The Lair of Bones (42 page)

“By the Powers!” Borenson swore. “There is no way that we can fight something like that. There aren't enough men and lances in all of Mystarria!”

But Sarka Kaul gazed off to the north and the west, and whispered, “Perhaps there
are
enough men to fight, if only they muster the will to do it.”

They took off riding, moving ever deeper beneath the smoky shadow. For several leagues they met women and children fleeing in droves, until at last their numbers began to dwindle.

As the clouds of smoke thickened with each mile, soon it seemed as if night closed overhead. They passed a deserted village, and all the cocks were crowing as if to greet the dawn.

Deep under the shadow, they rode up to a peasant girl trying to carry her two weary sisters, even as a pair of toddlers trailed behind, crying of weariness. Borenson asked, “Where are your mother and father?”

“They went to Carris, to fight,” the girl said.

“Don't you have any food?” Myrrima asked.

“We had some, yesterday, but I couldn't carry the children
and
the food. So we left it. There are farms along the way. I was hoping to find something to eat.”

There was a moment of silence as Borenson considered the girl's predicament. The land was full of rocks, and there wasn't a village for forty miles. Half a dozen farms spread out along the road, but other refugees were picking the last apples from the trees as they marched. This girl and her brothers and sisters would never make it.

Borenson would never have abandoned his own offspring like this.

“Give her the spare horse,” Myrrima urged.

Borenson felt torn. He looked to the west. He could see evidence of flames now—an angry red welt on the horizon. If these children didn't seek shelter soon, the fire would get them before the reavers did. “Nay,” he decided. “We may need the horse for battle. But give them some food.”

“We
may
need the horse,” Myrrima said, “but they
do
need it.”

Borenson hung his head. He understood some of the pain that Gaborn must be sensing. If he gave a warhorse to these children, he might save their lives. But he needed the horses for battle, a battle where he could save more than just five small children.

He looked back to Sarka Kaul for advice, but the Inkarran merely shrugged.

It was a bitter choice. He gave the girl some plums and a loaf of bread he'd bought fresh in Battenne, counseled them to head east toward the River Donnestgree, and then rode on.

As he moved toward the shadow, a strange thought took him: this is the road my father traveled to his own death.

It would have been only a week ago now that his father had ridden to Carris. The skies would have been blue and clear, and certainly his father hadn't known what awaited him, but it was the same road, the same farm-houses and trees, the same dull pond in the distance reflecting the sky.

Still the shadows lengthened, and darkness deepened. The air grew still,
motionless. Almost the inferno did not seem to be belching smoke at all. Borenson could imagine that invisible hands had reached into the earth, and were pulling out its entrails, just as a huntsman guts a stag.

At last he rounded a bend and could see a line of red beneath the smoke, the sputtering of flames. The road led through the fire.

They raced the horses then, past scorching flames that rose up on both sides of the road, and found themselves completely beneath the shadow. Ash and smoke filled the air so thickly that they all wrapped scarves over their faces.

The sky was black above, as black as dusk, and the ground was charred and black beneath the hooves of the horses. The only light came from brushfires that raged everywhere in a ragged line, like a fiery snake that stretched across the horizon.

The thundering of the reavers' feet could now be heard, rumbling beneath the sputter and hiss of flames. Howlers trumpeted mournful cries. Borenson, Myrrima, and Sarka Kaul raced toward the horde. Soon, gree began to whip overhead on wriggling wings, squeaking as if in agony.

Deep in the blackness, the reavers charged. They thundered along beside the charred highway, running hundreds abreast, and the line extended each direction for as far as the eye could see. Firelight reflected crimson from their carapaces. The ground shuddered beneath their feet, and the hissing of their breath sounded like a gasp.

Blade-bearers made up the vast bulk of the army, along with large numbers of pale spidery howlers whose eerie calls frequently were borne through the shadows. Among the mass of dark bodies, Borenson saw few scarlet sorceresses.

“What's that?” Myrrima shouted to be heard over the commotion. She pointed to a trio of enormous reavers that loped along about a quarter of a mile off. To Borenson's eye, they looked like any other reaver he had ever seen except that each of them had dozens of large, bulbous black growths all over their backs.

Myrrima raced her horse toward the monsters, and Borenson followed more warily. Sarka Kaul hung back, afraid of the reavers, for he was but a Days, a commoner without benefit of endowments.

As Borenson drew near, the mystery was solved: the huge reavers looked to be nurses, reavers charged with rearing the warren's hatchlings. Each
nurse was oversized, nearly forty feet in length, and the humps on their backs were young reavers, each no more than five or six feet tall, and eight feet in length. Ten or fifteen young clung to the backs of some nurses.

“Why would they bring their young?” Myrrima shouted, nocking an arrow.

Borenson had an inkling. He imagined the young reavers charging through the rooms of a keep, breaking into cellars to hunt for women and children. He could envision them climbing turret stairs—going any of the places where people might hide when fleeing reavers. How vicious such young creatures might be, he could not guess.

At that moment, an enormous blade-bearer must have smelled them. It came rushing out of the column at tremendous speed, the philia along its head waving wildly. Instantly Borenson saw that the horses wouldn't be able to outrun it.

He had never seen a reaver move so fast.

“Shoot it!” Borenson warned as he pulled his warhammer from its sheath.

The monster charged Myrrima. It stood over twenty feet tall, and its mouth was wide enough to swallow a horse. Fiery runes glowed on its battle arms, as pale blue as a will-o'-the-wisp in the swamps at Fenraven. The reaver hissed.

Myrrima reined in her black stallion, drawing her bow as the blade-bearer charged. But her horse threw back its ears, and its eyes grew wide. It began to dance backward.

Borenson veered his own mount toward the beast, shouted a war cry, and charged.

He was nearly on the monster when a dark shaft sizzled overhead and disappeared into the reavers' sweet triangle. The monster's right legs buckled, and it skidded in the ash for a moment, then floundered as it tried to regain its feet. The arrow had struck its brain, but had not killed it instantly.

“Flee!” Borenson shouted, wheeling to see where Myrrima might be. She had already grabbed her reins and was urging her horse away from the reaver's lines—not a moment too soon.

The wounded reaver struggled unsuccessfully to regain its feet, even as two of its kin raced out of the horde.

Borenson put heels to horseflesh and set his charger galloping over the blackened fields. Myrrima raced ahead. Before them, Sarka Kaul's mount galloped like the wind. Borenson looked over his back. The wounded reaver was spinning about in circles while its comrades charged after him.

They were gaining on him.

Borenson had his little white mare on a tether, and was trying to lead her out. But she wasn't as fast as his old warhorse. He considered cutting her loose. If nothing else, she might serve as a decoy for the reavers.

He glanced up toward Myrrima. She was drawing another arrow from her quiver, trying to nock it as she rode.

The reavers were gaining. He could hear their hissing breath closing in on him; their feet pounded the earth. Borenson had taken but one endowment of metabolism at Carris. Over the past few days, his facilitator had vectored him more. But he still moved more slowly than these reavers. He dared not face them with only a warhammer.

He peered ahead.

Myrrima was racing away from him, over the dun fields. Sarka Kaul still held the lead. The great smoke clouds above threw a broad shadow, so that it looked as if they fled beneath a storm. Her mount's hooves threw up turfs, then leapt over the blackened limb of a fallen oak. Yet even as Myrrima fled, she held her reins in her teeth and nocked another arrow.

Borenson put heels to horseflesh and struggled to hold on. He clung to his long-handled warhammer. With so few endowments, he would not be able to use it effectively, but it was all that he had.

He could hear the reavers gaining, lurching forward, their massive bodies thudding with each step, weightier than elephants. Their hissing came loud.

Once, in his youth, Borenson had been to the shipyards on the north coast of Thwynn where King Orden's warships were built. There a huge iron battering ram was being fashioned for the prow of a ship. It was longer than a mainmast. The shipwrights had said that much of the ram would be hidden within the hull of a small, fast vessel, built solely to ram and thus disable the big, heavily armored “floating castles” of Toom. Borenson had seen the new-forged ram lifted from its cast and levered into a ditch filled with oily water. When it touched the liquid, it hissed with the tongue of a thousand serpents and sent plumes of gray steam writhing into the air.

As the reavers advanced, their hissing reminded him of that now.

Ah, he thought, what I would not give for a good lance!

Suddenly he heard Myrrima cry out, and he looked ahead. She spun her horse about and was racing toward him.

“Watch out!” she warned.

Borenson let go the reins of his white mare, and she split to the left. In order to avoid colliding with Myrrima, he spurred his stallion to the right.

Myrrima raced between them, head down, charging the reavers, who were startled by her sudden attack.

The foremost skidded, trying to stop, its philia waving in alarm. Clouds of dust rose from its feet, and it raised a knight gig as if to gaff her horse. The light of distant fires flashed red on the long black pole. The reaver just behind it bungled on, striking it in the rear legs, so that the foremost reaver tripped.

Myrrima was nearly upon the tangled pair when she loosed an arrow. It blurred toward the foremost reaver and struck its sweet triangle with a
thwack.

The monster pushed off with its back legs and leapt nearly straight in the air, its four back legs kicking as if it sought to run. Then it flipped for-ward and crashed headfirst into the ground.

The felled reaver did not get up. It lay facedown in the black ash, its rear legs kicking in vain.

Now there was only one reaver. Borenson wheeled his mount to face it.

The last reaver had drawn to a halt. Myrrima raced away behind it, and the huge blade-bearer spun to confront her. Yet Borenson was now charging at its back, and the reaver swiveled its head, trying to gauge the threat. Sarka Kaul found some courage and brought his own mount galloping toward the fray.

The monster leaned back on its rear legs and raised its claws, as if it were cowed. Two of its companions were dead, and it couldn't tell whether Borenson, Myrrima, or Sarka Kaul represented the greater threat.

“Two hundred yards!” Myrrima shouted across the expanse.

She had now raced her horse about that distance from the last remaining reaver, and she wheeled her mount and drew an arrow from her quiver. Borenson suddenly understood what she meant to do.

Averan had said that a reaver's limit of vision was two hundred yards. The reaver here could certainly smell them, but he couldn't see them
clearly at such a distance. Borenson, too, now retreated outside the reaver's limit of vision while Sarka Kaul raced near, distracting the beast.

Myrrima took her great steel bow and drew back an arrow even with her ear. At such a distance, she had little hope of hitting the monster in its sweet triangle. Borenson wasn't sure that her bolt would even pierce the reaver's skin, no matter how sharp her bodkins.

She let her arrow fly. It arced up into the air and struck squarely in the reaver's haunch, burying its head in the monster's buttock.

The reaver snarled and leapt in the air, then wheeled and snapped, biting off the offending arrow. But it was no use. He could not pry out the head of the shaft from beneath his skin without doing greater damage.

Now he hissed in vain and spun about, looking for sign of his attacker. For all the world he reminded Borenson of a wounded bear snapping at the encircling hounds. The reaver looked forlorn and confused.

And why not? he asked himself. In all our battles, the reavers have faced men with lances and warhammers and javelins. Never have they had to contend against men armed with Sylvarresta's bows of spring steel. Never have they faced men who could strike from horseback beyond their limit of vision.

Now the reaver spun about, snarling, clawing at the air, and blindly waving his philia, seeking to catch sight or scent of its enemy.

“Go!” Myrrima called. “I'll come around and meet you.”

She hadn't hoped to kill the last reaver at all, only slow it enough so that they could escape. Sarka Kaul turned and headed back toward the highway. Borenson raced north to retrieve his white mare, while Myrrima circled downwind of the reaver, coincidentally putting the body of its fallen comrade between her and the monster.

She already had another arrow nocked.

Borenson went to his white mare, whispered soothing words, and took her reins. The little mare peered at him with frightened eyes, ears drawn back, and danced away at his approach.

“It's all right,” he said. “I won't leave you to the reavers again.”

He patted her, and heard the reaver roar wildly. He glanced back.

Myrrima was charging the wounded beast. She had the corpse of its fallen companion between them, and she was racing from downwind. She was less than a hundred yards away now.