Heritage of Shannara 01 - The Druid of Shannara
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Whosoever shall have cause and right shall wield it to its proper end.
Himself. Yet why? Because Allanon had decreed that it must be so? Had Allanon told the truth? Or simply a part of the truth? Or was he games-playing once more? What could Walker Boh believe?
He stood there, solitary, filled with indecision and dread, wondering what it was that had brought him to this end. He saw his hand begin to shake.
Then suddenly, unexpectedly, the whispers broke through his defenses in a torrent and turned to screams.
No!
He brought the Black Elfstone up almost without thinking, opened his hand, and thrust the dark gem forth.
Instantly the Elfstone flared to life, its magic a sharp tingling against his skin. Black light—the nonlight, the engulfing darkness. Whosoever. He watched the light gather before him, building on itself. Shall have cause and right. The backlash of the magic rushed through him, shredding doubt and fear, silencing whispers and screams, filling him with unimaginable power.
Shall wield it to its proper end.
Now!
He sent the black light hurtling forth, a huge tunnel burrowing through the air, swallowing everything in its path, engulfing substance and space and time. It exploded against the crest of the empty bluff, and Walker was hammered back as if struck a blow by an invisible fist. Yet he did not fall. The magic rushed through him, bracing him, wrapping him in armor. The black light spread like ink against the sky, rising, broadening, angling first this way, then that, channeling itself as if there were runnels to be followed, gutters down which it must flow. It began to shape. Walker gasped. The light of the Black Elfstone was etching out the lines of a massive fortress, its parapets and battlements, and its towers and steeples. Walls rose and gates appeared. The light spread higher against the skies, and the sunlight was blocked away. Shadows cast down by the castle enveloped Walker Boh, and he felt himself disappear into them.
Something inside him began to change. He was draining away. No, rather he was filling up! Something, the magic, was washing through. The other, he thought, weak before its onslaught, helpless and suddenly terrified. It was the magic that encased lost Paranor being drawn down into the Elfstone!
And into him.
His jaw clenched, and his body went rigid. I will not give way!
The black light flooded the empty spaces of the image atop the bluff, coloring it, giving it first substance and then life—Paranor, the Druid’s Keep, come back into the world of men, returned from the dark half-space that had concealed it all these years. It rose up against the sky, huge and forbidding. The Black Elfstone dimmed in Walker’s hand; the nonlight softened and then disappeared.
Walker’s hoarse cry ended in a groan. He fell to his knees, wracked with sensations he could not define and riddled with the magic he had absorbed, feeling it course through him as if it were his blood. His eyes closed and then slowly opened. He saw himself shimmering in a haze that stole away the definition of his features. He looked down in disbelief, then felt himself go cold. He wasn’t really there anymore! He had become a wraith!
He forced his terror aside and climbed back to his feet, the Black Elfstone still clutched in his hand. He watched himself move as if he were someone else, watched the shimmer of his limbs and body and the shadings that overlapped and gave him the appearance of being fragmented. Shades, what has been done to me! He stumbled forward, scrambling to gain the bluff, to reach its crest, not knowing what else to do. He must gain Paranor, he sensed. He must get inside.
The climb was long and rugged, and he was gasping for breath by the time he reached the Keep’s iron gates. His body reflected in a multitude of images, each a little outside of the others. But he could breathe and move as a normal man; he could feel as he had before. He took heart from that, and hastened to reach Paranor’s gates. The stone of the Keep was real enough, hard and rough to his touch—yet forbidding, too, in a way he could not immediately identify. The gates opened when he leaned into them, as if he had the strength of a thousand men and could force anything that stood before him.
He entered cautiously. Shadows enfolded him. He stood in a well of darkness, and there was a whisper of death all about.
Then something moved within the gloom, detached, and took shape—a four-legged apparition, hulking and ominous. It was a moor cat, black as pitch with luminous gold eyes, there and not there, like Walker himself.
Walker froze. The moor cat looked exactly like…
Behind the cat, a man appeared, old and stooped, a translucent ghost, shimmering. As the man drew near, his features became recognizable.
“At last you’ve come, Walker,” he whispered in an anxious, hollow voice.
The Dark Uncle felt the last vestiges of his resolve fade away.
The man was Cogline.
XXXIII
The King of the Silver River sat in the Gardens that were his sanctuary and watched the sun melt into the western horizon. A stream of clear water trickled across the rocks at his feet and emptied into a pond from which a unicorn drank, and a breeze blew softly through the maidenhair, carrying the scent of lilacs and jonquils. The trees rustled, their leaves a shimmer of green, and birds sang contented day-end songs as they settled into place in preparation for the coming of night.
Beyond, in the world of Men, the heat was sullen and unyielding against the fall of darkness, and a pall of weariness draped the lives of the people of the Four Lands.
So must it be for now.
The eyes that could see everything had seen the death of his child and the transformation of the land of the Stone King. The Maw Grint was no more. The city of Eldwist had gone back into the earth, returned to the elements that had created it, and the land was green and fertile again. The magic of his child was rooted deep, a river that flowed invisibly about the solitary dome in which Uhl Belk was, imprisoned. It would be long before his brother could emerge into the light again.
Iridescent dragonflies buzzed past him without slowing and disappeared into the twilight’s glow.
Elsewhere, the battle against the Shadowen went on. Walker Boh had invoked the magic of the Black, Elfstone, as Allanon had charged him, and the Druid’s Keep had been summoned out of the mists that had hidden it for three centuries. What would the Dark Uncle make, the King of the Silver River wondered, of what he found there? West, where the Elves had once lived, Wren Ohmsford continued her search to discover what had become of them—and, more important, though she did not yet realize it, what would become of herself. North, the brothers Par and Coll Ohmsford struggled toward each other and the secrets of the Sword of Shannara and the Shadowen magic. There were those who would help and those who would betray, and all of the wheels of chance that Allanon had set in motion could yet be stopped.
The King of the Silver River rose and slipped into the waters of the pond momentarily, reveling in the cool wetness, letting himself become one with the flow. Then he emerged and passed down the Garden pathways, through stands of juniper and hemlock onto a hillock of centauries and bluebells that reflected gold about the edges of their petals with the day’s fading light. He paused there, staring out again into the world beyond.
His daughter had done well, he reflected.
But the thought was strangely bleak and empty. He had created an elemental out of the life of his Gardens and sent that elemental forth to serve his needs. She had been nothing to him—a daughter in name only, a child merely by designation. She had been only a momentary reality, and he had never in-tended that she be anything more.
Yet he missed her. Shaping her as he did, breathing his life into her, he had brought himself too close. The human feelings they had shared would not dissolve as easily as their human forms. She should have meant nothing to him, now that she was gone. Instead, her absence formed a void he could not seem to fill.
Quickening.
A child of the elements and his magic, he repeated. He would do the same again—yet perhaps not so readily. There was something i
n the ways of the creatures of the mortal Races that endured beyond the leaving of the flesh. There was a residue of their emotions that lingered. He could still hear her voice, see her face, and feel the touch of her fingers against him. She was gone from him, yet remained.
Why should it be so?
He sat there as darkness cloaked the land and wondered at himself.
Here ends Book Two of The Heritage of Shannara. Book Three, The Elf Queen of Shannara, will reveal more of the mystery of Cogline and Paranor and chronicle the efforts of Wren Ohmsford to discover what has become of the missing Westland Elves.
By Terry Brooks
The Magic Kingdom of Landover
MAGIC KINGDOM FOR SALE—SOLD!
THE BLACK UNICORN
WIZARD AT LARGE
THE TANGLE BOX
WITCHES’ BREW
Shannara
FIRST KING OF SHANNARA
THE SWORD OF SHANNARA
THE ELFSTONES OF SHANNARA
THE WISHSONG OF SHANNARA
The Heritage of Shannara
THE SCIONS OF SHANNARA
THE DRUID OF SHANNARA
THE ELF QUEEN OF SHANNARA
THE TALISMANS OF SHANNARA
The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara
ISLE WITCH
ANTRAX
MORGAWR
High Druid of Shannara
JARKA RUUS
TANEQUIL
STRAKEN
THE WORLD OF SHANNARA
Word and Void
RUNNING WITH THE DEMON
A KNIGHT OF THE WORD
ANGEL FIRE EAST
SOMETIMES THE MAGIC WORKS:
LESSONS FROM A WRITING LIFE
STAR WARS®:
EPISODE I THE PHANTOM MENACE™
HOOK
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1991 by Terry Brooks
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously inCanada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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Map by Shelly Shapiro
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-42424
eISBN: 978-0-345-44539-1
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