The Elves of Cintra

by Terry Brooks

  By nightfall, everyone was pretty much resettled and the move across the river complete.

  “I don’t know how you did that,” Helen told Hawk later when they were sitting alone, close to where Tessa had gone to work helping the children. “But it’s proof enough for me that you are who you say.” She shook her head. “No one I’ve ever heard of could do what you did. Not even Angel Perez.”

  Hawk didn’t know what to say. He was still coming to terms with it himself. He could not understand yet how he had managed to generate such rapid growth from a few withered plant and grass ends, a talent so new to him that it seemed as if it must belong to someone else. He could not even decide how he had known what to do.

  “The children will be safer on this side,” he said. “But you may have to defend the bridge.”

  “If we stay here, I know we will,” she said. “You were right about the pursuit. Already an army is coming up the coast. We had hoped Angel would be back before it reached us. Now I don’t know.” She looked off into the twilight, as if she might find her friend there. “How long before we leave? You sound as if it might not be right away.”

  He nodded. “It won’t. We can’t leave until I find my family and bring them here. They are somewhere north, coming to meet me. I should be back with them in less than a week.”

  “You’re leaving?” she asked.

  “Not for long. But you have to hold the bridge until then. You have to protect the children. If others come this way, take them in, as well.” He paused, and then added, “Angel would want that.”

  He didn’t know if she would or wouldn’t, didn’t know the first thing about Angel Perez besides what he had heard from Helen Rice, but he thought that mention of her would help strengthen the other’s resolve.

  Helen sat silently for a moment, her slight form hunched, her head bent. “I am so tired,” she said.

  Then she rose, smiled at him momentarily, and walked away. Hawk watched her go. He was already making his departure plans. He waited until the camp began to go to sleep, then found Tessa and told her he was leaving to find the Ghosts. He watched a mix of fear and uncertainty flood her amber eyes and tighten the smooth skin of her dark face.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” he said. “You can wait for me here, if you want.”

  Tessa laughed. “I could do lots of things if I wanted to. But none of them are things I want to do without you.”

  “I’m sorry about everything that’s happened—the compound, your mother and father, all of it. I wish it hadn’t.”

  “I’m sorry about what’s happened, too. But mostly I’m sorry for you. It must be very scary, all of this…though it isn’t so out of keeping with who you are.”

  He smiled. “I wish I could feel that way. It all seems so weird.” He hesitated. “You’re coming with me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I want you to come. Maybe we can talk about what’s happened while we walk. I think I need to do that. I think it will help make it more real.”

  She took his hands in her own. “Then we’d better get started.”

  They gathered a few supplies in backpacks and with Cheney leading the way set out west, following the river as it wound through a chain of mountains that flanked it on both sides.

  By midnight, they were ten miles away.

  FINDO GASK stalked the darkness, a gray ghost on a shadowy night, the sky heavily overcast and empty of light, and the woods through which he passed deep-layered with gloom. Behind him, the camp of the once-men slumbered, their grunts and snores mingling with the whimpers and moans of the slaves they had taken on their march north from LA. Their journey had been a fast one, coming overland afoot and by flatbed truck, each travel day spanning sixteen to eighteen hours. There had been little time for delay once the gypsy morph had resurfaced, and less time still now that it had revealed itself a second time. It appeared stronger this time, its magic more potent and sweeping, and it was making no effort to mask what it was doing.

  Which was more than the demon could have hoped and dreamed for, and it knew it could not afford to let this chance slip through its fingers.

  Still, the source of the magic was a long way north, several hundred miles farther on at least, and this second using had not originated from the same place as the first. That meant that the morph was on the move, which meant that it had decided on a destination or a goal. Findo Gask could not know its purpose, but there was no mistaking the need to reach it before that purpose could be fulfilled. The morph was the demon’s most dangerous threat, the one servant of the Word who might undo everything the demon had spent so much time achieving.

  It still rankled Findo Gask that he had let the morph get free of him all those years ago when it had been within his grasp. Somehow, Nest Freemark had tricked him. He sensed it instinctively, knew that she had bonded with this Faerie creature and kept it safe from him. His victory over John Ross—or any of the other Knights of the Word he had dispatched over the years—felt hollow and insufficient. Nothing less than the death of the gypsy morph would satisfy him now.

  Nothing less would ever give him peace.

  It was a goal he expected to achieve. John Ross and Nest Freemark and all the rest of the magic wielders from that time were dead and gone, even that big copper-skinned war vet. Only he remained. The gypsy morph, whatever its form, was alone and isolated from its own kind, and was also, perhaps, unwitting of its danger. If he could just manage to reach it before it was warned…

  Or, he amended, if another could reach it in his place, one even more lethal and relentless than he was…

  He left the thought hanging as he moved into the deepest part of the forest, the part where sunlight never reached, and stopped at the edge of a pond. The pond was choked with water grasses and reeds and coated with a thick layer of scum, its waters fouled in the culmination of the destruction of the environment years earlier. What had once been clear and clean was now murky and polluted. Nothing that lived here was what it had started out as. Everything had evolved. The bite of the smallest insects would sicken a human. Even the air and water and plants were poisonous.

  But Findo Gask walked with impunity, picking his way without fear through the things that could kill humans. Nothing came near him—not the snakes or spiders or biting insects or creatures for which there were no names. Nothing came near because nothing was as dangerous or as venom-filled as he was. The denizens of the dark woods recognized one of their own, and they stayed clear.

  Except for one.

  It rose out of the pond’s mire like a leviathan surfacing from the deep ocean, the waters bubbling and heaving about it as it lifted clear, the gases escaping in spurts and burst bubbles, their stench filling the fouled air with fresh odors. Findo Gask knew it was hiding but would sense his approach and reveal itself because that was its nature. He stood safely distant and watched it emerge, the scum and dead grasses clinging to its broad back and hunched shoulders in damp patches. He watched, and he marveled at the monstrosity of its demon form.

  The Klee was like nothing else he had ever encountered. Its head was a conical plate of bone flattened and dented as if struck repeatedly by a heavy mallet. Its features were submerged in the leathery tissue beneath its brow, stunted and difficult to discern save for its small, wicked green eyes. Its long, heavy arms were fringed with hair and ridged with muscle, its hands crooked and gnarled, its tree-trunk legs thick and bowed, all of it encrusted with a mix of scale and hair and debris. When it stood clear of the mud and water, it towered over him, dwarfed him with its mass, and gave him momentary pause despite what he knew about it.

  Delloreen hated the Klee, calling it an animal and disdaining it as an unthinking monster that knew nothing but killing. She wasn’t wrong, but she missed the point. It was because the Klee was all this that Findo Gask found it useful.

  Once, it had been a man, a long time ago before he had encountered it in the ruins of a town amid so many dead that he could scarcely bel
ieve a single creature had killed them all. Once, it had been human. What had changed it was anybody’s guess. The Klee never talked. It barely listened, and it listened mostly to Findo Gask.

  The huge demon slogged out of the quicksand and mud to stand close to him, bent forward expectantly. It knew he had come for a reason, and he knew that the reason involved what it craved most.

  “I want you to find somebody for me,” Findo Gask said. “A Faerie creature, but it will have another form. I will give you a sense of what it will feel like, and you will be able to unmask it from that.”

  The Klee shifted from one foot to the other, a slow ponderous movement that signaled its understanding. From somewhere deep within its chest, a strange wheezing sound rumbled.

  Findo Gask smiled. That was the Klee’s expression of satisfaction.

  He reached out and touched the demon boldly on the chest with one finger. “Find this Faerie creature, and when you do, kill it,” he said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  R EUNITED FOLLOWING Candle’s kidnapping by the boy with the ruined face and Logan Tom’s search for plague medicine through the dark streets of Tacoma, the Ghosts continued their slow journey south. Departing their camp outside the city while it was still night and there was a reasonable chance that the Senator hadn’t yet discovered the loss of his “property,” they rolled south on the AV and attached hay wagon in the manner of their namesakes, shadows sliding through darkness. Catalya showed them the way, taking them off the freeway and through backstreets that bypassed the Senator’s stronghold and the places where he was likely to have stationed sentries to warn him of trespassers. By dawn, they were well outside the city and moving steadily away.

  Owl, riding inside the Lightning with River and Fixit, gave her charges strong doses of the serum that Cat had brought with her from her secret stash, covered both children with blankets, bathed them with cool cloths, and talked them through their feverish dreams in her soft, reassuring voice. Both began showing improvement almost immediately, their temperatures dropping and their restless discomfort turning to a deep sleep. Within twenty-four hours, their purple splotches began to fade, as well, and it became apparent that both would recover.

  Logan could tell himself with some conviction that things were progressing well enough that he no longer needed to consider leaving the Ghosts behind while he continued his search for Hawk. His fears over the possibility that shepherding a bunch of street kids would slow him down and burden him with unnecessary responsibilities had faded after the previous night’s events. It seemed to him now, in the light of the new day, that the kids could shoulder responsibility for themselves sufficiently that he needn’t feel that he must do so for them, and while that seemingly should have given him further reason to go on alone, it had quite the opposite effect. Given the freedom to leave, he found he no longer wanted to. The idea of abandoning the Ghosts had grown increasingly distasteful to him, and he found that he was more comfortable having things continue on the way they were.

  Which wasn’t to say he might not change his mind later. Events might one day dictate that he do so; you could never tell. But for now, at least, he could let the matter alone and simply concentrate on the journey ahead.

  The only problem was Cat. As he had feared, and she had suspected, she was not universally accepted by the other kids. Panther, not surprisingly, was the most vociferous, calling her Freak to her face and making it clear to all that he did not think she belonged with them, no matter what she had done to earn the privilege. Chalk took the same stance and, surprisingly, Sparrow. Perhaps the latter’s near-death encounter with the Croaks while they were fleeing Seattle had helped shape her thinking. Perhaps it was something she wasn’t telling them. But while keeping mostly silent on the matter, she nodded often enough while Panther was holding forth that Logan Tom had no doubt about where she stood. She, too, had no use for the girl who was neither one thing nor the other.

  The rest were more welcoming. Owl embraced Cat immediately and told her they were happy to have her travel with them, ignoring the groans and looks offered in counterpoint by Panther. Candle took her hand and walked with her during their first day on the road, a small gesture that made Logan proud of her.

  And Bear, big and steady and mostly quiet, stepped between Panther and Cat at one point when the former was making an unmistakable attempt at intimidation, forcing his fellow Ghost to back away and finally to turn aside. Panther, who normally wouldn’t have allowed anyone to do this to him, seemed genuinely confused.

  “She’s just a Freak, man,” he mumbled over his shoulder at Bear. But after that, he pretty much left the girl alone.

  Their destination was already settled, and they were quick to resume their journey. They were at least a week from reaching the Columbia River and their promised meeting with Hawk, so there was good reason to press ahead. Logan was wondering anew how they were supposed to find the boy, but knew that it was the boy who must find them. The gypsy morph that was concealed within the human skin would have surfaced by now, and the wild magic taken hold. This was what must happen, Logan realized, if the boy was to be their savior.

  Their travels took them out of the city and into the countryside. Buildings disappeared behind them, lost in a haze of smoke and ash that even the sun could not burn through. The corpses of vehicles that littered the highway dwindled, and the bitter metallic taste of the air took on a woodsy flavor. The land stretched away around them in a sprawl of wintry fields and stands of dying trees, of drainage and fouled ponds, of broken fences and collapsing farms. There was almost no sign of life—a bird here and there, the quick movement of a small animal passing through the weeds, a burrowing rodent sticking its head from its hole momentarily, and a pair of stick-thin figures running from an old house far off in the distance.

  The end of everything, Logan thought more than once. The way it will be everywhere before long. He tried to imagine it and failed. The world was too vast for such a thing. The prospect of it rendered empty and lifeless was too bleak to consider.

  Even though he knew it was coming.

  Even though it had been foretold.

  They drove south for three days, bypassing a handful of small towns that sat off to the side of the freeway, silent and empty. Once, they passed another city. Logan didn’t know their names, nor did Cat or any of the Ghosts. The signs that had once identified them were gone, leaving broken-off metal supports with twisted, jagged ends. The days were hazy with bad air and weak sunlight, and the landscape had the look of a mirage. The highway wound through oceans of liquid light that shimmered and contorted. In the junk heaps of ruined vehicles and scattered debris, in the clusters of falling-down walls and roofs, and in the barren fields and empty horizons, the world was a tomb.

  As midafternoon of the third day approached, they came in sight of a fresh cluster of buildings, their roofs just visible above a grouping of hills in rough country that was chilly and stark, a graveyard marked by the bones of dead trees.

  Logan was sitting in the front passenger’s seat of the Lightning, looking back over his shoulder while he talked with Owl. River and Fixit were on either side of her, sufficiently recovered that they could sit upright, but not yet strong enough to walk any distance. The rest of the Ghosts were riding on the hay wagon with Rabbit and Cat.

  Panther was driving.

  It had taken awhile for the boy to come around to the idea, but when Logan casually mentioned earlier in the day that it might be time for him to try, Panther had just as casually declared that it couldn’t hurt. He had been driving ever since.

  “I don’t understand why Cat was out on the streets alone at night like that,” Owl was saying. “That seems so dangerous.”

  “I thought so, too,” he agreed.

  “And she didn’t have any weapons?”

  “None that I could see.” He paused. “But I think she might be more capable than she appears. She seemed at home out there. She made a point of asking me what I was doing coming into
the city by myself. It felt like she thought she knew better than I did how to take care of herself.”

  That’s ’cause she’s a Freak, Panther said to himself, his mood darkening as he thought anew about having to put up with Lizard girl. Sometimes he wished Hawk were back in charge. Even he knew better than to try to bring a Freak into the family.

  “Hey, what’s that?” he broke in, suddenly catching sight of something in the road ahead.

  Logan turned to look, seeing what appeared to be a tangle of vehicles blocking their way. “Stop the AV,” he told Panther at once.

  When the boy had done so, Logan got out of the car and walked forward a few paces, searching the road ahead and then the countryside around. Nothing was moving. But it didn’t feel right. He glanced back at the kids and then ahead again. The road was straight and undeviating; there were no crossroads visible beyond the tangle. There was nowhere to go unless they drove off into the fields and hills, and he didn’t think the hay wagon could handle the rough terrain.

  He walked back and leaned down to Panther. “I’m going to walk ahead. Stay behind me. Keep your eyes open.”

  The boy’s face clouded. “Just looks like some junk,” he said. “We could turn around, I guess, find another way.”

  Logan shook his head. “Not much of anything out here to suggest there is another way. Let’s have a closer look.”

  He moved away. Panther reached down to touch the Parkhan Spray shoved down between the door and the seat, and then eased the Lightning ahead at a crawl, letting a sizable gap open between the Knight of the Word and the AV. Everyone had quit talking and begun looking around, searching the countryside. Logan, walking ahead, didn’t see anything, but it bothered him that these vehicles blocking the roadway were so far out in the middle of nowhere. The blockade could have been the result of a long-ago crash; it looked as if it was. But it made him uneasy nevertheless.

  He was within yards of the tangle when his nerves suddenly turned sharp-edged and raw, the magic sparked at his fingertips, and he decided this was a mistake. He couldn’t have said why, but he had learned to trust his instincts. He stopped where he was, one hand lifting to signal Panther.