“Del, me Del, don’t ye be leaving me now!” the witch cried, scrambling to her feet, rushing over to him.
There was nothing to grab onto, and soon, nothing to see.
The wail diminished, spread wide to the winds, and was no more.
No more was he a separate entity from the giant wave; no more was he Istaahl the mortal man. He sensed the shallows, knew in some primordial way that he was approaching the high cliffs of the shore.
Then he hit, a mountain of water, exploding in ecstasy against the dark stone of Kored-dul, thundering into the stone unabashedly, straight on, throwing all his life into it.
The roar went on and on, reverberating about the stones, and into the stone, the energy of the crashing water reaching every crack like grasping tendrils. And when the water was gone, the wave broken apart and splashed back out toward the sea, the reverberations continued, echoing.
A great slab of the cliff broke apart and slid down, thundering as it bounced off the stone, then hitting the water with a huge splash. The weakened cliff continued to tremble; another piece broke away. And then another; and then another.
And then it fell, all of it, taking the fire-ravaged disaster of Talas-dun with it.
“O Death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” Del shouted, stealing from an old passage he remembered, from the time before Aielle, from his world and a passage of Corinthians in a book called the Bible. How clear the words of that most ancient tome came to him now. He knew the book so well, though in life he had paid it hardly any heed. It was a book of the angels, the Colonnae, and a work of morality, of life and death, and life after death. He moved along a gray and foggy corridor, a cold place, passing the line of newly disembodied spirits. Their numbers alone told him that the battle was on in full, and also that Thalasi’s hold over the undead spirits was no more.
“O Death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” he shouted again, running now, passing all of them, descending swiftly to a place darker and colder still. He paused and felt within himself, and there, in a deep place, he sensed the passage of his daughter, and was soon fast on her trail. “And where is thy horror, ugly fiend?” he added, his own thoughts, as he came into the passage and then the chamber, in sight of the cloaked lord of the underworld.
“What terrors have thee left? What pains can thee promise, when thou hast taken all?” Del shouted.
“No promise, ghost of Jeffrey DelGiudice,” the specter replied in its unearthly, rasping voice.
“Is there no sympathy, no passion, no care for all the pain?”
“None,” Charon replied without hesitation. “I take nothing; I give nothing. I am.”
DelGiudice hesitated now, digesting the thoughts, the apparent impassivity. It occurred to him that an apathetic Death was, perhaps, more difficult an opponent than a malignant spirit.
“I will bargain,” he offered.
“I take nothing,” Charon replied. “I give nothing. No barter, no trade.”
“You took her!” Del accused, pointing to the bier where lay his daughter dear, so peaceful.
Too peaceful.
“She came to me by her own actions.”
Del stared at Rhiannon’s spiritual form, mirroring her physical form, lying perfectly still upon the bier, half wrapped by Charon’s eternal shroud.
“Give her back, I beg,” Del said.
“Back to whom?” Charon replied impassively. “To you? Need I remind you that you, too, are dead, Jeffrey DelGiudice? It is not an evil thing.”
“No,” Del agreed. “Not evil. But not for her. Not yet. She was just starting to know life.”
“That temporary aspect of life,” Charon said. “Now she will learn the next.”
Del shook his head. “No, no, no,” he kept saying, for though he knew that death was not a wicked thing, not an emptiness and certainly not painful, he felt, somehow, that this was not Rhiannon’s time, that the manner of her death, the breaking of that perverted staff, did not justify this end to her mortal coil.
But how to tell that to Charon the impassive? How to justify it when so many other young men and women had died, and would continue to die, this very day, long before they had really been given a chance to experience all that the previous life offered?
“I only know,” he said quietly, looking up at the specter, “it is not her time.”
Arien led them into the foothills, the sure-footed Avalon mounts quick-stepping past rocky jags and over the multitude of corpses. Enemies were not readily apparent, for those talons who had remained near the front lines had been brought down by the zombies and skeletons, and those who had been farther back had run away.
Arien meant to find them, though, every one, and end the scourge of the children of Thalasi once and for all. First, though, he turned his elves to the south, linking them up with Benador’s thousands, and he and Ardaz joined with the king.
“The world could not have hoped for a greater rout,” the king of Calva stated, his elation apparent. “The evil talons will be many generations recovering, if ever they do.”
“Never,” a dour Ardaz said, “for Thalasi is defeated, dead and gone forever.”
“Your news is wondrous, yet you speak it with heavy heart,” Benador noted.
“For my niece, Rhiannon, too, is gone,” Ardaz replied. “And so, too, is Istaahl, who has been my friend for centuries!”
The news hit King Benador hard, and he purposefully had to steady himself, else he would have fallen from his mount. “Istaahl gone?” he asked breathlessly, and he seemed a lost child at that moment.
“And Rhiannon,” Arien added grimly.
“Istaahl the White,” Charon stated. “Would you ask for him, as well?”
The ghost paused, digesting the sad news that the White Wizard of Pallendara was gone. Somehow, though, that seemed all right to him, as if it was meant to be, as if it was Istaahl’s time.
“And what of Jayenson Belltower?” Charon went on. “She was killed this hour, taken by a talon spear. Should I release her as well? I can name hundreds more, and thousands of talons, if they, too, are deserving of your misplaced mercy.”
“Not her,” Del said immediately. “Not any of them. Just Rhiannon. I know this. It was not her time; not like that. Calae put me back here, in this world, to deliver this one message.”
Charon did not respond.
“She gave Thalasi to you,” Del reasoned. “She broke his staff, that awful staff, that instrument which the Black Warlock crafted and used to steal from you. She gave it all back to you. You owe her this.”
“I do not bargain, nor do I ask for anything,” Charon said with some determination. “And I cannot be robbed, since nothing here is my possession. I simply am.”
“No!” Del cried, thinking he had found his logical opening. “No, Charon, your actions reveal the truth. How you hungered for Thalasi in that tower room, when the staff was first cracked. How your shadowy minions went after him, pulling him to you!”
The specter of Death did not reply, only, for the first time in all the eons, listened.
Belexus and Bellerian, atop Calamus, moved above the rocky foothills, searching for remnants of the talon army so that they could direct the continuing attacks of their kinsmen and the elves. At Belexus’ insistence, the older ranger turned the pegasus inevitably east, toward Talas-dun.
They came in sight of the broken cliff, all trace of the black fortress gone, and any trepidation they held at the sight of disaster disappeared when they spotted, far below, Bryan of Corning, moving along a narrow trail, bearing Rhiannon gently in his arms.