“Take endowments from the young,” Despair said. “And as you do, seize their livestock to feed yourselves. By the time that the livestock is gone, the small folk will be too weak to fight you, and you can harvest them. . . .”
Crull-maldor considered the plan. It was monstrous in nature. Despair would create a nation of runelords, something that—as far as she could tell—had never been tried before.
Among the humans, such a plan could not have worked. The humans were farmers and herdsmen. They relied so much upon their harvests that they could not have attempted anything on this scale.
But the wyrmling armies that swept across the worlds would move so quickly that they would be impossible to stop, and they could simply feed upon their enemies.
“I see,” Crull-maldor whispered. “We shall be the devourers of worlds.”
“You see but a glimpse,” Despair corrected. “For now, your people shall each take ten endowments apiece, and in doing so they shall ascend above all other races.
“But in a few weeks, they shall get ten more endowments of metabolism, and ten more—until each has a hundred. Thus each wyrmling will be born and die within a year, and conquer much. The work that we are set to do is vast indeed, so vast that it could take millennia to perform under normal circumstances.
“Yet within the year, your people will begin populating a thousand new worlds, breeding and multiplying. Inside a few decades, we shall not rule one world, but all worlds.”
Crull-maldor smiled, unable to fathom what this might mean. “Milord,” she whispered, “what place will you find for me to serve in such a vast kingdom?”
Despair gazed at her thoughtfully, and whispered, “You may choose a world, the finest jewel that you can find, and there you may reign.”
15
WATER
There seems to be an unwritten law to the universe. Whenever you determine to do something great, something extraordinary, your fellow men will mock you and combine against you.
—Gaborn Val Orden
For six weeks the Borrowbird plowed through a sea that seemed to Aaath Ulber to be made of stone. For much of the time, leaden waves, as rough as boulders, tumbled into the ship under heavy gray skies. Three times great storms arose, battering the ship, driving it mercilessly.
The ship’s meager supplies soon began to give out. The barrels of food dwindled, the water became depleted.
Aaath Ulber never caught sight of land, but six weeks into the journey Draken raised a shout in the nighttime, having spotted sails ahead. They were massive red sails of a wyrmling fleet, some twenty warships strong.
Aaath Ulber stood on the deck in the early morning and peered off in amazement: he hadn’t known that the wyrmlings had such fleets.
So much about the wyrmlings was a mystery. They lived underground, and often sought to hide their numbers. Their capitol was at Rugassa, but there were tales of other large cities elsewhere—in the lands that Sir Borenson had once known as Inkarra and Indhopal.
But fleets of warships?
“Where do you think they’re going?” Draken asked, while the rest of the family stood at Aaath Ulber’s back.
“To introduce themselves to the folk of Landesfallen,” Aaath Ulber said. The sight of the ships left him sick. “The wyrmlings must have learned of it.”
But how? Aaath Ulber wondered. He could come up with only one answer: The folks in Rofehavan must have alerted the wyrmlings.
Aaath Ulber didn’t want to alarm the children, but the sight of the fleet filled him with foreboding.
The wyrmlings have already taken Rofehavan, he reasoned. They wouldn’t send out ships if they felt that there was still a threat to their home front.
They could only have gained such complete control, Aaath Ulber reasoned, if they got to the blood metal at Caer Luciare.
Otherwise, the folk of Mystarria would have overrun the wyrmlings.
My wife Gatunyea will be dead, he realized. As will my children there.
The wyrmling ships drew near, and Aaath Ulber had to run to the north for several hours to evade them. But his small vessel, so light and free, quickly outpaced the black ships.
The water ran out completely a day later. Just when Aaath Ulber needed a storm, none came, and his barrels lay empty.
The family could not go long without water—a couple of days if the temperatures stayed cool, fewer if it grew hot.
He wrapped a little goat hair around a hook, creating something that looked like an eel, and threw his line out behind the ship, hoping to lure a fish, hoping for just a bit of moisture.
They caught a striped bass that way, and Aaath Ulber ate it raw, but the moisture in the fish tasted as salty as seawater, and it only made his thirst worsen.
There were tales of water wizards who could turn seawater into fresh pure drinking water, and so he asked Myrrima if she would give it a try. But she had no knack for it.
They sailed through the next night without water, and a third day.
By then, Aaath Ulber’s tongue felt swollen in his mouth, and he was beginning to grow sick with a fever. Little Sage was worse off. She fell into a swoon that morning, and when she woke at all, she kept calling to her dead sister, “Erin? Erin, where are you?”
Rain took some of her linen and draped it in seawater, then made a compress of it and put it on Sage’s head, to try to slow the fever. But upon feeling the moisture in the rag, Sage kept trying to pull it into her mouth.
“We need water,” Aaath Ulber mourned when his wife drew near. “Could you summon a storm?”
She just shook her head weakly. “I’ve never had a gift for that kind of thing.”
The day was cool, but the sun beat down on Aaath Ulber as he sat at his tiller, drying his skin. His lips were chapped and caked with sores. He felt light-headed.
This sun will be the death of me, he realized.
Every muscle felt weak. He doubted that he could make it through another day.
But Draken has steered through the nights. He can carry on when I’m gone.
If someone is to die, he thought, it is right that it is me. I’m the one who brought them here.
Such was the parade of his thoughts, plodding in circles through his frenzied mind, when suddenly Myrrima came from the galley.
“Head straight into the wind,” she said. “I smell fresh water.”
Aaath Ulber turned the rudder just a bit, and Myrrima adjusted for him. Then she saw how weak he was and told him to move aside, as she sat and steered.
He peered off toward the horizon, looking for signs of land, but saw nothing.
“Get into the hold,” Myrrima told him. “This sun will be the death of you.” Aaath Ulber chuckled, for he’d been thinking the same all day.
Groggily, he made his way into the hold, where he lay having fevered dreams. Sometimes he thought that he was Gaborn’s bodyguard again, and that they were traveling up the coasts of Mystarria to survey the realm. Other times he thought that he had been wounded fighting reavers, and that someone had put him in a death wagon by accident.
Draken put a cool compress on Aaath Ulber’s head, and after a time he began to recover.
For hour after hour, Myrrima steered, gradually moving farther and farther south. It was near dusk when Rain finally spotted the source of the water and let out a shout. Aaath Ulber found the strength to struggle up from the hold. The red sun on the horizon cast its light upon a snow-covered hill far in the distance, staining its peak red. A great blue fog spread out from the mountain’s base, so that Aaath Ulber could not see the island’s shore.
“There!” Myrrima cried.
Aaath Ulber grinned, and cheers went up from Rain and Sage and Draken.
But a moment later Aaath Ulber finally caught a strange scent—metallic and bitter.
It’s not a hill, he realized. It’s an iceberg!
But ice is water, fresh water. And we’re saved.
So that night in the fading twilight, as the half-moon rode upon th
e backs of the stars, the two men rowed their little away boats up to the berg.
As they drew near, the heavy fog obscured the stars. They could hear the sounds of the ice, splitting and cracking, and every few minutes some ice would rumble and go cascading into the water, starting an avalanche.
Getting the ice would be dangerous business. Even drawing close to the berg was to risk one’s life.
“Perhaps we should wait until morning,” Aaath Ulber suggested. “When we can see what we’re doing.”
“I’m not sure you’ll last until morning,” Draken said, as a loud crack split the air. “How about we get in and out quickly?”
Aaath Ulber grinned. “Spoken like a warrior.”
So they lit a torch, and then rowed close to the berg. The ice seemed to rise straight from the water a hundred feet, and Draken stood for a long moment, waving his torch from right to left, looking for a path.
They turned south and Aaath Ulber began to paddle for a moment. Behind them there was a cracking sound and boulders of ice came raining down, just where they had been.
“Hah,” Aaath Ulber jested, “if we’d only known, we could have just held our barrels out.”
But the blocks of ice that bobbed in the water now were contaminated with salt.
So the two rounded the berg until they found a gentler slope, one where loose ice lay like boulders.
Here they tied their boat to an outcrop of ice and disembarked.
Draken carried the torch and scaled the berg’s rough sides, while Aaath Ulber hoisted an empty water barrel under each arm and made his way behind.
When they were a hundred feet above the sea, and Aaath Ulber felt that the water would be pure and fresh, he used his war hammer as a pick, gouging out great blocks of ice.
With bare hands, Draken shoved the ice into barrels; then they hammered on lids and took them down to the boat in a rush, lest an avalanche fall upon them.
Three trips they made, hearts hammering in fear.
When the iceberg was silent, it seemed deathly silent. And when the ice cracked in the least, it sounded like doom.
On the last trip, Aaath Ulber carried two barrels up, and felt too weary to hammer the ice, so Draken took a turn. He had only clanked the hammer against the ice lightly, when Aaath Ulber heard movement above.
Chunks of ice began to roll down. One pinged off of a nearby ledge.
“Avalanche!” Draken shouted; he turned and began to slide downhill.
But Aaath Ulber paused. It was only a few chunks; he hoped that there would be no more.
He lifted his torch and looked up—toward the peak of the iceberg three hundred feet above. He saw something white in the darkness—huge, rushing toward him.
A boulder of ice! he thought. He heard a snarl as it came to life.
A bear rushed past him, a great white bear!
It dwarfed the enormous bears that had haunted the Dunnwood in his youth. This breed could stand thirteen feet tall and weigh well over a ton, and this particular specimen strained the limits for size.
Aaath Ulber shouted a warning, but Draken was already running, and his flight attracted the predator. It bounded atop him. The weight of the bear drove Draken down onto his belly, and the two of them began sliding over boulders of ice, sledding toward the water amid the frozen scree.
But the bear was eager for a kill.
Draken screamed in terror, tried to scrabble away. The bear roared and lunged for Draken’s neck.
By blind instinct, Draken managed to get on his back. He shoved his arm up into the bear’s mouth, far enough so that it got behind the monster’s teeth, and kept it there, trying to keep the bear’s jaws from clamping down. The bear slapped at Draken with a big paw, raking his side with its claws.
Aaath Ulber roared, hoping to startle the beast, and went rushing down the slope waving his torch.
He saw the war hammer that Draken had been digging with, and grabbed it as he ran.
Draken had nothing to fight with but his eating dagger, which was strapped to his hip. Draken shoved the bear’s head back with one hand, pulled the blade and stabbed, thrusting it into the bear’s neck.
The bear gave a yelping roar, whirled its head to the left to see where the pain came from.
Then it snarled and chomped down on Draken’s face. Its teeth were like a vise, and it shook its head savagely, trying to rip the young man’s flesh, or perhaps break his neck.
Aaath Ulber reached the pair and shouted, “Aaaagh! Get off of him!”
The bear looked up, saw Aaath Ulber. There was madness in the creature’s eyes, an endless hunger. Aaath Ulber realized that it had been stuck on this iceberg for weeks with little or nothing to eat. It was desperate, and would give no quarter.
Draken slammed his knife into the bear again, and the monster barely registered the pain.
So Aaath Ulber swung with his might, adjusting the blow in mid swing so that his war hammer, slammed the bear between the eyes.
The bear fell upon Draken, a sodden weight.
“You killed it!” Draken shouted, panicky, trying to shove the monster’s weight off of him. “You killed it!” he cried again, relief and glee mixed in his voice.
“Yes,” Aaath Ulber said dryly. “I killed it. But you get to skin and gut the beast!”
16
THE SPIRIT BAG
We define our own greatness. Envision the kind of person that you would most admire, and then set down the path to become that man.
—Emir Owatt of Tuulistan
A whisper of a thought came from the emperor. Lord Despair desires Knights Eternal to lead his armies. You will begin creating and training them.
Crull-maldor was down among her sorcerers, hundreds of liches and wyrmlings who struggled day and night to meet Lord Despair’s growing demands, for the wars that he was about to wage were straining every resource.
No longer was the Fortress of the Northern Wastes a sleepy little outpost. In the forges, hammers rang night and day. Ax and spear, helm and shield. Crull-maldor’s wyrmlings were struggling to meet the new orders.
War was imminent, Crull-maldor knew, a war so vast that the wyrmlings had never dreamed of the like. World upon world her people would be called upon to conquer.
But now this?
Knights Eternal? Crull-maldor demanded. How many will Lord Despair want?
For millennia the wyrmlings had only three. A few hundred years ago, Crull-maldor had participated in creation and training of three more. But Crull-maldor had recently learned that some of those had been killed. Obviously, Despair would want to replace them.
It was a great labor to create and train the monsters, a labor that Crull-maldor despised—especially now, when so much more was required of her troops.
Our lord desires a hundred thousand of them, the emperor whispered. It will require much from all of us. We will begin immediately. The rut is on. You will speak to the spirits of the babes in the wombs of your females, begin their instruction, and strangle all who are born this breeding season.
Crull-maldor was stunned, and could think of nothing to say, but the emperor cut off contact with her mind, relieving her of the burden of speech.
She hesitated a moment, wondering why the sudden need for Knights Eternal in such vast numbers. The training of such a monster took hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of hours.
For the next few centuries, training them would require all of Crullmaldor’s time, all of her effort.
I am a nursemaid to the undead, she thought. That is all that I can be.
This was the end of her life, she knew. There would be no honors, no vaunted position. She would never become emperor, for with a call for so many Knights Eternal, even the emperor Zul-torac would be demoted. He too, would become a nursemaid.
Why would Despair need so many of them? Crull-maldor wondered. But the answer was obvious. Despair had begun his great and last war. He was sending troops through the doorways, into the far reaches of the universe. He
would conquer one world at a time, until the heavens groaned under his rule.
He would need servants to dominate these worlds—the most powerful servants in Despair’s arsenal.
The Knights Eternal had gained Lord Despair’s favor. That was the only possibility. It was said that they had taken endowments. Their living flesh allowed them a boon that Crull-maldor could never receive. That was the rumor, at least, and Crull-maldor believed it, for it was the only thing that made sense.
The Knights Eternal shall rule the heavens, Crull-maldor realized . . . and I, I will die being their nursemaid.
The very thought made her seethe.
I am more powerful than they, she thought. I am more powerful than the emperor.
And an idea struck her.
The only reason that the Knights Eternal had gained favor with Lord Despair was because they could garner endowments.
But what if I took endowments?
It was an intriguing idea. The endowment process worked only among the living, she knew. If a runelord took endowments and died, then the attributes returned to those who had given them. And if a Dedicate died, then the attribute was stripped from the lord who had taken it.
For this reason, it was imperative that a runelord guard his Dedicates, keep them safe, lest the lord’s enemies kill the Dedicates and thus strip the lord of his attributes, leaving him weak and powerless.
But what is life? Crull-maldor wondered.
It was a mystery that she had studied for hundreds of years. As a lich, she defied death every second. She lived half in the world of the flesh, half in the world of the spirit.
Life is not an absolute, she told herself. Between life and death are infinite gradations, shades of gray. A body survives only so long as its spirit clings to its flesh, and most men who feel themselves to be alive are closer to death than they would like to believe.
So why would a Knight Eternal be able to take endowments, and not me? she wondered. The Knights Eternal are deader than I am, for I still cling to the remains of my own body while they only inhabit the shells left by others.
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