CHAPTER 58.

THE UNWORTHY.

Raj Ahten was not surprised to learn that the boy Gaborn sought to rescue Carris even from the reavers. It was an ill-considered move, as foolish as it was daring and chivalrous--an act of self-sacrifice from a weak-minded idealist.

He sprinted up the steps of a tower, looked to the north.

On the plains, Knights Equitable pinwheeled at the base of Bone Hill. Elsewhere, some thousand knights charged across the downs to the south, drawing away the reavers' forces, as did another contingent to the north.

Raj Ahten almost wanted to congratulate Gaborn. He'd done a fine job of spreading the reavers thin and baffling their lines.

He watched Gaborn's knights struggle toward Bone Hill, saw the world shiver around them, tearing stumps from the ground, hurling dirt and stones in the air, burying some reavers, tossing others from their burrows, and raising a sound a hundred times louder than the rolling of thunder.

For some reason that he could not understand, Raj Ahten had never been able to see Gaborn. A spell lay on the lad, one that hid him from Raj Ahten's view. But the Wolf Lord knew that he was out there.

He felt the quake strike Carris, set the walls to weaving like a drunkard, while those around him cried out.

Only the Earth King could have loosed. such a monstrosity. In the s.p.a.ce of a heartbeat, Raj Ahten saw the danger. It would level the city.

Almost as soon as the quake struck, Raj Ahten heard Gaborn's voice ring through his mind as he performed the Choosing.

So, Earth King, Raj Ahten wondered; you bless me and curse me in the same breath?

Gaborn's troops began to advance on Bone Hill and the fell mage. He rode with two thousand knights at his back, as if hoping that such a desperately small force might, by good fortune, strike a lucky blow.

A black wind rolled over Carris, bringing the fell mage's latest curse.

Raj Ahten tasted the scent, felt fatigue sap his strength like never before, and translated it thus: "Be thou weary unto death."

Yes, it was a powerful spell. If it were uttered against commoners at close range, Raj Ahten did not doubt that men would collapse with hearts too weak to beat, lungs too exhausted to draw another breath.

On the castle walls around him, many commoners dropped, too stricken to stand.

But Raj Ahten was no commoner.

As Gaborn's knights in their pinwheel slowly gravitated south, blade-bearers began to ama.s.s against Gaborn. Perhaps dismayed by the earthquake, they had turned and charged round both sides of Bone Hill. Indeed, the reavers close to Carris itself were wheeling to meet this new threat.

Gaborn would never repel the attack, Raj Ahten could see. The reavers' lines were too thick. In the battle for Carris, Raj Ahten imagined that no more than five hundred reavers had died so far. Twenty thousand reavers were still left to charge north. In moments they would crush Gaborn's troops, rend him to pieces.

"Flee! Flee Carris," Gaborn's command rang through Raj Ahten's mind. "Flee for your lives."

Even as the Earth King spoke, Raj Ahten recognized the folly in listening. The walls of Carris would come down, true, and many men would die. But they'd die regardless of whether they charged the reavers.

"The clever b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Raj Ahten hissed. He saw the lad's ploy now: Gaborn merely sought to use Raj Ahten and his men as p.a.w.ns, as a distraction, to draw the reavers from himself.

Raj Ahten was far too cunning to fall for such a ruse.

Raj Ahten's Invincibles had already withdrawn from the battle. "Stand fast!" Raj Ahten shouted to his men. To Paladane's men, he called, "Hold the breach!"

The Earth King will die here, Raj Ahten told himself, and I...I will idly watch.

Yet as Raj Ahten glanced down at the breach, he realized that Paladane's men suddenly fought as fiercely as reavers themselves. At first he imagined that desperation lent them strength. But it was obvious that an unseen power guided them. These were commoners and warriors of unfortunate proportion. He watched one commoner bait a reaver, stand for it to take a whack with its sword, then leap aside instantly. In the brief opening, two better men lunged forward with axes and took off the reaver's arm. As, the monster screamed, one quick fellow jumped into its mouth and thrust a longsword through its palate, into its brain. Before the beast ever fell, Paladane's men rushed forward to take on the next comer.

His men lunged quickly to take advantage of exposed targets, avoided reaver's blows. They ch.o.r.eographed thrusts and parries, so that the battle suddenly became something more than a frenzied free-for-all.

Now it seemed a macabre and deadly dance.

To Raj Ahten's wonder, Paladane's men began fighting so effectively that the reavers at the gates hesitated, withdrew in confusion, unwilling to withstand the slaughter.

Paladane's men closed ranks. Along the walls, men leapt down atop the mound of carca.s.ses and raced forward, forced reavers back to the causeway.

Everywhere in the castle, commoners staggered down the wall-walks, heading for the bailey, trying to obey Gaborn's command to flee the castle. Others threw themselves over the walls into the lake.

Carris was enormous, with nearly four hundred thousand troops on the walls and as many commoners within the city proper. Now these people spilled out into every narrow street, fleeing the quakes.

"Hold!" Raj Ahten shouted to them. "Stand fast, I say!" His Voice was so powerful and seductive that his words slipped like a dagger into the subconscious minds of Paladane's men, and soon most of them began to hold their positions.

I will not be ill-used, Raj Ahten told himself..

He smiled grimly and shouted across the distance, with a voice so powerful that even Gaborn could not fail to hear. "We are enemies still, son of Orden!"

Roland thought he heard dogs barking and snarling. He found himself in a tree carved of stone, perched high above the ground.

In a daze, he struggled to raise his head, saw huge reavers racing through the branches above, teeth flashing. An overwhelming fatigue smote him. He fell back. The tree shuddered below, and he heard its great bole snap under so much weight.

"The walls will come down! The walls are coming down!" someone. shouted distantly. Raj Ahten's Voice rolled through the woods, "To me! To me!"

Men screamed and died, and nearby Roland heard a woman shouting for help. He glanced down from his perch of stone and saw Baron Poll's familiar face, leering up at him.

"Help," Roland called weakly.

The Baron laughed. "Help? You want the help of a dead man? What would you give me?"

"Please..." Roland said.

"Not until you call me 'sirrah,"' Baron Poll said smugly.

"Please, sirrah," Roland begged.

"Now if only your son would say that word," Baron Poll laughed. He turned his horse and rode away through a misty field.

Distantly he heard men screaming, heard the rattling breath of reavers. He felt in great pain, almost past caring.

Light flashed overhead, flames dancing in a burning tower.

Roland opened his eyes, lay for a long time looking at his arm. It was wrapped in a b.l.o.o.d.y bandage. Men lay dead all around; gore splattered the merlons above him. The white plaster walls of Carris were turning crimson.

Gloom filled the sky. Feathery flakes of snow fell like ashes. No, he realized, they were ashes: Roland closed his eyes, for it pained him to look. It was nearly dark. Roland judged that he'd been unconscious for an hour or more.

He heard a baby crying, lolled his head to the side. Down in the courtyard just below, a young woman in a gray-blue robe had come out of the back of the manor, and she clucked softly as she tried to shush her fretting child.

Painfully, Roland gathered his strength and rolled to his stomach. Blood began to leak from his bandaged arm. He climbed to his knees and held his arm for along moment, stanching his wound, trying to make sense of what he saw.

No one was left alive on the south wall with him. Bodies by the thousands lay strewn along it, nearly all human, though a few reavers lay in the mix. Ashes and soot fell from the cold air.

The castle walls were swaying, stones grinding against stone. "I Choose you. I Choose you for the Earth," a voice whispered in Roland's mind. "Flee!"

Roland heard the call distantly, through the tattered remnants of a nightmare of pain. He struggled to comprehend it.

He glanced around. Everyone's killed, he thought. But no, he decided, the wall had been abandoned. The walls were bucking, plaster and stones falling from them.

He looked into the castle. The front gates were down, along with both gate towers. Reavers had broken into the castle. The men of Carris struggled for their lives down in the bailey; clambered up a mound of dead reavers in an effort to retake the causeway. A few frowth giants fought ferociously at their backs.

The plain before Carris was black with bodies--gray reavers by the dull thousands. At the foot of Bone Hill, a human host fought. Hundreds of knights whirled their mounts. in a slow-moving pinwheel, lances bristling.

Lances shattered as men met reavers. Horses stumbled with their knights. Blades and glory hammers rose and fell in deadly arcs.

In the midst of the pinwheel, a flag blew in the stiff wind: the green man of Mystarria, King Orden's standard.

At the center of a tiny knot, Roland saw the Earth King himself, Gaborn Val Orden, staggering toward the fell mage at Bone Hill. Guards circled him in a knot, and Roland's. heart swelled to imagine that his son would be among them. Ah, if only Averan were here to see this!

It's true, Roland realized. The voice I heard in the dream...the Earth King has Chosen me.

Why? Roland wondered. Why me? Surely I am not worthy. I am a murderer: A worthless commoner. I am no warrior.

Roland was not given to fantasies. Even if he had been a fantasist, he'd not have imagined the Earth King Choosing him.

Suddenly he found tears streaming down his cheeks, and Roland wondered how he might best repay the gift. "Thank you," he whispered, unsure whether the Earth King could hear him.

In that moment a gray wind swept over the castle walls, sending gree swirling like ashes in a flume, bearing the odor of the reaver's curse.

Roland felt weak from his wounds, had hardly made it to his knees. Now the curse wracked him with a lethargy that sapped all his will.

He succ.u.mbed atop the wall-walk, felt it swaying. He could not muster the energy to cry for help, to draw a breath, or even to blink.

CHAPTER 59.

UNEXPECTED RELATIONS.

Four miles from Castle Carris, Averan clung to Roland's back as she rode, afraid that she might fall. One of the men from Indhopal had wrestled the green woman into his saddle, though she struggled against him, trying to climb down.

They'd outpaced the reavers that chased them, left the monsters far behind.

But something was wrong. Averan could not understand why Roland was here with the beautiful woman from Indhopal and her bodyguards: Nor could she understand why Roland was dressed in clothes that were different from those he'd worn yesterday, or why he rode such a grand horse.

With some embarra.s.sment, she realized that this wasn't Roland at all. It was more than the clothes or the horse, this man smelled wrong. His clothes smelled of desert sage and greasewood and sand, not the green gra.s.s of Mystarria.

"Who are you?" she asked. "I thought you were someone else, my friend Roland."

The big man glanced back at her. She saw that this truly wasn't Roland. This fellow had the same red hair, the same laughing blue eyes. But some of his hair had begun to turn gray.

"You know someone named Roland?" the fellow asked. "From the Blue Tower?"

"Yes," she whispered. "He gave me a ride on his horse. He was riding with Baron Poll to Carris. He wanted to go north to see the Earth King, and his son--you. He was going to see you. Wasn't he?"

The big man nodded. "Roland is my father's name. You can call me Borenson." He didn't look happy to learn that his father was coming to see him.

"You don't like your father?" Averan asked.

"My mother detested him," Borenson answered "and since I look like him, in time she grew to detest me."

"I like Roland," Averan offered. "He's going to pet.i.tion Paladane so that I can be his daughter."

"The man is a lackl.u.s.ter," Borenson said. "He'll be no more of a father to you than he was to me."

The cold way that Borenson spoke of his father unnerved Averan, and she was angry that he dismissed everything she said. It was true that she was only nine years old, and that she had lost her endowments, but she wasn't a stupid child. She'd just told Borenson that she was going to be his sister, and she expected some kind of acknowledgment from him. But Borenson seemed intent on dismissing her.

They charged up along narrow hill, over dry rye stalks, bent and broken and as gray as ash.

At me top of the hill, an ancient granite sun dome lay in ruins. The perfect orb-shaped crematorium had rolled from its pedestal and cracked. Now it rested on the hill like a broken egg.

Averan could see the lay of the land to the north and south. They were far enough from any cover that no reaver could ambush them.

But as they crowned the hill and wheeled around the ruined dome, they gazed down on Carris, and Averan gasped in dismay.

Below in the distance, fire burned the white towers of Carris, reflected in the Waters of Lake Donnestgree.

The barbicans lay in ruins and the western wall of the castle was shattered. The smooth plaster everywhere was stripped.

Reavers blackened a land shrouded in dirty mist. One Indhopalese guard stared hard at the burning castle. "Our Lord Raj Ahten defends that fortress," he said grimly, "along with many men of Mystarria. The Earth King fights in the fields."

"Perhaps we are not needed," a eunuch said. "It seems that our lord has already called a truce." Averan thought him cowardly, the way his voice trembled.

The fields below were a wasteland. It looked as if Carris might never be fit for human habitation again--not even if men tried to rebuild their homes, replant their crops.

Averan watched the Earth King ride through the thick haze toward the foot of Bone Hill. Her eye was, drawn to him. She recognized him instantly, but felt surprised. Gaborn looked like an ordinary man, not the emerald flame she'd seen in her mind when she closed her eyes.

Averan glanced over at the green woman. She sat in the saddle in front of Pashtuk and watched the Earth King, but she watched him with her eyes closed. She smiled wistfully.