Ilse Witch - Terry Brooks [195]
Even getting past the ice pillars was not much of a challenge, although it required a little inventiveness. Choosing to avoid that approach completely, she used her magic to harness one of the Shrikes that nested on the outer cliffs, mounted it, and had it fly them over the top. Even with the heavy fog, she was able to guide Black Moclips without too much risk. The Shrike was a native and knew its way in and out of the mountains well. The winds were tricky, but not so much so that the airship couldn’t manage them. She had no idea how Walker had managed to navigate the pillars, believing his own magic, while powerful in some ways, not sufficiently adaptable for this. Her spy hadn’t been able to communicate that information. Not that it mattered. Both of them had made it through. They were still on course for their confrontation.
Except that now, for the first time, she had the upper hand. He was ashore and marooned there, even if he didn’t realize it yet. Without the use of an airship, he was helpless to escape her. Sooner or later, she would track him down, either on foot or from the air. The only question that remained to be answered was whether she would get to him before the thing that waited in the ruins did.
Even in this, she had an advantage the Druid did not. She knew what the thing was. Or more to the point, what it wasn’t. She had gone inside Kael Elessedil’s ruined mind to discover why he had been lost for thirty years. By doing so, she had seen through his eyes what it was that had captured him. She had witnessed the tearing out of his tongue and the gouging out of his eyes. She had witnessed the uses to which he had been put. Walker knew none of this. If he wasn’t careful, he might come to the same end. That would achieve her goal of destroying him, but cheat her of the personal satisfaction she would derive by seeing him die at her hands.
Yes, Walker would have to be very careful. The thing that had lured them here was patient and its reach was long. It was dangerous in ways she had not encountered before. So she would have to be careful, too. But she was always careful, always on guard against the unexpected. She had trained herself to be so.
Cree Bega sidled up to her. “The little peopless are all ssafely locked away,” he hissed.
“Leave five of your rets to make sure they stay that way,” she ordered. “Commander Kett will assign two of his crew to watch over the ship. The rest of us will take the Black Moclips after those already ashore.”
I’m coming for you, Druid, she thought triumphantly. Can you feel me getting close?
She climbed down from the pilot box, wrapped in grim fury and fierce determination, and walked back through the mist and gloom.
When the attack came, Walker was a little more than halfway between the others of the company and the obelisk, deep inside the maze of half walls and partitions. He heard a sharp click, like a lock opening or a trigger released, and he threw himself down just as a slender thread of brilliant red fire lanced overhead. Without even thinking, he turned the Druid fire on its source and fused the tiny aperture through which the thread had appeared.
Instantly, a dozen more threads crisscrossed the area in which he lay, some of them burning paths across the metal carpet, seeking him out. He rolled quickly into the shelter of a wall and burned shut one opening after another, snuffing out the threads, exploding apertures and entire sections of wall,