Then suddenly a shadow bounded from the tangled dark, huge, lean, and ghostly. It came toward her and she cried out in fright. A massive 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 shaggy 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. Massive 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 embarrassment. 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. The shadows 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.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Autumn had settled down across the land, and everywhere the colors of the season brightened and shone in the sunshine’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 grasses 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 passage 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 glass. 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 seemed solid 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.