Brotherhood of the Wolf Part 67

He would not leave her now.

He coughed, struggled to breathe, though dust clogged his nostrils.

"Flee now!" Gaborn's Voice warned once again.

It did not come more clearly, but Borenson realized whose voice he heard, and he struggled to obey. The air was filled with the stench of rot.

Borenson reached for Saffira, searched nearby "0 Bright Star, we must go!" he mumbled, struggling up. He tried to focus his eyes, but everything had gone black. Night was swiftly falling, and with dust filling the air here in the shadows of the reaver corpses, he could see almost nothing. He looked up. A vast cloud of dust hung overhead, though some light still silvered the north and south horizons. He crawled to his knees.. Lightning flashed overhead.

"Where would you take her, little man of the north?" Raj Ahten asked, his voice soft and melodious but seething with subdued rage.

Borenson blinked, trying to focus, to see Raj Ahten in the flicker of lightning, to hear his Voice above the pealing thunder.

He could see them now in the deep evening gloom. Raj Ahten's saffron-colored surcoat gleamed in the darkness. Saffira lay gently in Raj Ahten's arms, as still as the waters of a pond on a windless morning, her pale teeth and eyes hardly visible. She did not move. The glamour had dissipated from her.

For one eternal moment, Borenson knelt. All the air left his lungs. All the willpower seemed to drain from his heart, and he wondered that he could even remain on his hands and knees.

She was gone forever, and he feared that because she was gone, his mind would break.

Not all beauty is gone--he tried to console himself--only the greatest. Life is not empty. It only seems that way.

Yet he felt as if a great void suddenly yawned open inside him, and he could not breathe the dusty air, and he did not care that he could not breathe He'd known Saffira only for a day, and if it had been but a short time, it had been...He found no words for it.

Every breath he'd breathed had been for her. Every thought in his mind had revolved around her. In that day, he had been completely devoted, had become her creature. His devotion might have been short in duration, but it was intense.

To go on living now would be...fruitless.

"Run," Gaborn called to Borenson.

He was safely encircled by dead reavers, as if in a narrow canyon. Beyond them, on the shadowed battlefield, Borenson could hear sounds of war amid men shouting and cheering in the distance. Some reavers still fought, but none fought nearby. The battle had turned.

Borenson gazed warily at Raj Ahten. The Earth King had warned Borenson to flee, but now Borenson realized that he was not meant to flee from reavers.

"Answer me, man of the north," Raj Ahten said calmly. "Where would you take my wife?"

"To safety," Borenson managed to croak. He licked his dry mouth; grime came thick on his tongue.

"Yet you brought her here, didn't you? You brought her to her death, at your master's insistence. The most exquisite and finest woman in the world. You brought her here."

It was not an empty accusation. Blood rose hot to Borenson's cheeks. Even if Raj Ahten had not been struggling to convey Borenson's guilt through the power of his Voice, Borenson would have felt ashamed, d.a.m.ned beyond all hope.

"I did not know that reavers would be here at Carris," Borenson apologized more to himself than to Raj Ahten. "She didn't fear them. We wanted her to stay back, but she would not listen...."

Raj Ahten growled low in his throat, as if mere words could not express his rage.

He hates me, Borenson knew. The lies I told pried him loose from Castle Sylvarresta, and I slaughtered his Dedicates there when he left. My deceptions caused him to retreat from Heredon at Gaborn's ruse. I delivered his wife to her death.

"You were a worthy adversary," Raj Ahten whispered.

Borenson tried to lurch to his feet, to run, but he was no match for Raj Ahten with his endowments of metabolism.

Raj Ahten had taken brawn from more than two thousand men. Borenson could not fight him or escape his grasp any more than a newborn could withstand the wrath of its father.

The Wolf Lord of Indhopal caught Borenson's ankle, jerked swiftly and brought Sir Borenson down hard upon his back.

"I found you cradling her like a lover," Raj Ahten whispered fiercely. "Were you her lover?"

"No!" Borenson shouted.

"Do you deny that you loved her!"

"No!"

"It is forbidden fruit to look upon my concubines. There is a fee that one must pay!" Raj Ahten said. "Have you paid your toll?"

Borenson did not need to answer. The Wolf Lord swiftly pulled him near, ran his hands up Borenson's leg beneath his coat of ring mail and his tunic, to explore his private region.

Sir Borenson howled in outrage and grasped for his dagger, but Raj Ahten was swifter still.

He pinched hard with fingers as strong as a blacksmith's tongs, and he pulled.

The incredible burning pain that a.s.saulted Borenson caused him to black out for a moment, to drop his dagger.

When Raj Ahten brought his hand away, Sir Borenson was much less of a man.

Raj Ahten shoved Borenson hard into the ground, wrenching his back and sc.r.a.ping his face.

Sir Borenson writhed in pain and horror, barely able to retain consciousness. Raj Ahten climbed to his feet.

"Thus," Raj Ahten said, flicking a gobbet of flesh on the ground beside Borenson's ear, "I dismiss you."

Averan cried for help and tried to pry open the dead reaver's mouth. Lightning pounded, and now a gree whipped past her head, wriggling in the air, having also decided that the dead reaver's mouth was a fine dark place to hide. The cloying scent of decay filled the air, and it was so powerful that her hands and, face were blistering wherever the air touched them.

"Help me, please," she cried, trying to be heard above the thunder. Only the dimmest rays of evening light filtered through the dust clouds.

But her heart leapt. Through the flickering lightning she saw Raj Ahten suddenly enter a clearing between the dead reavers, not twenty feet away. He'd gone back there a minute before, to where Saffira and Borenson were, and he had exchanged some harsh words with Borenson.

Borenson's cries filled her with fear. Raj Ahten shouted now in some language of Indhopal.

Averan did not know what he said, but obviously he was calling orders to his men. He held his face up, so that dirty rain seamed over his helm, down his cheeks. Lightning flickered, and Averan could see him clearly. With so many endowments of glamour, he was the most handsome man that Averan had ever seen. He carried himself so proudly, with such grace, that it made her heart flutter.

"Please!" she cried, trying to pry open the reaver's mouth.

Raj Ahten glanced at her distractedly, as if he wanted nothing to do with a child.

But to her relief, he strode to her.

Averan had imagined that it would take several common men with pry bars to open the reaver's jaw, but Raj Ahten sheathed his warhammer on his back, then pulled the reaver's mouth wide with his fists. He gave Averan his hand, let her step out daintily, as if she were a lady of the court.

He had blood all over his gauntlets.

In seconds, half a dozen Invincibles leapt into the clearing between the dead reavers. Raj Ahten jabbered at them, talking so fast she was hard-pressed to follow.

Averan understood only one word: "Orden."

Then Raj Ahten and his men all raced north. They ran so swiftly that it seemed almost as if they merely vanished For one moment they stood still in the shadows, then she heard the ching of ring mail and the Invincibles fled in a blur.

In the sudden silence, Averan stood. Dust and mud fell from the sky. Thunder boomed. Lightning split the sky.

Reavers fear lightning, Averan recalled. It blinds them and fills them with pain. They're all going to run away. At least that's what I'd do, if I were a reaver.

Nearby, she heard gagging; someone was in pain.

The sound came from where she had last seen Sir Borenson.

Averan crept toward the sound, huddling close to the body of a reaver, until she could see past its head. There in the shadows lay Saffira and Sir Borenson.

But only Borenson was still alive. He was curled on his side like a baby. He'd vomited, and tears were streaming from his eyes. Saffira's glamour was gone from her, so that now she seemed to be only a pretty girl.

Averan feared that Borenson would die from his wounds, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. "What's wrong?" Averan asked timidly. "Are you hurt?"

Borenson gritted his teeth, wiped tears from his face. He didn't speak for a long minute, until finally in a strange voice, all filled with pain and fierceness, he said, "You're going to grow up to be a beautiful woman--and there's no way that someone like me would ever be able to do anything about it."

CHAPTER 65.

THE EARTH BETRAYED.

"Flee!" the Earth warned Gaborn.

He was sitting on the ground, looking skyward in astonishment. He'd never imagined that he had the power to summon animals to his aid.

The world worm had hardly risen from the ground. Dust and stones and pebbles gushed skyward above it. The vast beast towered there, twisting and writhing half a mile in the air.

The force of the blast had propelled Gaborn backward The green woman sprawled beside him.

Lightning flashed amid the dust, creating a crown around the great cloud, a crown of light that for a moment seemed to Gaborn to be his own. All around him, the reavers were turning, fleeing from the battle in terror.

"Go!" the Earth insisted.

Death was coming. Gaborn's own death. He'd never felt the overwhelming presence of the shroud so completely.

Darkness hovered above him, an immense black cloud of dust and falling debris that hid any remnant of daylight.

In that unnatural darkness, split time and again by lightning, Gaborn lurched to his feet and raced for his horse, calling for his troops to retreat.

Of course, he realized. He'd felt it all along. Strike and flee, strike and flee. That is what the Earth had wanted of him at Carris.

"Come!" he shouted to the green woman, offering his hand. She leapt twenty feet to land at his side, and Gaborn reached down, pulled her onto his horse.

"This way!" Gaborn shouted to his men. He began racing for his life.

He felt inside him.

In seconds, the entire course of the battle had s.h.i.+fted. Tens of thousands of people had fled Carris, and hundreds of thousands more had not yet even exited the city gates, but were still rus.h.i.+ng out as fast as possible.

Much had changed for the better.

The reavers fled. Lightning strobed the sky, and reavers abandoned the field Everywhere the threat to his people suddenly diminished.

Galloping past two living reavers, Gaborn careened north filled with a sense of dull wonder and terror--wonder at his victory here, terror at the rising sense of personal danger that a.s.sailed him.

The Earth no longer bade him to strike. Now the Earth bade him flee with all haste. He raced past reaver and man alike. He was no longer needed at Carris.

Thus he rode through the dust cloud thrown by the world worm, halfblinded, until he found his way north to the gates of the Barren's Wall.

The wall was a twisted ruin. Though Gaborn had focused all his attention to the south during the battle, the quakes had struck here, too. Much of the wall had fallen. The parts left standing leaned at precarious angles.

Miraculously, the arch above the Barren's Wall held, and as he rode toward it, Gaborn glanced back toward Carris.

Several castle towers had collapsed, and others were still burning. Clouds of dust filled the valley. Dead men and reavers littered the plain. Every bit of soil was churned and ruined. Every plant had been blasted and destroyed. The great Black Tower had collapsed in the distance, and a fire raged there. The world worm was slithering back down into the hole where the Seal of Desolation had been. Lightning bolts played overhead, striking through clouds of dust. A sickly brown mist still wreathed the field, carrying a marvelous stench of rot and illness.

No scene of destruction that Gaborn had ever imagined could begin to rival what he now beheld.

A few hundred yards across the battlefield, the wizard Binnesman spotted him. The old man had apparently retreated from the front line; now he galloped toward Gaborn, shouting.

Gaborn felt such a desperate need to escape that he dared not wait for Binnesman.

With only Jureem, Erin, and Celinor still at his back, he wheeled and raced on beneath the Barren's Wall.

"Milord," Pashtuk called. "There he is!" Raj Ahten had swiftly gathered a dozen Invincibles and ordered them to help find the Earth King.

Raj Ahten peered through clouds of dust, while thunder pounded overhead. The rising dirt had mingled with the clouds; now a muddy sleet fell. Raj Ahten stood atop a hill formed by two dead reavers and peered through the grit to where Pashtuk pointed.

Now he studied the horse that Pashtuk pointed toward. As for the Earth King, Raj Ahten spotted his mount--an una.s.suming roan--but he could discern nothing of Gaborn himself, only a green-skinned woman sitting oddly atop it and a piece of oak brush that appeared to be caught before her on the saddle. He rode north with several knights at his side. The wizard Binnesman raced to catch up with him.

Where do you think he is going?" Mahket asked.

It seemed odd for the Earth King to retreat so swiftly when the victory here seemed secured. Lightning flashed overhead, and everywhere the reavers scattered, leaderless and without purpose.

"I don't care where he is going," Raj Ahten answered simply. "I'm going to kill him."

"But...O Great Light," Pashtuk said. "He is your kinsman....He seeks a truce."