Bearers of the Black Staff - Terry Brooks [29]
“We’ll get word to you,” he promised.
“Walk softly,” she cautioned, and he was struck by the familiarity of that phrase: Sider Ament had used it as well.
“Thank you for everything.” Prue embraced the tall woman and held her close. “We owe you so much.”
Aislinne broke away. “You owe me nothing. Just keep safe until we meet again. Now go.”
They moved into the trees. Panterra looked back and waved good-bye to her. She was already turning away.
When he looked back again, she was gone.
SEVEN
AFTER LEAVING PRUE LISS AND PANTERRA, SIDER Ament set out to track down the second of the two creatures that had broken through his wards.
He was struggling with a number of issues. The weightiest of these was accepting that after all these years, the barrier that had kept his valley home safe was crumbling. It wasn’t that he found the idea impossible to believe; it was that it felt so personal. It had been five centuries, and there had been dozens of others who had patrolled the valley before him, all descendants of the old Knights of the Word. In all that time, the mists that barred passage in or out had held firm against intrusion. But now, in his time, while it was his turn to bear the black staff of power, they were breaking down.
He couldn’t know this for certain yet, even given what he believed to be clear evidence. But if the creature he tracked was attempting to get back to where it had come from, and if he failed to catch up to it before it succeeded, he would soon learn the truth. He supposed that he would find out in any case, because he had no choice now but to test the barrier no matter where he found the creature. The creature’s appearance might have been unexpected and hence unforeseeable, but that didn’t change the inevitable consequences. Depending on where it had come from, either the inhabitants of the valley were still safe from the outside world or they were not. Either life would go on as before or it would be changed forever.
It was his realization of what this meant that was so overwhelming. Like most, he knew something of what had happened five hundred years earlier to bring their ancestors here. The Great Wars—the wars of power, the wars of science—had destroyed civilization. They had leveled governments and institutions, obliterated cities and entire nations, poisoned air and water and earth, and left the larger world virtually uninhabitable. No one who had come into the valley had ever been able to go back out again to see what that meant. But the stories had persisted—the old world was lost and it wasn’t coming back; the new world was the world they would make here, within the confines of the mountain walls and the protective mists.
Yet the question persisted in the minds of everyone: What was it really like outside the valley?
He had tried to imagine it on more occasions than he could remember. He had tried to extrapolate, from the fragments of memories passed down through the years, what a world cast into chaos might be like five hundred years later. Would anything have survived? Was there any sort of population? There had been mutants at the end; some of them had come into the valley with Men and Elves. The Lizards and the Spiders were the largest part of these. But wouldn’t there have been others, too—others that were left behind or developed later, like the creature he tracked? Wouldn’t there be things he could not begin to imagine, born of life twisted into new shapes and forms?
It would all be so different from what any of them knew. There would be an entire world to discover, to interpret, and ultimately to embrace.
But few, he added quickly, would be eager to do so.
Certainly not the Children of the Hawk, who would regard as anathema any form of assimilation that