The Heritage of Shannara (177 page)

The nonlight streaked forth, spreading like ink across the shadowed well of the Keep to embrace the mist.
No more games!
Walker's shout was a euphoric, silent cry within his mind. The Grimpond—so insidious, so devious—had almost undone him.
Never again. Never …

Then everything began to happen at once.

Nonlight and mist meshed and joined. Back through the tunnel of the magic's dark flooded the mist, a greenish, pulsing fury. Walker had only an instant to catch his breath, to question what had gone wrong, and to wonder if perhaps he had failed to outsmart the Grimpond after all—and then the Druid magic was on him. It exploded within, and he screamed in helpless dismay. The pain was indescribable, a fiery incandescence. It felt as if another being had entered him, carried within by the magic, drawn out of the concealment of the mist. A physical presence, it burrowed into bone and muscle and flesh and blood until it was all that Walker could bear. It expanded and raged until he thought he would be torn apart. Then the sense of it changed, igniting a different kind of pain. Memories flooded through him, vast and seemingly endless. With the memories came the feelings that accompanied them, emotions charged with horror and fear and doubt and regret and a dozen other sensations that rolled through Walker Boh in an unstoppable torrent. He staggered back, trying to resist, to fling them away. His hand fought to close over the Black Elfstone in an effort to shut this attack off, but his body would no longer obey him. He was gripped by the magics—those of both Elfstone and mist—and they held him fast.

Like Allanon and the specter of death in the third version!

Shades! Had the Grimpond been right after all?

He was seeing other places and times, viewing the faces of men and women and children he did not know, witnessing events transpire and fade, and above all feeling a wrenching series of emotions emanate from the
being inside. Walker's sense of where he was disappeared. He was transported into the mind of his invader. A man? Yes, a man, he realized, a man who had lived countless lifetimes, centuries, far longer than any normal human, someone so different …

The images abruptly changed. He saw a gathering of black robes, dark figures concealed behind castle walls, closeted in chambers where the light barely reached, hunched over ancient books of learning, writing, reading, studying, discussing …

Druids!

And then he realized the truth—a jarring, shocking recognition that cut through the madness with a razor's edge.

The being that the mist had carried within him was Allanon—his memories, his experiences, his feelings, and his thoughts, everything but the flesh and blood he had lost in death.

How had Allanon managed this? Walker asked himself in disbelief, fighting to breathe against the rush of memories, against the suffocating blanket of the other's thoughts. But he already knew the answer to that. A Druid's magic allowed almost anything. The seeds had been planted three hundred years ago. Why, then? And that answer, too, came swiftly, a red flare of certainty. This was how the Druid lore was to be passed on to him. All that Allanon had known and felt was stored within the mist, his knowledge kept safe for three hundred years, waiting for his successor.

But there was more, Walker sensed. This was how he was to be tested as well. This was how it was to be determined if he should become a Druid.

His speculation ended as the images continued to rush through him, recognizable now for what they were, the whole of the Druid experience, all that Allanon had gleaned from his predecessors, from his studies, from the living of his own life. Like footprints in soft earth, they embedded in Walker's mind, their touch fiery and harsh, each a coal laid against his skin. The words and impressions and feelings descended in an avalanche. It was too much, too fast.
I don't want this!
he screamed in terror, but still the feeding continued, relentless, purposeful—Allanon's self transferring into Walker. He fought back against it, groping through the maze of images for something solid. But the black light of the Elfstone was a funnel that refused to be stoppered, drawing in the greenish mist, absorbing it, and channeling it into his body. Voices spoke words, faces turned to look, scenes changed, and time rushed away—a composite of all the years Allanon had been alive, struggling to protect the Races, to assure that the Druid lore wasn't lost, that the hopes and aspirations the First Council had envisioned centuries ago were carried forth and preserved. Walker Boh became privy to it all, learned what it had meant to Allanon and those whose lives he had touched, and experienced for himself the impact of life through almost ten centuries.

Then abruptly the images ceased, the voices, the faces, the scenes out of time—everything that had assailed him. They vanished in a rush, and he
was standing alone again within the Keep, a solitary figure slumped against the stone-block wall.

Still alive.

He lifted away unsteadily, looking down at himself, making certain he was whole. Within, there was a rawness, like skin reddened from too much sun, the implant of all that Druid knowledge, of all that Allanon had intended to bequeath. His spirit felt leavened and his mind filled. Yet his command over the knowledge was disjointed, as if it could not be brought to bear, not called upon. Something was wrong. Walker could not seem to focus.

Before him, the Black Elfstone pulsed, the nonlight a bridge that arced into the shadows, still joined with what remained of the mist—a roiling, churning mass of wicked green light that hissed and sparked and gathered itself like a cat about to spring.

Walker straightened, weak and unsteady, frightened anew, sensing that something more was about to happen and that the worst was still to come. His mind raced. What could he do to prepare himself ? There wasn't time enough left …

The mist launched itself into the nonlight. It came at Walker and enveloped him in the blink of an eye. He could see its anger, hear its rage, and feel its fury. It exploded through the new skin of his knowledge, a geyser of pain. Walker shrieked and doubled over. His body convulsed, changing within the covering of his robes. He could feel the wrenching of his bones. He closed his eyes and went rigid. The mist was within, curling, settling, feeding.

He experienced a rush of horror.

All of his life, Walker Boh had struggled to escape what the Druids had foreordained for him, resolved to chart his own course. In the end, he had failed. Thus he had gone in search of the Black Elfstone and then Paranor with the knowledge that if he should find them it would require that he become the next Druid, accepting his destiny yet promising himself that he would be his own person whatever was ordained. Now, in an instant's time, as he was wracked by the fury of what had hidden within the mist, all that remained of his hopes for some small measure of self-determination was stripped away, and Walker Boh was left instead with the darkest part of Al-lanon's soul. It was the Druid's cruelest self, a composite of all those times he had been forced by reason and circumstance to do what he abhorred, all those situations when he had been required to expend lives and faith and hope and trust, and all those years of hardening and tempering of spirit and heart until both were as carefully forged and as indestructible as the hardest metal. It was a rendering of the limits of Allanon's being, the limits to which he had been forced to journey. It revealed the weight of responsibility that came with power. It delineated the understanding that experience bestowed. It was harsh and ragged and terrible, an accumulation of ten normal lifetimes, and it inundated Walker like floodwaters over the wall of a dam.

Down into blackness the Dark Uncle spiraled, hearing himself cry out, hearing as well the Grimpond's laughter—imagined or real, he could not tell. His thoughts scattered before the flaying of his spirit, of his hopes, and of his beliefs. There was nothing he could do; the force of the magic was too powerful. He gave way before it, a monstrous strength. He waited to die.

Yet somehow he clung to life. He found that the torrent of dark revelation, while testing his endurance in ways he had not believed possible, had failed nevertheless to destroy him. He could not think—there was too much pain for that. He did not try to see, lost within a bottomless pit. Hearing availed him nothing, for the echo of his cry reverberated all about him. He seemed to float within himself, fighting to breathe, to survive. It was the testing he had anticipated—the Druid rite of passage. It battered him senseless, filled him with hurt, and left him broken within. Everything washed away, his beliefs and understandings, all that had sustained him for so long. Could he survive that loss? What would he be if he did?

Through waves of anguish he swam, buried within himself and the force of the dark magic, borne to the edge of his endurance, an inch from drowning. He sensed that his life could be lost in the tick of a moment's passing and realized that the measure of who and what he was and could be was being taken. He couldn't stop it. He wasn't sure he even cared. He drifted, helpless.

Helpless.

To be ever again who he had thought he would. To fulfill any of the promises he had made to himself. To have any control over his life. To determine if he would live or die.

Helpless.

Walker Boh.

Barely aware of what he was doing, separated from conscious reasoning, driven instead by emotions too primal to identify, the Dark Uncle thrashed clear of his lethargy and exploded through the waves of pain, through nonlight and dark magic, through time and space, a bright speck of fiery rage.

Within, he felt the balance shift, the weight between life and death tip.

And when he broke at last the surface of the black ocean that had threatened to drown him, the only sound he heard, as it burst from his lungs, was an endless scream.

I
t was late morning. The last three members of the company of nine worked their way cautiously through the tangle of the In Ju, following after the bulky, spiked form of Stresa, the Splinterscat, as he tunneled steadily deeper into the gloom.

Wren breathed the fetid, damp air and listened to the silence.

Distant, far removed from where they labored, Killeshan's rumble was a backdrop of sound that rolled across earth and sky, deep and ominous. Tremors snaked through Morrowindl, warning of the eruption that continued to build. But in the jungle, everything was still. A sheen of wetness coated the In Ju from the ground up, soaking trees and scrub, vines and grasses, a blanket that muffled sound and hid movement. The jungle was a vault of stunning green, of walls that formed countless chambers leading one into the other, of corridors that twisted and wound about in a maze that threatened to suffocate. Branches intertwined overhead to form a ceiling that shut out the light, canopied over a patchwork floor of swamp and quicksand and mud. Insects buzzed invisibly and things cried out from the mist. But nothing moved. Nothing seemed alive.

The Wisteron's webbing was everywhere by now, a vast networking that layered the trees like strips of gauze. Dead things hung in the webbing, the husks of creatures drained of life, the remains of the monster's feedings. They were small for the most part; the Wisteron took the larger offerings to its lair.

Which lay somewhere not far ahead.

Wren watched the shadows about her, made more anxious by the lack of any movement than by the silence. She walked in a dead place, a wasteland in which living things did not belong, a netherworld she traversed at her peril. She kept thinking she would catch sight of a flash of color, a rippling of water, or a shimmer of leaves and grasses. But the In Ju might have been sheathed in ice, it was so frozen. They were deep within the Wis-teron's country now, and nothing ventured here.

Nothing save themselves.

She held the Elfstones clutched tightly in her hand, free now of their leather bag, ready for the use to which she knew they must be put. She harbored no illusions as to what would be required of her. She bore no false hope that use of the Elfstones might be avoided, that her Rover skills might be sufficient to save them. She did not debate whether it was wise to employ the magic when she knew how its power affected her. Her choices were all behind her. The Wisteron was a monster that only the Elfstones
could overcome. She would use the magic because it was the only weapon they had that would make any difference in the battle that lay ahead. If she allowed herself to hesitate, if she fell prey yet again to indecision, they were all dead.

She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. Odd that she should be so dry there and so damp everywhere else. Even the palms of her hands were sweating. How far she had come since her days with Garth when she had roamed the Tirfing in what seemed now to have been another life, free of worry and responsibility, answerable only to herself and the dictates of time.

She wondered if she would ever see the Westland again.

Ahead, the gloom tightened into pockets of deep shadow that had the look of burrows. Mist coiled out and wound through the tree limbs and vines like snakes. Webbing cloaked the high branches and filled the gaps between—thick, semitransparent strands that shimmered with the damp. Stresa slowed and looked back at them. He didn't speak. He didn't have to. Wren was aware of Garth and Triss at either shoulder, silent, expectant. She nodded to Stresa and motioned for him to go on.