Twixt Heaven And Hell

by Tristan Gregory

  Despite his fatigue, Darius could find no rest. He sat wrapped in his coverings deep into the night, until finally Robert emerged from the darkness and sat heavily next to him.

  Neither man spoke for a time. Darius was worrying at something with both hands as he stared at the dirt before him, obviously deep in thought.

  “I did a count,” the wizard said, eventually. He tried to keep his voice even, but a hoarseness betrayed the turmoil within him.

  Robert waited for his captain to continue.

  “We lost over half of our men today, Robert. There are one hundred and twenty-three Gryphons in the camp.”

  A sudden convulsion gripped the old soldier's throat and his gaze twitched down to the dirt. When they had left Bastion only weeks before, the Gryphons had numbered two hundred and eighty-one of the toughest, most experienced soldiers in or out of the city.

  “Not one of the new recruits made it,” Darius continued in a flat voice. Robert's head bowed further.

  Finally Robert spoke. “The Gryphons have never been through a fight like this, sir. No soldier has. Even our veterans couldn't have been prepared for it, much less...”

  Robert trailed off, and both men went back to sitting in silence. Darius returned to brooding.

  “What's that, sir?”

  Robert was looking at Darius's hands, and the tiny object the wizard was rolling between his fingers. At Robert's words Darius stopped worrying at it and held it up to the firelight. Squinting, Robert saw that his captain held a small piece of wood, oak or ash, worn smooth by years of handling. There was a small stylized heart carved into the side.

  “Something my father gave my mother, before he left on his first deployment to the border,” Darius said. “He told her to kiss it when she missed him. Every time he returned, the first thing he would do is kiss it as well. 'To collect what I missed,' he told her.”

  Robert gave a tired smile. “Your father was a poet.”

  Darius shook his head. “He was a herder. As was I, until the wizards discovered the talent in me when I was six. That was the last day I saw him. I heard from him twice a year, when he drove some of the herd to Bastion. He would carry a letter from my mother and he. I was always too busy to greet him.

  “He was a sergeant with the Scouts. He had already done his service by the time I was born, but then came the debacle at Firthwinter. Bastion lost so many soldiers there, he was asked to return to service.”

  “I was at that battle,” Robert said. “One of my first. Demons and Angels all about, men screaming... it still haunts me.”

  Darius nodded absently. “I was still an acolyte. I got word from my mother that father had returned to the army. Four months later he was dead.”

  Robert bowed his head in sympathy.

  “He had given Bastion his years. He had a wife, children. He could have refused without shame.”

  “You think he should have?” Robert asked.

  Darius looked startled. “No. No, not at all. He was a man of great experience and skill – who knows how many men he kept safe with his return? His sense of duty told him to go, and so he left his family when Bastion called, never hesitating to give more.”

  “Then you are like him, Captain.”

  Darius smiled a sad, strange little smile.”As are you,” he said. “And every one of the Gryphons – and that is just the thing.”

  He leaned close to Robert. “We are fighting, and getting these men killed, so that we can end the War for the sake of men like them.” Darius gave a sound that was somewhere between laughter and sob. “It is – daft. Or entirely sensible. I cannot decide which.”

  Darius went back to worrying at the little piece of wood.

  “I wonder what my father would say about it.”

  Before they both lay down for rest, Darius mentioned that he would take any unwounded soldiers back south a distance to check for stragglers. If any of their men had fallen behind, he wanted to gather them up. Robert nodded, knowing that attempting to argue now would be useless. Both men were too weary, and in any case Robert thought that it was worth a try. They had lost so very many men.

  Despite an entire day spent searching – and nearly brushing with the Enemy on several occasions, narrowly avoided due to Darius’s vigilance – no stragglers were found. As darkness fell, they returned to the camp.

  The wizard in charge of the camp had been asleep when the Gryphons had arrived the night prior, and on Darius’s advice had not been disturbed. Darius had been too fatigued to speak with the man. Now, as the surviving members of the Gryphons entered his domain again, he came to meet them.

  Wizard Robehr was an amiable sort, young for such a high post. One of the very few wizards whose father had also been magically talented, he had gotten a head start on his indoctrination into Council-sponsored traditional thinking. For all that, Darius did not dislike him. Robehr's willingness to listen to opposing points of view – before strongly disagreeing with them – softened his image as another pet of the Council.

  “Darius!” he called as his peer came into sight. “You ran off this morning before I could get to you. Tell me everything.”

  Shaking his head, Darius declined. “I need to report in to Bastion, Robehr, and I am weary. Listen in while I globe the Crown. You’ll learn everything you need to know.”

  He was taken to the camp headquarters, a large tent with leather coverings on the ground and map tables taking up most of the room. There were several other wizards there, but Darius recognized none of them.

  In the center was the globe. Darius activated it with a thought and a tiny flow of power. Immediately Wizard Geralt's face appeared in the crystal. Both Darius and Robehr could see him, but only Darius could hear Geralt's words.

  “Darius, is that you? Handel’s beard, man! What are you doing with the Fourth?”

  “There is no time,” Darius told the wizard whose name he could not recall. Spending so much time out of Bastion left him less familiar with his peers than he might wish, but it was a small price. “I must speak to a member of the High Council at once.”

  The face disappeared, and Darius had to increase the flow of power to keep the connection open, now burdened with both ends. Some moments passed, and then Lazarus’s face appeared. Darius breathed a sigh of relief at the friendly visage.

  “Darius!” Lazarus exclaimed. “What are you doing with the Fourth?” he echoed the previous man's question.

  “I was in the Shambles when the attack came, Lazarus. I was not half a mile from the first spell.”

  “Fort Andreth is taken, then?”

  “No, Lazarus. Not Andreth – they took Fist.”

  The old wizard looked thoughtful. “Strange. Andreth is the mightier of the two... Tell me what happened.”

  Darius recounted the battle quickly. The sparse nature of his account helped when he decided to skip the fact that he had been ambushed, saved by a sorcerer, and had subsequently captured the man. An inner voice told him to hold that information close – even from Lazarus.

  “How well were you able to study the spell? Can you counter it?”

  “I think so, Lazarus. I know much, but it is still just memory and somewhat jumbled as well. We moved fast and fought often.”

  Seeing the tiredness in Darius's face, Lazarus graciously asked no more questions, save inquiring if Darius would return to Bastion.

  “Yes, immediately. I can’t say how long we’ll be – many of my men are hurt.”

  “Good speed to you, Darius. I will relay this information to the council.”

  “Thank you, Lazarus.”

  As the magical link faded, Robehr spoke.

  “Why don’t you leave some of your more seriously wounded men here? We can tend them well enough here. One at least looks like he couldn’t travel without many more days of rest.”

  Darius knew he was referring to the captive sorcerer, drugged and disguised. He shook his head. “No, my men would never stand for it. We’ve lost too many comrades already. An
Angel is sure to come to us once we’ve moved far enough away from the Enemy.”

  Robehr relented. “I’ll have you freshly provisioned, then. You’ll leave in the morning?”

  A curt nod. “With the dawn.”

  True to his word, when the first faint glow broke against the clouds in the sky, Darius woke his men. They ate in silence. Morale was dreadfully low. The mad dash two days before had been strange and distasteful. They had slaughtered literally hundreds of enemy soldiers, usually in disorganized clumps. Each engagement left a few more comrades dead or hurt.

  In an unwise glance at the men behind him, Darius had caught sight of a badly wounded soldier – who had been limping along with them valiantly for ten minutes, bleeding heavily from a gash in his left thigh – suddenly surrender to pain and inevitability. The man had not called out, nor drawn his comrades' attention. He had simply fallen to his knees, and lay down, vanishing amongst the tall grass.

  Fighting back tears and forcing his mind back to studying the spells, Darius had run on.

  The scene played again in the wizard’s head. It must have happened more than once, but he was thankful he had not seen it. That one vision was sure to haunt him for a long time to come.

  With two unwounded soldiers carrying the drugged sorcerer on a litter, the Gryphons left the army camp. They would swing west around Fortress Nebeth and rejoin the Bastion road on the far side, keeping much further from the fortress than before.

  With no further consumption of the herbs he’d been given, the sorcerer was lucid enough to trudge next to them through the endless, treeless grassland by midway through the first day. When they camped each night, he was dosed back into senselessness. Darius would take no chances with the man, not after what he’d seen him do in the Shambles. Traitor to his own people or no, the man was as brutal and cruel as any sorcerer. Darius was the only wizard with the Gryphons, and even he needed to sleep sometime – which he would only consent to do once the prisoner was dosed into absolute oblivion.

  By the third day they had gotten the trick of giving the prisoner enough of the herbs to keep him unconscious during the night, but able to walk come morning. The man moved in a daze, not quickly – but none of them did. Darius knew that the scramble to enter and to leave the Shambles had been a complete success. The soldiers knew this because he’d told them, but it was just empty words to them. The hundred and more missing faces were more powerful than some arcane knowledge their captain had gained.

  At times, Darius nearly agreed.

  The Gryphons moved in slow silence, their very pace a way of mourning the fallen. Darius did not hurry them, because that would have been disrespectful to the wounded and weary living. Darius did not try to cheer them, for that would have been disrespectful to the dead.

  In the wizard’s head, he constantly went over what he had learned. He had studied the Enemy’s spell thoroughly and repeatedly, and once been close enough to catch the very beginning. He now knew that the spell was targeted not for a simple spot on a map, but for a certain point in the world, a place that was marked out somehow.

  Going on the locations that had been attacked so far – regions that had been often held by the Enemy – Darius imagined that the spells were targeted by memory. All places held a unique mix of magics, and just as a man might notice a particularly large or gnarled tree Darius remembered many locations by their peculiar feel.

  This information, at least, was comforting. The Enemy could not just pick a point and attack it. Preparations had to be made, sorcerers found and chosen who had been to the target. Bastion, Riverside, and the majority of Bastion’s lands were safe. The Enemy was not threatening anything new – they had just found new ways to threaten.

  Darius now knew how the spell managed to leave no trace of itself, as well. The spell created a vortex that drew magic towards it. The origin of the spell remained with the caster – once the sorcerer moved through the portal, the spell shifted direction, devouring the energies of the new location. When the spell ended, the local magic was free to resume its natural pattern as if the intervening period had never occurred.

  On the fifth night, the Gryphons camped within sight of the Patchwork Forest. It raised the horizon upon the north and gave them indication that they were covering ground after all, not lost forever in the grasslands. Some of his soldiers watched as Darius sat idly bouncing a pebble within his hands – except that each time he threw the pebble in the air and caught it, there was a flash of light and the pebble was suddenly in the other hand. Robert came and sat next to him.

  “You’ve done it, sir?”

  Darius smiled, momentarily stopping with the pebble. “Not quite, Robert. I’ve taken a very important step, though.”

  Robert intrigued face asked him to continue. Darius did so, knowing that if he could communicate what he’d learned to Robert, then he could certainly make another wizard understand.

  “I developed a way to duplicate teleportation when we were back in Bastion, but it was too difficult. Even with help, I could not refine it enough to make it a practical spell. That is why I decided to leave, and investigate the Enemy’s method more directly.”

  He tossed the pebble once more, straight into the air above his left hand. The pebble reached its zenith and fell, and when it hit Darius’s palm there was a quick flash of bright white light – and Darius was rolling the pebble in the palm of his right hand.

  “Balkan will be astonished by what I just did, Robert. Even to move a pebble an arm length required vast power. I knew we were doing something wrong; now I know what.”

  Darius held up the pebble, a simple brown thing he’d found in the dirt near a campfire. “We tried to make the transport of the object a specific objective of the spell. Before it could complete and do its work, all of the necessary effort had to be supplied. The Enemy spell does not work as such. They simply open up a potential pathway, and allow their soldiers to step through it.”

  Robert was confused. Darius had dropped back into the speech of a wizard speaking to a wizard. He tossed the pebble again, trying to think of a simpler explanation. “When the Enemy casts this spell of theirs, all they are doing is opening up a door. When Balkan and I experimented, we tried to force the stone through the door, without opening it first. The Enemy lets their soldiers walk through the door. We tried to make a pebble grow legs.”

  Robert looked even more confused. Darius huffed, and tried something else.

  “Imagine you are trying to move a boulder, Robert. You could roll it across a field, and that would take days and a great deal of strength and work. Or, you could roll it two steps to the top of a hill. Then the boulder will roll of its own accord, with much less work on your part.”

  “So, you tried to push it across a field, and the Enemy rolls it down the hill?” Robert asked. Darius nodded. “But the boulder ends up in different places.”

  “Yes, but with our spell, we are choosing the destination – and then shaping the path in between. Thus, with our magic, it is as if across the field and the bottom of the hill are the exact same place.”

  Robert had come as far in understanding as it was possible for a non-magician. Darius thought his lieutenant would have made a fine wizard – which was about as useless an observation as saying an ant would have made a fine wolf.

  Robert pointed to where the prisoner was lying, dead to the world from his diet of stale biscuits and numbing potions.

  “What are we going to do with him, sir?”

  Dropping the pebble, Darius didn’t look at the sorcerer. He plucked a stalk of grass and idly held one end within the fire, feeling the heat and flame feed as the plant died. “We’ll take him to Bastion, where he can be guarded properly. We’ll question him, find out why he betrayed his people. Find out what he knows. Maybe some of it will be useful.”

  “He is a very powerful sorcerer, isn’t he?” Robert asked, a hint of unease in his voice. Steady as the big man was, magic – especially that of the Enemy – unsettled when us
ed for the kind of displays the sorcerer had put on in the Shambles.

  “I cannot say. What he did in the Shambles... it was not his own ability. He sacrificed that man, spilled his blood and reaped the escaping soul as fuel for his spells.”

  Darius would not mourn the fate of the sorcerer who had tried to kill him, but the act was still reprehensible.

  Darius’s words certainly didn’t reassure his lieutenant. Soldiers knew the words ‘human sacrifice’ only as some dark, terrible secret. To understand a thing, no matter how terrible, granted a measure of ease. Soldiers could not understand magic, any more than a man could understand childbirth.

  A wave of murmurs came from his men, and when Darius and Robert looked to see what the fuss was about the soldiers were looking and pointing into the sky. Darius did as well, and smiled in relief. An Angel was coming, the white light growing larger and brighter as it mocked the stars with its brilliance.

  “Why do they always come at night?” Darius wondered out loud. He’d meant the question to be rhetorical, and was a bit surprised when Robert answered.

  “Because they look better in the dark,” his friend said. The answer struck Darius as cynical, but no doubt Robert had meant it to be a joke. To think that Angels were concerned with appearance!

  When the Angel came to ground, all the soldiers that were still awake came with Darius and Robert to greet him.

  Nearly one hundred years after the Forging, a wizard had penned a tome simply entitled, “On Angels.” The very first sentence read, ‘To be in the presence of an Angel is to be comforted.’ The book was thin, as not much had been learned about Angels at the time and there was very little that Darius could add to it two hundred years later. It wasn’t so much that Angels were secretive than that they were intimidating to those who might seek to ask questions. That first sentence, though, captured the spirit of the great beings well.