The Heritage of Shannara (172 page)

The Federation.

The Shadowen.

They were both out there, stalkers that never seemed to sleep and that refused to quit. For almost a week now Damson and he had been running from them, ever since they had fled the Mole's underground hideout and made their way back through the sewers of the city to the streets. A week. He could barely sort through the debris of its passing, his memory in fragments, a jumble of buildings and rooms, of closets and crawlways, and of one concealment after another. They had not been able to rest anywhere for more than a few hours, always discovered somehow just when they had thought themselves safe, forced to run again, to flee the dark things that sought to claim them.

How was it, Par wondered for what must have been the thousandth time, that they were always found so quickly?

At first he had attributed it to luck. But luck would only take you so far, and the regularity of their discovery had soon ruled out any possibility that it was luck alone. Then he had thought that it might be his magic, traced somehow by Rimmer Dall—for it was the Seekers that came most often, sometimes in Federation guise, but more often revealed as the monsters they were, dark shadows cloaked and hooded. But he hadn't used his magic since they had escaped the sewers, and if he hadn't used it, how could it be traced?

“They have infiltrated the Movement,” Damson had declared, tight-lipped and wan before leaving him only hours earlier to search anew for a hiding place about which their pursuers did not know. “Or they have caught one of us and extracted all of our secrets. There is no other explanation.”

But even she had been forced to admit that no one other than Padishar Creel knew all the hiding places she used. No one else could have betrayed them.

Which led, in turn, to the disquieting possibility that despite their hopes to the contrary, the fall of the Jut had yielded the Federation the catch it had been so anxious to make.

Par let his head fall back to rest against the rough, heated stone, his eyes closing momentarily in despair. Coll dead. Padishar and Morgan missing. Wren and Walker Boh. Steff and Teel. The company. Even the Mole— there had been no word of him since they had fled his subterranean chambers. There was no sign of him, nothing to reveal what had happened. It was maddening. Everyone he had started out with weeks ago—his brother, his cousin, his uncle, and his friends—had disappeared. It sometimes seemed as if everyone he came in contact with was doomed to fall off the face of the earth, to be swallowed by some netherworld blackness and never resurface again.

Even Damson …

No.
His eyes snapped open again, anger reflected in the glimmer from the lamps.
Not Damson. He would not lose her. It would not happen again.

But how much longer could they keep running like this? How long before their enemies finally ran them to earth?

There was sudden movement at the corner of the wall ahead where it turned the building to follow the street west toward the bluff, and Damson appeared. She scurried through the shadows in a crouch and came up next to him, breathless and flushed.

“Two other safe holes are discovered,” she said. “I could smell the stench of the things that watch for us even before I saw them.” Her long red hair was tangled and damp against her face and neck, tied back by a cloth band about her forehead. Her smile, when it came, was unexpected. “But I found one they missed.”

Her hand reached out to brush his cheek. “You look so tired, Par. Tonight you will sleep well. This place—I remembered it, actually. A cellar
beneath an old gristmill that was once something else, I forget what. It hasn't been used in more than a year—not by anyone. Once, Padishar and I …” She stopped, the memory retrieved at the verge of its telling and drawn back again—too painful, her eyes said, to relate. “They will not know of this one. Come with me, Valeman. We'll try again.”

They hurried off into the night, twin shadows that appeared and faded again as quick as the blink of an eye. Par felt the weight of the Sword of Shannara against his back, flat and hard, its presence a reminder of the travesty his quest had become and of the confusions that plagued him. Was this, in fact, the ancient talisman he had been sent to find, or some trick of Rimmer Dall's meant to bring him to his destruction? If it was the Sword, why had he not been able to make it work when face to face with the First Seeker? If it was a fake, what had become of the real Sword?

But the questions, as always, yielded no answers, only further questions, and as always, he quickly abandoned them. Survival was all that counted for the moment, evasion of the black things and, more important, escape from the city. For their flight had been that of rats in a maze, trapped behind walls from which they could not break free. All efforts at getting clear of Tyrsis to regain the open country beyond had been thwarted. The gates were carefully watched, all the exits guarded, and Damson lacked sufficient skill, in the absence of the Mole, to navigate the tunnels beneath the city that provided the only other means of escape. So there was nothing left for them but to continue to run and hide, to scurry from one hole to the next, and to wait for an opportunity to arise or a means to present itself that would at last set them free.

They turned down a side street dappled with shards of light cast through the slats of shutters closed against windows high on a back wall, hearing laughter and the clink of drinking glasses from the alehouse within. Garbage littered the street, damp and stinking. Tyrsis wore her cheapest perfume in this quarter, and the smell of her body was rank and shameless where the poor and the homeless had been crowded away by the occupiers. Once a proud lady, she was used up and cast off now, a chattel to be treated as the Federation wished, a spoil of a war that had been over before it had begun.

Damson paused, searched carefully the empty swath of a lighted crossing, listened momentarily for sounds that didn't belong, then took him swiftly across. They passed down a second side street, this one as silent and musty as an unopened closet, then through an alcove and into an alley that connected to another street. Par was thinking of the Sword of Shannara again, wondering how he could discover if it was real and what test he could put it to that would determine the truth.

“Here,” Damson whispered, turning him abruptly through the broken opening of an ancient board wall.

They stood in a barnlike room thick with gloom, the rafters overhead barely visible in the faint light of other buildings where it seeped through cracks in the split, dry boards of the walls. Machines hunkered down like
animals crouched to spring, and rows of bins yawned empty and black. Damson steered him across the room, their boots crunching on stone and straw in the deep silence. Close to the back wall she stopped, reached down, seized an iron ring embedded in the floor, and pulled free a trapdoor. A glimmer of light showed stairs leading down into blackness.

“You first,” she ordered, motioning. “Just inside, then stop.”

He did as he was told, listened to the sound of her footsteps as she followed, then of the trapdoor as it closed behind them. They stood listening for a moment, then she pushed carefully past and fumbled quietly in the dark. A spark struck, a flame appeared, and the pitch of a torch caught and began to burn. Light filled the chamber in which they stood, weak and hazy, revealing a low cellar filled with old iron-banded casks and disintegrating crates. She gestured for him to follow, and they moved ahead through the debris. The cellar stretched on for a time, then ended at a passageway. Damson bent low against the black, thrust the torch ahead of her, and entered. The passage took them down a series of intersecting corridors to a room that had once been a sleeping chamber. A worn bed was positioned against one wall, a table and chairs against another. A second passage led out the other side and back into blackness. Where the torchlight ended, Par could just make out the beginning of a set of ancient stairs.

“We should be safe here for tonight, maybe longer,” she advised, turning now so that the light caught her features, the bright gleam of her green eyes, the softness of her smile. “It's not much, is it?”

“If it's safe, it's everything,” he replied, smiling back. “Where do the stairs lead?”

“Back to the street. But the door is locked from the outside. We would have to break it down if we needed to escape that way, if we were unable to use the cellar entry. Still, that's at least a measure of protection against being trapped. And no one will think to look where the lock is old and rusted and still in place.”

He nodded, took the torch from her hand, looked about momentarily, then carried it to a ruined lamp bracket and jammed it in place. “Home it is,” he declared, unslinging the Sword of Shannara and leaning it against the bed. His eyes lingered momentarily on the crest graven in its hilt, the upraised hand with its burning torch. Then he turned away. “Anything to eat in the cupboard?”

She laughed. “Hardly.” Impulsively she went to him, put her arms about his waist, held him momentarily, then kissed his cheek. “Par Ohms-ford.” She spoke his name softly.

He hugged her, stroked her hair, felt the warmth of her seep through him. “I know,” he whispered.

“It will be all right for you and me.”

He nodded without speaking, determined that it would be, that it must.

“I have some fresh cheese and bread in my pack,” she said, pulling away. “And some ale. Good enough for refugees like us.”

They ate in silence, listening to the muffled tick of cooling iron nails
embedded in the building's walls, tightening as the night grew deeper. Once or twice there were voices, so distant the words were indistinguishable, carried from the street through the padlocked door and down the ancient stairs. When they had finished, they carefully packed away what was left, extinguished the torch, wrapped themselves in their blankets, lay close together on the narrow bed, and quickly fell asleep.

Daybreak brought a glimmer of light creeping through cracks and crevices, cool and hazy, and the sounds of the city grew loud and distinct as people began to venture forth on a new day's business. Par woke refreshed for the first time in a week, wishing he had water in which to wash, but grateful simply to be shed momentarily of his weariness. Damson was bright-eyed and lovely to look upon, tousled and at the same time perfectly ordered, and Par felt as if the worst might at last be behind them.

“The first order of business is to find a way out of the city,” Damson declared between bites of her breakfast, seated across from him at the little table. Her forehead was lined with determination. “We can't go on like this.”

“I wish we could find out something about the Mole.”

She nodded, her eyes shifting away. “I've looked for him when I've been out.” She shook her head. “The Mole is resourceful. He has stayed alive a long time.”

Not with the Shadowen hunting for him, Par almost said, then thought better of it. Damson would be thinking the same thing anyway. “What do I do today?”

She looked back at him. “Same as always. You stay put. They still don't know about me. They only know about you.”

“You hope.”

She sighed. “I hope. Anyway, I have to find a way for us to get past the walls, out of Tyrsis to where we can discover what's happened to Padishar and the others.”

He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back. “I feel useless just sitting around here.”

“Sometimes waiting is what works best, Par.”

“And I don't like letting you go out alone.”

She smiled. “And I don't like leaving you here by yourself. But that's the way it has to be for now. We have to be smart about this.”

She pulled on her street cloak, her magician's garb, for she still appeared regularly in the marketplace to do tricks for the children, keeping up the appearance that everything was the same as always. A pale shaft of light penetrated the gloom of the passageways that had brought them, and with a wave back to him she disappeared into it and was gone.

He spent the remainder of the morning being restless, prowling the narrow confines of his shelter. Once, he climbed to the top of the stairs leading back to the street where he tested the lock that fastened the heavy wooden door and found it secure. He wandered back through the tunnels that branched from the gristmill cellar and discovered that each dead-ended
at a storage hold or bin, all long empty and abandoned. When noon came, he took his lunch from the remains of yesterday's foodstuffs, still cached in Damson's backpack, then stretched out on the bed to nap and fell into a deep sleep.

When he finally woke, the light had gone silver, and the day was fading rapidly into dusk. He lay blinking sleepily for a moment, then realized that Damson had not returned. She had been gone almost ten hours. He rose quickly, worried now, thinking that she should have been back long ago. It was possible that she had come in and gone out again, but not likely. She would have woken him. He would have woken himself. He frowned darkly, uneasily, twisted his body from side to side to ease the kinks, and wondered what to do.

Hungry, in spite of his concern, he decided to eat something, and finished off the last of the cheese and bread. There was a little ale in the stoppered skin, but it tasted stale and warm.

Where was Damson?

Par Ohmsford had known the risks from the beginning, the dangers that Damson Rhee faced every time she left him and went out into the city. If the Mole was captured, they would make him talk. If the safe holes were compromised, she might be, too. If Padishar was taken, there were no secrets left. He knew the risks; he had told himself he had accepted them. But faced for the first time since escaping from the sewers that the worst had happened, he found he was not prepared after all. He found that he was terrified.

Damson. If anything had happened to her …

A scuffing sound caught his attention, and he left the thought unfinished. He started, then wheeled about, searching for the source of the noise. It was behind him, at the top of the stairs, at the door leading to the street.

Someone was playing with the lock.