It was a time for phantoms, for ghosts that sailed on the
wind like ships at sea, for things that could walk and leave no
footprints with their passing. It was a time for the day’s hopes
and expectations and fears and doubts to take shape and come
forth, searching for a voice with which to speak, seeking re-
demption out of newfound belief. It was a time for reason to
give way to what imagination alone would permit. It was a
time for dreams.
Walker Boh summoned his and watched it come, swift and
certain, a hawk sweeping down, and when it reached him he
stretched to meet it, rising up out of his body as light as air,
catching hold and lifting away. Voiceless, invisible, as one with
the wraiths of the night, he went down out of the forests on the
slopes of the Runne, speeding through the dark trunks and
leafy boughs, through the silence and the black with the grim
certainty of death’s coming. He held himself as still as ice in
377
378 The Talismans of Shannara
winter, easing out onto the blasted, empty flats beyond, cross-
ing through the brume toward the waiting black obelisk. He
went in the manner of the Druids, in the way Allanon had
taught him, a spirit out of flesh. His memories twisted and
tugged at him, those of Allanon and those of the man he had
been. He remembered both at once, and saw himself again as
the outcast who would not believe,^ who had fought against the
transition that the Druid magic had inevitably wrought. And
again, too. Walker Boh saw himself as the Druid shade who
had set in motion the events that would culminate in that tran-
sition by bestowing on Brin Ohmsford the blood trust that ul-
timately would find its purpose in him. It was strange to be
more than one, and yet it was fitting, too. He had never been
at peace with himself, and his dissatisfaction came in large part
from feeling incomplete. Now he was fulfilled, one man made
out of many, one formed of all. He was still learning to be
what he had become, to be comfortable with what he was, but
it began with feeling whole, and he thought he was that at least
if nothing else.
The earth beneath was blackened and bare, stripped of life,
burned away and scorched, empty and razed. The Shadowen
had done that, but he did not understand yet the nature of their
poison. Tonight, he thought, he might.
Southwatch loomed ahead, its black pinnacle towering over
him, its knife-edged spire reaching for the sky. He could feel
the life within it. He could feel its pulse. Southwatch was
alive. There was magic in its walls, magic that had formed and
now sustained and protected it. The magic was powerful, but
reluctant He could sense that. He could feel the strain of its ef-
fort to be free. Deep inside the black stone it crouched, an an-
imal caged. Shadowen walked within and without, barely
visible against the black, keeping watch. The magic fled from
them.
A part of me mist, a part of the night, as silent as drifting
ash, he came up to the walls. Oblivious, the Shadowen did not
sense him passing close and moving on. He came to the gates
of the keep and slid swiftly away. They were too well pro-
tected to venture through, even as a spirit. He waited for one
of the dark things to enter through a crack in the stone skin
and followed. He felt the weight of the tower close about him
The Talismans of Shannara 379
as he did so, a palpable thing. He hugged himself against the
evil that raged through the air, a mix of terrible anger and ha-
tred and despair. Where, he wondered in surprise, did it come
from?
He hesitated in his choice of directions, and then impul-
sively followed the magic toward its source. Just for a mo-
ment, just to have a look. The magic emanated from below,
from deep within the earth beneath the keep, all darkness and
blind fury. He slipped along the corridors of the fortress, care-