they made him sad and confused and left him feeling empty. He
faced them one by one, and allowed them to speak. When they
had done so, he took their words and framed them in windows
of light that revealed them clearly.
What they meant, he decided, was that the worid had been
turned upside down.
The Sword of Shannara lay on the bed beside him. He wasn’t
sure if it had been there all along or if Damson had placed it
there after he had come back to himself. What he did know was
that it was useless. It was supposed to provide a means to destroy
the Shadowen, and it had been totally ineffective against Rim-
mer Dall. He had risked everything to gain the Sword, and it
appeared that the risk had been pointless. He still did not pos-
sess the talisman he had been promised.
Of lies and truth there were more than enough and no way to
separate one from the other. Rimmer Dall was lying surely-he
could sense that much. But he had also spoken the truth. Al-
lanon had spoken the troth-but he had been lying as well.
Neither of them was entirely what he pretended to be. Nothing
was completely as either portrayed it. Even he might be some-
thing other than what he believed, his magic the two-edged sword
about which his uncle Walker had always warned him.
But the harshest and most bitter of the memories he faced
was of poor, dead Coll. His brother had been changed into a
Shadowen while trying to protect him, made a creature of the
Pit, and Par had killed him for it. He hadn’t meant to, certainly
hadn’t wanted to, but the magic had come forth unbidden and
destroyed him. Probably there hadn’t been anything he could
have done to stop it, but such rationalization offered little in the
way of solace or forgiveness. Coil’s death was his fault. His
brother had come on this journey because of him. He had gone
down into the Pit because of him. Everything he had done had
been because of Par.
Because Coil loved him.
He thought suddenly of their meeting with the shade of Al-
lanon where so much had been entrusted to all of the Ohmsfords
but Coll. Had Allanon known then that Coil was going to die?
Was that why no mention had been made of him, why no charge
had been given to him?
The possibility enraged Par.
His brother’s face hovered in the air before him, changing,
running through the gamut of moods he remembered so well.
He could hear Coil’s voice, the nuances of its rough inten-
sity, the mix of its tones. He replayed in his mind all the adven-
tares they had shared while growing up, the times they had gone
against their parents’ wishes, the places they had traveled to and
seen, the people they had met and of whom they had talked. He
retraced the events of the past few weeks, beginning with their
flight from Varfleet. Much of it was tinged with his own sense
of guilt, his need to assign himself blame. But most of it was
free of everything but the wish to remember what his brother
Coil had been like.
Coil, who was dead.
He lay for hours thinking of it, holding up the fact of it to the
light of his understanding, in the silence of his thoughts, trying
to find a way to make it real. It wasn’t real, though-not yet. It
was too awful to be real, and the pain and despair were too
intense to be given release. Some part of him refused to admit
that Coil was gone. He knew it was so, and yet he could not
banish entirely that small, hopelessly absurd denial. In the end,
he gave up trying.
His world compressed. He ate and he rested. He spoke spar-
ingly with Damson. He lay in the Mole’s dark underground lair
amid the refuse of the upper world, himself a discard, only a
little more alive than the toy animals that kept watch over him.
Yet all the while his mind was at work. Eventually he would