He rose then, and Cogline with him. Walker faced the old man in silence for a moment, then reached out with his good arm and gently embraced him. “I am sorry for what has been done to you,” he whispered. “I meant what I said back at Hearthstone before Rimmer Dall came—that I was wrong to blame you for any of what has happened, that I am grateful for all you have done to help me. We shall find a way to get free, Cogline. I promise.”
Then he stepped back, and Cogline’s answering smile was a momentary ray of sunlight breaking through the gloom.
So Walker Boh went up into the keep, following the lead of Cogline and Rumor, three specters at haunt in a twilight world. The castle of the Druids was dark and heavy, shimmering like an image reflected in a pool of water adrift with shadows. The stone of the walls and floors and towers was cold and empty of life, and the hallways wound about like tunnels beneath the earth, dark and dank. There were bones scattered here and there along the carpeted, tapestried halls, the remains of those Gnomes who had died when Allanon had invoked the magic that sent the Keep out of the Four Lands three hundred years earlier. Piles of dust marked the end of the Mord Wraiths trapped there, and all that remained of what they had been was a whisper of a memory sealed away by the walls.
Passageways came and went, stairways that ran straight and curved about, a warren of corridors burrowing back into the stone. The silence was pervasive, thick and deep as leaves in late autumn in the forest, rooted in the castle walls and inexorable. They did not challenge it, wordless as they passed through its curtain, focusing instead on what lay ahead, on the path they followed to the paths that waited. Doors and empty chambers came and went about them, stark and uninviting within their trappings of gloom. Windows opened into grayness, a peculiar haze that shaded everything beyond so that the Keep was an island. Walker searched for something of the forestland that ringed the empty hill on which Paranor had stood, but the trees had disappeared; or he had, he amended—come out of the Four Lands into nothingness. Color had been drained from the carpets and tapestries and paintings, from the stone itself, and even from the sky. There was only the gloom, a kind of gray that defied any brightening, that was empty and dead.
Yet there was one thing more. There was the magic that held Paranor sealed away. It was present at every turn, at once invisible and suddenly revealed, a kind of swirling, greenish mist. It hovered in the shadows and along the edges of their vision, wicked and certain, the hiss of its being a whisper of killing need. It could not touch them, for they were protected by other magic and were at one with the Keep itself. But it could watch. It could tease and taunt and threaten. It could wait with the promise of what would happen when their protection was gone.
It was odd that it should be such an obvious presence,—Walker Boh felt it immediately. It was as if the magic were a living thing, a guard dog set at prowl through the Keep, searching out intruders and hunting them down so that they might be destroyed. Its presence reminded him of the Rake in Eldwist, a Creeper that scoured its master’s grounds and swept them clean of life. The magic lacked the substance of the Rake, but its feel was the same. It was an enemy, Walker sensed, that would eventually have to be faced.
Within the Druid library, behind the bookcases where the vault was concealed, they found the Histories, banks of massive, leather-bound books set within the walls of the Keep, the magic that had once hidden them from mortal eyes faded with the passing of the Keep from the world of men. Walker studied the books for a time, deliberating, then chose one at random, seated himself, and began to read. Cogline and Rumor kept him company, silent and unobtrusive. Time passed, but the light did not change. There was no day or night in Paranor. There was no past or future. There was only the here and now.
Walker did not know how long he read. He did not grow tired and did not find himself in need of sleep. He did not eat or drink, being neither hungry nor thirsty. Cogline told him at one point that in the world into which Paranor had been dispatched, mortal needs had no meaning. They were ghosts as much as they were two men and a moor cat. Walker did not question. There was no need.
He read for hours or days or even weeks; he did not know. He read at first without comprehending, simply seeing the words flow in front of his eyes, a narrative that was as distant and removed as the life he had known before the dreams of Allanon. He read of the Druids and their studies, of the world they had tried to make after the cataclysm of the Great Wars, of the First Council at Paranor, and of the coming together of the Races out of the holocaust. What should it mean to him? he wondered. What difference did any of it make now?
He finished one book and went on to another, then another, working his way steadily through the volumes, constantly searching for something that would tell him what he needed to know. There were recitations of spells and conjurings, of magics that could aid in small ways, of healings by touch and thought, of the succor of living things, and of the work that was needed to make the land whole again. He read them, and they told him nothing. How was he supposed to transform himself from what he was into what he was expected to be? Where did it say what he was supposed to do? The pages turned, the words ran on, and the answers stayed hidden.
He did not finish in one sitting, even though he was free of the distractions of his mortal needs and did not sleep or eat or drink. He left to walk about periodically, to think of other things, and to let his mind clear itself of all that the Histories related. Sometimes Cogline went with him, his shadow; sometimes it was Rumor. They might have been back at Hearthstone, walking its trails, keeping each other company, living in the seclusion of the valley once more. But Hearthstone was gone, destroyed by the Shadowen, and Paranor was dark and empty of life, and no amount of wishing could change what had gone before. There was no returning to the past, Walker thought to himself more than once. Everything that had once been was lost.
After a time, he began to despair. He had almost finished reading the Druid Histories and still he had discovered nothing. He had learned everything of who and what the Druids were, of their teachings and their beliefs, and of how they had lived and what they they had sought to accomplish, and none of it told him anything about how they acquired their skills. There was no indication of where Allanon had come from, how he had learned to be a Druid or who had taught him, or what the subject matter of his teachings had been. The books were devoid of any reference to the conjuring that had sealed away the Keep or what it might require to reverse the spell.
“I cannot fathom it, Cogline,” Walker Boh admitted finally, frustrated beyond hope as the last of the volumes sat open on his lap before him. “I have read everything, and none of it has helped. Is it possible that there are volumes missing? Is there something more to be tried?”
But Cogline shook his head. The answers, if they existed in written form, would be found here. There were no other books, no other sources of reference. Everything was contained in the Histories. All of the Druid studies began and ended there.
Walker went out alone then for a time, stalking the halls in anger, feeling betrayed and cheated, a victim of Druid whim and conceit. He thought bitterly of all that had been done to him because of who he was, of all that he had been forced to endure. His home had been destroyed. He had lost an arm and barely escaped with his life. He had been lied to and tricked repeatedly. He had been made to feel responsible for the fate of an entire world. Self-pity washed through him, and then his mouth tightened in admonishment. Enough, he chided himself. He was alive, wasn’t he? Others had not been so fortunate. He was still haunted by Quickening’s face; he could not forget how she had looked when he had let her fall. Remember me, she had pleaded with Morgan Leah—but she had been speaking to him as well. Remember me—as if anyone who had known her could ever forget.