Терри Брукс - The Druid of Shannara

At the fifth ale house they visited—Walker never even noticed the name—they finally got the response they were looking for. The keeper was a big, ruddy-complexioned fellow with a scarred face and a ready smile. He sized up Quickening in a way that made even Walker uncomfortable. Then he suggested that the girl should take a room with him for a few days, just to see if maybe she might like the town enough to stay. That brought Morgan Leah about with fire in his eyes, but Quickening screened him away with a slight shifting of her body, met the keeper’s bold stare, and replied that she wasn’t interested. The keeper did not press the suggestion. Instead, to everyone’s amazement in the face of the rejection he had just been handed, he told her that the man she was seeking was down the street at the Skinned Cat. His name, he said, was Horner Dees.

They went back out into the night, leaving the keeper looking as if he wasn’t at all sure what he had just done. The look was telling. Quickening had that gift; it was the essence of her magic. She could turn you around before you realized it. She could make you reveal yourself in ways you had never intended. She could make you want to please her. It was the kind of thing a beautiful woman could make a man do, but with Quickening it was something far more than her beauty that disarmed you. It was the creature within, the elemental that seemed human but was far more, an embodiment of magic that Walker thought reflected the father who had made her. He knew the stories of the King of the Silver River. When you met him, you told him what he wished to know and you did not dissemble. His presence alone was enough to make you want to tell him. Walker had seen how Morgan and Pe Ell and the men in the ale houses responded to her. And he as well. She was most certainly her father’s child.

They found the Skinned Cat at the far end of the town, tucked back within the shadow of several massive, ancient shagbarks. It was a large, rambling structure that creaked and groaned simply from the movement of the men and women inside and seemed to hang together mostly out of stubbornness. It was crowded as the others, but there was more space to fill and it had been divided along its walls into nooks and partitions to make it feel less barnlike. Lights were scattered about like distant friends reaching out through the gloom, and the patrons were gathered in knots at the serving bar and about long tables and benches. Heads turned at their entrance as they had turned at the other ale houses, and eyes watched. Quickening moved to find the keeper, who listened and pointed to the back of the room. There was a man sitting at a table there, alone in a shadowed nook, hunched over and faceless, pushed away from the light and the crowd.

The four walked over to stand before him.

“Horner Dees,” Quickening said in that silken voice.

Massive hands brought an ale mug slowly away from a bearded mouth and back to the tabletop, and a large, shaggy head lifted. The man was huge, a great old bear of a fellow with the better part of his years behind him. There was hair all over him, on his forearms and the backs of his hands, at his throat and on his chest, and on his head and face, grown over him so completely that except for his eyes and nose his features were obscured almost entirely. It was impossible to guess how old he was, but the hair was silver gray, the skin beneath it wrinkled and browned and mottled, and the fingers gnarled like old roots.

“I might be,” he rumbled truculently from out of some giant’s cave. His eyes were riveted on the girl.

“My name is Quickening,” she said. “These are my companions. We search for a place called Eldwist and a man named Uhl Belk. We are told you know of both.”

“You were told wrong.”

“Can you take us there?” she asked, ignoring his response.

“I just said...”

“Can you take us there?” she repeated.

The big man stared at her without speaking, without moving, with no hint of what he was thinking. He was like a huge settled rock that had survived ages of weathering and erosion and found them to be little more than a passing breeze. “Who are you?” he asked finally. “Who, other than your name?”

Quickening did not hesitate. “I am the daughter of the King of the Silver River. Do you know of him, Horner Dees?”

The other nodded slowly. “Yes, I know him. Any maybe you are who you say. And maybe I am who you think. Maybe I even know about Eldwist and Uhl Belk. Maybe I’m the only one who knows—the only one who’s still alive to tell about it. Maybe I can even do what you ask and take you there. But I don’t see the point. Sit.”

He gestured at a scattering of empty chairs, and the four seated themselves across the table from him. He looked at the men in turn, then his eyes returned to the girl. “You don’t look as if you’re someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Why would you want to find Uhl Belk?”

Quickening’s black eyes were fathomless, intense. “Uhl Belk stole something that doesn’t belong to him. It must be returned.”

Horner Dees snorted derisively. “You plan to steal it back, do you? Or just ask him to return it? Do you know anything about Belk? I do.”

“He stole a talisman from the Druids.”

Dees hesitated. His bearded face twitched as he chewed on something imaginary. “Girl, nobody who goes into Eldwist ever comes out again. Nobody except me, and I was just plain lucky. There’s things there that nothing can stand against. Belk, he’s an old thing, come out of some other age, full of dark magic and evil. You won’t ever take anything away from him, and he won’t ever give anything back.”

“Those who are with me are stronger than Uhl Belk,” Quickening said. “They have magic as well, and theirs will overcome his. My father says it will be so. These three,” and she named them each in turn, “will prevail.”

As she spoke their names, Horner Dees let his eyes shift to identify each, passing over their faces quickly, pausing only once—so briefly that Walker wasn’t sure at first that there had been a pause at all—on Pe Ell.

Then he said, “These are men. Uhl Belk is something more. You can’t kill him like an ordinary man. You probably can’t even find him. He’ll find you and by then it will be too late.” He snapped his fingers and sat back.

Quickening eyed him momentarily across the table, then reached out impulsively and touched the table’s wooden surface. Instantly a splinter curled up, a slender stem forming, leafing out and finally flowering with tiny bluebells.

Quickening’s smile was as magical as her touch. “Show us the way into Eldwist, Horner Dees,” she said.

The old man wet his lips. “It will take more than flowers to do in Belk,” he said.

“Perhaps not,” she whispered, and Walker had the feeling that for a moment she had gone somewhere else entirely. “Wouldn’t you like to come with us and see?”

Dees shook his head. “I didn’t get old being stupid,” he said. He thought a moment, then sat forward again. “It was ten years ago when I went into Eldwist. I’d found it some time before that, but I knew it was dangerous and I wasn’t about to go in there alone. I kept thinking about it though, wondering what was in there, because finding out about things is what I do. I’ve been a Tracker, a soldier, a hunter, everything there is to be, and it all comes down to finding out what’s what. So I kept wondering about Eldwist, about what was in there, all those old buildings, all that stone, everywhere you looked. I went back finally because I couldn’t stand not knowing anymore. I took a dozen men with me, lucky thirteen of us. We thought we’d find something of value in there, a place as secret and old as that. We knew what it was called; there’s been legends about it for years in the high country, over on the other side of the mountains where some of us had been. The Trolls know it. It’s a peninsula—just a narrow strip of land, all rock, jutting out into the middle of the Tiderace. We went out there one morning, the thirteen of us. Full of life. By dawn of the next day, the other twelve were dead, and I was running like a scared deer!”