west, the skies were washed with moonlight and filled with
stars, and the summer air was sweet and clean with the smell of
new growth. Walker was coming back from a visit to the pin-
nacle, a refuge he found particularly soothing, the massive stone
a source from which it seemed he could draw strength. The
cottage door was open and the rooms within lighted as always,
but Walker sensed the difference, even before Rumor’s purr
stilled and his neck ruff bristled.
Cautiously, he moved onto the porch and into the doorway.
Cogline sat at the old wooden dining table, skeletal face bent
against the glare of the oil lamps, his gray robes a weathered
covering for goods long since past repair. A large, squarish
package bound in oilcloth and tied with cord rested close beside
him. He was eating cold food, a glass of ale almost untouched
at his elbow.
“I have been waiting for you. Walker,” he told the other
while he was still in the darkness beyond the entry.
Walker moved into the light. “You might have saved yourself
the trouble.”
“Trouble?” The old man extended a sticklike hand, and Ru-
mor padded forward to nuzzle it familiarly. “It was time I saw
my home again.”
“Is this your home?” Walker asked. “I would have thought
you more comfortable amid the relics of the Druid past.” He
waited for a response, but there was none. “If you have come
to persuade me to take up the charge given me by the shade,
then you should know at once that I will never do so.”
“Oh, my, Walker. Never is such an impossible amount of
time. Besides, I have no intention of trying to persuade you to
do anything. A sufficient amount of persuading has already been
done, I suspect.”
Walker was still standing in the doorway. He felt awkward
and exposed and moved over to the table to sit across from
Cogline. The old man took a long sip of the ale.
“Perhaps you thought me gone for good after my disappear-
ance at the Hadeshom,” he said softly. His voice was distant
and filled with emotions that me other could not begin to sort
out. “Perhaps you even wished it.”
Walker said nothing.
“I have been out into the world. Walker. I have traveled into
the Four Lands, walked among the Races, passed through cities
and countrysides; I have felt the pulse of life and found that it
ebbs. A farmer speaks to me on the grasslands below the Strele-
heim, a man worn and broken by the futility of what he has
encountered. ‘Nothing grows,’ he whispers. ‘The earth sickens
as if stricken by some disease.’ The disease infects him as well.
A merchant of wooden carvings and toys journeys from a small
village beyond Varfleet, directionless. ‘I leave,’ he says, ‘be-
cause there is no need for me. The people cease to have interest
in my work. They do nothing but brood and waste away.’ Bits
and pieces of life in the Four Lands, Walker-they wither and
fade like a spotting that spreads across the flesh. Pockets here
and pockets there-as if the will to go on were missing. Trees
and shrubs and growing things fail; animals and men alike sick-
en and die. All become dust, and a haze of that dust rises up
and fills the air and leaves the whole of the ravaged land a still
life in miniature of the vision shown us by Allanon.”
The sharp, old eyes squinted up at the other. “It begins,
Walker. It begins.”
Walker Boh shook his head. “The land and her people have
always suffered failings, Cogline. You see the shade’s vision
because you want to see it.”
“No, not I, Walker.” The old man shook his head firmly. “I
want no part of Druid visions, neither in their being nor in their
fulfillment. I am as much a pawn of what has happened as your-
self. Believe what you will, I do not wish involvement. I have
chosen my life in the same manner that you have chosen yours.
You don’t accept that, do you?”
Walker smiled unkindly. “You took up the magic because