The Druid of Shannara

  They laid him carefully on the ground, brushed the dirt from his face, and Quickening knelt next to him. Her two hands reached out to take his one. She held it a moment, and his eyes flickered open. Morgan drew back. He had never seen Walker’s eyes like this; they were terrifying to look into, filled with dark madness.

  “Don’t let me die,” the Dark Uncle whispered harshly.

  The girl touched his face and he was instantly asleep. Morgan took a deep breath and let it out again slowly. Walker Boh wasn’t asking for help out of fear; he was asking out of rage.

  They made camp beside the ruins of the cottage that night, backed into the shelter of the trees as the light gave way to darkness. Quickening had a fire built close to where Walker Boh lay sleeping and she took up a position at his side and did not move. Sometimes she held his hand; sometimes she stroked him. Morgan and Pe Ell were forgotten. She did not seem to have need of them or wish that they intrude, so the Highlander built a second fire some distance away and prepared dinner from the supplies they carried—bread, some dried meat, cheese, and fruit. He offered some to the girl, but she shook her head and he moved away. He ate alone. Pe Ell took his food off into the dark.

  After a time Quickening lay down next to Walker Boh and went to sleep, her body pressed close against his. Morgan watched stone-faced, a surge of jealousy sweeping through him at the thought that the Dart Uncle should be so close to her. He studied her face in the firelight, the curve of her body, the softness of her. She was so beautiful. He could not explain the effect she had on him; he did not think he could refuse her anything. It wasn’t that he had a reasonable hope that she felt for him as he did for her—or even that she felt anything for him. It was the need she roused in him. He should not have come with her once he had escaped the prisons and made certain that Granny Else and Auntie Jilt were safe. He should have gone after the Valemen, after Par and Coll Ohmsford. He had promised himself more than once while lying in the darkness and filth of that Federation cell that if he ever got free, he would. Yet here he was, chasing off into the deep Mar after this girl, searching out a talisman she said existed but hadn’t once described, caught up with the enigmatic Pe Ell and now Walker Boh. It baffled him, but he didn’t question it. He was there because he wanted to be there. He was there because the moment he had met Quickening he had fallen hopelessly in love with her.

  He watched her until it hurt, then forced himself to look away. He was surprised when he saw Pe Ell standing back in the shadows at the edge of the trees watching too.

  He was surprised again moments later when the other man came over to sit next to him by the fire. Pe Ell made it seem the most natural thing in the world, as if there had been no distance kept between them before, as if they were companions and not strangers. Hatchet-faced, as lean as a wire’s shadow, he was not much more than a gathering of lines and angles that threatened to disappear in the dark. He sat cross-legged, his thin frame relaxed, hunched down, his mouth breaking into a faint smile as he saw Morgan frown. “You don’t trust me,” he said. “You shouldn’t.”

  Morgan said, “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t know me and you never trust anyone you don’t know. You don’t trust most of those you do either. That’s just the way it is. Tell me, Highlander. Why do you think I’m here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either. I would be willing to bet that it is the same with you. We’re here, you and I, because the girl tells us she needs us, but we really don’t know what she means. It’s just that we can’t bring ourselves to tell her no.” Pe Ell seemed to be explaining things as much to himself as to Morgan. He glanced Quickening’s way briefly, nodding. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? How can you say no to someone who looks like that? But it’s more, because she has something inside as well, something special even in this world. She has magic, the strongest kind of magic. She brings dead things back to life—like the Gardens, like that one over there.”

  He looked back at Morgan. “We all want to touch that magic, to feel it through her. That’s what I think. Maybe we can, if we’re lucky. But if the Shadowen are involved in this, if there are things as bad as that to be dealt with, why then we’re going to have to look out for one another. So you don’t have to trust me or me you—maybe we shouldn’t—but we have to watch each other’s backs. Do you agree?”

  Morgan wasn’t sure whether he did or not, but he nodded anyway. What he thought was that Pe Ell didn’t seem the kind who relied on anyone to watch his back. Or who watched anyone else’s back either, for that matter.

  “Do you know what I am?” Pe Ell asked softly, looking down into the fire. “I am a craftsman. I get myself in and out of places without anyone knowing. I move things aside that don’t want to be moved. I make people disappear.” He looked up. “I have a little magic of my own. You do, too, don’t you?”

  Morgan shook his head, cautious. “There’s the man with the magic,” he offered, indicating Walker Boh.

  Pe Ell smiled doubtfully. “Doesn’t seem to have done him much good against the Shadowen.”

  “It might have kept him alive.”

  “Barely, it appears. And what use is he to us with that arm?” Pe Ell folded his hands carefully. “Tell me. What can he do with his magic?”

  Morgan didn’t like the question. “He can do a lot of what you do. Ask him yourself when he’s better.”

  “If he gets better.” Pe Ell stood up smoothly, an effortless motion that caught Morgan by surprise. Quick, the Highlander thought. Much quicker than me. The other was looking at him. “I sense the magic in you, Highlander. I want you to tell me about it sometime. Later, when we’ve traveled together a bit longer, when we know each other a little better. When you trust me.”

  He moved away into the shadows at the fire’s edge, spread his blanket on the ground, and rolled into it. He was asleep almost at once.

  Morgan sat staring at him for a moment, thinking it would be a long time before he trusted that one. Pe Ell smiled easily enough, but it seemed that only his mouth wanted to participate in the act. Morgan thought about what the man had said about himself, trying to make sense of it. Get in and out of places without being seen? Move things that don’t want to be moved? Make people disappear? What sort of double-talk was that?

  The fire burned low and everyone around him slept. Morgan thought about the past for a moment, about his friends who were dead or disappeared, about the inexorable flow of events that was dragging him along in its wake. Mostly he thought about the girl who said she was the daughter of the King of the Silver River. Quickening. He wondered about her.

  What was she going to ask of him?

  What was he going to be able to give?

  Walker Boh came awake at sunrise, rising up from the black pit of his unconsciousness. His eyes blinked open to find the girl peering down at him. Her hands were on his face, her fingers cool and soft against his skin, and it seemed that she drew him up with no more effort than it would require to lift a feather.

  “Walker Boh.” She spoke his name gently.

  She seemed strangely familiar to him although he was certain they had never met. He tried to speak and found he couldn’t. Something forbade it, a sense of wonder at the exquisite beauty of her, at the feelings she invoked within him. He found her like the earth, filled with strange magic that was simple and complex at once, a vessel of elements, of soil, air, and water, a part of everything that gave life. He saw her differently than Morgan Leah and Pe Ell, though he couldn’t know that yet. He was not drawn to her as a lover or a protector; he had no wish to possess her. Rather, there was an affinity between them that transcended passion and need. There were bonds of immediate understanding that united them as emotions never could. Walker recognized the existence of those bonds even without being able to define them. This girl was something of what he had struggled all his life to be. This girl was a reflection of his dreams.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  His eyes loc
ked on her. She took her fingers from his face and moved them to the shattered remnants of his arm, to the stone stump that hung inert and lifeless from his shoulder. Her fingers reached within his clothing, stroking his skin, working their way to where the skin hardened into stone. He flinched at her touch, not wanting her to feel the sickness in him, or to discover the corruption of his flesh. But her fingers persisted; her eyes did not look away.

  Then he gasped as everything disappeared in a white-hot flash of pain. For an instant he saw the Hall of Kings again, the crypts of the dead, the stone slab with its rune markings, the black hole beneath, and the flash of movement as the Asphinx struck. After that he was floating, and there were only her eyes, black and depthless, folding him in a wave of sweet relief. The pain disappeared, drawing out of him in a red mist that dissipated into the air. He felt a weight lift away from him and he was at peace.

  He might have slept for a time then; he was not certain. When he opened his eyes again, the girl was there beside him, looking down at him, and the dawn’s light was faint and distant through the tips of the trees. He swallowed against the dryness in his mouth and throat, and she gave him water to drink from a skin. He was aware of Morgan Leah staring openmouthed at him from one side, his lean brown face a mask of disbelief. There was another man next to him, one he didn’t know, hard-faced and cunning. They had both been there when the girl found him, he remembered. What were they seeing now that so astonished them?

  Then he realized that something was different. His arm felt lighter, freer. There was no pain. He used what little strength he had to raise his head and look down at himself. His clothes had been pulled away from his shoulder, revealing pink, healed flesh where the stone wreckage of his sickness had been removed.

  His arm was gone.

  So, too, was the poison of the Asphinx.

  What did he feel? His emotions jumbled together within him. He stared at the girl and tried unsuccessfully to speak.

  She looked down at him, serene and perfect. “I am Quickening,” she said. “I am the daughter of the King of the Silver River. Look into my eyes and discover me.”

  He did as he was told, and she touched him. Instantly he saw what Morgan Leah had seen before him, what Pe Ell had witnessed—the coming of Quickening into Culhaven and the resurrection of the Meade Gardens out of ash and dust. He felt the wonder of the miracle and he knew instinctively that she was who she claimed. She possessed magic that defied belief, magic that could salvage the most pitiful of life’s wreckage. When the images were gone, he was struck again by the unexplainable sense of kinship he felt for her.

  “You are well again, Walker Boh,” she told him. “The sickness will trouble you no more. Sleep now, for I have great need of you.”

  She touched him once and he drifted away.

  He awoke again at midday, ravenous with hunger, dry with thirst. Quickening was there to give him food and water and to help him sit up. He felt stronger now, more the man he had been before his encounter with the Asphinx, able to think clearly again for the first time in weeks. His relief at being free of the poison of the Asphinx, at simply being alive for that matter, warred with his rage at what Rimmer Dall and the Shadowen had done to Cogline and Rumor. Just an old man and a bothersome cat, he had called them. He looked out across the clearing at the devastation. The girl did not ask him what had happened; she merely touched him and knew. All the images of that night’s tragic events returned in a flood of memories that left him shaking and close to tears. She touched him again, to comfort and reassure, but he did not cry. He would not let himself. He kept his grief inside, walled away behind his determination to find and destroy those responsible.

  Quickening said to him, away from Morgan Leah and the one she named Pe Ell, “You cannot give way to what you feel, Walker Boh. If you pursue the Shadowen now, they will destroy you. You lack the wisdom and the strength to overcome them. You will find both only through me.”

  Then, before he could respond, she called the other two over, seated them before her, and said, “I will tell you now of the need I have of you.” She looked at them in turn and then seemed to look beyond. “A long time ago, in an age before Mankind, before the faerie wars, before everything you know, there were many like my father. They were the first of the faerie creatures, given life by the Word, given dominion over the land. Theirs was a trust to preserve and protect, and while they could, they did. But the world changed with the fading of the faerie creatures and the rise of Man. The evolution of the world took away almost everything that had existed in the beginning including those like my father. One by one, they died away, lost in the passing of the years and the changes of the world. The Great Wars destroyed many of them. The Wars of the Races destroyed more. Finally, there was only my father, a legend by now, the faerie Lord they called the King of the Silver River.”

  Her face lifted. “Except that my father was not alone as he believed. There was another. Even my father did not know of him at first, believing that all his kindred had died out long ago, that he alone had survived. My father was wrong. Another like himself still lived, changed so markedly as to now be all but unrecognizable. All of the first faeries drew their magic from the elements of the land. My father’s strength derived from the rivers and lakes, from the waters that fed the earth. He built his Gardens to nourish them, to give them life, and draw life back again. His brother, the one he did not know had survived along with him, took his magic from the earth’s stone. Where my father found strength in fluidity and change, his brother found strength in constancy and immutability.”

  She paused. “His name is Uhl Belk. He is the Stone King. He had no name in the old days; none of my father’s kindred did. There was no need for names. My father was given his name by the people of the land; he did not ask for it. Uhl Belk took his name out of fear. He took it because he felt that only in having a name could he be certain of surviving. A name implied permanency, he believed. Permanency became everything for him. All around him, the world was changing, the old dying out, giving way to the new. He could not accept that he must change, for like the stone from which he drew his strength, he was unyielding. To survive, he embedded himself deeper in the ways that had sustained him for so long, burrowing into the earth on which he relied. He hid while the Great Wars destroyed almost everything. He hid again when the wars of magic, the Wars of the Races, threatened to do the same. He took his name and wrapped himself in stone. Like my father, his world was reduced to almost nothing, to a tiny bit of existence that was all his magic could protect. He clung to it desperately while the wars of Mankind raged through the centuries and he waited for a measure of sanity to return.

  “But, unlike my father, Uhl Belk put aside the trust that the Word had given him. He lost sight of his purpose in his struggle to survive; he became convinced that simply to exist at whatever cost was all that mattered. His pledge to preserve and protect the land was forgotten; his promise to care for the land’s life lost meaning. He hoarded and built upon his magic with one thought in mind—that when he grew strong enough he would make certain that his existence would never be threatened by anything or anyone again.”

  Quickening’s eyes glanced down and lifted again, filled with wonder. “Uhl Belk is master of Eldwist, a finger of land far north and east above the Charnal Mountains where the Eastland ends at the Tiderace. After centuries of hiding, he has come forth to claim the world of Men for his own. He does this through his magic, which grows in strength as he applies it. He applies it indiscriminately to the land—the soil, the waters, the trees, the creatures that take nourishment from them. He turns everything to stone and takes back such magic as will make him stronger still. The whole of Eldwist is stone and the land about begins to turn as well. The Tiderace holds him captive for now because it is huge, and even Uhl Belk’s magic is not yet sufficient to overcome an ocean. But Eldwist connects to the Eastland at its tip, and nothing prevents the magic’s poison from spreading south. Except my father.”

&nb
sp; “And the Shadowen,” Morgan Leah added.

  “No, Morgan,” she said, and it did not escape any of them that she called him by his first name alone. “The Shadowen are not Uhl Belk’s enemy. My father alone seeks to preserve the Four Lands. The Shadowen, like the Stone King, would see the Lands made over in a way that would leave them unrecognizable—barren and stripped of life. The Shadowen and Uhl Belk leave each other alone because neither has anything to fear from the other. One day that may change, but by then it will no longer matter to any of us.”

  She looked at Walker. “Think of your arm, Walker Boh. The poison that claimed it is Uhl Belk’s. The Asphinx belonged to him. Whatever living thing the Stone King or his creatures touch becomes as your arm did—hard and lifeless. That is the source of Uhl Belk’s power, that constancy, that changelessness.”

  “Why did he choose to poison me?” Walker asked.

  Her silver hair caught a ray of sunlight and shimmered in momentary brilliance. She shook the light away. “He stole a Druid talisman from the Hall of Kings, and he wanted to be certain that whoever discovered the theft would die before he could do anything about it. You were simply unlucky enough to be that one. The Druids, when they lived, were strong enough to challenge Uhl Belk. He waited until they were all gone to come forth again. His only enemy now is my father.”

  Her dark eyes shifted to Pe Ell. “Uhl Belk seeks to consume the land and to do so he must destroy my father. My father sends me forth to prevent that. I cannot do so without your help. I need you to come north with me into Eldwist. Once there, we must find and recover from the Stone King the talisman he stole from the Hall of Kings, from the Druids. That talisman is called the Black Elfstone. As long as he possesses it, Uhl Belk is invincible. We must take it away from him.”