Straken

Twenty

When she regained consciousness, Khyber Elessedil was sprawled on the catwalk, her body aching and her clothing soaked with her own blood. She pulled herself into a sitting position, glancing quickly about to be certain that the Gnome Hunter was still dead, lying where she had left him. The furnace room was unbearably hot, the tips of the flames from the pit dancing at the edges of her vision, as if trying to climb out. She felt suddenly dizzy, weakened from loss of blood and fatigue, and took a moment to gather her strength. Then she tore the sleeve of her tunic away, folded it into a compress, slipped it under her clothing, and pressed it against the dagger wound. When she had it in place, she pulled her belt free and used it to bind the compress tightly in place.

The effort took everything she had. She sat staring at the dead man, thinking that she had to move, that staying put was dangerous. Sooner or later, someone would come looking. She did not want to be there when they did.

But where was it that she wanted to be?

It was a question she could not answer easily. She had two choices. She could find her way clear of the Keep and seek help on the outside or she could stay where she was and try to find her way to the chambers of the Ard Rhys. Whichever she did, she had to do something to help Pen and Grianne Ohmsford avoid the triagenel. If she failed, they would be snared and made prisoners and the whole effort to rescue the Ard Rhys would have been for nothing.

She tried to think it through. Getting out of the Keep seemed the safer choice. Put some distance between herself and the rebel Druids and their Gnome Hunter protectors. But what would she do then? What sort of help could she expect to find outside Paranor? There were no communities for miles, no settlements, nothing but the heavy woods that surrounded the Keep. She could not count on Kermadec and his Trolls or Tagwen to find her. She could not even count on them to get free of Stridegate. She had no idea what had become of the Ohmsfords senior, they could be anywhere. And they did not know she was at Paranor in any case.

She knew she could not depend on help from the outside. Staying where she was made better sense, given that she had to come back in any case. But staying inside was also extremely dangerous. Enemies surrounded her. She did not know her way around. Everything about the Keep was a potential trap. No matter how careful she was, sooner or later she would make a mistake.

Either way, she might be done in by her wound, which burned like fire. If she didn’t bleed to death, she ran a good risk of infection. Her compress was already soaked through, sticking to her clothing and flesh both.

She closed her eyes against her dilemma, trying to think it through. She would stay, she decided finally. Getting safely out of the Keep risked as much as trying to remain hidden inside. There was no guarantee of any help no matter which way she went. She might as well stay where she could do some good.

How much time did she have? How long before Pen and the Ard Rhys would come back into Paranor? It couldn’t happen too quickly, he would have to find her first, and they would have to make their way back to the point of entry. But did time pass in the world of the Forbidding at the same speed it did in the Four Lands? What if the Ard Rhys was still at the place where she had entered, and Pen found her right away? It was possible they might come back much more quickly than she imagined.

She exhaled sharply. Too many questions, and there were no answers to any of them. She would have to do the best she could and hope that was enough.

With both hands grasping the catwalk guardrail, she pulled herself to her feet. She tottered for a moment, leaned against the railing for support, and waited for her head to clear. She was still hanging there when she remembered the Elfstones. In the heat of the struggle, she had forgotten them. Her throat tightened. Traunt Rowan had given them to one of the Gnome Hunters, but which one? What if it was the one she had pushed into the furnace pit? Fighting back against the burn of her fear, she pushed away from the railing and staggered back around the catwalk toward the tunnel through which she had entered. She passed the blackened husk of the third Gnome, turning her face away, trying not to look at him. She could not bring herself to begin her search there.

Instead, she retraced her steps and went back into the darkened passageway until she found the first of the remaining two. In the near darkness, she searched him thoroughly, but she did not find the Stones. Her heart sank. Taking his long knife from his belt so that she would have a weapon, she groped her way over to the second man.Please, she prayed, her fingers rummaging frantically through his clothing. This time she found what she was looking for. A surge of relief washed through her as she shoved the pouch into her tunic. Whatever else happened, she could not afford to lose the talismans.

Retrieving one of the torches she had extinguished earlier, she used her magic to relight it, and then started back up the passageway toward the Keep. If she encountered anyone at this point, she knew she was in trouble. There was no place for her to hide and she was too weak to fight. She moved ahead at a steady but painfully slow pace, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, conscious that her strength was slowing ebbing away. She knew she would have to treat her injury soon if she was to keep going, but she could not afford to stop and do so until she was someplace safe.

At some point, she lost her way, but she pushed on anyway. Eventually, she reached a confluence of tunnels, brightly lit with the smokeless torches the Druids favored in the Keep proper, and she cast her own aside. A stairway led upward, and she hesitated. She wasn’t ready to go back into Paranor’s upper regions just yet. Instead, she took one of the passageways leading off the hub. After passing several doors that were locked, she found one that wasn’t and slipped inside.

A pair of smokeless torches cast a dim glow over a vaulted ceiling and stone–block walls. She was in a storage room jammed high with casks of ale and wine, the oaken barrels ironbound and tipped on their sides in huge cradles. A carpet of dust lay over everything; the air was thick with it. The room had clearly not been entered in a long time. She found that she could not lock the door from the inside, but she did not think she had the strength to look for another. If no one had been here recently, her odds were pretty good that no one would come soon. She worked her way to the back of the room, into the deep shadows where she could not be seen by anyone entering, and collapsed on a wooden pallet used for storing barrel staves.

She closed her eyes, wanting badly to sleep. But she knew if she did, she might not wake up again. She needed to stop the bleeding. Her healing skills were rudimentary, but Ahren had given her a few basic lessons. She knew she had to cauterize the wound. It would have been better if she were outside the Keep where she could gather some healing herbs and leaves, but there was no help for it. She would have to make do with magic and luck alone. She knew it was going to be painful. She was not brave, and she did not want to do this. But she had no choice if she wanted to go on.

She stripped off her tunic and pulled away the compress, then drew a little of the wine from one of the barrels and used it to wash the wound. The wine burned, and she clenched her teeth. It was a start, but it wasn’t enough. For the healing process to begin, she had to close the wound all the way. She sat back down on the pallet and summoned a small magic that would help to numb the area around the wound, applying the dancing bits of colored light with her fingertips in gentle strokes. When the pain began to lessen, she brought out the long knife she had taken from the Gnome Hunter and used her magic–conjured fire to heat the tip of the blade until it glowed.

Then she bit down on a small piece of wood she found in a pile of scraps, summoned an image of Ahren and Emberen and better times to distract her, and laid the flat of the knife against the wound.

The pain was enormous. Trying not to and failing, she screamed into the wood, into the silence, smelling her flesh as it burned and seared. She did not lose consciousness, although she thought it might have been better if she had. When she could stand it no longer, she took the knife away, tears streaming down her cheeks, fire coursing through her body. She summoned more of the numbing magic and applied it with small strokes to the cauterized area. It took her a long time to make a difference, but finally the pain decreased.

She looked down at her side and then quickly away again. At least the wound was closed and the bleeding stopped. She had done what she could.

She pulled her tunic back on, wrapped herself in her cloak, and lay down to sleep, the knife gripped tightly in one hand.

Bek stood at the controls ofSwift Sure, easing the airship down the line of the Charnals toward the Dragons Teeth and Paranor. The sky was hazy and gray, the midday sun blocked by storm clouds that were building into thunderheads. He watched the approaching weather mostly out of habit, his thoughts were elsewhere. On the deck below the pilot box, Trefen Morys and Bellizen sat together, heads bent close as they conversed. Kermadec, his brother Atalan, and a handful of other Rock Trolls were scattered about the aft decking, wrapped in blankets and asleep. Tagwen was belowdecks, fighting airsickness yet again, apparently unable to come to terms with flight motion even with help from Rue, who had given him herbs and a drink to calm his stomach. Some people were like that, no matter how hard they tried or how hard others tried for them, they simply couldn’t make the adjustment.

He glanced over his shoulder. Somewhere behind them, perhaps half a day out, the balance of Taupo Rough’s Rock Trolls followed aboard the huge flat transports that Trolls favored for conveying their armies to a place of battle. Slow and cumbersome, they rarely got more than a few hundred feet off the ground. But Kermadec had insisted they would reach Paranor in time to be of help. His job, and the job of the small company he had brought with him, was to get inside the Keep and secure at least one of the gates. Bek wasn’t sure that eight or nine Trolls could manage that against a fortress of Druids and Gnome Hunters, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He wasn’t sure, after all, that he could do what he intended, either.

He was flying the ship alone at that point, something he enjoyed and was comfortable with. He liked the feeling of satisfaction it gave him to be able to control her all by himself. He liked the way she rose and fell beneath his feet in response to the air currents. He knewSwift Sure better than any ship he had ever flown, and he had been flying for more than twenty years, ever since his journey to Parkasia aboard the Jerk Shannara, where Redden Alt Mer had taught him his flight skills and Rue Meridian had caused him to fall in love.

If Tagwen was to be believed, «falling in love» appeared to have happened all over again with his son and the blind Rover girl, Cinnaminson. An improbable happening under any circumstance, it seemed particularly strange here. Pen, following in the steps of his father, had fallen in love on a dangerous expedition, at a place and a time when falling in love was not convenient. Of course, that was the way love worked. You couldn’t control the where or the when.

So many similarities in their lives. Pen, too, was a flier, although he had learned to fly much earlier and was already as comfortable aboard an airship as his father. It was strange to think of Pen traveling down such a familiar road, but the comparisons were inescapable.

But the strong possibility that, like himself, Pen possessed a secret magic gave Bek pause. He had been wrestling with the idea since the moment he had realized in his efforts to track his son that he was able to do so only because Pen had the use of a magic that neither he nor Rue had known anything about. Still, he could not ignore what reason and common sense told him about his connection to his son and, consequently, what it suggested about the possibility of another similarity in their lives. Bek, too, had possessed magic when he had gone with the Druid Walker to Parkasia, and he hadn’t known of it. It was only after they were well out over the Blue Divide and confronted with the barriers of Ice Henge and the Squirm that Walker had revealed the truth about who he really was and how the magic had been passed down to him.

He wondered when Pen had made his discovery. Had he known about it earlier and kept it secret from his parents? There was reason to think he might have done so, given his mother’s antipathy toward magic and Bek’s own reluctance to make use of it. It might also be that while Pen had known of it, he had not until recently fully explored its uses. It might be that he was still on a journey of discovery.

Of one thing Bek was quite certain. The King of the Silver River had chosen his son to make the journey into the Forbidding for a very specific reason, and it almost certainly had something to do with his heritage of the wishsong magic. The Faerie creature could have come to Bek to do what was needed, but he had gone to Pen instead. That meant that something about Pen made him the more appropriate candidate for going into the Forbidding and rescuing Grianne. A boy, barely grown. It was almost impossible to understand. But the King of the Silver River had come to Ohmsfords since the time of Shea and Flick in the days of Allanon, and had always done so with unerring instincts for what each of them was capable of achieving.

Now it was up to Bek and Rue to find a way to help their son fulfill the charge that had been given to him. History was repeating itself, another instance of a similarity in the lives of the Ohmsfords, and more particularly in the lives of a father and son.

Bek paused in his thinking. Would history repeat itself? Would it repeat in every particular? He had come back alive from the expedition he had embarked upon. Would Pen have the same good fortune?

He hated thinking about such a question, but he could not help himself. In part, it was a reflection of his own sense of responsibility for his son. He had been given the task of seeing that Pen got safely back through the Forbidding. If he failed to do that, he would have failed his son. It was a possibility he refused to consider.

« What are you thinking about?» Rue asked him.

She stepped up into the pilot box and stood beside him, her green eyes inquisitive. When she saw the look that came over his face, she leaned over and kissed him. «What’s wrong? Can’t you tell me?»

He nodded. «I was thinking about how much Pen depends on us, even though he doesn’t know it.»

« He is supposed to depend on us. He is our son.» «I don’t want to fail him.» «You won’t. Neither of us will.» They were silent a moment, watching the land slide away beneath the airships hull, the heavy weather west continuing to advance. Waterbirds from out of the Malg Swamp screamed eerie cries as they sailed across the skies. Far below, a cluster of Forest Trolls emerged from the trees and stalked in a line across the hills leading up to the mountains east.

« Is Tagwen any better?» he asked. She shook her head. «He just isn’t meant for this.» «I guess not.» He paused. «I’m worried about how much he really knows about getting into Paranor without being seen.» «You ought to be,” she said. He gave her a sharp look. «I asked him about it, and he admitted that he hadn’t been inside those secret tunnels in several years and that his memory of them was sketchy at best.» «So we can’t rely on him.» She shook her head again. «How about Trefen Morys and Bellizen? Do they know anything that might help?» «I don’t think so. They’ve only been a part of the order for a little over two years. They haven’t had time to do much more than complete the lessons assigned them as novice Druids. They are loyal to your sister, but they haven’t had the closeness with her that Tagwen has. They didn’t even know there were secret tunnels.»

He looked off into the distance. «So we have to depend on ourselves in this business.» She nodded. «Pretty much like always.» He didn’t say anything to that.

When she awoke, Khyber Elessedil ached from head to foot, as if the cauterization had been applied across her entire body. She was not feverish, but she was disoriented and weak. She sat up, wishing she had something to eat or drink, and then remembered she was surrounded by wine and ale casks. She moved over to the closest barrel, opened the spigot, and took a long, satisfying drink of cool wine. She would have preferred water, but the wine would suffice.

She could do nothing about her hunger, though. She considered the possibility that there might be foodstuffs stored somewhere down in these cellar passageways, but she had no idea where they might be and no time to spend looking for them. She would have to get by on whatever she might scavenge along the way. What mattered just then was reaching the sleeping chamber of the Ard Rhys as quickly as possible.

Something, she realized, she did not know how to do.

It was bad enough that she did not have a clear idea of where she was so that she might have some sense of which direction to go. It was much worse that she had no idea how to reach her destination without being seen. She could find a way to disguise herself, she supposed, just as she had done when she had freed Pen. But that was risky and, besides, even if she got that far the sleeping chamber would be heavily guarded.

Trying to decide where to begin, she considered her alternatives for a moment, but the task was hopeless. Everything she thought about trying was too dangerous. Once they found the dead Gnome Hunters, they would be looking for her anyway. Perhaps they already were. She needed to disappear, to become invisible.

She pondered the idea. There were secret passageways in the walls of Paranor. Ahren had told her so once. The Keep was honeycombed with them. The Druids had used them to reach one another when they wished their conferences kept secret. The Ard Rhys had used them from time to time, as well, to slip from her chamber without being seen when need or discretion warranted it.

If she could find a way into those …

She would be lost all over again, she finished dismally.

Unless …

Her mind raced. Unless she had a way to keep from getting lost.

Her hand strayed to the pocket in her tunic where the Elfstones were tucked away. The Elfstones could keep her from getting lost. They could show her a way into the sleeping chamber, just as they had shown Ahren the way to Stridegate and the tanequil.

She was suddenly excited, the aches and pains and hunger forgotten. But then she remembered that use of magic as powerful as the Elfstones was likely to be detected by the very people she was trying to avoid. It was the reason she had tried so hard not to use the Stones on the journey into the Charnals. Using them in the Druid’s Keep, right beneath their noses, would be madness. Besides, they thought the Elfstones destroyed, thrown into the furnace along with her body. Any release of the magic risked revealing that she was still alive.

Or did it?

If the Elfstones had been thrown into the furnace, would the intense heat and pressure destroy them? Would it serve to release the magic in doing so? No one knew, she suspected. There were no other Elfstones save the ones she carried, and little was known about their properties. It might well be that their destruction would unlock their magic in the same way as a user’s summoning.

Anyway, what other choice did she have?

She wondered suddenly how long she had been asleep. Did they know yet that she had escaped? Or did they think her dead and the Elfstones dead with her?

She rose and left the storage room, slipping cautiously through the door, and went back down the passageways of the Keep toward the furnace chamber. She picked up a torch on the way to provide her with the light she needed. She was hurrying by then, anxious to discover if her idea had a chance of working. It all depended on how much time had passed and what had happened in the interim. She moved quietly, listening for voices, for sounds that would indicate the bodies of the dead men had been discovered, that her deception was unworkable. But the passageways were silent and empty, and when she reached the place where the first two Gnomes had died, she found their bodies untouched. Farther down, within the furnace room itself, she found the third, as well. No one had missed them yet. No one had come looking.

She still had a chance.

One by one, she dragged the dead men to the edge of the fire pit and shoved them in. It would not conceal the struggle or the shedding of blood, but it would make it harder for those who eventually came looking to determine exactly what had happened. It might give her a measure of time and distance from discovery. She had to hope so because it was all she had to work with.

Exhausted from her efforts, she sat down with her back against the railing and took out the Elfstones. She had to try to use them, even if the release of the magic alerted Shadea and the other rebel Druids. She had to hope that they would register the source of the magic as the furnace room and attribute its presence to the destruction of the Stones in the fire.

She shook her head. She wished she had a better way. But she was stuck with things as they were, and there was no point wishing for something she couldn’t have.

She poured the Elfstones out of their pouch and into the palm of her hand, studying them a moment. Then she closed her fingers tightly about them, held up her hand, and summoned the magic.

It was easier this time than it had been before, perhaps because she was used to the process and more receptive to it. The familiar warmth spread from her hand through her arm and into her body before looping back again. When she was infused with the magic of the Stones, her thoughts centered on what she needed, seeking a way into the secret passages of the Keep, a blue glow formed within her fist and began to seep through the cracks of her fingers. Then, abruptly, it shot from her hand in a thin, long streamer, penetrating the fiery atmosphere of the furnace room, burrowing through stone and darkness, illuminating the way forward.

She watched as her route revealed itself, a twisting of passages and stairways, cutting through the walls of the Keep, winding steadily upward until they ended at a wall that gave secret entry into the sleeping chambers of the Ard Rhys. A strange glow leaked through the seams of the hidden door, a suggestion of magic contained within the room.

Then the vision flared and was gone, the blue glow of the Elf–stone magic disappeared, and the warmth within her faded away. She sat again on the catwalk with her back to the railing, her memory of what she had been shown sharp and clear.

High in the north tower, several floors below the sleeping room draped with the lethal netting of the triagenel, the Druid on watch in the cold chamber for disturbances triggered by unauthorized uses of magic noticed a spike on the otherwise smooth surface of the scrye waters. He leaned forward as the ripples spread outward, wanting to be certain of what he was seeing.

The source of the spike was the Druid’s Keep.

He took a long moment to consider what that meant. Magic was in frequent use at Paranor, so disturbances of that sort were not unusual. Still, the spike suggested a usage more powerful than the conjuring normally done. He should report it, he knew. But he also knew that if he chose to do so, he must go before Shadea a’Ru, something no one wanted to do these days.

He tried to think the matter through. It was possible that the usage was one the Ard Rhys knew about. It was even possible that the usage was hers. The Druid on watch did not want to intrude where he was not welcome. Discretion was well advised where matters involving Paranor and the order were concerned—especially by those who only served. Drawing attention to oneself was not wise. Others had disappeared from the Keep for much less.

Besides, what sort of magic could be called up within these walls that someone in authority did not know about?

He debated the matter only a moment more, then went back to his seat and resumed his vigil.