confrontation with the Grimpond and for the bet-
ter part of a week did nothing more than consider
what he had been told. The weather was pleasant, the days warm
and sunny, the air filled with fragrant smells from the woodland
trees and flowers and streams. He felt sheltered by the valley;
he was content to remain in seclusion there. Rumor provided all
the company he required. The big moor cat trailed after him on
the long walks he took to while away his days, padding silently
down the solitary trails, along the moss-covered stream banks,
through the ancient massive trees, a soundless and reassuring
presence. At night, the two sat upon the cottage porch, the cat
dozing, the man staring skyward at the canopy of moon and
stars.
He was always thinking. He could not stop thinking. The
memory of the Grimpond’s words haunted him even at Hearth-
stone, at his home, where nothing should have been able to
threaten him. The words played unpleasant games within his
mind, forcing him to confront them, to try to reason through
how much of what they whispered was truth and how much a
lie. He had known it would be like this before he had gone to
see the Grimpond-that the words would be vague and distress-
ing and that they would speak riddles and half-truths and leave
him with a tangled knot of threads leading to the answers he
sought, a knot that only a clairvoyant could manage to sort out.
He had known and still he was not prepared for how taxing it
would be.
He was able to determine the location of the Black Elfstone
almost immediately. There was only one place where eyes could
turn a man to stone and voices drive him mad, one place where
the dead lay in utter blackness-the Hall of Kings, deep in the
Dragon’s Teeth. It was said that the Hall of Kings had been
fashioned even before the time of the Druids, a vast and impen-
etrable cavern labyrinth in which the dead monarchs of the Four
Lands were interred, a massive crypt in which the living were
not permitted, protected by darkness, by statues called Sphinxes
that were half-man, half-beast and could turn the living to stone,
and by formless beings called Banshees who occupied a section
of the caverns called the Corridor of Winds and whose wail
could drive men mad instantly.
And the Tomb itself, where the pocket carved with runes hid
the Black Elfstone, was watched over by the serpent Valg.
At least it was if the serpent was still alive. There had been a
terrible battle fought between the serpent and the company un-
der Allanon’s leadership, who had gone in search of the Sword
of Shannara in the time of Shea Ohmsford. The company had
encountered the serpent unexpectedly and been forced to battle
its way clear. But no one had ever determined if the serpent had
survived that battle. As far as Walker knew, no one had ever
gone back to see.
Allanon might have returned once upon a time, of course.
But Allanon had never said.
The difficulty in any event was not in determining the mystery
of the Elfstone’s whereabouts, but in deciding whether or not to
go after it. The Hall of Kings was a dangerous place, even for
someone like Walker who had less to fear than ordinary men.
Magic, even the magic of a Druid, might not be protection
enough-and Walker’s magic was far less than Allanon’s had
ever been. Walker was concerned as well with what the Grim-
pond hadn’t told him. There was certain to be more to this than
what had been revealed; the Grimpond never gave out every-
thing it knew. It was holding something back, and that was
probably something that could kill Walker.
There was also the matter of the visions. There had been three
of them, each more disturbing than the one before. In the first,
Walker had stood on clouds above the others in the little com-
pany who had come to the Hadeshom and the shade ofAllanon,
one hand missing, mocked by his own claim that he would lose
that hand before he would allow the Druids to come again. In