The Talismans of Shannara Page 9

  Par gasped. A tingling sensation entered his fingers and spread into his hands and arms. He jerked backward in surprise—felt the Shadowen jerk as well. A flush of warmth surged through him, an odd pulse of heat that was centered in the palms of his hands.

  His eyes snapped down.

  The blade of the Sword of Shannara had begun to give off a faint blue glow.

  Par’s eyes widened. What was happening? Shades! Was it the magic? The magic of the Sword of—

  The talisman flared sharply, and the blue light turned to white fire that blazed as bright as the midday sun. In its terrifying glow, he saw the face of the Shadowen change, the slackness disappearing as the features tightened in shock. Par wrenched wildly at the blade, but the Shadowen hung on.

  From what seemed like a long way off, he heard Damson call his name once.

  Then the Sword’s light was surging through him, the white fire flaring like blood down the limbs of his body, cool but insistent as it took possession. It surrounded him and then drew him away, outward from himself into the blade and then into the body of the Shadowen. He fought to resist the abduction, but found himself powerless. He entered the dark-cloaked figure, feeling the other shudder at the intrusion. Par tried to cry out and could not. He tried to break free and failed. Down into the Shadowen he went, raging and despairing all at once. The Shadowen was all around him, was there before him, eyes and mouth wide with disbelief, features contorted into something …

  Someone …

  Coll! OK it was Coll!

  He might have whispered the words. He might have shrieked them aloud. He could not tell. There, in the dark center of his adversary’s soul, the lies fell away before the power of the Sword of Shannara and became the truth. This was no Shadowen he fought, no dark demon with his brother’s face, but his brother in fact. Coll, come back from the dead, come back to life, as real as the talisman they both clasped. Par saw the other shudder with some recognition of his own, realizing in the next instant that it was a recognition of what he had become. He saw his brother’s tears, heard his wail of despair, and saw him convulse as if stricken with poison. His brother’s mind shut down, too devastated by the revelation of what he had become to witness anything more. But Par saw the rest of it, all that his brother could not. He saw the truth of the cloak that wrapped Coll, a thing called the Mirrorshroud, Shadowen-made, stolen by his brother so that he could escape his imprisonment at Southwatch. He saw Rimmer Dall smile darkly, looming above them both from within a vortex of images. But most terrible of all, he saw the madness that engulfed his brother, that drove him in search of Par, in search of the perceived cause of his pain, determined to put an end to both …

  Then Coll thrashed uncontrollably and tore free, his hands releasing their grip on the Sword of Shannara. The images ceased instantly, the white fire dying. Par tumbled backward, his head striking the base of a tree with stunning force. Through a spinning dark haze he watched his brother, Shadowen-consumed, still wrapped within the hateful cloak, rise up like a netherworld specter. For an instant he crouched there, hands pressed against his hooded head as if to crush the images still locked within, shrieking against his madness. In the next he was gone, fled into the trees, crying as he went until the cries were just an echo in his horrified brother’s mind.

  * * *

  Damson was there then, helping Par to his feet, holding him up until she was sure he could stand alone. Her eyes were anxious and frightened, and he was conscious of the way she moved her body to shelter him. Soft streaks of morning light dappled their faces as they clung to each other. Together they stared out into the forest gloom, as if somehow they might catch a final glimpse of the creature who fled from them.

  “It was Coll.” Par breathed the words as if they were anathema. “Damson, it was Coll!”

  She stared at him in disbelief, not daring a reply.

  “And this!” He brought up the Sword of Shannara, still clasped in his scraped, raw hands. “This is the Sword.”

  “I know,” she whispered, more certain of this second declaration. “I saw.”

  He shook his head, still trying to comprehend. “I don’t know what happened. Something triggered the magic. I don’t know what. But something. It was there, buried inside the Sword.” He wheeled to face her. “I couldn’t bring it out alone, but when both of us held the blade, when we struggled …” His fingers tightened on her arms. “I saw him, Damson—as clearly as I see you. It was Coll.”

  Damson held herself rigid. “Par, Coll is dead.”

  “No.” The Valeman shook his head adamantly. “No, he is not dead. That was what I was supposed to think. But that wasn’t Coll I killed in the Pit. It was someone or something else. That”—he gestured toward the trees—“was Coll. The Sword showed me, Damson. It showed me the truth. Coll was imprisoned at Southwatch and escaped. But he’s been changed by that cloak he wears. There is some sort of malevolent magic in it, something that subverts you if you wear it. It’s Coll, but he’s turning into a Shadowen!”

  “Par, I saw his face, too. And it looked a little like Coll, but not enough that—”

  “You didn’t see everything,” he cut her short. “I did, because I was holding the Sword, and the Sword of Shannara reveals the truth! Remember the legends?” He was so excited he was shouting. “Damson, this is the Sword of Shannara! It is! And that was Coll!”

  “All right, all right.” She nodded quickly, trying to calm him. “It was Coll. But why was he chasing us? Why did he attack you? What was he trying to do?”

  Par’s lips tightened. “I don’t know. I didn’t have time to find out. And Coll doesn’t know what’s happening either. I could see what he was thinking for a moment—as if I was inside his mind. He realized what had been done to him, but he didn’t know what to do about it. That was why he ran, Damson. He was horrified at what he had become.”

  She stared at him. “Did he know who you were?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or how to help himself? Did he know enough to take off the cloak?”

  Par took a deep breath. “I don’t think so. I’m not even sure he can.” His face was stricken. “He looked so lost, Damson.”

  She put her arms around him then, and he held her as if she were a rock without which the sea of his uncertainty might wash him away. All about them darkness was fading as sunrise brightened the skies east. Birds were coming awake with cheerful calls, and a faint scattering of dampness sparkled on the grass.

  “I have to go after him,” Par said into her shoulder, feeling her stiffen at the words. “I have to try to help him.” He shook his head despairingly. “I know it means breaking my promise to go back for Padishar. But Coll’s my brother.”

  She moved so that she could see his face. Her eyes searched his and did not look away. “You’ve made up your mind about this, haven’t you?” She looked terrified. “This is probably a trap, you know.”

  His smile was bitter. “I know.”

  She blinked rapidly. “And I can’t come with you.”

  “I know that, too. You have to continue on to Firerim Reach and get help for your father. I understand.”

  There were tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “I don’t want to leave you either.”

  “Are you sure it was Coll? Absolutely sure?”

  “As sure as I am that I love you, Damson.”

  She brought her arms about him again. She didn’t speak, but buried her face in his shoulder. He could feel her crying. He could feel himself breaking apart inside. The euphoria of finding Paranor was gone, the discovery itself all but forgotten. The sense of peace and contentment he had experienced so briefly on getting free of Tyrsis was buried in his past.

  He pulled away again. “I’ll come back to you,” he said quietly. “Wherever you are, I’ll find you.”

  She bit at her lower lip, nodding. Then she fumbled through her clothing, reaching down the front of her tunic. A moment later she pulled forth a thi
n, flat metal disk with a hole in it through which a leather cord had been threaded and then tied about her neck. She looked at the disk a moment, then at him.

  “This is called a Skree,” she said. “It is a kind of magic, a street magic. It was given to me a long time ago.” There was fire in the look she gave him. “It can only be used once.”

  Then she took the disk in both hands and snapped it in two as easily as she might a brittle stick. She handed the loose half to him. “Take it and bind it about your neck. Wear it always. The halves will seek each other out. When the metal glows, it will tell us we are close. The brighter it becomes, the closer we will be.”

  She pressed the broken half of the disk into his hands. “That is how I will find you again, Par. And I will never stop looking.”

  He closed his fingers about the disk. He felt as if a pit had opened beneath him and was about to swallow him up. “I’m sorry, Damson,” he whispered. “I don’t want to do this. I would keep my promise if I could. But Coll’s alive, and I can’t—”

  “No.” She put her fingers against his lips to silence him. “Don’t say anything more. I understand. I love you.”

  He kissed her and held her against him, memorizing the touch and feel of her until he was certain the memory was burned into him. Then he released her, retrieved the scabbard for the Sword, picked up his blanket, rolled it up, and slung it over his shoulder.

  “I’ll come back to you,” he repeated. “I promise I will.”

  She nodded without speaking and would not look away, so he turned from her instead and hurried off into the trees.

  VIII

  It was nearing midafternoon of the day following the separation of Par and Damson when Morgan Leah at last came in sight of the borderland city of Varfleet. The summer was drifting toward autumn now, and the days were long and slow and filled with heat that arrived with the sun and lingered on until well after dark. The Highlander stood on a rise north of the city and looked down at the jumble of buildings and crooked streets and thought that nothing would ever be the same for him again.

  It had been more than two weeks since he had parted company with Walker Boh—the Dark Uncle gone in search of Paranor, the Black Elfstone his key to the gates of time and distance that locked away the castle of the Druids, and the Highlander come looking for Padishar Creel and the Ohmsford brothers.

  Two weeks. Morgan sighed. He should have reached Varfleet in two days, even afoot. But then nothing much seemed to work out the way he expected it these days.

  What had befallen him was ironic considering what he had survived during the weeks immediately preceding. On leaving Walker, he had followed the Dragon’s Teeth south along the western edge of the Rabb. He reached the lower branch of its namesake river by sunset of his second day out and made camp close-by, intent on crossing at sunrise and completing his journey the next day. The plains were sweltering and dusty, and there were pockets of the same sickness that marked the Four Lands everywhere, patches of blight where everything was poisoned. He thought that he had avoided these, that he had kept well clear in his passing. But when he woke at dawn on that third morning he was hot and feverish and so dizzy that he could barely walk. He drank some water and lay down again, hoping the sickness would pass. But by midday he was barely able to sit up. He forced himself to his feet, recognizing then how sick he was, knowing it was necessary that he find help immediately. His stomach was cramping so badly he could not straighten up, and his throat was on fire. He did not feel strong enough to cross the river, so instead he wandered upstream onto the plains. He was hallucinating when he came upon a farmhouse settled in a shady grove of elm. He staggered to the door, barely able to move or even speak, and collapsed when it opened.

  For seven days he slept, drifting in and out of consciousness just long enough to eat and drink the small portions of food and water he was offered by whoever it was who had taken him in. He did not see any faces, and the voices he heard were indistinct. He was delirious at times, thrashing and crying out, reliving the horrors of Eldwist and Uhl Belk, seeing over and over again the stricken face of Quickening as she lay dying, feeling again the anguish he had experienced as he stood helplessly by. Sometimes he saw Par and Coll Ohmsford as they called to him from a great distance, and always he found that try as he might he could not reach them. There were dark things in his dreams as well, faceless shadows that came at him unexpectedly and from behind, presences without names, unmistakable nevertheless for who and what they were. He ran from them, hid from them, tried desperately to fight back against them—but always they stayed just out of his reach, threatening in ways he could not identify but could only imagine.

  His fever broke at the end of the first week. When at last he was able to open his eyes and focus on the young couple who had cared for him, he saw in their faces an obvious relief and realized how close he had come to not waking at all. His sickness had left him drained of strength, and for several days after he had to be fed by hand. He managed to stay awake for short periods and to speak a little when he did. The young wife with the straw-blond hair and the pale blue eyes looked after him while her husband worked in the fields, and she smiled with concern when she told him that his dreams must have been bad ones. She gave him soup and bread with water and a small ration of ale. He accepted it gratefully and thanked her repeatedly for looking after him. Sometimes her husband would appear, standing next to her and looking down at him, bluff and red-faced from the sun, with kind eyes and a broad smile. He mentioned once that Morgan’s sword was safely put aside, that it had not been lost. Apparently that had been part of the nightmares as well.

  At the end of the two weeks Morgan was taking his meals with them at their dinner table, growing stronger daily, close to returning to normal. His memories lingered, however—the feeling of pain and nausea, the sense of helplessness, the fear that the sickness was the door to the darkness that would come at the end of his life. The memories stayed, for Morgan had come close to dying too often in the past few weeks to be able to put them aside easily. He was marked by what he had experienced and endured as surely as if scarred in battle, and even the farmer and his wife could see in his eyes and face what had been done to him. They never asked for an explanation, but they could see.

  He offered to pay them for their care and predictably they refused. When he said good-bye to them seventeen days later, he slipped half of what money remained to him into the pocket of the wife’s worn apron when she wasn’t looking. They watched after him as parents might a child until he was out of sight.

  And so not only was his arrival at Varfleet and his search for Padishar and Par and Coll considerably delayed, but he was left as well with a renewed sense of his own mortality. Morgan Leah had come down out of Eldwist and the Charnals still grappling with Quickening’s death, devastated by the loss he felt with her passing, in awe of her strength in carrying out her father’s wish that she give up her own life in order that the land should be restored. An elemental that had become more human than her father had anticipated, she remained for Morgan an enigma for which he did not believe he would ever find a resolution. Coupled with this realization was the undeniable pride and strength he had found in helping to defeat Uhl Belk and in regaining anew the magic of the Sword of Leah. When the Sword had been made whole again, somehow so had he. Quickening had given him that. In the loss of Quickening, Morgan realized, he had somehow found himself. The contradictions between what had been lost and gained had warred within him as he traveled south with Walker and Horner Dees, a conflict that would never be entirely settled, and it was not until the sickness had overtaken him that their raging was forced to give way to the more basic need of finding a way to stay alive.

  Now, staring down at the city, come back out of several nightmare worlds, out of the lives he had expended in those worlds, so distant that they might have been lived by someone else, Morgan reflected that he stood at the beginning of yet another life. He found himself wondering if those who had known him in
the old life would ever recognize now who he was.

  He entered Varfleet as just another traveler come down out of the north, a Southlander weathered and seasoned from troubles that were his own business, and he was pretty much ignored by the people of the city, who, after all, had troubles of their own to worry about. He passed through the poorer sections where families lived in makeshift shelters and children begged in the streets, conscious again of how little the ill-named Federation Protectorate had done to help anyone in Callahorn. He passed into the city proper, where the smells of cooking and sewage mingled unpleasantly, the merchants hawked their wares in strident voices from carts and shopfronts, and the tradesmen serviced the needs of those who could afford the price. Federation soldiers patrolled the streets, a threatening presence wherever they went, looking as uncomfortable as the people they were charged with policing. If you stripped away the weapons and uniforms, the Highlander thought darkly, it would be hard to tell who was who.

  He found a clothing shop and used most of his remaining money to buy pants, a tunic, a well-made forest cloak, and some new boots. His own clothing was frayed and soiled and worn beyond help, and he left it all behind in the shop when he departed, taking only his weapons. He asked for directions to the Whistledown, not certain even now what it was, and was told by the shopkeeper that it was a tavern that could be found at the center of the city on Wyvern Split.

  Making his way through the crowds and the midday heat, Morgan recalled anew the instructions that Padishar Creel had given him weeks ago. He was to go to the Whistledown and show the hawk ring to a woman named Matty Roh. She would know how to find Padishar. Morgan fingered the hawk ring where it was buried in his pocket, safely tucked away for the time he would need it. He mused on how often he had doubted that such a time would come. The rough outline of the hawk emblem pressed against his skin as he twisted it about, bringing back memories of the outlaw chief. He wondered if Padishar Creel had been forced to come back from the dead as often as he had these past few weeks. The possibility brought a bitter smile to his lips.