The Scions of Shannara

Chapter Two

Par Ohmsford stood in the rear doorway of the Blue Whisker Ale House and stared down the darkened tunnel of the narrow street that ran between the adjoining buildings into the glimmer of Varfleet’s lights. The Blue Whisker was a ramshackle, sprawling old building with weathered board walls and a wood shingle roof and looked for all the world as if once it had been someone’s barn. It had sleeping rooms upstairs over the serving hall and storerooms in the back. It sat at the base of a block of buildings that formed a somewhat lopsided U, situated on a hill at the western edge of the city.

Par breathed deeply the night air, savoring its flavors. City smells, smells of life, stews with meats and vegetables laced with spice, sharp-flavored liquors and pungent ales, perfumes that scented rooms and bodies, leather harness, iron from forges still red with coals kept perpetually bright, the sweat of animals and men in close quarters, the taste of stone and wood and dust, mingling and mixing, each occasionally breaking free—they were all there. Down the alleyway, beyond the slat-boarded, graffiti-marked backs of the shops and businesses, the hill dropped away to where the central part of the city lay east. An ugly, colorless gathering of buildings in daylight, a maze of stone walls and streets, wooden siding and pitch-sealed roofs, the city took on a different look at night. The buildings faded into the darkness and the lights appeared, thousands of them, stretching away as far as the eye could see like a swarm of fireflies. They dotted the masked landscape, flickering in the black, trailing lines of gold across the liquid skin of the Mermidon as it passed south. Varfleet was beautiful now, the scrubwoman became a fairy queen, transformed as if by magic.

Par liked the idea of the city being magic. He liked the city in any case, liked its sprawl and its meld of people and things, its rich mix of life. It was far different from his home of Shady Vale, nothing like the forested hamlet that he had grown up in. It lacked the purity of the trees and streams, the solitude, the sense of timeless ease that graced life in the Vale. It knew nothing of that life and couldn’t have cared less. But that didn’t matter to Par. He liked the city anyway. There was nothing to say that he had to choose between the two, after all. There wasn’t any reason he couldn’t appreciate both.

Coll, of course, didn’t agree. Coll saw it quite differently. He saw Varfleet as nothing more than an outlaw city at the edge of Federation rule, a den of miscreants, a place where one could get away with anything. In all of Callahorn, in all of the entire Southland for that matter, there was no place worse. Coll hated the city.

Voices and the clink of glasses drifted out of the darkness behind him, the sounds of the ale house breaking free of the front room momentarily as a door was opened, then disappearing again as it was closed. Par turned. His brother moved carefully down the hallway, nearly faceless in the gloom.

“It’s almost time,” Coll said when he reached him.

Par nodded. He looked small and slender next to Coll, who was a big, strong youth with blunt features and mud-colored hair. A stranger would not have thought them brothers. Coll looked a typical Valeman, tanned and rough, with enormous hands and feet. The feet were an ongoing joke. Par was fond of comparing them to a duck’s. Par was slight and fair, his own features unmistakably Elven from the sharply pointed ears and brows to the high, narrow bones of his face. There was a time when the Elven blood had been all but bred out of the line, the result of generations of Ohmsfords living in the Vale. But four generations back (so his father had told him) his great-great grandfather had returned to the Westland and the Elves, married an Elven girl, and produced a son and a daughter. The son had married another Elven girl, and for reasons never made clear the young couple who would become Par’s great-grandparents had returned to the Vale, thereby infusing a fresh supply of Elven blood into the Ohmsford line. Even then, many members of the family showed nothing of their mixed heritage; Coll and his parents Jaralan and Mirianna were examples. Par’s bloodlines, on the other hand, were immediately evident.

Being recognizable in this way, unfortunately, was not necessarily desirable. While in Varfleet, Par disguised his features, plucking his brows, wearing his hair long to hide his ears, shading his face with darkener. He didn’t have much choice. It wasn’t wise to draw attention to one’s Elven lineage these days.

“She has her gown nicely in place tonight, doesn’t she?” Coll said, glancing off down the alleyway to the city beyond. “Black velvet and sparkles, not a thread left hanging. Clever girl, this city. Even the sky is her friend.”

Par smiled. My brother, the poet. The sky was clear and filled with the brightness of a tiny crescent moon and stars. “You might come to like her if you gave her half a chance.”

“Me?” Coll snorted. “Not likely. I’m here because you’re here. I wouldn’t stay another minute if I didn’t have to.”

“You could go if you wanted.”

Coll bristled. “Let’s not start again, Par. We’ve been all through that. You were the one who thought we ought to come north to the cities. I didn’t like the idea then, and I don’t like it any better now. But that doesn’t change the fact that we agreed to do this together, you and me. A fine brother I’d be if I left you here and went back to the Vale now! In any case, I don’t think you could manage without me.”

“All right, all right, I was just...” Par tried to interrupt.

“Attempting to have a little fun at my expense!” Coll finished heatedly. “You have done that on more than one occasion of late. You seem to take some delight in it.”

“That is not so.”

Coll ignored him, gazing off into the dark.

“I would never pick on anyone with duck feet.”

Coll grinned in spite of himself. “Fine talk from a little fellow with pointed ears. You should be grateful I choose to stay and look after you!”

Par shoved him playfully, and they both laughed. Then they went quiet, staring at each other in the dark, listening to the sounds of the ale house and the streets beyond. Par sighed. It was a warm, lazy midsummer night that made the cool, sharp days of the past few weeks seem a distant memory. It was the kind of night when troubles scatter and dreams come out to play.

“There are rumors of Seekers in the city,” Coll informed him suddenly, spoiling his contentment.

“There are always rumors,” he replied.

“And the rumors are often true. Talk has it that they plan to snatch up all the magic-makers, put them out of business and close down the ale houses.” Coll was staring intently at him. “Seekers, Par. Not simple soldiers. Seekers.”

Par knew what they were. Seekers—Federation secret police, the enforcement arm of the Coalition Council’s Lawmakers. He knew.

They had arrived in Varfleet two weeks earlier, Coll and he. They journeyed north from Shady Vale, left the security and familiarity and protective confines of their family home and came into the Borderlands of Callahorn. They did so because Par had decided they must, that it was time for them to tell their stories elsewhere, that it was necessary to see to it that others besides the Vale people knew They came to Varfleet because Varfleet was an open city, free of Federation rule, a haven for outlaws and refugees but also for ideas, a place where people still listened with open minds, a place where magic was still tolerated—even courted. He had the magic and, with Coll in tow, he took it to Varfleet to share its wonder. There was already magic aplenty being practiced by others, but his was of a far different sort. His was real.

They found the Blue Whisker the first day they arrived, one of the biggest and best known ale houses in the city. Par persuaded the owner to hire them in the first sitting. He had expected as much. After all, he could persuade anyone to do just about anything with the wishsong.

Real magic. He mouthed the words without speaking them.

There wasn’t much real magic left in the Four Lands, not outside the remote wilderness areas where Federation rule did not yet extend. The wishsong was the last of the Ohmsford magic. It had been passed down through ten generations to reach him, the gift skipping some members of his family altogether, picking and choosing on a whim. Coll didn’t have it. His parents didn’t. In fact, no one in the Ohmsford family had had it since his great-grandparents had returned from the Westland. But the magic of the wishsong had been his from the time he was born, the same magic that had come into existence almost three hundred years ago with his ancestor Jair. The stories told him this, the legends. Wish for it, sing for it. He could create images so lifelike in the minds of his listeners that they appeared to be real. He could create substance out of air.

That was what had brought him to Varfleet. For three centuries the Ohmsford family had handed down stories of the Elven house of Shannara. The practice had begun with Jair. In truth, it had begun long before that, when the stories were not of the magic because it had not yet been discovered but of the old world before its destruction in the Great Wars and the tellers were the few who had survived that frightening holocaust. But Jair was the first to have use of the wishsong to aid in the telling, to give substance to the images created from his words, to make his tales come alive in the minds of those who heard them. The tales were of the old days: of the legends of the Elven house of Shannara; of the Druids and their Keep at Paranor; of Elves and Dwarves; and of the magic that ruled their lives. The tales were of Shea Ohmsford and his brother Flick and their search to find the Sword of Shannara; of Wil Ohmsford and the beautiful, tragic Elven girl Amberle and their struggle to banish the Demon hordes back into the Forbidding; of Jair Ohmsford and his sister Brin and their journey into the fortress of Graymark and confrontation with the Mord Wraiths and the Ildatch; of the Druids Allanon and Bremen; of the Elven King Eventine Elessedil; of warriors such as Balinor Buckhannah and Stee Jans; of heroes many and varied Those who had command of the wishsong made use of its magic. Those who did not relied on simple words. Ohmsfords had come and gone, many carrying the stories with them to distant lands. Yet for three generations now, no member of the family had told the stories outside the Vale. No one had wanted to risk being caught.

It was a considerable risk. The practice of magic in any form was outlawed in the Four Lands—or at least anywhere the Federation governed, which was practically the same thing. It had been so for the past hundred years. In all that time no Ohmsford had left the Vale. Par was the first. He had grown tired of telling the same stones to the same few listeners over and over. Others needed to hear the stories as well, to know the truth about the Druids and the magic, about the struggle that preceded the age in which they now lived. His fear of being caught was outweighed by the calling he felt. He made his decision despite the objections of his parents and Coll. Coll, ultimately, decided to come with him—just as he always did whenever he thought Par needed looking after. Varfleet was to be the beginning, a city where magic was still practiced in minor forms, an open secret defying intervention by the Federation. Such magic as was found in Varfleet was small stuff really and scarcely worth the trouble. Callahorn was only a protectorate of the Federation, and Varfleet so distant as to be almost into the free territories. It was not yet army-occupied. The Federation so far had disdained to bother with it.

But Seekers? Par shook his head. Seekers were another matter altogether. Seekers only appeared when there was a serious intent on the part of the Federation to stamp out a practice of magic. No one wanted any part of them.

“It grows too dangerous for us here,” Coll said, as if reading Par’s mind. “We will be discovered.”

Par shook his head. “We are but one of a hundred practicing the art,” he replied. “Just one in a city of many.”

Coll looked at him. “One of a hundred, yes. But the only one using real magic’

Par looked back. It was good money the ale house paid them, the best they had ever seen. They needed it to help with the taxes the Federation demanded. They needed it for their family and the Vale. He hated to give up because of a rumor.

His jaw tightened. He hated to give up even more because it meant the stories must be returned to the Vale and kept hidden there, untold to those who needed to hear. It meant that the repression of ideas and practices that clamped down about the Four Lands like a vise had tightened one turn more.

“We have to go,” Coll said, interrupting his thoughts.

Par felt a sudden rush of anger before realizing his brother was not saying they must go from the city, but from the doorway of the ale house to the performing stage inside. The crowd would be waiting. He let his anger slip away and felt a sadness take its place.

“I wish we lived in another age,” he said softly. He paused, watching the way Coll tensed. “I wish there were Elves and Druids again. And heroes. I wish there could be heroes again—even one.”

He trailed off, thinking suddenly of something else.

Coll shoved away from the doorjamb, clapped one big hand to his brother’s shoulder, turned him about and started him back down the darkened hallway. “If you keep singing about it, who knows? Maybe there will be.”

Par let himself be led away like a child. He was no longer thinking about heroes though, or Elves or Druids, or even about Seekers.

He was thinking about the dreams.

They told the story of the Elven stand at Halys Cut, how Eventine Elessedil and the Elves and Stee Jans and the Legion Free Corps fought to hold the Breakline against the onslaught of the Demon hordes. It was one of Par’s favorite stories, the first of the great Elven battles in that terrible Westland war. They stood on a low platform at one end of the main serving room, Par in the forefront, Coll a step back and aside, the lights dimmed against a sea of tightly packed bodies and watchful eyes. While Coll narrated the story, Par sang to provide the accompanying images, and the ale house came alive with the magic of his voice. He invoked in the hundred or more gathered the feelings of fear, anger and determination that had infused the defenders of the Cut. He let them see the fury of the Demons; he let them hear their battle cries. He drew them in and would not let them go. They stood in the pathway of the Demon assault. They saw the wounding of Eventine and the emergence of his son Ander as leader of the Elves. They watched the Druid Allanon stand virtually alone against the Demon magic and turn it aside. They experienced life and death with an intimacy that was almost terrifying.

When Coll and he were finished, there was stunned silence, then a wild thumping of ale glasses and cheers and shouts of elation unmatched in any performance that had gone before. It seemed for a moment that those gathered might bring the rafters of the ale house down about their ears, so vehement were they in their appreciation. Par was damp with his own sweat, aware for the first time how much he had given to the telling. Yet his mind was curiously detached as they left the platform for the brief rest they were permitted between tellings, thinking still of the dreams.

Coll stopped for a glass of ale by an open storage room and Par continued down the hallway a short distance before coming to an empty barrel turned upright by the cellar doors. He slumped down wearily, his thoughts tight.

He had been having the dreams for almost a month now, and he still didn’t know why.

The dreams occurred with a frequency that was unsettling. They always began with a black-cloaked figure that rose from a lake, a figure that might be Allanon, a lake that might be the Hadeshorn. There was a shimmering of images in his dreams, an ethereal quality to the visions that made them difficult to decipher. The figure always spoke to him, always with the same words. “Come to me; you are needed. The Four Lands are in gravest danger; the magic is almost lost. Come now, Shannara child.”

There was more, although the rest varied. Sometimes there were images of a world born of some unspeakable nightmare. Sometimes there were images of the lost talismans—the Sword of Shannara and the Elfstones. Sometimes there was a call for Wren as well, little Wren, and sometimes a call for his uncle Walker Boh. They were to come as well. They were needed, too.

He had decided quite deliberately after the first night that the dreams were a side effect of his prolonged use of the wishsong. He sang the old stories of the Warlock Lord and the Skull Bearers, of Demons and Mord Wraiths, of Allanon and a world threatened by evil, and it was natural that something of those stories and their images would carry over into his sleep. He had tried to combat the effect by using the wishsong on lighter tellings, but it hadn’t helped. The dreams persisted. He had refrained from telling Coll, who would have simply used that as a new excuse to advise him to stop invoking the magic of the wishsong and return to the Vale.

Then, three nights ago, the dreams had stopped coming as suddenly as they had started. Now he was wondering why. He was wondering if perhaps he had mistaken their origin. He was considering the possibility that instead of being self-induced, they might have been sent.

But who would have sent them?

Allanon? Truly Allanon, who was three hundred years dead?

Someone else?

Something else? Something that had a reason of its own and meant him no good?

He shivered at the prospect, brushed the matter from his mind, and went quickly back up the hallway to find Coll.

The crowd was even larger for the second telling, the walls lined with standing men who could not find chairs or benches to sit upon. The Blue Whisker was a large house, the front serving room over a hundred feet across and open to the rafters above a stringing of oil lamps and fish netting that lent a sort of veiled appearance that was apparently designed to suggest intimacy. Par couldn’t have tolerated much more intimacy, so close were the patrons of the ale house as they pressed up against the platform, some actually sitting on it now as they drank. This was a different group from earlier, although the Valeman was hard pressed to say why. It had a different feel to it, as if there was something foreign in its makeup. Coll must have felt it, too. He glanced over at Par several times as they prepared to perform, and there was uneasiness mirrored in his dark eyes.

A tall, black-bearded man wrapped in a dun-colored forest cloak waded through the crowd to the platform’s edge and eased himself down between two other men. The two looked up as if they intended to say something, then caught a close glimpse of the other’s face and apparently thought better of it. Par watched momentarily and looked away. Everything felt wrong.

Coll leaned over as a rhythmic clapping began. The crowd was growing restless. “Par, I don’t like this. There’s something...”

He didn’t finish. The owner of the ale house came up and told them in no uncertain terms to begin before the crowd got out of hand and started breaking things. Coll stepped away wordlessly. The lights dimmed, and Par started to sing. The story was the one about Allanon and the battle with the Jachyra. Coll began to speak, setting the stage, telling those gathered what sort of day it was, what the glen was like into which the Druid came with Brin Ohmsford and Rone Leah, how everything suddenly grew hushed. Par created the images in the minds of his listeners, instilling in them a sense of anxiety and expectation, trying unsuccessfully not to experience the same feelings himself.

At the rear of the room, men were moving to block the doors and windows, men suddenly shed of cloaks and dressed all in black. Weapons glittered. There were patches of white on sleeves and breasts, insignia of some sort. Par squinted, Elven vision sharp.

A wolf’s head.

The men in black were Seekers.

Par’s voice faltered and the images shimmered and lost their hold. Men began to grumble and look about. Coll stopped his narration. There was movement everywhere. There was someone in the darkness behind them. There was someone all about.

Coll edged closer protectively.

Then the lights rose again, and a wedge of the black-garbed Seekers pushed forward from the front door. There were shouts and groans of protest, but the men making them were quick to move out of the way. The owner of the Blue Whisker tried to intervene, but was shoved aside.

The wedge of men came to a stop directly in front of the platform. Another group blocked the exits. They wore black from head to toe, their faces covered above their mouths, their wolf head insignia gleaming. They were armed with short swords, daggers, and truncheons, and their weapons were held ready. They were a mixed bunch, big and small, stiff and bent, but there was a feral look to all of them, as much in the way they held themselves as in their eyes.

Their leader was a huge, rangy man with tremendously long arms and a powerful frame. There was a craggy cast to his face where the mask ended, and a half-beard of coarse reddish hair covered his chin. His left arm was gloved to the elbow.

“Your names?” he asked. His voice was soft, almost a whisper.

Par hesitated. “What is it that we have done?”

“Is your name Ohmsford?” The speaker was studying him intently.

Par nodded. “Yes. But we haven’t...”

“You are under arrest for violating Federation Supreme Law,” the soft voice announced. There was a grumbling sound from the patrons. “You have used magic in defiance of...”

“They was just telling stories!” a man called out from a few feet away. One of the Seekers lashed out swiftly with his truncheon and the man collapsed in a heap.

“You have used magic in defiance of Federation dictates and thereby endangered the public.” The speaker did not even bother to glance at the fallen man. “You will be taken

He never finished. An oil lamp dropped suddenly from the center of the ceiling to the crowded ale house floor and exploded in a shower of flames. Men sprang to their feet, howling. The speaker and his companions turned in surprise. At the same moment the tall, bearded man who had taken a seat on the platform’s edge earlier came to his feet with a lunge, vaulted several other astonished patrons, and slammed into the knot of Seekers, spilling them to the floor. The tall man leaped onto the stage in front of Par and Coll and threw off his shabby cloak to reveal a fully armed hunter dressed in forest green. One arm lifted, the hand clenched in a fist.

“Free-born!” he shouted into the confusion.

It seemed that everything happened at once after that. The decorative netting, somehow loosened, followed the oil lamp to the floor, and practically everyone gathered at the Blue Whisker was suddenly entangled. Yells and curses rose from those trapped. At the doors, green-clad men pounced on the bewildered Seekers and hammered them to the floor. Oil lamps were smashed, and the room was plunged into darkness.

The tall man moved past Par and Coll with a quickness they would not have believed possible. He caught the first of the Seekers blocking the back entrance with a sweep of one boot, snapping the man’s head back. A short sword and dagger appeared, and the remaining two went down as well.

“This way, quick now!” he called back to Par and Coll.

They came at once. A dark shape clawed at them as they rushed past, but Coll knocked the man from his feet into the mass of struggling bodies. He reached back to be certain he had not lost his brother, his big hand closing on Par’s slender shoulder. Par yelled in spite of himself. Coll always forgot how strong he was.

They cleared the stage and reached the back hallway, the tall stranger several paces ahead. Someone tried to stop them, but the stranger ran right over him. The din from the room behind them was deafening, and flames were scattered everywhere now, licking hungrily at the flooring and walls. The stranger led them quickly down the hall and through the rear door into the alleyway. Two more of the green-clad men waited. Wordlessly, they surrounded the brothers and rushed them clear of the ale house. Par glanced back. The flames were already leaping from the windows and crawling up toward the roof. The Blue Whisker had seen its last night.

They slipped down the alleyway past startled faces and wide eyes, turned into a passageway Par would have sworn he had never seen before despite his many excursions out that way, passed through a scattering of doors and anterooms and finally emerged into a new street entirely. No one spoke. When at last they were beyond the sound of the shouting and the glow of the fire, the stranger slowed, motioned his two companions to take up watch and pulled Par and Coll into a shadowed alcove.

All were breathing heavily from the run. The stranger looked at them in turn, grinning. “A little exercise is good for the digestion, they say. What do you think? Are you all right?”

The brothers both nodded. “Who are you?” asked Par.

The grin broadened. “Why, practically one of the family, lad. Don’t you recognize me? Ah, you don’t, do you? But, then, why should you? After all, you and I have never met. But the songs should remind you.” He closed his left hand into a fist, then thrust a single finger sharply at Par’s nose. “Remember now?”

Mystified, Par looked at Coll, but his brother appeared as confused as he was. “I don’t think...” he started.

“Well, well, it doesn’t matter just at the moment. All in good time.” He bent close. “This is no longer safe country for you, lad. Certainly not here in Varfleet and probably not in all of Callahorn. Maybe not anywhere. Do you know who that was back there? The ugly one with the whisper?”

Par tried to place the rangy speaker with the soft voice. He couldn’t. He shook his head slowly.

“Rimmer Dall,” the stranger said, the smile gone now. “First Seeker, the high mucky-muck himself. Sits on the Coalition Council when he’s not out swatting flies. But you, he’s taken a special interest if he’s come all the way to Varfleet to arrest you. That’s not part of his ordinary fly-swatting. That’s hunting bear. He thinks you are dangerous, lad—very dangerous, indeed, or he wouldn’t have bothered coming all the way here. Good thing I was looking out for you. I was, you know. Heard Rimmer Dall was going to come for you and came to make sure he didn’t get the job done. Mind now, he won’t give up. You slipped his grasp this time, but that will make him just that much more determined. He’ll keep coming for you.”

He paused, gauging the effect of what he was saying. Par was staring at him speechlessly, so he went on. “That magic of yours, the singing, that’s real magic, isn’t it? I’ve seen enough of the other kind to know. You could put that magic to good use, lad, if you had a mind to. It’s wasted in these ale houses and backstreets.”

“What do you mean?” Coll asked, suddenly suspicious.

The stranger smiled, charming and guileless. “The Movement has need of such magic,” he said softly.

Coll snorted. “You’re one of the outlaws!”

The stranger executed a quick bow. “Yes, lad, I am proud to say I am. More important, I am free-born and I do not accept Federation rule. No right thinking man does.” He bent close. “You don’t accept it yourself now, do you? Admit it.”

“Hardly,” Coll answered defensively. “But I question whether the outlaws are any better.”

“Harsh words, lad!” the other exclaimed. “A good thing for you I do not take offense easily.” He grinned roguishly.

“What is it you want?” Par interrupted quickly, his mind clear again. He had been thinking of Rimmer Dall. He knew the man’s reputation and he was frightened of the prospect of being hunted by him. “You want us to join you, is that it?”

The stranger nodded. “You would find it worth your time, I think.”

But Par shook his head. It was one thing to accept the stranger’s help in fleeing the Seekers. It was another to join the Movement. The matter needed a great deal more thought. “I think we had better decline for now,” he said evenly. “That is, if we’re being given a choice.”

“Of course you are being given a choice!” The stranger seemed offended.

“Then we have to say no. But we thank you for the offer and especially for your help back there.”

The stranger studied him a moment, solemn again. “You are quite welcome, believe me. I wish only the best for you, Par Ohmsford. Here, take this.” He removed from one hand a ring that was cast in silver and bore the insigne of a hawk. “My friends know me by this. If you need a favor—or if you change your mind—take this to Kiltan Forge at Reaver’s End at the north edge of the city and ask for the Archer. Can you remember that?”

Par hesitated, then took the ring, nodding. “But why . .?”

“Because there is much between us, lad,” the other said softly, anticipating his question. One hand reached out to rest on his shoulder. The eyes took in Coll as well. “There is history that binds us, a bond of such strength that it requires I be there for you if I can. More, it requires that we stand together against what is threatening this land. Remember that, too. One day, we will do so, I think—if we all manage to stay alive until then.”

He grinned at the brothers and they stared back silently. The stranger’s hand dropped away. “Time to go now. Quickly, too. The street runs east to the river. You can go where you wish from there. But watch yourselves Keep your backs well guarded. This matter isn’t finished.”

“I know,” Par said and extended his hand. “Are you certain you will not tell us your name?”

The stranger hesitated. “Another day,” he said.

He gripped Par’s hand tightly, then Coll’s, then whistled his companions to him. He waved once, then melted into the shadows and was gone.

Par stared down momentarily at the ring, then glanced questioningly at Coll. Somewhere close at hand, the sound of shouting started up.

“I think the questions will have to wait,” said Coll.

Par jammed the ring into his pocket. Wordlessly, they disappeared into the night.