The Lair of Bones Page 2

  Close by, knobby hills crowded the road and the dry wheat growing along their sides reflected the starlight. Leafless oaks on the slopes stood black and stark, like thorny crowns. A burrow owl screeched in the distance. Faintly, Averan could smell water from a small stream, though she could not hear it burble.

  She watched the steady rain of stars. The bits of light came arcing down in different directions, creating fiery paths against the sky.

  “So, Averan is well?” Binnesman asked softly.

  “It was hard for her,” Gaborn answered. “She stood before the Way-maker all day, holding her staff overhead, peering into the monster's mind. Sweat poured from her as if she were toiling at a forge. I was afraid for her.”

  “And has she learned the way to, to this… Lair of Bones?”

  “Aye,” Gaborn said. “But I fear that the lair is far in the Underworld, and Averan cannot describe the path. She will have to lead us—that is, if you will come with me.”

  “If?” Binnesman asked. “Of course I'll come.”

  “Good,” Gaborn said. “I'll need your counsel. I don't want to put too much burden on a girl so young.”

  Averan closed her eyes, feigning sleep, and took guilty pleasure in listening to them talk about her. She was but a child, yet in all the world she was the only person who had ever learned to converse with reavers, mankind's most feared enemy.

  Gaborn had recognized that she went through an ordeal to see into the mind of the Waymaker, but even he could not guess how painful it had been. Her head ached as if a steel band bound it, and she felt as if her skull might split on its own accord. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of scents crammed her mind—scents that gave her the names of places and passages in the Underworld, scents that in some cases had been handed down from reaver to reaver over generations. In her mind's eye, Averan could envision the reaver tunnels in the Underworld, like vast arteries connecting the warrens. There were tens of thousands of tunnels, leading to mines and quarries, to ranches and hunting grounds, to egg chambers and graveyards, to deadly perils and ancient wonders. Given a lifetime, Averan could not have mapped the Underworld for Gaborn.

  Even now, she feared that she could not retain so much lore. The brain of a human is a tenth the size of that of a reaver. Her mind couldn't hold so much knowledge. She only hoped that she could recall the way to the Lair of Bones.

  I have to remember, Averan told herself. I have to help Gaborn fight the One True Master.

  She heard footsteps crunching on the road and tried to breathe easily. She wanted to rest, and hoped that by feigning sleep she could continue to do so.

  Binnesman set his saddle in the back of the wagon. “Poor girl,” he said. “Look at her, innocent as a babe.”

  “Let her sleep,” Gaborn whispered. He spoke softly, not with the commanding voice one would expect from a king, but with the gentleness of a worried friend.

  Binnesman moved away, and wordlessly began hitching the horse to the single-tree on the wagon.

  “Have you any other news of the reavers?” Gaborn whispered.

  “Aye,” Binnesman said, “Most of it good. We harried them all day. Many of the monsters died from weariness while fleeing our lancers, and our knights attacked any that slowed. At last report there were only a few thousand left. But when they reached the vale of the Drakesflood, they dug into the sand. That was about midafternoon. Our men have them sur-rounded, in case they try to flee, but for now there is little more that they can do.”

  Averan pictured the monsters at the Drakesflood. The reavers were enormous, each more than sixteen feet tall, and twenty in length. With four legs and two huge forearms, in form they looked like vast, tailless scorpions. But their heads were shaped like spades, and the reavers could force their way under the soil just by pushing down and then crawling forward. That is how they would have dug in at the Drakesflood. The move would afford them good protection from the lances of the knights.

  “So that's the good news,” Gaborn said heavily, “now what of the bad?”

  Binnesman answered, “At the Mouth of the World we found reaver tracks heading in. It looks as if three reavers circled through the hills after the battle at Carris. Somehow they got past our scouts.”

  “By the Seven Stones!” Gaborn swore. “How soon before they reach their lair, do you think?”

  “It's impossible to guess,” Binnesman said heavily. “They may have already told their master how you defeated their army at Carris, and even now she will be considering how to respond.”

  Binnesman let that thought sink in.

  “But how did they elude my scouts?” Gaborn wondered.

  “I suspect that it would have been easy,” Binnesman answered. “After the battle at Carris, the horde fled in the night while rain plummeted like lead. We had only brief flashes of lightning to see by. With our soldiers busy at the front, they left before we ever thought to try to cut them off.”

  Binnesman and Gaborn hooked the horse to the wagon, and both men climbed onto the buckboard. Gaborn gave a whistle, and the force horse took off at a brisk trot.

  “This has me worried,” Gaborn said.

  Binnesman seemed to think for a long moment. At last he sighed. “Beware the Lair of Bones. Beware the One True Master. My heart is full of foreboding about this creature. No beast of this world could be so well versed in rune lore.”

  “You suspect something?” Gaborn asked.

  “Seventeen hundred years ago, when Erden Geboren prosecuted his war in the Underworld, do you know what he fought?”

  “Reavers,” Gaborn said.

  “That is the conventional wisdom, but I think not,” Binnesman answered. “In King Sylvarresta's library are some ancient scrolls, levies for men and supplies written in Erden Geboren's own hand. In them, he asked for men not to fight reavers but to fight something he called a locus. I think he was hunting for a particular reaver. It may even be the one that Averan calls the One True Master, though I cannot imagine that any reaver would live so long.”

  “And you think that this creature is not of our world?”

  “Perhaps not,” Binnesman said. “I begin to wonder. Maybe there are reavers in the netherworld, more cunning and powerful than our own. And perhaps reavers here are but mere shadows of them, in the same way that we are mere shadows of the Bright Ones of that realm.”

  “That is a sobering thought indeed,” Gaborn said.

  The wizard and the Earth King rode in silence. Averan lay back again, eyes closed. Her mind felt overwhelmed.

  The road had been leading down, and abruptly Gaborn jolted the wagon to a halt. Averan stealthily rose up on one elbow, and saw that they had reached a town, a small knot of gray stone cottages with thatched roofs. Averan recognized it as Chesterton. Here the road forked. One highway headed almost due east toward the Courts of Tide. The other road went southwest toward Keep Haberd—and beyond that, to the Mouth of the World.

  Overhead, a fireball lanced through the sky, huge and red. Flames streaked from it with a sputtering sound. As it neared the Alcair Mountains, it suddenly exploded into two pieces. They struck the snow-covered mountains not thirty miles away. The ground trembled, and moments later came sounds like distant thunder, echoing over and over.

  “The Earth is in pain,” the wizard Binnesman whispered.

  Averan heard a child squeal in delight. Up the road, beside one of the cottages, a woman squatted on her lawn. Three girls, none older than six, stood with her, looking up at the heavenly display in wonder.

  “Pretty!” the youngest child said, as she traced the trail of the fireball with her finger.

  An older sister clapped in delight.

  “Oh, that was the best one yet,” their mother said.

  Other than these four, the town slumbered. The cottages clustered in dark, tired mounds. The farmers within would not dare rise until the cows began bawling to be milked.

  Gaborn drove the buckboard through town. The mother and her daughters watched them
pass.

  Now the earth shivered beneath them like an old arthritic dog. Binnesman had spoken truly. Averan recognized the earth's pain by more than just the earthquakes or the fall of stars. There were less definable signs that perhaps only one who loved the land could discern. She'd been able to feel it for days now as she walked, a wrongness in the soil, an ache among the hills.

  “You know, Gaborn,” Binnesman said at last, “you say that you will lean upon my counsel. Therefore, let me say this: I think you take too much upon yourself. You plan to seek out the Lair of Bones, and hope there to kill the One True Master. But you have not been called to be the Earth's warrior, you are the Earth King, the Earth's protector. You also talk of war-ring with the reavers, killing… perhaps thousands. But more than just the fate of mankind hangs in the balance. There are owls in the trees, and mice in the fields, and fishes in the sea. Life, every kind of life, may fade with us. The Earth is in pain.”

  “I would rejoice if we could heal its pain,” Gaborn said, “but I don't know how.”

  “The Earth has selected you well,” Binnesman said. “Perhaps we will find the way together.”

  The wagon raced over the road, and Averan lay back with a heavy heart, feigning sleep.

  And what of me? Averan wondered. As a skyrider, she'd often had to travel far from home, and she had found some special places that she loved. She recalled a clear pool high in the pines of the Alcair Mountains where she'd sometimes picnicked, and the white sand dunes forty miles east of Haberd where she had played, rolling down the hills. She'd perched with her graak on rugged mountain peaks that no man could ever climb, surveying vast fields and the forests that undulated away in a green haze. Yes, Averan loved the land, enough even to live every day in its service.

  That's what makes me an Earth Warden's apprentice, she realized.

  The wagon rolled through the night with Averan lost in thought. It wound up into the hills. All too soon it came to a halt just outside a vast cavern, where dozens of horses were tethered. A bonfire crackled within the cave, where scores of knights were engaged in rowdy song.

  “Averan, wake up,” Gaborn called softly. “We're at the Mouth of the World.”

  He reached into the back of the wagon and as Averan raised her head, he retrieved the sack that held his armor, along with his long-handled war hammer. Binuesman got up and hobbled stiffly toward the cave, using his staff as a crutch.

  “I had a dream last night,” Erin Connal whispered to Celinor as they stooped to drink at a stream in South Crowthen, nearly a thousand miles to the northeast of Averan. The sun would not be up for half an hour, yet the sky glowed silver on the horizon. The early morning air felt chill, and dew lay heavy on the ground. “It was a strange dream.”

  She glanced suspiciously at South Crowthen's knights nearby, who were busy breaking camp. Captain Gantrell, a lean, dark man with a fanatical gleam in his eyes, stood ordering his men about as if they'd never broken a camp before. “Sweep the mud off that tent before you put it in the wagon,” he shouted to one soldier. To another he called, “Don't just pour water on the campfire, stir it in.”

  By the surly looks he got, Erin could tell that his troops did not love him.

  As the men bustled about, occupied with their work, for the first time since last night, Erin felt that she could talk to her husband with a measure of safety.

  “You dreamed a dream?” Celinor inquired, one eyebrow raised. “Is this unusual?” He drowned his canteen in the shallow creek almost carelessly, as if unconcerned that Gantrell's men surrounded them, treating the crown prince and his new wife as if they were prisoners.

  “I think it was more than a dream,” Erin admitted. “I think it was a sending.” Erin held her breath to see his reaction. In her experience, most people who claimed to receive sendings showed other signs of madness too.

  Celinor blinked, looking down at his canteen. “A sending from whom?” he asked heavily. He did not want to hear about his wife's mad dreams.

  “Remember yesterday, when I dropped my dagger into the circle of fire at Twynhaven? The dagger touched the flames and disappeared. It went through the gate, into the netherworld.”

  Celinor nodded but said nothing. He watched her suspiciously, daring her to speak on.

  “I dreamt last night that I saw a creature of the netherworld, like a great owl that lived in a burrow under a vast tree. It held my dagger in its beak, and it spoke to me. It gave me a warning.”

  Celinor finished filling his canteen, then licked his lips. He trembled slightly, as if from a chill. Like most folk, he felt uncomfortable when talking of the netherworld. Wondrous beings, like Bright Ones, peopled it, but there were tales of frightening creatures too—like the salamanders that Raj Ahten's flameweavers had summoned at Longmot, or the Darkling Glory they gated at Twynhaven. “What did this… creature warn you about?”

  “It warned me that the Darkling Glory could not be slain. A foul spirit possessed its body, a creature so dangerous that it strikes fear even into the hearts of the Bright Ones. The creature is called a locus, and of all the loci, it is one of the most powerful. Its name is Asgaroth.”

  “If you are convinced that this Asgaroth is a danger,” Celinor asked, “then why are you whispering? Why not shout it to the world?”

  “Because Asgaroth may be nearby,” Erin whispered. A squirrel bolted up the side of a tree, and Erin glanced back at it furtively, then continued. “We can slay the body that hosts the spirit, just as Myrrima slew the Darkling Glory, but we can't kill Asgaroth himself. Once a locus is torn from one body, it will seek a new host, an evil person or beast that it can control.” She paused to let him consider this. “When Myrrima slew the Darkling Glory, a whirlwind rose from it—and blew east, toward South Crowthen.”

  Celinor looked at her narrowly, anger flashing in his eyes. “What of it?”

  “You say that your father has been suffering delusions….”

  “My father may be mad,” Celinor said curtly, “but he has never been evil.”

  “You were the one who was after telling me how his far-seer turned up dead.” Erin reminded him. “If he killed him, it may have been an act of madness. Or it may have been evil.”

  “I only suspect him,” Celinor said. “There is no proof. Besides, his odd behavior began before Raj Ahten's sorcerers summoned the Darkling Glory. Even if you received a true sending, even if your ‘locus’ is real, there's nothing that should lead you to suspect my father.”

  Celinor didn't want to consider the possibility that his father might be possessed. She didn't blame him. Nor could she argue that his father's odd behavior had begun weeks ago.

  Yet something that the owl of the netherworld had told Erin caused her concern. It had shown her the locus, a shadow of evil that inhabited one man, even as it sent out tendrils of darkness around it, tendrils that touched others—seducing them, snaring them—filling them with a mea-sure of its own corruption.

  Thus the locus's influence spread, rotting the hearts of men, burning away their consciences, preparing them to act as hosts for others like it.

  Erin had never met Gantrell before, but the fanatical gleam in the captain's eyes, the way he had his men guard Celinor, the crown prince, as if he were a captured spy, made her suspect that he had been touched by a locus.

  And then there was Celinor's father: claiming to be the Earth King, plotting against Gaborn, spreading lies about him to far-off lords who ought to have been Gaborn's allies.

  Perhaps Celinor's father did not host Asgaroth, Erin thought, but he was dangerous by any standard.

  “What are you two doing over here, all alone?” Captain Gantrell called out. He came sauntering up, the grin splitting his face only a thin veneer to hide his suspicion.

  “Plotting my escape back to Fleeds,” Erin said in a jesting tone.

  “That wouldn't be wise,” Gantrell said, attempting to mimic her lightheartedness and failing miserably. Erin could tell that he had no sense of humor. He looked a
pprovingly to his knights, who had mounted their horses, and were now nearly ready to leave. “Well, let's see if we can make good time while it's still cool.”

  Erin forced a smile, but she grew more and more uneasy about Gantrell. Instinct warned her that rather than grin politely as if he were some unwel-come courtier, she'd be better off to slit his belly open and strangle him with his own guts.

  Erin mounted her horse, exhausted from lack of sleep, and rode through the pre-dawn. Every few miles they passed small contingents of knights, all riding south. Camp followers in the form of smiths, washwomen, and squires rode in wains or trudged down the dusty roads. Drivers rode war wagons filled with lances, arrows, food, and tents, everything one needed for an extended campaign.

  After passing a train of twenty ballistas mounted on wheels and drawn by force horses, Erin blithely asked Gantrell, “All this movement before the sun's even up. What country do you plan to invade?”

  “Invade, Your Highness?” Gantrell asked. “It is but a normal repositioning of our defenses.” He rode close enough so that she had to urge her horse aside, lest they bump legs.

  “If you were afraid of invasion,” Erin argued, “you would strengthen your fortifications, not mass troops on your southern border. So, who will you invade?”

  “I couldn't say, milady,” Gantrell answered with a maddening little smirk.

  So they rode through the morning. The horses nearly pranced as they raced through the chill. The knights’ ring mail chinged like cymbals to the drumming of the horses’ hooves, as if making music to accompany some vast empyreal hymn.

  Erin's fatigue lent the ride a surreal, dreamlike quality. Some thought South Crowthen to be a beautiful country, and it was true: the trees on the hills danced in particolored raiment of autumn colors, and in the more settled areas Erin would ride round a bend and discover a picturesque stone cottage dozing beneath a sprawling oak or elm. Nearby, a milk cow would crop the grass in some green field misted by morning dew, while stone fences that had stood for longer than men could remember neatly parceled out the quiet farmland. But when she rounded the next corner, she'd see another quaint stone house beneath a sprawling elm, with the milk cow's sister cropping the grass by the barn, and another endless stone fence parceling out the squares of dirt, and on and on and on it went until Erin thought that she would never again admire another cottage or cow or meadow or tree.