It seemed to Par that he was a little too quick to agree.
Geysers exploded and died from the flat, gray surface of the
lake, and the spray felt like bits of ice where it landed on Walkei
Boh’s skin.
“Tell me why you come here. Dark Uncle?” Allanon’s shade
whispered.
Walker felt the chill bum away as his determination caughr
fire. “I need tell you nothing,” he replied. “You are not Allanon.
You are only the Grimpond.”
Allanon’s visage shimmered and faded in the half-light, re-
placed by Walker’s own. The Grimpond emitted a hollow laugh.
“I am you, Walker Boh. Nothing more and nothing less. Do
you recognize yourself?”
His face went through a flurry of transformations-Walker as
a child, as a boy, as a youth, as a man. The images came and
went so quickly that Walker could barely register them. It was
somehow terrifying to watch the phases of his life pass by so
quickly. He forced himself to remain calm.
“Will you speak with me, Grimpond?” he asked.
“Will you speak with yourself?” came the reply.
Walker took a deep breath. “I will. But for what purpose
should I do so? There is nothing to talk about with myself. I
already know all that I have to say.”
“Ah, as do I, Walker. As do I.”
The Grimpond shrank until it was the same size as Walker.
It kept his face, taunting him with it, letting it reveal flashes of
the age that would one day claim it, giving it a beaten cast as if
to demonstrate the futility of his life.
“I know why you have come to me,” the Grimpond said
suddenly. “I know the private-most thoughts of your mind, the
little secrets you would keep even from yourself. There need be
no games between us. Walker Boh. You are surely my equal in
the playing of them, and I have no wish to do battle with you
again. You have come to ask where you must go to find the
Black Elfstone. Fair enough. I will tell you.”
Immediately, Walker mistrusted the shade. The Grimpond
never volunteered anything without twisting it. He nodded in
response, but said nothing.
“How sad you seem, Walker,” soothed the shade. “No ju-
bilation at my submission, no elation that you will have what
you want? Is it so difficult then to admit that you have dispensed
with pride and self-resolution, that you have forsaken your lofty
principles, that you have been won over after all to the Druid
cause?”
Walker stiffened in spite of himself. “You misread matters,
Grimpond. Nothing has been decided.”
“Oh, yes. Dark Uncle! Everything has been decided! Make
no mistake. Your life weaves out before my eyes as a thread
straight and undeviating, the years a finite number, their course
determined. You are caught in the snare of the Druid’s words.
His legacy to Brin Ohmsford becomes your own, whether you
would have it so or not. You have been shaped!”
“Tell me, then, of the Black Elfstone,” Walker tried.
“All in good time. Patience, now.”
The words died away into stillness, the Grimpond shifting
within its covering of mist. Daylight had faded into darkness,
the gray turned black, the moon and stars shut away by the
valley’s thick haze. Yet there was light where Walker stood, a
phosphorescence given off by the waters beneath the air on which
the Grimpond floated, a dull and shallow glow that played wick-
edly through the night.
“So much effort given over to escaping the Druids,” the
Grimpond said softly. “What foolishness.” Walker’s face dis-
sipated and was replaced by his father’s. His father spoke. “Re-
member, Walker, that we are the bearers of Allanon’s trust. He
gave it to Brin Ohmsford as he lay dying, to be passed from one
generation to the next, to be handed down until it was needed,
sometime far, far in the distant future …”
His father’s visage leered at him. “Perhaps now?”
Images flared to life above him, borne on the air as if tapes-
tries threaded on a frame, woven in the fabric of the mist. One
after another they appeared, brilliant with color, filled with the
texture and depth of real life.