The Elf Queen of Shannara

  Speak to me, Allanon, he pleaded silently. Tell me what to do.

  But no answer came.

  The doors of empty rooms and the dark tunnels of other halls and corridors came and went. He felt again the ache of his missing arm and wished that he were whole again, if only for the moment of this confrontation. He gripped the Black Elfstone tightly in his good hand, feeling its smooth facets and sharp edges press reassuringly against his flesh. He could summon the power within, but he could not predict what it would do. Destroy you, the thought came unbidden. He breathed slowly, deeply, to calm himself. He tried to remember the passage on the Stone’s usage from the Druid History, but his memory suddenly failed him. He tried to remember what he had read in all the pages of all those books and could not. Everything was melting away within, lost in the rush of fear and doubt that surged through him, anxious and threatening. Don’t give way to it, he admonished himself. Remember who you are, what has been promised you, what you have told yourself will happen.

  The words were dead leaves caught in a strong wind.

  Ahead, a broad alcove opened into the stone of the walls, arched and shadowed so deeply that it was as black as night. There, a set of tall iron doors stood closed.

  The entry to the well of the Druid’s Keep.

  Walker Boh came up to the doors and stopped. All around him he could hear a whispering of voices, taunting, teasing in the manner of the Grimpond, telling him to go back, urging him to go on, a maddening whirl of conflicting exhortations. Memories stirred from somewhere within—but they were not his own. He could feel their movement along his spine, a reaching out of fingers that coiled and tightened. Before him, he could see a trace of wicked green light probe at the cracks and crevices of the door frame. Beyond, he could sense movement.

  In that instant, he almost bolted. Had he been able to do so, he would have thrown down the Black Elfstone and run for his life, the whole of his resolve and purpose abandoned. His fear was manifest; it was so palpable that it seemed he could reach out and touch it. It did not wear the face he had expected. His fear was not of the confrontation, of the vision’s promise, or even of dying. It was of something beyond that, something so intangible he was unable to define it and at the same time was certain it was there.

  But Allanon’s shade held him fast, just as in the vision, a contrivance of fate and time and manipulation of centuries gone combining to assure that Walker Boh fulfilled the purpose the Druids had set for him.

  He reached forward with his closed fist, seeing his hand as if it belonged to another person, watching as it pushed against the iron doors.

  Soundlessly they swung open.

  Walker stepped through, his body numb and his head light and filled with small, terror-filled cries of warning. Don’t, they whispered. Don’t.

  He stopped, breathless. He stood on a narrow stone landing within the well of the Keep. Stairs coiled upward along the wall of the tower like a spike-backed serpent. Weak gray light filtered through slits cut in the stone, piercing the shadows. There was nothing below where he stood but emptiness—a vast, yawning abyss out of which rose the hollow echo of the iron doors as they thudded closed behind him. He listened to his heart pound in his ears. He listened to the silence beyond.

  Then something stirred in the abyss. Breath released from a giant’s lungs, quick and angry. Greenish light flared, dimmed again, turned to mist, and began to swirl sluggishly.

  Walker Boh felt the vastness of the Keep settle down about him, a monstrous weight he could not escape. Tons of stone ringed him, and the blackness it sealed away was a death shroud. The mist rose, a dark and ancient magic, the Druid watchdog mused and come forth to investigate. It came for him in a sweeping, lifting motion, curling along the stone, eating away at the dark, a morass that would swallow him without a trace.

  Still he would have run but for the certainty that it was too late, that he had begun something that must be finished, that time and events had caught up with him at last, and now here, alone, he would have to resolve the puzzle of his Druid-shaped life. He made himself move forward to the landing’s edge, frail flesh a drop of water against the ocean of the power below. It hissed at him as if it saw, a whisper of recognition. It seemed to gather itself, a tightening of movement.

  Walker brought up the hand with the Black Elfstone.

  Wait.

  The voice rose out of the mist. Walker froze. The voice belonged to the Grimpond.

  Do you know me?

  The Grimpond? How could it be the Grimpond? Walker blinked rapidly. The mist had begun to take form at its center, a pillar of swirling green that bore upward into the light, that lifted through the shadows, steady, certain, until it was even with him, hanging in air and silence.

  Look.

  It became a human figure all cloaked and hooded and faceless. It grew arms and hands that stretched to embrace Walker.

  Fingers curled and flexed.

  Who am I?

  A face appeared, shadows and light shifting within the mist. Walker felt as if his soul had been torn away.

  The face he saw was his own.

  Within the dark seclusion of the vault that housed the Druid Histories, Cogline lurched to his feet. Something was happening. Something. He could feel it in the air, a vibration that stirred the shadows. The wrinkled face tightened in concentration; the aged eyes stared into space. The silence was unbroken, vast and changeless, time suspended, and yet . . .

  Across the room from him, Rumor’s head snapped up and the moor cat gave a deep, low, angry growl. He moved into a crouch, turning first this way, then that, as if seeking an enemy that had made itself invisible. He, too, sensed something. Cogline’s eyes flickered right and left. On the table before him, the pages of the open book began to tremble.

  It begins, the old man thought.

  He gathered his robes close in an unconscious motion, thinking of all that had brought him to this place and time, of all that had gone before. After so many years, what price? he wondered. But the price would be paid not by him, but by Walker Boh.

  I must do what I can, he decided.

  He focused deep within, one of those few skills he retained from his once-Druid past. He retreated down inside until he was free enough to leave. He could travel short distances so, see within small worlds. He sped through the castle corridors, still within his mind, seeing and hearing everything. He swept through the darkness, through the gray half-light, to the tower of the Keep.

  There he found Walker Boh face to face with immortality and death, frozen by indecision. He realized what was happening.

  His voice was surprisingly calm.

  Walker. Use the Stone.

  Walker Boh heard the old man’s voice, a whisper in his mind, and he felt his body respond. His arm straightened, and he tensed.

  The thing before him laughed. Do you still not know me?

  He did—and didn’t. It was many things at once, some of which he recognized, some of which he didn’t. The voice, though—there could be no mistake. It was the Grimpond’s, taunting, teasing, calling his name.

  You have found your third vision, haven’t you, Dark Uncle?

  Walker was appalled. How could this be happening? How could the Grimpond be both this thing he had come to subdue and the avatar imprisoned in Darklin Reach? How could it be in two places at once? It didn’t make sense! The Druids hadn’t created the Grimpond. Their magics were diverse and opposed. Yet the voice, the movement, and the feel of the thing . . .

  The shadow before him was growing larger, approaching.

  I am your death, Walker Boh. Are you prepared to embrace me?

  And abruptly the vision was back in Walker’s mind, as clear as the moment it had first appeared to him—the shade of Allanon behind him, holding him fast, the dark shadow before him, the promise of his death, and the castle of the Druids all about.

  Why don’t you flee? Flee from me!

  It was all he could do to keep from screaming. He groped away from it,
beseeching help from any quarter Cogline’s voice was gone, buried in black fear. Resolve and purpose were scattered in pieces about him. Walker Boh was disintegrating while still alive.

  Yet some small part of him did not give way, held fast by memory of what had brought him, by the promise he had made himself that he would not die willingly or in ignorance. Cogline’s face was still there, the eyes frantic, the lips moving, trying to speak. Walker reached down inside for the one thing that had sustained him over the years, for that core of anger that burned at the thought of what the Druids had done to him. He fanned it until it blazed. He cupped it to his face and let it sear him. He breathed it in until the fear was forced to give way, until there was only rage.

  Then an odd thing happened. The voice of the thing before him changed. The voice became his own, frantic, desperate.

  Flee, Walker Boh!

  The voice was no longer coming from the mist; it was coming from himself! He was calling his own name, urging himself to flee!

  What was happening?

  And suddenly he understood. He wasn’t listening to the thing before him; he was listening to himself. It was his own voice he had been hearing all along, a trick of his subconscious—a trick, he realized in fury, of the Grimpond. The wraith had implanted in Walker’s mind, along with that third vision, a suggestion of his death, a voice to convince him of it, and a certainty that it was the Grimpond itself who came forth in another form to deliver it. Revenge on the descendants of Brin Ohmsford—it was what the Grimpond had been after from the first. If Walker listened to that voice, faltered in his resolve, and turned away from the purpose that had brought him . . .

  No!

  His fingers opened and the Black Elfstone flared to life.

  The nonlight streaked forth, spreading like ink across the shadowed well of the Keep to embrace the mist. No more games! Walker’s shout was a euphoric, silent cry within his mind. The Grimpond—so insidious, so devious—had almost undone him. Never again. Never . . .

  Then everything began to happen at once.

  Nonlight and mist meshed and joined. Back through the tunnel of the magic’s dark flooded the mist, a greenish, pulsing fury. Walker bad only an instant to catch his breath, to question what had gone wrong, and to wonder if perhaps he had failed to outsmart the Grimpond after all—and then the Druid magic was on him. It exploded within, and he screamed in helpless dismay. The pain was indescribable, a fiery incandescence. It felt as if another being had entered him, carried within by the magic, drawn out of the concealment of the mist. A physical presence, it burrowed into bone and muscle and flesh and blood until it was all that Walker could bear. It expanded and raged until he thought he would be torn apart. Then the sense of it changed, igniting a different kind of pain. Memories flooded through him, vast and seemingly endless. With the memories came the feelings that accompanied them, emotions charged with horror and fear and doubt and regret and a dozen other sensations that rolled through Walker Boh in an unstoppable torrent. He staggered back, trying to resist, to fling them away. His hand fought to close over the Black Elfstone in an effort to shut this attack off, but his body would no longer obey him. He was gripped by the magics—those of both Elfstone and mist— and they held him fast.

  Like Allanon and the specter of death in the third version!

  Shades! Had the Grimpond been right after all?

  He was seeing other places and times, viewing the faces of men and women and children he did not know, witnessing events transpire and fade, and above all feeling a wrenching series of emotions emanate from the being inside. Walker’s sense of where he was disappeared. He was transported into the mind of his invader. A man? Yes, a man, he realized, a man who had lived countless lifetimes, centuries, far longer than any normal human, someone so different . . .

  The images abruptly changed. He saw a gathering of black robes, dark figures concealed behind castle walls, closeted in chambers where the light barely reached, hunched over ancient books of learning, writing, reading, studying, discussing . . .

  Druids!

  And then he realized the truth—a jarring, shocking recognition that cut through the madness with a razor’s edge.

  The being that the mist had carried within him was Allanon—his memories, his experiences, his feelings, and his thoughts, everything but the flesh and blood he had lost in death.

  How had Allanon managed this? Walker asked himself in disbelief, fighting to breathe against the rush of memories, against the suffocating blanket of the other’s thoughts. But he already knew the answer to that. A Druid’s magic allowed almost anything. The seeds had been planted three hundred years ago. Why, then? And that answer, too, came swiftly, a red flare of certainty. This was how the Druid lore was to be passed on to him. All that Allanon had known and felt was stored within the mist, his knowledge kept safe for three hundred years, waiting for his successor.

  But there was more, Walker sensed. This was how he was to be tested as well. This was how it was to be determined if he should become a Druid.

  His speculation ended as the images continued to rush through him, recognizable now for what they were, the whole of the Druid experience, all that Allanon had gleaned from his predecessors, from his studies, from the living of his own life. Like footprints in soft earth, they embedded in Walker’s mind, their touch fiery and harsh, each a coal laid against his skin. The words and impressions and feelings descended in an avalanche. It was too much, too fast. I don’t want this! he screamed in terror, but still the feeding continued, relentless, purposeful—Allanon’s self transferring into Walker. He fought back against it, groping through the maze of images for something solid. But the black light of the Elfstone was a funnel that refused to be stoppered, drawing in the greenish mist, absorbing it, and channeling it into his body. Voices spoke words, faces turned to look, scenes changed, and time rushed away—a composite of all the years Allanon had been alive, struggling to protect the Races, to assure that the Druid lore wasn’t lost, that the hopes and aspirations the First Council had envisioned centuries ago were carried forth and preserved. Walker Boh became privy to it all, learned what it had meant to Allanon and those whose lives he had touched, and experienced for himself the impact of life through almost ten centuries.

  Then abruptly the images ceased, the voices, the faces, the scenes out of time—everything that had assailed him. They vanished in a rush, and he was standing alone again within the Keep, a solitary figure slumped against the stone-block wall.

  Still alive.

  He lifted away unsteadily, looking down at himself, making certain he was whole. Within, there was a rawness, like skin reddened from too much sun, the implant of all that Druid knowledge, of all that Allanon had intended to bequeath. His spirit felt leavened and his mind filled. Yet his command over the knowledge was disjointed, as if it could not be brought to bear, not called upon. Something was wrong. Walker could not seem to focus.

  Before him, the Black Elfstone pulsed, the nonlight a bridge that arced into the shadows, still joined with what remained of the mist—a roiling, churning mass of wicked green light that hissed and sparked and gathered itself like a cat about to spring.

  Walker straightened, weak and unsteady, frightened anew, sensing that something more was about to happen and that the worst was still to come. His mind raced. What could he do to prepare himself? There wasn’t time enough left.

  The mist launched itself into the nonlight. It came at Walker and enveloped him in the blink of an eye. He could see its anger, hear its rage, and feel its fury. It exploded through the new skin of his knowledge, a geyser of pain. Walker shrieked and doubled over. His body convulsed, changing within the covering of his robes. He could feel the wrenching of his bones. He closed his eyes and went rigid. The mist was within, curling, settling, feeding.

  He experienced a rush of horror.

  All of his life, Walker Boh had struggled to escape what the Druids had foreordained for him, resolved to chart his own course. In the e
nd, he had failed. Thus he had gone in search of the Black Elfstone and then Paranor with the knowledge that if he should find them it would require that he become the next Druid, accepting his destiny yet promising himself that he would be his own person whatever was ordained. Now, in an instant’s time, as he was wracked by the fury of what had hidden within the mist, all that remained of his hopes for some small measure of self-determination was stripped away, and Walker Boh was left instead with the darkest part of Allanon’s soul. It was the Druid’s cruelest self, a composite of all those times he had been forced by reason and circumstance to do what he abhorred, all those situations when he had been required to expend lives and faith and hope and trust, and all those years of hardening and tempering of spirit and heart until both were as carefully forged and as indestructible as the hardest metal. It was a rendering of the limits of Allanon’s being, the limits to which he had been forced to journey. It revealed the weight of responsibility that came with power. It delineated the understanding that experience bestowed. It was harsh and ragged and terrible, an accumulation of ten normal lifetimes, and it inundated Walker like floodwaters over the wall of a dam.

  Down into blackness the Dark Uncle spiraled, hearing himself cry out, hearing as well the Grimpond’s laughter—imagined or real, he could not tell. His thoughts scattered before the flaying of his spirit, of his hopes, and of his beliefs. There was nothing he could do; the force of the magic was too powerful. He gave way before it, a monstrous strength. He waited to die.