When they parted finally to sleep, exhausted anew from their efforts, Walker found himself besieged by a mix of feelings. He had grown so far beyond the man he had been that in many ways he was barely recognizable. He was conscious of the old man staring after him as he retreated down the hall to his sleeping room and could not shake the sense that they were drawing apart in more ways than one.
Cogline. The Druid-who-never-was made companion to the Druid-who-would-be—what must he be feeling?
Walker didn't know. But he accepted reluctantly that from this night forward things would never be the same between them again.
He slept then, and his dreams were tenuous and filled with faces and voices he could not recognize. It was nearing dawn when he woke, an urgency gripping him, whispering insidiously at him, bringing him out of his sleep like a swimmer out of water, thrusting to the surface and drawing in huge gulps of air. For a moment he was paralyzed by the suddenness of his waking, frozen with uncertainty as his heart pounded within his chest and his eyes and ears struggled to make sense of the darkness surrounding him. At last he was able to move, swinging his legs down off the bed, steadied by the feeling of the solid stone beneath his feet. He rose, aware that he was still wearing the dark robes in which he had fallen asleep, the clothing he had been too tired to remove.
Something stirred just outside his door, a soft padding, a rubbing against the ancient wood.
Rumor.
He went to the door and opened it. The big cat stood just without, staring up at him. It circled away anxiously and came back again, big head swinging up, eyes gleaming.
It wants me to follow, Walker thought. Something is wrong.
He wrapped himself in a heavy cloak and went out from his sleeping chamber into the tomblike silence of the castle. Stone walls muffled the sound of his feet as he hurried down the ancient corridors. Rumor went on ahead, sleek and dark in the gloom, padding soundlessly through the shadows. Without slowing, they passed the room in which Cogline slept. The trouble did not lie there. The night faded about them as they went, dawn rising out of the east in a shimmer of silver that seeped through the castle windows in wintry, clouded light. Walker barely noticed, his eyes fixed on the movement of the moor cat as it slid through the overlapping shadows. His ears strained to hear something, to catch a hint of what was waiting. But the silence persisted, unbroken.
They climbed from the main hall to the battlement doors and went out into the open air. The dawn was chill and empty-feeling. Mist lay over the whole of the valley, climbing the wall of the Dragon's Teeth east and stretching west to the Streleheim in a blanket that shrouded everything between. Paranor lay wrapped within its upper folds, its high towers islands thrusting out of a misty sea. The mist swirled and spun, stirred by winds that came down off the mountains, and in the weak light of the early dawn strange shapes and forms came alive.
Rumor padded down the walkway, sniffing the air as he went, tail switching uneasily. Walker followed. They circled the south parapet west without slowing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. They passed open stairwells and tower entryways, ghosts at haunt.
On the west battlement, Rumor slowed suddenly. The hair on the moor cat's neck bristled, and his dark muzzle wrinkled in a snarl. Walker moved up beside him and quickly placed a reassuring hand on the coarse hair of his back. Rumor was facing out now into the gloom. They stood just above the castle's west gate.
Walker peered into the mist. He could sense it, too.
Something was out there.
The seconds slipped away, and nothing showed. Walker began to grow impatient. Perhaps he should go out for a look.
Then suddenly the mist drew back, seemed to pull away as if in revulsion, and the riders appeared. There were four of them, gaunt and spectral in the faint light. They came slowly, purposefully, as gray as the gloom that had hidden their approach. Four riders atop their mounts, but none was human, and the animals they rode were loathsome parodies, all scales and claws and teeth. Four riders, each markedly different from the other, each with a mount that was a mirror of itself.
Walker Boh knew at once that they were Shadowen. He knew as well that they had come for him.
Coolly, dispassionately, he studied them.
The first was tall and lean and cadaverous. Bones pressed out against skin shrunk tight against it, the skeletal frame hunched forward like a cat at hunt. The face was a skull in which the jaw hung open slackly and the eyes stared out, too wide and too blank to be seeing. It wore no clothes, and its naked body was neither that of a man nor of a woman, but something in between. Its breath clouded the air before it, a vile green mist.
The second lacked any semblance of identity. It was human-shaped, but had no skin or bones. It was instead a raging cloud of darkness, buzzing and shrieking within its form. The cloud had the look of flies or mosquitoes trapped behind glass, gathered so thick that they shut out the light. The wicked sounds that issued from this rider seemed to warn that it hid within its spectral form an evil too dreadful to imagine.
The third was more immediately recognizable. Armored head to foot, it bristled with spikes and cutting edges and weapons. It wore maces and knives, swords and battle-axes, and carried a huge pike strung with skulls and finger bones laced together in a chain. A helmet hid its face, but the eyes that peered out through the visor slit were as red as fire.
The last rider was cloaked and hooded and as invisible as the night. No face could be seen within the concealing cowl. No hands showed to grip the reins of its sinewy mount. It rode hunched forward like a very old man, all bent and gnarled, a creature crippled by age and time. But there was no sense of weakness about it, nothing to suggest that it was anything of what it appeared. This rider rode steady and sure, and what crippled it was neither time nor age but the weight of the burden it bore for the lives it had taken.
Slung across its back was a scythe.
Walker Boh went cold with recognition. Far back in the Druid Histories, recorded from the old world of Men, there was mention of these four. He knew who they were, whom they had been created to be. Now Shad-owen had taken on their guises, assumed the identities of the dark things of old.
His chest tightened. Four riders. The Four Horsemen of the legends, the slayers of mortal men come out of a time so distant it had been all but forgotten. But he had read the tales, he repeated to himself, and he knew what they were.
Famine. Pestilence. War. Death.
Walker's hand lifted away from Rumor, and the cat began to growl deep in his chest. Shadowen, Walker thought in a mix of awe and fear, created to be something that never was, that was only a manifestation of abstracts, of killing ways, come now to destroy me.
He wondered anew at who and what the Shadowen were, at the source of power that would let them be anything they chose. His transformation had given him no insight into this. He was as ignorant of their origins now as he had been at the start of things. Yes, they were as dark as the shade of Allanon had forewarned. Yes, they were an evil that used magic as a weapon to destroy. But who were they? Where had they come from? How could they be destroyed?
Where could he find the answers to his questions?
He watched the Four Horsemen advance, settled atop their lurching, writhing mounts, things that vaguely resembled horses but were intended to be much more. Breath steamed on the morning air like poisonous vapor. Claws scraped and crunched on the rock. Heads lifted and muzzles drew back to show hooked, yellowed teeth. Steadily, the Horsemen came on.
When they reached the gates, they stopped. They made no move to pass through. They showed no interest in advancing. In a line they faced the gate and waited. Walker waited with them. The minutes passed and the light brightened slowly, the gloom taking on a whiteness as the dawn neared.
Then at last the sun crested the mountains east, a faint glimmer above the dark peaks, and at the gates below, the rider Famine suddenly advanced. When it was next to the barrier, it lifted its skeletal hand and knocked. The sound was a dim
ly heard, echoing, hollow thud—the shudder that life makes as it departs the body for the final time. Walker cringed in spite of himself, revolted by how it made him feel.
Famine backed away then, and one by one the Four Horsemen turned right, spreading out in a thin line to circle the castle walls. Around they went, passing beneath Walker one by one as he watched them return and disappear again, keeping carefully apart in their movement so that there was always one at each wall, one at each corner of the compass.
A siege, Walker realized. The knock was a challenge, and if he did not come out to answer it, they intended to keep him trapped within. Rimmer Dall and the Shadowen had discovered that Paranor was back and that Walker had accepted the mantle of Allanon. The Horsemen had been sent in response.
Walker folded his arms within his cloak. We'll see who traps whom, he thought darkly.
He stood looking down for a while longer on the apparitions below, then went to wake Cogline.
5
The sewers beneath Tyrsis were dank and chill in a twilight dark that seeped along gutters and down grates like spilled ink. Daylight had gone west, and the night hovered in shadows that lengthened from buildings and walls, a ghost come to life. Footsteps and voices faded homeward, and the weariness of day's end was a sigh echoed by the hot summer wind as it settled into pockets of still, suffocating heat in the runnels of the city's streets and byways, an airless blanket laid over the catacombs below.
Padishar Creel, Par Ohmsford, and the Mole groped their way slowly and steadily through those catacombs, three of the shadows that grew out of night's coming, as silent as the dust stirred by the boots passing in the streets above. They breathed through their mouths, the sewer smells oppressive and rank within the twisting conduits, the city's waste a sluggish flow at the edges of their feet. At times they climbed iron ladders and stone steps, at times they crawled through narrow tunnels, all the while working their way outward from the city's center toward its walls and the bluff face, the watchtower where Damson Rhee was held prisoner, and the confrontation that waited.
“We will not return without her,” Padishar had declared. “Whatever proves necessary to free her, we will do. Once we have her, we will not give her up again.
“Mole,” he had whispered, kneeling before the strange little fellow. “You will guide us in and, if possible, out again. But you will not fight, do you understand? Keep yourself clear and safe. Because, Mole, once we have freed Damson”—there was no suggestion, Par noted, that they would not— “you alone will know how to see her safely away again. Agreed?” And the Mole had nodded solemnly.
“Par, yours is a harder task still,” the leader of the free-born had continued, turning next to the Valeman. “If we encounter the Shadowen, you must use your magic to keep them from us. The Highlander was able to do so with his sword when we were trapped in the Pit. This time it will be up to you. I lack any means to defend against these monsters. If we encounter them, lad, don't hesitate.”
Par had already decided that use of the wishsong in this endeavor was a foregone conclusion, so he was quick to give Padishar his promise. What he could not promise—and what he did not tell the other—was that he was no longer certain he could control the magic. It had already proved unreliable, already shown that it could take on a life of its own, unleashing power that might well consume him. But such fears as recognition of this danger generated paled against his feelings for Damson Rhee. Buried by the struggle they had shared to escape the city and its hunters, and by the fact that he had felt her safe with him, his feelings had surfaced instantly with the report of her taking, and now they raged within him like a fire unchecked. He loved her. Perhaps he had loved her from the first, but certainly since she had held him together after Coll's death. She was as much a part of him as anything separate could possibly be, and he could not stand the thought of losing her. He would give anything to see her safe again. He would give everything. If it meant risking the fury of a magic that could change him irrevocably, that could even destroy him, then so be it. If Rimmer Dall was right about who and what he was, then there was nothing he could do to save himself in any case. He would not shy from the dangers of the magic where Damson's safety was at stake. He would do what he must.
So they had set out, each determined that Damson was worth losing everything, knowing the risk was such that everything could well be lost. Now the sewers stretched away in narrow, winding tunnels before them, the darkness closing fast about the little light that remained. Soon they would be forced to use torchlight to see, and that would be especially dangerous as they neared the city's walls. For there the dark things would likely be at watch below ground as well as above, and torchlight would be seen coming from a long way off.
They hurried on, the Mole's sharp eyes and steady senses choosing their way unerringly, sorting out which paths were safe, avoiding the ones that might impede them. As they went, they could hear the sounds of the city above drifting down in trickles and snatches, bits and pieces of a life as disconnected from their own as the living from the dead. Par's thoughts drifted. It felt somehow as if they were entombed within the stone of the bluff on which Tyrsis had been built, specters at haunt just out of sight of the people they had once been. It seemed to the Valeman, on reflection, that he was indeed more ghost than human, that in his flight from the Shadowen and the other dangers encountered on this journey he had become transformed in a way that he did not entirely understand and as a result had been stripped of substance and left ethereal. He moved now in a shadow existence, increasingly bereft of friends and family, left trapped in a tangle of magics that were causing him to disintegrate. There should have been a way to save himself, he knew, but somehow he could not seem to discover what it was.
They reached a broad confluence of pipes and slowed behind the Mole's cautious signal. Huddled close at the bottom of a well from which a stone stairway climbed, they held their last council.
“The stairway leads to a cellar within the inner wall,” whispered the Mole. His nose was damp and gleaming. “From there we must climb to a hall, follow it to an entryway that leads outside again, cross to another door, enter, and follow a second hall to a hidden passageway that will take us up through the watchtower to where Damson waits.”
He looked from Padishar to Par and back again, intent.
The big man nodded. “Federation guards?”
The Mole blinked. “Everywhere.”
“Shadowen?”
“In the tower, somewhere.”
Padishar gave Par a wry smile. “Somewhere. Very incisive.” He hunched his big shoulders. “All right. Remember what I said, the both of you. Remember what you are to do—and not to do.” He glanced at Par. “If I fall, you go on—if you can. If not, get to Firerim Reach and find help there. Promise me.”
Par nodded, thinking as he did that the promise was a lie, that he would never turn back, not until Damson was safe, no matter what.
Padishar reached back over his shoulder and tightened the straps that secured the broadsword to his back, then checked the long knives and short sword strapped about his waist. The handle of yet another long knife protruded from one boot. All were carefully sheathed and wrapped in cloth to keep the metal from rattling or reflecting light. Par wore only the Sword of Shannara. The Mole carried no weapons at all.
Padishar looked up again. “All right, then. Let's go in.”
In single file they climbed the stairs, crouching low against the stone, easing their way toward the faint light that shone above. A grate came into view, bars of iron that cast a web of shadows down the steps and onto their bodies. There was silence above, an empty, hollow nothingness.
On reaching the grate, the Mole paused to listen, his head cocked in the manner of an animal at hunt—or at risk—then reached up and with surprising strength lifted the grate away almost soundlessly. Stepping from the well, he carried the grate overhead as the other two climbed swiftly free, then set it carefully back in place.
They stood in a cellar that was one in a series of interconnected rooms, all in a line that ran away to either side as far as the eye could see. Stores were stacked everywhere, crates of weapons, tools, clothes, and sundry goods, all carefully labeled and piled back against the thick stone walls on wooden pallets. Barrels were housed in an adjoining chamber, and barely visible through the gloom the rusting frames of old beds formed a maze of metal bones. High on the walls, just below the cellar ceiling and just above the ground without, a row of narrow, barred windows let in thin streamers of dusk's fading light.
The Mole took them ahead through the maze of cellar rooms, past the stacks of stores, and around the tangle of crates to where a second set of stairs climbed to a heavy wooden door. They went up the stairs cautiously, and Par felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle with the possibility that unseen eyes watched their every move. He peered left and right, overhead and all about, but saw nothing.
At the door they stopped again while the Mole used a small metal implement to spring the lock. In seconds they were through, moving swiftly into the hallway beyond. They were inside the citadel's inner wall now, the second line of defense to the city and the location of the barracks that housed most of the Federation garrison. The corridor was straight and narrow, and riddled with doors and windows that might give them away to anyone. But no one appeared in the moments it took them to reach the entry the Mole sought, and they were through another door almost before Par had time to take a steadying breath.
Now they stood in a shadowed alcove that looked out across the courtyard that lay between the inner and outer walls of the city. Federation soldiers stood watch at gates and on ramparts, dim shapes in the growing dark. Lights flickered from the windows of the sleeping quarters and guardhouses and off the battlements and gates. Booted feet scraped in the stillness. Voices rose in low murmurs. Somewhere, a whetstone was sharpening metal. Par felt his stomach tighten. The sounds of activity were all about.