The Elves of Cintra (49 page)

“That will help draw the poison out,” she said by way of explanation. “Let’s get him out of here.”

Shouldering him from either side, the boy and the girl began to walk him across the arena toward the entry. Panther held the Parkhan Spray cradled in one arm, ready to use. But the few men and women who lingered outside fled quickly at their approach.

Behind them, they could hear Krilka Koos moaning and calling out Logan Tom’s name. Panther wanted to go back and cut out his tongue.

Once outside, they began the slow journey toward the freeway. The afternoon was waning, the light fading. East, the sky was already dark. Panther staggered under Logan Tom’s weight, trying to glance over his shoulder, worried that one of those militia stump heads would shoot them in the back.

“Weighs a ton,” he muttered, fighting to keep Logan upright.

Across from him, Cat nodded, her mottled face flushed.

“He might not make it, you know.” Panther glanced at her. “Most men wouldn’t.”

Her lips tightened. “He’s not like most men.”

Couldn’t argue with that. Panther tightened his grip about the Knight of the Word, his mind flooding with images of the battle they had just witnessed.

No, Logan Tom definitely wasn’t like most men.

TWENTY-NINE

L
EAVING
L
ARKIN
Q
UILL
to cross back over Redonnelin Deep to his home, there to await their signal that they required a return, Angel and her Elven companions set out once more for Syrring Rise. It was midmorning when they began their trek north, but the journey turned out to be anything but what Angel had expected.

“How far do we have to go?” she asked Simralin after enough time had passed that it had become a concern.

“Just a few more miles,” the Elven girl answered, glancing over her shoulder from her lead position, unable to conceal her grin.

Angel peered ahead. There were mountains, but they were some distance off and none of them was particularly distinctive. She guessed she just wasn’t seeing what she was supposed to see, that Syrring Rise was lost in the larger mass or in the dirty haze that hung like a pall over most of what lay ahead, a reminder of how bad the air had been polluted.

They trekked on without saying much, making what progress they could through country that was choked with wintry stands of weeds and scrub amid rocky flats and rises. Angel’s thoughts drifted to her old life and Johnny, and then to little Ailie, her doomed conscience. The tatterdemalion hadn’t had much chance to exercise that conscience, even though she had stated on their first meeting that this was her self-appointed goal. A creature who lived an average of thirty days, and she had offered herself as a voice of reason to a Knight of the Word—a Faerie creature trying to help a human. It seemed incongruous and somehow sad. She wished for what must have been the hundredth time that she could have found a way to save her tiny friend.

They were in the middle of wilderness by now, in country empty of buildings and roads and anything living. There wasn’t so much as a rodent poking its head from its burrow or a bird circling the sky. Heavy, dead trees clustered together in skeletal bundles, as if they had sought comfort from one another at the end. Grasses were spiky and gray with sickness and death. Dust lay thick on the ground everywhere, rising in small explosions from their footfalls. In the distance, the mountains loomed dark and bare, no closer now than they had been an hour ago.

“Exactly how far is it to Syrring Rise?” Angel asked impatiently.

Simralin stopped a moment, unslung her waterskin, and took a deep drink. “On foot, about two weeks. As the crow flies, about a hundred miles.” She nodded toward the mountain range. “On the other side of that.”

Angel stared. “Two weeks! We don’t have two weeks!”

Simralin nodded. “Don’t worry. We’ll be there before dark.” She shouldered the waterskin anew. “You’ll see, Angel. Trackers know how to get where they want to in ways that others don’t.”

An enigmatic comment that Angel felt inclined to challenge, but she decided not to. She glanced at Kirisin, who shrugged his lack of understanding but at the same time seemed confident that his sister could do what was needed. Angel wished she could have that kind of confidence in someone, but she didn’t even have it in herself.

They continued on for a short time, not much more than another half an hour, arriving at a broad, thick stand of huge old conifers, their once green needles turned silvery by nature and the elements. It was a strange sight, the trees stretching away for miles in all directions, seemingly all the way to the lower slopes of the mountains west. Without hesitating, Simralin took them directly into their center, striding ahead confidently, her blond hair a silken shimmer in the hazy light. Angel and Kirisin followed, neither saying anything. The woods were deep and gray and silent, and the emptiness was its own presence. Such places bothered Angel, who preferred the stones and bricks and concrete of the city. In the city, you could find your way. Here, there was nothing to tell you even so much as the direction in which you were going. The trees blocked the mountains. The haze diffused the sunlight. Everything looked the same.

Then abruptly the terrain changed from dust and scrub to an uneven hardpan that the wind had swept clear of everything loose. There were strange, twisted trees with spiky leaves and peeling bark set in among the conifers. There were tall stands of scrub, some of them more than six feet high. In minutes, they were deep into this new stand of foliage, and Angel was hopelessly lost. Her hands tightened on her staff, reassuring herself that she was not entirely powerless. But the woods seemed to press in against her anyway, threatening to suffocate her, to steal away her power.

“I hate this,” she muttered.

Kirisin looked over and nodded, but said nothing.

Angel was just beginning to wonder if this was leading to anything when the trees opened before them and they found themselves at the edge of a broad, shallow ravine surrounding a rocky flat on which two piles of brush covered a pair of square-shaped objects; what might once have been a third pile lay scattered about on the rocks nearby.

For the first time, Simralin hesitated, her forehead furrowing with concern. “There should be three,” she said, mostly to herself, but loud enough that her companions could hear her. “What happened to the third?”

Angel moved a few steps closer, right to the edge of the ravine, and peered at the two that were still covered. “Are those baskets of some sort?” she asked in surprise.

Simralin nodded. “They are. But there should be another. Wait here.”

She crossed the ravine, walking down into it and climbing out the other side, then moving over to the discarded pile of brush, peering intently at the ground. When she had seen enough, she cast about at the surrounding woods, and then looked back at them. “I can’t be sure. The ground is too rocky for a clear read. One man, I think. But it could be more. I don’t understand it. We don’t have any Trackers out this way just now.”

She knelt, studying the footprints a second time. “Nothing special about the few scuffs I can make out.” She shook her head. “If it was the demons, I could read the marks from that cat thing. But if it was just the other…” She trailed off. “All right. Come on over.”

Angel crossed with Kirisin and stood looking down at ground so hard and rocky it told her absolutely nothing. She could not understand how Simralin had determined as much as she had. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What are we doing here?”

“Uncover one of those baskets,” she said by way of response. “Kirisin can help. Remove everything you find packed in the bottom, separate it, and spread it out on the ground. Don’t try to attach any of it. Leave that to me. I’ll be back in a moment.”

She walked back down into the ravine, out the other side, and off into the trees until she could no longer be seen. Angel looked at Kirisin, and together they moved over to the closest basket, pulled off the dead limbs and brush concealing it—Angel thinking as they did so that this sort of concealment would only work against someone looking down from above, not someone who somehow happened upon it—and peered down into the basket interior. The basket was divided into four compartments, interlocking partitions that sectioned the interior and served as bracing for the sides. A tightly folded piece of material was shoved into the bottom along with various ropes, metal locking clasps, and hoses.

“What is this?” Angel asked the boy.

Kirisin shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Together they emptied the contents of the basket on the ground, laying out all the pieces separately as Simralin had told them to do. The material turned out to be a lightweight fabric that Angel could not identify, thin but strong, a mottled gray and white in color. Once it was unfolded and spread out, it took on a recognizable shape.

“This looks like a balloon,” Angel said.

“A hot-air balloon,” Simralin amended, striding out of the ravine once more. “Which is what will get us where we’re going.”

She was carrying several solar cells and what looked to be some sort of small motor. She put the solar cells into the basket and the motor on the ground next to the mouth of the balloon.

“This is a burner,” she advised, gesturing at the motor. She hooked up one end of the hose to a nozzle and shoved the other into the mouth of the balloon. “It heats the air and feeds it into the bag, which inflates. When the bag is full, it lifts the basket and its occupants off the ground.”

She flipped a switch, and the burner roared to life, breaking the silence. Slowly, the balloon began to fill. “Elven Trackers use these balloons for long-distance travel. We keep them hidden away in a handful of places on both sides of the mountains. Humans invented them, but we saw a use for them, too. Our Trackers began appropriating them a generation ago. We were using them even before your government collapsed, but after the wars started we began using them more frequently. We found it impossible to move about as we once had. Much of the open country was flooded with militia and mutated creatures. Much of it was dangerously poisoned. And travel time became a more important factor in many instances. The balloons helped us solve those problems.”

“Elves using human technology,” Angel murmured, shaking her head.

“Once in a while.” Simralin grinned. “We know enough to take advantage of a good thing. I’ll show you another example when we get to Syrring Rise.”

She gave the pile of brush to one side a quick glance. “We had three, but someone has taken one. Took some cells and a burner, too. All that equipment was hidden back in the rocks. Only long-range Trackers know where all that is; stumbling over it by accident is highly unlikely.”

She shook her head, turning to the ropes and clasps. “Here. Help me attach these to the balloon and the basket,” she said.

Under her direction, they made the balloon ready, watching the bag fill and begin to lift slowly off the ground. By that time, they had it firmly attached and had placed the burner and their gear inside the basket. Ropes tied to old logs and dead trees held the basket grounded as it strained to rise skyward. When Simralin was satisfied that it was ready, she ordered the other two into the basket, climbed in after them, released the restraining ropes, and they were off.

Madre de Dios,
Angel thought.

It was like nothing she had ever experienced. The earth dropped away as they ascended into the midday sky, trees and rocks and rivers and lakes growing slowly smaller, the landscape spreading away in miniature. Save for when Simralin used the compressor to feed more hot air into the bag, they were enveloped by a silence so deep and intense that it felt to Angel almost as if she had left everything terrible in her life behind. The basket bobbed softly on the wind currents, but mostly it just hung there, steady and smooth as Simralin steered it toward the mountains north and west.

“How do you like it?” the Tracker asked her at one point.

Angel grinned and nodded. “Any danger of the bag collapsing?”

Simralin shook her head. “The fabric is one we developed. Very strong, very tough. Rain doesn’t bother it. Even resists blades. A lightning strike is the biggest concern, but our weather is good.” She smiled. “Much better than walking. We’ll be there by sunset.”

They flew at a steady pace toward a gap in the mountain chain, the winds favoring a northwest flight. But Angel could tell that Simralin had considerable flying experience, working smoothly to keep the balloon on a course that carried it in the general direction required, maneuvering flaps that opened and closed in the bag, releasing small bursts of air to gain momentum or adjust height. She had learned to read and measure the movement of air currents and, after attaching the extra hoses to side ports in the basket, was able to change direction. It wasn’t a perfect science, even when all of it was cobbled together. At times, they drifted off course, but the Elven Tracker always seemed to find a way to bring them back around, tacking first one way and then another.

The hours crawled by, a passage that felt desperately at odds with the urgency of their undertaking. Angel scanned the ground they passed over, searching for something more than changes in the terrain. Signs of life. Signs of pursuit. Something of the dangers she knew she couldn’t see, but were there, nevertheless. It felt safe flying hundreds of feet in the air. But she knew the feeling was false.

They gained the far side of the peaks and caught prevailing southerly winds along the west face of the chain that carried them north. The winds waxed and waned with the passing of the afternoon, gusting at times, dying away completely at others. They flew over miles of blighted forests and foothills, keeping clear of the chain’s taller peaks, avoiding the canyons and defiles where the winds were treacherous and might blow them into the cliffs. Although Kirisin was full of questions, his natural curiosity demanding explanations that his sister was hard-pressed to provide, Angel was content just to observe, preferring the luxury of the silence that this wondrous flight afforded them. Silence was not easily found in the city. Until you were dead, of course, like Johnny, and then it was forever.