The Lair of Bones

by David Farland

  Borenson could not have hoped for a better escape. Sarka Kaul led them over desolate trails until they reached the shadowed forests, where winged lizards fluttered about, hunting for moths and gnats in the canopy.

  Only once did anyone try to stop them. As they neared the foot of the Alcair Mountains, a dark figure raced up behind the trio. The clatter of a charger's hooves announced that it was a force horse with great endowments, and Borenson looked back down a mountain trail, where he glimpsed the rider galloping through the trees.

  “I'll get him,” Myrrima said fiercely as they neared a meadow. She had kept her bow strung all morning, and she slowed her mount, leapt off, and slapped its rump. Her horse raced after Sarka and Sir Borenson, following them through a meadow full of white flowers so delicate that the sunlight shining through made them glow like ice.

  Sarka Kaul led the way and reached a line of trees just as their pursuer exited the woods. Borenson glanced back. An Inkarran prince raced under the shadows, his blood red robes flapping behind him like wings. He rode a horse as black as night itself. The mount galloped into the meadow a few paces, and suddenly Myrrima stepped out from behind a gnarled sycamore and loosed an arrow.

  The fellow cried and leaned forward, putting his heels to horseflesh. Borenson clearly saw the white plumes of goose feather from the arrow lodged in his back.

  The black horse came to a halt in the meadow and spun about. Its rider was cursing, lamely struggling to get it to flee, while he struggled to keep from falling off.

  Borenson raced to the wounded rider. The fellow's long silver braids announced that it was Prince Verazeth. He lay slumped in the saddle, clinging to his horse's neck, the arrow sticking up from his ribs. Myrrima had struck him near the heart. His horse danced around, frightened by the scent of hot blood.

  Sarka Kaul rode up behind Borenson.

  “Cour as! Cour as!” Help me, the prince muttered.

  “Gladly,” Sarka said, urging his mount forward.

  He grabbed the prince by the hair and plunged his sword into the man's back. He flung the body to the ground and took the horse's reins in one smooth motion.

  In a moment Myrrima came running up through the field.

  “He's dead?” she asked unnecessarily. She stood over the prince, bow in hand, arrow ready to fire.

  “He's dead,” Sarka said.

  “But… you watched him grow up from a child,” she objected.

  “And many a time I wished to put an end to his miserable life,” the Inkarran whispered. “Here, take his horse. It might come in handy. It has many endowments of sight to let it run in the darkness.”

  “This is it?” Borenson asked. “This is the only man they sent to hunt for us?”

  Sarka Kaul grunted. “Probably so. Inkarran politics are very complex. King Criomethes has secretly been in league with the Storm King's enemies for decades, so Verazeth couldn't dare risk revealing what his father has done. Their crime against you must remain a secret from the king. Nor could Verazeth tell his own cronies what has happened, for it will make him look foolish to be bested by Daylighters, people that he condemns as inferiors. He really only had one choice. He had to hunt you down himself. Only then could he pretend to avenge his family, and thus gain honor. So he came for you swiftly, foolish enough to hunt by daylight, and took his secret to the grave.”

  Myrrima seemed unsure. “Let's get out of here anyway.”

  She dragged the prince's body from the road, hid it under the trees two hundred yards into the woods. Then she leapt up on his black stallion and fought the beast for a moment, and led the way.

  The trip over the Alcairs went quickly. The snow-laden arms of the mountains glowed as white as bone in the daylight, and the horses were eager to run in the cool air.

  They raced up the jagged peaks, over roads that were almost never used, until at last they neared the Inkarran fortress. An icy gale was blowing spindrift from the peaks, so that by the time that they drew close, they did so in a dismal fog.

  The road zigzagged down the steep mountain. Sarka Kaul bypassed the fortress by riding up the slopes until he met the road above. Even force horses had a tough job of it, lunging through the foggy ice.

  When they neared the mountain peak, with its fearsome wall, Myrrima and Sarka both closed their eyes tightly, and Borenson led the horses. He only shivered once as he passed beneath the shadow of the gate, and noon found them all racing down snowy slopes.

  In such fierce light, Sarka was almost blind. Borenson kept a keen eye out for Inkarrans. Sarka warned that the Storm King Zandaros and his men might be camped on the road, hidden in some dark fen. But the snow showed no sign that any large party had ridden past in the night, and Sarka decided at last that Zandaros must have kept on Inkarran roads, heading farther west, before taking their path northward. That way, the Storm King would avoid any well-traveled highways in Mystarria, taking most of his journey through the wilderness.

  “He cares little for the fate of Rofehavan,” Sarka Kaul warned Borenson, “but if the reavers manage to destroy your land, he knows that his own people will have to fight a war.”

  The sun seemed to be a great and brittle pearl floating in a distant sea, somehow vaster than any sun that Borenson had ever seen. Below him to the north, clouds covered the green fields of Mystarria like a cloak.

  So they rode, racing the horses as fast as they would go down through Batenne and up the roads through the swamps at Fenraven. Verazeth's mount was as swift and tireless as any that Borenson had ever seen, and it carried Myrrima without complaint. His own warhorse and the white mare both tired more quickly, but Borenson kept from wearing them out by switching mounts each time one got winded. Sarka Kaul too had stolen a kingly mount, one whose coat was a peculiarly bright color of red. “They are called blood mounts in the south of Inkarra,” Sarka told them, “and are highly valued for their ability to see in the darkness.”

  His mount followed along behind the others, apparently baffled to be running in the daylight. Sarka Kaul kept his head low as he rode through the towns and villages, his deep hood concealing his face, a pair of black riding gloves to hide his hands, and if any man of Mystarria noted that an Inkarran was riding abroad in the daylight, no one gave chase.

  By early afternoon they left the swamps at Fenraven and rode west, where they began to draw near the reavers’ trail.

  A fire burned all across the horizon, and in the muggy air, the smoke billowed uncommonly black. It rose heavenward in thick columns, fulminating upward for miles. To Borenson, the columns looked like black vines espaliered against a stone cliff. At their crown, a breeze blew the smoke east in a thin haze, like tendrils of vine hanging over a garden wall.

  Along the road, they began to spot refugees fleeing the coming war. Borenson saw a young woman driving an oxcart. Four children slept on a pile of hay in the back. Food and clothes were wrapped into a few meager bundles.

  Then he began to see more exiles, old women with staves hobbling along the road, young women with babes in arms. But there were no men—no old men, no young men over the age of eleven or twelve. Not even the crippled or maimed were fleeing Carris.

  The smoke's reach was tremendous. For twenty miles it hung overhead like a ceiling, and Borenson, Myrrima, and Sarka rode closer and closer to the dark columns. Powdery ash began to drift from the sky.

  Borenson stopped at a stream near an abandoned farm to let the horses drink, and found a crowd of women who looked too exhausted to march any farther.

  “When did the fire start?” Myrrima asked, nodding toward the clouds looming in the west.

  “The Knights Equitable lit it yesterday before dawn,” an old woman answered. “They're riding ahead of the reavers, setting fire to everything, hoping to slow the horde.”

  If Borenson knew the Knights Equitable, they would do more than just light fires. It was easier to take reavers in the open field than to fight them from behind castle walls. High Marshal Chondler would send sorties against the reav
ers.

  “Have you seen the horde?” Borenson asked. “Do we have any estimates on how big it is?” The last horde sent against Carris had been nearly seventy thousand strong. Sarka claimed that this one might be over a million, but it was hard to credit such wild numbers.

  The old woman spoke up. “You can't count them all. The reavers’ lines stretches for a hundred miles, like a dark river, and the horde is so wide you can hardly see to the far shore.”

  “By the Powers!” Borenson swore. “There is no way that we can fight something like that. There aren't enough men and lances in all of Mystarria!”

  But Sarka Kaul gazed off to the north and the west, and whispered, “Perhaps there are enough men to fight, if only they muster the will to do it.”

  They took off riding, moving ever deeper beneath the smoky shadow. For several leagues they met women and children fleeing in droves, until at last their numbers began to dwindle.

  As the clouds of smoke thickened with each mile, soon it seemed as if night closed overhead. They passed a deserted village, and all the cocks were crowing as if to greet the dawn.

  Deep under the shadow, they rode up to a peasant girl trying to carry her two weary sisters, even as a pair of toddlers trailed behind, crying of weariness. Borenson asked, “Where are your mother and father?”

  “They went to Carris, to fight,” the girl said.

  “Don't you have any food?” Myrrima asked.

  “We had some, yesterday, but I couldn't carry the children and the food. So we left it. There are farms along the way. I was hoping to find something to eat.”

  There was a moment of silence as Borenson considered the girl's predicament. The land was full of rocks, and there wasn't a village for forty miles. Half a dozen farms spread out along the road, but other refugees were picking the last apples from the trees as they marched. This girl and her brothers and sisters would never make it.

  Borenson would never have abandoned his own offspring like this.

  “Give her the spare horse,” Myrrima urged.

  Borenson felt torn. He looked to the west. He could see evidence of flames now—an angry red welt on the horizon. If these children didn't seek shelter soon, the fire would get them before the reavers did. “Nay,” he decided. “We may need the horse for battle. But give them some food.”

  “We may need the horse,” Myrrima said, “but they do need it.”

  Borenson hung his head. He understood some of the pain that Gaborn must be sensing. If he gave a warhorse to these children, he might save their lives. But he needed the horses for battle, a battle where he could save more than just five small children.

  He looked back to Sarka Kaul for advice, but the Inkarran merely shrugged.

  It was a bitter choice. He gave the girl some plums and a loaf of bread he'd bought fresh in Battenne, counseled them to head east toward the River Donnestgree, and then rode on.

  As he moved toward the shadow, a strange thought took him: this is the road my father traveled to his own death.

  It would have been only a week ago now that his father had ridden to Carris. The skies would have been blue and clear, and certainly his father hadn't known what awaited him, but it was the same road, the same farm-houses and trees, the same dull pond in the distance reflecting the sky.

  Still the shadows lengthened, and darkness deepened. The air grew still, motionless. Almost the inferno did not seem to be belching smoke at all. Borenson could imagine that invisible hands had reached into the earth, and were pulling out its entrails, just as a huntsman guts a stag.

  At last he rounded a bend and could see a line of red beneath the smoke, the sputtering of flames. The road led through the fire.

  They raced the horses then, past scorching flames that rose up on both sides of the road, and found themselves completely beneath the shadow. Ash and smoke filled the air so thickly that they all wrapped scarves over their faces.

  The sky was black above, as black as dusk, and the ground was charred and black beneath the hooves of the horses. The only light came from brushfires that raged everywhere in a ragged line, like a fiery snake that stretched across the horizon.

  The thundering of the reavers’ feet could now be heard, rumbling beneath the sputter and hiss of flames. Howlers trumpeted mournful cries. Borenson, Myrrima, and Sarka Kaul raced toward the horde. Soon, gree began to whip overhead on wriggling wings, squeaking as if in agony.

  Deep in the blackness, the reavers charged. They thundered along beside the charred highway, running hundreds abreast, and the line extended each direction for as far as the eye could see. Firelight reflected crimson from their carapaces. The ground shuddered beneath their feet, and the hissing of their breath sounded like a gasp.

  Blade-bearers made up the vast bulk of the army, along with large numbers of pale spidery howlers whose eerie calls frequently were borne through the shadows. Among the mass of dark bodies, Borenson saw few scarlet sorceresses.

  “What's that?” Myrrima shouted to be heard over the commotion. She pointed to a trio of enormous reavers that loped along about a quarter of a mile off. To Borenson's eye, they looked like any other reaver he had ever seen except that each of them had dozens of large, bulbous black growths all over their backs.

  Myrrima raced her horse toward the monsters, and Borenson followed more warily. Sarka Kaul hung back, afraid of the reavers, for he was but a Days, a commoner without benefit of endowments.

  As Borenson drew near, the mystery was solved: the huge reavers looked to be nurses, reavers charged with rearing the warren's hatchlings. Each nurse was oversized, nearly forty feet in length, and the humps on their backs were young reavers, each no more than five or six feet tall, and eight feet in length. Ten or fifteen young clung to the backs of some nurses.

  “Why would they bring their young?” Myrrima shouted, nocking an arrow.

  Borenson had an inkling. He imagined the young reavers charging through the rooms of a keep, breaking into cellars to hunt for women and children. He could envision them climbing turret stairs—going any of the places where people might hide when fleeing reavers. How vicious such young creatures might be, he could not guess.

  At that moment, an enormous blade-bearer must have smelled them. It came rushing out of the column at tremendous speed, the philia along its head waving wildly. Instantly Borenson saw that the horses wouldn't be able to outrun it.

  He had never seen a reaver move so fast.

  “Shoot it!” Borenson warned as he pulled his warhammer from its sheath.

  The monster charged Myrrima. It stood over twenty feet tall, and its mouth was wide enough to swallow a horse. Fiery runes glowed on its battle arms, as pale blue as a will-o'-the-wisp in the swamps at Fenraven. The reaver hissed.

  Myrrima reined in her black stallion, drawing her bow as the blade-bearer charged. But her horse threw back its ears, and its eyes grew wide. It began to dance backward.

  Borenson veered his own mount toward the beast, shouted a war cry, and charged.

  He was nearly on the monster when a dark shaft sizzled overhead and disappeared into the reavers’ sweet triangle. The monster's right legs buckled, and it skidded in the ash for a moment, then floundered as it tried to regain its feet. The arrow had struck its brain, but had not killed it instantly.

  “Flee!” Borenson shouted, wheeling to see where Myrrima might be. She had already grabbed her reins and was urging her horse away from the reaver's lines—not a moment too soon.

  The wounded reaver struggled unsuccessfully to regain its feet, even as two of its kin raced out of the horde.

  Borenson put heels to horseflesh and set his charger galloping over the blackened fields. Myrrima raced ahead. Before them, Sarka Kaul's mount galloped like the wind. Borenson looked over his back. The wounded reaver was spinning about in circles while its comrades charged after him.

  They were gaining on him.

  Borenson had his little white mare on a tether, and was trying to lead her out. But she wasn't as
fast as his old warhorse. He considered cutting her loose. If nothing else, she might serve as a decoy for the reavers.

  He glanced up toward Myrrima. She was drawing another arrow from her quiver, trying to nock it as she rode.

  The reavers were gaining. He could hear their hissing breath closing in on him; their feet pounded the earth. Borenson had taken but one endowment of metabolism at Carris. Over the past few days, his facilitator had vectored him more. But he still moved more slowly than these reavers. He dared not face them with only a warhammer.

  He peered ahead.

  Myrrima was racing away from him, over the dun fields. Sarka Kaul still held the lead. The great smoke clouds above threw a broad shadow, so that it looked as if they fled beneath a storm. Her mount's hooves threw up turfs, then leapt over the blackened limb of a fallen oak. Yet even as Myrrima fled, she held her reins in her teeth and nocked another arrow.

  Borenson put heels to horseflesh and struggled to hold on. He clung to his long-handled warhammer. With so few endowments, he would not be able to use it effectively, but it was all that he had.

  He could hear the reavers gaining, lurching forward, their massive bodies thudding with each step, weightier than elephants. Their hissing came loud.

  Once, in his youth, Borenson had been to the shipyards on the north coast of Thwynn where King Orden's warships were built. There a huge iron battering ram was being fashioned for the prow of a ship. It was longer than a mainmast. The shipwrights had said that much of the ram would be hidden within the hull of a small, fast vessel, built solely to ram and thus disable the big, heavily armored “floating castles” of Toom. Borenson had seen the new-forged ram lifted from its cast and levered into a ditch filled with oily water. When it touched the liquid, it hissed with the tongue of a thousand serpents and sent plumes of gray steam writhing into the air.

  As the reavers advanced, their hissing reminded him of that now.

  Ah, he thought, what I would not give for a good lance!

  Suddenly he heard Myrrima cry out, and he looked ahead. She spun her horse about and was racing toward him.