Brotherhood of the Wolf (12 page)

He brought them to Iome and whispered, “In the House of Understanding, in the Room of Dreams, the Days are taught thus about the nature of good and evil,” Gaborn said. This surprised Iome. The teachings of the Days were hidden from Runelords. Now she knew why he whispered. The Days were right outside their doorway.

Gaborn showed her the following diagram:

The Three Domains of Man

“Every man sees himself as a lord,” Gaborn said, “and he rules over three domains: the Domain Invisible, the Domain Communal, and the Domain Visible.

“Each domain can have many parts. A man's time, his body space, his free will, are all part of his Domain Invisible, while all of the things he owns, all of the things he can easily see, are part of his Domain Visible.

“Now, whenever someone violates our domain, we call him evil. If he seeks to take our land or our spouse, if he seeks to destroy our community or our good name, if he abuses our time or tries to deny us our free will, we will hate him for it.

“But if another enlarges your domain, you call him good. If he praises you to others, enlarging your stature in the community, you love him for it. If he gives you money or honor, you love him for it.

“Iome, there is something I feel so deeply, and I can
only express it this way: the lives of all men, their fates, are all here, a part of my domain!”

He pointed to the drawing, waving vaguely toward the Domain Communal and the Domain Invisible. Iome looked up into his eyes, and she thought she understood. She'd been a Runelord all her life, had been entrusted in small ways with the affairs of state. She had accepted the hopes and dreams and fates of her people as part of her domain.

“I see,” Iome whispered.

“I know you do, in part,” Gaborn breathed, “but not in full. I feel … I feel the cataclysm approaching. The Earth is warning me. Danger is coming. Not just danger for you and for me, but for every man, woman, and child I've Chosen.

“I must do what I can to protect them—everything I can to protect them, even if I am doomed to failure.

“I must seek alliance with Raj Ahten.”

Iome noted the vehemence in his demeanor, and knew that he was not just stating his resolution. He was soliciting her approval.

“And where do I fit in your circles?” Iome asked, waving to the drawing in Gaborn's lap.

“You are all of it,” Gaborn said. “Don't you understand? This is not my bed or your bed. This is
our
bed.” He waved at himself. “This is not my body or your body, it is
our
body. Your fate is my fate, and my fate is yours. Your hopes are my hopes, and my hopes need to be yours. I don't want walls or divisions between us. If there are any, then we are not truly married. We are not truly one.”

Iome nodded. She understood. She'd seen couples before, seen how over time they'd shared so much, become so close, that they'd picked up even one another's oddest habits and notions.

Iome craved such union.

“You think you're so wise,” she said, “quoting forbidden teachings. But I've heard something from the Room of Dreams, too.

“In the House of Understanding, in the Room of Dreams, it is said that a man is born crying. He cries to his mother for her breast. He cries to his mother when he falls. He cries for warmth and love. As he grows older, he learns to differentiate his wants. ‘I want food!' he cries. ‘I want warmth. I want daylight to come.' And when a mother soothes her child, her own words are but a lament: ‘I want joy for you.'

“As we learn to speak, nearly all of our utterances are merely cries better defined. Listen to every word a man speaks to you and you can learn to hear the pleas embedded beneath every notion he expresses. ‘I want love.' ‘I want comfort.' ‘I want freedom.'”

Iome paused for a moment, for effect, and in that profound and sudden silence, she knew that she had his full attention.

Then she voiced her plea. “Gaborn, never surrender to Raj Ahten. As you love me—as you love your life and your people—never surrender to evil.”

“So long as I have the choice,” Gaborn said, at last listening to reason.

She pushed his book to the floor and took Gaborn's chin in her hand, kissed him firmly, and drew him down to the bed.

Two hours later, guards atop the castle wall called out in dismay and pointed to the Wye River, where it snaked among the verdant fields. The river upstream had turned red, red as blood.

But the flood of red washing downstream bore the strong mineral smells of copper and sulfur. It was only mud and silt thick enough to foul the waters, to clog the gills of fish and slowly suffocate them.

Gaborn took his wizard to investigate. Binnesman stood knee-deep in the water, experimentally dipped his hand in and tasted it, then made a sour face. “Mud from the deep earth.”

“How did it get in the river?” Gaborn wondered. He
stayed on the riverbank, not liking the smell of the fouled water.

“The headwaters of the Wye,” Binnesman said, “spring up from deep underground. The mud is coming from there.”

“Could an earthquake cause this?” Gaborn asked.

“A shift in the earth
could
cause it,” Binnesman mused. “But I fear it didn't. The ruins where we slew the reaver mage are near the source of the water. My guess is that reavers are tunneling there. Perhaps we didn't kill them all.”

Because so many lords had gathered outside Castle Sylvarresta for the celebration of Hostenfest, it was not hard to gather some worthy men quickly and ride the thirty miles into the mountains. Six hours later in the early afternoon, a full five hundred warriors reached the ancient duskin ruins, with Gaborn and Binnesman leading the way.

The ruins looked exactly as they had the night before, when Binnesman, Gaborn, and Borenson had emerged. The gnarled roots of a great oak on a hill half hid the entrance. The men lit their torches and made their way down an ancient broken stairway, where the earth held a thick mineral smell. Gaborn could tell that the scent had changed since yesterday.

The entrance to the ancient duskin city was a perfect half-circle some twenty feet in diameter. The stones along the walls were enormous, and each was perfectly carved and fitted, so that even after thousands of years, they still held solid.

For the first quarter mile, there was a myriad of side tunnels and chambers, houses and shops where duskins had once lived, now overgrown with the strange subterranean fauna of the Underworld—dark rubbery leaves of man's ear and spongy mats of foliage that clung to the wall. The place had been picked clean of any duskin artifacts ages ago, and now was the abode of glowing newts and blindcrabs and other denizens of the Underworld.

The troops had not gone half a mile down the winding stairs when it ended abruptly.

The path ahead had recently been shorn away. Where the stair should have been leading down—miles and miles to the Idymean Sea—instead a vast tunnel crossed the path.

Binnesman edged close to the bottom stair, but the rock cracked and shifted under his feet and he leapt back. He held a lantern high, peering down.

The tunnel opening there was a huge circle, at least two hundred yards across, and had been hewn through thick dirt and debris. The bottom was a mess of sludge and stone. No human could have dug this passage. No reaver, either, for that matter.

Binnesman stared down, stroking his beard. Then he picked up a stone and dropped it. “So, I did feel something stirring beneath my feet,” he mused aloud. “The Earth
is
in pain.”

Just then, a flock of small dark creatures flew through the black tunnel below, creatures of the Underworld that could not easily abide the light of day. They made shrieking sounds of pain, then wheeled away from the lanterns.

Nervously, Borenson broke the silence. “What could have burrowed such a tunnel?”

“Only one thing,” Binnesman answered, “though my bestiary of the Underworld describes it as a creature only witnessed once before by a single man, and therefore describes it as a thing of legend. Such a passage could only have been dug by a
hujmoth,
a world worm.”

4
THE REAVERS

“Skyrider Averan,” the beast master Brand said, “you are needed.”

Averan turned to look at him in the predawn light, but not too quickly. In the huge shadowy loft of the graak's aerie, she located Brand more by the sound of his footsteps than by sight. She was feeding some fledgling graaks and dared not look away from the reptiles. The graaks stood fourteen feet at the shoulder and could easily swallow a child like Averan whole. Though the graaks adored her and she'd been feeding them since they first clawed their way out of their leathery eggs, the graaks were likely to snap when hungry. Sometimes they would try to hook meat from her hand with a long wing claw. Averan did not want to lose an arm, as Brand had done so long ago.

Skyrider, she thought. He called me “skyrider.” Not “beast handler.” At nine years of age, Averan was too big, too old, to be a skyrider. She hadn't been allowed to fly in two years.

Brand stood in the doorway to the aerie, the dim morning light casting a halo around him. The haunch of a young lamb was tied to his belt with a coil of rope, a lure for the graaks. He squinted and stroked his gray beard with his left hand.

She wondered if he'd had too much new wine last night, had forgotten how old she was. “Are you—”

“Sure? Yes.” Brand grunted, and his words were clipped, strained. She suddenly realized that he was shaking. “And we must hurry.” He turned then, and headed for the lofts.

In the dim light, Averan and Brand climbed stairs chiseled in stone, into the upper aerie. The nests up here
smelled fetid. The older graaks carried a scent not unlike that of a snake, and after centuries of habitation, that odor permeated the very rock of the aerie. Averan had learned to like the smell long ago, just as some people were said to enjoy the stench of horse sweat or the odor of dogs.

The stairs opened into a wide chamber with a single narrow entrance chiseled in the east side of the hill. In the dim light, Averan could see that the chamber was empty. The graaks were out for their morning hunt. The cool autumn weather tended to make them restless and hungry.

Averan followed Brand onto the landing. He stood for a moment, took the haunch of lamb from his belt, and made sure that the rope was tied snugly between a ligament and the bone at the joint. Then he stood swinging the huge clumsy lure. It took a full-grown man to swing the graak bait like that.

“Leatherneck!” he called. “Leatherneck.”

The graak was trained to respond to his name. The lamb would serve as a reward for the monster's obedience, when he came.

Averan searched the morning sky. The reptile was nowhere in sight. Leatherneck was old and large, a beast of great stamina, but not much speed. He was seldom used as a mount anymore. Over the past summer, he'd taken to hunting farther and farther afield.

To the west, the Hest Mountains rose, their sheer peaks white from last night's dusting of snow. On the mountainside below the aerie, Keep Haberd rose—five stone towers, its walls spanning both sides of the narrow pass that led into the mountains. People were running about within the castle walls, shouting. Some still bore torches. Their voices sounded dim and distant. Women and children were climbing onto wagons down on the green, seeking to escape.