Ryer stopped crying, disengaged from his arms, and looked directly at him. “Are you still coming with me?”
He nodded. He had never thought to do otherwise.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect you to honor your promise, not after knowing that I-“
“Stop it,” he interrupted quickly, remonstratively. “Don’t say any more.”
She studied him a moment, then leaned forward to kiss his cheek. In the warmth and softness of her lips, he could feel a measure of his self-worth and respect return.
I hey rose then and continued through Castledown’s endless corridors and chambers, shrouded by the magic of the phoenix stone, guided by their instincts and need. The young seer was still warring with her inner demons, but her pale, ethereal features were tight with resolve. She had taken Ahren’s hand again, even though they had determined she did not need to do so. Ahren was glad. Her touch did at least as much for him as his did for her. He felt as if they were children lost in a dark forest, with night coming on and wolves all about, blindly trusting in a talisman he neither understood nor controlled. The magic of the phoenix stone was protecting them, but how much longer would it last? He did not want to be caught unprepared or short of their goal.
Or goals, he corrected himself. There was Walker on the one hand and the missing Elfstones on the other. He had not spoken of the latter to Ryer Ord Star, but once they found the Druid, he intended to search for the Stones. It might be that he was asking too much. It was possible that after locating Walker, the magic would vanish. He had no way of knowing. He could only plan for contingencies and hope and do the best he could with whatever happened.
They walked for a long time, but encountered neither creepers nor fire threads. If Antrax was hunting for them, it was doing so another way. They were descending at a steady rate now, down ramps and stairways alike, farther underground than they had gone before. It made sense to Ahren that Antrax would keep the magic it hoarded deeper down and better hidden. He thought there was a better than even chance that Walker would be there, too.
Ahead, not far away, machinery thrummed and chugged softly, a steady cadence, one that reverberated through the steel of the tunnels into his bones.
Then the corridor branched left and right into a series of arched, doorless openings, all of them leading onto a catwalk that overlooked a cavernous room filled with huge metal cabinets and clusters of blinking lights set into panels. Wheels spun behind smoky windows; brilliant silver disks reflected the soft light of flameless lamp tubes that ran up and down the walls and across the room’s high ceiling. The hum of machinery was everywhere, punctuated by beeps and chirps and other strange sounds, all of it coming from the chamber below.
It was an eerie sight, a surreal vision of something that hadn’t existed for thousands of years beyond these walls. They paused on the catwalk, looking down at the contents of the room, searching for something that made sense. Nothing they saw was familiar to either of them, but an instant later Ryer gasped sharply, spoke Walker’s name, and pulled on Ahren’s hand, dragging him after her toward a metal stairway leading down. He went without questioning her, already knowing what was happening. They descended the stairs and made their way through the maze of fifteen-foot-high cabinets filled with rows of spinning silver disks. At least some of the machinery they had heard from the catwalk was behind the panels. Ahren glanced up at their smooth surfaces, certain they had come out of the Old World, wondering if they contained the magic the company of the Jerle Shannara had come searching for. What sort of magic, he wondered, is kept in a metal shell of spinning disks and blinking lights? It was books they had come to find, but there were no books here-at least, none that he could see. Perhaps they were deeper underground, and the cabinets and their machinery served as protectors of some sort.