David Farland - Wizardborn

Here in the mountains, of course, the terrain stifled him. But it stifled the reavers as much.

The reavers only ran in short bursts, making less than twenty miles per hour. And as they climbed higher into the cold mountains, they became lethargic, moving at perhaps half their normal pace.

Skalbairn said, “There’s a bit of a clearing off to our left.”

“I saw. But it leads to more of a cliff than a clearing.”

“I saw a meadow,” Skalbairn argued. Chondler was a contrary, stubborn man. “I’ll prove it.”

Chondler gave a heavy sigh that would have earned him a beating in any other army. But among the Knights Equitable insubordination was as ubiquitous as fleas in the bedrolls. Chondler turned his mount toward Skalbairn’s “meadow.”

Sure enough, it was a cliff. A quarter of a mile below spread a serpentine valley, and the reaver horde bolted through it like floodwaters through a chasm.

They were a seething mass. In Internook in the late fall the blue eels would swim to the headwaters of the Ort River. When Skalbairn was a boy he’d seen eels so thick that he couldn’t spot a single pebble in the shallow riverbed. The reavers forging through the canyon below reminded him of those eels, at once loathsome and alluring.

Lightning flickered again, farther away. The reavers below did not miss a stride. The storm was blowing past.

But in the brief illumination he saw the reavers better. Blade-bearers fled by the thousands. At Carris the monsters had borne weapons—enormous blades twelve feet long, or glory hammers with heads that weighed as much as a horse, or knight gigs that the monsters could use to pull warriors from their chargers or from castle walls. But now, it looked as if half of the reavers had abandoned their weapons.

Among the blade-bearers were howlers, pale spidery creatures that even now stopped every few moments to send up their eerie cries.

Few glue mums remained alive. They moved slower than other breeds, and were less inclined to fight. Skalbairn’s men had already dispatched most of them.

But among the reavers, the most fearsome were the scarlet sorceresses. They were easy to spot. The runes branded on their skulls and legs glowed dimly, like the light of warm coals in the midst of an ash-covered fire.

A scarlet sorceress below raced along and suddenly stuck its shovel-shaped head into the soil. It dug in with its feet, tossed its head, and thrust itself underground.

The whole thing happened so fast that Skalbairn could hardly credit his eyes. Yet he’d seen boars hide beneath the humus in the forest that way. The pulped trees and bottom soil on the canyon floor provided good cover—even for a monster that weighed twelve tons.

“Did you see?” Skalbairn asked. Even as he spoke, another scarlet sorceress went to ground, and another. The blade-bearers still seemed to be fleeing blindly.

“I see,” Marshal Chondler replied. “They’re setting an ambush.”

Just as boars in the forest did. They’d rise up out of the bushes at a man’s feet and slash with their tusks.

Skalbairn looked north down the canyon course to where it wound out of sight. His lancers were still back a couple of miles, he suspected. Well out of harm’s way, for now.

Up to the south, the canyon rim snaked higher. The sides of the canyon were steep, treacherous. A man on horseback could hardly hope to ride up those slopes.

South, the blade-bearers reached a widening in the valley, and would go no further. They burrowed into the steep sides of a cliff.

Sir Skerret stood atop a promontory three hundred yards off with a lantern hooked atop his lance. By its light Skalbairn could see his regal profile, the silver tip of his beard jutting from beneath his helm, the golden light on his burnished plate.

“So that’s why Sir Skerret summoned us. He’s warning us off,” Marshal Chondler said.

Skalbairn couldn’t let his men ride into the ambush, but the scarlet sorceresses tempted him. They were the prize, the heart of the reavers’ forces. For centuries the lords of Rofehavan had offered a reward of five forcibles for any sorceress a man managed to kill.

More than the temptation, these reavers still presented a threat. They were marching south toward the wilderness. But it would not take much for the entire horde to veer east, into the cities along the river Donnestgree.

Skalbairn listened inside himself. Earlier today in the heat of the battle, he’d heard Gaborn’s voice warn him of danger. A dozen times Gaborn had saved his life.

But inside he heard nothing now. Inside he felt only apprehension.

“Damn them,” he cursed the reavers. Without the lightning to chase them, the reavers would regroup, begin to fight in concert. Skalbairn was trying to avert a catastrophe. Why was Gaborn holed up in Balington? His message said that he could still sense danger. So why didn’t he come and direct the attack personally?

Skalbairn crumpled Gaborn’s warning and tossed it to the ground, then turned his horse back toward the road. “Until tomorrow, then.”

In rain and darkness they came to Balington well after midnight—seven sodden men riding between hills that bowed like bald heads in contemplation. To a man they wore the brown robes of scholars, their beards jutting from beneath peaked hoods.

Had you seen them, you might have taken them for wights, they rode so silently. Only the jangle of harnesses and the splash of a hoof in a puddle betrayed them as living beings. They did not speak. Most dared hardly to breathe. Fear lay naked upon some of their faces. Other countenances were thoughtful or pained. Some old men clutched swords and warhammers, straining to hear the rasping of reavers.

But the only sound around them was the patter of a cool rain. In the past few hours the storm had spread north. Water plummeted out of the heavens and drenched everything, turning the muddy road to a stream. The clouds above the hills sealed in the darkness like a lid. The sixty or so whitewashed stone cottages of Balington, with their thatch roofs, were only vague humped shapes in the night.

A red hound struggled from beneath a woodpile and trotted beside the little group, its tongue lolling.

At the crossroads ahead the only light shone from lanterns hung outside the inn.

Jerimas, the leader of the band, had never been to this inn. Yet he remembered it well. King Orden had thought it a restful place, a hideaway from the heat of summer. But Jerimas’s nerves were frayed now. He took no joy in the sight.

He was still trying to cope with the aftermath of the battle at Carris.

There were wounded to tend, people to feed, reavers to fight. A couple of hours ago, Gaborn had sent a message asking Jerimas and the other Wits who had served King Orden to come to Balington as soon as they handled their most urgent matters. But on the heels of this message, others had come, delineating the current state of the kingdom—the vanquishing of Raj Ahten, the threats of Lowicker and Anders to the north, and of Inkarran assassins to the south.

Most concerning of all was the warning that Gaborn’s powers were severely weakened.

“So,” a scholar behind him said, “Balington is spared once again.” He was referring to this hamlet’s peculiar history. Though battles often raged around it, Balington always emerged unscathed. Two days past, Raj Ahten’s army had ridden down the road not three miles west. His troops had been starving, in need of shelter and horses. Yet no one at Balington had bothered to flee. The mayor, merchants, and peasants of Balington had felt that their village was just a trifle too remote from the highway and a tad too small for invaders to bother with.