Bastion of Darkness

Chapter 10
By the Colonnae Trained

“OH, THERE IT is, I do daresay!” the wizard proclaimed, hopping up from his bedroll and jumping wildly, his huge sleeves flapping like the wings of a frightened bird. “I knew I would find it, yes I did, and not you, you silly ranger! Me before you, after all! Hah! Old man’s eyes aren’t so bad, then, eh?”

The ranger sprinted to the spot, dodging trees and skidding at last to the boulder tumble where he had left the sleeping Ardaz, the sheltered place that had served as their campsite the previous night.

“Hah!” Ardaz barked at him, snapping his fingers triumphantly in the air and standing tall indeed, his skinny arms crossed over his puffed-out chest. “An old man’s eyes see with the wisdom of ages, I say, I do daresay!”

Belexus looked around skeptically. They had set camp before sunset, and he had personally inspected all the area while Ardaz had unpacked the pegasus. The ranger could hardly believe that he had missed the telltale mountain face, the very focus of this difficult journey. Not quick to doubt the Silver Mage of Lochsilinilume, Belexus looked all around again, scanning slowly through each direction, and truly there loomed a multitude of towering peaks all about them; the shelter afforded by those walls of stone had been a primary consideration in picking this camping spot. So how had he possibly missed the most important view of the entire journey?

Or had he? he wondered after many moments of fruitless scanning. Finally, perplexed, the ranger turned to the wizard for clarification, for he could find nothing remarkable.

“Where?” he asked simply.

Ardaz looked around, his expression growing incredulous. “Well, I saw it. I did!” he protested. “And you know that I see what I said that I saw! Just after I awoke.”

“Dreaming the sight?” Belexus remarked, and despite his frustration that they were not, apparently, near the end of their journey, a smile found its way onto his face.

“After I awoke,” Ardaz repeated dryly. “Sitting here minding my own business, after all, and then, poof! there it was, an old man’s profile, not so far away. I am not crazy, you know,” he added in low tones.

Belexus glanced up to Desdemona, who was in cat form, lying in the sun across the top of one of the boulders. She regarded him and yawned profoundly, then stretched and rolled over, letting the warm sun-and it was indeed warm for the season-caress her ample belly.

“Oh, she’ll be a help,” Ardaz said with obvious sarcasm.

“Where, then?” the ranger asked again.

Ardaz hopped in circles, looking all around, eyes darting, arms flapping, scratching his chin repeatedly and muttering “How curious, how very curious” many times. Finally he settled and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I did see it, after all.”

The ranger moved to inspect the wizard’s bedroll. “As soon as ye waked?” he reasoned.

“Well, and after a belch,” Ardaz replied. “But not too long a delay.”

To the wizard’s surprise, and confusion, Belexus then lay down atop Ardaz’ bedroll, then lifted his head just a bit. The ranger sat up quickly, smiling, then openly laughing, and the tone of his fit was more of resignation than of humor, as if to say, “I give up,” and not, “How amusing.”

“Are you to let me in on the joke?” Ardaz asked. “I mean, if I am the butt of it, after all, and since there is no one else for you to share it with.” As soon as he spoke the words, the wizard snapped a dangerous glare over the apparently oblivious-but Ardaz knew better-Desdemona. “And not a meow from you,” he said.

“Ye seen an old man’s profile,” the ranger explained. “Yer own.”

Ardaz snorted a dozen times, but lost his ire as Belexus pointed to a nearby wall of one of the boulders, its side covered by a cascade of ice.

The dumfounded wizard stuttered in protest, trying to refute the claim, but as he bumbled about, crouching to take the ranger’s perspective, he came to realize that Belexus had spoken truthfully. “Oh,” was all that Ardaz said.

Belexus laughed again, and now lost all of his frustration, allowing himself a bit of true mirth. The situation in all his world remained so very grim-the wraith, Andovar’s murderer, walked the world uncontested-but having the always-surprising Ardaz along on this long and perilous journey surely stole more than a bit of the tedium.

“I’ll play your fool, then,” the wizard said, seeming sullen. That mood lasted but a moment, though, Ardaz’ pout vanishing as the corners of his mouth inevitably turned upward. “My own profile,” he said suddenly. “Oh how jolly, how very jolly!”

It was a good laugh, a long laugh, followed by a hearty breakfast, after which Belexus announced that he would do a bit of hunting to try to restock their packs before they took to higher ground.

That left Ardaz alone to pack up the campsite. Desdemona watched the wizard work, the cat comfortably stretched on the warm boulder.

“So much help,” Ardaz complained to her.

She just rolled over again, warming the other side.

The cloud was huge, tremendous, beyond comprehension, a swirling mass of matter gradually, gradually contracting, pieces spinning off, the birth of stars.

And he watched it, saw it, the ages compressed into seconds, it seemed, or perhaps the seconds stretched out into ages. For out here, it didn’t matter. Out here, time was nonexistent, each instant its own bubble, always there, always recorded.

Immortality.

He knew that he would always be out here, that each moment of this experience would last forever and ever, and yet, he was going back, spinning through the galaxies, the star clusters. He saw the glowing rim, the sudden sunrise, and black turned to blue. So much blue! On and on he went, down and down, and he sensed the wind, though his less-than-corporeal form could not feel the wind. At least, not as he suspected he had once felt it.

There were colors below him, shining blue and dark brown, mostly blue, then mostly white and green, then still more white and green until it filled all his vision. White and green and brown and gray, a silver snake, a blue patch. Colors and texture, and familiarity somehow, though in the enormity of what he had seen, of what the angels had shown him, it seemed a distant memory indeed.

Down and down he dropped, and now he understood that he was indeed dropping, that there was a concept such as down. That recollection caused him to flinch, altogether unnecessarily, when he landed, when he did not continue to pass along, his form, somehow and somewhat more substantial than it had been, coming to rest on a hard gray surface.

“Ice,” he said, or rather, found himself saying, when he glanced to the side, to the crusted edges of a quick-running stream. The word, the sound, startled him, causing him to look down at himself. He had form again, real form, and not just the light he had been-the light he still was, though now he was encased in a somewhat corporeal coil. Even more curious, that coil was encased in a white material, a robe, he remembered.

“As it used to be,” he heard himself saying, and he screwed his unfamiliar face up curiously as he contemplated the notion of language , then grew even more curious as he considered the notion of time. “Used to be?” he asked, and the different inflection of words when used as a question only confounded him even more. “Always is, always was, always will be,” he recited, giving words to what he had learned to be the most pervasive and enduring truth about the universe, about existence itself. A jumble of thoughts came at him all at once, memories mixed with reasoning. He had worn this coil, this body, before, though it had been more substantial then, more attuned to the elements around it. He reached his hand down tentatively to brush the stone, to feel the stone. It seemed too smooth; he recognized that in his previous experience, the stone would have felt more grainy and rough, even painfully sharp-edged at some points.

For the spirit who had witnessed the birth and death of stars, it all seemed too curious. And so he sat, for a long, long while, and the entire concept of time, of the passage of moments, of a continuum, a fluid movement, came back to him. “Ice,” he said again, then, “Brook, stream, river… water. And snow, yes, of course. Snow.” He paused, then, mouthing that last word over and over, the very sound of it conjuring images of wild, playful fights, of rushing breakneck down hills, the wind blowing in his chilled ears. The very sound of it brought images of joy.

“Yes!” he said again suddenly. “Snow… and winter.” Again came that curious look, the strange-feeling face of this still-uncomfortable coil twisting and contorting. “Winter, cold,” he reasoned, and yet he did not feel cold. He looked down at his meager robes, and knew that they should not be able to ward any chill at all.

But as he thought about it, he did indeed come to feel cold-not unpleasantly so, not threateningly so, but rather a cold that he could control, that was there within his grasp only when he wanted to experience it. Already the spirit was beginning to understand that he was not quite the same-no, not at all-as he had once been. He was better now, he supposed, and he left it at that.

Something stirred to the side, moving out from under a tall pine tree.

“Deer,” the spirit said at once.

The creature froze in place, sniffed futilely at the air, ears twitching all the while. After some time, it seemed at last to see the form sitting on the stone, and away it leaped, disappearing from view in the wink of an eye.

“Curious,” the spirit remarked, and rose to follow. Again the binding form confused him, but he remembered enough to put one of his long lower limbs in front of the other and was soon walking steadily, a crude, but undeniably effective mode of transportation in this tangible, tiny-scale environment. Moving without a whisper of sound, he caught up to the deer in a small clearing not so far away. Once the creature noticed him, it again turned to flee, but this time the spirit reached out to it, imparted unthreatening thoughts to the creature, and it held still. He went to it, then, to examine it. Its fur seemed inviting; he vaguely remembered a pleasant sensation connected with touching it. Slowly, but eagerly, he lifted his arm, reached out his hand.

It passed right through the coat and the skin, slid right into the deer’s side.

The animal took flight, leaping wildly, running on and on at the edge of control.

“Oh pooh,” the spirit said, and he thought those words the most curious of all.

As if in answer, a bird chattered at him from above.

He answered with a telepathic thought, and the bird seemed less afraid, and would stay and converse with him. So he spent a long time standing there, below the tree branch, and he remembered even more of that past time, of this mortal coil. Soon he sensed hunger in the little creature, and then the bird flew off.

He lifted from the ground, too, thinking to follow, but he changed his mind, and instead went back to his stone by the stream. If the Colonnae had put him here for a purpose, then it was possible the reason would come to him, rather than he going off to try and find it. Because this place, though so infinitesimally tiny next to the star cloud, seemed large indeed when he was trapped within this corporeal coil.

He stood passively on the stone for a long time, then sat down-not because he was tired, but simply because he remembered that he used to sit down. Truly the new position was no more or less comfortable than standing, or than standing on his head for that matter, but he remembered that once it had been. The day brightened around him, then darkened once more, then brightened again and darkened, and again; and all the time he sat there, he recalled more and more of what had been, found more and more the perspectives imposed by this tangible world and these tangible trappings. He had been here once, in this frame of reference, this perspective. He knew that.

“Where, oh where, oh where, oh where?” the wizard mumbled, twiddling his thumbs. “Do go find him, Des. I do not want to waste my magical strength.”

The cat atop the boulder purred all the louder and made absolutely no move to leave.

“Beastly loyal,” Ardaz grumbled, a chant he felt was becoming all too common concerning Des, and he pulled himself to his feet. Indeed he did not want to delve into the realm of magic this morning; he was still exhausted from the magical flight that had brought him to Belexus, though that transformation had occurred more than a week before. “This is the old-fashioned way,” he said, and he started off, walking through the trees of the low valley.

Desdemona didn’t bother to follow.

Some time later, Ardaz sensed that he was being watched. At first he thought it to be Desdemona, but when he glanced all around, he came to know the truth. A white-tailed deer stood not so far away, motionless except for a slight trembling.

“Hmmm,” the wizard mumbled, rubbing at his thick white beard, for he knew that this was not the ordinary way a deer, a creature born to run, would react to the scent of a man-and obviously the deer had sensed him. And who could not? the wizard silently asked, thinking that it had been far too long since last he had bathed. But still the deer did not run, so Ardaz did go into the realm of magic, sent a mental image there, and that image came back to him, multiplied by the power of the realm. The wizard’s clothing twisted and changed hue, sprouted many leafy branches and twigs. “Much like a bush, I should say,” he quietly congratulated himself, and indeed, he did resemble the area’s flora. With that disguise, he moved slowly, very slowly, toward the deer, taking care not to step on any twigs and to keep his usually babbling mouth still.

To his surprise, despite the enchantment, Ardaz soon found himself right beside the creature, and he understood then that its fear was not a fear of him. “What has so terrified you?” he asked softly and, using a trick his sister Brielle had taught him, he attuned his thoughts to those of the deer, let his mind slip into the mind of the animal. A most curious image came over him then, one of a man-or was it a man?-sitting not so far away.

A decisive twang brought Ardaz from his contemplations and sent the deer leaping away. “What?” the wizard babbled repeatedly, looking all around at the brush and at the flicking white tail as the deer disappeared from sight. Then his gaze settled on his own bushy-looking robes, and there he found his answer in the form of an arrow, hanging loosely in the folds of the camouflaged outfit. A moment later, a confused Belexus came running toward him-confused, that is, only until the ranger spied Ardaz.

“Do you mean to keep shooting me then?” the wizard asked, prodding the arrow tip and opening a tiny wound on his finger. “I’m beginning to get the point, so to speak.”

“What’re ye about?” the exasperated ranger replied. “I telled ye I’d be hunting. I been chasing that deer for all the morn, and now I’ll not fill our packs afore the dusk!”

“Skittish deer,” Ardaz replied casually. “Says it saw a man not so far from here, sitting by the stream.” As he spoke, the wizard pointed to the north.

“A man?” Belexus echoed. The ranger didn’t doubt the wizard’s words-he had grown up in the shadow of Avalon, where Brielle was known to converse with animals routinely-but how could any man be out this far from the civilized world? “Man or talon?” he asked suspiciously, for indeed talons were known in the Crystals.

“Could be a talon, I suppose,” the wizard admitted, for the image the deer had shown to him had not been that detailed. “Don’t know that a deer would know the difference, after all. Either way, we should look into it.”

Belexus glanced over his shoulder. He had left Calamus in a clearing not so far away. He thought the better of calling the pegasus, though. If it was a talon, or a band of talons, for rarely was one of those wretched creatures ever found alone, then the flying horse and its riders would make too fine targets for arrows or spears. With a nod, Belexus motioned for Ardaz to follow and reached into his quiver for another arrow.

“Take this one,” the wizard offered dryly, pulling the arrow through his robe and handing it over. “I really have no need for it, after all, and even should I find a use for one, sure I am that you’ll be shooting me again soon enough!”

Belexus surrendered to a chuckle, then turned and led the way down to the one stream crossing this valley. He looked to Ardaz, who pointed north again, and so north they went, picking their careful way, with even the wizard managing to keep his mouth shut after only a few sharp reminders.

The going was easy, and quiet enough with the footfalls hidden beneath the song of the stream, and soon they came in sight of the man, and it was indeed a man, sitting passively on a large stone, wearing only a slight white shift, though the weather was brutally cold. At first, both of them thought that Istaahl must have come, for who but a wizard could have survived in this land in winter in so flimsy a gown, but then the man turned to face them, and recognition only added to the confusion.

Ardaz, mistrusting his eyes, tried to hold the ranger back, but so elated was Belexus that he burst away from the wizard, scrambling over the slippery stones to get near to his long-lost friend. “Jeffrey DelGiudice!” he cried.

“Jeffrey DelGiudice,” the spirit echoed, the strange words sounding familiar. “Jeffrey DelGiudice.”

“Can it really be?” the ranger asked, skidding to a halt barely five feet from the spirit. “I’d thought ye lost to me and to all the world; the elves been saying that ye jumped from the ledge at Shaithdun O’Illume.”

“Stepped, not jumped,” the spirit replied before it understood what it was saying, before it could even consider the words. As those words registered, a perplexed look crossed the spirit’s features, and indeed, it did remember that moment, long ago-or was it just an instant past?-when it had gone to the call of Calae of the Colonnae.

“Twenty years, it’s been,” Belexus went on.

That settled the time question, though the spirit wasn’t quite sure of how long a year might be. “Thirty-one million, five hundred thirty-six thousand seconds,” it replied immediately, and then all it had to do was figure out what a second might be. And of course, it remembered, there was the matter of “leap year”…

Now it was Belexus’ turn to wear the perplexed expression, but it couldn’t hold against his sincere delight. “Twenty years,” he said, “and suren ye don’t look a day older.”

Ardaz skidded to a stop right behind the ranger, seeing the vision, hearing the words, but unlike with Belexus, they brought little immediate delight to the wizard. His first thought was that this was some trap by Thalasi, and not a very good one, for if the Black Warlock truly wanted Ardaz and Belexus to think this was DelGiudice standing before them, then he should have aged the man, at least.

“What is a day?” the spirit asked. “Truly this concept of time is confusing!”

The exasperation seemed real enough, and Ardaz, himself taken by the Colonnae to be trained among the stars, understood that feeling, understood it all too well. “By the Colonnae,” he whispered.

“Indeed,” DelGiudice replied.

“They took you in, my boy!” Ardaz reasoned. “The Colonnae took you from that ledge that starry night. Took you and trained you, as they trained myself, and Brielle, and Istaahl, and Thalasi, curse his name!”

“Trained?” the spirit echoed skeptically, and then shrugged its shoulders. “Perhaps. They showed me, is what they did.”

“All of it,” Ardaz reasoned.

“Not all, but much,” DelGiudice replied. “So very much!” He looked to Belexus, and felt a smile-and what a strange and wonderful feeling it was!-cross his face. “Jeffrey DelGiudice?” he asked. “Is that what I am called?”

“That is who you are,” Ardaz answered, “and you’ll remember it soon enough.”

“Me friend,” Belexus said, “suren ye’ve come back to us at a dark time, but one in which ye’re needed!” With that, the ranger reached out to clasp hands with Del-Giudice, and the spirit returned the motion, but as with the deer, DelGiudice’s hand passed right through that of the ranger, a most uncomfortable sight and feeling for poor Belexus, and one that sent Ardaz’ bushy eyebrows arching heavenward.

“Oh, there is that,” DelGiudice said, and he felt as if he should shrug, though he did not.