The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

“This won’t work,” Khyber declared, wrinkling her nose against the stench as the three of them stared down at the steaming pouch. “The creature will spot this in a heartbeat and go right around it.”


Pen was inclined to agree, but he didn’t say so. At least the leaf-wrap was holding together, although it didn’t look any too secure.

“If it’s distracted, it might not notice the smell,” he said.

“There’s not very much of it to work with, either,” the Elven girl continued doubtfully. “Not enough to cover more than maybe two square feet, and that’s stretching it. How are we going to get it to step into a space that small?”

“Why worry about it?” Tagwen asked, throwing up his hands. “We don’t know how to find this thing anyway, so the matter of applying the tar unobtrusively and in sufficient amounts to render the creature helpless is of very little consequence!”

“We’ll find it,” Pen declared grimly.

They started walking north, the direction the Skatelow had flown. Pen reasoned that the creature knew Cinnaminson’s talent was most effective in the dark. It probably preferred to hunt at night anyway, since that was the only time they had ever seen it. They had been keeping watch for the Skatelow since sunrise, but hadn’t seen anything other than birds and clouds. Pen felt pretty certain that the airship wouldn’t reappear until nightfall.

As they traveled, they discussed how they were going to lure their hunter into the tar once they found it and attracted its attention. There were all sorts of problems about accomplishing this. In order to get it into the tar, they would have to spread the tar around, then lead the creature to it and hope it stepped blindly in. It didn’t seem too likely that this would happen; the thing hunting them was smart enough to avoid such an obvious trap. More to the point, one of them was going to have to act as bait, and the only one who would do was Pen. But neither Khyber nor Tagwen would hear of that, so another way had to be found.

It was midafternoon, and they were high on the slopes leading up to the Charnals, when they finally began to put a workable plan together. By then they were beginning to think about food again, remembering how good the rabbit Pen had caught two days before had tasted and wishing they had saved a bit of it. They had water from the mountain streams and had found roots and berries to chew on, but none of it was as satisfying as that rabbit.

“We can build a fire,” Khyber said. “That will attract attention from a long distance. The creature on the Skatelow won’t miss it. But we won’t be there. We’ll bundle up some sticks and leaves to look like sleepers, but we’ll be hiding back in the rocks.”

Pen nodded. “We need to find the right place, one where the creature will have to land in a certain spot and approach in a certain way. It has to seem to the creature that we think we are protected but really aren’t. It has to think it’s smarter than we are.”

“That shouldn’t be too hard,” Tagwen declared with a snort. “It is smarter than we are.”

“An open space leading to a gap in the rocks would be ideal,” Pen went on, ignoring him. “We can coat the ground and rock sides with the tar. Even if it just brushes up against it, that would help.” He looked over at Tagwen. “Does this stuff stay sticky when it gets cold?”

The Dwarf shook his head. “It stiffens up. We have to keep it warm. Frost is a problem, too. If it frosts, the tar will harden and lose its stickiness.”

There were so many variables in the plan that it was tough to keep them all straight, and Pen was growing increasingly worried that he was going to miss at least one of them. But there was nothing he could do about it except to continue talking the scheme over with Khyber and Tagwen, hoping that, together, they could keep everything straight.

The afternoon slipped away, and the shadows were beginning to lengthen when Khyber suddenly gripped Pen’s arm and said, “There! That’s what we’re looking for.”

She was pointing across a sparsely wooded valley to a meadow that fronted a heavy cluster of rocks leading up into the mountains. The rocks were threaded by a tangle of passages that gave the cluster the look of a complicated maze. The maze lifted toward the base of a cliff face that dropped sharply for several hundred feet from a high plateau.

“You’re right,” Pen agreed. “Let’s have a closer look before it gets dark.”

They went down through the valley, into the trees, and along a series of ravines and gullies that rains and snowmelt had carved into the slope, watching the sun slide steadily lower on the horizon. East, the sky was already dark behind the mountains, and a three-quarter moon was on the rise. Night birds were winging through the growing gloom, and night sounds were beginning to surface. A wind had picked up, bitter and chill as it blew down out of the higher elevations.