by Terry Brooks
“Because you knew. Even then. You knew he would be hunted.”
“His parents were killed under mysterious circumstances. Just before this happened, his mother brought the child to Collice and asked her to take him. She sensed the danger, I think. The women were close friends, and the boy’s mother knew my wife could be trusted. She asked Collice to keep him until she was certain the danger was past, then she would take him back. But if anything happened to the parents, we were to fake the boy’s death, then convey him to her brother’s home in the Borderlands and tell no one what we had done. We were to hide the truth from everyone so that her son might have a chance to live.”
“So you did as she asked? And the Warlock Lord and his Skull Bearers have not discovered the truth?”
“They have no reason to suspect the boy still lives. No one in the whole of the Westland knows the truth.”
“You are certain of this?”
“As certain as I can be. You will have to determine if I am right or not for yourself. The boy’s name is different now. He is called Shea Ohmsford. He was given his uncle’s surname. He resides in the village of Shady Vale in the forests south of the Border Cities.”
Derrivanian gave a weak smile and a shrug. “I have done what I promised myself I would do if you returned. It is the only thing I can offer as recompense for my behavior. I hope you can understand.” Then he gestured toward the door. “You should go now. Find the boy. Save him.”
Allanon rose. “You should take your own advice, then. Leave here immediately. Take your wife to Arborlon and ask the King for protection.”
The old man shook his head. “I sent her away to stay with friends the moment the Skull Bearer left to follow you. I asked them to hide her until they heard from me. I don’t know where she is.”
“Then join her. Do so before the Skull Bearer comes for you.”
The other man smiled, but there was no warmth. “No, it’s too late for that. It was always too late.” He took the glass of ale he had brought for himself and drained it. His eyes fixed on Allanon. “Do you really think we would be safe from the Warlock Lord and his Skull Bearers in Arborlon? Do you think we would be safe anywhere?”
“Eventine Elessedil is not his father. He harbors no bitterness toward you. He is dedicated and compassionate. He will do his best to protect you.”
“I am the only one who can do what is necessary to protect Collice, and I have done it.” He gestured toward the glass. “You see this? A permanent sleeping potion. The kind you hear about all the time. I am putting myself beyond the Warlock Lord’s reach. I know myself. I am weak, and if pressure were brought to bear, I would give up everything I know. But if I can’t talk, I can’t tell.”
Allanon stared. “You took poison?”
“I have betrayed you once. I would do so again. I would betray everyone. But I could not bear to let such a thing happen.” He shrugged. “I have lived my life doing the best I could. I would like to think I died in the same way.” He was already slurring his words. “Maybe, if you have the time, you could tell Collice …”
Then his eyes fixed, his head fell back, and he was gone.
Allanon rose, lifted him out of the chair, and laid him on the mattress in the corner. He placed a blanket over the body. It was the best he could do in the time he had. He couldn’t stay longer. He would tell someone about Derrivanian on the way through town.
He stood for a moment, looking down at the body. The old man had ended things on his own terms. He was probably right about his wife. Once he was dead, the Skull Bearers would not bother hunting her. There was no longer a reason.
He went outside into the twilight, wondering if Eldra and Collice Derrivanian would have found sanctuary in Arborlon as he had advised, or if they were both better off now.
He was uncertain, but the choice had not been his to make.
Minutes later, he was riding east toward the Borderlands and the hamlet of Shady Vale.
For those who want to find out what happened when the Druid Allanon went looking for Shea Ohmsford, be sure not to miss the epic adventure that started it all: THE SWORD OF SHANNARA—(also available as a special 35th anniversary annotated edition).
Paladins of Shannara: The Weapons Master’s Choice is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Del Rey eBook Original
Copyright © 2013 by Terry Brooks
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY and the Del Rey colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53681-5
www.delreybooks.com
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Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Paladins of Shannara: The Weapon Master’s Choice
Title Page
Copyright
First Page
He heard the woman coming long before he saw her. She was making no attempt to hide her approach, which suggested she intended him no harm, and this allowed him to sit back to wait on her. It was early evening, the sun gone below the horizon, the darkness settled in, and the purple-hued twilight filled with the sounds of insects and night birds. He was camped several miles outside of Tombara, an Eastland Dwarf village at the western edge of the Wolfsktaag Mountains below the Rabb River. He was there because he was looking for a small measure of peace and quiet and believed this was a place he could find it.
Wrong again.
Of course, she could have simply wandered in from the wilderness, following the smells of his dinner on the evening breeze. She could have appeared solely by chance and with no premeditation. The chances of that, by his reckoning, were only about a thousand to one.
Still, stranger things had happened, and he had borne witness to many of them.
He shifted slightly on the fallen log he was occupying, taking a moment to glance down at the skillet where his dinner was sizzling. Fresh cutthroat, caught by his own hand that very day. Fishing was a skill others would assume he had no time for, but a lot of the assumptions people made about him were wrong. He didn’t mind this. If anything, he encouraged it. Wrong assumptions were helpful in his line of work.
He rose as he heard her near the edge of his campsite. His black clothing hung loose and easy on his slender frame, and his gray eyes were a match for his prematurely silver-hued hair and the narrow beard to which he had taken a fancy of late. He was young—less than thirty—and the smoothness of his face betrayed this. He stared at the shadowed space through which he judged the woman must pass if she kept to her current trajectory, and then he heard her stop where she was.
He said nothing. He gave her time.
“Are you Garet Jax?” she asked him from the darkness.
“And if I am?” he called back.
“Then I would speak with you.”
No hesitation, no equivocating. She had come looking for him, and she had a reason for doing so.
“Come sit with me then. You can share my dinner. Are you hungry?”
She stepped from the trees into the firelight, and while she was in many ways a woman of ordinary appearance, there was something striking about her. He saw it at once, and it gave him pause. Perhaps it was nothing more than the unusual auburn color of her short-cropped hair. Perhaps it was the way she carried herself, as if she was entirely comfortable in her own skin and unconcerned with what others thought. Perhaps it was something else—a resolve and acceptance reflected in her strange green eyes, a suggestion of having to come to terms with something that was hidden from him.
She was carrying nothing. No pack, no supplies, no weapons. It made him wonder if she was alone. No one traveled this country without at least a long knife and a blanket.
She crossed the clearing, her eyes locked on his. She wore a long travel cloak pulled tight about her sho
ulders and fastened at the neck. Perhaps she kept her weapons concealed beneath.
“I am alone, if you are wondering,” she said without being asked. “They told me at the Blue Hen Tavern in Tombara that you were here.”
“No one knows where I am,” he said.
“They didn’t say you were in this exact spot. But they knew you were somewhere nearby. I found you on my own. I have a gift for finding lost things.”
“I’m not lost,” he said.
“Aren’t you?” she replied.
He gave no response, but wondered at the meaning behind her words. She moved over to the log he had been occupying earlier and sat down—although not too close to where he stood. He waited a moment and then joined her, respecting the distance she had chosen to keep.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Lyriana.” She glanced down at the long leather case propped up against a smaller log off to one side. “Are those your weapons?”
“Yes.” He studied her. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
“I know what they call you. The Weapons Master. But you seem awfully young to be a master of anything.”
“How do you know of me?”
She shrugged. “Stories told here and there. Word travels, even to places as remote as where I have come from. Most of the stories are good ones. People like to tell stories of disappointment and betrayal, of men and women who have suffered heartbreak and loss. But they don’t tell those stories about you. And they say you are a man who makes a bargain and keeps it.”
“My word is an important part of what I have to sell.”
“It’s said you don’t fear long odds. That you once confronted as many as a dozen armed men and killed them all in the blink of an eye with nothing but your hands.”
“Two blinks of an eye and a knife. Why have you come to find me? What need do you have of a man like me?”
She thought about it a moment, and then she smiled. “Can we eat first? Your trout is in danger of being overcooked.”
He poured ale from a skin into tin cups, and they sat together in silence while they ate their meal. All around them, the night sounds quickened as the darkness deepened and the quarter moon and stars came out. From out of a cloudless sky, clean white moonlight flooded the woods.
When they were finished, he scraped the plates and rubbed them clean with grasses before beginning on the skillet.
“You take good care of your equipment,” she observed.
He smiled. “What do you wish of me, Lyriana?”
She smiled back, but the smile was quick and small. “Help. I want you to come with me to Tajarin, my home city. I want you to put an end to what’s happening there. My people are being decimated. A warlock of enormous power is preying upon them. His name is Kronswiff. Do you know the name?”
He shook his head. “Nor do I know of Tajarin, and I thought there was no city in all of the Four Lands of which I had not heard. How did I miss this one?”
“It lies far outside the usual routes of travel, north and east on the shores of the Tiderace. It is very old. Once it was a seaport, hundreds of years ago. But those days are gone. Now it is home to my people and no longer known to the larger world. But what matters is that those who live there cannot protect themselves against what it is being done to them. They stay because they have nowhere else to go. They need someone like you to help them.”
“The Tiderace is a long way from here. I am awaiting word of a commission from Tyrsis. Agreeing to come with you would disrupt those plans.”
“Are you refusing me?”
“I haven’t heard enough yet to decide.”
Her lips tightened. “I need someone who will not turn on my people once the warlock is defeated. They are vulnerable, and I want to be sure they will be left alone afterward. There are few whose reputations suggest they could be counted on to do the right thing.”
She paused. “I am running out of time. I was sent because I was the strongest and most capable. Kronswiff bleeds my people as cattle are milked; many are already gone. If we do not hurry back, they will all be lost.”
“He is only one man. Are there not enough of you to stand against him?”
“He is not simply one man; he is a warlock. And he has men who follow him and do his bidding. They have taken over the city, and those of us he has not imprisoned are in hiding. No one dares to challenge him. A handful did so early on and were quickly dispatched.”
She paused. “This will not be an easy task. Not even for you. The warlock is powerful. His men are dangerous. But you are our best hope.”
“Perhaps a unit of the Border Legion might be a better choice. They undertake rescues of this sort when the need is clear.”
She shook her head. “Did you not hear what I said? We are speaking of a warlock. Ordinary men—even ones with courage and weapons and determination—will not be strong enough to stand against him. Will you come?”
“What am I to be paid for this?”
“Do you care?”
That stopped him. He stared at her. “Are you telling me you want me to do this for nothing? That there is to be no payment?”
She curled her lip. “I had judged you to be a better man than this. I had been told that money meant nothing to you. It was the challenge you cared about. Is this not so? Is money what matters? Because if it is, I will pledge you all the coin in the city, every last piece of gold and silver you can carry away.”
“All of your coin; all of your silver and gold? All of it?” He laughed. “What does that mean? That you haven’t got any gold or silver? Or have you so much you can afford to give it away?”
“It means that our lives are more precious than our riches. That our peace of mind and security are worth more than whatever must be paid to protect them. I’ll ask you once again. Will you come with me?”
Something about what she was telling him felt wrong, and his instincts warned him that she was keeping secrets. But they also told him that her need was genuine, and her plea for his assistance was heartfelt and desperate.
“How far is Tajarin?” he asked her.
“Perhaps seven or eight days,” she said.
“On horseback?”
“Horses can’t get to where we are going. So mostly we must go on foot. Does this matter?”
He shrugged.
“Will you come, then?”
He finished with the skillet, taking his time. “Let me sleep on it. Come back to me in the morning.”
She shook her head. “I have nowhere to go. I will sleep here with you.”
He studied her carefully. Then he rose, brought out his extra blanket, and handed it to her. “Find a place close to the fire. It gets cold at night.”
Wordlessly, she accepted his offering, walked over to the other side of the fire, spread the blanket, and rolled herself into it so that her back was to him.
He remained awake awhile longer, thinking through what she had told him, trying to come to a decision. It should have been easy. She was asking him to risk his life to save her people; he deserved complete honesty. If she was not telling him the entire truth, he should send her on her way.
But there was something about her that intrigued him, something that drew him—an undeniable attraction. He felt it in the mix of determination and vulnerability she projected. The contrast was compelling in a visceral way. He couldn’t quite explain it, although he felt a need to do so. He would have to think on it some more.
He lay down finally, having no reason to remain awake longer, and was almost asleep when he heard her say, “You should make up your mind as soon as possible.”
He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness. “Why is that?”
“Because I might have been followed.”
* * *
He didn’t sleep much after that, but when he sat up suddenly sometime after midnight, the moon had moved across the sky northwest of the clearing and the stars had shifted their positions. He hadn’t heard anythin
g, but he was the Weapons Master and his highly developed instincts warned him even in his sleep. He sat up slowly and looked around.
Lyriana was sitting on the log once more, still wrapped in her blanket. She met his gaze and pointed into the trees. He couldn’t imagine how she had heard what was out there before he did, but apparently she had, and he reassessed his view of her abilities immediately. She was definitely something more than she seemed.
He slipped from the blanket, rolled it into the shape of a sleeping man, and left it on the ground. Then he brought out a pair of throwing knives from beneath his loose garments. He made no sound doing so and none as he moved toward the trees, listening. For long seconds, he heard nothing. Then there came a slight rustle of clothing and the scrape of a boot against the earth.
He dropped into a crouch at the center of a deep pool of shadows. There were at least two of them. Possibly three.
He glanced over his shoulder at Lyriana, sitting on the log, and motioned for her to lie down. If she remained sitting up as she was, she presented an inviting target for a blade or an arrow. He waited for her to comply, but she just shook her head.
Then he realized what she was doing. She wasn’t simply being stubborn. She was offering herself as a target to distract their attackers.
He quit breathing and went perfectly still.
They came out of the trees, three of them, wrapped head-to-toe in black, faces covered, hands gloved, no skin showing. Two carried knives, the third a crossbow. Because they were looking for him to be sleeping by the fire with Lyriana, they didn’t see him in the shadows, even when they were right on top of him.
Then the one with the crossbow raised it to eye level and sent a bolt whizzing toward Lyriana.
He was fitting a second into place when Garet Jax killed him, piercing his heart with one of the throwing knives. The Weapons Master went straight at the other two. Agile and cat-quick, he killed the first before the man could defend himself and was on the second an instant later. Locked in combat, the pair rolled across the campsite and into the fire. Flames snatched at their clothing and began to burn, but neither relinquished his hold. In a silence punctuated only by gasps and grunts, each fought to break the other’s grip.