The Elves of Cintra

by Terry Brooks

  Leaving them sounded callous and unfeeling. But this was a world where thinking too much about others could get you killed.

  He put the matter aside that night after burying the Weatherman and settling in, thinking that he wasn’t ready to make the decision to leave, no matter the arguments in favor, no matter the risks of staying. The timing just didn’t feel right, and he would let things be for now.

  But by the following morning, Fixit and River had both come down with a severe fever and were showing symptoms of the same form of plague that had claimed the Weatherman.

  “I don’t have enough medicine left to treat them for more than a few days,” Owl advised him in confidence, her plain, no-nonsense features lined with worry. “We used most of what we had on River’s grandfather.”

  He had just finished placing both kids on stretchers in the back of the Lightning, taking it upon himself to secure them, using his own store of blankets to help keep them warm. They were flushed and coughing, their throats scratchy and dry. The first telltale signs of purple splotches were starting to show on their necks. River was much worse than Fixit, her breathing harsh and irregular. But then she had been exposed to her grandfather for longer than the boy. Logan was already dreading the ride ahead, shut away in a plague-infested space that even a steady influx of fresh air might not help. He was not afraid of demons and once-men, but ever since the sickness that had almost killed him at sixteen, he was deathly afraid of plague.

  He looked off into the distance, past the knot of kids watching, past the bleak landscape with its wintry, dry vistas and empty spaces, past everything he could see to what he could only envision. It would be so easy to leave them. It would be the smart thing to do.

  They found an old hay wagon sitting out in a field not long after they set out, and they abandoned the shopping cart and loaded the wagon with all their supplies and themselves, as well. Only Panther preferred to walk, striding out ahead, keeping a steady pace. Owl rode inside the Lightning with Logan so that she could watch over Fixit and River, insisting that she would share the risk, that she had survived contact with plague all her life. Logan was impressed. Not many in her place would have done so.

  They made better time that day and the next, covering a much greater distance, traveling all the way south to the next city down. Logan didn’t know its name; all the signage had long since been torn down. Owl produced one of her tattered maps and told him it was called Tacoma. By nightfall, they had reached the outskirts and found a field sheltered by a small copse of withered spruce in which to make camp. There were some buildings and a few pieces of rusted machinery, all of which helped hide and protect them against the things that prowled the night. River and Fixit had not improved; if anything, they were worse. Logan had already decided to go looking for the medicine Owl needed to treat them.

  “Write it out for me,” he asked her. “Describe what I’m looking for, especially the container. I’ll take the Lightning and have a look in the city. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find some medical supplies.”

  He didn’t think he would, but it didn’t serve any purpose to tell her that. Most of what might help had long since been picked over and taken by others. Drugs of any sort were rare, but especially those that protected or cured the various forms of plague.

  “It’s called Cyclomopensia,” she told him, handing him a scrap of paper with the name carefully printed out. “It will come in large white pills with CYL-ONE imprinted on each.” She handed him a plastic container. “This is what the ones I have left came in.”

  He studied the container and the paper a moment, and then shoved them into one of his pockets. He called the Ghosts together. “Listen carefully. I have to leave you for tonight and maybe all of tomorrow, too, if I’m going to find the medicine that River and Fixit need. I’ll need the Lightning to get the job done. You have to be careful while I’m gone. No one leaves this place. No one does anything to draw attention. Someone stands guard all the time. If you have to move, carry River and Fixit on the stretchers and walk toward the city. Leave everything else. Look for the Lightning or me. We won’t be far from each other.”

  He gave the Parkhan Sprays to Sparrow and Panther, and then handed a short-barreled Tyson Flechette, like the one his father had carried the day he had died, to Bear.

  “Don’t use any of these unless you have to. If you fire them, you will draw a lot of attention. The best thing you can do for yourselves is to be as inconspicuous as you can. Understand?”

  They all nodded solemnly. “We know what to do,” said Panther. “We ain’t stupid.”

  That remained to be seen, Logan thought, remembering that it was Panther who had caused the incident with the machines at Oronyx Experimental. But there was no help for it. He couldn’t leave them out here unarmed. He had to trust that they would use good judgment and common sense where the weapons were concerned.

  “Owl,” he said, drawing her attention. “I’ll put River and Fixit inside that shed over there.” He pointed to the building that was in the best shape of the bunch. “No one goes inside except you, and you only go in to give them medicine or liquids or whatever you think might help. But everyone else stays out. If this thing spreads, we could all come down with it.”

  She nodded wordlessly. He hesitated, trying to think what else he should tell them, worried suddenly that this was a mistake and he was leaving them here to die. They were only children, he told himself for what must have been the hundredth time since they had set out from Seattle. They did not have his survival skills. They did not have his experience or training. But there was no point in worrying over things that couldn’t be helped.

  He drove the hay wagon over to the buildings and behind the other machinery, then unhitched it. Mostly it looked like everything else, and it would go unnoticed if no one stopped to look or got too close.

  “Remember what I said,” he told them in parting. “Be careful. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  But even as he was driving away, he was thinking again about leaving them for good.

  EIGHTEEN

  L EAVING THE GHOSTS and their field camp behind, Logan Tom drove down the highway through the deepening twilight toward the darkened buildings of Tacoma. The city hunkered down on a mostly flat plain bordered by water on one side and hills on the other. Its look was a familiar one, residences on the perimeter, downtown in the center, the whole of it a shadowy presence, unlit and seemingly uninhabited.

  But there would be people, of course, perhaps living in a compound, perhaps living on the streets. There would be Freaks. There would be the usual strays and homeless. There would be things no one could imagine without first seeing them, creatures formed of the poisons and the plagues, the monsters of this brave new world.

  And always, there would be feeders, waiting.

  He scanned the shadows as he drove, weaving through the debris, angling for the open spots on the cracked, weed-grown pavement. He searched for movement, for any indication of life, and found little. Feral dogs and street kids. The flicker of solar-powered lamps from the dark recesses of buildings. The faint sounds of life that belied the otherwise deep silence. Now and then, he passed the remains of the dead, some of the bodies so old they had been reduced to little more than bones and bits of clothing. He tried to imagine how it had been before the wars had begun and the way back had been lost, and he could not.

  His mind drifted to other times and places. It was like this in so many other cities, the aftermath of destruction, the leavings of madness and despair. So much had been rendered useless. He looked around at the devastation, at the emptiness, and it made him want to cry. But he didn’t cry anymore. Not for this. He had seen it too often. It was the legacy of his time, a world depopulated, a civilization destroyed.

  Ahead, a huge domed building rose against the skyline, and in the fading light he could make out its massive support arches. It was an entertainment arena, a leftover from the time when there was order in the world. It was black and silent
now, an edifice that had lost its place and purpose, a mausoleum for a time of life that was dead and gone.

  He drove toward it.

  The highway dipped slightly in a long sloping ramp toward the domed building, but huge piles of trash and parts of discarded cars had been hauled over to form a barricade that blocked the exit. He drove a bit closer and abandoned his plan to follow the pavement. Instead he began driving across the open spaces adjacent to the highway and then through the yards of perimeter residences, cutting past other, smaller roads, choosing rougher terrain that offered more accessible passage for the AV. The Lightning was built to crawl over barriers from which other vehicles would have turned back.

  When he had gone as far as he could, close now to the dome and in sight of buildings that were clearly storefronts and warehouses, Logan stopped the AV and got out. He stood looking around for a few moments, taking in the feel of his surroundings, watching and listening. Nothing drew his attention. Satisfied, he triggered the Lightning’s security locks and protective devices and, picking up his staff, set out on foot.

  He walked softly, noiselessly, in the way he had learned from Michael, an almost invisible presence, just another of night’s shadows. The houses on either side were squat, dark structures empty of life. Once or twice, cats crossed his path, and once a pair of street kids, furtive and hunched over as they moved across his line of sight. Once, he thought he heard voices, but he could not decipher the words or detect their source.

  And once, like a vision, a woman appeared—or maybe a girl—sliding out of the shadows into the light, her hair long and blond and flowing, her form slender. He could only imagine that she was beautiful—her features hidden behind the night’s dark mask—yet he felt certain of it, even though she was there for only a moment.

  She made him feel something unexpected with her passing, a deep, inexplicable loss coupled with a sadness that left his throat tight and his mouth dry. He could not explain it, could not find a reason for it. He had disdained companionship since Michael and the others had died. He had jealously safeguarded his solitary existence, actively avoiding the company of others. It was his nature as a Knight of the Word. It was one of the dictates of the life he had chosen. The presence of others only complicated his work. Attachments only served to tie him down.

  Like the Ghosts threatened to do.

  And yet…

  He took a moment longer to search for the woman, peering into the shadows between the houses as, without thinking, he slowed. The silence deepened around him; the night closed about. There was no sign of her. It seemed to him now that he might have imagined her.

  He quickened his pace and moved on.

  He was twenty-eight years old, if his calculations were correct. He relied to a great extent on the calendar that Michael had built into the AV. Without it, time would have been lost to him completely. The seasons were unrecognizable, often passing from one into the other with little evidence of change. Clocks and watches had ceased to work years ago, save for a stubborn few that he came across now and then, and most of these only gave the time of day. There was an order to things when you could recite your age, when you could say with some certainty that you knew the day and month and year. There was a sense of being grounded in the world.

  Twenty-eight, and he felt disconnected from everything. Except for his work as a Knight of the Word. And now, perhaps, even from that. Now that he had been saddled with these street kids and their problems. He would have to leave them, he knew. He would have to find a way. Once they were no longer sick and safely away from the threat of being overtaken by demons and once-men. Once it felt right to him. He shook his head at the confusion this caused. Because his charge, his mission, was to find and give aid to the imprisoned and abandoned. His life was dedicated to helping those who were not as strong as he was, who required deliverance from evil and could be saved only by his special power.

  Were the Ghosts not most of these? Was he not bound to help them, too? Still, they were not of the same sort as those imprisoned in the slave camps or imperiled by the dark things that prowled the countryside. They did not need him in the same way as so many others.

  Or at all, really, if you thought about it. If you weighed their need against that of so many others. They did not need him.

  Did they?

  He was aware suddenly of a cat walking next to him. It had appeared out of nowhere, a burly, grizzled beast, brindle and black in color with a strange white slash across its blunt face—as if it had been slapped with a paintbrush. It had a peculiar gait, the like of which he had never encountered in a cat. Although it mostly ambled, it also hopped. It took no more than a couple of hops at a time, but that was enough to be noticeable. It was while it was trailing along slightly off to his right that he caught sight of the unusual movement out of the corner of his eye and was alerted to its presence.

  He stopped and looked down at the cat. The cat stopped and looked up at him.

  “Shoo,” he whispered.

  The cat blinked, then hissed back at him.

  He hesitated, thought about chasing it away, and decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He started walking again. Right away the cat followed. He picked up his pace, but the cat picked up its pace, too. When he stopped again, the cat stopped with him, staying back and well out of reach of the black staff. Not that he would strike out at it, but the cat couldn’t know.

  “Go on, get out of here,” Logan muttered.

  He continued on, trying to ignore the cat, turning his attention to the task at hand. The dome loomed ahead, a dark monolith against the skyline. He was close enough to it by now that storefronts and warehouses had replaced the residences of earlier. He began searching for signs of what he needed, but nothing useful revealed itself. Most of the stores had seen their doors and windows broken out and their fixtures and contents smashed. The warehouses were in similar condition. If there was anything to be found, it was probably only because it was well hidden. Medicines and bandages were the first things people took once the plagues and chemical poisonings began in earnest, after the governments had collapsed and the demons and the once-men had surfaced. It seemed unlikely that anything was left after this long.

  The cat made a series of sudden hops until it had drawn even with him, and then it gave a mournful cry that stopped him in his tracks.

  “Shhh! Don’t do that!” he snapped. He looked around in dismay. Everything within a hundred yards must have heard!

  The cat regarded him intently, and then did it again—a longer, deeper, more poignant cry. It held it for an impossibly long time, as if it might be trying for a record.

  Logan started for it, brandishing his staff, and the cat was gone in a blur of black and brindle. In the space of a heartbeat, it had disappeared. and Logan was left alone.

  “Just as well,” he muttered reproachfully.

  He walked on alone, upset by the encounter for reasons he couldn’t explain. He guessed it was the strangeness of the cat’s behavior, the way it was willing to approach him so boldly when most creatures, even larger ones, would have kept their distance. Maybe he felt a sense of kinship with it, a creature at once both aloof and unafraid. Maybe it was something about the way it had cried out, the sound so disturbing.

  Whatever the case, he had just managed to put the cat out of his mind when it was back again, walking a few paces behind, its familiar amble punctuated by the peculiar hopping motion. Logan glanced over his shoulder at it without slowing, smiling to himself at its persistence. It probably thought he had food. In fact, he realized abruptly, he did. He was carrying a piece of a packaged ration he had stuffed in his pocket before leaving. The cat must have smelled it.

  “Aren’t you the clever one,” he said, turning.

  He reached into his pocket, extracted the food, broke off a chunk, and tossed it toward the animal. The cat watched the offering hit the ground and roll to a stop. It examined it without moving, and then looked up at Logan as if to say, What am I supposed to do
with this?

  Logan shook his head. Feral cats; they learned early on how to be cautious or they ended up dead. They didn’t trust anyone. Besides, this one didn’t look particularly hungry. If anything, it looked overfed.

  He shrugged. “Fine, don’t eat it, then. Not my problem.”

  “She doesn’t ever eat food from strangers,” a voice said.

  Logan had been surprised enough times in his life to not jump out of his skin at unexpected voices, but he was startled nevertheless. He looked around without seeing anyone. “She doesn’t?”

  “She likes you, though. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t bother following you. She is very particular.”

  A girl not yet a woman, he guessed from the sound of her voice. He kept looking, and then saw her detach herself from the tree against which she had been leaning. Before, she had been part of the trunk, so closely assimilated that he had missed her. Even now, she was barely recognizable. She was cloaked and hooded, and her features were hidden. She stood facing him and made no move to come closer.

  “Is this your cat?” he asked her.

  “She thinks so. Her name is Rabbit. Mine is Catalya, sometimes Cat for short. What’s yours?”

  “Logan Tom.” He paused. “Your name is Cat and your cat’s name is Rabbit. Your cat acts like a rabbit. It makes me wonder.”

  She regarded him in silence for a moment. “What are you looking for?”

  He shook his head. “Supplies.”

  Rabbit moved over to her and began rubbing up against her legs with her grizzled face as if to scratch an itch. Catalya reached down and tickled the cat’s ears. She was still concealed within the shadows of her cloak and hood. “What kind of supplies?”