Averan lay limp in the Consort’s huge paw, rejoicing in the fact that he was holding her gingerly, and she feigned sleep. She tried to keep a loose contact with his mind, to learn what she could. But the Consort of Shadows seemed to run almost as if in a trance. He did not speak, did not think. His mind had become as eerie and as quiet as a tomb.
She hoped that he’d put her down again soon, give her a chance to escape.
The Consort of Shadows stopped for a moment and opened a stone door that led into a broader corridor. This tunnel was perhaps sixty feet wide, and the floor was rutted from use by reavers. He closed the door behind him, as he had all of the others. Her captor passed some scent markers, and Averan suddenly realized where she was: nearing the Lair of Bones. She was already inside the Unbounded Warren.
Time and again now she saw tunnels branch off, other reavers ambling about. She saw some howlers—blotchy yellow creatures like enormous spiders—coming out of one tunnel, dragging the squirming carcass of an eighty-foot worm behind them. She saw glue mums spitting out mucilage as they shored up a damaged wall. She saw young reavers, no more than ten feet tall, trundling behind a matron.
What she did not see were blade-bearers or sorceresses, the guardians of the lair.
They had all gone to war.
Suddenly the Consort of Shadows turned at a side tunnel. Averan spotted a pair of blade-bearers standing at guard. Both of them were enormous, with glowing runes branded into their heads and arms.
Inside the chamber beyond, Averan could smell the stench of human bodies, filthy and diseased.
“Take care with this one,” the Consort of Shadows told the guards.
“It shall not escape,” the guards said.
The Consort of Shadows trundled deeper into the tunnel, and Averan, with her endowments of scent from more than a dozen dogs, found the reek of filthy humans to be more unbearable with each passing step. She smelled the odor of sour sweat mingled with piles of feces and pools of urine, and the rot of infected flesh, fish guts, and unburied dead.
For the first time in hours, the Consort of Shadows seemed to come out of his reverie. The monster’s stomach churned in disgust at the scent.
He hates it in here, Averan realized. All of the reavers hate being here. The stink is too much for them.
The Consort of Shadows reached the middle of the large chamber and tossed Averan to the floor. Averan heard a woman cry out from a far corner, half in fear, half in wonder, and then the Consort of Shadows turned and was gone.
Averan lay in a heap for a moment, peering around. The cavern was not huge. The mucilage on the walls was eroding away, so that bare rock showed in some places. Stalactites hung from the roof, and the floor was uneven. The scent of sulfur water came from a nearby pool.
In the far corners of the room, people huddled. They were mere humps on the floor, their clothes so grimy that they had taken on the hues of the dirt. Only their eyes could be seen through masks of grime, eyes wide with wonder. Gradually, Averan began to make out more features: here a face so pale it looked like an Inkarran boy, there the leathery brown of an Indhopalese woman.
The more Averan peered about, the more she realized that all of the humps around her were people. Sick people, starving people, wounded people, but alive.
“Light!” an old man cried. “Wondrous light!”
And someone echoed his sentiment in Indhopalese, “Azir! Azir famata!”
The humps began to move, and people rushed toward her on hands and knees. Averan realized that, deprived of light, most of them had probably been scurrying about like this for weeks or months.
“Who are you, Light-Bringer?” a woman called, pleading. “Where do you hail from?”
“Averan. My name is Averan. I was the king’s skyrider at Keep Haberd.”
“Keep Haberd?” a man asked, a mere skeleton. “I am from Keep Haberd. Can you tell me how it fares?”
Averan didn’t dare tell him that the reavers had killed everyone. The fellow scuttled toward her, along with the others, until they pressed about her, their stinking flesh overwhelming, their eyes wide with wonder at sight of her glowing ring. The skeletal fellow reached up to paw it, stroke it gingerly. Soon twenty dirty folk surrounded her, fawning.
“See how it shines!” a woman cried, reaching to stroke Averan’s ring, but not daring to, “like a star fallen from heaven.”
“Nay, no star was ever so filled with luster,” another insisted.
“What year is it?” a man demanded, as if he were some captain among the king’s guard.
“Year one of the reign of Gaborn Val Orden in Mystarria,” Averan answered, “who followed on the heels of his father, Mendellas Draken Orden, who died in the twenty-second year of his reign.”
“Five years,” an elderly man said in a thick Indhopalese accent. “Five years since last I saw light.”
“Ten for me,” a sickly fellow croaked.
For a moment, there was silence, and the prisoners in this dark place looked about at one another.
“Gavin, where are you?” a young woman asked.
“Here,” a man said from a few feet away.
The two of them stopped and gazed at each other in wonder, with love shining in their eyes. Everyone fell silent. The woman began to weep.
These folks have never seen each other before, Averan realized. How would it be to live here in darkness for years, never having seen the face of a friend?
The lost souls wore rags, if they wore anything at all, and several of them seemed to have had more than one broken bone or game leg. The reavers that imprisoned them had not been kind.
Near a far wall lay a pile of bones, both fish and human. Beyond that, Averan could see no sign of food. She asked, “How—how do you live down here?”
“We don’t live,” the Indhopalese man answered. “We just die as slowly as we can.”
15
Forms of War
Every group of people develops many words for those things that concern them most. In Internook, men have seven words for ice. In Indhopalese, there are six different words for starvation. In Inkarra, there are eighty-two words for war.
The Inkarrans held Sir Borenson and Myrrima prisoner at the mountain fortress until it was nearly dark. The Inkarrans took their weapons and placed both of them in manacles. The fortress seemed to hold about twenty soldiers, none of whom wanted to go outside during daylight, where the glare on the white snow all but blinded them. So the westering sun was barely riding above the clouds as they marched into Inkarra.
They could not ride horses. Inkarrans rarely rode them at all, and certainly wouldn’t be able to do so tonight. The trail plunged down the mountain slopes through thickets and rock, then dove into the mists and trees. The combination of darkness, shadow, and fog would make riding impossible. So Borenson’s fine horses were left at the fortress.
Still, all of the party had endowments of metabolism. Shackled at the wrists, Borenson and Myrrima nearly raced downhill in the twilight, making good use of the last of the sun’s rays.
The party made good time in spite of the suddenly rather unbearable mixture of heat and humidity. In the late afternoon, the mists rising up the forested slopes felt as warm as a gentle steam.
By nightfall they were heading down steep mountain roads. The warmer climate here gave rise to vastly different flora and fauna than what was found north of the mountains. There were pines, but they were taller than any trees that Borenson had ever seen, and their bark was a dark red instead of gray. There were birds here, too, but these dusky magpies had longer necks than their northern cousins, and their raucous cries sounded alien to his ears. Everywhere, he saw strange lizards scurrying about—racing beneath ferns, hopping off rocks, leaping from tree branches to sail into the shadows on leathery wings.