Walker staggered to his feet, fighting through his exhaustion and pain, reaching down inside for the last of his strength.
Cogline's stick-thin frame was bending like deadwood in a high wind, crumpling beneath the Shadowen onslaught. Then suddenly he cried out, his hand snatched a handful of the black powder he carried from his robe, and he threw it at the Horseman with a curse.
At the same instant, the scythe swept down.
The powder exploded through Death in a flash of fire and sound, catching Cogline as well, sending both flying. Walker flinched away from the blast and the sudden glare and the glimpse of tattered bodies. Then he was stumbling forward, summoning the magic as he went, building the Druid fire in his fist. He saw Death rise from the dust, black-cloaked form singed and smoking, bits of flame spurting from the ends of its sleeve. The scythe lay shattered on the ground beside it, and its red eyes flared as it reached for what remained.
Walker sent the fire lancing into the Shadowen, down through the faceless hood, down into what lived inside. Death lurched back, stricken. Walker kept coming, the fire hammering with relentless purpose, burning and burning more. Death reeled away, trying to flee. But there was no escape. Walker caught up to it, jammed his fist into the twisting cowl, and sent everything he had left down inside.
Death shuddered once and exploded in flames.
Walker fell back, yanking his arm clear and twisting away from the light and the heat. His allies, light and heat, he thought dazedly—what he knew the Shadowen could not survive. He looked back once. Death burned in tatters on the dusty ground, lifeless and still.
Walker Boh went back then to where Cogline lay sprawled on the earth in a crumpled heap. Gently he turned the old man over, kneeling to straighten out his arms and legs and to place the blackened, singed head in his lap. Cogline's hair and beard were mostly burned away. There was blood leaking from his mouth and nostrils. He had been too close to the fire to escape what it would do. Walker felt a tightening in his chest. The old man had known that, of course. He had known it and used the powder anyway.
Cogline's eyes opened, startlingly white against the blackened skin. “Walker?” he breathed.
Walker nodded. “I'm here. It's over, old man. They are finished—all of them.”
A rattle of breath ended in a gasping for air. “I knew you would need me.”
“You were right. I did.”
“No.” Cogline's hand reached up and gripped his arm possessively. “I knew, Walker.” He coughed up blood, and his voice strengthened. “I was told. By Allanon. At the Hadeshorn, when he warned me that my time was gone, that my life was ending. Remember, Walker? I told you only part of what I learned that day. The part about the Druid Histories. There was more that I kept secret from you. You would have need of me, I was told. I would be given a little time, here, in Paranor, to be with you. I would stay alive long enough to be of use once more.”
He coughed, doubling over with pain. “Do you understand?”
Walker nodded. He recalled how distant and withdrawn the old man had seemed within the Druid's Keep. Something had changed, he had thought, but consumed by his struggle to escape the Shadowen he had not taken time to discover what. Now it was clear. Cogline had known his life was almost over. Allanon had given him a reprieve from death, but not a pass. The magic of the Druid Histories had saved him at Hearthstone so that he could die at Paranor. It was a trade the old man had been willing to make.
Walker glanced down at the ruined body. Where the scythe had cut through him, there was frost woven in silver streaks through the fabric of his robes.
“You should have told me,” he insisted quietly. There were tears in his eyes. He did not know when they had come. Some part of him remembered being able to cry once, a long time ago. He did not understand why he was able to do so now, but did not think after this that he would ever do so again.
Cogline shook his head, a slow and painful movement. “No. A Druid doesn't tell what he doesn't have to.” He coughed again. “You know that.”
Walker Boh couldn't speak. He simply stared down at the old man.
Cogline blinked. “You told me that I always knew when to act and when not to.” He smiled. “You were right.”
He swallowed once more. Then his eyes fixed and he quit breathing. Walker kept staring down at him, kneeling in the dust and heat, listening to the silence as it stretched away unbroken, thinking in bitter consolation that Allanon had used the old man for the last time.
He closed Cogline's sightless eyes.
It remained to be seen if the Druid had used him well.
20
Walker Boh buried Cogline in the woods below Paranor, laying him to rest in a glade cooled by a stream that meandered through a series of shallow rapids, a glade sheltered by oaks and hickories whose leafy branches dappled a carpet of wildflowers and green grasses with shadowy patterns that would shift and change each day with the sun's passage west. It was a setting that reminded Walker of the hidden glens at Hearthstone where they had both loved to walk. He chose a place near the center of the glade where the spires of Paranor could be clearly seen. Cog-line, who to the end had thought of himself as a Druid gone astray, had come home for good.
When he was finished with the old man, Walker stayed in the clearing. He was battered and worn, but the wounds that were deepest were those he couldn't see, and it gave him a measure of comfort to stand amid the ancient trees and breathe the forest air. Birds sang, a wind rustled the leaves and grasses, the stream rippled, and the sounds were soothing and peaceful. He didn't want to go back into Paranor just yet. He didn't want to go up past the blackened, charred remains of the Four Horsemen and their serpent mounts. What he wanted was to wipe away everything that had happened in his life like chalk from a board and start over. There was a bitterness within him that he could not resolve, which gnawed and scratched at him with the persistence of a hungry animal and refused to be chased. The bitterness had many sources—he did not care to list them. Mostly, of course, he was bitter with himself. He was always bitter with himself these days, it seemed, a stranger come out of nowhere, a man whose identity he barely recognized, an all-too-willing pawn for the wants and needs of old men a thousand years gone.
He sat in the glade by the stream, staring back across the clearing and the patch of fresh-turned earth where Cogline lay, and forced himself to remember the old man. His bitterness needed a balm; perhaps memories of the old man would provide it. He took a moment to splash handfuls of the stream's cold water on his face, cleansing it of the dirt and ash and blood, then positioned himself in a patch of sun and let his thoughts drift.
Walker remembered Cogline as a teacher mostly, as the man who had come to him when his life had been jumbled and confused, when he had abandoned the Races to live in isolation at Hearthstone where he would not be stared at and whispered about, where he would not be known as the Dark Uncle. The magic had been a mystery to Walker then, the legacy of the wishsong come down through the years from Brin Ohmsford in a tan gle of threads he could not unravel. Cogline had shown him ways in which he could control the magic so that he no longer would feel helpless before it. Cogline had taught him how to focus his life so that he was master of the white heat that roiled within. He removed the fear and the confusion, and he gave back to Walker a sense of purpose and self-respect.
The old man had been his friend. He had cared about him, had looked after him in ways that on reflection Walker knew were the ways that a father looked after a son. He had instructed and guided and been present when he was needed. Even when Walker was grown, and there was that distance between them that comes when fathers and sons must regard themselves as equals without ever quite believing it, Cogline stayed close in whatever ways Walker would allow. They had fought and argued, mistrusted and accused, and challenged each other to do what was right and not what was easy. But they had never given up on or forsaken each other; they had never despaired of their friendship. It helped Walker now to know that wa
s so.
Sometimes it was easy to forget that the old man had lived other lives before this one, some of which Walker still barely knew about. Cogline had been young once. What had that been like? The old man had never said. He had studied with the Druids—with Allanon, with Bremen, with those who had gone before, perhaps, though he had never really said. How old was Cogline? How long had he been alive? Walker realized suddenly that he didn't know. Cogline had been an old man when Kimber Boh was a child and Brin Ohmsford came into Darklin Reach in search of the Ildatch. That was three hundred years ago. Walker knew about Cogline then; the old man had talked about that period of time, about the child he had raised, about the madness he had feigned and then embraced, about how he had led Brin and her companions to the Maelmord to put an end to the Mord Wraiths. Walker had heard those stories; yet it was such a small piece of the old man's life to know—one day of a year's time. What of all the rest? What parts of his life had Cogline failed to reveal—what parts that were now lost forever?
Walker shook his head and stared out across the trees at Paranor. Parts that the old man had not minded losing, he decided. Walker could not begrudge that Cogline had chosen to keep them secret. It was that way with everyone's life. All people kept parts of who and what they were and how they had lived to themselves, things that belonged only to them, things that no one else was meant to share. At death, those things were dark holes in the memories of those who lived on, but that was the way it must be.
He pictured the old man's whiskered face. He listened for the sound of his voice in the silence. Cogline had lived a long time. He had lived any number of lives. He had lived longer than he should have, spared at Hearthstone to come into Paranor and see it brought back again, and he had died in the way he chose, giving up his own life so that Walker could keep his. It would be wrong for Walker to regret that gift, because in regretting it he was necessarily diminishing its worth. Cogline had lived to see him transformed into the Druid the old man had never become. He had lived to see him through growing up to the dreams of Allanon and the fulfillment of Brin Ohmsford's trust. Whether it was for good or bad, Walker had gotten safely through because of Cogline.
He felt some of the bitterness beginning to fade. The bitterness was wrong. Regrets were wrong. They were chains that bound you tight and dragged you down. Nothing good could come of them. What was needed was balance and perspective if the future was to have meaning. Walker could remember and should. But memories were for shaping what would come, for taking the possibilities that lay ahead and turning them to the uses for which they were intended. He thought again of the Druids and their machinations, of the ways they had shaped the history of the Races. He had despised their efforts. Now he was one of them. Cogline had lived and died so that he could be so. The chance was his to do better what he had been so quick to criticize in those who had gone before. He must make the most of that chance. Cogline would expect him to do so.
The sun was slipping beneath the canopy of the forest west when he rose and stood a final time before the ground in which the old man lay. He was better reconciled to what had happened than before, more at peace with the hard fact of it. Cogline was gone. Walker remained. He would take strength and courage and resolve from the old man's example. He would carry his memory in his heart.
With the light turning crimson and gold and purple in the haze of summer heat, he made his way back through the darkening forests to Paranor.
That night he dreamed of Allanon.
It was the first time he had done so since Hearthstone. His sleep was deep and sound, and the dream did not wake him though he thought afterward it might have come close once or twice. He was exhausted from his struggle, and he had eaten little. He had bathed, changed, then drank a cup of ale as he sat within the study that Cogline had favored. Rumor lay curled up at his feet, the luminous eyes glancing toward him now and then as if to ask what had become of the old man. When he had grown so tired he could barely hold himself upright, he had gone to his sleeping chamber, crawled beneath the blankets, and let himself drift away.
The dream seemed to come instantly. It was night, and he walked alone upon the shiny black rock that littered the floor of the Valley of Shale. The sky was clear and filled with stars. A full moon shone white as fresh linen against the jagged ridge of the Dragon's Teeth. The air smelled clean and new as it had of old, and a wind brushed his face with a cooling touch. Walker was dressed in black, robe and cowl, belt and boots, a Druid passing in the wake of Druids gone before. He did not question who he was, come out of the darkness of the Black Elfstone, come through the fire of the transformation in the well of the Keep, come back into the world of men.
He was master of Paranor and servant to the Races. It was a strange, exhilarating feeling. The feeling seemed to belong.
Languid moments slipped past in the dream and then he neared the Hadeshorn, its waters black and still in the night. Like glass the lake shone in the moonlight, smooth and polished, reflecting the sky and the stars. The stone crunched beneath his feet as he walked, but beyond that single sound there was only silence. It was as if he were alone in the world, the last man to walk it, keeper of a solitary vigil over the emptiness that remained.
He reached the Hadeshorn and stopped, standing perfectly still at its edge. The wind died as he did so, and the silence pressed in about him. He reached up and pulled back the hood of his cloak; he did not know why. Head bared, he waited.
The wait lasted only a moment. Almost instantly the Hadeshorn began to churn, its waters boiling as if heated in a kettle. Then they began to swirl, a slow and steady clockwise sweep that extended from shoreline to shoreline. Walker recognized what was happening. He had seen it happen before. The Hadeshorn hissed, and spray lifted in geysers that towered above the surface and fell away in a tumble of diamonds. Wailing began, the sound of voices trapped in a faraway place, begging for release. The valley shuddered as if recognizing the cries, as if cringing away from them. Walker Boh held his ground.
Then Allanon appeared, rising out of the black waters to a chorus of cries, a cloaked and hooded gray ghost come out of the netherworld to speak with the man who had been chosen as his successor. He shimmered as he rose, translucent in the moonlight, the flesh and bone of his mortal body faded into dust long ago, a pale image of who he had been. He ascended from the depths until he stood upon the surface of the waters, there to settle into stillness facing out at Walker Boh.
“Allanon,” the Dark Uncle greeted in a voice he did not recognize as his own.
—You have done well, Walker Boh—
The voice was deep and sonorous, welling up from far inside some cavernous space within the shade.
Walker Boh shook his head. “Not so well. Only adequately. I have done what I must. I have given up who I was for who you would have me be. I was angry at first that it should be so, but I have put that anger behind me.”
The waters of the Hadeshorn roiled and hissed anew as the shade came forward, gliding on the surface without seeming to move. It stopped when it was within ten feet of Walker.
—Life is a time for making choices, Walker Boh. Death is a time for remembering how we chose. Sometimes the memories are not always pleasant—
Walker nodded. “I know that it must be so.”
—Are you sad for Cogline—
Walker nodded again. “But that, too, is behind me. The choices he made were good ones. Even this last.”
The shade's arm lifted, trailing a glitter of spray that fell away like silver dust.
—I could not save him. Even Druids do not have the power to stay death. I was told by Bremen when my time was near. Cogline was told by me. I gave him what help I could—a chance to come back into the Four Lands with Paranor restored—a chance to help you one last time in your battle with the Shadowen. It was all I could do—
Walker did not speak, staring at the apparition, staring right through him, looking far away at events come and gone, at Cogline's final stand. Death had cla
imed the old man, but it had claimed him on his terms.
—If I could, I would give you back all those you have lost, Walker Boh. But I cannot. I can give you nothing of what is gone and nothing of what will yet be lost. A Druid's life sees many passings—
In his dream the valley was darkened by a wash of mistiness that swept like rain through a forest or clouds across the sun. It was a slow, soft passage, and it carried with it a sense that lives had come into being and run their course, all in a matter of seconds. There were faces, all unknown; there were voices that called out in laughter and pain. Time stretched away, hours to days, days to years, and Walker was there, unchanged, through it all, constantly left behind, eternally alone.
—It will be like that for you. Remember—
But Walker did not need to remember. He had Allanon's memories for that. The transformation had given them to him. He had the memories of all the Druids who had gone before. He knew what his life would be like. He understood what he was facing.
—Remember—
The shade's whisper brought time to a halt again, the Valley of Shale back into focus, and the flow of Walker's thoughts to bear on the dream's intent once more.
“Why am I here, Allanon?” he asked.
—You are complete now, Walker Boh. You have become what you were intended to be, and there is nothing more that remains to be done. You bear the Druid mantle; you will wear it in my stead. Carry it now from Paranor into the Four Lands. You are needed there—
“I know.”
Spray hissed and sang. Allanon's hooded face lowered.
—You do not know. You are transformed, Walker Boh, but that is only the beginning. You have become a Druid, yes—but becoming is not being. Yours is the responsibility of the Races, of their well-being, Dark Uncle. Those from whom you once sought to isolate yourself must now be your charge. They wait—
“To be free of the Shadowen.”