Terry Brooks - Bloodfire Quest

Moving ahead of her, he worked the pins in a particular sequence, then seized the handle and twisted. The locks released at once, and the door opened.

He gave her a look, cocking one eyebrow. “It’s all in the wrists.”

They entered a corridor formed of stone blocks and plank flooring that led to a second door, this one less formidable. Aphen led the way through, and they found themselves inside the stone well of the furnace chamber. Its circular walls rose into the body of the Keep, where heating ducts carried warmth to the various rooms of the fortress, and dropped away into the pit where the earth’s fires provided that warmth. Once, tenders had been used to mind those fires and control their output. But during the time of Grianne Ohmsford, the Druids had devised a system that tended the fires automatically. With the Keep deserted, the heat was diminished and the fires reduced to a dull red glow.

A long circular metal stairway, its interlocking sections connected by catwalks and platforms that formed ramps and thresholds to dozens of closed doors, wound in serpentine fashion about the stone walls.

“We need to go up,” Woostra advised.

They began to climb, ascending the steps at a cautious, steady pace, listening for sounds and watching for movement that would signal danger. But as the minutes drifted past, nothing happened save for the echo of their footfalls on the stairs. The pit was silent, and the Keep empty of everything but ghosts.

When they reached a door that opened onto the ground floor of the fortress, Aphen took the lead, her magic summoned and poised at her fingertips. They stepped out of the furnace room into a long corridor where dozens of bodies lay piled atop one another, twisted into positions that clearly indicated they had suffered an agonizing death. Federation soldiers, all of them, clumped against the walls for as far as the eye could see. From the marks on the stone and the damage to their hands, it could be deduced they had died trying to claw their way out. Some of them had worn their fingers down to the first and second knuckles. Some of them had torn out their own throats.

Aphen bent close to her companion. “Can we find a way to go other than through this?”

He nodded wordlessly and led her into a short corridor that branched off to the right and from there through a doorway to a narrow set of stone steps leading upward. Again, they began to climb. There were still no sounds, no signs of life anywhere. But Aphen sensed something once again—the warning stronger this time. A presence, unseen but lurking close. She hunted for it as they ascended, but couldn’t track it. The magic, she thought. It was there, and it was aware of them.

They reached the floor on which the Druid Histories were housed and made their way down the empty, cavernous hall, pressing through the weight of the silence.

Aphen.

The voice whispered in her head.

A voice she knew well.

I am here .

She kept moving, saying nothing to Woostra, who might have heard it as well but wasn’t acknowledging it.

Aphen. She caught her breath. I see you.

This time Woostra glanced over his shoulder, and there was no mistaking the look he gave her.

Reaching the door to the archive room, the old man released the locks and let them inside. Then he carefully closed the door and relocked it. He led the way through his office and a series of reading rooms into the storage vault—a box with bare walls and a massive wooden table set at its center. Once upon a time, only Druids had been granted access to this chamber and possessed the magic that would reveal the hiding place of the books. But Grianne Ohmsford had changed that, too, when she had become Ard Rhys. Now there were keepers of the records who were not Druids themselves but in service to the order. Woostra was the most recent of these, and like his predecessors he knew the secret of the books and the magic that would reveal them.

He used that knowledge now in Aphen’s presence, touching the wall here and there in a complex sequence that dissolved the concealment and revealed hundreds of tomes shelved in the stone, the whole of the Druid Histories emerging into the circle of light cast by their smokeless torches.

Woostra went straight to the book he wanted, pulled it out, set it on the table, and began to page through it. It took him several minutes before he found what he wanted. “Here,” he said, indicating where he wanted Aphenglow to read.

She bent close and did so.

The Forbidding endures only so long as the Ellcrys. The tree lives a long time, through many generations, but not forever. When it begins to fail, it selects one among the current order of service to carry its seed to where the Bloodfire burns, there to be immersed and quickened so that Chosen and seed can merge and become one. The old Ellcrys passes away and the new takes root, keeping the Forbidding intact or, in the case of a diminishment, restoring its former strength.

The Bloodfire can be found in only one known place in the Four Lands. It burns deep underground within the Safehold, warded by the mountain of Spire’s Reach in the country of the Wilderun within the middle regions of the Westland.

“A transformation many witnessed,” Woostra said, “but which few now believe actually happened.”

She looked at him. “There are any other entries that you have found?”

He shrugged. “A few, but nothing more revealing. I think Allanon determined the exact location from Wil Ohmsford, who made the journey with Amberle, thinking that a more complete record of where the Bloodfire could be found might help when it was needed again. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened.” He paused, studying her. “Yet.”

Aphen said nothing. She could tell he suspected. She read a few more entries from farther back in time, ones that Woostra pointed out to her, but he was not mistaken in his assessment of their worth. All were cursory, almost negligible references to things that were already common knowledge about the value of the tree.

“Since you already searched for any mention of Aleia Omarosian and her parents,” she said, “I assume you found nothing regarding her connection to the Chosen?” She wanted him to continue to think that this was the object of her search.

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

She closed the books and helped him reshelve them. She had memorized the passage detailing the location of the Bloodfire and could help Arling make the journey if it came to that. But she had discovered nothing that would prevent it from being necessary, nothing that would provide her sister any way out of this mess.

Woostra resealed the books within the walls of the room, and everything disappeared once more.

He turned to her. “The magic is waiting for you. It knows you are here. I believe it has something to say to you.”

“I know. I sense it, too.”

He sighed. “Are you ready?”

She nodded. “I want to go to the south wall to see if the Federation still watches the Keep. I’ve sensed no human presence anywhere since we left Wend-A-Way . I’m not even sure anyone from the Federation is out there now. But I need to know if they are. It might change my mind about what we need to do.”

He led her from the room, relocking first the vault and then the door leading into the chambers of his office. They walked down the hallway in the opposite direction, south toward the parapets of the Inner Wall. Suddenly tinges of a misty greenish light began to appear, pulsing softly against the surface of the walls, emanating from deep within the stone.

Aphen noticed Woostra hesitating as he caught sight of the eerie glow. “Keep moving,” she said.