Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [140]
‘You are to keep it with you always. It is your sword and shield. It will protect you from the things that you hunt and that, in turn, hunt you. It is a talisman of powerful magic. Nothing can stand against it. But its power is finite; it is directly dependent on your own strength. Grow tired, and it will grow tired, too. Grow careless or lose heart, and you will be at risk even with the staff.”
“What does it do?” she asks him.
“You will discover that when you use it. You will know instinctively.”
She is still not decided about whether she will agree, but then he tells her of the slave camps, of the raids that have already begun on the compounds, and of the fate of humans who are taken captive, and she makes her choice. When he leaves her, she is holding the staff, her new life still only a faint glimmer on the horizon of her understanding, a mystery she will have to unravel one day at a time.
She watches him walk away from her until he is standing in the shadows between the buildings where he first appeared to her, a big, motionless presence. Then a noise catches her attention, and she glances toward the sound out of reflex.
When she turns back again, he is gone. Something in the way he has disappeared—the quickness of it, perhaps—makes it feel as if he was never really there.
* * *
IT WAS NEARING midnight when Delloreen reached the storage complex and began a slow search of the pillaged units. She had tracked the woman Knight of the Word all the way from Anaheim, from the hotel lobby where she’d nearly had her, from the ruins of the city to the countryside north, a slow and arduous hunt. It had been difficult to do this, but not impossible. Delloreen could track anything that gave off a scent. She was blessed with animal instincts and habits, with feral abilities that gave her an advantage over others. Demons were humans made over, but she had always been more animal than human.
So when she pulled herself clear of the hotel rubble and began her hunt, she used her nose to smell out her quarry’s scent, to find it amid all the others, to taste it, memorize it, and then follow after it. It was easy enough, even mixed in as it was with all the other scents. Hers was a distinctive scent, a Knight of the Word’s peculiar scent, recognizable by a demon with Delloreen’s abilities, there for the discovering if you knew how to look. Delloreen tracked her all the way to the camp, to where she had met the humans fleeing Findo Gask and his army, and then lost the scent. But after circling about, she had found it again, a solitary trail that meandered off into the woods.
The woman Knight had met someone there, deep in the trees. She was able to tell that much, even though she was unable to tell much else. Whoever the Knight had met had left no scent, no tracks, and no readable traces—nothing that would provide an identity. In the end, Delloreen concluded that it was a Faerie creature and that something of importance had taken place, since it had drawn the woman Knight away from the children.
Delloreen had tracked her down the dirt road to the paved crossroad and the storage facility. The trail went into the facility and ended. There were machine smells everywhere, raw and rank and difficult to sort through. Her quarry’s scent disappeared in those. The demon ran up and down the paved road like a wolf, sniffing the ground, searching for tracks. She circled the entire complex twice, hunting carefully. But she found no trace of the woman Knight.
She went back into the complex and began to prowl through the units. Down on all fours, she worked her way along each row, through the discarded contents, in and out of the units, across the grounds and back again. Now and then, she caught a trace of the woman Knight’s scent, but not enough of it to determine where she had gone. Another hunter might have given up, but Delloreen was relentless.