“How horrible it must have been,” Iome said, as if this were something that had happened long ago.
Averan shook her head. “No, how horrible it must be. They’re still down here.”
It was heartbreaking news. Gaborn had imagined that Averan’s mind was a vast cave, full of treasures waiting to be brought to light. But now he found it full of bones and horror. “Do you know where they are?” Gaborn asked. “Can you show me the way?” On top of all his other impossible tasks, he’d have to find these people, bring them up from their prison, if he could.
“At the bottom,” Averan said. “Near the Lair of Bones.”
Gaborn inhaled deeply. He was finding it hard to breathe in this tight space. At first he’d thought that an outpost like this might be a good place to camp, but now he knew that he could never rest in this one, not with the hollow eyes of the child watching him. He felt guilty for being alive, when so many others were dead. He felt guilty for wanting life, when his earth senses warned that so many were about to die.
“Let’s go,” Gaborn said. His group had not ventured more than ten miles past the old outpost when Gaborn halted his horse, peered up the road, and said, “There is danger is here—not far ahead.”
5
The Shivering World
A well-bred lady must be prepared in all things. It is not enough to simply excel at needlepoint. She must also be equipped to lead a nation. She should know how to gossip effectively, barter for mercenaries, plan a feast, skewer an assassin, comfort a sick child, and lead a cavalry charge.
Iome’s nerves felt jittery and her stomach tightened. She’d known that she would find reavers in the Underworld, but she hadn’t wanted to find them soon.
For the past seventy miles the reaver tunnel had been almost featureless, a dull thoroughfare through the Underworld made interesting only by an occasional blind-crab or great-worm. The drab stones offered little variation in color. But suddenly the path ahead opened up into a natural cave whose ceiling rose hundreds of feet in the air. The sound of rushing water thundered in the distance, and nearby Iome could hear it trickling along the walls, dripping from stalactites. The tunnels ahead were covered with white calcite that gleamed like quartz, and the reavers had pummeled it under their feet, so that their trail looked as if it were strewn with bright glass, or bits of stars. The keen scent of sulfur water filled the air.
“The reavers like the pools here,” Averan said. “It’s the last drinking water before they leave the Underworld.”
“They’re here,” Gaborn said, nodding with certainty. “Up the road a ways. I feel the danger rising.”
Iome had watched men battle reavers from afar, but had never fought one herself. The green woman, Binnesman’s wylde, rose up in her stirrups, sniffing the air like a hound, peering ahead.
“Do you smell reavers?” Averan asked her.
The green woman shook her head. “No.”
Gaborn looked to Averan for counsel.
“There could be guards posted ahead,” Averan said. “They might have buried themselves.”
You would never have any warning before they got you, Iome thought.
“I’ll take the lead,” Gaborn said. With his Earth Sight, Gaborn was the only one who could travel this path with any degree of safety.
They rode on.
Iome’s senses were alert. As she rode, she held her opals up and lit the cavern perhaps more brightly than it had ever been lit before. The walls glittered like frosting in shades of honey and ivory. Warm sulfur water trickled and dripped over every surface, and over the ages it had built up deposits of stone in grotesque shapes. Stalagmites squatted like gargoyles on the cave floor while tubular stalactites hung overhead, twisting in serpentine fashion. Along both sides of the path, shallow green pools lay with steam curling up from their surfaces. Myriad reaver tracks deeply imprinted the mud of every pool.
Plant life was sparse, but feather ferns hung from crevasses near the roof. Something large, the size of an eagle, flitted overhead and circled a stalactite.
“Gree hawk!” Binnesman shouted.
Gaborn reined his horse and pulled out his sword, eyeing the creature as it circled twice more. In some ways, it resembled an enormous bat. But it had a head like a reaver’s—blind, broad, heavily toothed, with frills of philia sweeping off its jaw and in a ridge along the back.
To Iome, with her six endowments of metabolism, the gree hawk did not seem to present much of a threat, but to a commoner it would have seemed to be flitting about at lightning speed.
Iome asked, “Will it attack?”
“They mostly eat gree,” Binnesman said. “But if they are hungry, and if they are presented with an easy meal in the way of a lone traveler, they may attack.”
Gaborn eyed the gree hawk. It wheeled near the roof of the cave for a moment, then landed back in a dark corner, near some red feather ferns. The ferns all snaked back from the creature, withdrawing into recesses in the wall so that in moments there was no sign of the ferns at all, merely the small holes into which they had fled.
Gaborn led the way. For three miles the trail followed the line of pools, and Iome saw a host of intersecting tunnels running here and there to unknown destinations.
Averan kept to the straight path, and soon there was a huge rumbling sound, an incessant thunder—water tumbling over rocks. Gaborn halted the group again, seemed leery of the path ahead. He sniffed the air.
Iome rose in her stirrups. She had no endowments of scent from dogs to aid her, and the only smell she could detect in the air was the sulfur water. Ahead, just around a bend, a waterfall seemed to be cascading over the stones. The water breaking on the rocks caused the whole cave to tremble.
Yet as Iome listened, she realized that something strange was happening. The rumbling was growing stronger.
“Flee!” Gaborn shouted. He began wheeling his mount around, and for a moment everyone struggled to keep up.
“Earthquake!” Iome warned, for she had felt that same rumbling two days past, when a quake humbled the Courts of Tide.
“No,” Gaborn shouted. “Reavers are coming!”
How many reavers would it take to make the earth grumble like this? Iome wondered. Yet she knew the answer. She had heard a similar thundering across the plains at Carris.
Iome and the green woman were at the back of the group. Iome wheeled her mount as best she could, raced back the way she had come, but Binnesman’s mount surged ahead of hers.
What are we to do? she wondered. Our horses can outrun them, but to what end? The reavers will only chase us back up the tunnel.
Iome raced past one path that branched to the right, but when she reached a second that climbed a steep hill and then disappeared into another passageway, Gaborn shouted, “That way! To the left!”
Iome spurred her charger uphill. It would have been too steep for a normal mount, and even with endowments of brawn and metabolism her horse struggled up the incline, floundering once so that she thought that they would go tumbling back downhill. But the beast got its feet under it and surged up into the opening. A path opened ahead of Iome—stalagmites rose up all around like ogres. It was a forbidding landscape.
“Not this way!” Averan shouted when she reached the summit. “The Waymaker knew this path. It comes to a dead end a few miles up the trail!”
“Yes, this way!” Gaborn argued. His own mount had just lunged to the top of the hill. “Hide!”