Iome shook with fear as Gaborn held her. She peered into the darkness, her eyes unfocused.
Gaborn asked Iome, “How long will it take you to translate the rest of Erden Geboren’s book?”
“I don’t know,” Iome said. “It’s slow going. I could do it in a week, maybe.”
“I don’t need it all,” Gaborn said. “Just...tell me everything he says about the loci and the One True Master.”
Gaborn drained his flagon. It was water that they had taken from the pools at Abyss Gate, and it tasted strongly of minerals. He drank deeply, then sat for a moment. There was absolute silence, a silence so deep that it seemed to penetrate the bones. The distant pounding of reaver’s feet was gone. He had heard it when they looked over the spot where Averan was captured. When had it gone silent?
Aboveground it never grew this quiet. There was always a jay squawking, or the rush of wind through trees, or the bawl of sheep in a distant meadow. Here, there was nothing.
It overwhelmed him. It was as if the earth loomed above him, a sky of stone and iron, waiting to fall. He could smell it all around, the mineral tang.
It feels like a thunderstorm, Gaborn thought. That was the closest thing to it, like on a summer evening when the air grew heavy and the clouds slogged over the horizon, as black as slate. All of the animals would fall perfectly silent and hide. Even the flies quit buzzing.
That’s how quiet it was now, only deeper. It penetrated the skin and made the hair prickle nervously on the back of his arms. Ahead and behind there was only night so deep that he had never felt the like of it.
We’re in a wilderness, Gaborn realized, far, far from any human habitation.
He reached out with his Earth senses, then sighed heavily, looked at Iome. “Averan keeps moving. I suspect that we’ve run a hundred miles and we could have gone no faster, but my Earth Senses warn that Averan is far ahead.” He paused, as if considering what to say next. “There are reavers between us and her, I think. I sense danger.” He did not tell her how great the danger was. He couldn’t quite express it. It was as if there was a wall between them and Averan, a wall of death. Gaborn might make it, but could Iome?
Iome shook her head in near defeat.
Gaborn beat at the door for a bit, knocking off flakes now and then. When he grew fatigued, Gaborn let Iome work as he mended his shoe and put a new leather grip around Erden Geboren’s ancient reaver dart.
After only a few turns at the wall, Iome broke through. She sighed and nodded down the tunnel. “They’re up there waiting for us, aren’t they—the reavers? I can see it in your face.”
“Aye,” Gaborn said.
“Well then,” Iome said, climbing to her feet with the help of Averan’s staff of black poisonwood. “Let’s go make trouble.”
14
The Light-Bringer
After seventeen years of prosecuting this war underground, one might think that my men would most crave fresh air, clean water, good food, or the company of a woman. But no, we are beginning to learn how desperately a man can crave light.
The Consort of Shadows raced through the Underworld, its feet thundering over stone. Averan floated in and out of consciousness, struggling for breath.
She opened her eyes. The tunnels were a blur. The mucilage seals had begun to erode. Shadows of twisted stalagmites, like deformed giants, lumbered forward in the small light thrown by her opal, then were swallowed again by the darkness.
The reaver grasped her firmly to make sure that she didn’t escape, much as Averan had held lizards and frogs as a child. The more she had fought, the harder the monster gripped her.
So she faded back to sleep until she jolted awake. The Consort of Shadows had just leapt a fifty-foot cliff and was racing through a maze of stalagmites. As he did, he cupped Averan close to his chest.
He doesn’t want to kill me, she realized. He’s trying to keep me alive. The best thing I can do is to go limp.
She wasn’t sure that he was being tender enough to keep her alive. The skin of his massive paw was as thick as a bolster and as tough as scale mail. His three fingers were so wide that they enveloped Averan’s body from shoulder to heel. With every step he took, the monster dealt out a jolt. Averan felt sure that she was covered with bruises.
Powerless before the beast, Averan dazedly watched the scenery go by. She had no idea how long the Consort of Shadows had been carrying her, but he ran at a tremendous speed.
A fold of reaver’s skin was pushing against Averan’s ribs. She wasn’t sure if she dared try to move, lest the monster grasp her tighter.
She could think of only one thing to do. She cleared her mind, as Binnesman had taught her, and imagined the Consort of Shadows. She envisioned his great, spade-shaped head, as she’d seen it when he rose black from the waters, and she imagined how his philia quivered as he studied his prey. She imagined the feel of his feet as they struck the stone of the tunnel floor, and the sense of purpose he felt as he raced on and on. Soon her mind did a little flip, and she saw, the world through the “eyes” of the reaver.
He registered the force electric in the rocks around him as ghostly blue images, almost as if they were a fog. Plants and animals along the path were much brighter. Blind-crabs scurried from his path, blazing like stars in his field of view.
The path ahead was marked with old reaver scent. Even if it hadn’t been, the Consort of Shadows knew it well. He had hunted in the barrens most of his life.
“Where are you taking me?” Averan asked.
The Consort of Shadows jolted to a halt. He held Averan up to study her, and his philia waved.
“Are you speaking?” the reaver asked. She could feel wariness in the monster, “Or am I worm dreaming?”
“Yes, I can speak,” Averan said.
She felt a fleeting question. “Is this how humans talk to one another?”
“No,” Averan said. “I am a wizardess, a protector of the Earth. I can speak to your mind. But most people don’t talk like this.”
A memory came to the Consort of Shadows. There had been an Earth Warden among the reavers. The Consort’s ancestor had murdered the wizard in a grim battle, and the Consort had later eaten the ancestor’s brain.
“Your grandfather killed an Earth Warden!” Averan said. “I see it in your mind.”
“The One True Master ordered his death.”
Averan saw snatches of the battle unfold in the memory of the Consort of Shadows. The Consort’s grandfather had crept up behind the wizard, leapt on him and ripped off his forelegs. Once the Earth Warden was helpless, his attacker brutally pried apart the three bone-plates on the wizard’s head while he still lived, to torture him until the very last moment, when he scooped out the wizard’s brains. Now the Consort of Shadows held some of the wizard’s memories.
“That’s horrible,” Averan said.
“Proud was my ancestor to have done this deed,” the Consort of Shadows said.
He boasted, but Averan saw that the monster tried to hide more uncomfortable feelings. The memories of an Earth Warden lived inside him.
True, the Consort of Shadows hungered for human flesh. But he also sensed something that other reavers could not. Men were creatures of the Earth, too, beloved by their Creator. They were as valued by the Earth as reavers and blind-crabs, as world worms and tickle fern.
“Where are you taking me?” Averan asked once again.
“A place for humans,” the Consort of Shadows replied. A scent came into his mind, the stench of unwashed people huddled in a dark cavern, the air redolent with the stink of urine and feces. Keeper had also known of the place. It was a cell where the One True Master experimented on people, testing her new spells. Dread knotted Averan’s stomach.
“Your master will kill me there,” Averan said.