Without waiting for an answer, she hauled him back into the concealing shadows of the park and threw him to the ground. “If you try something like that again with me, I will break both your arms!” she snapped.
Par pulled himself up to a sitting position, still looking for a way to escape. But she shoved him back against the ground and crouched close. “Why don’t we try again, my beloved Elf-boy? Where are the others? What has happened to them?”
Par swallowed against his rage. “The Federation has them! They were waiting for us, Damson! As if you didn’t know!”
The anger in her eyes was replaced by surprise. “What do you mean, ‘as if I didn’t know’?”
“They were waiting for us. We never got past the wall. We were betrayed! The Federation commander told us so! He said it was one of our own—an outlaw, Damson!” Par was shaking.
Damson Rhee’s gaze was steady. “And you have decided that it was me, have you, Par Ohmsford?”
Par forced himself up on his elbows. “Who better than you? You were the only one who knew what we were about—the only one not taken! No one else knew! If not you, then who could it possibly have been?”
There was a long silence as they stared at each other in the dark. The sound of voices nearby grew slowly distinct. Someone was approaching.
Damson Rhee suddenly bent close. “I don’t know. But it wasn’t me! Now lie still until they pass!”
She pushed him into a gathering of bushes, then backed in herself and lay down beside him. Par could feel the warmth of her body. He could smell the sweet scent of her. He closed his eyes and waited. A pair of Federation soldiers worked their way out of the park, paused momentarily, then started back again and were gone.
Damson Rhee put her lips close against Par’s ear. “Do they know you are missing yet?”
Par hesitated. “I can’t be certain,” he whispered back.
She took his chin with her smooth hand and turned his face, until it was level with her own. “I didn’t betray you. It may seem as if I must have, but I didn’t. If I intended to betray you to the Federation, Par, I would have simply turned you over to that pair of soldiers and been done with it.”
The green eyes glittered faintly with moonlight that had penetrated the branches of their concealment. Par stared at those eyes and found no hint of deception mirrored there. Still, he hesitated.
“You have to decide here and now whether you believe me,” she said quietly.
He shook his head warily. “It isn’t that easy!”
“It has to be! Look at me, Par. I have betrayed no one—not you or Padishar or the others, not now, not ever! Why would I do something like that? I hate the Federation as much as anyone!” She paused, exasperated. “I told you that this was a dangerous undertaking. I warned you that the Pit was a black hole that swallowed men whole. Padishar was the one who insisted you go!”
“That doesn’t make him responsible for what happened.”
“Nor me! What about the distraction I promised? Did it come about as I said it would?”
Par nodded.
“You see! I fulfilled my part of the bargain! Why would I bother if I intended your betrayal?”
Par said nothing.
Damson’s nostrils flared. “You will admit to nothing, will you?” She shook back her auburn hair in a flash of color. “Will you at least tell me what happened?”
Par took a deep breath. Briefly, he related the events that surrounded their capture, including the frightening disappearance of the outlaw Ciba Blue. He kept deliberately vague the circumstances of his own escape. The magic was his business. Its secret belonged to him.
But Damson was not about to be put off. “So the fact of the matter is, you might as easily be the betrayer as I,” she said.
“How else is it that you managed to escape when the others could not?”
Par flushed, resentful of the accusation, irritated by her persistence. “Why would I do such a thing to my friends?”
“My own argument exactly,” she replied.
They studied each other wordlessly, each measuring the strength of the other. Damson was right, Par knew. There was as much reason to believe that he had been the betrayer as she. But that didn’t change the fact that he knew he wasn’t while he didn’t know the same of her.
“Decide, Par,” she urged quietly. “Do you believe me or not?”
Her features were smooth and guileless in the scattering of light, her skin dappled with shadows from the tiny leaves of the bushes. He found himself drawn to her in a way he had not believed possible. There was something special about this girl, something that made him push aside his misgivings and cast out his doubts. The green eyes held him, insinuating and persuasive. He saw only truth in them.
“Okay, I believe you,” he said finally.
“Then tell me how it is that you escaped when the others did not,” she demanded. “No, don’t argue the matter. I must have proof of your own innocence if we are to be of any use to each other or to our friends.”
Par’s resolve to keep to himself the secret of the wishsong slipped slowly away. Again, she was right. She was asking only what he would have asked in her place. “I used magic,” he told her.
She inched closer, as if to judge better the truth of what he was saying. “Magic? What sort?”
He hesitated yet.
“Sleight of hand? Cloud spells?” she pressed. “Some sort of vanishing act?”
“Yes,” he replied. She was waiting. “I have the ability to make myself invisible when I wish.”
There was a long silence. He read the curiosity in her eyes. “You command real magic, don’t you?” she said finally. “Not the pretend kind that I use, where coins appear and disappear and fire dances on the air. You have the sort that is forbidden. That is why Padishar is so interested in you.” She paused. “Who are you, Par Ohmsford? Tell me.”
It was still within the park now, the voices of the watch passed from hearing, the night gone deep and silent once more. There might have been no one else in all the world but the two of them. Par weighed the advisability of his reply. He was stepping on stones that floated in quicksand.
“You can see who I am for yourself,” he said finally, hedging. “I am part Elf and that part of me carries the magic of my forebears. I have their magic to command—or some small part of it, at least.”
She looked at him for a long time then, thinking. At last she seemed to have made up her mind. She crawled from the concealment of the bushes, pulling him out with her. They stood together in the shadows, brushing themselves off, breathing deeply the cool night air. The park was deserted.
She came up to him and stood close. “I was born in Tyrsis, the child of a forger of weapons and his wife. I had one brother and one sister, both older. When I was eight, the Federation discovered my father was supplying arms to the Movement. Someone—a friend, an acquaintance, I never knew who—betrayed him. Seekers came to our house in the middle of the night, fired it and burned it to the ground. My family was locked inside and burned with it. I escaped only because I was visiting my aunt. Within a year she was dead as well, and I was forced to live in the streets. That is where I grew up. My family was all gone. I had no friends. A street magician took me as his apprentice and taught me my trade. That has been my life.” She paused. “You deserve to know why it is that I would never betray anyone to the Federation.”
She reached up with her hand and her fingers brushed his cheek for just a moment. Then her hand trailed down to his arm and fastened there.
“Par, we must do whatever it is we are going to do tonight or it will be too late. The Federation knows who they have. Padishar Creel. They will send for Rimmer Dall and his Seekers to question Padishar. Once that happens, rescue will be pointless.” She paused, making certain that he took her meaning. “We have to help them now.”
Par went cold at the thought of Coll and Morgan in the hands of Rimmer Dall—let alone Padishar. What would the First Seeker do to the l
eader of the Movement?
“Tonight,” she continued, her voice soft, but insistent. “While they are not expecting it. They will still have Padishar and the others in the cells at the Gatehouse. They won’t have moved them yet. They will be tired, sleepy with the coming of morning. We won’t get a better chance.”
He stared at her incredulously. “You and I?”
“If you agree to come with me.”
“But what can the two of us do?”
She pulled him close. Her red hair shimmered darkly in the moonlight. “Tell me about your magic. What can you do with it, Par Ohmsford?”
There was no hesitation now. “Make myself invisible,” he said. “Make myself to appear to be different than I am. Make others think they are seeing things that aren’t there.” He was growing excited. “Just about anything that I want if it’s not for too long and not too extended. It’s just illusion, you understand.”
She walked away from him, paced into the trees close by and stopped. She stood there in the shadows, lost in thought. Par waited where he was, feeling the cool night air brush his skin in a sudden breath of wind, listening to the silence that spread across the city like the waters of an ocean across its floor. He could almost swim through that silence, drifting away to better times and places. There was fear in him that he could not suppress—fear at the thought of returning for his friends, fear at the thought of failing in the attempt. But to attempt nothing at all was unthinkable.
Still, what could they do—just this slip of a girl and himself?
As if reading his mind she came back to him then, green eyes intense, seized his arms tightly, and whispered, “I think I know a way, Par.”
He smiled in spite of himself.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
XX
Walker Boh journeyed directly back to Hearthstone after taking leave of the company at the Hadeshorn. He rode his horse east across the Rabb, bypassed Storlock and its Healers, climbed the Wolfsktaag through the Pass of Jade, and worked his way upriver along the Chard Rush until he entered Darklin Reach. Three days later he was home again. He talked with no one on the way, keeping entirely to himself as he traveled, pausing only long enough to eat and sleep. He was not fit company for other men and he knew it. He was obsessed with thoughts of his encounter with the shade of Allanon. He was haunted by them.
The Anar was enveloped by a particularly violent midsummer storm within twenty-four hours of his return, and Walker secluded himself truculently in his cottage home while winds lashed its shaved-board walls and rains beat down upon its shingled roof. The forested valley was deluged, wracked by the crack and flash of lightning, shaken by the long, ominous peals of thunder, pelted and washed. The cadence of the rains obliterated every other sound, and Walker sat amid their constant thrum in brooding silence, wrapped in blankets and a blackness of spirit he would not have thought possible.
He found himself despairing.
It was the inevitability of things that he feared. Walker Boh, whatever name he chose to bear, was nevertheless an Ohmsford by blood, and he knew that Ohmsfords, despite their misgivings, had always been made to take up the Druid cause. It had been so with Shea and Flick, with Wil, and with Brin and Jair before him. Now it was to be his turn. His and Wren’s and Par’s. Par embraced the cause willingly, of course. Par was an incurable romantic, a self-appointed champion of the downtrodden and the abused. Par was a fool.
Or a realist, depending on how you viewed the matter. Because, if history proved an accurate indicator, Par was merely accepting without argument what Walker, too, would be forced to embrace—Allanon’s will, the cause of a dead man. The shade had come to them like some scolding patriarch out of death’s embrace—chiding them for their lack of diligence, scolding them for their misgivings, charging them with missions of madness and self-destruction. Bring back the Druids! Bring back Paranor! Do these things because I say they must be done, because I say they are necessary, because I—a thing of no flesh and dead mind—demand it!
Walker’s mood darkened further as the weight of the matter continued to settle steadily over him, a pall mirroring the oppressiveness of the storms without. Change the whole of the face of the world—that was what the shade was asking of them, of Par, Wren, and himself. Take three hundred years of evolution in the Four Lands and dispense with it in an instant’s time. What else was the shade asking, if not that? A return of the magic, a return of the wielders of that magic, of its shapers, of all the things ended by this same shade those three hundred years past. Madness! They would be playing with lives in the manner of creators—and they were not entitled!
Through the gray haze of his anger and his fear, he could conjure in his mind the features of the shade. Allanon. The last of the Druids, the keeper of the Histories of the Four Lands, the protector of the Races, the dispenser of magic and secrets. His dark form rose up against the years like a cloud against the sun, blocking away the warmth and the light. Everything that had taken place while he lived bore his touch. And before that, it was Bremen, and before that the Druids of the First Council of the Races. Wars of magic, struggles for survival, the battles between light and dark—or grays perhaps—had all been the result of the Druids.
And now he was being asked to bring all that back.
It could be argued that it was necessary. It had always been argued so. It could be said that the Druids merely worked to preserve and protect, never to shape. But had there ever been one without the other? And necessity was always in the eye of the beholder. Warlock Lords, Demons, and Moth Wraiths past—they had been exchanged for Shadowen. But what were these Shadowen that men should require the aid of Druids and magic? Could not men take it upon themselves to deal with the ills of the world rather than defer to power they scarcely understood? Magic carried grief as well as joy, its dark side as apt to influence and change as its light. Bring it back again, should he, only to give it to men who had repeatedly demonstrated that they were incapable of mastering its truths?
How could he?
Yet without it, the world might become the vision Allanon’s shade had shown them—a nightmare of fire and darkness in which only creatures such as the Shadowen belonged. Perhaps it was true after all that magic was the only means of keeping the Races safe against such beings.
Perhaps.
The truth of the matter was that he simply didn’t want to be part of what was to happen. He was not a child of the Races of the Four Lands, not in body or in spirit, and never had been. He had no empathy with their men and women. He had no place among them. He had been cursed with magic of his own, and it had stripped him of his humanity and his place among humans and isolated him from every other living thing. Ironic, because he alone had no fear of the Shadowen. Perhaps he could even protect against them, were he asked to do so. But he would not be asked. He was as much feared as they. He was the Dark Uncle, the descendent of Brim Ohmsford, the bearer of her seed and her trust, keeper of some nameless charge from Allanon . . .
Except, of course, that the charge was nameless no more. The charge was revealed. He was to bring back Paranor and the Druids, out of the void of yesteryear, out of the nothingness.
That was what the shade had demanded of him, and the demand tracked relentlessly through the landscape of his mind, hurdling arguments, circumventing reason, whispering that it was and therefore must be.
So he worried the matter as a dog would its bone, and the days dragged by. The storms passed and the sun returned to bake the plains dry but leave the forestlands weltering in the heat and damp. He went out after a time, walking the valley floor with only Rumor for company, the giant moor cat having wandered down out of the rain forests east with the changing of the weather, luminous eyes as depthless as the despair the Dark Uncle felt. The cat gave him companionship, but offered no solution to his dilemma and no relief from his brooding. They walked and sat together as the days and nights passed, and time hung suspended against a backdrop of events taking place beyond their refu
ge that neither could know nor see.
Until, on the same night that Par Ohmsford and his companions were betrayed in their attempt to lay hands upon the Sword of Shannara, Cogline returned to the valley of Hearthstone and the illusion of separateness that Walker had worked so hard to maintain was shattered. It was late evening, the sun had gone west, the skies were washed with moonlight and filled with stars, and the summer air was sweet and clean with the smell of new growth. Walker was coming back from a visit to the pinnacle, a refuge he found particularly soothing, the massive stone a source from which it seemed he could draw strength. The cottage door was open and the rooms within lighted as always, but Walker sensed the difference, even before Rumor’s purr stilled and his neck ruff bristled.
Cautiously, he moved onto the porch and into the doorway.
Cogline sat at the old wooden dining table, skeletal face bent against the glare of the oil lamps, his gray robes a weathered covering for goods long since past repair. A large, squarish package bound in oilcloth and tied with cord rested close beside him. He was eating cold food, a glass of ale almost untouched at his elbow.
“I have been waiting for you, Walker,” he told the other while he was still in the darkness beyond the entry.
Walker moved into the light. “You might have saved yourself the trouble.”
“Trouble?” The old man extended a sticklike hand, and Rumor padded forward to nuzzle it familiarly. “It was time I saw my home again.”
“Is this your home?” Walker asked. “I would have thought you more comfortable amid the relics of the Druid past.” He waited for a response, but there was none. “If you have come to persuade me to take up the charge given me by the shade, then you should know at once that I will never do so.”
“Oh, my, Walker. Never is such an impossible amount of time. Besides, I have no intention of trying to persuade you to do anything. A sufficient amount of persuading has already been done, I suspect.”
Walker was still standing in the doorway. He felt awkward and exposed and moved over to the table to sit across from Cogline. The old man took a long sip of the ale.