most cost you your life once. It could do so again. And what
would that, in turn, cost me?”
Par shook his head. “You cannot hold yourself responsible
for the risks I choose to take. Walker. No man can hold himself
up to that standard of responsibility.”
“Oh, but he can, Par. And he must when he has the means
to do so. Don’t you see? If I have the means, I have the respon-
sibility to employ them.” He shook his head sadly. “I might
wish it otherwise, but it doesn’t change the fact of its being.”
He straightened. “Well, I came to tell you something, and I
still haven’t done so. Best that I get it over with so you can rest.”
He rose, pulling the damp forest cloak about him as if to ward
off a chill. “I am going with you,” he said simply.
Par stiffened in surprise. “To the Hadeshom?”
Walker Boh nodded. “To meet with Allanon’s shade-if in-
deed it is Allanon’s shade who summons us-and to hear what
it will say. I make no promises beyond that, Par. Nor do I make
any further concessions to your view of matters-other than to
say that I think you were right in one respect. We cannot pretend
that the world begins and ends at the boundaries we might make
for it. Sometimes, we must acknowledge that it extends itself
into our lives in ways we might prefer it wouldn’t, and we must
face up to the challenges it offers.”
His face was lined with emotions Par could only begin to
imagine. “I, too, would like to know something of what is
intended for me,” he whispered.
He reached down, his pale, lean hand fastening briefly on one
of Par’s. “Rest now. We have another journey ahead and only a
day or two to prepare for it. Let that preparation be my respon-
sibility. I will tell the others and come for you all when it is time
to depart.”
He started away, then hesitated and smiled. “Try to think
better of me after this.”
Then he was out the door and gone, and the smile belonged
now to Par.
Walker Boh proved as good as his word. Two days later he
was back, appearing shortly after sunrise with horses and pro-
visions. Par had been out of bed and walking about for the past
day and a half now, and he was much recovered from his ex-
perience in Olden Moor. He was dressed and waiting on the
porch of his compound with Steff and Teel when his uncle
walked out of the forest shadows with his pack train in tow into
a morning clouded by fog and half-light.
“There’s a strange one,” Steff murmured. “Haven’t seen
him for more than five minutes for the entire time we’ve been
here. Now, back he comes, just like that. More ghost than man.”
His smile was rueful and his eyes sharp.
“Walker Boh is real enough,” Par replied without looking at
the Dwarf. “And haunted by ghosts of his own.”
“Brave ghosts, I am inclined to think.”
Par glanced over now. “He still frightens you, doesn’t he?”
“Frightens me?” Steff’s voice was gruff as he laughed. “Hear
him, Teel? He probes my armor for chinks!” He turned his
scarred face briefly. “No, Valeman, he doesn’t frighten me any-
more. He only makes me wonder.”
Coil and Morgan appeared, and the little company prepared
to depart. Stors came out to see them off, ghosts of another sort,
dressed in white robes and cloaked in self-imposed silence, a
perpetually anxious look on their pale faces. They gathered in
groups, watchful, curious, a few coming forward to help as the
members of the company mounted. Walker spoke with one or
two of them, his words so quiet they could be heard by no one
else. Then he was aboard with the others and facing briefly back
to them.
“Good fortune to us, my friends,” he said and turned his
horse west toward the plains.
Good fortune, indeed, Par Ohmsford prayed silently.
XIIl
Sunlight sprayed the still surface of the Myrian Lake
through breaks in the distant trees, coloring the water
a brilliant red-gold and causing Wren Ohmsford to