Терри Брукс - The Talismans of Shannara

The earth beneath was blackened and bare, stripped of life, burned away and scorched, empty and razed. The Shadowen had done that, but he did not understand yet the nature of their poison. Tonight, he thought, he might.

Southwatch loomed ahead, its black pinnacle towering over him, its knife-edged spire reaching for the sky. He could feel the life within it. He could feel its pulse. Southwatch was alive. There was magic in its walls, magic that had formed and now sustained and protected it. The magic was powerful, but reluctant. He could sense that. He could feel the strain of its effort to be free. Deep inside the black stone it crouched, an animal caged. Shadowen walked within and without, barely visible against the black, keeping watch. The magic fled from them.

A part of the mist, a part of the night, as silent as drifting ash, he came up to the walls. Oblivious, the Shadowen did not sense him passing close and moving on. He came to the gates of the keep and slid swiftly away. They were too well protected to venture through, even as a spirit. He waited for one of the dark things to enter through a crack in the stone skin and followed. He felt the weight of the tower close about him as he did so, a palpable thing. He hugged himself against the evil that raged through the air, a mix of terrible anger and hatred and despair. Where, he wondered in surprise, did it come from?

He hesitated in his choice of directions, and then impulsively followed the magic toward its source. Just for a moment, just to have a look. The magic emanated from below, from deep within the earth beneath the keep, all darkness and blind fury. He slipped along the corridors of the fortress, careful not to brush against the walls, against anything of substance, for even in his spirit form he might be sensed. The wards were powerful here, greater than had been those of Uhl Belk at Eldwist, greater even than those of the Druids in the Hall of Kings. The magic was powerful beyond belief, a great crushing force that could destroy anything.

Anything, he corrected, but the bonds that secured it and made it serve the Shadowen.

He followed a stairwell down, winding and twisting through the black, hearing for the first time the sound of something grinding and huffing, the sound of something at labor. It had the feel of a dragon chained. It had the taste and smell of sweat. It strained and lifted like a bellows at work within a forge—and yet it was nothing so simple as that. It was from here that the magic took its life, he sensed. It was from here that it was given birth.

Then he reached wards that even a spirit could not pass undetected, and he was forced to turn aside. He was close to what lay trapped within the cellars of Southwatch, close to the source of the magic, to the secret the Shadowen kept so carefully hidden. But he could go no closer, and so the secret would have to keep.

He turned back up the stairway, speeding quickly through the gloom, a brief glimmer of thought and nothing more. He passed more of the Shadowen wraiths as he went, and one or two slowed before going on, but none discovered him. He went now in search of Par, knowing the Valeman was a prisoner, anxious to discover where he was being kept and whether he was still himself. For there was reason to believe he might not be. There was reason to believe that he had been subverted and was lost.

Walker Boh’s heart was as stone as he considered the possibility. The signs were there that it was happening. It had begun with the changing of Par’s magic, the evolution of the wishsong into something more than what it had been when he had begun his journey to the Hadeshorn and Allanon. It had continued with the breaking down of his confidence in its use, the sense that somehow the magic was getting away from him. It would terminate here, in the Shadowen keep, if Par embraced their cause, if he accepted that he was one of them.

As he was, Walker Boh thought darkly.

And yet wasn’t.

Games within games. He knew some of their rules, but not yet all.

He ascended the stairwells of the keep in steady search of the Valeman, seeking down the dark corridors and into the darker rooms, swiftly and silently. He remembered how Par had convinced him to come to the Hadeshorn to speak with the shade of Allanon. He remembered how Par had believed. The magic is a gift. The dreams are real. Well, yes and no. It was so. And not. Like so many things, the truth lay somewhere in between.

Old memories triggered new, and he saw himself as Allanon leading Cogline down the corridors of Paranor when the Druid’s Keep was still locked in the mists between worlds, banished by the magic to the nether reaches. He felt Cogline’s mix of fear and determination, and in those emotions found mirrored anew the conflict within himself. Cogline had understood that conflict. He had tried to help Walker learn to balance the weight of it. Human and Druid—the parts that formed him would struggle with each other forever, the demands and needs of each at constant war. It would never change. It was the bargain he had struck with himself when he had agreed to accept the blood trust. The last of the old Druids or the first of the new—which was he? Both, he thought. And thought, too, that maybe this was the way it had been for Allanon and Bremen and Galaphile and all the others.

He rose high within the dark tower, and suddenly there was the barest whisper of a familiar presence. It emanated from down the corridor he faced at the head of the stairwell, a gossamer thread. He went toward it, cautious because there was a second presence as well, and this one familiar, too. He smelled Rimmer Dall as he would a swamp, vast and depthless. The leader of the Shadowen filled the air with his dark magic, the scent of it a toxic perfume. Just beneath its veil and barely recognizable, Par’s own magic crouched, suppressed and raging.

Walker coasted to the door behind which they faced each other, paused without where he would not be sensed, and bent to listen.

“It would help,” Rimmer Dall said softly, “if you were not so frightened of the word.”

Shadowen.

“What you are will not be changed by what you are called. Or even by what you call yourself. It is your fear of accepting the truth about yourself that threatens you.”

Shadowen.

Par Ohmsford heard the whisper in his mind, a repetition that would not cease, that haunted him now both on waking and in sleep. And Rimmer Dall was right—he could not escape his fear of it, his growing certainty that he was the very thing he had been fighting against from the beginning, the enemy that the shade of Allanon had sent the children of Shannara to destroy.

He rose from the edge of his bed and walked to the window to stare out into the night. The sky was clouded and the land was misted and still, a ragged shadowed playground for the phantoms of his mind. He was coming apart, he knew. He could feel it happening. His thoughts were scattered and incoherent, his reasoning cluttered with roadblocks, and his concentration fragmented to the point of uselessness. Each day it grew worse, the darkness that surrounded him filling him up like a bowl that now threatened to overflow. He could not seem to escape it. His nights were haunted by dreams of confrontations with himself as a Shadowen, and his days were ragged and weary and empty of hope. He was wracked with despair. He was slipping steadily into madness.

All the while Rimmer Dall continued to come to him, to speak with him, to offer his help. He knew how bad it was, he assured the Valeman. He understood the demands of the magic. Time and again he had warned Par that he must confront who and what he was and take the steps necessary to protect himself. If he failed to do so—and failed now to do so immediately—he would be lost.