David Farland - The Lair of Bones

Gaborn peered down the hole. Its sides were covered with tickle fern and wormgrass. Averan could see perhaps a quarter mile down the tunnel. At that point, it seemed to twist away, but she could not be certain. The light was too dim to let her see farther. Averan looked into Gaborn’s eyes, wondering if they should dare the shaft.

“The Earth warns us to flee,” Gaborn said. “And this is the only way out.”

Averan reached down and touched a tickle fern. Its fronds brushed her hands gently. She pulled at it, and the roots came away easily.

“Trying to climb the rocks with this stuff is dangerous,” she said. “It’s as slippery as moss.”

“We can make it,” Gaborn said.

The packs lay all around, and Gaborn began pulling off the coils of rope and tying them together, while Iome tied one end of the rope to a nearby stalagmite.

“Let me have a look at those ribs,” Binnesman said to Gaborn.

“I’ll be fine,” Gaborn objected. “They’re almost healed.”

But Binnesman strode forward, unlaced Gaborn’s armor, and pulled it off. Beneath his padding and tunic, Gaborn’s ribs were a mess of blue and black bruises.

“They look worse than they feel,” Gaborn said.

“Good,” Binnesman said, “because if they felt as bad as they look, you’d be dead!” He placed his fingertips above the wound, never touching it. He frowned and muttered, “As I thought, four broken ribs. Even with all of your endowments, they won’t heal fully for a day or so. But I don’t understand how you got hit in the first place.”

“I trusted my eyes more than my heart,” Gaborn said. “I felt the warning to duck, but couldn’t see the danger. Then the knight gig came through so fast.”

“Let that be a warning,” Binnesman said. “Do as the Earth commands. Forget about what your eyes can see, or what you think you know.”

Binnesman reached into his robes, pulled out some melilot, and blew it onto the wound. When he finished tending Gaborn’s ribs, he picked up Gaborn’s mail and leather padding. He considered for half a second, then hurled it into the pit, where the mail clanked and thudded as it bounced down into the darkness.

“What?” Gaborn asked.

“It will only be a hindrance on the climb down,” Binnesman said. “And we should find it on the bottom easily enough.”

Iome and Averan had just finished tying the ropes together. They all looked at one another, and at the pit.

“Who should go first?” Iome asked tensely.

Gaborn walked to the edge of the pit, tossed his reaver dart down the hole. It clanged once, and then he threw the packs over. Last of all, he threw over the end of the rope, and jumped. Averan drew a startled breath.

But Gaborn merely twisted catlike in the air, then grabbed the rope. With so many endowments of brawn and grace, he began to scamper down as quickly as a spider.

Binnesman raised an eyebrow in surprise. Apparently Gaborn’s ribs were better than they appeared.

Averan went to the lip of the shaft and peered down. She gripped her poisonwood staff tightly. She wanted to carry it, but didn’t dare try. The staff was precious, though as yet it was unadorned. She planned to carve runes of protection into it as soon as she could. The poisonwood had chosen her, and in some way she felt that the staff was a part of her. She was wondering what to do with it when Binnesmen threw his own staff down the shaft, so that it cleared Gaborn by a yard. Then he had his wylde do the same.

“Go ahead,” Binnesman told Averan. “The wood knows you. It will be waiting for you at the bottom.”

Averan let her staff fall gingerly, fearing that it might shatter against a stone wall.

In moments they began to make the perilous descent. Gaborn led the way, followed by the wylde, Binnesman, and Iome, with Averan coming last.

The climb proved difficult. For the first hundred yards, Averan merely clung to the rope and lowered herself hand by hand. But all too soon, the rope came to an end.

At this point, she had to abandon it forever, and a sense of dread engulfed her. Each of them had brought some stout rope, and none of them would ever be able to use it again.

“Come on,” Iome urged. She was just below Averan, grunting and struggling for purchase as she made her way down. “If you start to fall, I’ll catch you.”

Averan’s heart raced. She felt powerful with her endowments of brawn, but still found it hard to find her first hand—and footholds. Rushing water had polished the rock over the years, leaving little purchase. The tickle ferns growing everywhere only added to the danger. She couldn’t really look down very well to see where to place her hands and feet, and ended up having to climb down more by a sense of feel than by sight.

Worse than that, the ferns were not trustworthy. If she found a small handhold and was tempted to rely on the ferns, she discovered that the roots sometimes seemed to have dug in enough to give her purchase. But too often the ferns would rip under her weight without notice, and she would be left grasping blindly for something to cling to.

With her short legs and arms, she had a harder time reaching some handholds than the others did.

Binnesman noticed her predicament, and he let Iome climb down past him. He moved up so that he was below Averan. At times when things got scary, he would put a hand up to hold her foot, or offer her reassurance. “Don’t worry,” he’d say. “There’s a good handhold just below you.”

So Averan swallowed her terror and lowered herself, carefully placing each foot, each hand.

A quarter of a mile they descended below the rope, and a quarter more. The tunnel sometimes snaked this way and that, yet every time Averan dared to glance down, the tunnel plunged deeper into the abyss.

It was slow work.

She reached one spot and was about to lower herself another step when Gaborn called out, “Averan, stop. Move to your right, and try to find a way down.”

He was far below her and could not possibly have seen her danger. But he was the Earth King, and he felt it. She did as he said, and dozens of times during the course of the journey he warned others to take similar measures.

More than a mile they climbed, and still Averan could see no end. Her nerves were frayed, and she found herself trembling all over.

Still the ground rumbled distantly, like faraway thunder, at the passage of reavers.

She felt astonished that no one had fallen yet. Even with Gaborn’s help and all of their endowments, it seemed an impossible feat.

Gaborn reached a rocky ledge, the first perch they had found, and called a rest. Averan inched down, met the others. Iome leaned with her back against the rock wall, grimacing with fear. Gaborn squatted next to her, heaving to catch his breath. Binnesman leaned away from the ledge, respectfully, but his wylde walked to the very end of it and peered down.

Their perch jutted out only three or four feet, then the shaft jogged back down. Under normal circumstances, Averan would have been terrified to stand so close to the ledge. But right now it felt like a little bit of paradise. She looked up the shaft, into the infinite blackness.

Once the reavers break through my rock wall, she thought, they will be on our trail in an instant.

Reavers were great climbers. With their huge grasping fore-claws and their four legs, they could scurry up and down stone slopes much faster than a human could. And the shaft from the old river channel was just wide enough to make this an easy climb for one of the monsters.

She imagined reavers up above, and that made her want to hurry all the faster.

“Once the reavers reach the top,” Averan dared say, “all they have to do is throw a rock down this hole, and we’ll all be knocked off the wall and swept to our deaths.”