The Talismans of Shannara

Chapter Thirty-Six

“What was inside the light, Walker?” Coll asked.

It was midmorning, and they were gathered in the shade of the trees on the slopes leading down from the Runne north of the ruins of Southwatch. Below, the Shadowen keep continued to steam and smoke and burn, its walls collapsed into rubble, the once-smooth black stone turned brittle and dull. Walker sat alone to one side, wrapped in the torn remnants of his dark robes. Par and Coll sat across from him. Morgan was leaning against the broad trunk of a red maple, chewing on a bit of grass and looking at his boots. Matty Roh was propped up next to him, her shoulder touching his. Damson lay sleeping a few yards off. They were battered and worn and covered with blood and dust, and Coll had broken an arm and ribs. But the tension had left their bodies and the wariness had faded from their eyes. They weren’t running anymore, and they weren’t afraid.

“It was magic,” Par said with quiet conviction. They had fled the cellars of the Shadowen keep through the tunnel Walker had chosen, stone crumbling and falling in chunks all about them as they raced through the underground gloom with only the Druid fire to guide them. The tunnel twisted and wound, and it seemed that they would never get clear in time. They could hear the sounds of the keep’s destruction behind them, feel the thrust of stale air and dust against their backs as the walls collapsed inward. They feared they would be trapped, but Walker seemed certain of the way, so they followed without question. At last the tunnel opened out through a cluster of brush onto a low hillside above the keep, and from there they scrambled upward into the shelter of the trees to watch the conflagration of fire and smoke that marked the keep’s demise. Damson was unconscious again, and Walker labored over her intently, using the Druid magic, healing her as he had healed Par weeks earlier when the Valeman had been poisoned by the Werebeasts. Her injuries made her feverish, but Walker brought the fever down, cooling her so that she could sleep. While he worked, the others washed and bound themselves as best they could.

Now, the sunlight stretching toward the hills west, they sat looking back across the flats where Southwatch smoldered. Everywhere they looked, there were wildflowers, come into bloom with the collapse of the Shadowen keep and the return of the light to the earth. A profusion of color, the blossoms blanketed the whole of the land for as far as the eye could see, covering even those areas that had been sickened and ravaged. Their smell drifting lightly on the morning air seemed to signal a new beginning.

“Stolen magic,” Walker Boh amended.

What Par had been shown by the magic of the Sword of Shannara, Walker had been able to intuit with his Druid instincts. Walker’s dark eyes were ringed in ash and dirt and his face was drawn, yet there was strength in his steady gaze. They had finished sharing their separate stories and were now considering the reasons behind everything that had happened to them.

Walker’s face lifted. “The light was the magic the Shadowen stole from the earth. It was how they gained their power. Elven magic in the time of faerie borrowed from the elements, most particularly from the earth, for the earth was its greatest source. When the Elves recovered that lost magic after Allanon’s death, the Shadowen were the renegades among them who sought to use it in ways for which it was not intended. Like the Skull Bearers and the Mord Wraiths before them, the Shadowen came to rely on the magic so heavily that eventually it subverted them. They became addicted to it, reliant on it for their survival. Eventually it was their sole reason for being. They stole it in small doses at first, and when the need grew stronger, when they wanted power enough to control the destiny of the races and the Four Lands, they built Southwatch to drain the magic off in massive amounts. They found a way to leach it from the core of the earth and chain what they had stolen beneath the keep. Southwatch, and the magic they gathered within, became the source of their power everywhere. But as they used it to propagate, to create things like the Creepers, to strengthen themselves, they weakened the earth from which the magic had been taken. The Four Lands began to sicken because the magic was no longer strong enough to keep them healthy.”

“The dreams of Allanon,” Par said.

“They would have come to pass in time. There was nothing to prevent it unless the magic was set free again.”

“And when it was, it destroyed its jailers.”

Walker shook his head. “Not in the way you think. It did not deliberately destroy them. What happened was more basic. Once it was freed, it pulled back into itself the whole of what had been stolen. It took back the power that had been drained away. When it did, it left the Shadowen and their monsters bereft of the life that had sustained them. It left them as hollow as sea shells left to dry on the beach. The magic kept them alive. When it was taken away, they died.”

They were silent a moment, thinking it through. “Was Southwatch a living thing, too?” Coll asked.

Walker nodded. “Alive, but not in the sense that we are. It was an organism, a creature of the Shadowen that served to feed and protect them. It was the mother that nurtured them, a mother they had created out of the magic. They fed on what she gave to them.”

Matty Roh made a face and scuffed at the earth. “Their sickness come back into themselves,” she murmured.

“I don’t understand why there were so many different kinds of Shadowen,” Morgan said suddenly. “Those at Southwatch, like Rimmer Dall and his Seekers, seemed in control of themselves. But what about those poor creatures in the Pit? What about the woodswoman and the giant we encountered on our way to Culhaven?”

“The magic affected them differently,” Par answered, glancing over. “Some did better with it than others.”

“Some adapted,” Walker said. “But many could not, though they tried. And some of those in the Pit were men who had been drained of their small magics by the Shadowen, the weak subverted by the strong. Remember how the Shadowen kept trying to come into you and become part of you? Like the woodswoman and the child on Toffer Ridge?”

Like Rimmer Dall, Par thought to himself but did not say so.

“They needed to feed to survive, and they fed where and when the need arose. They used up the humans around them as well as the earth that sustained them. If the magic was strong, the lure to steal it was stronger still. When the Shadowen had drained the magic away, it drove mad the creatures it had been drained from. Or in some cases, it drove the Shadowen mad to feed on it. It was a very destructive subversion. The Shadowen never understood. The power they sought was forbidden to them. The power that gives life to the earth and its creatures is too dangerous to tamper with.”

Rumor padded in from out of the shadows, singed and bloodied in a dozen places, patches of fur torn off in a dozen more. He seemed not to notice. His muzzle was wet from having drunk from a spring found somewhere back within the trees. His luminous eyes surveyed them briefly, then he wandered over to Walker, sat down, and began to lick himself clean.

Par picked at a wildflower growing near his feet. “Rimmer Dall wanted to drain the magic of the wishsong from me, didn’t he?”

“He wanted more than the magic, Par.” Walker had shifted to a more comfortable position, and Rumor looked over to make certain he wasn’t leaving. “He wanted you as well. He wanted to become you. This is difficult to understand, but the Shadowen had discovered how to leave their bodies and survive as wraiths early on. The old magic let them do that; the earth magic gave them the power to be anything they wished. But they lacked identity that way, and they craved to be something more than smoke. So they used the bodies of humans, discarding them when they were ready to be someone or something new.”

He leaned forward slightly. “But Rimmer Dall was First Seeker, the strongest of the Shadowen, and he hungered to be more than the others. He settled on being you, Par, because you gave him youth and power unlike that possessed by any other human. The wishsong was evolving; he knew that. More than that, he recognized the direction that evolution was taking. Your Elven blood was bringing the magic back around to what Brin Ohmsford had inherited from her father, the magic born of the Elfstones. Remember how she had struggled to keep it from destroying her? Rimmer Dall understood the nature of this magic. It was Elven, but it had its Shadowen side, too. If he could gain control of it, he could turn it to his own use. But this was not something he could do unless you helped him. The magic was too strong, too protective, to let you be subverted forcibly. He needed to trick you into helping him. It was what destroyed him in the end, his obsession with claiming you. He gave himself over to it, spending his time on finding a way to satisfy it, telling you that you were already a Shadowen, suggesting you were the very enemy you sought, letting you think you killed Coll and then bringing Coll back to life, chasing you about, harrying you into believing that without his help you would go mad.

“His cause was strengthened by his discovery that Allanon had sent you in search of the Sword of Shannara. He knew of your magic from Varfleet, but now he saw a way to make you his ally against his most dangerous enemy. He needed to keep close to you to make certain you did not discover the truth, and your magic helped. It was Elven-spawned, and every time you relied on it you told him where you were. It was not enough to enable him to capture you, but it kept him close.”

“But he was wrong about the Sword of Shannara,” Par insisted. “He thought I was the only one who could use it, and it was really meant for Coll.”

Walker shook his head. “I don’t know that it was meant specifically for either of you. It seems that it was meant for both. But it was necessary that Coll use it first if you were to be saved from Rimmer Dall. You had to find a way to accept the fact that even though your fears about the magic were true, they were not determinative of your fate. Allanon was careful not to reveal anything about Coll’s role. He must have known that it had to be kept secret if Coll was to help you.”

“Perhaps he knew that the Shadowen would discover the charges,” Morgan offered. “So he held one back.”

“What about the charges?” Par asked suddenly. “What were they meant to accomplish? We know why retrieving the Sword of Shannara was important, but what about the others?”

Walker breathed deeply, looked away toward the plains for a moment thinking, then turned back again. His knowledge and his reasoning allowed him to divine more quickly than his companions the truths behind what had transpired, and so they were quick to look to him for an explanation. Foresight, comprehension, perception, and deduction—Druid skills bequeathed to him. Add to those the power of the magic and the responsibility to use it wisely. He was beginning to appreciate already the burden that Allanon had carried all those years.

“The charges were given to accomplish more than simply the destruction of the Shadowen,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “A combination of things was required if the Four Lands was to survive. An understanding of who the Shadowen were and what they were about was necessary first and foremost, and the quests to carry out Allanon’s charges provided that. More directly, there were the talismans that helped destroy them—the Sword of Shannara, the Elfstones, the wishsong, and Morgan’s blade. And peripherally there were the magics that enabled us to recover those talismans.

“But the charges were given as well to sustain the Four Lands once the Shadowen were gone, to help keep the Shadowen or things like them from coming back. The Elves were returned to provide a balance that has been missing. The Elves are the healers of the land and her creatures, the caretakers needed to keep the magic safe and secure. When they fled, the Shadowen had no one to challenge their theft, no one who even realized what was happening. The Elves will work to prevent that from occurring again.

“And the Druids,” he said softly, “will contribute to that balance as well. It was something I did not understand before, something I learned in becoming one of them. The Druids are the land’s conscience. They do not simply manipulate and control. They seek out what troubles the land and her people, and they help to put it right again. It might seem sometimes as if they serve only their own purposes, but the misperception comes from fear of the power they wield. It remains a judgment for each of them, of course—for me, as well, I know—but the reason for their being comes from a need to serve.” He paused. “I could not be one of them otherwise.”

“Once, you could not have been one of them in any case,” Par observed quietly.

Walker nodded and the hardness in his eyes softened. “Once, Par, was a long time ago for all of us.”

Cogline would have agreed with that, the Valeman thought to himself. The old man would have recognized the truth in those words right away. Cogline had seen the passing of so many years, times gone out of memory and become legend, the disappearance of the Druids and their return, the transition from the old world to the new. Cogline had been the last of what once was, and he would have understood that the inevitability of change was the sole constant of life.

“So the black things are really gone,” Matty Roh said suddenly, as if needing confirmation, not looking at anyone as she spoke.

“The Shadowen are gone,” Walker Boh assured her. He paused, looking down. “But the magic that sustained them remains. Do not forget that.”

Damson stirred then, and they went to see that she was all right. Overhead, the sunlight brightened through the early haze, and the air began to turn hot and sticky. On the flats below, the remains of Southwatch shimmered and steamed in the swelter, and after a time took on the appearance of a mirage.

Midday came and went as the company rested within the cool of the mountain trees. Damson woke from her slumber to eat and drink, then closed her eyes once more. She would heal quickly, Walker Boh observed. She would be well again soon.

They fell asleep after that, drifting off one by one, smelling wildflowers and fresh grasses, comforted by the forest silence. Exhaustion might have claimed them, but Par thought afterward it must have been something more. He dreamed that Walker spoke to each of them as they slept, telling them that they should remember what he had said about the magic, that they should remember its importance to the land. What part of the magic they kept with them—and here he spoke mostly to Par—they must ward carefully against misuse and neglect. Keep it safe for when it was needed; hold it in trust for when it must be used. He touched them each in some way that was not immediately recognizable, passing among them silently, soundlessly, leaving them rested and at peace. He changed in appearance as he went, looking at times like Walker and at other times like Allanon. He took from Coll the Sword of Shannara. So that it will not be lost again, he explained. Coll did not object, nor did anyone. The Sword did not really belong to them. The Sword belonged to the Four Lands.

Then Walker began to fade away like a shadow in sunlight. I must leave you now, he told them, for my healing requires the Druid Sleep.

When they awoke again it was late afternoon, the sky turning purple and crimson, the forest hushed and cool and still. Walker Boh was gone, and they knew without being told that he was not coming back to them.

Moments later Elven Wing Riders and their Rocs appeared out of the fading sunlight west bearing Wren and Padishar and the others who had fought at the Valley of Rhenn, and it time for the explanations to begin again.