leather cover collecting motes of dust and gleaming faintly in
sunshine and lamplight. He disdained it. going about his busi-
ness as if it weren’t there, pretending it was a part of his sur-
roundings that he could not remove, testing himself against its
temptation. He had thought at first to rid himself of it immedi-
ately, then decided against it. That would be too easy and too
quickly second-guessed later on. If he could withstand its lure
for a time, if he could live in its presence without giving in to
his understandable desire to uncover its secrets, then he could
dispose of it with a clean conscience. Cogline expected him
either to open it or dispose of it at once. He would do neither.
The old man would get no satisfaction in his efforts to manipu-
late Walker Boh.
The only one who paid any attention to the parcel was Rumor,
who sniffed at it from time to time but otherwise ignored it. The
three days passed and the book sat unopened.
But then something odd happened. On the fourth day of this
strange contest, Walker began to question his reasoning. Did it
really make any better sense to dispose of the book after a week
or even a month than it did to dispose of it immediately? Would
it matter either way? What did it demonstrate other than a sort
of perverse hardheadedness on his part? What sort of game was
he playing and for whose benefit was he playing it?
Walker mulled the matter over as the daylight hours waned
and darkness closed about, then sat staring at the book from
across the room while the fire in the hearth burned slowly to ash
and the midnight hour neared.
“I am not being strong,” he whispered to himself. “I am
being frightened.”
He considered the possibility in the silence of his thoughts.
Finally he stood up, crossed the room to the dining table anci
stopped. For a moment, he hesitated. Then he reached down
and picked up the Druid History. He hefted it experimentally.
Better to know the Demon that pursues you than to continue
to imagine him.
He crossed back to his reading chair and seated himself oner
more, the book settled on his lap. Rumor lifted his massive head
from where he slept in front of the fire, and his luminous eye
fixed on Walker. Walker stared back. The cat blinked and went
back to sleep.
Walker Boh opened the book.
He read it slowly, working his way through its thick parch-
ment pages with deliberate pacing, letting his eyes linger on the
gold edges and ornate calligraphy, determined that now that the
book was opened nothing should be missed. The silence after
midnight deepened, broken only by an occasional throaty sound
from the sleeping moor cat and the snapping of embers in the
fire. Only once he thought to wonder how Cogline had really
come by the book-surely not out of Paranor!-and then the
matter was forgotten as the recorded history caught him up and
swept him away as surely as if he were a leaf upon a windswept
ocean.
The time chronicled was that of Bremen when he was among
the last of the Druids, when the Warlock Lord and his minions
had destroyed nearly all of the members of the Council. There
were stories of the dark magic that had changed the rebel Druids
into the horrors they had become. There were accounts of its
varied uses, conjurings, and incantations that Bremen had un-
covered but had been smart enough to fear. All of the fright-
ening secrets of what the magic could do were touched upon,
interspersed with the cautions that so many who tried to master
the power would ignore. It was a time of upheaval and fright-
ening change in the Four Lands, and Bremen alone had under-
stood what was at stake.
Walker paged ahead, growing anxious now. Cogline had
meant for him to read something particular within this history.
Whatever it was, he had not yet come upon it.
The Skull Bearers had seized Paranor for themselves, the
chronicles related. Paranor, they had thought, would now be