vines twisted and mottled, and great stalks of brush and weed stroked her body as she slipped past, feeding on the vibrancy of the music, finding in it an elixir that gave back life. From a great distance away, Brin felt their caress and smiled in response.
It was as if she had ceased to exist. Some tiny part of her knew that she should have been horrified by the things that wound about her and rubbed so lovingly against her. But she was given over to the music of the wishsong now, and she was no longer the one she had been. All of the feelings and reasonings that had been hers, that had made her who she was, were masked away by the dark magic, and she was become a thing like that into which she journeyed. She was a kindred spirit, wandered back from some distant place, the evil within her as strong as the evil she found waiting. She had become as dark as the Maelmord and the life that had been spawned there. She was one with it. She belonged.
A tiny part of her understood that Brin Ohmsford had ceased to exist, made over by the magic of the wishsong. It understood that she had let herself become this other thing — a thing so repulsive that she could not have stood it otherwise — and that she would not come back to herself until she had found her way through to the heart of the evil enfolding her. The euphoria, the exhilaration brought on by the frightening power of the wishsong, threatened to steal her away from herself completely, to strip her of her sanity and make her forever the thing she pretended to be. All the strange and marvelous imaginings were but trappings of a madness that would destroy her. All that remained of the one she once had been was that small bit of self that she still kept wrapped carefully within. All else had become the child of the Maelmord.
The wall of the jungle passed away and came about again, and nothing of it changed. Shadows wrapped close about, as soft as black velvet and as silent as death. The whole of the sky stayed screened away, and only the half–light of night’s coming penetrated beyond the gloom. All the while that she walked in this maze of darkness and stifling heat, the hissing of the Maelmord’s breath lifted from the earth, and the limbs, trunks, stalks, and vines swayed and writhed with the motion. Save for the hissing, there was only silence — intense and expectant. There was no sign of other life — no sign of the walkers, of the dark things that served them, or of the Ildatch that had given them all life.
She went on, driven by that spark of memory she harbored deep within herself. Find the Ildatch, it whispered in its small, empty voice. Find the book of the dark magic. Time fragmented and slipped away until it no longer had meaning. Had she been here an hour? Or more? There was a strange sense of having been here for a very long time, almost as if she had been here forever.
Far distant, almost lost to her in the vast tangle of the jungle, something tumbled from the cliffs above and fell into the pit. She could sense its fall and hear its scream as the Maelmord closed quickly about it, squeezing, crushing, and consuming until the thing was no more. She savored its death, tasted its blood as it was devoured. When it was gone, she longed for more.
Then whispered warnings brushed at her. From a dimly remembered past she saw Allanon once more. Tall and bent, his black hair gone gray, his lean face lined with age, he reached for her across a chasm she could not bridge, and his words were like sprinkled drops of rain upon a window closed before her. Beware. The wishsong is power like nothing I have ever seen. Use it with caution. She heard the words, saw them spatter on the glass and found herself laughing at the way they fell. The figure of the Druid receded and was gone. Dead, now, she reminded herself in surprise. Gone from the Four Lands forever.
She called him back again, as if his reappearance would serve to remind her of something that she had somehow forgotten. He came, sweeping out of the mists, striding across the chasm that had separated them. His strong hands came down gently to rest upon her shoulders. Wisdom and determination reflected in his eyes, and there was a sense of his never having truly left, but his always having been there. This is not a game you play, he whispered. Never that! Beware! And she shook her head. I am savior and destroyer, she whispered back. But who am I? Tell me now! Tell me…
A ripple in the fabric of her consciousness swept him away, a ghost, and suddenly she was back within the Maelmord. There was a rumbling of uneasiness within the pit, a tone of dissatisfaction in its hiss. It had sensed a momentary change in her and was disturbed. She reverted instantly to the thing she had created. The wishsong rose and swept into the jungle, soothing it, lulling it once again. The uneasiness and dissatisfaction faded.
She slipped ahead again into the nothingness, letting the Maelmord swallow her up. There was a deepening of shadows and a fading of the light. The breathing of the pit seemed to grow heavier. The sense of kinship that the wishsong created between them tightened and left her breathless with anticipation. She was close now — close to what she sought. The feel of it speared through her like a sudden rush of blood, and she sang with renewed intensity. The magic of the wishsong lifted through the gloom, and the Maelmord shuddered in response.
Then the wall of the jungle fell away, and she stood within a massive, shadowed clearing, wrapped close about by trees, brush, and vines. A tower stood at the center of the clearing, ancient and crumbling, lost in the gloom. Walls of stone rose upward toward the forest roof, forming and reforming in a series of spiraling turrets and notched parapets, as stripped and barren in their look as bleached bones. Nowhere did the foliage of the jungle grow upon the tower. As if its touch meant death, the jungle had passed it by.
Brin stopped, the music of the wishsong lowering to a whisper of expectancy as she stared at the tower.
Here! The heart of the evil is here. The Ildatch!
Drawing close the layers of magic that cloaked her, she went to meet it.
Chapter Forty–Three
Wooden doors, weathered and cracked with age, stood ajar at the tower’s dark entry, sagging on hinges broken and rusted with disuse. Wrapped in the music of her song, the Valegirl passed through. The gloom lay thick within, yet there was light enough by which she might see, a dim and misted glimmer that slipped in thin streamers through cracks and splits in the tower’s crumbling walls. Dust carpeted the stone flooring, forming a blanket of fine silt that rose in clouds as the girl’s boots pressed down upon it. It was cool here, the heat and the stench of the jungle somehow locked without.
Brin slowed. A hallway wound ahead into shadow. She turned briefly, a warning tug from deep within her bringing her about to stare guardedly back into the mass of the jungle that walled this tower away.
She went on. The power of the magic stirred through her in a flush of sudden heat, and she seemed to float. She passed down the hallway, following its bends and twists, barely aware of the dust as it rose vaporlike from beneath her feet. Once she thought to wonder how it was that no other footprints save hers marked the corridor she followed when surely the Mord Wraiths, too, had passed this way, but the matter faded quickly from her mind.
Stairs rose before her and she began to climb — a slow, endless climb into the center of the tower. Whispers seemed to call out to her, voices that had no source and no identity, but were born of the very air she breathed. All about her, the whispers called. Shadows and half–light mixed and blended. It seemed as if she were soaking into the stone of the tower itself, slipping ghostlike through its chambers, spreading out to become one with it, as she had become one with the Maelmord. She felt it happen, bit by bit, a welcome drawing in of her body. The magic of the song made it happen, still reaching out to the evil that lay hidden there, insinuating her within as if she were truly one with it…
Then the stairway ended and she stood on the threshold of a cavernous, domed rotunda that lay gray, shadowed, and empty. Almost of its own volition, the music of the wishsong faded to a whisper, and the voices in the air about her went still.
She entered the room, barely conscious of the movement of her body, still seeming to float as she passed. Shadows crept back from her, and her eyes adjusted to the light. The chamber was not empty, as she had first thought. There, almost lost in the gloom, was a dais; on the dais was an altar. She came forward a step. Something rested on the altar, huge, squarish, and shrouded in a darkness that seemed to emanate from within. She came forward another step. A fierce excitement flooded through her.
It was the Ildatch!
She knew it instantly, before she was certain what it was that she was seeing. This was the Ildatch, the heart of evil. The power of the wishsong filled her and drove through her, body with white–hot intensity.
