Straken (35 page)

W
hen 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.

B
ek stood at the controls of
Swift 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 knew
Swift 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
Jerle 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.