Part 46 (1/2)

She was exhausted, her strength drained by prolonged use of the wishsong and by her long journey down into the pit. She was lost, and the magic no longer gave her sight. And all about her, the tremors continued to shake the valley floor, forewarning of the destruction of the Maelmord and everything caught within it. Only her spirit remained strong, and it was her spirit that kept her moving now in search of an escape.

The ground sank sharply beneath her feet, giving way with a suddenness that was frightening. Brin stumbled and nearly went down. The Maelmord was breaking up. It was crumbling beneath her, and she knew now that she would be carried with it.

She slowed to a weary halt, gasping for breach. It was pointless to go on. She was running to no purpose, blind and directionless. Even the vaunted magic of the wishsong, should she choose to use it, could not save her now. Why had Jair abandoned her? Why had he gone?

Despair washed through her at the terrible sense of betrayal-despair and unreasoning anger. But she fought back against those feelings, knowing that they were senseless and unfair. Jair would not have left her unless he had been given no choice. Whatever had brought him to her had simply taken him back again.

Or perhaps what she had thought was Jair was not and what she had seen and felt had not even been real. Perhaps it had all been something that in her madness she had dreamed...

”Jair!” she screamed.

The echo of her voice broke against the rumblings of the earth and then was gone. The ground sank further beneath her.

Resolutely, stubbornly, she turned and went on. She no longer ran, too wearied to run further. Her dusky face hardened with determination, and she brushed everything from her mind but the need to put one foot before the other. She would not give up. She would go on. When she could no longer walk upright, she would crawl. But she would go on.

Then suddenly a shadow bounded from the tangled dark, huge, lean, and ghostly. It cametoward her and she cried out in fright. A ma.s.sive whiskered face rubbed against her body, and luminous blue eyes blinked in greeting. It was Whisper! She fell against the moor cat in grateful disbelief, crying openly, wrapping her arms about the s.h.a.ggy neck. Whisper had come for her!

The moor cat turned and started away at once, drawing her with him. She fastened one hand in the ruff of his neck and stumbled after. They slipped through the maze of the dying jungle. All about them, the rumblings grew and tremors shook the earth. Rotted limbs began to crash down about them. Steam smelling rank and fetid geysered from cracks that split the hardened earth. Boulders and slides broke away from the cliffs that walled the valley close and came tumbling through the dark.

Yet somehow they reached the Croagh, its coiled length materializing abruptly out of the gloom, rising from the valley floor into the night. The giant cat bounded onto the stairway with Brin a step behind. The Valegirl scrambled upward, groping her way uncertainly as the rumblings intensified. Ma.s.sive tremors rocked the Croagh, one following close upon another. Brin was thrown to her knees. Beneath her, the stone began to crack and split. Whole sections of the stairway were breaking off and tumbling downward into the pit. Not yeti she screamed soundlessly. Not until I am free! Whisper's deep roar lifted above the rumblings, and she struggled after the big cat. Below them, giant trees snapped apart like deadwood. The last of the failing twilight died as the sun slipped beneath the horizon and the whole of the land was wrapped in shadow.

And then the cliff ledge was before her again, and she stumbled onto it, crying out to the shadowy forms that closed about her. Arms reached for her, pulling her clear of the crumbling stairs, drawing her back from the precipice. Kimber was hugging and kissing her, her pixie face beaming with happiness and her eyes filled with tears. Cogline was muttering and grumbling, dabbing at her cheeks with a soiled cloth. And Rone was there, his lean, sun-browned face haggard and bruised, but his gray eyes were fierce with love. Whispering her name, he wrapped his arms about her and held her against him. It was then, finally, that she knew that she was safe.

Only moments later, Jair and Slanter came upon them, descending the Croagh from Heaven's Well in their desperate search for Brin. There were astonished looks and exclamations of relief. Then Brin and Jair were clasping each other close once more.

”It was you who came to me in the Maelmord,” Brin whispered, stroking her brother's head. She smiled through her tears. ”You saved me, Jair.”

Jair hugged, her back to mask his embarra.s.sment. Rone came over and hugged them both.

”For cat's sake, tiger-you're supposed to be back in the Vale! Don't you ever do anything you're told?”

Slanter hung back tentatively, eyeing them all with studied suspicion, from the three who persisted in hugging and kissing each other to the spindly old man, the woods girl, and the giant moor cat stretched out beside them. ”Oddest bunch I've ever come across,” he muttered to himself.

Then the rumblings from the floor of the valley rolled through the mountain rock like thunder, and the tremors shattered apart the whole of the Croagh. It tumbled into the pit and was gone. All of the little company that were gathered on the cliff ledge hastened to its edge and peered through the gloom. Shards of brightness from the moon and stars laced the darkness. In a rippling of shadows, the pit of the Maelmord began to sink. Downward it slipped, downward into the earth as if swallowed by quicksand. Soil, rock, and dying forest crumbled and fell away. Theshadows lengthened and drew together until the moonlight could no longer show any trace of what had once been.

In moments, the Maelmord had disappeared forever.

47.

Autumn had settled down across the land, and everywhere the colors of the season brightened and shone in the suns.h.i.+ne's warmth. It was a clear, cool day in the Eastland forests where the Chard Rush tumbled down from out of the Wolfsktaag, and the skies were a depthless blue.

There had been a frost that morning, and melted patches of it lingered still in the deep gra.s.ses and on the hardened earth and moss-grown rocks that lined the riverbanks, mixed with the spray of the channel's foaming waters.

Brin paused at the edge of those waters to gather her thoughts.

It had been a week now since the little company of friends had departed the Ravenshorn.

With the destruction of the Ildatch and the fading of the dark magic and all the things that it had made, the Gnome Hunters defending Graymark had fled back into the hills and forestlands of the deep Anar-back to the tribes from which they had been taken. Left alone in the crumbling, deserted fortress, Brin, Jair, and their friends had found the bodies of the Borderman Helt, the Dwarf Elb Foraker, and the Elven Prince Edain Elessedil and laid them to rest. Only Garet Jax had been left where he had fallen, for with the destruction of the Croagh, all pa.s.sage to Heaven's Well had been cut off. Perhaps it was right that the Weapons Master be left where no other mortal could go, Jair had offered solemnly. Perhaps it should be no different in death for Garet Jax than it had been in life.

They had camped that night in the forests below Graymark, south of where it nestled within the Ravenshorn, and it was there that Brin told the others her promise to Allanon that, when the Ildatch was destroyed and her quest finished, she would come back to him. Now that her long journey into the Maelmord was over, she must seek him out one final time. There were questions yet to be answered and things that she must know.

And so they had all come with her-her brother Jair, Rone, Kimber, Cogline, the moor cat Whisper, and even the Gnome Slanter. They had journeyed with her back down out of the Ravenshorn, skirted the mountains south along the barren stretches of Olden Moor, crossed again over Toffer Ridge into the forests of Darklin Reach and the valley of Hearthstone, then followed the winding channel of the Chard Rush west until they had reached the little glen where Allanon had fought his final battle. It had taken them a week to complete that journey; and on the evening of the seventh day they had camped at the edge of the glen.

Now, in the chill of early morning, she stood quietly, staring out across the river's flow.

Behind her, gathered in the bowl of the little glen, the others waited patiently. They had not come with her to the river's edge; she had not wanted them to. This was something that she must do alone.

How am I to summon him? she wondered. Am I to sing to him? Am I to use the wishsong's magic so that he will know that I am here? Or will he come without being called, knowing that I wait...?

As if in answer, the waters of the Chard Rush went still before her, their surface turned as smooth as gla.s.s. All about, the forest grew silent, and even the distant drone of the falls faded and was gone. Gently, the waters began to seethe, rippling and frothing like a stirred cauldron, and a single clear, sweet cry lifted into the morning air.

Then Allanon rose out of the Chard Rush, his tall, spare frame erect and robed in black.

He came across the still waters of the river, his head lifting within the shadow of the cowl and his dark eyes hard and penetrating. He did not look the way Bremen had appeared; his body seemedsolid rather than transparent, free from the mists that had cloaked his father's shade and free from the death shroud that had wrapped the old man close. It was as if he still lived, Brin thought suddenly, as if he had never died.

He drew close to her and stopped, suspended in the air above the waters of the river.

”Allanon,” she whispered.

”I have waited for you to come, Brin Ohmsford,” he answered her softly.

She looked closer, seeing now the fault glimmer of the river's waters through the darkness of his robes, s.h.i.+mmering gently, and she knew then that he was truly dead, and that it was only his shade that stood before her.

”It is finished, Allanon,” she told him, finding it suddenly difficult to speak. ”The Ildatch is destroyed.”

The cowled head inclined faintly. ”Destroyed by the power of the Elven magic, shaped and colored by the wishsong. But destroyed as well, Valegirl, by a power greater still-by love, Brin; by the love that bound your brother to you. He loved you too much to fail, even though he came too late.”

”Yes, by love, too, Allanon.”

”Savior and destroyer.” The black eyes narrowed. ”The power of your magic would make you both, and you have seen how corrupting such power can be. So terrible is the lure and so difficult to balance. I gave you warning of that, but such warning as I gave was not enough. I failed you badly.”

She shook her head quickly. ”No, it was not you who failed me. It was I who failed myself.”

The Druid's hand lifted from within the robes, and she found that she could see through it.

”I do not have long, so hear me well, Brin Ohmsford. I did not understand all that I should have of the dark magic. I deceived myself-just as the Grimpond told you. I knew that the magic of the wishsong could be as my father had warned-both blessing and curse-and that the holder could therefore become both savior and destroyer. But you possessed reason and heart, and I did not think the danger so great as long as those qualities stood by you. I failed to realize the truth about the Ildatch and that the danger of the dark magic could go beyond those created to wield it. For the true danger was always the book-the subverter of all who had come to use the magic from the time of the Warlock Lord to the time of the Mord Wraiths. All had been slaves to the Ildatch, but the Ildatch was not merely an inanimate gathering of pages and bindings in which the dark magic was recorded. It was alive-an evil that could turn to its uses by the magic's lure all who sought its power.”

Allanon bent close, sunlight streaking. through the edges of the dark robes as if they had frayed. ”It wanted you to come to it from the beginning. But it wanted you tested first. Each time you used the magic of the wishsong, you fell a bit further under the lure of the magic's power.

You realized that there was something wrong in your continued used of the magic, but you were forced to use it anyway. And I was not there to tell you what was happening. By the time that you had gone down into the Maelmord, you were a thing much the same as all who had served the book, and you believed that this was as it should be. This was what the book intended that you should believe. It wanted to have you for its own. Even the power of the Mord Wraiths was insignificant in comparison to yours, for they had not been born with the magic as had you. In you, the Ildatch had found a weapon that carried more power than any that had ever served it-even the Warlock Lord.”Brin stared at him disbelievingly. ”Then it spoke the truth when it said that it had been waiting for me-that there were bonds that joined us.”

”A twisted half-truth,” Allanon cautioned. ”You had become close enough in spirit to what it sought that it could make you believe that such was so. It could convince you that you were indeed the dark child of your fears.”

”But the wishsong could have made me so...”

”The wishsong could have made you...anything.”