David Farland - The Lair of Bones

By now all of the reavers around him hissed, and warning scents filled the cavern.

“Gaborn!” Averan called desperately.

He looked back at her, only three dozen yards away. She stood close to the mouth of chamber, her black staff of poisonwood in hand. “I can’t help you! I can’t kill helpless Dedicates. What shall I do?”

Gaborn felt in his heart, sensing for danger to the girl. “Do you know where the Great Seals are?”

Averan nodded.

“Go destroy them,” Gaborn said.

Indeed, the Earth now warned him that she must go. Danger was coming, and if Averan stayed, she would die.

Gaborn took off his green opal cape pin and tossed it to her. The glowing runes on the reaver Dedicates was the only light he would have to fight by.

Wordlessly, Averan whirled and sped off as fast as she could.

Gaborn redoubled his pace, plunging among the reavers. The monsters hissed and lashed at him, ripping with talons and gnashing with teeth.

Gaborn charged into them, dodging blows, lunging with his reaver dart, tasting the air for the scent of vectors.

Time and again his weapon stabbed.

He saw the Earth’s plan now. Danger was swelling all about him. The One True Master had sensed his presence, and would come for him, as would any Runelord who sought to protect his precious Dedicates.

He was glad that he had given up his light, for now he could see the reavers’ glowing runes even better.

He could sense a rising wave of danger.

She was coming. Gaborn darted into the reavers, raced beneath the legs of one monster, vaulted up onto the back of another and struck down a vector.

She was at the door.

He had killed perhaps fifty Dedicates, including three vectors. He whirled toward the chamber entrance.

A blackness swirled at the door, a shadow that blotted out the night. It wasn’t just Gaborn’s imagination. Dark vapors flowed into the chamber like a fog. Whatever was coming, it was more than a reaver.

And suddenly, Gaborn saw it.

A monstrosity appeared among the shadows, a reaver larger and more bloated than any fell mage he had ever encountered. Her feet clacked and her swollen belly groaned as she slid across the floor. A loud hissing followed as she scrabbled forward, air streaming from her vast anus.

The reek was magnificent. Gaborn could smell musty endowments, like putrid fat and rotten cabbages and moldy hair, so thick in the air that it choked him.

Darkness spread out from her, and as she advanced, shadows groped about Gaborn’s knees.

He suddenly felt dazed. The creature twisted in his vision, and his eyes could not focus on it. In his mind’s eye, the reaver seemed to expand suddenly, to grow taller and loom over him, as if to fill the whole chamber, as if to fill the universe.

Night fell swiftly over Carris. The sun slanted east beyond the mountains while the haze of distant smoke curtained off the light. Twenty miles to the north, reavers rushed in a horde down the mountainside, their feet making a dull rumble that shook a man’s very bones. Borenson could not see them well, for a cloud of gree blackened the sky above. Howlers emitted their strange cries, like unearthly trumpets, and all of the reavers hissed. But there was another sound that bothered Borenson, a dull concussive boom, boom, boom that preceded the reavers like distant thunder.

The horde was less than an hour away. On the castle wall, men took up battle song to cheer their hearts.

In the failing light, Chondler led Borenson to his post as commoners began pulling up planks from the old drawbridge and tossing them into the lake.

“Rider coming!” someone shouted from the rooftop.

Borenson turned to see a lone rider racing from the south in the dusk, his swift gray imperial warhorse thundering over the road. The rider bent low, his robes flapping wildly in the wind of his passage.

He raced along the road and rounded the bend. The bridge was more than halfway destroyed, but his powerful steed leapt the gulf and skidded to a halt not more than a dozen yards behind Borenson.

“Hail, Sir?...” Marshal Chondler said.

The rider came to a halt, and sat on his horse, peering critically at the defenses. He was an old man in gray robes, with gray hair and ruddy cheeks. A strange light was in his eyes, and Borenson felt unreasonably that he knew the man from somewhere.

As he tried to imagine where he’d met the fellow, his mind returned to his childhood. Near his home there had been a peach orchard where he’d liked to go. He’d spent many an afternoon beneath a crooked old peach tree, its boughs so heavy with fruit that they swept the ground, and he’d imagined that he was in a deep forest filled with wolves and lions. He’d always felt a great sense of peace there, and now he felt that peace again.

“Binnesman!” Myrrima cried. “What are you doing here?”

The old fellow looked down on Myrrima, and Borenson finally recognized the old wizard. He had aged forty years in the past two days. “I’ve come to protect my charges,” he said. “Perhaps for the last time.”

He said no more for a moment, just peered up at the defenses, studying the stonework for signs of weakness that only a wizard could see. Just ahead, blocking the causeway where the barbican had been, piles of stone bristled with sharpened reaver blades, forming odd little humped barriers. Borenson had seen drawings of them in a book. They were called hedgehogs. They had been laid out in a staggered pattern to slow any reaver charge enough so that archers and artillerymen atop the towers could use the causeway as a killing field.

Beyond that, two new guard towers rose north and south above the city gate.

“The mortar is far from dry in those towers,” Binnesman muttered under his breath. “The reavers could knock them down with a thought.” He frowned with concern and began muttering a spell, sparing no thought for Borenson, High Marshal Chondler, or any other man.

Chondler asked the wizard, “How did you come here? Why did you leave the Earth King’s side?”

Binnesman peered down at the High Marshal. “Foolishness. I came here by my own foolishness,” the wizard said at last. “I was wounded in the Underworld, and Gaborn buried me for my own protection. For long I lay beneath the Earth, healing, and pondered. As I did, the reaver horde thundered over my head. By the time I woke, Gaborn was far gone, beyond my power to reach him.

“I suspected then that the Earth suffered me to get wounded for a purpose. I led Gaborn into the Underworld because I felt that he needed me. But you are all under my protection, and I knew that I was needed here, also.

“So when I had healed enough, I took care of some urgent matters to the east, then came as fast as I could.”

“I thank you,” Marshal Chondler said. “A wizard of your stature will be welcome indeed.”

Binnesman peered at the castle walls. Worry etched his brow, and he shook his head. “I fear that there is little that I can do. But I will try.”

He dismounted and looked as if he would march into the castle. But he stopped and peered hard at Myrrima, then put a hand on her shoulder.

“Your time is at hand, woman. The enemies of the Earth are gathering, and perhaps only you can resist them. Help us.” He squeezed her shoulder, as if to comfort her, and then strode away.

Myrrima stood for a moment, then went to the moat. She reached down and dipped an arrow into the water, sat there for a long moment drawing runes upon the water’s surface, dipping each arrow from her quiver in turn.