David Farland - The Lair of Bones

They had ridden for several hours at a fast pace, when Gaborn noticed something: off the side of the trail was a small cave, crudely chiseled. Above it, clearly visible in the light of the gleaming opals, scratch marks looked to have been gouged by human hands.

“What’s this?” Gaborn asked. “An animal’s lair?”

“Not animal,” Binnesman said. “Human. Erden Geboren’s men often used to build such retreats in the Underworld, when they hunted reavers in times of old. The mark here is written in Inkarran. I’m not too handy with their tongue, but I believe that the sign calls this ‘Mouth of the World Outpost Number Three.’ ”

“The Waymaker knew of hundreds of such fortresses,” Averan said.

“I suppose that we had better check this out,” Gaborn said. “We may want to take refuge in one of these before our journey is over.”

Averan leapt off her mount, and peered into the narrow opening. She held her gleaming opal up before her, so that its reddish light showed the way. “The tunnel is chiseled into solid rock,” she said. “The crawlway goes up a dozen yards, then turns to the left.”

She climbed in first, and Gaborn got down from his own mount and followed the girl in.

Spongy black fungi, like wrinkled leaves, matted the floor. Gaborn crawled over them and felt as if he were crawling on a wet blanket.

At the top of the tunnel he found a room large enough for ten or fifteen people. A pair of blind-crabs, sensing the intruders’ presence, scrabbled to hide behind a tall stone jar that sat in one corner. An ancient reaver dart, its haft nearly rusted through, leaned against a wall.

Moldering in another corner were the bones of a child. The flesh had first dried on the skeleton, and then rotted away in patches so that the bones clung together.

Gaborn counted the ribs, and found that it had been a girl, a small child of perhaps four or five. The girl had been curled in a fetal position with her thumb in her mouth when she died. A blanket was wrapped around her, an Inkarran blanket woven from long strands of white goat hair.

Gaborn heard someone grunt. Iome had followed him up the tunnel. She caught him staring at the pile of bones.

“Who would bring a child down here?” Iome wondered aloud.

Averan spoke up. “A few days ago, when I tasted the brains of a reaver, I saw something. I saw...pens full of people down here in the Underworld, kept so that the reavers could test their magic spells.” Iome looked up at her, stricken. “All the spells that they learned: to wring the water from a man, to blind him with pain, to make his wounds rot, they had to practice on real people. So, they caught people—never too many from one place: here a person, there two or three, and they brought them down here. Maybe this girl was one of them.”

“How horrible it must have been,” Iome said, as if this were something that had happened long ago.

Averan shook her head. “No, how horrible it must be. They’re still down here.”

It was heartbreaking news. Gaborn had imagined that Averan’s mind was a vast cave, full of treasures waiting to be brought to light. But now he found it full of bones and horror. “Do you know where they are?” Gaborn asked. “Can you show me the way?” On top of all his other impossible tasks, he’d have to find these people, bring them up from their prison, if he could.

“At the bottom,” Averan said. “Near the Lair of Bones.”

Gaborn inhaled deeply. He was finding it hard to breathe in this tight space. At first he’d thought that an outpost like this might be a good place to camp, but now he knew that he could never rest in this one, not with the hollow eyes of the child watching him. He felt guilty for being alive, when so many others were dead. He felt guilty for wanting life, when his earth senses warned that so many were about to die.

“Let’s go,” Gaborn said. His group had not ventured more than ten miles past the old outpost when Gaborn halted his horse, peered up the road, and said, “There is danger is here—not far ahead.”

Iome’s nerves felt jittery and her stomach tightened. She’d known that she would find reavers in the Underworld, but she hadn’t wanted to find them soon.

For the past seventy miles the reaver tunnel had been almost featureless, a dull thoroughfare through the Underworld made interesting only by an occasional blind-crab or great-worm. The drab stones offered little variation in color. But suddenly the path ahead opened up into a natural cave whose ceiling rose hundreds of feet in the air. The sound of rushing water thundered in the distance, and nearby Iome could hear it trickling along the walls, dripping from stalactites. The tunnels ahead were covered with white calcite that gleamed like quartz, and the reavers had pummeled it under their feet, so that their trail looked as if it were strewn with bright glass, or bits of stars. The keen scent of sulfur water filled the air.

“The reavers like the pools here,” Averan said. “It’s the last drinking water before they leave the Underworld.”

“They’re here,” Gaborn said, nodding with certainty. “Up the road a ways. I feel the danger rising.”

Iome had watched men battle reavers from afar, but had never fought one herself. The green woman, Binnesman’s wylde, rose up in her stirrups, sniffing the air like a hound, peering ahead.

“Do you smell reavers?” Averan asked her.

The green woman shook her head. “No.”

Gaborn looked to Averan for counsel.

“There could be guards posted ahead,” Averan said. “They might have buried themselves.”

You would never have any warning before they got you, Iome thought.

“I’ll take the lead,” Gaborn said. With his Earth Sight, Gaborn was the only one who could travel this path with any degree of safety.

They rode on.

Iome’s senses were alert. As she rode, she held her opals up and lit the cavern perhaps more brightly than it had ever been lit before. The walls glittered like frosting in shades of honey and ivory. Warm sulfur water trickled and dripped over every surface, and over the ages it had built up deposits of stone in grotesque shapes. Stalagmites squatted like gargoyles on the cave floor while tubular stalactites hung overhead, twisting in serpentine fashion. Along both sides of the path, shallow green pools lay with steam curling up from their surfaces. Myriad reaver tracks deeply imprinted the mud of every pool.

Plant life was sparse, but feather ferns hung from crevasses near the roof. Something large, the size of an eagle, flitted overhead and circled a stalactite.

“Gree hawk!” Binnesman shouted.

Gaborn reined his horse and pulled out his sword, eyeing the creature as it circled twice more. In some ways, it resembled an enormous bat. But it had a head like a reaver’s—blind, broad, heavily toothed, with frills of philia sweeping off its jaw and in a ridge along the back.

To Iome, with her six endowments of metabolism, the gree hawk did not seem to present much of a threat, but to a commoner it would have seemed to be flitting about at lightning speed.

Iome asked, “Will it attack?”

“They mostly eat gree,” Binnesman said. “But if they are hungry, and if they are presented with an easy meal in the way of a lone traveler, they may attack.”