And then suddenly, near dawn, the Rake disappeared. He had glimpsed it only minutes earlier as it skittered away down a street in the central section of the city, rather close to where the others of the company were hiding. He could hear its legs and tentacles scrape, its body turn, and then there was nothing. Silence. Pe Ell slowed, stopped, and listened. Still there was nothing. He moved ahead cautiously, following a narrow alleyway until it emerged into a street. Still concealed within the shadows of the alleyway, he peered out. Left, the street tunneled into the gloom past rows of buildings that stretched skyward, flat faced and unrevealing. Right, the street was bisected by a cross street and bracketed by twin towers with huge, shadowed foyers that disappeared into complete blackness.
Pe Ell searched the street both ways, listened again, and began to fume. How could he have lost it so suddenly? How could it have just disappeared?
He was aware again of a brightening of the air, a hint of the sun’s pending emergence into the world beyond the clouds and mist and gloom of Eldwist. It was daybreak. The Rake would go into hiding now. Perhaps it already had. Pe Ell frowned, then scanned the impenetrable shadows of the buildings across the way. Was that its hiding place, he wondered?
He started from his own concealment for a look when that sixth sense he relied upon so heavily warned him what was happening. The Rake was in hiding all right, but not for the reason he had first imagined. It was in hiding because it was setting a trap. It knew the intruders were still loose in the city, somewhere close. It knew they would have to kill it or it would kill them. So on the chance that they had followed, it had set a trap. It was waiting now to see if anything fell into it.
Pe Ell felt a rush of cold determination surge through him as he shrank back into the gloom of the alleyway. Cat and mouse, that’s all it was. He smiled and waited.
Long minutes passed and there was only silence. Pe Ell continued to wait.
Then abruptly the Rake emerged from the shadows of the building across the street to the left, dancing almost gracefully into view, body poised. Pe Ell held his breath as the monster tested the air, turning slowly about. Satisfied, it moved on. Pe Ell exhaled slowly and followed.
It was growing brighter now, and the night air evolved into a sort of gray haze that reflected the dampness so that it became even more difficult to see what lay ahead. Yet Pe Ell did not slow, relying on his hearing to warn him of any danger, always conscious of the sound of the Rake moving ahead. It was no longer worrying about pursuit. Its night’s work was finished; it was headed home.
To the lair of the Stone King, Pe Ell thought, impatient for the first time since his hunt had begun.
He caught up with the Rake as it slowed before a flat-sided building with a shadowed alcove thirty feet high and twice that across. The Rake’s feelers probed the stone at the top of the alcove, and a section of the wall within swung silently away, lifting into the gloom. Without a backward glance, the Rake slipped through the opening. When it was inside, the wall swung back into place.
Got you! Pe Ell thought fiercely.
Nevertheless, he stood where he was for almost an hour afterward, waiting to see if anything else would happen, making certain that this was not another trap. When he was sure that it was safe, he emerged and darted along the edge of the buildings, following the walkways until he stood before the hidden entry.
He took a long time to study it. The stone facing was flat and smooth. He could trace the seams of the opening from within the frame of the alcove, but he would never have noticed the door without first knowing it was there. Far above him, just visible against the gray of the stone, he could detect a kind of lever. A release, he thought triumphantly. A way in.
He stood there for a while longer, thinking. Then he moved away, searching the buildings across the street for a hiding place. Once safely concealed, he would sit down and figure out a way to trip that lever. Then he would sleep again until it was dark. When night came, he would wake and wait for the Rake to go out.
When it did, he would go in.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Night lay across the Westland in a humid, airless pall, the heat of the day lingering with sullen determination long after the sun’s fiery ball had disappeared into the horizon. Darkness disdained to offer even the smallest measure of relief, empty of cool breezes, devoid of any suggestion of a drop in the temperature. The day’s swelter was rooted in the earth, a stubborn presence that would not be dispelled, breathing fire out of its concealment like an underground dragon. Insects buzzed and hummed and flew in erratic, random bursts. Trees were heat-ravaged giants, drooping and exhausted. A full moon crawled across the southern horizon, gibbous and shimmering against the haze. The only sounds that broke the stillness were those dredged from the throats of hunted creatures an instant before their hunters silenced them forever.
Even on the hottest of nights, the game of life and death played on.
Wren Ohmsford and the big Rover Garth turned their horses down the rutted trail that led into the town of Grimpen Ward. It had taken them a week to journey there from the Tirfing, navigating hidden passes of the Irrybis that only the Rovers knew, following the trails of the Wilderun north and west, shying well clear of the treacherous Shroudslip, winding at last over Whistle Ridge and down into the dank mire of the Westland’s most infamous lair.
When there was nowhere else to run or hide, it was said, there was always Grimpen Ward. Thieves, cutthroats, and misfits of all sorts came to the outlaw town to find refuge. Walled away by the Irrybis and the Rock Spur, swallowed up by the teeming jungle of the Wilderun, Grimpen Ward was a haven for renegades of every ilk.
It was also a deathtrap from which few escaped, a pit of vipers preying on one another because there was no one else, devouring their own kind with callous indifference and misguided amusement, feeding in a frenzy of need and boredom. Of those who came to Grimpen Ward seeking to stay alive, most ended up disappointed.
The town grew visible through the trees, and Wren and Garth slowed. Lights burned through the window glass of buildings black with grime, their shutters sagging and broken, their walls and roofs and porches so battered and ravaged by time and neglect that they seemed in immediate danger of collapse. Doors stood ajar in a futile effort to dispel the heat trapped within. Laughter broke sharply against the forest silence, rough, forced, desperate. Glasses clinked and sometimes shattered. Now and again, a scream sounded, solitary and disembodied.
Wren glanced at Garth and then signed We’ll leave the horses hidden here. Garth nodded. They turned their mounts into the trees, rode them some distance from the road until a suitable clearing was found, and tethered them in a stand of birch.
“Softly,” Wren whispered, fingers moving.
They worked their way back to the roadway and continued down. Dust rose from beneath their boots and settled in a dark sheen on their faces. They had been riding all day, a slow journey through impossible heat, unable to force the pace without risking the health of their horses. The Wilderun was a morass of midsummer dampness and decay, the wood of the forests rotting into mulch, the ground soft and yielding and treacherous, the streams and drinking pools dried or poisoned, and the air a furnace that parched and withered. No matter how terrible the heat might be in other parts of the Four Lands, it was always twice as bad here. A stagnant, inhospitable cesspool, the Wilderun had long been regarded as a place to which the discards of the population of the Four Lands were welcome.