“Why would Allanon’s shade come to Grandfather in a dream and ask him to bring you here rather than just appearing to you?” she interrupted heatedly. “What sense does it make to go through Grandfather? He would not be high on the list of people you might listen to!”
“There must be a reason, if he’s really had a vision from a shade. He must be involved in some important way.”
He looked at her for confirmation, but she had turned away, her mouth compressed in a tight, disapproving line. “Are you going to help him, Jair? Are you going to try to make him see that he is imagining things or are you going to feed this destructive behavior with pointless encouragement?”
He flushed at the rebuke, but kept his temper. Kimber was looking to him to help her grandfather find a way out of the quicksand of his delusions, and instead of doing so, he was offering to jump in himself. But he couldn’t dismiss the old man’s words as easily as she could. He was not burdened by years and experiences shared; he did not see Cogline in the same way she did. Nor was he so quick to disbelieve visions and dreams and shades. He had encountered more than a few himself, not the least of which was the visit from the King of the Silver River, two years earlier, under similar circumstances. If not for that visit, a visit he might have dismissed if he had been less open-minded, Brin would have been lost to him and the entire world changed. It was not something you forgot easily. Not wanting to believe was not always the best approach to things you didn’t understand.
“Kimber,” he said quietly, “I don’t know yet what I am going to do. I don’t know enough to make a decision. But if I dismiss your grandfather’s words out of hand, it might be worse than if I try to see through them to what lies beneath.”
He waited while she looked off into the distance, her eyes still hot and her mouth set. Then finally, she turned back to him, nodding slowly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to attack you. You were good enough to come when I asked, and I am letting my frustration get in the way of my good sense. I know you mean to help.”
“I do,” he reassured her. “Let him sleep through the night, and then see if he’s had the vision again. We can talk about it when he wakes and is fresh. We might be able to discover its source.”
She shook her head quickly. “But what if it’s real, Jair? What if it’s true? What if I’ve brought you here for selfish reasons and I’ve placed you in real danger? I didn’t mean for that to happen, but what if it does?”
She looked like a child again, waiflike and lost. He smiled and cocked one Elfish eyebrow at her. “A moment ago, you were telling me there wasn’t a chance it was real. Are you ready to abandon that ground just because I said we shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand? I didn’t say I believed it either. I just said there might be some truth to it.”
“I don’t want there to be any. I want it to be Grandfather’s wild imagination at work and nothing more.” She stared at him intently. “I want this all to go away, far away, and not come back again. We’ve had enough of Mord Wraiths and books of dark magic.”
He nodded slowly, then reached out and touched her lightly on the cheek, surprising himself with his boldness. When she closed her eyes, he felt his face grow hot and quickly took his hand away. He felt suddenly dizzy. “Let’s wait and see, Kimber,” he said. “Maybe the dream won’t come to him again.”
She opened her eyes. “Maybe,” she whispered.
He turned back toward the darkness, took a long, cool swallow of his ale, and waited for his head to clear.
The dream didn’t come to Cogline that night, after all. Instead, it came to Jair Ohmsford.
He was not expecting it when he crawled into his bed, weary from the long journey and slightly muddled from a few too many cups of ale. The horses were rubbed down and fed, his possessions were put away in the cupboard and the cottage was dark. He didn’t know how long he slept before it began, only that it happened all at once, and when it did, it was as if he were completely awake and alert.
He stood at the edge of a vast body of water that stretched away as far as the eye could see, its surface gray and smooth, reflecting a sky as flat and colorless as itself, so that there was no distinction between the one and the other. The shade was already there, hovering above its surface, a huge dark specter that dwarfed him in size and blotted out a whole section of the horizon behind it. Its hood concealed its features, and all that was visible were pinpricks of red light like eyes burning out of a black hole.
—Do you know me—
He did, of course. He knew instinctively, without having to think about it, without having been given more than those four words with which to work. “You are Allanon.”
—In life. In death, his shade. Do you remember me as I was—
Jair saw the Druid once again, waiting for Brin and Rone Leah and himself as they returned home late at night, a dark and imposing figure, too large somehow for their home. He heard the Druid speak to them of the Ildatch and the Mord Wraiths. The strong features and the determined voice mesmerized him. He had never known anyone as dominating as Allanon—except, perhaps, for Garet Jax.
“I remember you,” he said.
—Watch—
An image appeared on the air before him, gloomy and indistinct. It revealed the ruins of a vast fortress, mounds of rubble against a backdrop of forest and mountains. Graymark destroyed. Shadowy figures moved through the rubble, poking amid the broken stones. Bearing torches, a handful went deep inside, down tunnels in danger of collapse. They were cloaked and hooded, but the flicker of light on their hands and faces revealed patches of reptilian scales. Mwellrets. They wound their way deeper into the ruins, into fresh-made catacombs, into places where only darkness and death could be found. They proceeded slowly, taking their time, pausing often to search nooks and crannies, each hollow in the earth that might offer concealment.
Then one of the Mwellrets began to dig, an almost frantic effort, pulling aside stones and timbers, hissing like a snake. It labored for long minutes, all alone, the others gone elsewhere. Dust and blood soon coated its scaly hide, and its breath came in gasps that suggested near-exhaustion.
But in the end, it found what it sought, pulling free from the debris a seared, torn page of a book, a page with writing on it that pulsed like veins beneath skin . . .
—Watch—
A second image appeared, this one of another fortress, one he didn’t recognize right away, even though it seemed familiar. It was as dark and brooding as Graymark had been, as thick with shadows and gloom, as hard-edged and rough-hewn. The image lingered only a moment on the outer walls, then took the Valeman deep inside, past gates and battlements and into the nether regions. In a room dimly lit by torches that smoked and steamed in damp, stale air, a cluster of Mwellrets hovered over the solitary book page retrieved from Graymark’s ruins.
They were engaged in an arcane rite. Jair could not be certain, but he had the distinct feeling that they were not entirely aware of what was happening to them. They were moving in concert, like gears in a machine, each one in sync with the others. They kept their heads lowered and their eyes fixed, and there was a hypnotic sound to their voices and movements that suggested they were responding to something he couldn’t see. In the gloom and smoke, they reminded him of the Spider Gnomes on Toffer Ridge, come to make sacrifice of themselves to the Werebeasts, come to give up the lives of a few in the mistaken belief that it was for the good of the many.
As one, they moved their palms across the surface of the paper, taking in the feel of the veined writing, murmuring furtive chants and small prayers. Beneath their reptilian fingers, the page glowed and the writing pulsed. It was responding to their efforts. Jair could feel the raw pull of a siphoning, a leaching away of life.
The remnant of the Ildatch, in search of a way back from the edge of extinction, in need of nourishment that would enable it to recall and put to use the spells it had lost, was feeding.
The image faded. He was alone again with Allanon’s shade, two solitary fi
gures facing each other across an empty vista. The gloom had grown thicker and the sky darker. The lake no longer reflected light of any sort.
In the aftermath of the visions, he had realized why the second fortress had seemed so familiar. It was Dun Fee Aran, the Gnome prisons where he had been taken by the Mwellret Stythys to be coerced into giving up his magic and eventually his life. He remembered his despair on being cast into the cell allotted to him, deep beneath the earth in the bowels of the keep, alone in the darkness and silence. He remembered his fear.
“I can’t go back there,” he whispered, already anticipating what the shade was going to ask of him.
But the shade asked nothing of him. Instead, it gestured and for a third and final time, the air before the Valeman began to shimmer.
—Watch—
“I knew it!” Cogline exclaimed gleefully. “It’s still alive! Didn’t I tell you so? Wasn’t that just what I said? You thought me a crazy old man, Granddaughter, but how crazy do I look to you now? Hallucinations? Wild imaginings? Hah! Am I still to be treated as if I were a delicate flower? Am I still to be humored and coddled?”
He began dancing about the room and cackling like the madman that, Jair guessed, he was as close as possible to being while still marginally sane. The Valeman watched him patiently, trying not to look at Kimber, who was so angry and disgusted that he could feel the heat radiating from her glare. It was morning now, and they sat across from each other at the old wooden dining table, bathed in bright splashes of sunlight that streamed through the open windows and belied the darkness of the moment.
“You haven’t told us yet what the shade expects of you,” Kimber said quietly, though he could not mistake the edge to her words.
“What you have already guessed,” he answered, meeting her gaze reluctantly. “What I knew even before the third image showed it to me. I have to go to Dun Fee Aran and put a stop to what’s happening.”
Cogline stopped dancing. “Well, you can do that, I expect,” he said, shrugging aside the implications. “You did it once before, didn’t you?”
“No, Grandfather, he did not,” Kimber corrected him impatiently. “That was his sister, and I don’t understand why she wasn’t sent for, if the whole idea is to finish the job she started two years ago. It’s her fault the Ildatch is still alive.”
Jair shook his head. “It isn’t anybody’s fault. It just happened. In any case, Brin’s married and pregnant and doesn’t use the magic anymore.”
Nor would she ever use it again, he was thinking. It had taken her a long time to get over what happened to her at the Maelmord. He had seen how long it had taken. He didn’t know that she had ever been the same since. She had warned him that the magic was dangerous, that you couldn’t trust it, that it could turn on you even when you thought it was your friend. He remembered the haunted look in her eyes.
He leaned forward, folding his hands in front of him. “Allanon’s shade made it clear that she can’t be exposed to the Ildatch a second time—not even to a fragment of a page. She is too vulnerable to its magic, too susceptible to what it can do to humans, even one as powerful as she is. Someone else has to go, someone who hasn’t been exposed to the power of the book before.”
Kimber reached out impulsively and took hold of his hands. “But why you, Jair? Others could do this.”
“Maybe not. Dun Fee Aran is a Mwellret stronghold, and the page is concealed somewhere deep inside. Just finding it presents problems that would stop most from even getting close. But I have the magic of the wishsong, and I can use it to disguise myself. I can make it appear as if I’m not there. That way, I can gain sufficient time to find the page without being discovered.”
“The boy is right!” Cogline exclaimed, animated anew by the idea. “He is the perfect choice!”
“Grandfather!” Kimber snapped at him.
The old man turned, running his gnarled fingers through his tangled beard. “Stop yelling at me!”
“Then stop jumping to ridiculous conclusions! Jair is not the perfect choice. He might be able to get past the rets and into the fortress, but then he has to destroy the page and get out again. How is he to do that when all his magic can do is create illusions? Smoke and mirrors! How is he to defend himself against a real attack, one he is almost sure to come up against at some point?”
“We’ll go with him!” the old man declared. “We’ll be his protectors! We’ll take Whisper—just as soon as he comes back from wherever he’s wandered off to. Dratted cat!”
Kimber ran a hand across her eyes as if trying to see things more clearly. “Jair, do you understand what I am saying? This is hopeless!”
The Valeman didn’t answer right away. He was remembering the third vision shown him by Allanon’s shade, the one he hadn’t talked about. A jumble of uncertain images clouded by shadowy movement and wildness, it had frightened and confused him. Yet it had imbued him with a certainty of success, as well, a certainty so strong and unmistakable that he could not dismiss it.
“The shade said that I would find a way,” he answered her. He hesitated. “If I just believe in myself.”
She stared at him. “If you just believe in yourself?”
“I know. It sounds foolish. And I’m terrified of Dun Fee Aran, have been since I was imprisoned there by the Mwellret Stythys two years ago on my way to find Brin. I thought I was going to die in those cells. And maybe worse was going to happen first. I have never been so afraid of anything. I swore, once I was out of there, that I would never go back, not for any reason.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “But I think that I have to go back anyway, in part because it’s necessary if the Ildatch is to be stopped, but also because Allanon made me feel that I shouldn’t be afraid any more. He gave me a sense of reassurance that this wouldn’t be like the last time, that it would be different because I am older and stronger now—better able to face what’s waiting there.”
“Telling you all this might just be a way to get you to do what he wants,” Kimber pointed out. “It might be a Druid trick, a deception of the sort that shades are famous for.”
He nodded. “It might. But it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel false. It feels true.”
“Of course, it would,” she said quietly. She looked miserable. “I brought you here to help Grandfather find peace of mind with his dreams, not to risk your life because of them. Everything I told you I was afraid was going to happen is happening. I hate it.”
She was squeezing his hands so hard she was hurting him. “If I didn’t come, Kimber,” he said, “who would act on your grandfather’s dreams? It isn’t something we planned, either of us, but we can’t ignore what’s needed. I have to go. I have to.”
She nodded slowly, her hands withdrawing from his. “I know.” She looked at Cogline, who was standing very still now, looking distressed, as if suddenly aware of what he had brought about. She smiled gently at him. “I know, Grandfather.”
The old man nodded slowly, but the joy had gone out of him.
It was decided they would set out the following day. It was a journey of some distance, even if they went on horseback. It would take them the better part of a week to get through the Ravenshorn Mountains and skirt the edges of Olden Moor to where Dun Fee Aran looked out over the Silver River in the shadow of the High Bens. This was rugged country, most of it still wilderness, beyond the spread of Dwarf settlements and Gnome camps. Much of it was swamp and jungle, and some of it was too dangerous to try to pass through. A direct line of approach was out of the question. At best, they would be able to find a path along the eastern edge of the Ravenshorn. They would have to carry their own supplies and water. They would have to go prepared for the worst.
Jair was not pleased with the thought that both Kimber and Cogline would be going with him, but there was nothing he could do about that, either. He was going back into country that had been unfamiliar to him two years earlier and was unfamiliar to him now. He wouldn’t be able to find h
is way without help, and the only help at hand was the girl and her grandfather, both of whom knew the Anar much better than anyone else he would have been able to turn to. It would have been nice to leave them behind in safety, but he doubted that they would have permitted it even if he hadn’t had need of them. For reasons that were abundantly apparent, they intended to see this matter through with him.
They spent the remainder of the day putting together supplies, a process that was tedious and somehow emotionally draining, as if the act of preparation was tantamount to climbing to a cliff ledge before jumping off. There wasn’t much conversation exchanged, and most of what was said concerned the task itself. That the effort helped pass the time was the best that could be said for it.
More often than he cared to admit, Jair found himself wondering how far he was pressing his luck by going back into country he had been fortunate to escape from once already. He might argue that this time, like the last, he was going because he had no choice, but in fact he did. He could walk away from the dreams and their implications. He could argue that Kimber was right and that he was being used for reasons that he did not appreciate. He could even argue that efforts at reviving the Ildatch were doomed in any case, its destruction by his sister’s magic so complete that trying to re-create the book from a single page was impossible. He could stop everything they were doing simply by announcing that he was going home to ask help from his parents and sister. It would be wiser to involve them in any case, wouldn’t it?
But he would not do that. He knew he wouldn’t even as he was telling himself he could. He was just new enough at being grown up not to want to ask for help unless he absolutely had to. It diminished him in his own mind, if not in fact, to seek assistance from his family. It was almost as if they expected it of him, the youngest and least experienced, the one they all had been helping for so long. There was an admission of failure written into such an act, one that he could not abide. This was something he could do, after all. He had gone into this country once, and dangerous or not, he could go into it again.