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 andscaled, 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 ma.s.s 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 gra.s.sland, 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 spa.r.s.e shelter of an oak broken and ravaged by years of seasons pa.s.sing.

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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sage 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 gra.s.sland. 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 theprofession 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 pa.s.sed over the curtained windows, the light of day fading into dusk. The Valegirl watched its pa.s.sing 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, Bremensaw, 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed..."

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 pa.s.s."

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 pa.s.ses, Prince of Leah. I must pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing of the late-year storms, this day was light and comforting with its dazzling blue skies and sunshine.