Brotherhood of the Wolf (39 page)

Borenson considered wearily. “What would you like to know?”

“It is said that My Lord Raj Ahten fled before him in battle. Is this true?”

“It is,” Borenson said.

“He must be a fearsome warrior,” the Invincible said. “My Lord Raj Ahten seldom retreats.”

“Not really,” Borenson said. He did not want to speak the full truth. He was unwilling to admit that Gaborn hated
to take endowments from other men, and thus was no match at all for Raj Ahten.

“He is a tall man, though?” the Invincible said. “Strong?”

Borenson laughed outright. He saw what game the man played. He too had sometimes dreamt that someday an Earth King would arise.

“No, he is not tall,” Borenson said, though great height was considered a virtue in some parts of Indhopal. Leaders were expected to be tall. “He is shorter than you by a hand.”

“Yet he is handsome in spite of this, surely?” the Invincible asked. “As handsome as My Lord Raj Ahten.”

“He does not take endowments of glamour,” Borenson admitted. “Raj Ahten's beauty is a bonfire. My lord's beauty is … a cinder, shooting up into the night.”

“Ah!” the Invincible said, as if having made a discovery. “Then it is true what I have heard, that the Earth King is short and ugly!”

“Yes,” Borenson admitted. “He is shorter and uglier than Raj Ahten.”

“But he is very wise,” the Invincible said. “Very cunning and crafty.”

“He is a young man,” Borenson admitted. “He is not wise. And he would be insulted if you said he was cunning and crafty.”

“Yet he outwitted My Lord Raj Ahten in battle?” the Invincible said. “He drove women and cattle across the plains, and frightened my lord.”

“It was luck, I suspect,” Borenson said. “In fact, it wasn't even Gaborn's idea. His wife suggested it.”

“Ah, so he takes the counsel of women?” the Invincible asked. In parts of Indhopal, to suggest that a man took the counsel of women was to suggest that he was either unmanly or a fool.

“He listens to the counsel of men
and
women,” Borenson corrected.

The Invincible smiled at Borenson in a superior way, the pockmarks on his dark skin showing better as he angled his face against the sunlight.

“You have seen My Lord Raj Ahten?” the Invincible asked.

“I have seen your lord,” Borenson agreed.

“There is none better. There is none more handsome, or so fierce in battle,” the Invincible said. “His enemies rightly fear him, and his people obey him implicitly.”

Yet Borenson caught something in his tone. It was as if the Invincible were testing him somehow. “On this we agree. None is stronger, or more cunning, or more handsome, or more feared.”

“So why do you serve the Earth King?” the Invincible demanded.

“There is none so handsome as your lord,” Borenson said, “or so corrupt in his heart. Do I not say well that his own people fear him as much as his enemies do? And rightly so?”

“To say such things in Indhopal,” the Invincible warned, “is death!” His eyes flared, and his hand strayed toward the curved dagger at his side. He half drew it from its scabbard.

“To
speak truly
is death in Indhopal?” Borenson said. “Yet you are the one who bade me speak the truth. Is the price of my lunch going to be my life?”

The Invincible said nothing, so Borenson continued. “Yet I have not answered your question in full: I serve the Earth King because he has a good heart,” he declared loudly. “He loves his people. He loves even his enemies, and he seeks to save them all. I serve the Earth King because the Earth chose him and gave him his power, and that is something that Raj Ahten with all of his armies and his fine face will never have!”

The Invincible burst into amiable laughter. “You have earned your lunch, my friend! You spoke honestly, and for that I thank you.” He clasped hands with Borenson. “My name is Pashtuk.”

Pashtuk handed Borenson the bowl of rice and duckling. Borenson could not help but notice that he had called him “my friend.” In Indhopal, such words were not spoken lightly.

That encouraged him to ask, “When you were a boy, Pashtuk, did you also dream that someday the Earth King would come? Did you dream of being a knight in his retinue? Do you, too, intend to serve the Earth King now?”

The Invincible took a spoonful of rice and stared at it thoughtfully. “I did not think he would be short and ugly and take counsel from women. Nor did I think he would hail from enemy lands.…”

Borenson ate thoughtfully. The bowl of rice was not big, and barely assuaged his hunger. It filled him without making him overfull, renewed his energy a bit.

Borenson considered the implications of the deaths at the Blue Tower. If he'd lost his endowments, thousands of other warriors would have done the same. Many lords had preferred to keep their Dedicates under their own personal guard. Yet the Blue Tower had stood for thousands of years, had not been successfully attacked since the naval blockade of King Tison the Bold, four hundred years ago.

The lords of Mystarria would be in a panic.

Worse than that, Borenson had to wonder about Gaborn. Gaborn would also have lost his endowments.

Raj Ahten had not been able to flush Gaborn from his lair in Heredon, could not risk bringing his armies north so long as the wights of the Dunnwood served the Earth King. So he was seeking to force Gaborn's hand, bring him within striking range. Gaborn had counted on Duke Paldane to repel any attacks against Mystarria. Paldane was old and wise, a grizzled veteran who had led dozens of campaigns against petty tyrants and criminals in Orden's behalf. No one was more trustworthy than Paldane.

But Paldane couldn't fight with his hands tied behind his back, and Raj Ahten had succeeded in tying his hands.

Even in his weak and weary state, Borenson saw it all clearly. Raj Ahten knew that Gaborn could no longer resist the temptation to come into battle.

There could have been no more perfect a lure than the life of a nation, the lives of everyone that Gaborn knew and loved.

Borenson wished that he could speak to Gaborn now, urge his lord to flee, to return to the north. Yet he was not sure it would be the right thing to do. For if Gaborn did not go south, Raj Ahten would destroy Mystarria.

22
THE DARKLING GLORY

Erin and Celinor raced far ahead of the others. They were riding through the hills twenty miles south of Hayworth when Gaborn's warning came. “Hide!”

It coursed through Erin, and she found her heart pounding. Immediately she glanced around, searching for the source of danger, and reined in her mount.

Celinor did the same, asking, “What's wrong?”

Erin looked up at the steel-gray clouds. On the horizon a darker cloud rushed toward them.

Her breath came fast, and she could barely speak. “String your bow,” she whispered, for she thought she had time.

She leapt from her horse and grabbed her bow, tried to string it, fumbling. Celinor did the same, as he gaped up at the band of approaching night. It was like a great fish swimming behind the clouds, Erin thought. A great fish that lurks in the depths, half-hidden, half-revealed, waiting to strike.

I'm not afraid, she told herself. I'm a horsesister. The horsewomen of Fleeds do not give in to fear.

But though Erin was a horsewoman and had often engaged in mock combat and tournaments and even the occasional brawl, she'd never faced danger like this. She'd never felt helpless.

She had her bow strung when Gaborn spoke to her again. “Flee, Erin. Hide!”

She dropped her bow and leapt back into the saddle. She was mounted before she realized that Celinor had not been
Chosen, and had not heard Gaborn's command. He was still on the ground trying to string his bow. “There's no time!” she shouted. “Into the woods! Come on!”

Celinor looked up at her in surprise. He finished stringing his bow. Up ahead was a hill covered in alders, many of whose leaves had not yet fallen. Erin hoped they might hide her.

The darkness descended from the clouds, a roiling mass of night that the eye could not pierce. Above that mass only darkness stretched across the sky. A great maelstrom of fire, like a tornado, appeared to be fastened like an umbilicus to the ball of darkness, feeding all light into the center of that storm.

The fiery maelstrom writhed and twisted above the ball of darkness as it dipped toward them.

“Run,” Erin cried. Celinor grabbed his bow, leapt on his horse, and they raced away from the road.

The central mass of darkness had been sweeping directly over the Durkin Hills Road. Now it veered and dropped lower.

Behind them, Erin's and Celinor's Days cried out in horror and raced after them, trying hard to catch up to the swifter horses.

Erin's steed leapt down an embankment, raced into the forest. Her mount thundered through the sparse trees, jumping bushes and low rocks, the wind rushing in her face, all of night falling upon her.

She gazed back as the mass of darkness, half a mile in diameter, touched ground level. A great wall of wind roared through the trees on the hill, bowling them over like a ball. Great old patriarchs of the forest snapped like twigs. The trees screamed in protest, and the roar of the wind was the snarl of an animal. Branches and autumn leaves swirled into the roiling wind. Erin could see only the edges of the storm, only the wind swirling debris, but at its heart flew a cloud of blackest night.

The wind had picked up speed. The front of the wall blasted along the highway, struck Erin's Day's horse with
so much power that the steed staggered sideways, rolling over its rider.

Then the wind took them both, horse and rider. It lifted the Days like a hand and tossed her into the air.

Erin recalled a line from an ancient tome, a description of a Glory in battle. “And with it came the sunlight and the wind, a wind that swept from its wings like a gale, and smote the ships at Waysend, and lifted the ships from the water and hurled them into the deep.”

She'd always thought it a fanciful description. She'd seen large graaks in flight, and the wash of their wings had never created anything similar. But the creature that struck now controlled the wind with more than natural force. The wind and air moved like an extension of its body.

Now her Days shrieked, a cry of wild terror hardly heard above the storm, and as Erin watched, a huge spar—a pine tree stripped of all its branches—caught the woman in the midsection and impaled her, shot clean through like an arrow. Blood and entrails streamed out after it. Then the wind carried the Days' carcass and horse and the tree up a hundred feet in the sky, and all were lost as they tumbled end over end, into that impenetrable ball of darkness.

Erin had never liked her Days, had never been close to the woman. The only kindness Erin had ever extended her Days was to make her tea on the few occasions when she took sick from a cold. Yet the image of that woman, pierced and utterly destroyed, horrified Erin.

Celinor's Days reached the roadside, and his horse floundered, its rear legs suddenly pulled backward by the wind. The horse screamed as the Darkling Glory pulled it into the roiling mass. Erin did not watch.

The wall of wind raced toward her. Erin turned just as her horse landed hard in a sandy little ravine. A dry stream-bed wound its way through here. Celinor had turned his mount, was racing down the dry streambed for safety, fleeing the ball of darkness that chased behind, heading toward a tall stand of pines that opened before them like a dark tunnel. He fled from the wind, from the blackness.

Leaves and dry grasses suddenly swirled up around her. Erin put her heels to horseflesh, felt the wind tearing at her cloak. She looked behind.

Not a dozen yards back, the wind howled like an animal, and she stared into the blackness as if it were a pit. Trees crashed down to each side of her. The blackness gaping behind it all was like a huge mouth, trying to swallow her. A long pole thrust out of the darkness, hitting her in the back like a lance. It exploded against her mail, shattering on impact, shoving her forward.