19

It was midday of the next day when Jair awoke again. He might not have come awake even then were it not for the hands that shook him none too gently from his slumber and the rough voice that whispered in his ear, “Wake up, boy! You’ve slept long enough! Come on, wake up!”

Grudgingly, he stirred within the blankets that covered him, rolled onto his back and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Gray sunlight filtered through a narrow window next to his head, causing him to squint against its brightness.

“Come on, the day’s almost gone! Been shut away the whole of it, thanks to you!”

Jail’s eyes shifted to find the speaker, a stoutly familiar figure positioned at the side of his bed. “Slanter?” he whispered in disbelief.

“Now who else would it be?” the other snapped.

Jail blinked. “Slanter?”

Abruptly the events of the previous night recalled themselves to his mind in a flood of images: the flight from the Gnomes in the mountains about Capaal; the separation of the company; the long drop into the Cillidellan with Garet Jax; and their subsequent rescue from its waters by the Dwarves. You’re all right now, the Weapons Master had whispered to him. He blinked again. But Slanter and the others...

“Slanter!” he exclaimed, now fully awake. Hastily, he pushed himself upright. “Slanter, you’re alive!”

“Of course I’m alive! What does it look like?”

“But how did...?” Jair left the question hanging and grasped the Gnome’s arm anxiously. “What about the others? What’s happened to them? Are they all right?”

“Slow down, will you?” The Gnome freed his arm irritably. “They’re all fine and they’re all here, so stop worrying. The Elf took a dart in the shoulder, but he’ll live. Only one who’s in danger at the moment is me. And that’s because I’m shut up in this room with you, dying of boredom! Now will you climb out of that bed so we can get out of here?”

Jair didn’t hear all of what the Gnome was saying. Everyone’s all right, he was repeating to himself. Everyone made it. No one was lost, even though it had seemed certain that some of them must be. He breathed deeply in relief. Something the King of the Silver River had said recalled itself suddenly to his mind. A touch of magic for each who journey with you, the old man had told him. Strength for the body, given to others. Perhaps that strength, that touch of the magic, had seen each of them safely through last night.

“Get up, get up, get up!” Slanter was practically hopping up and down with impatience. “What are you doing just sitting there?”

Jair swung his legs out of the bed and glanced about the room in which he found himself. It was a small; stone block chamber, sparsely furnished with bed, sitting table, and chairs, its walls bare save for a broad heraldic tapestry hung from the far supports of its sloped ceiling. A second window opened out at the other end of the wall against which Jair’s bed rested, and a single wooden door stood closed, opposite where he sat. In one corner, a small fireplace cradled an iron gate and a stack of burning logs.

He glanced at Slanter. “Where are we?”

Slanter looked at him as if he were a complete idiot. “Now where do you think we are? We’re inside the Dwarf fortress!”

Where else? Jair thought ruefully. Slowly he stood up, still testing his strength as he stretched and peered curiously our of the window in back of him. Through its narrow, barred slot he could see the murky gray expanse of the Cillidellan stretching away into a day thick with mist and low-hanging clouds. Far distant, through this shifting haze, he could discern the flicker of watchfires burning along the shores of the lake.

Gnome watchfires.

Then he noticed how quiet it was. He was within the fortress of Capaal, the Dwarf citadel that stood watch over the locks and dams that regulated the flow of the Silver River westward, the citadel that one day earlier had been under assault by Gnome armies. Where were those armies now? Why wasn’t Capaal under attack?

“Slanter, what’s happened to the siege?” he asked quickly. “Why is it so still?”

“How should I know?” the other snapped. “No one tells me anything!”

“Well, what’s happening out there? What have you seen?”

Slanter jerked upright. “Haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you? What’s the problem-ears not working or something? I’ve been right here in this room with you ever since they dragged you out of the lake! Shut away like a common thief! Saved that confounded Borderman’s skin out there and what do I get for my trouble? Shut in here with you!”

“Well, I...”

“A Gnome’s a Gnome, they think! Don’t trust any of us! So here I sit, mother hen to you while you slumber on like you don’t have a care in the world. Waited all day for you to decide to wake up! You’d be sleeping still, I suppose, if I hadn’t lost patience entirely!”

Jair drew back. “You could have woken me sooner...”

“How could I do that!” the other exploded. “How was I to know what was wrong with you? Could have been anything! Had to let you rest just to be sure! Couldn’t be taking chances, could I? That black devil Weapons Master would have had me flayed!”

Jair grinned in spite of himself. “Calm down, will you?”

The Gnome clenched his teeth. “I’ll calm down when you get yourself out of that bed and into your clothes! There’s a guard on the other side of that door keeping me shut up in here! But with you awake, maybe we can talk him into letting the two of us out! Then you can be amused on your own time! Now, dress!”

Shrugging, Jair slipped off the night clothes that had been provided him and began pulling on his Vale clothes. He was surprised, though pleased, to find Slanter so vocal again, even if his discourse was, for the moment at least, limited to a tirade against the Valeman. Slanter seemed more his normal self again, more that voluble fellow he had been that first night after making Jair his prisoner in the highlands-that fellow Jair had come to like. He wasn’t sure why the Gnome had chosen now to come out of his shell, but he was delighted to have the old Slanter back as company once more.

“Sorry you had to be locked in here with me,” he ventured after a moment.

“You ought to be,” the other grumbled. “They put me in here to look after you, you know. Must think I make a good nursemaid of something.”

Jair grinned. “I’d say they’re right.”

The expression that crossed the Gnome’s face then caused Jair to turn away quickly, his face a carefully frozen mask. Chuckling inwardly, he was in the process of reaching for his boots when he abruptly remembered the vision crystal and the Silver Dust. He had not seen either while dressing. He had not felt them in his pockets. The grin he had allowed to slip back over his face faded. He ran his hands over his clothing. Nothing! Frantically, he pawed through his bedding, his bedclothes, and everything in sight. The vision crystal and the Silver Dust were gone. Then he thought back to the night previous, to the long jump into the Cillidellan. Had he lost them in the lake?

“Looking for something?”

Jair stiffened. It was Slanter speaking, his voice laced with false concern. Jair turned. “Slanter, what have you done...?”

“Me?” the other interrupted quickly, feigned innocence in the crafty face. “Your devoted nursemaid?”

Jair was furious. “Where are they, Slanter? Where did you put them?”

Now it was the Gnome’s turn to grin. “Enjoyable as this is-and believe me, it is enjoyable-I have better things to do. So if it’s the pouch and the crystal you’re looking for, the Weapons Master has them. Took them off you last night when they brought you in here and stripped you. Wouldn’t trust them to my care, of course.”

He folded his arms across his chest contentedly. “Now let’s put an end to this. Or do you need help dressing, too?”

Jair flushed, finished dressing, then wordlessly walked over to the wooden door and knocked. When the door opened, he informed the Dwarf standing guard that they would like to go out. The Dwarf frowned, told them to stay put, glanced suspiciously at Slanter, and pulled the door firmly shut again.

Growing curiosity over the absence of any sort of battle without and impatience with things in general notwithstanding, they had to wait fully an hour before the door to the room opened a second time, and the guard at last beckoned them to follow. Leaving the room hastily, they turned down a windowless corridor that ran past dozens of doors similar to the one they had just passed through, climbed a series of stairs, and emerged on battlements overlooking the murky waters of the Cillidellan. Wind and a faint spray blew off the lake into their faces, the midday air chill and hard. Here, too, the day was still and expectant, cloaked in mist and banks of low-hanging clouds that stretched between the peaks that sheltered the locks and dams. Dwarf sentries patrolled the walls, eyes shifting watchfully through the haze. There was no sign of the Gnome armies, save for the distant flicker of the watchfires, reddish specks of light in the gray.

The Dwarf took them down off the battlements, turning into a broad courtyard that spanned the center of the high dam where it walled away the Cillidellan. North and south of where they walked, the towers and parapets of the Dwarf fortress rose up against the leaden sky, stretching away into mist. It was an eerie, ghostly look that the day lent to the citadel, shrouding it in halflight and haze so that it almost seemed as if it were something strayed from a dream that threatened to be gone in a moment’s time upon waking. Few Dwarves were in evidence here, the vast courtyard all but deserted. Stairwells burrowed down into the stone at regular intervals-black tunnels that Jair presumed must run to the inner workings of the locks below.

They had almost crossed the empty courtyard when a shout brought them up short, and Edain Elessedil came running to greet them. Grinning broadly, his injured arm and shoulder heavily wrapped, he went to Jair at once and extended his hand in greeting.

“Safe and sound after all, Jair Ohmsford!” He put his good arm about the other as they turned once more to follow their taciturn guide. “Feeling better, I hope?”

“Much better.” Jair smiled back. “How is your arm?”

“Just a small scratch. A little stiff and nothing more. But what a night! Lucky that any of us got through safely. And this one!”

He indicated Slanter, who trailed a step behind. “His escape was nothing short of miraculous! Did he tell you?”

Jair shook his head, and Edain Elessedil promptly informed him of all that had befallen Slanter and Helt during their harrowing walk through the Gnome encampment the previous night. Jair listened with growing astonishment, casting more than one glance back at the Gnome. Beneath a mask of studied indifference, Slanter was looking a bit embarrassed by all the attention.

“Simplest way out, that’s all,” Slanter announced gruffly when the effusive Elf had finished his tale. Jair was smart enough not to make anything more out of it.

Their guide took them up a stairway onto the battlement on the northern watch, then led them through a set of double-doors into an atrium filled with plants and trees, flourishing in an obviously transplanted bed of black earth beneath glass and open sky. Even here, within the high mountains, the Dwarves carried with them something of their home, Jair thought in admiration.

Beyond the gardens. lay a terrace occupied by tables and benches.

“Wait here,” the Dwarf ordered and left them.

When he had gone, Jair turned back to Edain. “Why is there no battle being fought this day, Elven Prince? What of the Gnome armies?”

Edain Elessedil shook his head. “No one seems certain what has happened. The locks and dams have been under siege for almost a week. Each day, the Gnomes attack both exposures of the fortress. But today, no attack has come. The Gnomes gather at their siege lines and watch us-nothing more. It appears as if they are waiting for something.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Slanter muttered.

“Nor do the Dwarves,” Edain said quietly. “Runners have been sent to Culhaven and scouts slip through the underground tunnels to the rear of the Gnome army to keep watch.” He hesitated, then glanced at Jair. “Garet Jax is out there, too.”

Jair started. “He is? Why? Where has he gone?”

“I don’t know,” the Elf shook his head slowly. “He said nothing to me. I don’t think he’s left us. I think he’s simply out looking around. He took Helt with him.”

“Scouting on his own, then.” Slanter frowned. “He would do that.”

“Who can say?” The Elf tried a quick smile. “The Weapons Master keeps his own counsel, Slanter.”

“Dark reasons and dark purposes drive that one,” the Gnome muttered, almost to himself.

They stood in silence then for a few moments, not looking at each other, lost in their private speculations of the actions of Garet Jax. Jair remembered Slanter telling him that it was the Weapons Master who had possession now of the vision crystal and the Silver Dust. That meant that if anything were to happen to Garet Jax, the magic of the King of the Silver River would be lost. And that meant that Jair’s only chance of helping Brin would be lost as well.

The sound of the door opening brought them about, and Foraker appeared from out of the fortress. He came quickly to where they stood and greeted each with a handshake.

“Rested, Ohmsford?” he asked gruffly, and Jair nodded. “Good. I’ve asked that dinner be brought to us here on the terrace, so why don’t we find a table and sit?”

He motioned to the table closest to them, and the other three joined him there. The trees and shrubs of the gardens darkened further the gray cast of the late afternoon, so candles were lighted against the gloom. Moments later, a meal of beef, cheese, bread, soup, and ale was brought, and they began to eat. Jair was surprised to discover how hungry he was.

When the meal was finished, Foraker pushed back from the table and began fishing through his pockets. “I have something for you.” He glanced briefly toward Jair. “Ah-ha, here we are.”

He held in his hand the bag of Silver Dust and the vision crystal on its silver chain. He pushed them across the table to the Valeman. “Garet said to give these to you. Said to keep them safe until you woke. He had a message for you, too. He said to tell you that you showed courage last night.”

Surprise flashed over the Valeman’s face, and he experienced a sudden, intense feeling of pride. He glanced self-consciously at Edain Elessedil and Slanter, then back to the Dwarf.

“Where is he now?” he stammered.

Foraker shrugged. “He’s gone with the Borderman to explore a passage that will take us out from the fortress behind the Gnome siege lines north. He wants to be certain it’s safe before we all go. And we go at nightfall tomorrow. Can’t wait any longer on the siege; it may go on for months. We’ve been shut away too long already for his taste.”

“Some of us have been more shut away than others,” Slanter grumbled pointedly.

Foraker faced him, brows knitting fiercely. “We have vouched for you, Gnome-all those who came with you from Culhaven. Radhomm, who commands this garrison, feels that our word is enough. But there are some within these walls who feel much differently-some who have lost friends and loved ones to the Gnomes who lay siege without. For them, our assurance may not be enough. You have been kept under guard not as a prisoner, but as a charge. Your safety is of some concern, believe it or not-particularly to Ohmsford here.”

“I can look after myself,” Slanter muttered darkly. “And I don’t need anyone’s concern-especially this boy’s!”

Foraker stiffened. “That ought to come as good news to him!” he snapped.

Slanter lapsed into silence. He withdraws into himself again, thought Jair; he shields himself from everything happening about him. It is only when he is alone with me that he seems to be willing to come out of that protective shell. It is only then that he seems to recover even a bit of the old Slanter he showed when we first met. The balance of the time he is an outsider, a self-proclaimed loner, unaccepting of his role as a member of our little company.

“Did our message get through?” Edain Elessedil was asking Foraker. “About the destruction of the bridge at the Wedge?”

“It did.” The Dwarf removed his dark gaze from Slanter. “Your plan was well conceived, Elven Prince. Had we known better the extent of this siege and the army that mounts it, we might have escaped in the bargain.”

“Are we in danger here, then?”

“No, the fortress is secure. Stores are plentiful enough to withstand a siege of months if need be. And no army can bring the whole of its strength to bear with the mountains so close. Any danger to us will be found outside these walls when we resume our journey north.”

At his elbow, Slanter muttered something unintelligible and drained the remainder of his ale. Foraker glanced at the Gnome and his bearded face tightened. “In the meantime, there is something that must be done-and you and I, Gnome, must do it.”

Slanter’s eyes lifted guardedly. “What is it we must do-Dwarf?”

Foraker’s face darkened further, but his voice stayed calm. “There is someone within these walls who claims to know well the castle of the Mord Wraiths-someone who claims to know it better than anyone. If true, that knowledge could be of great use to us.”

“If true, then you have no further use for me!” Slanter snapped. “What have I to do with this?”

“The knowledge is of use only if it is true,” Foraker continued carefully. “The only one who can tell us that is you.”

“Me?” The Gnome laughed mirthlessly. “You would trust me to tell you whether or not what you are being told is the truth? Why should you do that? Or do you think to test me? That seems more likely, I think. You would test what I tell you against what another says!”

“Slanter!” Jair admonished the Gnome, a flush of anger and disappointment stealing through him.

“You are the one who mistrusts,” Edain Elessedil added firmly.

Slanter started to respond, then thought better of it and went still.

It was Foraker who spoke then, low and pointed. “If I thought to test you, it would not be against this one.”

The table was silent. “Who is it?” Slanter asked finally.

The Dwarf s fierce brows knitted. “A Mwellret.”

Slanter went rigid. “A Mwellret?” he growled. “A lizard?”

He said it with such loathing that Jair Ohmsford and Edain Elessedil looked at each other in astonishment. Neither had ever seen a Mwellret. Neither had even heard of one until now, and both, having witnessed the Gnome’s reaction to the mention of one, wondered if perhaps they would have been better off remaining ignorant.

“One of Radhomm’s patrols found him washed up at the edge of the lake a day or two before the siege,” Foraker went on, his eyes holding Slanter’s. “More dead than alive when they pulled him out. Mumbled something about being driven from the Ravenshorn by the black walkers. Said that he knew ways in which they could be destroyed. The patrol brought him here. Didn’t have time to get him out before the siege.” He paused. “Until now, there had been no way to test the truth of what he has to say.”

“The truth!” Slanter spit. “There is no truth in the lizards!”

“Revenge against those he feels have wronged him may bring out the truth. We can offer him that revenge-a trade, perhaps. Think carefully. He must know the secrets of the Ravenshorn and Graymark. Those mountains were once his. The castle was his.”

“Nothing was ever his!” Slanter came out of his chair with a lunge, stiff with anger. “They took it all, the lizards did! Built their castle on the bones of my people! Made slaves of the Gnome tribes living in the mountains! Used the dark magic like the walkers! Black devils, I would as soon cut my own throat as give them an instant’s trust!”

Jair thought to intercede, rising as well. “Slanter, what...?”

“A moment, Ohmsford,” Foraker cut him short. The fierce countenance turned again to Slanter. “Gnome, I give the Mwellrets no more trust than you. But if this one can help, then let us take whatever help we find. Our task is difficult enough as it is. And if we find that the Mwellret lies...well, then we know what can be done with him.”

Slanter glared down at the table in front of him wordlessly for a moment, then slowly reseated himself. “It is a waste of time. Go without me. Use your own judgment, Foraker.”

The Dwarf shrugged. “I thought that this would be preferable to being left under lock and key. I thought you might have had enough of that.” He paused, watching the dark eyes of the Gnome snap up to find his own. “Besides, my judgment is useless in determining whether or not the Mwellret speaks the truth. You are the only one who can help us with that.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Slanter’s eyes remained locked on Foraker. “Where is the Mwellret now?” he asked finally.

“In a storage room that serves as his cell,” Foraker answered. “He never comes out, even to walk. Doesn’t like the air and the light.”

“Black devil!” the Gnome muttered in response. Then he sighed. “Very well. You and me.”

“These two as well, if they choose.” Foraker indicated Jair and Edain.

“I’m coming,” Jair announced at once.

“And I,” the Elven Prince agreed.

Foraker rose to his feet and nodded. “I’ll take you there now.”

20

They went from the terrace gardens down into the bowels of the locks and dams of Capaal. From the gray light of an afternoon rapidly fading into dusk, they descended stairwells and passageways that curled deep into stone and timber. Shadows gathered about small pools of hazy light given off by the flames of oil lamps dangling from iron brackets. The air trapped within the massive rock of the dam was stale and damp. Through the silence that pervaded the lower levels came the distant rush of waters flowing through the locks and the low grinding of great wheels and levers. Closed doors came and went as the four passed deeper, and there was the sense of a beast hidden somewhere within, stirring in response to the sounds of the locks and their machinery, caged and waiting to break free.

They came upon few Dwarves within these levels of the fortress. A forest people who had survived the Great Wars by tunneling within the earth, the Dwarves had long since emerged from their underground prison into the sunlight and in so doing had vowed never again to return. Their abhorrence of dark, closed places was well known among the people of the other races, and it was only with some difficulty that they managed to endure such closures. The locks and dams at Capaal were necessary to their existence, vital in the regulation of the waters of the Silver River as they flowed westward to their homeland, and so the sacrifice was made-but never for long and never more frequently than was required. Brief shifts to monitor the machinery that they had built to serve their purposes were followed by hasty exits back into the world of light and air above.

So it was that the few faces the four companions did come upon as they made their way downward bore a look of stoic endurance that barely masked an abiding distaste for this most unpleasant of duties.

Elb Foraker evidenced a trace of this, though he bore his discomfort well. His fierce, dark face was turned forward into the maze of corridors and stairwells, and his solid frame was erect and purposeful as he took his companions through lamplight and shadow toward the storage room yet further down. As they went, he told Jair and Edain Elessedil the story, of the Mwellrets.

They were a species of Troll, he explained in beginning his tale. The Trolls had survived the Great Wars above the earth, exposed to the terrible effects of the energies those wars had unleashed. Mutated from the men and women they had once been, they had altered in form, their skin and body organs adapting to the frightening conditions the Great Wars had created over almost the whole of the earth’s surface. Northland Trolls had survived within the mountains, grown huge and strong, their skin toughened until it had taken on the appearance of rough tree bark. But the Mwellrets were the descendants of men who had sought to survive within forests that the Great Wars had turned to swamp, the waters poisoned, the foliage diseased. Assuming the characteristics of creatures for whom swamp survival was most natural, the Mwellrets had taken on the look of reptiles. When Slanter called them lizards, he was describing them in truth as they now appeared-scaled over where skin had once been, arms and legs grown short and clawed, and bodies grown as flexible as snakes.

But there was a greater difference yet between the Mwellrets and the other species of Trolls that occupied the dark corners of the Four Lands. The Mwellrets’ climb back up the ladder of civilization had been more rapid, and it had been marked by a strange and frightening ability to shape-change. Survival had made fearful demands upon the Mwellrets, as upon all of the Trolls; in the process of learning the secrets of that survival, they had undergone a physical transformation that enabled them to alter body shape with the pliability of oiled clay. Not so advanced in their art as to be able to disguise their basic characteristics, they nevertheless could shorten or elongate all of the parts of their bodies and could mold themselves in ways that would allow them to adapt to the demands of any environment in which they found themselves. Little was known as to how the shape-changing was done. It was enough to know that it could be done and to know that the Mwellrets were the only creatures who had mastered it.

Few beyond the borders of the Eastland knew of the Mwellrets, for they were a reclusive and solitary people who seldom ventured beyond the shelter of the deep Anar. No Mwellrets had come forth in the time of the Councils at Paranor. No Mwellrets had fought in the Wars of the Races. Withdrawn into their dark homeland, within forest, swamp, and mountain wilderness, they had kept themselves apart.

Except where the Gnome people were concerned, that was. Sometime after the First Council at Paranor, a time more than a thousand years earlier, the Mwellrets had migrated up from swampland and broken forest into the wooded heights of the Ravenshorn. Leaving the dank and fetid mire of the lowlands to the creatures with whom they had shared those regions since the destruction of the old world, the Mwellrets had drifted into the higher forestlands inhabited by scattered tribes of Gnomes. A superstitious people, the Gnomes had been terrified of these creatures who could change shape and who seemed to command elements of the dark magic that had been brought to life with the advent of the Druids. In time, the Mwellrets began to take advantage of that fear and to assert their authority over the tribes living within the Ravenshorn. Mwellrets assumed the role of chieftains, and the Gnomes were reduced to slaves.

At first, there was resistance to these creatures-these lizards, as they were called-but after a time all resistance ceased. The Gnomes were not strong enough or organized enough to fight back, and a few terrifying examples of what would be done to those who failed to submit made a lasting impression on the others. Under the rule of the Mwellrets, the fortress at Graymark was constructed-a massive citadel from which the lizards governed the tribes inhabiting the immediate region. Years passed, and the whole of the Ravenshorn fell under the sway of the Mwellrets. Dwarves to the south and Gnome tribes to the north and west stayed out of those mountains, and the Mwellrets in turn showed no inclination to venture beyond their newly adopted home. With the coming of the Warlock Lord in the Second War of the Races, it was rumored that a bargain had been struck in which the lizards offered a number of their Gnome subjects to serve the Dark Lord-but there was never anyone who could prove it for a fact.

Then with the conclusion of the aborted Third War of the Races-the war in which Shea Ohmsford had gone in search of the mystic Sword of Shannara and the Warlock Lord had been destroyed-the Mwellrets had unexpectedly begun to die out. Age and sickness began to deplete their numbers and only a handful of young were born into the world. As their numbers declined, so did their sway over the Gnome tribes in the Ravenshorn. Bit by bit, their small empire crumbled away until at last it was limited to Graymark and the few tribes that still remained within that region of the world.

“And now it seems that these last few, too, have been driven back into the swamps that bred them,” Foraker concluded his tale. “Whatever their power, it was no match for that of the walkers. Like the Gnomes they ruled, they would become slaves as well, were they to remain within the mountains.”

“Better they had been wiped from the face of the earth!” Slanter interjected bitterly. “They deserve no less!”

“Do they in truth possess the power of the dark magic?” Jair asked.

Foraker shrugged. “I’ve never seen it. The magic is in the shape-changing, I think. Oh, there are stories of the ways in which they affect the elements-wind, air, earth, fire, and water. Maybe there is some truth to that simply because they have developed an understanding of how the elements react to certain things. But for the most part, it is just superstition.”

Slanter muttered something unintelligible and gave Jair a dark look that suggested he wasn’t in complete agreement with the Dwarf.

“You will be safe enough, Ohmsford.” Foraker smiled gravely. The dark brows lifted. “If he were foolish enough to use the magic within these walls, he would be dead quicker than you could blink!”

Ahead, the darkened corridor grew suddenly light, and the four approached an intersecting passageway and a line of doors stretching down to their right. A pair of sentries stood watch before the closest door. Hard eyes turned to oversee their approach. Foraker spoke a quick word in greeting and ordered that the door be opened. The sentries glanced at each other and shrugged.

“Take a light,” the first said, passing Foraker an oil lamp. “The lizard keeps it black as pitch in there all the time.”

Foraker lighted the lamp from the wick of one hanging beside the door, then glanced over at his companions. “Ready,” he told the sentries.

Latch bolts released and a crossbar lifted. With a mournful groan, the ironbound door swung open into total blackness. Foraker started forward wordlessly, the other three a step behind. As the faint circle of the oil lamp penetrated the gloom, the humped and shadowed forms of crates, packing cases, and sack stores came into view. The Dwarf and his companions stopped.

Behind them, the door swung closed with a bang.

Jair glanced about the darkened room apprehensively. A rank and fetid odor permeated the air, a smell that whispered of things dying and fouled. Shadows lay over everything, deep and silent about their little light.

“Stythys?” Foraker spoke the name quietly.

For a long moment, there was no answer. Then from the shadows to their left, from out of a corner of crates and stores, a stirring broke the silence.

“Who iss it?” something hissed.

“Foraker,” the Dwarf answered. “I’ve come to talk. Radhomm sent word to you that I would come.”

“Hss!” The voice rasped like chain being dragged over stone. “Sspeak what you would, Dwarf.”

Something moved within the shadows-something huge and cloaked like death itself. A shape appeared, vague and shadowy, rising up beside the stores. Jair felt a sudden, overwhelming repulsion for what was there. Keep very still, a voice within him warned. Say nothing!

“Little peopless,” the figure murmured coldly. “Dwarf and Elvess and Gnome. Musstn’t be frightened, little peopless. Sstep closser.”

“Step closer yourself,” Foraker snapped impatiently.

“Hss! Don’t like the light. Need darknesss!”

Foraker shrugged. “Then we’ll both stay where we are.”

“Sstay,” the other agreed.

Jair glanced quickly at Slanter. The Gnome’s rough face was twisted in a mask of hatred and disgust, and he was sweating. He looked as if he might bolt at any moment. Edain Elessedil must have seen the look, too, for all at once he moved around Jair and Foraker and placed himself almost protectively on the other side of the distraught Gnome.

“I’m fine!” Slanter muttered almost inaudibly, brushing with his hand at the darkness before him.

Then abruptly the Mwellret came forward to the edge of the light, a tall, cloaked form that seemed to materialize from out of the shadows. Essentially man-shaped, it walked upright on two powerful hind legs, crooked and muscled. Forearms reached out tentatively, and where there should have been skin and hair there was only a covering of toughened gray scales ending in crooked claws. Within its cowl, the Mwellret’s face turned toward them, reptilian snout lifting into the light, scaled and split wide to reveal rows of sharpened teeth and a serpent’s tongue. Nostrils flared at the snout’s blunt end; further up, almost lost within the cowl’s darkness, slitted green eyes glimmered.

“Sstythyss knowss what bringss you, little peopless,” the monster hissed slowly. “Knowss well.”

There was silence. “Graymark,” Foraker said finally.

“Wraithss,” the other whispered. “Sstythyss knowss. Walkerss that desstroy. Come from out of the pitss, from the black hole of the Maelmord. From death! Climbss to Heaven’ss Well to Poisson the waterss of the Ssilver River. Poisson the land. Desstroy it! Comess into Graymark, doess the evil. Comess to drive uss from our homess. Ensslave uss.”

“You saw it happen?” Foraker asked.

“Ssaw it all! Wraithss come from darknesss, drive uss forth and sseize what iss ourss. No match for ssuch power. Flee! Ssome of uss desstroyed!”

Slanter spit suddenly into the darkness, muttering as he shifted back a step and kicked at the stone flooring.

“Sstay!” the Mwellret hissed suddenly, an unmistakable tone of command in its voice. Slanter’s head snapped up. “Gnomess have no need to fear uss. Friendss have we been-not like the Wraithss. Wraithss desstroy all that iss life becausse they are not life. Thingss of death! The dark magic ruless. All the landss will fall to them.”

“But you have a way to destroy them!” Foraker pressed.

“Hss! Graymark belongss to uss! Wraithss tresspasss in our home! Think themsselvess ssafe with uss gone-but wrong. Wayss to get at them there! Wayss they do not know!”

“Passages!” Jair exclaimed suddenly, so intent on what the other was telling them that for an instant he forgot his vow.

At once the Mwellret’s head snapped up, as if an animal testing the air. Jair went cold, a sense of something tremendously evil settling over him as he stood there in the sudden silence.

The Mwellret’s serpent tongue snaked out. “Magicss, little friend? Magicss do you have?”

No one spoke. Jair was sweating violently. Foraker glanced about at him sharply, momentarily uncertain as to what had happened.

“In your voisse, little friend?” the Mwellret whispered. “Ssense it in your voisse, I do. Ssense it in you. Magicss like my own. Do it for me, yess? Sspeak!”

Something seemed to wrap itself about Jair, some invisible coil that squeezed the breath from him. Before he could help himself he began to sing. Quick and sharp, the wishsong slipped from between his clenched teeth and waves of color and shape rode the air between them, dancing through the darkness and lamplight like living things.

An instant later Jair was free again, the coils that had bound him gone. The wishsong died into silence. The Valeman gasped in shock and dropped weakly to his knees. Slanter was at his side at once, pulling him back toward the door, yelling wildly at the Mwellret, grappling with his free hand for Edain Elessedil’s long knife. Hurriedly, Foraker parted them, his own sword drawn free as he turned to face Stythys. The Mwellret had suddenly shrunk in size, withdrawing into the shadows of the cowled robes, stepping back again into darkness.

“What did you do to him?” Foraker snapped. The Mwellret shrank back further, slitted eyes gleaming in the black. Foraker wheeled abruptly. “That’s enough. We’re leaving.”

“Sstay!” the Mwellret wailed suddenly. “Sspeak with Sstythyss! Can tell you of the Wraithss!”

“Not interested anymore,” Foraker replied, banging his sword handle against the storage room door.

“”Hss! Musst talk with Sstythyss if you wissh the Wraithss desstroyed! Only I know how! Ssecretss mine!” the creature’s voice was hard and impossibly cold now, all pretense of friendliness gone. “Little friendss will come back-musst come back! Be ssorry if you leave!”

“We’re sorry we came!” Edain Elessedil threw back. “We don’t need your help!”

Jair was walking through the open doorway now, supported on one side by the Elven Prince and on the other by Slanter, who was muttering every step of the way. Shaking his head to clear it, the Valeman glanced back at the Mwellret, a cloaked and faceless shape squeezed deep within the shadows as Foraker took his small light from the room.

“Needss my help!” the creature said softly, scaled arm lifting. “Comess again, little friendss! Comess back!”

Then the Dwarf sentries were closing and barring the storage room door once more, latch bolts and crossbars snapping tightly into place. Jair took a deep breath and straightened himself, shrugging free of the supporting arms. Foraker stopped him, peering closely into his eyes, grunted, and turned back down the passageway that had brought them.

“Guess you’re all right,” he announced. “Let’s get back up into the air.”

“What happened, Jair!” Edain Elessedil wanted to know. “How did he make you do that?”

Jair shook his head. “I’m not sure.” Still shaken, he began walking after Foraker, the Elven Prince and the Gnome on either side. “I’m just not sure.”

“Black devils!” Slanter muttered heatedly, invoking his favorite epithet. “They can twist you.”

The Valeman nodded briefly and walked on. He wished he knew how that misting had been done.

21

Night swept down about Capaal, black, misted and still. Moon and stars lay screened away from the mountain heights, and only the oil lamps of the Dwarves and watchfires of the Gnomes gave light to the shadowed dark. Frost began to form on stone and scrub, moisture freezing white as the temperature fell lower. An unpleasant stillness lay over everything.

Atop the battlements of the Dwarf fortress, Jair and Elb Foraker looked down upon the locks and dams that spanned the gap between the mountains where the Silver River flowed.

“More than five hundred years old now,” the Dwarf was explaining, his voice low and rough against the night’s silence. “Built in the time of Raybur, when our people still had kings. Built when the Second War of the Races was ended.”

Jair stared wordlessly over the parapets into the darkness below, tracing the massive outline of the complex against the faint light of torches and lamps that lit its stone. There were three dams, broad bands curving back against the flow of the Silver River as it dropped downward to the gorge below. A series of locks regulated that flow, the machinery, seated within and concealed by the dams and the fortress that protected both. The fortress sat astride the high dam, sprawled end to end and guarding all passageways leading in. Behind the high dam, the Cillidellan stretched away into blackness, ringed by the red watchfires of the siege army, yet oddly opaque in the moonless shadows of this night. Between the high dam and its lower levels, the Silver River pooled in two small reservoirs on its passage downward from the heights. Sheer cliffs flanked both ends of the lower levels, and the only way down was across catwalks or through underground passageways that tunneled into the rock.

“Gnomes would love to have this,” Foraker grunted, his arm sweeping over the complex. “Controls nearly the whole of the water supply for the lands west to the Rainbow Lake. In the rainy seasons, without this, there would be flooding, as there used to be before the locks and dams were built to guard against it.” He shook his head. “In a bad spring, even Culhaven would be swept away.”

Jair looked about slowly, impressed with the size of the complex, awed by the effort that must have been expended in its construction. Foraker had already taken him on a tour through the inner workings of the locks and dams, explaining the machinery and the duties of those who tended it. Jair was grateful for the tour.

Slanter was absorbed in reworking Dwarf maps of the lands north to the Ravenshorn-maps, the Gnome had been quick to point out when they were shown him, which were entirely inaccurate. Anxious to avoid the necessity of a return to the storage room where the Mwellret was caged and determined to establish his own expertise, Slanter had agreed to make notations on the maps so that the little company would be properly advised as to the geography of the lands they must pass through during the journey that lay ahead. Edain Elessedil had excused himself and gone off on his own. When Foraker, therefore, had offered to show Jair something of the locks and dams, the Valeman had been quick to accept. Part of the reason for the tour, Jair suspected, was to take his mind off Garet Jax, who had still not returned. But that was all right, too. He preferred not to think about the missing Weapons Master.

“Cliffs don’t allow the Gnomes a way down to the lower dams,” Foraker was saying, eyes turned back toward the distant watchfires. “The fortress guards all passage that way. Our ancestors knew that well enough when they built Capaal. As long as the fortress stands, the locks and dams are safe. As long as the locks and dams are safe, the Silver River is safe.”

“Except that it’s being poisoned,” Jair pointed out.

The Dwarf nodded. “It is. But it would be worse if the whole of the Cillidellan were let loose into the gorge. The poisoning would be quicker then-all the way west.”

“Don’t the other lands know this?” Jair asked quietly.

“They know.”

“You would think they would be here to help you, in that case.”

Foraker chuckled mirthlessly. “You would think so. But not everyone wants to believe the truth of things, you see. Some want to hide from it.”

“Have any of the races agreed to aid you?”

The Dwarf shrugged. “Some. The Westland Elves are sending an army under Ander Elessedil. It’s still two weeks away, though. Callahorn promises aid; Helt and a handful of others already fight with us. Nothing from the Trolls yet-but the Northern territories are vast and the tribes scattered. Perhaps they will at least help us along the northern borders.”

He trailed off. Jair waited a moment, then asked, “And the Southland?”

“The Southland?” Foraker shook his head slowly. “The Southland has the Federation and its Coalition Council. A bunch of fools. Petty internal bickerings and power struggles occupy all of their energies. And the new Southland has no use for the peoples of the other lands. The race of Man reverts to what it was in the time of the First War. If there were a Warlock Lord alive now, I fear the Federation would be a willing follower.”

Jair winced inwardly. In the First War of the Races, fought hundreds of years earlier, the Warlock Lord had subverted the race of Man and convinced it to attack the other races. Man had been defeated in that war and had still not recovered from the humiliation and bitterness of their loss. Isolationist in policy and practice, the Federation had absorbed and become spokesman for the majority of the Southland and the race of Man.

“Still, Callahorn stands with you,” Jair declared quickly. “The Bordermen are a different breed.”

“Even the Bordermen may not be enough.” Foraker grunted. “Even the whole of the Legion. You’ve seen the gathering of tribes without. United, they are a power greater than anything we can match. And they have the aid of those black things that command them...” He shook his head darkly.

Jair’s brow furrowed. “But we have an ally of our own who can stand against the Mord Wraiths. We have Allanon.”

“Yes, Allanon,” Foraker murmured, then shook his head once more.

“And Brin,” Jair added. “Once they’ve found the Ildatch...”

He trailed off, the warning of the King of the Silver River suddenly a dark whisper in his mind. Leaves in the wind, he had said. Your sister and the Druid. Both will be lost.

He shoved the whisper aside roughly. It won’t happen like that, he promised. I’ll reach them first. I’ll find them. I’ll throw the Silver Dust into Heaven’s Well to cleanse its waters, throw the vision crystal after, and then...He paused uncertainly. What? He didn’t know. Something. He would do something that would keep the old man’s prophecy from coming to pass.

But first there was the journey north, he reminded himself glumly. And before that, Garet Jax must return...

Foraker was walking along the battlements once more, bearded face lowered into his chest, hands stuffed into the pockets of the travel cloak he wore wrapped about his stocky frame. Jair caught up with him as he started down a set of broad stone steps to a lower ramp.

“Can you tell me something about Garet Jax?” the Valeman asked suddenly.

The Dwarf’s head remained lowered. “What would you have me tell you?”

Jair shook his head. “I don’t know. Something.”

“Something?” the other grunted. “Bit vague, don’t you think? What sort of something?”

Jair thought about it a moment. “Something no one else knows. Something about him.”

Foraker walked to a parapet overlooking the dark expanse of the Cillidellan, resting his elbows on the stonework as he stared out into the night. Jair stood silently beside him, waiting.

“You want to understand him, don’t you?” Foraker asked finally.

The Valeman nodded slowly. “A little, at least.”

The Dwarf shook his head. “I’m not sure that it’s possible, Ohmsford. It’s like trying to understand a...a hawk. You see him, see what he is, what he does. You marvel at him, you wonder at his being. But you can’t ever understand him-not really. You have to be him to understand him.”

“You seem to understand him,” Jair offered.

Foraker’s fierce countenance swung sharply about to face him. “Is that what you think, Ohmsford? That I understand him?” He shook his head once more. “No better than I understand the hawk. Less, maybe. I know him because I’ve spent time with him, fought with him, and trained men with him. I know him for that. I know what he is, too. But all that doesn’t amount to a pinch of dust when it comes to understanding.”

He hesitated. “Garet Jax is like another form of life compared to you, me, or anyone else you’d care to name. A special and singular form of life, because there’s only one.” The eyebrows lifted. “He’s magic in his way. He does things no other man could hope to do-or even try to do. He survives what would kill anyone else, and he does it time after time. Like the hawk, it’s instinct-it lets him fly way up there above the rest of us where no one can touch him. A thing apart. Understand him? No, I couldn’t begin to understand him.”

Jair was quiet for a moment. “He came to the Eastland because of you, though,” he said finally. “At least, he says that is why he came. So he must feel some sort of friendship for you. You must share a kinship.”

“Perhaps.” The other shrugged. “But that doesn’t mean I understand him. Besides, he does what he does for reasons that are all his own and not necessarily what he says they are-I know that much. He’s here not just because of me, Ohmsford. He’s here for other reasons as well.” He tapped Jair on the shoulder. “He’s here as much because of you as because of me, I think. But I don’t know the reason why. Perhaps you do.”

The Valeman hesitated, thinking. “He said he would be my protector because that was what the King of the Silver River had said he must be.” He trailed off.

“Well and good.” Foraker nodded. “But do you understand him any better for knowing that? I do not.” He paused, then looked back out across the lake. “No, his reasons are his own and the reasons are not ones he would tell to me.”

Jair barely heard him. He had remembered something, and a look of surprise flitted over his face. Quickly he turned away. His mind froze. Were the reasons that Garet Jax would not tell to Foraker ones that he would tell to the Valeman? Hadn’t the Weapons Master done just that in the dark, chill rain that second night out of Culhaven when the two had crouched alone beneath that ridgeline? The memory stirred slowly to life. I want you to understand...That was what Garet Jax had told him. The dream promised a test of skill greater than any I have ever faced. A chance to see if I am truly the best. For me, what else is there...?

Jair breathed deeply the chill night air. Maybe he understood Garet Jax better than he thought. Maybe he understood him as well as anyone could.

“There is one thing not many know.” Foraker turned back suddenly. Jair shoved aside his musings. “You say he found you in the Black Oaks. Ever wonder why he happened to be there? After all, he was coming east out of Callahorn.”

Jair nodded slowly. “I hadn’t thought about that. I guess the Black Oaks are rather out of the way for one traveling from the borderlands to the Anar.” He hesitated. “What was he doing there?”

Foraker smiled faintly. “I’m only guessing, you understand. He’s not told me any more than you. But the lake country north, between Leah and the lowlands of Clete-that was his home. That was where he was born, where he grew up. Once, long ago, he had family there. Some, anyway. Hasn’t said anything about it for a long time, bur maybe there’s still someone there. Or maybe just memories.”

“A family,” Jair repeated softly, then shook his head. “Has he told you who they were?”

The Dwarf pushed himself back from the parapet. “No. Mentioned it once, that was all. But now you know something about the man no one else knows-except me, of course. Does that help you understand him any better?”

Jair smiled. “I don’t suppose so.”

Foraker turned and together they started back across the battlements. “Didn’t think it would,” the Dwarf muttered, pulling his cloak close about him as the wind caught at them beyond the shelter of the wall. “Come back inside with me, Ohmsford, and I’ll brew you a cup of hot ale. We’ll wait for our hawk’s return together.”

Foraker’s rough hand clapped his shoulder gently, and he hurried after.

The night slipped away, its hours empty and lingering and clouded with dark anticipation. Mist crept down out of the heights on cat’s paws, thickening, shrouding the whole of the locks and dams, and draping Gnome and Dwarf armies alike in veils of damp, clinging haze until even the bright glow of the watchfires disappeared from view.

Jair Ohmsford fell asleep at midnight, still awaiting the return of Garet Jax. Slumped wearily in a high-backed captain’s chair in a watch lounge while Foraker, Slanter, and Edain Elessedil talked in low voices over mugs of hot ale and a single candle lighted against the deepening gloom, he simply drifted off. One minute he was awake, listening in weary detachment to the drone of their voices, eyes closed against the light; in the next, he was sleeping.

It was almost dawn when the Elven Prince shook him awake.

“Jair. He’s back.”

The Valeman brushed the sleep from his eyes and pushed himself upright. Barely visible through the gloom of fading night, the embers of a dying fire glowed softly in the little hearth across the room. Without, the patter of rain sounded on the stonework.

Jair blinked. He’s back. Garet Jax.

He stood up hurriedly. He was fully dressed save for his boots, and he quickly snatched them up and began to pull them on.

“He came in not half an hour ago.” The Elf stood next to him, his voice strangely hushed, as if fearful he might wake someone else within the room. “Helt was with him, of course. They’ve found a path north beyond the tunnels.”

He paused. “But something else has happened, Jair.” The Valeman looked up expectantly. “Sometime after midnight, it began to rain and the mist to dissipate. When the light returned with dawn’s approach, the Gnomes were there, too-all of them. They’d gathered close about the shoreline of the Cillidellan from one end of the high dam to the other, dozens deep, just standing there, waiting.”

Jair was on his feet. “What are they up to?”

Edain Elessedil shook his head. “I don’t know. No one seems to know. But they’ve been out there for hours now. The Dwarves are all awake and on the battlements. Come with me and you can see for yourself.”

They hastened from the watch lounge down the maze of corridors beyond until they had passed through doors leading out into the courtyard that spanned the central section of the high dam. A chill wind blew across the Cillidellan, and the rain stung their faces as they hurried forward. It was still night, the predawn light a distant gray haze beyond the tips of the mountains east. The Dwarf defenders had taken their positions along the ramparts of the dam and fortress, cloaked and hooded against the weather, weapons in hand. The whole of Capaal lay shrouded in silence.

On reaching the fortress that protected the north end of the high dam, Edain took Jair up a series of stone stairs and across a line of battlements to a watchtower high above the complex. The wind seemed to grow stronger here, and the rain beat harder through the gray night.

As they paused before an ironbound oak door leading into the tower, a cluster of Dwarves pushed past them and started down the stairs adjoining. Foremost of these was a fierce-looking Dwarf with flaming red hair and beard, armored in leather and chainmail.

“Radhomm, the Dwarf commander!” Edain whispered to Jair.

Hurriedly, they pushed through the oak door into the tower beyond, shutting the weather behind them as they entered. A faint glow of lamplight barely penetrated the gloom within as a handful of cloaked forms seemed to materialize before them.

“Humph, he’d sleep all the time if you’d let him!” he heard Slanter grumble.

“Well met again, Jair Ohmsford,” a deep voice greeted him, and Helt’s massive hand extended to clasp his own.

Then Garet Jax was there, as black as the night about him, implacable and unchanging as the stone of the mountains. They faced each other, and no words were spoken. Lean face intense, the Weapons Master rested his hands gently on Jair’s shoulders and within the eyes of ice there flickered a strange, unfamiliar warmth. Only for the briefest second was it there; in the next, it was gone. The hands slipped away, and Garet Jax turned back into the gloom.

The door burst open behind them, and a rain-soaked Dwarf hastened over to where Elb Foraker crouched above a pile of maps that rested on a small wooden table. They conversed in low, hushed voices; then as swiftly as he had come, the runner was gone again.

Foraker walked over at once to Jair, the other members of the little company gathering about them. “Ohmsford,” he said quietly, “I’ve just been told that the Mwellret has escaped.”

There was a stunned silence. “How could that happen?” Slanter snapped angrily, his rough face pushing forward into the light.

“A shape-change.” Foraker kept his eyes on Jair. “He used it to fit himself into a small ventilation shaft that circulates air to those lower levels. It happened sometime during the night. No one knows where he might be now.”

Jair went cold. There was no mistaking the Dwarf s intent in telling him this unpleasant piece of news. Even locked within that storage room, the Mwellret had been able to sense the presence of the Elven magic and to force Jair to reveal it. If he were loose...

“This was something he could have done anytime,” Edain Elessedil pointed out. “There must be a reason that he chose to do it now.”

And I could be that reason, Jair acknowledged silently. Foraker realizes it, too. That is why he made it a point to speak first to me.

Garet Jax reappeared from out of the gloom, sudden and purposeful. “We are leaving at once,” he advised. “We have delayed too long already. The quest given us lies north. Whatever is to happen here, we need not be part of it. With the Gnomes gathered about the Cillidellan as they are, it should be easy enough to...”

OOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM!

Startled, the members of the little company looked hurriedly about. A monstrous wail assailed their ears, deep and haunting as it shattered the predawn silence. It grew louder, thousands of voices giving it life, rising up against wind and rain into the mountains about Capaal.

“Shades! “.Slanter cried, his rough yellow face twisting in recognition.

All six broke for the door in a rush, burst through, and in seconds were clustered against the battlements without, rain and wind thrusting at them as they peered north across the choppy waters of the Cillidellan.

OOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!

The wail rose higher, one long, continuous howl that swept through the heights. All about the shoreline of the Cillidellan, the Gnomes joined in the dark chant, voices blended into one as they faced the murky lake, the air filled with the mournful sound.

Radhomm appeared on the battlements below, shouting orders, and runners scurried from his side as he dispatched them to his captains. Everywhere there was a frenzy of activity as the garrison braced for whatever. was to come. Jair’s hand moved to his tunic, searching out and finding the reassuring presence of both the Silver Dust and the vision crystal.

Garet Jax snatched Slanter by his cloak and hauled him close. “What is happening here?”

There was unmistakable fear in the Gnome’s eyes. “A summons-a summons to the dark magic! Once before I saw it-at Graymark!” The Gnome twisted in the iron grip. “But it needs the touch of the walkers, Weapons Master! It needs their touch!”

“Garet!” Foraker pulled the other about roughly, pointing to the near shore of the Cillidellan, not a hundred yards from where. the high dam arced away. The Weapons Master released his grip on Slanter. All eyes turned to where the Dwarf directed.

From out of the midst of the Gnomes gathered along the shoreline, three black-cloaked figures approached, tall and hard against the coming dawn.

“Mord Wraiths!” Slanter whispered harshly. “The walkers have come!”

22

Down to the Cillidellan the Mord Wraiths came, gliding to the water’s edge almost without seeming to move. Hooded and featureless within the shadow of their cowls, they might have been ghosts of no substance but for the black-clawed fingers slipped from beneath their coverings to wrap with death grips about three gnarled gray staffs of burnished witch-wood. The wail of their Gnome believers rose all about them, shrieking into the whistle of the wind; to those who watched from the battlements of Capaal, is seemed as if the black ones had been born of its sound.

Then, without warning, the terrible wail died into silence as the Gnomes grew suddenly still. The wind’s strident shriek sounded across the empty expanse of the Cillidellan, and the lapping of the waves stirred with its passing.

The foremost of the Mord Wraiths lifted his staff high, his skeletal black arm thrusting from its protective robe like blasted deadwood. A strange and vibrant hush fell over the heights, and it seemed to the defenders that for an instant even the wind had gone still. Then the staff came slowly down, reaching toward the blackened waters of the lake. The other staffs joined it, witch-wood touching and becoming one as burnished tips slipped within the waters of the Cillidellan.

For an instant, nothing happened. Then the staffs exploded into lances of red fire, the flames ripping downward into the lake, burning and scorching its cool darkness. The waters shuddered and heaved, then began to boil. Gnomes shrieked in a cacophony of glee and fear, stumbling back from the shore’s edge.

“It is the summons!” Slanter cried.

The red fire burned through the murky, impenetrable blackness, down into the deepest recesses of the lake to where no light ever shone. Like a stain of blood, the light of chose flames spread outward through the waters, reaching. Geysers of steam burst skyward with a violent hiss, and the whole of the lake began to churn.

The defenders on the ramparts of the Dwarf fortress stood frozen with indecision. Something was about to happen, something unspeakable, and no one knew how it could be stopped.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Slanter snatched at Garet Jax urgently. There was fear in his eyes, but reason as well. “Quickly, Weapons Master!”

Abruptly the fire from the witch-wood staffs died away. The gray wood lifted from the Cillidellan, clawed hands drawing back within their robes. Yet still the waters boiled feverishly; the reddened stain had become a deep and distant glow that shone from far beneath the surface like an eye slipped open from sleep.

OOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!

The wail of the Gnome siege army rose once more, shrill and expectant. Hands lifted and joined, stretching as the staffs of the Mord Wraiths signaled anew. Steam ripped from the lake in answer to the wail, and the whole of the Cillidellan seemed to erupt with a newfound fury.

Then something huge and dark began to rise from the depths.

“Weapons Master!” Slanter cried out.

But Garet Jax shook his head. “Stand fast. Helt, bring the long bows.”

The Borderman disappeared back into the watchtower at once. Jair glanced after him momentarily, then turned back to the Cillidellan-back to the deafening wail of the Gnomes and to the black thing rising from the deep.

It came swiftly now, growing in size as it neared the surface. An evil summoned by the Wraiths-but what manner of thing was it? Jair swallowed against the tightening of his throat. Whatever it was, it was monstrous, its bulk seeming to fill the whole of the lake bottom as it lifted free. Slowly it began to take shape, a great and hulking thing with arms that twisted and groped...

Then, with a thunderous surge, it broke the surface of the lake and burst free into the gray dawn. A misshapen black body wrenched clear of the confining waters and hung silhouetted for an instant against the light. Barrel-like in appearance, it was coated with bottom mud and slime, crusted over with sea life and corral. Four great fin-legs propelled it as it rose, clawed and spiny. Its head was a mass of writhing tentacles that surrounded a giant beak-shaped maw lined with razor teeth. Suckers coated the insides of the tentacles, each the size of a man’s spread hand, the whole protected without by scales and spines. Immediately back of the tentacles and to either side, a pair of reddened eyes blinked coldly. Stretching as it rose, the thing was more than a hundred feet from tip to tail and forty feet across.

Cries of dismay sounded from the battlements of Capaal.

“A Kraken!” Foraker said. “We are done now!”

The wail of the Gnomes had risen to a shriek that forbore all semblance of anything human. Now, with the monster’s appearance into the light, the wail dissipated into a battle cry that broke across the length and breadth of Capaal. Down into the waters of the lake the Kraken thundered, its black body twisting in response as it turned abruptly toward the wail of the dam and the fortress that protected it.

“It comes for us!” Garet Jax whispered in surprise. “A thing that cannot live within freshwater, a thing that comes from the ocean-yet here! Brought by the dark magic!” The gray eyes glittered coldly. “But it shall not have us, I think. Helt!”

Instantly the giant Borderman was at his side, three long bows clasped in one great hand. Garet Jax took one, left one with the Borderman, and passed the third to Edain Elessedil.

Slanter pushed forward. “Listen to me! You cannot stand against this thing! It is a monster summoned out of evil and too much even for you!”

But Garet Jax didn’t seem to hear him. “Remain with the Valeman, Gnome. He is your charge now. See that he stays safe.”

He went down off the watchtower, Helt and Edain Elessedil close upon his heels. Foraker hesitated only an instant, a mistrustful glance directed at Slanter; then he, too, followed.

The Kraken surged up against the wall of the Dwarf citadel, its giant bulk hammering into stone and mortar with stunning force as it breached. The giant tentacles swept from the water, reaching for the Dwarves that clustered on the battlements. Dozens were caught up, knocked from their feet into the waters of the lake, and wrapped in the suckers and spines of the thing that attacked them. Shrieks and howls filled the morning air as the Dwarves died. Weapons rained down upon the black thing, but its hide protected it from harm. Steadily it cleared away the small figures who sought to hold it back, tearing at them with its whiplike arms, breaking apart the battlements behind which they sought to keep safe.

Now the Gnomes joined in the attack as well, the siege army battering the gates at both ends of the high dam, scaling ladders and grappling hooks clutched in their hands as they came. Dwarf defenders rushed to the parapets, holding fast against this fresh assault. But the Gnomes seemed to have gone mad. Heedless of the losses being inflicted upon them, they flung themselves against the gates and walls to die.

Yet there was purpose to this seeming madness. While the Dwarf defenders were thus distracted, the Kraken worked its way north until it was up against the wall where it banked closest to the gates. With a sudden lurch, it rose from the waters of the, lake, fin-legs braced upon the stone of the dam where it curved into the shoreline. Massive tentacles snapped forward along the walls, suckers fastened to the gates, and the monster heaved back. With a splintering of wood and iron, crossbars snapped and locks broke apart. The gates to the citadel tumbled down, ripped from their hinges, and the army of the Gnomes poured through with a roar of triumph.

On the battlements of the watchtower, Jair and Slanter viewed the struggle with growing horror. With the gates gone, the Dwarves could no longer hold back their attackers. In a matter of minutes the fortress would be overrun. Already its defenders were in retreat along the walls leading back, small clusters rallying about their captains, desperately trying to stand against the onslaught. But it was clear from where the Valeman and the Gnome stood watching that the battle was lost.

“We’ve got to escape while we can, boy!” Slanter insisted, a hand gripping the other’s arm.

But Jair refused to leave, still searching for his friends, almost too horrified by what was happening to do anything else. The Kraken had slipped once more into the waters of the lake, dragging its bulk back along the sea wall toward the center of the dam. In its wake, the Mord Wraiths glided to the edge of the shattered battlements, gray staffs raised in exhortation as their Gnome followers surged forward. With implacable purpose, the Gnomes moved into the fortress of the Dwarves.

“Slanter!” Jair cried suddenly, pointing into the heart of the battle.

High atop the ramparts of the forward wall, Helt’s giant form rose up through the smoke and dust, Elb Foraker at his side. Bow gripped tightly in one hand, the Borderman braced himself against the parapets, sighted downward to where the Mord Wraiths stood, slowly drew back the bowstring, and let it slip free. A shadowy blur, the long black arrow sped away to bury itself deep in the breast of the foremost Wraith. The creature straightened with a shudder, hammered back by the force of the blow. A second arrow followed close upon the first, and again the Wraith staggered back. Shrieks of dismay rose up from those closest to the black things, and for an instant the whole of the Gnome advance seemed to falter.

But then the Mord Wraith steadied. One clawed hand grasped the arrows embedded within it and drew them free with effortless ease. Holding them high for all to see, the monster crushed them into splinters. Then the staff of witch-wood lifted and red fire burst from its tip. All along the battlements the fire burned, exploding into stone and defender alike. Helt and Foraker flew back as the fire reached them and disappeared in an avalanche of broken wall and dust.

Jair started forward in fury, but Slanter yanked him about. “You can’t do anything to help them, boy!” Without waiting for any argument on the matter, he began dragging Jair along the ramparts toward the stone stairway leading down. “Better start worrying about yourself! Perhaps if we’re quick enough...”

Then they caught sight of the Kraken. It had lifted itself out of the Cillidellan midway along the sea wall where the broad courtyard joined together the fortress that guarded the ends of the high dam, its tentacles and fin-legs gripping at the stone. Once clear, with only the hindmost portion of its barreled body still submerged within the lake, it pivoted slowly to where the Dwarf defenders were attempting to escape the north fortress. Tentacles stretched across the girth of the high dam in a writhing mass; in seconds, all passage out was blocked.

“Slanter!” Jair cried out in warning, falling back against the stairs as one giant feeler swept past his head.

They retreated back up the stairway, crouching down within the shelter of a balustrade where it curved back into the parapets. Spray from the monster’s tail fin that thrashed within the lake mixed with dust and shattered stone to rain down about them. Below, the Kraken’s tentacles groped and hammered about the fortress walls, clutching at anything that ventured within reach.

It seemed for a moment as if any chance of escape back across the courtyard had been lost. But then the Dwarves counterattacked. They rushed from the lower levels of the fortress, the darkened stairwells, and the tunnels that ran beneath. Foremost among them was the Dwarf commander Radhomm. Red hair flying, he led his soldiers into the tangle of giant arms, cutting and hacking with a broadax. Bits and pieces of the Kraken flew in a froth of blood, reddish ichor spilling down upon the dampened scone of the dam. But the Kraken was a monstrous thing, and the Dwarves were little more than gnats to be brushed aside. The tentacles came down, smashing the tiny creatures who swarmed about it, leaving them lifeless. Still the defenders came on, determined to clear the way for those trapped within the doomed fortress. But the Kraken swept them aside as quickly as they appeared, and they fell dying all about the monster.

Finally the Kraken caught Radhomm as the Dwarf commander fought to break past. The monster swung the red-haired Dwarf high into the air, unaffected by the broadax that still flailed in stubborn determination. The Kraken lifted Radhomm; then, with horrifying suddenness, it smashed him downward to the stone, broken, twisted, and lifeless.

Slanter was pulling vainly at Jair. “Run!” he screamed in desperation.

Tentacles swept past them, hammering into the battlements and smashing the stone so that it flew in all directions. A shower of jagged fragments struck the Valeman and the Gnome as they struggled, knocking them sprawling, half burying them in debris. Shaking his head dazedly, Jair regained his feet and staggered forward against the stone balustrade. Below, the Dwarves had fallen back within the beseiged fortress, demoralized by the loss of Radhomm. The Kraken was still stretched across the littered courtyard, edging closer now to the walls upon which Jair crouched. The Valeman started to drop back, then stopped in dismay. Slanter lay stunned at his feet, blood oozing from a deep cut in his head.

Then far below, seemingly from out of nowhere, Garet Jax appeared. Lean and black against the gray light of the dawn, he darted swiftly from the shelter of the battlements on the sea wall, a short spear gripped in his hands. Jair cried out as he saw him-a sudden, wild cry-but the sound was lost in the wail of the wind and the screams of battle. Across the blood-soaked length of the high dam the Weapons Master raced, a small and agile figure-not away from the deadly tentacles of the Kraken, but directly into them. Weaving and dodging like a shadow without substance, he broke for the monster’s gaping maw. The tentacles hammered down, swatting at him, missing him, sliding past him, far too slow for anyone so impossibly quick. But one slip, one mistake...

Up against the hooked beak, the Weapons Master leaped, against the very jaws of the beast. He struck with stunning swiftness, the short spear burying itself deep within the soft tissue of the open maw. Instantly, the tentacles collapsed, the giant body lurching. But Garet Jax was already moving, spinning sideways and diving clear of the trap that sought to snare him. On his feet once more, the Weapons Master caught up a new weapon, this one a lance fixed with an iron pike, the haft still clutched in the lifeless hands of its owner. With a quick scooping motion, Garet Jax had wrenched it free. Too late, the Kraken caught sight once more of this dangerous attacker, barely two yards from one lidded eye. The iron-tipped lance thrust upward at the unprotected eye, piercing through skin, blood, and bone into the brain beyond.

The stricken Kraken wrenched backward in obvious distress, fin-legs churning madly. Stone ramparts shattered all about it as it sought to regain the waters of the Cillidellan. Still Garet Jax clung to the lance embedded within the monster’s brain, refusing to release it, grinding it deeper and deeper as he waited for the life force to expend itself. But the Kraken was impossibly strong. Heaving upward, it lifted free of the high dam, then fell ponderously into the Cillidellan and dove from sight. Hands still fixed upon the haft of the lance, Garet Jax was carried with it.

Jair stumbled back against the shattered balustrade in stunned disbelief, his cry of anger dying soundlessly in his throat. Below, the high dam lay clear again and the Dwarf defenders trapped within broke from their prison for the safety of the south watch.

Then Slanter was next to him once more, staggering back to his feet. Blood covered the wizened yellow face, but the Gnome brushed it aside wordlessly and yanked the Valeman down the stairs after him. Stumbling and falling, they gained the courtyard and started across in the direction taken by the fleeing Dwarves.

But already they were too late. Gnome Hunters had appeared on both sides of the battlements behind them. Howling and screaming, a mass of armored, blood-soaked forms, they poured across the crest of the high dam and streamed down into the court. Slanter took one quick look back and abruptly wheeled Jair into one of the dark stairwells. They raced down several flights of lamp-lighted stairs, deep into the shadowed dark of the lower levels that led to the inner workings of the locks. Above, the sounds of pursuit began to fade.

When the stairs ended, they found themselves in a dimly lighted corridor that disappeared down the length of the dam. Slanter hesitated, then turned north, pulling Jair after him.

“Slanter!” the Valeman howled, struggling to slow the Gnome. “This leads back the way we’ve come-away from the Dwarves!”

“Gnomes will be going the other way, too!” Slanter snapped. “Won’t be hunting Dwarves or anybody else this way, will they! Now, run!”

They ran into the gloom, stumbling wearily along the empty corridor. The sounds of battle were far away now, distant and faint against the steady grinding of the machinery and the low rush of the waters of the Cillidellan. Jair’s mind spun with the shock of what had befallen them. The little company from Culhaven was no more-Helt and Foraker struck down by the walkers, Garet Jax carried away by the Kraken, and Edain Elessedil disappeared. Only Slanter and he were left-and they were running for their lives. Capaal was gone, fallen to the Gnomes. The locks and dams that regulated the flow of the Silver River west into the homeland of the Dwarves were in the hands of their most implacable enemy. Everything was lost.

His lungs tightened with the strain of running, and his breathing was harsh and labored in his ears. Tears stung his eyes, and his mouth was dry with bitterness and anger. What was he to do now? How was he to reach Brin? He could never find her before she stepped down into the Maelmord and was forever lost. How was he to complete the mission given him by the King...?

His legs went out from under him, knocked away by something he hadn’t seen, and he went sprawling into the darkness. Ahead, Slanter ran on, unheeding, a dim shadow in the darkness of the tunnel. Hurriedly, Jair scrambled back to his feet. Slanter was getting too far ahead of him.

Then an arm shot out of the darkness and a hand clamped across his mouth, rough and scaled, sealing away his breath. A second arm encircled his body, hard as iron, and he was dragged back into the shadows of an open door.

“Sstay, little peopless,” a voice hissed. “Friendss, we of magicss. Friendss!”

Jair’s voice was a soundless scream in his mind.

It was midmorning when Slanter pulled himself clear of the Dwarf escape tunnel, exiting through a thick mass of scrub that concealed the hidden entrance, there to stand alone upon the windswept heights of the mountains north of Capaal. Gray, hazy light filtered down out of skies clouded and drenched by rain, and the chill of night still lingered in the mountain rock. The Gnome glanced about cautiously, then he hunched down against the scrub and moved forward to where the slope dropped away into the gorge.

Far below, the locks and dams of Capaal were swarming with Gnomes. All across the broad bands of stone block, about the battlements and ramparts of the fortress, and deep within the inner workings of the complex; the Gnome Hunters scurried like ants about the business of maintaining their hill.

Well, this was the way it had to end, Slanter thought. He shook his rough yellow face in silent admonition. No one could stand against the walkers. Capaal was theirs now. The siege was done.

He stood up slowly, eyes still fixed on the scene below. There was little danger of being discovered this high up. The Gnomes were all within the fortress and what remained of the Dwarf army had fled south to Culhaven. Nothing was left for him to do but to go his own way.

And that, of course, was exactly what he had wanted all along.

Yet he stood there, his mind adrift with unanswered questions. He still did not know what had become of Jair Ohmsford. One minute the Valeman had been right behind him; the next he had vanished just like that. Slanter had looked for him, of course; but there hadn’t been a trace. So at last the Gnome had gone on alone-because, after all, what else could he do?

“Boy was too much trouble anyway!” he muttered irritably. But his words lacked conviction somehow.

He sighed, glanced upward into the graying skies, and turned slowly away. With the Valeman gone and the rest of the little company dead or scattered, the journey to Heaven’s Well was finished. Just as well, of course. It was a stupid, impossible quest from the beginning. He had told them so time and again-all of them. They had no idea what they were up against; they had no idea of the power of the walkers. It wasn’t his fault that they had failed.

The frown on his rough face deepened. Nevertheless, he didn’t like not knowing what had happened to the boy.

He slipped back past the scrub guarding the hidden entrance to the tunnel and climbed to a rocky projection overlooking the Eastland and giving view to its sweep west. At least, he had been smart enough to plan his own escape, he thought smugly. But that was because he was a survivor; and survivors always took time to plan for an escape-except for the crazed ones like Garet Jax. Slanter’s frown turned to a faint smile. He had learned long ago not to risk himself unnecessarily where there was no reason for it. He had learned long ago to keep one eye open for the quickest way out of any place into which he ventured. So when the Dwarf had been kind enough to provide him with maps showing the underground tunnels that would take them north behind the siege army, he had been quick to study them. That was why he was alive and safely out of there. If the rest of them hadn’t been so foolish...

The wind blew against his face, harsh and bitter as it came out of the mountain rock. Far north and west, the forests of the Anar spread away into patches of autumn color, dampened by mist and rain. That was the way for him, he thought grimly. Back to the borderlands, to some semblance of sanity and peace, where his old life could be regained and all of this forgotten. He was free again and he could now go where he wished. A week, ten days at the outside, and the Eastland and the war that ravaged it would be left behind.

He scuffed his boot against the rock. “That boy had sand, though,” he said quietly, his thoughts straying yet.

Undecided, he stared out into the rain.

23

Late in the afternoon of the day that marked the disappearance of Paranor from the world of men, the whole of Callahorn from the Streleheim south to the Rainbow Lake was engulfed in heavy autumn rains. The storms swept down through the borderlands, swept across forest and grassland, and over the Dragon’s Teeth and the Runne, falling at last across the broad expanse of the Rabb Plains. It was there that it caught up with Allanon, Brin, and Rone Leah as they journeyed eastward toward the Anar.

They camped that night, exposed to the downpour and huddled within their sodden cloaks, beneath the sparse shelter of an oak broken and ravaged by years of seasons passing. Empty and barren, the Rabb stretched away on all sides as the storms thundered overhead, the glare of the lightning revealing in vivid flashes the starkness of the plain. No other life could be found on its cracked and windswept surface; they were all alone. They might have pushed on that night, ridden east until dawn, and thereby gained the Anar before stopping to take their rest. But the Druid saw that the highlander and the Valegirl were exhausted and thought it better not to press.

So they stayed that night upon the Rabb and rode on again at dawn. The day stretched out to greet them, gray and rain-filled, the sun’s light a faint and hazy glow behind the storm clouds that blanketed the autumn skies. They rode east across the plains until they reached the banks of the Rabb River, then turned south. Where the river branched west out of its main channel, they crossed at a narrows close to the forest’s edge and continued south until daylight had slipped into a murky, sodden dusk.

They spent a second night unsheltered upon the Rabb, crouched within cloaks and hoods, with the rain a constant, annoying drizzle that drenched them to the bone and kept them from sleep. The chill of the season settled in about them. While neither cold nor sleeplessness had an apparent effect upon the Druid, it wore with singular perseverance on the stamina of the girl and the highlander. On Brin, particularly, it began to take its toll.

Yet at dawn of the following day, she was ready to travel once more, her determination as hard as iron, reforged out of an inner battle she had fought through the empty hours of the night to keep herself sane. The rains that had followed them since their departure out of the Dragon’s Teeth were gone, turned now to a soft, feathery mist. The skies were clearing into wisps of whitened clouds as the sunlight began to slip above the forestline. The appearance of the sun rekindled in the Valegirl a strength of mind and body that the rains and the dark had done much to erode, and she fought valiantly to ignore the exhaustion that seeped through her. Back astride her horse, she turned gratefully toward the warmth of the still hazy sunlight and watched as it crept steadily out of the east.

But exhaustion was not so easily dispatched, she found. Though the day brightened as they traveled on, a weariness still persisted deep within, besieging her with doubts and fears that would not fade. Faceless demons darted in their shadows-darted from her mind into the forest they rode beside, laughing and taunting. There were eyes upon her. As it had been within the Dragon’s Teeth, there was the sense of being watched, sometimes from far away through eyes that were not bound by any distance, sometimes from eyes that seemed very close. And again there was that insidious premonition. It had come to her first in the rocks and shadows of the Dragon’s Teeth, following after her, teasing her relentlessly, warning her that she and those she traveled with played a game with death they could not win. She had thought it lost after Paranor, for they had escaped the Druid’s Keep alive and safe. Yet now it was back again, reborn in the gray and wet of the last two days, a familiar and haunting demon of her mind. It was evil, and though she sought to drive it from her thoughts with determination and a savage anger; still it would not stay gone.

The hours drifted aimlessly away in the course of the third morning’s travel, and Brin Ohmsford’s determination gradually began to drift with them. The drifting manifested itself first as an inexplicable sense of aloneness. Besieged by her premonition-a premonition that her companions could not even recognize-the Valegirl began to withdraw into herself. It was done in self-defense to begin with, a withdrawing from the thing that sought to ravage her with its viperous warnings and insidious teasings. Walls came up, windows and doors slammed, and within the shelter of her mind she sought to close the thing out.

But Allanon and Rone were closed out as well, and somehow she could not find a way to bring them back in. She was alone, a prisoner within her own self, chained in irons of her own forging. A subtle change began to overtake her. Slowly, inexorably, she began to believe herself alone. Allanon had never been close, a distant and forbidding figure even under the most favorable circumstances, a stranger for whom she could feel pity and for whom she could sense an odd kinship-yet a stranger nevertheless, impervious and forbidding. It had been different with Rone Leah, of course; but the highlander had changed. From her friend and companion, he had become a protector as formidable and unapproachable as the Druid. The Sword of Leah had wrought that change, giving to Rone Leah power that made him in his own mind equal to anything that sought to stand against him. Magic, born of the dark waters of the Hadeshorn and the black sorcery of Allanon, had subverted him. The sense of intimacy that had bound them each to the other was gone. It was the Druid to whom Rone was bound now and to whom the kinship belonged.

But the drifting of Brin’s determination grew quickly beyond her sense of aloneness. It became a feeling that somehow, in some way, she had lost her purpose in this quest. It wasn’t gone entirely, she knew-yet it had strayed. Once that purpose had been clear and certain; she was to travel into the Eastland, through the Anar and the Ravenshorn, to the edge of the pit they called the Maelmord and there descend into that pit’s blackened maw to destroy the book of dark magic, the Ildatch. That had been her purpose. But with the passage of time, in the dark, cold, and discomfort of their travels, the urgency of that purpose had slipped from her until it now seemed distant and tenuous. Allanon and Rone were strong and certain-twin irons against the shadows that would stop them. What need had they of her?

Could they not act as well as she in this quest, despite the Druid’s words? Somehow she felt that they could, that she was not the important member of this company, but almost a burden, a thing not needed, her usefulness misjudged. She tried telling herself that this was not true. But somehow it was; her presence was a mistake. She sensed it, and in sensing it grew even more alone.

Midday came and went, and the afternoon wore on. The mist of early morning was gone now, and the day had become bright with sunlight. Bits of color reappeared on the barren plains. The cracked and ravaged earth turned slowly once again to grassland. Brin’s sense of aloneness became for a time less oppressive.

By nightfall, the riders had reached Storlock, the community of Gnome Healers. An aged, famous village, it was little more than a gathering of modest stone and timber dwellings, settled within the fringe of the woods. It was here that Wil Ohmsford had studied and trained for the profession that he had always sought to follow. Here Allanon had come to find him so that he might accompany the Druid on his journey south to find the Chosen Amberle in the quest to preserve the Ellcrys tree and the Elven race-a journey that ended with the infusion of the Elfstone magic into Brin’s father, thereby bequeathing to her the power of the wishsong. It had been more than twenty years ago, Brin thought in somber, almost bitter reflection. That was how the madness had begun-with the coming of Allanon. For the Ohmsfords, that was how it always began.

They rode through the tranquil, sleepy village, drawing to a halt behind a large, broad-backed building that served as the Center. The white-robed Stors appeared as if they had been waiting for the three to arrive. Silent and expressionless, a handful led away the horses while three more took Brin, Rone, and Allanon inside, down dark and shadowed hallways to separate rooms. Hot baths waited, clean clothes and food, and beds with fresh linens. The Stors spoke no words as they went about the task of caring for their guests. Like ghosts, they lingered for a few minutes and then were gone.

Alone in her room, Brin bathed, changed, and ate her meal, lost in the weariness of her body and the solitude of her mind. Nightfall slipped down across the forestland, and shadows passed over the curtained windows, the light of day fading into dusk. The Valegirl watched its passing with sleepy, languorous unconcern, given over to the pleasure of comforts she had not enjoyed since leaving the Vale. For a time, she could almost pretend that she was back again.

But when the evening deepened, there came a knock upon the door and a white-robed Stor beckoned for her to follow. She went without argument. She knew without asking that Allanon had called.

She found him within his room at the end of the hallway, Rone Leah seated beside him at a small table on which an oil lamp burned to cast away the night’s shadow. Wordlessly, the Druid beckoned to a third chair, and the Valegirl moved to occupy it. The Stor who had brought her waited until she was seated, then turned and glided from the room, closing the door softly behind him as he left.

The three companions faced one another in silence. Allanon shifted in his chair, dark face hard and fixed, eyes lost in worlds that the Valegirl and the highlander could not see. He looked old this night, Brin thought and wondered that it could be so. No one had known Allanon to age, save for her father, and that had come about just before the Druid disappeared from the Four Lands twenty years earlier. Yet now she saw it, too. He had aged beyond what he had looked when first he had come to the Vale to seek her out. His long, dark hair was grayer in its tone, his lean face more lined and time-ravaged, his look more bent and rough. Time was working against the Druid, even as it worked against them all.

The black eyes swept up to meet her own. “I would tell you now of Bremen,” he rumbled softly, and the gnarled hands folded before him.

“Long ago, in the time of the Councils of the Druids at Paranor, in the time between the Wars of the Races, it was Bremen who saw the truth about the coming of the magic. Brona, who was to become the Warlock Lord, had unlocked the secrets years before and fallen prey to their power. Consumed by what he had hoped to master, the rebel Druid became a slave. After the First War of the Races, the Council believed him destroyed, yet Bremen saw that it was not so. Brona lived, preserved by the magic, driven by its force and its need. The sciences of the old world were gone, lost in the holocaust of the Great Wars. In their place was reborn the magic of a world older still, a world in which only faerie creatures had existed. It was this magic, Bremen saw, that would preserve or destroy the new world of men.

“Thus Bremen defied the Council as Brona had before him-yet with greater care for what he was about-and began to learn for himself the secrets of the power that the rebel Druid had unlocked. Prepared for the Warlock Lord’s eventual return, he saved himself when all the other Druids were destroyed. It became his mission, the sole and fixed purpose of his life, to regain the power that the evil one had let loose, to recapture it and seal it away where it could not again be tampered with. No easy task-yet a task to which he pledged himself. The Druids had unlocked the magic; now, as the last of those Druids, it was left to him to lock it away once more.”

Allanon paused. “He chose to do this through the creation of the Sword of Shannara, a weapon of ancient Elven magic that could destroy the Warlock Lord and the Bearers of the Skull that served him. In the darkest hour of the Second War of the Races, with the whole of the Four Lands threatened by the armies of the evil one, Bremen forged from magic and from the skills he had acquired and the knowledge he had gained, the fabled Sword. He gave it to the Elven King Jerle Shannara. With that Sword, the King would face in battle the rebel Druid and see him destroyed.

“As you know, however, Jerle Shannara failed. Unable fully to master the power of the Sword, he let the Warlock Lord escape. Though the battle was won and the armies of the evil one driven forth, still Brona lived. Years would pass before he could return, but return he would. Bremen knew that he would not be there to face Brona again. Yet his pledge had been given, and Bremen would never forsake a promise”

The Druid’s voice had slipped down to a whisper, and there was a look of intense pain within the black, impenetrable eyes. “He did three things, then. He chose me to be his son, the flesh and blood offspring of the Druid line who would walk upon the Four Lands until the time of the Dark Lord’s return. He gave added life to himself first and to me later through the sleep that preserves so that, for as long as might be necessary, a Druid would stand as protector of mankind against the Warlock Lord. And finally, he did one thing more. When the time of his passing was at hand and he could not make himself let go, he used the magic in one last, terrible evocation. He bound his spirit to this world in which his body could not stay; so that he could reach beyond life’s end to see fulfillment of the pledge that he had made.”

Gnarled hands tightened into fists. “He bound himself, spirit out of flesh, to me! He used the magic to achieve that binding, father to son, his spirit exiled in a world of dark where past and future joined, where summons could be had when the need was there. That was what he chose for himself, a lost and hopeless being, never to be freed until it was done, until both had passed...”

He stopped suddenly, as if his words had brought him farther than he wished to go. In that instant, Brin caught sight of what had been hidden from her before-a quick, elusive glimpse of the secret that the Druid had withheld from her in the Valley of Shale when Bremen had risen from the Hadeshorn and spoken of what was to be, and which gave substance to the whisperings of her premonition.

“I thought it done once,” Allanon went on, brushing past the sudden pause. “I thought it done when Shea Ohmsford destroyed the Warlock Lord-when the Valeman unlocked the secret of the Sword of Shannara and made himself its master. But I was wrong. The dark magic did not die with the Warlock Lord. Nor was it locked away again as Bremen had foresworn it must be. It survived, kept safe within the pages of the Ildatch, secreted away within the bowels of the Maelmord to await new discoverers. And, finally, the discoverers came.”

“And became the Mord Wraiths,” Rone Leah finished.

“Made slaves to the dark magic as had been the Warlock Lord and the Skull Bearers in old days. Thinking to be master, they became only slaves.”

But what is the secret that you hide? Brin whispered in her mind, still waiting to hear it told. Speak now of that!

“Then Bremen cannot be freed from his exile within the Hadeshorn until the book of the Ildatch is destroyed-and the-magic with it?” Rone was too caught up in the history of the tale to see what Brin saw.

“He is pledged to that destruction, Prince of Leah,” Allanon whispered.

And you. And you. Brin’s mind raced.

“All of the dark magic gone from the land?” Rone shook his head wonderingly. “It does not seem possible. Not after so many years of its being-of wars fought because of it, of lives expended.”

The Druid looked away. “That age ends, highlander. That age must pass.”

There was a long silence then, a hushed stillness that filled the night shadows about the flame of the oil lamp and crowded close about the three who huddled there. Wrapped by it, they thought their separate. thoughts, eyes slipping past one another’s faces to shield what whispered within. Strangers joined in common cause but without understanding, thought Brin. We strive for a common good, yet the bond is curiously weak...

“Can we succeed in this, Allanon?” Rone Leah asked suddenly. His wind-burned face turned toward the Druid. “Have we strength enough to destroy this book and its dark magic?”

The Druid did not answer for a moment. His eyes flickered with hidden knowledge, elusive and quick. Then he said quietly, “Brin Ohmsford has the strength. She is our hope.”

Brin looked at him and shook her head slowly. Her smile twisted with irony. “Hope and no hope. Savior and destroyer. Remember the words, Allanon? Your father spoke them of me.”

Allanon said nothing. He simply sat there, dark eyes staring into her own.

“What else did he tell you, Allanon?” she asked him quietly. “What else?”

There was a long pause. “That I shall not see him again in this world.”

The silence deepened. She was close now to the secret the Druid kept hidden, she realized. Rone Leah stirred uneasily in his chair, eyes shifting to find those of the Valegirl. There was uncertainty in those eyes, Brin saw. Rone did not want to know any more. She looked away. It was she who was the hope, and she who must know.

“Was there more?” she said.

Slowly Allanon straightened, dark robes wrapping close about him, and on his worn and haggard face, a small smile appeared. “There is an Ohmsford obsession with knowing the truth of all that is,” he replied. “Not a one of you has ever been content with less.”

“What did Bremen say?” she pressed.

The smile died away. “He said, Brin Ohmsford, that when I go from the Four Lands this time, I shall not come again.”

Valegirl and highlander stared at him in shocked disbelief. As certain as the cycle of the seasons was the return of Allanon to the Four Lands when the danger of the dark magic threatened the races. There had never been a time in memory when he had not come.

“I don’t believe you, Druid!” Rone insisted heatedly, unable to think of anything else to say, a trace of outrage in his voice.

Allanon shook his head slowly. “The age passes, Prince of Leah. I must pass with it.”

Brin swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “When...when will you...?”

“When I must, Brin,” the Druid finished gently. “When it is time.”

Then he rose, a tall and weathered form as black as night and as steady as its coming. The great, gnarled hands reached out across the table. Without fully understanding why, the Valegirl and the highlander reached to clasp them in their own, joining for just an instant the three as one.

The Druid’s nod was brief and somehow final. “Tomorrow we ride east into the Anar-east until our journey is done. Go now and sleep. Be at peace.”

The great hands released their own and dropped away. “Go,” he said softly.

With a quick, uncertain glance at each other, Brin and Rone stood up and walked from the room. All the way out, they could feel the dark gaze following after.

They walked in silence down the hallway beyond. The sound of voices, distant and fragmented, wafted through the shadows of the empty hall and drifted disembodied from some unseen place. The air was thick with the smell of herbs and medicines, and they breathed in the aromas, distracted from their thoughts. When they reached the doors to their sleeping rooms, they stopped and stood together, not touching or looking at each other, sharing without speaking the impact of what they had been told.

It cannot be true, Brin thought, stunned. It cannot.

Rone turned to face her then, and his hands reached down to take hers. For the first time since their departure from Hadeshorn and the Valley of Shale, she felt close to him again.

“What he told us, Brin...what he said about not returning...” The highlander shook his head. “That was the reason we went to Paranor and he sealed away the Keep. He knew he would not be coming back...”

“Rone,” she said quickly and put her finger to his lips.

“I know. It’s just that I cannot believe it.”

“No.”

For a long moment they stared at each other. “I am afraid, Brin,” he said finally, his voice a whisper.

She nodded without speaking, then wrapped her arms about him and held him close. Then she stepped back again, kissed him lightly on the mouth and disappeared into her room.

Slowly, wearily Allanon turned from the closed door and seated himself once more at the small table. Eyes shifting from the flame of the oil lamp, he stared fixedly into the shadows beyond, his thoughts drifting. Once he would not have felt the need to reveal the secrets that were his. He would have disdained to do so. He was the keeper of the trust, after all; he was the last of the Druids and the power that had once been theirs belonged now to him. He had no need to confide in others.

It had been so with Shea Ohmsford. Much of the truth had been kept from Shea, left hidden for the little Valeman to discover on his own. It had been so as well with Brin’s father, when the Druid had taken him in quest of the Bloodfire. Yet Allanon’s resolve for secrecy, for deliberate and iron-willed refusal to tell to any-even those closest-all that he knew, had somehow weakened through the years gone past. Perhaps it was the aging, come upon him at last, or the inexorable passing of time that weighed so heavily upon him. Perhaps it was simply the need to share what he carried with some other living soul.

Perhaps.

He rose again from the table, another of night’s shadows floating beyond the reach of the light. A sudden breath of air, and the oil lamp went dark.

He had told so much more to the Valegirl and the highlander than to any of the others.

And still he had not told them all.

24

Dawn broke over the Eastland and the forests of the Anar, and the journey of the three who had come from Shady Vale resumed. Supplied with fresh provisions by the Healers of Storlock, they rode east out of the village into the woodlands beyond. Few saw them depart. A handful of white-robed Stors, sad-faced and voiceless, gathered at the stables behind the Center to lift their arms in farewell. Within minutes, the three had disappeared into the trees, gone as silently and as enigmatically as they had come.

It was the kind of autumn day fond memories conjure up of a milder season’s passing when winter snows lie deep about. It was warm and sun-filled, with the colors of the forest trees radiant and sprinkled with soft beams of light and the morning smells sweet and pleasant. Dark and chill as the days gone by had been in the wake of the passing of the late-year storms, this day was light and comforting with its dazzling blue skies and sunshine.

The promise of the day was lost, however, to Brin Ohmsford and Rone Leah. Haunted by Allanon’s dark revelation and by a tense expectation of what lay ahead, neither could share much of the warmth that the day had to offer. Separate and withdrawn, each within a dark covering of private emotions and secretive thoughts, Valegirl and highlander rode forward in determined silence through the dappled shadows of the great, dark trees, feeling only the cold that lay buried within themselves.

“Our path hereafter will be a treacherous one,” Allanon had told them as they gathered that morning before the stables where their horses had been tended, his voice low and strangely gentle. “All across the Eastland and through the forests of the Anar, the Wraiths will be watching for us. They know that we come; Paranor removed all question of that. They know as well that they must stop us before we reach the Maelmord. Gnomes will seek us, and where they do not, others who obey the walkers will. No path east into the Ravenshorn will be safe for us.”

His hands had come up then to rest upon their shoulders, drawing them close. “Still, we are but three and not so easily found. The Wraiths and their Gnome eyes will look two ways for our approach-north above the Rabb River and south out of Culhaven. Safe and unobstructed but for themselves, these are the approaches a wise man would choose. We will choose neither, therefore. Instead, we will pass where it is most dangerous-not only to us, but to them as well. We will pass directly east into the central Anar-through the Wolfsktaag, Darklin Reach, and Olden Moor. Older magics than theirs dwell within those regions-magics that they will be hesitant to challenge. The Wolfsktaag are forbidden to the Gnomes, and they will not enter, even though the Wraiths command it. There are things there more dangerous than the Gnomes we seek to avoid, but most lie dormant. If we are quick and cautious, we should pass through unharmed. Darklin Reach and the Moor are the haunts of other magics yet, but there perhaps we shall find some more friendly to our cause than to theirs...”

They rode through the western fringe of the central Anar up into the high ground that formed the doorstep to the rugged, forested humps of the Wolfsktaag. As they traveled, they searched past sunlight and warmth and the brilliant autumn colors for the dark things that lay hidden there. By midday, they had reached the Pass of jade and begun a long, circuitous climb along its southern slope, where trees and scrub hid them from view as they walked their horses in the deep shadow. Midafternoon found them well east of the pass, wending their way upward toward the high peaks. Timber and rock stretched dark and silent about them as the daylight began to wane. By nightfall, they were deep within the mountains. In the trees through which they passed, the shadows slipped now like living things. All the while they searched, yet found no sign of other life and felt themselves to be alone.

It was curious and somehow frightening that they could be so alone, Brin thought as the dusk settled into the mountains and the day came to an end. She should sense at least a touch of life other than their own, yet it was as if these peaks and forests had been stripped. There were no birds within these trees, no insects, no living creatures of any kind. There was only the silence, deep and pervasive-the silence, itself become a living thing in the absence of all other life.

Allanon brought them to a halt in the shelter of a grove of rough and splintering hickory to set their camp. When provisions were sorted, the horses tended, and the camp at ready, the Druid called them to him, ordered that no fire be lighted, and stalked off into the trees with a quick word of farewell. Valegirl and highlander stared after him wordlessly until he was out of sight, then sat down to consume a cold meal of bread, cheese, and dried fruit. They ate in darkness, not speaking, watching the shadows about them for the life that never seemed to come. Overhead, the night sky brightened with a great scattering of stars.

“Where do you think he has gone this night?” Rone Leah wondered after a time. He spoke almost as if he were asking himself the question. Brin shook her head and said nothing, and the highlander glanced away again. “Just like a shadow, isn’t he? Shifts with every change of sun and moon, appears, and then he’s gone again-always for reasons all his own. He wouldn’t share those reasons with us, of course. Not with mere humans like us.” He sighed and set aside his plate. “Except that I guess we’re not mere humans anymore, are we?”

Brin toyed with the bit of bread and cheese that remained on her own plate. “No,” she answered softly.

“Well, no matter. We are who we always were, nevertheless.” He paused, as if wondering how sure of that he really was. Then he leaned forward. “It’s odd, but I don’t feel the same way about him now that I did before. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I still don’t trust him entirely. I can’t. He knows too much that I don’t. But I don’t mistrust him either. He is trying to help, I think, in the best way that he can.”

He stopped, waiting for Brin to agree with him, but the Valegirl stayed silent, eyes turned away.

“Brin what’s troubling you?” he asked finally.

She looked at him and shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

“Is it what he told us last night-that we wouldn’t see him again after this?”

“That, yes. But it’s more than that.”

He hesitated. “Maybe you’re just...”

“Something is wrong,” she cut him short, and her eyes locked on his.

“What?”

“Something is wrong.” She said it slowly, carefully. “With him, with you, with this whole journey-but most especially with me.”

Rone stared at her. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand either. I just feel it.” She pulled her cloak tightly about her, hunching down within its folds. “I’ve felt it for days-ever since the shade of Bremen appeared in the Hadeshorn, and we destroyed that Wraith. I feel something bad coming...something terrible. And I don’t know what it is. I feel, too, that I’m being watched; all the time I’m being watched, but there is never anything there. I feel, worst of all, that I’m being...pulled away from myself, from you and Allanon. Everything is changing from what it was when we started out at Shady Vale. It’s all different, somehow.”

The highlander didn’t say anything for a moment. “I suppose it’s because of what’s happened to us, Brin. The Hadeshorn, Paranor-Allanon telling us what the shade of Bremen told to him. It had to change us. And we’ve been away from the Vale and the highlands for many days now, from everything familiar and comfortable. That has to be a part of it, too.”

“Away from Jair,” she said quietly.

“And your parents.”

“But Jair most of all,” she insisted, as if searching for a reason for this. Then she shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s something else, something besides what’s happened with Allanon and missing home and family and...That’s too easy, Rone. I can feel it, deep down within me. Something that...”

She trailed off, her dark eyes uncertain. She looked away. “I wish I had Jair here with me now-just for a few moments. I think he would know what was wrong. We’re so close that way...” She caught herself, then laughed softly. “Isn’t that silly? Wishing for something like that when it would probably mean nothing?”

“I miss him, too.” The highlander tried a quick smile. “At least he might take our minds off our own problems. He’d be out tracking Mord Wraiths or something.”

He stopped, realizing what he had said, then shrugged away his discomfort. “Anyway, there’s probably nothing wrong-not really. If there was, Allanon would sense it, wouldn’t he? After all, he seems to sense everything else.”

Brin was a long time responding. “I wonder if that is still so,” she said finally. “I wonder if he still can.”

They were silent then, neither looking back at the other as they stared fixedly into the dark and pondered their separate thoughts. As the minutes slipped away, the stillness of the mountain night seemed to press in about them, anxious to wrap them in the blanket of its stark, empty solitude. It seemed more certain with the passing of each moment that some sound must break the spell, the distant cry of a living creature, the small shifting of forest wood or mountain rock, or the rustle of leaf or insect’s buzz. But nothing did. There was only the quiet.

“I feel as if we are drifting,” Brin said suddenly.

Rone Leah shook his head. “We travel a fixed course, Brin. There is no drifting in that.”

She looked over at him. “I wish I had listened to you and had never come.”

The highlander stared at her in shock. The beautiful, dusky face stayed turned toward his own. In the girl’s black eyes there was a mix of weariness and doubt that bordered too closely on fear. For just an instant he had the unpleasant sensation that the girl who sat across from him was not Brin Ohmsford.

“I will protect you,” he said softly, urgently. “I promise.”

She smiled then, a faint, uneven smile that flickered and was gone. Gently her hands reached out to touch his own. “I believe that,” she whispered in reply.

But somewhere deep inside, she found herself wondering if he really could.

It was nearly midnight when Allanon returned to the campsite, stepping from the trees as silently as any shadow that moved within the Wolfsktaag. Moonlight slipped through the boughs overhead in thin streamers of silver and cast the whole of the night in eerie brightness. Wrapped within their blankets, Rone and Brin lay sleeping. Across the broad, forested sweep of the mountains, all was still. It was as if he alone kept watch.

The Druid paused several dozen feet from where his charges slept. He had walked to be alone, to think, and to ponder the certainty of what was to be. How unexpected the words of Bremen had been when the shade had spoken them-how strangely unexpected. They should not have been, of course. He had known what must be from the beginning. Yet there was always the feeling that somehow it might be changed. He was a Druid, and all things were possible.

His black eyes shifted across the mountain range. The yesterdays of his life were far away, the struggles he had weathered and the roads he had walked down to reach this moment. The tomorrows seemed distant, too, but that was an illusion, he knew. The tomorrows were right before him.

So much had been accomplished, he mused. But not enough. He turned and looked down at the sleeping Valegirl. She was the one upon whom everything would depend. She would not believe that, of course, or the truth about the power of the wishsong, for she chose to see the Elven magic in human terms, and the magic had never been human. He had shown her what it could be-just a glimpse of the limits to which it could be taken, for she could stand no more, he sensed. She was a child in her understanding of the magic and her coming of age would be difficult. More difficult, he knew, because he could not help her.

His long arms wrapped tightly within the black robes. Could he not help her? There it was again. He smiled darkly. That decision that he should never reveal all, only so much as he felt necessary-that decision that as it had been for Shea Ohmsford in a time long past, truth was best learned by the one who would use it. He could tell her, of course-or at least he could try to tell her. Her father would have said that he should tell her, for Wil Ohmsford had believed the same about the Elven girl Amberle. But the decision was not Wil Ohmsford’s to make. It was his own.

It was always his own.

A touch of bitterness twisted his mouth. Gone were the Councils at Paranor when many voices and many minds had joined in finding solutions to the problems of mankind. The Druids, the wise men of old, were no more. The histories and Paranor and all the hopes and dreams they had once inspired were lost, and only he remained.

All of the problems of mankind were now his, as they always had been his and would continue to be his for as long as he lived. That decision, too, had been his to make. He had made it when he had chosen to be what he was. But he was the last. Would there be another to make the same decision when he was gone?

Alone, uncertain, he stood at the edge of the forest shadows and looked down at Brin Ohmsford.

They rode east again at daybreak. It was another brilliant, sunfilled autumn day-warm, sweet, and alive with dreams of what could be. As night fled westward from the Wolfsktaag, the sun lifted out of the eastern horizon, slipping from the forestline in golden streamers that stretched and spread to the darkest corners of the land and chased the gloom before them. Even within the vast and empty solitude of the forbidden mountains there was a feeling of comfort and peace.

Brin thought of home. How beautiful the Vale would be on a day such as this one, she thought to herself as she walked her horse along the ridgeline and felt the sun’s warmth upon her face. Even here the colors of the season spread in riotous disarray against a backdrop of moss and groundcover still green with summer’s touch. Smells of life filled her nostrils and left her heady with their mix. In the Vale, the villagers would be awake now, about to begin their day’s work. Breakfast would be underway, the succulent aroma of the foods that were cooking escaping through windows thrown wide to catch the warmth of the day. Later, when the morning chores were done, the village families would gather for stories and games on an afternoon that too seldom came this time of year, anxious to take advantage of its ease and recapture for at least a brief time the memory of the summer gone.

I wish I were there to share it, she thought. I wish I were home.

The morning slipped quickly away, its passing lost in the warmth of the sun and the memories and the dreams. Ridgelines and mountain slopes came and went, and ahead the deep forests of the lowlands beyond the Wolfsktaag began to appear in brief glimpses through the humped peaks. By noon, the bulk of the range was behind them, and they were starting down.

It was shortly thereafter that they became aware of the Chard Rush.

It began as sound long before it could be seen-a deep, penetrating roar from beyond a wooded ridge that broke high and rugged against the sweep of the Eastland sky. Like an invisible wave, it surged toward them, a low and sullen rumble that shook the rutted earth with the force of its passing. Then the wind seemed to catch it, magnifying its intensity until the forest air was filled with thunder. The way forward leveled off, and the timber began to thicken. Atop the ridge head, freezing spray and a deep, rolling mist masked all but the faintest trace of distant blue from a noonday sky now lost far above the tangled branches of the forest trees with their damp, moss-grown bark and earth-colored leaves shimmering bright with wetness. Ahead, the trail sloped upward once more through clusters of rock and fallen timber that loomed spectrally out of the haze like frozen giants. And still there was only the sound, massive and deafening.

Yet slowly, as the trail wound on and the ridgeline grew close, the mist began to dissipate beneath the thrust of the wind as it raked down across the summit of the land, out of the Wolfsktaag to the lowlands east. The bowl of the valley opened before them, its wooded slopes dark and forbidding in the shadow of the mountain peaks beneath a line of ridges colored gold with sunlight. And here, at last, the source of the sound was discovered-a waterfall. An awesome, towering column of churning white water poured wildly through a break in the cliff rock and tumbled downward hundreds of feet through clouds of mist and spray that hung thick across the whole of the western end of the valley, downward into a great river that twisted and turned through rocks and trees until it was lost from view.

In a line, the three riders drew their mounts to a halt.

“The Chard Rush.” Allanon pointed to the falls.

[[pg 259 picture]]

Brin gazed down wordlessly. It was as if she stood at the edge of the world. She could not describe what she felt at that moment, only what she saw. Below, barely a hundred yards distant, the waters of the Chard Rush crashed and swirled down rock and through crevice in a magnificent, breathtaking spectacle that left her filled with wonder. Far beyond the valley into which the waters fell, the distant Eastland spread to the horizon, shimmering slightly through the windblown spray of the falls, colored like a painting faded and worn with age, its clarity muted. A steady mist washed over the Valegirl’s dusky face and whipped through her long black hair and forest clothing like a light rain. She blinked the water from her eyes and breathed deeply the cold, hard air. In a way she could not explain, she felt as if she had been born again.

Then Allanon was motioning them ahead, and the three riders began working their way down the inside slope of the wooded valley, angling toward the break in the cliff face where the falls dropped away. Single file, they wound through brush and slanted pine that clung tenaciously to the rocky soil of these upper reaches, following what appeared to be a worn, rutted pathway that ran down past the falls. Rising clouds of mist enveloped them, damp and clinging against their skin. The wind died behind the rim of the ridgeline, the sound of its shrill whistle lost in the muffled roar of the falls. Sunlight dropped away into shadow, a false twilight settling over the forestland through which they passed in gradually deepening waves.

Finally they reached the base of the falls and continued along the dark pathway that had brought them there to emerge at last from mist and shadow into warm sunlight. They rode eastward along the banks of the river through deep grass still green and fresh beneath a scattering of pine and yellow-leaved oak. Gradually the roar of the falls subsided and the air grew less chill. In the trees about them, birds flew in sudden bursts of color.

Life had come back again to the land. Brin sighed gratefully, thinking how relieved she was to be clear of the mountains.

And then abruptly Allanon reined his horse to a stop.

Almost as if the Druid had willed that it should be so, the forest about them went still-a deep, layered silence that hung over everything like a shroud. Their horses came to a halt behind his. Valegirl and highlander stared at the big man and then at each other, surprise and wariness in their eyes. Allanon did not move. He simply sat there astride his horse, rigid against the light, staring ahead into the shadows of the forest trees and listening.

“Allanon, what...?” Brin started to ask, but the Druid’s hand lifted sharply to cut her short.

At last he turned, and the lean, dark face had drawn tight and hard, a look within the narrow eyes that neither Valegirl nor highlander had ever seen. In that instant, without understanding why it was that the feeling had come over her, Brin was suddenly terrified.

The Druid did not speak. Instead, he smiled-a quick, sad smile-and turned away. His hand beckoned them after, and he started ahead into the trees.

They rode only a short distance through a scattering of trees and dying scrub to where a small glen opened before them beside the banks of the river. There Allanon again drew his mount to a halt and this time dismounted. Rone and Brin followed him down. Together they stood there before the horses, looking out over the glen into a deepening stand of trees beyond.

“What’s wrong, Allanon?” Brin finished the question this time.

The Druid did not turn. “Something comes. Listen.”

They waited, motionless beside him. So complete was the silence now that even the sound of their own breathing was harsh within their ears. Brin’s premonition whispered anew in her mind, come from the rain and the gray of the Dragon’s Teeth to find her. Fear stroked her skin with its chill touch and she shivered.

Suddenly, there was a sound, faint and cautious-a soft rustling of dried leaves as something moved among them.

“There!” Rone cried, his hand pointing.

Something came into view through the trees on the far side of the glen. Still hidden within the gloom, it stopped suddenly, catching sight of the three who watched it. For long moments, it stayed frozen within its shelter, invisible eyes staring out at them, a silent shadow within the dark.

Then, with swift and certain intent, it stepped from the trees into the light. The chill that had settled within Brin turned instantly to frost. She had never seen anything like the creature that stood before them now. It was man-shaped in appearance, raised upright in a half-crouch, its long arms dangling loosely before it. It was a big, strong creature, lean and heavily muscled. Its skin was a strange reddish color, drawn tight against its powerful body; it was hairless except for a thick ruff that grew about its loins. Great, hooked claws curled from its fingers and toes. Its face lifted toward them, and it was the face of some grotesque beast, blunt and scarred. Gleaming yellow eyes fixed upon their own, and its snout split wide in a hideous grin to reveal a mass of crooked teeth.

“What is it?” Rone Leah whispered in horror.

“What was promised,” Allanon replied softly, his voice strangely distracted.

The reddish thing came forward a few steps further to the edge of the glen. There it stopped and waited.

Allanon turned to the Valegirl and the highlander. “It is a Jachyra, a thing of another age, a thing of great evil. It was locked from the lands by the magic of the creatures of faerie in a time before the dawn of man-in a time even farther back than that in which the Elves created the Forbidding. Only magic of equal power could have set it free again.

He straightened and brought his black robes close about him. “It appears that I was wrong-the Mord Wraiths did anticipate that we might come this way. Only within a place like these mountains, a place where the magic still lives, could a thing like the Jachyra be set loose again. The Wraiths have given us an adversary far more dangerous than they to overcome.”

“Suppose we find out how dangerous,” Rone suggested bravely and drew forth the ebony blade of the Sword of Leah.

“No.” Allanon caught his arm quickly. “This battle is mine.”

The highlander glanced at Brin for support. “It seems to me that any battle to be fought on this journey must be fought by all of us.”

But Allanon shook his head. “Not this time, Prince of Leah. You have shown your courage and your devotion to this girl. I no longer question either. But the power of this creature is beyond you. I must face it alone.”

“Allanon, don’t!” Brin cried suddenly, grasping his arm.

He looked down at her then, the worn face and the eyes that penetrated past all that she would hide a mask of sad determination. They stared at each other, and then without quite knowing why she did so, she released him.

“Don’t,” she repeated softly.

Allanon reached to touch her cheek. At the fat side of the glen, the Jachyra gave a sudden, sharp cry that shattered the silence of the afternoon-a cry that was almost like a laugh.

“Let me come with you!” Rone Leah insisted, again starting forward.

The Druid blocked his way. “Stand fast, Prince of Leah. Wait until you are called.” The black eyes fixed those of the highlander. “Do not interfere in this. No matter what happens, stay clear. Give me your promise.”

Rone hesitated. “Allanon, I cannot...”

“Give me your promise!”

The highlander stood before him defiantly for an instant longer and then reluctantly nodded. “I promise.”

The Druid’s eyes turned back to the Valegirl one last time, a lost and distant look in the gaze they gave to her. “Keep you safe, Brin Ohmsford,” he whispered.

Then he wheeled about and started down into the glen.