For a long moment, she held him. Then she kissed him once on the forehead, once on the lips, and once on each hand.
“Go now,” Iome said. “I can’t keep up with you any longer. I’d only slow you down. I’ll follow as best I can. Mark the trail for me.”
Gaborn nodded heavily, then peered at her. “May I have Averan’s staff? She’ll need it when I find her.”
Iome handed him the simple staff of black poisonwood. Gaborn felt in his heart, considering the path ahead. Yes, the wall of death awaited him just a few miles up the tunnel.
I’ll either clear a path for Iome, Gaborn thought, or die in the attempt.
Gaborn held Iome for a long moment, and whispered into her ear. “I love you. I forgive you.”
He turned and raced down the tunnel, redoubling his pace, becoming smaller and smaller. For a moment he looked the size of a young man, and then a boy, and then a toddler, until at last he turned round a bend and was gone altogether.
17
The Bone Man
Even in the driest desert, a flower sometimes blooms.
Averan was in the fetid prison where lost souls huddled around her in the blackness, drawn to the light of her ring like moths. They were staring at the gem, at her.
Averan tried to sit up but fell back in a swoon. Her head spun and sweat streamed from every pore.
“Get her some water,” one shaggy old man said. Soon, a half-naked girl brought water in her cupped hands, and gave Averan a drink.
“There’s more blindfish in the stream,” the girl reported.
“Fish?” Averan asked.
Barris said, “Fish. It’s about all that we have to eat. There’s a river that runs underground, and the fish swim up through it. We have no fire to cook them with, and they taste like rancid oil and sulfur. But if you pick through the spines and the bones, there’s meat on them.”
Averan’s stomach churned at the thought. She still had her pack on. “There’s supplies in my bags,” she told the group. “Apples and onions, cheeses, nuts and dried berries. It isn’t much, but split it among yourselves.”
No one moved to touch her pack until Averan pulled it off her own back and handed out the food. There wasn’t much, enough for each person to have an apple or a handful of nuts. Yet the folk seemed greatly touched by the gesture, and Averan heard one man weep in gratitude as he bit into an onion.
There was a long silence, and one old man, his face lined with wrinkles and gray in his hair, asked, “You was saying that you hail from Keep Haberd?”
“Aye,” Averan admitted.
“I’m from there,” he said. “But I don’t remember much anymore. I try to imagine grass or sunlight, and I can’t. There were people that I knew, but their faces...”
Averan didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to admit that Keep Haberd had been destroyed, its walls knocked down by reavers, its people slaughtered and eaten. Everyone that this old fellow had known would be dead. “Do you have a last name?”
“Weeks, Averan Weeks.”
“Oh,” the fellow said. “Then you must know of Faldon Weeks?”
“That was my father’s name,” Averan said. “You knew him?”
“I knew him well,” the old fellow said. “He was a prisoner here, captured in the same battle as me. I remember that he was married to a small woman whose smile could light the stars at night. But I don’t remember a daughter.”
“He was here?” Averan asked, disbelieving. She had been told that reavers had eaten him. She had never guessed that he might have been carried down here.
“He always dreamed of going home,” the old fellow said. “But he could not hold on forever. Even with endowments, none of us can hold on forever. And now our endowments have been taken. He succumbed within the very hour that it happened.”
Averan peered into the fellow’s face. Here was someone who had known her father. The man was little more than bones with a bit of skin draped over him. He was so thin that his eyes seemed to bulge in their sockets. His only clothing was a scrap of dirty gray cloth tied around his loins. He looked as if he might expire at any moment.
With sudden certainty, Averan realized what had happened. Raj Ahten had killed the Dedicates at the Blue Tower. When he’d done it, Averan had lost her own endowments, and had grown so weak that she thought that she would die. How much worse would it have been if she’d been a prisoner down here, with nothing but an endowment or two of stamina to sustain her?
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she began to shudder, as if she would collapse. “My father is here?”
“Yes,” the old fellow said. He pointed back to a far wall, where white bones glistened wetly, and blind-crabs still scuttled about the remains. “But there is nothing left of him.”
Ten years, Averan thought. Ten years he’d been down here, and she had missed meeting him by only a week.
Bitterly, Averan cursed the reavers that had brought them here, and wished them all dead.
She found herself sobbing. The old man reached out timidly, as if begging permission to comfort her, and she grasped him around the neck, hugging him.
These could have been my father’s bones, Averan thought. This could have been the smell of his unwashed neck.
A sullen rage grew in her, and she swore to take revenge.
18
An Unexpected Party
There is no surer refuge than a close friend.
“Hide underground tonight!” Uncle Eber told Chemoise as he came in the door that morning, bringing home from the village a pail of fresh milk and a loaf of bread. “That’s what the Earth King said to do. Hide underground. I just heard it in town from the king’s messenger.”
Chemoise looked up from the breakfast table. She was at her uncle’s estate in the village of Ableton, far in the north of Heredon. Her aunt had just finished cooking some sausages and had asked her to sit until Eber got home. And grandmother sat in her rocker before the fireplace, deaf as a doorpost and half-blind as well.
“Why did he send messengers?” Chemoise asked. “He could have just told us that we are in danger.”
“I...don’t know,” Eber said. “He’s off way down in Mystarria. Maybe the Earth King’s warnings won’t carry so far. Or perhaps he wanted to be sure that everyone was forewarned, not just his Chosen.”
Chemoise looked around the room with a rising sense of panic. It was early in her pregnancy, but for the past few days, the very mention of breakfast had made her too ill to eat. She was beginning to feel that sense of fragility that often accompanies gestation. So coming down for breakfast had given her a sense of accomplishment.
Now this. “Underground?” she asked. “Why?”
“I’ll bet it’s the stars,” her aunt Constance offered. “They’ve been falling every night, each night worse than the night before!”
Chemoise’s heart skipped a beat. She knew little of such things. She’d heard of men mining iron from fallen stars, and so she imagined that perhaps it would rain down like grapeshot from a catapult. But that couldn’t be right. Falling stars were hot. The stars wouldn’t be like grapeshot; they’d be more like fire raining from the skies, fire and molten iron. After last night’s meteor showers, with the fireballs roaring through the heavens, it wasn’t hard to imagine such a thing.
Uncle Eber shot Constance a furtive look, warning her to be quiet. He didn’t want to trouble Chemoise with wild speculations about what might happen. That look worried her even more.
Chemoise often missed her life at Castle Sylvarresta. At least if I were there, she thought, I might have heard more about the threat. Even if the folks in the castle didn’t know any more than Uncle Eber does, there would have been some juicy speculations.
But Chemoise knew of things more terrifying than meteor showers that Gaborn might warn them about.