David Farland - The Lair of Bones

Dearborn rowed the boat steadily in the late afternoon, his eyes dull from fatigue. Beads of perspiration trickled down his cheek and off his nose, and sweat liberally stained the armpits of his work shirt.

“Almost there,” he said. “We should see the castle as we round this next bend.”

For hours he had rowed, seeming never to tire, never stopping to rest. He watched the currents, keeping the boat in the center of the V each time he rounded a bend, in order to borrow more speed from the fast water.

A chill shook Chemoise. She tried to ignore it. Instead, she watched the flat green water and rejoiced in the warm sunlight on her skin. It made her feel clean, as if its heat could burn the infection from her.

“Have you decided what to give?” Dearborn asked.

“Metabolism,” she said at last.

It was the least dangerous endowment to grant. It wouldn’t hurt Chemoise’s child, and would hardly inconvenience her. She could give it easily. If Gaborn won, and killed the reavers, then she would wake in some distant day when the war was over, only a bad dream, fading into insignificance.

“Hmmm...” Dearborn muttered. He was obviously displeased. By giving metabolism, she would leave him in a way. She’d sleep as he grew old. But she wasn’t about to let some minor attachment deter her.

Her journey downstream had been almost like a pleasure outing. The banks of the River Wye were overgrown with cattails along the route, and trout could be seen slapping the water in their quest for midges. Mallards paddled near shore, ever vigilant as their ducklings followed behind. Once, Chemoise saw a huge stag leap up from its bed beneath an apple tree.

All of the sudden, they rounded the bend, and Chemoise spotted Castle Sylvarresta ahead, a walled city built upon a long hill; the tall watchtowers looked like gray arrows taking aim at the sky. From here, you could hardly see the damage wreaked by the Darkling Glory. The Graak’s Aerie hid most of the wreckage of the King’s Tower and the Dedicate’s Keep, and the burnt front gates remained concealed by the castle walls. Only blackened grass on nearby hills reminded one that a battle had been fought here.

Chemoise felt surprised to see crowds surrounding the castle. Tens of thousands of bright tents and pavilions were pitched upon the nearer hills. The smoke of cooking fires hung above the fields like gray cobwebs. Horses were tethered along the riverbank ahead.

Chemoise had lived in the city before the Darkling Glory came. Four hundred thousand people or more had camped in the fields round about, eager to meet the Earth King. They’d fled at Gaborn’s warning, fading into the forest to hide from the Darkling Glory. Now it looked as if nearly everyone had returned.

“Look at them all,” Chemoise said in wonder. “It’s like Hostenfest.”

Dearborn craned his head as he rowed, glanced over his shoulder, and grunted in dull surprise. Soon, they passed along shores where hundreds of women and children were washing clothes or fetching pails of water.

Chemoise shouted to one washwoman, “Why is everyone at Castle Sylvarresta?”

“The Earth King needs endowments,” she replied.

“That can’t be it,” Chemoise whispered to Dearborn. “That many people wouldn’t give endowments. There must be another reason. Maybe they came to hide from the rats.”

“Did the rats come last night?” Dearborn asked the washwoman.

“They came,” she answered. “Drowned trying to swim the moat. The ferrin took those what made it over the city walls.” She seemed little concerned, and Chemoise envied her. In Ableton the rats had given them a bitter struggle.

So it was that Dearborn beached the rowboat, and Chemoise climbed the banks of the River Wye, up through oat stubble, looking for signs of a great struggle like the one fought back home. The city looked peaceful.

“The rats didn’t kill your horses?” Chemoise asked the old woman. “They didn’t ruin your tents?”

“We were all in the castle,” she answered. “Hiding. We filled every tomb and every cellar.”

“There was room for everyone?” Chemoise asked, unsure if she believed it.

“Och, no,” the old woman said. “Some folks went up to the old iron mines in the Dunnwood, and stayed as cozy as peas in a pod. The rats never even made it to their door. The ferrin folk had them all, I suppose.”

Chemoise stared in disbelief. There was no sign of a struggle. The sun shone golden over the fields. The cottages by the river sat undisturbed. The farms spread out along the road in a patchwork quilt of colors—white of oat stubble, the forest green of a field of mint, the yellow of mustard flowers, the ruddy gold of winter wheat.

It wasn’t until they had walked a hundred yards toward the castle that Dearborn discovered sign of the attack. With his boot he pointed out a dead rat curled up under a clump of grass beside the road, a ferrin’s broken spear still in its gut.

A chill shook Chemoise, and she noticed a bit of sadness in Dearborn’s eyes and a thoughtful look on his face.

“What is it?” Chemoise asked.

“We’re the lucky ones,” he said. “It’s only little rats we’re fighting. Imagine if this thing was as big as a farmer’s cottage, lumbering about. That’s what our folks will be facing at Carris.”

It was worse than that, Chemoise knew. Rats didn’t have hide as tough as armor. Rats didn’t have mages that cast foul spells. Rats weren’t as cunning as men.

She peered into Dearborn’s face in wonder. “Our folks,” he had called the people of Carris. But they were strangers, hundreds of miles beyond the city’s borders.

It’s the war, she realized. A common foe had made brothers of them all.

She hurried her stride, reached the city gates. There were boys beside the moat, using rakes to pull drowned rats from the water, then throwing the nasty things into wicker baskets.

One boy had waded into the depths up to his chest, and used a spear to try to fish some rats out of the lilies that grew in the shadow of the castle wall.

The vermin would have been able to crawl over the moat on the backs of their dead, Chemoise imagined.

She glanced behind. Shadows were growing long. The sun loomed on the horizon, splendorous among some golden clouds. Soon it would be night. Chemoise hoped that she still had time. She raced up Merchant Street, where vendors hawked food, filling the evening air with scents of fresh bread and meats that made her mouth water.

It wasn’t until she passed the King’s Gate, out of the merchant’s quarter, that she saw how strange the world had become.

She heard the distant birdlike singing of facilitators as they took endowments, and found that just inside the King’s Gate, a crowd had formed.

A thousand people stood waiting to give endowments, jostling one another in an effort to be first. One woman called, “Tell the facilitators to hurry. We haven’t got all night!”

The King’s Tower and Dedicates’ Keep were naught but ruins after last week’s battle with the Darkling Glory, and little had been done to clean up the pile of broken stone. But the old barracks and attendant Great Hall still stood, and these had been turned into a makeshift Dedicates’ Keep.

Pavilions in a riot of color covered the green, and everywhere Chemoise saw hundreds of people lying in their shade, as if in a faint.

Dully she realized that the barracks was full, and the tents were full, and there was nowhere else to put the Dedicates except to lay them on the grass until something better could be arranged. Those without brawn lay as slack as newborn babes while attendants clustered around them. Dozens of blind men and women sat beside a cooking fire, strumming lutes and singing an old ballad, which had served as a call over the ages: