David Farland - The Lair of Bones

“Did they kill him?”

“I do not know,” the old woman answered. “I know only this. I did nothing to save him, a man that I admired and loved far more than I could ever care for my lord Criomethes. So, I ask that you forgive me.”

The old woman opened her clenched fist, and held out a key. Swiftly she climbed up on the lip of the parapet and unlocked Myrrima’s fetters. Myrrima slid to the ground.

“Go now,” the old woman said. “Almost everyone is asleep in the palace. Now is your chance to escape!”

“Not without my husband,” Myrrima said.

“It is too late for him,” the old woman said. “He has already given an endowment of will. He is one of the living dead.”

“Then I’ll take the endowment back,” Myrrima said dangerously. She stripped the chains from her, and only then did the old woman seem to recognize her mistake.

She let out a yelp, as if she would scream, but Myrrima grabbed her by the throat. The old woman pawed and kicked, but Myrrima had many endowments, and she choked the old woman until she lost consciousness, and then chained her, and hung her from the peg.

“I’m sorry,” Myrrima whispered as she locked the old woman into place. “I’m sorry.”

Myrrima turned the woman, so that she wouldn’t be burned by the sun, and crept back into the dark tunnel.

Sir Borenson lay upon his wooden bed, breathing in, breathing out. A cozy fire burned in the hearth, and Borenson could see the room clearly for the first time in more than an hour. He was in the main chamber of King Criomethes’s apartments. The Inkarran facilitator hunched over Borenson’s bare foot. He painstakingly dipped a long needle into an inkpot, and then inserted it into Borenson’s foot. He was constructing a tattoo to cover the whole of Borenson’s leg.

I could look down, Borenson told himself. I could see the shape of the rune of Will.

But he had no desire to do it. For ages the men of Rofehavan had sought to learn the secret of its making. But Borenson did not bother to look. There was a fat black spider on the stone ceiling, meandering along. Borenson watched it, unblinking. His eyes felt dry and itchy, and each time that the pain grew too great, he would try to summon the energy to blink them. This he did only because his tormentor forced him to do so.

His tormentor was a woman. She had stood over him with a bamboo rod since he first bestowed his endowment, and had given him orders. “Breathe for me, or I shall hit you,” she warned. And whenever he stopped breathing, she would rap his shins with the rod, causing excruciating pain. And so he breathed in for her, and he breathed out. Thus she taught him to breathe.

Left to his own devices, he would have merely stopped and suffocated. He no longer cared if he breathed or not.

“Blink for me when eyes get dry,” the woman told him after he had lain staring at the spider on the ceiling for an hour. She rapped him across the hands to show how much pain she could cause. And thus he learned to blink, though he did not care if his eyes went dry in their sockets.

Now she stood over him, lecturing. “I not feed you. I not your slave. When you get hungry, must out of bed and eat. Understand? If you not eat until full, I will beat you. Understand?”

Borenson understood, but he made no sign of it. To speak was a waste of energy, to nod a worthless gesture. He merely lay, staring at the ceiling.

The woman rapped him across the face with the rod. “You have tongue. You answer me. You understand?”

“Yes,” Borenson said. He was angry and frustrated. The thought came to him that he could run away. He was not chained any longer. The facilitator had removed the chains so that he could create his tattoo. Yet the desire to flee was not strong enough to move Borenson’s feet.

If I ran, how would I live? he wondered. And the answer was that it would be impossible. He would have to find his horse, a deed that could take hours. He would have to evade or fight the guards, a task that seemed too monumental. Then he would have to travel for days. For what? Everything he needed was here. Food, shelter, water. All he had to do was lie down, and others would bring it to him.

He felt the need to urinate, and announced it by letting his water flow. The urine soaked his pants and pooled beneath him, warming him.

The facilitator cleared his throat in disgust and issued an order to the tormenter. She had been busy across the room with something. She raced back to him.

“No!” she shrieked at Borenson. “You not animal. You not pee on floor or bed. You get up to pee like person. Understand?” She slammed her bamboo rod down. Borenson lamely put a hand over his groin to protect himself.

He heard a deep voice say something in Inkarran. From out of the shadows came King Criomethes himself.

“You well, I hope?” the king asked.

Borenson had no desire to frame an answer.

“Life without will is hard,” the king said. “There no hope, only senseless desire. No real dreams, only longing for goals that one cannot attain. Life become burden, worthless to you. But we teach to live again. We teach to breathe, to eat, to pee. You will live like we tell you to. You will live because it easier than dying.”

“Say ‘Thank you,’” the old woman ordered.

Borenson made no answer, until she rapped him across the chin. “Thank you.”

King Criomethes smiled and was about to leave when Borenson heard the scuff of a shoe across the room. Criomethes whirled to see the cause of the noise. A shadow came out of the darkness. There was a whistle of a swinging blade, and then the thunk of metal cleaving bone.

Blood spattered across Borenson’s face as King Criomethes went down, a fine Inkarran sword blade cleaving down through his neck, into his rib cage.

The facilitator staggered back, and the old woman with her bamboo cane cried out and tried to duck, but the shadow whirled, yanking the blade free from Criomethes’s dead body. The shining blade sliced off the old woman’s head and hit the facilitator in the throat, slashing his windpipe. He fell back against the wall, blood pumping wildly.

Suddenly, in a rush, the will returned to Borenson. He pushed himself from bed, sitting up.

Myrrima stood before him, wrapped in her robes, her hood thrown up to make her one with the darkness.

“Come on,” she said. “We’re getting out of here!”

A moment ago, Borenson had felt empty, almost complacent. Now it seemed that some emotion had to fill that void, and the thing that he felt was rage.

Criomethes lay on the floor, struggling to pull himself up by grasping a chair with one hand. Borenson knew that the man was dead, that his body now only moved by impulse. Yet Borenson struggled against the urge to vent his rage. He watched the dying king as if through a red haze.

He grabbed Criomethes by the hair and lifted him up, raised a fist and would have struck him between the eyes hard enough to crush the man’s skull.

But Myrrima touched Borenson’s raised arm with one finger, and whispered, “Peace be with you.”

It was more than a greeting, it was a powerful spell. Peace washed over him as if it were a flood, and all of the anger subsided.

He had only felt something similar once—at the pool south of Bannisferre, where an undine had kissed him and washed the guilt from his tortured mind.

He dropped the old king, embarrassed by his fury, by his lack of self-control.

A million questions came rushing at once. Where are my boots? Where is my warhammer? How did you escape?

Yet he held them all in, and for a moment just stared down at his leg. The skin burned from the tattoo. The old facilitator had begun at the sole of his foot and worked upward, creating an image of roots on a tree. It was as if Borenson wore a purple sock now, one that covered his foot up to his ankle. But there on his calf lay a rune that he had never seen before, the symbol for will. To Borenson it looked something like the head of a bull, all wrapped within a circle. There were squiggly lines above it that almost seemed to form a word or a thought in his mind. Runes often affected one that way.