The Elves of Cintra (Book 2 of The Genesis of Shannara)

She smiled unexpectedly. “We do what we are here to do.

When the demons surface, they become my problem. Yours—yours and Simralin’s—is to find the Loden and use it in the way it is meant to be used and save your people.”

They traveled through the rest of that day and into the next, a long, torturous slog through hot, dry, open country denuded of plant life and filled with the bleached bones of humans and animals alike. It was a graveyard of indeterminate origin, a grim memorial to the presence of the dead and the absence of the living. Finally, when they were within a mile of Redonnelin Deep, Simralin turned them sharply northeast.

“We’re going to need help getting across,” she announced.

“We require a boat.”

“Aren’t there bridges?” Angel asked. She was hot and tired and still sick at heart about the children she felt she had abandoned. She constantly found herself looking for some sign of them along the riverbank, even when she knew there wouldn’t be any, that there hadn’t been time for them to get this far. “A river this size, there must be one or two that would take us across on foot.”

“More than that, actually. But the bridges are in the hands of militias and some others that are even worse. We don’t want to fight that battle if we don’t have to.” She gestured ahead. “Better to use a boat. I know someone who can help us. An old friend.”

“No one who sees us looking like this will want to help,”

Kirisin declared.

They were dust-covered and dirt-streaked from head to foot.

They hadn’t bathed in almost two weeks, traversing the high desert and lava fields with only the water they carried for drinking and nothing with which to wash. Angel looked at the other two and could only imagine how bad she must look.

But Simralin simply shrugged. “Don’t worry, Little K. This particular friend couldn’t care less.”

They trudged across the flats approaching the river through the heat of the afternoon and by nightfall’s approach had reached it. There were houses along the lower banks, dilapidated and empty, docks to which boats had once been moored and now were crumbling, and weedy paths that meandered in between. There was no sign of life anywhere.

The river itself was swift and wide, the open waters churning with whitecaps and the inlets thick with debris and deadwood collected and jammed together by deep rapids. In the fading light, the waters were gray and silt-clogged, and from its depths emanated a thick and unpleasant odor that suggested secrets hidden below the surface of other creatures’ failed attempts at crossing.

“Are you sure about this?” Kirisin asked uneasily. “Maybe a bridge would be safer, after all.”

Simralin only grinned and put a reassuring arm around him before setting off anew. Angel wasn’t sure, either, but the Tracker had gotten them this far without incident. She thought briefly of the children whom Helen Rice and the other protectors were guiding north and wished she could do the same for them. She glanced up and down the banks, and then looked behind her for what she knew she wouldn’t see.

I can’t seem to help myself, she thought.

Afraid, as she thought it, that she would never see any of them again.





Chapter TWENTY-THREE


DARKNESS CLOSED ABOUT the three weary travelers as they entered a stand of skeletal trees as bare and lifeless as the bones of the dying earth, bleached white and worn smooth. The woods seemed sparse at first, but the trunks stood so close together that two dozen feet in, it became impossible to tell which way led out. Simralin looked unfazed, picking their path without hesitating, taking them deeper in. After a time, they reached an inlet that had cut away into a ring of surrounding cliffs. Piles of jagged rocks broken off by time and upheaval lay all along the shoreline, their sharp-edged outlines suggesting the ridged backs of sleeping dragons. The travelers angled right along the shoreline, skirting the rocks when they could, climbing over them when they couldn’t. In the dark it was hot, arduous work, and Angel kept feeling that both time and opportunity were slipping away.

Finally, several hours after they had begun their inlet trek, they caught sight of a pinprick of light ahead, dim and hazy in a thick stand of ruined trees, burning out of the window of a small cottage.

“We’re here,” Simralin advised, giving them a quick smile.

They climbed over a tangled mound of fallen trees, forded a stream that branched off the inlet, and arrived outside the cottage with its solitary light.

The sheltering harbor was so draped with shadows from the cliffs and trees that the gloom was all but impenetrable. Angel, who had excellent eyesight, could barely make out the details of the cottage and the surrounding landscape.

“Larkin?” Simralin called into the darkness. “Are you home?”