The Scions of Shannara (22 page)

Darkness descended and the stars began to flicker into view, a scattering here and there at first, and then the sky was filled with them. No moon showed itself; it was the promised time when the sun's pale sister wore black. Daylight's sounds faded and night's remained hushed. The cooking fire crackled and snapped in the silence as conversation lagged. One or two smoked, and the air was filled with the pungent smell. Morgan took out the bright length of the Sword of Leah and began to polish it absently. Wren and Garth fed and curried the horses. Walker moved up the trail a short distance and stood staring into the mountains. Others sat lost in thought.

Everyone waited.

 

It was midnight when Cogline returned for them. The old man appeared out of the shadows like a ghost, materializing so suddenly that they all started. No one, not even Walker, had seen him coming.

“It is time,” he announced.

They came to their feet voicelessly and followed him. He took them up the trail from their campsite into the gradually thickening shadows of the Dragon's Teeth. Although the stars shone brightly overhead when they started out, the mountains soon began to close about, leaving the little company shrouded in blackness. Cogline did not slow; he seemed to possess cat's eyes. His charges struggled to keep pace. Par, Coll, and Morgan were closest to the old man, Wren and Garth came next, Steff and Teel behind them, and Walker Boh brought up the rear. The trail steepened quickly after they reached the beginning peaks, and they moved through a narrow defile that opened like a pocket into the mountains. It was silent here, so still that they could hear one another breathe as they labored upward.

The minutes slipped away. Boulders and cliff walls hindered their passage, and the trail wound about like a snake. Loose rock carpeted the whole of the mountains, and the climbers had to scramble over it. Still Cogline pressed on. Par stumbled and scraped his knees, finding the loose rock as sharp as glass. Much of it was a strange, mirrorlike black that reminded him of coal. He scooped up a small piece out of curiosity and stuck it in his pocket.

Then abruptly the mountains split apart before them, and they stepped out onto the rim of the Valley of Shale. It was little more than a broad, shallow depression strewn with crushed stone that glistened with the same mirrored blackness as the rock Par had pocketed. Nothing grew in the valley; it was stripped of life. There was a lake at its center, its greenish black waters moving in sluggish swirls in the windless expanse.

Cogline stopped momentarily and looked back at them. “The Hadeshorn,” he whispered. “Home for the spirits of the ages, for the Druids of the past.” His weathered old face had an almost reverent look to it. Then he turned away and started them down into the valley.

Except for the huff of their breathing and the rasp of their boots on the loose rock, the valley, too, was wrapped in silence. Echoes of their movements played in the stillness like children in the slow heat of a midsummer's day. Eyes darted watchfully, seeking ghosts where there were none to find, imagining life in every shadow. It was strangely warm here, the heat of the day captured and held in the airless bowl through the cool of the night. Par felt a trickle of sweat begin to run down his back.

Then they were on the valley floor, closely bunched as they made their way toward the lake. They could see the movement of the waters more clearly now, the way the swirls worked against each other, haphazard, unbidden. They could hear the rippling of tiny waves as they lapped. There was the pungent scent of things ageing and decayed.

They were still several dozen yards from the water's edge when Cogline brought them to a halt, both hands lifting in caution. “Stand fast, now. Come no closer. The waters of the Hadeshorn are death to mortals, poison to the touch!” He crouched down and put a finger to his lips as if hushing a child.

They did as they were bidden, children indeed before the power they sensed sleeping there. They could feel it, all of them, a palpable thing that hung in the air like wood smoke from a fire. They remained where they were, alert, anxious, filled with a mix of wonder and hesitancy. No one spoke. The star-filled sky stretched away endlessly overhead, canopied from horizon to horizon, and it seemed as if the whole of the heavens was focused on the valley, that lake, and the nine of them who kept watch.

At last Cogline lifted from his crouch and came back to them, beckoning with birdlike movements of his hands to draw them close about him. When they were gathered in a knot that locked them shoulder to shoulder, he spoke.

“Allanon will come just before dawn.” The sharp old eyes regarded them solemnly. “He wishes me to speak with you first. He is no longer what he was in life. He is just a shade now. His purchase in this world is but the blink of an eye. Each time he crosses over from the spirit world, it requires tremendous effort. He can stay only a little while. What time he is allotted he must use wisely. He will use that time to tell you of the need he has of you. He has left it to me to explain to you why that need exists. I am to tell you of the Shadowen.”

“You've spoken to him?” asked Walker Boh quickly.

Cogline said nothing.

“Why wait until now to tell us about the Shadowen?” Par was suddenly irritated. “Why now, Cogline, when you could have done so before?”

The old man shook his head, his face both reproving and sympathetic. “It was not permitted, youngster. Not until all of you had been brought together.”

“Games!” Walker muttered and shook his head in disgust.

The old man ignored him. “Think what you like, only listen. This is what Allanon would have me tell you of the Shadowen. They are an evil beyond all imagining. They are not the rumors or the tall tales that men would have them be, but creatures as real as you and I. They are born of a circumstance that Allanon in all his wisdom and planning did not foresee. When he passed from the world of mortal men, Allanon believed the age of magic at an end and a new age begun. The Warlock Lord was no more. The Demons of the old world of faerie were again imprisoned within the Forbidding. The Ildatch was destroyed. Paranor was gone into history and the last of the Druids were about to go with it. It seemed the need for magic was past.”

“The need is never past,” Walker said quietly.

Again, the old man ignored him. “The Shadowen are an aberration. They are a magic that grew out of the use of other magics, a residue of what has gone before. They began as a seeding that lay dormant within the Four Lands, undetected during the time of Allanon, a seeding that came to life only after the Druids and their protective powers were gone. No one could have known they were there, not even Allanon. They were the leavings of magic come and gone, and they were as invisible as dust on a pathway.”

“Wait a minute!” Par interjected. “What are you saying, Cogline? That the Shadowen are just bits and pieces of some stray magic?”

Cogline took a deep breath, his hands locking before him. “Valeman, I told you once before that for all the use you have of magic, you still know little about it. Magic is as much a force of nature as the fire at the earth's core, the tidal waves that sweep out of the ocean, the winds that flatten forests or the famine that starves nations. It does not happen and then disappear without effect! Think! What of Wil Ohmsford and his use of the Elf-stones when his Elven blood no longer permitted such use? It left as its residue the wishsong that found life in your ancestors! Was that an inconsequential magic? All uses of the magic have effects beyond the immediate. And all are significant.”

“Which magic was it that created the Shadowen?” asked Coll, his blocky face impassive.

The old man shook his wispy head. “Allanon does not know. There is no way of being certain. It could have happened at anytime during the lives of Shea Ohmsford and his descendents. There was always magic in use in those times, much of it evil. The Shadowen could have been born of any part of it.”

He paused. “The Shadowen were nothing at first. They were the debris of magic spent. Somehow they survived, their presence unknown. It was not until Allanon and Paranor were gone that they emerged into the Four Lands and began to gain strength. There was a vacuum in the order of things by then. A void must be filled in all events, and the Shadowen were quick to fill this one.”

“I don't understand,” Par said quickly. “What sort of vacuum do you mean?”

“And why didn't Allanon foresee it happening?” added Wren.

The old man held up his fingers and began crooking them downward one by one as he spoke. “Life has always been cyclical. Power comes and goes; it takes different forms. Once, it was science that gave mankind power. Of late, it has been magic.

Allanon foresaw the return of science as a means to progress—especially with the passing of the Druids and Paranor. That was the age that would be. But the development of science failed to materialize quickly enough to fill the vacuum. Partly this was because of the Federation. The Federation kept the old ways intact; it proscribed the use of any form of power but its own—and its own was primitive and military. It expanded its influence throughout the Four Lands until all were subject to its dictates. The Elves had an effect on matters as well; for reasons we still don't know they disappeared. They were a balancing force, the last people of the faerie world of old. Their presence was necessary, if the transition from magic to science was to be made faultlessly.”

He shook his head. “Yet even had the Elves remained in the world of men and the Federation been less a presence, the Shadowen might have come alive. The vacuum was there the moment the Druids passed away. There was no help for it.” He sighed. “Allanon did not foresee as he should have. He did not anticipate an aberration on the order of the Shadowen. He did what he could to keep the Four Lands safe while he was alive—and he kept himself alive for as long as was possible.”

“Too little of each, it seems,” Walker said pointedly.

Cogline looked at him, and the anger in his voice was palpable. “Well, Walker Boh. Perhaps one day you will have an opportunity to demonstrate that you can do it better.”

There was a strained moment of silence as the two faced each other in the blackness. Then Cogline looked away. “You need to understand what the Shadowen are. The Shadowen are parasites. They live off mortal creatures. They are a magic that feeds on living things. They enter them, absorb them, become them. But for some reason the results are not always the same. Young Par, think of the woodswoman that you and Coll encountered at the time of our first meeting. She was a Shadowen of the more obvious sort, a once-mortal creature infected, a ravaged thing that could no more help herself than an animal made mad. But the little girl on Toffer Ridge, do you remember her?”

His fingers brushed Par's cheek lightly. Instantly, the Valeman was filled with the memory of that monster to whom the Spider Gnomes had given him. He could feel her stealing against him, begging him, “hug me, hug me,” desperate to make him embrace her. He flinched, shaken by the impact of the memory.

Cogline's hand closed firmly about his arm. “That, too, was a Shadowen, but one that could not be so easily detected. They appear to varying extents as we do, hidden within human form. Some become grotesque in appearance and behavior; those you can readily identify. Others are more difficult to recognize.”

“But why are there some of one kind and some of the other?” Par asked uncertainly.

Cogline's brow furrowed. “Once again, Allanon does not know. The Shadowen have kept their secret even from him.”

The old man looked away for a long moment, then back again. His face was a mask of despair. “This is like a plague. The sickness is spread until the number infected multiplies impossibly. Any of the Shadowen can transmit the disease. Their magic gives them the means to overcome almost any defense. The more of them there are, the stronger they become. What would you do to stop a plague where the source was unknown, the symptoms undetectable until after they had taken root, and the cure a mystery?”

The members of the little company glanced at one another uneasily in the silence that followed.

Finally, Wren said, “Do they have a purpose in what they do, Cogline? A purpose beyond simply infecting living things? Do they think as you and I or are they . . . mindless?”

Par stared at the girl in undisguised admiration. It was the best question any of them had asked. He should have been the one to ask it.

Cogline was rubbing his hands together slowly. “They think as you and I, Rover girl, and they most certainly do have a purpose in what they do. But that purpose remains unclear.”

“They would subvert us,” Morgan offered sharply. “Surely that's purpose enough.”

But Cogline shook his head. “They would do more still, I think.”

And abruptly Par found himself recalling the dreams that Allanon had sent, the visions of a nightmarish world in which everything was blackened and withered and life was reduced to something barely recognizable. Reddened eyes blinked like bits of fire, and shadow forms flitted through a haze of ash and smoke.

This is what the Shadowen would do, he realized.

But how could they bring such a vision to pass?

He glanced without thinking at Wren and found his question mirrored in her eyes. He recognized what she was thinking instinctively. He saw it reflected in Walker Boh's eyes as well. They had shared the dreams and those dreams bound them, so much so that for an instant their thinking was the same.

Cogline's face lifted slightly, pulling free of the darkness that shaded it. “Something guides the Shadowen,” he whispered.

“There is power here that transcends anything we have ever known . . .”

He let the sentence trail off, ragged and unfinished, as if unable to give voice to any ending. His listeners looked at one another.

“What are we to do?” Wren asked finally.