David Farland - Wizardborn

“I will,” Gaborn said. “And before we go, you’ll need to take endowments. We have to make the journey swiftly, and I cannot afford to have you lag. You’ll need brawn, grace, stamina, and metabolism. Most of all, you’ll need endowments of scent so that you can smell the reavers’ markings.”

“Averan—” Iome began to say. But Averan cut her off.

“It’s all right,” Averan said. “Everyone dies. All my friends are gone. He wants to know if I’ll die down there with him.”

“That’s right,” Gaborn said. “It could come to that.”

Iome bit her lip, shot Averan a mournful look. Yet she had to know that Gaborn could not ask this lightly.

Averan took Iome’s hand, squeezed it. “I know what I’m doing. It’s better for one person to die, than a whole world. Don’t you think?”

Gaborn was not surprised at the tears that filled Iome’s eyes. She had always loved her people, but he felt overwhelmed by the way she grabbed Averan, and hugged her fiercely. “I could never be good at that kind of math.”

Gaborn knelt, wrapped his arms around them both.

“Iome,” he whispered into his wife’s ear. “I want you to go someplace safe. I can’t think of any place safer than the Courts of Tide. I need you to carry a letter for me to an old friend. He’ll know where we can get the endowments we need.”

“It will take days for the dogs to bond with her,” Iome objected.

“We’ll have the dog handlers take the endowments,” Gaborn said. “That way it can be done in hours. Then we’ll give them to the girl as vectors.”

Iome nodded her consent. Gaborn quickly penned his missive. As he did, his mind turned to other matters.

He knew the value of stepping outside himself, of learning to think like his enemy. He’d discovered it when he was Averan’s age, and for a moment he was lost in a memory.

When Gaborn was nine, he’d gone on an autumn hunt with his father and some Runelords near the headwaters of the river Dweedum.

On the hunt, the lords found a few salmon running weeks before expected. Gaborn’s father set up camp, and mentioned that he wanted fish for dinner.

The lords couldn’t let such a challenge lie. Catching the salmon suddenly loomed large.

It was one of those cool dawns in autumn when the sun barely filters into the canyons, and the morning mists spend half the day trying to climb up the ridges to make their escape into the sky. The larks and finches had been hopping in the pines, and the spores on the ferns along the hillside were so thick that the whole of the forest carried their scent, so that a tang like iron mingled with the pine needles and a carpet of moss.

With the river running low, the riverbed held more round gray boulders than water.

The lords rode their horses up through the shallows of the river, driving the salmon up to Wildman Falls. The falls soared a hundred and seventy feet. The water tumbled like silver hair, leaving a cold spray in the air that misted Gaborn’s shoulders. No salmon could leap those falls, so the basin beneath was a good place to hem the salmon in. The tumbling water had carved a nice little pond, cool and deep. A few strategically placed boulders all but blocked the shallow exit downstream, and that could be easily guarded.

There weren’t many salmon. Gaborn had only spotted three or four on the ride up, and saw only one swim into the deep waters, making it all that much more desirable.

The older lords thrust a spear into Gaborn’s hands and told him to stand in the shallows and “try” to bag any fish that headed downstream.

Meanwhile, the lords all rode their horses out into the deeper pool, till the water reached their mounts’ bellies. Then they launched themselves at fish with spears that were meant for boars.

It was a mad episode. The horses lunging around in the pool soon muddied the water so that no one could see. If one man did spot a fish, he’d give a shout and spur his horse forward, and all of the others would give chase, for they’d made a game of seeing who would spear the biggest fish.

For the most part, they spent their time chasing around trout that weren’t much longer than Gaborn’s forearm. After an hour of this, only one knight had speared a salmon, a little jack that was small by way of having swum upstream to spawn a year or two early.

But Gaborn was his father’s son, and he decided that if he were going to get a fish, he’d have to think like a fish.

The knights all held to the deep, splashing and muddying the water so that a fish wouldn’t be able to breathe.

So Gaborn went to the shallows at the edge of the stream, where a few overhanging weeds provided cover and the water was fairly clear. Soon he spotted the tail of a salmon poking out. A quick thrust with his spear won Gaborn the salmon that his father had ordered.

The lords had talked about it for days afterward—this little lad, going out and spearing the only salmon in the pool while a bunch of force soldiers and Runelords made fools of themselves.

If I were a reaver, Gaborn wondered, what would I do? The reavers were all fleeing along the exact same trail that had brought them here two days ago. At least, that’s what it looked like.

But a smart reaver would take another trail.

“Sir Langley, Marshal Skalbairn,” Gaborn said, calling the men to his side. “Is it possible that this main force of reavers is acting as a decoy? Could some others have left the trail?”

“I had men watching,” Skalbairn said. “But it’s hard to say for sure what they did in the night.”

“Send a hundred men to check for tracks,” Gaborn ordered. “In particular, have them search back where the reavers dug in last night. Unless I miss my guess, some of them waited to leave. Your men must kill any that they find.”

“Yes, milord,” Skalbairn said.

“And after you’ve done that, call the lords together for a council. We have to get the reavers down from the rock.”

Gaborn turned to Averan. “Could the reavers be digging a well up there?”

“On Mangan’s Rock?” Iome asked.

It didn’t sound feasible even to Gaborn. The rock had to be hundreds of feet thick. But reavers were inordinately strong, and there were thousands up there to work. They had a virtually unassailable position.

Gaborn frowned in concentration.

He felt...rising danger around some of his men.

He looked up. The reavers were sculpting a shallow dome atop Mangan’s Rock. Glue mums had begun to spit out pulpy strands into a configuration he recognized. A brown haze rolled from it, and actinic blue lights flashed beneath. An enormous flameweaver crawled atop the thing, raised a crystalline staff to the sky.

Gaborn’s heart seemed to freeze.

Binnesman breathed out in wonder. “They’re making another Rune of Desolation.”

On the western slopes of the Anja Breal, in the Valley of the Lotus, lay sprawling Maygassa, the capital of old Indhopal, It was a city that produced nothing but people—a myriad of people.

The rajahs of Indhopal had long ago built the Palace of Elephants here, a stronghold along the river. On the west, above the city, the palace stood atop an enormous gray stone nearly eight hundred feet high. All along the base of this huge stone were pictographs in ancient Indhopalese that gave the Enlightened Texts of the ancient Rajah Peshwavanju. The texts covered the gray rock, forming an exquisite pattern that was much admired throughout Indhopal. The pattern was called “Lace of Stone.”