Brotherhood of the Wolf (78 page)

As Blythefellow voiced this thought, Baron Poll frowned. “I don't think that's it at all. Maybe they're just sending us a message.”

“A message?” Roland asked, incredulous. It was obvious that the reavers were poisoning the people of Carris, sickening them with their twisted magics. “Reavers can't talk.”

“Not usually,” the Baron argued, “at least not so that we can understand. But they talk nonetheless.”

“So what are the reavers saying?” Roland asked.

Baron Poll waved his arms across the landscape. As far as the eye could see, the land around Carris was scarred and barren. Cities, farmhouses, fences, and fortresses alike had all fallen and been carted away. Trees steamed on hills five miles distant.

“Can't you read it?” Baron Poll said. “It's not as hard to decipher as high script: ‘The land that was once yours is ours. Your homes are our homes. Your food—well, you are our food. We
supplant
you.'”

Down in the bailey, Raj Ahten's troops had mounted. The knights sat astride their chargers, war lances held upright, pointed like glistening needles at the sky.

“Open the gates!” Raj Ahten shouted at their head. Chains creaked as the drawbridge lowered.

49
HUE AND CRY

Averan didn't know that she'd fallen asleep until she felt Spring lurch up, ripping the warm cloak from her grasp. The green woman shivered with excitement, sniffing the air.

All night long, Averan had suffered from strange dreams, unreal visions of the Underworld.

The day was cool. The sun lay behind thick clouds. A thin drizzle rained down. Averan had been dreaming that one of the graaks had brought a rotten goat to the aerie, as they sometimes did, and Brand was making her drag it away.

She cleared her eyes. While she'd slept, the ferns above her had all died. They hung wet and sullen, like limp gray rags. Indeed, every bit of moss at her fingertips, every tender vine, every tree overhead, all had wilted as if blasted by the worst hoarfrost ever seen. The scent of decay lay heavy in the air.

Worse than that, whatever had cursed the ground seemed also to affect her. Averan felt nauseous, and her muscles were weak. A dry film coated her mouth.

If I stay here, I'll die, she thought.

In mounting curiosity and horror, Averan glanced up at the sky. Sunrise had come and gone hours ago. Soon the sun would set.

She'd run most of the night. In her exhaustion, Averan
had slept the entire day. In that time, a horrible change had been wrought upon the land.

Now the green woman lifted her nose so that her olive hair fell back on her shoulders, and she said softly, “Blood, yes. Sun, no.”

Averan leapt to her feet in the evening drizzle, glanced down the long hill. A mile away, a group of huge reavers raced on her side of the canal, following her scent.

The air issuing from their thoraxes made a dull rattle, and they scurried about in a defensive formation called “nines.” A scarlet sorceress led them, bearing a staff that glowed cruelly with obscene runes.

A reaver mage, Averan realized dully, fighting panic. In dull wonder, Averan realized that the scout she had eaten had known this monster and the blade-bearers at her back. These were no common troops. These were some of the fell mage's most elite guards.

Averan's shouts of “Beware” must have frightened the reavers, causing them to send some of their most deadly warriors.

Desperately, Averan sprinted through the wilted ferns surrounding the hill, sliding on their slimy surface, hardly daring to make an occasional loop, knowing she could never outrun the monsters, knowing that in moments she would be within their field of vision.

The green woman loped beside her, curious, glancing back like a dog eager to hunt squirrels, unsure whether to fight or flee.

Overhead, the leaves of every tree had fallen. There was no foliage, nothing she could hide behind. With nowhere to go and nothing to lose, Averan did what instinct bade her. She raised a hue and cry: “Help! Help! Murder!”

Even as she screamed, she thought, If I yelled “Reavers!” no one would be dumb enough to come to my rescue.

50
RIDE OF THE MICE

“Open the gates!” Raj Ahten shouted from the bailey. Five hundred force soldiers gathered behind the castle gates, the knights and horses gleaming in armor, painted lances prickling toward the sky.

The only monument left to mankind within sight was Carris itself, still tall, its white plaster walls still proud in the fading afternoon light. Rain had fallen on and off all day long, misting everything. Now a bit of sunlight beamed from a break in the clouds.

The walls of Carris gleamed preternaturally, contrasting with the dark wet mud outside.

The drawbridge dropped, and everywhere within the walls, men began to cheer wildly. Raj Ahten led the foray himself, bearing a long white lance of ash, riding his great gray Imperial force horse.

He swept over the causeway at an astonishing speed, and in seconds thundered over the plains toward the Throne of Desolation. Blade-bearers waiting well back from the causeway charged to meet him.

He swept past the first few of the great monsters as if they were but islands in a stream. His troops flowed behind. Each horse had endowments of brawn and grace and metabolism, and thus even in armor could race over the downs like a gale.

Raj Ahten's face shone like the sun. Even at this distance, he drew the eye like no other man could, as if he bore beauty with him.

Now the knights took formation, five columns charging north toward the Throne of Desolation. Reavers rushed to
block them, their carapaces gleaming darkly from the afternoon rain.

From such a distance, Raj Ahten and his men looked to Roland like a great herd of mice, charging out to make war upon overfed cats.

Their horses were marvelous and speedy, their lances gleamed in the sunlight like needles. The men shouted war cries that were lost on the wind.

And the reavers towered above them, sickly gray and bloated.

Lances struck home. Some knights sought to strike the reaver's brain by aiming at the soft spot in its skull, or by driving a lance through the roof of its mouth. A reaver so struck died almost instantly.

But others opted to try to drive a lance into the reaver's belly, a maiming wound.

Thus the Invincibles charged and began to strike, but almost as often as a lance went home, it exploded harmlessly against a reaver's hard carapace. The unfortunate warriors who failed to strike a deadly blow were often borne backward off their horses, left weaponless to scurry for refuge while hoping that their fellows would slay their foes.

Roland watched one horse slip on the slick mud and crash into a reaver as if it were a stone wall, so that both horse and rider were broken instantly. Elsewhere a bladebearer swung a great blade and sliced the legs from beneath a charging force horse.

Half a dozen reavers went down in seconds, along with several men. As each column of knights met resistance, its men would veer away from the foe, so that the columns quickly became irregular snaking streams.

And once a lancer met his target, his lance would be destroyed. Either it would become hopelessly impaled into the reaver, or it would shatter. In either case the lancer was forced to turn his horse and retreat.

Raj Ahten and a few knights bore down on the Throne of Desolation, his mount racing through the brown clouds
that continuously swirled out from it, between wide columns of hardened mucilage that formed the cocoon.

He's charging like a fly into the spider's web, Roland feared.

The few dozen enormous blade-bearers rose up to meet him. Atop the throne, glue mums like ugly grubs reared in wonder at the threat, while mages took defensive positions behind the walls of the rune itself. Howlers fled for cover. The fell mage whirled to look at him from her eyeless head, then dismissed the threat and went back to work.

As the Invincibles charged, at the edge of the cocoon reavers reared up on their back legs, great talons gleaming as they clutched their enormous blades or glory hammers.

Then the forces clashed. A dozen reavers were thrust through by the fury of the charge. Lances shattered. Blades whipped through the air faster than the eye could see; Invincibles and their horses were slashed asunder.

In that single charge at the lip of the cocoon, Raj Ahten lost a full dozen men. Those who met the reavers forfeited their lances. Raj Ahten himself brought a reaver down, plunging his lance into its mouth.

But even as it fell, its tonnage blocked the path to Bone Hill. Raj Ahten turned his mount and raced back for the castle, a few knights at his heel.

From the warrens at Lord Paldane's Slums, reavers issued from their burrows in fury, scuttling from the shadows, while others raced from the western shore of the lake. Along the roads to the south, reavers still marched in an unending line.

Raj Ahten saw the threat, wheeled toward the castle. His men retreated for their lives.

Reavers from the west lumbered up to block the causeway—and Raj Ahten's escape.

On the castle walls, men began to shout, encouraging Raj Ahten's troops to better speed, cheering for men who had been their enemies a few hours before.

But Roland merely stood with his mouth agape.

Is that the best we can do against them? he wondered.
Shall we halt their work for three seconds and then flee, like a child pelting a knight with rotten figs?

To do so was folly.

No more than sixty or seventy dead reavers littered the plains; Raj Ahten was forced to retreat, and now he would be chastised by the fell mage and her minions.

As if she had been waiting for this moment all along, the fell mage struck.

The huge mage perched atop Bone Hill raised her great staff to the sky, and an odd hissing roar issued from it. Even now, she wore her fiery runes like a coat of light.

There was a noise like a peal of thunder, and a blast of wind surged from her, sweeping across the hill as if an invisible stone had dropped into a pool, sending out a ring. Roland would not have been able to see it at all if not for the gree that writhed through the air. When the wind struck them, it sent them swirling like leaves.