The Scions of Shannara (19 page)

 

XII

 

P
ar Ohmsford drifted through a landscape of dreams.

He was both within himself and without as he journeyed, a participant and a viewer. There was constant motion, sometimes as charged as a voyage across a stormy sea, sometimes as gentle as the summer wind through the trees. He spoke to himself alternately in the dark silence of his mind and from within a mirrored self-image. His voice was a disembodied whisper and a thunderous shout. Colors appeared and faded to black and white. Sounds came and departed. He was all things on his journey, and he was none.

The dreams were his reality.

He dreamed in the beginning that he was falling, tumbling downward into a pit as black as night and as endless as the cycle of the seasons. There were pain and fear in him; he could not find himself. Sometimes there were voices, calling to him in warning, in comfort, or in horror. He convulsed within himself. He knew somehow that if he did not stop falling, he would be forever lost.

He did stop finally. He slowed and leveled, and his convulsions ceased. He was in a field of wildflowers as wondrous as a rainbow. Birds and butterflies scattered at his approach, filling the air with new brightness, and the smells of the field were soft and fragrant. There was no sound. He tried to speak so that there might be, but found himself voiceless. Nor did he have touch. He could feel nothing of himself, nothing of the world about him. There was warmth, soothing and extended, but that was all.

He drifted and a voice somewhere deep within him whispered that he was dead.

The voice, he thought, belonged to Walker Boh.

Then the world of sweet smells and sights disappeared, and he was in a world of darkness and stench. Fire erupted from the earth and spat at an angry, smudge-colored sky. Shadowen flitted and leaped, red eyes glinting as they whipped about him, hovering one moment, ducking away the next. Clouds rolled overhead, filled with lightning, borne on a wind that howled in fury. He felt himself buffeted and tossed, thrown like a dried leaf across the earth, and he sensed it was the end of all things. Touch and voice returned, and he felt his pain once more and cried out with it.

“Par?”

The voice came once and was gone again—Coll's voice. But he saw Coll in his dream then, stretched against a gathering of rocks, lifeless and bloodied, eyes open in accusation. “You left me. You abandoned me.” He screamed and the magic of the wishsong threw images everywhere. But the images turned into monsters that wheeled back to devour him. He could feel their teeth and claws. He could feel their touch . . .

He came awake.

Rain fell into his face, and his eyes opened. There was darkness all about, the sense of others close at hand, a feeling of motion, and the coppery taste of blood. There was shouting, voices that called to one another against the fury of a storm. He rose up, choking, spitting. Hands bore him back again, slipping against his body and face.

“. . . awake again, hold him . . .”

“. . . too strong, like he's ten instead of . . .”

“Walker! Hurry!”

Trees thrashed in the background, long-limbed giants lifting into the roiling black, the wind howling all about them. They threw shadows against cliffs that blocked their passage and threatened to pen them up. Par heard himself scream.

Lightning crashed and thunder rolled, filling the dark with echoes of madness. A wash of red screened his vision.

Then Allanon was there—Allanon! He came from nowhere, all in black robes, a figure out of legend and time. He bent close to Par, his voice a whisper that somehow managed to rise above the chaos. Sleep, Par, he soothed. One weathered hand reached out and touched the Valeman, and the chaos dissipated and was replaced by a profound sense of peace.

Par drifted away again, far down into himself, fighting now because he sensed that he would live if he could just will it to be so. Some part of him remembered what had happened—that the Werebeasts had seized him, that their touch had poisoned him, that the poison had made him sick, and that the sickness had dropped him into that black abyss. Walker had come for him, found him somehow, and saved him from those creatures. He saw Rumor's yellow lamp eyes, blinking in warning, lidding and going out. He saw Coll and Morgan. He saw Steff, his smile sardonic, and Teel, enigmatic and silent.

He saw the Shadowen girl-child, begging again to be hugged, trying to enter his body. He felt himself resist, saw her thrown back, watched as she disappeared. Shades! She had tried to enter him, to come into him, to put herself within his skin and become him! That was what they were, he thought in a burst of understanding—shadows that lacked substance of their own and took the bodies of men. And women. And children.

But can shadows have life?

His thoughts jumbled around unanswerable questions, and he slipped from reason to confusion. His mind slept, and his journey through the land of dreams wore on. He climbed mountains filled with creatures like the Gnawl, crossed rivers and lakes of mist and hidden dangers, traversed forests where daylight never penetrated, and swept on into moors where mist stirred in an airless, empty cauldron of silence.

Help me,
he begged. But there was no one to hear.

Time suspended then. The journey ended and the dreams faded into nothingness. There was a moment's pause at their end, and then waking. He knew he had slept, but not for how long. He knew only that there had been a passage of time when the dreams had ended and dreamless sleep had begun.

More important, he knew that he was alive.

He stirred gingerly, barely more than a twitch, feeling the softness of sheets and a bed beneath him, aware that he was stretched out full-length and that he was warm and snug. He did not want to move yet, frightened that he might still be dreaming. He let the feel of the sheets soak through him. He listened to the sound of his own breathing in his ears. He tasted the dryness of the air.

Then he let his eyes slip open. He was in a small, sparsely furnished room lit by a single lamp set on a table at his bedside. The walls of the room were bare, the ceiling beams uncovered. A comforter wrapped him and pillows cradled his head. A break in the curtains that covered the windows opposite where he lay told him it was night.

Morgan Leah dozed in a chair just inside the circle of light given off by the lamp, his chin resting on his chest, his arms folded loosely. “Morgan?” he called, his voice sounding fuzzy.

The Highlander's eyes snapped open, his hawk face instantly alert. He blinked, then jumped to his feet. “Par! Par, are you awake? Good heavens, we've been worried sick!” He rushed over as if to hug his friend, then thought better of it. He ran the fingers of one hand through his rust-colored hair distractedly. “How do you feel? Are you all right?”

Par grinned weakly. “I don't know yet. I'm still waking up. What happened?”

“What
didn't
happen is more like it!” the other replied heatedly. “You almost died, do you realize that?”

Par nodded. “I guessed it. What about Coll, Morgan?”

“Sleeping, waiting for you to come around. I packed him off several hours ago when he fell out of his chair. You know Coll. Wait here, I'll get him.” He grinned. “Wait here, I tell you—as if you were going anywhere. Pretty funny.”

Par had a dozen things he wanted to say, questions he wanted to ask, but the Highlander was already out the door and gone. It didn't matter, he guessed. He lay back quietly, flooded with relief. All that mattered was that Coll was all right.

Morgan returned almost immediately, Coll beside him, and Coll, unlike Morgan, did not hesitate as he reached down and practically squeezed the life out of Par in his enthusiasm at finding him awake. Par hugged him back, albeit weakly, and the three laughed as if they had just enjoyed the biggest joke of their lives.

“Shades, we thought we'd lost you!” Coll exclaimed softly. He wore a bandage taped to his forehead, and his face seemed pale. “You were very sick, Par.”

Par smiled and nodded. He'd heard enough of that. “Will someone tell me what happened?” His eyes shifted from one face to the other. “Where are we anyway?”

“Storlock,” Morgan announced. One eyebrow arched. “Walker Boh brought you here.”

“Walker?”

Morgan grinned with satisfaction. “Thought you'd be surprised to learn that—Walker Boh coming out of the Wilderun, Walker Boh appearing in the first place for that matter.” He sighed. “Well, it's a long story, so I guess we'd better start at the beginning.”

He did, telling the story with considerable help from Coll, the two of them stepping on each other's words in their eagerness to make certain that nothing was overlooked. Par listened in growing surprise as the tale unfolded.

Coll, it seemed, had been felled by a Gnome sling when the Spider Gnomes attacked them in that clearing at the eastern end of the valley at Hearthstone. He had only been stunned, but, by the time he had recovered consciousness, Par and their attackers were gone. It was raining buckets by then, the trail disappearing back into the earth as quickly as it was made, and Coll was too weak to give chase in any case. So he stumbled back to the cottage where he found the others and told them what had occurred. It was already dark by then and still raining, but Coll demanded they go back out anyway and search for his brother. They did, Morgan, Steff, Teel, and himself, groping about blindly for hours and finding nothing. When it became impossible to see anything, Steff insisted they give it up for the night, get some rest and start out again fresh in the morning. That was what they did, and that was how Coll encountered Walker Boh.

“We split up, trying to cover as much ground as possible, working the north valley, because I knew from the stories of Brin and Jair Ohmsford that the Spider Gnomes made their homes on Toffer Ridge and it was likely they had come from there. At least, I hoped so, because that was all we had to go on. We agreed that if we didn't find you right away we would just keep on going until we reached the Ridge.” He shook his head. “We were pretty desperate.”

“We were,” Morgan agreed.

“Anyway, I was all the way to the northeast edge of the valley when, all of a sudden, there was Walker and that giant cat, big as a house! He said that he'd sensed something. He asked me what had happened, what was wrong. I was so surprised to see him that I didn't even think to ask what he was doing there or why he had decided to appear after hiding all that time. I just told him what he wanted to know.”

“Do you know what he said then?” Morgan interrupted, gray eyes finding Par's, a hint of the mischievousness in them.

“He said,” Coll took control again of the conversation, “ ‘Wait here, this is no task for you; I will bring him back'—as if we were children playing at a grown-up's game!”

“But he was as good as his word,” Morgan noted.

Coll sighed. “Well, true enough,” he admitted grudgingly.

Walker Boh was gone a full day and night, but when he returned to Hearthstone, where Coll and his companions were indeed waiting, he had Par with him. Par had been infected by the touch of the Werebeasts and was near death. The only hope for him, Walker insisted, lay at Storlock, the community of Gnome healers. The Stors had experience in dealing with afflictions of the mind and spirit and could combat the Werebeasts' poison.

They set out at once, the six of them less the cat, who had been left behind. They pushed west out of Hearthstone and the Wilderun, following the Chard Rush upriver to the Wolfsktaag, crossing through the Pass of Jade, and finally reaching the village of the Stors. It had taken them two days, traveling almost constantly. Par would have died if not for Walker, who had used an odd sort of magic that none of them had understood to prevent the poison from spreading and to keep Par sleeping and calm. At times, Par had thrashed and cried out, waking feverish and spitting blood—once in the middle of a ferocious storm they had encountered in the Pass of Jade—but Walker had been there to soothe him, to touch him, to say something that let him sleep once more.

“Even so, we've been in Storlock for almost three days and this is the first time you've been awake,” Coll finished. He paused, eyes lowering. “It was very close, Par.”

Par nodded, saying nothing. Even without being able to remember anything clearly, he had a definite sense of just how close it had been. “Where is Walker?” he asked finally.

“We don't know,” Morgan answered with a shrug. “We haven't seen him since we arrived. He just disappeared.”

“Gone back to the Wilderun, I suppose,” Coll added, a touch of bitterness in his voice.

“Now, Coll,” Morgan soothed.

Coll held up his hands. “I know, Morgan—I shouldn't judge. He was there to help when we needed him. He saved Par's life. I'm grateful for that.”

“Besides, I think he's still around,” Morgan said quietly. When the other two looked inquiringly at him, he simply shrugged.

Par told them what had befallen him after his capture by the Spider Gnomes. He was still reasoning out a good part of it, so he hesitated from time to time in his telling. He was convinced that the Spider Gnomes had been sent specifically to find him, otherwise they would have taken Coll as well. The Shadowen had sent them, that girl-child. Yet how had it known who he was or where he could be found?

The little room was silent as they thought. “The magic,” Morgan suggested finally. “They all seem interested in the magic. This one must have sensed it as well.”

“All the way from Toffer Ridge?” Par shook his head doubtfully.

“And why not go after Morgan as well?” Coll asked suddenly. “After all, he commands the magic of the Sword of Leah.”

“No, no, that's not the sort of magic they care about,” Morgan replied quickly. “It's Par's sort of magic that interests them, draws them—magic that's part of the body or spirit.”