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

She placed the tip of her staff against the Gotrin Elfish symbol, and her dark features tightened in concentration. The runes carved in her staff began to glow, turning bright with fiery light. Almost immediately the symbol responded; it, too, began to glow.

Then a deep grating sound broke the stillness of the night, the heavy rasp of stone moving across stone, and an entire section of the earth, not a dozen feet from where they stood, began to move. A huge slab, concealed beneath layers of dirt and debris, dropped slowly into the earth and out of sight, leaving a gaping hole.

The four stepped over to its edge and peered down. It was as black as pitch in the hole, but they could see that the slab formed a platform onto the steps of a stairway leading down.

“What do we do?” Simralin asked.

Angel Perez shook her head, the runes of her staff gone dark once more. Erisha started to say something, then stopped herself.

It was Kirisin who spoke the words that the rest of them couldn’t.

“We go down,” he said.

AT THE WEST ENTRANCE to the burial ground, hidden back in the shadow of the trees, Ailie caught a sudden whiff of demon scent. It was borne on the night breeze, coming out of the darkness north along the berm that designated the boundary to Ashenell. A second later, she saw a long, sinewy form leap out of the darkness, clear the earthen rise, and drop soundlessly inside the grounds. Ailie recognized it at once: it was the creature that had tracked them all the way from California, the creature that had twice done battle with Angel and twice been thwarted.

Now it was here.

Ailie wasn’t surprised that it had found them. It was a skilled hunter, a feral beast that could track anyone or anything. What surprised her was the timing. How had the creature happened to find them now, in the middle of the night? Something about it didn’t feel right. Ailie watched the beast slouch through the markers, sniffing the ground, its big head turning this way and that, casting about for further scent. She wasn’t worried about being discovered. Tatterdemalions left no scent, and she was much faster and more elusive than the demon. She could fly from her hiding place anytime she wished. But she was curious to see what it would do. It would have a purpose in mind, but its wanderings amid the markers seemed so aimless.

She was still watching when she became aware of a second presence, this one much stronger and closer, approaching her from behind. It took her only a moment to remember that there was another demon, the one from the Council chambers, the one disguised as an Elf.

She had time for a single thought.

Flee! And then there was no time at all.

DELLOREEN PADDED over to where the remains of the Faerie creature were already fading, sinking back into the earth from which she had been formed, leaving only the thin white garment she had been wearing.

Delloreen licked at the cloth, tasting its dampness, and then glanced over to where the second demon was wiping its hands on the grasses of the burial grounds.

“Remember what I told you,” the other said, fastidiously cleaning away what remained of Ailie. “We have a plan, and the plan is not to be changed. Kill only the one. Leave the others for later. Can you remember?”

Delloreen snapped at the air between them, showing all of her considerable teeth. She could remember as much as she needed to.

Head hunched between her shoulders, body stretched out so low that it almost touched the ground, she crept toward the deep shadows and her unsuspecting kill.





Chapter TWELVE


AS KIRISIN AND HIS COMPANIONS stared down into the black hole left by the opening of the stone slab, two things happened in immediate sequence. First, torches fastened in iron stanchions secured to the rock walls of the stairwell flared to life, allowing them to see that the stairs themselves wound so deep underground that their end was invisible. Second, as they took their first cautious steps down those stairs, leaving Ashenell behind, the stone slab slid back into place with a fresh grating sound that froze them in their tracks. There was no time to turn back, and no chance to escape. The slab filled the gap anew, blotting out the night sky, and they were left shut away in the earth.

“Already, I don’t like any of this,” Simralin said.

“We are not meant to go back,” Angel said. “No mistaking that.”

They glanced at one another. Then, reaching an unspoken common consensus, they resumed their descent. Kirisin had started out in the lead, but Simralin quickly passed him by, giving him a look of warning as she did so. If there was to be any sort of trouble, the look said, she was better equipped to deal with it. He found that hard to argue with and dropped back to walk beside Erisha. He was thinking that they had brought almost no weapons at all with which to defend themselves.

“It would be good if we stayed close together,” Angel observed from just behind them.