David Farland - The Sum of All Men

The words slid from Raj Ahten's tongue as sweetly as candied dates. The men could not resist the power of his Voice. The facilitators drew out the forcibles.

A cold wind blew from the south, rippling the silk walls of Raj Ahten's Pavilion.

Faintly, across the battlefield, from the huge purple royal tent that Raj Ahten had entered, Orden heard the chants of facilitators borne on the cold wind. The sound came dimly, so dimly that few men on the walls could have discerned it. Orden could hear it only because he focused, detected it beneath the song of the wind rushing through the leaves of grass along the hills, a sound so much like the waves of the ocean back home.

“What's taking them so long?” an archer on the castle walls asked, a farm boy who knew nothing of war. They'd been waiting an hour. In that time, Raj Ahten's men had not sought to parlay. They did not seem to want to attack.

King Orden began to pace the walls, past men who stood shoulder to shoulder, four deep. He watched with mounting nervousness as Raj Ahten set his forces, laid his siege.

“I do not like that chanting,” Captain Holmon said softly in Orden's ear. “Raj Ahten has endowments enough without it. We would be better off if we got this battle under way, before their reinforcements arrive.”

“How?” Orden asked. “Mount a charge?”

“We can goad the old dog into battle.”

Orden nodded to Captain Holmon. “Sound your horn, then. Call Raj Ahten to a parlay. I want him out here, within bowshot.”

The facilitators had just finished granting endowments of metabolism from nine of Raj Ahten's men to Salim when the horns sounded, calling for a parlay.

The facilitators looked at Raj Ahten, curiously.

“Finish it,” Raj Ahten said to his chief facilitator. He'd stripped from his armor, and sat on a cushion, awaiting the endowment.

He listened with rising excitement as the facilitator sang the familiar words to the chants. Salim shrieked in pain while the forcible burned his flesh, adding to the scent of charred fat and burning hair that filled the Pavilion.

To take an endowment, to feel the kiss of the forcibles, gave profound delight. It was like making love to a beautiful woman. But to take an endowment from someone who already had received many endowments, to combine that euphoria over and over again—that gave unspeakable ecstasy. By the time Salim had taken his endowments from eleven men—men who had all received endowments of their own—he had combined nearly forty endowments of metabolism, all waiting to burst free into Raj Ahten at once.

Seldom did Raj Ahten receive such great pleasure.

He was sweating with anticipation by the time the facilitator drew the forcible away from Salim, held its glowing tip high, and danced across the room, painting the air inside the tent with ribbons of sulfurous light.

When the tip of the forcible touched the skin beneath Raj Ahten's nipple, the Wolf Lord shuddered with such unspeakable ecstasy that he could barely contain it. He fell to the floor, his body racked by waves of pure pleasure, and he cried out as if in orgasm. Only his many endowments of stamina allowed him to survive the pleasure. For several moments, he blacked out.

When he woke, the facilitators knelt over him nervously. Raj Ahten's sweaty skin shivered. He looked up at his men.

“My lord, are you well?” Facilitator Hepolus asked. The words slurred, as if he spoke very slowly. The whole world seemed strange and exotic, as if in some liquid dream. The men around him moved slowly, and the air felt heavy, thick.

Raj Ahten wiped the sweat from his body, took care not to leap up too quickly.

Long ago, he'd learned that when one takes an endowment of metabolism, it affects the hearing. Not only do people around you speak and move very slowly, but the entire way that sound is perceived is affected. High pitches become lower, while low pitches become almost inaudible. To reply to a question in a manner that others could understand required both patience and great control of Voice.

“I am well,” Raj Ahten answered with care.

The facilitators glanced around meaningfully, moving with such seeming deliberation they looked like old, old men.

Raj Ahten waved at Salim, lying on the carpets within the tent. “Move my vector to the Dedicates' wagon. Place guards to watch these others.”

Raj Ahten currently had forty-two endowments of metabolism. With so many, if he tried to walk at an average pace, he'd travel at over a hundred and forty miles per hour. If the air stood still, his movement alone would make it feel as if he pressed through a hurricane.

With forced slowness he pulled on his scale mail, donned his helm. He accidentally moved too fast while fastening his helm, so that his left pinky finger snapped under unexpected pressure. It healed instantly in a crooked position.

Raj Ahten broke it again, pulled it straight, let it heal.

He ambled slowly outside the tent, tried to appear as natural as ever.

On the battlements of Castle Longmont, above the gate, King Orden's men waved the green flag of parlay.

Between a pair of giants who stood like a wall, eleven Invincibles had already mounted imperial horses, prepared to act as Raj Ahten's honor guard. A footman held the twelfth horse for him.

Raj Ahten ambled to his horse, nodded toward his flameweavers, giving them their signal.

Then he forced himself to sit very still as the horse galloped toward Longmot's gates.

It was an odd situation. As the horse ran, Raj Ahten often found himself momentarily thrust into the air, but those moments stretched out interminably, so that for half of the short ride, it seemed he was airborne, just floating above the ground.

He had not gone far when a shimmering nimbus took shape above his head, courtesy of the flameweavers, a scintillating golden light that emitted brief sparks of titanium white.

In the glimmering light he gazed steadfastly at the wide eyes of the defenders on the castle walls.

The knights were grim men, skeptical. Not the soft city folk he'd seen at Castle Sylvarresta. Many of them clutched their weapons fiercely, and it seemed a thousand bowmen on the walls nocked their bows, drew arrows full. Their eyes shone with calculation.

“People of Longmont,” Raj Ahten called, modulating so that he spoke slowly, sliding all the power of his Voice into the words, so that he'd seem like a man of peace and reason.

On the castle walls, Orden clenched his fists, calling, “Shoot!”

In slow motion, the hail of arrows descended, a black wall of arrows and bolts from steel longbows and ballistas.

Raj Ahten tried to sit still in his saddle, tried not to overreact as bolts sped toward him. He could dodge them or push them aside, as needed.

The arrows hurtled toward him in a deadly rain, and Raj Ahten glanced to each side. The knights in his honor guard were raising their shields, dismayed by this act of premeditated butchery.

He did not have time to save them.

As the first arrow sped to him, he grabbed for it, thinking to knock it from the air. But when his mailed fist slapped the arrow, such was the velocity and momentum at which both his hand and the arrow traveled, that the wooden shaft snapped in two. The head of the arrow veered toward his chest, and Raj Ahten had to grab for it again quickly, catch it in his hand.

At that moment, the deadly rain of arrows slammed into his knights, their mounts.

A huge iron ballista bolt unseated the knight next to him, and the Wolf Lord was forced to raise his small shield, knock away more arrows that sang through the air toward him.

A shaft struck between the plates of his horse's armor, sliding into its ribs, and the mount began to stagger. It stepped on a caltrop and let its feet give way.