THE VOYAGE OF THE JERLE SHANNARA : Morgawr (BOOK THREE)

They set off again, working their way through the jungle, and hadn’t gone two hundred yards when Tian Cross spied the wooden crate that contained the crystals lying in a deep depression of its own making. Amazingly, the crate was still in one piece, if somewhat misshapen, the nails and stout wire securing it having held it together despite the fall from the precipice.

Big Red bent down to examine it. The crate was maybe two and a half feet on each side and weighed in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds. A strong man could carry it, but not far. He thought about taking out several of the crystals and tucking them into his clothing. But they were heavy and too awkward for that. Besides, he wanted to retrieve them all, not just some. It would take longer to haul out the entire crate, but there was no reason to think that on the long journey home they might not need replacement crystals again.

He stood up, pulled out the compass, and took another reading.

“Captain,” Rucker Bont called over to him.

He glanced up. The big Rover was pointing ahead. There was a distinct gap in the wall of the jungle where trees and brush were missing and hazy light flooded down through the canopy. It was a clearing, the first they had come across.

He snapped shut the casing on the compass and tucked the instrument back into his pocket. Something about the break in the jungle roof didn’t look right. He made his way through trees and vines for a closer look, leaving the crystals where they were. The other two Rovers followed. The brush was thicker here, and it took them several minutes to reach the edge of the clearing, where they slowed to a ragged halt and, still within the fringe of the trees, peered out in surprise.

A section of the forest had been leveled on both sides of a lazy stream that meandered through the dense undergrowth, its waters so still they were barely moving. Trees had been knocked down, bushes and grasses had been flattened, and the earth torn up so badly it had the look of a plowed field. A hole had been opened in the trees that tunneled back down the length of the stream and disappeared into the mist.

Rucker Bont whistled softly. “What do you suppose did that?”

Big Red shrugged. “A storm, maybe.”

Bont grunted. “Maybe. Could have been wind, too.” He paused. “Could also be that something bigger than us lives down here.”

His eyes darting right and left watchfully, Big Red walked out of the trees and into the clearing, picking his way across the rutted, scarred earth. The other two waited a moment, then followed. At the clearing’s center, he knelt to look for tracks, hoping he wouldn’t find any. He didn’t, but the ground was so badly churned he couldn’t be sure of what he was looking at.

He glanced up. “I don’t see anything.”

Rucker Bont scuffed his boot in the dirt, glanced over at Tian Cross and then back at Alt Mer. “Want me to have a look around?”

Big Red peered down the debris-strewn length of the little stream, down the tunnel that burrowed into the trees. In places the damage was so severe that the stream’s banks had collapsed entirely. Tree limbs and logs straddled the stream bed, wooden barriers that stuck out in all directions and smelled of shredded leaves and wood freshly ripped asunder. Everything he was seeing felt wrong for a windstorm or a flood. The damage was too contained, too geometrical, not random enough. Perhaps Bont wasn’t as far off the mark as he had thought. This had the look of something done by a very big, very powerful animal.

Aware suddenly of a change in the forest, he stood up slowly. The birds and butterflies they had seen in such profusion only minutes ago had disappeared entirely and the jungle had gone very still. His hand strayed to the hilt of his sword.

He saw Jahnon Pakabbon then, his eyes drawn to the corpse as surely as if it had been pointed out to him. Across the clearing, less than fifty feet away, Pakabbon lay sprawled against a clump of rocks and deadwood. Only he didn’t look the way he had when he was alive, and the fall alone wouldn’t account for it. His body had been stripped of its flesh and his organs sucked out. His clothes hung on bleached bones. His eyes were missing. His mouth hung open in a soundless scream and seemed to be trying to bite at something.