He came awake.
Rain fell into his face, and his eyes opened. There was darkness all about, the sense of others close at hand, a feeling of motion, and the coppery taste of blood. There was shouting, voices that called to one another against the fury of a storm. He rose up, choking, spitting. Hands bore him back again, slipping against his body and face.
“. . . awake again, hold him . . .”
“. . . too strong, like he’s ten instead of . . .”
“Walker! Hurry!”
Trees thrashed in the background, long-limbed giants lifting into the roiling black, the wind howling all about them. They threw shadows against cliffs that blocked their passage and threatened to pen them up. Par heard himself scream.
Lightning crashed and thunder rolled, filling the dark with echoes of madness. A wash of red screened his vision.
Then Allanon was there—Allanon! He came from nowhere, all in black robes, a figure out of legend and time. He bent close to Par, his voice a whisper that somehow managed to rise above the chaos. Sleep, Par, he soothed. One weathered hand reached out and touched the Valeman, and the chaos dissipated and was replaced by a profound sense of peace.
Par drifted away again, far down into himself, fighting now because he sensed that he would live if he could just will it to be so. Some part of him remembered what had happened—that the Werebeasts had seized him, that their touch had poisoned him, that the poison had made him sick, and that the sickness had dropped him into that black abyss. Walker had come for him, found him somehow, and saved him from those creatures. He saw Rumor’s yellow lamp eyes, blinking in warning, lidding and going out. He saw Coll and Morgan. He saw Steff, his smile sardonic, and Teel, enigmatic and silent.
He saw the Shadowen girl-child, begging again to be hugged, trying to enter his body. He felt himself resist, saw her thrown back, watched as she disappeared. Shades! She had tried to enter him, to come into him, to put herself within his skin and become him! That was what they were, he thought in a burst of understanding—shadows that lacked substance of their own and took the bodies of men. And women. And children.
But can shadows have life?
His thoughts jumbled around unanswerable questions, and he slipped from reason to confusion. His mind slept, and his journey through the land of dreams wore on. He climbed mountains filled with creatures like the Gnawl, crossed rivers and lakes of mist and hidden dangers, traversed forests where daylight never penetrated, and swept on into moors where mist stirred in an airless, empty cauldron of silence.
Help me, he begged. But there was no one to hear.
Time suspended then. The journey ended and the dreams faded into nothingness. There was a moment’s pause at their end, and then waking. He knew he had slept, but not for how long. He knew only that there had been a passage of time when the dreams had ended and dreamless sleep had begun.
More important, he knew that he was alive.
He stirred gingerly, barely more than a twitch, feeling the softness of sheets and a bed beneath him, aware that he was stretched out full-length and that he was warm and snug. He did not want to move yet, frightened that he might still be dreaming. He let the feel of the sheets soak through him. He listened to the sound of his own breathing in his ears. He tasted the dryness of the air.
Then he let his eyes slip open. He was in a small, sparsely furnished room lit by a single lamp set on a table at his bedside. The walls of the room were bare, the ceiling beams uncovered. A comforter wrapped him and pillows cradled his head. A break in the curtains that covered the windows opposite where he lay told him it was night.
Morgan Leah dozed in a chair just inside the circle of light given off by the lamp, his chin resting on his chest, his arms folded loosely. “Morgan?” he called, his voice sounding fuzzy.
The Highlander’s eyes snapped open, his hawk face instantly alert. He blinked, then jumped to his feet. “Par! Par, are you awake? Good heavens, we’ve been worried sick!” He rushed over as if to hug his friend, then thought better of it. He ran the fingers of one hand through his rust-colored hair distractedly. “How do you feel? Are you all right?”
Par grinned weakly. “I don’t know yet. I’m still waking up. What happened?”
“What didn’t happen is more like it!” the other replied heatedly. “You almost died, do you realize that?”
Par nodded. “I guessed it. What about Coll, Morgan?”
“Sleeping, waiting for you to come around. I packed him off several hours ago when he fell out of his chair. You know Coll. Wait here, I’ll get him.” He grinned. “Wait here, I tell you—as if you were going anywhere. Pretty funny.”
Par had a dozen things he wanted to say, questions he wanted to ask, but the Highlander was already out the door and gone. It didn’t matter, he guessed. He lay back quietly, flooded with relief. All that mattered was that Coll was all right.
Morgan returned almost immediately, Coll beside him, and Coll, unlike Morgan, did not hesitate as he reached down and practically squeezed the life out of Par in his enthusiasm at finding him awake. Par hugged him back, albeit weakly, and the three laughed as if they had just enjoyed the biggest joke of their lives.
“Shades, we thought we’d lost you!” Coll exclaimed softly. He wore a bandage taped to his forehead, and his face seemed pale. “You were very sick, Par.”
Par smiled and nodded. He’d heard enough of that. “Will someone tell me what happened?” His eyes shifted from one face to the other. “Where are we anyway?”
“Storlock,” Morgan announced. One eyebrow arched. “Walker Boh brought you here.”
“Walker?”
Morgan grinned with satisfaction. “Thought you’d be surprised to learn that—Walker Boh coming out of the Wilderun, Walker Boh appearing in the first place for that matter.” He sighed. “Well, it’s a long story, so I guess we’d better start at the beginning.”
He did, telling the story with considerable help from Coll, the two of them stepping on each other’s words in their eagerness to make certain that nothing was overlooked. Par listened in growing surprise as the tale unfolded.
Coll, it seemed, had been felled by a Gnome sling when the Spider Gnomes attacked them in that clearing at the eastern end of the valley at Hearthstone. He had only been stunned, but, by the time he had recovered consciousness, Par and their attackers were gone. It was raining buckets by then, the trail disappearing back into the earth as quickly as it was made, and Coll was too weak to give chase in any case. So he stumbled back to the cottage where he found the others and told them what had occurred. It was already dark by then and still raining, but Coll demanded they go back out anyway and search for his brother. They did, Morgan, Steff, Teel, and himself, groping about blindly for hours and finding nothing. When it became impossible to see anything, Steff insisted they give it up for the night, get some rest and start out again fresh in the morning. That was what they did, and that was how Coll encountered Walker Boh.
“We split up, trying to cover as much ground as possible, working the north valley, because I knew from the stories of Brin and Jair Ohmsford that the Spider Gnomes made their homes on Toffer Ridge and it was likely they had come from there. At least, I hoped so, because that was all we had to go on. We agreed that if we didn’t find you right away we would just keep on going until we reached the Ridge.” He shook his head. “We were pretty desperate.”
“We were,” Morgan agreed.
“Anyway, I was all the way to the northeast edge of the valley when, all of a sudden, there was Walker and that giant cat, big as a house! He said that he’d sensed something. He asked me what had happened, what was wrong. I was so surprised to see him that I didn’t even think to ask what he was doing there or why he had decided to appear after hiding all that time. I just told him what he wanted to know.”
“Do you know what he said then?” Morgan interrupted, gray eyes finding Par’s, a hint of the mischievousness in them.
“He said,” Coll took control again
of the conversation, “ ‘Wait here, this is no task for you; I will bring him back’—as if we were children playing at a grown-up’s game!”
“But he was as good as his word,” Morgan noted.
Coll sighed. “Well, true enough,” he admitted grudgingly.
Walker Boh was gone a full day and night, but when he returned to Hearthstone, where Coll and his companions were indeed waiting, he had Par with him. Par had been infected by the touch of the Werebeasts and was near death. The only hope for him, Walker insisted, lay at Storlock, the community of Gnome healers. The Stors had experience in dealing with afflictions of the mind and spirit and could combat the Werebeasts’ poison.
They set out at once, the six of them less the cat, who had been left behind. They pushed west out of Hearthstone and the Wilderun, following the Chard Rush upriver to the Wolfsktaag, crossing through the Pass of Jade, and finally reaching the village of the Stors. It had taken them two days, traveling almost constantly. Par would have died if not for Walker, who had used an odd sort of magic that none of them had understood to prevent the poison from spreading and to keep Par sleeping and calm. At times, Par had thrashed and cried out, waking feverish and spitting blood—once in the middle of a ferocious storm they had encountered in the Pass of Jade—but Walker had been there to soothe him, to touch him, to say something that let him sleep once more.
“Even so, we’ve been in Storlock for almost three days and this is the first time you’ve been awake,” Coll finished. He paused, eyes lowering. “It was very close, Par.”
Par nodded, saying nothing. Even without being able to remember anything clearly, he had a definite sense of just how close it had been. “Where is Walker?” he asked finally.
“We don’t know,” Morgan answered with a shrug. “We haven’t seen him since we arrived. He just disappeared.”
“Gone back to the Wilderun, I suppose,” Coll added, a touch of bitterness in his voice.
“Now, Coll,” Morgan soothed.
Coll held up his hands. “I know, Morgan—I shouldn’t judge. He was there to help when we needed him. He saved Par’s life. I’m grateful for that.”
“Besides, I think he’s still around,” Morgan said quietly. When the other two looked inquiringly at him, he simply shrugged.
Par told them what had befallen him after his capture by the Spider Gnomes. He was still reasoning out a good part of it, so he hesitated from time to time in his telling. He was convinced that the Spider Gnomes had been sent specifically to find him, otherwise they would have taken Coll as well. The Shadowen had sent them, that girl-child. Yet how had it known who he was or where he could be found?
The little room was silent as they thought. “The magic,” Morgan suggested finally. “They all seem interested in the magic. This one must have sensed it as well.”
“All the way from Toffer Ridge?” Par shook his head doubtfully.
“And why not go after Morgan as well?” Coll asked suddenly. “After all, he commands the magic of the Sword of Leah.”
“No, no, that’s not the sort of magic they care about,” Morgan replied quickly. “It’s Par’s sort of magic that interests them, draws them—magic that’s part of the body or spirit.”
“Or maybe it’s simply Par,” Coll finished darkly.
They let the thought hang a moment in the silence. “The Shadowen tried to come into me,” Par said finally, then explained it to them in more detail. “It wanted to merge with me, to be a part of me. It kept saying, ‘hug me, hug me’—as if it were a lost child or something.”
“Hardly that,” Coll disputed quickly.
“More leech than lost child,” Morgan agreed.
“But what are they?” Par pressed, bits and pieces of his dreams coming back to him, flashes of insight that lacked meaning. “Where is it that they come from and what is it that they want?”
“Us,” Morgan said quietly.
“You,” Coll said.
They talked a bit longer, mulling over what little they knew of Shadowen and their interest in magic, then Coll and Morgan rose. Time for Par to rest again, they insisted. He was still sick, still weak, and he needed to get his strength back.
The Hadeshorn, Par remembered suddenly! How much time did they have before the new moon?
Coll sighed. “Four days—if you still insist on going.”
Morgan grinned from behind him. “We’ll be close by if you need us. Good to see you well again, Par.”
He slipped out the door. “It is good,” Coll agreed and gripped his brother’s hand tightly.
When they were gone, Par lay with his eyes open for a time, letting his thoughts nudge and push one another. Questions whispered at him, asking for answers he didn’t have. He had been chased and harried from Varfleet to the Rainbow Lake, from Culhaven to Hearthstone, by the Federation and the Shadowen, by things that he had only heard about and some he hadn’t even known existed. He was tired and confused; he had almost lost his life. Everything centered on his magic, and yet his magic had been virtually useless to him. He was constantly running from one thing and toward another without really understanding much of either. He felt helpless.
And despite the presence of his brother and his friends, he felt oddly alone.
His last thought before he fell asleep was that, in a way he didn’t yet comprehend, he was.
He slept fitfully, but without dreaming, waking often amid stirrings of dissatisfaction and wariness that darted through the corridors of his mind like harried rats. Each time he came awake it was still night, until the last time when it was almost dawn, the sky beyond the curtained window brightening faintly, the room in which he lay still and gauzy. A white-robed Stor passed briefly through the room, appearing from out of the shadows like a ghost to pause at his bedside and touch his wrist and forehead with hands that were surprisingly warm before turning and disappearing back the way he had come. Par slept soundly after that, drifting far down within himself and floating undisturbed in a sea of black warmth.
When he woke again, it was raining. His eyes blinked open and he stared fixedly into the grayness of his room. He could hear the sound of the raindrops beating on the windows and roof, a steady drip and splash in the stillness. There was daylight yet; he could see it through the part in the curtains. Thunder rolled in the distance, echoing in long, uneven peals.
Gingerly, he hoisted himself up on one elbow. He saw a fire burning in a small stove that he hadn’t even noticed the previous night, tucked back in the shadows. It gave a solid warmth to the room that wrapped and cradled him and made him feel secure. There was tea by his bedside and tiny cakes. He pushed himself up the rest of the way, propping himself against the headboard of his bed with his pillows and pulling the cakes and tea to him. He was famished, and he devoured the cakes in seconds. Then he drank a small portion of the tea, which had gone cold in the sitting, but was wonderful in any case.
He was midway through his third cup when the door opened soundlessly and Walker Boh appeared. His uncle paused momentarily on seeing him awake, then closed the door softly and came over to stand at his bedside. He was dressed in forest green—tunic and pants belted tight, soft leather boots unlaced and muddied, long travel cloak spotted with rain. There was rain on his bearded face as well, and his dark hair was damp against his skin.
He pushed the travel cloak back across his shoulders. “Feeling better?” he asked quietly.
Par nodded. “Much.” He set his cup aside. “I understand I have you to thank for that. You saved me from the Werebeasts. You brought me back to Hearthstone. It was your idea to bring me to Storlock. Coll and Morgan tell me that you even used magic to see to it that I stayed alive long enough to complete the journey.”
“Magic.” Walker repeated the word softly, his voice distracted. “Words and touching in combination, a sort of variation on the workings of the wishsong. My legacy from Brin Ohmsford. I haven’t the curse of the fullness of her powers—only the annoyance of its shadings. Still, now and again,
it does become the gift you insist it must be. I can interact with another living thing, feel its life force, sometimes find a way to strengthen it.” He paused. “I don’t know if I would call it magic, though.”
“And what you did to the Werebeasts in Olden Moor when you stood up for me—was that not magic?”
His uncle’s eyes shifted away from him. “I was taught that,” he said finally.
Par waited a moment, but when nothing more was forthcoming he said, “I’m grateful for all of it in any case. Thank you.”
The other man shook his head slowly. “I don’t deserve your thanks. It was my fault that it happened in the first place.”
Par readjusted himself carefully against his pillows. “I seem to remember you saying that before.”
Walker moved to the far end of the bed and sat down on its edge. “If I had watched over you the way I should have, the Spider Gnomes would never have even gotten into the valley. Because I chose to distance myself from you, they did. You risked a fair amount in coming to find me in the first place; the least I could have done was to make certain that once you reached me, you would be safe. I failed to do that.”
“I don’t blame you for what happened,” Par said quickly.
“But I do.” Walker rose, as restless as a cat, stalking to the windows and peering out into the rain. “I live apart because I choose to. Other men in other times made me decide that it was best. But I forget sometimes that there is a difference between disassociating and hiding. There are limits to the distances we can place between ourselves and others—because the dictates of our world don’t allow for absolutes.” He looked back, his skin pale against the grayness of the day. “I was hiding myself when you came to find me. That was why you went unprotected.”