The Lair of Bones (38 page)

Eber slogged forward a few steps, wading now through rats that broke off their assault on the door and assailed an easier victim, uttering fierce growls of triumph. The rats scampered up his legs and onto his shoulders, weighing him down so that Chemoise could not see her uncle at all, only a surging, struggling mound covered with rats.

Eber dashed the oil barrel to the ground, smashing dozens of rats in the process. They growled in rage and squealed in pain. Oil spilled over every-thing. He threw the lantern.

Flames surged up before him, forming a wall. Hundreds of rats had latched firmly onto Eber now, and he spun about crazily for a moment trying to dislodge them.

But he must have known that he could not survive their noxious bites. He staggered into the midst of the flames, dragging the rats with him.

All around Chemoise, the children and women uttered cries of horror. Aunt Constance struggled to reach Eber, but the other women grabbed her arms and held her back. The flaming oil ignited a savage blaze. The old wine barrels were dry as kindling and fed the flames. The tall grasses and wild daisies became an inferno. A wall of fire raged eighty feet high now, just outside the winery door, fanned by the keening wind.

Still the rats came, racing into the fire.

A few burst through, roiling in flames. But few of them survived the wall of fire, and the ferrin easily dispatched the rest.

The wind hammered at the door so that it swung on its hinges, and then slammed closed. The lift bolt slid back into place.

Outside, the storm continued to rage and the fire blossomed. Oily smoke billowed under the door. Dearborn Hawks hurried up and shoved his coat under the cracks.

The rats stopped coming at all.

Chemoise felt numb. She slumped to the floor and sat, exhausted, fearing that more of the vermin would come rushing through, worried that the battle would renew at any moment, only hoping for a brief rest. Many women and children were crying.

Grandmother Kinnelly warned, “Everyone, tend to your wounds! Now is
not the time to rest.” She took a keg of wine and went around the room, pouring it on the rat bites and muttering supplications to the Powers.

Chemoise got up to help. The children searched among the rats, club-bing to death any that were found wounded.

The sheer number of bites on some men was astonishing. Long into the night Chemoise worked. When she finished ministering to her own kind, she went to work on the ferrin. The ferrin folk had taken the worst of it. A dozen had died in the battle, and many others had gored ears, swollen muzzles, torn legs, and the like. One old fellow had his tail gnawed off. It broke Chemoise's heart to see so much pain.

The ferrin, which were normally afraid of humans, suffered her touch now.

Never again will I think of taking a bounty on the ferrin folk, she promised herself. And I'll take a stick to any man or boy that I hear of who hurts one of them.

Thus she worked through the night, tending each ferrin in turn. When she finished, she found that many wounds on both man and ferrin alike had begun to fester, so that she was forced to minister to them again.

Chemoise worked until she was too feverish and weak to continue. She sat with her back against a rough stone wall to rest for a moment. Her eyes felt as if they were weighted with lead, and so she closed them, still unwilling to let down her guard.

She worried about others that she knew, friends from Castle Sylvarresta. Where was Iome? Where was Gaborn?

Gaborn had sent his warning all through Heredon. Chemoise realized that battles such as this were happening everywhere—in storage cellars and abandoned mines, in dungeons and dank caves. She imagined rats swarming through each village in black hordes, and men and ferrin fighting them bravely, side by side.

The wind howled and snarled outside, and thunder pounded, until its rhythm seemed to beat its way inside of her, become one with her.

Shaking with sobs, Chemoise fell asleep, dreaming of rats.

23

Those who surrender to despair forge the bars of their own private prison.

—
Kingjas Laren Sylvarresta

A
dispute erupted only a few hours after the Consort of Shadows threw Averan in with the other prisoners.

There were only sixteen people here, sixteen left out of hundreds who had been brought down over the years. They were of all ages, taken from villages miles apart.

“We have light,” one man said. “We have light for the first time… since we've been here. That's a weapon. It's the one thing that has kept us from making a run for it before. You yourself, Obar, you've said a hundred times that if you had a light, you would make a run for it, whether you lived or died.”

“But what good is light?” Obar asked in a thick Indhopalese accent. “We are miles below surface, and tunnels go everywhere. We never find way out!”

“So what choice do you have?” asked Barris, the man Averan had taken to be their leader. “Now that you have a light, you'll sit here and huddle around it untilflowersgrow out your arse?”

“We're not all Runelords,” an Indhopalese woman, Inura, pleaded. “We can't all fight.”

“Barris is right,” Averan said. “We need to escape. But we don't have to fight alone. Help is coming.”

“Help?” Barris asked. “Down here?”

“Yes,” Averan said. “Gaborn Val Orden, the King of Mystarria, is coming.”

“Praise be to the Powers!” Inura cried.

“Why?” Barris asked as if he thought Averan had gone mad. “Why would a king come down here?”

“He's coming to find the Lair of Bones, to fight the fell mage that guides the reavers,” Averan said. “I was trying to show him the way when the reavers caught me. Gaborn will have no choice but to follow. He should be able to track me. He has taken endowments of scent from twenty dogs.

Barris demanded, “And why would a child like you be leading a king?”

“Because I'm an Earth Warden,” Averan said truthfully, “or at least an apprentice.”

“If you're wizardborn,” Barris suggested, “then maybe there are other things you can do to help us.”

“Like what?” Averan asked.

“Could you summon animals to fight for us?”

“I don't have my staff,” Averan apologized. “Besides, I don't think there is anything bigger than blind-crabs for miles.”

“Please,” Inura said. “Try anything.”

These people were desperate. Averan looked in their grimy, hopeless faces, and could think of no way to help. But anger still burned in her at the thought of her father, and she, too, wanted revenge.

She squinted, wondering. “I'll try,” Averan said. Silently the prisoners crept near, peering at her in the darkness. She slowed her breath and let her thoughts stretch far away.

Her mind lit first on Gaborn. She imagined his face. When she pictured it clearly, she tried to match the pace of his frantic breathing. He was running. She could sense that much at least.

She tried to envision what he saw as he ran, tried to feel the hard stone earth pounding beneath his feet. But it was useless. She couldn't gain entry to his troubled mind.

She needed an easier target, someone more accessible. Binnesman had had her summon a stag back in the hills above the Mangan's Rock because it was a stupid animal.

What kind of animal do I know that's stupid? Averan wondered. A world worm, she thought. That's what Gaborn summoned.

But the idea of some vast worm tunneling through the warrens was too frightening. She dared not try to call such a monster.

She cleared her mind, and an image came slowly: the green woman, Binnesman's wylde.

Averan stretched out with her thoughts.

She envisioned the green woman, and tried to touch the wylde's mind. But the creature was so far away. After long minutes, she began to see through the wylde's eyes, hear as it heard, smell as it smelled. Averan felt astonished at the keenness of every sense. The green woman had a nose sharper than a hound's and eyes keener than an owl's. Every nerve was alive. She felt the slightest currents on her skin, and could taste the lively air with a flick of her tongue. Binnesman had wrought his wylde well indeed. Never had Averan imagined that any creature could feel so vital, so in tune with its surroundings.

The green woman reached a great abyss where a canyon cut across her path. Below, stone trees grew along a riverbank and canyon walls like twisted, leafless caricatures of oaks, and wormgrass flourished beside river-banks where elephant snails huddled in packs like rounded boulders.

Reavers and humans alike would have had to spend long hours negotiating the dangerous climb past the canyon. But the wylde merely stepped off the precipice, falling hundreds of feet before she grasped a rock on the far wall.

Averan could almost feel the stone shift, as if to mold itself to fit the green woman's hand, and then she scampered up the cliff as quickly as a spider.

Averan marveled at the wylde's endurance. The creature drew its strength from the Earth, and now Earth was all around it, enclosing it, suf-fusing it with energy. Averan could feel endless vigor in the creature's taut muscles.

“Spring,” Averan called. “Help me.”

Those three words cost her. Averan felt spent merely to think them, and her head suddenly reeled.

The green woman leapt like a cat, spinning in the air.

“Averan?” she asked.

“Help us,” Averan begged. “We've been caught by reavers, deep in the warrens, near the Lair of Bones.” Averan poured herself into the wylde's mind. Averan enticed her, “The enemies of the Earth are here.”

Averan fell down in a swoon. She could hardly hold contact.

The green woman's head snapped up. Her nostrils flared. The wylde
howled like a hollow wolf and began racing down the tunnel. Averan caught the scent of a reaver's marker as she met a sudden crossroad. Averan frowned in concentration, recognized the spot.

The wylde had been following the reavers' horde up to the surface. The creature was hundreds of miles away.

“Help,” Averan cried. “Turn around.”

Bitterly, choking back her own sobs, Averan withdrew from the creature's mind, unable to maintain contact, and fell into a black place, void of desire.

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