David Farland - Brotherhood of the Wolf

“The headwaters of the Wye,” Binnesman said, “spring up from deep underground. The mud is coming from there.”

“Could an earthquake cause this?” Gaborn asked.

“A shift in the earth could cause it,” Binnesman mused. “But I fear it didn’t. The ruins where we slew the reaver mage are near the source of the water. My guess is that reavers are tunneling there. Perhaps we didn’t kill them all.”

Because so many lords had gathered outside Castle Sylvarresta for the celebration of Hostenfest, it was not hard to gather some worthy men quickly and ride the thirty miles into the mountains. Six hours later in the early afternoon, a full five hundred warriors reached the ancient duskin ruins, with Gaborn and Binnesman leading the way.

The ruins looked exactly as they had the night before, when Binnesman, Gaborn, and Borenson had emerged. The gnarled roots of a great oak on a hill half hid the entrance. The men lit their torches and made their way down an ancient broken stairway, where the earth held a thick mineral smell. Gaborn could tell that the scent had changed since yesterday.

The entrance to the ancient duskin city was a perfect half-circle some twenty feet in diameter. The stones along the walls were enormous, and each was perfectly carved and fitted, so that even after thousands of years, they still held solid.

For the first quarter mile, there was a myriad of side tunnels and chambers, houses and shops where duskins had once lived, now overgrown with the strange subterranean fauna of the Underworld, dark rubbery leaves of man’s ear and spongy mats of foliage that clung to the wall. The place had been picked clean of any duskin artifacts ages ago, and now was the abode of glowing newts and blindcrabs and other denizens of the Underworld.

The troops had not gone half a mile down the winding stairs when it ended abruptly.

The path ahead had recently been shorn away. Where the stair should have been leading down miles and miles to the Idymean Sea, instead a vast tunnel crossed the path.

Binnesman edged close to the bottom stair, but the rock cracked and shifted under his feet and he leapt back. He held a lantern high, peering down.

The tunnel opening there was a huge circle, at least two hundred yards across, and had been hewn through thick dirt and debris. The bottom was a mess of sludge and stone. No human could have dug this passage. No reaver, either, for that matter.

Binnesman stared down, stroking his beard. Then he picked up a stone and dropped it. “So, I did feel something stirring beneath my feet,” he mused aloud. “The Earth is in pain.”

Just then, a flock of small dark creatures flew through the black tunnel below, creatures of the Underworld that could not easily abide the light of day. They made shrieking sounds of pain, then wheeled away from the lanterns.

Nervously, Borenson broke the silence. “What could have burrowed such a tunnel?”

“Only one thing,” Binnesman answered, “though my bestiary of the Underworld describes it as a creature only witnessed once before by a single man, and therefore describes it as a thing of legend. Such a passage could only have been dug by a hujmoth, a world worm.”

“Skyrider Averan,” the beast master Brand said, “you are needed.”

Averan turned to look at him in the predawn light, but not too quickly. In the huge shadowy loft of the graak’s aerie, she located Brand more by the sound of his footsteps than by sight. She was feeding some fledgling graaks and dared not look away from the reptiles. The graaks stood fourteen feet at the shoulder and could easily swallow a child like Averan whole. Though the graaks adored her and she’d been feeding them since they first clawed their way out of their leathery eggs, the graaks were likely to snap when hungry. Sometimes they would try to hook meat from her hand with a long wing claw. Averan did not want to lose an arm, as Brand had done so long ago.

Skyrider, she thought. He called me “skyrider.” Not “beast handler.” At nine years of age, Averan was too big, too old, to be a skyrider. She hadn’t been allowed to fly in two years.

Brand stood in the doorway to the aerie, the dim morning light casting a halo around him. The haunch of a young lamb was tied to his belt with a coil of rope, a lure for the graaks. He squinted and stroked his gray beard with his left hand.

She wondered if he’d had too much new wine last night, had forgotten how old she was. “Are you—”

“Sure? Yes.” Brand grunted, and his words were clipped, strained. She suddenly realized that he was shaking. “And we must hurry.” He turned then, and headed for the lofts.

In the dim light, Averan and Brand climbed stairs chiseled in stone, into the upper aerie. The nests up here smelled fetid. The older graaks carried a scent not unlike that of a snake, and after centuries of habitation, that odor permeated the very rock of the aerie. Averan had learned to like the smell long ago, just as some people were said to enjoy the stench of horse sweat or the odor of dogs.

The stairs opened into a wide chamber with a single narrow entrance chiseled in the east side of the hill. In the dim light, Averan could see that the chamber was empty. The graaks were out for their morning hunt. The cool autumn weather tended to make them restless and hungry.

Averan followed Brand onto the landing. He stood for a moment, took the haunch of lamb from his belt, and made sure that the rope was tied snugly between a ligament and the bone at the joint. Then he stood swinging the huge clumsy lure. It took a full-grown man to swing the graak bait like that.

“Leatherneck!” he called. “Leatherneck.”

The graak was trained to respond to his name. The lamb would serve as a reward for the monster’s obedience, when he came.

Averan searched the morning sky. The reptile was nowhere in sight. Leatherneck was old and large, a beast of great stamina, but not much speed. He was seldom used as a mount anymore. Over the past summer, he’d taken to hunting farther and farther afield.

To the west, the Hest Mountains rose, their sheer peaks white from last night’s dusting of snow. On the mountainside below the aerie, Keep Haberd rose—five stone towers, its walls spanning both sides of the narrow pass that led into the mountains. People were running about within the castle walls, shouting. Some still bore torches. Their voices sounded dim and distant. Women and children were climbing onto wagons down on the green, seeking to escape.

Only then did Averan realize that something was terribly wrong. “What’s happening?”

Brand set down the haunch of lamb as if weary, measured her with a gaze. “A squire just rode in with news out of the hills of Morenshire. A volcano erupted in the Alcair Mountains last night, spewing ash. Reavers are approaching in its wake. The rider estimates that among the reavers are some eighty thousand blade-bearers, and another thousand lesser mages with a fell mage. A cloud of gree flies above them, blackening the skies. You must get the news to Duke Paladane at Carris.”

Averan struggled to understand the implications of what Brand had just said. Morenshire was a region in the farthest west of Mystarria, bordering the juncture of the Hest and Alcair mountains. The citadel here, Keep Haberd, the nearest fortress, was old and stalwart. It served as a refuge for travelers in the mountains, and the soldiers here mostly kept the trails safe against robbers and reavers and other vermin. But the fortress would never hold out against a force like the one that Brand described. The reavers would overrun the walls in an hour, and they wouldn’t take prisoners.

Duke Paladane was the King’s strategist. If anyone could defeat the reavers, Paladane could. But Paladane had his hands full. Raj Ahten’s men had taken or destroyed several castles on the borders, and lords and peasants alike were fleeing from the north.