Nothing happened.
Keeping his eyes riveted on the other, he held the blade steady and willed that the truth be revealed. Still nothing happened. Par waited for as long as he could stand it, then lowered the blade in despair and stepped away.
“Now you know. There is no lie about me,” Rimmer Dall said. “The lie is in what you have been told.”
Par found that he was shaking. “But why would Allanon lie? What purpose could that possibly serve?”
“Think for a moment on what you have been asked to do.” The big man was relaxed, his voice calm and reassuring. “You have been asked to bring back the Druids, to restore to them their talismans, to seek our destruction. The Druids want to regain what was lost to them, the power of life and magic. Is that any different, Par, from what the Warlock Lord sought to do ten centuries ago?”
“But you hunted us!”
“To talk to you, to explain.”
“You imprisoned my parents!”
“I kept them safe from harm. The Federation knew of you and would have used them to find you, if I hadn’t gone to them first.”
Par caught his breath, his arguments momentarily exhausted. Was what he was being told true? Shades, was everything the lie that Rimmer Dall claimed it to be? He could not believe it, yet he could not bring himself to disbelieve it either. His confusion wrapped him like a blanket and left him feeling small and vulnerable.
“I have to think,” he said wearily.
“Then come with me and do so,” Rimmer Dall responded at once. “Come with me and we shall talk more of this. You have many questions that require answers, and I can give them to you. There is much you need to know about how the magic can be used. Come, Valeman. Put aside you fears and misgivings. No harm shall come to you—never to one whose magic is so promising.”
He spoke reassuringly, compellingly, and for an instant Par was almost persuaded. It would have been so easy to agree. He was tired, and he wanted this odyssey to end. It would be comforting to have someone to talk to about the frustrations of possessing the magic. Rimmer Dall would surely know, having experienced them himself. As much as he hated to admit it, he no longer felt threatened by the man. There seemed to be no reason to deny what he was asking.
But he did nevertheless. He did without really understanding why. “No,” he said quietly.
“Think of what we can share if you come with me,” the other persisted. “We have so much in common! Surely you have longed to talk of your magic, the magic you have been forced to conceal. There has never been anyone for you to do that with before me. I can feel the need in you; I can sense it! Come with me! Valeman, you have...”
“No.”
Par stepped away. Something ugly whispered suddenly in his mind, some memory that did not yet have a face, but whose voice he clearly recognized.
Rimmer Dall watched him, his craggy features gone suddenly hard. “This is foolish, Valeman.”
“I am leaving,” Par said quietly, tense now, back on his guard. What was it that bothered him so? “And I am taking the Sword.”
The black-cloaked form became another shadow in the half-light. “Stay, Valeman. There are dark secrets kept from you, things that would be better learned from me. Stay and hear them.”
Par edged toward the passageway that had brought him in.
“The door is directly behind you,” Rimmer Dall said suddenly, his voice sharp. “There are no passageways, no stairs. That was all illusion, my magic invoked to closet you long enough so that we might talk. But if you leave now, something precious will be destroyed. Truth waits for you, Valeman—and there is horror in its face. You cannot withstand it. Stay, and listen to me! You need me!”
Par shook his head. “You sounded for a moment, Rimmer Dall, like those others, those Shadowen who look nothing like you outwardly, yet speak with your need. Like them, you would possess me.”
Rimmer Dall stood silently before him, not moving, simply watching as he backed away. The light the First Seeker had produced faded, and the chamber slid rapidly into darkness.
Par Ohmsford grasped the Sword of Shannara in both hands and bolted for freedom.
Rimmer Dall had been right about the passageways and stairs. There were none. It was all illusion, a magic Par should have recognized at once. He burst from the blackness of the vault directly into the gray half-light of the Pit. The damp and the mist closed about him instantly. He blinked and whirled about, searching.
Coll.
Where was Coll?
He stripped the cloak from his back and wrapped it hurriedly about the Sword of Shannara. Allanon had said he would need it—if Allanon was still to be believed. At the moment, he didn’t know. But the Sword should be cared for; it must have purpose. Unless it had lost its magic. Could it have lost its magic?
“Par.”
The Valeman jumped, startled by the voice. It was right behind him, so close that it might have been a whisper in his ear if not for the harshness of its sound. He whirled.
And there was Coll.
Or what had once been Coll.
His brother’s face was barely recognizable, ravaged by some inner torment that he could only begin to imagine, a twisting that had distorted the familiar features and left them slack and lifeless. His body was misshapen as well, all pulled out of joint and hunched over, as if the bones had been rearranged. There were marks on his skin, tears and lesions, and the eyes burned with a fever he recognized immediately.
“They took me,” Coll whispered despairingly. “They made me. Please, Par, I need you. Hug me? Please?”
Par cried out, howling as if he would never stop, willing the thing before him to go away, to disappear from his sight and mind. Chills shook him, and the emptiness that opened inside threatened to collapse him completely.
“Coll!” he sobbed.
His brother stumbled and jerked toward him, arms outstretched. Rimmer Dall’s warning whispered in Par’s mind—the truth, the truth, the horror of it! Coll was a Shadowen, had somehow become one, a creature like the others in the Pit that Rimmer Dall claimed the Federation had destroyed! How? Par had been gone only minutes, it seemed. What had been done to his brother?
He stood there, stunned and shaking, as the thing before him caught hold of him with its fingers, then with its arms, enfolding him, whispering all the time, “Hug me, hug me,” as if it were a litany that would set it free. Par wished he were dead, that he had never been born, that he could somehow disappear from the earth and leave all that was happening behind. He wished a million impossible things—anything that could save him. The Sword of Shannara dropped from his nerveless fingers, and he felt as if everything he had known and believed in had in a single instant been betrayed.
Coll’s hands began to rip at him.
“Coll, no!” he screamed.
Then something happened deep inside, something that he struggled against for only an instant’s time before it overpowered him. A burning surged within his chest and spread outward through his body like a fire out of control. It was the magic—not the magic of the wishsong, the magic of harmless images and pretended things, but the other. It was the magic that had belonged once to the Elfstones, the magic that Allanon had given to Shea Ohmsford all those years ago, that had seeded itself in Wil Ohmsford and passed through generations of his family to him, changing, evolving, a constant mystery. It was alive in him, a magic greater than the wishsong, hard and unyielding.
It rushed through him and exploded forth. He screamed to Coll to let go of him, to get away, but his brother did not seem to hear. Coll, a ruined creature, a caricature of the blood and flesh human Par had loved, was consumed with his own inner madness, the Shadowen that he had become needing only to feed. There was no response beyond his frantic effort to do so. The magic took him, enveloped him, and in an instant turned him to ash.