Walker breathed the air, closed his eyes, and drifted away into a place deep inside him. War was passing now, all sharp edges and spikes, glinting armored plates and black breathing holes. Walker ignored the Shadowen. Settling into the silence and the calm that lay within, he played out once more what was to happen. Step by step, he went over the plan he had formed while he lay healing, taking himself through the events he would precipitate and the consequences he would control. There would be nothing left to chance this time. There would be no testing, no halfway measures, no quarter given. He would succeed, or he would...
He almost smiled.
Or he would not.
He opened his eyes and glanced skyward. The midday was past now, edging on toward afternoon. But the light was not yet at its brightest and the heat not yet at its greatest, and so he would wait a little longer still. Light and heat would serve him better than it would the Shadowen, and that was why he was out there at midday. Before, he had thought to slip away in darkness. But darkness was the ally of the Horsemen, for they were creatures born of it and took their strength therefrom. Walker, with his Druid magic, would find his strength in brightness.
It was to be a testing of strengths, after all, that would determine who lived and died this day.
Strengths of all kinds.
He remembered his last conversation with Cogline. It was nearing dawn and he was preparing to go out. There was movement on the steps leading down through the gate towers to the entry court where he was positioned, and Cogline appeared. His stick-thin body slipped from the stairwall shadows in a soft flutter of robes and labored breathing. The seamed, whiskered face glanced at Walker briefly from beneath the edges of his frayed cowl, then looked away again. He approached and stopped, turning toward the door that led out.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Walker nodded. They had discussed it all—or as much of it as Walker was willing to discuss. There was nothing more to say.
The old man’s hands rested on the stone bulwarks that shielded and supported the iron-bound entry, so thin that they seemed almost transparent. “Let me come with you,” he said quietly.
Walker shook his head. “We have discussed this already.”
“Change your mind, Walker. Let me come. You will have need of me.”
He sounded so sure, Walker recalled thinking. “No. You and Rumor will wait here. Stay by the door—let me back in if this fails.”
Cogline’s jaw tightened. “If this fails, you won’t need me to let you back in.”
True, Walker thought. But that didn’t change things. He wasn’t going to let the old man and the moor cat go out there with him. He wasn’t going to be responsible for their lives as well. It would be enough that he would have to worry about keeping himself whole.
“You think I can’t look after myself,” the old man said, as if reading his thoughts. “You forget I took care of myself for years before you came along—before there were any Druids. I took care of you as well, once.”
Walker nodded. “I know that.”
The old man fidgeted. “Could be I was meant to take care of you again, you know. Could be you’ll have need of me out there.” He turned his face within the cowl to look at Walker. “I’m an old man, Walker. I’ve lived a long time—lived a full life. It doesn’t matter so much what happens to me anymore.”
“It matters to me.”
“It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t matter a whit.” Cogline was emphatic. “Why should it matter? Since when did you like me all that much anyway? I was the one who dragged you into this business. I was the one who persuaded you to visit the Hadeshorn, then to read the Druid History. Have you forgotten?”
Walker shook his head. “No, I haven’t forgotten any of it. But it was me who made the choices that mattered—not you. We’ve talked all this out, too. You were as much a pawn of the Druids as I was. Everything was decided three hundred years ago when Allanon bestowed the blood trust on Brin Ohmsford. You are not to blame for any of it.”
Cogline’s eyes turned filmy and distant. “I am to blame for everything that has happened in my life and yours as well, Walker Boh. I chose early on to take up the Druid way and chose after to discard it. I chose the old sciences to learn, to recover in small part. I made myself a creature of both worlds, Druid and Man, taking what I needed, keeping what I coveted, stealing from both. I am the link between the past and the present, the new and the old, and Allanon was able to use me as such. How much of what I am has made your own transformation possible, Walker? How far would you have gone without me there to prod you on? Do you think for a moment that I wasn’t aware of that? Or that Allanon was blind to it? No, I cannot be absolved from my blame. You cannot absolve me by taking it upon yourself.”
Walker remembered the vehemency in the other’s voice, the hard edge it had revealed, the insistence it had conveyed. “Then I shall not attempt to absolve you, old man,” he replied. “But neither shall I absolve myself. You did not make the choices for me; nor did you hinder me in making them. Yes, there were compelling reasons to choose as I did, but those reasons were not suggested by you before I had considered them myself. Besides, I could claim as you do, if I wished. Without me, what part would you have had in all of this? Would you have been more than a messenger to Par and Wren if you had not been tied to me as well? I don’t think that you can say so.”
The old man’s face was lowered into shadow by then, seeing the other’s inflexibility, hearing his resolve.
“You will help me best by waiting here,” Walker finished, reaching out to touch the other’s arm. “Always before, you have understood the importance of knowing when to act and when not to. Do so again for me now.”
It had ended there, Cogline standing with him until the sound of the Shadowen challenge had reverberated through Paranor’s stone walls and Walker had gone out into the gloomy dawn to meet it.
Strengths of all kinds, he repeated as he stood now in the lee of the castle wall and listened to the approach of the next of the circling Shadowen. He would need especially a resolve of the sort that Cogline possessed—a fierce determination not to give in to the hardest and most certain of life’s dictates—if he was to survive this day. Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, come to claim his soul. But on this day he was Fate, and Fate would determine the destiny of all.
He looked up as Pestilence appeared, then straightened perceptibly. It was time.
Walker Boh waited in the shadow of the wall, an invisible presence, while the Horseman approached. It came disinterestedly, lethargically, borne on its serpent mount, a swarm of buzzing, plague-ridden insects gathered in the shape of a man. Pestilence lacked features and therefore expression, and Walker could not tell what it was seeing or thinking. It passed without slowing, serpent claws scraping roughly on the path. Walker fell into step behind it. The spell of invisibility kept him from being seen, and the sound of the serpent’s own passage kept him from being heard. Walker had considered using the spell of invisibility to slip clear of the Shadowen entirely. But they had been quick enough to find him when he had tried to escape through Paranor’s underground tunnels, even though he had been as silent as thought, and he believed that they could sense him when he was far enough from the Keep, from his sanctuary and the source of his Druid power. Even invisibility might not protect him then. Better, he had decided, to use his advantage where it could be relied upon and put an end to the Horsemen once and for all.