The Heritage of Shannara (240 page)

Spirit broke clear of the mist and into the sunlight above, causing Wren to blink from the sudden brightness. The Matted Brakes and what lay hidden within the mist and gloom receded below.

Like Morrowindl, relegated to the past …

Wren turned her face to the sun and did not look back.

T
wilight shadows lengthened into night, and the sky over South-watch grew thick with clouds that screened away the stars and moon and promised showers before dawn. The day's heat cooled, the dust and grime settling back to earth in motes that danced like fairies as the air lost some of its thickness. Improbably, the barest trace of a breeze wafted down out of the Runne. Silence fell across the land, as smooth as satin and as fragile as glass. Mist clung to the earth in long tendrils that snaked through gullies and across ridges and turned the poisoned grasslands surrounding the Shadowen keep into a vast white sea.

Foaming and swirling, the sea began to roil.

It was a time for phantoms, for ghosts that sailed on the wind like ships at sea, for things that could walk and leave no footprints with their passing. It was a time for the day's hopes and expectations and fears and doubts to take shape and come forth, searching for a voice with which to speak, seeking redemption out of newfound belief. It was a time for reason to give way to what imagination alone would permit. It was a time for dreams.

Walker Boh summoned his and watched it come, swift and certain, a hawk sweeping down, and when it reached him he stretched to meet it, rising up out of his body as light as air, catching hold and lifting away. Voiceless, invisible, as one with the wraiths of the night, he went down out of the forests on the slopes of the Runne, speeding through the dark trunks and leafy boughs, through the silence and the black with the grim certainty of death's coming. He held himself as still as ice in winter, easing out onto the blasted, empty flats beyond, crossing through the brume toward the waiting black obelisk. He went in the manner of the Druids, in the way Allanon had taught him, a spirit out of flesh. His memories twisted and tugged at him, those of Allanon and those of the man he had been. He remembered both at once, and saw himself again as the outcast who would not believe, who had fought against the transition that the Druid magic had inevitably wrought. And again, too, Walker Boh saw himself as the Druid shade who had set in motion the events that would culminate in that transition by bestowing on Brin Ohmsford the blood trust that ultimately would find its purpose in him. It was strange to be more than one, and yet it was
fitting, too. He had never been at peace with himself, and his dissatisfaction came in large part from feeling incomplete. Now he was fulfilled, one man made out of many, one formed of all. He was still learning to be what he had become, to be comfortable with what he was, but it began with feeling whole, and he thought he was that at least if nothing else.

The earth beneath was blackened and bare, stripped of life, burned away and scorched, empty and razed. The Shadowen had done that, but he did not understand yet the nature of their poison. Tonight, he thought, he might.

Southwatch loomed ahead, its black pinnacle towering over him, its knife-edged spire reaching for the sky. He could feel the life within it. He could feel its pulse. Southwatch was alive. There was magic in its walls, magic that had formed and now sustained and protected it. The magic was powerful, but reluctant. He could sense that. He could feel the strain of its effort to be free. Deep inside the black stone it crouched, an animal caged. Shadowen walked within and without, barely visible against the black, keeping watch. The magic fled from them.

A part of the mist, a part of the night, as silent as drifting ash, he came up to the walls. Oblivious, the Shadowen did not sense him passing close and moving on. He came to the gates of the keep and slid swiftly away. They were too well protected to venture through, even as a spirit. He waited for one of the dark things to enter through a crack in the stone skin and followed. He felt the weight of the tower close about him as he did so, a palpable thing. He hugged himself against the evil that raged through the air, a mix of terrible anger and hatred and despair. Where, he wondered in surprise, did it come from?

He hesitated in his choice of directions, and then impulsively followed the magic toward its source.
Just for a moment, just to have a look.
The magic emanated from below, from deep within the earth beneath the keep, all darkness and blind fury. He slipped along the corridors of the fortress, careful not to brush against the walls, against anything of substance, for even in his spirit form he might be sensed. The wards were powerful here, greater than had been those of Uhl Belk at Eldwist, greater even than those of the Druids in the Hall of Kings. The magic was powerful beyond belief, a great crushing force that could destroy anything.

Anything, he corrected, but the bonds that secured it and made it serve the Shadowen.

He followed a stairwell down, winding and twisting through the black, hearing for the first time the sound of something grinding and huffing, the sound of something at labor. It had the feel of a dragon chained. It had the taste and smell of sweat. It strained and lifted like a bellows at work within a forge—and yet it was nothing so simple as that. It was from here that the magic took its life, he sensed. It was from here that it was given birth.

Then he reached wards that even a spirit could not pass undetected, and he was forced to turn aside. He was close to what lay trapped within the cellars of Southwatch, close to the source of the magic, to the secret the
Shadowen kept so carefully hidden. But he could go no closer, and so the secret would have to keep.

He turned back up the stairway, speeding quickly through the gloom, a brief glimmer of thought and nothing more. He passed more of the Shad-owen wraiths as he went, and one or two slowed before going on, but none discovered him. He went now in search of Par, knowing the Valeman was a prisoner, anxious to discover where he was being kept and whether he was still himself. For there was reason to believe he might not be. There was reason to believe that he had been subverted and was lost.

Walker Boh's heart was as stone as he considered the possibility. The signs were there that it was happening. It had begun with the changing of Par's magic, the evolution of the wishsong into something more than what it had been when he had begun his journey to the Hadeshorn and Allanon. It had continued with the breaking down of his confidence in its use, the sense that somehow the magic was getting away from him. It would terminate here, in the Shadowen keep, if Par embraced their cause, if he accepted that he was one of them.

As he was, Walker Boh thought darkly.

And yet wasn't.

Games within games. He knew some of their rules, but not yet all.

He ascended the stairwells of the keep in steady search of the Valeman, seeking down the dark corridors and into the darker rooms, swiftly and silently. He remembered how Par had convinced him to come to the Hadeshorn to speak with the shade of Allanon. He remembered how Par had believed.
The magic is a gift. The dreams are real.
Well, yes and no. It was so. And not. Like so many things, the truth lay somewhere in between.

Old memories triggered new, and he saw himself as Allanon leading Cogline down the corridors of Paranor when the Druid's Keep was still locked in the mists between worlds, banished by the magic to the nether reaches. He felt Cogline's mix of fear and determination, and in those emotions found mirrored anew the conflict within himself. Cogline had understood that conflict. He had tried to help Walker learn to balance the weight of it. Human and Druid—the parts that formed him would struggle with each other forever, the demands and needs of each at constant war. It would never change. It was the bargain he had struck with himself when he had agreed to accept the blood trust. The last of the old Druids or the first of the new—which was he? Both, he thought. And thought, too, that maybe this was the way it had been for Allanon and Bremen and Galaphile and all the others.

He rose high within the dark tower, and suddenly there was the barest whisper of a familiar presence. It emanated from down the corridor he faced at the head of the stairwell, a gossamer thread. He went toward it, cautious because there was a second presence as well, and this one familiar, too. He smelled Rimmer Dall as he would a swamp, vast and depthless. The leader of the Shadowen filled the air with his dark magic, the scent of it a toxic
perfume. Just beneath its veil and barely recognizable, Par's own magic crouched, suppressed and raging.

Walker coasted to the door behind which they faced each other, paused without where he would not be sensed, and bent to listen.

“It would help,” Rimmer Dall said softly, “if you were not so frightened of the word.”

Shadowen.

“What you are will not be changed by what you are called. Or even by what you call yourself. It is your fear of accepting the truth about yourself that threatens you.”

Shadowen.

Par Ohmsford heard the whisper in his mind, a repetition that would not cease, that haunted him now both on waking and in sleep. And Rim-mer Dall was right—he could not escape his fear of it, his growing certainty that he was the very thing he had been fighting against from the beginning, the enemy that the shade of Allanon had sent the children of Shannara to destroy.

He rose from the edge of his bed and walked to the window to stare out into the night. The sky was clouded and the land was misted and still, a ragged shadowed playground for the phantoms of his mind. He was coming apart, he knew. He could feel it happening. His thoughts were scattered and incoherent, his reasoning cluttered with roadblocks, and his concentration fragmented to the point of uselessness. Each day it grew worse, the darkness that surrounded him filling him up like a bowl that now threatened to overflow. He could not seem to escape it. His nights were haunted by dreams of confrontations with himself as a Shadowen, and his days were ragged and weary and empty of hope. He was wracked with despair. He was slipping steadily into madness.

All the while Rimmer Dall continued to come to him, to speak with him, to offer his help. He knew how bad it was, he assured the Valeman. He understood the demands of the magic. Time and again he had warned Par that he must confront who and what he was and take the steps necessary to protect himself. If he failed to do so—and failed now to do so immediately—he would be lost.

The dark-cloaked figure moved to stand beside him, and for an instant Par wanted to seek comfort within the other's shadowy strength. The urge was so strong that he had to bite his lip to keep himself from doing so.

“Listen to me, Par,” the whispery voice urged, low and persuasive. “Those creatures within the Pit in Tyrsis were like you once. They had use of the magic—not as you do, for their magic was of a lesser sort, but like you in that it was real. They denied who and what they were. We tried to reach them—or as many of them as we could find. We urged them to accept that they were Shadowen and to embrace the help that we could offer. They refused.”

A hand settled lightly on Par's shoulder, and he flinched from it. The hand did not move. “The Federation found them all, one by one, and took them to Tyrsis and put them into the Pit, caging them like animals. It destroyed them. Trapped in the darkness, deprived of hope and reason, they became victims quickly. The magic consumed them and made them the monsters you found. Now they live a terrible existence. We who are Shad-owen can walk among them, for we can understand them. But they can never be free again, and the Federation will leave them there until they die.”

No, Par thought. No, I do not believe you. I do not.

But he wasn't sure, just as he wasn't sure about much of anything now. Too much had happened for him to be sure. He knew he was being eaten up by magic, but he did not know whose it was. He had determined that he would stall until he could find out, but he had made no progress. He was as imprisoned as the creatures in the Pit, and though Rimmer Dall had offered him help repeatedly, he could not accept that the First Seeker's help was what he needed.

Demons wheeled before his eyes, sharp-eyed monsters that teased and laughed and danced away. They followed him everywhere. They lived within him like parasites. The magic fostered them. The magic gave them life.

Down in the depths of Southwatch, the thrumming continued, steady and inexorable.

He wheeled away from the window and the big man's touch. He wanted to bury his face in his hands. He wanted to cry or scream. But he had resolved to show nothing and he was determined to keep that promise. So much had happened to him, he thought. So much that he wished had not. Some of it was beginning to fade, dim memories lost in a haze of confusion. Some of it lingered like the acrid taste of metal on his tongue. It felt as if everything inside was roiling about like windswept clouds, shaping and reshaping and never showing anything for more than an instant.

“You must allow me to help you,” Rimmer Dall whispered, and there was an urgency to his voice that Par could not ignore. “Don't let this happen, Par. Give yourself a chance. Please. You must. You have gone on as long as you can alone. The magic is too great a burden. You cannot continue to carry it by yourself.”