His serpentine trail twisted over the tortuous ridges and through the crevasses, curling among black pines that struggled up to bristle like spears through cracked rock and a thin crust of snow.
It was bitterly cold, and Raj Ahten clung to his warhammer. After the rout at Carris, reavers had fled blindly in every direction. Twice Raj Ahten had stumbled upon the monsters in the woods and brought them down.
Worse than reavers hunted in these woods. Gaborn had turned many of Raj Ahten’s own Invincibles against him. A troop of them had ridden over the pass recently, leaving hoofprints in the fresh snow.
So Raj Ahten traveled over paths that horses could not follow, bypassing his armies in the mountains.
Wolves howled in the shadowed pines. They’d caught his blood-scent, and now loped behind, trying to match his pace. Raj Ahten could smell his own vital fluids, cloying amid the competing scents of snow, ice, stone, and pine.
He found himself breathing hard; the muscles in his chest were knotted. The air so high in the mountains was thin, pricking his lungs like needles.
His armor seemed suffocating; its metal leeched the warmth from his bones. He’d carried it all night, but finally he stripped off his torn shirt of mail and threw it down. Black scales broke off and scattered on the snow as if he’d tossed a carp against a rock.
Raj Ahten’s stomach clenched from hunger.
With so many endowments of brawn and stamina to his credit, he should have felt vigorous, filled with endless energy.
He wondered at the strange illness that assailed him. Eleven hours past, Binnesman’s wylde had attacked him, breaking the ribs in his chest. Perhaps they’d not healed properly. All night long, Raj Ahten had felt rising pain—in the wounds in his chest, in his muscles, as if he suffered from some wasting disease.
He feared that some Dedicates had died, causing him to lose stamina. But a Dedicate’s death brought a sudden nausea and a wrenching sense of loss as the magical connection severed. He had not felt that.
Raj Ahten silently stalked over a small rise, and beheld an oddity: half a mile ahead, in a shadowed valley, his spy balloon rested in a clearing, a great balloon shaped like a graak.
On the ground beneath it a fire burned, reflecting flames off the snow into the silk wings of the graak.
Some of his men huddled beside the fire brewing tea—his counselor Feykaald, along with his flameweavers: Rahjim, Chespot, and Az. The Days that chronicled Raj Ahten’s life was also in the group.
Feykaald was old, his gray burnoose pulled up over his head, a black cloak wrapped around him like a blanket. The flameweavers wore nothing but loincloths, and luxuriated near the blaze. The flames of many fires had long ago licked the hair from their brown skins. Their eyes glowed like mirrors, perfectly reflecting light from the campfire.
Raj Ahten’s most loyal followers sat quietly, as if awaiting him—or as if they were silently summoning him.
He thrust his warhammer into its scabbard, strode to the camp. “Salaam,” he said. Peace. The men acknowledged him, each mumbling “Salaam” in turn.
“Rahjim,” Raj Ahten asked the most powerful of the flameweavers, “did you see a patrol pass by?”
“Riders came down the trail just as we landed, judges of the Ah’kellah, led by Wuqaz Faharaqin. He carried the head of his nephew, Pashtuk, in a bag. He will try to raise the Atwaba against you.”
“Troublemaker,” Raj Ahten said. “I’m glad that not all of my men follow the Earth King.”
Rahjim shrugged. “The Earth King could not Choose me any more than he could Choose a water buffalo.” Smoke puffed out from his mouth as he spoke.
Raj Ahten grunted, but merely stood gasping in the campfire’s glow, warming his hands in its pale smoke. A log crackled; cinders shot into the sky.
The fire felt good. It burned away the cold and the pain. Flames fanned out along the ground, as if to lick him, though no wind blew. He suspected that the sorcerers manipulated the flames to his benefit.
All three flameweavers watched Raj Ahten curiously.
Rahjim ventured, “O Great Light, do you feel...well?”
“I feel—” There was no word for it. Raj Ahten felt noticeably weak, frail, and disoriented. “I am not myself. I may have lost some endowments.”
Rahjim studied him with that penetrating gaze. Flameweavers were often discerning healers, capable of diagnosing a man’s most minor ailment.
“Yes,” Rahjim said. “Your light is very dim. Please, breathe the smoke of the fire, and blow it out for me.”
Raj Ahten bent low to the fire, inhaled the pine smoke, blew it out slowly. The flameweavers studied the way that the smoke moved, traced its path through the sky.
Suddenly Rahjim’s eyes widened. He looked to the others as if for confirmation, but dared not speak.
“What is it?” Raj Ahten asked. He wondered if he had contracted some illness due to the fell mage’s curses.
“There are changes in you—” Rahjim admitted. “This is no common illness. Wizardry is involved—Binnesman’s curse. Remember Longmont?”
“Yes!” Az said, his own eyes wide. “I see it too!”
“See what?” Raj Ahten demanded.
Rahjim said, “The Earth Powers are withdrawing from you. That is causing...the changes.”
“What changes?” Raj Ahten demanded.
“You have lost stamina—a single endowment. And one of wit, one of brawn....”
“Only one? It feels like more.”
“You’ve lost your key endowments,” Rahjim said.
“Key endowments” was a term used by facilitators. It meant the endowments a man was born with. Like the keystones in an arch, they held a man together. The news was baffling.
“You are dying,” Chespot said plainly. “In some sense, perhaps you are dead already.”
“What?” Raj Ahten demanded.
Raj Ahten had heard of dead men who still breathed, of course. As a child, he’d been raised on such tales. Just as a senile man can often mask his condition with endowments of wit—effectively remembering much even as his brain slowly withered inside his head—a slain Runelord with many endowments of stamina could sometimes survive for hours or days in a morbid state.
“What am I?” Raj Ahten asked, numb.
Rahjim said, “You...are something that has never been before.”
Chespot eyed him critically. “To live beyond your allotted hour is not a small thing. Your life is ended, but the endowments you’ve taken have not returned to those who gave them. You have taken a great step. I believe that you are the Sum of All Men. You are eternal.”
Am I? Raj Ahten wondered. For years he had gathered endowments, sought to become the Sum of All Men, that mythical creature that could become immortal. He’d hoarded the strength, stamina, and wit of thousands of men, and grown in might until he felt as if he were one of the Powers, like the Earth or Air.
Yet Raj Ahten felt diminished. This morbid state was not what he’d sought. Chespot was wrong. He did not feel like an eternal power. His senses warned that he was failing still—caught like a moth in a web somewhere between life and death.
Raj Ahten’s Days asked, “Your Highness, do you recall the precise moment that it happened?”
Raj Ahten scowled. Part of him had died with Saffira. She had been the most beautiful and the rarest of flowers.
And when he had called his Invincibles together and ordered them to help destroy Gaborn, they’d fought him instead. It was a grim struggle. He’d emerged from the battle only half alive.
“I don’t recall,” Raj Ahten lied.
No one spoke for a long moment.
The flames from the bonfire spread out low to the ground, fanned toward him. Raj Ahten reached out until his right hand was nearly in them. The flame licked it, and in such piercing cold he felt no heat, only a warmth that seeped into his bones, easing the pain. Its golden curls were like sunlight shining through the trees, soft and glorious. The flame-weavers nodded knowingly.