The Warrior King (Book 4) (26 page)

The two spells had already sapped a third of the strength from Memnet’s orb. Either one would have halted an army of living men, and if they had been living men, the wizard could have called upon a dozen more spells. A hammer of wind would have thrown them to the ground, or he could have made the ground shake, or caused the underground stream beneath the hill to well up and turn the soil to mud. He could have turned their swords hot with flame until they cast them away, cursing in pain. Any of these would have stopped a normal army and still left Markal with power to draw on.

But none of those ideas would work with the ravagers. He needed something stronger. A spell came to his mind. The only one that would work. It was two spells, really, chained together, and it would draw everything he had left. The orb glowed white in his hand, making his hands disappear in the intensity of it.

“
Moenia atque en mortariu cadunt saeclum.
” 

The ravagers had reached the ruined gates. Several men jumped down from their horses and yanked at the gates to tear them out of the way and clear the path for their horses. Arrows slammed into them, but they didn’t stop even to pluck the shafts from their flesh.

Markal lifted the orb above his head and called out the last words of the spell. The orb flared one final time as a huge, uncoiling snake of pure power blasted out and into the two towers that stood on either side of the gates. The orb went black in his hands. He staggered back a step as a crippling wave of exhaustion rolled over him with the expenditure of so much magic.

The mortar began to crumble out between the stones of the towers. It fell as dust from every joint and seam between the heavy granite blocks until it was like a fine, dry snow sifting onto the heads of the ravagers below, who paid it no attention. But then the ground began to shake and rumble as if some great beast were awakening in the bowels of Mithyl. The ravagers looked up. Roderick met Markal’s gaze, and this time it was the wizard who smiled. Roderick bellowed for his ravagers to fall back, but it was too late.

The gate towers were shaking violently, spilling stones from their heights. Markal fled along the battlements, where he ran into Whelan, who had come up to join him, Soultrup in hand.

Markal shoved him. “Get back!”

The right gate tower collapsed, followed seconds later by the other tower. They fell in a heap of stone and dust, with enormous chunks of stone spilling onto the ravagers and their horses, crushing them. The entire castle wall itself shuddered, and parapets collapsed, with huge blocks of stone tumbling down. For a moment it seemed as though the entire castle would give way, killing everyone on top of, within, and outside, but at last the ground stopped shaking.

When the dust cleared, half of the ravagers lay buried beneath the rubble. The rest were blocked from entering the bailey. Hoffan’s men had finally succeeded in destroying the ravagers left behind, but at the terrible cost of perhaps half of his four hundred men dead, wounded, or unhorsed. The rest came riding up the hillside toward the dazed ravagers who had survived the collapse of the gate towers. Hoffan’s men wouldn’t be enough to finish off the twenty or so enemy left, but they could pin the ravagers against the rubble until Lord Denys’s men could arrive on foot. Bring out the Knights Temperate over the rubble to finish the fight. But it wasn’t a sure victory yet.

The precarious nature of the battle didn’t stop the archers on the walls or the knights in the bailey from letting up a great cheer. From the relief on their faces, it was clear that moments earlier each and every man had expected to die this day.

Whelan should have been putting his sword away and going back to give orders to his signalers, but instead he leaned forward with Soultrup in hand, looking for a moment like a hound straining on its leash, anxious to go after a fox it has scented. Markal followed the king’s gaze.

Now that the dust had cleared, Markal could see the remains of the near gate tower. The outer walls had collapsed, leaving only the central column, around which spiraled the staircase rising to the top. The lower part of this was intact, and a ravager came up the stairs where they lay open to the sky. He reached the ruined upper reaches, grabbed hold of the broken outer wall of the castle itself, and scrambled up toward the battlements. Three other ravagers spotted him and began to follow. They were going to gain the castle anyway. In moments, the lead ravager would be at the battlements, and there was nothing that would stop him from rushing around to attack the king. The ravager looked up, and Markal’s courage blanched as he met the gaze of his enemy. It was Captain Roderick.

“Fall back,” Markal ordered the king. “I will hold him.”

Whelan turned, the skepticism deepening in his expression as he saw the wizard leaning against one of the merlons on the parapet. “No, I won’t leave you.”

Markal had almost nothing left. His body was weak and shaking from the sheer effort of calling forth the magic from the orb. Even his thoughts seemed sticky with cobwebs. But he knew that he couldn’t let Whelan face his brother, not with Soultrup slippery in his grasp.

“We can’t lose you. You cannot die.”

“Neither can you.”

“I have magic. I’ll hold him.”

Markal shoved the orb into his robes and lifted his hands. They were still whole and strong, the magic of the Order of the Wounded Hand not yet called forth. But his confidence was shaken, and he had already used his most powerful spells, only to see them fail.

Roderick gained the battlements and stared at the wizard from a few dozen feet away. His face was charred and peeling great chunks of flesh as the undead body struggled to heal itself.

“I killed Memnet the Great,” he said. It was Roderick’s voice, but deeper, and somehow overlaid as if a second man spoke from over his shoulder.

“Turn back,” Markal said. “I will destroy you.”

“So too, shall you fall,” the ravager said, paying Markal’s warning no heed. “Your soul will serve my dark master. Soon, the dead will bend a knee before King Toth.”

Markal lifted his right hand as Roderick strode toward him with his sword outstretched. “The Harvester take you.” Then he cast the spell. “
Di nach necram!
” 

Roderick laughed as he heard the words, even as the spell gathered and cast itself. He must recognize it, via whatever monstrous thing had taken hold of him. The spell, Roderick would know, might break the bones of a living man, but it would not stop a ravager.

Except Markal hadn’t cast it against the ravager, but against the man’s sword. It shattered with an ear-splitting shriek, and shards of metal went flying. Roderick looked at the broken hilt in his hands and cast it aside with a snarl. He sprang toward Markal and slammed into him with a mailed fist. The blow crushed the air from Markal’s lungs. He flew back against the parapet and nearly went over the edge. He slumped to the ground and tried to gain his feet against the burning pain in his chest where Roderick had hit him.

To the wizard’s dismay, Roderick now drew a long dagger from his side to replace the shattered sword. He stood at the ready while Whelan came at him with Soultrup. The king had two or three good swings before the other three ravagers—now atop the battlements—joined the fight.

But as Markal watched in horror, Whelan struggled to control the weapon. Soultrup twisted in his hand as if trying to throw itself free. When the king brought it down, it seemed to curve, like a willow branch bent between two hands. The sword whistled past Roderick’s head. Then it twisted free and clattered to the ground.

“Kill him!” one of the other ravagers cried. He was a tall warrior with his helm split and his blond hair lying in burned clumps. Another dead Knight Temperate, turned against his former companion in the Brotherhood.

Roderick sprang at his unarmed brother with a triumphant cry, his dagger stabbing toward the king’s heart.

Chapter Twenty-four

The nightmare of the last few weeks had reached its conclusion. Roderick came at Whelan with his dagger thrusting, ready to end his brother’s life. For weeks, he had struggled as Pradmort led him through one atrocity after the other. With each twist of his emotions, he fell deeper under the dark wizard’s spell.

Earlier in the battle, Roderick had spied his opportunity to break free from Pasha Ismail’s doomed army and charge the weakened castle on the hill where he sensed his brother waiting. He had roared a command to his men, and they fought clear of the combined army of Balsalomians and Eriscobans pinning Ismail between the two hills. Ismail’s men cried out in fear to see their strongest warriors fleeing and begged Roderick to turn around and defend them against certain destruction. Roderick ignored them and rode hard for the Tothian Way. He had one goal, and one goal only.

There they met a powerful force of enemy riders, who encircled them and came in with a relentless attack of swords and scimitars. But when he feared he might fail to gain the castle, a strengthening breeze of magic came flowing through the ravagers from the direction of Veyre and the Dark Citadel, and Roderick and his men fought with the strength of five men. They hacked and killed and shortly opened a bloody wound in the center of the enemy forces. Then they were free and riding unopposed toward the castle.

For a few glorious moments, Roderick thought they would be able to ride straight through the broken gates and into the bailey where they would slaughter the king and his defenders and leave the enemy army leaderless. But then the cursed wizard attacked, burning and then burying in rubble half of Roderick’s force.

Roderick felt every emotion and the pain from every sword thrust and every burning arrow that slammed into him from the walls above, but at the same time it was as though he were watching everything from a distance. Some other entity seemed to grip his body, controlling his movements down to the commands and taunts that came from his mouth. When he came upon Markal standing atop the walls, a terrible rage swept over him that seemed to be drawn from someone else’s mind.

It’s the dark wizard,
some small part of his mind insisted.
He is controlling you from a distance.
 

“Kill him!” Pradmort cried with maniacal glee when Soultrup twisted and fell from Whelan’s hands. The former captain and two other ravagers had joined Roderick in climbing the broken castle walls to stand on the battlements.

Roderick’s surviving consciousness recoiled in horror as he thrust at his brother with his dagger, trying to bring it in under the man’s breastplate. Whelan twisted at the last moment, ducking back, and Roderick’s dagger caught in his cloak. Whelan grabbed his wrist and dragged him forward. Roderick fell off-balance and dropped the dagger. Whelan drew his second sword and plunged it into Roderick’s back between the shoulder blades.

Roderick roared in pain. He fought to his feet and reached for the sword sticking out of his back, but couldn’t pull it free. Even still impaled, the pain was fading now, and he felt stronger than ever. Now both men were unarmed. Roderick turned to Pradmort, who was behind him now on the narrow battlements.

“Give me your sword,” Roderick demanded.

He grabbed for the weapon and wrenched it from Pradmort’s hand. It was a long, straight blade, made of Southron steel and forged in Arvada. The weapon of a Knight Temperate, it would now be used to kill the king. Whelan picked up Soultrup, which lay at his feet.

Markal had been bypassed by the three ravagers, who had seen his prone body and assumed he was finished. But while one of the wizard’s hands had blackened into a claw, he now held up the other, as if trying to gather himself for a final spell.

“The wizard,” he warned Pradmort.

Whelan sprang at Roderick. Soultrup bent and twisted in his hands, and all the muscles bulged in the king’s arms and shoulders simply to contain it. Roderick understood, through the entity which controlled him, that this was by design. One of Toth’s allies and servants, the wicked Pasha Malik, lay within the sword, his soul bound there for hundreds of years. He had been gathering allies to struggle against Memnet the Great and was now fighting a pitched battle at the heart of the sword. Control of the sword hung in the balance, but Malik had enough strength to turn its blows. The sword would never hit the ravager captain.

Roderick lifted his own weapon. He could see the last moments of the battle now as if he were watching from a distance. Summoning every bit of strength to control Soultrup, Whelan would take a final swing at Roderick’s head. There was no need for the ravager captain to lift his own blade to block it, because at the last second, the sword would bend harmlessly to the right. Roderick would then bring his own blade up and shove it through his brother’s chest with all the might of a ravager and the power sent through his limbs by King Toth himself. Whelan would die. Roderick would be the one to kill him. He would return to Veyre with Soultrup in hand to stand as King Toth’s champion. Together, they would bathe the whole of Mithyl in the blood of their enemies.

Now. You must act now. If you do not fight it, you will never have a chance again. You will be the dark wizard’s slave forever. Thousands of innocents will fall to your blade.

Whelan brought Soultrup down toward Roderick’s head. It was a powerful, crushing blow, delivered with such strength that Malik, fighting within, only just bent its course. Instead of hacking through Roderick’s skull, it would only graze his cheek.