Averan was alive for the moment, but he sensed death advancing toward her. The reaver is taking her home for some reason, Gaborn decided.
He felt lost. He’d brought Binnesman and Averan down into this damned hole to guide him, and now he was stripped of both their counsels.
“Is it possible,” Iome asked hopefully, “that the reaver isn’t taking her anywhere? Averan is a wizardess. She summoned the Waymaker yesterday, and held it for hours. Maybe she’s controlling it.”
“No, I don’t think she’s in control,” Gaborn said. “The Waymaker was almost dead from fatigue, and she had her staff to help her. If she were controlling this monster, I think she’d bring it back to us. I only know that she’s alive for now, and she is the only one who can lead us. We have to find her.”
Gaborn held up his light, revealing the path ahead. The land bridge spanned perhaps forty yards, and there he could see the beginnings of a reaver tunnel. The walls were sealed with mucilage, and bonelike pillars supported the roof. Gaborn ventured, “I can track Averan. Her scent is everywhere.”
He stood for a moment, uncertain.
“What’s wrong?” Iome asked.
“I think we are in for a long chase, with a fight at the end of it,” Gaborn said. He turned back to Iome. She stood on the far side of the tangler vine. “Use Averan’s staff to vault over,” he said.
Iome took half a minute to build up her courage, then ran a step, using a rock as a stair, and leapt. With all of her endowments, her jump carried her fifteen feet in the air, and eighty feet in distance.
And then they were off. They did not walk or even jog. Gaborn sprinted, and Iome hurried after him.
He found that his recent meal refreshed him like a feast, invigorating both mind and spirit. Worry over Averan weighed on him, but with the nourishment, it seemed as if the fog had lifted a bit.
So they ran. Scrambling through the reaver tunnel wasn’t easy. Gaborn found that as he sped, odd things happened to his body. His own sense of movement told him that he was going no faster than normal, but he could not round a sharp corner with ease, since his forward motion tended to throw him off course. Thus, he had to lean into his turns at what seemed an unnatural angle. In some ways it was much like riding a force horse.
He also had to pay attention to his footing on the rocky, uneven trail. There was the constant hazard of tripping or twisting an ankle on stone, though plants grew over the path. Wormgrass and molds vied for control of the rocky walls. Rootlike bushes hung from the roof, yellow and white tendrils often cascading down like frozen waterfalls. Sometimes they formed curtains, barring the way, and only the fact that a huge reaver had passed through, ripping the foliage down, had cleared the path at all. In many places, seepage dampened the cave. Black hairlike moss grew beside the water, with golden drops of sap in it, while rubbery plants sprouted tiny brown pods the size of cherries. Gaborn found both to be particularly hazardous. The moss was slippery, while the pods could roll beneath his feet.
Added to these difficulties was the lack of light. The coruscating glow from their opals seemed bright when one stood still. But when he ran fifty miles per hour, Gaborn needed time to choose where to put his feet, to decide whether to speed up or slow down or to leap over a bit of tangle root or pick his way through it. Most important, he had to remain alert for new dangers.
More than once he found himself running headlong into a lumbering crevasse crawler or giant blind-crab, and would have to dodge around it.
Thus, even with endowments of sight, he squinted into the gloom, watching at the limit of vision.
Once, he sensed that he was winning the race, that Averan was only a mile or so ahead. But he and Iome rounded a corner and found their path blocked by a huge stone.
The reavers had constructed a door. The door seemed to have been carved from the rock itself, for it rested on a stone hinge that hung from the ceiling. The panel appeared to be three feet through the center. By pushing at the bottom, Gaborn discovered that the door wouldn’t budge.
It had been locked.
He beat against it in frustration, and then he and Iome went to work. Using shards of rock from nearby, they hammered and chiseled through the bottom of the door, a process that took what seemed like hours.
Gaborn felt weary by the time they started on the trail again, and Averan had been carried far, far away.
There was no sun or moon to track the turning of the earth. There was only darkness fleeing from the light of their opals, returning to reclaim all they left behind as they raced along.
The trail wound, tunneling through veins of soft rock, twisting through boulders, sometimes taking odd turns for reasons that only reavers would understand.
But always the trail sloped down.
Gaborn measured time by the pounding of his feet, by the gasping of his breath, by the waves of sweat that trickled down his cheeks. The heat and humidity began to soar as the miles receded.
Sometimes they reached side tunnels or shafts that rose like chimneys. Each time they did, Gaborn would stop and sniff at every passage, checking for Averan’s scent.
They spoke little. Gaborn found himself alone with his thoughts, and he found himself wondering at the book that Iome carried in her pack: Erden Geboren’s tome.
Had he really been searching for the One True Master? And if so, what was it?
Two days ago when Averan first mentioned the creature, Binnesman had seemed confused. He’d asked, “Are you sure that it is a reaver?”
Averan had been sure. But now Gaborn wondered. What exactly was a locus? He felt that his Earth Sight was failing him. Binnesman had said that it was because he was still asking the wrong questions. Perhaps once Gaborn understood his enemy better, he’d know how to fight it.
He felt sure that the book would tell more, but Iome couldn’t read and run at the same time.
Indeed, they reached a tunnel that slanted steeply down, and found that the tickle fern was gone, trampled. The ground lay in waste. Reavers frequented this trail.
A second door confronted them.
Gaborn called a halt. “I’ll hammer away at the door. You should get some food. If you can spare a moment, I’d like you to read to me.”
He reached into his pack, pulled out some apples and a flask of water. He took a bite of apple, picked up the nearest stone, and began hammering at the door.
Iome munched her own apple as she sat down to read. Alnycian was not an easy language, Gaborn knew. It had been dead for hundreds of years, and most scholars spoke the most recent variety, but Erden Geboren had written back when the tongue was still vibrant. Thus, his spellings, word choice, and grammar would all lie outside the norm.
Iome opened the book, skimmed through.
“Tell me as soon as you find anything interesting,” Gaborn said.
Still huffing from the long run, Iome said, “Erden Geboren begins by summing up his early life in a few sentences. He was a swineherd in the Hills of Tomb, until the Earth Spirit called him. Then he tells how he met the Wizard Sendavian, who guided him and Daylan Slaughter—that must have been Daylan’s name before he won the Black Hammer—upon ‘paths of air and green flame’ to the netherworld.”
This was all the stuff of legend. Iome didn’t bother to go into detail. Then she said, “But once he gets to the netherworld, he suddenly changes the style of his book. He begins inserting subtitles, breaking it into chapters.”
“See if you can find anything about the locus,” Gaborn suggested.
Iome skimmed down the headings silently for a minute, flipping a dozen pages of text, until she said, “Here’s something: ‘Upon Meeting a Locus.’ I’ll try to translate it into a more modern style.”
“ ‘The locus was an most hideous creature. The Bright Ones kept it locked within a cage, hidden in a green glade in a narrow box canyon. It was a difficult journey to reach it, and the monster beat its wings against its prison bars wildly as we approached. The wings had black feathers and a span of perhaps thirty feet. The creature itself had a form somewhat like a man’s, with stubby legs and long arms that ended in cruel talons. But there was a blackness about the beast that defied the eye. Squint as I might, I could not pierce the depths of its cage. It was as if the monster absorbed the light around it, or perhaps bent it, wearing it like a black robe. Air circled the beast, swirling about, carrying with it the scent of rot. Rather than seeing the creature clearly, I got only a vague impression of sharp fangs, cruel talons, and glaring eyes.’ ”