Wizardborn (43 page)

A dozen lords had gathered round. Gaborn asked, “Gentlemen, may we have some privacy?”

He took Averan by the shoulder and led her away from the knot of warriors. Only Iome and Gaborn's Days dared follow.

“Averan,” Gaborn said. His stomach knotted. “I have an enormous favor to beg.”

“What?” Averan asked in a small voice. She was trembling. She looked very timid, though she tried to be brave.

“I'm going to the Underworld, to look for the Place of Bones and the One True Master. Can you lead me to her?” He'd known that he would have to ask this of her, yet asking was difficult.

Averan swallowed and began to tremble harder.

“You can't ask that of a child,” Iome said.

“I have to,” Gaborn replied. “We're running out of time.”

“Perhaps the wylde can do it?” Iome said.

“I thought of that,” Gaborn said. “But it doesn't speak well enough yet. I doubt it could understand our questions, much less give us answers.”

“But she's just a little girl. Even if she said yes, she doesn't understand the question.”

“Yes I do,” Averan told Iome fiercely. “I know what it means better than he does.” She jabbed a finger in Gaborn's direction. “He's the one who doesn't know what he's asking.
The path is long and dangerous. The reavers crawled through the Underworld for days to get here.”

“How many days?” Gaborn asked.

Averan shook her head. “I don't know. Reavers don't measure time like we do.”

“Averan,” Gaborn said, “this is important. I feel danger approaching. I feel a great danger to every man, woman, and child I've chosen. We have to leave soon. We don't have days to waste looking for the path. Is there any other way that you know of?”

Averan shook her head emphatically.

Gaborn wasn't sure that he believed her. “The reavers left a groove in the ground on the way here. Can't we just follow it?”

“Probably much of the way,” Averan admitted. “But we'll have to go to the deepest nesting grounds, where the sorceresses lay their eggs. All of the tunnels have well-beaten paths, and the sentinels keep watch.”

Gaborn sighed, rubbed his temple, trying to relieve the tight muscles.

“If you want me to lead you,” Averan offered, “then you must get the Waymaker off that rock!” She pointed toward the monolith on the horizon.

“I will,” Gaborn said. “And before we go, you'll need to take endowments. We have to make the journey swiftly, and I cannot afford to have you lag. You'll need brawn, grace, stamina, and metabolism. Most of all, you'll need endowments of scent so that you can smell the reavers' markings.”

“Averan—” Iome began to say. But Averan cut her off.

“It's all right,” Averan said. “Everyone dies. All my friends are gone. He wants to know if I'll die down there with him.”

“That's right,” Gaborn said. “It could come to that.”

Iome bit her lip, shot Averan a mournful look. Yet she had to know that Gaborn could not ask this lightly.

Averan took Iome's hand, squeezed it. “I know what I'm
doing. It's better for one person to die, than a whole world. Don't you think?”

Gaborn was not surprised at the tears that filled Iome's eyes. She had always loved her people, but he felt overwhelmed by the way she grabbed Averan, and hugged her fiercely. “I could never be good at that kind of math.”

Gaborn knelt, wrapped his arms around them both.

“Iome,” he whispered into his wife's ear. “I want you to go someplace safe. I can't think of any place safer than the Courts of Tide. I need you to carry a letter for me to an old friend. He'll know where we can get the endowments we need.”

“It will take days for the dogs to bond with her,” Iome objected.

“We'll have the dog handlers take the endowments,” Gaborn said. “That way it can be done in hours. Then we'll give them to the girl as vectors.”

Iome nodded her consent. Gaborn quickly penned his missive. As he did, his mind turned to other matters.

He knew the value of stepping outside himself, of learning to think like his enemy. He'd discovered it when he was Averan's age, and for a moment he was lost in a memory.

When Gaborn was nine, he'd gone on an autumn hunt with his father and some Runelords near the headwaters of the river Dweedum.

On the hunt, the lords found a few salmon running weeks before expected. Gaborn's father set up camp, and mentioned that he wanted fish for dinner.

The lords couldn't let such a challenge lie. Catching the salmon suddenly loomed large.

It was one of those cool dawns in autumn when the sun barely filters into the canyons, and the morning mists spend half the day trying to climb up the ridges to make their escape into the sky. The larks and finches had been hopping in the pines, and the spores on the ferns along the hillside were so thick that the whole of the forest carried their scent,
so that a tang like iron mingled with the pine needles and a carpet of moss.

With the river running low, the riverbed held more round gray boulders than water.

The lords rode their horses up through the shallows of the river, driving the salmon up to Wildman Falls. The falls soared a hundred and seventy feet. The water tumbled like silver hair, leaving a cold spray in the air that misted Gaborn's shoulders. No salmon could leap those falls, so the basin beneath was a good place to hem the salmon in. The tumbling water had carved a nice little pond, cool and deep. A few strategically placed boulders all but blocked the shallow exit downstream, and that could be easily guarded.

There weren't many salmon. Gaborn had only spotted three or four on the ride up, and saw only one swim into the deep waters, making it all that much more desirable.

The older lords thrust a spear into Gaborn's hands and told him to stand in the shallows and “try” to bag any fish that headed downstream.

Meanwhile, the lords all rode their horses out into the deeper pool, till the water reached their mounts' bellies. Then they launched themselves at fish with spears that were meant for boars.

It was a mad episode. The horses lunging around in the pool soon muddied the water so that no one could see. If one man did spot a fish, he'd give a shout and spur his horse forward, and all of the others would give chase, for they'd made a game of seeing who would spear the biggest fish.

For the most part, they spent their time chasing around trout that weren't much longer than Gaborn's forearm. After an hour of this, only one knight had speared a salmon, a little jack that was small by way of having swum upstream to spawn a year or two early.

But Gaborn was his father's son, and he decided that if he were going to get a fish, he'd have to think like a fish.

The knights all held to the deep, splashing and muddying the water so that a fish wouldn't be able to breathe.

So Gaborn went to the shallows at the edge of the stream, where a few overhanging weeds provided cover and the water was fairly clear. Soon he spotted the tail of a salmon poking out. A quick thrust with his spear won Gaborn the salmon that his father had ordered.

The lords had talked about it for days afterward—this little lad, going out and spearing the only salmon in the pool while a bunch of force soldiers and Runelords made fools of themselves.

If I were a reaver, Gaborn wondered, what would I do? The reavers were all fleeing along the exact same trail that had brought them here two days ago. At least, that's what it looked like.

But a smart reaver would take another trail.

“Sir Langley, Marshal Skalbairn,” Gaborn said, calling the men to his side. “Is it possible that this main force of reavers is acting as a decoy? Could some others have left the trail?”

“I had men watching,” Skalbairn said. “But it's hard to say for sure what they did in the night.”

“Send a hundred men to check for tracks,” Gaborn ordered. “In particular, have them search back where the reavers dug in last night. Unless I miss my guess, some of them waited to leave. Your men must kill any that they find.”

“Yes, milord,” Skalbairn said.

“And after you've done that, call the lords together for a council. We have to get the reavers down from the rock.”

Gaborn turned to Averan. “Could the reavers be digging a well up there?”

“On Mangan's Rock?” Iome asked.

It didn't sound feasible even to Gaborn. The rock had to be hundreds of feet thick. But reavers were inordinately strong, and there were thousands up there to work. They had a virtually unassailable position.

Gaborn frowned in concentration.

He felt… rising danger around some of his men.

He looked up. The reavers were sculpting a shallow
dome atop Mangan's Rock. Glue mums had begun to spit out pulpy strands into a configuration he recognized. A brown haze rolled from it, and actinic blue lights flashed beneath. An enormous flameweaver crawled atop the thing, raised a crystalline staff to the sky.

Gaborn's heart seemed to freeze.

Binnesman breathed out in wonder. “They're making another Rune of Desolation.”

   36   

Maygassa is the oldest city in the world. For twice ten thousand years it has stood, and if a man digs anywhere beneath its streets, he will find the ruins of older buildings and the bones of the ancients. The meaning of its name is lost in time, but the oldest texts argue that it means “First Home.”

—
Excerpt from
Cities and Villages of Indhopal,
by Hearthmaster Arashpumanja, of the Room of Feet

On the western slopes of the Anja Breal, in the Valley of the Lotus, lay sprawling Maygassa, the capital of old Indhopal. It was a city that produced nothing but people—a myriad of people.

The rajahs of Indhopal had long ago built the Palace of Elephants here, a stronghold along the river. On the west, above the city, the palace stood atop an enormous gray stone nearly eight hundred feet high. All along the base of this huge stone were pictographs in ancient Indhopalese that gave the Enlightened Texts of the ancient Rajah Peshwavanju. The texts covered the gray rock, forming an exquisite pattern that was much admired throughout Indhopal. The pattern was called “Lace of Stone.”

Some legends said that the texts were not carved by human hand but had appeared overnight, written by the Earth for those who sought enlightenment.

Raj Ahten glanced up at the palace, read the uppermost verse, “Bow before the Elephant Throne, O haughty traveler.
You upon your proud camel: know that you are nothing.

The words struck Raj Ahten with the force of a portent. The warnings from Binnesman, the way that the Earth Powers had withdrawn from him—even his failure to catch the insolent Wuqaz Faharaqin—all seemed evidence that the Earth was against him. Now the inscription in stone seemed to blaze.

It was only a coincidence that he read that verse, of course. Peshwavanju's masons had known that merchants traveling the Old Spice Route would ride by on camels, and would of course glance up to read the verses.