Терри Брукс - The Druid of Shannara

Pe Ell felt a rush of cold determination surge through him as he shrank back into the gloom of the alleyway. Cat and mouse, that’s all it was. He smiled and waited.

Long minutes passed and there was only silence. Pe Ell continued to wait.

Then abruptly the Rake emerged from the shadows of the building across the street to the left, dancing almost gracefully into view, body poised. Pe Ell held his breath as the monster tested the air, turning slowly about. Satisfied, it moved on. Pe Ell exhaled slowly and followed.

It was growing brighter now, and the night air evolved into a sort of gray haze that reflected the dampness so that it became even more difficult to see what lay ahead. Yet Pe Ell did not slow, relying on his hearing to warn him of any danger, always conscious of the sound of the Rake moving ahead. It was no longer worrying about pursuit. Its night’s work was finished; it was headed home.

To the lair of the Stone King, Pe Ell thought, impatient for the first time since his hunt had begun.

He caught up with the Rake as it slowed before a flat-sided building with a shadowed alcove thirty feet high and twice that across. The Rake’s feelers probed the stone at the top of the alcove, and a section of the wall within swung silently away, lifting into the gloom. Without a backward glance, the Rake slipped through the opening. When it was inside, the wall swung back into place.

Got you! Pe Ell thought fiercely.

Nevertheless, he stood where he was for almost an hour afterward, waiting to see if anything else would happen, making certain that this was not another trap. When he was sure that it was safe, he emerged and darted along the edge of the buildings, following the walkways until he stood before the hidden entry.

He took a long time to study it. The stone facing was flat and smooth. He could trace the seams of the opening from within the frame of the alcove, but he would never have noticed the door without first knowing it was there. Far above him, just visible against the gray of the stone, he could detect a kind of lever. A release, he thought triumphantly. A way in.

He stood there for a while longer, thinking. Then he moved away, searching the buildings across the street for a hiding place. Once safely concealed, he would sit down and figure out a way to trip that lever. Then he would sleep again until it was dark. When night came, he would wake and wait for the Rake to go out.

When it did, he would go in.

Night lay across the Westland in a humid, airless pall, the heat of the day lingering with sullen determination long after the sun’s fiery ball had disappeared into the horizon. Darkness disdained to offer even the smallest measure of relief, empty of cool breezes, devoid of any suggestion of a drop in the temperature. The day’s swelter was rooted in the earth, a stubborn presence that would not be dispelled, breathing fire out of its concealment like an underground dragon. Insects buzzed and hummed and flew in erratic, random bursts. Trees were heat-ravaged giants, drooping and exhausted. A full moon crawled across the southern horizon, gibbous and shimmering against the haze. The only sounds that broke the stillness were those dredged from the throats of hunted creatures an instant before their hunters silenced them forever.

Even on the hottest of nights, the game of life and death played on.

Wren Ohmsford and the big Rover Garth turned their horses down the rutted trail that led into the town of Grimpen Ward. It had taken them a week to journey there from the Tirfing, navigating hidden passes of the Irrybis that only the Rovers knew, following the trails of the Wilderun north and west, shying well clear of the treacherous Shroudslip, winding at last over Whistle Ridge and down into the dank mire of the Westland’s most infamous lair.

When there was nowhere else to run or hide, it was said, there was always Grimpen Ward. Thieves, cutthroats, and misfits of all sorts came to the outlaw town to find refuge. Walled away by the Irrybis and the Rock Spur, swallowed up by the teeming jungle of the Wilderun, Grimpen Ward was a haven for renegades of every ilk.

It was also a deathtrap from which few escaped, a pit of vipers preying on one another because there was no one else, devouring their own kind with callous indifference and misguided amusement, feeding in a frenzy of need and boredom. Of those who came to Grimpen Ward seeking to stay alive, most ended up disappointed.

The town grew visible through the trees, and Wren and Garth slowed. Lights burned through the window glass of buildings black with grime, their shutters sagging and broken, their walls and roofs and porches so battered and ravaged by time and neglect that they seemed in immediate danger of collapse. Doors stood ajar in a futile effort to dispel the heat trapped within. Laughter broke sharply against the forest silence, rough, forced, desperate. Glasses clinked and sometimes shattered. Now and again, a scream sounded, solitary and disembodied.

Wren glanced at Garth and then signed We’ll leave the horses hidden here. Garth nodded. They turned their mounts into the trees, rode them some distance from the road until a suitable clearing was found, and tethered them in a stand of birch.

“Softly,” Wren whispered, fingers moving.

They worked their way back to the roadway and continued down. Dust rose from beneath their boots and settled in a dark sheen on their faces. They had been riding all day, a slow journey through impossible heat, unable to force the pace without risking the health of their horses. The Wilderun was a morass of midsummer dampness and decay, the wood of the forests rotting into mulch, the ground soft and yielding and treacherous, the streams and drinking pools dried or poisoned, and the air a furnace that parched and withered. No matter how terrible the heat might be in other parts of the Four Lands, it was always twice as bad here. A stagnant, inhospitable cesspool, the Wilderun had long been regarded as a place to which the discards of the population of the Four Lands were welcome.

Bands of Rovers frequently came to Grimpen Ward to barter and trade. Accustomed to the vagaries and treacheries of Men, outsiders themselves from society, branded outlaws and troublemakers everywhere, the Rovers were right at home. Even so, they traveled in tight-knit families and relied on strength of numbers to keep themselves safe. Seldom did they venture into Grimpen Ward alone as Wren and Garth were doing.

A chance encounter with a small family of coin traders had persuaded the girl and her giant protector to accept the risk. Just a day after Garth’s unsuccessful attempt to backtrack and trap their shadow, they had come upon an old man and his sons and their wives traveling north out of the passes, returning from a journey through the pit. Eating with them, sharing tales, Wren had asked simply out of habit if any among them knew of the fate of the Westland Elves, and the old man had smiled, broken toothed and wintry, and nodded.

“Not me, girl, you understand,” he had rasped softly, chewing at the end of the pipe he smoked, his gray eyes squinting against the light. “But at the Iron Feather in Grimpen Ward they be an old woman that does. The Addershag, she’s called. Haven’t spoke to her myself, for I don’t frequent the ale houses of the Ward, but word has it the old woman knows the tale. A seer, they say. Queer as sin, maybe mad.” He’d leaned into the fire’s glow. “They’s making use of her someway, I hear. A pack of them snakes. Making her give them secrets to take others’ money.” He shook his head. “We stayed clear.”

Later, they had talked it over, Wren and Garth, when the family was asleep and they were left alone. The reasons to stay out of the Wilderun were clear enough; but there were reasons to go in as well. For one, there was the matter of their shadow. It was back there still, just out of view and reach, carefully hidden away like the threat of winter’s coming. They could not catch it and despite all their efforts and skill they could not shake it. It clung to them, a trailing spider’s web floating invisibly in their wake. The Wilderun, they reflected, might be less to its taste and might, with a bit of luck, bring it to grief.