Терри Брукс - The Talismans of Shannara

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 Shadowen 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 dimly 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.

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.”