High druid of Shannara_ Jarka Ruus - Terry Brooks [58]
“Stupid woman!” it snapped, the words strange-sounding in the odd dialect, but comprehensible. “Yelling at me like that. Look what you did to me! Look how far I fell! I could have broken every bone in my body!”
He rubbed his arms as if for emphasis, daring her to contradict him. She narrowed her gaze at him. “You should watch what you say to me. If I don’t like what I hear, I might break every bone anyway.”
He grimaced. “I could hurt you, if I wanted. You ought to be afraid of me.” His odd face scrunched up, and his tongue licked out like a cat’s, revealing the razor-sharp teeth. “Who are you? Are you a witch?”
She shook her head. “No, I am Ard Rhys of Paranor. I am a Druid. Where am I?”
He stared blankly at her. “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you know where you are? Are you lost?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Tell me what you did to that Dracha. Magic, wasn’t it? I’ve never seen anything like that. If you aren’t a witch, you must be a sorceress or a Straken. Are you a Straken?”
There was another name she hadn’t encountered outside of the Druid Histories. Strakens were powerful magic wielders out of the world of Faerie, gone for thousands of years. Like the Dracha.
“Is this the Faerie world?” she asked, beginning to think it must be.
The spindly creature stared at her, head cocked. “This is the land of the Jarka Ruus. You’re inside the Dragon Line, above Pashanon. You must know that! Where is it you come from?”
“Paranor. Callahorn. The Four Lands.”
She paused with each name, searching his eyes for recognition and finding none. But the words Jarka Ruus meant something to her. She had heard them before, though she couldn’t remember where. “What are you?” she asked him. “What Race do you belong to? Are you a Troll?”
“Ulk Bog,” he announced proudly. He smiled, showing all his considerable teeth. “But I don’t have a home at present because I’m traveling. This country is too dangerous. Dragons everywhere, all sorts, and they like to eat my kind. Of course, I try to eat their eggs, so I guess it’s fair they should try to eat me. But they’re much bigger than I am, for the most part, so I have to be careful. Anyway, I don’t want to stay here anymore. Where are you going?”
She didn’t have the faintest idea, of course, since she didn’t even know where she was. She wasn’t at all sure she was going anywhere until she figured out what had happened to her. Nevertheless, she pointed west, if only to satisfy him, at the same time trying to figure out how to extract some useful information.
“Ah, Huka Flats. Good choice. Soft earth for burrows and tender rats to eat.” He hitched up his belt. “Maybe I should go with you, since you don’t seem to know the way. I know it. I’ve been everywhere.”
Ulk Bogs had disappeared with the world of Faerie, as well, she was thinking. Everything suggested she had gone back in time to the beginning of things, back before Men were created. The idea was so ridiculous that she kept searching for a better answer, but nothing else suggested itself.
“Are there lots of dragons here in the Dragon Line?” she pressed. “Big ones, as well as the Drachas?”
“You are a stranger, aren’t you?” he said. He was growing bolder again, more confident. He puffed out his narrow chest.
“Of course there are big ones. Wyverns and Frost Dragons. Fire Drakes, too, though not so many of those. Some live right down here in the forests, like the Drachas. You have to watch out for them all the time. That’s how I happened to be up in that — ”
He stopped himself quickly, looking away into the trees. “Well, how I was, uh... how I was...”
“That Dracha I