Blade-bearers made up the vast bulk of the army, along with large numbers of pale spidery howlers whose eerie calls frequently were borne through the shadows. Among the mass of dark bodies, Borenson saw few scarlet sorceresses.
“What’s that?” Myrrima shouted to be heard over the commotion. She pointed to a trio of enormous reavers that loped along about a quarter of a mile off. To Borenson’s eye, they looked like any other reaver he had ever seen except that each of them had dozens of large, bulbous black growths all over their backs.
Myrrima raced her horse toward the monsters, and Borenson followed more warily. Sarka Kaul hung back, afraid of the reavers, for he was but a Days, a commoner without benefit of endowments.
As Borenson drew near, the mystery was solved: the huge reavers looked to be nurses, reavers charged with rearing the warren’s hatchlings. Each nurse was oversized, nearly forty feet in length, and the humps on their backs were young reavers, each no more than five or six feet tall, and eight feet in length. Ten or fifteen young clung to the backs of some nurses.
“Why would they bring their young?” Myrrima shouted, nocking an arrow.
Borenson had an inkling. He imagined the young reavers charging through the rooms of a keep, breaking into cellars to hunt for women and children. He could envision them climbing turret stairs—going any of the places where people might hide when fleeing reavers. How vicious such young creatures might be, he could not guess.
At that moment, an enormous blade-bearer must have smelled them. It came rushing out of the column at tremendous speed, the philia along its head waving wildly. Instantly Borenson saw that the horses wouldn’t be able to outrun it.
He had never seen a reaver move so fast.
“Shoot it!” Borenson warned as he pulled his warhammer from its sheath.
The monster charged Myrrima. It stood over twenty feet tall, and its mouth was wide enough to swallow a horse. Fiery runes glowed on its battle arms, as pale blue as a will-o’—the-wisp in the swamps at Fenraven. The reaver hissed.
Myrrima reined in her black stallion, drawing her bow as the blade-bearer charged. But her horse threw back its ears, and its eyes grew wide. It began to dance backward.
Borenson veered his own mount toward the beast, shouted a war cry, and charged.
He was nearly on the monster when a dark shaft sizzled overhead and disappeared into the reavers’ sweet triangle. The monster’s right legs buckled, and it skidded in the ash for a moment, then floundered as it tried to regain its feet. The arrow had struck its brain, but had not killed it instantly.
“Flee!” Borenson shouted, wheeling to see where Myrrima might be. She had already grabbed her reins and was urging her horse away from the reaver’s lines—not a moment too soon.
The wounded reaver struggled unsuccessfully to regain its feet, even as two of its kin raced out of the horde.
Borenson put heels to horseflesh and set his charger galloping over the blackened fields. Myrrima raced ahead. Before them, Sarka Kaul’s mount galloped like the wind. Borenson looked over his back. The wounded reaver was spinning about in circles while its comrades charged after him.
They were gaining on him.
Borenson had his little white mare on a tether, and was trying to lead her out. But she wasn’t as fast as his old warhorse. He considered cutting her loose. If nothing else, she might serve as a decoy for the reavers.
He glanced up toward Myrrima. She was drawing another arrow from her quiver, trying to nock it as she rode.
The reavers were gaining. He could hear their hissing breath closing in on him; their feet pounded the earth. Borenson had taken but one endowment of metabolism at Carris. Over the past few days, his facilitator had vectored him more. But he still moved more slowly than these reavers. He dared not face them with only a warhammer.
He peered ahead.
Myrrima was racing away from him, over the dun fields. Sarka Kaul still held the lead. The great smoke clouds above threw a broad shadow, so that it looked as if they fled beneath a storm. Her mount’s hooves threw up turfs, then leapt over the blackened limb of a fallen oak. Yet even as Myrrima fled, she held her reins in her teeth and nocked another arrow.
Borenson put heels to horseflesh and struggled to hold on. He clung to his long-handled warhammer. With so few endowments, he would not be able to use it effectively, but it was all that he had.
He could hear the reavers gaining, lurching forward, their massive bodies thudding with each step, weightier than elephants. Their hissing came loud.
Once, in his youth, Borenson had been to the shipyards on the north coast of Thwynn where King Orden’s warships were built. There a huge iron battering ram was being fashioned for the prow of a ship. It was longer than a mainmast. The shipwrights had said that much of the ram would be hidden within the hull of a small, fast vessel, built solely to ram and thus disable the big, heavily armored “floating castles” of Toom. Borenson had seen the new-forged ram lifted from its cast and levered into a ditch filled with oily water. When it touched the liquid, it hissed with the tongue of a thousand serpents and sent plumes of gray steam writhing into the air.
As the reavers advanced, their hissing reminded him of that now.
Ah, he thought, what I would not give for a good lance!
Suddenly he heard Myrrima cry out, and he looked ahead. She spun her horse about and was racing toward him.
“Watch out!” she warned.
Borenson let go the reins of his white mare, and she split to the left. In order to avoid colliding with Myrrima, he spurred his stallion to the right.
Myrrima raced between them, head down, charging the reavers, who were startled by her sudden attack.
The foremost skidded, trying to stop, its philia waving in alarm. Clouds of dust rose from its feet, and it raised a knight gig as if to gaff her horse. The light of distant fires flashed red on the long black pole. The reaver just behind it bungled on, striking it in the rear legs, so that the foremost reaver tripped.
Myrrima was nearly upon the tangled pair when she loosed an arrow. It blurred toward the foremost reaver and struck its sweet triangle with a thwack.
The monster pushed off with its back legs and leapt nearly straight in the air, its four back legs kicking as if it sought to run. Then it flipped forward and crashed headfirst into the ground.
The felled reaver did not get up. It lay facedown in the black ash, its rear legs kicking in vain.
Now there was only one reaver. Borenson wheeled his mount to face it.
The last reaver had drawn to a halt. Myrrima raced away behind it, and the huge blade-bearer spun to confront her. Yet Borenson was now charging at its back, and the reaver swiveled its head, trying to gauge the threat. Sarka Kaul found some courage and brought his own mount galloping toward the fray.
The monster leaned back on its rear legs and raised its claws, as if it were cowed. Two of its companions were dead, and it couldn’t tell whether Borenson, Myrrima, or Sarka Kaul represented the greater threat.
“Two hundred yards!” Myrrima shouted across the expanse.
She had now raced her horse about that distance from the last remaining reaver, and she wheeled her mount and drew an arrow from her quiver. Borenson suddenly understood what she meant to do.
Averan had said that a reaver’s limit of vision was two hundred yards. The reaver here could certainly smell them, but he couldn’t see them clearly at such a distance. Borenson, too, now retreated outside the reaver’s limit of vision while Sarka Kaul raced near, distracting the beast.
Myrrima took her great steel bow and drew back an arrow even with her ear. At such a distance, she had little hope of hitting the monster in its sweet triangle. Borenson wasn’t sure that her bolt would even pierce the reaver’s skin, no matter how sharp her bodkins.
She let her arrow fly. It arced up into the air and struck squarely in the reaver’s haunch, burying its head in the monster’s buttock.