“All lies,” she whispered, her anger strong again, her magic roiling within her. She would strike him down if he said another word. She would tear him apart and put an end to things here and now.
“Would you know the truth?” he asked.
“I know it already.”
“Would you know the truth finally and forever?”
She stared at him. There was intensity to his dark eyes that she could not dismiss. He had something in mind, something he was working toward, but she was not certain what it was. Be careful, she told herself.
She folded her arms into her robes. “Yes,” she said.
“Then use the sword.”
For a moment, she had no idea what he was talking about. Then she remembered the talisman she wore strapped across her back, the one the boy had given her. She reached over her shoulder and touched it lightly. “This?”
“It is the Sword of Shannara.” He swallowed thickly, his breath rattling in his chest. “Call upon it if you would know the real truth, the one you have denied for so long. The talisman cannot lie. There can be no deception with its use. Only the truth.”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t trust you.”
His smile was faint and sad. “Of course not. I’m not asking you to. But you trust yourself, don’t you? You trust your own magic. Use it, then. Are you afraid?”
“I’m afraid of nothing.”
“Then use the sword.”
“No.”
She thought that would be the end of it, but she was wrong. He nodded as if she had given him the answer he expected. Instead of thwarting his intentions, she seemed to have buttressed them. His good arm shifted so that his hand was lying on his shattered breast. She did not know how he could still be alive.
“Use the sword with me,” he whispered.
She shook her head instantly. “No.”
“If you do not use the sword,” he said softly, “you can never gain control over the magic I have hidden from you. Everything I have acquired, all the knowledge of the Old World gleaned from these catacombs, all of the power granted by the Druids, is locked away inside me. It can be released if you use the sword, if you are strong enough to master it, but not otherwise.”
“More lies!” she spat.
“Lies?” His voice was weakening, his words fatigued and slurred. “I am a dead man. But I am still stronger than you are. I can use the sword while you cannot. Dare not. Prove me wrong, if you think you can. Do as I say. Use the sword. Test yourself against me. All that I have, all of it, becomes yours if you are strong enough. Look at me. Look into my eyes. What do you see?”
What she saw was a certainty that brooked no doubt and concealed no subterfuge. He was challenging her to look at the truth as he believed it to be, asking her to risk what that might mean. She did not think she should do so, but she also believed that access to his mind was worth any risk. Once inside, she would know all his secrets. She would know the truth about the missing books of magic. She would know the truth about herself and the boy. It was a chance she could not afford to pass up. His nonsense about Druid knowledge and power was a ploy to distract her, but she could play such games much better than he could.
“All right.” Her words were rimmed in iron. “But you will place your hand on the sword first, under mine, so that I can hold you fast. That way, should this prove to be a trick of some kind, you will not escape me.”
She thought she had turned the tables on him neatly. She expected him to refuse, frightened of being linked to her in a way that stripped him of a chance to break free. But again he surprised her. He nodded in agreement. He would do as she asked. She stared at him. When she thought she saw a flicker of satisfaction cross his face, she was flooded with anger and clenched her fist at him.
“Do not think you can deceive me, Druid!” she snapped. “I will crush you faster than you can blink if you try!”
He did not respond, his eyes still locked on hers. For an instant she thought to abandon the whole effort, to back away from him. Let him die, and she would sort it all out later. But she could not make herself give up the opportunity he was offering her, even if it was only for a moment. He kept so many secrets. She wanted them all. She wanted the truth about the boy. She wanted the truth about the magic of that safehold. She might never have another chance to discover either, if she did not act quickly.
She took a steadying breath. Whatever else he intended, whatever surprise he planned, she was more than a match for him, wasn’t she?
She reached over her shoulder and slowly unsheathed the sword, bringing it around in front of her, setting it between them, blade down, handle up. In the smoky gloom, the ancient weapon looked dull and lifeless. Her doubts returned. Was it really the legendary Sword of Shannara or was it something else, something other than what she believed it to be? There was no other magic concealed within it; she would have detected any by now. Nor was there anything about it that would lend strength to the dying Druid. Nothing could save him from the wounds he had incurred. She wondered again at what had savaged him so and would have asked if she had thought there was enough time left to do so.
She inched closer to him, repositioning the blade so that he could reach the handle. She kept her eyes on his, watching for signs of deceit. It seemed impossible that he could manage anything. His eyes were lidded, his breathing rough and shallow, his torn body leaking blood into his robes in such copious amounts she did not know how there could be any left inside him. For just an instant, fresh doubt assailed her, warning her away from what she was about to do. She trusted her instincts, but she hated to acknowledge fear in the face of her sworn enemy, a man against whom she had measured herself for so many years.
She brushed the doubt away. “Place your hand on the sword!”
He raised his bloodied hand from his chest and wrapped his fingers around the handle. As he did so, he seemed to lose focus for a moment, and his hand extended past the talisman to brush lightly against her forehead. She was concentrating so hard on his eyes that she did not think to watch his hand. She flinched at his touch, aware of the damp smear his fingers had left against her skin. She heard him say something, words spoken so softly she could not make them out.
The feel of his blood on her forehead disturbed her, but she would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her troubled enough to wipe it away. Instead, she placed her hand over his and tightened her grip to hold him fast.
“Now we shall see, Druid.”
“Now we shall,” he agreed.
Eyes locked, they waited in the smoking ruins of the extraction chamber, so alone that there might have been no one else alive in the world. Everything had gone still. Even the severed cables and wires that had sparked and buzzed only moments before and the shattered machines that had struggled so hard to continue functioning had gone still. It was so quiet that the Ilse Witch could hear the sound of the Druid’s breathing slow to almost nothing.
She was wasting her time, she thought abruptly, angry all over again. This wasn’t the Sword of Shannara. This wasn’t anything more than an ordinary blade.
In response, her fingers dug into Walker’s hand and the worn handle beneath it. Tell me something! Show me your truth, if you have any truth to show!
An instant later, she felt a surge of warmth rise out of the blade, enter her hand, and spread through her arm. She saw the Druid flinch, then heard him gasp. An instant after that, white light flared all about them, and they disappeared into its molten core.
On the coast of the Blue Divide, dawn was breaking offshore through a fog bank that stretched across the whole of the horizon like a massive wall. From the deck of the Jerle Shannara, Redden Alt Mer watched the fog materialize in the wake of the retreating night, a rolling gray behemoth closing on the shoreline with the inevitability of a tidal wave. He had seen fog before, but never like that. The bank was thick and unbroken, connecting water to sky, north to south, light to dark. Dawn fought to break through cracks in its surface,
a series of angry red streaks that had the look of heated steel, as if a giant furnace had been lit somewhere out on the water.
March Brume experienced heavy fog at times, as did all the seaports along the Westland coast. Mix heat and cold where land met water, stir in a healthy wash of condensation, and you could muster fog thick enough to spread on your toast—that was the old salt’s claim. The fog Redden Alt Mer was watching was like that, but it had something else to it, as well, a kind of energy, dark and purposeful, that suggested the approach of a storm. Except the weather didn’t feel right for it. His taste and smell of the air revealed nothing of rain, and there had been no sounds of thunder or flashes of lightning. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Even the pressure readings gave no hint of trouble.
The Rover Captain paced to the aft decking and peered harder into the haze. Had something moved out there?
“Pea soup,” Spanner Frew grumbled, coming up to stand beside him. He frowned out of his dark beard like a thunderhead. “Glad we’re not going that way anytime soon.”
Alt Mer nodded, still looking out into the haze. “Better hope it stays offshore. I’ll be skinned and cooked before I’ll let us be stuck here another week.”
One more day, and the repair on the airship would be finished. It was so close now that he could barely contain his impatience. Little Red had been gone for three days already, and he hadn’t felt right about it once. He had faith in her good judgment, and in Hunter Predd’s, as well, but he felt compromised enough as it was by what had befallen the members of the ship’s company in that treacherous land. They were scattered all over the place, most of them lost or dead, and he had no idea how they were ever going to bring everyone together, even without the added problem of wondering what might have happened to his sister.
“Have you solved the problem of that forward port crystal?” he asked, watching the shifting fog bank, still thinking he had seen something.
The burly shipwright shrugged. “Can’t solve it without a new crystal, and we don’t have one. Lost the spares overboard in the channel during the storm. We’ll have to make do.”
“Well, we’ve been down that road before.” He leaned forward, his hands on the railing, his eyes intent on the fog bank. “Take a look out there, Black Beard. Do you see something? There, maybe fifteen degrees off …”
He never finished. Before he could complete the sentence, a cluster of dark shapes materialized out of the gloom. Airborne, they flew out of the roiling gray like a flock of Shrikes or Rocs, silhouetted against the crimson-streaked wall. How many were there? Five, six? No, Alt Mer corrected himself almost at once. A dozen, maybe more. He counted quickly, his throat tightening. Two dozen at least. And they were big, too big even for Rocs. Nor did they have wings to propel them ahead, to provide them with vertical lift.
He caught his breath. They were airships. A whole fleet of them, come out of nowhere. He watched them take shape, masts and sails, rakish dark hulls, and the glint of metal stays and cleats. Warships. He brought up his spyglass and peered closely at them. No insignia emblazoned on flags or pennants, no markings on the gunwales or hulls. He watched them clear the fog and wheel fifteen degrees left, all on a line across the horizon, black as netherworld shades as they drifted into formation and began to advance.
Redden Alt Mer put down the spyglass and took a deep, steadying breath.
They were sailing right for the Jerle Shannara.
Here ends Book Two of The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara. Book Three, Morgawr, will conclude the series as the Ilse Witch is forced to confront the truth about herself and the survivors of Castledown begin the long journey home.
Read on for an excerpt from
The Measure of the Magic
by Terry Brooks
Published by Del Rey Books
ONE
HUMMING TUNELESSLY, THE RAGPICKER WALKED the barren, empty wasteland in the aftermath of a rainstorm. The skies were still dark with clouds and the earth was sodden and slick with surface water, but none of that mattered to him. Others might prefer the sun and blue skies and the feel of hard, dry earth beneath their feet, might revel in the brightness and the warmth. But life was created in the darkness and damp of the womb, and the ragpicker took considerable comfort in knowing that procreation was instinctual and needed nothing of the face of nature’s disposition that he liked the least.
He was an odd-looking fellow, an unprepossessing, almost comical figure. He was tall and whipcord-thin, and he walked like a long-legged waterbird. Dressed in dark clothes that had seen much better days, he tended to blend in nicely with the mostly colorless landscape he traveled. He carried his rags and scraps of cloth in a frayed patchwork bag slung over one shoulder, the bag looking very much as if it would rip apart completely with each fresh step its bearer took. A pair of scuffed leather boots completed the ensemble, scavenged from a dead man some years back, but still holding up quite nicely.
Everything about the ragpicker suggested that he was harmless. Everything marked him as easy prey in a world where predators dominated the remnants of a decimated population. He knew how he looked to the things that were always hunting, what they thought when they saw him coming. But that was all right. He had stayed alive this long by keeping his head down and staying out of harm’s way. People like him, they didn’t get noticed. The trick was in not doing anything to call attention to yourself.
So he tried hard to give the impression that he was nothing but a poor wanderer who wanted to be left alone, but you didn’t always get what you wanted in this world. Even now, other eyes were sizing him up. He could feel them doing so, several pairs in several different places. Those that belonged to the animals—the things that the poisons and chemicals had turned into mutants—were already turning away. Their instincts were sharper, more finely tuned, and they could sense when something wasn’t right. Given the choice, they would almost always back away.
It was the eyes of the human predators that stayed fixed on him, eyes that lacked the awareness necessary to judge him properly. Two men were studying him now, deciding whether or not to confront him. He would try to avoid them, of course. He would try to make himself seem not worth the trouble. But, again, you didn’t always get what you wanted.
He breathed in the cool, damp air, absorbing the taste of the rain’s aftermath on his tongue, of the stirring of stagnation and sickness generated by the pounding of the sudden storm, of the smells of raw earth and decay, the whole of it marvelously welcome. Sometimes, when he was alone, he could pretend he was the only one left in the world. He could think of it all as his private preserve, his special place, and imagine everything belonged to him.
He could pretend that nothing would ever bother him again.
His humming dropped away, changing to a little song:
Ragpicker, ragpicker, what you gonna do
When the hunters are hunting and they’re hunting for you.
Ragpicker, ragpicker, just stay low.
If you don’t draw attention they might let you go.
He hummed a few more bars, wondering if he had gotten past the predators. He was thinking it was almost time to stop and have something to drink and eat. But that would have to wait. He sighed, his lean, sharp-featured face wreathed in a tight smile that caused the muscles of his jaw to stand out like cords.
Ragpicker, ragpicker, you’re all alone.
The hunters that are hunting want to pick your bones.
Ragpicker, ragpicker, just walk on.
If you wait them out they will soon be gone.
He crossed a meadow, a small stream filled with muddy water, a rocky flat in which tiny purple flowers were blooming, and a withered woods in which a handful of poplars grew sparse and separate as if strangers to one another. Ahead, there was movement in a rugged mass of boulders that formed the threshold to foothills leading up to the next chain of mountains, a high and wild and dominant presence. He registered the movement, ignored it. Those who had been watching him were still there an
d growing restless; he must skirt their hiding place and hope they were distracted by other possibilities. But there didn’t appear to be anyone else out here other than himself, and he was afraid that they would come after him just because they were bored.
He continued on furtively, still humming softly.
Daylight leached away as the clouds began to thicken anew. It might actually rain some more, he decided. He glanced at the skies in all four directions, noting the movement of the clouds and the shifting of their shadows against the earth. Yes, more rain coming. Better find shelter soon.
He stalked up the slope into the rocks, his long, thin legs stretching out, meandering here and there as if searching for the best way through. He headed away from the watchers, pretending he was heedless of them, that he knew nothing of them and they, in turn, should not want to bother with him.
But suddenly his worst fears were realized and just like that they were upon him.
They emerged from the rocks, two shaggy-haired, ragged men, carrying blades and clubs. One was blind in one eye, and the other limped badly. They had seen hard times, the ragpicker thought, and they would not be likely to have seen much charity and therefore not much inclined to dispense any. He stood where he was and waited on them patiently, knowing that flight was useless.
“You,” One-eye said, pointing a knife at him. “What you got in that bag of yours?”
The ragpicker shrugged. “Rags. I collect them and barter for food and drink. It’s what I do.”
“You got something more than that, I’d guess,” said the second man, the larger of the two. “Better show us what it is.”