His gaze shifted momentarily to Kirisin and then back again to the road. “Michael said once that automatic weapons were our best defense against the militias and the rogue armies and all the rest, but that you shouldn’t let yourself rely on them too heavily. Sooner or later, one of them would fail. If that was all you had, you were dead. He said that we hunted to be sure we had more to work with than guns and armored vehicles. He said that sooner or later a time would come when you had only yourself, so you’d better be ready for when that time came around.”
He gave a quick, hard laugh. “Even that wasn’t enough to save him in the end. He thought it would be, but it wasn’t.”
“Michael was your teacher?” Kirisin asked, wanting now to know something more about Michael, unwilling to let it slide further.
Logan Tom nodded. “That, and much more. My surrogate father. My best friend. My only family.” He took a deep breath and exhaled sharply. “Everything, once.”
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “When I went into the skrail camp to rescue you, I was doing something for myself, too. I was proving to myself that there was more to me than the staff’s magic, that I was more than a Knight of the Word. I had to reassure myself. Michael had warned about relying too heavily on automatic weapons. It’s the same with magic. It’s wrong to rely too much on anything.”
“Like you were telling me earlier,” Kirisin said. “The magic can be dangerous in more ways than you might think. It can undermine you in lots of unexpected ways.”
“The magic hasn’t been too reliable lately,” the other continued. “I thought it was time to make sure I could still get along without it. I needed to test myself. Going in after you in the old way, the way I used to with Michael, was what I thought I needed to do.”
“Well, if you thought it was important, then it probably was,” the boy offered, at the same time wondering if that was really so.
“Maybe. I’m still not sure. You make a choice and it works out and you think it was the right one. But maybe you just got lucky. If you made that choice a second time, you might end up dead.”
There was nothing Kirisin cared to say about that. He decided to leave the matter there, and he turned back to face down the road, looking off into space, seeing things that hadn’t happened yet, but that one day would.
Neither said anything further.
Midday CAME AND WENT, and in the lengthening shadows of the Cintra the afternoon crawled toward another lank, gray evening. Findo Gask stood at the edge of the skrail encampment and watched the sun slide toward the wall of the mountains west. Fifty of his once–men were engaged in cleaning up the mess behind him, diligent servants under the whip and blade of a pair of his newly promoted demon lieutenants. With Delloreen dead and the Klee still in search of the gypsy morph, he had need of new subordinates, of creatures anxious to move up in the pecking order, to take the place of those he had favored before. They lasted only a short while, for the most part, and then they were gone and there were others. They all had the same ambitions, the same central goal–to fawn for his favor while they schemed to replace him. They all wanted the same thing–his power, his status, his rule.
Except for the Klee–which wanted nothing but the opportunities he provided for it–they were all alike.
He thought momentarily of Delloreen. Unlike most of the others, he genuinely regretted losing her. Certainly, he would have had to kill her before much longer in any event, but he had admired her grit and determination. He had enjoyed their verbal sparring; staying alert to her endless machinations had helped keep him sharp. There was no one among the present crop who could scheme as she did and be prepared to back it up with savagery and cruelty, which even he had trouble matching.
The demon called Dariogue wandered over, slouching in that peculiar way it had developed, one leg shorter than the other, neck twice broken and reset, face all smashed in. Findo Gask didn’t like Dariogue much and didn’t trust him at all, but he was the most capable of the bunch.
“It’s done, Master,” his subordinate offered, gesturing vaguely.
“All of them?”
“All, Master.”
“Do we know anything more than we did before about what happened to the boy?”
“No, Master, nothing.”
Findo Gask was not pleased. Not that he had expected Dariogue to be any more successful than himself at finding out how the Elf boy had escaped. Not that he didn’t already have a pretty good idea.
“Let’s have a look, then.”
They started off toward the grove of skeletal trees north of the clearing. Findo Gask was already thinking ahead to his pursuit of the Elf boy. It didn’t matter how he had escaped–or with whom. The end result would be the same. He would track the boy, find him, and extract from him the truth about the whereabouts of the Loden. The boy would have it near him or know where it was; he would have to if he expected to save his people. Culph had been quite clear about how the Elfstone worked. His ideas of manipulating the user remained valuable even though he himself was dead and gone.
Gask frowned on thinking of the deaths of his spies–the old man and the Tracker. How had the boy managed to kill not one, but two demons? He must have access to a magic Findo Gask did not yet know of; he would have to be cautious. The boy was capable of more than any of them had believed. The boy was dangerous.
“Here, Master,” Dariogue advised, breaking into his musings.
He looked to where the other was pointing. The broken bodies of the minder and twenty–five skrails dangled from the limbs of the trees to which they had been nailed. They looked vaguely like bats. Or strange decorations for a pagan celebration.
The old man studied them with his cold, empty eyes, and was satisfied. Failure of the sort that had occurred here would not be tolerated.
“We’re leaving,” he said to Dariogue. “Send me something that can track the boy. Blood soaks or huntrys should do. Then bring up the rest of the army. March them by these trees so that they can see what happens when I am disappointed.”
An object lesson, he thought as he brushed the other off with a wave of his hand. But it was nothing compared with the lesson he intended to teach the Elf boy.
TWENTY-TWO
A NGEL PEREZ stalked through the center of the refugee children’s camp, radiating anger and dismay with every step. She walked purposefully, giving no sense that she had any doubt at all about where she was going. She had been in the camp for only three days, but that was enough time for her to find her way about. The camp sprawled, and its configuration changed continuously as its inhabitants were shifted from one care group and one location to the next. But Angel was a quick study. Besides, it didn’t really matter where she was going. It only mattered that she was able to find the person she was looking for.
She heard Helen Rice before she saw her, and she saw her just about where she expected, down by the bridge where the work was going on, engaged in discussions with the demolition experts and the sappers. Helen was animated as she issued instructions and responded to questions, a small dynamo of energy. Nothing had changed since their time together at the Anaheim compound. Helen was still a take–charge kind of person, a born leader able to adjust to what the circumstances required. Even when she didn’t possess knowledge specific enough to provide a solution, she knew how to find those who did and enlist them to her cause. Like she was doing now, as she set about preparing for the demon army that had pursued them all the way north from California.
Angel stopped a short distance away. She wanted to talk to Helen alone. The information she carried was not meant to be general knowledge. Not yet. It would happen soon enough, no matter what precautions they took. But there was no need to rush things.