Jerle Shannara - Antrax Part 14

Besides, even if he had somehow avoided them, what could he do? Books of magic or not, he was trapped. She had control of both airships. She had the boy and the Sword of Shannara. The Druid was alone, or nearly so. To have any chance at all of escaping, he would have to come to her. She was prepared for that to happen.

She shrugged. Whatever the case, she would know what to do about the Druid when she found the books of magic. Her senses would tell her quickly enough if he had been there before her.

She moved through the darkening twilight like a shade, wrapped in her gray robes, a silent presence. She sent her magic ahead of her, sweeping the darkness, searching for what she could not see, for what might lie in wait. She found nothing. It was as if the world were deserted save for her. She liked the feeling. She always preferred the night, but preferred it best when she was alone. She did not feel anxious or concerned about what lay ahead. She knew what to expect from what she had been told by Cree Bega and, more important, from what she had discovered in her mind probe of the dying Kael Elessedil. She knew of the fire threads and creepers and did not feel them to be a threat. She knew about the books of magic and the thing that warded them. Antrax. That was the name it had been given many centuries ago. She knew what it was and how it could be overcome. She knew more about it than it knew about her. It had misjudged the extent of the information contained in Kael Elessedil's brain. She thought she even knew how to destroy it, should it become necessary to do so.

But the destruction of Antrax was not her concern. The books of magic were what she wanted, and while she did not know how many there were or where they were hidden, she was confident she could uncover and seize them, which was all she wanted of the machine. She would take the ones she needed, the ones that would give her the most power, and leave the rest for another time. She would use her magic to disrupt Castledown's security, concealing her presence, masking her theft, and hiding her retreat. If everything went as she wished, she would be there and gone again with Antrax none the wiser.

Then she would deal with that boy.

That boy who claimed he was Bek.

Even thinking about him angered her. His words skipped and jumped through her mind like small unruly animals. Even while trying to focus her thinking on what lay ahead, she could not dismiss them. Or him. That boy! His image was constant and tenacious, lingering in a way that came close to causing her panic. It was ridiculous that he should affect her so strongly. She had overcome him easily enough, outsmarted him time and again, stolen away his voice and his talisman, made him her prisoner, and crushed his hopes for convincing her of who he thought he was.

And yet ...

And yet she could not rid herself of his voice, his face, his presence! Working on her like iron tools on hard earth, digging and hoeing and shoveling, breaking up her resistance with their sharp edges, with their implacable certainty. How had he managed that, when no one else could? Others had sought to breach her defenses, to convince her of their rightness, to twist her thinking to suit their own. No one had come close to succeeding, not since she was very little, when the Morgawr . . .

She did not finish the thought, not wanting to travel that road again just now. The boy was no Morgawr, but he might prove to be just as dangerous. His talent for magic was raw and unskilled, but that could change quickly enough. When it did, he would be a formidable adversary. She did not need another of those.

She stopped suddenly, startled by a realization that had escaped her earlier. His magic, rough and undisciplined as it was, had affected her already. Infected her. That was why she could not rid herself of his voice, why she could not banish it. She exhaled sharply, angry all over again. How could she have been so stupid! She used her own voice in the same way, as if speaking in ordinary conversation, but all the while working on the listener's thinking. She had let him talk to her because she had foolishly believed it made no difference what he said. She had missed the point. What he said didn't matter; how he said it, did! She had given him an opportunity he could not possibly have missed and he had used it!

She was shaking with rage. She looked back the way she had come. She was tempted to go back and deal with him. He was too much like her for comfort. Too similar. It was disquieting. It was cause for more concern than she had been willing to give it until now.

For a long time she stood, undecided. Then she shook off her hesitation. What lay ahead was what mattered most. The boy was helpless. He was not going to cause problems before she got back. He was not going to do anything but sit and wait.

Hitching up the Sword of Shannara once more, smoothing the angry wrinkles from her pale face, she adjusted the concealing cloak and cowl and continued on into the night.

NINETEEN.

In a maelstrom of jetting fire and clashing steel, Walker fled through the corridors of Castledown. He was under attack from every quarter, fire threads lashing out at him from hidden ports and crevices, creepers converging in droves. They had found him only moments before, while he crept through what seemed an empty pa.s.sageway, and now they were all about him. He had kept them at bay with the Druid fire, but only barely, and the circle was tightening as he tried to fight his way clear, dodging through tunnels and into chambers, out doorways and into corridors, taking every stairway that led up, desperate to regain the surface where he might gain his freedom. He no longer sought to find the books of magic. His plans for that had long since been abandoned. Fatigue and tension had eroded his resolve. He had not slept in so long he could not remember the last time. He had eaten nothing in what seemed like weeks. He kept going out of sheer determination, out of stubbornness, and out of certainty that if he stopped, he would die.

Flattened against a wall, he watched a cl.u.s.ter of fire threads crisscross the pa.s.sageway ahead, blocking his advance. He could not understand it. Whatever he did seemed only to make things worse. No matter how careful he was, he could not elude his pursuers. It was as if they knew what he was going to do before he did it. That should not be possible. He was cloaked in Druid magic, which hid him from everything. His pursuers should not be able to see where he was or what he was about. He should have lost them long ago. Yet there they were, at every turn, at every juncture, waiting on him, striking at him, hemming him in.

He edged back through a doorway that led down a narrow corridor to a larger pa.s.sage. For a moment, the fire threads were left behind. He took deep, life-giving breaths of air, his throat on fire from running, and his chest tight and raw. He tried to think what to do, but his mind would not respond. His thinking, once so precise and clear, had turned muddled and thick. Exhaustion and stress would have contributed to that, but it was something more. He simply could not reason, could not make his thoughts come together coherently, could not consider in a balanced way. He knew to run and he knew to defend himself, but beyond that his mind refused to function. It locked away all thoughts of the past, everything that had led to his present predicament; all of it had turned to vague, surreal memories. Nothing mattered to him anymore. Nothing but the here and now and his battle to stay alive.

He knew it was wrong. Not morally, but rationally-it was wrong. It made no sense that he should think that way. He fought against it, struggled to get a handle on the problem so that he could twist it around and make it right again, but nothing he attempted worked. He was adrift in the moment, with no sense that he could ever get himself out.

There was a stairway at the end of the larger corridor, and he raced to gain it ahead of his pursuers. It led upward toward fresh light, a brightness more genuine than the flameless lamps of his prison. He charged up the stairs into its glow, thinking that at last-at last!-he had found his way free. He gained the head of the stairs and found himself in a cavernous chamber with tall windows opening to blue sky and green trees. His fatigue and despair forgotten, he rushed to the closest one and peered out. There was a forest beyond the wall of the chamber, so close it seemed he could reach out and touch it. Somehow he had fled far enough that he was all the way to the edge of the city. He wheeled about, searching for a door. There was none to be found.

Behind him, he heard the clank and whir of creepers on the stairs. In desperation, he sent the Druid fire lancing into the gla.s.s windows. It struck their clear surface and bounced harmlessly away. Walker stared in disbelief. That wasn't possible. Gla.s.s could not deflect Druid magic. He moved quickly down the line of windows and tried again, on another pane, then a second and third. They, too, held fast.

The creepers appeared at the head of the stairs. He lashed out at them in fury and frustration, burning those closest, sending their sc.r.a.p metal leavings back down the well into the others.

He caught sight of a deep alcove he had missed before. Nestled within its shadowy confines was a small wooden door. He moved quickly toward it, found its lock old and rusted, and burned it away with barely any effort. The door collapsed on its broken hinges, and he kicked it aside, pushing through to the fresh air and sunshine beyond.

A jungle rose all about him, vast and impenetrable, stretching away against the open sky like a wall. He plunged into it, heedless of what waited, knowing only that he had to get away from what followed. Thick gra.s.ses and tangled vines choked off any clear pa.s.sage through the ma.s.sive trees. Walker twisted and fought his way ahead, buoyed by the smell of rotted wood and leaves, by the warm glow of the sun and the feel of soft earth beneath his feet.

Behind him, the city ruins disappeared from view, and he could no longer hear the creepers. He smiled faintly, relief surging through him. It would be all right. Whatever lay ahead couldn't be any worse than what he had escaped.

Then the ground heaved beneath his feet and sent him stumbling away. It settled and heaved again, as if an animal breathing. He tried to get clear of the motion, but it followed, tossing him from one side to the other, almost upending him. The trees began to shiver and the gra.s.ses to wave. Vines reached down, trying to grasp the Druid, to snare him, and he twisted away from them desperately. More waited, and more after that. He was forced to call up the Druid fire once more, burning them away to clear pa.s.sage. The a.s.sault was relentless and purposeful, as if the jungle was determined to devour him. He could not understand it. There was no reason for the attack and no way to explain why or how it was happening.

He fought his way ahead, unable to do anything else, adrift in an undulating sea of green.

In a room of smoky gla.s.s, its walls papered with myriad panels of blinking lights and flashing red numbers, Ahren Elessedil and Ryer Ord Star stared in horror at the limp, motionless form of the missing Druid. He lay on a metal table, bound in place by padded straps fastened about his forehead, throat, waist, ankles, and the wrist of his good arm so that he could not move. Tubes ran to his arm and torso, attached to needles inserted into his veins. Liquids pulsed through the tubes, fed from bottles slung about metal hangers. One tube, the largest, was inserted into his mouth and attached to a bellows that worked slowly and steadily by his side. Machines hemmed him in, all of them blinking with lights and humming with activity. Wires ran to his temples, eyes and throat, heart and loins, even to the fingers of his hand, black snakes ending in suckers fastened to his skin. The wires that trailed from his fingers were attached to their tips by what looked like the ends of gloves, cut away and fitted in place to the second knuckle of each digit. The wires pulsed within clear coverings as they ran from the Druid to a bank of clear gla.s.s containers. Flashes of blue light surged into a reddish liquid, which then flowed on through tubes into ports in the metal walls and recycled back.

Ahren could not make himself move. What was being done to Walker? He leaned closer to look at the Druid's face. Were his eyes gouged out? Had his tongue been removed? He peered down fearfully, but he could not tell. The Druid's eyes were blinkered and his mouth clogged with the tube; everything was obscured. Ahren wanted to rip the tubes out of Walker, to cut loose the straps that secured him. But he sensed that he should not, that by doing so he might injure the Druid. He couldn't be certain, couldn't know by just looking, but he thought that the tubes might be keeping Walker alive.

He looked over at Ryer Ord Star, who was crying soundlessly beside him, her hands closed into fists and pressed against her mouth. She was hunched over and shaking, and he pulled her against him, trying to share with her a rea.s.surance he didn't feel. On the other side of the room, the multilimbed metal attendant moved diligently from panel to panel, studying dials and numbers, touching switches and b.u.t.tons. It seemed to be monitoring things, perhaps studying the Druid's condition, perhaps recording what was happening.

Which was what?

Still hidden away from Antrax and creepers alike within the protective seal of the phoenix stone's magic, Ahren tried to make sense of it. There could be only one explanation. Antrax was siphoning off Walker's magic. It had lured the men and women of the Jerle Shannara to Castledown for precisely that purpose, just as it had lured Kael Elessedil and his Elven command all those years ago. Once Walker was a prisoner, trapped underground and rendered helpless, the milking had begun. Ahren would suffer the same fate, once Antrax found him; he would be drugged and bound and drained of life. He didn't know how the process worked, but he was certain of what it was.

The metal attendant finished its duties and wheeled back toward the door. Ahren pulled Ryer Ord Star out of its way and watched it disappear outside, leaving them alone. He looked around the room, at all the machinery. He could never hope to understand it, to learn enough about it to know how to free the Druid. The technology belonged to another era, and all knowledge of it had been lost for centuries. Ahren felt helpless in the face of that reality.

He bent close to the seer. "I don't know what to do," he admitted softly.

She brushed at her eyes with the heels of her palms, swallowed her tears, and stiffened her body. He released her, waiting to see what she would do-because it was clear she intended to do something.

She took his hand in hers. "Stay close to me. Don't let go." He followed her as she hurried to where Walker lay, easing between the machines, stepping carefully over the wires and tubes. Ahren could see that the Druid was alive. He was breathing and there was a pulse in his neck. His face twitched, as if he dreamed. His skin was bloodless and damp with perspiration. Of course, he was alive. He would have to be alive to be of any use to Antrax.

The Elven Prince fought down his revulsion and fear. Don't let me end up like this, he prayed. Let me die first.

Ryer Ord Star looked over at him. "I have to try to reach him. I have to let him know I'm here."

Turning back to the Druid, she trailed the fingers of her free hand over his face and down his arm to his hand, then back again.

She spent a long time doing that, staring down at him as she did so, looking impossibly small and frail amid the metal banks of machinery. Ahren held her hand tightly in his, remembering her instructions, knowing that he was her lifeline back from wherever she might have to go to try to save the Druid.

"Walker?" she whispered.

There was no response. There was no movement at all that communicated understanding. His chest rose and fell, his pulse beat, and his features twitched. Liquids flowed in and out of his body, and the wires flashed where they connected to the gla.s.s containers. He was lost to them, Ahren thought. Even Ryer Ord Star was not going to be able to get him back.

The seer straightened and brushed at loose strands of her silvery hair. Her face turned slightly toward him. "Let go of me, Ahren," she ordered. "But stay close."

Then she was climbing onto the metal table, easing carefully into the nest of wires and tubes, fitting her slender body to the Druid's, nestling against him as if a child clinging to a parent who slept. The Elf stayed so close to her that he could feel the heat of her body.

"Walker?" she said again. She lifted her hands to his cheeks and turned his head toward her own, snuggling into his shoulder. Her leg fitted itself over his, so that they were intertwined. "Please, Walker," she begged, the words breaking on her lips like shattered gla.s.s.

There was no response. Walker lay as if his body had been drained of all but just enough life to keep death at bay.

"Please, Walker," the seer whispered again, her fingers moving across his face, her eyes closing in concentration. Tears ran down her cheeks once more.

Please, Ahren repeated the word in the silence of his mind, standing over them both, watching helplessly. Come back to us.

Walker fought his way through the writhing tentacles of the jungle vines and gra.s.ses for what seemed an endless amount of time, burning them away to clear a path, fighting for s.p.a.ce to breathe, and still he seemed to get nowhere. The jungle was vast and unchanging, and he could find no distinguishing features to mark his pa.s.sage. In the back of his mind, deep within the hazy thinking that drove him on, he realized that by escaping Castle-down and gaining the jungle, he had merely exchanged one type of maze for another.

Having no other choice, he forced himself to go on. His body ached with fatigue; all he could think about now was finding a place to sleep. He was beginning to hallucinate, to hear voices, to see movement, and to feel the touch of shades that weren't there. The sensations emerged from the green of the jungle, from the emerald sea he sought to swim, reaching out to him. They grew steadily more insistent, so much so that they were soon overshadowing even the plants and trees of the jungle, causing some to fade and others to change their look entirely. Oddly, the attacks on him ended, the vines and gra.s.ses drew back, and the undulations of the earthen floor quieted.

He slowed his ragged advance and looked around, trying to decide what had happened.

He heard someone speak his name.

Walker? Please, Walker.

He recognized the voice, but it was a distant memory he could barely bring into focus. He grasped for it nevertheless, clutching at it as if it were a lifeline. The surging earth was still, and the deep green of the jungle had darkened to something hard and black, a night sky filled with blinking red stars. A face appeared, hazy and indistinct. It was a young woman's face, its thin, frail features framed with long, silver hair. She was so close to him he could feel the softness of her skin, and her breath upon his cheek was a feathery tickle. He felt her arms reach about him, cradling him. Where had she come from to find him, here in this jungle, in the middle of nowhere, a part of this madness?

Walker?

He remembered now. She was Ryer Ord Star. She was the seer he had brought with him on his voyage out of the Four Lands. Of all those who might have found him, she alone had managed to do so. He could not understand it.

Abruptly he was a.s.sailed by a rush of odd sensations, feelings that seemed foreign and wrong to him. At first, he could not identify them, could not trace their source or determine their purpose. He stood motionless and confused in the fading jungle and the descending night with its odd red stars, the young woman clinging to him, the world turned upside down.

Then everything changed in an instant. The jungle was gone. The green of the trees, the blue of the sky, the smell of rotted wood and leaves, the softness of the earth-his entire sense of place and time-disappeared. He was no longer standing upright, but was laid out upon a hard metal surface in a room filled with blinking lights and softly humming machines. Tubes ran from the machines to his body, pumping fluids. Wires attached to his skin snaked everywhere. He did not see this with his eyes. His eyes were blindfolded. He saw it instead with his mind, his Druid senses suddenly come awake from a deep, immobilizing sleep. He saw it the way a dream is seen, except that the dream was of the jungle, of the ruins and the creepers and the fire threads, of everything he had believed to be true.

He remembered then. He knew what had happened, what had been done to him. He understood it all, brought back into reality from drug-induced sleep and nightmarish dreams by the presence of the young woman who lay beside him, by her voice and her touch. She alone had reached him when no one else could. When he lay dying of the bramble poison after Shatterstone and she saved him with her empathic healing, a link had been forged between them. It bound them in an unintended way, through trading life for death and healing for suffering. So it was that she had sensed his need when even he was not aware of it, heard his subconscious call for help, come to him.

She stirred slightly, her fingers trailing down his face like velvet, her warmth infusing him with strength. She called his name softly, repeatedly, still reaching out to him, determined to bring him back from his prison.

When he felt her hand slide over his, cupping it, he lifted his fingers and pressed them against her palm in response.

Ahren missed the movement, his eyes on the Druid's face. But he saw Ryer Ord Star suddenly go very still, her body motionless. Even her fingers stopped tracing lines on Walker's face. He waited for her to speak, to begin moving again, to give him some indication of what was happening. But the seer had turned to stone.

"Ryer?" he whispered.

She made no response. She lay pressed against the Druid as if to become a part of him, her eyes closed and her breathing slowed so completely that he could barely detect it. He thought to touch her, but he was afraid to do so. Something had happened, and whatever it was, she was responding to it in the best way she could. He knew he must not disturb her. He must wait for her. He must be patient.

The minutes ticked by, endless and silent. He bent over her once, trying unsuccessfully to see what was happening. Then he stepped back a pace, as if a measure of distance might give him a better view. Nothing helped. He looked around at the banks of lights and switches, thinking the answer might lie there. If it did, he could not detect it. He looked out through the darkened gla.s.s to the cavernous room beyond, to the banks of spinning disks. Metal attendants moved down the brightly lit aisles, steady and purposeful in their labors. None looked in his direction or seemed in any way aware of what was happening in the room. He listened for a change in the sounds of the machinery, but there was none. Everything seemed the same.

Yet he knew it wasn't.

He did not think that he or Ryer Ord Star had been detected. The concealing haze of the phoenix stone still wrapped them both. If the magic had failed, there would have been some indication of it. If Ryer's presence at the Druid's side had been detected, an alarm would have sounded or flashed. Ahren hugged himself against the chill seeping through his body, against raw impatience and fear. What could he do? What should he do? He had to trust in the magic; it was all he had. That, and his sense of purpose in going there, in agreeing to do something that terrified him, persuaded by the seer that doing anything was better than giving up.

Yet it wasn't even his sense of purpose, he realized. It was hers. She was the one who had wanted to find Walker, who had insisted they find him, who had believed that they must do so if he was to have any chance of escaping Castledown. It seemed that she had been right, that if they hadn't come, Walker would have remained where he was, undiscovered, neither quite dead nor quite alive, neither one thing nor the other, but something in between, something terrible and repulsive and inhuman.

But having found the Druid, how were they supposed to save him? What were they supposed to do? Whatever it was, he did not know if they were equal to the task.

"Ryer?" he said again.

There was no response. What was she doing? He glanced around nervously, aware of how long they had lingered in the room, of how much they were risking. Sooner or later, the magic of the phoenix stone would fail and they would be discovered. Nothing could save them then. Bravery and sense of purpose would count for nothing.

"Ryer!" he hissed.

To his astonishment, she looked up at him, eyes snapping open as if she had come awake suddenly, unexpectedly. There was such unrestrained joy, such boundless hope in her gaze that he was momentarily speechless.

"He's come back!" she breathed softly, tears flooding her eyes. "He's free, Ahren!"

Free of what? Ahren wondered. He didn't look free. But the Elven Prince nodded and smiled as if what she said were so. He reached out to take her arm and help her stand again, but she motioned him away.

"No. Wait. We have to wait. It's not time yet." She closed her eyes and pressed herself tighter against the Druid. "He's going back in. To find Antrax. To find the books of magic. I have to stay with him while he does. I have to be here for him."

She went still again, eyes closing, breathing slowing, hands moving to the Druid's forehead, fingers pressing against his temples. "The machines don't know. We mustn't let them find out. I have to keep them from knowing. Stay close to me, Ahren."

He wasn't sure what she was talking about, what it was she was doing to help Walker, but the urgency in her plea was unmistakable. He stood beside her, beside the Druid, feeling alone and vulnerable and lost, looking down in helpless silence, and waited to find out.

TWENTY.

Surfacing from the stream of drug-induced illusions that Antrax had used to control him, Walker drew on Ryer Ord Star's empathic strength to keep from going under again. He was swimming upstream against a raging tide, but at least he understood what had been done to him. His tumble down the tower chute after escaping the fire threads and the creepers had ended in his loss of consciousness and ultimate imprisonment. He had been drugged and immobilized immediately, then brought to the room to be strapped down and drained of his power. The method was clever and effective: let the victim think himself still free, make him fight to stay that way, and siphon off the power of the magic he used to do so. The tubes that ran to his body fed him liquids and drugs, keeping him alive but dreaming of a life that never was. If not for the seer, he would have remained that way until he died.

His understanding brought no comfort. Kael Elessedil must have spent his days the same way, using the Elfstones over and over, thinking himself free, unable ever to manage to do more than to keep running. He would have lived thirty years like that, until he had grown too old or weak or sick to be of any further use. Then Antrax would have sent him home again, using him one final time, to lure a replacement.

Except that Antrax had gotten lucky. It had succeeded in luring not one, but several, luring to his deadly trap not only the Druid, but Ahren Elessedil, Quentin Leah, and perhaps even Bek Ohmsford, all of whom had command of significant magic. Antrax would have known about them, of course. It would have known from what it had recorded of their efforts to recover the keys on the islands of Flay Creech, Shatterstone, and Mephitic. A machine that built machines, a creation of the technology of the Old World, it had known to test the capabilities of those it sought to snare. That was the reason for luring humans to its lair. That was the purpose for the underground prison. To steal their magic and convert it to the power that fed Antrax. To keep Antrax alive.

Yet perhaps that was only one reason and not the one that mattered most to it. Perhaps it was still searching for those who had created it, waiting for them to come back to claim the treasure they had left it to guard. The books of the Old World. The secrets of another time.

How did he know that? Unconscious and dreaming, how could he know? He knew it in part from what he had deciphered from the map, written in a language the Druid Histories still recorded. He knew it in part from what Ryer Ord Star had communicated to him in bringing him back from his slumber, her words and thoughts revealing his situation. He knew it in part from what he could deduce from the use of the machinery that immobilized and drugged him. He knew it finally from what he was able to intuit. It was enough to keep him from slipping back into his prison, to keep him fixed on what he must do if he was to complete his task in going there-the task that had cost the lives of so many of his companions and might yet, if he was not swift and sure and focused enough, cost him his.

He gathered himself within his body, using his magic to summon his shade and set it free, the way Cogline had done years ago in entering lost Paranor. It was what Allanon had done in his time. There was danger in it. If his body should die, his shade was lost. If he strayed too far or allowed himself to be trapped outside his body, he might never get back again. Yet it was a gamble he must take. He could not free his body from the wires and tubes that linked it to Antrax without triggering alarms that would bring the creepers. There was no reason to free himself if he did not know what to do to stay free. As a shade, he could explore Castledown without Antrax being any the wiser. Ryer Ord Star would keep his body strong and alive and functioning, would keep the machines deceived as to what was happening. She would feed him enough of her empathic healing power to prevent him from slipping back into the deadening dreams. So long as she could do so, nothing would seem any different. So long as the magic of the phoenix stone cloaked the seer, even the eyes of Antrax could not detect her presence. Walker's magic would continue to feed out in small increments, reduced by the absence of real thought, responding out of reflex only. Antrax would not be concerned at the decline in his magic's output right away. Not even for several hours, should it take that long. Time was relative in Castledown. Antrax had lived for more than twenty-five hundred years. A few hours were nothing.

Walker did not consider further what he must do. He went out from his body as a shade, tracking the wires that fed into it back to their source. Penetrating metal, gla.s.s, and stone as if they were air, he sped through the walls of the keep, a silent and invisible presence. He stayed alert for Antrax all the while, wanting to keep it from that room where his body lay, from examining him too closely, from finding out the truth. He surged down conduits and through cl.u.s.ters of wires and metal pieces that conducted electricity and thought, power garnered from magic and converted to use. He seethed at the knowledge of what had been done to the men and women who had been lured there, but stayed focused on what was needed to stop it from happening again.

He found the relays for the security system quickly enough. Eyes of gla.s.s watched from ceilings all through the safehold, mechanical orbs that let Antrax view everything. But of what use were they? Antrax was a machine; it did not need eyes. The eyes, Walker realized with a start, were for the humans who had once controlled Antrax. They served no other purpose now. Antrax would use a more sophisticated system-one of touch and feel and sound and perhaps body heat. Only magic would thwart it, and perhaps not all magic at that.

Where did Antrax dwell within this vast complex? Where did all the information feed?

He tracked it for a time, down lines and through chambers, along corridors and around corners. But one set of relays led to another. One bank of machines was tied to a second. Lines of power opened into new lines, and there was no end of them. Nothing to tell him where to find the start and finish of things.

He tried quieting himself and tracking Antrax by feel. It was not difficult to do. But once again, there seemed to be no start or finish. Antrax was vast and sprawling. It was everywhere at once, all about and seeping through, endless and immutable. Antrax was the safe-hold of Castledown; spread in equal parts throughout, there was no part of the keep that it did not inhabit. It warded everything at once. Walker did not waver from his goal. He had come too far to give up. There was too much at stake and no one else who could do what was needed. Not even . . .

He hesitated. The words were bitter with realities he did not want to face.

Yet what choice did he have?

He finished the sentence in a rush. Not even her.

He must change his thinking, he acknowledged in what, for some, might have been considered an admission of defeat. But Druids dealt with neither victory nor defeat, but with reality and truth. What was fated could not be denigrated or altered by imposition of moral judgment. It was not his mandate. Druids served a higher cause, the preservation and advancement of Mankind and the Races. The Great Wars had reduced civilization to ruins and humans to animals. That must not happen again. The Druid Council had been formed in the time of Galaphile to see that it could not, and every Druid since had worked in furtherance of that end.