Chapter Twenty-Three

They spent what remained of the night in an arbor of white oaks bordering the Mermidon a few miles below the Kennon Pass. It was cool and shady where they slept, protected from the late summer heat that gathered early on the open grasslands, and they did not wake until well after sunrise. They washed and ate from the supplies that Damson carried, listening to the steady flow of the river and an effervescent birdsong. Morgan rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to remember everything that had happened the previous day, but it was already growing vague in his mind, a memory that seemed to have been stored away a long time ago. That Padishar Creel was safe again, however distant the event, was all that mattered, he told himself wearily, and he let the matter slide into the distance of yesterday.

He pulled on his boots as he munched on bread and cheese and considered what lay ahead. Today was a hot, sultry expectation that shimmered through the dappled shadows of the leaves and branches, and it might take him anywhere. The past was a reminder of the vicissitudes of life, chance playing off opportunity and giving back what she would. The hardships and losses that Morgan had experienced had tempered him like iron run through the fire, and a vacuum had formed around him that he did not think anything would ever get past again, a dead place where hurt and disappointment and fear could not survive, a shield that let him keep everything away so that he might go on when sometimes he did not think he could. The problem, of course, was that it kept other things away as well — hope and caring and love among them. He could admit them when he chose, but there was always the danger that the other feelings would come in as well. When you let in one, you always risked letting in the others. It was his legacy from Steff and Quickening, from the Jut and Eldwist, from Druid wraiths and Shadowen. It was a truth that haunted him.

He brushed aside the musings and speculation, finished off his meal, and stood and stretched.

“Ready?” Damson Rhee asked. She was flushed from cold water splashed on her skin, and her fiery hair was brushed out so that it shone. She was pretty and vital and filled with a determination that radiated like heat from a flame. Morgan looked at her and thought again how lucky Par was to have someone like that in love with him.

Matty Roh finished washing off her plate and handed it over to Damson to pack. “Where do we go from here?” she asked in her customarily blunt fashion. “How do we go about finding Par Ohmsford?”

Damson shoved the plate in with the others. “We track him.” She tightened the stays on the pack and stood up. “With this.”

She reached down inside her tunic front and pulled out what looked to be half of a medallion threaded on a leather thong. Morgan and Matty bent close. The medallion — a metal disk, actually — had no markings or insignia, and the jagged sharpness of the straight edge indicated that it had been broken recently^

“It is called a Skree,” Damson explained, holding it up to the light where it gleamed a copper gold. “I gave the other half to Par when we separated. The disk was fashioned out of one metal, one forging, and can only be used once. The halves draw the holders to each other. They give off light when they are brought close.”

Matty Roh looked skeptical. “How close do you have to be?” Her black hair was short and straight about her elfin face, and her eyes were deep and searching. She looked fresh-scrubbed and new — younger than she was, Morgan thought, and nothing of who she could be.

Damson smiled. “The Skree is a street magic. I have seen it work; I know what it can do.” The smile tightened. “Shall we try it out?”

She held it outstretched in her palm and faced west, north, and then east. The Skree did nothing. Damson glanced at them quickly. “He was traveling south,” she explained. “I saved that for last.”

She pointed her hand south. The coppery face of the Skree might have pulsed faintly, but Morgan really wasn’t sure. Damson, however, nodded in satisfaction.

“He’s a long way away, it seems.” Her smile was hesitant as she let her eyes meet theirs. “You have to know how to read it.” She stuffed the disk back inside her tunic. “We had better start walking.”

She reached down for her pack and swung it over her shoulders. Matty Roh gave Morgan a sideways glance and a shake of her head that said, Did you see something I missed? Morgan shrugged. He wasn’t sure.

They set out into the heat, following the Mermidon on its winding path east toward Varfleet, keeping as much as they could to the shade of the trees. A breeze blew off the water and helped cool them, but the surrounding countryside was empty and still. The peaks of the Dragon’s Teeth north were barren and gray with the summer’s swelter, and the mix of hills and low mountains south were burned out and dry. The sun lifted in the cloudless sky, and the heat beat down in waves. Dead animals lay scattered on the open plains, their twisted bodies rotting. Vast stretches of Callahorn’s woods had been sickened and the earth beneath left bare. Pools of stagnant, dull-green water stood listless and stinking. Trees were ravaged and withered like the carcasses of creatures hung out to dry. Often the stretches of ruined earth lasted for miles. Morgan could smell the decay in the air. This was more than the summer heat and dryness; this was the Shadowen poisoning that he had witnessed time and again since coming north, a devastation of the land that the dark things were somehow causing. And it was growing worse.

Midday faded into afternoon, and they skirted Varfleet to the north, still following the Mermidon as it began to bend south. They encountered a handful of peddlers and other tradesmen on their way, but the heat kept most would-be travelers out of the sun, so they had the river road pretty much to themselves. They spotted their first Federation patrol as they neared Varfleet and stepped back into the trees to let it pass.

Damson used the Skree again while they waited, and the result was the same. The disk glowed faintly when pointed south — or it might have been nothing more than a glimmer of sunlight. Again Morgan and Matty Roh exchanged a surreptitious look. It was hot, and they were tired. They were wondering if this was leading somewhere or if Damson was just being hopeful. There were other ways to track Par if the disk wasn’t working, but neither of them was ready to challenge Damson on the matter just yet.

They needed a boat to travel down the Mermidon to the Rainbow Lake, she advised, tucking the Skree away once more. It would be quicker by three times than trying to make the journey afoot. Matty shrugged and said she would go into the city, since it was less dangerous for her to do so than for them, and she would meet them here again as soon as she had found what they needed. She put down the bedroll she had been carrying and disappeared into the swelter.

Morgan sat with Damson in the shade of an ancient willow close by the riverbank where they could see anyone approaching from either direction. The river was muddy and clogged with debris in the wake of last night’s storm, and they watched it flow past in sluggish, deliberate fashion, a bearer of discards and old news. Morgan’s eyes were heavy with lack of sleep, and he closed them against the light.

“You’re still not certain of me, are you?” he heard Damson ask after a time.

He looked over at her. “What do you mean?‘

“I saw the look you exchanged with Matty when I used the Skree.”

He sighed. “That doesn’t mean I’m not certain of you, Damson. It means I didn’t see anything and that worries me.”

“You have to know how to use it.”

“So you said. But what if you’re wrong? You can’t blame me for being skeptical.”

She smiled ironically. “Yes, I can. Somewhere along the way we have to start trusting each other, all three of us. If we don’t, we’re going to get into a lot of trouble. You think about it, Morgan.”

He did and was still thinking on it when dusk settled over the borderlands and Matty trudged back out of the haze with a tired look on her face.

“We have a boat,” she announced, dropping wearily into the shadow of the willow and reaching for the water cup Damson offered. She splashed water on her dust-streaked face and let it run off. “A boat, supplies, and weapons, all tucked away at the waterfront. We can pick them up after dark when we won’t be seen.

“Any problems?” Morgan asked.

She gave him a hard look. “I didn’t have to kill anyone, if that’s what you mean.” She glowered at him, then settled back and wouldn’t say another word.

Now they were both mad at him, he thought, and decided he didn’t care.

When night came, they followed the riverbank down into the city until they reached the docks north where Matty had secured the boat. It was an older craft, a flat-bottomed skiff with poles, oars, a mast, and a canvas sail, and was supplied with food and weapons as Matty had promised. They climbed aboard without saying anything and shoved off, rode the skiff downriver to the first unoccupied cove, then beached their craft and went immediately to sleep. At sunrise they were up again and off. They rode the Mermidon south toward the Runne until sunset and made camp in a wedge of rocks that opened onto a narrow sand bar fronting a grove of ash. They ate dinner cold, rolled into their blankets, and slept once more. Two days had passed without anyone saying much of anything. Tempers were frayed, and uncertainty over the direction they were taking had shut down any real effort at communication. There had been a bonding in Tyrsis that was lacking here — perhaps because of the doubts they were feeling about one another, perhaps because of their uneasiness over what might be waiting for them. In Tyrsis there had been a plan — or at least the rudiments of one. Here there was only a vague determination to keep hunting for Par Ohmsford until he was found. They had known where Padishar was, and there had been a sense of having some control over reaching him. But Par could be anywhere, and there was nothing to suggest that they were not already too late to do him any good.

It was with immense relief, then, that when Damson brought out the Skree the following morning and pointed her hand south, the copper metal gleamed bright even in the shadow of the rocks that hemmed them about. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then they smiled like old friends rediscovering one another and pushed off into the channel with fresh determination.

The tension eased after that and the sense of companionship they had shared in rescuing Padishar returned once more. The skiff eased its way down the channel, borne steadily south on waters that had turned calm and smooth once more. The day was hot and windless, and the journey was slow, but the free-born women and the Highlander passed the time exchanging thoughts and dreams, working their way past the barriers they had allowed to form between them, conversing until they were comfortable with one another once more.

Nightfall found them deep within the Runne, the mountains a shadowy wall in the growing dark that blocked the starlight and left them with only a narrow corridor of sky overhead. They camped on an island that was mostly sandy beach and bleached driftwood encircling a stand of scrub pine. The air stayed sultry and was thick with pungent river smells — dead fish, mud flats, and rushes. Morgan fished, and they ate what he caught over a small fire, drank a little of the ale Damson carried, and watched the river flow past like a silver ribbon. Damson used the Skree, and it glowed bright copper when pointed south. So far, so good. They were less than a day’s journey from where the Mermidon emptied into the Rainbow Lake. Perhaps there they would learn something of the whereabouts of Par.

After a time Damson and Matty stretched out on their blankets to sleep while Morgan ambled down to the water’s edge and sat thinking of other times and places. He wanted to pull together the threads of all that had happened in an effort to make some sense out of what was to come. He was tired of running from an enemy he still knew almost nothing about, and in typical fashion believed that if he considered the matter hard enough he was bound to learn something. But the threads trailed away from him as if blown in a wind, and he could not seem to gather them up. They drifted and strayed, and the questions that had plagued him for weeks remained unanswered.

He was digging in the sand with a stick when Matty appeared and sat down next to him.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she offered. Her face was pale and cool-looking in the starlight, and her eyes were depthless. “What are you doing?”

He shook his head. “Thinking.”

“What about?”

“Everything and nothing.” He gave her a quick smile. “I can’t seem to settle on much. I thought I might try to reason out a few things, but my mind just keeps wandering.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, her eyes turning away to look out over the river. “You try too hard,” she said finally.

He looked at her.

“You work at everything like it was the last chance you were ever going to get. You’re like a little boy with a chore his mother has given him to do. It means so much to you that you can’t afford to make even the smallest mistake.”

He shrugged. “Well, that’s not how I am. Maybe that’s how I seem at the moment, but that isn’t really me. Besides, now who’s judging who?”

She met his gaze squarely. “I’m not judging you; I’m giving you my impression. That’s different from what you were doing. You were judging me.‘

“Oh.” He didn’t believe it for a moment. His face said so, and he didn’t bother to hide it. “Anyway, trying hard isn’t a bad thing.”

“Do you remember when I told you that I had killed a lot of men?” He nodded. “That was a lie. Or at least an exaggeration. I just said that because you made me mad.” She looked away again, thoughtful. “There’s a lot you don’t understand about me. I don’t think I can explain it all to you.”

He stared at her hard, but she refused to look at him. “Well, I didn’t ask you to explain,” he replied defensively.

She ignored him. “You’re very good with that sword. Almost as good as I am. I could teach you to be better if you’d let me. I could teach you a lot. Remember what happened to you at the Whistledown when you grabbed me. I could teach you to do that, too.”

He flushed. “That wouldn’t have happened if...”

“... you had been ready.” She smiled. “I know, you said so before. But the point is, you weren’t ready — and look what happened. Besides, being ready is what counts. Padishar taught me that. Being ready is certainly more important than trying hard.”

His jaw tightened. “Are you about finished detailing what’s wrong with me? Or is there something else you’d like to add?”

The smile disappeared from her face. She did not look at him, keeping her eyes on the river. He started to say something more, then thought better of it. She seemed strangely vulnerable all of a sudden. He watched her draw up her knees, clasp her arms about them, and lower her head into the darkened space between. He could hear the sound of her breathing, slow and even.

“I like you a lot,” she said finally. She kept her face hidden. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

He didn’t know what to say. He just stared at her.

“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “That’s why I came.” she lifted her head to look at him. “What do you think about that?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what I think.”

She took a deep breath. “Damson told me about Quickening.”

She said it as if the words might catch fire in her mouth. Her eyes searched his, and he saw that she was frightened of what he might be thinking but determined that she would finish anyway. “Damson said you were in love with Quickening, that losing her was the worst thing that had ever happened to you. She told me about it because I asked her. I wanted to know something about you that you wouldn’t tell me yourself. Then I wanted to talk to you about it, but I didn’t know how. I’m very good at listening, but not so good at asking.”

Morgan blinked. He saw Quickening in his mind, a flawless, silver-haired vision as ephemeral as smoke. The pain he felt in remembering was palpable. He tried to shut it away, but it was pointless. He did not want to remember, but tbe memory was always there, just at the edges of his thinking.

Matty Roh put her hand over his, impulsive, hesitant. “I could listen now, if you would let me,” she said. “I would like it if I could.”

He thought, No, I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t even want to think about it, not with you, not with anybody! But then he saw her again in his mind bathing her ruined feet in the stream and telling him how she had come to be disfigured, how the poisoning of the land had changed her life forever. Was the pain of her memories any less than his own? He thought, too, of Quickening as she lay dying, healing the shattered Sword of Leah, giving him a part of herself to take with him, something that would transcend her death. What she had left behind was not meant to be kept secret or hidden. It was meant to be shared.

And memories, he knew, were not glass treasures to be kept locked within a box. They were bright ribbons to be hung in the wind.

He turned his hand over and clasped hers. Then he leaned close so that he could see her face clearly and began to speak. He talked for a long time, finding it hard at first and then easier, working his way through the maze of emotions that rose within him, searching for the words that sometimes would not come, forcing himself to go on even when he thought that maybe he could not.

When he was done, she held him close and some of the pain slipped away.

They set out again at dawn, the daylight gray and misty with a promise of rain. Clouds rolled out of the west, a heavy, dark avalanche that sealed away everything in its path. It was hot and still on the river, and the slap of the water against the canyon walls echoed sharply as they wound their way downriver. Morgan put up the mast and sail, but there was little wind to help, and after a while he took it down again and let the current carry them. It was nearing midday when they passed beneath South-watch, the black obelisk towering over them, vast and silent and impenetrable, its shadow cast like a Forbidding across the Mermidon. They stared at it with loathing as they passed, imagining the dark things that waited within, uneasy with the possibility that they might be watched. But no one appeared, and they sailed by unchallenged. Southwatch receded into the distance, melted into the haze, and was gone.

They reached the mouth of the river shortly after, the waters widening and stretching away to become the Rainbow Lake, smoothing into a glassy surface and brightening into a richer blue. The rainbow from which the lake took its name was in pale evidence, shimmering in the heat and mist, suspended above the water like a weathered, faded banner whose stays had come loose so that it floated free. They guided the skiff to the west bank, beached it, and walked out onto a barren flat that dropped away east and south into the water and spread northwest across a plain empty of everything but scrub grass and stunted, leafless ironwood to where a line of hills shadowed the horizon. They breathed the air and looked about, finding no sign of anything for as far as they could see.

Damson brushed back her fiery hair, tied it in place with a bandanna across her forehead, and drew out the Skree. Holding it forth in her open palm, she faced south. Morgan watched as the half disk glimmered bright copper.

She began to put it away, apparently had second thoughts, and tested each of the other compass points. When she faced north, the direction from which they had come, the Skree glimmered a second time, a small, weak pulsing. Damson stared at it in disbelief, closed her hand over it, turned away and then back once more, and reopened her hand. Again the Skree glimmered fitfully.

“Why is it doing that?” Matty asked immediately.

Damson shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it behaving like this.”

She faced south again and carefully let her palm travel the horizon from east to west and back again. Then she did the same thing facing north, reading the Skree’s hammered surface as she turned. There was no mistake in what they were seeing. The Skree brightened both ways.

“Could it have been broken again and the pieces carried in two directions?” Morgan asked.

“No. It can onjy be divided once. Another breaking would render it useless. That hasn’t happened.” Damson looked worried. “But something has. The reading south points towards the Silver River country west of Culhaven above the Battlemound. It is the stronger of the two.” She looked over her shoulder. “The reading north is centered on Southwatch.”

There was a long silence as they considered what that meant. A heron cried out from over the lake, swept out of the haze in a flash of silver brightness, and disappeared again.

“Two readings,” Morgan said, and put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “And one of them is a fake.”

“So which one do we believe?” Matty asked. She started away a few steps as if she had something in mind, then turned abruptly and came back again. “Which is the real one?”

Again Damson shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Matty’s cobalt eyes glanced toward the horizon where the clouds were building. “Then we will have to check them both.”

Damson nodded. “I think so. I don’t know any other way.”

Morgan exhaled in frustration. “All right. We’ll go south first. That reading is the stronger of the two.”

“And abandon Southwatch?” Matty shook her head. “We can’t do that. Someone has to stay here in case Par Ohmsford is inside. Think about it, Highlander. What if he’s in there and they try to move him? What if a chance to rescue him comes along and no one is here to do anything about it? We might lose him and have to start all over again. I don’t think we can take that chance.”

“She’s right,” Damson agreed.

“Fine, you stay, Damson and I will go south,” Morgan declared, irritated that he hadn’t thought of it first.

But Matty shook her head again. “You have to be the one who stays. Your sword is the only effective weapon we have against the Shadowen. If a rescue is needed, if any sort of confrontation comes about, your Sword is a talisman against their magic. My skills are good, Morgan Leah, but I also know when I’m overmatched. I don’t like this any better than you do, but it can’t be helped. Damson and I will go south.”

There was a long silence as they faced each other, Morgan fighting to control an almost irresistible urge to reject flatly what he perceived to be the madness of her suggestion, Matty with her cobalt eyes steady and determined, the weight of her arguments mirrored in their blue light.

Finally Morgan looked away, reason winning out over passion, a reluctant submission to necessity and hope. “All right,” he said softly. The words were bitter and harsh sounding. “All right. I don’t like it, but all right.” He looked back again. “But if you find Par and there’s to be a fight, you come back for me.”

Matty nodded. “If we can.”

Morgan winced at the qualification, shook his head angrily, and glanced at Damson in challenge. But Damson simply nodded in agreement. Morgan exhaled slowly. “If you can,” he repeated dully.

They conferred a moment more, agreeing on what they would do if time and circumstance allowed. Morgan scanned the countryside and then pointed west to where a bluff fronting the lake looked out across the surrounding land. From there he would be able to see anything coming to or going from Southwatch. If nothing happened in the time between, that was where they would find him when they returned.

He walked back with them to the skiff and retrieved supplies sufficient to last him a week. Then he embraced them hesitantly, Damson first, then Matty. The tall girl held him tightly against her, almost as if to persuade him of her reluctance to leave. She did not speak, but her hands pressed into his back, and her lips brushed his cheek. She looked hard at him as she broke away, and he had the feeling that she was leaving something of herself behind with him in that look. He started to give her a reassuring smile in reply, but she had already turned away.

When they were gone, faded into the mist that had settled over the river, he turned west toward his selected watch post and trudged into the growing dark. The clouds blanketed the skies from horizon to horizon, and the air had begun to cool. A wind had sprung up, gusting across the flats, sending dust and silt swirling into his eyes. Far west, the rain was a dark curtain moving toward him. He pulled up the hood of his forest cloak and lowered his eyes to the ground.

He had just reached his destination when the rain arrived, a downpour that swept across the plains in a rush and covered everything in an instant’s time. Morgan burrowed deep within the shelter of a broad-limbed fir and settled down against the base of the trunk. It was dry and protected there, and the storm rolled past leaving him untouched. The rain continued for several hours, then turned to drizzle, and finally stopped. The thunderheads passed east, the skies cleared, and the sunset was a red and purple blaze in the fading light.

Morgan left the shelter of the fir and found a stand of broad-leaf maple that allowed him to remain hidden while at the same time giving him a clear view of Southwatch and the Mermidon east, a large stretch of the Rainbow Lake south, and a cut through the hills below the Runne that funneled any land traffic that might approach the Shadowen keep from the north and west. It was an ideal position to observe everything for nearly a dozen miles. Good enough, he decided, and settled in to await the night.

He ate a little of the food he had brought and drank some water. He wondered if Damson and Matty had attempted a crossing of the Rainbow Lake before the storm had struck or if they had decided to wait. He wondered if they were camped somewhere along the river looking back across at him.

The light faded to gray, and the stars began to appear. Morgan stared down at Southwatch and wished he could see inside. He tried not to think too closely about what might be happening there. Too much imagination could be a dangerous thing. He studied the plains east, barren and stripped of life, a wasteland of brown earth and gray deadwood that radiated out from the tower of the Shadowen like a stain. The fringes, he noted, were already darkening as well, infected by the poison as it spread. Trees rotted and grasses withered. The bluff on which he sat was an island already at risk.

He unstrapped the Sword of Leah from his back and cradled it in his arms. A talisman against the Shadowen, Matty Roh had called it. But it was power, too, that stole your soul, and there was little that could be done to protect against it. Each time he used the magic, a test of wills resumed, his own and the Sword’s, both fighting for supremacy, struggling for control. Three hundred years ago Allanon had answered Rone Leah’s desperate, angry plea by bestowing a tiny part of the Druid magic on the ancient weapon, and the legacy of that gift or curse — take your choice — was a bittersweet taste that once experienced cried out for more.

As did the wishsong for Par. As did all the magic that ever was or had ever been — siren songs of power that transcended everything in their compelling, inexorable need to be sung.

He smiled darkly. Be careful what you wish for. Wasn’t that the old admonition to those who begged for what they did not have?

The smile faded. Maybe he would find out when it came time to summon the Sword’s magic again — as summon it he surely must, sooner or later. Maybe Quickening’s healing touch, the magic that had restored his talisman, would prove in the end to be as killing as that of the Shadowen.

The thought left him feeling cold and empty and impossibly alone. He sat motionless in the shadows, staring out across the countryside, waiting for the darkness to claim it.