood atop the city wall, waving his battle-axe in defiance, even as slabs of plaster cascaded around him.

And atop Bone Hill, the fell mage raised a pale yellow staff to the sky and hissed. Thunder sounded and rolled down over the hill to Carris.

The beautiful woman from Indhopal said softly, “So, it is true. My husband rejects the Earth King, his cousin by marriage, and will leave him to the reavers.”

Her tone was one of solemn revulsion, as if she'd never imagined that Raj Ahten could be so heartless.

“I am afraid so, O Great Star, my Saffira,” Borenson said gently, trying to ease the blow.

Another aftershock made the ground rumble, the horses dance to keep their feet.

Saffira shouted and spurred her mount downhill. It ran with speed and grace and purpose as only a force horse could, racing due west toward Carris as if to reach the city, though ten thousand reavers blocked her way.

Borenson shouted, and Averan clutched his back tightly as their mount shot forward.

Saffira rode east, and at first Averan thought she rode blindly. But she changed course, veered south, and Averan saw where she headed.

The reavers had broken into several fronts. One front directed its attack against Carris, while a second raced for the Earth King. A third chased after the cavalry that had struck south.

As the reavers split, they left an empty field in the midst of their forces. Into this field Saffira charged.

“Wait!” the eunuchs shouted. “Hold up!”

But it did no good. Saffira galloped for Carris, until she came within half a mile of its walls, and the reavers down the slope ahead were so thick that she could ride no farther.

Sensing her at their backs, blade-bearers nearby all began to wheel. The rasping at their thoraxes became louder.

For a moment Saffira charged alone to a small hillock, in the last light of day. She wore a riding robe of fine red cotton, embroidered with exquisite gold threads to form curlicues like the tendrils of vines that wrapped about her arms and breasts. On her head, she wore a thin red veil beneath a silver crown.

Now she unbuckled a narrow golden belt, tossed it on the ground, and pulled off her robe. She withdrew her veil, so that for one moment she sat proud atop a gray Imperial charger, wearing only a sheer dress of lavender silk that accentuated the exquisite dark hues of her skin.

At the edge of the horizon, the sun was falling, and a few small rays slanted from the broken clouds.

Many other hillocks were scattered through the wasteland, but now Averan saw that Saffira had chosen this one because she'd seen the wan light upon it and knew it was the best place to display herself.

To Averan, Saffira seemed to be perfection given form. The graceful lines of her neck and shoulders would have kept a proper minstrel writing lines for a lifetime, yet even Behoran Goldentongue himself could not have composed a tune and words that would have captured her grace, or the light in her eyes, or the courage in her stance.

It seemed to Averan that even then Saffira knew she would die. She'd ridden too close to the reavers. The nearest of them wheeled not a hundred yards down the slope, taking a defensive stance. Reavers are easily surprised, and often hesitate when trying to determine the nature of a threat, but it would only take a moment for the monster to recognize that Saffira stood alone.

But one moment was all Saffira wanted. In that moment, she began to sing.

60
BONE HILL

How do I save them all? Gaborn wondered.

He'd connected to hundreds of thousands of people in Castle Carris, and he felt overwhelmed by the sense of danger around them. A third aftershock began to make the ground swell and buck.

At the castle gates, thousands of men were fighting for their lives. Gaborn concentrated on them, for their situation was gravest. Yet in Castle Carris, Raj Ahten refused Gaborn, smugly chose to hinder his troops from advancing. Surely, his Invincibles could hack a path over the causeway.

Fatigue wracked him as he doggedly advanced toward Bone Hill, a deep-seated lethargy that worried the bone. The closer he drew, the more paralyzing it became.

I have Chosen too indiscriminately, he realized. He led
a ragtag band of warriors. Desperately, his men forged on. Unhorsed and without their long deadly lances, they were not as effective as mounted knights, yet they advanced manfully, as if moved by his will alone.

Gaborn climbed down from the saddle and tried to lead them a few paces closer, but the effect of the fell mage's spell was so powerful he could hardly hold the reins of his own mount.

To the south, High Marshal Skalbairn sought to make an ill-fated charge. Gaborn sent the message “Turn back! Save yourselves if you can!”

He focused on the job at hand, hoping that the warriors who guarded him now would be able to fend off the impending attack.

Two hundred yards ahead was the great cocoon, with the fell mage atop the hill. Reavers were racing round both sides of Bone Hill. They'd be here in seconds.

When he could go no farther from weariness, Gaborn numbly dropped in the dust and began to draw a second rune of Earth-breaking.

Desperately he searched the rune itself, looking for weaknesses, flaws in its binding.

A wave of reavers rushed toward his battle lines, fifty yards ahead on each side. Near his foot lay a strand of cocoon, a line that ran two hundred yards.

Gaborn glanced up at Bone Hill, trying to see the object of his spell. Reavers blocked the way, climbed the cocoon in droves. A reaver's head was larger than a wagon bed and its paws were longer than a man's body. As monsters surged closer, surrounding him, he could not see over them.

Yet his men held their line, prepared to fight with the strength of desperation.

A reaver charged the Earth King, not even slowing as it barreled over two men ahead, crushing them with its bulk. Erin Connal cried out in dismay, lunged to meet it.

“You take it low, I'll take it high!” Celinor shouted at her back.

She ran at the beast. It raised its glory hammer overhead. Erin shouted and struck her own warhammer into the monster's elbow, biting deep into the joint just beneath its protective bone spur.

The jolt should have frozen the reaver in pain for a moment, or perhaps enraged it.

Instead the reaver struck with its glory hammer—eight hundred pounds of steel at the end of a twenty-foot pole. She heard no warning from the Earth King.

The pole slammed into her shoulder, throwing her to the ground, pinning her for a moment. The reaver raised a massive paw in a fist, ready to pound her into the dust.

Celinor leapt over Erin, lunged in, and struck the beast between its thoracic plates. His blow was not powerful enough. No guts gushed from the monster.

The reaver hissed in fear and lurched back a pace, trying to escape.

Celinor leapt in and delivered a second blow. The reaver's guts spilled down in a gruesome rain, and the monster leapt away, slamming into another of its kind.

The Prince of South Crowthen spun, dodged out of battle, and grabbed Erin's hand, helping her up. “Two!” he warned.

Erin felt her face redden with chagrin.

Gaborn finished drawing his rune of Earth-breaking, raised his fist, and looked up.

All around him, reavers thundered forward in a terrifying wall of flesh, pounding into the ranks of his men, overwhelming them.

To his left a reaver smashed a fellow with a glory hammer. The body somersaulted in the air twice, arced toward him.

Celinor raised his shield, threw himself before Gaborn, but the force of both bodies slammed into Gaborn, smacking him to the ground.

Everything went black.

61
IN THE FADING LIGHT

Saffira sang in the voice of her homeland, in Tuulistanese, and because she had thousands of endowments of Voice, her aria rang louder than any sung by a commoner.

So beautiful was her song that Raj Ahten looked up from a wall of Castle Carris where he had been watching Gaborn's debacle of a charge.

Time seemed to freeze.

So loud was her song that even on the causeway, many reavers drew back, philia waving in the air, as if trying to decipher whether her Voice presented some new threat that they must confront.

For a moment, the tumult of battle dimmed, as men listened to Saffira's golden Voice.

Certainly, most of the men of Rofehavan could not have understood Saffira's words. Tuulistan was a small nation in Indhopal, insignificant. One could walk across its borders in a fortnight. Yet the pleading tone of the young woman's voice struck Raj Ahten to the soul, made him yearn to … do anything, anything to placate his bride.

She sat in the saddle on some ruined mound, and all beneath her the land was black with reavers. In the last light of day, her lavender dress seemed but a veil that lightly covered her perfect beauty.

She shone like the first and brightest star in the nighttime sky, and all around him, Raj Ahten heard the rush of indrawn breath as thousands men gasped in astonishment.

Immediately Raj Ahten saw what Gaborn had done. He saw the glamour of all his concubines, of the loveliest women from every nation he conquered, all bound into one.
He heard the sweetness of every melodious voice in his harem.

Saffira sang a common lullaby.

She'd sung it to her firstborn son, Shandi, when she'd first held him, five years ago—before a Knight Equitable slaughtered the child in an effort to rid the world of Raj Ahten's progeny.

The tune was not profound, neither was its message. Yet it moved Raj Ahten to the core of his soul.

“There
is no you. There is no me.
Love makes us one. There is only
we.”

Of all the men who heard that song, only Raj Ahten understood its message. “I understand your hatred and anger,” she said. “I understand, and I feel it, too. I have not forgotten our son. But now you must lay your anger aside.”