She paused. “Do you remember when he was trapped on Shatterstone and Bek warned us he needed help? Walker called to him because Bek shares his magic, and he can reach out to Bek when it is needed. A Druid’s tool. But I heard it, too. Walker didn’t call to me, but I heard his voice in my mind, as well. Because we’re linked, Elven Prince. I hear his voice now, except that this time it is meant for me and no other. He speaks to me through images, fragments of what he is experiencing. He is in trouble, trapped underground, beneath these ruins, beneath that tower. He is deep in a maze of catacombs that lie below this city. Castledown is not up here, Elven Prince. It is down there.”
“So the treasure and whatever wards it-“
“Is there, as well, the one secreted away, the other watching everything, controlling what happens aboveground as well as below. Walker tells me this in his images, in my visions and dreams, but in my subconscious, as well. He doesn’t tell me everything, because he does not feel safe doing so. But he tells me what he can, what he must. He is in trouble, and he clings to me as he might a broken spar on a shipwrecked sea. He is adrift and lost, and I am his lifeline back.”
She waited for his response. He did not have one to give. He wasn’t sure if he believed it all or not. She might be confused, misled, or delusional from the events of yesterday afternoon. She seemed lucid and assured, but you couldn’t always tell another person’s state of mind from the way they looked and sounded.
“Is he asking you to come to him?” he said finally.
Suddenly she seemed confused, as if the question had presented a new dilemma for her. “No,” she replied after a moment. “He clings to me without revealing I am here. It is a reaching that asks nothing of me.” Tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
“But I will go to him anyway. I will because I must. There is no one else, no one left but me. And you, if you will go with me.”
He would do no such thing, Ahren thought, certain that it was suicide to go back into the maze under any circumstances. He was filled with dread at the prospect and riddled with fear by his memories of that encounter. He couldn’t help himself. He was still fighting to come to terms with his failure to fight, his abandonment of his friends, and the shame he felt as a result of both. But even his growing desire to redeem himself was not enough to make him go back into that maze. The best he could do for Ryer Ord Star was to convince her she was making a mistake.
“How will you get into that tower?” he asked, looking for a way to reach her.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“If you do get in, how will you find Walker? If he isn’t summoning you, isn’t calling to you, how will you track him?”
“I don’t know.”
“This whole city, ruins and all, is made of stone and metal. There are no tracks to follow. Look at the size of it. If it’s only half this big underground, it will take weeks, maybe even months, to search it all. How are you going to know where to look?”
She was crestfallen, but her lips tightened with resolve. “I don’t know any of this, Elven Prince. I only know I have to try. I have to go to him.”
He felt helpless in the face of her blind determination to go forward, to do what she had set her mind to do no matter the obstacles and complications. He felt as if he was crushing her hopes without persuading her to give them up, so that when all was said and done, she would go anyway, but he would have stripped her of her spirit.
He sat back on the rubble and peered out into the ruined city. It stretched away in the sunlight, vast and broken, its history lost deep in the past with the dead civilization that had occupied it. It was a relic of the Old World, of that time before the Great Wars when science ruled and all of the Races were one. He wondered if any of those who had lived then had foreseen this end to things. He wondered if they had tried to do anything to prevent it.