Two more young reavers dropped from the castle wall, while a third climbed over the rampart, ignoring the flames.
There is a difference between bravery and foolishness, Borenson knew. He was cut off from Myrrima. He dove through the window of the nearest merchant’s shop and raced through a back room while a reaver gave chase. The reaver bulled into the shop’s wall, and the building collapsed as Borenson exited out back, into a narrow alley called Bleak Street.
The street was too narrow for an adult reaver to negotiate easily, but a juvenile came rushing toward him.
He ran to the nearest door, found it bolted. Borenson lowered his shoulder and hit the door. It shattered, and he tumbled in.
He stood for an instant, wondering what to do. The reavers would come after him any second. He bounded across the room, heading for a back door.
He felt a wrenching in his gut, as if something vital had torn away, and realized that one of his Dedicates had died.
It could mean only one thing: Reavers hunted uphill where his Dedicates hid in the tombs beneath Paldane’s Palace.
Deep in the Underworld, Iome stabbed with her javelin, and another reaver died, her fifth kill.
Across the black chamber, Gaborn yelped.
She looked up.
“Gasht!” A curse boiled from the One True Master’s staff. Gaborn flung himself away, a shadow in the darkness, moving so fast that for a moment he seemed to vanish.
The One True Master became mindful of her. The reaver lord lurched back from Gaborn and scrambled to cut off Iome’s advance. Tendrils of darkness, like a wispy fog, flowed out from the monster’s feet, surging toward Iome.
Gaborn howled like an animal, leaping to attack. He raced to the One True Master, moving so fast that Iome could not track him as he stabbed her in the thorax.
The creature whirled to face him, cracking her whip. For a moment she blurred, and the surging fog halted in its progress.
Iome kept racing toward a knot of reavers, where a strong light burned, bounding over Dedicates both living and dead. “Gasht!” a spell hurtled from the monster’s staff, a dark cloud of destruction.
“Jump!” Gaborn shouted.
Iome sprang thirty feet in the air, somersaulting as she did. A funnel of destruction, glittering like ash, touched the ground where she had stood, blasting several reavers to oblivion, smiting the floor so that flakes of stone and dust flew up beneath her.
The wind was a tumult as she fell.
Iome came down into the mess. Her left ankle twisted violently, and she cried out in pain. She crawled to her knees and used her reaver dart as a staff to hobble into the midst of the reavers. One struck out at her, and she dodged its blow.
Their bodies formed an almost solid wall. They moved so slowly that they almost seemed to be monoliths. Iome passed beneath their shadows as if into a dark wooded dell. For a moment she was reminded of the glade amidst the Seven Standing Stones of Heredon, where Binnesman had raised his wylde.
But amid these monoliths, there was no vast reservoir of Earth Power, nothing so grand and glorious.
Sir Borenson gripped his warhammer in bloody hands and stood panting in some poor merchant’s hovel. Outside, reavers raged through Carris, knocking down buildings, digging through rubble. The death screams rose, a continuous wail of fear and pain all across the island.
Smoke filled the air as the whole district went up in flames.
And he could do nothing to stop it. In the past few moments, his Dedicates had all been slain, stripped from him.
Without his endowments of brawn, his armor weighed like an anvil about his shoulders, and his long-handled hammer proved so unwieldy that he could hardly swing it.
Without stamina, he felt sick near to death. The exertions of the past few days had taken their toll—his ride to Inkarra and back, the torture he had endured at the hand of King Criomethes. His legs felt so worn that they threatened to collapse beneath him.
He wanted to work up some strength, to go across the street and hunt for Myrrima, the reavers be damned. If she was alive still, perhaps he could help her. And if she had died, then he had no reason to live out the day.
Strength is an illusion, he thought in his torment.
Twice now in his life, Dedicates had been torn from him, dozens of good men and women killed in an effort to prove him weak.
Screaming a war cry, he grabbed his weapon and burst out into the night.
Flames licked the sky in every direction, and smoke reflected the light in such a way that it seemed that the heavens had taken fire. It was brighter than dawn.
Almost directly overhead, Borenson saw a great balloon hundreds of feet above, nearly lost in smoke, a balloon shaped like a graak in flight. It floated in eerie silence.
At the far north of the island, trumpets blared wildly, calling once again for the folk of Carris to retreat.
A sudden roar shook the earth, like rising thunder. The earth began to quiver beneath his feet. Buildings trembled as if a giant jarred their foundations.
A reaver barreled down the street at the end of the alley, a juvenile blade-bearer, with grotesquely long legs and a small head.
It skidded to a halt and whirled, its philia writhing as it spotted Borenson. It opened its maw and charged.
“Death!” Borenson roared as he raised his hammer and rushed to meet it.
Raj Ahten looked down on Carris from a far hill.
The city was an inferno. Reavers thundered everywhere, slamming into homes like battering rams, raking through the rubble to pull out anyone who might still be alive. On the north end of the island, horns desperately blew a call for retreat while people climbed the castle walls and flung themselves into Lake Donnestgree.
But they couldn’t climb the ladders and tower steps fast enough to escape, and so they crowded the walls in a seething mass, trampling one another in their terror. Some tried to fight back as the reavers advanced, shooting with their puny bows or raising their weapons, but the reavers waded into them. As well might hens try to fight when the hollow wolf is in the pens.
The speed at which the reavers overwhelmed Carris astonished him. Powerful lords had protected the gates, but the young reavers merely sprang over them or slammed into them, grinding them to ruin.
Men were no match for such monsters.
Above the city, Raj Ahten’s spy balloon wafted on hot thermals. He could hear the whispering thoughts of his flameweavers, exulting. Sweet-smelling smoke roiled upward in great clouds, enticing them to battle. Their gondolas were loaded with arcane powders made of sulfur, potash, and herbs, brought from the south of Indhopal just for this night. “Give us the signal,” their thoughts whispered, “and we will drop our load.”
“Patience,” he whispered in return. The balloon had been drifting toward the reavers’ fell mage as she squatted in the midst of a great rune, her Seal of Desolation.
As the wind carried the balloon toward the seal, he whispered, letting the Power of Fire carry his words to his flameweavers. “Now let the heavens blaze!”
The flameweavers rejoiced, crying in tongues of flame, “Long live Scathain, Lord of Ash!”
Three miles north of Carris stood the Barren’s Wall, a rampart that rose chest high and spanned from Lake Donnestgree in the east to the Alcair Mountains some dozen miles to the west.
King Anders’s troops came up behind it, riding hard in the darkness, only to find Queen Rialla Lowicker’s army, more than a hundred thousand strong, huddled in its lee. Ballistas by the hundreds were ranged higher on the hill, to help hold back any charge by the reavers, while archers and footmen manned the wall. Lowicker’s intent seemed obvious: she would hold the wall if the reavers sought to range north.
Beyond the wall, Carris flamed. Horns blared on the castle walls as the folk of Carris called for help, yet the screams of the dying overwhelmed the horns.