David Farland - Brotherhood of the Wolf

How do I save them all? Gaborn wondered. He’d connected to hundreds of thousands of people in Castle Carris, and he felt overwhelmed by the sense of danger around them. A third aftershock began to make the ground swell and buck.

At the castle gates, thousands of men were fighting for their lives. Gaborn concentrated on them, for their situation was gravest. Yet in Castle Carris, Raj Ahten refused Gaborn, smugly chose to hinder his troops from advancing. Surely, his Invincibles could hack a path over the causeway.

Fatigue wracked him as he doggedly advanced toward Bone Hill, a deep-seated lethargy that worried the bone. The closer he drew, the more paralyzing it became.

I have Chosen too indiscriminately, he realized. He led a ragtag band of warriors. Desperately, his men forged on. Unhorsed and without their long deadly lances, they were not as effective as mounted knights, yet they advanced manfully, as if moved by his will alone.

Gaborn climbed down from the saddle and tried to lead them a few paces closer, but the effect of the fell mage’s spell was so powerful he could hardly hold the reins of his own mount.

To the south, High Marshal Skalbairn sought to make an ill-fated charge. Gaborn sent the message “Turn back! Save yourselves if you can!”

He focused on the job at hand, hoping that the warriors who guarded him now would be able to fend off the impending attack.

Two hundred yards ahead was the great cocoon, with the fell mage atop the hill. Reavers were racing round both sides of Bone Hill. They’d be here in seconds.

When he could go no farther from weariness, Gaborn numbly dropped in the dust and began to draw a second rune of Earth-breaking.

Desperately he searched the rune itself, looking for weaknesses, flaws in its binding.

A wave of reavers rushed toward his battle lines, fifty yards ahead on each side. Near his foot lay a strand of cocoon, a line that ran two hundred yards.

Gaborn glanced up at Bone Hill, trying to see the object of his spell. Reavers blocked the way, climbed the cocoon in droves. A reaver’s head was larger than a wagon bed and its paws were longer than a man’s body. As monsters surged closer, surrounding him, he could not see over them.

Yet his men held their line, prepared to fight with the strength of desperation.

A reaver charged the Earth King, not even slowing as it barreled over two men ahead, crushing them with its bulk. Erin Connal cried out in dismay, lunged to meet it.

“You take it low, I’ll take it high!” Celinor shouted at her back.

She ran at the beast. It raised its glory hammer overhead. Erin shouted and struck her own warhammer into the monster’s elbow, biting deep into the joint just beneath its protective bone spur.

The jolt should have frozen the reaver in pain for a moment, or perhaps enraged it.

Instead the reaver struck with its glory hammer—eight hundred pounds of steel at the end of a twenty-foot pole. She heard no warning from the Earth. King.

The pole slammed into her shoulder, throwing her to the ground, pinning her for a moment. The reaver raised a massive paw in a fist, ready to pound her into the dust.

Celinor leapt over Erin, lunged in, and struck the beast between its thoracic plates. His blow was not powerful enough. No guts gushed from the monster.

The reaver hissed in fear and lurched back a pace, trying to escape.

Celinor leapt in and delivered a second blow. The reaver’s guts spilled down in a gruesome rain, and the monster leapt away, slamming into another of its kind.

The Prince of South Crowthen spun, dodged out of battle, and grabbed Erin’s hand, helping her up. “Two!” he warned.

Erin felt her face redden with chagrin.

Gaborn finished drawing his rune of Earth-breaking, raised his fist, and looked up.

All around him, reavers thundered forward in a terrifying wall of flesh, pounding into the ranks of his men, overwhelming them.

To his left a reaver smashed a fellow with a glory hammer. The body somersaulted in the air twice, arced toward him.

Celinor raised his shield, threw himself before Gaborn, but the force of both bodies slammed into Gaborn, smacking him to the ground.

Everything went black.

Saffira sang in the voice of her homeland, in Tuulistanese, and because she had thousands of endowments of Voice, her aria rang louder than any sung by a commoner.

So beautiful was her song that Raj Ahten looked up from a wall of Castle Carris where he had been watching Gaborn’s debacle of a charge.

Time seemed to freeze.

So loud was her song that even on the causeway, many reavers drew back, philia waving in the air, as if trying to decipher whether her Voice presented some new threat that they must confront.

For a moment, the tumult of battle dimmed, as men listened to Saffira’s golden Voice.

Certainly, most of the men of Rofehavan could not have understood Saffira’s words. Tuulistan was a small nation in Indhopal, insignificant. One could walk across its borders in a fortnight. Yet the pleading tone of the young woman’s voice struck Raj Ahten to the soul, made him yearn to...do anything, anything to placate his bride.

She sat in the saddle on some ruined mound, and all beneath her the land was black with reavers. In the last light of day, her lavender dress seemed but a veil that lightly covered her perfect beauty.

She shone like the first and brightest star in the nighttime sky, and all around him, Raj Ahten heard the rush of indrawn breath as thousands men gasped in astonishment.

Immediately Raj Ahten saw what Gaborn had done. He saw the glamour of all his concubines, of the loveliest women from every nation he conquered, all bound into one.

He heard the sweetness of every melodious voice in his harem.

Saffira sang a common lullaby.

She’d sung it to her firstborn son, Shandi, when she’d first held him, five years ago—before a Knight Equitable slaughtered the child in an effort to rid the world of Raj Ahten’s progeny.

The tune was not profound, neither was its message. Yet it moved Raj Ahten to the core of his soul.

“There is no you. There is no me.

Love makes us one. There is only we.”

Of all the men who heard that song, only Raj Ahten understood its message. “I understand your hatred and anger,” she said. “I understand, and I feel it too. I have not forgotten our son. But now you must lay your anger aside.”

Saffira then called in her imperfect Rofehavanish. “My Lord Raj Ahten, I beg you to put aside this war. The Earth King asks me to bear this message: The enemy of my cousin Is my enemy. Men of Mystarria, men of Indhopal unite!”

She beckoned to Raj Ahten, and in the silence, the reavers near her suddenly responded, surging uphill, as if at her summoning.

Saffira’s eunuch guards—the finest of Raj Ahten’s Invincibles—rushed to her side and followed her downhill as she raced now to the north, toward Gaborn’s forces half a mile distant.

She had far too many reavers ahead of her. The great monsters stood back to back around the Earth King’s pitiable army, forming a solid wall. Even with all the speed of her mount, Raj Ahten knew that she would not be able to break those lines.

Certainly she understood that. Yet she rode into danger, into the heart of the maelstrom.

She would force his hand. If you will not come to save him, then at least come to save me, her actions said.

With a shout of horror and dismay, the men of Carris responded to Saffira’s plea.

For several moments now, Paladane’s men and the frowth giants had been shoving the reavers back, had managed to scrabble over the pile of dead reavers to the causeway in Lake Donnestgree, then shove them back a hundred yards toward the mainland. The causeway itself was littered with dead reavers.