Raj Ahten wiped the sweat from his body, took care not to leap up too quickly.

Long ago, he'd learned that when one takes an endowment of metabolism, it affects the hearing. Not only do people around you speak and move very slowly, but the entire way that sound is perceived is affected. High pitches become lower, while low pitches become almost inaudible. To reply to a question in a manner that others could understand required both patience and great control of Voice.

"I am well," Raj Ahten answered with care.

The facilitators glanced around meaningfully, moving with such seeming deliberation they looked like old, old men.

Raj Ahten waved at Salim, lying on the carpets within the tent. "Move my vector to the Dedicates' wagon. Place guards to watch these others."

Raj Ahten currently had forty-two endowments of metabolism. With so many, if he tried to walk at an average pace, he'd travel at over a hundred and forty miles per hour. If the air stood still, his movement alone would make it feel as if he pressed through a hurricane.

With forced slowness he pulled on his scale mail, donned his helm. He accidentally moved too fast while fastening his helm, so that his left pinky finger snapped under unexpected pressure. It healed instantly in a crooked position.

Raj Ahten broke it again, pulled it straight, let it heal.

He ambled slowly outside the tent, tried to appear as natural as ever.

On the battlements of Castle Longmont, above the gate, King Orden's men waved the green flag of parlay.

Between a pair of giants who stood like a wall, eleven Invincibles had already mounted imperial horses, prepared to act as Raj Ahten's honor guard. A footman held the twelfth horse for him.

Raj Ahten ambled to his horse, nodded toward his flameweavers, giving them their signal.

Then he forced himself to sit very still as the horse galloped toward Longmot's gates.

It was an odd situation. As the horse ran, Raj Ahten often found himself momentarily thrust into the air, but those moments139 stretched out interminably, so that for half of the short ride, it seemed he was airborne, just floating above the ground.

He had not gone far when a shimmering nimbus took shape above his head, courtesy of the flameweavers, a scintillating golden light that emitted brief sparks of titanium white.

In the glimmering light he gazed steadfastly at the wide eyes of the defenders on the castle walls.

The knights were grim men, skeptical. Not the soft city folk he'd seen at Castle Sylvarresta. Many of them clutched their weapons fiercely, and it seemed a thousand bowmen on the walls nocked their bows, drew arrows full. Their eyes shone with calculation.

"People of Longmont," Raj Ahten called, modulating so that he spoke slowly, sliding all the power of his Voice into the words, so that he'd seem like a man of peace and reason.

On the castle walls, Orden clenched his fists, calling, "Shoot!"

In slow motion, the hail of arrows descended, a black wall of arrows and bolts from steel longbows and ballistas.

Raj Ahten tried to sit still in his saddle, tried not to overreact as bolts sped toward him. He could dodge them or push them aside, as needed.

The arrows hurtled toward him in a deadly rain, and Raj Ahten glanced to each side. The knights in his honor guard were raising their shields, dismayed by this act of premeditated butchery.

He did not have time to save them.

As the first arrow sped to him, he grabbed for it, thinking to knock it from the air. But when his mailed fist slapped the arrow, such was the velocity and momentum at which both his hand and the arrow traveled, that the wooden shaft snapped in two. The head of the arrow veered toward his chest, and Raj Ahten had to grab for it again quickly, catch it in his hand.

At that moment, the deadly rain of arrows slammed into his knights, their mounts.

A huge iron ballista bolt unseated the knight next to him, and the Wolf Lord was forced to raise his small shield, knock away more arrows that sang through the air toward him.

A shaft struck between the plates of his horse's armor, sliding into its ribs, and the mount began to stagger. It stepped on a caltrop and let its feet give way.

Suddenly Raj Ahten found himself flying through the air, seemingly in slow motion, unhorsed, grabbing and kicking arrows from his path, twisting so that a shaft broke against his vambrace rather than pierced his scale mail.

He was a strong man, but even Raj Ahten could not break the fundamental laws of motion.

The momentum of the horse's fall threw him somersaulting headfirst over the beast's shoulder.

He knew that if the force of his landing did not crack his skull, the weight of the armored horse rolling over him afterward might crush him.

Raj Ahten managed to reach out, push himself slowly off the ground as he moved toward it, then tuck, so that he rolled cleanly over the grass, away from his charger.

But that maneuver cost him, for as he came around, a vividly painted red arrow lodged in his collarbone just above the line of his mail, and another bit into his thigh.

Raj Ahten crawled away from his falling horse, looked up at the grim soldiers on the castle walls.

He grabbed the arrow in his thigh, pulled it free, and hurled it back at his attackers.

But when he grasped the red shaft in his collarbone, it snapped in two.

He held it up, astonished, for he'd taken it gingerly. It should not have broken under so slight a pressure.

The shaft broke, he now saw, because the arrow had been hollowed and notched. The shaft was meant to break away. Raj Ahten guessed the reason behind this even before he felt the fiery poison creeping toward his heart. He stared hard at the castle wall, saw one soldier a hundred feet above him--a tall fellow with a thin face and yellow teeth, a tunic made of pig hide. The fellow threw his longbow in the air, shouting in triumph at having killed the Wolf Lord of Indhopal.

As this first volley of arrows finished landing, a quiet moment followed where the skies remained relatively free of missiles.

Raj Ahten pulled his dagger from its sheath. The wound in his collar hurt fiercely. The poison rushed through his bloodstream so fast, Raj Ahten did not know if even his thousands of endowments of stamina could save him.

The skin on his collarbone had already healed over the wound, sealing the arrowhead beneath. With a quick shove, Raj Ahten slammed his dagger into his collar, cutting it open, and pulled out the arrowhead.

With deadly accuracy, he then hurled the dagger at the jubilant archer.

He turned and began slowly running before more arrows fell, not even bothering to watch the archer on the castle wall take the dagger through the forehead, fall back under the force of the blow.

It was enough to hear the man's death scream.

Raj Ahten ran a hundred yards over the grass. The poison made him weary, made it hard to raise one foot, then the next. His breath came slow and labored. He feared that the poison would asphyxiate him. The arrow had fallen close to his lungs, deep in his chest, and the poison had not been able to bleed out before the skin healed over the wound.

He struggled for each step, collapsed from fatigue. The wound in his shoulder hurt like death, and he could feel the poison clutching at his heart, holding it like a mighty fist.

He reached toward his men, begging aid, begging for healers. He had physics to care for him, herbalists and surgeons. Yet he was living so quickly, a minute to him now seemed like the better part of an hour. He feared he'd succumb long before an herbalist could arrive.

His heart beat sporadically, pumping hard. Raj Ahten gasped for each breath. With his endowments of hearing, Raj Ahten could hear every surge and gurgle of his failing heart. With his head pressed against the ground, he could hear worms stirring in the earth beneath him.

Then his heart stopped.

In the sudden silence, the sound of worms beneath the ground came louder, as if it were all the sound in the world.

Raj Ahten willed his heart to beat again, willed it to start. Beat, damn you. Beat...

He struggled for air, gasped. He slapped his own mailed chest in frustration.140 His heart beat, weakly, once. Then it began to stutter, jerking spastically.

Raj Ahten concentrated. Felt his heart beat once, strongly. A second later, it came again. He gasped air that felt black in his lungs.

Silently, he cried out, willed his facilitators in far lands to give him more stamina, so that he might withstand this. "A king is coming," he heard the words echoing through his memory. "A king who can kill you!"

Not like this, he begged the powers. Not so ignoble a death.

Suddenly the clutching in his heart eased. It began pumping furiously, and Raj Ahten peed in his armor like an old man with no control over his bladder. He felt some relief as his body rid itself of poison.

As he lay on the grass, the pain receded. He'd been lying on the ground for what seemed to him minutes, though the archers on the wall must have felt only seconds fly by.

He fought to his feet once again, staggered to his line of troops, fell to his knees behind a Frowth giant that he used as a shield.

He glanced back, saw some of his honor guard still struggling to rise under the onslaught of arrows, shields high. But bowmen on the walls were riddling them with shafts.

Rage threatened to take him, a blind and burning rage. Raj Ahten fought it down. Destroying these men would gain him nothing.

Out of bowshot, Raj Ahten stood, panting, and shouted at the castle, "Brave knights, dishonorable lords: I come as a friend and ally in these harsh times. Not as your enemy!"

He let the full power of his Voice flavor the words. Surely these men could see he was the injured party here. Eleven of his finest warriors lay dying on the battlefield.

Though he was far away, too far for his glamour to take full effect, his Voice alone might sway the men.

"Come, King Orden," he shouted reasonably. "Let us counsel together. Surely you know I have a great army in the wings.

Perhaps you can see them now from your vantage point?"

He hoped Vishtimnu was coming. Perhaps such a sighting had prodded Orden to this dastardly deed. With all the sweetness he could muster, he said soothingly, "You cannot defeat me, and I bear you no malice. Throw down your weapons.

"Throw open your gates. Serve me. I will be your king, and you will be my people!" He waited for surrender expectantly, as he had at Castle Sylvarresta.

It seemed he waited for a full minute for any reaction at all. When it came, it was not what he had hoped.

Only a couple dozen of the younger men tossed weapons over the walls, so that spears and bows clattered against the battlements, splashed into the moat.

But as quickly as the weapons fell, so did their bearers--for the hardened warriors on the wall tossed their weak-willed companions to their deaths. The bodies bounced down along the sloped walls of the castle.

A great, greasy-looking bear of a man stood directly above the gates, and he spat as far as he could, so that a wad of spittle hit Raj Ahten's dying knights. Orden's men burst into laughter and shook their weapons.

Raj Ahten sat in the cool wind, gritted his teeth. He had not spoken any better at Castle Sylvarresta, but the effect had been profoundly different.

It might have been that with his increased metabolism, he had not spoken the words as slowly as he'd hoped, enunciated them with the proper intonation. Each time one took endowments of metabolism, one had to learn the arts of speaking and hearing all over again.

Or perhaps it was the endowments of glamour, he told himself. I've lost glamour since Castle Sylvarresta. He'd felt it when the Duchess of Longmont had died, taking her endowments of glamour with her.

"Very well!" Raj Ahten shouted. "We shall do this the hard way!" If Orden had been seeking for some goad to spark Raj Ahten's anger, he'd found it.

Raj Ahten struggled for control, found himself seething. He knew it would be hard for those men in the castle. It would have been quicker for all concerned if they had surrendered. Raj Ahten had taken a hundred castles, many as stout as this, until it was a practiced art. I'll make an example of haughty King Orden, he vowed.

He stood before his battle lines, raised his warhammer high, then dropped it with a cutting motion.

The first volley of stones lofted from his catapults. Some smaller stones disappeared over the walls, while heavier loads slammed lower on the battlements. Two of Orden's cutthroats dropped under the weight of the stones.

Orden countered with artillery from the city walls--six catapults, and four ballistas. The catapults hurled small iron shot that fell like a deadly hail--five yards short of his men. Orden would have done better with some lighter shot.

The ballistas were another matter. In all the South, Raj Ahten had never seen a ballista made with Heredon's spring steel. In cities like Bannisferre and Ironton, artificers--earth wizards who had mastered secret arts of metallurgy and artifice--had labored long to make such steel. Raj Ahten was unprepared when bolts flashed from the walls in a dark blur, striking through the ranks of his men.

One ballista bolt, like a huge arrow cast of iron, flashed toward him. He leaned away from it, only to hear the bolt plummet into someone behind with a sickly thud.

He turned to see a flameweaver sit roughly to the ground, a hole the size of a grapefruit through his navel.

The young man's saffron robes suddenly burst into white flame, as his power raged out of control.

"Retreat!" Raj Ahten called for his men to take cover. They needed little urging.

Raj Ahten raced over the hill as the flameweaver erupted--the massive form of the elemental that had coiled like a worm at the center of his soul suddenly escaping.

A lean, bald man took form, a hundred feet tall, sitting on the ground. Flames licked at his skull and swirled at his fingertips.

He gazed at Longmont with a troubled expression.

Raj Ahten watched. Such an elemental could wreak havoc, blast the stone walls to oblivion, burn the gate, fry the inhabitants of the castle like maggots on a griddle. Just as the elemental had done at Castle Sylvarresta.141 Yet Raj Ahten felt disappointed. For years he'd nurtured these flame-weavers. Now two had already been slaughtered in this campaign. It was a damnable waste of resources.

There was nothing to do for it but wait, watch the elemental do its work, then clean up after.

The elemental became a raging inferno that set the grass at his feet burning. The air roared like a furnace, and heat smote Raj Ahten, searing his lungs with each breath.

The hot-air balloon still hovered five hundred feet over the battlefield. Raj Ahten's men pulled it away before the elemental's heat made its silk burst into a ball of fire.

The elemental pointed itself toward the city, began striding across the battlefield.

Men on the walls of Longmont fired bows in terror. The tiny arrows flew toward the monster like stars that burst into flame in the night sky before they were consumed. The arrows could not defeat the elemental, only feed it.

The elemental reached for the nearest wood, its fingers extending in a twisting green flame that caressed the drawbridge of Longmont. The sounds of crackling wood and splintering beams filled the air. The soldiers atop the walls rushed to escape as a fiery blast slammed against the castle.

A cheer now rose from the throats of Raj Ahten's men, though Raj Ahten only smiled grimly.

Suddenly, water began gushing from the walls over the arch, flowing in runnels from the mouths of the gargoyles above the gate, wept from the castle's stone everywhere in great waves, so that the gray walls glistened.

Everywhere, water was rushing up the stone battlements from the moat, forming a wall. The great elemental turned to steam at its touch, began to shrink and dissipate.

Raj Ahten seethed, wondering.

One of his flameweavers shouted, "A water wizard's ward!" It seemed the castle had some unanticipated magical protection.

Yet there were no water wizards here in Heredon that Raj Ahten had ever heard of.