David Farland - The Lair of Bones

Iome had urged Gaborn to forge ahead to the Lair of Bones, but she never intended to lag far behind. So she ran, straining to keep up.

True to his word, Gaborn had marked a path for her through tunnels and caves, down canyons and watercourses, past wonders that Iome suspected no man had ever seen. She passed once through a long tunnel carved in crystal, its walls as transparent as ice. She beheld forests of stone trees, twisted and surreal in their beauty, climbing in whorls along the wall. She’d raced through migrations of blind-crabs and climbed down endless chasms. She’d passed under waterfalls, where the roar of an Underworld flood deafened the ear.

And all along the way, one thought rang in her memory, “And while you are saving the world,” she’d asked Gaborn, “who will be saving you?”

It wasn’t an idle question. It had been a promise, one that she hoped to keep. She wanted to stand beside him, but she had no weapon, and she had no way to catch up with him.

It was not until she reached another old Inkarran outpost that she had a hope of gaining a weapon.

A hole near the floor of the reaver tunnel marked the sanctuary.

Iome quickly crawled inside, hoping to find something that might be of help. Pocket crabs had gnawed countless burrows in the walls. The pale creatures looked much like small reavers, with heavy fore-claws and thick shells. They scurried about on the tunnel floor down here by the millions, rushing for their burrows as soon as they sensed movement. Some were no larger than roaches, while others were more the size of a rat.

As Iome crawled through the narrow opening, the pocket crab dens dug into the wall made the outpost look so worn that she thought that it must have been abandoned, but just inside the room a stone jar held a store of hazelnuts and buckwheat with dried melon, apples, and cherries. Iome scooped up a handful of it, and found that it tasted salty but edible. By the taste, she suspected that it had been sitting for more than a year. A second clay jug held some sweet winter-melon wine.

In the far corner, four Inkarran reaver darts stood propped against a wall. One was bent, another so old that it had rusted through, and the other two had each lost the diamond from one tip. None was ideal. But any weapon was better than nothing.

As Iome picked through the darts, wondering if she could repair them, she glanced over her back, at a faint charcoal drawing upon the wall. It showed squiggling lines, marked with Inkarran symbols. It looked like a map.

If indeed it was a map, she suspected that it would do her little good. The pocket crabs had dug so many holes in the walls that one could hardly follow the lines, and the pigment itself seemed to have faded. The map had to be hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

“I must be here,” Iome said, seeing an icon that looked like a shield with Inkarran numbers on it. “And that is the path ahead.” She traced her finger along a sloping line that shot off in a far direction, then circled back below her, then intersected a corkscrew that went down and down. The path ahead led to the unbounded warren, she suspected. But the map seemed to indicate a shortcut, a small trail written as arrow points.

“A shortcut?” Iome wondered. Her heart pounded. With all of his endowments of metabolism, Gaborn was certainly far ahead of her. At her current pace, Iome would never reach him in time to be of help. But if she had indeed found a shortcut...

At the top of the shortcut was an icon, like the head of a crevasse crawler.

It’s an old crevasse crawler tube, she realized excitedly. It could save me...a hundred miles, maybe two hundred. That is, if Gaborn keeps following the main tunnel.

I couldn’t be so lucky, Iome thought. Even if there had been a shortcut once, what was the chance that it still existed? With all of the pocket crabs around, the walls of the tube would be pitted and scarred at least, and might even have caved in.

Iome studied the drawing. Dare I take the risk? she wondered.

She took her newfound weapon and raced down the tunnel, where she soon found a wall brimming with burrows dug by a large crevasse crawler. Each passageway was three or four feet in diameter. An Inkarran icon had been chiseled above the entrance to one burrow. Iome peered in, the light from her opal crown dancing off the pale stone.

The crawlway wormed this way and that, as if dug by a madman. As Iome had guessed, the walls were pitted with burrows from pocket crabs, but the tunnel seemed passable. Dark lichenous plants felt almost rubbery beneath her palm, and dozens of mushworms—green sluglike creatures that squished into a syrup under the slightest pressure—fed upon the plants. Iome wriggled in, clutching her reaver dart. Only a hundred yards in, the tunnel shot down nearly straight, just as the map had shown.

Iome’s heart pounded. The only way to go forward was to let herself drop and hope that the slope at the bottom would be gentle.

But she imagined what might be down there—a cave-in that choked the passage with rock so that when she hit, the impact would shatter every bone in her body—or a chasm carved by water that would send her falling into some void.

Iome turned around, so that she could go feet-first. She hesitated, suspecting that once she dropped blindly down the tunnel, her life would come to a swift end.

She pushed herself over the edge.

Deep shadows peeled away with each foot that she dropped. She slid over mushworms that formed a thin oil, slicking the way. Now and then, some blind-crab would be clinging to a wall, and these she kicked free, so that they tumbled all around her.

The tube plummeted down and down, but she took no serious harm. Suddenly it veered right, then left, then right again, and Iome found herself spinning, thrown down face-first as she slid ever onward.

Darkness flowed in behind her to reclaim its territory.

In the hills twelve miles west of Carris, Raj Ahten’s army gathered before dawn, a hundred thousand strong. His flameweavers raised a cloud of oily smoke that clung to the ground like a morning mist, hiding them from view, and the morning sun was so obscure, that it looked like a blood red pearl hanging in the air above.

His troops cut trees for scaling ladders, sharpened their weapons, ranged their catapults, and otherwise prepared for war. Raj Ahten spent most of the early hours listening to reports from scouts and far-seers he had sent abroad during the night.

The news disturbed him. To the south the reavers marched in a horde that blackened the lands, heading toward Carris as a host of Knights Equitable vainly fought to forestall their attack.

To the east, the far-seers spotted only ragged bands of women and children, fleeing the coming battle along the highways, or floating in boats and makeshift rafts down the River Donnestgree.

But to the north, his spies found things to be a bit more interesting. Lowicker’s daughter, Queen Rialla of Beldinook, had marshaled a powerful army, some 180,000 strong. Most of these were archers, armed with the yew tallbows common in Beldinook. They rode in war carts drawn by heavy force horses, and thus could be conveyed quickly to the battlefront. The army also boasted many powerful Runelords, cavalrymen mounted on heavily armored chargers that were both swift and powerful.

But Lowicker’s daughter, it seemed, was unsure what to do. The scout said, “We saw her march some troops within a stone’s throw of the gates of Carris last night. Then she retreated twenty miles back north, to a place where the reavers’ curses have not blasted the grass. There she has set camp on the road, where there is plenty of forage for the beasts. Even now her troops squat, holding the road against any allies that might seek to lend aid to Carris.”