David Farland - The Lair of Bones

The stroke flung him against the far wall.

“Kill a reaver!” Binnesman shouted to his wylde. The wizard stood with his back against a stone wall, gasping, and tried to pull Gaborn to safety.

The green woman, unleashed at her master’s command, leapt forward. As she did, she waved her iron-bound staff in the air, making it do a little dance, forming a rune of power.

She jabbed the reaver’s paw, and there was a sound like stone hitting meat. The reaver’s massive hand exploded, sending shards of broken bone through flesh. The monster wheezed in pain and dropped its weapon as it struggled to back from the cave. For the moment, no other reavers could get near to attack.

Iome grabbed her own reaver dart, and plunged it into the tiny crevasse. Stone broke beneath her, a clod as large as her hand. The spear pushed through. She lowered her head and peered down. She saw another cave beyond the grotto!

Iome’s air was almost gone. Her lungs burned, but she dared not draw breath. Instead, she pounded the stone alongside the crevasse as fast as she could, widening the hole.

Averan let out her breath, and cried in agony. “Help! I can’t see!”

Iome could do nothing for her. She dared not. She plunged the spear into the stone, breaking away a handful of calcite here, another there. Even with endowments of brawn, it was harrowing work. Her spear point felt blunted and all but useless in a matter of moments.

She toiled on.

Another large reaver entered the mouth of the cave, picked up the pole, and thrust it in. It hit the wylde on the ankle, throwing her to the ground.

Iome slammed her spear into the stone. A large chunk of calcite fell away, went sliding downward.

She could see the cave beyond! There was a path of flowstone, and it dripped down the hill until it joined what must have been the bed of a submerged river, for there the path widened.

She could hold her breath no longer.

She exhaled, and gasped.

The reaver mage’s stench burned her throat. As air filled her lungs, she could almost hear the reaver’s command, “See no more.”

The wylde roared in anger and swung her staff. The blow struck a wall, sending shards of dust and rock everywhere. The reaver that had attacked her backed away.

Iome’s eyes throbbed. The cords that held her eyeball convulsed and spasmed so that she could not focus. She felt as if a dagger had been thrust into each socket, and now her attacker was methodically twisting the blade. Even with a dozen endowments of stamina, she could barely see.

She grabbed Averan first, shoved her through the hole. Averan went tumbling a few yards, then slid on her belly the last dozen feet. As she reached bottom, she began to flounder and make a mewling noise, trying to crawl to safety. Iome found the girl’s pack and shoved it after.

“This way!” Iome shouted.

She could barely make out her friends. Her eyes wouldn’t focus. Gaborn, Binnesman, and the wylde were but partly glimpsed shadows, shifting about in a world of pain.

“Duck!” Gaborn shouted.

Iome ducked.

A swinging pole whipped past her head. She felt more than saw it. Half blinded, only Gaborn’s warning had kept her from being brained.

She grabbed Gaborn. He hunched in pain, holding his ribs. She propelled him toward the exit. “Go!”

Last of all, she grabbed Binnesman.

The green woman still held the front of the grotto. Another reaver slammed its head into the crevasse, trying to wedge its way in, and she lunged forward, slugging it in the jaw. Bloody gobbets of reaver flesh rained through the grotto.

Iome felt about blindly on the floor. Binnesman had dropped his staff and his pack. Iome hurled both through the small opening, then tossed her own pack through, and slid down the exit.

She gasped air, fresh air! She lay for a moment on her belly, chest heaving, trying to clear her lungs of the reavers’ curses.

“Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer—to me!” Binnesman called out weakly. In answer, the green woman came hurtling through the opening from above. She rolled downhill and landed against a stone wall with such a shock that if she had been human, she would have broken every bone in her body.

“Let’s get away from here,” Gaborn said. The ground still shook from the passage of reavers, and all around was a distant hiss.

Iome looked back. With all her endowments of sight and stamina, her vision began to clear quickly. It might take the reavers some time to dig through the grotto and find their escape route. But she had no doubt that they would follow.

Ahead, an ancient riverbed wound through the Underworld. There was still water in it here and there, small pools. Grotesque Underworld vegetation, like cabbage leaves, covered the walls. Tubers and hairy rootlike plants hung from the roof in twisted splendor, while giant fungi rose up like little islands from the tickle ferns that covered the floor. Still, there was something of a trail cut by the watercourse. It would be a hard path, a wild path. Where it led, Iome could not guess.

Their horses were gone. Gaborn was hurt. And the reavers were after them. A stalactite fell from the roof, shattered on the floor not a dozen feet away.

“Looks like we’re through the easy part,” Iome said.

“Come!” Gaborn urged the group. “We have no time to waste.”

Come where? Averan wondered.

In the reavers’ tunnels, Averan knew the way. But here in this natural cave, without any reaver scents written on the wall to guide her, she was lost. The ground thundered beneath the feet of hundreds of thousands of reavers.

They had barely escaped the grotto. Averan gasped, struggling to clear her lungs of the reavers’ curses. “I’m blind!” She squinted. Her eyes would not focus. Instead, the cords in them convulsed and twitched, and Averan peered through a red haze.

“It will pass,” Binnesman promised. Averan peered at him, a vague shape in the darkness recognizable only by the color of light shining from his cape pin. For an instant his face came into focus. Such was the power of the reavers’ curse that the whites of the wizard’s eyes had gone blood red.

Averan’s eyes burned like poison. She had never imagined such exquisite pain.

The whites of my eyes are probably as red as his, she realized.

Binnesman felt in the pockets of the robe, pulled out a tiny sprig. “Here,” he said. “Eyebright!”

He broke the stem of the plant and wetted it with his tongue, then quickly painted a bit over each of Averan’s eyes. The pain drained away quickly as Binnesman ministered to the others.

Averan grabbed her pack and ropes, peered along the cave both ways, upstream and down. Along the sides of the cavern, stalactites dripped from the ceiling and stalagmites rose up from the floor like a forest of spears. Only the center of the cavern was clear of them. There, water had flowed swiftly once, polishing away the debris. Now the rivercourse was overgrown. Binnesman had called the plants tickle fern. Their fronds fanned slowly, as if swaying in an invisible breeze.

In her mind, Averan tried to construct an image of what the reaver tunnels looked like. But in her mind, the image was a tangled ball of yarn. Perhaps the Waymaker could have envisioned it, but she doubted it. The reavers didn’t negotiate the tunnels by sight. They didn’t use maps. They followed their sense of smell.

Averan sniffed. The reavers had a name for this kind of stone. The name was a smell—the chalky scent of blue-white cave pearls. If this deposit joined with any other reaver tunnels, she might be able to figure it out by the scent.