The Lair of Bones (56 page)

An earthquake began to build. The riblike supports on the walls swayed with the motion, and the floor beneath her began to rise and fall as if in waves. Chips of rock and dust peeled from the roof and cracked to the ground.

The Earth is in pain, Averan thought. She could feel it, the dull sustained ache that cut through the very bones of the world, adding to her own distress.

She rounded a corner, and a reaver blocked her way, a big lumbering matron. It became aware of Averan charging headlong, and wheeled to flee into the egg chambers. Averan could smell its distress call.

In the pocket of her wizard robes she carried a sprig of parsley that Binnesman had given her days ago. He had told her to tie it in seven knots and throw it on her trail if anything gave chase. She had tied it in knots, but hadn't needed it until now. Suddenly, the sprig blossomed in her memory.

She grasped its dried leaves between her fingers, dropped it to the floor, and gave a little chant.

“Round the circle, round the bend,

Round the corner and back again

Seek my scent, and when it's found,

Twelve times twelve, follow it around.”

Averan raced along the tunnel. The floor trembled wildly as another tremor hit, and suddenly ahead it buckled. Slabs of rock tilted up. Averan leapt over them, racing like a hare.

It wasn't far now—up one tunnel, round a bend, over a bridge where
burning white mud pots splattered against a wall, round a corner.

And Averan was there—a chamber much smaller than the Dedicates' Keep had been. It was only a couple of hundred yards from one end to the other. As in the keep, sluggish water flowed through a small pond, bubbling up from a hot spring. A few stonewood trees grew from the ceiling.

The whole room was eerily lit.

Upon the floor lay a vast rune, fully a hundred yards across: the Rune of Desolation. It was evil to behold, and seemed all the more depraved for being carved in stone. It was no simple shape. To Averan's eye, it looked almost like two snakes seeking to devour each other within a vast circle. But other protuberances jutted up among the scene to monstrous effect. A noxious haze circled above it, obscuring the symbol.

The rune itself was made of earth. Knobs and ridges of carved stone rose from the ground in varying heights, forming a bas-relief.

Actinic flashes of red and blue shot from the rune, eerily lighting the vast chamber, as if the flames of a hearth flickered upon the walls. Averan could discern no source for the fire. The ground seemed to fulminate, for she could see glowing embers, yet earth remained unconsumed.

Averan peered about, searching. Gaborn had told her to destroy the seals. But she saw only one seal before her, a Seal of Desolation.

Where are the others?

She tried to imagine what nearby rooms they might be hidden in. But the Waymaker's memory only confirmed that the runes stood before her.

Then she gasped: there, among the flickering lights she discerned a shape. If she squinted hard, she could see it, a rune carved not in earth but formed in the sourceless fire. The Seal of the Inferno.

And there, above the earth and fire floated a noxious gray haze, swirling in lazy circles. No wind made the smoke swirl so. The third rune was also here, the Seal of Heaven, written in currents of air.

The seals were stacked atop one another.

Her first instinct was to break the Seal of Desolation.

I can collapse the roof on it, Averan thought.

She stretched out her staff, and prepared a spell to weaken the stone.

38

To give your life in the service of ahigher cause, one must first renounce all self-indulgence.

—
The Wizard Binnesman

Gaborn danced away as the One True Master advanced. With every step backward, the Earth warned him, “Flee,” and then again, “Strike!”

Thus he knew that it was not his task to face the monster yet. She was beyond his strength to battle. He raced away from her, slaughtering her Dedicates as he did.

In Carris the battle was in full swing. Dozens of his Chosen were torn from him in an instant, and Gaborn cried out in pain.

Dark tendrils of vapor wrapped around his leg, and ice seemed to freeze his heart. The voice of the One True Master whispered in his mind. “You have failed. Because of your weakness, your Chosen will die.”

Gaborn saw as if in a vision from the hills west of Carris, reavers roaring across the causeway in a black tide, leaping onto the castle walls. The city seemed to be aflame, the only light in a blackened world. Outside the castle, a fell mage and her sorceresses sought to complete a new Seal of Desolation. Actinic blue lights rose from the ground where it took form.

Above the castle, a balloon shaped like a graak wafted through the smoke.

Gaborn's army was crumbling. Men raced from the gates, fleeing in terror atop the castle wall. From this distance, Gaborn saw a reaver reach up to pull a young boy from a tower window. Gaborn knew that what he witnessed was true, for the boy was one of his Chosen, and Gaborn felt the boy's life ripped from him.

And then the view changed and Gaborn saw, as if from above, Raj Ahten to the west of Carris, high on a hill, with his troops behind him. His
face was a mask of ruin, with his ear burned off, the skin seared from his jaw, and his eye puckering white and blind.

He exulted at the slaughter in the distance, watched the reavers bursting through walls to get at the people that hid in their homes and cellars.

“This is your doing,” the One True Master whispered. “You made him your enemy, and sought his life.”

The Master sought to crush Gaborn with guilt, like a massive stone, but he would have none of it.

“Liar!” he shouted. “He made himself my enemy—at your bidding!”

The One True Master is only seeking to delay me, he realized. Gaborn raced to another Dedicate, and plunged his reaver dart into its kidney.

“Duck,” the Earth whispered, and Gaborn threw himself flat to the ground, dodging beneath the knees of a reaver.

As he did, the One True Master snapped her vile whip, slicing the air above his head.

“Dodge,” the Earth commanded, and Gaborn leapt aside as the monster hissed a curse.

“Gasht,”
the words sounded, and a black funnel of wind issued from her staff, racing near the spot where Gaborn had stood. The ground boiled where it touched, and flakes of rock splintered from the floor. Three reaver Dedicates, seemingly frozen in time, fell beneath the blast. Their blood and bones spattered through the chamber.

The floor bucked beneath Gaborn's feet as a strong earthquake rocked the chamber. Stones and dust fell from the ceiling.

“Strike!” the earth commanded, and Gaborn leapt over a reaver and plunged his dart into another vector. He craned his neck and felt gratified to see one of the ghostly blue runes on the monster fade to gray.

The tendrils of darkness swept over him, and Gaborn found himself wishing to curl up on the floor and die. The monster fought him, sought to take control of his limbs.

As if uttering a curse he shouted, “The Glories deliver me!”

In that moment, Gaborn wished for nothing more than to become pure light himself, to fight the corruption he beheld.

The monster wheezed as if stricken, and the shadow withdrew.

The way his very desire seemed to engender pain in the creature gave Gaborn sudden insight.

I can do it, he thought. I can call upon the Glories, and she knows it!

“No,” the monster whispered. “You're not worthy.” Images flashed before his eyes: a pair of reavers tearing a man in two as they fought to eat him; a woman rushing from a reaver as its blade whipped down, cutting her in half. “This is your legacy,” the beast whispered.

But Gaborn did not believe it. By making him view the world's corruption, the beast hoped to dishearten him.

“I am worthy,” Gaborn said. “The Glories have made me so.”

The One True Master wheezed and lunged.

Gaborn found that he had backed beneath a twisted stonewood tree, and the bole of it bored into his ribs.

The monster sprang forward in an astonishing leap.

“Jump,” the Earth warned. Gaborn leapt thirty feet in the air, rising between two branches of the tree. “Dodge.” He felt the warning, and Gaborn twisted as he leapt. “Dodge,” the earth warned again, and he twisted once more as he dropped toward the ground.

The One True Master raked the air with her crystalline staff, swatting at him with incredible speed. Once, twice, three times she sought to strike him as he fell, and each time he only barely managed to twist away from the blow.

As he dropped, Gaborn saw a light at the mouth of the chamber, and huge dancing shadows. Iome had come to help.

Gaborn landed on hard rock. The ground began to buck from the force of the earthquake, and stones showered from the ceiling.

For miles Iome had run, following Gaborn, until at last she rounded a bend and saw a light ahead. She could make out man-shapes, dozens of them, and her voice caught in her throat, for she imagined that Gaborn had found an Inkarran war party.

But when she neared she saw only a tattered band of skeletal beings, the shadows of people dressed in rags, and she recalled Averan's tale of prisoners in the dark places of the world.

She rushed up to them.

“Where is Gaborn?” Iome begged.

No one answered at first, for she had many endowments and spoke too
quickly, but one finally pointed down the tunnel. “That way! Hurry!”

Iome raced down the trail, over a floor polished as smooth as marble by millions of reavers that had trundled over it during the centuries. Her heart hammered with every stride. She knew that Gaborn's need was upon him, for he had left no marks at side tunnels.

She glanced down each crawlway that crossed her path, afraid that she might lose the way. She saw great rooms carved in stone, and longed to search them, to learn what she could of the secret ways of reavers.

Over the weary days of travel she had lost her ability to track time. Her race seemed unending, measured only by the sense of urgency that drove her.

She rounded a bend, saw a trio of dead reavers, and the mouth of a tunnel. As if from a great distance, Gaborn shouted, “Iome, stay back!”

The ground bucked and swayed beneath her feet. Iome threw herself against a wall for support, and warily peered up, afraid that the roof would col-lapse, but the walls and roof were reinforced with mucilage from glue mums.

She raced into the mouth of a huge chamber. Stones tumbled from the ceiling. Dead reavers lay in humps all about. But in the distance, wading through a swarm of companions, Iome saw a reaver far more enormous and hideous than any that she'd ever imagined.

Its abdomen was so swollen with eggs that she looked bloated to the bursting point. Yet she danced over the battlefield with a speed and grace that left Iome breathless.

Then Iome spotted Gaborn, a second shadow lit only by the big reaver's glowing runes. He was in something of a clearing, created as reavers rushed to escape his presence.

Gaborn and his adversary moved as if in dance, seeming to read each other's minds. Gaborn recoiled backward some eighty feet, spinning in the air as he dodged the monster's whip.

Never had Iome imagined such grace and speed in a man. It was like watching lightning arc across the heavens. To her, it seemed that Gaborn had become a force of nature, the Sum of All Men.

But the One True Master lunged toward him with equal speed, and if Gaborn was the Sum of All Men, then she seemed at this moment, with her power and deadly intent, to be the Sum of All Reavers.

Together, Gaborn and his attacker raced between a pair of grotesque stonewood trees.

“Iome,” Gaborn called. “Kill the vectors.”

All throughout the cave were countless reavers, each marked by softly glowing runes. Comprehension dawned in Iome. She peered about, searching for targets. To her left, her keen eyes detected a bright glow. Half a dozen reavers clustered around it, as if to shield it from view.