The Elf Queen of Shannara

At first he had attributed it to luck. But luck would only take you so far, and the regularity of their discovery had soon ruled out any possibility that it was luck alone. Then he had thought that it might be his magic, traced somehow by Rimmer Dall—for it was the Seekers that came most often, sometimes in Federation guise, but more often revealed as the monsters they were, dark shadows cloaked and hooded. But he hadn’t used his magic since they had escaped the sewers, and if he hadn’t used it, how could it be traced?

“They have infiltrated the Movement,” Damson had declared, tight-lipped and wan before leaving him only hours earlier to search anew for a hiding place about which their pursuers did not know. “Or they have caught one of us and extracted all of our secrets. There is no other explanation.”

But even she had been forced to admit that no one other than Padishar Creel knew all the hiding places she used. No one else could have betrayed them.

Which led, in turn, to the disquieting possibility that despite their hopes to the contrary, the fall of the Jut had yielded the Federation the catch it had been so anxious to make.

Par let his head fall back to rest against the rough, heated stone, his eyes closing momentarily in despair. Coll dead. Padishar and Morgan missing. Wren and Walker Boh. Steff and Teel. The company. Even the Mole—there had been no word of him since they had fled his subterranean chambers. There was no sign of him, nothing to reveal what had happened. It was maddening. Everyone he had started out with weeks ago—his brother, his cousin, his uncle, and his friends—had disappeared. It sometimes seemed as if everyone he came in contact with was doomed to fall off the face of the earth, to be swallowed by some netherworld blackness and never resurface again.

Even Damson . . .

No. His eyes snapped open again, anger reflected in the glimmer from the lamps. Not Damson. He would not lose her. It would not happen again.

But how much longer could they keep running like this? How long before their enemies finally ran them to earth?

There was sudden movement at the corner of the wall ahead where it turned the building to follow the street west toward the bluff, and Damson appeared. She scurried through the shadows in a crouch and came up next to him, breathless and flushed.

“Two other safe holes are discovered,” she said. “I could smell the stench of the things that watch for us even before I saw them.” Her long red hair was tangled and damp against her face and neck, tied back by a cloth band about her forehead. Her smile, when it came, was unexpected. “But I found one they missed.”

Her hand reached out to brush his cheek. “You look so tired, Par. Tonight you will sleep well. This place—I remembered it, actually. A cellar beneath an old gristmill that was once something else, I forget what. It hasn’t been used in more than a year—not by anyone. Once, Padishar and I . . .” She stopped, the memory retrieved at the verge of its telling and drawn back again—too painful, her eyes said, to relate. “They will not know of this one. Come with me, Valeman. We’ll try again.”

They hurried off into the night, twin shadows that appeared and faded again as quick as the blink of an eye. Par felt the weight of the Sword of Shannara against his back, flat and hard, its presence a reminder of the travesty his quest had become and of the confusions that plagued him. Was this, in fact, the ancient talisman he had been sent to find, or some trick of Rimmer Dall’s meant to bring him to his destruction? If it was the Sword, why had he not been able to make it work when face to face with the First Seeker? If it was a fake, what had become of the real Sword?

But the questions, as always, yielded no answers, only further questions, and as always, he quickly abandoned them. Survival was all that counted for the moment, evasion of the black things and, more important, escape from the city. For their flight had been that of rats in a maze, trapped behind walls from which they could not break free. All efforts at getting clear of Tyrsis to regain the open country beyond had been thwarted. The gates were carefully watched, all the exits guarded, and Damson lacked sufficient skill, in the absence of the Mole, to navigate the tunnels beneath the city that provided the only other means of escape. So there was nothing left for them but to continue to run and hide, to scurry from one hole to the next, and to wait for an opportunity to arise or a means to present itself that would at last set them free.