Borenson was already studying the ground, the shabby camp. The hob-bled horse had lain in its own excrement for hours. It gazed at Borenson imploringly.
Myrrima saw no sign of food, no extra wood for the fire. There was nothing left of the campfire but lightly smoking ruins.
Borenson knelt over Pilwyn's corpse. Four days past, Sir Hoswell, who had been one of Iome's guards, had shot Pilwyn with an arrow. The wound would have killed any commoner in a matter of minutes. The arrow had punctured Pilwyn's lung. But wizards of the Air were notoriously hard to kill. Beyond that, Pilwyn was a Runelord with endowments of stamina. So he had merely plugged the cavity in his chest with a crude bandage. But now Myrrima could see that black blood crusted the wound, and it had swollen horribly. Maggots crawled around the lip of the bandage.
“He wasn't long for the world,” Borenson said. “He'd have died in a few more hours, even if we hadn't come along. If the infection hadn't killed him, the hollow wolves would have.”
“But why was he following us the other night?” Myrrima asked.
“My guess is that he wasn't,” Borenson said. “We're all on the road to Inkarra, fellow travelers. He probably pulled off the road to rest and heard us pass, then just crept along behind us. He may have even hoped for our aid. But he was an Inkarran in Mystarria—an outlaw.” He sighed.
Myrrima went to the body. She reached down to pull the bandage back, look at the old wound. She felt a cool wind whip around her hand as it neared the man's chest—suspected that she had just touched protective runes written with wind.
Up the hill, through a thin veil of trees, she heard the horrid ghostly wailing of his voice, and could see the plume of windblown ice still racing away, now nearly a mile uphill.
Borenson gazed in that direction. “His elemental will reach Inkarra long before we do,” he said, and Myrrima wondered about her own elemental, the thing growing inside her. She imagined that when she died, the Water within her would merely leak from her mouth and eyelids, leaving a moist puddle.
Borenson went to Pilwyn's mount, removed its hobbles. The beast struggled to its feet.
Borenson then leapt up on the stone fence above the camp. He did not speak, but his posture, the tilt of his head, asked, “Ready to go?”
Myrrima asked, “What should we do with the body?”
“Leave it,” Borenson said. “The wolves will have him.”
“But he's the Storm King's nephew,” Myrrima said. “We should show him some respect.”
“We can't dig a hole, and I won't take him over the mountains to Inkarra,” Borenson argued. “King Zandaros would be none too pleased to learn that we killed his nephew on our way to beg his favor.”
“You're right,” Myrrima said. “Of course you're right. But I don't feel easy about it. Wizards don't just die. After I slew the Darkling Glory, its elemental hurled boulders around as if they were apples. Binnesman warned that the elemental was still capable of great evil. Pilwyn's elemental is small, but that thing is headed for Inkarra.”
Again she felt the foreboding that had been growing all day. Some-thing, or someone, would seek to take her husband from her. Could it be the wizard's elemental?
“Look at the bright side,” Borenson said. “At least we got a good horse.”
With three force horses, the trip through the snow went fast. Or at least it would have seemed so to an outsider. Had you seen them, you would have tracked the force horses galloping up the mountainsides, churning snow and ice with each hoofbeat. When the road leveled, they seemed to almost float above it, such was the length and grace of their stride.
But Myrrima had endowments of metabolism now, more even than her mount, and to her senses the horse did not seem to be moving fast at all. Instead, she felt as if the stuff of time had stretched. The sun lumbered interminably into the sky, and gradually slanted toward darkness. Thus one day seemed to be expanding to fill five. Myrrima felt every second of her life waning past.
Their journey had begun before dawn. In that time, they traveled hundreds of miles.
The journey up the slopes was tedious. Myrrima never even got to see one of the much-vaunted hollow wolves up close. In the distance she saw a pack of them sweeping over the snow—white on white—wafting ghostlike over the slopes of a nearby mountain. Even from a distance they looked huge.
The hollow wolves saw her party and redoubled their speed, hoping to catch up, but they were no match for force horses. Borenson let the mounts race for an hour.
When next they stopped, they were near the mountain peaks. The snow was now six inches deep and crusted from last night's freeze. Myrrima followed its course up the mountains with her eyes. The snow-covered trail looked broad and easy as it wound through the hills. It had been cut wide enough to accommodate wagons, and was none too steep.
Somehow, in Myrrima's imagination, the Alcair Mountains had always seemed impassable. Perhaps for one without endowments the journey would have been more challenging. But she suspected that there wasn't so much a physical challenge in crossing the mountains as there was a political one.
At the mountaintops, stone wheels stood against the sky. The wheels looked to be more than thirty or forty feet tall. The line that they formed zigzagged crazily, marching up one ridge, then diving into a ravine, like rocky pearls to decorate the hills. On each stone wheel a rune had been carved. Myrrima eyed them, not quite able to make out the design.
“Don't look at the runewall!” Borenson warned. “Not unless you have to. Keep your eyes on the road!”
Myrrima averted her gaze, but now felt curious. What was the runewall? The runes looked as if they had been carved on individual tablets of stone and then rolled into place. The making of this massive bulwark had been a monumental task. The border between Rofehavan and Inkarra spanned a thousand miles. Building a barrier like this would have taken tens of thou-sands of masons a period of decades.
The fact that gazing upon it was forbidden made it that much more enticing. Myrrima wanted to feel the awe of it.
“I had no idea it would be so vast,” Myrrima said. She studied the ground. The snow here was dirty, streaked with ash. She looked for the source of the ash, but could see no sign of a fire. There were no trees so high, only low shrubs here and there that thrust their dead branches up between the rocks.
She dutifully kept her eyes on the road as the horses plodded step after weary step, and felt a most peculiar sensation. The stone bucklers loomed enormous in her mind. It was as if the very shadow of them weighed upon her consciousness. As she drew nearer, she could feel them, demanding her regard.
She had to will herself not to look. She had to force herself to focus on a rough stone road ahead, or the twisted roots of a dead bush, or plain rock casting an uneven shadow in the snow. Even when she did, her eyes sought to flit away, to land like sparrows upon those monoliths that formed the runewall.
The desire to look and be done with it burned her mind, left an acid taste in her mouth. She could close her eyes and feel the stone tablets looming above her. She could track them thus.
An awful certainty grew in her: to keep her eyes closed was better than to look.
Suddenly at her back she heard a loud thump, and the mount that she trailed pulled at its reins. Carefully keeping her eyes averted, she turned to glance back at the horse. Its eyes had gone wide, as if in shock, and it stared in frozen horror toward the monoliths.
Myrrima worried that the animal had picked a lamentable time to look up, but knew in her heart that it was no accident. Even this dull beast felt the forbidding presence of the wall.
If a horse can look upon it, I can too, Myrrima thought. And instantly her eyes darted toward the road ahead. She was just beneath the skyline now, not more than fifty yards away.
A vast archway spanned the road. Overhead, the skies were blue, but clouds on the far horizon lay opalescent beneath that dark arch, making it look for all the world like a blind eye.
An inscription above the arch was written in both Rofeh
avanish and Inkarran: Beyond This Point, Your Tribe is Barren.
She struggled now to avoid looking at the monolithic stones raised up like shields on either side of the arch. But she had let her gaze stray too far, and now it was taken hostage.
She saw vast round stones, like wheels or shields, on either side of the road. Her eyes went to the northernmost stone. Inscribed upon it was a trail, a groove in the rock, leading downward and inward, like a map. She recognized that it was a rune, a mesmerizing rune, and powerful. She tried to look away, but could not. Her eyes were forced to follow that groove along its tortured path, winding down, down. And as it wound, she felt the weight of ages slowly passing by, wheeling beneath her. Civilizations could rise within each turning of the wheel, and worlds could rot. Great cities formed, and in her mind's eye, Myrrima saw them crumble. Their foundations sank and moldered among forgotten forests. Monuments to proud kings wore away. Their squalid children fought and sought shelter among the ruins. In time they began the process of building again. Still the wheel turned, and Myrrima was swept away among the dreams of proud lovers, the boasts of warriors, the wild utterances of poets and prophets, and still the wheel turned toward its devastating conclusion.
Her heart surged in panic, and her mouth went dry.
Looking at this will kill me, Myrrima thought feebly. She fought it, tried to close her eyes and twist away. A groan escaped her, but she stared on, her eyes following that twisted groove along its fearsome course-—as towers rose and dreamers dreamed and proud lords made war under a hazy sun—until it all stopped.
Immediately an emotion surged through her, struck her with awful force.
You are nothing, a voice seemed to roar through her mind. All your deeds and dreams are futile. You strive for beauty and permanence, yet you are less than a worm on the road, waiting to be crushed beneath the wheels of time.
The conviction of this, the power of it, overwhelmed her. The visions elicited by the rune proved the argument. How dare one like her seek to enter Inkarra? She was loathsome. Better to turn the horse back now and run it madly over some cliff than to proceed.
Myrrima never thought about what she was doing. She merely groaned and reined in her mount, tried to turn it, and spurred its flanks with her heel. She sought escape.
Nothing that had ever happened to her was as cruel as the thought of facing that rune. Until now she had lived in relative peace, not knowing of its existence.
But now that she had seen it, she could never be free. Better to be nothing. Blind with panic, she did not see the cliffs below.
All the heavens had gone black, and she fled through a dark tunnel toward oblivion.
“No!” Borenson shouted. “No!”
Her husband came off his horse and grabbed her own mount by the reins. He was fighting the beast, trying to subdue it and the Inkarran's horse at the same time. Myrrima could not see him, but felt his hands grab her wrists, pull the reins. She gouged her mount's flanks. She was riding his big strong warhorse, and as the beast pawed the air, she felt certain that it would deliver a crushing blow to Borenson's skull, as it had been trained to do. But Borenson had been its handler for years, and perhaps that alone saved his life.
He wrestled the horse down, shouting at Myrrima, “Don't look! Don't look at it!”
Myrrima was blind with panic, but suddenly she began to see as if through a haze.
Borenson peered up at her. His own eyes went to the runewall, and he gazed at the horror there. Fierce tears welled up, and he stared in defiance. “It's a lie!” he raged at her. “I love you! I love you, Myrrima. Damn those bastards.”
He turned and led the horses onward. Each step seemed to fall painfully, as if his legs were slogging through molten iron.
Myrrima clenched her eyes shut and faced the wall. Her heart hammered.
I faced a Darkling Glory, she told herself. I bested a wight. I can fight this, too. Yet somehow, the vile runes terrified her more than other monsters ever could. She could do little to help Borenson but urge the horse forward with a kick of her heel.
Thus Borenson forged on against the repressive wards, dragging Myrrima someplace she could never have gone herself.
She felt the weight of the wards grow above her. Even with eyes clenched shut, she could see their loathsome shape now, stamped on the back of her brain as she bowed in submission. Your birth was a misfortune, a chance collision of wantonness with abandonment. You are no better than the secretions from which you were formed.
And farther away, as if from some hollow in the hills, Borenson roared in defiance, “Don't believe it.”
And then she was beneath the arch. She could almost feel the weight of it as if it leaned upon her back, crushing her.
And then she was past it, and still she felt it behind her. Sobs wracked Myrrima now.
“I love you,” Borenson said calmly as he strode forward.
Myrrima would have lashed her horse and sped away into Inkarra but for the fact that Borenson kept it firmly in control.
With each step, the power of the wards faded. In a sense, she felt like a dreamer who has awakened from a nightmare. The dream was fading from her memory with each step of the horse, for the mind was not meant to feel such torment, and ultimately could not hold it for long.
Myrrima was half a mile beyond the wall, maybe more, by the time she was able to open her eyes and raise her head a bit. Borenson had taken the reins of all three mounts and led them over the pass and down toward Inkarra. His own mount bumped her leg to her right, the wizard's mount to her left.
She gazed down the slopes. Ahead, a sea of mist rose above Inkarra. It was warmer on this side of the mountains, much warmer she realized, as if the wall did more than keep out unwanted northerners but also kept out the cold. The thin layer of snow vanished just down the hill, and shrubs here still rose up among the rocks, showing green leaves.
But beyond that, beyond those few signs of life among the stones, she could only discern a rolling sea of fog. “Beyond this point, your tribe is barren.” Barren of what? She wondered. Barren of hope? Barren of pride? Barren of comfort?
Borenson rounded a sharp corner in the road, and Myrrima suddenly saw to her a left a small cave, the mouth of a fortress carved into the stone.
At the mouth of the cave stood three men with ivory skin and long silver hair wrapped in corn braids, which were all coiled together and hung over their right shoulders. They wore blood-red tunics that did not quite reach their knees, and beyond that, Iome could see no other article of clothing except their sandals, tied with cords that wrapped around the ankles and knees. For armor they wore steel breastplates, perfect circles, upon their backs and chests. They wore similar disks on bands upon their foreheads, and another upon their upper arms. Two of the men bore long-bows, and the third carried an Inkarran battle-axe—two slats of wood bound together with a row of spikes between, so that it looked like the jaw-bone of some sharp-toothed beast.
“Halt!” an Inkarran warrior called in a thick accent as he strode forward. “You are our captives!”
9
ABYSS GATE
Few have dared explore the depths of the Underworld, and fewer still have dared assault reavers in their lair. The exploits of Erden Geboren, whose Dark Knights hunted in the Underworld for years, are the stuff of legend now.
—from Campaigns in the Underworld, by Hearthmaster Coxton, from the Room of Arms
Long and long the riverbed wound through the Underworld. Gaborn ran in a daze of grief. His side ached from the blow he'd taken from the reavers, but the physical pain was nothing compared to the concern he felt at the loss of Binnesman.
The wizard had been the one to introduce Gaborn to the Earth Spirit. He had been a wise counselor and friend.
More than that, he had been Gaborn's strongest supporter. As an Earth Warden, he had been set apart for one duty only: to protect mankind through the dark times to come. Gaborn was the Earth King, with powers of his own, regardless of how diminished.
But Binnesman's powers and wisdom had been incomparable.
With him gone, what will become of us? Gaborn wondered.
He felt ashamed to even worry about such a thing. But he knew the answer. Binnesman had said it himself. If he failed, mankind would be lost.
Averan raced beside Gaborn on her short legs, weeping bitterly. Iome stayed back and tried to urge the child on, her face a blank mask.
They had been running through the bed of the ancient river, where water had dribbled over rocks, leaving crater-shaped pools. They reached a wide cavern, where a tiny stream dripped down from a high wall, fillingsome pools.
Iome asked Gaborn at last, “Can we stop here for a rest?” The sound of reavers running overhead was a dim rumble. Gaborn stretched out his senses, felt for danger. Yes, he could feel it everywhere. Battles coming to Heredon, death to Carris, the creeping darkness that could swallow the world. With every hour that they ran, the darkness was one hour closer.
But for the moment, the danger to the three of them was not great. “We can stop.” His mouth was parched from lack of drink, and his belly clenched like a fist. With all his endowments of stamina he could endure much, but even a Runelord needed some refreshment.
He hadn't eaten a decent meal since when? Yesterday at dawn? With his endowments of metabolism, his body registered that as something closer to ten days.
“We can't stay long,” Averan said, her voice thick with fear.
“Why?” Gaborn asked.
“That reaver,” Averan said, “the one that… hit Binnesman. I smelled him. I know him. All of the reavers know him. He's called the Consort of Shadows. He won't leave us alone. He'll hunt us until we're dead.”
“What do you mean?” Gaborn asked.
“Among the reavers, he's a legend,” Averan said. “He's the One True Masters’ favorite, her mate. He's a hunter, sent to track down sick and dangerous reavers.”
“Dangerous?” Iome asked.
“Among reavers,” Averan explained, “the most feared illness is some-thing they call worm dreaming. Tiny worms eat into the reaver's brain, causing phantom smells and visions—worm dreams. In time the worms cause terrible pain, forgetfulness, and death.
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