Bloodfire Quest (The Dark Legacy of Shannara, #2)(76)

Aphen watched the warship draw closer.

Don’t panic.

Then she dispatched a swarm of hornets into the faces of the men aboard the airship, and for a moment everything turned to chaos. Everyone aboard ran screaming and shouting, swinging their arms to fend off the stinging insects, all of them abandoning their posts to find shelter. But she could not sustain the attack, and not enough damage was done to cause the pursuit to fall off.

Think!

Efforts at setting fire to the vessel’s sails and decking fell apart as the crew quickly extinguished the flames. An attempt to damage the controls failed, as well. Too much shielding warded them, and the distance was too great for her to make a precision strike.

By now the airship was much closer, her black hull looming over the smaller ship, her ramming bow pointed directly toward Aphen.

“Aphen!” Cymrian shouted, desperation surfacing in his voice.

On the mainmast, the Wend-A-Way’s crew was engaged in changing out the light sheaths, working frantically to set their rigging and attach radian draws that would siphon off fresh power for the diapson crystals. But it was all going to be too late. The warship would be on them before the effort could be completed.

“Aphen, get out of there!” Cymrian screamed.

But she held her ground stubbornly. If she were to be given only one chance, she would take it, no matter the risk. She watched the warship draw close enough that she could make out the individual planking nails, the knots on the cleats, the openings in the parse tubes, and, most terrifying of all, the muzzles of the fire launchers swinging down to take aim.

Swiftly she summoned and gathered together the magic she needed, staying calm as she watched the warship draw even with them.

Then, at what she believed to be the last moment, she released all of it in a thunderbolt of power. It exploded out of her in a fiery burst that struck the Federation warship’s mainmast and broke it in two. Down came the top three-quarters, dragging with it all of the light sheaths and rigging, whereupon everything burst into flames.

But an instant later the fire launchers aboard the Federation ship fired a broadside barrage that raked Wend-A-Way’s decks from bow to stern. Planking and railing splintered and burst apart. The charge that struck closest to Aphen razored off a section of railing and balustrades that slammed into her head, flinging her backward. Explosions rocked the Elven vessel, and fires broke out all across the decking.

Aphenglow remained conscious just long enough to realize that the entire length of the Elven ship had been swept clean, everyone had disappeared in a mix of fire and smoke and ash, and that the ship was going into a steep, precipitous dive. Then everything went black.





20





Redden Ohmsford woke from a restless sleep and immediately wondered whether this was the day he would finally be killed. He lay on his bed of straw in his darkened cell, the stone block walls damp with moisture and the air chill and stale. There were no windows and only a single heavy door. A tiny horizontal slit cut into the door’s thick wood admitted a glimmer of light from pitch-coated torches burning in the hallway, and a hint of fresh air that wafted down into the depths into which he had been cast.

Here, any semblance of normal life had been extinguished. No sounds, no movements, no anything. Hallways like the one without, doors similar to his, and a pervasive suffocating silence that shrouded everything. He knew this much only because of what he had seen while being brought here by his jailers. How long ago had it been now? Days? Weeks? He had no way of telling. This deep underground, time stopped entirely. He ate and drank his prisoner’s meals, he slept on the straw in his squalid accommodations, he sat in the darkness and fought to keep his fears and doubts in check, and he waited for the inevitable.

At some point in time, they were going to kill him. They were going to come for him and they were going to drag him out. And no matter how hard he pleaded with them, they were going to kill him.

They would kill the Ard Rhys, as well, if they hadn’t already done so. He had no way of knowing at this point if she were alive or dead. He hadn’t seen her since they had brought the two of them to this fortress, to this massive sprawling complex of walls and towers and battlements built of black stone rimmed in iron and situated on a bluff that rose a thousand feet above the lands beneath it. Here inside the Forbidding, this keep was the home of the Straken Lord, and the seat of the supreme power that dominated this monstrous world.

The journey to reach their imprisonment had been nightmarish. They had been hauled in wagons fitted with cages. Khyber Elessedil was sprawled on the wooden floor across from him, both of them bound and gagged and chained to the bars so they could not reach each other or even speak, Pleysia’s head spiked on a pole just outside, where they could watch it bounce and sway as the wagon rolled on across miles of desolate country. Huge beasts that vaguely resembled oxen hauled the wagons, while whip-wielding drivers that looked like huge toads sat stone-still atop wooden seats, their eyes directed straight ahead. Wolves prowled the perimeter—huge shaggy beasts, eyes burning with hunger. They growled and snarled and snapped at one another and everything around them. Now and again, they lunged at the cages as if intending to tear them open and devour the prisoners inside.

And the creatures that served the Straken Lord as soldiers and handlers and minions stalked without. They were Goblins for the most part, but other things, too—things that had no recognizable names or origin or even purpose, hunching and shuffling and slogging to keep pace with the wagons.