Binnesman offered, “Here, let’s hitch up my mount.”
The wagon came to a complete halt as the wizard got off his horse and unsaddled it.
Averan sneaked a peek upward. Overhead, stars arced through the heavens as if intent upon washing the earth in light. The sun would not crest the horizon for perhaps an hour, yet light spilled like molten gold over the snowy peaks of the Alcair Mountains. To Averan it seemed that the light was sourceless, as if it suffused from another, finer world.
The heavenly display fooled even the animals. Morning birdsong swelled over the land: the throaty coo of the wood dove, the song of the lark, the jealous squawk of a magpie.
Close by, knobby hills crowded the road and the dry wheat growing along their sides reflected the starlight. Leafless oaks on the slopes stood black and stark, like thorny crowns. A burrow owl screeched in the distance. Faintly, Averan could smell water from a small stream, though she could not hear it burble.
She watched the steady rain of stars. The bits of light came arcing down in different directions, creating fiery paths against the sky.
“So, Averan is well?” Binnesman asked softly.
“It was hard for her,” Gaborn answered. “She stood before the Waymaker all day, holding her staff overhead, peering into the monster’s mind. Sweat poured from her as if she were toiling at a forge. I was afraid for her.”
“And has she learned the way to, to this...Lair of Bones?”
“Aye,” Gaborn said. “But I fear that the lair is far in the Underworld, and Averan cannot describe the path. She will have to lead us—that is, if you will come with me.”
“If?” Binnesman asked. “Of course I’ll come.”
“Good,” Gaborn said. “I’ll need your counsel. I don’t want to put too much burden on a girl so young.”
Averan closed her eyes, feigning sleep, and took guilty pleasure in listening to them talk about her. She was but a child, yet in all the world she was the only person who had ever learned to converse with reavers, mankind’s most feared enemy.
Gaborn had recognized that she went through an ordeal to see into the mind of the Waymaker, but even he could not guess how painful it had been. Her head ached as if a steel band bound it, and she felt as if her skull might split on its own accord. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of scents crammed her mind—scents that gave her the names of places and passages in the Underworld, scents that in some cases had been handed down from reaver to reaver over generations. In her mind’s eye, Averan could envision the reaver tunnels in the Underworld, like vast arteries connecting the warrens. There were tens of thousands of tunnels, leading to mines and quarries, to ranches and hunting grounds, to egg chambers and graveyards, to deadly perils and ancient wonders. Given a lifetime, Averan could not have mapped the Underworld for Gaborn.
Even now, she feared that she could not retain so much lore. The brain of a human is a tenth the size of that of a reaver. Her mind couldn’t hold so much knowledge. She only hoped that she could recall the way to the Lair of Bones.
I have to remember, Averan told herself. I have to help Gaborn fight the One True Master.
She heard footsteps crunching on the road and tried to breathe easily. She wanted to rest, and hoped that by feigning sleep she could continue to do so.
Binnesman set his saddle in the back of the wagon. “Poor girl,” he said. “Look at her, innocent as a babe.”
“Let her sleep,” Gaborn whispered. He spoke softly, not with the commanding voice one would expect from a king, but with the gentleness of a worried friend.
Binnesman moved away, and wordlessly began hitching the horse to the single-tree on the wagon.
“Have you any other news of the reavers?” Gaborn whispered.
“Aye,” Binnesman said, “Most of it good. We harried them all day. Many of the monsters died from weariness while fleeing our lancers, and our knights attacked any that slowed. At last report there were only a few thousand left. But when they reached the vale of the Drakesflood, they dug into the sand. That was about midafternoon. Our men have them surrounded, in case they try to flee, but for now there is little more that they can do.”
Averan pictured the monsters at the Drakesflood. The reavers were enormous, each more than sixteen feet tall, and twenty in length. With four legs and two huge forearms, in form they looked like vast, tailless scorpions. But their heads were shaped like spades, and the reavers could force their way under the soil just by pushing down and then crawling forward. That is how they would have dug in at the Drakesflood. The move would afford them good protection from the lances of the knights.
“So that’s the good news,” Gaborn said heavily, “now what of the bad?”
Binnesman answered, “At the Mouth of the World we found reaver tracks heading in. It looks as if three reavers circled through the hills after the battle at Carris. Somehow they got past our scouts.”
“By the Seven Stones!” Gaborn swore. “How soon before they reach their lair, do you think?”
“It’s impossible to guess,” Binnesman said heavily. “They may have already told their master how you defeated their army at Carris, and even now she will be considering how to respond.”
Binnesman let that thought sink in.
“But how did they elude my scouts?” Gaborn wondered.
“I suspect that it would have been easy,” Binnesman answered. “After the battle at Carris, the horde fled in the night while rain plummeted like lead. We had only brief flashes of lightning to see by. With our soldiers busy at the front, they left before we ever thought to try to cut them off.”
Binnesman and Gaborn hooked the horse to the wagon, and both men climbed onto the buckboard. Gaborn gave a whistle, and the force horse took off at a brisk trot.
“This has me worried,” Gaborn said.
Binnesman seemed to think for a long moment. At last he sighed. “Beware the Lair of Bones. Beware the One True Master. My heart is full of foreboding about this creature. No beast of this world could be so well versed in rune lore.”
“You suspect something?” Gaborn asked.
“Seventeen hundred years ago, when Erden Geboren prosecuted his war in the Underworld, do you know what he fought?”
“Reavers,” Gaborn said.
“That is the conventional wisdom, but I think not,” Binnesman answered. “In King Sylvarresta’s library are some ancient scrolls, levies for men and supplies written in Erden Geboren’s own hand. In them, he asked for men not to fight reavers but to fight something he called a locus. I think he was hunting for a particular reaver. It may even be the one that Averan calls the One True Master, though I cannot imagine that any reaver would live so long.”
“And you think that this creature is not of our world?”
“Perhaps not,” Binnesman said. “I begin to wonder. Maybe there are reavers in the netherworld, more cunning and powerful than our own. And perhaps reavers here are but mere shadows of them, in the same way that we are mere shadows of the Bright Ones of that realm.”
“That is a sobering thought indeed,” Gaborn said.
The wizard and the Earth King rode in silence. Averan lay back again, eyes closed. Her mind felt overwhelmed.
The road had been leading down, and abruptly Gaborn jolted the wagon to a halt. Averan stealthily rose up on one elbow, and saw that they had reached a town, a small knot of gray stone cottages with thatched roofs. Averan recognized it as Chesterton. Here the road forked. One highway headed almost due east toward the Courts of Tide. The other road went southwest toward Keep Haberd—and beyond that, to the Mouth of the World.
Overhead, a fireball lanced through the sky, huge and red. Flames streaked from it with a sputtering sound. As it neared the Alcair Mountains, it suddenly exploded into two pieces. They struck the snow-covered mountains not thirty miles away. The ground trembled, and moments later came sounds like distant thunder, echoing over and over.