Ilse Witch - Terry Brooks [189]
Then it struck him suddenly that perhaps he had made an incorrect assumption. The more he stared at the ruins, the more unlikely it seemed that it had been built to house people. The look of the buildings was all wrong. Low and wide and flat, vast spaces with high windows and broad entrances, sprawling foundations with no personal spaces, they seemed better suited for something else. For warehousing, perhaps. For factories and construction yards.
For housing machines.
He glanced at those around him. All looked awestruck, staring at the city as if trying to comprehend its purpose, as if working to make it seem real. Then he noticed Ryer Ord Star. She stood apart from the others as she always did, but she was shaking, her eyes cast down and her fingers knotted tightly in the folds of her clothing. Her breath came in short, ragged gasps, and she was crying soundlessly. Walker moved next to her, placed his arm on her shoulders, and drew her slender body close.
“What’s wrong?” he asked softly.
She glanced up at him momentarily, then shook her head and melted against him once more, burying her face in his robes. He held her quietly until she stilled—it took a few minutes, no more— then stepped away from her and ordered Ard Patrinell to move out.
They descended the valley slope to its floor, stopping in a wooded clearing a hundred yards back from the edge of the ruins to make camp for the night. By now the sun was brushing the valley rim west and would be down in another hour. It was too late to attempt any exploration of the city today. Walker felt confident that they had located Castledown and that what they had come to find was hidden somewhere within. How difficult it would be to uncover what he sought remained to be seen, but he preferred that their first foray be undertaken in daylight.
Alone, while the others set camp and prepared dinner, he walked to the edge of the city. He stood there in the waning light staring into the shadowed ruins, down long, broad avenues, through gaps in the metal walls, along rooflines long since reshaped by time and the ravages of a conflict he was grateful he had not been alive to see. The races of the present thought of a Druid’s magic as powerful, but real power was unknown to them. Real power was born of science. He found himself wondering what it might have been like to live in those distant times, before the Old World was destroyed. How would it have felt to have power that could destroy entire cities? What sort of havoc would it play with your soul to be able to snuff out thousands of lives at a touch? It made him shiver to imagine it. It made him feel frightened and sick inside.
Perhaps that was what Ryer Ord Star was feeling. Perhaps that was why she cried.
Thinking of her triggered a memory of her vision of the islands and their protectors. It was what she had said after speaking of the keys that surfaced unexpectedly in his thoughts. He had almost forgotten it, dismissed it out of hand as obvious. I see this in a haze of shadow that tracks you everywhere and seeks to place itself about you like a shroud. He had believed her words referred to the Ilse Witch and her relentless pursuit of him.
But looking into the ruins of Castledown and feeling the presence of the thing that waited there like an itch against his skin, he knew he had been mistaken.
Chapter THIRTY
Morning arrived in a haze of mist and light rain. Crowded together in leaden skies, dark clouds hid the sun and foreshadowed a gloomy day. The air was windless and warm and smelled of damp earth and new leaves. Silence wrapped the world in a veil of hushed expectancy and whispered caution, and even the small comfort of yesterday’s birdsong had disappeared.
In the valley’s pale brume, the ruins of Castledown hunkered down in glistening, sharp-edged relief, dark metallic surfaces streaked bright green by rain-dampened lichen and moss.
Walker divided the search party into