Wizardborn (11 page)

She knew how his deed this past week tormented him. He'd slain King Sylvarresta and two thousand Dedicates on the orders of Gaborn's father. For the murder of a friend, his mind was filled with torment.

She couldn't comprehend the anguish of someone who had been forced to slay idiots and children—people whose only crime was to love their lord so much that they were willing to share their finest attributes with him.

But now she saw something even darker in his eyes. There was a gulf of misery between them that words could not describe.

“What happened?” she asked as gently as she could.

“Ah, well,” he said solidly. “Nothing much. My father's dead. I found Saffira, and now she's dead. Reavers got them both.”

“I know,” Myrrima answered. “I saw her body.”

“You should have seen her,” Borenson offered, and his eyes suddenly blazed as if he beheld her glory in the distance. “She shone like sunlight, and her voice was so… beautiful. I thought that surely Raj Ahten would listen.”

For a moment, he fell quiet. Then Borenson looked up at her again and said sharply, “Go home! I'm not the man you married. Raj Ahten made sure of that.”

“What?” she asked. His eyes lowered, and Myrrima's gaze went to the oozing and crusted blood on his surcoat, there by his thighs. She imagined that he'd been stabbed, had taken a gut wound and was slowly dying. “What?”

“I succeeded in the task Gaborn set for me,” Borenson explained. “I convinced Saffira to come here. I got her killed. I got us all killed.”

Borenson gripped the handle of his battle-ax and pulled himself to a standing position. He wavered for a moment, and Myrrima realized that he was on his last legs. Suddenly his complete dispassion made sense: she'd seen the wounded here in Carris, sometimes taking ill with gangrene from even the slightest scratch. The fell mage's curses made sure of that. Borenson had been down in the thick of the battlefield where the curses were strongest.

And now he stood trembling, with sweat beaded upon his brow and eyes covered in film.

He turned his back, began to hobble painfully away from them in the night, still using his battle-ax as a crutch. The rain had begun to fall more earnestly, and the cool drops hissed into the dead leaves all around. The little girl with the lantern let out a gasping sob. Borenson stumbled and fell in the muck there among the dead. He lay unmoving.

The child let out a shriek, and Myrrima said, “Run and find a healer.”

The girl handed Myrrima a lamp, and Myrrima went to her husband, flipped his body over. With her endowments of brawn, it was easily done. Borenson's eyes were open to slits, rolled back in a faint. She touched his forehead, and it felt as if he were on fire.

The child didn't run for a healer. Instead, she watched as Myrrima pulled up Borenson's surcoat and ring mail, looking for the source of the blood and pus that oozed down his legs.

When she discovered the wound, it was far more horrifying than any that she'd imagined. Truly, Borenson was not the man she had married.

Raj Ahten had made sure that he was a man no more.

   7   

When a storm sings through the trees, one often hears the voices of men far off. But those are the songs of the dead. Wise men do not listen.

—
Proverb of Rofehavan

In Mystarria a cold wind sang above the village of Padwalton near the Courts of Tide an hour before dawn, shoving clouds through the sky. It stripped the brown leaves from the chestnut trees and let them drop on the hillsides to lie among the bones of leaves left from the preceding fall.

The wind moaned through barren branches, and a gust made the laundry hanging upon old lady Triptoe's clothesline dance and flutter as if it would come alive, while the bucket above her well swung slowly in the breeze.

A milkmaid felt the wind's prickly touch on her back. She squinted and turned to see if something had brushed against her. She drew her cloak tight and hurried her cow to the barn.

Then a finger of wind went skittering along the village street, dancing over the dark surface of puddles left from the night's rain.

It slapped against the door at the Red Stag, then slithered through a crack beneath.

The lady of the inn was just pulling a platter of savories out of the oven—lightly toasted crusts stuffed with morel mushrooms in venison and red wine. She inhaled the scent
as she carried them into the common room to cool, then noticed the chill.

The fire beneath the oven gave the only light in the room, and had kept it warm and cozy for the past hour.

The lady frowned at the draft, turned to see if the door was open.

In an upstairs room several Runelords lay abed after a hard ride. Word had reached them that trouble was brewing in Carris. They were racing from the western provinces to the far eastern borders.

One lord, Baron Beckhurst, lay sleeping soundly when the air brushed his neck.

“Kill the queen,” a voice whispered in his ear, “lest Iome's son become greater than the father.”

Beckhurst rolled over and his eyes came open. He whispered, “At once, milord.”

Without waking his companions, he got up. He briskly dressed in his ring mail, and went to the store of weapons that one of his fellow travelers had carried.

He selected a lance, well balanced and of a comfortable heft. Iron bands bound it in a dozen places. As he raised it to the sky, he pointed it high. Long ago, his mother had taught him a rune of the Air. He drew it with the lance tip, and a flickering blue bolt of lightning curled along its length. He grinned, rode from the inn.

The wind traveled on.

   8   

After the battle at Engfortd, asked I of gud Sir Gwellium, “How fared ye with yon forcibles?”

His demeanor became very thoughtful. Said he, “No mytier weapon hath man devised! Forty-five strong knichts cleaved I 'twixt cock's crow and eventide, yet weary not. By my beard, such devices shall let courteous men put down every barbarity!”

Then said his wife, “Nay, but with them methinks cruel men shall
perfect
barbarity.”

—
On the discovery of forcibles,
from the Chronicles of Sir Gwellium of Seward,
as recorded by his Days

An hour before dawn, the stars above Raj Ahten blazed in a cold sky as if intent on igniting heaven. He raced over the Hest Mountains down toward the deserts of Indhopal, sweat drenching him, his blood crusting from wounds at his knee and chest. His shirt of black scale mail, torn from battle, rang like shackles with every step.

His serpentine trail twisted over the tortuous ridges and through the crevasses, curling among black pines that struggled up to bristle like spears through cracked rock and a thin crust of snow.

It was bitterly cold, and Raj Ahten clung to his warhammer. After the rout at Carris, reavers had fled blindly in every direction. Twice Raj Ahten had stumbled upon the monsters in the woods and brought them down.

Worse than reavers hunted in these woods. Gaborn had
turned many of Raj Ahten's own Invincibles against him. A troop of them had ridden over the pass recently, leaving hoof prints in the fresh snow.

So Raj Ahten traveled over paths that horses could not follow, bypassing his armies in the mountains.

Wolves howled in the shadowed pines. They'd caught his blood-scent, and now loped behind, trying to match his pace. Raj Ahten could smell his own vital fluids, cloying amid the competing scents of snow, ice, stone, and pine.

He found himself breathing hard; the muscles in his chest were knotted. The air so high in the mountains was thin, pricking his lungs like needles.

His armor seemed suffocating; its metal leeched the warmth from his bones. He'd carried it all night, but finally he stripped off his torn shirt of mail and threw it down. Black scales broke off and scattered on the snow as if he'd tossed a carp against a rock.

Raj Ahten's stomach clenched from hunger.

With so many endowments of brawn and stamina to his credit, he should have felt vigorous, filled with endless energy.