that if they stopped they might not be able to start again.
Morgan was beginning to despair when the eyes appeared in
front of him. Cat’s eyes, they gleamed in the darkness and then
disappeared.
Morgan came to an immediate stop. “Did you see that? ” he
whispered to Matty Roh.
He felt, rather than saw, her nod. They stood frozen for a
long time, not wanting to move until they knew what was out
there. Those eyes had not belonged to any rat.
Then there was a whisper of water disturbed and a scrape of
boots.
“Morgan? ” someone called softly. “Is that you? ”
It was Damson. Morgan answered, and an instant later she
was hugging him, then Many, telling them she had been look-
ing for them for hours, searching the tunnels from end to end,
trying to find their trail.
“Alone? ” Morgan asked incredulously. He was so relieved
to see her he was almost giddy. “Do you have any food or wa-
ter? ”
She gave them both an aleskin and bread and cheese from
her pack. “I had the Mole to help me,” she said, keeping her
The Talismans of Shannara 263
voice at a whisper. “When you collapsed the ceiling to the
warehouse, a part of the tunnel went with it. Maybe you didn’t
even notice. At any rate, we were cut off from you, and you
ended up going the wrong way.” She shook back her fiery hair
and sighed. “We had to get Padishar and the others out first.
There was no time to look for you then. When they were safe,
the Mole and I came back for you.”
In the darkness to one side, the Mole’s bright eyes blinked
and gleamed. Morgan was dumbfounded. “But how did you
find us? We were completely lost. Damson. How could
you…?”
“You left a trail,” she said, clutching at his arm to slow his
argument.
“A trail? But the rainwater washed everything away!”
She smiled, although she was clearly trying not to. “Not in
the earth, Morgan—in the air.” He shook his head in confu-
sion. “Mole? ” she called. ‘Tell him.”
The Mole’s furry face eased into the light. He blinked al-
most sleepily, and his nose twitched as he sniffed at the High-
lander. “Your smell is very strong,” he said. “All through the
tunnels. Lovely Damson is right. You were easy to track.”
Morgan stared. He could hear Many Roh’s smothered laugh-
ter, and he turned bright red.
They rested only long enough to eat, then set out again, this
time with the Mole as their guide. There were no encounters
with either Federation soldiers or Shadowen wraiths and their
passage was smooth and easy. As he walked, Morgan’s
thoughts wandered into the past and out again, a slow, deliber-
ate journey of self-evaluation. He looked at himself and the
ways he had changed. When he was done, he found he was not
displeased. The lessons he had learned were important ones,
and he was better for having traveled the road that had brought
him north from Lean.
When they emerged from the side of the mountain north, the
skies were clear once more and filled with light from the moon
and stars. The air was rain-washed and smelled of the forest,
and the breeze that blew out of the west was cool and soft as
down. They stood together in grasses still damp with the
264 The Talismans of Shannara
storm, looking out across the plains and hills to the Dragon’s
Teeth and the horizon beyond.
Morgan glanced at Matty Roh and found her studying him,
smiling slightly, her thoughts private and secretive and
strangely compelling. She was plain and pretty, reticent and
forward, and a dozen other contradictions, a paradox of moods
and behavior he did not understand but wanted to. He saw her
in fragments of memory—as’the boy he had believed her to be
at the Whistledown, as the girl with the ruined feet and shat-
tered past at Pirerim Reach, as the deadly quick swordswoman
standing against the Federation and the Shadowen at Tyrsis,
and as the quixotic waif who could be either demon or sprite