Chaosbound (29 page)

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

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.

But that was the difference, she recognized. The Knights Eternal clung to flesh.

For ages she had trained the creatures, telling them that they had no spirits, that it was only the power of their minds that allowed them to seize a corpse and inhabit it.

But that was not true. The Knights Eternal did have spirits, powerful spirits. Crull-maldor lied to the creatures only so that they would fear oblivion all the more, so that they would cling to any flesh that they could, like a drowning man clinging to a raft.

It was true that their spirits were not whole, undefiled. As part of their preparation, before birth Crull-maldor would damage them, remove the spirit tendrils that formed their conscience and gave them their will. By doing so she made the Knights Eternal ill-suited to become abodes for the loci. Thus, the Knights Eternal could not communicate across the leagues with other loci, as Crull-maldor did. That had always been their weakness. That was why Despair had never shown them favor.

But much had changed with the binding of the worlds.

Much has changed, Crull-maldor thought, and much more shall yet change. . . .

Less than an hour later Crull-maldor trundled into the Dedicates' Keep deep in the wyrmling fortress. She wore her cloak of glory.

The cloak was not made of material; it was fashioned from skin, Crull-maldor's own hide, skinned from her while she was still alive. By wearing it, Crull-maldor could walk about in her wyrmling form, rather than appear as a spirit. She could manipulate things with her hands, if she so desired—bearing a spear into battle, or adjusting an ocular.

There was life in the hide still. It breathed on its own, and required nourishment. She kept it in a vat by day, soaking in blood, seawater, and various nutrients.

The skin had aged over the centuries, becoming wrinkled. Growths had formed over it—warty things—and patches of it were discolored.

The skin had eye holes but no eyes, mouth holes but no teeth. Crullmaldor could move about in the skin, but she had no flesh and bone to give her proper form.

Instead, she walked with a hunched back, barely able to hold her head up, her knuckles sometimes dragging on the floor. She was unsightly.

But the cloak of glory had its uses. The eye holes and other orifices could all be sewn tightly shut, so that Crull-maldor could inhabit her old skin and walk about in the daylight, as she had need.

Now she hoped that it would provide another use.

The Dedicates' keep here was a vast hall where dozens of sorcerers
coaxed attributes from human Dedicates and bestowed them upon the wyrmlings. Hundreds of people filled the hall—terrified human women weeping and begging to be spared, wyrmling soldiers eager to taste the sweet kiss of a forcible.

The wyrmling troops were drawing attributes as quickly as they could. Mostly they took metabolism from the humans, thus speeding up the troops while leaving the Dedicates in a magical slumber. Human workers sweated and grunted as they lugged the sleeping Dedicates off for storage.

The room was filled with the deep songs of the facilitators, the screams of pain from Dedicates. White lights flashed as forcibles came to life, and the odor of burned skin and singed hair filled the room.

Crull-maldor limped to her chief facilitator, and commanded in a harsh whisper, “Give me an endowment.”

The facilitator stared at her a moment, and a scowl of revulsion crossed his face. Obviously he did not think that her experiment could succeed, but his answer was contrite. “Which endowment, O Great One?”

“It matters not,” Crull-maldor said. “Metabolism is easy. Give me metabolism.” She imagined how it would be to speed up, to move faster than other liches, to think twice as fast as the emperor. There were so many possible advantages. . . .