High druid of Shannara_ Jarka Ruus - Terry Brooks [125]
The mist thickened the farther away from land they flew, swirling like witch’s brew around the airship, alive with strange shadows and unexpected movement. There was no wind, and yet the haze roiled as if there were. Pen felt uneasy at the phenomenon, not understanding how it could occur. He glanced again at Ahren Elessedil, but the Druid was staring straight ahead, his concentration focused on something else.
He was listening.
Pen listened, as well, but he couldn’t hear a thing beyond the creaking of the ship’s rigging. He looked to Khyber, but she shook her head to indicate that she didn’t hear anything, either.
Then Pen froze. There was something after all. At first, he wasn’t sure what it was. It sounded a little like breathing, deep and low, like a sleeping man exhaling, only not that, either. He furrowed his brow in concentration, trying to place it. It must be the wind, he thought. The wind, sweeping over the hull or through the rigging or along the decks. But he knew it wasn’t.
The sound grew louder, crept closer, as if a sleeping giant had woken and was coming over for a look. Pen glanced quickly at Ahren, but the Druid’s gaze was intense and fixed, directed outward into the mist, searching.
“Uncle?” Khyber whispered, and there was an unmistakable hint of fear in her voice.
He nodded without looking at her. “It is the lake,” he said. “It is alive.”
Pen had no idea what that meant, but he didn’t like the sound of it. Lakes weren’t alive in the sense that they could breathe, so why did it sound as if this one was? He tried to pick up a rhythm to the sound, but it was unsteady and sporadic, harsh and labored. The ship sailed into the teeth of it, sliding smoothly through the fog, down the giant’s throat and into its belly. Pen could see it in his mind. He tried to change the picture to something less threatening, but could not.
Then abruptly, ethereal forms appeared, incomplete and hazy, riding the windless mist. They brought the sound with them, carried it in their shadowy, insubstantial bodies, bits and pieces echoing all about them as they moved. Pen shrank back as several approached, sliding over the railing and across the airship’s rain-slick deck. Cinnaminson gasped and her father swore angrily, swatting ineffectually at the wraith forms.
“The dead come to visit us,” Ahren Elessedil said quietly. “This is the Lazareen, the prison of the dead who have not found their way to the netherworld and still wander the Four Lands.”
“What do they want?” Khyber whispered.
Ahren shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The shades were all around the Skatelow, sweeping through her rigging like birds. The breathing grew louder, filling their ears, a windstorm of trouble building to something terrible. Slowly, steadily, vibrations began to shake the airship, causing the rigging to hum and the spars to rattle. Pen felt them all the way down to his bones. Seconds later, its pitch shifted to a frightening howl, a wail that engulfed them in an avalanche of sound. Pen went to his knees, racked with pain. The wail tightened like a vise around his head, crushing his ineffectual defenses. In the pilot box, in a futile effort to keep the sound at bay, Cinnaminson doubled over, her hands clapped over her ears. Gar Hatch was howling in fury, fighting to remain in control of the airship but losing the battle.
“Do something!” Khyber screamed at everyone and no one in particular, her eyes squeezed shut, her face twisted.
Like the legendary Sirens, the shades were driving the humans aboard the Skatelow mad. Their voices would paralyze the sailors, strip them of their sanity, and leave them catatonic. Already, Pen could feel himself losing control, his efforts at protecting his hearing and his mind failing. If he had the wishsong, he thought, he might have a way to fight back. But he had no defense against this, no magic