by Terry Brooks
Pen thought, running his hand through his red hair. “A few minutes, no more, if the power lines haven’t been disconnected. Even then, not long. A reconnect from any draw to any parse tube would be enough to get off the ground. Cut the ropes, engage the thrusters, open the draws, and you’re away. We wouldn’t have to worry about Cinnaminson until after we were airborne.”
“All we need to figure out, then, is what it will take to get our cloaked friend off the ship.” She considered. “Besides you.”
“But I am exactly what it will take, Khyber,” he said quietly. “You know that. I’m what it’s after. We know that much from Anatcherae. We don’t know the reason, but we know I’m what it’s come for.” He took a deep breath. “Don’t look at me that way. I know what I told Tagwen.”
“Good. That means you know as well that you are talking nonsense. Tagwen was right to warn you against latching on to any plan that exposed you to risk. That isn’t why you came on this journey, Pen. You are the reason for everything that’s happened, and you don’t have the right to put yourself in a position where you could be killed.”
“That isn’t what I’m suggesting!” He couldn’t keep the irritation from his voice. “The trick is to make sure that by becoming bait, I can still get away when I need to. The trick is in getting the monster off the Skatelow and me on, all at the same time. But I don’t see any other way of making that happen if we can’t deceive this thing into thinking it has a chance to get its hands on me.”
Khyber sighed. “You assume that getting its hands on you is its goal. What if it simply wants to kill you? It came close to doing that in Anatcherae.”
Pen looked down and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think it was trying to kill me. I think it was trying to scare me. I think it was hoping I would freeze in place and it would be on me before anyone could help. It wants me for its prisoner, to take me to whoever sent it.”
He saw the look of doubt that crossed her face and went on hurriedly. “All right, maybe it was trying to injure me or slow me down. It’s possible.”
She shook her head. “What’s possible is that you are no longer in touch with reality. Your feelings for this girl have muddled your thinking. You’re starting to invent possibilities that have no basis in fact or common sense. You have to stop this, Pen.”
He suppressed the sharp reply that struggled to break free and looked off across the mountainside. They were wasting time, going nowhere, and it was his fault. What they were supposed to be doing was traveling to Taupo Rough to find Kermadec, so that he could reach the ruins of Stridegate and the island of the tanequil, gain possession of a limb from the tree, fashion it into a darkwand, return to Paranor, get through the Forbidding, and somehow rescue his aunt, Grianne Ohmsford, the Ard Rhys! Even without speaking the words aloud, he was left breathless—and left with a feeling of urgency for getting on with what he was supposed to do.
Yet here he was, doing none of it. Instead, he was insisting on rescuing Cinnaminson, and it was admittedly for selfish reasons. He looked up at the clear blue sky, then down at the foothills that banked and leveled to the shores of the Rabb. He felt a momentary stab of panic as he realized that Khyber was right in her analysis; he was grasping at straws.
But he couldn’t bear to think of leaving Cinnaminson in the hands of that spidery creature, not feeling as he did about her.
There has to be a way.
Why couldn’t he think of what it was?
Why couldn’t he think of something?
shouldn’t his magic be able to help him? He had been chosen for this journey expressly because his magic would give him a way to communicate with the tanequil. If it would allow him to do that, shouldn’t he be able to find a way to use it here? It had possibilities he had never dreamed of; the King of the Silver River had revealed as much. One of those possibilities ought to be available for use here. If he could think of it. If he could get past the feeling that his magic was small and insignificant, no matter what anyone said—spirit creature or human. If he could persuade himself that it was good for something more than drawing the interest of moor cats like Bandit and reading the danger signs in the flight of cliff birds. If he could just do that, he ought to be able to use it to help Cinnaminson.
He was looking for a place to restart the conversation with Khyber when Tagwen walked back out of the rocks, brushing off his hands and looking less owlish than earlier.
“You can’t imagine what I just found,” he said. Pen and Khyber exchanged a quizzical glance. “Broad-leaf rampion. Hardly ever find it in low country. Prefers higher elevations, cooler climates. No snow, mind you, but a hint of frost seems to favor it.”
Both the boy and the Elf girl stared at him. He looked quickly from one to the other. “Never heard of it? It’s a plant. Not very big, but fibrous. It secretes a sticky resin from splits in its skin. You break off stalks, crush them up, fire the whole mess to release the resin, separate it from the plant material, mix it with wort moss and albus root, cook it all until it thickens, and you know what you get?”
He grinned through his beard with such glee that it was almost frightening. “Tar, my young friends. Very sticky tar.”
So now they had a means, of sorts, of gaining an advantage over their enemy. If they could manage to lure it into a patch of that tar, everything it touched would stick to it, including the ground itself, and it would quickly become so bogged down with debris that it would have great difficulty functioning. Better still, if they could find a way to bring it into contact with something as immovable as a tree, it wouldn’t be able to function at all.
They spent the remainder of the morning distilling resin from the plant and turning it into a small batch of tar. They were able to find the albus root and wort moss needed to make the mix, and they cooked it over a smokeless fire using an indented stone for a bowl. When it was ready, they formed it into a ball, allowed it to cool, and wrapped it in young broad leaves tied together with strips of leather. The tar smelled awful, and they had to consider the problem of disguising its presence as well as tricking the creature on the Skatelow into stepping into it.
“This won’t work,” Khyber declared, wrinkling her nose against the stench as the three of them stared down at the steaming pouch. “The creature will spot this in a heartbeat and go right around it.”
Pen was inclined to agree, but he didn’t say so. At least the leaf-wrap was holding together, although it didn’t look any too secure.
“If it’s distracted, it might not notice the smell,” he said.
“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 th
e 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.
FOUR
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.
