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

She took his hands in her own. “Then we’d better get started.”


They gathered a few supplies in backpacks and with Cheney leading the way set out west, following the river as it wound through a chain of mountains that flanked it on both sides.

By midnight, they were ten miles away.

FINDO GASK stalked the darkness, a gray ghost on a shadowy night, the sky heavily overcast and empty of light, and the woods through which he passed deep-layered with gloom. Behind him, the camp of the once-men slumbered, their grunts and snores mingling with the whimpers and moans of the slaves they had taken on their march north from LA. Their journey had been a fast one, coming overland afoot and by flatbed truck, each travel day spanning sixteen to eighteen hours. There had been little time for delay once the gypsy morph had resurfaced, and less time still now that it had revealed itself a second time.

It appeared stronger this time, its magic more potent and sweeping, and it was making no effort to mask what it was doing.

Which was more than the demon could have hoped and dreamed for, and it knew it could not afford to let this chance slip through its fingers.

Still, the source of the magic was a long way north, several hundred miles farther on at least, and this second using had not originated from the same place as the first. That meant that the morph was on the move, which meant that it had decided on a destination or a goal. Findo Gask could not know its purpose, but there was no mistaking the need to reach it before that purpose could be fulfilled. The morph was the demon’s most dangerous threat, the one servant of the Word who might undo everything the demon had spent so much time achieving.

It still rankled Findo Gask that he had let the morph get free of him all those years ago when it had been within his grasp. Somehow, Nest Freemark had tricked him. He sensed it instinctively, knew that she had bonded with this Faerie creature and kept it safe from him. His victory over John Ross—or any of the other Knights of the Word he had dispatched over the years—felt hollow and insufficient. Nothing less than the death of the gypsy morph would satisfy him now.

Nothing less would ever give him peace.

It was a goal he expected to achieve. John Ross and Nest Freemark and all the rest of the magic wielders from that time were dead and gone, even that big copper-skinned war vet. Only he remained. The gypsy morph, whatever its form, was alone and isolated from its own kind, and was also, perhaps, unwitting of its danger. If he could just manage to reach it before it was warned…Or, he amended, if another could reach it in his place, one even more lethal and relentless than he was…He left the thought hanging as he moved into the deepest part of the forest, the part where sunlight never reached, and stopped at the edge of a pond.

The pond was choked with water grasses and reeds and coated with a thick layer of scum, its waters fouled in the culmination of the destruction of the environment years earlier. What had once been clear and clean was now murky and polluted. Nothing that lived here was what it had started out as. Everything had evolved. The bite of the smallest insects would sicken a human. Even the air and water and plants were poisonous.

But Findo Gask walked with impunity, picking his way without fear through the things that could kill humans. Nothing came near him—not the snakes or spiders or biting insects or creatures for which there were no names. Nothing came near because nothing was as dangerous or as venom-filled as he was. The denizens of the dark woods recognized one of their own, and they stayed clear.

Except for one.

It rose out of the pond’s mire like a leviathan surfacing from the deep ocean, the waters bubbling and heaving about it as it lifted clear, the gases escaping in spurts and burst bubbles, their stench filling the fouled air with fresh odors. Findo Gask knew it was hiding but would sense his approach and reveal itself because that was its nature. He stood safely distant and watched it emerge, the scum and dead grasses clinging to its broad back and hunched shoulders in damp patches. He watched, and he marveled at the monstrosity of its demon form.

The Klee was like nothing else he had ever encountered. Its head was a conical plate of bone flattened and dented as if struck repeatedly by a heavy mallet. Its features were submerged in the leathery tissue beneath its brow, stunted and difficult to discern save for its small, wicked green eyes. Its long, heavy arms were fringed with hair and ridged with muscle, its hands crooked and gnarled, its tree-trunk legs thick and bowed, all of it encrusted with a mix of scale and hair and debris. When it stood clear of the mud and water, it towered over him, dwarfed him with its mass, and gave him momentary pause despite what he knew about it.