David Farland - The Sum of All Men

Suddenly Raj Ahten found himself flying through the air, seemingly in slow motion, unhorsed, grabbing and kicking arrows from his path, twisting so that a shaft broke against his vambrace rather than pierced his scale mail.

He was a strong man, but even Raj Ahten could not break the fundamental laws of motion.

The momentum of the horse's fall threw him somersaulting headfirst over the beast's shoulder.

He knew that if the force of his landing did not crack his skull, the weight of the armored horse rolling over him afterward might crush him.

Raj Ahten managed to reach out, push himself slowly off the ground as he moved toward it, then tuck, so that he rolled cleanly over the grass, away from his charger.

But that maneuver cost him, for as he came around, a vividly painted red arrow lodged in his collarbone just above the line of his mail, and another bit into his thigh.

Raj Ahten crawled away from his falling horse, looked up at the grim soldiers on the castle walls.

He grabbed the arrow in his thigh, pulled it free, and hurled it back at his attackers.

But when he grasped the red shaft in his collarbone, it snapped in two.

He held it up, astonished, for he'd taken it gingerly. It should not have broken under so slight a pressure.

The shaft broke, he now saw, because the arrow had been hollowed and notched. The shaft was meant to break away. Raj Ahten guessed the reason behind this even before he felt the fiery poison creeping toward his heart. He stared hard at the castle wall, saw one soldier a hundred feet above him—a tall fellow with a thin face and yellow teeth, a tunic made of pig hide. The fellow threw his longbow in the air, shouting in triumph at having killed the Wolf Lord of Indhopal.

As this first volley of arrows finished landing, a quiet moment followed where the skies remained relatively free of missiles.

Raj Ahten pulled his dagger from its sheath. The wound in his collar hurt fiercely. The poison rushed through his bloodstream so fast, Raj Ahten did not know if even his thousands of endowments of stamina could save him.

The skin on his collarbone had already healed over the wound, sealing the arrowhead beneath. With a quick shove, Raj Ahten slammed his dagger into his collar, cutting it open, and pulled out the arrowhead.

With deadly accuracy, he then hurled the dagger at the jubilant archer.

He turned and began slowly running before more arrows fell, not even bothering to watch the archer on the castle wall take the dagger through the forehead, fall back under the force of the blow.

It was enough to hear the man's death scream.

Raj Ahten ran a hundred yards over the grass. The poison made him weary, made it hard to raise one foot, then the next. His breath came slow and labored. He feared that the poison would asphyxiate him. The arrow had fallen close to his lungs, deep in his chest, and the poison had not been able to bleed out before the skin healed over the wound.

He struggled for each step, collapsed from fatigue. The wound in his shoulder hurt like death, and he could feel the poison clutching at his heart, holding it like a mighty fist.

He reached toward his men, begging aid, begging for healers. He had physics to care for him, herbalists and surgeons. Yet he was living so quickly, a minute to him now seemed like the better part of an hour. He feared he'd succumb long before an herbalist could arrive.

His heart beat sporadically, pumping hard. Raj Ahten gasped for each breath. With his endowments of hearing, Raj Ahten could hear every surge and gurgle of his failing heart. With his head pressed against the ground, he could hear worms stirring in the earth beneath him.

Then his heart stopped.

In the sudden silence, the sound of worms beneath the ground came louder, as if it were all the sound in the world.

Raj Ahten willed his heart to beat again, willed it to start. Beat, damn you. Beat...

He struggled for air, gasped. He slapped his own mailed chest in frustration.

His heart beat, weakly, once. Then it began to stutter, jerking spastically.

Raj Ahten concentrated. Felt his heart beat once, strongly. A second later, it came again. He gasped air that felt black in his lungs.

Silently, he cried out, willed his facilitators in far lands to give him more stamina, so that he might withstand this. “A king is coming,” he heard the words echoing through his memory. “A king who can kill you!”

Not like this, he begged the powers. Not so ignoble a death.

Suddenly the clutching in his heart eased. It began pumping furiously, and Raj Ahten peed in his armor like an old man with no control over his bladder. He felt some relief as his body rid itself of poison.

As he lay on the grass, the pain receded. He'd been lying on the ground for what seemed to him minutes, though the archers on the wall must have felt only seconds fly by.

He fought to his feet once again, staggered to his line of troops, fell to his knees behind a Frowth giant that he used as a shield.

He glanced back, saw some of his honor guard still struggling to rise under the onslaught of arrows, shields high. But bowmen on the walls were riddling them with shafts.

Rage threatened to take him, a blind and burning rage. Raj Ahten fought it down. Destroying these men would gain him nothing.

Out of bowshot, Raj Ahten stood, panting, and shouted at the castle, “Brave knights, dishonorable lords: I come as a friend and ally in these harsh times. Not as your enemy!”

He let the full power of his Voice flavor the words. Surely these men could see he was the injured party here. Eleven of his finest warriors lay dying on the battlefield.

Though he was far away, too far for his glamour to take full effect, his Voice alone might sway the men.

“Come, King Orden,” he shouted reasonably. “Let us counsel together. Surely you know I have a great army in the wings. Perhaps you can see them now from your vantage point?”

He hoped Vishtimnu was coming. Perhaps such a sighting had prodded Orden to this dastardly deed. With all the sweetness he could muster, he said soothingly, “You cannot defeat me, and I bear you no malice. Throw down your weapons.

“Throw open your gates. Serve me. I will be your king, and you will be my people!” He waited for surrender expectantly, as he had at Castle Sylvarresta.

It seemed he waited for a full minute for any reaction at all. When it came, it was not what he had hoped.

Only a couple dozen of the younger men tossed weapons over the walls, so that spears and bows clattered against the battlements, splashed into the moat.

But as quickly as the weapons fell, so did their bearers—for the hardened warriors on the wall tossed their weak-willed companions to their deaths. The bodies bounced down along the sloped walls of the castle.

A great, greasy-looking bear of a man stood directly above the gates, and he spat as far as he could, so that a wad of spittle hit Raj Ahten's dying knights. Orden's men burst into laughter and shook their weapons.

Raj Ahten sat in the cool wind, gritted his teeth. He had not spoken any better at Castle Sylvarresta, but the effect had been profoundly different.

It might have been that with his increased metabolism, he had not spoken the words as slowly as he'd hoped, enunciated them with the proper intonation. Each time one took endowments of metabolism, one had to learn the arts of speaking and hearing all over again.

Or perhaps it was the endowments of glamour, he told himself. I've lost glamour since Castle Sylvarresta. He'd felt it when the Duchess of Longmont had died, taking her endowments of glamour with her.

“Very well!” Raj Ahten shouted. “We shall do this the hard way!” If Orden had been seeking for some goad to spark Raj Ahten's anger, he'd found it.