The High Druid's Blade (The Defenders of Shannara, #1)(74)

Grehling was hustling her backward, away from whatever was waiting just outside the front door. She heard a scratching sound and saw the door handle lever downward and catch on the lock.

“Quickly!” Leofur hissed. “There’s no—”

In the next instant the door burst inward, torn from its hinges as a huge black shape appeared in the opening. Leofur’s weapon discharged a fireball that shot across the space separating her from the intruder and exploded into it with such force that it was thrown backward through the doorway and into the street.

By then Grehling was shoving Chrysallin through the trapdoor and down the ladder to the passageway below, practically leaping after her. A moment later Leofur reappeared, clambering down to join them, pulling and bolting the trapdoor behind her.

She pulled out a smokeless torch from a niche in the wall and lit it. “This way,” she said without preamble, starting down the passageway, smoke curling from the barrel of the strange weapon.

“Did you kill it?” Chrysallin heard Grehling ask breathlessly as he rushed her along through the near darkness.

“Didn’t do much of anything to it. Confused it, maybe.” She didn’t look around, didn’t slow. “Keep going.”

The corridor ahead branched, and she turned left. The passageway twisted and turned with sets of stairs and ladders leading upward all along the way.

“What is that thing you used on it?” the boy persisted. “I’ve never seen one before.”

“There aren’t many,” Leofur shot back over her shoulder. Her eyes were dark with anger and frustration. “They’re still experimental, a part of the Federation’s weapons development program. Handheld flash rips.”

“How did you get one?”

She glanced back at him. “Contacts in my business. A bargain, a trade. What difference does it make? It wasn’t enough to stop that thing back there, was it? What have you gotten me into, Grehling?”

Not him, Chrysallin thought, not him. What have I gotten us into? I’m the one responsible.

Behind them, they heard a prolonged ripping of metal and wood. The trapdoor was open.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry! She screamed it in silence, screamed it to no one and everyone. So sorry!

She was coming apart again, the momentary sense of balance she had achieved when the creature had broken down the door and she had begun her flight thrown off kilter. The nightmares were back, the face of the gray-haired Elven woman right in front of her eyes, the pain and anguish surging through her in waves. She could feel herself moving, but was losing all sense of what she was about.

“Up here!” Leofur hissed at them as they reached a set of wooden steps cut into the earth.

They scrambled up to another trapdoor, which the young woman threw open, leading them through in a rush. When they were free of the tunnels, she dropped the door back into place once more and sealed it with locking bolts. They were standing in a warehouse, the space cavernous and dark. Crates were stacked against the walls and piled up in the center of the room. Windows set high up near the eaves let in what little light the room allowed.

With Leofur still leading the way, they rushed across the space, skirting the stacks of boxes and crates, to where a small door opened near the rear of the building and led back out onto the streets. They emerged panting for breath, their strength sapped, but their fear of what tracked them providing fresh resolve.

Leofur wheeled on the other two, the weapon held ready, the barrel still smoking. “We have to go to the airfield, Grehling. I don’t care what’s waiting there. That thing found us once; it will find us again.” She thrust the flash rip at him. “If this won’t stop it, I don’t know what will. We have to get out of the city!”

Grehling nodded. “All right. We’ll find a way. Chrysallin! You have to stay on your feet. You can’t fall! Can you do it?”

There was nothing she could say. She didn’t think she could make it to the next corner, let alone to the airfield. Her mind wandered momentarily, and she wondered where she was and where Paxon was and why she was hurting so badly. She wondered if the terrifying Elven woman was anywhere close. Or Mischa.

Mischa!

Suddenly she was looking right at her, standing not ten feet away.

Chrysallin screamed.





[page]TWENTY-ONE




PAXON AND STARKS HAD JUST FINISHED THE CLIMB TO THE second floor of Dark House and were rounding the corner to begin their ascent to the third when Arcannen appeared above them coming down. They saw one another at the same time and all three immediately stopped where they were.

“I want my sister, Arcannen!” Paxon shouted up to him.

The sorcerer seemed nonplussed. Then he smiled. “We all want the same thing, boy,” he called down. “All three of us. I don’t have her. I don’t know where she is. Like you, I’m looking for her.”

“You’re not trying to tell us you didn’t take her, are you?” Starks demanded.

Arcannen shook his head. “I took her. I brought her here. I intended to bargain her back to the boy in exchange for his sword and his services. I admit that. But she escaped me. I don’t know how she did it, but she did.”

“You want us to believe she’s not here?” Paxon snapped angrily.

“I don’t much care what you believe. I have no purpose in lying. You’ll search Dark House in any event, but you won’t find her. Not if you look until next year’s turn to summer. She’s gone, and that’s the truth, like it or not.”