David Farland - The Lair of Bones

“What do you mean, this is the horde?” Iome demanded.

“Now the real warriors are coming,” Averan said, “and all of them will come. They’ll bring their most powerful battle mages, and...and—” She threw up her arms, unable to explain.

Iome suspected that even Averan couldn’t guess what the reavers were capable of.

Three days. Gaborn had warned that there would be a great battle at Carris in three days. Iome calculated how fast the common reavers had run before, and realized that three days was about right. In three days the army that was marching from the Underworld would reach Carris.

Gaborn paced at the mouth of the grotto.

“What’s wrong?” Iome demanded.

“The Earth...” Gaborn said. “The Earth warns me to flee, but I see no escape.”

“Maybe we should go after the horses,” Averan suggested.

“No,” Gaborn said. “This is the right path. I just—I just don’t see the way out.”

Iome searched frantically. Everywhere, the white walls hung like dripping curtains of stone. Craters pocked the floor where pools had formed and then dried out ages ago. White ridges along each ledge showed where the waterline had been. Perfect blue-white cave pearls rested on the floor.

The water had to come from somewhere, Iome thought. She peered up. The roof above rose some twenty feet. Small stalactites hung overhead like spears. The ground rattled under her feet now, and Iome licked her lips, afraid that a stalactite would break loose and fall, along with the flakes of stone that had begun tumbling from the roof.

Then she spotted it—a tiny shaft so small that a badger could not have crawled through. It was near the roof, at the back of the cave.

“Up here!” she said.

Iome dropped her pack and ropes and climbed up the wall. Her fingers and toes found purchase in tiny crevices and indentations that no commoner could ever have used. The flowstone offered ample opportunity for support. With her endowments of brawn and grace, she felt almost as if she were a fly, climbing along the wall.

She reached the top. Her opal crown gleamed, and by its light she searched the hole. She couldn’t see far back. She reached in. The hole narrowed, and became no wider than her arm. She grasped a knob of calcite, a cave pearl that had fused to the floor of the small spring, and tried to wrench it free. With so many endowments of brawn she was able to break it off, but even as she did, her hand snapped up and hit the roof of the cave, banging it. Her knuckles bled profusely. It was no use. The calcite deposits were as hard as quartz. She’d never be able to dig fast enough to widen the opening.

“Here they come!” Gaborn shouted. “Everyone to the back!”

He herded the others to the rear of the grotto. Iome clung to the wall like a fly, afraid to move. The wall shook beneath her grasp.

Silently, she prayed to the Earth Powers, “Hide us. Let them not find us.”

Loud hissing rose outside the grotto.

“They’ve smelled us,” Averan said. “There’s no other reason why they’d be coming up this branch of the cave.”

The acrid stench of horse sweat was everywhere. Even without endowments from a dozen dogs, Iome could smell it. She only hoped that Binnesman’s spells could hide them.

The hope was short-lived.

In seconds a reaver reached the mouth of the grotto. The huge monster rushed up the cliff and wedged its head into the crevasse at the opening. The philia along its jaw line quivered as if in anticipation. Slime dripped from its fearsome jaws.

“He’s found us!” Averan screamed. “He’s shouting to the others, warning them.”

There was no sound from the reaver other than his hissing breath. His shouts were smells, odors so subtle that Iome could not distinguish them.

The opening was only six feet wide, too narrow for a full-grown reaver to enter—at least that is what Iome thought.

But the monster shoved its head into the crack, and twisted its body sideways. It heaved once, and there was a snapping noise.

On the reaver’s head were three bony plates joined by cartilage. Now the reaver shoved its head into the crevice, and the plates snapped back, so that it could shove its muzzle into the hole. It twisted onto its side, and its torso followed.

Iome could smell the stink of its hot breath. A gree flew up from the beast, dislodged by its acrobatics, and flapped around the small grotto with a squeaking sound.

Gaborn leapt forward, stabbed the monster in the muzzle with his dart. Even with all his endowments of brawn, the blow hardly pierced the monster’s thick flesh.

Iome looked for a place to run. She could not see an exit up here.

The reaver hissed in outrage at Gaborn’s thrust, and pulled its muzzle back, inching from the grotto. It backed out completely, and Iome’s heart pounded in terror: behind it were more reavers, a tide of them sweeping into the small tunnel. Their bodies formed a black wall.

Yet even as they came to a halt outside, the trembling continued, growing louder. She realized that the main part of the reaver horde was still marching, passing them by, uninterested in a few intrepid humans that dared venture into their domain, or perhaps more concerned with advancing to war.

A larger reaver appeared at the mouth of the grotto and thrust a knight gig—a metal hook on a long iron pole—through the hole. Gaborn leapt just as the knight gig approached.

“Binnesman!” Gaborn shouted.

The reaver flipped its knight gig around expertly, and would have impaled Binnesman, then dragged him from safety. But Gaborn leapt down on the pole and ran up its length two paces, until he reached the reaver’s massive paw. He struck with his dart, plunging it into the soft flesh between the monster’s fingers. The reaver wheezed in pain.

There was a hissing at the reaver’s back, a sound of rushing wind that sounded like “Gasht!”

Iome had heard that sound before, when reaver mages cast their spells.

A dark cloud roiled into the grotto, filling it with noxious fumes. Iome found her eyes burning, as if hot coals had been flung into them. She dared not take a breath, for even in the open air on the battlefield, a reaver mage’s spells were devastating. Here in the confines of a grotto, their effect would be twenty-fold.

Think, Iome told herself. Gaborn said that there has to be a way out. But where?

The reaver drew his knight gig from the grotto, banging it against the walls. The pole must have been thirty feet long and six inches around. As it struck the left wall, a huge chunk of stone broke away.

Encouraged by this, the reaver swung the knight gig, hitting a far wall.

“He’s widening the opening!” Binnesman warned. The wizard let out a breath, and was forced to draw air. He fell back against the wall, eyes tearing. He struggled to reach into his pocket for some healing herb.

The green woman rushed forward and would have done battle with the reavers, but Binnesman put a restraining hand on her shoulder. “No,” he said, the word wrung from his throat in torture.

The floor! Iome realized. There were pools here, but no sign of a stream flowing away. That meant that the water had to have emptied through the floor below at one time. There might be an exit hidden down there.

She leapt from the roof of the grotto, twenty feet, jarring her ankles as she hit ground. She peered around the edge of the deepest pool. Her eyes burned, and she swiped tears away. At the back of the grotto she saw it—a tiny crevasse under the craterlike rim of a pool, not more than a foot long and an inch wide.

Gaborn raced to the mouth of the grotto and stabbed at the reaver’s paw. As he did, a second knight gig thrust through the opening. Even with all her endowments of metabolism, it seemed to Iome that the gig wrenched through with incredible speed. Gaborn tried to dodge, and took a glancing blow.