by Terry Brooks
If any of them were still alive to do the mapping, Morgan thought dismally. He wasn’t convinced any longer that they would be. What had happened with Teel had left him angry and doubting. He knew now how easy it was for the Shadowen—and therefore their Federation allies—to infiltrate those who stood against them. Anyone could be the enemy; there was no way to tell. Betrayal could come from any quarter and likely would. What were they to do to protect themselves when they could never be certain whom to trust?
It was bothering Padishar as well, Morgan knew—though the outlaw chief would be the last to admit it. Morgan had been watching him closely since their escape, and the big man was seeing ghosts at every turn.
But, then, so was he.
He felt a dark resignation chill him as if seeking to turn him to ice. It might be best for both of them to be alone for a while.
“Will it be safe for you to try going back to Tyrsis so soon?” he asked abruptly, wanting to make some sort of conversation, to hear the other’s voice, but unable to think of anything better to say.
Padishar shrugged. “As safe as it ever is for me. I’ll be disguised in any case.” He looked over, dipping his head briefly against a gust of wind and rain. “Don’t be worrying, Highlander. The Valemen will be all right. I’ll make certain of it.”
“It bothers me that I’m not going with you.” Morgan could not keep the bitterness from his voice. “I was the one who talked Par and Coll into coming here in the first place—or at least I had a lot to do with it. I abandoned them once already in Tyrsis, and here I am abandoning them again.” He shook his head wearily. “But I don’t know what else I can do. I have to do what Steff asked of me. I can’t just ignore . . .”
What he was going to say caught sharply in his throat as the memory of his dying friend flashed through his mind and the pain of his loss returned, sharp and poignant. He thought momentarily that there might be tears, but there weren’t. Perhaps he had cried them all out.
Padishar reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “Highlander, you must keep your promise. You owe him that. When it’s finished, come back. The Valemen and I will be waiting, and we’ll all begin again.”
Morgan nodded, still unable to speak. He tasted the rain on his lips and licked it away.
Padishar’s strong face bent close, blocking out everything else for just an instant. “We do what we must in this struggle, Morgan Leah. All of us. We are free-born as the rally cry says—Men, Dwarves, Trolls, all of us. There is no separate war to fight; it’s a war that we all share. So you go to Culhaven and help those who need it there, and I’ll go to Tyrsis and do the same. But we won’t forget about each other, will we?”
Morgan shook his head. “No, we won’t, Padishar.”
The big man stepped back. “Well, then. Take this.” He handed Morgan his ring with the hawk emblem. “When you need to find me again, show this to Matty Roh at the Whistledown in Varfleet. I’ll see to it that she knows the way to where I’ll be. Don’t worry. It served the purpose once; it will serve it twice. Now, be on your way. And good luck to you.”
He extended his hand and Morgan took it with a firm grasp.
“Luck to you as well, Padishar.”
Padishar Creel laughed. “Always, lad. Always.”
He walked back across the bluff to a grove of towering fir where the outlaws and Trolls waited. Everyone who could came to their feet. Words of parting were spoken, distant and faint through the rain. Chandos was hugging Padishar, others were clapping him on the back, a few from their stretchers lifted their hands for him to take.
Even after all that’s happened, he’s still the only leader they want, Morgan thought in admiration.
He watched the Trolls begin to move north into the rocks, the huge, lumbering figures quickly becoming indistinguishable from the landscape through which they passed.
Padishar was looking at him now. He lifted his arm and waved in farewell.
He turned east into the foothills. The rain lashed at him, and he kept his head bent low to protect his face. His eyes focused on the path before him. When he thought to look back again, to see those he had fought beside and traveled with one final time, they had disappeared.
It occurred to him then that he said nothing to Padishar about the magic that still lingered in the broken Sword of Leah, the magic that had saved both their lives. He had never told the other how he had defeated Teel, how it was that he had managed to overcome the Shadowen. There had been no time to talk of it. He supposed that there had been no real reason. It was something he didn’t yet fully understand. Why there was still magic in the blade, he didn’t know. Why he had been able to summon it, he wasn’t certain. He had thought it all used up before. Was it all used up now? Or was there enough left to save him one more time if the need should arise?
He found himself wondering how long it would be before he had to find out.
Moving cautiously down the mountainside, he faded away into the rain.
Par Ohmsford drifted.
He did not sleep, for in sleeping he would dream and his dreams haunted him. Nor did he wake, for in waking he would find the reality that he was so desperate to escape.
He simply drifted, half in and half out of any recognizable existence, tucked somewhere back in the gray in-between of what is and what isn’t, where his mind could not focus and his memories remained scattered, where he was warm and secure from the past and future both, curled up deep inside. There was a madness upon him, he knew. But the madness was welcome, and he let it claim him without a struggle. It made him disoriented and distorted his perceptions and his thoughts. It gave him shelter. It cloaked him in a shroud of nonbeing that kept everything walled away—and that was what he needed.
Yet even walls have chinks and cracks that let through the light, and so it was with his madness. He sensed things—whispers of life from the world he was trying so hard to hide from. He felt the blankets that wrapped him and the bed on which he lay. He saw candles burning softly through a liquid haze, pinpricks of yellow brightness like islands on a dark sea. Strange beasts looked down at him from cabinets, shelves, boxes, and dressers, and their faces were formed of cloth and fur with button eyes and sewn noses, with ears that drooped and tipped, and with studied, watchful poses that never changed. He listened as words were spoken, floating through the air as motes of dust on streamers from the sun.
“He’s very sick, lovely Damson,” he heard one voice say.
And the other replied, “He’s protecting himself, Mole.”
Damson and Mole. He knew who they were, although he couldn’t quite place them. He knew as well that they were talking about him. He didn’t mind. What they were saying didn’t make any difference.
Sometimes he saw their faces through the chinks and cracks.
The Mole was a creature with round, furry features and large, questioning eyes who stood above him, looking thoughtful. Sometimes he brought the strange beasts to sit close by. He looked very much the same as the beasts, Par thought. He called them by name. He spoke with them. But the beasts never answered back.
The girl fed him sometimes. Damson. She spooned soup into his mouth and made him drink, and he did so without argument. There was something perplexing about her, something that fascinated him, and he tried talking to her once or twice before giving up. Whatever it was he wished to say refused to show itself. The words ran away and hid. His thoughts faded. He watched her face fade with them.
She kept coming back, though. She sat beside him and held his hand. He could feel it from where he hid inside himself. She spoke softly, touched his face with her fingers, let him feel her presence even when she was doing nothing. It was her presence more than anything that kept him from drifting away altogether. He would have liked it better if she had let him go. He thought that it would happen that way eventually, that he would drift far enough that everything would disappear. But she prevented that, and, while it frustrated and even angered him at times, it also interested him. Why w
as she doing this? Was she anxious to keep him with her, or did she simply want to be taken along?
He began to listen more intently when she spoke. Her words seemed to grow clearer.
“It wasn’t your fault,” was what she told him most often. She told him that over and over, and for the longest time he didn’t know why.
“That creature was no longer Coll.” She told him that, too. “You had to destroy it.”
She said these things, and once in a while he thought he almost understood. But fierce, dark shadows cloaked his understanding, and he was quick to hide from them.
But one day she spoke the words and he understood immediately. The drifting stopped, the walls broke apart, and everything rushed in with the cold fury of a winter ice storm. He began screaming, and he could not seem to stop. The memories returned, sweeping aside everything he had so carefully constructed to keep them out, and his rage and anguish were boundless. He screamed, and the Mole shrank from him, the strange beasts tumbled from his bedside, he could see the candles flickering through the tears he cried, and the shadows danced with glee.
It was the girl who saved him. She fought past the rage and anguish, ignored the screams, and held him to her. She held him as if the drifting might begin anew, as if he were in danger of being swept away completely, and she refused to let go. When his screams finally stopped, he found that he was holding her back.
He slept then, a deep and dreamless sleep that submerged him completely and let him rest. The madness was gone when he awoke, the drifting ended, and the gray half-sleep washed away. He knew himself again; he knew his surroundings and the faces of Damson Rhee and the Mole as they passed beside him. They bathed him and gave him fresh clothes, fed him and let him sleep some more. They did not speak to him. Perhaps they understood that he could not yet respond.
When he woke this time, the memories from which he had hidden surfaced in the forefront of his mind like creatures seeking air. They were no longer so loathsome to look upon, though they made him sad and confused and left him feeling empty. He faced them one by one, and allowed them to speak. When they bad done so, he took their words and framed them in windows of light that revealed them clearly.
What they meant, he decided, was that the world had been turned upside down.
The Sword of Shannara lay on the bed beside him. He wasn’t sure if it had been there all along or if Damson had placed it there after he had come back to himself. What he did know was that it was useless. It was supposed to provide a means to destroy the Shadowen, and it had been totally ineffective against Rimmer Dall. He had risked everything to gain the Sword, and it appeared that the risk had been pointless. He still did not possess the talisman he had been promised.
Of lies and truth there were more than enough and no way to separate one from the other. Rimmer Dall was lying surely—he could sense that much. But he had also spoken the truth. Allanon had spoken the truth—but he had been lying as well. Neither of them was entirely what he pretended to be. Nothing was completely as either portrayed it. Even he might be something other than what he believed, his magic the two-edged sword about which his uncle Walker had always warned him.
But the harshest and most bitter of the memories he faced was of poor, dead Coll. His brother had been changed into a Shadowen while trying to protect him, made a creature of the Pit, and Par had killed him for it. He hadn’t meant to, certainly hadn’t wanted to, but the magic had come forth unbidden and destroyed him. Probably there hadn’t been anything he could have done to stop it, but such rationalization offered little in the way of solace or forgiveness. Coll’s death was his fault. His brother had come on this journey because of him. He had gone down into the Pit because of him. Everything he had done had been because of Par.
Because Coll loved him.
He thought suddenly of their meeting with the shade of Allanon where so much had been entrusted to all of the Ohmsfords but Coll. Had Allanon known then that Coll was going to die? Was that why no mention had been made of him, why no charge had been given to him?
The possibility enraged Par.
His brother’s face hovered in the air before him, changing, running through the gamut of moods he remembered so well. He could hear Coll’s voice, the nuances of its rough intensity, the mix of its tones. He replayed in his mind all the adventures they had shared while growing up, the times they had gone against their parents’ wishes, the places they had traveled to and seen, the people they had met and of whom they had talked. He retraced the events of the past few weeks, beginning with their flight from Varfleet. Much of it was tinged with his own sense of guilt, his need to assign himself blame. But most of it was free of everything but the wish to remember what his brother Coll had been like.
Coll, who was dead.
He lay for hours thinking of it, holding up the fact of it to the light of his understanding, in the silence of his thoughts, trying to find a way to make it real. It wasn’t real, though—not yet. It was too awful to be real, and the pain and despair were too intense to be given release. Some part of him refused to admit that Coll was gone. He knew it was so, and yet he could not banish entirely that small, hopelessly absurd denial. In the end, he gave up trying.
His world compressed. He ate and he rested. He spoke sparingly with Damson. He lay in the Mole’s dark underground lair amid the refuse of the upper world, himself a discard, only a little more alive than the toy animals that kept watch over him.
Yet all the while his mind was at work. Eventually he would grow strong again, he promised himself. When he did, someone would answer for what had been done to Coll.
XXXIV
The prisoner came awake, easing out of the drug-induced sleep that had kept him paralyzed almost from the moment he was taken. He lay on a sleeping mat in a darkened room. The ropes that had bound his hands and feet had been removed, and the cloths with which he had been gagged and blindfolded were gone. He was free to move about.
He sat up slowly, fighting to overcome a sudden rush of dizziness. His eyes adjusted to the dark, and he was able to make out the shape and dimensions of his jail. The room was large, more than twenty feet square. There was the mat, a wooden bench, a small table, and two chairs pushed into it. There was a window with metal shutters and a metal door. Both were closed.
He reached out experimentally and touched the wall. It was constructed of stone blocks and mortar. It would take a lot of digging to get through.
The dizziness passed finally, and he rose to his feet. There was a tray with bread and water on the table, and he sat down and ate the bread and drank the water. There was no reason not to; if they had wanted him dead, he would be so by now. He retained faint impressions of the journey that had brought him there—the sounds of the wagon in which he rode and the horses that pulled it, the low voices of the men, the rough grasp of the hands that held him when he was being fed and bedded, and the ache that he felt whenever he was awake long enough to feel anything.
He could still taste the bitterness of the drugs they had forced down his throat, the mix of crushed herbs and medicines that had burned through him and left him unconscious, drifting in a world of dreams that lacked any semblance to reality.
He finished his meal and came back to his feet. Where had they brought him, he wondered?
Taking his time, for he was still very weak, he made his way over to the shuttered window. The shutters did not fit tightly, and there were cracks in the fittings. Cautiously, he peered out.
He was a long way up. The summer sunlight brightened a countryside of forests and grassy knolls that stretched away to the edge of a huge lake that shimmered like liquid silver. Birds flew across the lake, soaring and diving, their calls ringing out in the stillness. High overhead, the faint traces of a vast, brightly colored rainbow canopied the lake from shoreline to shoreline.
The prisoner caught his breath in surprise. It was the Rainbow Lake.
He shifted his gaze hurriedly to the outer walls of his prison. He could just c
atch a glimpse of them as the window well opened up and dropped away.
They were formed of black granite.
This time his revelation stunned him. For a moment, he could not believe it. He was inside Southwatch.
Inside.
But who were his jailors—the Federation, the Shadowen, or someone else altogether? And why Southwatch? Why was he here? Why was he even still alive for that matter?
His frustration overcame him for a moment, and he lowered his head against the window ledge and closed his eyes. So many questions once again. It seemed that the questions would never end.
What had become of Par?
Coll Ohmsford straightened, and his eyes slipped open. He pressed his face back against the shutters, peered into the distant countryside, and wondered what fate his captors had planned for him.
That night Cogline dreamed. He lay in the shelter of the forest trees that ringed the barren heights on which ancient Paranor had once stood, tossing beneath the thin covering of his robes, beset by visions that chilled him more surely than any night wind. When he came awake, it was with a start. He was shaking with fear.
He had dreamed that the Shannara children were all dead.
For a moment he was convinced that it must be so. Then fear gave way to nervous irritation and that in turn to anger. He realized that what he had experienced was more probably a premonition of what might be than a vision of what was.