“Thirty, maybe forty miles,” Pitts replied.
The news chilled Borenson. Forty miles to the front? And their line extended south for as far as the eye could see.
“How far to the back of their lines?” Myrrima asked.
“Hard to say,” Pitts replied. “Some make it a hundred miles, others a hundred and twenty.” Borenson was still trying to guess how huge the horde might be, but Pitts was well ahead of him. “There may be a million of them,” Pitts said grimly. “We don’t have enough lances to take them all, not even a twentieth. The Earth King used them all last week. So we’re concentrating on their leaders. Their fell mage is well protected, near the front of the lines. It has been a bloody row.” His voice sounded shaken as he said this. “We’ve lost lots of men already. Sir Langley of Orwynne has fallen.”
“By the Powers!” Borenson swore.
“How are we to fight them,” Myrrima asked, “without lances?”
“We’ll fight them on the ground, at the gates of Carris,” Pitts said. “We’ll use warhammers and reaver darts, and resort to fingernails if we have to. But we’ll fight.” His sentiments were as foolish as they were brave.
“Chondler knows more tricks than a trained bear,” Pitts said. “Go to Carris, and see for yourself!”
“It will take more than a trained bear to win Carris,” Sarka Kaul said. Borenson glanced back. Sarka Kaul looked ominous upon his red horse, his face draped with a black hood. His voice seemed almost disembodied. “But be of good cheer. Young King Orwynne is riding into the city gates even now with three thousand men at his back. He has found his courage at last.”
Pitts peered hard at the figure all draped in black robes. He asked Borenson. “Who’s your friend?”
“Sarka Kaul,” Borenson said, “meet Sir Pitts.”
“An Inkarran?” Pitts asked in wonder, clenching his lance. “What’s he doing here?”
“I go to fight in Carris, friend,” Sarka Kaul answered.
Pitts barked in laughter. “Well then, I hope to meet you there!”
“Come before the darkness falls,” Sarka Kaul said.
Borenson and Myrrima spurred their horses on. Ahead the land grew dark. Columns of smoke roiled upward, creating a vast curtain that leached all light from the plains. The marching of reavers caused the earth to tremble, as if the ground would shatter beneath them.
Borenson, Myrrima, and Sarka Kaul were nearly to Mangan’s Rock before they reached the head of the reaver horde. There, knights on tired mounts raced across the reavers’ path, setting torch to every blade of grass, every copse of scrub and bracken, every tree.
The flames roared to heaven and smoke blackened the skies. The light grew faint indeed, for by now the sun slanted low to the west, and here the dense forests of the Hest Mountains were wet so that the smoke that roiled up from that furnace was inky black and laden with soot.
Still there was no sign of any cavalry. The group passed beyond the vale of fire into the mountains, racing their horses. They stopped on a southern slope for a while, in the cool shadow of a rowan, and glimpsed the sun for the first time in hours. Even here, beyond the line of smoke, the sun glimmered like a hot coal in a torrid sky. High up, the smoke acted as a lens that colored the world in shades of ash.
So they hurried over the mountains, down through lesser towns, into the dead lands blasted by reaver curses, where at last they saw Carris gleaming upon the banks of Lake Donnestgree.
Here, the green fields had all gone gray a week ago. Vines and trees lay in twisted ruin. Every blade of grass had withered. Nothing lived. Even the crows and vultures had fled. Only the corpses of rotting reavers, monoliths, their mouths frozen wide in a rictus smile that brimmed with teeth, offered mute testimony to what had happened here.
For a moment as Borenson rode into the blasted lands, he had an odd sensation. He felt as if instead of riding from Fenraven to Carris, he was riding from the past into the future. Behind him lay the sweet green fields of the world he had known. Ahead lay rot and oblivion.
Sarka Kaul sniffed the fields. Borenson could smell old reaver curses on the dead ground. “See no more.”
“Be thou dry as dust.” The ground seemed to whisper the curses. “Rot, O thou child of men!”
“Those who saw the battle tried to describe it,” Sarka Kaul whispered, as he stared out across the killing fields, “but words failed them. I could not envision this. I couldn’t imagine how wide the destruction went, or how perfectly it had been carried out.”
Borenson spat onto grass that was as gray as ash. “No rain here in a week. A stinking inferno this shall all make.”
As the three approached Carris, the sun slowly descended beyond the rim of the world, hidden behind towers of billowing smoke. The wind was ominously still, and the heat that rose from the soil leached the stink from the blasted lands and left it hovering in a fetid haze. To the west the foothills were all gray with decay, and to the east Lake Donnestgree lay flat and dull. Not a single wave rippled across its surface. Gone were the seagulls that had winged above its shore a week past.
Ahead, Carris was a city of ruins. The plaster had all cracked from the castle walls, so that only a few bright strips still gleamed above the gray stone. The walls had buckled and bulged. Gone were the doves and pigeons that had wheeled above Castle Carris like confetti.
It was a far fairer sight that greeted my father’s eyes, Borenson thought.
Why Carris? Borenson wondered. Why would the reavers attack it again? There is nothing here worth winning, nothing worth defending. Yet we keep on fighting, like a pair of crabs squabbling over a worthless rock.
Unless there is something here that the reavers value? he wondered.
But what it might be, he could not guess. The land was a broken waste.
Still the armies had gathered. A million reavers were marching from the south, while men and women paced along the cracked castle walls, armor gleaming dully like the backs of beetles in the dying light.
Borenson caught wind of a noxious odor, and noted that to his right were the trenches that the reavers had made to channel water from the lake. The reavers had thrown in some huge yellow stones.
At the time no one had comprehended what the reavers were doing. It wasn’t until Averan explained that reavers could only drink water rich in sulfur that anyone had understood: the monsters were creating drinking water.
But now the ditches were filled with lumps of white lye soap, brown human turds, and an oily scum that colored the water’s surface. Chondler’s men had poisoned it so badly that even a whiff of the putrid mix made Borenson’s eyes burn.
“Even if the reavers manage to win Carris,” Myrrima said, “I don’t think that they’ll be enjoying their stay.”
The sun dipped behind the peaks, and suddenly the black plains plunged into near darkness. Borenson heard a cry rise up from the city, and he glanced back to the south.
A rim of fire could be seen on the mountaintops, twenty miles behind, and columns of smoke rose straight up like the black boles of vast trees. High in the atmosphere, the smoke spread like a mushroom cap, or like the limbs of an oak. Already, clouds of smoke arched overhead.
But it was not the encroaching darkness that caused the cries of alarm. There, in the distance, behind the rim of fire, reavers marched in a broad band, and raced down the mountainside like a black cataract. The distant hissing of their breathing and the pounding of their feet made it sound as if a dam had broken, and trees and boulders tumbled in the glut of the flood.
The city of Carris squatted on an isle out in Lake Donnestgree. The city was more than two miles long from north to south, and a little over a mile wide at its widest point. One could only reach it by boat or by walking up a narrow road that led over a long causeway.
Here on the causeway a week ago, towers and gates had guarded the city. But the reavers had pushed the towers over and thrown down the city gates, and Marshal Chondler, despite all his good intentions, had not had time to replace them.