The only one who paid any attention to the parcel was Rumor, who sniffed at it from time to time but otherwise ignored it. The three days passed and the book sat unopened.
But then something odd happened. On the fourth day of this strange contest, Walker began to question his reasoning. Did it really make any better sense to dispose of the book after a week or even a month than it did to dispose of it immediately? Would it matter either way? What did it demonstrate other than a sort of perverse hardheadedness on his part? What sort of game was he playing and for whose benefit was he playing it?
Walker mulled the matter over as the daylight hours waned and darkness closed about, then sat staring at the book from across the room while the fire in the hearth burned slowly to ash and the midnight hour neared.
“I am not being strong,” he whispered to himself. “I am being frightened.”
He considered the possibility in the silence of his thoughts. Finally he stood up, crossed the room to the dining table and stopped. For a moment, he hesitated. Then he reached down and picked up the Druid History. He hefted it experimentally.
Better to know the Demon that pursues you than to continue to imagine him.
He crossed back to his reading chair and seated himself once more, the book settled on his lap. Rumor lifted his massive head from where he slept in front of the fire, and his luminous eyes fixed on Walker. Walker stared back. The cat blinked and went back to sleep.
Walker Boh opened the book.
He read it slowly, working his way through its thick parchment pages with deliberate pacing, letting his eyes linger on the gold edges and ornate calligraphy, determined that now that the book was opened nothing should be missed. The silence after midnight deepened, broken only by an occasional throaty sound from the sleeping moor cat and the snapping of embers in the fire. Only once he thought to wonder how Cogline had really come by the book—surely not out of Paranor!—and then the matter was forgotten as the recorded history caught him up and swept him away as surely as if he were a leaf upon a windswept ocean.
The time chronicled was that of Bremen when he was among the last of the Druids, when the Warlock Lord and his minions had destroyed nearly all of the members of the Council. There were stories of the dark magic that had changed the rebel Druids into the horrors they had become. There were accounts of its varied uses, conjurings, and incantations that Bremen had uncovered but had been smart enough to fear. All of the frightening secrets of what the magic could do were touched upon, interspersed with the cautions that so many who tried to master the power would ignore. It was a time of upheaval and frightening change in the Four Lands, and Bremen alone had understood what was at stake.
Walker paged ahead, growing anxious now. Cogline had meant for him to read something particular within this history. Whatever it was, he had not yet come upon it.
The Skull Bearers had seized Paranor for themselves, the chronicles related. Paranor, they had thought, would now be their home. But the Warlock Lord had felt threatened there, wary of latent magic within the stones of the Keep, within the depths of the earth where the furnaces beneath the castle fortress burned. So he had called the Skull Bearers to him and gone north...
Walker frowned. He had forgotten that part. For a time Paranor had been abandoned completely when it could have belonged to the rebels. After all, the Second War of the Races had dragged on for years.
He paged ahead once more, skimming the words, searching without knowing exactly what it was he was searching for. He had forgotten his resolve of earlier, his promise to himself that he was not to be caught up in Cogline’s snare. His curiosity and intellect were too demanding to be stayed by caution. There were secrets here that no man had set eyes upon for hundreds of years, knowledge that only the Druids had enjoyed, dispensing it to the Races as they perceived necessary and never otherwise. Such power! How long had it been hidden from everyone but Allanon, and before him Bremen, and before him Galaphile and the first Druids, and before them...?
He stopped reading, aware suddenly that the flow of the narrative had changed. The script had turned smaller, more precise. There were odd markings amid the words, runes that symbolized gestures.
Walker Boh went cold to his bones. The silence that enveloped the room became enormous, an unending, suffocating ocean.
Shades! he whispered in the darkest corner of his mind. It is the invocation for the magic that sealed away Paranor!
His breathing sounded harsh in his own ears as he forced his eyes away from the book. His pale face was taut. This was what Cogline had meant for him to find—why, he didn’t know—but this was it. Now that he had found it, he wondered if he might not be better off closing the book at once.
But that was the fear whispering in his ear again, he knew.
He lowered his eyes once more and began to read. The spell was there, the invocation of magic that Allanon had used three hundred years ago to close away Paranor from the world of men. He found to his surprise that he understood it. His training with Cogline was more complete than he would have imagined. He finished the narrative of the spell and turned the page.
There was a single paragraph. It read:
Once removed, Paranor shall remain lost to the world of men for the whole of time, sealed away and invisible within its casting. One magic alone has the power to return it—that singular Elfstone that is colored Black and was conceived by the faerie people of the old world in the manner and form of all Elfstones, combining nevertheless in one stone alone the necessary properties of heart, mind, and body. Whosoever shall have cause and right shall wield it to its proper end.
That was all it said. Walker read on, found that the subject matter abruptly changed and skipped back. He read the paragraph again, slowly, searching for anything he might have—missed. There was no question in his mind that this was what Cogline had meant for him to find. A Black Elfstone. A magic that could retrieve lost Paranor. The means to the end of the charge that the shade of Allanon had given him.
Bring back Paranor and restore the Druids. He could hear again the words of the charge in his mind.
Of course, there were no longer any Druids. But maybe Allanon intended that Cogline should take up the cause, once Paranor was restored. It seemed logical despite the old man’s protestations that his time was past—but Walker was astute enough to recognize that where Druids and their magics were concerned logic often traveled a tortuous path.
He was two-thirds of the way through the history. He spent another hour finishing it, found nothing further that he believed was intended for him, and turned back again to the paragraph on the Black Elfstone. Dawn was creeping out of the east, a faint golden light in the dark horizon. Walker rubbed his eyes and tried to think. Why was there so little digression on the purpose and properties of this magic? What did it look like and what could it do? It was a single stone instead of three—why? How was it that no one had ever heard of it before?
The questions buzzed around inside his head like trapped flies, annoying and at the same time intriguing him. He read the paragraph several times more—read it, in fact, until he could recite it from memory—and closed the book. Rumor stretched and yawned on the floor in front of him, lifted his head and blinked.
Talk to me, cat, Walker thought. There are always secrets that only a cat knows. Maybe this is one of them.
But Rumor only got up and went outside, disappearing into the fading shadows.
Walker fell asleep then and did not come awake again until midday. He rose, bathed and dressed anew, ate a slow meal with the closed book in front of him, and went out for a long walk. He passed south through the valley to a favorite glade where a stream rippled noisily over a meandering rock bed and emptied into a pool that contained tiny fish colored brilliant red and blue. He lingered there for a time, thinking, then returned again to the cottage. He sat on the porch and watched the sun creep westward in a haze of purple and scarlet.
“I should never have opened the book,” he chide
d himself softly, for its mystery had proven irresistible after all. “I should have bound it back up and dropped it into the deepest hole I could find.”
But it was too late for that. He had read it and knowledge acquired could not be readily forgotten. A sense of futility mingled with anger. He had thought it impossible that Paranor could be restored. Now he knew that there was a magic that could do exactly that. Once again, there was that sense of the inevitability of things prophesied by the Druids.
Still, his life was his own, wasn’t it? He needn’t accept the charge of Allanon’s shade, whatever its viability.
But his curiosity was relentless. He found himself thinking of the Black Elfstone, even when he tried not to. The Black Elfstone was out there, somewhere, a forgotten magic. Where? Where was it?
That and all the other questions pressed in about him as the evening passed. He ate his dinner, walked again for a time, read from the few precious books of his own library, wrote a bit in his journal, and mostly thought of that single, beguiling paragraph on the magic that would bring back Paranor.
He thought about it as he prepared for bed.
He was still thinking about it as midnight approached.
Teasingly, insinuatingly, it wormed about restlessly inside his mind, suggesting this possibility and that, opening doors just a crack into unlighted rooms, hinting at understandings and in-sights that would bring him the knowledge he could not help but crave.
And with it, perhaps, peace of mind.
His sleep was troubled and restless. The mystery of the Black Elfstone was an irritation that would not be dispelled.
By morning, he had decided that he must do something about it.
Par Ohmsford came awake that morning with a decision of his own to make. It had been five days since Damson and he had rescued Coll, Morgan, Padishar Creel, and the other two outlaws from the cells of the Federation Gatehouse, and the bunch of them had been on the run ever since. They had not attempted to leave the city, certain that the gates would be closely watched and the risk of discovery too great. They had not returned to the basement of the weapons-maker’s shop either, feeling that it might have been compromised by their mysterious betrayer. Instead, they had skipped from one shelter to the next, never remaining more than one night, posting guards throughout their brief stay at each, jumping at every sound they heard and every shadow they saw.
Well, enough was enough. Par had decided that he was through running.
He rose from the makeshift bed he occupied in the attic of the grain house and glanced over at Coll next to him, who was still asleep. The others were already up and presumably downstairs in the main warehouse, which was closed until the beginning of the work week. Gingerly he crossed to the tiny, shuttered window that let in what small amount of light the room enjoyed and peered out. The street below was empty except for a stray dog sniffing at a refuse bin and a beggar sleeping in the door of the tin factory across the way. Clouds hung low and gray across the skies, threatening rain before the close of the day.
When he crossed back to pull on his boots, he found Coll awake and looking at him. His brother’s coarse hair was ruffled and his eyes were clouded with sleep and disgruntlement.
“Ho-hum, another day,” Coll muttered and then yawned hugely. “What fascinating storage room will we be visiting today, do you suppose?”
“None, as far as I’m concerned.” Par dropped down beside him.
Coll’s eyebrows arched. “That so? Have you told Padishar?”
“I’m on my way.”
“I suppose you have an alternative in mind—to hiding out, that is.” Coll pushed himself up on one elbow. “Because I don’t think Padishar Creel is going to give you the time of day if you don’t. He hasn’t been in the best of moods since he found out he might not be as well-loved among his men as he thought he was.”
Par doubted that Padishar Creel ever had allowed himself to become deluded enough to believe that he was well-loved by his men, but Coll was certainly right enough about the outlaw chief’s present temperament. His betrayal at the hands of one of his own men had left him taciturn and bitter. He had retreated somewhere deep inside himself these several days past, still clearly in command as he led them through the network of Federation patrols and checkpoints that had been thrown out across the city, still able to find them refuge when it seemed there could be none, but at the same time had become uncharacteristically withdrawn from everyone about him. Damson Rhee had come with them, whether by choice or not Par still wasn’t sure, but even she could not penetrate the defenses the outlaw chief had thrown up around himself. Except for exercising his authority as leader, Padishar had removed himself from them as surely as if he were no longer physically present.
Par shook his head. “Well, we have to do something besides simply hop about from place to place for the rest of our lives.” He was feeling rather sullen about matters himself. “If there’s a need for a plan, Padishar should come up with one. Nothing’s being accomplished the way things stand now.”
Coll sat up and began dressing. “You probably don’t want to hear this, Par, but it may be time to rethink this whole business of allying ourselves with the Movement. We might be better off on our own again.”
Par said nothing. They finished dressing and went downstairs to find the others. There was cold bread, jam, and fruit for breakfast, and they ate it hungrily. Par could not understand how he could be so famished after doing so little. He listened as he ate to Stasas and Drutt compare notes on hunting in the forests of their respective homes somewhere below Varfleet. Morgan was keeping watch by the doors leading into the warehouse and Coll went to join him. Damson Rhee sat on an empty packing crate nearby, carving something. He had seen little of her during the past several days; she was often out with Padishar, scouting the city while the rest of them hid.
Padishar was nowhere to be seen.
After eating, Par went back upstairs to gather his things together, anticipating that, whatever the result of his confrontation with Padishar, it would likely involve a move.
Damson followed him up. “You grow restless,” she observed when they were alone. She seated herself on the edge of his pallet, shaking back her reddish mane. “An outlaw’s life is not what you had in mind, is it?”
He smiled faintly. “Sitting about in warehouses and basements isn’t what I had in mind. What is Padishar waiting around for?”
She shrugged. “What we all wait around for from time to time—that little voice buried somewhere deep inside that tells us what to do next. It might be intuition or it might be common sense or then again it might be the advent of circumstances beyond our control.” She gave him a wicked smile. “Is it speaking now to you?”
“Something certainly is.” He sat down next to her. “Why are you still here, Damson? Does Padishar keep you?”
She laughed. “Hardly. I come and go as I please. He knows I was not the one who betrayed him. Or you, I think.”
“Then why stay?”
She considered him thoughtfully for a moment. “Maybe I stay because you interest me,” she said at last. She paused as if she wanted to say more, but thought better of it. She smiled. “I have never met anyone who uses real magic. Just the pretend kind, like me.”
She reached up and deftly plucked a coin from behind his ear. It was carved from cherry wood. She handed it to him. It bore her likeness on one side and his on the other. He looked up at her in surprise. “That’s very good.”
“Thank you.” He thought she colored slightly. “You may keep it with the other for good luck.”
He tucked the coin into his pocket. They sat silent for a time, exchanging uncertain glances. “There isn’t much difference, you know, between your kind of magic and mine,” he said finally. “They both rely on illusion.”
She shook her head. “No, Par. You are wrong. One is an acquired skill, the other innate. Mine is learned and, once learned, has become all it can. Yours is constantly growing, and its lessons are limi
tless. Don’t you see? My magic is a trade, a way to make a living. Your magic is much more; it is a gift around which you must build your life.”
She smiled, but there was a hint of sadness in it. She stood up. “I have work to do. Finish your packing.” She moved past him and disappeared down the ladder.
The morning hours crawled past and still Padishar did not return. Par busied himself doing nothing, growing anxious for something—anything—to happen. Coll and Morgan drifted over from time to time, and he spoke to them of his intention to confront the outlaw chief. Neither seemed very optimistic about his chances.
The skies grew more threatening, the wind picking up until it made a rather mournful howl about the loose-fitting jambs and shutters of the old building they were housed in, but still it didn’t rain. Card games were played to pass the time and topics of conversation exhausted.
It was nearing midafternoon when Padishar returned. He slipped in through the front doors without a word, crossed the room to Par and motioned him to follow. He took the Valeman into a small office situated at the back of the main floor and shut the door behind them.
When they were alone, he seemed at a loss for words.
“I have been thinking rather carefully about what we should do,” he said finally. “Or, if you prefer, what we should not do. Any mistake we make now could be our last.”
He pulled Par over to a bench that had been shoved back against the wall and sat them both down. “There’s the problem of this traitor,” he said quietly. His eyes were bright and hard with something Par couldn’t read. “I was certain at first that it must be one of us. But it isn’t me or Damson. Damson is above suspicion. It isn’t you. It might be your brother; but it isn’t him either, is it?”