“Phfftt! Don’t move, Wren of the Elves!” she heard another cry out in warning. Stresa.
“Stay where you are, Lady Wren,” the first cautioned frantically. Triss.
The Captain of the Home Guard inched forward, his weapon held before him. She saw his face now, lean and hard, filled with determination. Behind him was Garth, a larger form, darker, inscrutable. Leading them both, spines bristling, was the Splinterscat.
A cold place opened in the pit of her stomach. What were they doing here? What had happened to bring them? She felt a surge of fear strike her, a sense that something was about to happen and she had not even been aware of it.
She forced back the lassitude, the calm, and the whisper of the wind and made herself see again. The cold turned to ice. The light surrounding her emanated from the things that clustered close. Drakuls, all about. They were so close she could feel their breath—or seem to. She could see their dead eyes, their gaunt, nearly featureless faces, and their ivory fangs. There were dozens of them, pressed about her, parted only at the point where Triss and Garth and Stresa sought to approach, a window into the dark of the Harrow. Their hands and fingers clutched her, held her fast, bound her in ropes of hunger. They had lured her to them, lulled her almost to slumber as they must have done Eowen. Turned from phantoms to things of substance, they were about to feed.
For an instant Wren hung suspended between being and nonbeing, between life and death. She could feel the draw of two choices, very different, each compelling. One would have her break free of the soothing, deadly bonds that held her, would have her rise up in revulsion and fury and fight for her life because that was what her instincts told her she must do. The other would have her do as the wind voice had whispered and simply let go because that was the only way she would ever be free of the magic. Time froze. She weighed the possibilities as if detached from them, a judging that seemed to bring into focus the whole of her existence, past, present, and future. She could see her rescuers creep nearer, their gestures unmistakable. She could feel the Drakuls draw a fraction of an inch closer. Neither seemed to matter. Each was a distant, slow-moving reality that could change in the blink of an eye.
Then fangs brushed her throat—a whisper of hunger and need.
Drakuls.
Shadowen.
Elves.
An evolution of horror—and only she knew.
If I do not escape Morrowindl and return to the Four Lands, who else will ever know?
“Lady Wren!” Triss called softly to her, his voice pleading, desperate, angry and lost.
She stepped back from the precipice and took a long, deep breath. She could feel the strength of her body return, a rising up out of lethargy. But she would still be too slow. She flexed gently, almost imperceptibly, seeking to discover if she could move, testing the limits of her freedom. There were none; the hands that secured her held her so fast that she might as soon have been chained to the earth.
One chance, then. One hope. Her mind focused, hard and insistent, reaching deep within. Her fingers slipped open.
Now.
Blue fire exploded into the night, racing up her body to sheathe her in flames. The fangs jerked back, the hands fell away, the Drakuls shrieked in fury, and she was free. She stood within a cylinder of fire, the magic’s heat racing over her, wrapping her about as she waited for the pain to begin, anticipated what it would feel like to be burned to ash. Better that than to become one of them, the thought flashed through her mind, the corner of her life’s need turned and become a certainty she would not question again. Just let it be quick!
The fire pillared over her, rising up against the black, searing the curtain of the vog. The Drakuls flung themselves into the flames, desperately trying to reach her, moths bereft of reason. They died in sudden bursts of light, incinerated as quick as thought. Wren watched them come at her, reach for her, become entangled in the fire and disappear. Her eyes snapped open seeking the Elfstones. She found them in the cup of her open hand, white with magic, as brilliant as small suns.
Yet she did not burn. The fire raged about her, swallowed her attackers, and left her untouched.
Oh, yes!
Now the exhilaration began, the sense of power that the magic always gave her. She felt invincible, indestructible. The fire could not hurt her, would not—and she must have known as much. She flung her hands out, carrying the fire away from her in a sweep, into the maelstrom of Drakuls that circled about her. They were engulfed and consumed, shrieking in despair. For you, Eowen! She watched them perish and felt nothing beyond the joy that use of the magic gave her, the Drakuls reduced to things of no consequence, as insignificant to her as dust. She embraced the magic’s power and let it carry her beyond reason, beyond thought.
Use it, she told herself. Nothing else matters.
For an instant, she was lost completely. Forgotten were Triss and Garth, the need to escape Morrowindl and return to the Four Lands, the truths she had learned and planned to tell, the history of who and what she was, and the lives that had been given into her trust, everything. Forgotten was any purpose beyond the wielding of the Elfstones.
Then some small, ragged corner of her conscience reclaimed her once again, a whisper of sanity that reached past the mix of fear and exhaustion and despair that threatened to turn determination to madness. She saw Triss and Garth and Stresa as they fought the Drakuls turning now on them, back to back as the circle closed. She heard their cries to her and heard the voice within herself that echoed in reply. She sensed the island of self on which she had retreated beginning to sink into the fire.
Down came the hand with the Elfstones, the pillar of flames dying to a flare of light that curled about her hand, brought under control once more. She saw the darkness and the mist again, the ragged slopes of the ravine, the lava rock, jagged and black. She smelled the night, the ash and fire and heat. She wheeled toward the Drakuls and hissed at them as a snake might. They backed away in fear. She moved toward her friends, and the attackers that ringed them fell away. She carried death in her hand, certain annihilation for things who understood all too well what annihilation meant. They shimmered about her, losing substance. She stalked into their midst, unafraid, swinging the light of her magic this way and that, threatening, menacing, alive with deadly promise. The Drakuls did not challenge; in an instant they faded and were gone.
She came then to where Garth and Triss stood crouched, weapons in hand, uncertainty in their eyes. She stopped before Stresa, who stared up at her as if she were a thing beyond comprehension. She closed her fingers tight about the Elfstones, and the fire winked out.
“Help me walk from the ravine,” she whispered, so weary she was in danger of collapse, knowing she could not, realizing that the Drakuls still watched.
Triss had his arm about her instantly. “Lady, we thought you lost,” he said as he turned her gently about.
“I was,” she answered, her smile tight.
Slowly, a step at a time, eyes sweeping the island night, they began to climb.
It took them until midnight to get clear of the Harrow. The Drakuls had drawn Wren deep into their lair, far from the pathway she had thought to follow, turning her about so completely after discovering Eowen that she had ended up wandering across the flats in the wrong direction. Stress had managed to track her, but it hadn’t been easy. They had come in search of her at nightfall, despite her command that they were not to do so, worried by then because she had been gone so long, determined to make certain that she was safe, even at the risk of their own lives. They knew they had no effective protection against the Drakuls, but that no longer mattered. Both Garth and Triss were decided. Dal was left to keep watch over Gavilan and the Ruhk Staff. Stress had come because no one else could find Wren’s trail in the dark. They might not have found her even then if the Drakuls hadn’t been so preoccupied with their quarry. Even a handful of the wraiths would have been enough to disrupt the rescue effort. But Wren, bearer of the Elfstone magic, was a l
ure for the Drakuls, and all had joined in the hunt, anxious to share in the feeding, Shadowen to the end. Stress had been able to track her unhindered. They had found her, it seemed, just in time.
Wren told them in turn of Eowen’s fate, of how the Drakuls had subverted her, of how she had been made one of them. She described the seer’s death, unwilling to gloss past it, needing to hear the words, to give voice to her grief. It felt as if she were speaking from some hollow place within, wrapped in a haze of emptiness and exhaustion. She was so tired. Yet she would not slow; she would not rest. She disdained all help once clear of the ravine. She walked because she would not let herself be carried, because that would be another demonstration of weakness and she had shown weakness enough for one night. She was dismayed by what had happened to her, appalled at how easily she had been misled by the wind voice, how close she had come to dying, and how willing she had been to allow it to happen—Wren Elessedil, called Queen of the Elves, bearer of the trust of a people, heir of so much magic. She could still remember how inviting the wind voice had made it seem for her to give up her life. She had been so ready, welcoming the peace she had supposed she would find. All of her life she had been strong in the face of death, never giving way to the possibility of it finding her, always certain that she would fight for her last breath. What had happened in the Harrow had shaken her confidence more than she cared to admit. She had failed to resist as she had always told herself she would. She had let exhaustion and despair work through her so thoroughly that she was as hollowed out as wormwood and as quick to crumble. She saw the way the magic pulled her, first one way, then the other, the Drakul’s, her own. Just as Eowen had been a prisoner of her visions, so Wren was now becoming a prisoner of the Elven magic. She hated herself for it. She despised what she had become.
I am nothing of what I believed, she thought in despair. I am a lie.
She talked to keep from thinking of it, speaking of what she had seen as she wandered the Harrow, of how the wind voice of the Drakuls had lulled her, of how Eowen—so vulnerable to visions and images—must have become ensnared. She rambled at times, the sound of her voice helping to distract her from dark thoughts, keeping her awake, keeping her moving. She thought of the dead on this nightmare journey, of Ellenroh and Eowen in particular. She was consumed by their loss, ravaged by feelings of helplessness at having been unable to save them and by guilt at being inadequate for the task they had left her. She clutched the Elfstones tightly in her hand, unable to persuade herself to put them away, frightened that the Drakuls would come again. They did not. Not even the wind voice whispered in the darkness now, gone back into the earth, leaving her alone. She gazed out into the black and felt it a mirror of the void within. She was heartsick for what she had become and what she feared she yet might be. The world was a place she no longer understood. She could not even decide which was the greater evil—the monsters or the monster makers. Shadowen or Elves—which should bear the blame? Where was the balance to life that should come from lessons learned and experience gained? Where was the sense that the madness would pass, that a purpose would be revealed for everything that was happening? She had no answers. The magic had caught them all up in a whirlwind, and it would drop them where it chose.
This night, it picked a darker hole than she would have imagined could exist. They came off the Harrow bone weary and numb, relieved to be clear, anxious to be gone. They would rest until dawn, then continue on. The greater part of Blackledge was behind them now, left in the shadow of Killeshan’s vog. Ahead, between themselves and the beaches, there was only the In Ju. They would pass through the jungle quickly, two days if they hurried, and reach the shores of the Blue Divide in two more. Quick, now, they urged themselves silently. Quick, and get free.
They reached the spot where their companions had been left, a clearing within a cluster of lava rocks in the shadow of a fringe of barren vines and famished scrub. Faun raced through the darkness, come out of hiding from some distance off, chittering wildly, springing to Wren’s shoulder and hunkering there as if no other haven existed. Wren’s hands came up reassuringly. The Tree Squeak was shivering with fear.
They found Dal then, sprawled at the clearing’s far edge, a lifeless tangle of arms and legs, his skull split wide. Triss bent close and turned the Elven Hunter over.
He looked up, stunned. Dal’s weapons were still sheathed.
Wren glanced away in despair, a dark certainty already taking hold. She didn’t have to look further to know that Gavilan Elessedil and the Ruhk Staff were gone.
XXIII
Par Ohmsford crouched in the shadow of the building wall, as dark as the night about him within the covering of his cloak, listening to the sounds of Tyrsis as she stirred restlessly beneath her blanket of summer heat, waiting for morning. The air was still and filled with the city’s smells, sweet, sticky, and cloying. Par breathed it in reluctantly, wearily, peering out from his shelter into the pools of light cast by the street lamps, watchful for thugs that didn’t belong, that crept and hunted, that searched relentlessly.
The Federation.
The Shadowen.
They were both out there, stalkers that never seemed to sleep and that refused to quit. For almost a week now Damson and he had been running from them, ever since they had fled the Mole’s underground hideout and made their way back through the sewers of the city to the streets. A week. He could barely sort through the debris of its passing, his memory in fragments, a jumble of buildings and rooms, of closets and crawlways, and of one concealment after another. They had not been able to rest anywhere for more than a few hours, always discovered somehow just when they had thought themselves safe, forced to run again, to flee the dark things that sought to claim them.
How was it, Par wondered for what must have been the thousandth time, that they were always found so quickly?
At first he had attributed it to luck. But luck would only take you so far, and the regularity of their discovery had soon ruled out any possibility that it was luck alone. Then he had thought that it might be his magic, traced somehow by Rimmer Dall—for it was the Seekers that came most often, sometimes in Federation guise, but more often revealed as the monsters they were, dark shadows cloaked and hooded. But he hadn’t used his magic since they had escaped the sewers, and if he hadn’t used it, how could it be traced?
“They have infiltrated the Movement,” Damson had declared, tight-lipped and wan before leaving him only hours earlier to search anew for a hiding place about which their pursuers did not know. “Or they have caught one of us and extracted all of our secrets. There is no other explanation.”
But even she had been forced to admit that no one other than Padishar Creel knew all the hiding places she used. No one else could have betrayed them.
Which led, in turn, to the disquieting possibility that despite their hopes to the contrary, the fall of the Jut had yielded the Federation the catch it had been so anxious to make.
Par let his head fall back to rest against the rough, heated stone, his eyes closing momentarily in despair. Coll dead. Padishar and Morgan missing. Wren and Walker Boh. Steff and Teel. The company. Even the Mole—there had been no word of him since they had fled his subterranean chambers. There was no sign of him, nothing to reveal what had happened. It was maddening. Everyone he had started out with weeks ago—his brother, his cousin, his uncle, and his friends—had disappeared. It sometimes seemed as if everyone he came in contact with was doomed to fall off the face of the earth, to be swallowed by some netherworld blackness and never resurface again.
Even Damson . . .
No. His eyes snapped open again, anger reflected in the glimmer from the lamps. Not Damson. He would not lose her. It would not happen again.
But how much longer could they keep running like this? How long before their enemies finally ran them to earth?
There was sudden movement at the corner of the wall ahead where it turned the building to follow the street west toward the bluff, and Damson
appeared. She scurried through the shadows in a crouch and came up next to him, breathless and flushed.
“Two other safe holes are discovered,” she said. “I could smell the stench of the things that watch for us even before I saw them.” Her long red hair was tangled and damp against her face and neck, tied back by a cloth band about her forehead. Her smile, when it came, was unexpected. “But I found one they missed.”
Her hand reached out to brush his cheek. “You look so tired, Par. Tonight you will sleep well. This place—I remembered it, actually. A cellar beneath an old gristmill that was once something else, I forget what. It hasn’t been used in more than a year—not by anyone. Once, Padishar and I . . .” She stopped, the memory retrieved at the verge of its telling and drawn back again—too painful, her eyes said, to relate. “They will not know of this one. Come with me, Valeman. We’ll try again.”
They hurried off into the night, twin shadows that appeared and faded again as quick as the blink of an eye. Par felt the weight of the Sword of Shannara against his back, flat and hard, its presence a reminder of the travesty his quest had become and of the confusions that plagued him. Was this, in fact, the ancient talisman he had been sent to find, or some trick of Rimmer Dall’s meant to bring him to his destruction? If it was the Sword, why had he not been able to make it work when face to face with the First Seeker? If it was a fake, what had become of the real Sword?
But the questions, as always, yielded no answers, only further questions, and as always, he quickly abandoned them. Survival was all that counted for the moment, evasion of the black things and, more important, escape from the city. For their flight had been that of rats in a maze, trapped behind walls from which they could not break free. All efforts at getting clear of Tyrsis to regain the open country beyond had been thwarted. The gates were carefully watched, all the exits guarded, and Damson lacked sufficient skill, in the absence of the Mole, to navigate the tunnels beneath the city that provided the only other means of escape. So there was nothing left for them but to continue to run and hide, to scurry from one hole to the next, and to wait for an opportunity to arise or a means to present itself that would at last set them free.