Antrax

8

Ahren Elessedil stared at Ryer Ord Star with no small amount of incredulity. What in the name of everything sane was she talking about? Look for Walker? She’d said it as if it was the most obvious and reasonable suggestion in the world. But Ahren didn’t find it to be either. He thought she’d lost her mind.

“What are you saying?” was all he could manage.

The words came out in a sort of threatening hiss, and she turned to look at him at once. “I have to find him, Elven Prince,” she said, her own voice maddeningly calm and self-assured. “It’s where I was going when you found me.”

“But you don’t know where he is!” Ahren exclaimed in dismay. “You don’t even know where to look!”

She knelt again, facing him, her violet eyes boring into him him with a look of unmistakable determination and certainty. She looked so young, so impossibly vulnerable, that the idea of her undertaking so dangerous a task seemed at once preposterous and foolish.

“You may not have seen what happened to him during the attack,” she began quietly, “but I did. I ran into the ruins after him, knowing he was in danger from more than the creepers and the fire threads. The visions had warned me of this place, and I understood the threat to him better than any of you did. I was struck by one of the threads and prevented from reaching him, but I saw what happened. He went on alone, past fire threads and creepers, through all the smoke and confusion. He reached the tower at the center of the maze, found a doorway, and disappeared inside. He did not come out again. He is still in there somewhere.”

Ahren felt his exasperation building. “Maybe so. Maybe you saw everything you say. Maybe Walker is inside that tower. But how are we supposed to get to him? Fire threads and creepers attack everyone who tries to get close. There isn’t any way past those things! You’ve seen what happened to us and to the Mwellrets, as well! Besides, even if you somehow managed to get all the way up to that tower, how are you going to get in? You don’t have a Druid’s powers. Don’t tell me the door will just open for you. And if it did, that wouldn’t be good news either, would it? Why would you even think of doing something this … this ridiculous?”

He was almost shouting, and his breath was ragged as he cut himself off and rocked back on his heels. “You can’t do this!” A surge of fear washed through him as he imagined trying. “I won’t help you,” he finished in a rush.

She gave him such a patient, understanding look that he wanted to shake her. She hadn’t heard a word he’d said, or if she had, she hadn’t paid him the least attention.

But then she surprised him by saying, “Everything you say is true, Ahren Elessedil.”

He stared at her, not knowing what to say. “Then you’ll give up on this idea, won’t you? Come with me instead, back to the coast. We can wait for the Jerle Shannara there. We can hide until she returns. Maybe we can find Tamis again, maybe one or two others who might have escaped. They can’t all be dead, can they? What about Bek? Won’t he try to find his way back to that clearing?”

She brushed back her long hair and folded her hands into her lap, tucking them between her legs like a little girl. Her violet eyes were depthless and filled with pain as they fixed on him. He was suddenly certain that although she was no older than he was, her experience with life’s vicissitudes was far greater than his own.

“Let me tell you something about Walker and me,” she said quietly. “Something I haven’t told anyone. When we left the island of Shatterstone and he was sick from its poison, I sat with him in his cabin. Bek was there, as well. Joad Rish was doing everything he knew to help Walker, but nothing was working. After several days it became clear to all of us that Walker was dying. The poison was in too deep, and it was infused with the magic of that place and the spirit who warded it. Walker’s own magic could not give him sufficient protection against what was happening. He couldn’t make himself well again without help.”

She smiled. “So I used my own skills to heal him. I am a seer, but an empath, as well. My empathic powers allow me to absorb the hurt in others so that they can better mend. It is a draining and debilitating effort, but I knew there was no other choice. Know this, Elven Prince. I would have died gladly for him. He is special to me in a way you know nothing about and I don’t care to discuss. What matters is that in healing him, I formed a link with his subconscious. I think it was intentional on his part, but I cannot be sure. I became joined to him through the bond created by my willingness to give up something of my life in order to save his. It happens now and then with empaths, though usually it fades after the healing is finished. It did not do so here. It continued. It continues now.”

He studied her carefully in the silence that followed. “Are you saying Walker is communicating with you? That you can hear him speaking?”

“After a fashion, yes. Not words exactly. More a presence that comes and goes and suggests things. He is there in my mind, whispering to me that he is alive and well. I can feel him. I can sense him reaching out to me. It is the link we share, he and I, forged of a blending of our lives, of our magic, of the experience shared when he was dying and I saved him.”

She paused. “Do you remember when he was trapped on Shatterstone and Bek warned us he needed help? Walker called to him because Bek shares his magic, and he can reach out to Bek when it is needed. A Druid’s tool. But I heard it, too. Walker didn’t call to me, but I heard his voice in my mind, as well. Because we’re linked, Elven Prince. I hear his voice now, except that this time it is meant for me and no other. He speaks to me through images, fragments of what he is experiencing. He is in trouble, trapped underground, beneath these ruins, beneath that tower. He is deep in a maze of catacombs that lie below this city. Castledown is not up here, Elven Prince. It is down there.”

“So the treasure and whatever wards it—”

“Is there, as well, the one secreted away, the other watching everything, controlling what happens aboveground as well as below. Walker tells me this in his images, in my visions and dreams, but in my subconscious, as well. He doesn’t tell me everything, because he does not feel safe doing so. But he tells me what he can, what he must. He is in trouble, and he clings to me as he might a broken spar on a shipwrecked sea. He is adrift and lost, and I am his lifeline back.”

She waited for his response. He did not have one to give. He wasn’t sure if he believed it all or not. She might be confused, misled, or delusional from the events of yesterday afternoon. She seemed lucid and assured, but you couldn’t always tell another person’s state of mind from the way they looked and sounded.

“Is he asking you to come to him?” he said finally.

Suddenly she seemed confused, as if the question had presented a new dilemma for her. “No,” she replied after a moment. “He clings to me without revealing I am here. It is a reaching that asks nothing of me.” Tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “But I will go to him anyway. I will because I must. There is no one else, no one left but me. And you, if you will go with me.”

He would do no such thing, Ahren thought, certain that it was suicide to go back into the maze under any circumstances. He was filled with dread at the prospect and riddled with fear by his memories of that encounter. He couldn’t help himself. He was still fighting to come to terms with his failure to fight, his abandonment of his friends, and the shame he felt as a result of both. But even his growing desire to redeem himself was not enough to make him go back into that maze. The best he could do for Ryer Ord Star was to convince her she was making a mistake.

“How will you get into that tower?” he asked, looking for a way to reach her.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“If you do get in, how will you find Walker? If he isn’t summoning you, isn’t calling to you, how will you track him?”

“I don’t know.”

“This whole city, ruins and all, is made of stone and metal. There are no tracks to follow. Look at the size of it. If it’s only half this big underground, it will take weeks, maybe even months, to search it all. How are you going to know where to look?”

She was crestfallen, but her lips tightened with resolve. “I don’t know any of this, Elven Prince. I only know I have to try. I have to go to him.”

He felt helpless in the face of her blind determination to go forward, to do what she had set her mind to do no matter the obstacles and complications. He felt as if he was crushing her hopes without persuading her to give them up, so that when all was said and done, she would go anyway, but he would have stripped her of her spirit.

He sat back on the rubble and peered out into the ruined city. It stretched away in the sunlight, vast and broken, its history lost deep in the past with the dead civilization that had occupied it. It was a relic of the Old World, of that time before the Great Wars when science ruled and all of the Races were one. He wondered if any of those who had lived then had foreseen this end to things. He wondered if they had tried to do anything to prevent it.

“Maybe we could find some of the others to help us,” he said finally, feeling doomed and trapped, but unable to bring himself to abandon her.

She shook her head. “No, Ahren. There is only you and me.”

It was the first time she had used his name, and he was surprised at the depth of feeling it aroused in him. It was as if she knew just how to say it—as if by saying it, she was linking them in the same way that she was linked to Walker.

It drew him to her and at the same time it made him afraid.

“I can’t go with you,” he said quickly, shaking his head for emphasis because he thought his voice was shaking.

She did not reply, simply sat there looking at him. He couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze, but kept his eyes directed out at the city, at the miles of rubble and debris, at that mirror of the wasteland he was feeling inside.

“My brother knew what he was doing by sending me on this voyage,” he said to the empty landscape, at the same time trying to make the girl understand. “He knew I was weak, not strong enough to survive—”

“Your brother was wrong,” she interrupted quickly.

He turned and stared at her, surprised at the vehemence in her voice. “My brother—”

“Your brother was wrong,” she repeated. “About this voyage. About Walker. But especially about you.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, feeling a shift in his thinking that was impossible to reconcile with common sense but equally impossible to ignore. Could he do what she was asking of him? Could he possibly find the resolve that seemed to come so easily to her? It was madness of the sort that he could not quite manage to dismiss. Something deep inside was responding to her need, and it made him disregard all other considerations.

Even so, what could he do that would make a difference? “I don’t think I can protect you, Ryer Ord Star,” he whispered.

Then a distant sound caught his attention, one so tiny and insignificant he almost missed hearing it. He froze momentarily, afraid of what it might be. The seer watched him, waiting. Finally he rose to peer from their hiding place into the ruins. She was beside him at once, pressing close.

The sound had come from the maze. Dozens of tiny metal creatures skittered and wheeled their way through its intricate system of walls, none of them more than perhaps two feet high. There were several different kinds, each clearly built to perform a specific task. Some hauled away the bodies of the dead Mwellrets, gripping them with pincers at the end of stubby arms and dragging them across the smooth metal floor, where they dropped them down chutes that opened briefly and then sealed again. Some used a torch mechanism attached to their bodies to repair the rents caused by the fire threads in the metal surface of the maze. Some swept and polished and otherwise cleaned away all traces of the one-sided battle, restoring the maze so that it looked as if nothing had ever happened there.

It took them less than an hour to complete their work, speeding about like mice in a cage, sunlight gleaming off their metal shells, the sounds of clicking and whirring and buzzing barely audible in the stillness surrounding them. When they were finished, they wheeled into lines and disappeared down rampways that opened to admit them in the same fashion as the chutes that had swallowed the Mwellrets. In seconds, they were gone.

Ahren looked at Ryer Ord Star. A surge of relief swept through him. He felt giddy. “Sweepers,” he said, gesturing toward the tiny machines, the word popping into his mind all at once, causing him to smile in spite of himself.

She did not smile back. Instead, she pointed to something just behind him. His heart lurched as he followed her gaze and found one of the newly named sweepers parked not three feet away.

The sweeper wasn’t doing anything. It was just sitting, a squat, cylindrical body on a set of multiple rollers. Its round head might have been the top half of a metal ball resting on a set of heavy springs. Thin, short probes stuck out from the head in various places and directions, and a pair of fat knobs stuck out of its body on opposite sides, each about the size of a fist.

Ahren had no idea how it had gotten so close without them hearing it. Nor did he care. What mattered was what it was doing there. It didn’t appear to have any weapons, but he was not about to discount the possibility.

Neither Ryer Ord Star nor he said anything for a moment. They stared at the sweeper and waited for it to do something. The sweeper, to the extent that it was capable of doing so, stared back.

Then all of a sudden a hatch on its head popped open and a beam of light shot out, freezing an image in the air about two feet away from them. The image wasn’t very big, but it was quite clear. It was of Walker.

Ryer Ord Star gasped, and Ahren gripped her arms to steady her as she sagged into him.

The image was gone an instant later. A second image appeared in its wake, this one showing the Druid running swiftly through a series of tunnels lit by odd lamps with no flame, sliding from one patch of light to the next, his face tense and worn. Every so often he paused to look over his shoulder or peer ahead into the gloom, listening and searching. His black robes were torn and soiled, and his dark face was streaked with sweat and dirt and perhaps blood. He was being hunted, and the strain of running and hiding was beginning to tell on him.

The image disappeared. Ryer sobbed softly, as if the impact of the images had collapsed whatever wall of strength remained to her and all that was left was despair.

Ahren clutched at her. “Stop it!” he hissed angrily. “We don’t know if that is really happening! We don’t have any idea what this is about!”

Another image appeared, then another and another, all of creepers moving through the same tunnels, hunting something. Claws and blades flashed brightly when they passed through light. Some of them were huge. Some were rocking in an eager, anticipatory fashion. All had parts awkwardly grafted onto them, giving them a barbaric, half-finished look.

The images disappeared. Ahren decided he’d had enough. “What do you want!” he snapped at the sweeper, not giving a moment’s consideration to whether it could understand him.

Apparently it could. Another image appeared, the Elf and the seer following the little sweeper through the same series of tunnels, searching the gloom. A second image followed, Walker, looking over his shoulder, stopping, lifting his arm as if in recognition, beckoning. Then all of them were joined in a third image, relief painted on their faces, hands reaching out in greeting, Ryer Ord Star melting into Walker’s strong embrace.

The seer was almost hysterical. “It wants us to follow!” she cried. “It wants to take us to Walker. Ahren, we have to go! You saw him! He needs us!” She was shaking him, any attempt at calm forgotten.

Nowhere near as convinced as she was, Ahren freed himself roughly. “Don’t be so quick, Ryer.” He used her first name to make her listen, and it worked. She went still, eyes fastened on him. “We don’t know if any of this is true. We don’t know if these images are real. What if this is a trick? Where did this sweeper come from anyway?”

“It isn’t a trick, it’s real; I can feel it. That really is Walker, and he’s down in those tunnels, and he needs our help!”

Ahren was wondering what sort of help they would be able to provide to the Druid. He was wondering how following the sweeper down into the tunnels—supposing they could do that—would result in the happy ending they had been shown. If Walker, with all his magic, couldn’t get free of the creepers, what difference would their coming after him make?

He looked at the little sweeper. “How did you find us?”

A fresh image appeared. The sweeper was cleaning down at the edges of the maze, just below their hiding place. It was viewing everything through some sort of lens. Something distracted it, and it moved out of the maze and into the ruins, climbing slowly through the rubble until it was just behind them.

The image faded. “It must have heard us,” the seer whispered, giving Ahren a quick, hopeful look.

He didn’t see how. They had been careful not to make any noise at all. Maybe it had sensed their presence. But why hadn’t the other sweepers sensed them, as well?

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“Ahren!” she pleaded, her voice wrenching and sad.

He gave an exasperated sigh, feeling trapped by her need and expectations. She was so desperate to get to Walker, to do something to help him, that she was abandoning any attempt to exercise caution or good sense. On the other hand, he was so desperate to get away from this place, that he was refusing to give the sweeper’s credibility any consideration at all.

“Why are you trying to help us?” he asked the little machine. “What difference does it make to you what we do?”

The sweeper must have expected the question; an image immediately appeared in the same place as the others. It showed the sweeper performing its tasks in the maze and the tunnels belowground. A second set of images followed, these showing the sweeper being kicked and pummeled and knocked about in almost every conceivable way by something big and dark and fearsome that was always cloaked in shadow or just out of sight. Time and again, the sweeper was picked up and flung against a wall. Over and over, it was knocked on its side and had to be righted by other sweepers coming to its aid. There seemed to be no reason for the attacks. They appeared random and purposeless, the result of misdirected or pointless anger and frustration. Dented and cracked, the little sweeper would have to be repaired by its fellows before returning to its duties.

The images disappeared. The sweeper went still once more. Ahren tried to reconcile his doubts. An abused sweeper? Kicked around so thoroughly and for so long that it would do anything to put a stop to it? That meant, of course, that the sweeper was capable of feeling emotion and reacting to treatment that troubled it. As a rule, machines didn’t feel anything, not even creepers. They were machines, which by definition meant they weren’t human.

But these machines might well be as old as the city and whatever lived in it. It was not impossible to imagine that before the Great Wars destroyed the old civilization, humans had developed machines that could think and feel.

“It’s asking for our help,” Ryer Ord Star pointed out, breaking the silence. She brushed back her long silver hair in frustration. “In return, it will help us find Walker. Don’t you understand?”

Not entirely, Ahren thought. “What sort of help does it expect us to give it?”

An image flashed from the open hatchway in the sweeper’s metal head. Walker, Ahren, and Ryer Ord Star were walking from the ruins with the sweeper in tow.

“You want us to take you along when we leave?” he asked in disbelief.

The image repeated itself twice more, insistent and unmistakable. Then a new image appeared, the Jerle Shannara rising skyward, light sheaths stretched taut, radian draws rippling with power. At the bow of the airship stood the little sweeper, looking back at the land it was leaving behind.

“This is ridiculous,” Ahren muttered, almost to himself. “It’s a machine!”

“A sentient machine,” Ryer Ord Star corrected him. “Sophisticated and capable of feeling. Ahren, it wants what we all want. It wants to be free.”

The Elven youth sat down slowly on the pile of rubble and put his chin in his hands. “I still don’t feel good about this,” he said, his eyes watching the sweeper. “If we do what it wants and go underground, we’ll be cut off from everything. If this is a trap, we won’t have any chance of escaping. I don’t know. I still think we ought to find the others first.”

She knelt in front of him and put her hands over his, the tips of her fingers brushing his face. “Elven Prince, listen to me. Why would this be a trap? If whatever wards Castledown wanted us, couldn’t it have had us by this time? If this sweeper meant to betray us, wouldn’t we already be surrounded by creepers? What difference does it make to anything if it manages to get us belowground? Why would it go to so much trouble to accomplish so little?”

He had to admit he didn’t know. She was right; it didn’t make much sense. But neither did a lot of other things that had happened on this voyage, and he wasn’t about to discount the way his instincts kept tugging at him in warning. Something was bothering him. Maybe it was just his fear of ending up like Joad Rish and the others. Maybe it was his indelible memory of the carnage and screams and dying. It was all too fresh to allow him to think objectively yet.

“There’s no time to look for anyone else,” she insisted. “There may not be anyone out there to find!”

It was his greatest fear, of course. That there was no one else alive, that they were all that was left.

She was pressing her hands over his, cupping them. He lifted his chin from their cradle, but she would not release him. “Ahren,” she whispered. “Come with me. Please.”

She was afraid, too. He could feel it in her touch and hear it in her voice. She was no less vulnerable than he. She could see the future, and perhaps she had seen things that she shouldn’t, things that frightened her more than what was past. But she was going because she felt so strongly about Walker that she could not abandon him no matter what. He envied her such strength. It eclipsed his own and left him newly ashamed. She would go whether he went or not. And what would he do then? Go back to the bay, hide from the Mwellrets, and wait for the Jerle Shannara to return? Fly home again and live for the rest of his life with what he had done?

He might as well be dead if he did that.

“All right,” he said quietly, taking her hands in his, holding them like tiny birds. He bent to her reassuringly, his voice steady. “We’ll give it a try.”