“Do you know a woman called the Addershag?” Wren asked him.
Expressionless, the man shook his head, accepted his money, and walked away. Wren watched him stop and whisper something to another man. The man slipped away. Wren sipped at her mug, found the ale unpleasantly warm, and moved down the serving bar, repeating her question as she went. No one knew of the Addershag. One grinned, leered, and made an unimaginative suggestion. Then he saw Garth and hurried off. Wren continued on. A second man reached out at her, and she flicked his arm away. When he reached again, she brought the heel of her hand into his face so hard he was knocked unconscious. She stepped around him, anxious to be done with this business. It was dangerous to continue on, even with Garth to protect her.
She reached the end of the serving bar and slowed. At the very back of the room a group of men occupied a table in the shadows. One of them beckoned, waited until he was certain she had seen, then beckoned again. She hesitated, then moved forward, pushing through the crowd, Garth at her back. She came up to the table and stopped when she was just out of reach of the men seated there. They were a rough bunch—dirty, unshaven, their skin the color of paste, their eyes ferretlike and dangerous. Ale mugs sat before them, sweating.
The man who had beckoned said, “Who is it you’re looking for, girl?”
“A seer called the Addershag,” she answered and then waited, certain that he already knew who she was looking for and probably where she would look.
“What do you want with her?”
“I want to ask her about the Elves.”
The man snorted. “There aren’t any Elves.”
Wren waited.
The man eased forward in his chair. He was thick-featured, and his eyes were empty of feeling. “Suppose I decided to help you. Just suppose. Would you do something for me in turn?” The man studied her face a moment and grinned insolently. “Not that. I just want you to talk to her for me, ask her something. I can tell what you are by your clothes. You’re a Rover. See, the Addershag is a Rover, too.” He paused. “Didn’t know that, did you? Well, she doesn’t feel like talking to us, but she might feel different about you, one of her own.” His gaze on her was hard and sullen. All pretense was gone now, the game under way. “So if I take you to her, then you have to ask a question or two for me. That a deal?”
Wren knew already that the man was planning to kill her. It was simply a question of how and when he and his friends would try. But she also knew he might really be able to take her to the Addershag. She weighed the risks and rewards momentarily, then said, “Agreed. But my friend goes with me.”
“Whatever you say.” The man smirked. “Course, my friends go, too. So I’ll feel safe. Everyone goes.”
Wren looked at the man appraisingly. Heavyset, muscular, an experienced cutthroat. The others the same. If they got her in a tight place…
“Garth,” she said, looking back at him. She signed quickly, screening her movements from the men at the table. Garth nodded. She turned back to the table. “I’m ready.”
The speaker rose, the others with him, an anxious, hungry-looking bunch. There was no mistaking what they were about. The speaker began ambling along the rear wall toward a door leading out. Wren followed, cautious, alert. Garth was a step behind; the remainder of the table trailed. They passed through the door into an empty hall and continued toward a back entrance. The sounds of the ale house disappeared abruptly as the door closed.
The man spoke over his shoulder. “I want to know how she reads the gaming cards like she does. How she reads the dice roll. I want to know how she can see what the players are thinking.” He grinned. “Something for you, girl; something for me. I have to make a living, too.”
He stopped unexpectedly before a side door, and Wren tensed. But the man ignored her, reaching into his pocket to extract a key. He inserted it in the lock and twisted. The lock released with a click and the door swung open. There were stairs beyond leading down. The man groped inside and brought forth an oil lamp, lit it, and handed it to Wren.
“She’s in the cellar,” he said, motioning through the door.
“That’s where we’re keeping her for the moment. You talk to her. Take your friend if you want. We’ll wait here.” His smile was hard and unpleasant. “Just don’t come back up without something to trade for my helping you out. Understand?”
The men with him had crowded up behind them, and the reek of them filled the narrow hall. Wren could hear the ragged sound of their breathing.
She moved close to the speaker and put her face inches from his own. “What I understand is that Garth will remain here with you.” She held his gaze. “Just in case.”
He shrugged uncomfortably. Wren nodded to Garth, indicating the door and the gathering of men. Then holding the lamp before her, she started down the steps.
It was a shadowy descent. The stairway wound along a dirt wall shored up with timbers, the earth smell thick and pungent. It was cooler here, if only marginally. Insects skittered from underfoot. Strands of webbing brushed her face. The steps angled left along a second wall and ended. The cellar opened up before her in the lamplight.
An old woman sat slumped against the far wall, almost lost in the gloom. Her body was a dried husk, and her face had withered into a maze of lines and furrows. Ragged white hair tumbled down about her frail shoulders, and her gnarled hands were clasped before her. She wore a cloth shift and old boots. Wren approached and knelt before her. The ancient head lifted, revealing eyes that were milky and fixed. The old woman was blind.
Wren placed the oil lamp on the floor beside her. “Are you the seer they call the Addershag, old mother?” she asked softly.
The staring eyes blinked and a thin voice rasped, “Who wishes to know? Tell me your name.”
“My name is Wren Ohmsford.”
The white head tilted, shifting toward the stairway and the door above. “Are you with them?”
Wren shook her head. “I’m with myself. And a companion. Both of us are Rovers.”
Aged hands reached out to touch her face, exploring its lines and hollows, scraping along the girl’s skin like dried leaves. Wren did not move. The hands withdrew.
“You are an Elf.”
“I have Elven blood.”
“An Elf!” The old woman’s voice was rough and insistent, a hiss against the silence of the ale house cellar. The wrinkled face cocked to one side as if reflecting. “I am the Addershag. I am the seer of the future and what it holds, the teller of truths. What do you wish of me?”
Wren rocked back slightly on the heels of her boots. “I am searching for the Westland Elves. I was told a week ago that you might know where to find them—if they still exist.”
The Addershag cackled softly. “Oh, they exist, all right. They do indeed. But it’s not to everyone they show themselves—to none at all in many years. Is it so important to you, Elf-girl, that you see them? Do you search them out because you have need of your own kind?” The milky eyes stared unseeing at Wren’s face. “No, not you. Despite your blood, you’re a Rover before everything, and a Rover has need of no one. Yours is the life of the wanderer, free to travel any path you choose, and you glory in it.” She grinned, nearly toothless. “Why, then?”
“Because it is a charge I have been given—a charge I have chosen to accept,” Wren answered carefully.
“A charge, is it?” The lines and furrows of the old woman’s face deepened. “Bend close to me, Elf-girl.”
Wren hesitated, then leaned forward tentatively. The Addershag’s hands came up again, the fingers exploring. They passed once more across Wren’s face, then down her neck to her body. When they touched the front of the girl’s blouse, they jerked back as if burned and the old woman gasped. “Magic!” she howled.
Wren started, then seized the other’s wrists impulsively. “What magic? What are you saying?”
But the Addershag shook her head violently, her lips clamped shut, and her head sunk into her shrunken breast. Wren held
her a moment longer, then let her go.
“Elf-girl,” the old woman whispered then, “who sends you in search of the Westland Elves?”
Wren took a deep breath against her fears and answered, “The shade of Allanon.”
The aged head lifted with a snap. “Allanon!” She breathed the name like a curse. “So! A Druid’s charge, is it? Very well. Listen to me, then. Go south through the Wilderun, cross the Irrybis and follow the coast of the Blue Divide. When you have reached the caves of the Rocs, build a fire and keep it burning three days and nights. One will come who can help you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Wren replied, wondering at the same time if she really did. Rocs, did the old woman say? Weren’t they supposed to have been a form of giant coastal bird?
“Beware, Elf-girl,” the other warned, a stick-thin hand lifting. “I see danger ahead for you, hard times, and treachery and evil beyond imagining. My visions are in my head, truths that haunt me with their madness. Heed me, then. Keep your own counsel, girl. Trust no one!”
She gestured violently, then slumped back again, her blind gaze fixed and hard. Wren glanced down the length of her body and started. The Addershag’s worn dress had slipped back from her boots to reveal an iron chain and clamp fastened to her leg.
Wren reached out and took the aged hands in her own. “Old mother,” she said gently. “Let me get you free of this place. My friend and I can help you, if you’ll let us. There is no reason for you to remain a prisoner.”
“A prisoner? Ha!” The Addershag lurched forward, teeth bared like an animal at bay. “What I look and what I am are two very different things!”
“But the chain…”
“Holds me not an instant longer than I wish!” A wicked smile creased the wrinkled face until its features almost disappeared. “Those men, those fools—they take me by force and chain me in this cellar and wait for me to do their bidding!” Her voice lowered. “They are small, greedy men, and all that interests them is the wealth of others. I could give them what they want; I could do their bidding and be gone. But this is a game that interests me. I like the teasing of them. I like the sound of their whining. I let them keep me for a time because it amuses me. And when I am done being entertained, Elf-girl, when I tire of them and decide again to be free, why…this!”
Her stick hands freed themselves, then twisted sharply before Wren’s eyes and were transformed into writhing snakes, tongues darting, fangs bared, hissing into the silence. Wren jerked away, shielding her face. When she looked again, the snakes had disappeared.
She swallowed against her fear. “Were…they real?” she asked thickly, her face flushed and hot.
The Addershag smiled with dark promise. “Go, now,” she whispered, shrinking back into the shadows. “Take what I told you and use it as you will. And guard yourself closely, Elf-girl. Beware.”
Wren hesitated, pondering whether she should ask answers to the rush of questions that flooded through her. She decided against it. She picked up the oil lamp and rose. “Goodbye, old mother,” she said.
She went back through the darkness, squinting into the light of the oil lamp to find the stairs, feeling the sightless gaze of the Addershag follow after her. She climbed the steps swiftly and slipped back through the cellar doorway into the ale house hall.
Garth was waiting for her, facing the knot of men who had come with them from the front room. The sounds of the ale house filtered through the closed door beyond, muffled and raucous. The eyes of the men glittered. She could sense their hunger.
“What did the old woman tell you?” the leader snapped.
Wren lifted the oil lamp to shed a wider circle of light and shook her head. “Nothing. She doesn’t know of the Elves or if she does, she keeps it to herself. As for gaming, she won’t say a word about that either.” She paused. “She doesn’t seem any kind of a seer to me. I think she’s mad.”
Anger reflected m the other man’s eyes. “What a poor liar you are, girl.”
Wren’s expression did not change. “I’ll give you some good advice, cutthroat. Let her go. It might save your life.”
A knife appeared in the other’s hand, a glint of metal come out of nowhere. “But not yours…”
He didn’t finish because Wren had already slammed the oil lamp onto the hallway floor before him, shattering the glass, spilling the oil across the wood, exploding the flames everywhere. Fire raced across the wooden planks and up the walls. The speaker caught fire, shrieked, and stumbled back into the unwilling arms of his fellows. Garth and Wren fled the other way, reaching the backdoor in seconds. Shoulder lowered, Garth hammered into the wooden barrier and it flew from its hinges as if made of paper. The girl and the big Rover burst through the opening into the night, howls of rage and fear chasing after them. Down between the buildings of the town they raced, swift and silent, and moments later emerged back onto the main street of Grimpen Ward.
They slowed to a walk, glanced back, and listened. Nothing. The shouts and laughter of the ale houses nearest them drowned out what lay behind. There was no sign of fire. There was no indication of pursuit.
Side by side, Wren and Garth walked back up the roadway in the direction they had come, moving through the revelers, the heat and the gloom, calm and unhurried.
“We’re going south to the Blue Divide,” Wren announced as they reached the edge of the town, signing the words.
Garth nodded and made no response.
Swiftly they disappeared into the night.
XXIII
When Walker Boh, Quickening, and Carisman left Morgan and Horner Dees, they traveled only a short distance east through the darkened streets of Eldwist before slowing to a halt. Walker and the girl faced each other. Neither had said anything about stopping; it was as if they had read each other’s mind. Carisman looked from one face to the other in confusion.
“You know where the Stone King is hiding,” Quickening said. She made it a statement of fact.
“I think I do,” Walker answered. He stared into the depthless black eyes and marveled at the assurance he found there. “Did you sense that when you chose to come with me?”
She nodded. “When he is found, I must be there.”
She didn’t explain her reasoning, and Walker didn’t ask. He glanced into the distance, trying futilely to penetrate the gloom, to see beyond the mist and darkness, and to find something of what he was meant to do. But there was nothing to be found out there, of course. The answers to his questions lay somewhere within
“I believe the Stone King hides within the dome,” he said quietly. “I suspected as much when we were there several days ago. There appear to be no entrances, yet as I touched the stone and walked about the walls I sensed life. There was a presence that I could not explain. Then, yesterday, when we were beneath the earth, trapped in that underground cavern, I again sensed that presence—only it was above us this time. I took a quick calculation when we emerged from the tunnels. The dome is seated directly above the cavern.”
He stopped momentarily and glanced about. “Eldwist is the creation of its master. Uhl Belk has made this city of the old world his own, changing to stone what wasn’t already, expanding, his domain outward symmetrically where the land allows it. The dome sits centermost, a hub in a wheel of streets and buildings, walls and wreckage.”
His pale face turned to meet hers. “Uhl Belk is there.”
He could almost see the life brighten in her eyes. “Then we must go to meet him,” she said.
They started off again, following the walkway to the end of the block and then turning abruptly north. Walker led, keeping them carefully back from the streets, against the walls of the buildings, clear of the open spaces, and away from the danger of trapdoors. Neither he nor Quickening spoke; Carisman hummed softly. They watched the gloom like hawks, listened for strange sounds, and smelled and tasted the damp, stale air warily. A brief rain caught up with them and left them shedding water from their cloaks and hoods, their feet chilled with
in their boots.
Walker Boh thought of home. He had done so increasingly of late, driven by the constant, unrelenting pressure of being hemmed about by the city’s stone and darkness to seek out something of what had once been pleasant and healing. For a time he had sought to banish all thoughts of Hearthstone; its memories cut at him like broken glass. The cottage that he had adopted as his home had been burned to the ground in the battle with the Shadowen. Cogline and Rumor had died there. He had barely escaped dying himself, and keeping his life had cost him his arm. He had once believed himself invulnerable to the intrusions of the outside world. He had been vain and foolish enough to boast that what lay beyond Hearthstone presented no danger to him. He had denied the dreams that Allanon had sent him from the spirit world, the pleas that Par Ohmsford had extended for his help, and in the end the charge he had been given to go in search of Paranor and the Druids. He had encased himself in imaginary walls and believed himself secure. When those walls began collapsing, he had found that they could not be replaced and those things he had thought secure were lost.
Yet there were older memories of Hearthstone that transcended the recent tragedies. There were all those years when he had lived in peace in the valley, the seasons when the world outside did not intrude and there was time enough for everything. There were the smells of flowers, trees, and freshwater springs; the sounds of birds in early spring and insects on warm summer nights; the taste of dawn on a clear autumn morning; the feeling of serenity that came with the setting sun and the fall of night. He could reach back beyond the past few weeks and find peace in those memories. He did so now because they were all he had left to draw on.