The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

“Tie a rope around his waist,” Khyber suggested suddenly. “Tie one to each of them. It couldn’t hurt.”


They did so, the trolls knotting the ropes in place and taking up positions on both sides of the bridge, ready to haul back should it be required. Pen felt foolish, trussed as he was. He thought the effort pointless. If the spirits of the air or whatever else dwelled in that place wanted them dead, they were not going to be able to save themselves anyway.

He looked at Cinnaminson and wished she weren’t involved. It was bad enough risking his life. He didn’t care to risk hers, as well. It wasn’t her fight. It had nothing to do with her. She was here because of him, and that was unforgivable.

“Pen.” Khyber came up to him. “I will stand at the edge of the ravine when you cross. If anything threatens—anything at all—I will use the Druid magic and the Elfstones to help you.” Her lips tightened. “I won’t fail you.”

He nodded and smiled. “You haven’t yet, Khyber.”

Cinnaminson took hold of his hand. Pen looked around at those assembled, those who had come with him on the quest. The trolls stared back, blank-faced and imperturbable. Tagwen was tugging on his beard, but he managed an encouraging nod. Khyber was already at the edge of the ravine, the Elfstones gripped in her hand, her dark face alert and watchful.

Pen took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. With Cinnaminson’s hand in his own, he began to walk toward the bridge.





TWENTY-THREE


As he approached, Pen was able to take a closer look at the bridge, and what he saw gave him pause. It was narrow, less than eight feet wide, and provided no handholds to protect against a fall. You don’t want to walk too close to the edge, he thought. You don’t want to look down.

But it was the nature of its construction that troubled him most. The bridge was formed of massive stone blocks cut and placed so precisely that the seams were barely noticeable. Each block was wedge shaped, with the narrow part pointed downward, the blocks carefully fitted and aligned so that the weight of each was buttressed by the others, the whole arranged to form the arch that spanned the ravine. There were no pins or supports or any kind. Stone abutments at each end wrapped the corners, serving as cradles to keep the stones tightly pressed together and immobile.

But the massive blocks each must have weighed thousands of pounds. How had they been shaped, carried, and placed across the ravine without underlying supports? They could not have just hung in midair, each in turn, while the rest were fitted. Pen could not fathom it. Even using pulleys and a block and tackle it would have been impossible to suspend the first stones while waiting to set the others. They were too big, too heavy, and too cumbersome.

There was something else to consider, he saw. These stones were not as old as those of the ruins themselves. They were smooth and not yet worn and pitted by weather and time as were the walls behind which Pen and his companions had hidden earlier. Stridegate was thousands of years old. The bridge was much newer. It had been constructed long after the city was destroyed and its inhabitants dead.

The implications of his reasoning caused him to shiver; they made him want to turn around right then and there and go back.

It would have taken at least one giant to construct this bridge. It would have taken technology that no longer existed in his world.

Or it would have taken a very powerful magic.

He didn’t care for any of those possibilities. All were beyond anything the group had ever encountered. It dwarfed them, reducing their tiny defenses to a handful of pebbles. Even Khyber, with the magic of the Elfstones to aid her, would not be able to stand against something that could accomplish what he saw before him.

He stopped abruptly, not five feet from the bridge, and stood staring at it. Sensing his discomfort, Cinnaminson whispered, “Pen? What’s wrong?”

He didn’t know what to say in reply, how to explain. He wasn’t sure he should try. He couldn’t turn back, couldn’t give up. The Ard Rhys needed him to go forward if she was to have any chance at all of escaping the Forbidding. Those he had come with needed him to cross if they were to realize any success from their efforts to bring him there. All other considerations, no matter how daunting, had to be put aside.

He was just a boy, but he knew instinctively what he must do.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, squeezing her hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry.”

He started forward again, leading her onto the bridge, reaching out with his senses into the twilight shadows that now draped everything from the forested pinnacle to the ravine that surrounded it to the bridge that reached to it. He used his tiny magic, his strange gift, to seek anything that might be waiting. Whispers came back to him, small rustlings and little hissings. They came from unidentifiable sources, from the impenetrable dark, from the void. He heard them, but could not make sense of them. He sorted through them swiftly, seeking just one that he might recognize.