He gave them no thought. He had no faculty for thinking. He had nothing left inside but a frantic, desperate need to escape—not so much what pursued him as what he was feeling. His fear. His terror. If he did not escape it, he knew, if he did not run fast enough, it would consume him.
He gained the heights after endless minutes of climbing through the fading afternoon light and the deepening haze of an approaching nightfall. He never stopped to see if he was being pursued, and it was only as Spanner Frew’s big hands reached down to pull him over the lip of the precipice that he realized how quiet it was.
He looked back in wonder. Nothing was behind him, no sign of the lizard, no indication that anything had ever happened. There was no movement, no sound, nothing. The jungle had swallowed it all and gone as still and calm as the surface of the sea after a storm.
Spanner Frew saw his face, and the light in his own eyes darkened. “What happened? Where are the others?”
Redden Alt Mer stared at him, unable to answer. “Dead,” he said finally.
He looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking.
Later that night, when the others were asleep and he was alone again, he resolved to wake his sister and tell her what he had done. He would tell her not just that he had failed to retrieve the crystals or Jahnon Pakabbon and that the men who had gone into the valley with him were dead, but that he had panicked and run. It would be his first step toward recovery, toward finding a way back from the dark place into which he had fallen. He knew he could not live with himself if he did not find a way to face what had happened. It began with telling Rue, from whom he had no secrets, to whom he confided everything. He would not stint in his telling now, casting himself in the most unfavorable light he could imagine. What he had done was unthinkable. He must confess himself to her and seek absolution.
But when he rose and went to her and stood looking down, he imagined what that confession would feel like. He could see her face as she listened to his words, changing little by little, reflecting her loss of pride and trust in him, revealing her distaste for his actions. He could see the way her eyes would darken and veil, hiding feelings she had never before experienced, changing everything between them. Rue, the little sister who had always looked up to him.
He couldn’t bear it. He stood there in the shadows without moving, studying her face, letting the moment pass, and then he left.
Back on deck, well away from where the watch stood at the airship’s bow looking out toward the dark bowl of the valley, he leaned against the masthead and stared up at the hazy night sky. Glimpses of a half-moon and clusters of stars were visible through breaks in the clouds. He watched the way they came and went, thinking of his feckless courage and uncertain resolve.
After a time, he slid down to a sitting position, his back against the roughened timber, and lay his head back. As still as the mast itself, he lost himself in the fury of his bitter self-condemnation, and morning still hours away and redemption still further off, he closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
THIRTEEN
Imprisoned in the bowels of the Morgawr’s flagship, Ahren Elessedil rode out the storm that had brought down the Jerle Shannara. He was not chained to the wall as Bek had been when held prisoner on Black Moclips a day earlier, but left free to wander about the locked room. The storm had caught up to them as they flew north into the interior of the peninsula, snatching at the airship like a giant’s hand, tossing it about, and finally tiring of the game, casting it away. With the room’s solitary window battened down and the door secured, he could see nothing beyond the walls of his prison, but Ahren could feel the storm’s wrath. He could feel how it attacked and played with the airship, how it threatened to reduce her to a shattered heap of wooden splinters and iron fragments. If it did, his troubles would be over.