The Heritage of Shannara (111 page)

“Come if you wish, Morgan,” Quickening soothed, and Walker nodded without comment.

They resumed walking, three rain-soaked figures nearly lost in the mist and shadows. Walker led, a lean and white-faced ghost against the gloom, leader now because Quickening had moved a step back to be with Morgan, content to follow. He hunched his narrow shoulders against the weather, felt the bite of the wind as it gusted momentarily, and felt the emptiness inside threaten to engulf him. He reached into that emptiness and tried to secure some part of his magic, a strength he could rely upon. It eluded him, like a snake in flight. He peered ahead through the thin curtain of the rain and watched the shadows chase after the light. The specter of his fate leered at him, a faint shimmer in a pool of water, a wisp of fog in a doorway, a darkening of stone where the dampness reflected like a mirror. In each instance, it wore the face of Allanon.

The street ended, and the dark bulk of the dome lifted before them like the shell of some sleeping crustacean. The three stepped down off the walkway and crossed to stand before it, dwarfed by its size. Walker stared at the dome without speaking, aware that Morgan and Quickening were waiting on him, conscious that something else was waiting on him as well.
It.
The presence he had sensed before was back again, stronger here, readier, more assured. And watching. Silently watching. Walker did not move. He felt eyes all around him, as if there were nowhere he might run that he could not be seen. The stone of the city was a hand that cradled him yet might close without warning to crush out his life. The presence wanted him to know that. It wanted him to know how insignificant he was, how futile his quest, and how purposeless his life. It bore down on him, pressed about like the mist and rain. Go home, he heard it whisper. Leave while you can.

He did not leave. He did not even step away. He had faced enough threats in his time, enough dark things that roamed the land, to know when he was being tested. The effort was not a crushing one; it was teasing and fey, as if designed to insinuate an opposite effect than the one indicated. Don't really leave, it seemed to say. Just remember that you were asked.

Walker Boh stepped forward to where the wall was broadest between the bands of stone. Death brushed up against him, a soft sprinkle of rain caught in the wind. It was odd, but he sensed Cogline close beside him, the old man's ghost risen from the ashes of Hearthstone, come to watch his student practice the craft he had taught him, come perhaps to judge how well he performed. You will never be free of the magic, he could hear the other say. He stared momentarily at the pitted, worn surface of the wall, watching the rainwater snake downward along its irregular paths, silver streamers that glistened like strands of Quickening's hair. He reached down again within himself for the magic and this time fastened on it. He drew its strength about him like armor, banded himself with it as if to match the stone of the shell before him, then reached out with his one remaining hand and pressed his fingers to the wall.

He felt the magic rise within him, flowing hot like fire, extending from his chest to his arm to the tips of his fingers to …

There was a shudder, and the stone before him drew back, flinching away as if human flesh that had been burned. There was a long, deep groan that was the sound of stone grating on stone and a thin shriek as if a life had been pressed between. Quickening crouched like a startled bird, her silver hair flung back, her eyes bright and strangely alive. Morgan Leah drew out the broadsword strapped across his back in a single swift motion.

The wall before them opened—not as a door would swing wide or a panel lift, but as a cloth torn asunder. It opened, stretched wide from foundation to apex, a mouth that sought to feed. When it was twenty feet across, it stopped, immobile once more, the stone edges smooth and fixed, imbued with the look of a doorway that had always been there and clearly belonged.

A way in, thought Walker Boh. Exactly what they had come searching for.

Quickening and Morgan Leah stood beside him expectantly. He did not look at either of them. He kept his eyes focused on the opening before him, on the darkness within, on its sea of impenetrable shadows. He searched and listened, but nothing revealed itself.

Still, he knew what waited.

Carisman's voice sang softly in his mind.
Come right in, said the spider to the fly.

With the girl and the Highlander flanking him, Walker Boh complied.

S
hadows enveloped them almost immediately, layers of darkness that began less than a dozen feet inside the opening to the dome and entirely concealed everything that lay beyond. They slowed on Walker's lead, waiting for their eyes to adjust, listening to the hollow echoes of their booted feet fade into the silence. Then there was only the sound of their breathing. Behind them, the faint gray daylight was a slender thread connecting them to the world without, and an instant later it was severed. Stone grated on stone once more, and the opening that had admitted them disappeared. No one moved to prevent it from happening; indeed, they had all expected as much. They stood together in the silence that followed, each conscious of the reassuring presence of the others, each straining to hear the sound of any foreign movement, each waiting for some small measure of sight to return. The sense of emptiness was complete. The interior of the dome had the feel of a monstrous tomb in which nothing living had walked in centuries. The air had a stale and musty smell, devoid of any recognizable scents, and it was cold, a bone-biting chill that entered through the mouth and nostrils and worked its way instantly to the pit of the stomach and lodged there. They began to shiver almost immediately. Even in the impenetrable darkness it seemed to Walker Boh that he could see the clouding of his breath.

The seconds dragged by, heartbeats in the unbroken stillness. The three waited patiently. Something would happen. Someone would appear. Unless they had been brought into the dome to be killed, Walker speculated in the silence of his thoughts. But he didn't think that was the case. In fact, he no longer believed as he had in the beginning that there was any active effort being made to eliminate them. The character of their relationship with Eld-wist suggested on close study that the city functioned in an impersonal way to rid itself of intruders, but that it did not exert any special effort if it immediately failed. Eldwist did not rely on speed; it relied on the law of averages. Sooner or later intruders would make a mistake. They would grow incautious and either the trapdoors or the Rake would claim them. Walker was willing to wager that Quickening had guessed right, that until very recently the Stone King hadn't even been aware of their presence—or if he had, hadn't bothered himself about it. It wasn't until Walker had used magic against the shell of his enclosure that he had roused himself. Not even using magic against the Rake had made any difference to him. But now, Walker believed, he was curious—and that was why they had been brought inside …

Walker caught himself. He had missed something. Nothing was going to happen if they just stood there in the darkness, not if they waited all that day and all the next. The Stone King had brought them inside for a reason. He had brought them inside to see what they would do.

Or, perhaps,
could
do.

He reached out with his good arm to grip first Morgan and then Quickening and bent their heads gently to press close against his own. “Whatever happens, Quickening,” he whispered, speaking only to the girl, his voice so soft it was barely audible, “remember your vow to do nothing to reveal that you have any use of the magic.”

Then he released them, stepped away, brought up his hand, snapped his fingers, and sparked a single silver flame to life.

They looked about. They were standing in a tunnel that ran forward a short distance to an opening. Holding the flame before him, Walker led them forward. When they reached the tunnel's end, he extinguished the flame, summoned his magic a second time, and sent a scattering of silver fire into the darkness.

Walker inhaled sharply. The shower of light flew into the unknown, soaring through the shadows, chasing them as it went, and rising until everything about them lay revealed. They stood at the entrance to a vast rotunda, an arena ringed by row upon row of seats that lifted away into the gloom. The roof of the dome stretched high overhead, its rafters of stone arcing downward from peak to foundation. Lines of stairs ran upward to the rows of seats, and railings encircled the arena. The arena and stands, like the rafters, were stone, ancient and worn by time, hard and flat against the darkness that cloaked them. A string of shadowed tunnels similar to the one that had admitted them opened through the stands, black holes that burrowed and disappeared.

At the very center of the arena stood a massive stone statue, rough-hewn and barely recognizable, of a man hunched over in thought.

Walker let the fire settle in place, its light extending. The dome was vast and empty, silent save for the sound of their footfalls, seemingly bereft of any life but their own. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Morgan start forward and reached out quickly to hold him back. Quickening moved over to take the Highlander's arm protectively in her own. Walker's gaze swept the arena, the black tunnels that opened onto it, the stands that surrounded it, the rafters and ceiling, and then the arena again. He stopped when he reached the statue. Nothing moved. But there was something there. He could feel it, more strongly now than before, the same presence he had sensed when he had stood without.

He started forward, slowly, cautiously. Morgan and Quickening trailed. He was momentarily in command of matters now, Quickening's deference in some way become an acknowledgment of her need. She was not to use magic. She was to rely on him. He discovered an unexpected strength of resolution in the fact that he had made her dependent on him. There was no time now for drifting, for self-doubts and fears, or for the uncertainties
of who and what he was meant to be. A fiery determination burned through him. It was better this way, he realized, better to be in command, to accept responsibility for what was to happen. It had always been that way. At that moment he understood for the first time in his life that it always would.

The statue loomed directly before them, a massive chunk of stone that seemed to defy the light Walker had evoked to defuse the darkness. The thinker faced away from them, a gnarled and lumpish form, kneeling half-seated and half-slumped, one arm folded across his stomach, the second closed to a fist and cocked to brace his chin. It might have been intended that there be a cloak thrown about him or he might simply have been covered with hair; it was impossible to discern. There was no writing on the base he rested upon; indeed, it was a rather awkward pedestal that seemed to join the legs of the statue to the dome's floor as if the rock had simply melted away once upon a distant time.

They reached the statue and began to circle it. The face came slowly into view. It was a monster's face, ravaged and pocked, a mass of protuberances and knots, all misshapen in the manner of a sculpture partially formed and then abandoned. Eyes of stone stared blankly from beneath a glowering brow. There was horror written in the statue's features; there were demons captured in the shaping that could never be dislodged. Walker glanced away uneasily to search again the dome's shadows. The silence winked back at him.

Suddenly Quickening stopped, freezing in place like a startled deer. “Walker,” she whispered, her voice a low hiss.

She was looking at the statue. Walker wheeled catlike to follow her gaze.

The eyes of the statue had shifted to fix on him.

He heard Morgan's blade clear its sheath in a rasp of metal.

The statue's misshapen head began moving, the stone grating eerily as it shifted, not breaking off or cracking, but rearranging somehow, as if become both solid and liquid. The grating echoed through the hollow shell of the dome like the shifting of massive mountain boulders in a slide. Arms moved and shoulders followed. The torso swiveled, the stone rubbing and grinding until the short hairs on Walker's neck were rigid.

Then it spoke, mouth opening, stone rubbing on stone.

—Who are you—

Walker did not reply, so astonished at what he was seeing that he could not manage to answer. He simply stood there, dumbfounded. The statue was alive, a thing of stone, frighteningly shaped by a madman's hand, lacking blood and flesh, yet somehow alive.

In the next instant he realized what he was seeing and even then he could not speak the creature's name. It was Quickening who spoke for him.

“Uhl Belk,” she whispered.

—Who are you—

Quickening stepped forward, looking tiny and insignificant in the shadow of the Stone King, her silver hair swept back.

“I am called Quickening,” she replied. Her voice, surprisingly strong
and steady, reverberated through the stillness. “These are my companions, Walker Boh and Morgan Leah. We have come to Eldwist to ask you to return the Black Elfstone.”