The Lair of Bones (36 page)

The world is full of burrowing creatures—great stone worms whose diameters are larger than a house, crevasse crawlers with their sharp teeth and segmented bodies, blind-crabs and pouch spiders, and even tiny weevils called chervils, that can burrow into a man's armor. But reavers are hunters, not burrowers. They live in holes tunneled by other animals, and seem to dig only when trying to dislodge their prey from some small cavity.

—
from
Binnesman's Bestiary, Animals of the Underworld

Gaborn raced through the Underworld in a tunnel where mud pots spattered pale calcite against the white walls of the crawlway. Behind those walls, he could hear steam roaring upward through hidden chimneys, as if the reavers that fashioned this place had tried to wall out vast rivers of boiling water. It was a rolling thunder in his ears.

The light from his single opal pin was fading. He didn't know how much longer it would last. It seemed that he had been running for days now, perhaps weeks. He sensed danger ahead, stopped and peered down the trail.

The path intersected a crude cavern, a hole bored by some massive rock worm. Part of the roof had collapsed, leaving dirt, gravel, and boulders on the floor. It was perfect for an ambush. The main tunnel had been polished by the tread of countless reavers. But the side tunnel was wild. Red shag-weed grew to the height of a man's knees.

Indeed, blister worms had crawled from the side cave and now infested the floor by the thousands, dining on dung left by the reaver horde. The worms, sluglike creatures the length of a finger, were gray, shot through with crimson veins. The worms' flesh secreted a poison that blistered the skin, but a large blind-crab, oblivious to the poison, was raking through the dung, feeding.

Gaborn could see no fresh sign of reavers at the crossroad, no philia peeking suspiciously from beneath a pile of dirt. Yet he sensed death lying in wait.

A reaver was there; perhaps more than one. He caught a faint odor, like flesh that quickly transformed to mold. Reavers were whispering in scents.

Gaborn peered up the trail and felt a sudden rush of energy. His facilitators in Heredon were granting him more endowments. He wasn't sure if he had just gained more brawn or stamina, but the effect was gratifying to one who had been running for so long.

Gaborn clutched his weapon tightly, his sweaty palms gripping the leather straps that bound the reaver dart, and prepared to step forward.

“Wait!” the Earth warned. Gaborn could see no reason to wait, but as he did, he felt a wash of power, and his muscles unclenched just the smallest bit. He had just received an endowment of grace.

He lifted his foot, leaned forward, and the Earth whispered wait again. Suddenly he understood the warning. The danger had just grown less, but it was still too great. The Earth Spirit forbade him to move forward until he had enough endowments.

And so Gaborn stopped and made a small fire. He made a paste of flour, water, salt and honey from his pack, and then cooked himself some fry bread.

As he ate, his powers continued to grow. Brawn, stamina, grace, and wit were all added to him. With each endowment, Gaborn felt more hale, more… permanent.

He continued to strain his senses for a long hour, whiffing faint scents that drifted across the cave floor.

At last, when he had eaten his fill and digested some food, he climbed back to his feet. He picked up a large flat rock and carried it up near the intersection, then threw it low to the floor, so it skipped as if on the surface of a pond, grinding the blister worms into gooey bits and startling the crab that fed among them.

The effect was instantaneous. A great reaver lurched up from the ground in front of him. The soil seemed almost to explode. Dust and pebbles flew up.

Confused, the monster gtasped wildly at the stone, seeking its prey. A second reaver dropped from the roof of a side tunnel to the left. A third
mage lurched from a cavity to the right, a deadly crystalline staff gleaming in its hand.

A bolt of green energy sizzled from the staff, smashing into the blind-crab. Gaborn smelled the stench of death, and as if a voice rang in his mind, heard the words, “Rot, thou child of men.”

As their leader recognized that Gaborn had not run into its trap, it rushed forward with tremendous speed and power, and for a moment Gaborn watched in astonishment.

He somersaulted backward a dozen paces, hoping that in the narrows, they would have to attack in single file.

The huge leader lunged, hissing in frustration.

Gaborn leapt into its mouth—knees high so that his feet cleared the rows of scythelike teeth on its bottom jaw. He hit its raspy tongue, and found the beast's mouth wet with slime, so that he slipped as if on wet stones.

Gaborn shoved his reaver dart into the soft spot in the monster's upper palate, striking its brain. The monster responded by shaking its head roughly, trying to dislodge him.

Gaborn clung to his reaver dart, holding on for dear life, for the reaver's teeth were as sharp as daggers and would shred him like parchment.

Gaborn's weight caused the javelin to waggle. Hot blood showered over him as the monster provided the impetus to scramble its own brains.

Shortly, the reaver staggered and fell, its mouth gritted tightly. Gaborn drew his spear out.

The largest and fastest of the three reavers was dead, but Gaborn's Earth Senses were screaming, “Dodge.”

Suddenly the dead reaver's mouth was pried open, and one of its companions slashed with its deadly claw.

Gaborn launched himself from the dead reaver's cavernous mouth.

The reaver mage stood just feet away, its paws occupied with holding its dead master's mouth open. Gaborn struck before it could react, hurling his javelin into the monster's sweet triangle.

The reaver let go of its master's jaws and lurched backward, stumbling into its companion. It reached up and tried to pry the reaver dart free, but must have done more damage than good. For as soon as it pulled the dart out, a gush of brains and blood came with it, and the mage stumbled and fell.

The battle with the third reaver lasted for several minutes, as Gaborn
weaved and dodged to escape its attacks. Yet for all practical purposes, the battle was over before it had begun.

Soon, all three reavers lay dead.

Gaborn had received nothing more than a vicious cut.

But as he staggered over the battlefield, where dead blister worms lay in heaps, he was amazed. The little worms were all dead. They lay in piles of moldering flesh. Even the blind-crab that had been feeding on them was dead, bits of mold and putrescence oozing from its mouth.

Gaborn's cut began to fester. The reaver mage had been powerful. Indeed, Gaborn could feel the food turning bad in his stomach.

And yet he lingered for a moment, for the spell was so familiar. Gaborn sensed Earth Power here. The spell had been a healing spell, he decided, like those that Binnesman pronounced upon the wounded. Only it was reversed.

Gaborn began to choke, as if his lungs would rot in his chest, and he staggered away from the foul place. Patches of fungi, like liver spots, were forming on his hands.

He ran a few hundred yards, and on impulse, pulled off his backpack. His food was all covered with mold. He had nothing in there worth carrying, so he tossed the pack to the ground.

He ran on for hours, until his healing powers closed his wounds.

Who am I fighting? he wondered. What am I fighting?

Back in Heredon, two weeks ago, he had imagined that Raj Ahten was his nemesis. But the Wizard Binnesman had warned that Raj Ahten was only a phantom, a mask that a greater enemy hid behind.

He'd imagined then that Binnesman was speaking of Fire, was trying to tell him that one of the greater Powers fought him. And then Iome had warned that a wizard of the Air had attacked her, and he imagined that two of the greater Powers were allied in battle.

But something that Gaborn had just seen made him wonder even at that. The reavers' spells showed that they were twisting the Earth Powers. At Carris they had caused wounds to fester, and sent blindness upon men. They had hurled black mists that shredded a man's flesh.

They had wrung the water from men. Water?

It wasn't just Fire and Air that allied against him. Even the forces of healing and protection had been subverted. Even the Earth that he served seemed to have turned against him.

Earth, Air, Fire, Water.

A creature called the Raven had tried to wrest control of them once before, long ago, in a time of legend.

What was it that Binnesman had said in his garden, when the Earth Spirit first appeared to Gaborn? Other Powers would grow. But “the Earth would diminish.”

Gaborn wondered. The Earth had withdrawn from him, left him bereft of his ability to warn his Chosen people of danger. But had the Earth with-drawn because of Gaborn's own moment of weakness or because of its own?

Gaborn ran on, and on, until his Earth Senses warned that death was approaching his people in Heredon.

Night was falling aboveground.

It had been a day and a half in common time since he'd entered the Mouth of the World. But there was no measuring time anymore. It had been less than two weeks in common time since Raj Ahten launched his attack on Heredon. It had been ten days since Gaborn had become the Earth King.

But with his endowments of metabolism, time stretched out of all pro-portion. Days seemed to draw out into weeks, weeks into months.

He ran through a tunnel where tiny crystalline cave spiders, so perfectly clear that they seemed to be cut from quartz, hung from thick silken strings. He had seen such spiders before in Heredon, but then they had climbed up their webs so quickly that they had seemed to be droplets of water, dribbling upward.

Now they were frozen motionless. The whole world seemed to be frozen, and all eternity was but a moment.

He reached a place where tunnel floors were flooded to a depth of several feet. He picked up his pace, raced over the water. Each time the sole of either foot touched the surface, it would begin to sink as if in soft mud. But he raced on, letting the surface tension buoy him.

He didn't know how many endowments of metabolism he had anymore. At least forty. He had heard that it took that many before a man could run on the water. But he could have had a hundred endowments.

He had no way to measure time except by the slap of his feet over stone, and the pounding of his heart.

There is a limit to the number of endowments of metabolism a man can take. Common wisdom said that one should never take more than a dozen,
for when he reaches that point, certain subtle dangers arise. All of the runes by which facilitators transferred attributes were imperfect. The rune for metabolism made the muscles move swiftly, made the brain think clearly, but it often did not make all of the organs work with the same efficiency.

Thus, one who took vast endowments of metabolism and held them for long often became jaundiced and sickly, and within weeks would fall to his death. Adding two endowments of stamina for each endowment of metabolism could ease the problem. But rarely could a lord afford so many forcibles, and so a man who took great endowments of metabolism in a time of need was like a star that blazes brightly as it fades.

Gaborn wondered if the facilitators would kill him with their forcibles.

He did not stop to rest, did not sleep. With almost every step, he felt stronger.

There is a limit to what endowments can do. Once a man takes five endowments of wit, he forgets virtually nothing. At twenty endowments, every heartbeat, every blink of the eye, becomes etched in memory, and there is little benefit to taking more endowments beyond that point.

The same is true with brawn. A warrior who takes ten endowments of brawn might lift a horse, and Gaborn had seen more than one drunken knight attempt the feat. But adding more endowments does nothing to strengthen the bones, and so the warrior soon reaches practical limits. True, he might lift a horse, but in doing so he stood in grave danger of snapping the bones in his back or ankles.

A warrior who takes five endowments of stamina also reaches a limit: the point where he needs no sleep. It is true that he might grow fatigued, but a moment of rest is as refreshing as a night in bed.

Gaborn had never wanted to be like Raj Ahten, to horde endowments that benefited him little.

Yet as Gaborn ran, he could feel himself being added upon. He felt as if he had grown beyond all natural limits. He could not even guess how many endowments he had. A hundred of brawn? Even when straining to leap a sixty-foot chasm, he moved effortlessly. A thousand of stamina? He felt no weariness. It soon felt as if vigor and wholeness oozed from every pore.

And with each few steps, as the facilitators in Heredon vectored him more endowments, the vigor grew.

He felt as if he were a fruit ripening in the sun, ready to burst its skin
from its own copiousness. He felt as if he were only dreaming of the race through the Underworld, as if he'd left his body far behind, and now glided on wings of thought.

Raj Ahten must feel this way, he thought. I could run across a cloud.

He raced through the cavern, crossed the water. Ahead, a squat brown creature, like a giant slug, oozed along the cavern floor—a mordant, digesting everything that it touched. The floors of the tunnel were riddled with holes now, the burrows of blind-crabs and other small animals.

Gaborn halted to drink from a warm pool. The water could not slake his thirst. And though he gathered some gray fungi to eat, it could do little more than ease the knot in his empty stomach.

He felt a death as one of his Chosen was torn from him. In Heredon the killing had begun. Gabom stretched out with his Earth Sight. He felt his own death lurking in the dark corridors ahead, even as he felt death rushing toward his Chosen people in Heredon. Even with the warnings he'd sent, tens of thousands would die tonight.

He halted for a moment to gnaw on some gray man's ear and mourn his people. He felt that tonight was but a portent of worse things to come.