The Warrior King (Book 4) Read online

  “Now can we use magic?” Darik asked.

  “Not yet.”

  The second cat finally gathered itself and sprang. It slipped as it jumped, and its claws barely reached the branch. It flailed, trying to get its balance. If it fell, it was a dozen or more feet to the flagstones. The gray cat hooked it with a paw and yanked it up until the sick cat could get a better grip. Then the gray cat scrambled to the ground and stood meowing up at the branch until the other one had managed to get itself down.

  Darik found his attention suddenly drawn elsewhere. He recognized it as magic, tried to fight it, but by the time he’d turned back to the cats, they were gone. In their place were two figures in robes.

  “Hah!” Markal said. “It’s you.”

  The wizard Narud stood in front of them in a gray robe. He was the strangest member of Markal’s order, and his powers were connected to the earth and to the animal life living on it. He could change himself to seemingly any animal he pleased, although this was generally an owl, a goat, or some other harmless creature and not something useful like a lion or a mammoth. Markal could change forms too, but it cost him a great deal more; Narud seemed to complete the transformation at will and with little cost.

  Narud paid no attention to Markal and Darik, but had his arm wrapped around the second figure, who lurched and almost fell, head drooping. The person staggered and would have fallen without the wizard’s support.

  “Help me get her to the shade,” Narud said.

  Together, Markal and Darik took the weak, swaying woman. A length of damp hair, as black as a raven’s feather, fell out of her hood and she lifted a pale, sweating face to look at him as he helped her down. Darik had a jolt of recognition at the sight of her familiar brown eyes.

  “Daria!” he said.

  An initial burst of elation to see the griffin rider quickly turned to alarm. She felt so light in his arms, not the strong, lean figure he’d last seen two weeks earlier in the mountains.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Darik asked, his fear growing by the second.

  Narud pulled back his sleeves. One of his hands was withered and blackened as if burned. The other was pink and raw and tender looking—more healed from an earlier spell, but still weak. He placed this one against her head. “It’s the heat. It’s killing her.”

  “You have a spell to cool her,” Markal said. “Why didn’t you use it?”

  Narud grimaced. “I used everything I could to get us across the desert. We left the griffin in a cave five miles outside Marrabat—I couldn’t risk flying into the city during daylight. He’s a big animal, and it was all I could do to cool his surroundings enough to help him. I thought the girl would hold up until we found you.” A worried look crossed his face. “Perhaps not.”

  Darik sat down and put his hands on Daria’s face. It was dry and hot. The desert seemed to have wrung the moisture from her body. Narud had a waterskin at his belt, but it only had a few swallows, which he tilted into the young woman’s mouth. It temporarily wet her red, blistered lips.

  Daria looked up at Darik and tried to smile. “Well met.”

  He was too worried to answer her. The griffin rider was a daughter of the high mountain peaks, her people shaped over generations to breathe the cold, thin air. Daria bathed in icy streams, could walk barefoot in the snow without being troubled, and flew her griffin to heights that made Darik lightheaded and faint. But she found even the moderate warmth of a northern summer oppressively hot, dangerous if endured too long. Here in the desert, she would melt like a drift of snow beneath the midday sun.

  “The Harvester take you,” he said angrily to Narud. “Why did you bring her into the desert? You know she can’t stand the heat.”

  “Shh, Darik,” Daria said. “I wanted to come. It was the fastest way. Talon—” she stopped and swallowed.

  “Talon?”

  “The golden griffin,” Narud explained. “Quickly, is there more water?”

  Darik sprang to his feet with the empty waterskin in hand. He left the dry gardens in which he and Markal had established themselves. Hurrying through the sloping courtyards below theirs with little worry about spies or palace guards, he went until he found one of the many fountains. It sent water overflowing into a coursing channel that gurgled through a cobbled trough into the next series of gardens below. He filled the water skin and ran back to rejoin his companions.

  Daria gulped half the waterskin and would have emptied it, but Darik instead pulled back her hair from her face and poured it over her head.

  “It’s so warm,” she said. “Don’t you have anything cooler?”

  Nevertheless, her voice seemed more clear. By the time he returned with a second full waterskin and she had drained it, she looked a little stronger. Her face regained some of its color, and perspiration began to bead on her forehead. Soon she was sweating profusely. No wonder she’d been so dehydrated.

  “Poor girl,” Narud said. “So brave and strong. She faced down a dragon. They say it was a hundred feet long, but she crippled it and drove it off. And now look at her.”

  “So why did you bring her here?” Darik asked. “Her place is in the mountains.”

  The reason, Narud explained, was the ravagers. Since Markal and Darik departed, the ravagers had been growing in strength and had escaped toward the Desolation of Toth on their way east. More terribly still, King Whelan’s own brother Roderick, former captain of the Knights Temperate, was in their midst, and Narud suspected that Roderick had been their target all along, that they’d only risked entering the Free Kingdoms to murder him and force him into the service of the enemy.

  “But I don’t understand why,” Narud said. “And I don’t know how to stop them from raising more of these dead men as their champions.”

  Markal chewed on his lower lip. “It’s difficult, costly magic to bind a man’s soul to his dead body and keep the Harvester from gathering his wight. In the Tothian Wars—the first wars, that is,” he added ruefully, “—there were never more than a handful of ravagers. One of them murdered Memnet the Great in his garden with the sword Whelan now carries. I don’t understand how Toth is creating so many of them. Or why they would need Roderick in particular. You’re sure?”

  “I am sure of nothing,” Narud said.

  “I’ll have to get close to Roderick to find out. Capture him, if I can. If not, one of his fellow ravagers.”

  “How will you do that?” Darik asked.

  “I don’t know, but I can’t do it here. I’ll have to travel north again. I suppose Whelan could use my advice and assistance, if nothing else.” Markal glanced at Daria, then at the other wizard. “A golden griffin, you say? Could it carry three?”

  Darik’s heart leaped at the thought that he might be flying out of here with Daria, but then he realized he was the one who would be excluded. Markal would have greater need of Narud’s wizardry, and of course the griffin rider herself needed to get away from this place as soon as possible. That would leave Darik behind to deal with Whelan’s bratty daughter. And then who would face Chantmer the Tall?

  “It’s a golden griffin,” Daria said. She was so damp now with sweat that her robes themselves were soaked. Already, she was eying the empty waterskin. “Of course it can carry three, if we fly low enough.”

  Narud shook his head. “You are brave and so is Talon, but we struggled with two. Markal is larger than I, and the griffin is already tired.”

  “But if Darik flies . . . ”

  She also was thinking that Darik would be the third. It made his heart ache with longing to imagine flying with her again.

  Narud rested a hand tenderly on the young woman’s head. “By the Brothers, you’ll see each other again. Now, is there somewhere we can find to cool the girl? We’ll wait until night to travel.”

  Chapter Six

  Roderick woke with a start. He sat in the saddle of a horse, all pain receded to a haze in the back of his mind. Rags no longer covered his body. Instead, he wore a fine cloak, leath
er breeches, boots, and riding gloves. He touched a hand to his breast. There he wore a black metal breastplate. He remembered the smell of his own burning flesh as they’d pressed the hot branding iron into his skin. Yet his mind had been gone, lost in a haze of pain and torture from the savaging of Pradmort’s dogs. After the branding, he’d lost consciousness.

  He thought at first that it was night, but then he saw the morning sun rising over the blasted land, witnessed through the hazy cloud over his eyes. What he’d taken before for the fog of a deep sleep passing had become his permanent vision.

  They were riding through the Desolation of Toth. Roderick had only glimpsed it before from the Tothian Way as the road carved a magical passageway through the ruined, dead kingdom of Aristonia, left so destroyed by the Tothian Wars that it had become a dead land, haunted by mindless, gibbering wights. The Harvester himself couldn’t gather souls in the Desolation.

  Even though the sun itself looked dim in the sky, and the massive, billowy cloud with its castles and windmills seemed gray and faded, like the colors of an old painting that had been rotting in the cellar of a derelict castle, he was surprised by how clearly he could see the features of the Desolation itself. There were people and beasts among the ruins. Peasants tended fields, and soldiers rode horses. A boy drove a herd of goats across a field, and when the goats stopped, they dropped their heads to pull at the grass.

  Except there was no grass, only sand. There were no fields, either, and the women sweeping their houses were only passing invisible brooms over the rubble of gutted cottages. The soldiers rode their horses in straight lines across roads that no longer existed, and hadn’t for hundreds of years. Most curiously, Roderick could only see the people and animals when he stared straight at them. As he turned his head, they faded even before they’d reached his peripheral vision, while other people appeared instead. Whenever he stopped focusing and cast his gaze across the entire landscape, all he could see was dead, dry land and empty ruins.

  Roderick rode in a company of ravagers, with Pradmort next to him, and two more men in front. The captain stared straight ahead without acknowledging that the other man had just awakened. Roderick opened his mouth to speak and was surprised by the words that came out.

  “Master, how do we travel through the Desolation without attracting attention from the wights? Why don’t they attack us?”

  The man glared at him. “Speak when spoken to.”

  A tide of uncontrollable emotions swept over Roderick at the insult, and he found the sword at his waist and drew it. It was a heavy, evil thing with a red sheen like blood. It reminded him of his brother Whelan’s sword, Soultrup, except dark and wicked. He lifted the blade to strike.

  Pradmort lifted a hand. “Enough. Save your emotions for when we train. Put the sword away.”

  A flush of loyalty washed over him, and shame that he would lift his sword against this man who had brought him back to life. A small voice noted this reaction with alarm. Roderick, what are you doing? Have you gone mad?

  But the voice blinked out as soon as he noted it. He slid the sword into its scabbard. “Yes, my master.”

  One of the other men looked over his shoulder and stared hard at Roderick before saying to the captain, “So you were right. He has kept his mind. I’d have thought he would become one of the mindless ones.”

  “He is a prince, the brother of kings,” Pradmort said, unperturbed that this other man had spoken first, unlike the injunction against Roderick. “His mind is strong.”

  Roderick kept his eyes on the road ahead of him, wondering, but not asking what they were talking about.

  The captain must have felt his question and deemed it worthy of answer. “Many men cannot stand the magic that binds together body and soul. The first test—in your case, the dogs—drives them mad. They become the mindless ones.”

  He nodded over his shoulder, and Roderick looked back to see the bulk of the company, most of whom rode behind, their eyes glazed and staring straight ahead as if not seeing. It reminded him of that horrifying battle where he’d been killed, when the enemy knights had come at him relentlessly, wordlessly, as if ordered by some unseen force, but carrying no more will than the swords or axes wielded in their hands. Some of the ravagers he’d seen in the mountains seemed to have split off from the band, and he couldn’t see the mastiffs that had hunted him down, but at least forty of Pradmort’s men were riding hard across the Desolation.

  In contrast to the silently riding dead, a half-dozen of the men up front, including Pradmort and the man who had been speaking to him—a Balsalomian warrior, from the looks of his olive skin and almond-colored eyes—seemed very much alive. Yet if Roderick had retained his mind, he seemed to have little control of his own body.

  “They don’t attack us,” Pradmort said, addressing Roderick’s other question, “because they only pursue the living. It is the warmth of life that draws them. It reminds them that they’re dead.” He gave a toothy, chilling grin. “But we’re dead too.”

  “What about our mounts? Wouldn’t they . . .?”

  “We killed them before we entered the Desolation.”

  “You killed the horses?”

  “They must be dead to cross this land. Does this shock you?”

  For some reason, yes, it did. That an enemy might give no thought to spilling human blood, he could understand. He could even understand, albeit deplore, how a vicious army might sweep through hostile territory, burning crops and slaughtering livestock. But no soldier, no warrior would kill a good warhorse any more than he would put his own men to the sword. A horse, raised in the art of war, strong enough to carry an armored rider and steady enough to charge a line of bristling pikes, was one of the most valuable commodities of war. Entire campaigns had faltered for lack of sufficient mounts.

  Roderick reached down a hand, and the horse’s flesh felt hot beneath his skin, like it was burning with fever. Yet it was not lathered, though they were riding at a brisk canter, and must have been doing so for some time given how deeply they had penetrated into the Desolation.

  “This land is safe for us, a refuge,” Pradmort said. “We fear nothing, not even the One Who Gathers.”

  The One Who Gathers? The Harvester?

  They rode most of the day, stopping only when Captain Pradmort needed to take stock of their surroundings. The ravagers didn’t eat, and Roderick felt no hunger or thirst. Neither did the horses appear to need rest or fodder. They traveled well into the night before the horses began to slow. By now, a debilitating exhaustion had burrowed into Roderick’s bones. All around, the men hung their heads, as if their last energy had been spent.

  Now is your chance. They are tired. Fall back, escape.

  The captain lifted his head and stared, as if he’d been reading Roderick’s thoughts. Roderick forced his mind to go blank. Once he’d done so, he felt sluggish, unable to remember what had been troubling him.

  “I can feel your soul struggling to break free,” Pradmort said.

  “There is no struggle.”

  “We complete your training tomorrow. Then you’ll be one of us, forever and irrevocably.”

  “Training,” Roderick said in a flat voice. He still didn’t know what the man meant by training, but he remembered the dogs. He remembered the fear, the rage that had wrapped about his neck so tightly he thought he would strangle. But it was not his right to question the captain. Why had he done so?

  A flicker passed through the captain’s eyes, and for a moment, it was as though Roderick could see right through the man’s breastplate and into his chest again. There were worms in there, eyes, wriggling white things, feeding on something. And then the impression was gone.

  “Yes, training. Come, we fall behind. There are miles more to travel before we stop. We grow stronger as we draw nearer to our master, but still we cannot ride forever without rest.”

  #

  The next day they emerged from the Desolation and into the khalifates. Pradmort grew suddenly cautious
. They could only travel during the day, since at night they needed to take refuge in some fortress or atop a sheltered hill and remain very still while the sounds of the Harvester’s horn and the distant baying of his hounds traveled through the air. During the day, they continued east toward Veyre.

  There had been fighting here, and they came across a small walled village at the crossroads of two roads that had seen violence. Its walls had been breached and its towers torn down, yet curiously, the rest of the village seemed undamaged, not sacked as one would expect from an opposing army. Pradmort ordered three of his men into the village to look for survivors and question them while he rode ahead. An hour later the small scouting party returned with news and bloody swords.

  The village was a tribute of the larger town of Yoth, which was itself attached to the Khalifate of Chalfea, an ally and subject of the dark wizard and Veyre. Two weeks earlier a small army had holed up in the village when Roderick’s brother Whelan had led a force of Eriscobans to subdue it. After a day or two of fighting, Whelan had convinced the Yothians to withdraw from the village and let the army from the Free Kingdoms tear down its defenses in return for a promise not to attack Yoth or any of its lands.

  “So they collaborated with the enemy,” Pradmort said.

  “Traitors,” Roderick said. He felt a sudden fury at Yoth’s treachery.

  “Yes,” Pradmort said. He gave Roderick a curious look, and seemed to be turning over something in his mind.

  Later that afternoon they came upon a force of some two hundred Chalfeans on foot with their attendant baggage caravan. They flew the banner of King Toth and were marching in the direction of Veyre and the war. There was a walled town on a hillock to the north of the road, surrounded by fields of golden grain, with goat herders tending their flocks in the surrounding grasslands, but the army didn’t turn toward it even though it was late afternoon and they would need billeting for the night. The men eyed the ravagers warily as they passed.

  “Is that Yoth?” Pradmort asked a passing soldier. When the man confirmed that it was, he said, “It will soon be night. Why don’t you seek refuge in the town?”