Yet as the King's far-seer, Sir Millman, watched the escalade, he suspected that some of those assassins were moving at three times the normal human rate. Men so endowed would be decrepit in ten years, dead in fifteen.
And only men with inhuman strength could climb those walls, prying with toes and fingers to grip at cracks in the stone. Sir Millman couldn't even guess how many endowments of brawn each assassin had.
Millman had been watching from inside the King's Tower. With endowments of sight from seven men, he was well qualified for this post. Now he called softly at the door to the King's chamber, “Milord, our guests have arrived.”
King Sylvarresta had been sitting in his father's favorite old reading chair, his back to the wall, studying the tome of Emir Owatt of Tuulistan, trying to decipher which of Raj Ahten's battle tactics were so original that he'd kill to keep them secret.
Now Sylvarresta blew out his lantern, went to the oriel, and gazed out a clear pane in the stained-glass window. The window was so old that the glass was all wavy and distorted, had flowed down like lumps of melted butter.
The assassins had just reached the final defensive wall in Castle Sylvarresta, the wall of the Dedicates' Keep, which housed those people who had granted endowments to House Sylvarresta, for the use of the King's family and soldiers.
So, Raj Ahten's assassins came to destroy Sylvarresta's Dedicates, murder those whose minds and strength and vitality fed the King's forces.
It was a vile deed. The Dedicates could not protect themselves. The brilliant young men who'd given endowments of wit no longer knew their right hands from their left. Those who had granted brawn now lay like babes, too weak to climb from their beds. It was craven to kill Dedicates. Yet, sadly, too often it was the easiest way to assail a Runelord. By murdering those who constantly fed a Runelord strength and support, one deprived the lord of his powers, making him into a common man.
As the attack progressed, Sylvarresta barely had time to marshal his defenders. Boiling oil had been lugged up to the wall-walk shortly after dark. Though the normal complement of three guards marched along the Parapet, a dozen more crouched behind the battlements out of sight.
Still, defenders needed to be warned. Archers manned the towers; soldiers hiding in the city needed to be notified so that they could cut off the assassins' escape.
From behind his stained-glass window, Sylvarresta watched the assassins reach the halfway point on the stone wall of the keep; then the King opened the window and blew a soft, shrill whistle.
As one, his soldiers leapt up and poured oil down the keep's walls, tossing great iron cauldrons over as they emptied. The oil did not have the desired effect. It had cooled too much since sunset, and though the assassins cried in dismay at their burns and some plummeted when swept from the walls by falling cauldrons, more than twenty still scrambled up the walls, swift as lizards.
The guards atop the Dedicates' Keep drew swords and pikes. From the King's Keep, some hundred yards distant, archers let arrows fly. A few more assassins plummeted, but Raj Ahten's knights were frighteningly swift, terrifyingly determined.
King Sylvarresta had imagined the assassins would run when they met resistance. Instead they scurried faster, reaching the tops of the parapet, where razor wire hindered them. Sylvarresta's soldiers hacked at the assassins, so that a dozen more plummeted from the keep's tower.
Still, seven assassins won the top of the tower, where their incredible skills as fighters came into play. The assassins moved so swiftly, Sylvarresta's men could not well defend themselves. Yet four more assassins got cut down, while a dozen defenders were slaughtered.
The three remaining assassins hurtled down the steps into the Dedicates' Keep—just as the King's pikemen rushed from the guardroom beneath the portcullis.
The assassins ignored the guards, instead leapt to the iron grate that covered one low door to the Dedicates' Hall. Though the door was barred with heavy iron, two assassins grabbed a bar and pulled, ripping it from the wall, dislodging two-hundred-pound stones set with mortar.
The third assassin faced the pikemen, ready to defend.
But these pikemen were no common soldiers.
Captain Derrow and Captain Ault came, side by side, holding back nothing. Captain Ault stabbed at the assassin's head, a lightning thrust.
The assassin dodged, his own short sword snaking out, biting Ault's gloved hand. The assassin was a dark monster, draped in robes of black, a man whose speed astonished. He shifted on his feet, weaving from side to side so quickly that no commoner could have landed a blow. He drew a second knife, his hands whirling in the deadly Dancing Arms style.
In that second, the door to the Dedicates' Keep screamed as if in agony.
The two assassins pulled the door wide. One assassin bolted through the door.
Captain Derrow swung his pike as if it were an axe. An assassin by the door took a firm knock to the head.
The assassin guard ducked. Ault anticipated his move and lunged. Ault slammed the pike into the man's chest, then lifted, flinging the assassin up and aside.
Ault tossed away the pike, drew a long dagger, and bolted into the Dedicates' Keep.
Inside, Ault found that the last assassin had already slaughtered two guards posted by the door, then had run into the hall, felling some five or six Dedicates who should have been abed. Even now, the assassin knelt over a victim, scimitar in hand.
Ault threw his short sword, caught the assassin solidly in the back. Had the assassin been a commoner, he'd have collapsed. Had he been an angered man with great stamina, he'd have turned and gone berserk.
What the assassin did next chilled Ault to the bone.
The assassin turned, all dressed in a black caftan and black cotton pants, a black kerchief hiding his face. A gold ring glittered in his ear.
He studied Ault thoughtfully, eyes filled with deadly intent. Ault's heart pounded, for he wondered how many endowments of stamina it took for a man to ignore a sword in his back.
A dozen soldiers rushed through the broken door, filling the Dedicates' Keep. Ault took a hammer from a dead guard.
The assassin looked Captain Ault in the eye, then raised his hands. He said in a thick accent, “Barbarian: As you see this tide of men sweep over me, so shall my lord's Invincibles sweep over you!”
Raj Ahten's Invincibles were elite troops—men with great stamina, each of whom had at least one endowment of metabolism. The assassin made as if to charge. Yet Ault knew it would be a feint. Having won through to the Dedicates' Keep, the assassin would now continue with his duty, to slay as many Dedicates as possible.
Ault lunged, swinging his hammer, just as the assassin spun toward the beds of the sleeping. The warhammer bit into the assassin's neck.
“Don't bet on it,” Ault said.
In his keep, King Sylvarresta felt the deaths of his Dedicates as he began to lose his magical connection to them. It was a nauseating sensation, like a cold snake writhing through his innards. Men who had endowed him with wit died, and Sylvarresta was assailed by a sudden emptiness as rooms of memory closed off forever.
He'd never know what he'd lost—memories of friends from childhood or a picnic in the forest, memories of important sword strokes practiced time and again with his father, or a perfect sunset, or a wife's kiss.
He only became aware that he was sundered. The doors to the rooms of memory slammed shut. The shutters to the windows fell. And in his mind there was a great moment of darkness, a keen sense of loss.
As he rushed downstairs to guard his Dedicates himself if need be, he felt as if he wallowed through the darkness.
A minute later, Sylvarresta reached the Dedicates' Bailey, counted his losses. Ten guards dead, five wounded. And five Dedicates lost.