The Lair of Bones (17 page)

“But that was a long time ago,” Myrrima argued. “Perhaps the new high king will be more tolerant?”

“Zandaros is still the High King of Indhopal. It's true that he's old, but he's more than a king, it is said. He is a powerful sorcerer who can summon storms, and he uses his powers to extend his life.”

“But,” Myrrima protested, “in sixty years, surely his anger has cooled. His argument was with Gaborn's grandfather, not with us.”

“Aye,” Borenson said. “That's my hope. It is the only thing that might save us. We come as the envoys not of the old king but of a new, and we bear entreaties of peace. Even that black-hearted old badger should respect that.”

There was a pregnant silence. Borenson loved his wife, and was offering her one last opportunity to abandon their quest. But Myrrima said with finality, “I won't be left behind.”

“Very well,” Borenson said.

Borenson gave over three forcibles of stamina to the marquis's facilitator, an elderly man who studied the forcibles with glee, as if he had not seen so many together in a long, long time. The facilitator went to a logbook and came back shaking his head. “Only two folks have offered to give stamina in the past year. Would you like to wait until our criers find a third?”

“That could take weeks.” Borenson sighed. “Give me what you can now, and send out the criers. Perhaps you can vector the third endowment to me?”

“Done,” the facilitator said, disappearing from the room to make the arrangements. For a moment they stood in the silence, and Myrrima gazed about at the work chamber filled with implements of the facilitators' craft. There were scales for weighing blood metal, tongs and hammers and files, a
small forge, thick iron molds for making forcibles. A chart on the wall showed the various runes that allowed the transfer of each type of endowment, like sight and wit, along with possible minor variations in the shape of the runes. Cryptic notes written in the secret language of facilitators were scrawled upon the charts.

Myrrima gazed curiously at Borenson. She noticed that he was pacing, and his face seemed a bit pale. “How do you feel?”

“Fine,” he replied. “Why?”

“The facilitator back in Carris said that he'd vector endowments to you: metabolism, brawn, wit. But you're not moving any faster now than you did two days ago. Do you think he forgot?”

“No,” Borenson said. “The facilitators keep copious notes. I'm sure he's just too busy. The city was—” He searched for the right word for the destruction of Carris. The walls of the city had buckled under the onslaught of the reavers, and many of its finest towers had fallen. The lands for thirty miles around lay black and blasted, every plant dead. The corpses of reavers, black monoliths with mouths gaping wide, littered the fields along with dead men. The reavers' curses hung over the city—a reek that demanded that the men inside dry up, be blind, and rot and putrefy. Recalling the nightmare of Carris, Myrrima could think of no word to describe it.
Destroyed
was too weak. Demolished? Devastated? Borenson offered “Expunged.”

“Still,” Myrrima said, “plenty of people survived. He should be able to get Dedicates.”

“But those people want nothing more than to get away from Carris,” Borenson said. “The facilitators had their hands full just trying to move the Dedicates, boat them downstream. I'm sure that he'll get the endowments vectored as soon as he can.”

Though he reassured Myrrima, Borenson didn't seem so confident him-self. He began to pace about the room. In all likelihood, his Dedicates were floating downriver now, perhaps on their way to the Courts of Tide. If the facilitator was with them, he'd be looking for a place to settle them, and Myrrima knew by report that most of the towns along the river would be too full of injured and homeless refugees to take on a large number of Dedicates. Under such conditions, it might be days or weeks before the facilitator returned to his normal duties.

Borenson's lack of endowments put an uneven burden on Myrrima. As a soldier she didn't have Borenson's years of training, but she had more endowments and was definitely stronger, faster, smarter. In every way, she was more prepared for a journey to Inkarra than he.

Perhaps that was why Borenson paced. He went to a window, looked out, sighed, and then sat down with his back against the wall. He was pale, trembling all over. Sweat stood out on his forehead.

“What's wrong?” Myrrima asked.

“I don't know if I can do this anymore,” he said. “I've seen too many Dedicates die.”

Myrrima knew what he was thinking. He had been forced to butcher Raj Ahten's Dedicates at Castle Sylvarresta—thousands of men, women, and children in a single night. And he was thinking of his own Dedicates that Raj Ahten had murdered at the Blue Tower.

“You know,” he said softly, “the marquis was right about me. As a young man, I always wanted to be a Runelord. I wanted to prove myself, and I thought that taking endowments would make me powerful. But it doesn't just give you power. It gives you new responsibilities, and leaves you open to… whole new worlds of suffering.”

Within the hour the facilitator brought the Dedicates, two robust young girls, aged eleven and twelve. They stood just behind a curtain in the receiving room, a comfortable room, gaily painted, with warm couches to put the potential Dedicates at ease. Myrrima could hear the girls talking to the facilitator, begging for assurances that their widowed mother and younger brothers would receive food from the king's stores.

“Fine young sacrifices, both of them,” Borenson whispered angrily as he peered through the curtain.

He trembled as the facilitator drew the stamina from the girls, along with their screams of pain. And when the forcibles kissed his own flesh, even the rush of ecstasy that came with taking an endowment did not stop him from shaking. As the facilitator's aids carried the girls away afterward, both of them pale and weak with shock, Borenson vomited on the facilitator's floor.

8

The hollow wolf may have taken its name from its unusual profile. It is long of leg, with a stomach that hugs the beast's backbone and looks perpetually empty. But I favor the theory that the creature takes its name from its icy, soulless eyes.

In the days of mad King Harrill, the creature was hunted nearly to extinction. However, on an outing the king heard a chorus of their haunting voices, deeper and more resonant than those of their smaller cousins.

“Ah,
what beauteous music these wolves do make. Let their voices fill these mountains forever!” said he, banning the hunting of the creatures for nearly forty years, until the mountains became overrun.

After his death, the hunt resumed. Indeed, entire armies were deployed in what became known as the “War of the Wolves!'

—
from
Mammals of Rofehavan,
by The Wizard Binnesman

South of Batenne, the road up into the Alcair Mountains became a deso-late track. In places, the forests covered it completely, and often Myrrima and Borenson found themselves riding through trees, squinting vainly for sight of the road. But as they began to climb above the forests toward the jagged icy peaks, the ruts and stone walls along the road could be easily discerned.

The voices of hollow wolves could be heard in the distant mountains, eerily howling, like the moan of wind among rocks.

They had just stopped to put on heavy cloaks, and were in the last of the thinning trees where mounds of snow still huddled in the shadows of boulders, when Myrrima became aware of another rider.

“Our friend is near,” Myrrima said. “I can smell him up the road.”

“The assassin?” Borenson asked.

She got off her horse and warily strung her bow. She drew an arrow from her quiver, and spat on the sharp steel bodkin, anointing it with water from her own body. “Strike true,” she whispered. She looked to Borenson.

Borenson drew his warhammer. He seemed self-conscious. He was not a Water wizard, but Myrrima had washed him and offered the Water's blessings upon him. He spat on the spike, and whispered, “May Water guide you.”

She peered up the road. The land rose steadily. Dwarf pines, nearly black against the fields of blinding snow up above, grew in ragged patches on the slopes of the mountain. There wasn't much cover, not many places for a man to hide. But Myrrima felt sure that the assassin was far enough ahead that he could not have spotted them.

“How far?” Borenson asked.

“A mile or two,” Myrrima said.

“You take the right side of the road, I'll take the left,” Borenson said. They tied their horses to a tree, then split up. Each of them crept through the woods on opposite sides of the road.

The snow was rife with wolf tracks. Myrrima strained her senses, letting her gaze pierce the shadows, listening for any sound-—a cough, the snap of a twig. She sniffed the air. The wind was blowing in odd directions among the trees. She'd lose his scent one moment, smell it twice as strong the next.

There was little cover here, and after half a mile of sneaking, the trees gave out almost completely.

Myrimma leapt over the ground and raced ahead, her feet softly shushing in the snow. With five endowments of metabolism added to her brawn and stamina, she could run effortlessly for hours. More important, she could run faster than most horses. She hoped that this speed would give her the advantage in any fight.

She raced along at fifty or sixty miles an hour, head low, scenting for the smell of the assassin. She had never run like this since taking her endowments. It was queer.

Time did not seem to pass any differently. She ran at a good pace, but not overly quick. Yet when she rounded a bend, she could feel an odd force tugging her, so that she quickly learned to lean into her turns. And when she topped a rise, her stomach would do a little twist as she went airborne.

She felt sleek and powerful, like a wolf as it races after a stag.

The air grew thin and chill. Frost stood up in the dirt where the day's
sun had not yet penetrated the shadows. Higher up the mountain, the sun glinted on snow. She was nearly past the treeline when the odor of the assassin's horse came suddenly strong.

She drew to a stop, and watched the road ahead. She could smell the brittle scent of a fire, its ashes gone cold. The assassin had made camp uphill, to her right among a knot of trees. She hoped that he might be asleep.

Myrrima peered at the spot for a long moment, but saw no movement, and could not make out any form that seemed vaguely human.

She crept off the road two hundred yards, and circled up through a gully into the trees. She saw no sign of anyone, yet the smell of horseflesh grew stronger. She let her nose guide her into the thick copse of pine, up a ridge, past a fallen log.

She did not spot the assassin's camp until she was less than forty feet from it. He hid in the midst of thick trees, their branches forming a natural roof. At some time in ages past a depression had been dug there, and a small rock wall built up to chest height in a semicircle, forming a crude defense. She saw a horse's ears poking above the rocks, and Myrrima froze for a moment.

She could hear the assassin, drawing deep, wheezing breaths. She scented the air. She could smell blood and rot. The man was injured.

Myrrima looked behind her. Borenson had seen her run, and he was leaping up the hill toward her, trying to catch her. He slipped in a deep snowdrift, and for a moment snow churned in the air all around him as he fought back to his feet. She raised a warning hand, dropped to cover behind a tree, and waited for him.

When he drew near, he was huffing for breath. He tried to still it. He peered into the dense foliage, saw the little camp there, and nodded. He motioned for her to circle the camp, come at it from behind.

Myrrima crept along the edge of the wood, walking in slushy snow. A twig crunched beneath her foot, under the snow. She could barely see the top of the horse's head there in the camp. The horse's ear went erect.

Wolf tracks littered the ground here at the edge of the camp. Myrrima looked up and saw a white form against some dark trees uphill. A huge wolf was there, as motionless as the snow. Suddenly it spun in its tracks and bounded away over the ice field, emitting a soft woof.