The Scions of Shannara

Chapter Twenty

Walker Boh journeyed directly back to Hearthstone after taking leave of the company at the Hadeshorn. He rode his horse east across the Rabb, bypassed Storlock and its Healers, climbed the Wolfsktaag through the Pass of Jade, and worked his way upriver along the Chard Rush until he entered Darklin Reach. Three days later he was home again. He talked with no one on the way, keeping entirely to himself as he traveled, pausing only long enough to eat and sleep. He was not fit company for other men and he knew it. He was obsessed with thoughts of his encounter with the shade of Allanon. He was haunted by them.

The Anar was enveloped by a particularly violent midsummer storm within twenty-four hours of his return, and Walker secluded himself truculently in his cottage home while winds lashed its shaved-board walls and rains beat down upon its shingled roof. The forested valley was deluged, wracked by the crack and flash of lightning, shaken by the long, ominous peals of thunder, pelted and washed until it could no longer stand upright. The cadence of the rains obliterated every other sound, and Walker sat amid their constant thrum in brooding silence, wrapped in blankets and a blackness of spirit he would not have thought possible. He found himself despairing. It was the inevitability of things that he feared. Walker Boh, whatever name he chose to bear, was nevertheless an Ohmsford by blood, and he knew that Ohmsfords, despite their misgivings, had always been made to take up the Druid cause. It had been so with Shea and Flick, with Wil, and with Brin and Jair before him. Now it was to be his turn. His and Wren’s and Par’s. Par embraced the cause willingly, of course. Par was an incurable romantic, a self-appointed champion of the downtrodden and the abused. Par was a fool.

Or a realist, depending on how you viewed the matter. Because, if history proved an accurate indicator, Par was merely accepting without argument what Walker, too, would be forced to embrace—Allanon’s will, the cause of a dead man. The shade had come to them like some scolding patriarch out of death’s embrace—chiding them for their lack of diligence, scolding them for their misgivings, charging them with missions of madness and self-destruction. Bring back the Druids! Bring back Paranor! Do these things because I say they must be done, because I say they are necessary, because I—a thing of no flesh and dead mind—demand it!

Walker’s mood darkened further as the weight of the matter continued to settle steadily over him, a pall mirroring the oppressiveness of the storms without. Change the whole of the face of the world—that was what the shade was asking of them, of Par, Wren, and himself. Take three hundred years of evolution in the Four Lands and dispense with it in an instant’s time. What else was the shade asking, if not that? A return of the magic, a return of the wielders of that magic, of its shapers, of all the things ended by this same shade those three hundred years past. Madness! They would be playing with lives in the manner of creators—and they were not entitled!

Through the gray haze of his anger and his fear, he could conjure in his mind the features of the shade. Allanon. The last of the Druids, the keeper of the Histories of the Four Lands, the protector of the Races, the dispenser of magic and secrets. His dark form rose up against the years like a cloud against the sun, blocking away the warmth and the light. Everything that had taken place while he lived bore his touch. And before that, it was Bremen, and before that the Druids of the First Council of the Races. Wars of magic, struggles for survival, the battles between light and dark—or grays perhaps—had all been the result of the Druids.

And now he was being asked to bring all that back.

It could be argued that it was necessary. It had always been argued so. It could be said that the Druids merely worked to preserve and protect, never to shape. But had there ever been one without the other? And necessity was always in the eye of the beholder. Warlock Lords, Demons, and Mord Wraiths past—they had been exchanged for Shadowen. But what were these Shadowen that men should require the aid of Druids and magic? Could not men take it upon themselves to deal with the ills of the world rather than defer to power they scarcely understood? Magic carried grief as well as joy, its dark side as apt to influence and change as its light. Bring it back again, should he, only to give it to men who had repeatedly demonstrated that they were incapable of mastering its truths?

How could he?

Yet without it, the world might become the vision Allanon’s shade had shown them—a nightmare of fire and darkness in which only creatures such as the Shadowen belonged. Perhaps it was true after all that magic was the only means of keeping the Races safe against such beings.

Perhaps.

The truth of the matter was that he simply didn’t want to be part of what was to happen. He was not a child of the Races of the Four Lands, not in body or in spirit, and never had been. He had no empathy with their men and women. He had no place among them. He had been cursed with magic of his own, and it had stripped him of his humanity and his place among humans and isolated him from every other living thing. Ironic, because he alone had no fear of the Shadowen. Perhaps he could even protect against them, were he asked to do so. But he would not be asked. He was as much feared as they. He was the Dark Uncle, the descendant of Brin Ohmsford, the bearer of her seed and her trust, keeper of some nameless charge from Allanon....

Except, of course, that the charge was nameless no more. The charge was revealed. He was to bring back Paranor and the Druids, out of the void of yesteryear, out of the nothingness.

That was what the shade had demanded of him, and the demand tracked relentlessly through the landscape of his mind, hurdling arguments, circumventing reason, whispering that it was and therefore must be.

So he worried the matter as a dog would its bone, and the days dragged by. The storms passed and the sun returned to bake the plains dry but leave the forestlands weltering in the heat and damp. He went out after a time, walking the valley floor with only Rumor for company, the giant moor cat having wandered down out of the rain forests east with the changing of the weather, luminous eyes as depthless as the despair the Dark Uncle felt. The cat gave him companionship, but offered no solution to his dilemma and no relief from his brooding. They walked and sat together as the days and nights passed, and time hung suspended against a backdrop of events taking place beyond their refuge that neither could know nor see.

Until, on the same night that Par Ohmsford and his companions were betrayed in their attempt to lay hands upon the Sword of Shannara, Cogline returned to the valley of Hearthstone and the illusion of separateness that Walker had worked so hard to maintain was shattered. It was late evening, the sun had gone west, the skies were washed with moonlight and filled with stars, and the summer air was sweet and clean with the smell of new growth. Walker was coming back from a visit to the pinnacle, a refuge he found particularly soothing, the massive stone a source from which it seemed he could draw strength. The cottage door was open and the rooms within lighted as always, but Walker sensed the difference, even before Rumor’s purr stilled and his neck ruff bristled.

Cautiously, he moved onto the porch and into the doorway.

Cogline sat at the old wooden dining table, skeletal face bent against the glare of the oil lamps, his gray robes a weathered covering for goods long since past repair. A large, squarish package bound in oilcloth and tied with cord rested close beside him. He was eating cold food, a glass of ale almost untouched at his elbow.

“I have been waiting for you, Walker,” he told the other while he was still in the darkness beyond the entry.

Walker moved into the light. “You might have saved yourself the trouble.”

“Trouble?” The old man extended a sticklike hand, and Rumor padded forward to muzzle it familiarly. “It was time I saw my home again.”

“Is this your home?” Walker asked. “I would have thought you more comfortable amid the relics of the Druid past.” He waited for a response, but there was none. “If you have come to persuade me to take up the charge given me by the shade, then you should know at once that I will never do so.”

“Oh, my, Walker. Never is such an impossible amount of time. Besides, I have no intention of trying to persuade you to do anything. A sufficient amount of persuading has already been done, I suspect.”

Walker was still standing in the doorway. He felt awkward and exposed and moved over to the table to sit across from Cogline. The old man took a long sip of the ale.

“Perhaps you thought me gone for good after my disappearance at the Hadeshorn,” he said softly. His voice was distant and filled with emotions that the other could not begin to sort out. “Perhaps you even wished it.”

Walker said nothing.

“I have been out into the world, Walker. I have traveled into the Four Lands, walked among the Races, passed through cities and countrysides; I have felt the pulse of life and found that it ebbs. A farmer speaks to me on the grasslands below the Streleheim, a man worn and broken by the futility of what he has encountered. “Nothing grows,” he whispers. “The earth sickens as if stricken by some disease.” The disease infects him as well. A merchant of wood carvings and toys journeys from a small village beyond Varfleet, directionless. “I leave,” he says, “because there is no need for me. The people cease to have interest in my work. They do nothing but brood and waste away.” Bits and pieces of life in the Four Lands, Walker—they wither and fade like a spotting that spreads across the flesh. Pockets here and pockets there—as if the will to go on were missing. Trees and shrubs and growing things fail; animals and men alike sicken and die. All become dust, and a haze of that dust rises up and fills the air and leaves the whole of the ravaged land a still life in miniature of the vision shown us by Allanon.”

The sharp, old eyes squinted up at the other. “It begins, Walker. It begins.”

Walker Boh shook his head. “The land and her people have always suffered failings, Cogline. You see the shade’s vision because you want to see it.”

“No, not I, Walker.” The old man shook his head firmly. “I want no part of Druid visions, neither in their being nor in their fulfillment. I am as much a pawn of what has happened as yourself. Believe what you will, I do not wish involvement. I have chosen my life in the same manner that you have chosen yours. You don’t accept that, do you?”

Walker smiled unkindly. “You took up the magic because you wished to. Once-Druid, you had a choice in your life. You dabbled in a mixture of old sciences and magics because they interested you. Not so myself. I was born with a legacy I would have been better born without. The magic was forced upon me without my consent. I use it because I have no choice. It is a millstone that would drag me down. But I do not deceive myself. It has made my life a ruin.” The dark eyes were bitter. “Do not attempt to compare us, Cogline.”

The other’s thin frame shifted. “Harsh words, Walker Boh. You were eager enough to accept my teaching in the use of that magic once upon a time. You felt comfortable enough with it then to learn its secrets.”

“A matter of survival and nothing more. I was a child trapped in a Druid’s monstrous casting. I used you to keep myself alive. You were all I had.” The white skin of his lean face was taut with bitterness. “Do not look to me for thanks, Cogline. I haven’t the grace for it.”

Cogline stood up suddenly, a whiplash movement that belied his fragile appearance. He towered above the dark-robed figure seated across from him, and there was a forbidding look to his weathered face. “Poor Walker,” he whispered. “You still deny who you are. You deny your very existence. How long can you keep up this pretense?”

There was a strained silence between them that seemed endless. Rumor, curled on a rug before the fire at the far end of the room, looked up expectantly. An ember from the hearth spat and snapped, filling the air with a shower of sparks.

“Why have you come, old man?” Walker Boh said finally, the words a barely contained thrust of rage. There was a coppery taste in his mouth that he knew came not from anger, but from fear.

“To try to help you,” Cogline said. There was no irony in his voice. “To give you direction in your brooding.”

“I am content without your interference.”

“Content?” The other shook his head. “No, Walker. You will never be content until you learn to quit fighting yourself. You work so hard at it. I thought that the lessons you received from me on the uses of the magic might have weaned you away from such childishness—but it appears I was wrong. You face hard lessons, Walker. Maybe you won’t survive them.”

He shoved the heavy parcel across the table at the other man. “Open it.”

Walker hesitated, his eyes locked on the offering. Then he reached out, snapped apart the binding with a flick of his fingers and pulled back the oilcloth.

He found himself looking at a massive, leatherbound book elaborately engraved in gold. He reached out and touched it experimentally, lifted the cover, peered momentarily inside, then flinched away from it as if his fingers had been burned.

“Yes, Walker. It is one of the missing Druid Histories, a single volume only.” The wrinkled old face was intense.

“Where did you get it?” Walker demanded harshly.

Cogline bent close. The air seemed filled with the sound of his breathing. “Out of lost Paranor.”

Walker Boh came slowly to his feet. “You lie.”

“Do I? Look into my eyes and tell me what you see.”

Walker flinched away. He was shaking. “I don’t care where you got it or what fantasies you have concocted to make me believe what I know in my heart cannot possibly be so! Take it back to where you got it or let it sink into the bogs! I’ll have no part of it!”

Cogline shook his wispy head. “No, Walker, I’ll not take it back I carried it out of a realm of yesterdays filled with gray haze and death to give it to you. I am not your tormentor—never that! I am the closest thing to a friend you will ever know, even if you cannot yet accept it!” The weathered face softened. “I said before that I came to help you It is so. Read the book, Walker. There are truths in there that need learning.”

“I will not!” the other cried furiously.

Cogline stared at the younger man for long minutes, then sighed. “As you will. But the book remains Read it or not, the choice is yours. Destroy it even, if you wish.” He drained off the remainder of his ale, set the glass carefully on the table, and looked down at his gnarled hands. “I am finished here.”

He came around the table and stood before the other. “Goodbye, Walker. I would stay if it would help. I would give you whatever it is within my power to give you if you would take it. But you are not yet ready. Another day, perhaps.”

He turned then and disappeared into the night. He did not look back as he went. He did not deviate from his course. Walker Boh watched him fade away, a shadow gone back into the darkness that had made him.

The cottage, as if by his going, turned empty and still.

“It will be dangerous, Par,” Damson Rhee whispered. “If there were a safer way, I should snatch it up in an instant.”

Par Ohmsford said nothing. They were deep within the People’s Park once more, crouched in the shadows of a grove of cedar just beyond the broad splash of light cast by the lamps of the Gatehouse. It was midway toward dawn, the deepest, fullest hours of sleep, when everything slowed to a crawl amid dreams and rememberings. The Gatehouse rose up against the moonlit darkness like a gathering of massive blocks stacked one upon the other by a careless child. Barred windows and bolted doors were shallow indentations in a skin made rough and coarse by weather and time. The walls warding the ravine ran off to either side and the crossing bridge stretched away behind, a spider web connecting to the tumbledown ruin of the old palace. A watch had been stationed before the main entry where a pair of matched iron portals stood closed behind a hinged grate of bars. The watch dozed on its feet, barely awake in the enveloping stillness. No sound or movement from the Gatehouse disturbed their rest.

“Can you remember enough of him to conjure up a likeness?” Damson asked, her words a brush of softness against his ear. Par nodded. It was not likely he would ever forget the face of Rimmer Dall.

She was quiet a moment. “If we are stopped, keep their attention focused on yourself. I will deal with any threats.”

He nodded once more. They waited, motionless within their concealment, listening to the stillness, thinking their separate thoughts. Par was frightened and filled with doubts, but he was mostly determined. Damson and he were the only real chance Coll and the others had. They would succeed in this risky business because they must.

The Gate watch came awake as those patrolling the west wall of the park appeared out of the night. The guards greeted each other casually, spoke for a time and then the watch from the east wall appeared as well. A flask was passed around, pipes were smoked, and then the guards dispersed. The patrols disappeared east and west The Gate watch resumed their station.

“Not yet,” Damson whispered as Par shifted expectantly.

The minutes dragged by. The solitude that had shrouded the Gatehouse earlier returned anew. The guards yawned and shifted. One leaned wearily on the haft of his poleaxe.

“Now,” Damson Rhee said. She caught the Valeman by the shoulder and leaned into him. Her lips brushed his cheek. “Luck to us, Par Ohmsford.”

Then they were up and moving. They crossed into the circle of light boldly, striding out of the shadows as if they were at home in them, coming toward the Gatehouse from the direction of the city. Par was already singing, weaving the wishsong’s spell through the night’s stillness, filling the minds of the watch with the images he wished them to see.

What they saw were two Seekers cloaked in forbidding black, the taller of the two First Seeker Rimmer Dall.

They snapped to attention immediately, eyes forward, barely looking at the two who approached Par kept his voice even, the magic weaving a constant spell of disguise in the minds of the willing men.

“Open!” Damson Rhee snapped perfunctorily as they reached the Gatehouse entry.

The guards could not comply quickly enough. They pulled back the hinged grate, released the outer locks and hammered anxiously on the doors to alert the guards within. A tiny door opened and Par shifted the focus of his concentration slightly. Bleary eyes peered out in grouchy curiosity, widened, and the locks released. The doors swung back, and Par and Damson pushed inside.

They stood in a wardroom filled with weapons stacked in wall racks and stunned Federation soldiers. The soldiers had been playing cards and drinking, clearly convinced the night’s excitement was over. They were caught off guard by the appearance of the Seekers and it showed. Par filled the room with the faint hum of the wishsong, blanketing it momentarily with his magic. It took everything he had.

Damson understood how tenuous was his hold. “Everyone out!” she ordered, her voice flinty with anger.

The room emptied instantly. The entire squad dispersed through adjoining doors and disappeared as if formed of smoke. One guard remained, apparently the senior watch officer. He stood uncertainly, stiffly, eyes averted, wishing he were anywhere else but where he was, yet unable to go.

“Take us to the prisoners,” Damson said softly, standing at the man’s left shoulder.

The soldier cleared his throat after trying futilely to speak. “I’ll need my commander’s permission,” he ventured. Some small sense of responsibility for his assigned duty yet remained to him.

Damson kept her eyes fixed on the man’s ear, forcing him thereby to look elsewhere. “Where is your commander?” she asked.

“Sleeping below,” the man answered. “I’ll wake him.”

“No.” Damson stayed his effort to depart. “We’ll wake him together.”

They went through a heavily bolted door directly across the room and started down a stairwell dimly lit by oil lamps. Par kept the wishsong’s music lingering in the frightened guard’s ears, teasing him with it, letting him see them as much bigger than life and much more threatening. It was all going as planned, the charade working exactly as Damson and he had hoped. Down the empty stairs they went, circling from landing to landing, the thudding of their boots the only sound in the hollow silence. At the bottom of the well there were two doors. The one on the left was open and led into a lighted corridor. The guard took them through that door to another, stopped and knocked. When there was no response, he knocked again, sharply.

“What is it, drat you?” a voice snapped.

“Open up at once, Commander!” Damson replied in a voice so cold it made even Par shiver.

There was a fumbling about and the door opened. The Federation commander with the short-cropped hair and the unpleasant eyes stood there, his tunic half buttoned. Shock registered on his face instantly as the wishsong’s magic took hold. He saw the Seekers. Worse, he saw Rimmer Dall.

He gave up trying to button his clothing and came quickly into the hall. “I didn’t expect anyone this soon. I’m sorry. Is there a problem?”

“We’ll discuss it later, Commander,” Damson said severely. “For now, take us to the prisoners.”

For just an instant there was a flicker of doubt in the other man’s eyes, a shading of worry that perhaps everything was not quite right. Par tightened the hold of the magic on the man’s mind, giving him a glimpse of the terror that awaited him should he question the order. That glimpse was enough. The commander hastened back down the corridor to the stairwell, produced a key from a ring at his waist, and opened the second door.

They stepped into a passageway lit by a single lamp hung next to the door. The commander took the lamp in hand and led the way forward. Damson followed. Par motioned the watch officer ahead of him and brought up the rear. His voice was beginning to grow weary from the effort of maintaining the charade. It was more difficult to project to several different points. He should have sent the second man away.

The passageway was constructed of stone block and smelled of mold and decay. Par realized that they were underground, apparently beneath the ravine. Things of considerable size darted from the light, and there were streaks of phosphorescence and dampness in the stone.

They had only gone a short distance when they came to the cells. They were low-ceilinged cages, not high enough for a man to stand in, dusty and cobwebbed, the doors constructed of rusted iron bars. The entire company was crammed into the first of these, crouched or sitting on a stone slab floor. Eyes blinked in disbelief, widened as the lie of the magic played hide-and-seek with the truth. Coll knew what was going on. He was already on his feet, pushing to the door, motioning the others up with him. Even Padishar obeyed the gesture, realizing what was about to happen.

“Open the door,” Damson ordered.

Again, the eyes of the Federation commander registered his misgivings.

“Open the door, Commander,” Damson repeated impatiently. “Now!”

The commander fumbled for a second key within the cluster at his belt, inserted it into the lock and turned. The cell door swung open. Instantly, Padishar Creel had the astonished man’s neck in his hands, tightening his grip until the other could scarcely breathe. The watch officer stumbled back, turned, tried unsuccessfully to run over Par, was caught from behind by Morgan, and hammered into unconsciousness.

The prisoners crowded into the narrow passageway, greeting Par and Damson with handclasps and smiles. Padishar paid them no heed. His attention was focused entirely on the hapless Federation commander.

“Who betrayed us?” he said with an impatient hiss.

The commander struggled to free himself, his face turning bright red from the pressure on his throat.

“It was one of us, you said! Who?”

The commander choked. “Don’t... know. Never saw...”

Padishar shook him. “Don’t lie to me!” “Never... Just a... message.”

“Who was it?” Padishar insisted, the cords on the back of his hands gone white and hard.

The terrified man kicked out violently, and Padishar slammed his head sharply against the stone wall. The commander went limp, sagging like a rag doll.

Damson pulled Padishar about. “Enough of this,” she said evenly, ignoring the fury that still burned in the other’s eyes. “We’re wasting time. He clearly doesn’t know. Let’s get out of here. There’s been enough risk-taking for one day.”

The outlaw chief studied her wordlessly for a moment, then let the unconscious man drop. “I’ll find out anyway, I promise you,” he swore.

Par had never seen anyone so angry. But Damson ignored it. She turned and motioned for Par to get moving. The Valeman led the way back up the stairwell, the others trailing behind him in a staggered line. They had devised no plan for getting out again when they had made the decision to come after their friends. They had decided that it would be best simply to take what opportunity offered and make do.

Opportunity gave them everything they needed this night. The wardroom was empty when they reached it, and they moved swiftly to pass through. Only Morgan paused, rummaging through the weapons rack until hp had located the confiscated Sword of Leah. Smiling grimly, he strapped it across his back and went after the others.

Their luck held. The guards outside were overpowered before they knew what was happening. All about, the night was silent, the park empty, the patrols still completing their rounds, the city asleep. The members of the little band melted into the shadows and vanished.

As they hurried away, Damson swung Par around and gave him a brilliant smile and a kiss full on the mouth. The kiss was hungry and filled with promise.

Later, when there was time to reflect, Par Ohmsford savored that moment. Yet it was not Damson’s kiss that he remembered most from the events of that night. It was the fact that the magic of the wishsong had proven useful at last.