The Heritage of Shannara (225 page)

And memories, he knew, were not glass treasures to be kept locked within a box. They were bright ribbons to be hung in the wind.

He turned his hand over and clasped hers. Then he leaned close so that he could see her face clearly and began to speak. He talked for a long time, finding it hard at first and then easier, working his way through the maze of emotions that rose within him, searching for the words that sometimes would not come, forcing himself to go on even when he thought that maybe he could not.

When he was done, she held him close and some of the pain slipped away.

They set out again at dawn, the daylight gray and misty with a promise of rain. Clouds rolled out of the west, a heavy, dark avalanche that sealed away everything in its path. It was hot and still on the river, and the slap of the water against the canyon walls echoed sharply as they wound their way downriver. Morgan put up the mast and sail, but there was little wind to help, and after a while he took it down again and let the current carry them. It was nearing midday when they passed beneath Southwatch, the black obelisk towering over them, vast and silent and impenetrable, its shadow cast like a Forbidding across the Mermidon. They stared at it with loathing as they passed, imagining the dark things that waited within, uneasy with the possibility that they might be watched. But no one appeared, and they sailed by unchallenged. Southwatch receded into the distance, melted into the haze, and was gone.

They reached the mouth of the river shortly after, the waters widening and stretching away to become the Rainbow Lake, smoothing into a glassy surface and brightening into a richer blue. The rainbow from which the lake took its name was in pale evidence, shimmering in the heat and mist, suspended above the water like a weathered, faded banner whose stays had come loose so that it floated free. They guided the skiff to the west bank, beached it, and walked out onto a barren flat that dropped away east and south into the water and spread northwest across a plain empty of everything but scrub grass and stunted, leafless ironwood to where a line of hills shadowed the horizon. They breathed the air and looked about, finding no sign of anything for as far as they could see.

Damson brushed back her fiery hair, tied it in place with a bandanna across her forehead, and drew out the Skree. Holding it forth in her open palm, she faced south. Morgan watched as the half disk glimmered bright copper.

She began to put it away, apparently had second thoughts, and tested each of the other compass points. When she faced north, the direction from which they had come, the Skree glimmered a second time, a small, weak pulsing. Damson stared at it in disbelief, closed her hand over it, turned away and then back once more, and reopened her hand. Again the Skree glimmered fitfully.

“Why is it doing that?” Matty asked immediately.

Damson shook her head. “I don't know. I've never heard of it behaving like this.”

She faced south again and carefully let her palm travel the horizon from
east to west and back again. Then she did the same thing facing north, reading the Skree's hammered surface as she turned. There was no mistake in what they were seeing. The Skree brightened both ways.

“Could it have been broken again and the pieces carried in two directions?” Morgan asked.

“No. It can only be divided once. Another breaking would render it useless. That hasn't happened.” Damson looked worried. “But something has. The reading south points towards the Silver River country west of Culhaven above the Battlemound. It is the stronger of the two.” She looked over her shoulder. “The reading north is centered on Southwatch.”

There was a long silence as they considered what that meant. A heron cried out from over the lake, swept out of the haze in a flash of silver brightness, and disappeared again.

“Two readings,” Morgan said, and put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “And one of them is a fake.”

“So which one do we believe?” Matty asked. She started away a few steps as if she had something in mind, then turned abruptly and came back again. “Which is the real one?”

Again Damson shook her head. “I don't know.”

Matty's cobalt eyes glanced toward the horizon where the clouds were building. “Then we will have to check them both.”

Damson nodded. “I think so. I don't know any other way.”

Morgan exhaled in frustration. “All right. We'll go south first. That reading is the stronger of the two.”

“And abandon Southwatch?” Matty shook her head. “We can't do that. Someone has to stay here in case Par Ohmsford is inside. Think about it, Highlander. What if he's in there and they try to move him? What if a chance to rescue him comes along and no one is here to do anything about it? We might lose him and have to start all over again. I don't think we can take that chance.”

“She's right,” Damson agreed.

“Fine, you stay, Damson and I will go south,” Morgan declared, irritated that he hadn't thought of it first.

But Matty shook her head again. “You have to be the one who stays. Your sword is the only effective weapon we have against the Shadowen. If a rescue is needed, if any sort of confrontation comes about, your Sword is a talisman against their magic. My skills are good, Morgan Leah, but I also know when I'm overmatched. I don't like this any better than you do, but it can't be helped. Damson and I will go south.”

There was a long silence as they faced each other, Morgan fighting to control an almost irresistible urge to reject flatly what he perceived to be the madness of her suggestion, Matty with her cobalt eyes steady and determined, the weight of her arguments mirrored in their blue light.

Finally Morgan looked away, reason winning out over passion, a reluctant submission to necessity and hope. “All right,” he said softly. The words were bitter and harsh sounding. “All right. I don't like it, but all right.” He
looked back again. “But if you find Par and there's to be a fight, you come back for me.”

Matty nodded. “If we can.”

Morgan winced at the qualification, shook his head angrily, and glanced at Damson in challenge. But Damson simply nodded in agreement. Morgan exhaled slowly. “If you can,” he repeated dully.

They conferred a moment more, agreeing on what they would do if time and circumstance allowed. Morgan scanned the countryside and then pointed west to where a bluff fronting the lake looked out across the surrounding land. From there he would be able to see anything coming to or going from Southwatch. If nothing happened in the time between, that was where they would find him when they returned.

He walked back with them to the skiff and retrieved supplies sufficient to last him a week. Then he embraced them hesitantly, Damson first, then Matty. The tall girl held him tightly against her, almost as if to persuade him of her reluctance to leave. She did not speak, but her hands pressed into his back, and her lips brushed his cheek. She looked hard at him as she broke away, and he had the feeling that she was leaving something of herself behind with him in that look. He started to give her a reassuring smile in reply, but she had already turned away.

When they were gone, faded into the mist that had settled over the river, he turned west toward his selected watch post and trudged into the growing dark. The clouds blanketed the skies from horizon to horizon, and the air had begun to cool. A wind had sprung up, gusting across the flats, sending dust and silt swirling into his eyes. Far west, the rain was a dark curtain moving toward him. He pulled up the hood of his forest cloak and lowered his eyes to the ground.

He had just reached his destination when the rain arrived, a downpour that swept across the plains in a rush and covered everything in an instant's time. Morgan burrowed deep within the shelter of a broad-limbed fir and settled down against the base of the trunk. It was dry and protected there, and the storm rolled past leaving him untouched. The rain continued for several hours, then turned to drizzle, and finally stopped. The thunderheads passed east, the skies cleared, and the sunset was a red and purple blaze in the fading light.

Morgan left the shelter of the fir and found a stand of broadleaf maple that allowed him to remain hidden while at the same time giving him a clear view of Southwatch and the Mermidon east, a large stretch of the Rainbow Lake south, and a cut through the hills below the Runne that funneled any land traffic that might approach the Shadowen keep from the north and west. It was an ideal position to observe everything for nearly a dozen miles. Good enough, he decided, and settled in to await the night.

He ate a little of the food he had brought and drank some water. He wondered
if Damson and Matty had attempted a crossing of the Rainbow Lake before the storm had struck or if they had decided to wait. He wondered if they were camped somewhere along the river looking back across at him.

The light faded to gray, and the stars began to appear. Morgan stared down at Southwatch and wished he could see inside. He tried not to think too closely about what might be happening there. Too much imagination could be a dangerous thing. He studied the plains east, barren and stripped of life, a wasteland of brown earth and gray deadwood that radiated out from the tower of the Shadowen like a stain. The fringes, he noted, were already darkening as well, infected by the poison as it spread. Trees rotted and grasses withered. The bluff on which he sat was an island already at risk.

He unstrapped the Sword of Leah from his back and cradled it in his arms. A talisman against the Shadowen, Matty Roh had called it. But it was power, too, that stole your soul, and there was little that could be done to protect against it. Each time he used the magic, a test of wills resumed, his own and the Sword's, both fighting for supremacy, struggling for control. Three hundred years ago Allanon had answered Rone Leah's desperate, angry plea by bestowing a tiny part of the Druid magic on the ancient weapon, and the legacy of that gift or curse—take your choice—was a bittersweet taste that once experienced cried out for more.

As did the wishsong for Par. As did all the magic that ever was or had ever been—siren songs of power that transcended everything in their compelling, inexorable need to be sung.

He smiled darkly. Be careful what you wish for. Wasn't that the old admonition to those who begged for what they did not have?

The smile faded. Maybe he would find out when it came time to summon the Sword's magic again—as summon it he surely must, sooner or later. Maybe Quickening's healing touch, the magic that had restored his talisman, would prove in the end to be as killing as that of the Shadowen.

The thought left him feeling cold and empty and impossibly alone. He sat motionless in the shadows, staring out across the countryside, waiting for the darkness to claim it.

T
hree days earlier another storm had passed, one markedly more violent, a torrential downpour riddled by explosions of thunder and flashes of lightning and driven by a rough-faced howling wind, the sort of deluge that came and went regularly in the Borderlands with the buildup of late summer pressure and heat. It swept into Callahorn at dusk,
inundated the land through the night, and disappeared south with the coming of dawn.

In the wake of its passing a solitary figure rose from the sodden earth at the edge of the Rainbow Lake, muddied beyond recognition and stooped as if weighed down with chains.

Dark eyes blinked and tried to focus. The day was late in waking, worried perhaps that the storm might return, dark-edged clouds lingering fitfully in the leaden skies, sunrise iron-gray and cautious as it eased back the night's stubborn shadows. The figure stared out at the flat expanse of the lake, at the light east, at the skies, at a world that was clearly unfamiliar. One hand held a sword that glimmered faintly where the grass and mire caked on it were scraped down to the metal. The figure hesitated uncertainly, then stumbled to the edge of the lake and submerged hands and face and finally body as well, washing and rinsing down to a tangle of rags and bare skin.

Mud and debris swirled away in the dark waters, and Coll Ohmsford rose to look about.

At first he could not remember anything beyond who he was—though he was quite determined of that, as if perhaps his identity had been in doubt once. He recognized the Rainbow Lake, the ground upon which he stood, and the country that surrounded him. He was standing on the lake's southern shore west of Culhaven and north of the Battlemound. But he did not know how he had gotten there.

He looked down at the blade in his hand (Had he managed to wash himself without releasing it?) and realized that he was holding the Sword of Shannara.

And then the memories came back in a rush that caused him to gasp and double over as if a blow had been delivered to his stomach. The images hammered at him. He had been captured by the Shadowen and imprisoned at Southwatch. He had managed an escape, but in truth Rimmer Dall had managed it for him. He had been tricked into believing that the Mirror-shroud would conceal him when in truth it had subverted him in ways he did not care to recall, turning him into one of them, making him over in their image. He had lost control of himself, becoming something very close to animal, scouring the countryside in search of his brother, Par, seeking him without clear reason or purpose beyond a vague intention to cause him harm. Cloaked in the Mirrorshroud's dark folds, he had tracked, found, and attacked his brother …