Wizardborn (61 page)

A thousand blows struck in battle bring a man less honor than a single act of compassion.

—
Ivarian Borenson

Borenson staggered through the dark moors, carrying Myrrima in his arms. She was a big woman, and even with an endowment of brawn, he could not carry her easily—he tired too quickly.

As he carried her, he clung to her right hand, gripping it for life, hoping that by some miracle he could help her hold on for a while longer.

It made little difference, he suspected.

In fact, after an hour, he knew that it made no difference. The bleak cold from her hand froze his bones, making them hard as iron. His own right hand became locked to hers.

He did not regret his decision to hold her, to warm her. He regretted only that he could not feel her hand anymore, for his own flesh seemed to have frozen as solid as midwinter ice.

So he bore her over uneven ground. He listened to her teeth chatter, and each time a puff of icy air came from her mouth, he thought it a small miracle.

It became a chore to walk. Sweat poured from him and his legs burned. Without an endowment of stamina, he tired as quickly and deeply as any other man. He dared not rest, for fear that if he stopped, then he would not regain the will to move again.

So he staggered on beneath the dripping trees and starlit
skies over a land so dank it was fit only for newts and worms. The wolf continued to howl. He no longer feared assassins or wights. He knew his own death would not be far away. The cold of the Toth's wight stole the heat from his own hand, had worked its way down to his elbow. His prayer had been answered in part.

Myrrima would die. He could not stop it. But he also knew that he could not live much longer. He had taken her death into himself as well.

So it was that as he walked, he felt an odd sensation between his legs as his testicles suddenly dropped.

He had had no premonition, no tingling or warning. Indeed, he had forgotten that little boys are not born with hanging walnuts. Instead, they ripen in small sacs between their legs, and drop after a couple of years.

The wizard's balm had worked its miracle. There could have been no more natural way for it to happen.

“I'll pay that damned wizard no more than a pint for the both of them,” Borenson choked, and laughed at fate's cruel jest.

He kept walking. Lift a foot, plod forward. Lift a foot, stagger on.

He could no longer hold his head up. With every step, the world seemed to swim, and his eyes would not focus.

He lost consciousness, and walked for a while in a dreamscape where Myrrima's shade floated beside him.

“I'm coming with you to Inkarra no matter what,” she said. “Leave my body here, and I'll follow. It's all gone cold anyway.”

An overwhelming sadness took him, and he looked down to discover if it was true. He couldn't see whether she was breathing anymore. Icy cold ran up the length of his own arm, pierced his shoulder now.

He wanted nothing more than to lie down with Myrrima to die.

He thought about the message for King Zandaros. He wasn't sure that he could deliver it any longer. He'd always
tried to be faithful to Gaborn. It hurt to find that he had failed him at last.

It was bound to happen, Borenson told himself.

And Daylan Hammer, that mythical figure, was still supposed to be in Inkarra. What of the Sum of All Men? Did he even exist?

He kept walking, and must have slept as he did. He stumbled into a streambed, slipped on round wet stones. One of them drove into his knee, waking him. It was hazy. Mist rose up from the brook, filling its channel with a thick fog. He got up, waded in water up to his hips across the stream, under the dark trees.

I must be getting close to Fenraven, he thought.

He heard a horse whicker. He jumped, realized that he had passed it in the dark, or fog, or perhaps in his sleep.

His own warhorse, the one he'd let Myrrima ride, stood beside the brook, its reins tangled in a limb. He went to it, held Myrrima still as he dug into the saddlebags.

He found the wizard's balm, as she'd said.

He pulled it out, managed to open the tin with one hand. He looked at Myrrima for a long moment. It was dark and foggy. He could hardly see for the burning sweat that stung his eyes. He could not tell if she breathed anymore. If her chest rose and fell, he could not detect it.

He gazed up at the sky, saw a pair of stars plunging through the night. The horizon seemed to be lighter. Soon dawn would come. He wondered if he would live to see it.

He sat down with Myrrima, and smeared the wizard's balm up her arm, over her wrist, and between each finger on her right hand.

He spared only the tiniest bit for himself. There was precious little of it left.

Then he lay down with her beside the stream. He tried to listen to the plink of water as it tumbled over stones. He gazed at the odd way that fog coursed along the channel. He sniffed the scent of moist ground. A cricket chirped in a thicket of brambles, adding a lonely serenade to the music
of the water. He could feel nothing in his right hand. He lay against Myrrima, hoping to warm her.

His thoughts came muzzily. He felt weary nigh to death, but could not sleep.

For a long hour he remained as the stars began to fade, and if his wife breathed, he could not see it, could not feel it. He caressed her chin. It was cold to the touch.

She's dead, he finally admitted, his mind reeling in a daze.

The balm had warmed his hand, brought some life back to it. He pried it loose from Myrrima's frozen grasp.

There was no use pretending any longer, or hoping that she might live. On the Isle of Thwynn, where Borenson was born, the dead were not consigned to the earth, but to the sea.

So he kissed Myrrima goodbye, and begged her forgiveness for loving her poorly. Then he carried her back to the brook, and waded in to his hips. The water seemed warmer than the night air. It still remembered summer.

Somewhere in the distance, a cock crowed. His mind was a muddle from fatigue. He gave his wife to the stream and to the mist, let her float along the brook. Part of him could not believe that she was gone. It is that way with death. He stared into the mist, listened to the stream's music. “Let her find peace in your embrace,” he whispered to the brook, “as you carry her to the sea.”

He felt as if he had somehow betrayed his wife. But in his spent and confused state, he couldn't figure out why. He turned and staggered to his mount. There would be an inn at Fenraven, but he doubted that he would find comfort there.

   51   

Life is a journey, and with every step we reach a point of no return.

—
Gaborn Val Orden

Dawn found Averan lying in a fetal position beside Spring in the back of a wagon as it thundered along a road, heading south from Carris. Averan's tongue had quit bleeding where she'd bitten it, but sweat soaked her thin robe. A large praying mantis rode on the buckboard above her, having turned as gray-brown as the wagon. It stood perfectly still.

Averan lay trembling in pain, wrung out. But the convulsions had mostly stopped an hour ago. She knew that she would live.

Worst of all, she knew that she had failed. She'd fed upon the wrong reaver again. The Waymaker was still out there in the reaver horde, waiting for Gaborn to hunt him down. Waiting for Averan.

She shook her head in despair. The reavers were suffering more than men could suffer. She knew that now. Their capacity to endure pain far exceeded that of a man. Averan feared that if she tried to eat again, she'd die. Yet if she found the Waymaker, she couldn't refuse to try.

She knew little of the blade-bearer she had eaten. Cunning Eater was its name. His few memories tormented her.

Cunning Eater had often tunneled beneath enemy hives and masterminded his queen's wars of genocide. The visions Averan faced were atrocious—charging through enemy tunnels, tearing off the sweet meat of enemy corpses
and gulping them down with a ravenous appetite. In her memory, none were spared. Even the eggs of enemy queens became food for Cunning Eater's horde. No human lord had ever been as rapacious as the monster Averan had eaten.

He had been a master of war, one who had studied ancient battles against mankind and sought to devise new strategems.

Averan closed her eyes against the rising sun, tried to forget.

Still the wagon raced on, chasing the reavers' trail. In the still dawn the high clouds blanketed the skies like a sheet of white silk, while behind it the sun was a rose-colored lamp, all incandescent. A morning mist roamed the fields.

The reavers thundered over the plains, black in the wan morning light, like a vast stampede of elephants as they rocked across the golden grasslands, stirring up dust and sending starlings to wheel through the sky in fretful clouds.

But the reavers plodded slowly now. In five hours during the night they had traveled fewer than forty miles.

The reavers had spent themselves. Averan could feel it from Cunning Eater's every memory. Sweat still squeezed from her every pore. A ravenous thirst still assailed her. She drank, but water did not satisfy. She craved more, but when men offered it to her fresh, she sniffed at it and panicked. She wanted sulfur in it.

The reavers themselves had begun to show signs that they were failing. In the night, first one reaver and then another dropped from the marching line. They did not stop, just simply began loping in circles. Their left legs kept marching while their right could not, so that they spun around on the ground like water beetles on the surface of a pool.

Gaborn himself had ridden up to her wagon in the predawn darkness an hour ago, pointed out the afflicted reavers by moonlight and asked, “Do you know what it means?”

“They're dying of thirst,” she confirmed.

“Let's hope for a warm day then,” he'd said. “Maybe a bit of sun will hurry their end.”

Now, Averan's left arm spasmed in a cramp. She cried out. Spring crept up beside her in the bed of the wagon and began stroking Averan's hair.