David Farland - Wizardborn

His victory would far outshine any deeds that Gaborn Val Orden had accomplished. He, Raj Ahten, had killed the greatest of reaver mages, had saved the Earth.

Songs would be sung about him for a thousand years. Children as yet undreamed of would sit around the campfires at night and hear how Raj Ahten stood against the Lord of the Underworld. Their mouths would gape in wonder, and they would try to hide from their fathers how they shivered in fear.

All of this, and more, Raj Ahten envisioned as he cleared the mouth of the fortress, came back into the daylight. The poisoned air swirled round the reavers’ hive in a dingy cloud.

He plunged down the ridge into the reavers’ dry moat and suddenly felt a nauseating wrench.

He knew the sensation far too well.

His Dedicates were dying.

At the palace in Bel Nai, the markets were awash with morning light. White doves fluttered about the spires of the citadels, or strutted along rooftops, cooing contentedly.

In the bazaar, a merchant cried as always, “Fresh roasted pistachios, still hot!”

Camels lay in the street, chewing lazily.

Here, a thousand miles north of Kartish, word had not yet reached the city of a reaver attack in far lands. Raj Ahten’s ministers had not wished to alarm the populace.

Yet in the deepest heart of the Dedicates’ Keep, four men lay dying. Three were men who vectored stamina to Raj Ahten. The Emir Owatt knew them by voice. One was Korab Manthusar, a Dedicate who had acted as a vector for nearly twelve years. Another was Jinjafal Dissai, who had vectored stamina for less than five.

Between them, they accounted for hundreds of endowments. They had been sipping tea as they played chess when the emir came upon them and jabbed each with his poisoned needle.

The resin of the malefactor bush paralyzed the lungs, and would leave the men gasping on the floor. Without stamina, they would not resist death for long.

But though the poison promised to make quick work of them, it did not do so soon enough. Both men managed to cry out a brief warning.

The emir spun and stabbed a third dedicate.

A nearby guard heard the noise, rushed into the common room, and sliced the emir in half.

As the old king died, the guard held his hand.

For a moment, the emir imagined the man sought to offer him comfort. But only in his final seconds did he realize that the guard held him to keep the poison needle from piercing another victim.

Raj Ahten gasped outside the reavers’ stronghold, choking on the fetid air. Even now he could taste the great mage’s curse: “Breathe no more.”

The power of it was undeniable.

The curse reached into his lungs, its decimating grip clutching them like a vise. He fought it desperately, but all his remaining endowments of stamina would not keep him alive.

Dedicates were dying, his vectors. His defenses were crumbling. Binnesman’s curse had undone him. He was not the Sum of All Men.

He struggled for air, and his heart beat wildly. Moments before he had imagined the praise that would be his as savior of the world. Now, he lay beneath clouds of darkness, gasping in the pit.

Over Raj Ahten’s head, a fireball hurtled toward the fortress, slammed into its side. Delicious heat spilled out in a hundred directions. Flames roared nearby.

He felt the warmth like a soothing balm, recalled how delicious it had felt against his skin at the campfire high in the Hest Mountains.

“I can heal you,” Az whispered in his memory.

The skies went dark as Az enticed fire from the heavens again. It swirled down into his hands, a brilliant maelstrom, a webwork of light piercing the darkness.

Unable to walk, Raj Ahten crawled toward it. His frame shook. Despite all his endowments of brawn, he trembled like an old woman, and gasped in the fetid air. He gained the lip of the pit, and looked up at the burning rune only three hundred yards away.

A wave of nausea rushed over him. He gasped as if he felt his own heart had been ripped away. Another vector gone.

There is an assassin at Bel Nai, he realized.

I will never live to reap my reward. I will not hear the songs I have earned.

He tottered up the lip of the pit, began stalking toward the great fire.

Az stood at the heart of the Rune of Night, drawing flames to himself, stealing the very light from heaven.

“Az!” Raj Ahten shouted with the last of his strength. His voice rang over the battlefield. He collapsed to his knees, struggled to even hold up a hand, pleading.

Az glanced down at him, saw his failing condition, and hurled the fireball.

It expanded as it roared near, until it filled Raj Ahten’s vision.

In one instant, the white silks on his back seared to ashes. The fire pierced him with a thousand burning fangs. The flesh of his face bubbled. Ears and eyelids roasted to nothingness.

Old parts of him, unneeded parts, the dross of his humanity, melted away.

An intense light burned into his mind, expanded his vision. In an instant he saw that he had been traveling toward this destination all his life. He had imagined that he fought to serve mankind by becoming the Sum of All Men, while others said that he only served himself.

But at every juncture in the path of his life, he had chosen to serve Fire.

Even as a young man, he had appropriated for himself the title Sun Lord.

Now his master seized him and, like precious ore, purified him in the flames. The dross melted away, and that which remained was hardly flesh at all—only a vessel that veiled an immaculate light.

Raj Ahten was no longer human. He was the power that he had served so faithfully, and now, all of the lesser flameweavers of this world would bow before him and call him by his secret name.

Burned, naked, transformed, and trailing glorious clouds of smoke, he climbed to his feet. The flames hissed his new name: Scathain.

Guildmaster Wallachs led Averan, Binnesman, and the wylde out the back of the guildhall to a cobbled square bordered on one side by shops.

Here, draftsmen designed the works to be created while young wrights cut the timbers and master carvers did the detail work. Averan was surprised to see two blacksmith forges for the smiths that fashioned the carvers’ myriad tools.

In a finishing shop where pieces were stained and varnished, four burly men were loading wooden barrels into the back of a wagon. The team was already in its traces. The odors that arose from the wagon were noxious—the barrels were filled with spoiled linseed oil, denatured alcohol, poisonous lac, bags of salt crystals, and colored powders that she didn’t even recognize. All of them seemed to be ingredients for various types of varnishes and wood preservatives. The woodcutters were carting off virtually anything that they hoped might poison a reaver.

“Are the other wagons gone?” Wallachs asked.

“Aye,” one of his men muttered. He wiped an arm across his sweaty face.

“Leave the rest,” Wallachs told the laborers, indicating the poison. “Go save your families.”

The workers leapt from the wagon. Binnesman and Wallachs sat on the driver’s seat. Averan and the wylde climbed in.

As they left the stable, Averan could hear a distant roar, like the pounding of the sea. The reavers were coming.

She tried to judge her distance from the reavers by sound alone. Over the past two days, she’d become good at it. “They’re maybe three miles out, I think. They’ll be here in five minutes, maybe less.”

Her words seemed to have caught Wallachs by surprise. “So soon?”