30 The Talismans of Shannara
must be this … this thing they have made of me, I shall at
least give it my voice and my heart!”
So they walked, Cogline as cold as death listening to the tor-
mented Walker Boh, Walker as hot as the fires that had begun
to bum anew within the furnaces below Paranor’s stone walls,
his fury made over into the strength that sustained him against
what was happening.
For the change continued even now as they walked the castle
corridors, the old man and the becoming Druid, shadowed by
the silent presence of Rumor the moor cat, as black-browed as
his masters. The change swirled through Walker like smoke in
the wind, stirred by the hands of the Druids gone, their spirits
alive within the one who would permit the magic to live again.
It came as knowledge revealed in bits and pieces and sometimes
in sharp bursts, knowledge gained and preserved through the
years, all that the Druids had discovered and shaped in their or-
der, the whole of what had sustained them through the years of
the Warlock Lord and the Skull Bearers, through the Demons
within the Forbidding, through the Ildatch and the Mord
Wraiths, through all the trials of dark evil set to challenge hu-
mankind. The magic revealed itself little by little, peeking forth
from the jumble of hands and eyes and whispered words that
roiled in Walker Boh’s mind and gave him no peace.
He did not sleep at all for three days. He tried, exhausted to
the point of despair, but when he endeavored to let himself go,
to slip away into the comfort of the rest he so desperately
needed, some new facet of the change lurched alive and
brought him upright as if he were a puppet on strings, making
him aware of its need, of its presence, of its determination to
be heard. Each time he would fight it, not to prevent it from
being, for there was no sense in that, but to assure that it was
not accepted without question, that the knowledge was perused
and studied, that he recognized its face and was cautioned
thereby against blind use. The Druids were not his maker, he
reminded himself over and over again. The Druids had not
given him his life and should not be allowed to dictate his des-
tiny. He would do that. He would decide the nature of his life,
power of magic or no, and in doing so would be accountable
only to himself.
The Talismans of Snannara 31
Cogline and Rumor stayed with him, as exhausted as he
was, but frightened for him and determined that he would not
be left alone to face what was happening. Cogline’s was the
voice that Walker needed to hear now and again in response to
his own, a caution and reassurance to blunt his lamentations of
disgust. Rumor was the shaggy dark certainty that some things
did not change, a presence as solid and dependable as the com-
ing of day after night, the promise that there could be a waking
from even the worst of nightmares. Together they sustained
him in ways he could not begin to describe and that they in
turn could not begin to understand. It was enough that they
sensed that the bond was there.
Three days passed, then, before the change finally ran its
course and the transformation was made complete. All at once
the hands stopped molding, the eyes disappeared, and the
whispers faded. Within Walker Boh, everything suddenly went
still. He slept then and did not dream, and when he woke he
knew that while he was changed in ways he was only begin-
ning to discover, still he was in the deepest part of himself the
same person he had always been. He had preserved the heart
of the man who mistrusted the Druids and their magics, and
while the Druids now lived within him and would have then-
voice in the way he conducted his life, nevertheless they would
be ruled by beliefs that had preceded their coming and would
survive their stay. Walker rose in the solitude of his sleeping