Chaosbound by David Farland Page A

Binnesman
    War horns rent the air; Myrrima startled awake, heart pounding.
    She cocked an ear, alert for sounds of danger, and heard the screams of horses dying in battle, along with some warlord shouting, “Man the breach! Man the breach, damn you!”
    A drum pounded and sent a snarl rolling over the hills like the crack of thunder. Deep voices roared in challenge in some strange tongue, voices unlike any that Myrrima had ever heard.
    Blinking the sleep from her eyes, Myrrima climbed from her bed there in the lee of the rocks, the warm ferns crushed from her weight, and peered out in alarm in the cool morning mist, trying to find the source of danger.
    But there were no armies clashing in the distance, and as she woke it seemed to her that the sounds faded, as if they could be heard only in dream.
    She stood panting, trying to catch her breath, clear her head. She blinked, looking around. Erin’s body still lay there on the grass not a hundred yards off, her face pale, her lips going blue. Sage was sleeping soundly in the ferns.
    Nearby, the Walkin clan was still sleeping, too. Myrrima was the only one who had wakened.
    Her heart ceased to hammer so hard; she stood for a moment, thinking.
    It was only a dream. It was only a dream. All of Borenson’s talk last night stirred up evil memories of battles long past. Or perhaps her vision of Erin that she’d had not more than a couple of hours ago had conjured an evil dream.
    Whatever the cause, the sounds of battle had faded. Myrrima sat in a daze, wondering.
    â€œWhat is it, Mother?” Sage asked, stirring from her sleep.
    â€œNothing,” Myrrima whispered. She searched about camp. Borenson and Draken were still gone.
    Yet as she sat in the early dawn, she heard the sound of water tinkling in the streamlet nearby, the discreet cheeping of small birds in a thicket.
    Other than that, the morning was utterly still. The sun was just rising in the far hills, painting the dawn in shades of peach and rose. It was that time of morning when everything is still, even the wind.
    Yet there she heard it again—the deep call of a war horn in the distance, and the sound of men clashing in battle.
    She strode toward it with a start and cocked her ear. The sound seemed to be coming from the far side of the old river channel.
    Straining to hear, she crept over to the cliff, her feet rustling dry grasses, and stood for a moment. The sound had faded again, but she could hear it now—a deep rumbling in the ground, as if horses were charging into battle, the blare of horns. She could almost smell blood in the air.
    She peered across the channel. Its waters were dark and muddy, filled with filth and jetsam. Mists rising off of it made the far shore nearly impossible to make out. Could there be a battle over there? But who would be fighting?
    Yet as she stood at the edge of the cliff, peering about, there was no sign of troops in the distance, and the sound seemed now to be coming from below her, from the still waters in the channel.
    Myrrima clambered carefully down the steep slope a hundred feet, until she stopped at the water’s edge.
    The sounds of war came distant now, so distant. She wondered if she was listening to the remnant of a dream.
    Suddenly, out in the water a body floated to the surface not forty feetfrom shore, a woman with wide hips, someone who would have made her home in the village of Sweetgrass. Thankfully, Myrrima could not see her face, only her stringy gray hair.
    The corpse bobbed for a moment, and then the sounds of battle suddenly blasted in Myrrima’s ears.
    â€œInternook! Internook!” a barbarian cried. “Hail to the Bearers of the Orb!” Men cheered fiercely all around her, and she heard them running, mail ringing and jangling.
    She peered off in the mist, and let her eyes go out of focus, and then she saw it: a castle a hundred miles north of the Courts of Tide, its battlements all lit by fire. It was dark there,