Brotherhood of the Wolf (70 page)

She ripped the paper in half and trampled the message case, then rode back to the tree. “We'll take his horse as a palfrey,” she told the others. “I don't want him following us. But leave him with money and food, so that he can make his way home as best he can.”

“You'll leave him alive?” Hoswell asked. He did not hide the incredulity in his voice. She was taking a dangerous risk.

“The Storm King may want to wage war against us, but
we desire peace,” Iome said. “Let Pilwyn coly Zandaros bear that message back to his uncle.”

With that, they gathered the Inkarran's horse and left his body beneath the tree. The fellow still had not moved, had not drawn a breath. Hoswell left the arrow in his shoulder.

The three of them had not ridden more than two hundred yards when an arrow whizzed past Iome's head.

Iome looked back. The Inkarran stood with his white hair blowing in the wind. He'd pulled the arrow from his shoulder, sent it over her head.

“Honor dictates that I repay your kindness, Your Highness,” he shouted at her. “I give you your life, for mine.”

Iome nodded curtly, as ladies of the court were taught to do, and said, “Let there be peace between us.”

But the Inkarran shook his head. “Though the Earth King may shake his fists and cry out against it, the wind blows him war.

“There is no hope for him, or for the vast hordes of mankind. The earth powers weaken. But my offer to you stands, milady. The Storm King will offer you a haven—” He pointed off to a distant cloud, a great cumulonimbus on the horizon.

Iome turned and rode south.

42
A LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD

The walls around Carris shuddered as the reaver horde raced from the mists.

Out in the fields before the city gates, the common troops of Indhopal ran for their lives, even as the castle guards began to crank up the drawbridge. Many of those troops sprinted up the causeway to where the drawbridge had stood open, then threw themselves into the water and swam
for safety, relying upon those at the barbicans to pull them from the lake. The water became thick with splashing sounds, pleas for help, and the cries of the drowning.

Others were too slow to escape, and reavers herded them or hunted them mercilessly. To Roland's amazement, many of the men, when confronted by a reaver that blocked their way, merely fled in terror back out onto the plains, into greater danger, or lay down and huddled, afraid to even move. Thousands of men were thus stranded, cut off from Carris.

Roland clung to the castle wall. The crows and gulls all began to wing away from their roosts in the city, so that only gree filled the air, writhing like tormented things.

Nine reaver mages raced toward the castle, heads held high, staves thrust forward, as if drawn by the scent of its men. Soldiers on the walls shouted in terror.

Raj Ahten's flameweavers ran to the wall-walk above the city gates. Soldiers backed away from the flameweavers, who burst into flame and were clothed only in living fire. One flameweaver raised a hand, drew light from the sky so that for a moment he stood in gloom as sunlight whirled and funneled down into his palm.

He traced a shape in the air: A fiery rune took form before him, a magnificent green shield of living fire that glowed like the sun. The flameweaver shoved it forward. The rune floated down to the end of the causeway and hung in the air two hundred yards from the castle gates. In rapid succession, two more flameweavers did the same, and then the first flameweaver created a fourth rune.

The temperature around Carris plummeted by ten degrees as flameweavers drew heat from the sky. The cold drizzle that had been falling turned to sleet.

But within thirty seconds a wall of four fiery shields blockaded the causeway, cutting off the retreat of men, or the reavers' hopes for attack.

All the while, behind the mages, the main army of reavers marched northward, as if they cared for Carris not at all.

A wild hope began to rise in Roland's chest.

We are nothing to them, he realized. Whatever the reavers intend, Carris is nothing to them.

But out on the plain, the reaver mages formed ranks, a group of nine, so that they charged over the battlefield like geese in formation, with the largest mage at their head.

No, Roland suddenly understood. We are not nothing to them. They merely think so little of us, that they only feel the need to dispatch these nine.

The leader of the nine was a huge thing, over twenty feet tall at the shoulder, with fiery runes tattooed across its entire face and along its forearms. It held its head up fearlessly and approached the causeway, its staff high. As it charged, the dull azure glow within its staff began to blush to crimson, and the rod itself began to trail black smoke.

The artillerymen cut loose with a volley of ballista bolts, the
whonk, whonk, whonk
sounds punctuated with shouts of “Reload!” and the cranking of gears.

At such close range, one of the artillerymen should have pierced a reaver. But mysteriously, every bolt seemed to veer wide of its mark.

Magic! Roland realized. We can't shoot them. There's no stopping them.

The great reaver mage reached the end of the causeway and halted momentarily before the green shields of flame. It moved its head this way and that, as if studying them. Then it reached out experimentally with its staff and touched the whirling green wheel of living fire.

It will dispel them, Roland imagined. The shields will collapse harmlessly.

The shields exploded with the sound of an avalanche, tearing at the castle's foundations. Roland fell backward on his butt. Bolts of green flame slashed skyward. Hot air surged over Roland in a violent concussion, and he felt as if he were leaning over a blacksmith's forge, even though the flames were over two hundred yards off. Men nearer the inferno cried out in pain and dropped for cover.

Flames blasted Carris. The heat was so intense that the water wards on the castle wall took effect.

A steam cloud geysered upward, surging into the air, forming a vast curtain that obscured Roland's view. Water condensed on his brow, filled his eyes, and he wiped it away with his sleeve.

Roland looked up for one heart-stopping moment and saw the most beautiful rainbow above him.

He climbed up. The clouds of steam rose, darkening everything, and for several minutes he saw nothing.

Though the walls of Carris were bound and strengthened with Earth runes, the explosion had punished the walls, caused stones to shift. Great slabs of white plaster fell from both the inner and outer castle walls, stripping away the bone-white exterior to leave the stone naked to the cold sleet.

Then the men upon the walls nearest the reavers began to shout and cheer and whistle.

Roland spotted the mage at last, lying two hundred yards back from the mouth of the causeway, black as a cinder and uglier than any nightmare he'd ever had.

It lay dead, unmoving. Green smoke issued from its wounds, where the fiery lances had pierced it. Behind it, other flame-blackened mages were canted sideways, feebly pawing the ground with broken limbs.

Four of the reaver mages near the rear wheeled and scurried from the castle, limping or dragging broken limbs.

Roland whistled and gaped at the dead behemoth. He found himself breathing hard in relief. We've beat them, he thought. We've beat their attack. Men clapped and cheered.

Out on the plains, a few thousand footmen had become trapped. Only three dozen reavers bothered to herd them. The reavers stalked among them, slaughtering them wholesale, but hundreds of men made it to the causeway, threw themselves into the water.

For a long moment, Roland gazed across the countryside. The fog was still receding steadily; a mile from the castle, reavers marched northward in great lines.

The rattling sound of their carapaces smashing against stone could be heard everywhere, like roaring surf. On nearby hills Roland spotted reavers by the thousands.

There are many kinds of creatures that men call reavers, Roland knew, but men rarely saw different varieties. Mostly when men painted images of reavers, they showed the most common breed: the hordes of dreaded blade-bearers and the fearsome mages that led those hordes.

But other species existed. Now for the first time, Roland saw some of those among the blade-bearers: the manylegged worms that men called “glue mums,” each some eighty feet long, and the smaller urine-colored spidery creatures that men called “howlers” because of the queer howls that they emitted from time to time.

Though these beasts did not look like the more common reavers, they somehow fit within reaver society. Whether they were intelligent species that the reavers had subverted or whether they were dumb animals trained to slave away in the reavers' behalf, no man knew.

Then, from out of the fog, the reaver horde's leader came.

She was the stuff of legend, a reaver lord unlike any to have been seen aboveground for thousands of years.

“A fell mage!” men shouted in dread as she issued from the fog. A hundred reaver mages bore her on a vast palanquin over their heads. Though a reaver stood taller than an elephant, she dwarfed her companions. Thirty feet at the shoulder, and a full length longer than a normal reaver, her entire body was clothed in runes that glimmered like a garment of light. She did not ride upon the palanquin alone, but sat among a pile of glowing crystals so brilliant that at first Roland thought them to be a bed of glimmering diamonds.

But no, he realized, they were merely reaver bones, eaten free of flesh and licked clean by tongues of fire. These were her vanquished foes.

In her paws she held an enormous staff that glowed a sickly citrine hue.

She is beautiful, Roland thought.

Any reaver so terrified him that he did not know how to feel about this one. He looked to see others' reactions, for he suspected that the warriors here would know enough lore to gauge the threat better than he could. The face of Baron Poll, who had joked at the sight of lesser mages, now looked chiseled and bloodless in terror. Raj Ahten himself gaped at her, eyes wide and nostrils flaring.

A moment before, Roland had breathed a sigh of relief. Now hair rose on the back of his head, while goose pimples formed on his arms.

Here was a veritable Lord of the Underworld.

The reaver mages that had tasted the sorcerous fires of Carris raced toward the palanquin.

“Uh-oh,” Baron Poll grumbled dangerously. “If there's one thing I don't like, it's a tattletale.”

Perhaps the fell mage won't care, Roland hoped desperately. Perhaps she has more urgent work to the north.

The four mages reached the palanquin, and to Roland's surprise they dropped their shovel-shaped heads into the ground and did obeisance, almost exactly as if they were knights presenting themselves before their lord; their leader raised her tail in the air as if she were a stinkbug. The mages bearing the palanquin stopped.

The fell mage swiveled her broad head toward Carris, then did something that Roland had never heard of before. She rose up on her back legs, the way that a marmot might do at the front of her burrow, so that her forepaws and middle legs dangled uselessly.

She shimmered in the gray morning. The philia along the top of her head stood up and waved like the spicules on a sea anemone as it grasps for food in a tidal pool.

“She can't see us from there, can she?” Roland asked, hoping that at such a distance, he might be overlooked.

“She's smelling us,” Baron Poll said. “Smelling all eight hundred thousand of us.”

The fell mage took her great staff in both hands, then leapt from her palanquin and came loping toward Carris.
At her back, her whole army, thousands upon thousands of reavers, followed in a dark tide.

Down above the castle gates, the flameweavers had just vanquished the mages. Now they desperately began pulling fire from the sky, setting down more of their infernal wards before Carris. As they worked, the air grew colder, and the flameweavers leached heat even from the stone walls, until frost rimed them. The falling slush turned to drifting snow.