The Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks [269]
“This is the place we last saw him.”
Panamon stood motionlessly at the summit of the broad hill they had just scaled, breathing heavily. Shea reached his side and glanced about in disbelief. All the surrounding hills looked exactly the same as this one, save for small variations in size and shape. He stared dubiously at the horizon. He wasn’t even sure where they had come from.
“Keltset, what do you see?” the other man demanded.
The Rock Troll strode slowly about the hilltop, scanning the ground for any trace left by the passage of the little Gnome, but the storm appeared to have erased any signs. He moved about noiselessly for several minutes more, then turned to them and shook his head negatively. Panamon’s dirt-stained face burned red in sudden anger.
“He was here. We’ll walk on a bit farther.”
They moved ahead in silence, scrambling unceremoniously down one hill and up the next. There was no further discussion. There was nothing further to be said. If Panamon were mistaken, nobody had any better idea, except to keep looking. An hour crawled by as they labored northward. Still there was nothing. Shea began to realize the hopelessness of their task. It would be impossible to search all of the land stretching east and west; if the wily Gnome had traveled just fifty yards to either side of them, they would probably never know he had gone that way. Perhaps he had been buried in a mudslide during the storm along with the Sword and they would never find him.
Shea’s muscles ached from the strenuous climbing, and he considered calling a brief halt to reassess their decision to proceed in this direction. Perhaps they should try to cut across the elusive trail. Yet a glance at Panamon’s dark face quickly dissuaded the Valeman from even suggesting such an action. The tall adventurer had the same look in his face Shea had seen just before he had destroyed the Gnomes days ago. He was the hunter once more. If Panamon found him, Orl Fane was a dead man. Shea shuddered involuntarily and looked away.
Several hills later, they found a piece of what they were searching for. Keltset spotted it from atop a small hillock, his sharp eyes picking out the foreign object as it lay half buried in dust at the bottom of a small ravine.
Directing the other two, he slid quickly down the rock-strewn hill and rushed eagerly over to the discarded object, snatchind it and holding it out to them. It was a large strip of cloth that had once been the major portion of a tunic sleeve. They stared at it quietly for a moment, and then Shea looked at Keltset for confirmation that it was indeed Orl Fane’s. The giant Troll nodded solemnly. Panamon Creel impaled the piece of cloth on the end of his pike, smiling grimly.
“So we’ve found him again. This time he won’t get away!”
But they didn’t find him that day, nor did they discover any further signs of his passing. In the heavy dust, the Gnome’s footprints would have clearly shown, yet there were none. Despite Panamon’s earlier opinion, Orl Fane had somehow wandered on during the storm, escaping both mudslides and drowning. The rain had washed away his tracks but, with freakish perversity, had left uncovered the torn sleeve. It could have been washed down from anywhere, so there was no way to tell which direction the Gnome had come from or gone. By nightfall, the blackness shrouding the land was so heavy that it was impossible to see more than several feet, and the search was reluctantly abandoned for the night. With Keltset standing the first watch, Panamon and Shea collapsed in near exhaustion and fell asleep almost instantly. The night air was cool, though the humidity of the day lingered on, and all three wrapped themselves once again in the half-dry hunting cloaks.
The morning returned all too swiftly in the familiar graying haze. This day was not as humid as the previous one, but