to continue to run and hide, to scurry from one hole to the
next, and to wait for an opportunity to arise or a means to
present itself that would at last set them free.
They turned down a side street dappled with shards of light
cast through the slats of shutters closed against windows high
on a back wall, hearing laughter and the clink of drinking glasses
from the alehouse within. Garbage littered the street, damp and
stinking. Tyrsis wore her cheapest perfume in this quarter, and
the smell of her body was rank and shameless where the poor
and the homeless had been crowded away by the occupiers.
Once a proud lady, she was used up and cast off now, a chattel
to be treated as the Federation wished, a spoil of a war that had
been over before it had begun.
Damson paused, searched carefully the empty swath of a
lighted crossing, listened momentarily for sounds that didn’t be-
long, then took him swiftly across. They passed down a second
side street, this one as silent and musty as an unopened closet,
then through an alcove and into an alley that connected to an-
other street. Par was thinking of the Sword of Shannara again,
wondering how he could discover if it was real and what test he
could put it to that would determine the truth.
“Here,” Damson whispered, turning him abruptly through
the broken opening of an ancient board wall.
They stood in a barnlike room thick with gloom, the rafters
overhead barely visible in the faint light of other buildings where
it seeped through cracks in the split, dry boards of the walls.
Machines hunkered down like animals crouched to spring, and
rows of bins yawned empty and black. Damson steered him
across the room, their boots crunching on stone and straw in
the deep silence. Close to the back wall she stopped, reached
down, seized an iron ring embedded in the floor, and pulled free
a trapdoor. A glimmer of light showed stairs leading down intO
blackness.
“You first,” she ordered, motioning. “Just inside, then
stop.”
He did as he was told, listened to the sound of her footsteps
as she followed, then of the trapdoor as it closed behind them.
They stood listening for a moment, then she pushed carefullY
past and fumbled quietly in the dark. A spark struck, a flame
appeared, and the pitch of a torch caught and began to burn-
Light filled the chamber in which they stood, weak and hazy,
revealing a low cellar filled with old iron-banded casks and dis-
integrating crates. She gestured for him to follow, and they
moved ahead through the debris. The cellar stretched on for a
time, then ended at a passageway. Damson bent low against the
black, thrust the torch ahead of her, and entered. The passage
took them down a series of intersecting corridors to a room that
had once been a sleeping chamber. A worn bed was positioned
against one wall, a table and chairs against another. A second
passage led out the other side and back into blackness. Where
the torchlight ended, Par could just make out the beginning of
a set of ancient stairs.
“We should be safe here for tonight, maybe longer,” she
advised, turning now so that the light caught her features, the
bright gleam of her green eyes, the softness of her smile. “It’s
not much, is it?”
“If it’s safe, it’s everything,” he replied, smiling back. “Where
do the stairs lead?”
“Back to the street. But the door is locked from the outside.
We would have to break it down if we needed to escape that
way, if we were unable to use the cellar entry. Still, that’s at
least a measure of protection against being trapped. And no one
will think to look where the lock is old and rusted and still in
place.”
He nodded, took the torch from her hand, looked about
momentarily, then carried it to a ruined lamp bracket and
jammed it in place. “Home it is,” he declared, unslinging the
Sword of Shannara and leaning it against the bed. His eyes lin-
gered momentarily on the crest graven in its hilt, the upraised