Antrax (15 page)

Quentin refitted the headband around his long hair. “Always thinking ahead, the way Druids do.”

The Dwarf grunted. “Farther ahead than you and I and most others could manage. That’s why I think he’s still alive.” He stopped whittling and looked up. “That’s why I think that sooner or later we’ll find him.”

Quentin wasn’t so sure, but he kept that to himself, as well. His attitude about things in general was less positive than when he had started the journey. Bek would be surprised at the change in him.

Not ten minutes later, Tamis reappeared. They didn’t see her until she was almost on top of them and she was not trying to hide her coming. She loped up through the rubble and into their shelter, her face damp with sweat, her short dark hair tousled, and her clothing disheveled. Quentin saw by the look on her face that all was not well.

“I followed the Mwellrets almost all the way back through the ruins.” She spoke quickly, wiping at her face with her tunic sleeve as she crouched before them. She was breathing hard. “I caught up
with one of them. He was injured and lagging behind the rest so I took a chance. I knocked him down, put a knife to his throat, and asked him what had happened. It was pretty much what you would guess, the same thing that happened to us. He told me they were tracking the seer, but they never found her.”

“What about Bek?” Quentin asked at once.

She shook her head. “They don’t know anything about him. When they reached that clearing, only the seer and the Ilse Witch were there. The witch told them to hunt us down and make us prisoners and then went off to hunt someone or something by herself.” She paused. “It could have been Bek.”

The Highlander frowned. “Why would she waste time hunting Bek? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does if she knows about his magic,” Panax pointed out.

Quentin shook his head stubbornly. “She’s after the treasure in Castledown. Maybe the Mwellret was lying to you.”

“I don’t think so,” Tamis replied. “Bek was there when I left to find you and gone when the Mwellrets showed up. Something happened to him between times, and it probably involved the Ilse Witch. If we could find the seer, we might find out the truth. She must have seen something.”

Panax tucked his whittling wood and knife away. “She could have died in the maze, along with the rets.”

Tamis waved the suggestion off. “Why would she go back into the maze knowing what she does about its dangers? Besides, the ret I questioned said they didn’t find her, dead or alive.” She stood up. “That’s enough for now. We have to get out of here. They’ll be coming for us.”

“You didn’t kill the ret?” Kian asked her sharply.

Tamis wheeled on him angrily. “He was unarmed and helpless,” she snapped. “I need better reasons than that to kill a man. I knocked him senseless and left. When he wakes, we’ll be far away. Now let’s go!”

“Go where?” Quentin demanded, standing up, brushing dirt and debris off his pants legs. “Do what?”

She shrugged. “We’ll figure that out later. For now, we’ll get far enough away that we won’t be looking over our shoulders all the time. But we’ll stay here in the ruins. They’re big enough that we can hide and not be easy to track. We can keep looking for Patrinell and the others.”

She started away, and they followed without further argument, knowing she was right, that they had to find a new hiding place, farther from the maze, deeper into the city. The Mwellrets would certainly hunt them, and they were excellent trackers, relying on their highly developed senses, on their shape-shifting abilities, and on their reptilian ancestry. In any case, it was foolish to assume that staying put would help. Following along behind Tamis, the Highlander, the Dwarf, and the Elven Hunters took care to disguise their tracks, to walk on the hard slabs of metal and stone where footprints wouldn’t show. Several times, Tamis dropped back to muddy further any sign of their passing, using her special skills to conceal their trail.

Overhead, the sun had passed the midday point, easing into the afternoon, sliding through the cloudless blue toward nightfall. Within the ruins, the heat cast in the wake of its passing rose off the stone and metal in shimmering waves. Quentin loosened the buttons of his tunic and pushed up his sleeves. The Sword of Leah, strapped across his back, felt heavy and cumbersome. The magic with which it had infused him had faded, gone back into whatever dark pocket it had come from, leaving him bereft, but free, as well. He wondered if he would manage it better next time it was needed. There would be a next time, after all. He could hardly expect otherwise.

After they had gone some distance, he moved up beside Tamis. “Why are we going this way and not back toward the bay where we landed? What about Bek?”

She glanced over at him, her lips compressing in a tight line. “Two things. We have to find where Bek went before we can go after him, and we don’t want the Mwellrets knowing what we intend.”

He nodded. “We need them to believe we are doing something entirely different, running away perhaps, fleeing inland.” He paused. “But won’t they expect us to try to get back to the
Jerle Shannara?”

“I expect they’re hoping we do exactly that.”

It was the way she said it that caught his attention. “What do you mean?”

Tamis rounded on him, bringing him up short. Her face was hard and set. The others closed about. “The Mwellret told me something else,” she said, “something I didn’t tell you before. I thought it could wait, since there was nothing we could do about it anyway. But maybe it can’t. We’ve lost the ship. The Ilse Witch found a way through the pillars of ice and surprised it in the channel. She used her magic to put the Rovers to sleep and made them all prisoners. She’s left Federation soldiers and Mwellrets to fly her.” She shook her head. “We’re on our own.”

They stared at her, stunned. They were all thinking the same thing. They were marooned in a strange land, and any hope of being rescued by Redden Alt Mer and his Rovers or of getting back to the
Jerle Shannara
was gone.

Quentin started to say something, but she cut him short. “No, Highlander, the ret wasn’t lying. I made sure. He was very definite. The
Jerle Shannara
is under the control of the Ilse Witch. She’s not coming back for us.”

“We have to get her back!” he replied at once, blurting it out before he could stop himself.

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Panax observed, arching one eyebrow. “All we need are wings to fly up to her. Or maybe she’ll do us the favor of coming down where we can reach her.”

“For now, what we need to do is walk,” Tamis said, dismissing the subject as she wheeled away. “Let’s go.”

They continued on for the better part of the afternoon, watching the sun descend into the west until it was little more than a bright glimmer along the horizon. By then they had crossed to the other side of the city and could see the trees of the forest ahead through gaps in the fallen buildings. Their shadows trailed behind them in long dark stains, sliding over the rubble like oil. The heat had dissipated and the air cooled. There had been no sign of the Mwellrets all afternoon. Nor had there been any sign of other survivors from their own company. The city seemed empty of life, save for themselves. Ahead, the trees formed a dark wall over which the fading sun cast its silver halo.

Tamis called a halt, glancing around as she did so, taking her time. “I don’t think we should attempt to circle back through the city at night,” she said. “There’s bound to be other traps. There might be sentries, as well. Better to wait until morning when we can see something.”

Quentin, like the others, had adjusted to the idea that they were alone and cut off from rescue or escape, that whatever they chose to do, they had better do so with that in mind. Mistakes would prove costly now, perhaps fatal. If the Mwellrets wanted to try tracking them in the dark, let them do so. With any luck, the city and its horrors would swallow them.

“We’ll make camp in the forest?” Panax asked.

Tamis nodded. “As best we can. No fire, cold food, and one of us on watch all night. We’ve seen what’s in the city, but not what’s in these woods.”

A comforting thought, Quentin mused, trailing after her into the trees until she found a suitable clearing. The sun was down by then, and the first stars were appearing. The same stars would already be out at home, so far away he could barely imagine it anymore.
His parents would be in bed and perhaps asleep under them. He wondered if Coran and Liria were thinking of him now, as he was thinking of them. He wondered if he would ever see them again.

They had a little food and water, but no bedding. Almost everything had been lost in the flight out of the maze or left behind at the edge of the ruins. They ate what they had, drank from an aleskin Panax was carrying, and slept in their clothes using whatever they could find for pillows. Tamis took the first watch. Quentin was asleep so fast he had barely cradled his head in the crook of his arm before he was gone.

He dreamed, but his dreams were jumbled and disjointed fragments. They left him shaken and at times frantic, but they lacked meaning and were forgotten almost immediately. Each time, after jerking awake, he slipped quickly back to sleep again. Black and still, the night enveloped and carried him away.

It was Kian who woke him, gripping his shoulder firmly, steadying him when he started from his sleep. “You’ve been dreaming all night, Highlander,” the Elven Hunter whispered. “You might as well take the watch and let those of us who can rest do so.”

His was the last watch, and already he could sense the shift in time. The stars had circled about and the darkness was losing its hold. Quentin sat looking out across the clearing to where the sunrise would begin, waiting for the light to change. His companions slept all about him, their dark shapes unmoving, the sounds of their breathing slow and ragged in the stillness.

Once, something flew through the branches of the trees overhead, a quick and hurried movement that disappeared almost as fast as it had come. A bird of some sort, he decided, and let his heart settle back into his chest. A little later, feeling uneasy, he rose and peered out into the ruins of the city, searching the darkness. He saw nothing and heard nothing. Maybe there was nothing to
see or hear. Just themselves. Maybe in a world of creepers and fire threads, of Mwellrets and the Ilse Witch, they were all of humankind that was left.

But as the dawn brightened in a thin silver thread along the eastern horizon, chasing back the forest shadows just enough to give identity to shapes and forms, he saw that he was wrong. A man stood opposite him on the far side of the clearing, vaguely defined by the light, immobile against the gloom. At first Quentin thought he was seeing something that wasn’t really there, that the light was playing tricks on his eyes. Why would someone be standing there in the dark? But as the light sharpened the image and gave clarity to its features, he found he wasn’t mistaken after all. The man was tall and thin, wearing a sleeveless tunic, pants that ended at the knees, sandals that laced up his ankles, and leather wrist guards. He carried what seemed to be a spear yet wasn’t, a slender piece of wood six feet in length with a second, much shorter length fastened to its center.

Quentin waited until he was absolutely certain of what he was seeing, then reached over to Tamis, who was sleeping right beside him, and touched her arm.

She was awake instantly, rising to a sitting position and staring at him. He pointed at the figure. A second later, she was standing beside him, fully alert.

“How long has he been there?” she whispered.

“I don’t know. He was already there before it was light enough to see him.”

“Has he done anything?”

Quentin shook his head. “Just stand there and watch us.”

Tamis went silent. She sat with Quentin, studying the man, waiting to see what would happen. In the new light, her small face took on a different cast; she looked young and pretty and faintly exotic with her Elven features. Quentin found himself studying
her as much as the stranger. He liked the calm, easy way she dealt with things, the way she was never flustered, the fact that she never overreacted. In another time and place, in other circumstances, he would have responded to that attraction; he did not think he could allow that there.

The sun crested the horizon and sent splinters of brilliant light chasing after the fading night. In the wake of their passing, the stranger’s features were fully revealed. His skin had a reddish cast to it, almost copper. It gleamed faintly, as if it was oiled. His hair, redder still, if a shade lighter, was thick and tightly curled against his skull, cut short and left free. Even his eyes, now visible in the dawn, were vaguely cinnamon.

He continued to regard them, a statue carved of stone. For the first time, Quentin saw what might be a short javelin tucked into his leather belt behind his back, one end protruding.

“What is he carrying in his hand?” he whispered to Tamis.

She shook her head. “I think it’s a blowgun, but I’ve never seen one that size. See the piece strapped to its middle? That would be a holder for the darts.” She went silent again, then said, “We can’t wait on this any longer. We have to see what he wants. Stay here while I wake the others.”

She rose and moved from Panax to the Elven Hunters, waking each with a touch, bending close to caution them, to tell them not to react. One by one they sat up and looked over to where the stranger stood watching.

Tamis came back to Quentin and bent close. “This might be tricky. He won’t be alone. There will be others in the trees. He wouldn’t expose himself so completely if there wasn’t someone protecting his back. He’s offering himself as a decoy to see what we do. Let’s not give him reason to think we mean him harm.”

She stood up and walked slowly over to where he stood. She kept her hands at her sides and her weapons sheathed. Quentin
heard her greet him in the Elven tongue and then, when he failed to respond, in several variants. None worked. She tried several Southland languages. Still nothing. She spoke bits of half a dozen Troll dialects, all without result.