to wait the Shadowen out; he could go out and face them; or
he could try to slip past them without being seen. The first of-
fered only the faintest possibility of success, and besides, time
was not something of which he had an abundance in any case.
The second seemed incontestably foolhardy.
That left the third.
Five days after the Pour Horsemen laid siege to Paranor,
Walker Boh decided to attempt an escape.
Underground.
He told Cogline of his plan at dinner that night—a dinner
comprising some few small stores left over from three centu-
ries gone and frozen in time with the castle, sorely depleted
stores that reinforced the importance of breaking the siege.
There were tunnels beneath the castle that opened into the for-
ests beyond, concealments known only to Druids past and now
to him. He would slip through such a tunnel that night and
emerge behind where the Horsemen patrolled the walls. He
would be clear of them and gone before they knew he had es-
caped.
Cogline frowned and looked doubtful. It seemed entirely too
easy to him. Surely the Shadowen would have thought of such
a possibility.
But Walker had made up his mind. Five days of standing
about was long enough. Something had to be tried, and this
was the best he could come up with. Cogline and Rumor
would remain within the Keep. If the Horsemen attempted an
assault before Walker returned, they should slip out the same
way he had gone. Cogline reluctantly agreed, bothered by
something he refused to discuss, so agitated that Walker came
close to pressing for an explanation. But the old man’s enig-
matic behavior was nothing new, so in the end Walker let the
matter drop.
He waited for midnight, watching from the walls until late
to make certain that the Shadowen kept to their rounds. They
did, spectral shapes in the dark below, circling ceaselessly. The
fog that had blanketed the valley for the better part of four
days had lifted that dawn, and now with the coming of night
Walker Boh saw something new in the valley. Far west, where
108 The Talismans of Shannara
the Dragon’s Teeth turned north into the Streleheim, there were
watch fires at the mouth of the Kennon Pass. An army was
camped there, blocking all passage. The Federation, Walker
thought, staring out across the trees of the forest below, across
the hills beyond, to the light. Perhaps their presence in the pass
was unrelated to that of the Shadowen at Paranor, but Walker
didn’t think so. Knowingly or not, the Federation served the
Shadowen cause—a tool for Rimmer Dall and others in the
Coalition Council hierarchy—and it was safe to assume that
the soldiers in the Kennon had something to do with the Four
Horsemen.
Not that it mattered. Walker Boh wasn’t worried for a mo-
ment that Federation soldiers would prove any hindrance to
him.
When midnight came, he left the castle walls and went
down through the Keep. He wore clothes as black as night,
loose-fitting and serviceable, and carried no weapons. He left
Cogline and Rumor peering after him as he entered the fire pit.
His memories were Allanon’s and those of Druids gone before,
and he found he knew his way as well as if the Keep had al-
ways been his home. Doors hidden within the castle stone
opened at his touch, and passageways were as familiar as the
haunts of Hearthstone in the days before the dreams of
Allanon. He found the tunnels that ran beneath the rock on
which Paranor rested and worked his way down into the earth.
All about him he could hear the steady thrum of the fires con-
tained in the furnaces beneath the Keep, throbbing steadily
within their core of rock deep below the castle walls, the only
sound within the darkness and silence.
It took him over an hour to make his way through. There
were numerous passageways beneath the castle, all intertwined
and leading from a single door that only he could open. He
chose the one that led west, seeking to exit within the shel-
tering trees of the forests that lay between the Horsemen and