Bastion of Darkness (18 page)

“Yes, a whip-dragon.”

“And what else might ye be remembering?” the ranger asked. “Arien and the elves?”

“Of course,” Del replied, and he smiled at the memory of the fair folk of Lochsilinilume. “And Brielle.”

The spirit did not notice the cloud that passed over the ranger’s face at that moment.

“Most of all, Brielle,” Del went on, and he looked to the south and west, the brightening peaks and the dark, mysterious shadows below them.

The cloud darkened for Belexus, but then a chuckle from the spirit broke the tension. Belexus followed Del’s gaze to the sleeping wizard, or more particularly, to the black cat sitting atop the wizard’s chest, every so often batting Ardaz across the nose. With a great sneeze that sent Desdemona scrambling and growling in protest, Ardaz popped open his eyes.

“What? What?” the wizard sputtered. “Oh, Des, you silly beast!” He looked all around then, focusing at last on Del and Belexus. “Morning already?” he quipped, so suddenly seeming more wide awake than either of them could ever hope to be. “Off we go, then!”

“Our friend’s begun to remember,” Belexus announced.

“Splendid!” the wizard roared, coming out of the tangle of blankets, catching his legs in one and falling facedown to the ground but hopping right back up, undaunted, bouncing toward the pair. “All of it?”

“All since the submar—the ship that brought me here,” Del replied.

“Submarine,” Ardaz corrected. “Went on one once—or
in
one, actually. Wouldn’t do to go
on
one, now would it? I do daresay! Beastly tight and cramped in there. Could hardly spread my wings. Of course, that was before I was a wizard, after all, and so I couldn’t sprout wings in the first place. Ha ha!”

It took Del a while to sort through that rambling, but as he did, he recalled that Ardaz was from his own world, the world gone twelve centuries, the world before the holocaust, which the elves called
e-Belvin Fehte
. That realization alone brought Del some recollections of that lost time, but they were distant images, far away and unclear. He tried to clarify them for a long moment but gave up, thinking that he had more important business this day.

When he focused on his companions once more, he found Belexus looking up forlornly at the nearest peaks. Or at least, where the nearest peaks should have been, for a low cloud cover was closing in on them, stealing their sharp, rocky outlines in a blur of gray.

“We’ll not be finding much this day,” the ranger reasoned.

“A bit of, more than a bit of, snow in the air,” Ardaz agreed, shaking his head. “Oh bother.”

“I thought I’d be finding little trouble in getting to the wyrm’s lair,” the ranger admitted. “High up on Calamus, and with all the view before me.”

“But?” Del prompted, not seeming to comprehend any of it.

“But I can’t be keeping up for long in this wind,” the ranger explained. “Too cold for me bones, and for Calamus. And the snow’s been general, and been slowing me, with a bit of it almost every day.”

“The season will change soon,” the ever-optimistic Ardaz said hopefully.

“Not soon enough, by me thinking,” the ranger said. “The wraith’s about, and that one’s naught but mischief.” Again he looked forlornly at the sky, and already the clouds were lower, gathering thick about the mountain peaks. “I canno’ go up in that.”

“But I can,” Del said suddenly, a smile brightening on his ghost face. To prove his point, he lifted off the ground, floating gently, untouched by the wind.

Belexus and Ardaz exchanged incredulous, and then hopeful, looks.

“What exactly am I looking for?” the spirit asked.

“A mountain peak looking like an old man’s profile,” the ranger explained, and he illustrated the image by bending low and cutting a likeness of it into the snow. “That’s the wyrm’s peak, so says Brielle.”

“And the dragon is somewhere inside?”

“Ayuh.”

DelGiudice stood quiet for a moment, studying the drawing, not so certain that he actually wanted to find this particular mountain. He didn’t know much about dragons, for there were no dragons in the world before
e-Belvin Fehte
, none that weren’t man-made at least. He vaguely remembered some of the legends—Saint George and Bilbo and Smaug and the like—and in his world there were some generally accepted guidelines of what dragons were like. He didn’t remember much of that, but he did understand that dragons were supposedly very, very bad, and not likely to be welcoming his two companions as houseguests.

Whatever business Belexus had with this particular dragon seemed important, though, else why would the ranger have come out into the Crystals in winter? So
with an instinctive shrug, which he found most curious, the spirit lifted away from the ground.

“We’ll await here for your return,” Ardaz called.

Del immediately descended.

“What?” the wizard asked.

“Well, I did not want to keep you waiting,” Del explained. “I remember that as being quite rude.”

“We’ll be looking for yer return after ye’ve found the mountain,” Belexus explained.

“Oh,” Del said, and with another shrug, he started into the air once more.

It was quiet up in the clouds, comfortably so, and the floating spirit lost his focus many times, lapsing into thoughts of his previous life, both in Aielle and before Aielle. He thought of Brielle often, of their love, and of his family, the one before the holocaust, of his mother and father and their small house in New England. In his heightened state of being, it was actually more than merely thinking of those times. Through sheer concentration and an understanding of time itself—or rather, an understanding of the
lack
of time—Del put his consciousness back to those moments, relived them as easily as if they were strung out before him, little bubbles that he could enter at will. And each seemed to lead to a dozen more, and so he did very little searching while he floated up above the sheltered vale, but much remembering.

He did not return to his companions all that day, nor that night, nor the next day, which was even more snowy, nor the next night. On the third morning, the weather breaking somewhat, Belexus announced that he would wait no longer, and he began to saddle up Calamus.

“But what of DelGiudice?” Ardaz wanted to know. “Can’t be running about separately in the mountains,
after all. Too many walls, too many clouds. We’ll never find each other again.”

Belexus shared his friend’s concern, but that did not overrule the urgency of his own quest. “Might that he’s gone back to the Colonnae,” the ranger said somberly. “We’re not for knowing why he was here, or if he really was.”

“What could you mean?” Ardaz asked, and then,
pop!
, he figured it out. “Oh, no,” he said, wagging his hands in the air before him. “No, no, I do daresay. Couldn’t be, no no. No trick of Thalasi, that one.”

“Can ye say that ye’re sure?”

Ardaz nodded so violently that his great hat fell down over his eyes.

“Well, we’re still not knowing what bringed him to us, or for how long,” Belexus reasoned. “And every day we’re waiting, the wraith’s likely bringing pain.”

In the face of such simple and indisputable logic, the wizard ran out of arguments, so he went to the campsite, muttering every step of the way, and began packing their provisions. “Cold up there,” he mumbled repeatedly, and unhappily, though he didn’t disagree with the ranger’s decision that they set out again on their way.

Before they ever got the pegasus readied, though, Desdemona gave a long mew, announcing the return of the missing ghost.

“Good that ye’ve returned!” Belexus beamed, trotting to the spot before the descending spirit. “We were just about to leave.”

“Why?”

“Ye been gone a long while, me friend.”

Del regarded the ranger curiously, not quite understanding. “I said I would go to find the peak,” he replied at length, as if that should explain everything.

“So ye did say, but we were thinking ye’d check back
with us at day’s end,” the ranger tried to explain, though he was beginning to catch on that he and this ghost were not reasoning along the same lines.

“Why?”

“Oh, never mind,” Ardaz interrupted, hopping between the two, impatient for news. Ardaz saw it, if Belexus did not: the spirit’s calm demeanor hinted at success. “The peak. The peak. Oh, did you find the peak?”

DelGiudice pointed to the northwest. “Not so far,” he explained.

Belexus moved as if to give the spirit a hug, but backed off immediately, remembering their unsettling first encounter.

“But it’s hard to see,” Del explained. “You have to approach at just the right angle, or all it looks like is rocks. Except from that way,” he added quickly, pointing straight north. “From that way, it looks like a shark’s fin on an ocean swell.”

“Ye’re sure it’s the peak?” Belexus asked, his excitement ebbing as doubts began to creep in.

“From the south it is,” Del replied happily. “An old man, just as you drew. But only from the south. Come along, I will show you; we can get there before the sun goes low if Calamus is swift of wing.”

The ranger and the wizard went at their packing with vigor. “Oh, come along, Des,” Ardaz called repeatedly to the sleeping feline. “And do hurry, for a grand day it is! It is!”

The wizard stopped in midpirouette and considered the cat carefully. “Grand?” he asked. “I call it a grand day, though I’m about to walk into the lair of a great dragon? Oh, silly me!”

Desdemona spat at him and turned away.

Ardaz shrugged and finished his work.

They were airborne soon after, the wizard and ranger
and the still, sleeping cat, atop mighty Calamus, following Del’s speeding spirit through ravines and around great jags of stone. They had to stop several times so that the ranger and wizard could warm their bodies, but, as the spirit had predicted, they came in sight of the mountain—and there was no doubt that it was indeed the mountain—shortly after noon.

They circled it once, then put down on a lower ledge, having found no obvious entrance of any sort.

“Well, if this is the place—and I do not doubt my sister—” Ardaz reasoned, “then the dragon has been inside a while, I daresay, and the snow and the wind have apparently sealed the wyrm away. Not that that’s a bad thing!”

“But not a good thing for those meaning to get inside,” Belexus replied. “I’m not even for guessing where we might start looking for a door.”

“I can get in,” Del said suddenly, and both his companions turned on him.

“I thought that nonliving matter presented a barrier even to you,” Ardaz reasoned. “Or why haven’t you fallen under the ground, after all?”

“Fall?” Del echoed, as if the concept itself seemed foreign to him. “Oh, yes, of course. I cannot fall, for gravity has no hold on me,” he explained. “But you are correct in that I can touch stones and the like. They’re more dense than your own bodies, you see, and so I cannot pass through them.”

“Then how’re ye meaning to get in?” Belexus asked.

“Cracks in the wall, of course,” Del answered.

The ranger turned to inspect the stone, but saw no obvious cracks.

“You have to look closer,” the spirit explained. “They’re there, I know, and I can get through them.”

“It seems that our meeting was good fortune indeed,” the ranger said.

“Lead on,” Ardaz bade.

Del did just that, his form becoming two-dimensional, a most disturbing sight, and then slipping into the stone wall easily. He came back soon after, announcing that the particular crack was a dead end, but he tried again, and then again, and over and over, until finally, he did not return so quickly.

He had come to an inner chamber, a tunnel winding through the mountain. To his relief, and surprise, he found that he could see as readily in the dark as in the light. It made sense when he thought about it, for he wasn’t actually here, in this physical place, for he wasn’t actually corporeal at all. Darkness was an obstacle to physical eyes, but not to the entity that Del had become.

He considered the tunnel before him, its arching ceiling and fairly smooth walls. If he could only find a way for his friends to get in, it would be wide enough for them, he knew. But which way was out, and which deeper in?

On a mere guess, Del went left, floating swiftly along, until he came to a wall, again with cracks through which he could maneuver. He found that the wall was not so thick, only a foot or so, coming out of the mountain under an overhang of rock not so far from where he had left his friends. “Belexus could knock through that,” Del reasoned. “Or Ardaz certainly could.” The spirit smiled as he remembered the first time he had met the bumbling wizard, the time Ardaz had used a bolt of lightning to remove a huge rock from the meadow at Brisenballas. How the wizard had hopped about, his fingers burned by the stroke!

But the spirit reminded himself that Belexus was in rather a bit of a hurry, and he filed the memory away
for another time. “Not yet,” he decided, and he went back through the crack, back into the tunnel. Before he brought Belexus and Ardaz to the spot and got their hopes up, he thought it wise to make sure that he was leading them correctly. And so he went the other way down the tunnel, past the spot where he had first entered, and farther on into the mountain. Down and down he traveled, the corridor widening and narrowing, sometimes with a low ceiling, and other times covered by long and high shafts, so that there was no ceiling visible. He came to one chamber filled by dark water, which he merely floated over, and was relieved to see that there was enough of a ledge for his friends to get by.

Then came a steep, descending slope, and down Del went. He sensed something different about this area, and in tuning his other senses, found that the air was warmer and that a subtle, rhythmic vibration was all about him.

As he neared the bottom of the slope, he understood the rhythm to be the breathing of a dragon—a huge, sleeping dragon.

Now he moved more cautiously, though he could rationally tell himself that this wyrm, however magnificent, could not hurt him. There was something in the air, beyond the warmth and the snores, some tangible aura, inciting terror. Del tried to tell himself that it was just his expectations of what a dragon might be that were making him tentative, but soon he came to understand that it was indeed something more than that, something very real.