The Lair of Bones (31 page)

Even in the driest desert, a flower sometimes blooms.

—
a proverb of Indhopal

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 for-ever. 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

There is no surer refuge than a close friend.

—
a Saying in Heredon

“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.

“Perhaps another Darkling Glory is coming,” Chemoise offered. The threat hung in the air like a cold fog.

Constance set the spatula beside the stove and began wiping her hands. She turned the subject, “So, where will we stay tonight?”

“I've been thinking we could use the winecellars,” Eber responded. “They're old and dusty, but they go back quite far under the hill.” A dozen years ago the estate had had some large vineyards. But blight had killed the grapes. With the loss of both his crop and the plants, Eber hadn't been able to afford to replant, so he'd leased his fields to sharecroppers.

“Those old tunnels?” his wife asked in surprise. “They're infested with ferrin!”

The thought of the little ratlike creatures gave Chemoise a shiver.

“The ferrin won't mind a bit of company for just one night,” Eber said. He nibbled his lip. “I've invited the sharecroppers to stay with us.”

“That's half the village!” Constance said.

“I invited the other half, too,” Eber confessed. Constance opened her mouth in surprise as Eber set the bread and milk on the table and made a great show of sitting down, waiting for Constance to bring his breakfast. “There's nowhere else for them to go!” he apologized. “Only a few folk have root cel-lars, and the nearest caves are miles from here. We'll be safer together!”

“Well then,” Constance said with a tone of false cheer, putting the sausages on the table. “We'll make a party of it.”

Chemoise and Constance hiked up to the wine cellars half a mile behind the hill. The air had a strange quality today. The sky was hazy, and yet seemed to be heavy and looming. The path in front of the cellars was choked with tall grass, shrubs, clinging vines, and wild daisies. A few pear trees were growing before the door. This late in the season only a few dry leaves still clung to the trees.

It took some hard work even to wrench the door open. The odor of mold permeated the old winery. The floors were thick with dust, and little trails showed where ferrin had walked. A pile of their dung moldered next to the door.

“Yech,” Aunt Constance said. “What a mess!”

The cellar had been dug far back into the hill so that the wine could age at an even temperature. Chemoise left the door open and waded through the dust, past some vines white from lack of sunlight, back into the dark storerooms. After twenty feet, the tunnel branched. To her right lay a little shop with hammers and benches where a cooper had made barrels. “Well,” Constance said. “The heavier hammers are still here, but it looks as if the ferrin stole all the lighter chisels and files.”

Straight ahead were rows and rows of old wine barrels. Winged termites crawled about on the nearest ones. Signs of ferrin were everywhere in the little trails on the floor. There were ferrin spears leaning against one barrel, and some ferrin had made a conkle—a fiendish image constructed of straw and twigs—and set it in a corner. Strange paintings, like scratch marks made with coal, surrounded the conkle. No one quite knew why the ferrin built them. Chemoise imagined that they hoped it would frighten away enemies.

She tapped the nearest wine barrel to see if it held anything. Inside, some sleeping ferrin awoke. They began snarling like badgers and whistling in alarm, then raced out the back of the barrel through a small hole.

Soon the whole wine cellar reverberated with such whistles, ferrin talk for “What? What?”

The calls seemed to echo from everywhere, and Chemoise spotted little holes dug into the walls behind the barrels. Fierce little ferrin warriors wearing scraps of stolen-cloth poked their heads out of the holes.

“What a mess!” Aunt Constance said, coming in behind. “We'll never get it all cleaned up in time.”

“Would you like some help?” someone called. Chemoise turned. In the doorway stood a young man of perhaps eighteen years. He was tall and broad of shoulder, with blond hair that swept down his back and halfway covered his green eyes.

It had only been four days since Chemoise had come to Ableton. As of yet, she had met only half of the villagers. But she hadn't been able to help noticing this young man plowing a field across the valley.