The First King of Shannara - Terry Brooks [128]
Kinson’s gaze wandered back to Mareth. She was staring directly at him, her dark eyes huge and shadowed beneath her helmet of short-cropped black hair, her face smooth and serene. In that instant, he thought he was on the verge of understanding her as he had been unable to do before. It was something about the way she was looking at him, in the openness of her expression, in the intensity of her gaze. But then she smiled unexpectedly, her mouth quirking at the comers, and her eyes shifted from his face to something she saw behind him.
When he turned to look, he found Shifter staring at him, the big moor cat’s face only inches from his own, the luminous eyes fixed on him as if he were the strangest thing the cat had ever seen.
Kinson swallowed the lump in his throat. He could feel the heat of the cat’s breath on his face. When had it come awake? How had it gotten so close without him noticing? Kinson held the cat’s gaze a moment longer, took a deep breath, and turned away.
“I don’t suppose you would want to come with us?” Bremen was asking their host. “A journey of a few days, just long enough to see the talisman forged?”
Cogline snorted and shook his head. “Take your games playing elsewhere, Bremen. I give you the forging process and my best wishes. If you can make use of either, well and good. But I belong here.”
He had scribbled something on a piece of old parchment, and now he passed it to the Druid. “The best that science can offer,” he muttered. “Take it.”
Bremen did, stuffing it into his robes.
Cogline straightened, then looked at Kinson and Mareth in turn.
“Watch out for this old man,” he warned. There was dismay in his eyes, as if he had suddenly discovered something that displeased him. “He needs more looking after than he realizes. You, Tracker, have his ear. Make sure he listens when he needs to. You, girl — what is your name? Mareth? You have more than his ear, don’t you?”
No one spoke. Kinson’s eyes shifted to Mareth. There was no expression on her face, but she had gone suddenly pale.
Cogline studied her bleakly. “Doesn’t matter. Just keep him safe from himself. Keep him well.”
He stopped abruptly, as if deciding he had said too much. He mumbled something they could not hear, then rose to his feet, a loose jumble of bones and skin, a rumpled caricature of himself.
“Spend the night, and then be on your way,” he muttered wearily.
He looked them over carefully, as if expecting to find something he had missed previously, as if thinking perhaps they might be other than who they claimed. Then he turned and moved away.
Good night, they called after him. But he did not respond. He walked resolutely away from them and did not look back.
Chapter Nineteen
Clouds skimmed the edges of the quarter-moon, casting strange shadows that raced across the surface of the earth like night birds ahead of the advancing Dwarves. It was the slow, deep hour before sunrise, when death is closest and dreams hold sway in men’s sleep. The air was warm and still, and the night hushed. There was a sense of everything slowing, of time losing half a tick in its clockwork progression, of life drifting momentarily from its inexorable pathway so that death, for a few precious moments, might be further delayed.
The Dwarves had slipped from the trees of the Anar in a wave of dark forms that seemed to flow like a river. They were several thousand strong, come down through the Wolfsktaag out of the Pass of Jade a dozen miles north of where the army of the Warlock Lord was encamped. It was two days since the army had passed south of Storlock, and while the Dwarves had watched its progress closely, they had determined to wait until now to attack.
They eased their way down the line of the trees to where the Rabb dropped away in a long, low swale close to a small river called the Nunne. It was there that the Northland army, unwisely, had