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

Angel peered ahead. There were mountains, but they were some distance off and none of them was particularly distinctive. She guessed she just wasn’t seeing what she was supposed to see, that Syrring Rise was lost in the larger mass or in the dirty haze that hung like a pall over most of what lay ahead, a reminder of how bad the air had been polluted.

They trekked on without saying much, making what progress they could through country that was choked with wintry stands of weeds and scrub amid rocky flats and rises. Angel’s thoughts drifted to her old life and Johnny, and then to little Ailie, her doomed conscience. The tatterdemalion hadn’t had much chance to exercise that conscience, even though she had stated on their first meeting that this was her self-appointed goal. A creature who lived an average of thirty days, and she had offered herself as a voice of reason to a Knight of the Word—a Faerie creature trying to help a human.

It seemed incongruous and somehow sad. She wished for what must have been the hundredth time that she could have found a way to save her tiny friend.

They were in the middle of wilderness by now, in country empty of buildings and roads and anything living. There wasn’t so much as a rodent poking its head from its burrow or a bird circling the sky. Heavy, dead trees clustered together in skeletal bundles, as if they had sought comfort from one another at the end. Grasses were spiky and gray with sickness and death. Dust lay thick on the ground everywhere, rising in small explosions from their footfalls. In the distance, the mountains loomed dark and bare, no closer now than they had been an hour ago.

“Exactly how far is it to Syrring Rise?” Angel asked impatiently.

Simralin stopped a moment, unslung her water skin, and took a deep drink. “

On foot, about two weeks. As the crow flies, about a hundred miles.” She nodded toward the mountain range. “On the other side of that.”

Angel stared. “Two weeks! We don’t have two weeks!”

Simralin nodded. “Don’t worry. We’ll be there before dark.”

She shouldered the water skin anew. “You’ll see, Angel. Trackers know how to get where they want to in ways that others don’t.”

An enigmatic comment that Angel felt inclined to challenge, but she decided not to. She glanced at Kirisin, who shrugged his lack of understanding but at the same time seemed confident that his sister could do what was needed. Angel wished she could have that kind of confidence in someone, but she didn’t even have it in herself.

They continued on for a short time, not much more than another half an hour, arriving at a broad, thick stand of huge old conifers, their once green needles turned silvery by nature and the elements. It was a strange sight, the trees stretching away for miles in all directions, seemingly all the way to the lower slopes of the mountains west. Without hesitating, Simralin took them directly into their center, striding ahead confidently, her blond hair a silken shimmer in the hazy light. Angel and Kirisin followed, neither saying anything. The woods were deep and gray and silent, and the emptiness was its own presence. Such places bothered Angel, who preferred the stones and bricks and concrete of the city. In the city, you could find your way. Here, there was nothing to tell you even so much as the direction in which you were going. The trees blocked the mountains. The haze diffused the sunlight.

Everything looked the same.

Then abruptly the terrain changed from dust and scrub to an uneven hardpan that the wind had swept clear of everything loose. There were strange, twisted trees with spiky leaves and peeling bark set in among the conifers. There were tall stands of scrub, some of them more than six feet high. In minutes, they were deep into this new stand of foliage, and Angel was hopelessly lost. Her hands tightened on her staff, reassuring herself that she was not entirely powerless. But the woods seemed to press in against her anyway, threatening to suffocate her, to steal away her power.

“I hate this,” she muttered.

Kirisin looked over and nodded, but said nothing.

Angel was just beginning to wonder if this was leading to anything when the trees opened before them and they found themselves at the edge of a broad, shallow ravine surrounding a rocky flat on which two piles of brush covered a pair of square-shaped objects; what might once have been a third pile lay scattered about on the rocks nearby.

For the first time, Simralin hesitated, her forehead furrowing with concern.

“There should be three,” she said, mostly to herself, but loud enough that her companions could hear her. “What happened to the third?”

Angel moved a few steps closer, right to the edge of the ravine, and peered at the two that were still covered. “Are those baskets of some sort?” she asked in surprise.

Simralin nodded. “They are. But there should be another.

Wait here.”