The RuneLords (11 page)

As the attack progressed, Sylvarresta barely had time to marshal his defenders. Boiling oil had been lugged up to the wall-walk shortly after dark. Though the normal complement of three guards marched along the Parapet, a dozen more crouched behind the battlements out of sight.

Still, defenders needed to be warned. Archers manned the towers; soldiers hiding in the city needed to be notified so that they could cut off the assassins' escape.

From behind his stained-glass window, Sylvarresta watched the assassins reach the halfway point on the stone wall of the keep; then the King opened the window and blew a soft, shrill whistle.

As one, his soldiers leapt up and poured oil down the keep's walls, tossing great iron cauldrons over as they emptied. The oil did not have the desired effect. It had cooled too much since sunset, and though the assassins cried in dismay at their burns and some plummeted when swept from the walls by falling cauldrons, more than twenty still scrambled up the walls, swift as lizards.

The guards atop the Dedicates' Keep drew swords and pikes. From the King's Keep, some hundred yards distant, archers let arrows fly. A few more assassins plummeted, but Raj Ahten's knights were frighteningly swift, terrifyingly determined.

King Sylvarresta had imagined the assassins would run when they met resistance. Instead they scurried faster, reaching the tops of the parapet, where razor wire hindered them. Sylvarresta's soldiers hacked at the assassins, so that a dozen more plummeted from the keep's tower.

Still, seven assassins won the top of the tower, where their incredible skills as fighters came into play. The assassins moved so swiftly, Sylvarresta's men could not well defend themselves. Yet four more assassins got cut down, while a dozen defenders were slaughtered.

The three remaining assassins hurtled down the steps into the Dedicates' Keep--just as the King's pikemen rushed from the guardroom beneath the portcullis.

The assassins ignored the guards, instead leapt to the iron grate that covered one low door to the Dedicates' Hall. Though the door was barred with heavy iron, two assassins grabbed a bar and pulled, ripping it from the wall, dislodging two-hundred-pound stones set with mortar.

The third assassin faced the pikemen, ready to defend.

But these pikemen were no common soldiers.

Captain Derrow and Captain Ault came, side by side, holding back nothing. Captain Ault stabbed at the assassin's head, a lightning thrust.

The assassin dodged, his own short sword snaking out, biting Ault's gloved hand. The assassin was a dark monster, draped in robes of black, a man whose speed astonished. He shifted on his feet, weaving from side to side so quickly that no commoner could have landed a blow. He drew a second knife, his hands whirling in the deadly Dancing Arms style.

In that second, the door to the Dedicates' Keep screamed as if in agony.

The two assassins pulled the door wide. One assassin bolted through the door.

Captain Derrow swung his pike as if it were an axe. An assassin by the door took a firm knock to the head.

The assassin guard ducked. Ault anticipated his move and lunged. Ault slammed the pike into the man's chest, then lifted, flinging the assassin up and aside.

Ault tossed away the pike, drew a long dagger, and bolted into the Dedicates' Keep.

Inside, Ault found that the last assassin had already slaughtered two guards posted by the door, then had run into the hall, felling some five or six Dedicates who should have been abed. Even now, the assassin knelt over a victim, scimitar in hand.

Ault threw his short sword, caught the assassin solidly in the back. Had the assassin been a commoner, he'd have collapsed. Had he been an angered man with great stamina, he'd have turned and gone berserk.

What the assassin did next chilled Ault to the bone.

The assassin turned, all dressed in a black caftan and black cotton pants, a black kerchief hiding his face. A gold ring glittered in his ear.

He studied Ault thoughtfully, eyes filled with deadly intent. Ault's heart pounded, for he wondered how many endowments of stamina it took for a man to ignore a sword in his back.

A dozen soldiers rushed through the broken door, filling the Dedicates' Keep. Ault took a hammer from a dead guard.

The assassin looked Captain Ault in the eye, then raised his hands. He said in a thick accent, "Barbarian: As you see this tide of men sweep over me, so shall my lord's Invincibles sweep over you!"

Raj Ahten's Invincibles were elite troops--men with great stamina, each of whom had at least one endowment of metabolism. The assassin made as if to charge. Yet Ault knew it would be a feint. Having won through to the Dedicates' Keep, the assassin would now continue with his duty, to slay as many Dedicates as possible.

Ault lunged, swinging his hammer, just as the assassin spun toward the beds of the sleeping. The warhammer bit into the assassin's neck.

"Don't bet on it," Ault said.

In his keep, King Sylvarresta felt the deaths of his Dedicates as he began to lose his magical connection to them. It was a nauseating sensation, like a cold snake writhing through his innards. Men who had endowed him with wit died, and Sylvarresta was assailed by a sudden emptiness as rooms of memory closed off forever.

He'd never know what he'd lost--memories of friends from childhood or a picnic in the forest, memories of important sword strokes practiced time and again with his father, or a perfect sunset, or a wife's kiss.

He only became aware that he was sundered. The doors to the rooms of memory slammed shut. The shutters to the windows fell. And in his mind there was a great moment of darkness, a keen sense of loss.

As he rushed downstairs to guard his Dedicates himself if need be, he felt as if he wallowed through the darkness.

A minute later, Sylvarresta reached the Dedicates' Bailey, counted his losses. Ten guards dead, five wounded. And five Dedicates lost.

In studying the corpses of the Muyyatin assassins, he found that each had been formidable. Their leader, whom Ault had slain, had over seventy runes burned into his flesh. With so many endowments, he had to have been a captain among the Invincibles. Many others had twenty runes or more, making them equal to Captain Derrow.

Five of Sylvarresta's Dedicates lay dead. Two gentlemen who had granted Sylvarresta wit, two who had granted sight to the King, and one who had granted sight to the King's far-seer. Sylvarresta imagined that the blind men must have been telling stories by the hearth, and the sound of their voices had brought the idiots their deaths.

When the body count was taken, Sylvarresta considered himself lucky. It could have been worse. If the assassins had made it farther into the Dedicates' Keep, the result would have been devastating.

Yet King Sylvarresta could not help but wonder at what he'd lost. He'd had endowments of wit from five men. Now he'd lost forty percent of all his memories, of years of studies. What had he known five minutes ago that he might need to remember in days to come...?

He considered the dead, wondering. Was this attack a precursor to next year's war?

Had Raj Ahten sent assassins to attack all the kings of the North, in an attempt to weaken them? Or was this a part of some more daring scheme?

Sylvarresta's readings in the Emir's book made him worry. Raj Ahten seldom bothered with feints. Instead he singled out castles, striking with ferocity, overwhelming his opponents, then consolidated his position before moving on.

It seemed odd to Sylvarresta that Raj Ahten would target Heredon. It was not the closest neighbor to Raj Ahten. Nor was it the least defensible of the northern realms.

Yet he recalled his chess game from so many years ago. The way Raj Ahten struggled to control even far corners of the hoard. Though Heredon was at the edge of Raj Ahten's board, the consequences of its loss would be devastating: Raj Ahten would take a Northern country, forcing Fleeds and Mystarria to defend on fronts both to their north and south. Heredon was not a poor country. Sylvarresta's smiths were the finest makers of arms and armor in Rofehavan, and the land was rich in cattle for food, sheep for wool, in timber to build fortifications and engines of war, and in vassals to give endowments.

Raj Ahten would need all of these to take the North.

My wife is his cousin, Sylvarresta reminded himself. Perhaps he imagines she is a danger to him. The Powers know, Venetta Sylvarresta would have stabbed Raj Ahten in his sleep years ago, if she'd had the chance.

Is this part of a grander scheme? Sylvarresta worried. Attacks like this could be taking place in every castle in Rofehavan. If all the assassins struck simultaneously, Sylvarresta would not have time to warn his fellow kings.

He rubbed his eyes, lost in speculation.

In the forests of the Dunnwood, Prince Gaborn rode in silence through the starlight, avoiding the narrow gullies and darker woods where wights might congregate.

The trees above him were twisted things, with limbs half-bare, the yellow birch leaves waggling in the night wind like fingers. The carpet of leaves beneath his horse's hooves was deep and lush, making for a quiet ride.

Shortly after dusk the sorcerous mists had begun to fail. Raj Ahten no longer needed such mists to hide him. Instead, now the stars overhead shone with unnatural clarity, perhaps because of some spell cast by Raj Ahten's flameweavers, gathering light so that they might let the Wolf Lord's army pick their way through the woods.

For hours Gaborn had been circumventing Raj Ahten's army, evading pursuers. He'd managed to kill two more Frowth giants, and he shot an outrider from his saddle. But Gaborn had seen no sign of pursuit for three hours.

As he rode, he wondered. The Dunnwood was an old wood, and a queer place by any standard. The headwaters of the River Wye were said to be magical places, where three-hundred-year-old sturgeons as wise as any sage lived in the deep pools.

But it was not these that Gaborn wondered at. It was the woods' legendary affinity for "right" and "law." Few outlaws had ever penetrated the forest. There was Edmon Tillerman, who came into the woods as an outlaw, a madman who took endowments of brawn and wit from bears until he became a creature of the wood himself. According to the folktales, he left off his stealing, and in time became a hero--avenging poor farmers wronged by other outlaws, protecting the woodland creatures.

But there were stranger stories still: the old woman centuries ago who was murdered and hidden in a pile of leaves in the Dunnwood, who then became a creature of wood and sticks that hunted down her killers.

Or what of the giant "stone men" that some said walked these woods? Creatures that sometimes came to the edge of the forest and stood gazing thoughtfully to the south?

There was a time--centuries ago--when these woods loved man more than they did now. A time when men could travel them freely. Now, a stillness, a heaviness, had come under the trees, as if the wood itself were outraged and considering retaliation against so many uninvited men. Certainly the heat of the flameweavers, the iron-shod hooves of horses, the mass of men and giants would all cause some damage to the forest.

The owls had fallen silent this night, and twice Gaborn had seen huge harts bounding through the trees, shaking their great antlers from side to side as if prepared to fight.

Off to his right, the armies marched. A. feeling pervaded the forest, like the electric thrill of a brewing storm.

For long hours, Gaborn rode through the trees, a heaviness growing in his heart, a drowsiness fogging his mind. It was a sweet, organic tiredness--like that brought on by mulled wine while one sits beside a fire, or like the drugged sleep induced by an herbalist's concoction of poppy petals.

Gaborn's eyelids began to feel weighty. He half-dozed as he rode up a ridge, around a peak, and back down into a valley, where brambles and limbs blocked his every path.

He became angry, drew his saber, and considered hacking his way through the trees, but stopped when he heard curses just ahead, and the sound of someone else, a man in armor, hacking through the same copse.

Almost too late he recognized the source of the danger. Somehow he'd turned around in his ride.

The trees. He wondered if they had led him to danger.

In the shadowed woods, Gabon stopped. He glimpsed one of Raj Ahten's patrols. A dozen scouts hacked a path through the brush, while Gaborn held perfectly still.

They passed in the darkness. Gaborn feared even to breathe.

He reined in his horse, hard, and inhaled deeply. For long moments he tried to focus his thoughts. No harm, he wanted to say to the woods. I mean you no harm.

It required all his will to merely sit a horse, to keep from riding headlong toward destruction. Sweat broke out on Gaborn's forehead, his hands trembled, and his breathing came ragged.

I am your friend, he wanted to say. Feel me. Test me. For long moments, he tried to open himself, his mind and heart, to communicate to the wood.

He felt the tendrils of thought move slowly, seeking him, grasping him as a root might grasp a stone. He could feel their ponderous power.

The trees seized him, infiltrated every portion of his mind. Memories and childhood fears began to flash before Gaborn's eyes--unwanted bits of dreams and adolescent fantasies. Every hope and deed and desire.

Then, just as slowly, the seeking tendrils began to withdraw.

"Bear me no malice," Gaborn whispered to the trees when at last he could speak. "Your enemies are my enemies. Let me pass safely, that I may defeat them."

After many long heartbeats, the heaviness around him seemed to ease. Gaborn let his mind drift and dream, though with his stamina he needed no sleep.

He thought upon the thing that had brought him north, his desire to see Iome Sylvarresta.

On a mad impulse last year, he had come secretly to Heredon for the autumn hunt, so that he could take the measure of her. His father came annually for Hostenfest, the autumn celebration of the great day, some sixteen hundred years past, when Heredon Sylvarresta had speared a reaver mage here. Now, each year in the Month of Harvest, the lords of Heredon rode through the Dunnwood, hunting the great boars, practicing the same skills with lance that had been used to defeat the reavers.