The Lair of Bones

by David Farland

  Dazed, she wandered in a strange world, half in and half out of dream. She imagined that she roamed an empty plain, gray and without form. The ground was flat and featureless, with only cracked clay beneath her feet, as if from an interminable drought.

  And in the dream she raised her staff, and the ground began to tremble. Rocks and clay rose up in a circle all around her, forming a ridge about a hundred yards across that became a strange and magnificent rune. And from those rocks and ridges, animals began to take shape. The gray clay at her feet shaped itself into a tiny stag only two feet long. The stag lay upon its side, mouth open, head tilted backward. At first the form was vague and general, a lumpy creature that a child might have wrought. But in moments the image became more and more refined, as if worked by the hands of an invisible sculptor. Suddenly, when the stag seemed perfect to Averan, it began to move, kicking about as if it were a babe, seeking to stand upon its own feet for the first time. It struggled to its knees, then climbed up, and suddenly the gray figure blossomed into color, a tawny red at the back, white at the throat, with living eyes that glinted in the sunlight. The creature bounded away, past Averan's feet.

  And as suddenly as the stag had formed, she turned her gaze and saw that it was happening everywhere across the vast rune. Tiny boars were taking shape, squealing with delight. Elephants trumpeted in a far corner, and snakes wriggled past her foot. A flock of tiny doves, smaller than moths, fluttered before her view, as if rising into the mountains. Every-where she began to discern hopping frogs and wriggling fishes, butterflies in bright clouds, reavers and whales.

  Filled with wonder, Averan strolled along the gray earth, studying the rune, seeking ways to improve it.

  Ah, if I could only make such a rune, she thought.

  Then she became aware of her surroundings once again. She opened her eyes, fumbling for her staff. But it was gone, and the Consort of Shadows was feeding.

  Averan considered making a run for it.

  She squinted furtively. Fortunately, her white opal ring still glowed, and by its light she could see that the reaver had brought her far down into the Underworld. The tunnel that she was in now had changed. The stifling heat and high humidity made the air muggy, and because of the heat and moisture, hairlike plants as gray and thick as a wolf's pelt covered the tunnel floor. Wormgrass and feather fern battled for control of the walls, and root-like plants dangled from the tunnel roof. The broken shells of blind-crabs and the round shapes of elephant snails littered the floor. More important, not far ahead, some crystalline rods grew near the wall and blocked the floor of an adjoining cavern. Each rod was as clear as quartz, and many reached as much as eight or nine feet in height. Each hollow rod came to a jagged point. Averan recognized them from reaver memories: the homes of flesh eaters.

  Each tube was a cocoon, spun by a pregnant creature that looked like a crab stretched impossibly thin. Once the cocoon was complete, the crab crawled inside to die. As the eggs inside her hatched, the young devoured their way out of her womb, consuming her. These young, each not much larger than a flea, made the flesh-eater tube their lair.

  They crawled to the lip of the tube and waited for something to brush against it—a reaver, a blind-crab, or mordant, it didn't matter. Any animal would do.

  Then the flesh eaters would burrow into their victims. They would be carried through the bloodstream, where they wreaked damage on its organs.

  Reavers feared the tubes of flesh eaters. If such tubes began to grow in one of their tunnels, they would sometimes seal off the crawlway and dig a new route.

  Thus, the tunnel that Averan was in now was dangerous. The number of plants dangling from the ceiling and growing from the floor showed that common reavers had abandoned it. But the Consort of Shadows often trod dangerous paths.

  I could run in among the flesh eater tubes and hide, Averan thought. As long as I don't get near the tip of the tubes, the bugs won't get me.

  But she didn't dare. Not with the Consort of Shadows watching her. Instead, she used her summoning powers, concentrated upon the Consort of Shadows to learn what he was thinking, to feel what he was feeling.

  “I should eat the human,” Consort of Shadows thought. “No one would deny me the pleasure. She is small and worthless.”

  Yet another voice whispered inside him, as if it were the voice of an intruder. “No creature that the Earth has formed is worthless, especially not this one. She is not just its creation, she is its advocate.”

  “This is only worm dreaming,” he told himself.

  Consort of Shadows grabbed Averan violently, whisked her up against his chest, and began to run, scraping his hide against the far wall of the crawlway in order to avoid the flesh-eater tubes.

  I've lost my chance to escape, Averan thought desperately.

  She knew what was happening to the Consort of Shadows. Just as she had eaten the brains of reavers and thought at first that she would go mad, the Consort of Shadows had done the same. His grandfather had eaten the brain of an Earth Warden, and ever since, almost as if in punishment, the Earth Warden's thoughts had haunted those who partook of its brains.

  Averan lay limp in the Consort's huge paw, rejoicing in the fact that he was holding her gingerly, and she feigned sleep. She tried to keep a loose contact with his mind, to learn what she could. But the Consort of Shadows seemed to run almost as if in a trance. He did not speak, did not think. His mind had become as eerie and as quiet as a tomb.

  She hoped that he'd put her down again soon, give her a chance to escape.

  The Consort of Shadows stopped for a moment and opened a stone door that led into a broader corridor. This tunnel was perhaps sixty feet wide, and the floor was rutted from use by reavers. He closed the door behind him, as he had all of the others. Her captor passed some scent markers, and Averan suddenly realized where she was: nearing the Lair of Bones. She was already inside the Unbounded Warren.

  Time and again now she saw tunnels branch off, other reavers ambling about. She saw some howlers—blotchy yellow creatures like enormous spiders—coming out of one tunnel, dragging the squirming carcass of an eighty-foot worm behind them. She saw glue mums spitting out mucilage as they shored up a damaged wall. She saw young reavers, no more than ten feet tall, trundling behind a matron.

  What she did not see were blade-bearers or sorceresses, the guardians of the lair.

  They had all gone to war.

  Suddenly the Consort of Shadows turned at a side tunnel. Averan spotted a pair of blade-bearers standing at guard. Both of them were enormous, with glowing runes branded into their heads and arms.

  Inside the chamber beyond, Averan could smell the stench of human bodies, filthy and diseased.

  “Take care with this one,” the Consort of Shadows told the guards.

  “It shall not escape,” the guards said.

  The Consort of Shadows trundled deeper into the tunnel, and Averan, with her endowments of scent from more than a dozen dogs, found the reek of filthy humans to be more unbearable with each passing step. She smelled the odor of sour sweat mingled with piles of feces and pools of urine, and the rot of infected flesh, fish guts, and unburied dead.

  For the first time in hours, the Consort of Shadows seemed to come out of his reverie. The monster's stomach churned in disgust at the scent.

  He hates it in here, Averan realized. All of the reavers hate being here. The stink is too much for them.

  The Consort of Shadows reached the middle of the large chamber and tossed Averan to the floor. Averan heard a woman cry out from a far corner, half in fear, half in wonder, and then the Consort of Shadows turned and was gone.

  Averan lay in a heap for a moment, peering around. The cavern was not huge. The mucilage on the walls was eroding away, so that bare rock showed in some places. Stalactites hung from the roof, and the floor was uneven. The scent of sulfur water came from a nearby pool.

  In the far corners of the room, people huddled. They were mere humps on the floor, their clothes so
grimy that they had taken on the hues of the dirt. Only their eyes could be seen through masks of grime, eyes wide with wonder. Gradually, Averan began to make out more features: here a face so pale it looked like an Inkarran boy, there the leathery brown of an Indhopalese woman.

  The more Averan peered about, the more she realized that all of the humps around her were people. Sick people, starving people, wounded people, but alive.

  “Light!” an old man cried. “Wondrous light!”

  And someone echoed his sentiment in Indhopalese, “Azir! Azir famata!”

  The humps began to move, and people rushed toward her on hands and knees. Averan realized that, deprived of light, most of them had probably been scurrying about like this for weeks or months.

  “Who are you, Light-Bringer?” a woman called, pleading. “Where do you hail from?”

  “Averan. My name is Averan. I was the king's skyrider at Keep Haberd.”

  “Keep Haberd?” a man asked, a mere skeleton. “I am from Keep Haberd. Can you tell me how it fares?”

  Averan didn't dare tell him that the reavers had killed everyone. The fellow scuttled toward her, along with the others, until they pressed about her, their stinking flesh overwhelming, their eyes wide with wonder at sight of her glowing ring. The skeletal fellow reached up to paw it, stroke it gingerly. Soon twenty dirty folk surrounded her, fawning.

  “See how it shines!” a woman cried, reaching to stroke Averan's ring, but not daring to, “like a star fallen from heaven.”

  “Nay, no star was ever so filled with luster,” another insisted.

  “What year is it?” a man demanded, as if he were some captain among the king's guard.

  “Year one of the reign of Gaborn Val Orden in Mystarria,” Averan answered, “who followed on the heels of his father, Mendellas Draken Orden, who died in the twenty-second year of his reign.”

  “Five years,” an elderly man said in a thick Indhopalese accent. “Five years since last I saw light.”

  “Ten for me,” a sickly fellow croaked.

  For a moment, there was silence, and the prisoners in this dark place looked about at one another.

  “Gavin, where are you?” a young woman asked.

  “Here,” a man said from a few feet away.

  The two of them stopped and gazed at each other in wonder, with love shining in their eyes. Everyone fell silent. The woman began to weep.

  These folks have never seen each other before, Averan realized. How would it be to live here in darkness for years, never having seen the face of a friend?

  The lost souls wore rags, if they wore anything at all, and several of them seemed to have had more than one broken bone or game leg. The reavers that imprisoned them had not been kind.

  Near a far wall lay a pile of bones, both fish and human. Beyond that, Averan could see no sign of food. She asked, “How—how do you live down here?”

  “We don't live,” the Indhopalese man answered. “We just die as slowly as we can.”

  15

  FORMS OF WAR

  Every group of people develops many words for those things that concern them most. In Internook, men have seven words for ice. In Indhopalese, there are six different words for starvation. In Inkarra, there are eighty-two words for war.

  —Hearthmaster Highborn, from the Room of Arms, On the Eighty-two Forms of War

  The Inkarrans held Sir Borenson and Myrrima prisoner at the mountain fortress until it was nearly dark. The Inkarrans took their weapons and placed both of them in manacles. The fortress seemed to hold about twenty soldiers, none of whom wanted to go outside during daylight, where the glare on the white snow all but blinded them. So the westering sun was barely riding above the clouds as they marched into Inkarra.

  They could not ride horses. Inkarrans rarely rode them at all, and certainly wouldn't be able to do so tonight. The trail plunged down the mountain slopes through thickets and rock, then dove into the mists and trees. The combination of darkness, shadow, and fog would make riding impossible. So Borenson's fine horses were left at the fortress.

  Still, all of the party had endowments of metabolism. Shackled at the wrists, Borenson and Myrrima nearly raced downhill in the twilight, making good use of the last of the sun's rays.

  The party made good time in spite of the suddenly rather unbearable mixture of heat and humidity. In the late afternoon, the mists rising up the forested slopes felt as warm as a gentle steam.

  By nightfall they were heading down steep mountain roads. The warmer climate here gave rise to vastly different flora and fauna than what was found north of the mountains. There were pines, but they were taller than any trees that Borenson had ever seen, and their bark was a dark red instead of gray. There were birds here, too, but these dusky magpies had longer necks than their northern cousins, and their raucous cries sounded alien to his ears. Everywhere, he saw strange lizards scurrying about—racing beneath ferns, hopping off rocks, leaping from tree branches to sail into the shadows on leathery wings.

  Nothing could have prepared him for the strangeness of Inkarra, the misted forest, the exotic perfumes of the peach-colored mountain orchids that grew across the road. Sir Borenson had been raised on Orwynne, an island in the Carroll Sea not more than two hundred miles north of here. Yet once he crossed the mountains, he felt as if he had entered a world of which he had never dreamed.

  Night closed in on them soon, and the Inkarran captors traveled noiselessly in near total darkness. They did not speak, did not give their names. The Inkarrans tried to guide Borenson and Myrrima as best they could, moving them this way and that to avoid roots that stretched across the rutted road, but the two daylighters kept tripping. The path couldn't have been any less negotiable if Borenson was blindfolded. Borenson's feet were getting bruised and bloody from the abuse.

  After two hours of this, the party came to a halt. Borenson could hear laughter, the nasal voices of Inkarrans sounding odd to his ear.

  “We wait,” one of the guards said in a thick accent

  “What for?” Myrrima asked.

  “Lamps. We at village. We bring you lamps.” One Inkarran headed off through the woods.

  Borenson peered all about. There were no lights to show him where the village might be. Indeed, he could make out nothing at all, beyond a deeper darkness that showed him the bole of a nearby tree.

  “I thought you used flame lizards to guard your houses,” Myrrima said.

  “Draktferion very expensive,” the guard explained. “Eat much meat. This poor village. No draktferion here.”

  Borenson soon heard rustling in the trees, the sound of approaching feet, and he heard the shy laughter of children. Apparently, he had drawn a crowd.

  At last he saw light, a pair of swinging lamps. The lanterns, which hung from chains, were like rounded cups made of glass. In each cup burned Inkarran candles, strange candles as yellow as agates, as hard as stone, and without wicks. Borenson knew of them only from legend. Once lit, each candle would burn without smoke for a week or more. Indeed, he could see no flame from the peculiar candles. Instead, they merely glowed like bluish white embers.

  As the guard passed through a crowd of children, the lanterns lit them briefly. The youngest children ran naked, while the older ones wore shifts of white linen. Their pale faces were as white as their clothes. To Borenson, they all looked like ghosts, like a convocation of the dead.

  The guard tied a lamp around Borenson's wrist, and one around Myrrima's. In its soft glow, he could hardly make out the ground at his feet.

  Still, it was enough.

  All through the night they walked, until they came down out of the mountains altogether, into flat lands where no trees shadowed their path. They passed village after village, but there was little to see.

  The villagers lived belowground, in hollows under the hills. In some richer areas, draktferions did indeed stand guard at the mouth of each village. There, the flame lizards would spread wide their hoods and hiss at the first sign of a stranger,
fluorescing. By the flickering bloody light that they threw, Borenson could see the peculiar stelae that marked the entrance to the Inkarran “villages.” The stelae were carved of stone and stood some twenty feet tall. At the top was a circle, like a head, with two branches extending from the base, like arms. On the stelae, carved in stone, were the surnames of the families who lived in the town below.

  As they approached a broad river, Borenson was aware that they passed farms. He could smell the rice paddies, and at last they reached a village, where the guards hurried them through a market where merchants hawked white peaches, fresh red grapes, a dozen kinds of melons, and dragon-eye fruits. Freshly killed crocodiles, snakes, and fish hung beside the road, where vendors would cook them while you waited.

  The guards bought some winged lizards glazed with some sweet sauce, along with melon, and Borenson and Myrrima fed hungrily while one of the guards disappeared in a crowd.

  “Come,” the guard said when he returned. “Boat take us downriver!”

  In minutes, the guards had Borenson and Myrrima hustled into an Inkarran longboat. The boat was some sixty feet long and fairly narrow, made of some strange white wood that buoyed high on the water. At the bow of the boat was carved the head of a bird with a long beak, like a graceful crane.

  The boat was filled with Inkarran peasants, ghostly white faces. Some of them carried bamboo cages that housed chickens or piglets.

  Borenson sat near the front of the boat, looking off into the water. The air was still. He could hear night noises—the peep of tree frogs, the croak of a crocodile, the calls of some strange bird. The laughter and voices of the Inkarrans in town rose like music.

  The sky overhead was still hazy, but the moon wafted above the mist, and now he could see the river dimly. Its shores spread broader than any river in Mystarria, mightier. He could not see the other side.