High druid of Shannara_ Jarka Ruus - Terry Brooks [63]
The weather inside the Forbidding never changed, earth and sky rendered gray and colorless by an absence of sunlight and a heavy, unbroken ceiling of clouds that in the distance flashed with lightning and rumbled with thunder. Sunset was little more than a deepening of the gray they had traveled through all day. Vegetation everywhere had a blighted and wintry look to it, as if sickened by the soil in which it grew. Nothing of the world suggested that living things were welcome or encouraged. Everything whispered of death.
By day’s end, they had reached the southern mouth of one of the passes leading out of the mountains and were looking down from the foothills into the plains that Weka Dart called Pashanon, which in her world would be Callahorn. Burnt, stunted grasses grew in clumps over miles of hardpan earth and barren hills that stretched away from countless miles through a scattering of high, windswept plateaus.
“We need a safe place to sleep,” the Ulk Bog declared in his odd phlegmy voice, casting about for what he wanted. “Ah, there!”
He pointed to a huge chestnut set back from the bluff at the edge of a stand of trees that marched upward into the foothills like soldiers.
“We have to sleep in a tree?” she asked him doubtfully.
He gave her a wicked grin. “Try sleeping on the ground, Straken, and see what friends you make during the night.”
She was not happy that he was still calling her Straken after she had warned him, but she supposed there was no help for it. He addressed her as he saw her, and nothing she said was likely to change that.
“Is it safer in the trees?” she asked.
“Mostly. We are less visible in the trees and the worst of the things that hunt at night don’t climb. Except for vine serpents.” He grinned, his teeth flashing like daggers. “But there are not so many of those this high up.” He started away into the trees. “Wait here.”
He was gone for some time, but when he returned, he was carrying an odd assortment of roots and berries, which he deposited at her feet triumphantly. He clearly thought that this was what she would want to eat, and she decided not to disappoint him. She thanked him, cleaned the food as best she could, and ate it, grateful for the nourishment. Afterwards, he directed her to a small stream. The water seemed clean enough to drink, and so she did.
She was aware of the light failing around her, of the darkness settling in, heavy and enfolding. The silence of the day was deepening, as well, as if what little noise she had been able to discern on her travels had gone into hiding. The look and feel of the land around her was changing from gloom to murk, the kind of darkness she understood, the kind in which predators flourished. But the darkness here had a different feel to it. Partly, it was the absence of moon and stars. Yet the smell and taste of the night air were different, too, fetid and rotting, and it carried on its breath the scents of carrion and blood. She felt a tightening in her stomach, a response of her magic to unseen dangers.
“Better get up into that tree now,” Weka Dart urged, looking skittish and uneasy as he led her back from the stream, his side-to-side movements become quick feints.
She was aware that he hadn’t eaten anything of what he had brought her, and she asked him about it. His response was a grunt of indifference. They climbed the chestnut and settled themselves in a broad cradle formed by a conjoining of branches. Any sort of rest seemed out of the question, she thought, feeling the roughness of the bark digging into her back. She glanced down at her nightgown and found it tattered