David Farland - The Lair of Bones

As if to echo their calls, the frowth giants climbed a hill to the west and called out, “Wahoot! Wahoot!” over and over. They beat upon hollow logs, and their leaders raised a dead reaver high overhead, as if to make an offering to Gaborn, and then laid it on the battlefield.

Only King Anders’s men had refused to pack up and go skulking away in the darkness. In moments a knight came riding from his camp. The fellow looked fearful. He rode up to the castle wall and stood on the parapet, looking up. He called out to Gaborn, “Your Highness, my lord King Anders of South Crowthen sends his congratulations on a battle well won, and wishes you peace and a long life.”

“Why does he not come and offer such words himself?” Gaborn asked suspiciously.

“I fear that moving him unnecessarily would not be wise. His surgeons tell me that he has taken a mortal wound, and wishes only to return and die within sight of his homeland. I fear that he will not make it. Still, we beg your indulgence, and ask that you grant us permission to leave the battlefield.”

“What of Celinor?” Iome asked.

“The boy is with his father, trying to ease his way,” the messenger said. “He also begs permission to leave the battlefield.”

Gaborn peered across the battlefield, filled with misgivings. Anders had claimed to be the Earth King, and now he asked to leave the battlefield?

“I will come to bid him farewell,” Gaborn said.

With that, he sped across the field faster than the messenger could have imagined, past dead reavers, up the hill to a small rise where Anders’s startled guards barely had time to register his approach before he was at Anders’s tent.

Erin Connal lay outside it, bound hand and foot. Inside the tent, Anders lay abed with Celinor at his side. His wound did not look mortal. Gaborn peered at the man with his Earth Sight, and saw within him something far more terrifying than any reaver. There was a shadow in him, a blackness deep and grotesque.

Celinor and the guards reacted slowly to Gaborn’s presence. They shouted and began to fall back.

King Anders opened his eyes to slits, peered up at Gaborn, and merely smiled. “Will you kill me?”

“What would be the point?” Gaborn asked. “A locus cannot be slain.”

Celinor had staggered back a step and was drawing his blade, as if to protect his father. Gaborn stopped him with a glance.

“You are wise, Earth King,” Anders said.

Gaborn looked up to Celinor. “Your father harbors a locus, and is therefore your father no more. Bind him, and bear him to the deepest dungeon at Ravenscroft. There, you may tend him and feed him, but do him no harm.”

Celinor peered at his father, horror showing in every line of his face.

At that, King Anders screamed in protest, his back arching up off of the ground. His eyes rolled back in his head, and when he slumped to the ground, he breathed no more. Gaborn saw a flash of darkness as the locus fled. A chill ran up Gaborn’s spine. He rushed from the tent, and saw the shadow blurring away to the north.

“What happened?” Celinor called from within the tent. Gaborn peered back through the flap. The guards were looking about darkly.

“The locus feared imprisonment,” Gaborn said with certainty. “So it tore your father’s spirit from its body, and fled.” Gaborn felt certain that it would make itself known in time.

Celinor went to Erin, and begging forgiveness, cut her free of her bonds.

Home, Averan thought, as Gaborn raced to Anders’s tent. Everyone is going home. But where will I go? Her home was gone.

By her body’s clock, thirty days and nights she had been in the Underworld, and in that time she had become accustomed to the smell of the deep earth, the overwhelming silence of the Underworld, the eternal shadows. The open sky above her seemed strange and foreboding, with all of its bright stars falling down from midnight blue skies in a steady stream, like bright coins of gold and silver tumbling through the darkness.

By dawn the folk of Carris had begun to bury the dead in two great mounds before the castle walls. In a cool gray mist Averan watched them as she rode south toward the Courts of Tide, the hills becoming smaller and smaller, fading into the distance. She imagined them as they would be someday, with broad-leafed elms growing atop them, giving shade to the folk who would build cities here again. Rabbits would feed on the hillsides, and foxes would dig dens beneath the roots of the forest giants. Doves would call from the boughs in the evening while young men sat in the shade of the hillock and sang to the women they loved.

Soon, the Earth whispered to Averan. It will happen again soon.

On the road, the prisoners that Averan and Gaborn had rescued from the Underworld filed off toward their homes. Gaborn provided each of them with cloaks and horses and food and money for the road, and many a proud man wept in gratitude as he took his leave.

The ride to the Courts of Tide was not a hurried one. The Earth King traveled by day, and by night he ranged far from camp. With his many endowments he traveled quickly over hills and through the fields, seeking out the cottages of humble farmers and woodsmen, Choosing those that he fancied. He took to wearing a green travel robe, and carrying a staff of oak. Tiny rootlings took shape in the robe almost as soon as he put it on, and within two days they had so overrun the fabric that nothing could be seen of the original material. Instead, Gaborn wore a wizard’s robe that seemed as brown as turned earth in some light, or as green as pine needles in others.

Within three days, they reached the soaring towers at the Courts of Tide, where the crystalline bridges spanned the ocean between the isles.

The warlords of Internook had already sailed away by the time they reached the city, but evidence of the damage they had wrought was everywhere—scorched wood along the piers, walls of huge estates knocked over.

Still, the folk were delighted to see the Earth King, and came out in force. All of the warning bells in the city rang for joy, and the children and mothers cried.

Gaborn rode through the city slowly, for he was so pressed by those who wanted the Choosing that he could hardly move forward. So he sat atop his horse and held his left hand high, looking into the crowd at knots of people, calling, “I Choose you. I Choose you all for the Earth.”

Averan wondered why he bothered. He had saved the seeds of the Earth, as was his duty. Why did he keep up the Choosing?

So she asked him one night a week after they had reached the city.

“I am the Earth King in times of peace, as well as in times of war,” Gaborn said. “Indeed, now my Power will serve me best.”

And he continued to Choose. Over the coming weeks, lords came from far lands—from the remote reaches of Indhopal, and the islands of the north, and from every realm in Rofehavan, all of them bowing their heads and offering up tribute from their realms. Wuqaz Faharaqin came from Indhopal, to make a peace offering from all of the kings of the desert, and brought with him a great store of blood metal as tribute.

Gaborn distributed the blood metal freely, but only to those who belonged to the Brotherhood of the Wolf. “The Earth King needs no standing army,” he explained. “Our greatest enemy now is the evil that lurks among us, and the Brotherhood of the Wolf is hereby charged with excising that evil. Go into the hills and find the brigands and bandits there, and root them out. Go into the halls of your barons and dukes, and find the evil there, and cut them down.” And though his orders sounded broad, the truth is that few men actually paid the ultimate price. The Brotherhood went out with great authority, executing judgment righteously, and all who dared to defy them were destroyed.