Wizardborn (54 page)

Raj Ahten breathed out a curse. The mines at Kartish were an open pit with steep sides and tailings piled haphazardly. Such terrain favored reavers, not cavalry.

“How can this be?” Raj Ahten asked.

Rahjim shrugged. “The reavers have built a fortress. The fell mage who guards it is mightier than the beast you faced in Carris. But all is not lost. Pusnabish has prepared well for the battle tomorrow.”

Raj Ahten stood rubbing his numb left hand, trying to increase the circulation.

The flameweaver Az nodded toward it. “You are feeling worse?”

“I'm well enough,” Raj Ahten said.

“I can heal you,” Az offered. But Raj Ahten wanted none of his healing—not at the price of his humanity.

Raj Ahten cast a cold eye on his army. These were troops of old Indhopal, dressed in simple breastplates with spiked helms on their heads, and round targets clamped to their left forearms. They bore weapons fit to kill reavers—oversized
longspears, warhammers, and axes. But men without endowments would not fare well with such weapons. Even if a man could swing these warhammers, he'd tire quickly.

Three hundred thousand common troops would be ineffectual against the reavers. But Raj Ahten could think of some use for them. At the battle for Carris, when confronted by masses of men, the reavers balked. They could not detect which men might be Runelords and which were commoners.

The reavers' ignorance might be his best weapon.

Raj Ahten called upon the powers of his Voice and his glamour, and shouted. “Honorable warriors of Indhopal, I salute you! Now is the hour we have feared. Desolation is upon us. Only your strong arms and brave hearts can save the day. Tonight the kingdoms of Indhopal live or die by our valor. Tonight I will lead you in a war like none that mankind has ever known! Ride with me now, ride for Indhopal!”

The power of his Voice surprised even Raj Ahten. The weary men raised their weapons and cheered like berserkers.

He leapt on his camel and raced before them so that even the wind could not catch him.

In the winter, snow fell heavily in the Alcairs, leaving the mountains white. It melted throughout the summer, feeding the rivers that tumbled over the green slopes. In the Valley of Om on the southern verge of Kartish, twelve waterfalls spilled down from the hills.

It was Raj Ahten's favorite place in the world. Every year on the first day of the month of Poppies, he would journey to Om. Always the pecan blossoms were in bloom, and the new grass grew lush and fragrant, and the red poppies covered the valley while the waterfalls spilled from the freshets into languid pools, misting the air above the Palace of Canaries.

The grounds around the palace were pristine. No man or
animal was allowed to trample them, and the palace itself was a gem.

Its walls were made of thin slabs of yellow marble, and at night when the lanterns were lit within, the whole complex shone like burnished gold beneath the starlight. On such nights the palace earned its name: for the palace took its name not from canaries, as some supposed, or even for its yellow walls—but rather from the songsters who vied for the honor of performing within its great arching acoustic hall.

Many were the pleasant nights that Raj Ahten had spent listening to songsters in the jasmine-scented hall, wandering the pristine poppy fields, gazing at the waterfalls and the palace in the moonlight, seducing young women.

He'd lain with Saffira here.

Raj Ahten shook the memories away. There was nothing for it. The joy of his life was gone.

Among the Jewel Kingdoms, blood-metal mines had always made Kartish the richest. The kaifs of the land had grown fat over the centuries. They had controlled the blood metal, and could set the prices they saw fit. Beyond that, they knew precisely how many forcibles each lord purchased over the years, and thus by regulating shipments ensured that no one ever built a force powerful enough to strike against them.

Over centuries they acted as puppetmasters, orchestrating the rise and fall of nations that they knew only by rumor. The fat old men had kept their knives to the jugular vein of the world, and congratulated themselves on their cunning.

Of course, they made mistakes. From time to time, shipments would fall into the wrong hands, and the kaifs of Kartish would be slaughtered wholesale. The world hardly noticed, for the sun set on one despot only to rise on another.

Raj Ahten had killed them all easily enough.

When Raj Ahten reached the Palace of Canaries, the palace
itself shone as usual, and the falls tumbled like a silver mist in the starlight.

But on his pristine grounds, an army had settled, blackening the land with tents and bodies. The valley would never heal from the double curse of the reavers' blight and the damage done by the troops.

Dingy fires guttered in the vale. No fewer than two million men bivouacked for miles around the palace. The stench of men, horses, and elephants was unbearable. All through the camps, horses whinnied and elephants trumpeted in hunger while men short of rations sounded loud and raucous in turn. So the valley filled with a noise of pandemonium.

Raj Ahten rode down through the hills while an army of three hundred thousand men raced to keep up.

As he did, heralds bore torches on either side of him, both ahead and behind. Men beheld his countenance, and were cowed by his glamour.

He shouted to the common troops huddled below, his voice a roar. “Men of Indhopal, how can you sit here idle while the reavers call us to war? Rise now! Grab your weapons and armor. We go to battle at dawn. I promise you victory!”

He met Warlord Aysalla Pusnabish at the palace gates. Pusnabish dropped to his hands and knees and did obeisance.

“O Great Dawn of Our Lives,” he said, “we thank you for delivering us.”

“My Dedicates are safe?” Raj Ahten asked.

“We hastened them away at the first sign of trouble, O Great One. By now they have reached the coast, and are sailing north for the Palace of Ghusa in Deyazz.”

Raj Ahten felt weak, disjointed. His left hand trembled.

“What of my forcibles?”

“They are in the treasury, O Sun of Our Morning,” Pusnabish said.

Raj Ahten did not want to hear more. His troops were preparing for battle, and he had enough men that he suspected
he could swarm the hills, take the reavers in their lair.

He pushed past Pusnabish and strode through the gilded halls of the Palace of Canaries, up toward his treasury.

“I'll need my facilitators,” Raj Ahten said, “and men to grant me stamina.”

Pusnabish snapped his fingers at a servant, and the man ran to get the facilitators.

“There is some good news,” Pusnabish insisted, running in his wake. “Our miners struck a new vein of blood ore. It is quite promising, as you will see.”

Raj Ahten smiled grimly.

   45   

Many adventures await you upon the road of life. Enter these doors, and take your first step
…

—
From a placard above the Horn and Hound Pub, the first stop in the Room of Feet

Myrrima didn't fancy being followed. It was doubly worrying that she wasn't sure whether the creature tracking them was human or not.

Borenson did not speak as they rode. He peered about, his bright blue eyes alert. Each time she started to open her mouth, he would raise a hand, begging her to be silent. So she held her tongue.

She was a wolf lord now, with endowments of scent from a dog, and sight from a man. Borenson's nervousness kept her wary, and she strained her senses, sniffing the air and keeping her eyes open for signs of danger.

In the Westlands, the barren plains gave way to woods where hoary trees grew among craggy rocks, limbs heavy with moss. The trees were tall and dark, with only a few ragged gray leaves clinging to them. The earth smelled of mold and fungus. Toadstools thrust up from the detritus in the fens.

It was not hard to envision the wars fought here against the Toth so long ago, or to imagine that the dark pools still held traces of blood.

She wanted to ride through quickly. But the muddy roads forced them to slow their horses to a walk.

It was a stagnant land. In spite of the yawning emptiness, time and again she found herself reaching for her steel bow, slung in its case on her saddle pack.

The forest was dead. No squirrels danced round the sides of the trees to hide when they passed. No deer were startled from the grass if they happened on a glade. Only once in a great while would she catch sight of some dark-winged bird as it darted for cover in a shadowed glen.

She strained for any sound—the buzz of a locust, the pattering of a woodpecker, or the caw of a crow.

But the woods held little in the way of life, and none of it was pleasant. Myrrima imagined that nothing much
could
live here. Biting flies and mosquitoes swarmed in clouds over brackish pools, and in places they seemed so thick that she imagined that they'd simply strip the hide off any animal that held still long enough.

She did not hold still.

Wights haunted this place, Myrrima knew.

That's why Borenson shushed her every time she wanted to speak. Wights were drawn to sound, to movement. They hid in shadows. Their icy touch would kill a man.

The shrouded bogs where oily water gave rise to night mists, the creepy woods with their folds and hollows, both were the perfect abode for such creatures.

And while the wights of the Dunnwood back home protected the realm, the same was not true of the Westlands. Sixteen hundred years ago, nomen and Toth had died here by the uncounted score. Their revenants craved vengeance. At times it was said that the shades of men could be seen fighting them still, as if reenacting their deaths on old battlegrounds.

Once, they came upon a hill and heard the rush of wind through the trees in the valley to their left, a distant sigh like the beating of waves upon an endless shore.

Myrrima imagined that the wind heralded a coming storm, and that soon all of the trees would begin bobbing and creaking in the gale.

Instead, the wind merely passed—as if it were an invisible rider heading south through the forest.

When it was gone, Borenson whispered, breaking an hours-long silence, “What was that, do you think?”

“Wights?”

“There are wights here,” he admitted, “and they're aware of us. But that wasn't one. Something else passed by.”

Myrrima's mind returned to the Darkling Glory, to the howling tornado that had issued from it. Binnesman had warned that it was capable of great evil still.

“If we ride slowly,” Borenson whispered, “we won't reach Fenraven by sunset, but if we ride fast, we might catch up to whatever passed us by.”

Myrrima bit her lip. “Ride fast,” she whispered.

Myrrima glimpsed another rider just before sunset, and knew for sure that they were being followed.

They'd been cantering through the hills, and had come down for the hundredth time into another marsh. They let their horses forage for a few short minutes, and had then ridden on for half a mile, until they reached a bog so wide that the road itself was submerged.