Borenson peered down through a broken battlement to the scene directly below. Dead reavers lay piled before the city gates, blocking the street. The corpses were stacked two or three deep, attesting to the fact that the archers and champions at the gate had made the reavers pay a toll for crossing the bridge.
But it had not been much of a toll.
Sarka Kaul, Captain Tempest, and a dozen other fierce Runelords were already climbing over the bodies, sprinting to help Gaborn.
Borenson launched himself from the broken tower onto the back of a reaver, a drop of some twenty feet, and tried to ignore the pain that shot through both ankles on landing.
He raced to reach the other warriors. Several of them were already approaching Gaborn’s back.
Borenson shouted to the men, “I want the first swing!”
The men fanned out quickly, stalking toward Raj Ahten. Dead reavers littered the battlefield here, so near the causeway. Most were impaled with ballista bolts.
Borenson headed toward the flameweaver, his heart hammering.
Raj Ahten, he told himself. It’s Raj Ahten.
But looks belied the creature. It wasn’t Raj Ahten. It was something more. Even at hundreds of yards, he could feel the heat rising from the monster, hotter than the blast of any forge.
Borenson rushed behind a dead reaver, using its shadow to keep cool as he sought to draw near. Around him, others did the same. Silently, warriors crept about in the shadows thrown by dead reavers, ringing Raj Ahten as dogs ring a bear. Some had nocked arrows in bows. Others held long spears or warhammers. Borenson noted that the men wore armor from several nations—Mystarria, Heredon, Orwynne, and Indhopal.
And more men were rushing over the causeway at Gaborn’s back.
“Come ahead, little men,” Raj Ahten shouted. He stood among a knot of dead reavers. “The first to attack will be the first to die.”
One archer burst from cover and took aim at Raj Ahten’s back.
“Raj Ahten, beware!” Gaborn shouted.
The archer loosed his arrow.
Raj Ahten whirled and stretched forth his hand. Coiling ropes of white fire flowed from it, incinerating the arrow in its flight. Then the fire traveled on.
At such a short distance, the archer had no time to escape. The coils whipped about him. His robes and hair flashed into incandescence, and his flesh burned an oily green. He stood like a living torch, crying out in agony.
Borenson had heard of such curses. Spells of flesh-burning were the stuff of legend.
Borenson peered toward Gaborn, who sat cross-legged on the ground, now a scant two hundred yards from Raj Ahten.
“I warn you one last time,” Gaborn said to the flameweaver. “Turn back now.”
At Raj Ahten’s back, Sarka Kaul suddenly appeared from behind a huge reaver, whose legs rose up like the trunks of trees. The Inkarran Days, his face reflecting the fierce light of Raj Ahten, sprang a dozen yards and thrust with his long knife.
But the heat roiling off Raj Ahten was so intense, that Sarka Kaul succumbed a dozen feet from his target.
He dropped to one knee, weakened by the heat, and his clothes burst into flames.
Borenson ducked back under cover, behind a dead reaver’s head, and grasped his battle-ax, thinking.
I’ll have to throw my weapon, he decided. But he’d lost his endowments of brawn, and he knew that he could not hurl the weapon more than thirty or forty feet now.
Suddenly, from atop a nearby reaver, a commanding voice cried out. “Lord of Ash,” the Wizard Binnesman intoned. “Leave here! I warn you one last time.”
The flaming monster whirled and peered at the Earth Warden. The wizard stood with his staff in hand, held protectively high above. His robes billowed out, blowing in the evening breeze.
Raj Ahten laughed. “You cannot harm me with that old tree limb. I am beyond your power!”
“That may well be,” Binnesman intoned. “But you are not beyond hers!”
Binnesman dropped his arms, and suddenly Borenson saw Myrrima hidden there behind his robe, her bow drawn to the full. Borenson’s heart hammered wildly in relief to see her alive. She was bloody and wet, as if she had just come out of the lake, and Borenson realized that she must have dived to safety when the tower collapsed.
She let an arrow fly.
It blurred in its speed.
Gaborn shouted, “Raj Ahten, dodge!”
Raj Ahten saw the arrow blur toward him, and heard Gaborn’s warning at the same moment. He heard, but refused to humor the little man.
He had no time to concentrate his energies, consume the arrow. Instead he reached up to catch it before it could bury itself in his eye.
He caught the shaft, and only then realized his mistake.
A force struck him, a Power irresistible.
He caught the arrow, and felt as if it shattered every bone in his arm. The flames that had encircled him, caressed him, suddenly guttered and died. The heat leached from him in an instant, and Raj Ahten stood naked but for the scars of thousands of runes matted over his body.
It was as if an impenetrable wall had formed between him and the source of his Power. Only then did he realize that the arrow had never been meant to pierce him. Far more disastrous were the runes that had been written on its shaft with water.
“No!” Raj Ahten bellowed. The sound of his voice, amplified by thousands of endowments, echoed over the low hills.
“Take him down,” Myrrima shouted, “before my spell wears off!”
Suddenly men sprang out from the shadows at every turn. Arrows whizzed toward Raj Ahten, while men with spears and battle-axes charged to meet him.
I am no coward, Raj Ahten told himself, to be chased off by pups like these. I am a Runelord still!
He batted aside the first two arrows that neared him, pulled the spear from the hand of the first man to attack, and hit the fellow hard enough to crush his skull.
Whirling, he faced to meet his enemies.
In the palace at Ghusa, Balimar had been lying in the Dedicates’ Keep. The ceiling rose high, some twenty feet, and soaring marble arches showed what had once been an open-air courtyard. But Raj Ahten had walled it in with cheap mud bricks, so that more Dedicates could be housed here.
Balimar’s heart had pounded as he reached into the bandage on his hip, grasped the hilt of a long, narrow dagger that lay concealed there.
It had been easy to fake giving an endowment. As a warrior among the Ah’Kellah, he had taken enough endowments himself. He had seen how the Dedicates sweated as the forcibles were pressed to their bare flesh, how they swayed and cried out as the endowment was taken, how their eyes rolled back and they fell senseless to the ground afterward. So he had feigned giving the endowment. The scars of the forcible were upon him, but in his heart, he had only hatred to give to Raj Ahten.
His face betrayed no emotion, though he grinned inwardly. Raj Ahten’s endless appetite for endowments would be his own undoing. His facilitators were working so hard to strip attributes from the local villagers that they had not even bothered to question the street urchins whom Balimar had bribed to pretend that he was their brother.
He had let the facilitators carry him into the innermost sanctuary of the keep, among the Dedicates. They were an ailing lot. He could hear them coughing, see them limping about.
The facilitators had tossed Balimar to the ground like a rag, throwing him near the door, simply because the Keep was so full.
Now, outside, a ram’s horn blew three long blasts—Wuqaz Faharaqin’s call to battle. It was a mere feint. Wuqaz and thirty men would ride to the gate, shoot arrows at the guards, killing as many as they could.
Indeed, even as Balimar lay there, a death cry arose, and horses began to scream.
Two guards within the Keep rushed toward the door. Their leader shouted, “We’re under attack! Bar the gate behind me.” He rushed through.
The second guard was occupied for a moment, pulling the huge iron gates closed, placing the iron bar across it.