by Terry Brooks
It was a long time before they reached the sewers again and caught a glimpse of daylight through a street grating. The light was thin and fading now, the day easing quickly toward dark. The rain had turned to a slow drizzle, and the city was silent and empty feeling. They walked until they found a ladder leading up, and Morgan took a deep breath and climbed. When he peered out from between the bars he saw Federation soldiers stationed across from him, grim and silent in the gloom. He climbed back down noiselessly, and they continued on.
Their torch burned out, the daylight turned to dark—the skies so clouded that almost no light showed down into the tunnels, and the sound of their hunters faded away and was replaced by the scurrying of rats and the drip of runoff. All of the grate openings they checked were under watch. They kept moving because there was nothing else for them to do, afraid that if they stopped they might not be able to start again.
Morgan was beginning to despair when the eyes appeared in front of him. Cat’s eyes, they gleamed in the darkness and then disappeared.
Morgan came to an immediate stop. “Did you see that?” he whispered to Matty Roh.
He felt, rather than saw, her nod. They stood frozen for a long time, not wanting to move until they knew what was out there. Those eyes had not belonged to any rat.
Then there was a whisper of water disturbed and a scrape of boots.
“Morgan?” someone called softly. “Is that you?”
It was Damson. Morgan answered, and an instant later she was hugging him, then Matty, telling them she had been looking for them for hours, searching the tunnels from end to end, trying to find their trail.
“Alone?” Morgan asked incredulously. He was so relieved to see her he was almost giddy. “Do you have any food or water?”
She gave them both an aleskin and bread and cheese from her pack. “I had the Mole to help me,” she said, keeping her voice at a whisper. “When you collapsed the ceiling to the warehouse, a part of the tunnel went with it. Maybe you didn’t even notice. At any rate, we were cut off from you, and you ended up going the wrong way.” She shook back her fiery hair and sighed. “We had to get Padishar and the others out first. There was no time to look for you then. When they were safe, the Mole and I came back for you.”
In the darkness to one side, the Mole’s bright eyes blinked and gleamed. Morgan was dumbfounded. “But how did you find us? We were completely lost, Damson. How could you …?”
“You left a trail,” she said, clutching at his arm to slow his argument.
“A trail? But the rainwater washed everything away!”
She smiled, although she was clearly trying not to. “Not in the earth, Morgan—in the air.” He shook his head in confusion. “Mole?” she called. “Tell him.”
The Mole’s furry face eased into the light. He blinked almost sleepily, and his nose twitched as he sniffed at the Highlander. “Your smell is very strong,” he said. “All through the tunnels. Lovely Damson is right. You were easy to track.”
Morgan stared. He could hear Matty Roh’s smothered laughter, and he turned bright red.
They rested only long enough to eat, then set out again, this time with the Mole as their guide. There were no encounters with either Federation soldiers or Shadowen wraiths and their passage was smooth and easy. As he walked, Morgan’s thoughts wandered into the past and out again, a slow, deliberate journey of self-evaluation. He looked at himself and the ways he had changed. When he was done, he found he was not displeased. The lessons he had learned were important ones, and he was better for having traveled the road that had brought him north from Leah.
When they emerged from the side of the mountain north, the skies were clear once more and filled with light from the moon and stars. The air was rain-washed and smelled of the forest, and the breeze that blew out of the west was cool and soft as down. They stood together in grasses still damp with the storm, looking out across the plains and hills to the Dragon’s Teeth and the horizon beyond.
Morgan glanced at Matty Roh and found her studying him, smiling slightly, her thoughts private and secretive and strangely compelling. She was plain and pretty, reticent and forward, and a dozen other contradictions, a paradox of moods and behavior he did not understand but wanted to. He saw her in fragments of memory—as the boy he had believed her to be at the Whistledown, as the girl with the ruined feet and shattered past at Firerim Reach, as the deadly quick swordswoman standing against the Federation and the Shadowen at Tyrsis, and as the quixotic waif who could be either demon or sprite at a moment’s passing.
He could not help himself. He smiled back at her, trying to share a secret that only she knew.
Damson was kneeling before the Mole. “Won’t you come with us this time?” she was asking him. The Mole was shaking his head. “It grows more dangerous for you every time you go back.”
The Mole considered. “I am not afraid for myself, lovely Damson. I am afraid only for you.”
“The monsters, the Shadowen, are in the city,” she reminded him gently.
He gave her a small shrug and a serious look. “The monsters are everywhere.”
Damson sighed, nodded, reached out carefully, put her arms around the little fellow, and hugged him. “Goodbye, Mole. Thank you for everything. Thank you for Padishar. I owe you so much.”
The Mole blinked. His bright eyes glistened.
She released him and rose. “I will come back for you when I can,” she said. “I promise.”
“When you find the Valeman?” The Mole suddenly looked embarrassed.
“Yes, when I find Par Ohmsford. We will both come back.”
The Mole brushed at his face. “I will wait for you, lovely Damson. I will always wait for you.”
Then he turned and disappeared back into the rocks, melting away like one of night’s shadows. Morgan stood with Matty Roh and stared after him, not quite believing he was really gone. The night was still and cool, empty of sound and filled with memories that jumbled together like words spoken too fast, and it seemed as if everything was a dream that could end in the blink of a waking eye.
Damson turned to look at him. “I’m going after Par,” she announced quietly. “Chandos has taken Padishar and the others back to Firerim Reach where they will rest a day or two before making their journey north to meet with the Trolls. I have done what I can for him, Morgan. He doesn’t need me for anything more. But Par Ohmsford does, and I intend to keep my promise to him.”
Morgan nodded. “I understand. I’m going with you.”
Matty Roh looked inexplicably defiant. “Well, I’m going, too,” she declared. She searched first one face and then the other for an objection, found none, and then asked in a more reasonable tone, “Who is Par Ohmsford?”
Morgan almost laughed. He had forgotten that Matty knew only a little of what was going on. There was no reason, he guessed, that she shouldn’t know it all. She had earned the right by coming with them into Tyrsis after Padishar Creel.
“Tell her on the way,” Damson interjected suddenly, and gave an uneasy glance over her shoulder. “We’re too exposed, standing about out here. Don’t forget they’re still hunting for us.”
Within moments they were moving east away from the bluff and toward the Mermidon. An hour’s walk would bring them to the shelter of the forests and a few hours’ sleep. It was the best that they could hope for this night.
As they traveled, Morgan told again the story of Par Ohmsford and the dreams of Allanon. The three figures receded slowly into the distance, midnight came and went, and the new day began.
XXIII
They spent what remained of the night in an arbor of white oaks bordering the Mermidon a few miles below the Kennon Pass. It was cool and shady where they slept, protected from the late summer heat that gathered early on the open grasslands, and they did not wake until well after sunrise. They washed and ate from the supplies that Damson carried, listening to the steady flow of the river and an effervescent birdsong. Morgan rubbed sleep from his e
yes and tried to remember everything that had happened the previous day, but it was already growing vague in his mind, a memory that seemed to have been stored away a long time ago. That Padishar Creel was safe again, however distant the event, was all that mattered, he told himself wearily, and he let the matter slide into the distance of yesterday.
He pulled on his boots as he munched on bread and cheese and considered what lay ahead. Today was a hot, sultry expectation that shimmered through the dappled shadows of the leaves and branches, and it might take him anywhere. The past was a reminder of the vicissitudes of life, chance playing off opportunity and giving back what she would. The hardships and losses that Morgan had experienced had tempered him like iron run through the fire, and a vacuum had formed around him that he did not think anything would ever get past again, a dead place where hurt and disappointment and fear could not survive, a shield that let him keep everything away so that he might go on when sometimes he did not think he could. The problem, of course, was that it kept other things away as well—hope and caring and love among them. He could admit them when he chose, but there was always the danger that the other feelings would come in as well. When you let in one, you always risked letting in the others. It was his legacy from Steff and Quickening, from the Jut and Eldwist, from Druid wraiths and Shadowen. It was a truth that haunted him.
He brushed aside the musings and speculation, finished off his meal, and stood and stretched.
“Ready?” Damson Rhee asked. She was flushed from cold water splashed on her skin, and her fiery hair was brushed out so that it shone. She was pretty and vital and filled with a determination that radiated like heat from a flame. Morgan looked at her and thought again how lucky Par was to have someone like that in love with him.
Matty Roh finished washing off her plate and handed it over to Damson to pack. “Where do we go from here?” she asked in her customarily blunt fashion. “How do we go about finding Par Ohmsford?”
Damson shoved the plate in with the others. “We track him.” She tightened the stays on the pack and stood up. “With this.”
She reached down inside her tunic front and pulled out what looked to be half of a medallion threaded on a leather thong. Morgan and Matty bent close. The medallion—a metal disk, actually—had no markings or insignia, and the jagged sharpness of the straight edge indicated that it had been broken recently.
“It is called a Skree,” Damson explained, holding it up to the light where it gleamed a copper gold. “I gave the other half to Par when we separated. The disk was fashioned out of one metal, one forging, and can only be used once. The halves draw the holders to each other. They give off light when they are brought close.”
Matty Roh looked skeptical. “How close do you have to be?” Her black hair was short and straight about her elfin face, and her eyes were deep and searching. She looked fresh-scrubbed and new—younger than she was, Morgan thought, and nothing of who she could be.
Damson smiled. “The Skree is a street magic. I have seen it work; I know what it can do.” The smile tightened. “Shall we try it out?”
She held it outstretched in her palm and faced west, north, and then east. The Skree did nothing. Damson glanced at them quickly. “He was traveling south,” she explained. “I saved that for last.”
She pointed her hand south. The coppery face of the Skree might have pulsed faintly, but Morgan really wasn’t sure. Damson, however, nodded in satisfaction.
“He’s a long way away, it seems.” Her smile was hesitant as she let her eyes meet theirs. “You have to know how to read it.” She stuffed the disk back inside her tunic. “We had better start walking.”
She reached down for her pack and swung it over her shoulders. Matty Roh gave Morgan a sideways glance and a shake of her head that said, Did you see something I missed? Morgan shrugged. He wasn’t sure.
They set out into the heat, following the Mermidon on its winding path east toward Varfleet, keeping as much as they could to the shade of the trees. A breeze blew off the water and helped cool them, but the surrounding countryside was empty and still. The peaks of the Dragon’s Teeth north were barren and gray with the summer’s swelter, and the mix of hills and low mountains south were burned out and dry. The sun lifted in the cloudless sky, and the heat beat down in waves. Dead animals lay scattered on the open plains, their twisted bodies rotting. Vast stretches of Callahorn’s woods had been sickened and the earth beneath left bare. Pools of stagnant, dull-green water stood listless and stinking. Trees were ravaged and withered like the carcasses of creatures hung out to dry. Often the stretches of ruined earth lasted for miles. Morgan could smell the decay in the air. This was more than the summer heat and dryness; this was the Shadowen poisoning that he had witnessed time and again since coming north, a devastation of the land that the dark things were somehow causing. And it was growing worse.
Midday faded into afternoon, and they skirted Varfleet to the north, still following the Mermidon as it began to bend south. They encountered a handful of peddlers and other tradesmen on their way, but the heat kept most would-be travelers out of the sun, so they had the river road pretty much to themselves. They spotted their first Federation patrol as they neared Varfleet and stepped back into the trees to let it pass.
Damson used the Skree again while they waited, and the result was the same. The disk glowed faintly when pointed south—or it might have been nothing more than a glimmer of sunlight. Again Morgan and Matty Roh exchanged a surreptitious look. It was hot, and they were tired. They were wondering if this was leading somewhere or if Damson was just being hopeful. There were other ways to track Par if the disk wasn’t working, but neither of them was ready to challenge Damson on the matter just yet.
They needed a boat to travel down the Mermidon to the Rainbow Lake, she advised, tucking the Skree away once more. It would be quicker by three times than trying to make the journey afoot. Matty shrugged and said she would go into the city, since it was less dangerous for her to do so than for them, and she would meet them here again as soon as she had found what they needed. She put down the bedroll she had been carrying and disappeared into the swelter.
Morgan sat with Damson in the shade of an ancient willow close by the riverbank where they could see anyone approaching from either direction. The river was muddy and clogged with debris in the wake of last night’s storm, and they watched it flow past in sluggish, deliberate fashion, a bearer of discards and old news. Morgan’s eyes were heavy with lack of sleep, and he closed them against the light.
“You’re still not certain of me, are you?” he heard Damson ask after a time.
He looked over at her. “What do you mean?”
“I saw the look you exchanged with Matty when I used the Skree.”
He sighed. “That doesn’t mean I’m not certain of you, Damson. It means I didn’t see anything and that worries me.”
“You have to know how to use it.”
“So you said. But what if you’re wrong? You can’t blame me for being skeptical.”
She smiled ironically. “Yes, I can. Somewhere along the way we have to start trusting each other, all three of us. If we don’t, we’re going to get into a lot of trouble. You think about it, Morgan.”
He did and was still thinking on it when dusk settled over the borderlands and Matty trudged back out of the haze with a tired look on her face.
“We have a boat,” she announced, dropping wearily into the shadow of the willow and reaching for the water cup Damson offered. She splashed water on her dust-streaked face and let it run off. “A boat, supplies, and weapons, all tucked away at the waterfront. We can pick them up after dark when we won’t be seen.”
“Any problems?” Morgan asked.
She gave him a hard look. “I didn’t have to kill anyone, if that’s what you mean.” She glowered at him, then settled back and wouldn’t say another word.
Now they were both mad at him, he thought, and decided he didn’t care.
When night c
ame, they followed the riverbank down into the city until they reached the docks north where Matty had secured the boat. It was an older craft, a flat-bottomed skiff with poles, oars, a mast, and a canvas sail, and was supplied with food and weapons as Matty had promised. They climbed aboard without saying anything and shoved off, rode the skiff downriver to the first unoccupied cove, then beached their craft and went immediately to sleep. At sunrise they were up again and off. They rode the Mermidon south toward the Runne until sunset and made camp in a wedge of rocks that opened onto a narrow sand bar fronting a grove of ash. They ate dinner cold, rolled into their blankets, and slept once more. Two days had passed without anyone saying much of anything. Tempers were frayed, and uncertainty over the direction they were taking had shut down any real effort at communication. There had been a bonding in Tyrsis that was lacking here—perhaps because of the doubts they were feeling about one another, perhaps because of their uneasiness over what might be waiting for them. In Tyrsis there had been a plan—or at least the rudiments of one. Here there was only a vague determination to keep hunting for Par Ohmsford until he was found. They had known where Padishar was, and there had been a sense of having some control over reaching him. But Par could be anywhere, and there was nothing to suggest that they were not already too late to do him any good.
It was with immense relief, then, that when Damson brought out the Skree the following morning and pointed her hand south, the copper metal gleamed bright even in the shadow of the rocks that hemmed them about. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then they smiled like old friends rediscovering one another and pushed off into the channel with fresh determination.
