David Farland - The Sum of All Men

Earth raised two fingers of dust, the forefinger and index finger of its left hand, to Gaborn's forehead, and there traced a rune.

When it finished, Earth stuck the two fingers to Gaborn's lips.

Gaborn opened his mouth. Earth placed its fingers inside. Gaborn bit, tasting clean soil on his tongue.

In that moment, the fine filaments of hair on the creature of dust fell away, and its muscles slackened, until a pile of dust sloughed to the ground.

Immediately, the suffocating presence of earth power diminished. Light shone thinly still through the trees, and Gaborn breathed deep.

When Binnesman next moved, his face was pale, and the wizard stared at the mound of dust in awe. Reaching down, he respectfully prodded it with a finger, then tasted the dirt.

He took another pinch and sprinkled it over Gaborn's left shoulder, then his right, and then his head, chanting, “The earth heal, the earth hide you, the earth make you its own!

“Now,” Binnesman whispered, placing his hands on Gaborn's shoulders, “Gaborn Val Orden, I name you Earthborn indeed. As you serve the land, it serves you in return.”

Gaborn still smelled rue here in the glade, but now its powerful scent only made his nose itch. He went to the bush, caressed a faded yellow flower, pulled a few leaves from branches.

Gaborn glanced over, saw Binnesman staring at him with something like awe etched into his features.

When Gaborn had taken a dozen more leaves, Binnesman grumbled.

“You don't need enough to wipe out a whole village. Come now, time is short.”

The wizard rolled the rue leaves between his hands, and when he held out his palm, the leaves had crumbled to powder. Binnesman took a pouch from around his own neck, put the crumbled leaves into the pouch, and placed it around Gaborn's throat.

Gaborn took it stiffly, wanting to ask a hundred questions. But when he'd first come into this wild, tangled garden, he'd felt a sense of safety, of being protected. Now he recognized time was drawing short, and he felt a sense of urgency. He had no time to question now.

The kitchen maid had been standing this whole while at the edge of the glade, a terrified expression on her face. Now Binnesman led her and Gaborn downhill, to the south wall of the garden, and they hurried along a narrow trail, Gaborn clutching the forcibles in one hand, the hilt of his saber in the other.

He felt so odd. So numb. He wanted to rest, to have time to sort things out.

When they'd reached the far side of the meadow, beneath the shade of the exotic trees, Gabon heard shouting behind. He glanced back up the trail.

Night had almost completely fallen. Gaborn could see lights shining now from the watchtowers of the Dedicates' Keep, and from down below at the Soldiers' Keep, and from the King's own chambers. A few lonely stars had begun to glow in the sky. This surprised him, for the eyebright so aided his vision that it did not seem night.

But uphill, on the trail behind them, far brighter than any other lights, a fiery man strode into view, the green flames flickering across his shoulders like the tongues of snakes, licking the clean skin of his hairless skull.

The flameweaver was behind the gate still, the same gate Gaborn had entered only minutes before. The guards had fallen back from this sorcerer, and the flameweaver reached out a hand. A bolt of sunlight seemed to burst hungrily from his palm, and the iron gate melted and twisted. The flameweaver pushed past the ruined gate, entered the garden.

Behind him came Raj Ahten's scouts. Men in dark robes, searching for Gaborn's scent.

“Hurry!” Binnesman whispered. If these had been normal men, Gaborn would not have feared. But he sensed now that this was no fight between mere mortals that he engaged in. This was Fire, seeking him.

Then they were running through the woods, over marshy ground beside the stream. Just downhill a few hundred yards, the stream would meet with the River Wye, and there Gaborn hoped to find a means of escape. The maid and the wizard could not match Gaborn's speed. He jumped some low bushes, and in a few moments they reached a small cottage with whitewashed wattle and a thatch roof.

“I must go and save my seeds,” Binnesman hissed. “Rowan, you know the way to the mill. Take Gaborn. May the Earth be with you both!”

“Come,” Rowan said. “This way.”

She reached back for his sleeve, pulled him down a brick road. Gaborn did as he was told, rushing with a renewed sense of urgency. He could hear shouting in the meadows behind him. He still had his boots in hand, was painfully aware with each step that he needed to put them on, yet Rowan ran over the uneven stones recklessly, feeling nothing.

Yet even as he ran, he felt...astonished, full of wonder, incapable of comprehending all that had just happened. He wanted to stop, to take time to ponder. But at the moment, he knew it was too dangerous to do so.

At the edge of the garden, Gaborn told Rowan, “Stop, stop. Put on your shoes, before you break every bone in your foot!”

Rowan stopped, put on her own shoes while Gaborn pulled on his boots; then they ran with greater speed.

She raced out the garden gate, along a street to the King's stables, an enormous building of new wood. She pulled one of the doors open.

A stableboy sleeping in the hay just inside the door shouted in alarm, but Gaborn and Rowan rushed past him, past the long stalls. Here, slung from the ceiling in belly harnesses, were dozens of the King's Dedicate horses—horses robbed of wit, brawn, stamina, or metabolism so that the King's own force horses could have greater power. Rowan ran past the long row of stalls, then fled out the back door. Here a stream, the same stream that had flowed through the wizard's garden, wound through a muddy corral, where the horses stamped and neighed in fear. The stream passed under a great stone wall, the Outer Wall to the city's defenses.

Gaborn could not climb that wall, some fifty feet in height. Instead, Rowan squirmed under the wall, where the stone had eroded over the ages. The passage was narrow, too narrow to admit a warrior in armor, but the thin girl and Gaborn squeezed through, getting wet in the icy water.

Now the stream tumbled downhill, down a steep green. All around the stream grew tall pussy willows.

Gaborn looked up. An archer on the walls was posted just above them. He looked down, saw them escape, and pointedly looked the other way.

The ground here was kept open near the walls, so that archers could shoot from above. Gaborn could never have sneaked into the castle from here, not unobserved.

The hillside became steep just below the pussy willows, where it led into some deep birch and alder woods that were so dark that Gaborn could hardly see. Yet it was only a small grove, a triangle of trees barely two hundred yards long and a hundred wide.

Through the trees Gaborn spotted the river now, broad and black. He could hear its soft voice burbling.

He halted, grabbed Rowan's ankle to stop her from crawling farther. On the far side of the river he saw movement: nomen and Frowth giants setting camps in the darkness. The nomen were black shadows in the fields of grain, hunched and clawing. Gaborn knew that the nomen, who preferred to leap on their prey from trees in the starlight, would be able to see well in the night, but he did not know how well.

Though the nomen had invaded from the sea a thousand years before, the Runelords had decimated their numbers, had even gone so far as to sail to their own dark lands beyond the Caroll Sea to wipe them out. Long had their war cries been silenced. They had not been fierce warriors, but were cunning fighters in the darkness. The nomen were now little more than legend. Still, rumor said that nomen inhabited the Hest Mountains, beyond Inkarra, and that they sometimes stole children to eat. The Inkarrans seemed never quite able to wipe the last of the creatures from the rain forests. Gaborn didn't know how much of the tales to believe. Perhaps the nomen could see him even now.