The Heritage of Shannara (88 page)

“Have you the magic for that, Walker?” Pe Ell teased when she finished, but Walker only smiled and wondered the same thing.

Rain caught up with them as the second week ended and followed them relentlessly into the third, dampening their trail, their packs and clothing, and their spirits. Clouds massed overhead along the line of the peaks and refused to budge, dark and persistent. Thunder boomed and lightning flashed against the wall of the mountains as if giants were playing shadow games with their hands. There were not many travelers this far north; most of those they encountered were Trolls. Few spoke and fewer still had anything useful to tell. There were several passes that led through the mountains a day or two ahead, all of them beginning at a town high in the foothills called Rampling Steep. Yes, some of the passes led all the way east to the Tiderace. No, they had never heard of Eldwist.

“Makes you wonder if it really exists,” Pe Ell muttered, persisting in his role as agitator, a smile creasing his narrow face, cold and empty and devoid of humor. “Makes you think.”

That night, two days short of the completion of their third week of travel, he broached the subject in a manner that left no one in doubt as to his feelings. The rains were still falling, a gray haze that chilled and numbed the senses, and tempers had grown short.

“This town, Rampling Steep,” he began, an edge to his voice that
brought them all around in the stillness of the twilight, “that's where we lose any idea of where we're going, isn't it?” He asked the question of Quickening, who made no response. “We're lost after that, and I don't like being lost. Maybe it's time we talked a bit more about this whole business.”

“What would you know, Pe Ell?” the girl asked quietly, unperturbed.

“You haven't told us enough about what lies ahead,” he said. “I think you should. Now.”

She shook her head. “You ask for answers I do not have to give. I have to discover them as well.”

“I don't believe that,” he said, shaking his head for emphasis, his voice low and hard. Morgan Leah was looking at him with undisguised irritation and Walker Boh was on his feet. “I know something about people, even ones who have the magic like yourself and I know when they're telling me everything they know and when they're not. You're not. You better do so.”

“Or you might turn around and go back?” Morgan challenged sharply.

Pe Ell looked at him expressionlessly.

“Why don't you do that, Pe Ell? Why don't you?”

Pe Ell rose, his eyes flat and seemingly disinterested. Morgan stood up with him. But Quickening stepped forward, coming swiftly between them, moving to separate them without seeming to mean to do so, but as if she sought only to face Pe Ell. She stood before him, small and vulnerable, silver hair swept back as she tilted her face to his. He frowned and for a moment looked as if he felt threatened and might lash out. Whip-thin and sinewy, he curled back like a snake. But she did not move, either toward him or away, and the tension slowly went out of him.

“You must trust me,” she told him softly, speaking to him as if he were the only other person alive in all the world, holding him spellbound by the force of her voice, the intensity of her black eyes, and the closeness of her body. “What there is to know of Uhl Belk and Eldwist, I have told you. What there is to know of the Black Elfstone, I have told you. As much, at least, as I am given to know. Yes, there are things I keep from you just as you keep things from me. That is the way of all living creatures, Pe Ell. You cannot begrudge me my secrets when you have your own. I keep nothing back that will harm you. That is the best I can do.”

The lean man stared down at her without speaking, everything closed away behind his eyes where his thoughts were at work.

“When we reach Rampling Steep, we will seek help in finding our way,” she continued, her voice still barely above a whisper, yet bell-clear and certain. “Eldwist will be known and someone will point the way.”

And to the surprise of both Walker and Morgan Leah, Pe Ell simply nodded and stepped away. He did not speak again that night to any of them. He seemed to have forgotten they existed.

The following day they reached a broad roadway leading west into the foothills and turned onto it. The roadway wound ahead snakelike into the light and then into shadow when the sun dropped behind the peaks of
the Charnals. Night descended and they camped beneath the stars, the first clear sky in many days. They talked quietly as the evening meal was consumed, a sense of balance restored with the passing of the rains. No mention was made of the previous night's events. Pe Ell seemed satisfied with what Quickening had told him, although she had told him almost nothing. It was the way in which she had spoken to him, Walker thought on reflection. It was the way she employed her magic to turn aside his suspicion and anger.

They set out again early the following morning, traveling northeast once more, the sunrise bright and warming. By late afternoon they had climbed high into the foothills, close against the base of the mountains. By sunset they had arrived at the town of Rampling Steep.

The light was nearly gone by then, a dim glow from behind the mountains west that colored the skyline in shades of gold and silver. Rampling Steep was hunkered down in a deep pool of shadows, cupped in a shallow basin at the foot of the peaks where the forest trees began to thin and scatter into isolated clumps between the ridges of mountain rock. The buildings of the town were a sorry bunch, ramshackle structures built of stone foundations and wooden walls and roofs with windows and doors all shuttered and barred and closed away like the eyes of frightened children. There was a single street that wound between them as if looking for a way out. The buildings of the town crouched down on either side save for a handful of shacks and cottages that were settled back on the high ground like careless sentries. Everything was desperately in need of repair. Boards from walls were broken and hung loose, roofing shingles had slipped away, and porch fronts sagged and buckled. Slivers of light crept through cracks and crevices. There were teams of horses hitched to wagons pulled up close against the buildings, each looking a little more ruined than the one before, and shadowed figures on two legs moved between them like wraiths.

As the company drew nearer Walker saw that the figures were mostly Trolls, great, hulking figures in the twilight, their barklike faces impossible to read. A few glanced at the four as they passed down the roadway, but none bothered to speak or to give a second look. The sound of voices reached out to them now, disembodied grunts and mutterings and laughter that the dilapidated walls could not keep in. But despite the talk and the laughter and the movement of men, Rampling Steep had an empty feel to it, as if it had long ago been abandoned by the living.

Quickening took them up the roadway without pausing, glancing neither left nor right, as sure of herself now as she had been from the start. Morgan followed no more than a step behind, staying close, keeping watch, being protective although there was probably no need for him to do so. Pe Ell had drifted out to the right, distancing himself. Walker trailed.

There was a series of ale houses at the center of Rampling Steep, and it appeared that everyone had gathered there. Music came from some, and men lurched and swaggered through the doors, passing in and out of the light in faceless anonymity. A few women passed as well, worn and hard
looking. Rampling Steep appeared to be a place of ending rather than beginning.

Quickening took them into the first of the ale houses and asked the keeper if he knew of someone who could guide them through the mountains to Eldwist. She asked the question as if there were nothing unusual about it. She was oblivious to the stir her presence caused, to the stares that were directed at her from every quarter, and to the dark hunger that lay behind a good many of the eyes that fixed upon her, or at least she seemed to be. Perhaps, Walker thought, as he watched her, it was all simply of no consequence to her. He saw that no one tried to approach and no one threatened. Morgan stood protectively at her back, facing that unfriendly, rapacious gathering—as if one man could make a difference if they should decide to do something—but it was not the Highlander that deterred them or Walker or even the forbidding Pe Ell. It was the girl, a creature so stunning that like a thing out of some wild imagining it could not be disturbed for fear it would prove false. The men gathered in the ale house watched, that crowd of wild-eyed men, not quite believing but not willing to prove themselves wrong.

There was nothing to be learned at the first ale house, so they moved on to the next. No one followed. The scenario of the first ale house was repeated at the second, this one smaller and closer inside, the smoke of pipes and the smell of bodies thicker and more pungent. There were Trolls, Gnomes, Dwarves, and Men in Rampling Steep, all drinking and talking together as if it were the natural order of things, as if what was happening in the rest of the Four Lands was of no importance here. Walker studied their faces dispassionately, their eyes when their faces told him nothing, and found them secretive and scared, the faces and eyes of men who lived with hardship and disappointment yet ignored both because to do otherwise would mean they could not survive. Some seemed dangerous, a few even desperate. But there was an order to life in Rampling Steep as there was in most places, and not much happened to disturb that order. Strangers came and went, even ones as striking as Quickening, and life went on nevertheless. Quickening was something like a falling star—it happened a few times and you were lucky if you saw it but you didn't do anything to change your life because of it.

They moved on to a third ale house and then a fourth. At each ale house, the answers to Quickening's questions were the same. No one knew anything of Eldwist and Uhl Belk and no one wanted to. There were maybe eight drinking houses in all along the roadway, most offering beds upstairs and supplies from storerooms out back, a few doubling as trading stations or exchanges. Because Rampling Steep was the only town for days in either direction that fronted the lower side of the Charnals and because it was situated where the trails leading down out of the mountains converged, a lot of traffic passed through, trappers and traders mostly, but others as well. Every ale house was filled and most gathered were temporary or sometime residents on their way to or from somewhere else. There was talk
of all sorts, of business and politics, of roads traveled and wonders seen, of the people and places that made up the Four Lands. Walker listened without appearing to and thought that Pe Ell was doing the same.

At the fifth ale house they visited—Walker never even noticed the name—they finally got the response they were looking for. The keeper was a big, ruddy-complexioned fellow with a scarred face and a ready smile. He sized up Quickening in a way that made even Walker uncomfortable. Then he suggested that the girl should take a room with him for a few days, just to see if maybe she might like the town enough to stay. That brought Morgan Leah about with fire in his eyes, but Quickening screened him away with a slight shifting of her body, met the keeper's bold stare, and replied that she wasn't interested. The keeper did not press the suggestion. Instead, to everyone's amazement in the face of the rejection he had just been handed, he told her that the man she was seeking was down the street at the Skinned Cat. His name, he said, was Horner Dees.

They went back out into the night, leaving the keeper looking as if he wasn't at all sure what he had just done. The look was telling. Quickening had that gift; it was the essence of her magic. She could turn you around before you realized it. She could make you reveal yourself in ways you had never intended. She could make you want to please her. It was the kind of thing a beautiful woman could make a man do, but with Quickening it was something far more than her beauty that disarmed you. It was the creature within, the elemental that seemed human but was far more, an embodiment of magic that Walker thought reflected the father who had made her. He knew the stories of the King of the Silver River. When you met him, you told him what he wished to know and you did not dissemble. His presence alone was enough to make you
want
to tell him. Walker had seen how Morgan and Pe Ell and the men in the ale houses responded to her. And he as well. She was most certainly her father's child.

They found the Skinned Cat at the far end of the town, tucked back within the shadow of several massive, ancient shagbarks. It was a large, rambling structure that creaked and groaned simply from the movement of the men and women inside and seemed to hang together mostly out of stubbornness. It was as crowded as the others, but there was more space to fill and it had been divided along its walls into nooks and partitions to make it feel less barnlike. Lights were scattered about like distant friends reaching out through the gloom, and the patrons were gathered in knots at the serving bar and about long tables and benches. Heads turned at their entrance as they had turned at the other ale houses, and eyes watched. Quickening moved to find the keeper, who listened and pointed to the back of the room. There was a man sitting at a table there, alone in a shadowed nook, hunched over and faceless, pushed away from the light and the crowd.

The four walked over to stand before him.

“Horner Dees,” Quickening said in that silken voice.

Massive hands brought an ale mug slowly away from a bearded mouth
and back to the tabletop, and a large, shaggy head lifted. The man was huge, a great old bear of a fellow with the better part of his years behind him. There was hair all over him, on his forearms and the backs of his hands, at his throat and on his chest, and on his head and face, grown over him so completely that except for his eyes and nose his features were obscured almost entirely. It was impossible to guess how old he was, but the hair was silver gray, the skin beneath it wrinkled and browned and mottled, and the fingers gnarled like old roots.

“I might be,” he rumbled truculently from out of some giant's cave. His eyes were riveted on the girl.