Soldiers and Varden alike had been tossed sprawling. Nothing remained of the fountain except for a low pile of rubble from which water spurted at erratic intervals. Next to it, where Carn had been, lay a blackened, withered corpse, its smoking limbs clenched tight, like those of a dead spider, the whole thing so charred and pitted and burned away that it was barely recognizable as anything that had once been alive or human. Inexplicably, the hook-nosed magician still stood in the same place, though the explosion had robbed him of his outer clothes, leaving him wearing nothing but his breeches.

Uncontrollable anger gripped Roran, and without a thought for his own preservation, he staggered toward the center of the square, determined to kill the magician once and for all.

The bare-chested conjurer held his ground even as Roran drew near. Raising his hammer, Roran broke out into a shambling run and shouted a war cry that he could hear but dimly.

And yet the magician made no move to defend himself.

In fact, Roran realized that the spellcaster had not stirred so much as an inch since the explosion. It was as if he were a statue of a man and not the thing itself.

The spellcaster’s seeming indifference to Roran’s approach tempted Roran to ignore the man’s unusual behavior—or lack of behavior, as it was—and simply bash him over the head before he recovered from whatever strange stupor ailed him. However, Roran’s wariness cooled his lust for vengeance and caused him to slow to a stop not five feet from the magician.

He was glad he did.

While the magician had appeared normal from a distance, up close, Roran saw that his skin was loose and wrinkled like that of a man thrice his age, and that it had acquired a coarse, leathery texture. The color of his skin had darkened as well, and was continuing to darken, moment by moment, as if his entire body had been bitten by frost.

The man’s chest was heaving and his eyeballs were rolling in their sockets, showing white, but other than that, he seemed incapable of movement.

As Roran watched, the man’s arms, neck, and chest shriveled, and his bones appeared in sharp relief—from the bowlike curve of his collarbones to the hollow saddle of his hips, where his stomach hung like an empty waterskin. His lips puckered and drew back farther than they were intended to over his yellow teeth, baring them in a grisly snarl, while his eyeballs deflated as if they were engorged ticks being squished empty of blood, and the surrounding flesh sank inward.

The man’s breathing—a panicked, high-pitched sawing—faltered then, but still did not entirely cease.

Horrified, Roran stepped backward. He felt something slick beneath his boots and looked down to see that he was standing in a spreading puddle of water. At first he thought it was from the broken fountain, but then he realized that the water was flowing outward from the feet of the paralyzed magician.

Roran cursed, revulsion filling him, and jumped to a dry patch of ground. Seeing the water, he understood what it was Carn had done, and his already profound sense of horror increased. Carn, it seemed, had cast a spell that was drawing every single drop of moisture from the magician’s body.

Over the span of only another few seconds, the spell reduced the man to no more than a knobby skeleton wrapped in a shell of hard black skin, mummifying him the same as if he had been left in the Hadarac Desert, exposed to a hundred years of wind and sun and shifting sands. Although he was most certainly dead by then, he did not fall, as Carn’s magic held him upright: a ghastly, grinning specter that was the equal of the most terrible things Roran had ever seen in his nightmares or on the battlefield—both being much the same.

Then the surface of the man’s desiccated body blurred as it dissolved into a fine gray dust, which sifted downward in gauzy curtains and lay floating atop the water below, like ashes from a forest fire. Muscle and bone soon followed, then the stony organs, and then the last parts of the hook-nosed magician crumbled away, leaving behind only a small, conical mound of powder rising out of the pool of water that had once sustained its life.

Roran looked over at Carn’s corpse, then looked away just as quickly, unable to bear the sight. At least you had your revenge on him. Then he put aside thoughts of his slain friend, for they were too painful to dwell on, and instead concentrated upon the most immediate problem at hand: the soldiers at the southern end of the square, who were slowly picking themselves up off the ground.

Roran saw the Varden doing much the same. “Oi!” he shouted. “With me! We’ll never have a better chance than now.” He pointed at some of his men who were obviously wounded. “Help them up and put them in the center of the formation. No one gets left behind. No one!” His lips and mouth throbbed as he spoke, and his head ached as if he had been up all night drinking.

The Varden rallied at the sound of his voice and hurried to join him. As the men gathered into a broad column behind him, Roran took his place in the foremost rank of warriors, between Baldor and Delwin, both of whom bore bloody scrapes from the explosion.

“Carn is dead?” Baldor asked.

Roran nodded and lifted his shield, as did the other men, so that they formed a solid, outward-facing wall.

“Then we better hope Halstead doesn’t have another magician hidden away somewhere,” Delwin muttered.

When the Varden were all in place, Roran shouted, “Forward march!” and the warriors tramped across the remainder of the courtyard.

Whether because their leadership was less effective than the Varden’s or because the blast had dealt them a more severe blow, the Empire soldiers had failed to recover as quickly and so were still disorganized when the Varden drove into their midst.