Only men with endowments of metabolism could move so fast, so swiftly that if you blinked, you almost believed you hadn’t seen them. To take such endowments was suicide: an endowment of metabolism let you move nearly twice as fast as a normal man, but also caused you to age at twice the speed.

Yet as the King’s far-seer, Sir Millman, watched the escalade, he suspected that some of those assassins were moving at three times the normal human rate. Men so endowed would be decrepit in ten years, dead in fifteen.

And only men with inhuman strength could climb those walls, prying with toes and fingers to grip at cracks in the stone. Sir Millman couldn’t even guess how many endowments of brawn each assassin had.

Millman had been watching from inside the King’s Tower. With endowments of sight from seven men, he was well qualified for this post. Now he called softly at the door to the King’s chamber, “Milord, our guests have arrived.”

King Sylvarresta had been sitting in his father’s favorite old reading chair, his back to the wall, studying the tome of Emir Owatt of Tuulistan, trying to decipher which of Raj Ahten’s battle tactics were so original that he’d kill to keep them secret.

Now Sylvarresta blew out his lantern, went to the oriel, and gazed out a clear pane in the stained-glass window. The window was so old that the glass was all wavy and distorted, had flowed down like lumps of melted butter.

The assassins had just reached the final defensive wall in Castle Sylvarresta, the wall of the Dedicates’ Keep, which housed those people who had granted endowments to House Sylvarresta, for the use of the King’s family and soldiers.

So, Raj Ahten’s assassins came to destroy Sylvarresta’s Dedicates, murder those whose minds and strength and vitality fed the King’s forces.

It was a vile deed. The Dedicates could not protect themselves. The brilliant young men who’d given endowments of wit no longer knew their right hands from their left. Those who had granted brawn now lay like babes, too weak to climb from their beds. It was craven to kill Dedicates.

Yet, sadly, too often it was the easiest way to assail a Runelord. By murdering those who constantly fed a Runelord strength and support, one deprived the lord of his powers, making him into a common man.

As the attack progressed, Sylvarresta barely had time to marshal his defenders. Boiling oil had been lugged up to the wall-walk shortly after dark. Though the normal complement of three guards marched along the parapet, a dozen more crouched behind the battlements out of sight.

Still, defenders needed to be warned. Archers manned the towers; soldiers hiding in the city needed to be notified so that they could cut off the assassins’ escape.