The Talismans of Shannara

Chapter Thirteen

Walker Boh deliberated for two days before he again tried to escape the Shadowen siege of Paranor.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have gone even then, but he found himself slipping into a dangerous state of mind. The more he thought about various ways of breaking free, the more it seemed he needed to consider further. Each plan had its flaws, and each flaw became magnified as it was held up this way and that for examination. Nothing he conceived seemed exactly right, and the harder he worked at discovering a foolproof method of gaining his escape, the more he began to doubt himself. Finally it became apparent that if he allowed himself to go on, he would lose all confidence and in the end be unable to act at all.

It was all part of a game that the Shadowen were playing with him, he was afraid.

His first encounter with the Four Horsemen had left him physically battered, but those injuries were not the ones that troubled him. It was the psychological damage that refused to mend, that lingered within like a fever. Walker Boh had always been in control of his life, able to manipulate events around him and to keep intrusions at bay. He had accomplished this mostly by isolating himself within the familiar confines of Darklin Reach, where the dangers to be faced and problems to be solved were familiar and within the purview of his enormous capabilities. He had command of magic, intelligence coupled with extraordinary insight, and other assorted abilities that ranged from the intuitive to the acquired—all of which were far superior to those of anyone against whom he chose to direct them.

But that was changed. He had crossed out of Darklin Reach and come into the outside world. This was his home now, the cottage at Hearthstone reduced to ashes, the life he had known gone into another time. He had traveled a road that had altered his existence as surely as dying. He had taken up Allanon’s charge and followed it through to its conclusion. He had recovered the Black Elfstone and brought back Paranor. He had become the first of the new Druids. He was someone entirely different than the person he had been only weeks ago. That change had given him new insight, strength, knowledge, and power. But it had also exposed him to new responsibilities, expectations, challenges, and enemies. It remained to be decided if the former would be sufficient to overcome the latter. For the moment at least, the matter was unresolved. Walker Boh might fall and be lost forever—or he might find a way to climb back to safety. He was a man hanging from a precipice.

The Shadowen knew this. They had come for him as soon as they had discovered that Paranor was returned. Walker was still a child in his role as Druid, and now was the time when he would be most vulnerable. Besiege him, frustrate him, distract his development, kill him if possible, but cripple him at all costs—that was the plan.

And the plan was working. Walker had come back into Paranor, after his first aborted attempt at escape, aware of several very unpleasant truths. First, he did not possess sufficient power to break free in a head-to-head confrontation. The Four Horsemen were his equal and more, their magic a match for his own. Second, he could not slip past them undetected. Third, and worst of all, their experience was superior to his own—and they did not fear him. They had come looking for him. They had done so openly, without subterfuge. They had challenged him, daring him to come out and fight them. They circled Paranor in open disdain of what he might do. He was a prisoner in his own castle, reduced to trying to come up with a plan that would let him be free, and the Four Horsemen were betting he couldn’t do it. It was possible, he was forced to admit, that they were right.

“You are working too hard at this,” Cogline advised him finally, finding him back on the walls, staring down at the wraiths circling below. He looked gaunt and pale, ragged and worn. “Look at you, Walker. You barely sleep. You take no notice of your appearance—you have not bathed since your return. You do not eat.”

A frail hand rubbed at the whiskers of the old man’s chin. “Think, Walker. This is what they want. They are afraid of you! If they weren’t, they would simply force the gates and finish this business. But that won’t be necessary if you can be made to doubt yourself, to panic, to forgo the caution and resolve that got you this far. If that happens, they will have won. Sooner or later, they think, you will do something foolish, and then they will have you.”

It was the most that Cogline had said to him since his return. Walker stared at him, at the ancient, weather-beaten face, at the stick-thin body, at the arms and legs jutting from his robes like poles. Cogline had welcomed him back with reassurances, but mostly he had seemed removed and distant—just as he had for those few days before Walker had first tried to go out. Something was happening with Cogline, some secret conflict, but Walker had been too preoccupied with his own problems then, as he was now, to take time to decipher what it was.

Nevertheless, he let the old man lead him down from the parapets to the inner shell of the castle and a hot meal. He ate without enthusiasm, drank a little ale, and decided that a bath was a good idea after all. He sat in the steaming water, letting it cleanse him inside and out, feeling the heat soothe and relax his body and mind. Rumor kept him company, curled up against the side of the tub as if to share its warmth. While Walker dried himself and dressed again, he pondered the enormous calm of the moor cat, the facade that all cats assumed as they regarded the world about them, considering it in their own impenetrable way. A little of that calm would be useful, he thought.

Then his thoughts shifted abruptly.

What was wrong with Cogline?

He left his own troubles behind with the bathwater and went out to find the old man. He came on him in the library, reading once more the Druid Histories. Cogline looked up as he entered, startled by his appearance or by something it suggested—Walker could not tell which.

Walker sat beside him on a carved, cushioned bench. “Old man, what is it that bothers you?” he asked quietly. He reached out to place a reassuring hand on the other’s thin shoulder. “I see the worry in your eyes. Tell me.”

Cogline shrugged in an exaggerated manner. “I worry for you, Walker. I know how strange everything seems to you since... well, since all this began. It cannot be easy. I keep thinking there must be something I can do to help.”

Walker looked away. Since the Black Elfstone, he thought. Since Allanon made himself a part of me, come in through the magic left to keep Paranor safe until the Druids return. Strange is hardly the word for it.

“You need not worry for me,” he replied, his smile ironic. At least not about that. The warring within of the past and the present had faded as the two assimilated, and the lives and knowledge of the Druids had become his own. He thought of the way the magic had churned through him, burning away defenses until there had been nothing left for him to do but to accept it as his own.

“Walker.” Cogline was staring at him, focused now. “I do not think Allanon would have put you through this if he did not believe that it would leave you with sufficient power to stand against the Shadowen.”

“You have more faith than I.”

Cogline nodded solemnly. “I always have, Walker. Didn’t you know that? But my faith will be yours as well one day. It simply takes time. I have been given that time and used it to learn. I have been alive a long time now, Walker. A long time. Faith is a part of what gives me the strength to go on.”

Walker took his hand away. “I had faith in myself. I had it when I knew who and what I was. But that has changed, old man. I am someone and something else entirely, and I am being asked to place my faith in a stranger. It is hard for me to do that.”

“Yes,” Cogline agreed. “But it will happen—if you give it time.”

“If I have the time to give,” Walker Boh finished.

He went out again. Rumor trailed, a black shadow slipping from lamplight to lamplight in the gloom, head swaying rhythmically, tail switching. Walker was aware of him without thinking of him, his thoughts turned again to the Shadowen without.

There must be a way...

Strength alone was not enough. The power of the Druid magic was impressive, but it had never been enough by itself even for those Druids come and gone. Knowledge was necessary as well. Cleverness. Resolve. Unpredictability. This last most of all, perhaps—an intangible that was the special province of survivors. Did he have it? he wondered suddenly. What did he have besides what the Druid magic had given him that he could call upon? He had made much out of the fact that nothing done to him by the Druids would change who he was. But was that so? If so, then what part of himself could he call upon now to enable him to believe in himself once again?

And wasn’t that the key to everything? That he believe in himself enough that he should not despair?

He went back up to the battlements, Rumor trailing. The night was clear and bright with stars, and the air smelled clean and fresh. He breathed it deeply as he walked atop the walls, not looking down at what waited there, letting his thoughts slip free as he went, unburdened. He found himself thinking about Quickening, the daughter of the King of the Silver River, the elemental who had given everything to restore life to a land of stone, to give the earth a chance to heal. He pictured her face and listened in his memory to her voice. He felt the slight weight of her that last time as he carried her to the edge of Eldwist, the sense of sureness that had emanated from her, the sense of power. Dying, she was fulfilling her promise. It was what she had wanted. But she had bequeathed some part of her life to him, a sense of purpose and need, a resolve that he would do in life what she could only do in death.

He stopped, staring out at the night. How far he had traveled, he thought in genuine amazement. How long a journey it had been. All to reach this point, to arrive at this place and time.

He paused in his meandering, faced inward to the castle spires, to the walls and towers that loomed over him, rising darkly into the night. Was this where his life was supposed to end? he wondered suddenly. Was this where the journey finally stopped?

It had been a pointless struggle if that was so.

He turned and looked down over the wall. One of the Horsemen was passing directly below, a faint luminescence against the dark. Death, he thought, but it was hard to tell. It made no difference in any case. Names notwithstanding, identities assumed aside, they were all Death in one form or another. Shadowen killers lacking use and purpose beyond their ability to destroy. Why had they allowed themselves to become so? What choice had made them thus?

He watched that rider fade and waited for the next. All night they would patrol and at dawn assemble once more before the gates to issue their challenge anew...

He caught himself. All together, before the gates.

A glimmer of hope flickered in his mind. What if he were to answer that challenge?

His face grim-set, he wheeled from the wall and went down the battlements in search of Cogline.

Dawn arrived with a silvering of the eastern skies that hinted of mist and heat. The air was still and sultry even this early, a remnant of yesterday’s swelter, a promise that this summer did not intend to give way easily to autumn. Birds sounded their calls in snappish, weary tones, as if unwilling to herald the morning’s start.

The Four Horsemen were assembled before the gates, lined up in the grayness on their nightmare mounts. The serpents clawed distractedly at the earth as their riders sat mutely before Paranor’s high walls, specters without voice, lives without balance. As the light crested the tips of the Dragon’s Teeth, War urged his monstrous carrier forward, lifted his armored hand, and struck the gate with a hollow thud. The sound lingered in the silence that followed, an echo that disappeared into the trees and the gloom. The gate shuddered and went still.

War started to turn away.

Walker Boh was waiting. He was already outside the walls, come through a hidden door in a tower barely fifty feet away.

He was cloaked by his magic in a spell of invisibility, shrouded in the touch and look and smell of ancient stone so that he appeared just another part of Paranor. They had not been looking for him. Even if they had, he believed he would not have been discovered.

He brought up his good arm, the magic already summoned, gathered within until it was white-hot, and he sent it hurtling toward the Shadowen.

The magic exploded into War and cut the unsuspecting wraith entirely in half. The serpent mount bolted, War’s legs and lower torso still clinging to it, and disappeared.

Walker struck again. The magic hammered into the remaining three, catching them bunched tightly together and entirely unprepared. Fire exploded everywhere, engulfing them. The serpents reared and clawed in fury, wheeling about in an effort to escape. Walker sent the fire in front of their eyes so that they could not see and into their nostrils so that they could not smell, so that it clogged their senses and drove them mad. The Shadowen slammed up against one another, blinded and confused.

I’ve got them! Walker thought in elation.

His strength was draining from him fast, but he did not relent. He dropped the spell of invisibility, saving as much of himself as he could, and pressed the attack further, willing the magic into fire, willing the fire to consume. One of the Horsemen broke free, steaming and spitting like embers kicked by a boot. It was Pestilence, the strange body come apart into a buzzing swarm of darkness, all of its shape and definition lost. Famine had gone down, horse and rider writhing on the earth in a desperate effort to extinguish the flames that were consuming them. Death spun out of control, wheeling in a frenzy.

Then the impossible happened. Through smoke and flame, come back from where it had fled stricken and ruined, War reappeared atop its serpent mount.

But War had become whole again.

Walker stared in disbelief. He had severed the Horseman at the midpoint of its body, seen the top half fall away, and now War was back together, looking as if nothing had been done to it at all.

It charged Walker, closing the distance between them, armored body leaning forward eagerly, metal gleaming in the faint dawn light. Walker could hear the thunder of the clawed feet, the rasp of breathing, the shriek of armor, and the whistle of air giving way before its coming.

It wasn’t possible!

Instinctively Walker shifted the magic to meet the attack, gathering it in one final burst. It caught the Horseman and its mount in a whirlwind of fire and spun them away, sweeping them off the pathway circling the castle and down into the trees where they disappeared with a crash.

But there was no time to follow up the attack. The remaining Horsemen had recovered themselves. Death pivoted toward him, gray-cloaked and hooded, gleaming scythe lowered. Pestilence followed, hissing like a sackful of snakes, its body taking shape as it came. Walker cut Death’s serpent’s legs from beneath it and sent both tumbling in a heap. By then Pestilence was almost on top of him. He jumped aside, cat quick. But the Horseman’s outstretched fingers grazed him as it passed.

Instantly a wave of nausea swept through Walker. He dropped to his knees, weakened and dazed. Just a touch had been all! He swung about to track Pestilence and sent a new lance of fire into the Shadowen’s dark back. Pestilence broke apart in a swarm of black flies.

Everything seemed to slow down for Walker Boh. He watched Famine approach in a heavy, sluggish, lurching rush. He tried to respond, but his strength seemed to have deserted him. He was aware of the day beginning, of new light brightening the eastern horizon, diffusing in thick, syrupy streamers across the trailing robes of departing night. He could feel the air, could taste and smell it, the scents of fresh leaves and grasses mingling with dust and heat. Paranor was a monstrous stone shadow at his elbow, close enough to touch and yet impossibly far.

He should not have dropped his cloak of invisibility. He had lost any advantage he had possessed.

He sent fire lancing into Famine and turned its attack aside, the Horseman’s skeletal body hunching and breaking apart from the blow.

Dead, but not really, Walker thought, feeling himself turning feverish and hot.

The horsemen swarmed back from all directions, serpents rising up and converging on him. Why wouldn’t they die? How could they keep coming? The questions rolled thickly off his tongue, and he was aware suddenly that he was speaking them aloud, that a sort of delirium was settling in. He was impossibly weak as he stumbled back toward the wall, mustering his strength to face the renewed rush. His plan was falling apart. He had misjudged something. What was it?

He lifted his arm and sent the fire sweeping in all directions, scattering it into his attackers in a desperate effort to keep them at bay. But his strength was depleted now,.expended in his initial attack, siphoned away by Pestilence. The magic barely slowed the Shadowen, who broke through its screen and came on. War threw a jagged-edged mace at him, and he watched it hurtle toward him, unable to act. At the last moment he summoned magic enough to deflect it, but still the iron struck him a glancing blow, spinning him backward into Paranor’s stone with such force that the breath was knocked from him.

The blow saved his life.

As he clawed at the stone of Paranor’s wall to keep himself from falling, he found the seam of the hidden door. For an instant his head cleared, and he remembered that he had left himself a way to escape if things went wrong. He had forgotten it in the rage of battle, in the grip of the fever and delirium. He still had a chance. The Four Horsemen were bearing down on him, closing impossibly fast. The fingers of his hand raced along the hidden door’s seam, numb and bloodied. If only he had two hands, two arms! If only he was whole! The thought was there and gone in an instant, the despair that summoned it banished by his fury.

There was a shriek of metal and claws.

His fingers closed on the release.

The door swung inward, carrying him with it, a shapeless bundle of robes. As it did, he threw back into the space it left shards of fire as sharp as razors. He heard them tear into his pursuers, thought that perhaps he heard the Shadowen scream somewhere inside his mind.

Then he was in musty, cool darkness, the sound and fury shut away with the closing of the door, the battle over.

Cogline found him in the passageway beneath the castle’s ramparts, curled in a ball, so exhausted he could not bring himself to move. With considerable effort, the old man brought Walker to his bed and laid him in it. He undressed him, sponged him with cool, clean water, gave him medicines, and wrapped him in blankets to sleep. He spoke words to Walker, but Walker could not seem to decipher them. Walker replied, but what he said was unclear. He knew that he was alive, that he had survived to fight another day, and that was all that mattered.

Shivering, aching, bone-weary from his struggle, he let himself be settled in and left in darkness to rest. He was conscious of Rumor curling up beside him, keeping watch against whatever might threaten, ready to summon Cogline if need required it. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat, thinking that the sickness would pass, that he would be well again when he woke. Determined that he would be.

His eyes closed, but as they did so his mind locked tightly on a final, healing thought.

The battle had been lost this day. The Four Horsemen had broken him again. But he had learned something from his defeat—something that ultimately would prove their undoing.

He took a long slow breath and let it out again. Sleep swept through his body in warm, relaxing waves.

The next time he faced the Shadowen, he promised himself before drifting off, sheathing his oath in layers of iron resolve, he would put an end to them.