He felt a tightening within that seemed grounded in the magic
of me wishsong. It was a pulling, a tugging that wrenched against
shackles he could neither see nor understand. He felt a pressure
building within himself that he had never experienced before.
Coil saw his face and went pale. “Par?” he whispered anx-
iously and shook him.
Red pinpricks of light appeared in the mist all about them,
burning like tiny fires in the damp. They shifted and winked
and drew closer. Faces materialized, no longer human, the flesh
decaying and half-eaten, the features twisted and fouled. Bodies
shambled out of the night, some massive, some gnarled, all
misshapen beyond belief. It was as if they had been stretched
and wrenched about to see what could be made of them. Most
walked bent over; some crawled on all fours.
They closed about the little company in seconds. They were
things out of some loathsome nightmare, the fragments and
shards of sleep’s horror come into the world of waking. Dark,
substanceless wraiths flitted in and out of their bodies, through
mouths and eyes, from the pores of skin and the bristles of hair.
Shadowen!
The pressure inside Par Ohmsford grew unbearable. He felt
something drop away in the pit of his stomach. He was seeing
the vision in his dreams come alive, the dark world of animal-
like humans and Shadowen masters. It was seeing Allanon’s
promise come to pass.
The pressure broke free. He screamed, freezing his compan-
ions with the sharpness of his cry. The sound took form and
became words. He sang, the wishsong ripping through the air
as if a flame, the magic lighting up the daikness. The Shadowen
jericed away, their faces horrible in the unexpected glare, the
lesions and cuts on their bodies vivid streaks of scariet. Par
stiffened, flooded with a power he had never known the wish-
song to possess. He was aware of a vision within his mind-a
vision of the Sword of Shannara.
The light from the magic, only an illusion at first, was sud-
denly real. It brightened, lancing the daikness in a way Par
found strangely familiar, flaring with intensity as it probed the
gloom. It twisted and turned like a captured thing trying to
escape, winding past the stone wreckage of the fallen Bridge of
Sendic, leaping across the carcasses of fallen trees, burning
through the ragged brush to where a singular stone chamber sat
alone amid a tangle of vines and grasses not a hundred yards
from where he stood.
He felt a surge of elation race through him.
There!
The word hissed in the white silence of his mind, cocooned
away from the magic and the chaos. He saw weathered black
stone, the light of his magic burning into its peeked surface,
scouring its cracks and crevices, picking out the scrolled words
carved into its facing:
Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations.
Their right to be free men,
Their desire to live in peace,
Their courage . . .
His strength gave out suddenly before he could complete his
reading, and the magic flared sharply and died into blackness,
gone as quickly as it had come. He staggered backward with a
cry, and Coil caught him in his arms. Par couldn’t hear him. He
couldn’t hear anything but the strange ringing that was the wish-
song’s residue, the leavings of a magic he now realized he had
not yet begun to understand.
And in his mind the vision lingered, a shimmering image at
the forefront of his thoughts-all that remained of what mo-
ments earlier the magic had uncovered in the mist and dark.
The weathered stone vault. The familiar words in scroll.
The Sword of Shannara.
Then the ringing stopped, the vision disappeared, and he was
back in the Pit, drowning in weakness. The Shadowen were
closing, shambling forward from all directions to trap them
against the stone of the bridge. Padishar stepped forward, tall
and forbidding, to confront the nearest, a huge bearish thing
with talons for hands. It reached for him and he cut at it with
the broadsword-once, twice, a thud time-the strokes so rapid
par could barely register them. The creature sagged back, limbs
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