The First King of Shannara

Risca used his magic, sending Druid fire into the midst of the hunters, chasing them back. A handful of the netherworld grotesques hove into view, lurching mindlessly after the scrambling Dwarves, and Risca was forced to stand long enough to throw them back as well.

They nearly had him then. They closed on him from three sides, drawn by the flare of his Druid fire. Weapons flew, and dark things launched themselves at him and tried to drag him down. He fought with fury and exhilaration, alive as he could not otherwise be, a warrior in his element. He was strong and quick, and he would not he overpowered. He threw back his attackers, fought off their strikes, used the Druid magic to shield his movements, and escaped them.

Then he was at the back side of the maze and racing after the last of the Dwarves. Their force had been halved, and those who remained were bloodied and exhausted. Raybur lingered until Risca caught up, grim-faced and sweating in the faint light. The battle-axe he carried had one blade shattered and was covered in blood.

“We’ll have to hurry,” he warned, lumbering forward. “They’re almost on top of us.”

Risca nodded. Spears and arrows flew at them from out of the rocks below. They charged up the valley slope, hearing the cries of the Northlanders chase after. Another of the Dwarves went down in front of them, an arrow in his throat. There were only a handful left of the twenty who had come. Risca whirled as he sensed something sweep out of the skies and sent a bolt of fire after one of the winged hunters as it swooped hurriedly away. The mist was growing thicker now. If they could stay clear of their pursuers for a few more minutes, they would lose them.

And so they did, pushing on until they were past exhaustion and running on determination alone. Eight in all, the last of the Dwarves reached the gathering place of the others, deserted now save for Geften. Wordlessly, they hastened after the anxious Tracker as he led them into the hills and the peaks beyond.

Behind them, the Northlanders swarmed into the valley, crashing through trees and brush, howling in fury. Somewhere the Dwarves were hidden and trapped. Soon they would be found.

The hunt went on, moving farther south toward the Pass of Noose.

With luck, Risca thought, the two halves of the Warlock Lord’s army would run up against each other in the mist and dark and each would think the other was their quarry. With luck, each would kill large numbers of the other before they discovered their mistake.

He moved up into the boulders that marked the beginning of the high range. They would not be followed here, not in this darkness, and by morning they would have passed the point where their tracks could be found.

Raybur dropped back and clapped a congratulatory hand on his friend’s broad shoulder. Risca smiled at the king, but inwardly he felt cold and hard. He had measured the size of the army that hunted them. He had judged the nature of the things that commanded it. Yes, the Dwarves had escaped this time. They had tricked the Northlanders into a prolonged and futile hunt, delayed their advance, and lived to fight another day.

But it would be a day of reckoning when it came.

And it would come, Risca feared, all too soon.





Chapter Twenty


The rain was falling in Arborlon, a slow, steady downpour that draped the city in a curtain of shimmering damp and hazy rain. It was midafternoon. The rain had begun at dawn and now, more than nine hours later, showed no signs of lessening.

Jerle Shaimara watched it from the seclusion of the king’s summer home, his current retreat, his present hideaway. He watched is spatter on the windowpanes, on the walkways, in the hundreds of puddles it had already formed. He watched it transform the trees of the forest, turning their trunks a silky black and their leaves a vibrant green. It seemed to him, in his despondency, that if he watched it long and hard enough, it would transform him as well.