Running with the Demon - Terry Brooks [87]
“I think we are fortunate he is here! What else would I think?” The sylvan looked indignant. “He’s a Knight of the Word, Nest — one of the Word’s anointed champions! He’s come because there’s a demon on the loose and that means we’re in a lot of trouble! You don’t know about demons; I do. A demon is the worst sort of creature. If this one accomplishes whatever it is he’s set out to do, the result will be something that none of us wants even to consider! Criminy!”
Nest found herself thinking about Two Bears and his warning of the previous night. There is reason to think that your people will destroy themselves. Perhaps, she surmised, they would do so a little more quickly with the help of a demon.
“How do you know he is a Knight of the Word?” she pressed.
“John Ross? Because he is!” Pick snapped irritably. “Why are you being so difficult, Nest?”
She shrugged. “I’m just asking, that’s all.”
The sylvan sighed laboriously. “I know because of the staff. A staff like that is given only to a Knight of the Word. Been so for centuries. No one else can carry them; no one else is allowed. Every sylvan knows what they look like, how they’re marked. The runes — did you notice them? Do they seem familiar to you?”
They did, of course, and now she realized why. Pick had drawn those same runes in the park’s earth on several occasions when working his healing magic. That was where she had seen them before.
“He seems very tired,” she observed, still musing on what he had revealed about himself, still working it through in her mind.
“You would be tired, too,” he sniffed, “if you spent all your time tracking demons. Maybe if you and I do what he’s asked of us and spot the demon, then he can get some rest!”
Unperturbed by the rebuke, she looked off into the trees. The shadows had melted into a black wall, and only the faint, silvery streamers of light from moon and stars and the harsher yellow glare of house lamps penetrated the darkness. Mosquitoes buzzed at her, but she ignored them, swinging idly, lazily in the tire, still thinking about John Ross. Something wasn’t right. Something about him was different from what he wanted her to believe. What was it?
“Drat!” exclaimed Pick suddenly, springing to his feet on her shoulder. “I forgot to tell him about the maentwrog! Criminy sakes! I’ll bet the demon has something to do with weakening the magic that imprisons it! Maybe that’s what the demon has come here to do — to set the maentwrog free!”
“He said he was here to see about the feeders,” Nest replied thoughtfully.
“Well, of course! But the feeders respond to human behavior, and certainly setting free the maentwrog would stir up a few emotions in the good citizens of Hopewell, don’t you think?”
Maybe, maybe not, Nest thought, but she kept her opinion to herself. Why, she wondered once again, were there suddenly so many feeders in Sinnissippi Park? If they were attracted by human emotion, if they responded to what was dark and scary and terrible, why were so many gathered here? What had drawn them to this time and place? Was it whatever John Ross had come to prevent? If so, if it was that, then what were they ‘ doing here already, clustered thick as fall leaves even before whatever it was that was going to happen had happened?
She leaned back in the swing, letting her head and shoulders hang down and her legs tilt up. Dislodged from his perch, Pick gave a sharp exclamation, jumped down, and was gone. Nest let him go, weary of talking. She swung slowly in the humid night air, looking up at the stars, wishing suddenly that she could go fishing or hiking or maybe ran far out on the roadways that led through the surrounding farmland, wishing that she could be someplace else or maybe even be some other person. She felt a sudden need to escape her present and flee back into her past. She could feel her childhood slipping away, and she despaired suddenly of losing it. She did not want to grow up, even after having struggled so hard to do so. She wanted to go back, just for a little while, just long enough to remember what it was