Tanequil (4 page)

“There's not very much of it to work with, either,” the Elven girl continued doubtfully. “Not enough to cover more than maybe two square feet, and that's stretching it. How are we going to get it to step into a space that small?”

“Why worry about it?” Tagwen asked, throwing up his hands. “We don't know how to find this thing anyway, so the matter of applying the tar unobtrusively and in sufficient amounts to render the creature helpless is of very little consequence!”

“We'll find it,” Pen declared grimly.

They started walking north, the direction the
Skatelow
had flown. Pen reasoned that the creature knew Cinnaminson's talent was most effective in the dark. It probably preferred to hunt at night anyway, since that was the only time they had ever seen it. They had been keeping watch for the
Skatelow
since sunrise, but hadn't seen anything other than birds and clouds. Pen felt pretty certain that the airship wouldn't reappear until nightfall.

As they traveled, they discussed how they were going to lure their hunter into the tar once they found it and attracted its attention. There were all sorts of problems about accomplishing this. In order to get it into the tar, they would have to spread the tar around, then lead the creature to it and hope it stepped blindly in. It didn't seem too likely that this would happen; the thing hunting them was smart enough to avoid such an obvious trap. More to the point, one of them was going to have to act as bait, and the only one who would do was Pen. But neither Khyber nor Tagwen would hear of that, so another way had to be found.

It was midafternoon, and they were high on the slopes leading up to the Charnals, when they finally began to put a workable plan together. By then they were beginning to think about food again, remembering how good the rabbit Pen had caught two days before had tasted and wishing they had saved a bit of it. They had water from the mountain streams and had found roots and berries to chew on, but none of it was as satisfying as that rabbit.

“We can build a fire,” Khyber said. “That will attract attention from a long distance. The creature on the
Skatelow
won't miss it. But we won't be there. We'll bundle up some sticks and leaves to look like sleepers, but we'll be hiding back in the rocks.”

Pen nodded. “We need to find the right place, one where the creature will have to land in a certain spot and approach in a certain way. It has to seem to the creature that we think we are protected but really aren't. It has to think it's smarter than we are.”

“That shouldn't be too hard,” Tagwen declared with a snort. “It
is
smarter than we are.”

“An open space leading to a gap in the rocks would be ideal,” Pen went on, ignoring him. “We can coat the ground and rock sides with the tar. Even if it just brushes up against it, that would help.” He looked over at Tagwen. “Does this stuff stay sticky when it gets cold?”

The Dwarf shook his head. “It stiffens up. We have to keep it warm. Frost is a problem, too. If it frosts, the tar will harden and lose its stickiness.”

There were so many variables in the plan that it was tough to keep them all straight, and Pen was growing increasingly worried that he was going to miss at least one of them. But there was nothing he could do about it except to continue talking the scheme over with Khyber and Tagwen, hoping that, together, they could keep everything straight.

The afternoon slipped away, and the shadows were beginning to lengthen when Khyber suddenly gripped Pen's arm and said, “There! That's what we're looking for.”

She was pointing across a sparsely wooded valley to a meadow that fronted a heavy cluster of rocks leading up into the mountains. The rocks were threaded by a tangle of passages that gave the cluster the look of a complicated maze. The maze lifted toward the base of a cliff face that dropped sharply for several hundred feet from a high plateau.

“You're right,” Pen agreed. “Let's have a closer look before it gets dark.”

They went down through the valley, into the trees, and along a series of ravines and gullies that rains and snowmelt had carved into the slope, watching the sun slide steadily lower on the horizon. East, the sky was already dark behind the mountains, and a three-quarter moon was on the rise. Night birds were winging through the growing gloom, and night sounds were beginning to surface. A wind had picked up, bitter and chill as it blew down out of the higher elevations.

They were almost through the trees when Pen drew up short and pointed back the way they had come. “Did you see something move just then?” he asked.

The Dwarf and the girl peered through the dark wall of trunks and the pooling shadows. “I didn't see anything,” Khyber said.

Tagwen shook his head as well. “Shadows, maybe. The wind.”

Pen nodded. “Maybe.”

They went on quickly and were out of the trees and across the meadow in moments, heading for the rocks. Pen saw at once that it was exactly what they had hoped to find. The meadow sloped gently upward into a jumble of boulders too high and too deep to see over. There were passages leading into the rocks, but most of them ended within a dozen yards. Only one led all the way through, traversing small clearings in which sparse stands of evergreens and scrub blocked clear passage. It was possible to get through, but not without maneuvering over and around various obstacles and making the correct choices from among the narrow defiles. Best of all, one of the choices led to an outcropping at the edge of the woods they had just come through—and it was elevated enough to allow them to see over the rim of the maze to the meadow below.

“We build our fire in one of these clearings, make our sleeping dummies, and hide out here.” Pen had it all worked out. “An airship can spot our fire if she comes anywhere within miles, but we can spot the airship, too. We can tell if she's the
Skatelow.
We can see her land, we can watch what happens. Once the creature comes into the rocks, we slip down off the outcropping, skirt the trees, and come at the ship from outside. It's perfect.”

Neither the girl nor the Dwarf cared to comment on that bold declaration, so it was left hanging in the stillness of the twilight, where, even to Pen, it sounded a bit ridiculous.

They went back through the maze to a clearing where the opening from the meadow was so narrow it was necessary to turn sideways to squeeze through. Pen looked around speculatively, then found what he was looking for. On the other side of the clearing, deeper in, was a rocky alcove where someone could hide and watch the opening.

“One of us will hide here,” he said, facing them. “When our friend from the
Skatelow
comes through that opening, the tar gets thrown at it. The leaves will split on impact, so the tar will go all over. It will take the creature a moment or two at least to figure out what happened. By then, we'll be heading for the airship.”

Tagwen actually laughed. “That is a terrible plan, young Penderrin. I suppose you believe that you should be the one who throws the tar, don't you?”

“Tagwen has a point,” Khyber agreed quickly. “Your plan won't work.”

Pen glowered at her. “Why not? What's wrong with it?”

The Elven girl held his angry gaze. “In the first place, we have already established that you are the one individual who is indispensable to the success of the search for the Ard Rhys. So you can't be put at risk. In the second place, you are the only one who can fly the airship. So you have to get aboard if we're to fly out of here. In the third place, we still don't know what this thing is. We don't know if it's human or not. We don't know if it has the use of magic. That's too many variables for you to deal with. I'm the one who has the Elfstones. I also have a modicum of magic I can call upon if I need to. I'm faster than you are on foot. I'm expendable. I have to be the one who confronts it.”

“If you miss,” Tagwen said darkly, “you had better be fast indeed.”

“All the more reason why you and Pen have to be moving toward the
Skatelow
the moment it enters the rocks. You have to be airborne before it can recover and decide it has been tricked, whatever the result of my efforts. If it gets back through that maze and out into the meadow before you board and cut the lines, we're dead.”

There was a long silence as they considered the chances of this happening. Pen shook his head. “What if it brings Cinnaminson into the rocks with it?”

Khyber stared at him without answering. She didn't need to tell him what he already knew.

“I don't like it,” Tagwen growled. “I don't like any of it.”

But the matter was decided.

 
F
OUR
 

Night descended across the rugged slopes of the Charnals like a silky black curtain pricked by a thousand silver needles. The clarity of the sky was stunning, a brilliant wash of light that gave visibility for miles from where Khyber Elessedil sat staring northward in the company of Penderrin and Tagwen. The purity of the mountain air was in sharp contrast to the murkiness of Anatcherae on the Lazareen or even to Syioned's storm-washed isolation on the Innisbore. There was a hushed quality to the darkness, the sounds of the world left far below on the hilltops and grasslands, unable to rise so high or penetrate so deeply. Here, she felt soothed and comforted. Here, rebirth of the sort that the world always needed was possible.

They had done what they could to prepare for the
Skatelow
's appearance. They had built their fire, a bright flicker of orange just below where they sat hiding, feeding it sufficient wood so that it would burn for hours before it needed replenishing. They had placed the tar ball close enough to protect it from the cold so that it would stay sticky inside its leafy wrapping. They had built their straw men, scarecrows made of debris and covered with their cloaks. They had spent time working on the look of them, on the setting of positions, placing them just far enough away so as not to be immediately recognizable for what they really were, but close enough to suggest the possibility of sleeping travelers. They had done this before the sun had disappeared into the hills west, before twilight faded and darkness arrived. They had studied all the possible routes of approach and escape, marked well the path from where they hid to where the fire burned and from where they hid to where the tree line would lead them back to the meadow.

They were as ready, she supposed, as they were ever going to be. She wished they could do more, but they had done all they could think to do and would have to be content with that.

The plan was unchanged save for one aspect. Instead of hiding down in the rocks ahead of time, she was waiting with Pen and Tagwen until the
Skatelow
made her approach. That way she would know better when to make ready. Her plan was simple—wait for the creature to appear, toss the tar from her hiding place in the rocks, and run. By then, Pen and Tagwen would already be aboard the
Skatelow
and flying to meet her. If they were unable to land again, they would simply drop her a line and whisk her away.

It all sounded simple, but she was already having her doubts. For one thing, the tar ball was heavy and unwieldy. It was going to take a mighty throw to get it to fly more than twenty feet. That meant letting their hunter get awfully close. And it was going to be difficult to be accurate. The tar was squishy and crudely formed; it wasn't going to be like throwing a rock or a wooden ball. She was also thinking back to how fast the creature had moved along the rooftops of Anatcherae, and she didn't think she could outrun it if the tar didn't slow it down.

Of course, she would use her Druid skills to help in the effort, an implementation of a little magic to help with speed and direction and control. But her skills were untested for the most part and never in circumstances as dire as these. She would have to get everything right.

She sighed wearily. It didn't do much good to think about those things because she knew she couldn't change any of them. Most plans involved an element of luck. She was going to have to hope she had a lot of it with this one.

She listened to the breathing of her companions in the stillness, to the soft scrape of their boots on the rocks as they shifted position. Pen was lying down, and Tagwen was sitting with his head between his knees. Both were dozing. She didn't blame them. It was nearing midnight, and there had been no sign of the airship. She was beginning to think that it had gone another way, even though Pen insisted the creature would return to search the only area they could reasonably be expected to cover on foot. Cinnaminson might attempt to steer it away from them, but it would know approximately where to look no matter what she said. So far it hadn't appeared, however, and Khyber was growing impatient.

And cold. Without her cloak to keep warm, she was shivering. This whole journey had been a disaster as far as she was concerned. But she was the one who had encouraged it, insisting that Uncle Ahren take them all under his Druid's wing and bring them in search of the tree that would give Pen entrance into the Forbidding. She was the one who had said they had an obligation to help the Ard Rhys.

She felt her throat tighten, and her eyes filled with tears as she thought of Ahren Elessedil, dead in the Slags. Her mentor, her surrogate father, her best friend—gone, killed by another Druid. Druids at war with Druids—it was an abomination. She had wanted so badly to be one of them, but now she wasn't sure. Ahren was dead, Grianne Ohmsford was locked in the Forbidding, and the very order she had so desperately wanted to join was responsible for all of it. She had learned a little of how to employ elemental magic, but so far it hadn't proved very useful. She carried the Elfstones, but they weren't really hers. In plain language, she was a rank amateur, a thief, and a runaway, and she was risking her life to achieve something she wasn't sure she believed in.

She gave vent to her disappointment and despair, crying silently, keeping her face turned away from the other two so as not to wake them. She stopped after a few moments, deciding she had been self-indulgent enough, and composed herself. She could not afford to waste time. The decision had been made, the journey had been undertaken, and there was no turning back. She had believed rescuing the Ard Rhys was the right thing to do when she had started out, and nothing had changed. The loss of her uncle was staggering, but she knew that if he were there he would tell her not to give up, to remember what was at stake, to be brave and to trust in what her instincts and common sense told her was true. He had come through worse on the voyage of the
Jerle Shannara.
He had found strength in recognition of his own failures and his ability to confront them. A boy younger than she was now, he had remade himself into a man. She must do no less for herself, if she was to be deserving of his trust.

Absorbed in her thoughts, she very nearly missed seeing the sleek, dark shape of the
Skatelow
as it appeared on the horizon and turned toward them.

“Pen!” she hissed frantically. “Tagwen!”

They jerked awake, the Dwarf starting so violently that he nearly rolled off his perch. She seized his shoulder to steady him, then pointed out to where the airship sailed through the starlit sky like a dark phantom. “That's her,” Pen whispered.

“I'm going down,” Khyber announced, climbing to her feet. “Don't forget. Once you see that thing leave the airship, move into the trees. Even if it brings Cinnaminson into the rocks, Pen. No matter what.”

She didn't hear his response, if he gave one, and she didn't look back at him. She couldn't worry about him anymore. He was going to have to do his part, just as she was going to have to do hers, and that meant he was going to have to put all thoughts of Cinnaminson behind him. She wasn't sure he could do that, but it was out of her control.

Her heart was beating rapidly and her face felt flushed as she hurried through the maze toward the fire, blood singing through her veins. She forced herself to focus on the task ahead, picturing herself flinging the tar ball at the creature, imagining it coated in black goo. She glanced skyward once or twice, but she was too deep in the rocks to see what was happening with the
Skatelow.
The creature hunting them had to have seen the fire. Patience, she told herself. It was coming.

She reached the clearing and retrieved the tar ball from beside the fire. The tar was warm and pliable through its leafy wrapping, in perfect condition for its intended use. She turned back to her hiding place and stepped inside. The crevice was deeply shadowed and slightly elevated from the fire and the three cloaked forms stretched out around it. She could see everything that might happen and not be seen herself. Moon and stars lit the open space, revealing the opening to the passageway through which the creature would enter the clearing. But the angle of the moon left her own hiding place in the rocks shadowed and dark.

She hefted the tar in her hands and settled back to wait.

If she had been a little more proficient with her magic, she might have floated the tar out over the entry point, as Ahren had taught her to do with a leaf, dropping it on the creature when it appeared. But that required skill and timing she did not yet possess, and she could not afford to miss on her one opportunity. Thinking of her inability to use her magic made her wish she had studied longer and harder when she'dhad the chance, when Ahren was still there to teach her. Who would teach her now? There was only so much she could do for herself, and now no one in the Druid ranks whom she could turn to.

If she even got the chance to try.

The minutes passed. The darkness was deep and silent, a sweeping shroud lying soft and gentle across the world. Nothing moved. The clearing remained empty.

The longer she stood there waiting, the more certain she became that the whole plan was doomed to fail. The thing that hunted them was quick and agile. Her chances of actually hitting it were poor, and her chances of escaping afterwards were poorer still. She began to think of ways in which she could use her small magic to slow it down—something, anything she could do to get far enough ahead of it that it couldn't catch her. A cold certainty began to creep through her that she didn't possess the necessary tools. She was just learning magic, just beginning to make the sort of progress that would lead her to a command of real power.

Maybe she could use the Elfstones. Maybe the thing was possessed of magic, after all. They had been referring to it as
creature
rather than
human being
all along. It certainly looked to be so from the brief glimpses they had caught of it in Anatcherae. So maybe the Stones would work against it.

Or she could try summoning the wind that she had used to sweep it off the deck of the
Skatelow.
The wind had worked once. There wasn't any reason it shouldn't work again. That was a magic she could safely command. That was a weapon she could put to use.

She waited some more. The minutes dragged by. The creature did not appear.

Something was wrong. It had been too long. It should have been here by now, if it was coming. She hated that she couldn't see what was happening beyond the clearing. It left her blind and helpless to do anything but stand there and hope they had guessed right about what the creature would do. But what if they hadn't?

Her eyes scanned the clearing, probing the passage opening at the far side. Still nothing moved.

Then a soft scrape sounded right above her hiding place, and a small shower of dust descended in a tiny cloud.

Her breath caught in her throat. It was right above her.

She froze, caught off guard completely.
Right above me.
Did it know she was there? She waited, trying to regain control of her muscles, listening to the silence, anticipating so many bad possibilities that she wanted to scream to relieve the tension.

Then she saw it, creeping along the rim of the rocks to her right, circling the clearing like a big spider, cloaked and hooded, as silent as the dark into which it had blended so easily. She realized at once the mistake they had made. They had assumed it would come at them on the ground because that's what they would have done in its place. But the thing wasn't like them. In Anatcherae, it had used the rooftops. Aboard the
Skatelow,
it had hung from the rigging. It liked the advantage of height. It had used it here, coming into the maze not through the twisting passageways, but over the tops of the boulders, leaping and crawling like the insect it resembled.

Do something!

It was still moving, slowly and just a few yards at a time, studying the fire and the bundled forms. It might have sensed something was wrong or it might simply have been making sure it wasn't missing anything. Whatever the case, if she was going to use the tar, she had to do it while the thing was still within striking distance. It would see her the moment she moved, of course. She would have to step out from her hiding place, and it would see her.

She realized suddenly that this wasn't going to work. She wouldn't be fast or accurate enough. It could drop down in those rocks much faster than she could move. It was looking for a trap, and it would spot her the moment she left the shadows.

What else can I do?

The question echoed in her mind in a hopeless wail of despair.

Then all at once the creature wheeled about, looking off to the south, toward the trees below the meadow, toward the path that Pen and Tagwen were already surely taking to reach the
Skatelow.
It froze in place, tensed and staring. A second later it was gone, bounding over the rocks and out of view, moving so swiftly that it seemed simply to disappear.

She stood staring after it for a second, realizing what it intended, immobilized by her sense of failure and helplessness to prevent it from succeeding. She was too far away to reach them, too far away to get back to where they were.

There was only one chance. Breaking from her hiding place in a rush, she raced across the clearing and through the passageway that led out to the meadow and the airship.

 

 

After Khyber Elessedil disappeared into the rocks, Pen sat with Tagwen and watched as the
Skatelow
moved steadily closer to their hiding place and then finally started to descend toward the meadow. Even with the bright moon and stars to aid him, he could not make out what was happening aboard the airship. As the vessel landed, he searched for Cinnaminson and her captor without success. A cold premonition began to seep through him that it was too late for her; that the thing that had taken her prisoner had decided she was not worth the trouble. His premonition was not eased when he saw the shadowy form of the creature slide over the side of the vessel to tie her off and then start toward the rocks in a skittering crawl.