“Why?” he asked, when the well-wishers had left. “Why would the Darkling Glory come after you?”
Iome did not want to burden him with another worry. “I don’t—”
“Please,” Gaborn said.
“It wants your son,” Iome said. “It knows that I’m carrying your son.”
Gaborn asked, “My son?”
“Yes,” Iome admitted. When it was stalking me at Castle Sylvarresta “it said that it could smell a son in my womb.”
Iome did not know how Gaborn would react. She had not wanted him to find out this way. She feared that he would be angry with her for withholding such news.
“That’s why I took more endowments,” Iome whispered. “I wanted to give birth to him quickly. If the Darkling Glory wanted him dead so badly...”
Gaborn’s eyes grew bright as he blinked back tears of joy. Or perhaps they were mingled with tears of sadness. Both he and Iome had taken endowments of metabolism—too many to ever live normal lives again. They would age and die before their child reached adulthood. With half a dozen endowments of metabolism each, by the time the child was a dozen years old, Gaborn and Iome would have aged to nearly a hundred. Though endowments of stamina might keep them healthy to that point, in time the human body was meant to wear out. This child might be born safely, but Iome and Gaborn would never live to see it reach adulthood. Gaborn had to realize that, had to know the price that she’d already paid for her child.
Gaborn knelt beside her, put his hand on her back. “Here, lie down.”
“I’m all right,” Iome said.
“You’re more than all right. You’re magnificent,” Gaborn said. “But lie down anyway.”
Gaborn took off his cloak and laid it on the grass, Iome lay on it. Her head was ringing, but she felt well enough to stand. Binnesman was still tending Borenson.
“When were you going to tell me?” Gaborn asked.
“I don’t know,” Iome admitted. “I thought I’d wait until there was a lull in the battles—or until the child was two or three. Whichever came first.”
Gaborn forced a smile. She could see worry pent up behind it. “Then I’m glad there was a lull in the battle.”
As the roaring of the Darkling Glory faded, the sound of thunder followed. In the distance, two more lightning bolts struck in rapid succession.
Averan sat in the grass, staring inward, lost to internal nightmares. The stomach cramps and sweats were abating, yet she felt as if the bolts pierced her.
In the distance, on Mangan’s Rock, the reavers hissed in alarm.
The memories that the thunder aroused were terrifying: racing up through the narrow canyons in the Brace Mountains, running with thousands of reavers, the sky erupting in its display of pyrotechnics, the horrible lightning storm that had left her blind and dazed.
Those were some of the last memories that Keeper had formed.
Even now, she could feel his pain. The cold last night had been so bitter that it nearly froze his joints, until at last he huddled in a burrow with the others, sharing their warmth.
Even now, sitting in the sun, Averan shivered at the thought, and her feet ached from endlessly running. The weariness that Keeper had endured after days of marches, of fighting, of working without stop, also assailed her, along with an endless burning thirst.
But most of all she felt the horror of last night, Keeper’s fear of the lightning.
The fear it aroused was almost primal. It moved her beyond all bounds of reason. While others cleared the battlefield, Averan sat wondering why this was so.
But though the reavers’ memories flowed into her, they came at their own pace. She could not choose to discover what she wanted to know.
So she sat for long minutes, peering deeper into Keeper’s dark soul. Memories assailed her: reavers digging trenches to channel steaming water to newly opened caverns, reavers herding immature worms from one tunnel to another, reavers cleaning their kills.
In so many ways, Keeper had just been a peasant.
Yet gradually she realized that Keeper was like no human farmer she’d ever known. She’d watched milkmaids with their cows, and shepherds with their sheep. She’d tended graaks in an aerie.
There was a bond of affection that grew between a man and his animals. Averan used to love to pet her graaks, to feed them and stroke them between their eyes, or to scratch them roughly beneath the jiggling folds of skin at their throats.
But Keeper had felt none of that. He tended the creatures he ate, watched them grow. But all of the time that he did so, he could barely restrain himself from tearing his charges to pieces.
Keeper had been a creature of monstrous appetite.
And suddenly she knew that he had come here with a charge—to learn to capture and harvest men and women.
She saw it clearly now, through Keeper’s memory. There had been a cave deep in the Underworld. Keeper had gone there to help tend the human charges, to learn how it was done so that he could perfect the techniques.
In the reaver’s memory, Averan recalled people huddled in that black place, too terrified to move as Keeper crept among them. The humans were thin, emaciated. Averan saw them through the monster’s eyes as potential meals. They had all been counted, and Keeper knew that he could not eat one, could not even take a nibble.
But he happened upon a mother with her newborn child. The other keepers had not counted the babe.
So he quickly snatched the infant from its mother and swallowed it. The flavor was bland.
Averan felt horrified—not merely at the thought that Keeper had eaten a child, but that she had then eaten Keeper in turn.
She was filled with revulsion.
Gaborn depended on her. He wanted another victory. Timidly, in the aftermath of the attack, she got up and walked to him as he hunched over Iome.
Her body felt strange, as if her hands and feet were all disconnected. In her memory, she always ran on four legs.
She stepped over a dead sparrow to reach Gaborn.
“You were right,” she told him. “The reavers are monsters. They’re nothing like people.”
Gaborn shot her an inquisitive stare.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because of what they plan to do to us. Because of how they feel inside. I know how they feel when they look at us: it’s a burning hunger.
“You wondered why the reavers stopped here?” she said. “I can’t say for sure. Maybe they did it because they are cold, tired, and starving. They aren’t built to walk in the snow, to charge up through rivers of ice like they did in the mountains last night, or to go for days on end with nothing to drink. They’re dying of thirst.”
Gaborn stared off at the reavers in wonder. “So, have we run them aground?”
“Maybe. But I know what they’re thinking, and mostly they’re just afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of you!”
Gaborn chuckled as if she had paid him an undeserved compliment. “How could they fear me?”
“They smell you,” Averan said. “Yesterday, in the battle, the fell mage tasted your scent. She knew that you caused the earthquakes, and that men fought more fiercely when you came. She sent your smell to all of her warriors, warning them that you were a danger.
“She did it just before the world worm destroyed the Rune of Desolation, and lightning flashed in the sky.”
“Yes?” Gaborn said. He didn’t understand her point.
“Don’t you see?” Averan asked. “They think that you summoned Glories into battle. The reavers aren’t fleeing back to their caves just because they’re afraid, they’re going back to warn the One True Master!”
A sudden silence formed around Averan. Iome, Gaborn, and dozens of other lords all leaned close to listen.
“And what happens if they warn the One True Master?” Gaborn asked.
Averan found herself breathing hard. “She’ll summon her armies to destroy you.”
34
The Netherworld
In the beginning, there was one world, and one sun, and all men were Bright Ones who thrived beneath the One True Tree.