Bearers of the Black Staff - Terry Brooks [80]
“I’m so sorry.”
“There’s no need. Not anymore.”
She broke away from him, turned quickly, and went back down the path that had brought them. She took long, purposeful strides, and her long hair swung from side to side like a dusky curtain.
She did not look back.
SIXTEEN
PAN! WAKE UP!”
A familiar voice, hushed and urgent. It was both close and at the same time a long way off, indistinct and fuzzy. He tried to put a name to it and failed.
“Pan! Please!”
Prue. He blinked against the woolly darkness that wrapped him like a blanket and opened his eyes. She was looking at him from only inches away, her eyes huge and gleaming in a wash of firelight. Her face was tight with fear.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
Good question, he thought. His head was pounding and he was trussed hand and foot with ropes. He tried to remember what had happened. Something big and black had fallen on him while they were stalking the builders of the fire. Prue had sensed its presence, they had tried to escape, the black thing had …
A cloud of acrid smoke blew past him from the fire as the wind shifted. Sparks erupted from the blaze in a bright shower, and he caught a glimpse of huge bodies standing all around him, leaning on clubs and spears, shoulders hunched. Somewhere farther off voices argued. He could not make out the words, but there was no mistaking the tone.
Then a wolfish head swung into view directly in front of him, and he caught his breath. Yellow eyes fixed on him as jaws split wide in a lean muzzle to reveal rows of white teeth. A tongue licked and lolled alternately from between hooked incisors. He could smell the beast’s fetid breath, could feel the heat of its humped, shaggy body as it moved to block his view, eyeing him as it might a piece of raw meat. Some sort of wolf? A feral dog? He couldn’t tell; he only knew that he had never seen anything like it. He shrank from it, pressing himself up against Prue.
The beast regarded him a moment, looked deep into his eyes as if seeking something, and then turned away and moved off, joining another of its kind, a second beast that looked exactly the same, a few yards off. They touched noses, giving greeting. Tongues licked out, and muzzles rubbed affectionately.
“That was what jumped on you and knocked you down,” Prue whispered over his shoulder. “You hit your head on a rock and lost consciousness. Then the Lizards took us both.”
Lizards, Panterra repeated silently. He was conscious suddenly of the source of the insistent throbbing: a sharp pain that emanated from a point far up on his forehead. It was there he had hit his head; he could feel a small trickle of blood running down his face. He tried to reach up to feel the wound, but his hands were tied around his waist, and he couldn’t raise them.
“It isn’t too bad,” Prue assured him. “Mostly, it’s just a big knot.”
Mostly. Pan shook his head. He wasn’t sure if he was more angry or embarrassed, being caught like this. He should have known better than to listen to Phryne Amarantyne. There was no good reason for him to have done what he did, coming out of cover and exposing himself just to see who had built a fire. But it was wrong to blame the Elven Princess; he was the one who had made the decision, the one who had given in when he should have known better.
He wondered suddenly where she was, where the Orullians were, too, for that matter. Did they realize what had happened to Prue and himself? Had they tried to come after them when they didn’t return? Had they sought a way to save them? He looked around more carefully, scanning the darkness, but he didn’t see anything.
He felt Prue edge closer, positioning herself so that she could whisper in his ear. “They were waiting for us, Pan. They built and lit the campfire as a trap. It’s some kind of game, I think. There were dozens of them in hiding, but they were too far away and too well concealed for me to detect. It was those beasts that did all the work. It was too late to do anything by the time I sensed them. They stalked us, cornered us, and knocked you