David Farland - Wizardborn

“Perhaps the reavers will do us a favor and bake in an oven of their own design,” a second lord chimed in.

Raj Ahten’s heart hammered. He felt the heat, but did not fear it. The coldness in his left hand eased a little. It felt more alive.

Az had promised him again and again that fire would heal him, but only if he let it burn away his humanity.

Raj Ahten’s pulse quickened.

For several moments the inferno grew more murderous. Flames danced hundreds of feet in the air, and billowed up in clouds.

“There is a great rune carved in the ground at the center of that fortress,” Raj Ahten shouted to his nobles. “I will grant a chest full of rubies to the first man who buries his warhammer in it.” He blew his horn again, preparing his men for attack.

His lords shouted their war cries.

Above the reaver fortress, the commoners in the graak began dumping bags of volatile powders into the air. The powders fell in dirty streaks—curtains of red, gray, yellow. The heat was so intense that the men themselves succumbed. One man tumbled over, unable to throw the bag. For a moment, one of the silk wings of the graak began to smolder, but the flameweaver Chespot quickly drew the heat to himself, kept hurling out the powders.

Suddenly a ball of fierce white light came screaming from the west, ignited the fell powders.

The resulting fireball erupted high in the air, sent out a deep boom that went echoing for miles. The ground trembled, and three black spires on the reavers’ fortress shattered. The reavers could endure it no more.

From the warrens to the south, thousands of reavers came streaming from their burrows, weapons in hand.

Meanwhile, from the fortress, the fell sorceress hurled a counterspell. A thundering gasht sound erupted, and noxious fumes billowed from every kill hole in the fortress. The flames near the fortress sputtered and died.

“Attack,” Raj Ahten screamed, filling the hills with the power of his Voice.

The artillerymen south of the flames loosed volleys of rocks and ballista bolts into the onrushing horde. His army of commoners did not balk. They split into two wings and raced to meet the reavers.

Raj Ahten did not concern himself with the battle on the plains. He spurred a great Imperial warhorse toward the fortress, drew his hammer. Men charged around him and ahead.

Flanked by burning runes, he felt a sudden sense of serenity. There was a presence here in battle that he had never sensed before. It had no body or form, only a vast appetite. He felt as if it were a cloud, hovering above the battlefield, like an eagle waiting to feast.

It did not speak, yet he felt certain that it was mindful of him.

He hit the swirling mists, held his breath as his charger plunged through. His eyes and nose burned at the very touch of the air.

His mount reached the pits, and Raj Ahten leapt down. The sky went black as he scrambled up the other side. The flameweavers drew fire from the heavens. In moments they would begin hurling massive fireballs toward the kill holes of the fortress.

Screams filled the battlefield as his armies clashed with the reaver horde.

The sky brightened again, filled with fiery light and a whooshing sound. A fireball streaked from Az.

Half a dozen warriors gained the entrance to the fortress, ran inside. The reavers’ lair was painfully dark.

Kill holes were set above and below the entrance. The first warrior who raced inside halted for half a second as a knight gig dropped down, hooked him beneath the chin, and jerked him upward.

A second man took a reaver’s blade through the crotch. The force of the blow drove him upward a dozen feet into the ceiling. He rained a spray of blood as he fell. A third man saw the danger and leapt through quickly, dodging past a blow from above, another from a side slot. The entrance became a deadly gauntlet.

The tunnel sloped up along a sinuous curve into perfect blackness. Raj Ahten smelled the rising danger of a reaver’s curse back at the end of the tunnel, and it issued forth before he could warn his men.

He leapt from the entrance. A cloud of green-gray shot from the gullet of the lair. Twenty men disappeared.

Raj Ahten leapt through before the sorceress could hurl another spell.

He realized that he might well be the only man in the world fit to breach the reavers’ fortress. He had endowments of sight that let him see the reavers’ shimmering forms even in perfect darkness. His metabolism and grace let him leap past deadly blades faster than the reavers could move.

In less than a second after the sorceress had cast her spell, he was up the tunnel.

He leapt into her open mouth, thrust his warhammer into her soft upper palate before she knew he had even charged. Brains and blood rained down as she opened her mouth in alarm, staggered back.

He rolled from her mouth, ducked beneath her legs. He felt a rush of peace and comfort. There was something deeply satisfying about killing reavers.

The walls around him shuddered as a fireball slammed against the fortress, spilling light through a thousand kill holes. Up ahead he saw his next target, another sorceress.

He had gained ingress to the reavers’ fortress.

“Hear me! Hear me, O People!” a man shouted in the dawn, filling the streets with the sound of his voice.

The Emir Owatt woke from his slumber in the Dedicate’s tower at his palace in Bel Nai, a city near the sea in the small country of Tuulistan, just north of Kuhran.

The emir was blind. He had given the use of his eyes to Raj Ahten. And because the emir was beloved by his people, he had been made Raj Ahten’s vector.

As such, he was pampered here in Bel Nai, like some woman’s old cat.

The emir did not stir, did not stumble out to the balcony to better hear. The fellow who shouted had great endowments of voice, so that his words flew above the dusty streets and trumpeted above the noise of the city—the bawling of camels, the crowing of roosters, the first morning cries of vendors in the bazaar. “Hear the words of Wuqaz Faharaqin, Warlord of the Ah’kellah, as I raise the Atwaba against a murderer most despicable: he who calls himself ‘Lord of the Sun,’ Raj Ahten.”

It had been but six short years ago that Emir Owatt was captured in the Palace of Weeping Vines at Ma’al. At the time, Raj Ahten’s Invincibles had surrounded the entire city. By surrendering, the emir had hoped to save his people from outright slaughter.

Now he climbed from his bed and hobbled to the small open window, grasping the bars with both hands. The cool night air off the ocean slapped him like a woman’s open palm.

Nine-year-old Messan came rushing up the tower stairs. “Father! Father! Do you hear?”

“Yes, I hear very well,” the emir said. “Come, be my eyes. Tell me what you see?”

The boy grabbed the elbow of his father’s burnoose, and stood on tiptoe. The smell of dust, camels, and smoke hung over the city, along with the scent of wet hemp, which women in the markets wove into rope and baskets.

Emir Owatt could hear the scuffle of feet as people went running. Guards shouted at the gate.

“There is a great crowd gathering outside the keep,” Messan whispered. “Three Invincibles sit on their horses in the square.”

“You are sure they are Invincibles?”

“They are sitting on Imperial warhorses, and all wear the surcoats of Invincibles among the Ah’kellah. One man has wings on his breast and helm. He is holding something—the head of a man. He has it by the hair!”