Orden blew a deep, bass hunting horn in signal. Immediately his men at the gates let the drawbridge drop. His energies swelled as all through the castle the men in his serpent ring held perfectly still.

Suddenly the air seemed to thicken to the consistency of syrup. Orden had the strength of twelve men, but with the metabolism of sixty, it required considerable effort to breathe.

He leapt forward, bearing a single weapon—a thin half-sword, sharp enough to strike off Raj Ahten’s head. He planned to take Gaborn’s warning to heart, decapitate the Wolf Lord. And he carried his shield.

He began running, leaping down the stairs from the castle wall, surprised at the initial push it took to combat inertia. Running required constant, steady pressure. As he spun round a corner, his momentum was such that he accidentally veered from his course.

He raced down to the gate, and already his men had begun raising the drawbridge, as he had ordered. He bounded up the slight incline, gingerly leapt forty feet to clear the moat, running as he landed, and hurried after Raj Ahten.

The resistance of the wind against his shield felt tremendous. After a few yards he dropped it, hurried through the charred streets of the city, then veered onto a footpath that led over the downs.

The grass seemed marvelously green this morning, having been cleansed by last night’s rains, and everywhere the little white winterstar flowers lay among the fields.

Orden raced over the downs, found that like Raj Ahten, when he reached the top of a mound, he was traveling so fast that he became airborne.

Orden had read of men who had taken great endowments of metabolism. He knew that going airborne was of little danger, so long as when he landed he made certain that he sped a little, kept his feet moving to absorb the impact of his fall.

He turned a corner. Learning to lean into a turn, he knew, was perhaps the most difficult aspect of running with high metabolism.

Many people found it difficult to adopt the easy rolling gait necessary to run. They wanted to move fast by pressing hard with their feet, as a normal man would when seeking a quick start, but those who tried it would snap their legs. The resting body had too much inertia to overcome.

Orden understood this principle well.

But remembering to lean into curves at the proper angle, that just felt unnatural. As Orden gained speed, he found he’d be running, trying to make a turn in the trail, and it seemed that strange forces grasped him. Gravity did not pull down so much as momentum kept him running in whatever direction he’d taken, and as he hit a muddy spot on one turn, only a great deal of dancing let him stay afoot and keep from smashing into a tree beside the trail.