Ilse Witch - Terry Brooks [188]
Even so, Walker was wary. Despite appearances, he knew what waited for them somewhere along the way. He would have preferred to have Truls Rohk foraging ahead to ward their approach, but there was no help for that. The Elven Hunters would have to do. They were well trained and able, but no one was as good at staying hidden as the shape-shifter. He wondered where the other was, if he had escaped detection aboard the airship of the Ilse Witch, if he was accomplishing something important. He shook his head at the thought. Whatever Truls was doing, it couldn’t be as important as what he could be doing here.
Morning came and went, and still they trekked on through the forest without finding anything. The castaway’s map had brought them to the bay and pointed them inland and that was as much direction as they were going to get. On the map, a dotted line led to an X that said Castledown. There was no explanation of what Castledown was. There was no description of how they might recognize it. Walker had to assume that its identity would be self-evident when they came across it. It wasn’t the biggest assumption he had made in this business by any means, so he wasn’t uncomfortable following it.
It was late in the afternoon when his faith was rewarded. They topped a steep rise through a heavily wooded draw and discovered all three Elven scouts clustered together waiting for them. Her pixie face solemn and expectant, Tamis pointed ahead.
It was hardly necessary for her to do so. The hillside before them fell away into a broad, deep valley that easily ran ten miles from end to end and another five across. Trees carpeted the slopes and ridges, a soft green ring in the afternoon sunlight. But across the entire valley floor, all ten miles wide and five miles deep of it, sprawled the ruins of a city. Not a city from the present, Walker realized at once. Even from where they stood, still a half mile away, that much was apparent. The buildings were low and flat, not tall like those of Eldwist had been in the land of the Stone King. Some were damaged, their surfaces cracked and broken, their edges ragged and sharp. Holes opened through walls to reveal twisted, burned-out interiors. Debris lay scattered everywhere, some of it rusted and pitted by weather, some of it overgrown with lichen and moss. There was a uniformity to the ruins that indicated clearly that no one had lived here for a very long time.
But what struck the Druid immediately about the city, even more so than its immense size, was that virtually everything was made of metal. Walls, roofs, and floors all gleamed with patches of metallic brightness. Even bits and pieces of the streets and passageways reflected the sun. As far as the eye could see, the ruins were composed of sheets and slabs and struts of metal. Scrub grasses and brush had fought their way up through gaps in the fittings like pods of sea life breaching in an open sea. Isolated groves of trees grew in tangled thickets that might have been parks, carefully tended once perhaps, gone wild now. Even in its present state, crumbling and deteriorated since the Great Wars had reduced it to an abandoned wreck, the nature of its once sleek, smooth condition was evident.
“Shades!” Panax hissed at his elbow, thinking perhaps of the ruins his people had once mined in the aftermath of the holocaust.
Walker nodded to himself. The ruins of Castledown were gigantic. He had never imagined something of this size could exist. How many people had there been in the world if this was an example of the massiveness of their cities? He knew from the Druid histories that the number had been large, much larger than now. But there had been thousands of cities then, not hundreds. How many of them had been this huge? Walker found himself suddenly overwhelmed by the images, the numbers, and the