He ran up a tunnel, following Averan’s scent. He could feel her nearby. A mile, a half a mile, a quarter of a mile, and he was at her door.
A cavelike recess opened to the corridor, with guardrooms dug into either side. As Gaborn approached, two huge reavers sprang out to do battle.
The first raised a blade overhead, and hissed in fear. Gaborn smelled a spray of words fill the air, probably shouts of surprise or warning. It threw its head back and gaped its maw wide, crystalline teeth bristling like daggers.
He leapt up into its mouth, landing on its dark tongue, and plunged his reaver dart through the soft spot in the creature’s upper palate, into its brain. The weapon slammed into the top of the monster’s skull.
Gaborn gave the dart a twist, scrambling the reaver’s brain.
Purple blood and bits of gray brain rained down from the wound.
Gaborn leapt from its mouth as the huge blade-bearer crashed to the ground. The second reaver reared high on her back legs. She was a mage, bearing a crystalline staff. A perfume of words wheezed from her anus as she tried to cast a spell. Gaborn would have none of it.
He dove between her forelegs and plunged his reaver dart into her breast, through her tough carapace, into an organ that the knights of Rofehavan called a kidney. The reaver’s perfumed words transformed into the garlicky reek of a death cry.
Gaborn raced into the cave.
Averan stood there, turning to peer at him with frightened eyes, lit by the opal that gleamed from her silver ring. Around her squatted a crowd of starved, half-naked people. The reek of their prison was astounding—the stench of unwashed bodies, of urine and feces, and of the rotting carcasses of both fish and the unburied dead.
“Averan,” Gaborn cried before she had time to react to his presence. He took her staff of black poisonwood, which he had been carrying in his free hand, and threw it to her.
With ten endowments of metabolism, Averan responded before the others even registered Gaborn’s presence. She caught the staff, moving with a liquid slowness.
Gaborn cried, “The battle in Carris is about to begin! But I’m not ready to face the One True Master. How do I defeat her?”
Averan seemed to leap in slow motion to grab the staff as she peered at him. Her voice sounded unnaturally deep and tediously slow as she asked, “What?”
Gaborn forced himself to speak slower, to modulate his voice, as he repeated his request.
Worry dawned in Averan’s face, and she leapt over the squatting prisoners. Her movements seemed painfully deliberate. She ran two paces, and stopped. “Wait!” she shouted.
She struggled to pull off her ring, twisting it on her finger, and then turned and threw it to the prisoners. She could not leave them comfortless.
As she worked, two of Gaborn’s Chosen died on the walls of Carris—a proud knight and a young girl. With their deaths, he felt as if a hole gaped in his heart, as if he were rich soil and his Chosen were tender plants, cruelly plucked away. It pained him no end.
Averan raced to Gaborn, sprang past him. “This way!”
She ran with all her might, straining every muscle, intensity plain on her face. Then the green glow of Gaborn’s opal bathed her back, and threw her dancing shadow on the tunnel floor.
Gaborn followed, disheartened at how sluggishly she seemed to move, even with ten endowments of metabolism.
He ambled beside her. A hundred endowments? Gaborn wondered. Perhaps the facilitators have given me more. They’ll kill me, he realized.
He followed at Averan’s heel. She sprinted with all her might, her every movement smooth and graceful. Tears streamed from her eyes, tears of frustration, Gaborn imagined, that came from yearning for greater speed.
He walked ahead of her, slaughtering any reaver that barred their path.
And ever closer, he felt the approach of danger.
“There!” Averan called. “Up the corridor, three more passageways. The Dedicates’ Keep.”
Of course! Gaborn realized. Averan had warned that the One True Master was experimenting with giving endowments, though he could not guess how much success she might have. That was why he could not hope to face her.
Gaborn left Averan behind, sprinted round the corner.
“Leap!” his Earth Senses warned, and Gaborn sprang fifteen feet into the air.
A reaver stood before him at the mouth of the Dedicates’ Keep, a great black blade-bearer. Its blade whistled beneath his feet, then sang through the air as it whipped behind its back.
The monster did not open its mouth. Instead it leaned back, moving with a speed that nearly matched Gaborn’s. The philia on its head and along its jaw raised into the air and waved like snakes as all its senses came alert.
This is no common reaver, Gaborn knew. Dull blue runes glimmered along its forearms.
As Gaborn reached the apex of his leap, he hurled his reaver gig with all his might, aiming for the soft spot in the monster’s sweet triangle. He threw so hard that he felt the ball joint in his shoulder rip from its socket.
The reaver gig struck home, plunged into the monster’s flesh, piercing its brain, and then stood quivering like an arrow in a tree.
But the great blade-bearer still lived. Its blade whirled round, sang through the air before Gaborn even touched ground.
Gaborn twisted, catlike, as the blade whistled toward him. It struck his chest a glancing blow that shattered the rings in Gaborn’s chain mail and jogged him to the side.
He darted away as another blow clove the ground at his feet. He threw himself backward as the reaver charged.
He had no weapon to fight with. His reaver gig stood transfixed in the monster’s brain.
Averan came rushing up the tunnel, and the reaver whirled its massive head to gaze at her, all of its philia quivering.
In that instant, Gaborn struck. He leapt twenty feet in the air and grabbed his reaver gig on the way up. He did not pull it free but instead wrenched it violently as he reached the apex of his leap, then jerked it down with greater force as he fell, slashing the monster’s brain.
It shuddered and crumpled to its knees. Ahead, in the hallway, two more guards barred Gaborn’s way, but neither moved as quickly as the monster that Gaborn had just fought. He dispatched them, and rushed into the Dedicates’ Keep.
In all his dreams, in all of his nightmares, Gaborn have never imagined a place such as this. The light glowing green from his opal could not pierce the murk. Shadows fled as he entered the vast chamber, but the ceiling was so high that even with all of his endowments of sight, Gaborn could not view a roof overhead, only the steadily curving braces and supports constructed by the glue mums. These were not like the beams that men would use to brace the ceiling of a Great Hall. Instead, they looked more like cobwebs dancing along trusses, spanning over chasms. Not even the fabled Songhouse of Sandomir could have rivaled the complexity or grandeur of the workmanship. The supports, gray with age, rose up like lacework along the ceilings. Gaborn imagined that spiders might build such webs if they could only hope or dream. The designs were as alien as they were beautiful.
And beneath this glorious webwork, reaver Dedicates milled in an endless reeking herd.
The smell of them astonished Gaborn no less than the sight of them. A cloud of alien scents smote him—the odor of reaver dung and rotting carrion, suffused with the scents of reaver endowments as brittle as ice and as dank as mold.
There were hundreds of Dedicates, down in a bowl-shaped enclave. The room was black with them, but the dull light of fiery runes burned among them, so that a glimmering haze shone all about.
A huge, spidery creature the size of an elephant lay on its back about two hundred yards off, with its legs curled in the air. Reavers tore at the beast with their forepaws and teeth, rending its flesh.
Beyond that, a fetid stream ran, sending up vapors of sulfur water. Some Dedicates knelt in its shallows, dipping their heads and then craning them back like birds as they drank. Overhead sprawled a pair of massive stonewood trees, like vast leafless oaks, their limbs twisted in ineffable torment.