The Talismans of Shannara

Chapter four

The man in the high castle was Walker Boh, and he walked its parapets and battlements, its towers and keeps, all of the corridors and walkways that defined its boundaries like the wraith he had been and the outcast he felt. Paranor, the castle of the Druids, was returned, come back into the world of men, brought alive by Walker and the magic of the Black Elfstone. Paranor stood as it had three hundred years before, lifting out of the dark forest where wolves prowled and thorns the size of lance-points bristled protectively. It rose out of the earth, set upon a bluff where it could be seen across the whole of the valley it dominated, from the Kennon to the Jannisson, from one ridgeline of the Dragon’s Teeth to the other, spires and walls and gates. As solid as the stone from which it had been built more than a thousand years earlier, it was the Keep of legends and folk tales made whole once more. But shades, Walker Boh thought in his despair, what it had cost!

“It was waiting for me down in the tower well, the essence of the Druid magic he had set at watch,” Walker explained to Cogline that first night, the night he had emerged from the Keep with Allanon’s presence at haunt within. “All those years it had been waiting, his spirit or some part of that spirit, concealed in the serpentine mist that had destroyed the Mord Wraiths and their allies and sent Paranor out of the land of men to wait for the time it would be summoned back again. Allanon’s shade had been waiting as well, it seems, there within the waters of the Hadeshorn, knowing that the need for the Keep and its Druids would one day prove inexorable, that the magic and the lore they wielded must be kept at hand against the possibility that history’s evolution would take a different path than the one he had prophesied.”

Cogline listened and did not speak. He was still in awe of what had happened, of whom Walker Boh had become. He was afraid. For Walker was Walker still, but something more as well. Allanon was there, become a part of him in the transformation from man to Druid, in the rite of passage that had taken place in the Keep’s dark hold. Cogline had ventured, in his spirit form, just long enough to pull Walker back from the madness that threatened to engulf him before he could come to grips with the change that was taking place. In those few seconds Cogline had felt the beginnings of Walker’s change—and he had fled in horror.

“The Black Elfstone drew the mist into itself and thereby into me,” Walker whispered, the words a familiar repetition by now, as if saying them would make them better understood. His stark visage lowered into the cowl of his robe, a mask still changing. “It brought Allanon within. It brought all of the Druids within—their history and lore and magic, their knowledge, their secrets, all that they were. It spun them through me like threads on a loom that weaves a new cloth, and I could feel myself invaded and helpless to prevent it.”

The face within the cowl swung slightly toward the old man. “I have all of them inside me, Cogline. They have made a home within me, determined that I should have their knowledge and their power and that I should use it as they did. It was Allanon’s plan from the beginning—a descendant of Brin to carry forth the Druid lineage, one that would be chosen when the need arose, one who would serve and obey.”

Iron fingers fastened suddenly on Cogline’s shoulder and made him wince. “Obey, old man! That is what they intend of me, but not what they shall have!” Walker Boh’s words were edged with bitterness. “I can feel them working about inside, living things! I can sense their presence as they whisper their words and try to make me heed. But I am stronger than they are, made so by the very process that they used to change me. I survived the trial they set for me, and I will be what I choose, be they living within my body and mind, be they shades or memories of the past, be they what they will! If I must be this this thing they have made of me, I shall at least give it my voice and my heart!”

So they walked, Cogline as cold as death listening to the tormented Walker Boh, Walker as hot as the fires that had begun to burn anew within the furnaces below Paranor’s stone walls, his fury made over into the strength that sustained him against what was happening.

For the change continued even now as they walked the castle corridors, the old man and the becoming Druid, shadowed by the silent presence of Rumor the moor cat, as black-browed as his masters. The change swirled through Walker like smoke in the wind, stirred by the hands of the Druids gone, their spirits alive within the one who would permit the magic to live again. It came as knowledge revealed in bits and pieces and sometimes in sharp bursts, knowledge gained and preserved through the years, all that the Druids had discovered and shaped in their order, the whole of what had sustained them through the years of the Warlock Lord and the Skull Bearers, through the Demons within the Forbidding, through the Ildatch and the Mord Wraiths, through all the trials of dark evil set to challenge humankind. The magic revealed itself little by little, peeking forth from the jumble of hands and eyes and whispered words that roiled in Walker Boh’s mind and gave him no peace.

He did not sleep at all for three days. He tried, exhausted to the point of despair, but when he endeavored to let himself go, to slip away into the comfort of the rest he so desperately needed, some new facet of the change lurched alive and brought him upright as if he were a puppet on strings, making him aware of its need, of its presence, of its determination to be heard. Each time he would fight it, not to prevent it from being, for there was no sense in that, but to assure that it was not accepted without question, that the knowledge was perused and studied, that he recognized its face and was cautioned thereby against blind use. The Druids were not his maker, he reminded himself over and over again. The Druids had not given him his life and should not be allowed to dictate his destiny. He would do that. He would decide the nature of his life, power of magic or no, and in doing so would be accountable only to himself.

Cogline and Rumor stayed with him, as exhausted as he was, but frightened for him and determined that he would not be left alone to face what was happening. Cogline’s was the voice that Walker needed to hear now and again in response to his own, a caution and reassurance to blunt his lamentations of disgust. Rumor was the shaggy dark certainty that some things did not change, a presence as solid and dependable as the coming of day after night, the promise that there could be a waking from even the worst of nightmares. Together they sustained him in ways he could not begin to describe and that they in turn could not begin to understand. It was enough that they sensed that the bond was there.

Three days passed, then, before the change finally ran its course and the transformation was made complete. All at once the hands stopped molding, the eyes disappeared, and the whispers faded. Within Walker Boh, everything suddenly went still. He slept then and did not dream, and when he woke he knew that while he was changed in ways he was only beginning to discover, still he was in the deepest part of himself the same person he had always been. He had preserved the heart of the man who mistrusted the Druids and their magics, and while the Druids now lived within him and would have their voice in the way he conducted his life, nevertheless they would be ruled by beliefs that had preceded their coming and would survive their stay. Walker rose in the solitude of his sleeping chamber, alone in the darkness that the windowless room provided, at peace with himself for the first time he could remember, the long, terrible journey to fulfill the charge he had been given ended, the ordeal of the transformation set for him finished at last. Much had come undone and more than a little had been lost, but what mattered above all else was that he had survived.

He went out then to Cogline and found him sitting close-by with the moor cat curled at his feet, worry lines etched in his aging face, uncertainty reflected in his eyes. He came up to the old man and raised him to his feet as if he were a child—grown impossibly strong with the change, made over by the hands and eyes and voices until he was as ten men. He put his good arm about the frail old body and held his mentor gently.

“I am well again,” he whispered. “It is over and I am safe.” And the old man gripped him back and cried into his shoulder.

They talked then as they had of old, two men who had experienced more than their share of surprises in life, joined by the common bond of the Druid magic and by the fates that had brought them to this time and place. They spoke of Walker’s change, of the feelings it had generated, of the knowledge it had brought, and of the needs it might fulfill. They were whole again, flesh-and-blood men, and Paranor was returned. It was the beginning of a new era in the world of the Four Lands, and they were at the first moment in time that would determine how that era evolved. Walker Boh was uncertain even now how he was to wield the Druid magic—or even that he should. There was the Shadowen threat to consider, but the nature and extent of that threat remained a mystery. Walker had been given the Druid lore, but not an insight into what he was expected to do with it—especially as regarded the Shadowen.

“My transformation has left me with certain insights that weren’t there before,” Walker confided. “One is that the use of Druid magic will prove necessary if the Shadowen threat is to be ended. But whose insight is it—mine or Allanon’s? Can I trust it, I wonder? Is it a truth or a fiction?”

The old man shook his head. “I think you must discover that for yourself. I think Allanon wants it that way. Hasn’t it always been left to the Ohmsfords to discover the truth of things on their own? Gamesplaying, you once called it. But isn’t it really much more than that? Isn’t it the nature of life? Experience comes from doing, not from being told. Experiment and discover. Seek and find. It is not the machinations of the Druids that compel us to do so; it is our need to know. It is, in the end, the way we learn. I think it must be your way as well, Walker.”

What should be done first, they decided, was to find out what had become of the other scions of Shannara—Par, Coll, and Wren. Had they fulfilled the charges they had been given? Where were they and what secrets had they uncovered in the weeks that had passed since their meeting at the Hadeshorn?

“Par will have found the Sword of Shannara or be searching for it,” Walker declared. They sat within the Druid study, the Histories spread out before them, perused this time for particulars that Walker remembered from his previous readings and now understood differently with the knowledge his transformation had wrought. “Par was driven in his quest. He was all iron and determination. Whatever the rest of us chose to do, he would not have given up.”

“Nor Wren either, I think,” the old man offered thoughtfully. “There was as much iron in her, though it was not so apparent.” He met Walker’s gaze boldly. “Allanon’s shade sensed what would drive each of you, and I think no one ever really stood a chance of being able to walk away.”

Walker leaned back in the chair that cushioned him, lean face shadowed by lank dark hair and beard, the eyes so penetrating it seemed that nothing could hide from them. “From the time of Shea Ohmsford, the Druids have made us their own, haven’t they?” he mused, cool and distant. “They found in us something that could be shackled, and they have held us prisoner ever since. We are servants to their needs—and paladins to the races.”

Cogline felt the air in the room stir, a palpable response to the flow of magic that rose from Walker’s voice. He had sensed it more than once since Walker had come out of the Keep, a measure of the power bestowed on him. More Druid than man, he was a manifestation of the dark arts and lore that once, long ago, the old man had studied and rejected in favor of forms of the old-world sciences. Opportunity lost, he thought. But sanity gained. He wondered if Walker would find peace in his own evolution.

“We are just men,” he said cautiously.

And Walker replied, smiling, “We are just fools.”

They talked late into the night, but Walker remained undecided on a course of action. Find the others of his family, yes—but where to begin and how to go about it? Use of his newfound magic was an obvious choice, but would that use reveal him to the Shadowen? Did his enemies know what had happened yet—that he had become a Druid and that Paranor had been brought back? How strong was the Shadowen magic? How far could it reach? He should not be too quick to test it, he kept repeating. He was still learning about his own. He was still discovering. He should not be hasty about what he chose to do.

The debate wore on, and as it did so it began to dawn on Walker that something was different between Cogline and himself. He thought at first that his reluctance to commit to a course of action was simply indecision—even though that was very unlike him. He soon realized it was something else altogether. While they talked as they had of old, there was a distance between them that had never been there before, not even when he had been angry with and mistrustful of the old man. The relationship between them had changed. Walker was no longer the student and Cogline the teacher. Walker’s transformation had left him with knowledge and power far superior to Cogline’s. Walker was no longer the Dark Uncle hiding out in Darklin Reach. The days of living apart from the races and forswearing his birthright were gone forever. Walker Boh was committed to whom and what he had become—a Druid, the only Druid, perhaps the single most powerful individual alive. What he did could affect the lives of everyone. Walker knew that. Knowing, he accepted that his decisions must be his own and the making of them could never again be shared, because no one, not even Cogline, should have to bear the weight of such a terrible responsibility.

When they parted finally to sleep, exhausted anew from their efforts, Walker found himself besieged by a mix of feelings. He had grown so far beyond the man he had been that in many ways he was barely recognizable. He was conscious of the old man staring after him as he retreated down the hall to his sleeping room and could not shake the sense that they were drawing apart in more ways than one.

Cogline. The Druid-who-never-was made companion to the Druid-who-would-be—what must he be feeling?

Walker didn’t know. But he accepted reluctantly that from this night forward things would never be the same between them again.

He slept then, and his dreams were tenuous and filled with faces and voices he could not recognize. It was nearing dawn when he woke, an urgency gripping him, whispering insidiously at him, bringing him out of his sleep like a swimmer out of water, thrusting to the surface and drawing in huge gulps of air. For a moment he was paralyzed by the suddenness of his waking, frozen with uncertainty as his heart pounded within his chest and his eyes and ears struggled to make sense of the darkness surrounding him. At last he was able to move, swinging his legs down off the bed, steadied by the feeling of the solid stone beneath his feet. He rose, aware that he was still wearing the dark robes in which he had fallen asleep, the clothing he had been too tired to remove.

Something stirred just outside his door, a soft padding, a rubbing against the ancient wood.

Rumor.

He went to the door and opened it. The big cat stood just without, staring up at him. It circled away anxiously and came back again, big head swinging up, eyes gleaming.

It wants me to follow, Walker thought. Something is wrong.

He wrapped himself in a heavy cloak and went out from his sleeping chamber into the tomblike silence of the castle. Stone walls muffled the sound of his feet as he hurried down the ancient corridors. Rumor went on ahead, sleek and dark in the gloom, padding soundlessly through the shadows. Without slowing, they passed the room in which Cogline slept. The trouble did not lie there. The night faded about them as they went, dawn rising out of the east in a shimmer of silver that seeped through the castle windows in wintry, clouded light. Walker barely noticed, his eyes fixed on the movement of the moor cat as it slid through the overlapping shadows. His ears strained to hear something, to catch a hint of what was waiting. But the silence persisted, unbroken.

They climbed from the main hall to the battlement doors and went out into the open air. The dawn was chill and empty-feeling. Mist lay over the whole of the valley, climbing the wall of the Dragon’s Teeth east and stretching west to the Streleheim in a blanket that shrouded everything between. Paranor lay wrapped within its upper folds, its high towers islands thrusting out of a misty sea. The mist swirled and spun, stirred by winds that came down off the mountains, and in the weak light of the early dawn strange shapes and forms came alive.

Rumor padded down the walkway, sniffing the air as he went, tail switching uneasily. Walker followed. They circled the south parapet west without slowing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. They passed open stairwells and tower entryways, ghosts at haunt.

On the west battlement, Rumor slowed suddenly. The hair on the moor cat’s neck bristled, and his dark muzzle wrinkled in a snarl. Walker moved up beside him and quickly placed a reassuring hand on the coarse hair of his back. Rumor was facing out now into the gloom. They stood just above the castle’s west gate.

Walker peered into the mist. He could sense it, too.

Something was out there.

The seconds slipped away, and nothing showed. Walker began to grow impatient. Perhaps he should go out for a look.

Then suddenly the mist drew back, seemed to pull away as if in revulsion, and the riders appeared. There were four of them, gaunt and spectral in the faint light. They came slowly, purposefully, as gray as the gloom that had hidden their approach. Four riders atop their mounts, but none was human, and the animals they rode were loathsome parodies, all scales and claws and teeth. Four riders, each markedly different from the other, each with a mount that was a mirror of itself.

Walker Boh knew at once that they were Shadowen. He knew as well that they had come for him.

Coolly, dispassionately, he studied them.

The first was tall and lean and cadaverous. Bones pressed out against skin shrunk tight against it, the skeletal frame hunched forward like a cat at hunt. The face was a skull in which the jaw hung open slackly and the eyes stared out, too wide and too blank to be seeing. It wore no clothes, and its naked body was neither that of a man nor of a woman, but something in between. Its breath clouded the air before it, a vile green mist.

The second lacked any semblance of identity. It was human-shaped, but had no skin or bones. It was instead a raging cloud of darkness, buzzing and shrieking within its form. The cloud had the look of flies or mosquitoes trapped behind glass, gathered so thick that they shut out the light. The wicked sounds that issued from this rider seemed to warn that it hid within its spectral form an evil too dreadful to imagine.

The third was more immediately recognizable. Armored head to foot, it bristled with spikes and cutting edges and weapons. It wore maces and knives, swords and battle-axes, and carried a huge pike strung with skulls and finger bones laced together in a chain. A helmet hid its face, but the eyes that peered out through the visor slit were as red as fire.

The last rider was cloaked and hooded and as invisible as the night. No face could be seen within the concealing cowl. No hands showed to grip the reins of its sinewy mount. It rode hunched forward like a very old man, all bent and gnarled, a creature crippled by age and time. But there was no sense of weakness about it, nothing to suggest that it was anything of what it appeared. This rider rode steady and sure, and what crippled it was neither time nor age but the weight of the burden it bore for the lives it had taken.

Slung across its back was a scythe.

Walker Boh went cold with recognition. Far back in the Druid Histories, recorded from the old world of Men, there was mention of these four. He knew who they were, whom they had been created to be. Now Shadowen had taken on their guises, assumed the identities of the dark things of old.

His chest tightened. Four riders. The Four Horsemen of the legends, the slayers of mortal men come out of a time so distant it had been all but forgotten. But he had read the tales, he repeated to himself, and he knew what they were.

Famine. Pestilence. War. Death.

Walker’s hand lifted away from Rumor, and the cat began to growl deep in his chest. Shadowen, Walker thought in a mix of awe and fear, created to be something that never was, that was only a manifestation of abstracts, of killing ways, come now to destroy me.

He wondered anew at who and what the Shadowen were, at the source of power that would let them be anything they chose. His transformation had given him no insight into this. He was as ignorant of their origins now as he had been at the start of things. Yes, they were as dark as the shade of Allanon had forewarned. Yes, they were an evil that used magic as a weapon to destroy. But who were they? Where had they come from? How could they be destroyed?

Where could he find the answers to his questions?

He watched the Four Horsemen advance, settled atop their lurching, writhing mounts, things that vaguely resembled horses but were intended to be much more. Breath steamed on the morning air like poisonous vapor. Claws scraped and crunched on the rock. Heads lifted and muzzles drew back to show hooked, yellowed teeth. Steadily, the Horsemen came on.

When they reached the gates, they stopped. They made no move to pass through. They showed no interest in advancing. In a line they faced the gate and waited. Walker waited with them. The minutes passed and the light brightened slowly, the gloom taking on a whiteness as the dawn neared.

Then at last the sun crested the mountains east, a faint glimmer above the dark peaks, and at the gates below, the rider Famine suddenly advanced. When it was next to the barrier, it lifted its skeletal hand and knocked. The sound was a dimly heard, echoing, hollow thud—the shudder that life makes as it departs the body for the final time. Walker cringed in spite of himself, revolted by how it made him feel.

Famine backed away then, and one by one the Four Horsemen turned right, spreading out in a thin line to circle the castle walls. Around they went, passing beneath Walker one by one as he watched them return and disappear again, keeping carefully apart in their movement so that there was always one at each wall, one at each corner of the compass.

A siege, Walker realized. The knock was a challenge, and if he did not come out to answer it, they intended to keep him trapped within. Rimmer Dall and the Shadowen had discovered that Paranor was back and that Walker had accepted the mantle of Allanon. The Horsemen had been sent in response.

Walker folded his arms within his cloak. We’ll see who traps whom, he thought darkly.

He stood looking down for a while longer on the apparitions below, then went to wake Cogline.