David Farland - The Lair of Bones

His warhammer fell and with a sickening thud slammed into flesh. A wailing cry arose. “Oooooooh!”

Wind rushed about the trees then, circling like a storm.

The man’s cry kept ripping from his throat. Pine needles and ice lashed through the air in a maelstrom, then went rushing south up the slopes toward Inkarra.

Myrrima heard the scream “Noooooo!” in the wind, as it drew farther and farther away, echoing among the canyons.

She ran up to Borenson, knowing what she would find.

He stood over a corpse, struggling to free the spike of his hammer from a wizard’s head. The dead man wore the blue tunic of Mystarria’s couriers, with the image of the green man on his chest. But his long silver hair proclaimed him to be of Inkarran birth. His eyes were flung open, and his mouth drawn in a little circle of surprise or pain.

His horse whinnied pitifully at the sight of strangers, and tried to rise. But its legs had been shackled.

“Pilwyn coly Zandaros,” Myrrima mouthed the man’s name.

“This is the wizard that tried to kill Gaborn?” Borenson confirmed.

She nodded. Pilwyn had been both an assassin and a wizard of the Air. Myrrima shook her head in confusion. “What do you think he was up to? Waiting in ambush?”

Borenson was already studying the ground, the shabby camp. The hobbled horse had lain in its own excrement for hours. It gazed at Borenson imploringly.

Myrrima saw no sign of food, no extra wood for the fire. There was nothing left of the campfire but lightly smoking ruins.

Borenson knelt over Pilwyn’s corpse. Four days past, Sir Hoswell, who had been one of Iome’s guards, had shot Pilwyn with an arrow. The wound would have killed any commoner in a matter of minutes. The arrow had punctured Pilwyn’s lung. But wizards of the Air were notoriously hard to kill. Beyond that, Pilwyn was a Runelord with endowments of stamina. So he had merely plugged the cavity in his chest with a crude bandage. But now Myrrima could see that black blood crusted the wound, and it had swollen horribly. Maggots crawled around the lip of the bandage.

“He wasn’t long for the world,” Borenson said. “He’d have died in a few more hours, even if we hadn’t come along. If the infection hadn’t killed him, the hollow wolves would have.”

“But why was he following us the other night?” Myrrima asked.

“My guess is that he wasn’t,” Borenson said. “We’re all on the road to Inkarra, fellow travelers. He probably pulled off the road to rest and heard us pass, then just crept along behind us. He may have even hoped for our aid. But he was an Inkarran in Mystarria—an outlaw.” He sighed.

Myrrima went to the body. She reached down to pull the bandage back, look at the old wound. She felt a cool wind whip around her hand as it neared the man’s chest—suspected that she had just touched protective runes written with wind.

Up the hill, through a thin veil of trees, she heard the horrid ghostly wailing of his voice, and could see the plume of windblown ice still racing away, now nearly a mile uphill.

Borenson gazed in that direction. “His elemental will reach Inkarra long before we do,” he said, and Myrrima wondered about her own elemental, the thing growing inside her. She imagined that when she died, the Water within her would merely leak from her mouth and eyelids, leaving a moist puddle.

Borenson went to Pilwyn’s mount, removed its hobbles. The beast struggled to its feet.

Borenson then leapt up on the stone fence above the camp. He did not speak, but his posture, the tilt of his head, asked, “Ready to go?”

Myrrima asked, “What should we do with the body?”

“Leave it,” Borenson said. “The wolves will have him.”

“But he’s the Storm King’s nephew,” Myrrima said. “We should show him some respect.”

“We can’t dig a hole, and I won’t take him over the mountains to Inkarra,” Borenson argued. “King Zandaros would be none too pleased to learn that we killed his nephew on our way to beg his favor.”

“You’re right,” Myrrima said. “Of course you’re right. But I don’t feel easy about it. Wizards don’t just die. After I slew the Darkling Glory, its elemental hurled boulders around as if they were apples. Binnesman warned that the elemental was still capable of great evil. Pilwyn’s elemental is small, but that thing is headed for Inkarra.”

Again she felt the foreboding that had been growing all day. Something, or someone, would seek to take her husband from her. Could it be the wizard’s elemental?

“Look at the bright side,” Borenson said. “At least we got a good horse.”

With three force horses, the trip through the snow went fast. Or at least it would have seemed so to an outsider. Had you seen them, you would have tracked the force horses galloping up the mountainsides, churning snow and ice with each hoofbeat. When the road leveled, they seemed to almost float above it, such was the length and grace of their stride.

But Myrrima had endowments of metabolism now, more even than her mount, and to her senses the horse did not seem to be moving fast at all. Instead, she felt as if the stuff of time had stretched. The sun lumbered interminably into the sky, and gradually slanted toward darkness. Thus one day seemed to be expanding to fill five. Myrrima felt every second of her life waning past.

Their journey had begun before dawn. In that time, they traveled hundreds of miles.

The journey up the slopes was tedious. Myrrima never even got to see one of the much-vaunted hollow wolves up close. In the distance she saw a pack of them sweeping over the snow—white on white—wafting ghostlike over the slopes of a nearby mountain. Even from a distance they looked huge.

The hollow wolves saw her party and redoubled their speed, hoping to catch up, but they were no match for force horses. Borenson let the mounts race for an hour.

When next they stopped, they were near the mountain peaks. The snow was now six inches deep and crusted from last night’s freeze. Myrrima followed its course up the mountains with her eyes. The snow-covered trail looked broad and easy as it wound through the hills. It had been cut wide enough to accommodate wagons, and was none too steep.

Somehow, in Myrrima’s imagination, the Alcair Mountains had always seemed impassable. Perhaps for one without endowments the journey would have been more challenging. But she suspected that there wasn’t so much a physical challenge in crossing the mountains as there was a political one.

At the mountaintops, stone wheels stood against the sky. The wheels looked to be more than thirty or forty feet tall. The line that they formed zigzagged crazily, marching up one ridge, then diving into a ravine, like rocky pearls to decorate the hills. On each stone wheel a rune had been carved. Myrrima eyed them, not quite able to make out the design.

“Don’t look at the runewall!” Borenson warned. “Not unless you have to. Keep your eyes on the road!”

Myrrima averted her gaze, but now felt curious. What was the runewall? The runes looked as if they had been carved on individual tablets of stone and then rolled into place. The making of this massive bulwark had been a monumental task. The border between Rofehavan and Inkarra spanned a thousand miles. Building a barrier like this would have taken tens of thousands of masons a period of decades.

The fact that gazing upon it was forbidden made it that much more enticing. Myrrima wanted to feel the awe of it.

“I had no idea it would be so vast,” Myrrima said. She studied the ground. The snow here was dirty, streaked with ash. She looked for the source of the ash, but could see no sign of a fire. There were no trees so high, only low shrubs here and there that thrust their dead branches up between the rocks.