Rialla herself was dead, and her men had doomed themselves. Footmen and archers who had been charging at her back suddenly turned and fled.
The frowth giants cried out in horror as the reavers lunged into their lines.
Raj Ahten’s men continued to advance, but their war cries had turned to wails of pain and despair. “Onward,” he cried, forcing them into battle like beasts of burden. From here it looked as if every foot they purchased, they bought with barrels of blood.
A meteor blazed overhead, sputtering so brightly that it shone even through the haze of war.
Borenson dropped to a crouch, and leaned against the stone wall of the shop. His mind whirled. He clutched his warhammer.
It’s the end of the world, Borenson thought.
41
The Heat of Battle
Learn to love all men equally, the cruel as well as the kind.
The path before Raj Ahten’s troops was black with reavers. Their blades and staves reflected firelight from the elementals at their backs. The philia on their heads waved like cobras. The colored smoke of their spells drifted through the battlefield in toxic clouds.
Their dead formed lurid mounds. He had spent many men to create those hills, hills that his troops could not easily climb. So they fell back and let the reavers come to them, slowing as they climbed over their own dead. His archers fired with their finest horn bows, piercing the sweet triangles of many of the reavers. Those that made it alive over the wall would have to face the most powerful lords of Indhopal.
Raj Ahten merely sat ahorse and watched. Hot blood thrilled through his veins, making him eager for battle. His men were fighting well, but he could see that they would not hold out long. His men were spending their lives too fast.
Only one thing could save them: Raj Ahten himself.
He needed them to know that. He needed to confront them with their own weakness, crush their hopes for the future, leave them debased and adrift. He needed their despair.
For only when they were bereft of hope would they begin to venerate the horrible light that filled him.
His common foot soldiers on the left flank had begun to fall back, weakened by spells and facing a particularly fierce counterassault by a dozen reaver mages that hurled blasting spells from behind their dead.
“Onward, you curs,” Raj Ahten shouted at his men. They jerked like marionettes, driven forward by virtue of his endowments of glamour and voice. “Climb over the dead, kill those mages.” Gree whipped over their heads like bats. His soldiers held their breath and charged to their deaths.
Raj Ahten surveyed the battle. Carris was destroyed. Reavers could be seen racing the length of its walls. The inhabitants had thrown themselves into the lake in a last-ditch effort to escape.
Queen Lowicker’s army to the north was nearly destroyed. King Anders’s flag flew safely behind the Barren’s Wall, while his men rushed in and threw themselves on the reavers.
Even the frowth giants roared in pain, and had begun a slow retreat.
The thwonk, thwonk, thwonk of ballistas from the lakefront now grew quiet, for the warlords of Internook had nearly spent their bolts, to little effect.
At the front lines, one great lord turned from the battle and called, “O Great One, save us! The battle is hopeless.”
“Fight on,” Raj Ahten insisted.
In the moments that followed, first one and then another lord took up the cry. “Help us, O Great One!”
He could hear the rising panic in their voices, the despair.
My time has come, he realized at last.
Ahead, the elementals of his flameweavers towered above the reavers. Clouds of fire-lit smoke billowed above them. They had lost all manly form, becoming mere monsters, mindless with pain, ravaged by the need to consume. They struck at the reavers blindly, hurling fireballs, lashing with whips of flame. Soon they would lose form altogether, becoming aimless in their desires.
Lust is a powerful force when skillfully focused. But these creatures wasted their strength.
Raj Ahten stretched out his hand, as if beckoning the elementals. With that gesture, he drew the heat from them in crimson cords that swirled about, whirling toward him like a tornado.
Thus he took their fire into himself.
It was too much for any man to hold. In an instant, heat blazed from every pore, and wrapped itself around him like a brilliant robe. His body armor melted like slag.
The huge gray imperial warhorse screamed beneath him and died. It fell to the ground instantly, its boiled guts gushing out beneath it.
Raj Ahten stepped lightly to the ground. He felt as if he had no weight at all. He was only brightness and flame now.
He stalked toward the reavers’ lines, and his men whirled. He could see them everywhere, their dark faces frozen in astonishment, like pebbles on the ground.
“Fear not,” he told them, “for I will vanquish all of your foes. My sword will fall upon the Earth, and night shall be no longer.”
Raj Ahten’s light was whiter than sunlight, and he strode easily now toward the battlefront, as if all of the stars in heaven had combined, and now a creature of starlight took shape.
A reaver broke through his lines, came crashing in among his men. Raj Ahten pointed his finger, sent a shaft of fire swirling through the air. It touched the reaver’s forehead, hit its sweet triangle.
The monster thudded to the ground as a smoking crater opened, revealing the brains that fried in its head. Raj Ahten sent a shaft toward another reaver, and another.
To kill them all would be child’s play.
But in a heartbeat, everything changed.
Suddenly, the world shook, and as soon as Raj Ahten became aware of it, the reavers began to hiss. He had never heard a sound like it. A million reavers wheezed at once, like the sound that a blade hot from the forge makes when it meets the water.
Every reaver hissed, expelling gas from its anus, and filling the world with a single, strange scent, a smell that reminded him of mold.
Every reaver turned from battle, throwing down its weapon. The monsters drew back from their human foes, each of them turning to face something in the thick of the battlefield, just before the gates of Carris.
Raj Ahten could not see what had transpired there. But as he peered, he saw a mound of earth rising up. A hillock appeared, gray earth and stone spilling up from the ground. Atop the knoll crouched a dozen wary figures, like tender sprouts.
Iome wore a crown that glowed like moonlight on water, and Gaborn wore a cape pin that shone like a lantern. Gaborn stood in the light, and held something speared to a reaver dart—a reaver’s philia, like the carcasses of wolf eels, gray and slimy.
He raised them aloft, and the reavers hissed and backed away en masse. All of them lowered their tail ends, dragging them on the ground.
Only one reaver dared confront him—the great fell mage that had marshaled the horde. She left her hillock some two hundred yards to the west, thundering toward Gaborn.
She held her head high, philia waving madly atop her regal cape, a livid crystalline staff in her hand. She drew near tentatively, as if undecided on how to do battle.
Gaborn merely raised his left hand and pointed south.
The reaver gazed toward him a moment, raised its massive head as if scenting the air like a hound, and then peered south. She seemed to take his meaning: “Your master is dead. Go home. Return to the Underworld.”