David Farland - The Lair of Bones

Suddenly a stone shifted beneath her, along with dozens of other rocks nearby that sank a foot as if they had dropped into a sinkhole.

He’s coming! she realized.

She leapt thirty feet, landed on a large stone, and leapt again. Froglike, she bounded past her buried foe.

She reached the far side of the Lair of Bones. A tunnel gaped before her, and the rubble suddenly came to an end.

The Chamber of the Seals was just down the corridor, only three miles. Averan could run it in minutes.

She raced into the tunnel, bypassing crawlways that led to the One True Master’s personal quarters, to her egg chambers. Averan wiped her eyes, fighting back tears.

The face of Gaborn burned in her memory, and for a moment she worried about how he fared. She was so shaken that she didn’t notice the tremors at first.

An earthquake began to build. The riblike supports on the walls swayed with the motion, and the floor beneath her began to rise and fall as if in waves. Chips of rock and dust peeled from the roof and cracked to the ground.

The Earth is in pain, Averan thought. She could feel it, the dull sustained ache that cut through the very bones of the world, adding to her own distress.

She rounded a corner, and a reaver blocked her way, a big lumbering matron. It became aware of Averan charging headlong, and wheeled to flee into the egg chambers. Averan could smell its distress call.

In the pocket of her wizard robes she carried a sprig of parsley that Binnesman had given her days ago. He had told her to tie it in seven knots and throw it on her trail if anything gave chase. She had tied it in knots, but hadn’t needed it until now. Suddenly, the sprig blossomed in her memory.

She grasped its dried leaves between her fingers, dropped it to the floor, and gave a little chant.

Averan raced along the tunnel. The floor trembled wildly as another tremor hit, and suddenly ahead it buckled. Slabs of rock tilted up. Averan leapt over them, racing like a hare.

It wasn’t far now—up one tunnel, round a bend, over a bridge where burning white mud pots splattered against a wall, round a corner.

And Averan was there—a chamber much smaller than the Dedicates’ Keep had been. It was only a couple of hundred yards from one end to the other. As in the keep, sluggish water flowed through a small pond, bubbling up from a hot spring. A few stonewood trees grew from the ceiling.

The whole room was eerily lit.

Upon the floor lay a vast rune, fully a hundred yards across: the Rune of Desolation. It was evil to behold, and seemed all the more depraved for being carved in stone. It was no simple shape. To Averan’s eye, it looked almost like two snakes seeking to devour each other within a vast circle. But other protuberances jutted up among the scene to monstrous effect. A noxious haze circled above it, obscuring the symbol.

The rune itself was made of earth. Knobs and ridges of carved stone rose from the ground in varying heights, forming a bas-relief.

Actinic flashes of red and blue shot from the rune, eerily lighting the vast chamber, as if the flames of a hearth flickered upon the walls. Averan could discern no source for the fire. The ground seemed to fulminate, for she could see glowing embers, yet earth remained unconsumed.

Averan peered about, searching. Gaborn had told her to destroy the seals. But she saw only one seal before her, a Seal of Desolation.

Where are the others?

She tried to imagine what nearby rooms they might be hidden in. But the Waymaker’s memory only confirmed that the runes stood before her.

Then she gasped: there, among the flickering lights she discerned a shape. If she squinted hard, she could see it, a rune carved not in earth but formed in the sourceless fire. The Seal of the Inferno.

And there, above the earth and fire floated a noxious gray haze, swirling in lazy circles. No wind made the smoke swirl so. The third rune was also here, the Seal of Heaven, written in currents of air.

The seals were stacked atop one another.

Her first instinct was to break the Seal of Desolation.

I can collapse the roof on it, Averan thought.

She stretched out her staff, and prepared a spell to weaken the stone.

Gaborn danced away as the One True Master advanced. With every step backward, the Earth warned him, “Flee,” and then again, “Strike!”

Thus he knew that it was not his task to face the monster yet. She was beyond his strength to battle. He raced away from her, slaughtering her Dedicates as he did.

In Carris the battle was in full swing. Dozens of his Chosen were torn from him in an instant, and Gaborn cried out in pain.

Dark tendrils of vapor wrapped around his leg, and ice seemed to freeze his heart. The voice of the One True Master whispered in his mind. “You have failed. Because of your weakness, your Chosen will die.”

Gaborn saw as if in a vision from the hills west of Carris, reavers roaring across the causeway in a black tide, leaping onto the castle walls. The city seemed to be aflame, the only light in a blackened world. Outside the castle, a fell mage and her sorceresses sought to complete a new Seal of Desolation. Actinic blue lights rose from the ground where it took form.

Above the castle, a balloon shaped like a graak wafted through the smoke.

Gaborn’s army was crumbling. Men raced from the gates, fleeing in terror atop the castle wall. From this distance, Gaborn saw a reaver reach up to pull a young boy from a tower window. Gaborn knew that what he witnessed was true, for the boy was one of his Chosen, and Gaborn felt the boy’s life ripped from him.

And then the view changed and Gaborn saw, as if from above, Raj Ahten to the west of Carris, high on a hill, with his troops behind him. His face was a mask of ruin, with his ear burned off, the skin seared from his jaw, and his eye puckering white and blind.

He exulted at the slaughter in the distance, watched the reavers bursting through walls to get at the people that hid in their homes and cellars.

“This is your doing,” the One True Master whispered. “You made him your enemy, and sought his life.”

The Master sought to crush Gaborn with guilt, like a massive stone, but he would have none of it.

“Liar!” he shouted. “He made himself my enemy—at your bidding!”

The One True Master is only seeking to delay me, he realized. Gaborn raced to another Dedicate, and plunged his reaver dart into its kidney.

“Duck,” the Earth whispered, and Gaborn threw himself flat to the ground, dodging beneath the knees of a reaver.

As he did, the One True Master snapped her vile whip, slicing the air above his head.

“Dodge,” the Earth commanded, and Gaborn leapt aside as the monster hissed a curse.

“Gasht,” the words sounded, and a black funnel of wind issued from her staff, racing near the spot where Gaborn had stood. The ground boiled where it touched, and flakes of rock splintered from the floor. Three reaver Dedicates, seemingly frozen in time, fell beneath the blast. Their blood and bones spattered through the chamber.

The floor bucked beneath Gaborn’s feet as a strong earthquake rocked the chamber. Stones and dust fell from the ceiling.

“Strike!” the earth commanded, and Gaborn leapt over a reaver and plunged his dart into another vector. He craned his neck and felt gratified to see one of the ghostly blue runes on the monster fade to gray.