The Elves of Cintra (39 page)

“I was a Tracker like Sim,” Larkin said. “When I lost my sight, I lost my job. No one thought I could do it anymore. I wasn’t too pleased about that because I knew how well I could see. Better than they could, those who thought I had no further use. So I moved out here, away from everyone but the few like Sim who would take the trouble to come see me. It was my way of proving I was still whole, I suppose. Childish, in a way. But it suits me.”

He moved over to the tiny kitchen and without pausing or fumbling brought down glasses and poured out the contents of an ale jug until each was full.

“Long-range Trackers like myself know about Larkin,” Simralin continued. “We rely on him. He keeps a boat to ferry us across the Redonnelin Deep so we can avoid using the bridges. He takes us across and then comes back to get us when we’re done. He reads the currents of the river the same way he reads the faces of the Elves who think he can’t see.” She smiled. “Don’t you, Larkin?”

“If you say so. Who would know better than you?” He took a deep swallow from his glass. “She hasn’t told you yet that she was the one who saved me when I lost my sight. We were on patrol together below the Cintra and came across a mantis field.”

“The insects,” Simralin interjected. “Thousands of them.”

“Thousands, devouring everything in their path. But some of these had mutated. They spit out a poison that blinded me before I realized the danger. Poor instincts, that day. Simralin was lucky. They missed her, and she was able to get us both away. The Elves went out later and eradicated the mantis field. Too late for me, though.”

“He was my mentor before and after the accident,” Simralin said, continuing the story. “He taught me how to be a Tracker, taught me everything I know. He still teaches me. He still knows more than I do.”

“That’s because I’m older and I’ve had time to learn more. Now why don’t you go bathe, you and Angel Perez? Then we’ll wash down our junior member of the family. Meanwhile, Kirisin, you can keep me company and tell me everything I don’t know about your sister. Come on, now. Don’t be shy. I’m willing to bet that there’s lots you can tell me that she doesn’t want me to know.”

There was a rudimentary shower out in back of the cottage at the base of the cliffs that took its water from a narrow falls. Angel and Simralin stripped off their clothes and began to wash. The water felt icy cold as it splashed over Angel’s hot skin.

“I can’t believe anyone who is blind could live out here alone like this,” she said, scrubbing off the dirt. “In fact, I can’t believe that he can tell as much as he can about what’s going on around him.”

Simralin caught the bar of soap she was tossed. “He sees in ways none of us can. He won’t talk about it, but it’s there in the way he knows things no blind person should be able to know. Not even with enhanced senses. He’s a different breed.”

“But the Elves don’t know this?”

The Tracker shrugged. “Elves aren’t so different from humans. They make up their minds and pass judgment without knowing as much as they should. ‘Blind people can’t see. Blind people can’t do as much as sighted people.’ You’ve heard something like it. No one questions that it could be any different for him. Certainly, they don’t want to take a chance on him as a Tracker.”

They finished washing, and then sent Kirisin out to do the same. When they were all clean and wearing the one change of clothes they had brought with them as they fled Arborlon, they sat down to eat. Dinner was hot and tasty. Angel never even bothered to ask what it was she was eating; she just ate it and washed it down with ale and felt a little of the aching weariness seep from her body.

Afterward, they sat out on Larkin’s tiny porch while Simralin told him what had brought them north from the Cintra and what sort of danger he might be in if he agreed to help.

“We need a crossing,” she finished. “We need to get to the far shore without being seen and without anyone knowing you helped.”

The blind man said nothing, made no movement.

“In truth, you shouldn’t help,” she added as they stared at one another in the ensuing silence. “A smart man would tell us to take our troubles somewhere else.”

He nodded, and his Elven face wrinkled with amusement. “Good advice, I’m sure.”

“Arissen Belloruus will have sent his Elven Hunters looking for us. Those demons will come looking, too.”

“I expect so. They might even show up at the same time.”

Simralin gazed at him. “You don’t sound as if you are taking this seriously enough. You sound like you think this is amusing. But there are three dead people back in Arborlon who would tell you differently if they could still talk.”

Larkin brushed off her comments with a wave of his hand. “Do you want my help or not, Simralin? Did you come all this way to talk me out of doing anything or to talk me into it? You can’t have it both ways.”

“I just want to make certain you understand—”

“Yes, that this is dangerous business.” He leaned forward, his milky eyes fixed and unseeing, but his attention all on her. “What have we ever done as Trackers that isn’t dangerous? We live in a world that is filled with dangerous creatures, infected with plague and poison, and saturated in madness at every turn. I think I have the picture.”

She stared at him, her lips tight. “Sometimes you make me want to scream.”

“Please resist the urge. Now then. We should make the crossing at first light, when the tide is out and the world mostly still at rest. In the meantime, it looks to me as if young Kirisin has the right idea.”

They glanced over. The boy was asleep in his chair.

Larkin rose without waiting for a response to his suggestion and gestured toward one corner of the room. “We can make a place for all three of you right over there. A little crowded, but if you are as tired as you look, it shouldn’t matter. I’ll keep watch while you rest.”

He paused, his head cocking slightly in the silence that followed, his blank gaze fixing on the space that separated them. “Have I been clear enough for you?”

A
NGEL SLEPT POORLY
that night, plagued by dreams of Johnny. In her dreams, he was still alive, walking the streets of the barrio, keeping watch over the people who lived there in the wake of civilization’s collapse. She was a child still, and he was her protector. She would sit in the doorway of their home and wait for him to return, scanning the faces of those who passed, searching for his, afraid until she found it.

And then one day, in her dream as in her life, she searched for him in vain.

The dawn was unexpectedly chill and damp as they set out across Redonnelin Deep, the air thick with moisture off the river and the sky gray with roiling storm clouds. A change in the weather was coming, something no one saw much of anymore. It might even bring serious rain, although Angel was doubtful. No one had seen more than a trace of rain in LA in almost a year. Could it be so different here?

“The higher mountains might even see snow,” said Larkin Quill, smiling brightly into the wind and the light as he steered the boat from the shelter of the inlet toward the open water. His face was lifted into the wind, as if he took direction from its feel. “Once, there was snow on the upper slopes year-round. I was told that. Imagine. Snowcaps all year long, brilliant veils of white. Wouldn’t that be something to see? Syrring Rise, draped in white?”

The boat that conveyed them northward was a blunt, heavy craft with a metal-reinforced bow, the cleats of her gunwales wrapped with old tires and lashed with protective fenders. She boasted a pilothouse, an open aft deck, a galley, and two berths below through a hatchway. Twin inboard engines thrummed softly and, in the same way as the lamps inside the little cottage, seemed to lack any source of fuel. When Angel asked Larkin how they worked, he just smiled and shrugged.

“Magic,” he said.

Not magic of a sort that she was used to, she thought. She had believed until now that the Elves had lost all their magic, but it seemed that a revision of her thinking was in order. She let the matter alone for the moment, but made a promise to herself to follow up on it later. For now, it was enough that they were leaving the land in which the demons prowled and the Elven King hunted and the dream of Johnny still haunted her in her sleep.

Adios, mi amigo,
she whispered to the wind, thinking of him once more.
You were the best of us all. Rest in peace forever.

The chop of the waters quickened, and the waves grew higher. The earlier haze had settled lower on the waters, long trailers fanning out, weaving strange patterns. She looked back at the shoreline and found that it was already fading away.

Vaya con Dios. Tu madre sueña contigo. Your mother dreams of you.

Then, as she lifted her eyes toward the high bluffs that Larkin Quill’s little cottage backed up against, she caught sight of something moving. Three figures, indistinct and shadowy, appeared out of the veil of the mist. They stood at the edge of the bluff and looked down at her.

A boy, a girl, and a very large dog.

They were visible for just a few seconds, and then they faded back into the mist. As the boat moved farther out into the channel, she tried repeatedly to find them again, but could not do so.

When she finally turned away, setting her gaze on the shoreline ahead, she was not even certain of what she had seen.

O
N THE FAR BANK,
two figures crouched behind a screen of heavy brush and peered out at the boat that was crossing toward them. The boat could not put in anywhere close to where they waited, which was atop a sheer cliff wall that dropped straight into the rough waters of the river. Instead the boat would land farther upriver, where an inlet offered shallow waters running up to a small sandbar. After disembarking, the occupants would be forced to ascend a steep, rocky slope to the heights, a climb that would consume the better part of an hour. By then, the watchers would be gone, leading the way to their mutual destination, a place known as well to them as to the three they shadowed.

Shadowed, rather than tracked, thought the one.

“It would trouble them to know that we will be there to greet them,” the two-legged demon whispered to the four. “See how they look behind, searching the shoreline for some sign of us? How worried they must be that we will catch them unawares! How helpless they must feel! They have no idea that we passed them by more than a week ago, do they?”

It reached over and stroked the other demon’s sleek, scaly form, feeling it press itself against its hand, anxious for its touch.

“They have no idea of anything,” the speaker whispered.

They watched the boat sail slowly closer, buffeted by the waves, knocked about by the current, straining mightily to stay on course for the inlet. But the watching quickly grew tedious, and the four-legged demon became restless. The other demon understood. It was time to quit this place, to continue on with their journey.

The two-legged demon edged backward until it could no longer see the river, then rose to a standing position. “We know where they will go next, don’t we, pretty thing?” it murmured to its companion. “Oh, yes, we know. We know everything.”

The Elves and the Knight of the Word would soon find that out.

TWENTY-FOUR

W
HEN
H
AWK WOKE,
it was dawn on a gray and mist-draped morning, the sky and earth of a single hue, the air smelling of damp and old earth. He lay in a sparse woods close by the edge of a bluff that sloped away toward a deep gorge; through this a broad-banked river churned, its surface white-capped and choppy. He could see the far side of the river and the high, cliff-edged bank beyond, but the land after that was shrouded in a deep, impenetrable haze.

He had no idea at all where he was.

He glanced over to find Tessa lying several feet away, still asleep, and beyond her—a dark shaggy lump against the wintry grasses—was Cheney.

For just a moment, his thoughts returned to the gardens of the King of the Silver River. His senses were infused with its colors and its smells, his memories of what the old man had told him fresh and new, and his vision of his destiny as clear as still water. Then the moment was gone and he was staring into the gray, past the sleeping forms of his companions to a future he could only imagine.