air. For a moment he was paralyzed by the suddenness of his
waking, frozen with uncertainty as his heart pounded within
his chest and his eyes and ears struggled to make sense of the
darkness surrounding him. At last he was able to move, swing-
ing his legs down off the bed, steadied by the feeling of the
solid stone beneath his feet. He rose, aware that he was still
wearing the dark robes in which he had fallen asleep, the
clothing he had been too tired to remove.
Something stirred just outside his door, a soft padding, a
rubbing against the ancient wood.
Rumor.
He went to the door and opened it. The big cat stood just
without, staring up at him. It circled away anxiously and came
back again, big head swinging up, eyes gleaming.
It wants me to follow, Walker thought. Something is wrong.
He wrapped himself in a heavy cloak and went out from his
sleeping chamber into the tomblike silence of the castle. Stone
walls muffled the sound of his feet as he hurried down the an-
cient corridors. Rumor went on ahead, sleek and dark in the
gloom, padding soundlessly through the shadows. Without
slowing, they passed the room in which Cogline slept. The
trouble did not lie there. The night faded about them as they
went, dawn rising out of the east in a shimmer of silver that
seeped through the castle windows in wintry, clouded light.
Walker barely noticed, his eyes fixed on the movement of the
moor cat as it slid through the overlapping shadows. His ears
strained to hear something, to catch a hint of what was wait-
ing. But the silence persisted, unbroken.
They climbed from the main hall to the battlement doors
and went out into the open air. The dawn was chill and empty-
feeling. Mist lay over the whole of the valley, climbing the
wall of the Dragpn’s Teeth east and stretching west to the
Streleheim in a blanket that shrouded everything between.
Paranor lay wrapped within its upper folds, its high towers is-
lands thrusting out of a misty sea. The mist swirled and spun,
stirred by winds that came down off the mountains, and in the
weak light of the early dawn strange shapes and forms came
alive.
Rumor padded down the walkway, sniffing the air as he
36 The Talismans of Shannara
went, tail switching uneasily. Walker followed. They circled
the south parapet west without slowing, seeing nothing, hear-
ing nothing. They passed open stairwells and tower entryways,
ghosts at haunt.
On the west battlement. Rumor slowed suddenly. The hair
on the moor cat’s neck bristled, and his dark muzzle wrinkled
in a snarl. Walker moved up beside him and quickly placed a
reassuring hand on the coarse hair of his back. Rumor was fac-
ing out now into the gloom. They stood just above the castle’s
west gate.
Walker peered into the mist. He could sense it, too.
Something was out there.
The seconds slipped away, and nothing showed. Walker be-
gan to grow impatient. Perhaps he should go out for a look.
Then suddenly the mist drew back, seemed to pull away as
if in revulsion, and the riders appeared. There were four of
them, gaunt and spectral in the faint light. They came slowly,
purposefully, as gray as the gloom that had hidden their ap-
proach. Four riders atop their mounts, but none was human,
and the animals they rode were loathsome parodies, all scales
and claws and teeth. Pour riders, each markedly different from
the other, each with a mount that was a mirror of itself.
Walker Boh knew at once that they were Shadowen. He
knew as well that they had come for him.
Coolly, dispassionately, he studied them.
The first was tall and lean and cadaverous. Bones pressed
out against skin shrunk tight against it, the skeletal frame
hunched forward like a cat at hunt. The face was a skull in
which the jaw hung open slackly and the eyes stared out, too
wide and too blank to be seeing. It wore no clothes, and its na-
ked body was neither that of a man nor of a woman, but some-