Then Bremen appeared, come out of the dark like an avenging wraith, hands thrust forward, bathed in Druid fire. The fire lanced from his fingertips in a frantic burst and slammed into the monster as it reached for the king, enveloping it, consuming it, turning it into a writhing torch. The beast reared back, shrieked in fury, turned, and raced away into the night, flames trailing after Bremen did not wait to see what became of it. He reached down for the king. Elves of the Home Guard reappearing to assist him, and hauled Jerle Shannara to his feet.
“The sword...” the king began brokenly, shaking his head in despair.
But Bremen stopped him with a hard look, saying, “Later, when there is time and privacy, Elven King. You are alive, you fought well, and the attack succeeded. That is enough for one night’s work. Now come, hurry away, before other creatures find us.”
They fled once more into the night, the king, the Druid, and a handful of Home Guard. Smoke and ash chased after them, and farther off, lighting the whole of the horizon like beacons, the fires from the supply wagons and the siege machines burned on. Preia Starle returned out of the dark, breathless, harried, eyes revealing both anger and fear. She shouldered her way under Jerle Shannara’s left arm and bolstered him as he walked. The king did not resist. His eyes met her own and looked away. His mouth was set.
The fear that smoldered in the dark comers of his consciousness had burst forth in flames this night—fear that somehow the sword with which he had been entrusted was not right for him and would not respond when needed. It had emerged to challenge him, and he had failed to meet that challenge. If not for Bremen, he would be dead. A thing of lesser magic would have finished him, a thing of far less power than the Warlock Lord. Doubt riddled his resolve.
All he had believed possible just hours earlier was lost. The magic of the sword was wrong for him. The magic would not answer to his call. It needed someone else, someone more attuned to its use.
He was not that man. He was not.
He could hear the words echo in the pounding of his heart, cold and certain. He tried to close his mind and his ears to the sound, but found he could not. In hopeless despair, he ran on.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
With Bremen gone west to bear the Druid sword to the Elves, Kinson Ravenlock and Mareth turned east along the Silver River in search of the Dwarves. They traveled that first day through the hill country that buttressed the river’s north bank, winding their way steadily closer to the forests of the Anar. Mist clung to the hills with dogged persistence, then began to burn away as the sun rose higher in the midday sky. By early afternoon, the travelers had reached the Anar and started in.
Here the land flattened and smoothed. Sunlight pierced the leafy canopy and dappled the earthen carpet. They had enough food and water for that day only, and they divided it carefully when they paused for their lunch, reserving enough for dinner in the event that no better choice presented itself.
The Anar was bright with the green of the trees and the blue of the river, with shafts of sunlight from the mostly cloudless sky, and with birdsong and the cluttering of small creatures darting through the undergrowth. But the trail was trampled and strewn with the leavings of the Northland army, and no human life revealed itself anywhere. Now and again the faint scent of charred wood and old ashes wafted on the wind, and moments of silence would descend—a quiet so intense it caused the man and the woman to look about guardedly. They passed small cottages and outbuildings, some still standing, some burned out, but all vacant.
No Dwarves appeared. No one passed them on the trail.
“We shouldn’t be surprised,” Mareth observed at one point when Kinson had remarked on the subject. “The Warlock Lord has only just withdrawn from the Eastland. The Dwarves must still be in hiding.”
It seemed a logical conclusion, but it bothered Kinson nevertheless to pass through country so improbably deserted. The absence of even the most transient peddler was disturbing to him.
It suggested that there was no reason for anyone to be here anymore, as if life no longer had a purpose in these forests. It gave him pause to think that an entire people could vanish as if they had never been. He had no frame of reference for an eradication of this magnitude. What if the Dwarves had been annihilated? What if they had simply ceased to exist? The Four Lands would never recover from such a loss. They would never be the same.
As they walked, content to stay silent, mulling over their separate thoughts, the Borderman and the Druid apprentice did not speak to each other much. Mareth walked with her head up and her eyes forward, and her gaze seemed directed to something beyond what either of them could see. Kinson found himself wondering if she was pondering the possibility of her heritage in light of what she had learned from Bremen. That she was not his daughter, after thinking for so long that she must be, would be shock enough for anyone. That she was perhaps the daughter of one of the dark things that served the Warlock Lord was worse.
Kinson did not know how he would react to such a revelation. He did not think he would accept it easily. It did not matter, he thought, that Bremen insisted it could have no bearing on the sort of person Mareth was. There was more than logic at issue here.
Mareth was well-reasoned and intelligent, but the vicissitudes of her childhood and the complexities of her adult life had rendered her vulnerable to an undermining of the few beliefs she had managed to hold on to.
From time to time he considered speaking to her of this. He considered telling her she was the person she had always believed herself to be, he could see the goodness in her, he had witnessed the force of it firsthand, and she could never be betrayed by so tenuous a heritage as her blood. But he could not think of a way to frame the words so as not to make them appear condescending, and he was afraid to risk that happening. She seemed content simply to have him there, and in spite of his rude remarks when Bremen had suggested she come with him, he was secretly happy that she had. He had grown comfortable with her, with the history they shared, with their talks, with the way in which each knew what the other was thinking, and in the closeness he felt toward her in dozens of small ways he could not easily define. The latter came from such small things as the sound of her voice, the way she looked at him, and the sense of companionship that transcended simply the sharing of the journey. It was enough, he decided in the end, that he was there if she should decide she needed to talk. She knew that her father’s identity and origins made no difference to him. She knew that none of it mattered.
They reached Culhaven at sunset, the light fading, the air cooling, the smell of death harsh and pungent amid the shadows.
The home city of the Dwarves had been burned to the ground, and the land ravaged. Nothing remained but scorched earth, rubble, a few burned timbers, and scattered bones. Many of the dead had been left to lie where they had fallen. They were indistinguishable from one another by now, but the smallness of the bones revealed that some had been children. The Borderman and the apprentice Druid came out of the trees into the clearing where the city had stood, paused in sad appraisal, and then began to walk slowly through the carnage. The attack was weeks old, the fires long burned away, the land already regenerating from beneath the ruins, small green shoots poking up out of the ash. But Culhaven was empty of human life, and across the whole of its blackened sprawl the silence hung in curtains of indifference.
At the center of the city they found a vast pit into which hundreds of Dwarves had been thrown and their bodies burned.
“Why didn’t they run?” Mareth asked softly. “Why did they stay? They must have known. They must have been warned.”