Brotherhood of the Wolf (94 page)

“No, I did not come to make threats. I hoped to warn you that you are in grave danger. I felt such danger myself, yesterday, just before you destroyed the Blue Tower. It was a cloying, indefinable rot. I tell you that Mystarria is not the only land where reavers are massing. I fear that
your
Dedicates will be next.”

He sounded sincere, though the lad had no cause to wish
Raj Ahten well. “So, you want me to flee home?” Raj Ahten said. “To chase phantoms while you strengthen your borders?”

“No,” Gaborn answered. “I want you to go home and save yourself. If you do, I will use all the powers at my command to aid you.”

“Not half an hour ago, you tried to kill me,” Raj Ahten pointed out. “What has brought about so great a change of heart?”

“I Chose you,” Gaborn said. “I did not want to use my powers against you, but you forced me to it. I ask you one more time: join with me.”

So the boy seeks an ally, Raj Ahten realized. He fears that he cannot stop the reavers on his own.

Raj Ahten wondered if Gaborn still might be persuaded to return the forcibles.

“Look around you, Raj Ahten,” the wizard Binnesman cut in. “Look at the land behind you, the death and ruin! You faced the fell mage. Is that the world you want? Or would you come with us, to this land, to a land that is fair and green, hail and living?”

“You offer me land?” Raj Ahten said, genuinely disappointed. “That is gracious: to offer land that I could so easily take, land that you are incompetent to hold.”

“The Earth bids me warn you,” Gaborn said. “A pall lies over you. I cannot protect a man who does not want my protection. If you stay in any of the kingdoms of Rofehavan, I cannot save you.”

“You cannot put me out,” Raj Ahten said. He glanced back toward Carris, toward his own troops.

In that moment, something changed in Gaborn. He began to laugh. Not a mere nervous chuckle, but a laugh of such deep and profound relief, a laugh from so deep in the gut, that Raj Ahten wondered at the source. He wished he could see the boy.

“You know,” Gaborn said in a cordial tone. “Once, I might have feared you and your Invincibles. But I have just realized how I could defeat you, Raj Ahten. All I need do
is
Choose
your people—man by man, woman by woman, child by child—and make them my own!”

Beside Gaborn, the wizard Binnesman smiled and also burst into laughter as he realized Raj Ahten's predicament.

Raj Ahten cringed inwardly as he saw the truth. He himself no longer had an army at Carris. He doubted that he could bring any men against Gaborn at all.

“Go back to Carris if you dare,” Gaborn suggested coldly. “You defeated twelve Invincibles, but I have hundreds of thousands of followers there: your men. Will you fight them all?”

“Give me my forcibles,” Raj Ahten demanded calmly, hoping that through the persuasive power of his Voice, he still might reach some settlement.

But Gaborn Val Orden shouted, “No bargaining, you foul cur! I offer you your breath, nothing more! Begone, I order you one last time—or I'll take even that!”

Raj Ahten's face flushed with rage, and his heart began to pound in his chest.

He shouted and charged.

A dozen knights loosed arrows. He whipped his hands around, tried to knock them aside, but one lodged in his injured knee. He fought the bone-chilling numbness that sapped energy from his heart.

And then the green woman rushed to meet him. She took him by his coat of mail and lifted him, her nails digging so powerfully that bits of scale mail scattered from his coat like scales from a trout.

He tried to grapple with her, aiming a punch at her throat with his mailed gauntlet.

The force of his blow shattered his right arm, though it also knocked the green woman backward a pace. She seemed surprised to be affected at all—surprised, but not injured.

She screamed and drew a small rune in the air, her right hand twisting in an intricate little dance that baffled the eye.

Then she slugged him in the chest. His ribs shattered, ripping into his lungs and heart. Raj Ahten flew backward
head over feet a dozen yards, lay gasping for a moment, staring up at the evening sky.

He had not noticed until now that the clouds had begun to scatter, that brilliant white stars pierced the heavens. With his thousands of endowments of sight, he could see more stars than a common man could, infinitely more stars—swirling masses of light, dazzling orbs—all very pretty.

He lay choking on his own blood, heart beating erratically. Every fiber of his chest seemed to burn, as if each individual muscle were demolished. Sweat broke upon his brow.

They've killed me, he thought. They've killed me.

Blood pounded in his ears, and the green woman rushed to him, grabbed his throat, and prepared to yank out his windpipe.

“Hold!” the wizard Binnesman shouted.

The green woman merely held him. Her dark-green tongue darted out, slowly played over her upper lip. In her eyes, he could see an endless longing. “Blood?” she pleaded.

Binnesman rode his mount up close to Raj Ahten, and several knights surrounded him, bows drawn. Fortunately, the wizard had dropped his leaf of monkshood. The wizard asked Gaborn in mock sincerity, “What say you, milord? Shall we do him now?”

Raj Ahten was healing. The shattered bones in his chest were knitting askew; his right arm throbbed from fingertip to shoulder. He began healing, and in a few minutes he felt sure that he'd be able to fight. He needed to stall them.

Yet he healed slowly. More slowly than he'd have thought possible. Even with thousands of endowments of stamina, he could not heal.

He lay at their mercy while they ringed him like hounds.

Myrrima looked over at Gaborn, studied the Earth King. She could see the righteous anger flaring in his eye, could see how livid he was. His muscles were taut, hard. She'd
been astonished that he'd asked the Wolf Lord's forgiveness, sought an alliance even now.

But that was past. Gaborn fumed, and she thought that Gaborn would kill him himself, though she yearned for the honor.

Myrrima had not lied a few hours' past, when she'd told Iome that the presence of the Earth King made her want to fight something. Gaborn was someone whom she would willingly die for.

No man on the face of the earth deserved an execution more than did Raj Ahten. She felt fortunate to have met Gaborn here, this fine evening, so that she would be present to see the demise of the Wolf Lord.

Yet with pain and regret and a tone of finality, Gaborn answered Binnesman. “No. Leave him.”

“Milord!” Prince Celinor shouted in outrage, as did Erin Connal and a dozen other lords, though Celinor's voice rose above the rest. “If you will not kill him, give me the honor!”

“Or me!” other men shouted.

Iome tried to remain calm. “My love, you make a mistake here,” she told Gaborn through clenched teeth. “Let them have him.”

Rage burned in Myrrima's veins. She'd seen Gaborn's father alive at Longmot five hours before the castle fell, and he'd refused her entry to the fortress, knowing that in doing so he probably saved her life. She'd seen him cold dead, along with thousands of other warriors, later that night.

She recalled Hobie Hollowell and Wyeth Able and a dozen other boys from Bannisferre who had died in that battle, while closer to home the farmers all around her house had been decapitated by Raj Ahten's scouts as his army sought to slip unnoticed through the Dunnwood. Even her neighbor, ninety-three-year-old Annie Coyle who couldn't have hobbled to town to save her life, had been butchered.

Gaborn's own wife had been robbed of her glamour, had
watched her mother die at Raj Ahten's hand. She'd been present when her own father was assassinated because of Raj Ahten's deeds, and her armies had been decimated.

Yet Gaborn had the audacity to forbear.

And as Myrrima gazed around at the hard faces of the knights in that company, she knew that not a man among them had lived a life untouched by Raj Ahten's evil. All of them had lost their kings and queens to his assassins, seen friends or brothers or parents die at his hand.

To think that Raj Ahten should live another minute seemed unbearable. The blood sang in her veins, demanding vengeance.

“As you love me,” Gaborn said to his lords, “as you love your very lives, I beg each of you to spare him. The Earth bids me to let him live.”

In outrage Myrrima studied Gaborn's eyes. Every muscle in her was tense. She reached into her quiver and drew another arrow, nocked it. The first shaft she'd fired was still lodged in Rah Ahten's knee, though she'd hoped to hit the bastard in the chest.

“This is unconscionable!” Sir Hoswell shouted. “To let him live is—”

Other men roared agreement.

But Gaborn merely raised his hand, asking for silence.

Gaborn said solemnly, “I Chose Raj Ahten in desperation, and sought afterward to use my powers to slay him. For my sin, the Earth has withdrawn. My powers have diminished, and it may be that I cannot make amends.

“I only know that for the sake of the world, I must lay my wrath aside. No man here wants to see him dead more than do I….”

Gaborn trembled with impotent rage. He groaned in despair. He put the spurs to his charger and fled south toward Carris as if he no longer trusted himself to remain and let Raj Ahten live.

He raced half a mile ahead, and stopped at the brow of the hill, on the blasted earth, looking back. “Come!” Gaborn cried. “Get away from there!”

Aspen leaves whispered behind Myrrima in the evening wind; the grass rustled. She gritted her teeth and waited.

Binnesman climbed down from his own mount, touched the green woman's shoulder. “Come,” he whispered into her ear. “Leave him for now.”

The wylde backed away, though no one else did. The knights held steady on their horses in the gloom, weapons bristling. Myrrima could hear the hard breath of their anger, smell their sweat.

Raj Ahten sat up, pulled the arrow from his knee. The wylde had torn his surcoat and so decimated his kingly scale mail that the coat now looked a ragged mess, ripped and shredded in the front.

The Wolf Lord of Indhopal stared at the lords, regal and imperious even now. He wheezed as he breathed, as if something inside him were torn. “Were I the Earth King,” he said softly, “I would not be such a pathetic little man.”

“Of course not, my cousin,” Iome said, “for you so need to show yourself to be every man's superior, you would of necessity be both much larger, and far more pathetic than he.”

Iome turned from the odious Raj Ahten and spoke to the lords. “Come. Let us go.” She turned and followed Gaborn. Other lords began to file off after her, slowly at first, but then faster, for they feared to be alone with Raj Ahten.

Myrrima stayed, determined to be the last to leave, to show no fear. Sir Hoswell stayed at her back, while Binnesman kept his wylde at his side.

When the others had all fled, Myrrima held Raj Ahten with her glare. Still seated on the ground, he stared up at her as if amused.

“I'll thank you for the return of my arrow,” Myrrima said, nodding toward the shaft in Raj Ahten's hand. She wanted him to know that it was her shaft that had scored on him, for all the good it had done.

Raj Ahten climbed to his feet, presented the arrow and answered in a seductive tone. “Anything for a beautiful woman.”

She took the arrow and surreptitiously sniffed at him, to catch his scent, so that if she ever needed to track him, she'd be able to do so.

Raj Ahten said, “I have but three words for you, young woman: Wolf… Lord … Bitch.”

Raj Ahten turned southwest, headed off through the blasted lands.

Myrrima left the blood on her shaft and dropped it back into her quiver. She turned her horse and followed her King, though leaving Raj Ahten alive was the hardest thing she'd ever done.

She did not suspect how much she'd come to regret it.

67
IN THE BLASTED LANDS