The Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks [267]
Menion cursed everything that had brought them all to this sorry end. They had allowed themselves to be backed into a corner. There was only one path still open to them. In the holocaust of tomorrow’s battle, human beings would die, and few, if any, would know the reason. It was an unavoidable part of war, that men should die for unknown reasons — it had been happening for centuries. But this war was something beyond human comprehension, this war between a substanceless spirit being and mortals. How could evil such as the Warlock Lord be destroyed when it could not even be understood? Only Allanon seemed fully to appreciate the nature of the creature. But where was the Druid when they needed him most?
The candles burned low on the table before them, and the darkness of the secluded room deepened. On the wood and tapestry decorated walls, torches sputtered slowly in their iron racks, and the five voices dropped to low murmurs, hushed as if the night were a child in danger of being unexpectedly awakened. The city of Tyrsis slept now, and in the grasslands beyond, the Northland army. In the peace and solitude of the moonlit night, it seemed that all forms of life were at rest, and that war, with its promise of death and pain, was merely a vague, nearly forgotten memory of years past. But the five who spoke in quiet tones of better days and the friendship shared could not, even for a few moments, completely stifle the lingering realization that the horror of war was no more distant than the sunrise and as inevitable as the darkness of the Warlock Lord, reaching slowly, inexorably from out of the north to snuff out their frail lives.
Chapter Thirty
On the morning of the third day of the search for Orl Fane, the torrential rains that had swept through the vastness of the barren Northland subsided, and the sun reappeared as a dim, fuzzy ball of white fire, burning through the misty darkness left with the passing of the Warlock Lord’s black wall to the mud and rock-strewn terrain with the fury of an oven. The storm had left the topography of the land completely altered, the rains sweeping away almost every distinguishable landmark and leaving only four, identical horizons of rocky hillocks and muddied valleys.
At first the appearance of the sun was a welcome sight. The heat from its rays penetrated the hateful gloom that had become permanently affixed to the barren surface of the earth to warm away the chill left by the now vanished storm as the temperature rose steadily, and the character of the land began to alter once more. But in an hour’s time, the temperature had risen thirty degrees and was continuing to rise unchecked. The rivers that washed through the winding gullies carved out by the force of the rain began to steam and mist in the heat, and the humidity soared, drenching everything in a new, even more uncomfortable wetness.
The little plant life born in the aftermath of the devastating storm withered and died in suffocation, cut off from the sun’s life-giving brightness and choked by the stifling heat that permeated the graying mist. The muddied earth lay unprotected from the heat and soon baked into a cracked, hardened clay that would support no life. The rivers and lakes and puddles began to dry up quickly, and in almost no time had disappeared altogether. The exposed surface of the huge boulders that dotted the parched land quickly absorbed the burning heat like iron settled in live coals. Slowly, inexorably the land became what it had been before the rains had swept its surface — a dry, barren slab of earth, devoid of life, silent and forbidding beneath a vast, cloudless sky. The only movement came from the slow, unchanging arc of an ageless, disinterested sun as it followed its ceaseless path from east to west, turning days into years and years into centuries.
Three bent figures stepped gingerly from beneath the shelter of a rocky alcove cut in the side of one of the countless, nondescript hillocks, their cramped