The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

by Terry Brooks

  When the head lifted a moment later, he saw that the bird had the face of a woman. But not any kind of woman he had ever seen. This woman had sharp, bony features, its mouth jutting and pinched in the manner of a beak and its eyes hard and birdlike. Its body and wings were covered with dark feathers, and its feet ended in huge, hooked talons that seemed too big for the rest of it.

  Hunched so far over that it looked deformed, it sat on the log and watched him intently but made no move toward him. He held his ground a moment, then started to back away. But another shriek rose, and a second bird-woman swooped down right behind him, blocking his way. Then two more appeared, and two more after that, materializing out of the haze, wings flapping as they landed all about him, some on the ground, some on the limbs of trees. A dozen, at least, he saw, all watching him, gazes hard and fixed.

  Harpies.

  He swallowed hard. He knew what Harpies were; he had read stories of them in his father’s histories of the Four Lands. Vicious and unpredictable creatures, Harpies had been exiled to the Forbidding along with the other dark things in the time of Faerie. If memory served him correctly, Harpies were flesh eaters that were said to have preyed on men and animals alike.

  He glanced again at the talons of the one perched on the log in front of him and felt a fresh surge of panic. He needed to be somewhere else right away, but he didn’t know how he could manage that, encircled as he was. Some of them had started to edge closer, making small cooing sounds. They seemed pleased. They sounded eager.

  “Get away!” he shouted at them, waving his arms threateningly.

  Instantly, the runes on the darkwand flared, brightening like bits of fire, dancing up and down the wood. The Harpies shrieked and flapped their leathery wings, and those advancing paused. Pen shouted at them some more and tried to move through them, but they quickly adjusted to keep him in place. He swung the staff at them. The runes danced even more wildly. The Harpies flinched but held their ground.

  Pen felt an overwhelming sense of desperation. He had to find something more effective. He remembered the dragon then and how his use of the wishsong had sent the runes flying off into the distance, luring it away. Perhaps that would work with the Harpies, as well. He didn’t have much control over how the magic worked, but it was all he could think of.

  He began to sing boldly, as if he might force his way through his attackers by the sheer force of his voice. He sang snatches of phrases and bits and pieces of things that just came to him, hoping that something would work. It did. Rune images spun off the staff in a glowing swirl and soared skyward, forming bright, complex patterns against the dark ceiling of the clouds.

  The Harpies watched as the images lifted into the sky but they did not follow.

  Pen’s desperation increased. He didn’t know what more he could do. He kept singing, punctuating his increasingly frantic efforts with shouts and cries, looking for something that would drive the Harpies back. But, having seen that his magic was confined to pretty glowing images that danced and flew and did nothing more, the bird-women were advancing again. Their sharp eyes glittered in the dim light and their strange mouths worked slowly up and down, opening and closing hungrily.

  Pen gripped the darkwand tightly in both hands and prepared to use it as a club. It was all he had left.

  But just when it seemed that he was all out of chances, a dark shape appeared on the horizon, winging toward him, quickly growing larger and taking form. The dragon! It was tracking the rune images once more, following them to their source. How it had seen them from so far away, Pen couldn’t know. But it was flying right for where the greatest number circled and danced against the clouds overhead.

  Their bright, hard eyes fixed on Pen, the Harpies didn’t see the dragon at first. Then the dragon screamed—there was no other word for it—and they swung about swiftly, necks craned, a fresh urgency in their posture. A few took flight immediately, but the rest hesitated, unwilling to abandon their prey.

  Plummeting out of the sky with such swiftness that Pen, who had thought he might try to make a run for it, had no chance to do anything but stand and watch, the dragon dropped on them like a stone. It snatched up the Harpies the way a big cat might small birds, tearing them apart and casting them aside as fast as it could reach them. A few flew at the dragon with their wicked talons outstretched, but the beast simply crushed them in its huge jaws and flung them to the ground. The Harpies screamed and hissed and flapped their wings frantically, unable to escape.

  One by one, the dragon killed them until only two were left, crawling about the blood-soaked earth and whimpering in despair. The dragon played with them, nudging them this way and that. Pen watched for as long as it took him to realize that he might be next, then slowly backed away. Rune images still danced and soared overhead, and fresh images leapt from the darkwand to whirl about the dragon like fireflies. If the dragon saw them, it gave no indication. For the moment, its attention was fixed on its new toys.

  Pen reached the edge of the woods without the dragon taking notice and slipped into the trees. After he was well into them, he put the darkwand beneath his cloak, closed down his thoughts of his aunt, and waited for the runes to go dark.

  Soaked in his own sweat, he pushed on, barely able to make himself move. He had thought the dragon safely gone. But it couldn’t have been far away if it had seen the rune images. That should have made him happy, since it had saved his life, but it only made him further aware of how vulnerable he was. He might be saved for the moment, but he would remain in peril until he was out of the Forbidding and back in the Four Lands. Until then, his life span probably didn’t measure the length of his arm. He had to find his aunt, and he had to find her quickly or his luck would be used up.

  He kept walking, refusing to look back, heading in the general direction he knew he had to go. He kept the darkwand lowered and inactive, afraid to do anything that would bring the runes to life.

  He was half a mile away before he could no longer hear the crunching of bones.

  TWENTY-TWO

  No matter how often she scowled at him, he just wouldn’t stop talking about it.

  “Such power, Straken Queen! Such incredible power! No one can match you—no one who is or ever was! I sensed you were special, I did, Grianne of the trees! When I first saw you from my hiding place and knew you for who you were, I knew, too, what you were! It was in your eyes and the way you carried yourself. It was in your voice when you first spoke to me. You awoke in a prison, sent by your enemies to be destroyed, and still you showed no fear! That is evidence of real power!”

  She let him go on mostly because she didn’t know how to shut him up. Weka Dart was a bundle of pent-up energy, bouncing off the cavern walls and skittering across the uneven floor, darting this way and that, rushing ahead and then wheeling back, a wild thing in search of an outlet. She didn’t think he could help himself; that was just the way he was, a creature of ungovernable whims and uncontrollable urges. He had been like that on the journey to the Forbidding’s version of the Hadeshorn, so his hyperactivity was not a surprise.

  In any case, she was too tired to do much more than put one foot in front of the other and press on.

  “How much farther?” she asked at one point.

  “Not far, not far,” he said, dashing back to take her hand, which she yanked away irritably. “The tunnels open onto the Pashanon just ahead, and then we will be back outside in the fresh air and light!”

  It was all relative, she supposed, picturing the world that waited with its greasy air and its dingy skies. She would not know true fresh air and light again ever if she did not get back into her own world. She found herself thinking again of the boy who was coming to find her, the salvation she had been promised by the Warlock Lord. He seemed such an impossibility that she could not make herself accept that he was real. But if he wasn’t, she was trapped there forever. So she kept alive a faint hope that somehow he would appear, whether that appearance was reflected accurately in the word
s of the promise or in some less easily discernible way. She just knew it had better happen soon because she was beginning to fail.

  She took a moment to measure the truth of that statement and found it accurate. It was happening in subtle ways—ways she did not think she could reverse while trapped within the Forbidding. Her physical strength was eroded, the result of poor food and drink, a lack of sleep, and the debilitating struggles she had waged with Tael Riverine. But her emotional and psychological strengths had been drained, as well, and those in a more direct and damaging way. She had been forced to use the magic several times, and each time she had felt something change inside her. It was bad enough that she was forced to use it at all—worse still that she was forced to use it in such horrifying ways. Assimilating with the Furies had torn apart her psyche. Resisting the power of the conjure collar had all but broken her spirit.

  But her confrontation with the Graumth had reduced her to a new level of despair, one so fraught with bad feelings that she was literally afraid of calling up the magic again. It was the way the wishsong had responded. She should have been thankful she still had command of it after all she had been through. She should have welcomed its appearance. But the strength of its response had terrified her. It had been not only greater than she had expected, but also virtually uncontrollable. It hadn’t just surfaced on being summoned, ready to do her bidding. It had exploded out of her, so wild and destructive that she couldn’t hold it back. She had lived with the wishsong for more than thirty years, and she had known before coming into the Forbidding what to expect from it. But that was changed. The magic had taken on a new feel, becoming something she didn’t recognize. It was a strange creature living inside her, threatening her in ways that made her afraid for the first time in years.

  What she feared most was that it had evolved because of where she was and that the unforeseen evolution was changing her into something that belonged more to the Forbidding than to her world.

  Yet what could she do to stop it?

  Weka Dart had probably done as much for her as he could. Debilitated or not, she was the one with the magic. If they were backed into a corner, she was the one who could keep them alive. She would have to put aside her concerns about using the magic. The hunt for them would continue, and it would not end until she was free of the Forbidding or she was dead.

  They continued working cautiously through the tunnels below Kraal Reach, and it wasn’t long until there was a brightening of the darkness ahead of them. Within minutes, they had reached a fissure in the mountain rock, one that opened into the clouded mistiness of the Pashanon.

  They stood in silence for a moment, staring out onto a broad wetlands pocked by dozens of stagnant pools and vast stands of heavy grasses and thick scrub. The waters of the ponds nearest were covered in greenish slime and smelled of decay. Insects buzzed and chirped from every quarter, swarms of gnats and flies hovered above the surface of the ponds, and snakes slid soundlessly through the shadows.

  The wetlands spread away for miles in all directions.

  Grianne shook her head in dismay. “How do we get through this?”

  Weka Dart looked over at her, eyes bright and teeth showing. “Follow me, Grianne of the wondrous magic, and I will show you.”

  Without pausing, he started out through the swamp. She followed with no small amount of misgiving, not certain she should trust his judgment, yet unwilling to be left behind. But the Ulk Bog seemed to know what he was doing. Even though the hazy light was pale and deceptive, he chose their path without hesitating. Now and then he would change course in midstride, turning another way. More than once he reversed himself entirely, muttering about obstacles that hadn’t been there before, that didn’t belong, that had appeared merely to vex him. When a snake crossed his path he simply reached down, snatched it up, and tossed it aside. He didn’t seem afraid of them. He didn’t seem to mind the clouds of insects either. He lapped at them with his tongue, hissed at them to clear his nostrils.

  Disgusted by her surroundings, Grianne settled for putting her arm and the sleeve of her tunic across her mouth and nose and lowering her head as far as she could without losing sight of the Ulk Bog. The odor of death permeated the air; she could feel the decay worming its way into her breathing passages. She used a little of the wishsong’s magic to keep it all at bay—not enough to give them away to anyone following, but enough to give her a measure of distance from the foulness. She cast quick glances all about as they went, searching for movement that might signal a pursuit. But nothing of that sort showed itself, and she began to wonder if perhaps chase had not yet been given. It seemed unlikely that the dead Goblins hadn’t been discovered in a changing of the guard, but it was possible. It was possible, as well, that even if they had been discovered, the search for her was still being conducted inside the walls of Kraal Reach and hadn’t yet extended to the Pashanon.

  Of course, when it did, she would be tracked down pretty fast if she was still out in the open.

  “Is there somewhere we can go to hide?” she asked Weka Dart at one point, hurrying to catch up with him as he slipped eel-like through the swamp.

  He gave her an irritated glance, feral features screwed up with concentration, breathing quick and heavy. “A place to hide? Why would we hide, Straken Queen? If we are going to your world, we should go there at once.”

  She took a quick breath. She had forgotten that she had not told him of the boy, of the need for the boy to find her before she could go anywhere. “We might not be able to do that,” she said.

  He wheeled on her, his face contorted with fury. “What do you mean, We might not be able to do that? What are you saying, Grianne of the broken promises?”

  She would not tolerate his insolence or his rebelliousness, not then and not with what was at stake. She snatched his tunic front and yanked him close.

  “Don’t question me, little Ulk Bog!” she hissed. “I didn’t make you a promise about how this would happen. Or even that it would happen. I told you there was a chance I couldn’t do anything to help either of us!”

  He hissed back at her, then dropped his head and sulked. “I didn’t mean anything by it. You just upset me. You frightened me. I thought you had a plan.”

  She released him. “I do, but it relies on help from my own world. Someone is coming to find me, someone who can get through the Forbidding without help from Tael Riverine. We have to wait until he appears. I don’t know when that will be. But if it doesn’t happen before we reach the Dragon Line, then we might have to hide for a while. Do you understand?”

  He nodded sullenly. “I understand.”

  “Then think about where we might go to do that and stop being so suspicious!”

  She kicked at him, and he started off again, skittering away through the grasses. There was no point in telling him everything. Certainly not that she was waiting for a mysterious boy, for something of which she could barely conceive, for a miracle. She hated having told him she would try to get him out of the Forbidding. She would not have done so if there had been any other way of securing his help. She had no idea if there was a way to free him. Or even if such freedom was a good idea. In fact, it probably wasn’t. But she would have said or done anything to escape Tael Riverine and thwart his plan to make her the bearer of his spawn. She shuddered at the thought of that, determined that she would die before she would let herself be taken by him again.

  They slogged on through the fading daylight, nightfall tracking them west until, sweeping slowly across the flats, it began to overtake them. They crossed out of the swamp and found dry ground beyond, a wintry plain in which the grasses were as dry as old bones, crackling beneath their feet as they stepped through them. Ahead the land stretched away, bleak and empty, crisscrossed by deep ravines and dotted by hummocks.

  After a time, Weka Dart dropped back to walk beside her.

  “I didn’t mean what I said before.” He looked at her with his sharp, restless eyes, and then glanced away quickly. “
I know you keep your promises. I know you haven’t lied to me. If anyone has lied …” He shook his head. “I can’t help myself, you know. I have lied about everything all my life because that is how Ulk Bogs are. That is how we live. That is how we stay alive. We lie to keep others from gaining an advantage over us.”

  “I don’t think lying does as much for you as you think,” she replied. “Do you know what they say about lies? They say that lies have a way of coming back to haunt you.”

  He shrugged. “I just want you to know that I will change when you take me to your country. I won’t lie anymore. Or, at least, I will try hard not to lie. I will be a good companion for you, Grianne of the kind eyes. I will help you do your work, whatever your work is. You will see that I am always there to do your bidding. Here, I would do the bidding of a Straken to stay alive. I would do it because I would have no choice. But it will not be like that with you. I will do your bidding because I want to. Because I respect you.”

  She sighed wearily. “You don’t know me well enough to promise that, Weka Dart. I am not what you think. I have dark secrets in my life. I have a history that is every bit as bad as that of Tael Riverine. I might not be like the demon now, but I was once, not so long ago.” She paused. “I might still be like him in some ways.”

  But the Ulk Bog shook his head stubbornly. “No, you are not like him. You could never be like him.”

  But I was like him, she thought, the weight of the admission infusing her with a sadness she could barely stand. I could be like him again.

  Ahead, the flats turned rocky and were eroded by gullies and pocked by wormholes, the grasses and scrub disappearing entirely, the whole of the landscape changing abruptly to something Grianne hadn’t seen before. Weka Dart, who was walking next to her but paying little attention to the land into which they were walking, suddenly caught sight of where they were going and drew up short, putting out his arm urgently.