Antrax (33 page)

W
alker fought his way through the writhing tentacles of the jungle vines and grasses for what seemed an endless amount of time, burning them away to clear a path, fighting for space to breathe, and still he seemed to get nowhere. The jungle was vast and unchanging, and he could find no distinguishing features to mark his passage. In the back of his mind, deep within the hazy thinking that drove him on, he realized that by escaping Castledown and gaining the jungle, he had merely exchanged one type of maze for another.

Having no other choice, he forced himself to go on. His body ached with fatigue; all he could think about now was finding a place to sleep. He was beginning to hallucinate, to hear voices, to see movement, and to feel the touch of shades that weren’t there. The sensations emerged from the green of the jungle, from the emerald sea he sought to swim, reaching out to him. They grew steadily more insistent, so much so that they were soon overshadowing even the plants and trees of the jungle, causing some to fade and others to change their look entirely. Oddly, the attacks on him ended, the vines and grasses drew back, and the undulations of the earthen floor quieted.

He slowed his ragged advance and looked around, trying to decide what had happened.

He heard someone speak his name.

Walker? Please, Walker.

He recognized the voice, but it was a distant memory he could barely bring into focus. He grasped for it nevertheless, clutching at it as if it were a lifeline. The surging earth was still, and the deep green of the jungle had darkened to something hard and black, a night sky filled with blinking red stars. A face appeared, hazy and indistinct. It was a young woman’s face, its thin, frail features framed with long, silver hair. She was so close to him he could feel the softness of her skin, and her breath upon his cheek was a
feathery tickle. He felt her arms reach about him, cradling him. Where had she come from to find him, here in this jungle, in the middle of nowhere, a part of this madness?

Walker?

He remembered now. She was Ryer Ord Star. She was the seer he had brought with him on his voyage out of the Four Lands. Of all those who might have found him, she alone had managed to do so. He could not understand it.

Abruptly he was assailed by a rush of odd sensations, feelings that seemed foreign and wrong to him. At first, he could not identify them, could not trace their source or determine their purpose. He stood motionless and confused in the fading jungle and the descending night with its odd red stars, the young woman clinging to him, the world turned upside down.

Then everything changed in an instant. The jungle was gone. The green of the trees, the blue of the sky, the smell of rotted wood and leaves, the softness of the earth—his entire sense of place and time—disappeared. He was no longer standing upright, but was laid out upon a hard metal surface in a room filled with blinking lights and softly humming machines. Tubes ran from the machines to his body, pumping fluids. Wires attached to his skin snaked everywhere. He did not see this with his eyes. His eyes were blindfolded. He saw it instead with his mind, his Druid senses suddenly come awake from a deep, immobilizing sleep. He saw it the way a dream is seen, except that the dream was of the jungle, of the ruins and the creepers and the fire threads, of everything he had believed to be true.

He remembered then. He knew what had happened, what had been done to him. He understood it all, brought back into reality from drug-induced sleep and nightmarish dreams by the presence of the young woman who lay beside him, by her voice and her touch. She alone had reached him when no one else could. When
he lay dying of the bramble poison after Shatterstone and she saved him with her empathic healing, a link had been forged between them. It bound them in an unintended way, through trading life for death and healing for suffering. So it was that she had sensed his need when even he was not aware of it, heard his subconscious call for help, come to him.

She stirred slightly, her fingers trailing down his face like velvet, her warmth infusing him with strength. She called his name softly, repeatedly, still reaching out to him, determined to bring him back from his prison.

When he felt her hand slide over his, cupping it, he lifted his fingers and pressed them against her palm in response.

A
hren missed the movement, his eyes on the Druid’s face. But he saw Ryer Ord Star suddenly go very still, her body motionless. Even her fingers stopped tracing lines on Walker’s face. He waited for her to speak, to begin moving again, to give him some indication of what was happening. But the seer had turned to stone.

“Ryer?” he whispered.

She made no response. She lay pressed against the Druid as if to become a part of him, her eyes closed and her breathing slowed so completely that he could barely detect it. He thought to touch her, but he was afraid to do so. Something had happened, and whatever it was, she was responding to it in the best way she could. He knew he must not disturb her. He must wait for her. He must be patient.

The minutes ticked by, endless and silent. He bent over her once, trying unsuccessfully to see what was happening. Then he stepped back a pace, as if a measure of distance might give him a better view. Nothing helped. He looked around at the banks of lights and switches, thinking the answer might lie there. If it did,
he could not detect it. He looked out through the darkened glass to the cavernous room beyond, to the banks of spinning disks. Metal attendants moved down the brightly lit aisles, steady and purposeful in their labors. None looked in his direction or seemed in any way aware of what was happening in the room. He listened for a change in the sounds of the machinery, but there was none. Everything seemed the same.

Yet he knew it wasn’t.

He did not think that he or Ryer Ord Star had been detected. The concealing haze of the phoenix stone still wrapped them both. If the magic had failed, there would have been some indication of it. If Ryer’s presence at the Druid’s side had been detected, an alarm would have sounded or flashed. Ahren hugged himself against the chill seeping through his body, against raw impatience and fear. What could he do? What should he do? He had to trust in the magic; it was all he had. That, and his sense of purpose in going there, in agreeing to do something that terrified him, persuaded by the seer that doing anything was better than giving up.

Yet it wasn’t even
his
sense of purpose, he realized. It was
hers.
She was the one who had wanted to find Walker, who had insisted they find him, who had believed that they must do so if he was to have any chance of escaping Castledown. It seemed that she had been right, that if they hadn’t come, Walker would have remained where he was, undiscovered, neither quite dead nor quite alive, neither one thing nor the other, but something in between, something terrible and repulsive and inhuman.

But having found the Druid, how were they supposed to save him? What were they supposed to do? Whatever it was, he did not know if they were equal to the task.

“Ryer?” he said again.

There was no response. What was she doing? He glanced around nervously, aware of how long they had lingered in the room, of how
much they were risking. Sooner or later, the magic of the phoenix stone would fail and they would be discovered. Nothing could save them then. Bravery and sense of purpose would count for nothing.

“Ryer!” he hissed.

To his astonishment, she looked up at him, eyes snapping open as if she had come awake suddenly, unexpectedly. There was such unrestrained joy, such boundless hope in her gaze that he was momentarily speechless.

“He’s come back!” she breathed softly, tears flooding her eyes. “He’s free, Ahren!”

Free of what? Ahren wondered. He didn’t look free. But the Elven Prince nodded and smiled as if what she said were so. He reached out to take her arm and help her stand again, but she motioned him away.

“No. Wait. We have to wait. It’s not time yet.” She closed her eyes and pressed herself tighter against the Druid. “He’s going back in. To find Antrax. To find the books of magic. I have to stay with him while he does. I have to be here for him.”

She went still again, eyes closing, breathing slowing, hands moving to the Druid’s forehead, fingers pressing against his temples. “The machines don’t know. We mustn’t let them find out. I have to keep them from knowing. Stay close to me, Ahren.”

He wasn’t sure what she was talking about, what it was she was doing to help Walker, but the urgency in her plea was unmistakable. He stood beside her, beside the Druid, feeling alone and vulnerable and lost, looking down in helpless silence, and waited to find out.

S
urfacing from the stream of drug-induced illusions that Antrax had used to control him, Walker drew on Ryer Ord Star’s empathic strength to keep from going under again. He was swimming upstream against a raging tide, but at least he understood what had been done to him. His tumble down the tower chute after escaping the fire threads and the creepers had ended in his loss of consciousness and ultimate imprisonment. He had been drugged and immobilized immediately, then brought to the room to be strapped down and drained of his power. The method was clever and effective: let the victim think himself still free, make him fight to stay that way, and siphon off the power of the magic he used to do so. The tubes that ran to his body fed him liquids and drugs, keeping him alive but dreaming of a life that never was. If not for the seer, he would have remained that way until he died.

His understanding brought no comfort. Kael Elessedil must have spent his days the same way, using the Elfstones over and over, thinking himself free, unable ever to manage to do more than to keep running. He would have lived thirty years like that, until he
had grown too old or weak or sick to be of any further use. Then Antrax would have sent him home again, using him one final time, to lure a replacement.

Except that Antrax had gotten lucky. It had succeeded in luring not one, but several, luring to his deadly trap not only the Druid, but Ahren Elessedil, Quentin Leah, and perhaps even Bek Ohmsford, all of whom had command of significant magic. Antrax would have known about them, of course. It would have known from what it had recorded of their efforts to recover the keys on the islands of Flay Creech, Shatterstone, and Mephitic. A machine that built machines, a creation of the technology of the Old World, it had known to test the capabilities of those it sought to snare. That was the reason for luring humans to its lair. That was the purpose for the underground prison. To steal their magic and convert it to the power that fed Antrax. To keep Antrax alive.

Yet perhaps that was only one reason and not the one that mattered most to it. Perhaps it was still searching for those who had created it, waiting for them to come back to claim the treasure they had left it to guard. The books of the Old World. The secrets of another time.

How did he know that? Unconscious and dreaming, how could he know? He knew it in part from what he had deciphered from the map, written in a language the Druid Histories still recorded. He knew it in part from what Ryer Ord Star had communicated to him in bringing him back from his slumber, her words and thoughts revealing his situation. He knew it in part from what he could deduce from the use of the machinery that immobilized and drugged him. He knew it finally from what he was able to intuit. It was enough to keep him from slipping back into his prison, to keep him fixed on what he must do if he was to complete his task in going there—the task that had cost the lives of so many of his companions and might yet, if he was not swift and sure and focused enough, cost him his.

He gathered himself within his body, using his magic to summon his shade and set it free, the way Cogline had done years ago in entering lost Paranor. It was what Allanon had done in his time. There was danger in it. If his body should die, his shade was lost. If he strayed too far or allowed himself to be trapped outside his body, he might never get back again. Yet it was a gamble he must take. He could not free his body from the wires and tubes that linked it to Antrax without triggering alarms that would bring the creepers. There was no reason to free himself if he did not know what to do to stay free. As a shade, he could explore Castledown without Antrax being any the wiser. Ryer Ord Star would keep his body strong and alive and functioning, would keep the machines deceived as to what was happening. She would feed him enough of her empathic healing power to prevent him from slipping back into the deadening dreams. So long as she could do so, nothing would seem any different. So long as the magic of the phoenix stone cloaked the seer, even the eyes of Antrax could not detect her presence. Walker’s magic would continue to feed out in small increments, reduced by the absence of real thought, responding out of reflex only. Antrax would not be concerned at the decline in his magic’s output right away. Not even for several hours, should it take that long. Time was relative in Castledown. Antrax had lived for more than twenty-five hundred years. A few hours were nothing.