The Heritage of Shannara by Terry Brooks Page B

and this old man appeared with his lantern and took him clear.” Morgan shook his head. “I never knew whether to believe the man or not. Drummers make better storytellers than truth-sayers.”
    “I think he's gone,” Par said, filled with a sense of sadness at his own certainty. “The magic doesn't last when it isn't practiced or believed in. The King of the Silver River hasn't had the benefit of either. He's just astory now, just another legend that no one but you and I and Coll and maybe a handful of others believe was ever real.”
    “We Ohmsfords always believe,” Coll finished softly.
    They walked on in silence, listening to the night sounds, following the trail as it wound eastward. They would not reach Culhaven that night, but they were not yet ready to stop either, so they simply kept on without bothering to discuss it. The woods thickened as they moved farther inland, deeper into the lower Anar, and the pathway narrowed as scrub began to inch closer from the darkness. The river turned angry as it passed through a series of rapids, and the land grew rough, a maze of gullies and hillocks peppered with stray boulders and stumps.
    “The road to Culhaven isn't what it once was,” Morgan muttered at one point. Par and Coll had no idea if that was so or not since neither had ever been to the Anar. They glanced at each other, but gave no reply.
    Then the trail ended abruptly, blocked by a series of fallen trees. A secondary pathway swung away from the river and ran off into the deep woods. Morgan hesitated, then took it. The trees closed about overhead, their branches shutting out all but a trickle of moonlight, and the three friends were forced to grope their way ahead. Morgan was muttering again, inaudibly this time, although the tone of his voice was unmistakable. Vines and overhanging brush were slapping at them as they passed, and they were forced to duck their heads. The woods began to smell oddly fetid, as if the undergrowth was decaying. Par tried to hold his breath against the stench, irritated by its pervasiveness. He wanted to move faster, but Morgan was in the lead and already moving as fast as he could.
    “It's as if something died in here,” Coll whispered from behind him.
    Something triggered in Par's memory. He remembered the smell that had emanated from the cottage of the woodswoman the old man had warned them was a Shadowen. The smell here was exactly the same.
    In the next instant, they emerged from the tangle of the forest into a clearing that was ringed by the lifeless husks of trees and carpeted with mulch, deadwood, and scattered bones. A single stagnant pool of water bubbled at its center in the fashion of a cauldron heated by fire. Gimlet-eyed scavengers peered out at them from the shadows.
    The companions came to an uncertain halt. “Morgan, this is just like it was …” Par began and then stopped.
    The Shadowen stepped noiselessly from the trees and faced them. Par never questioned what it was; he knew instinctively. Skepticism and disbelief were erased in an instant's time, the discarded trappings of years of certainty that Shadowen were what practical men said they were— rumors and fireside tales. Perhaps it was the old man's warning whispering in his ear that triggered his conversion. Perhaps it was simply the look of the thing. Whatever it was, the truth that was left him was chilling and unforgettable.
    This Shadowen was entirely different than the last. It was a huge, shambling thing, manlike but twice the size of a normal man, its body coveredin coarse, shaggy hair, its massive limbs ending in paws that were splayed and clawed, its body hunched over at the shoulders like a gorilla. There was a face amid all that hair, but it could scarcely be called human. It was wrinkled and twisted about a mouth from which teeth protruded like stunted bones, and it hid within leathery folds eyes that peered out with insistent dislike and burned like fire. It stood looking at them, studying