Chaosbound (28 page)

But they would age more quickly, too.

And they would need to eat ten times as often. Thus, they would have to harvest caribou and elk, wild oxen and seals. But there was not enough game on the island for that. In a month or two, all of the animal population would be decimated, and the wyrmlings would face starvation.

“There is much to eat on the island now,” Despair said. “There is not just game—there are the horses and cows and sheep that belong to the humans, and then there are the humans themselves.

“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

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 the 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.