Luckily for the Windeye, Aurian was well beyond speech at this point, but he was close enough for her to send him, in the mode of mind-speech, an image of an extremely obscene gesture.
Chiamh chuckled wickedly. “You can’t make that one good without coming over here.”
“And remember, Wizard,” the voice of Basileus added, “the alternative is to go back down again by the track—in your case, probably backward all the way.”
Silently cursing the pair of them, Aurian took a deep breath and knelt in an upright position, reaching above her head for the upper set of ropes. Clasping them so tightly that her hands were knots of bone, she used them to pull herself up to her feet. Then, carefully, she began to shuffle her feet along the lower strands.
Where the makeshift bridge left the cliff, the rope dipped suddenly beneath her weight. Aurian gave a squeak of terror, clinging tightly to the upper strands as her stomach leapt up into her throat, and she bit her tongue. The remainder of the crossing was a blur. Some deeply buried instinct for survival seemed to take over from Aurian’s conscious mind, and it decided that she had better get across that gap as fast as possible. She remembered a rapid, lurching scramble, a dreadful instant of frozen horror when she thought she must be slipping; then Chiamh was reaching out for her, and she hurled herself to safety, feeling his arms gather her, both of them collapsing in an entangled heap on the secure and solid floor of the Chamber of Winds. Long shudders passed through Aurian’s body as her mind shook itself free of the terror and she began to realize that she was safe at last.
“Well done, Wizard,” the voice of Basileus boomed in her mind. “You have conquered your fear, and have proved yourself courageous and worthy of the Staff. Now, you must make one last, dark journey, to restore both its powers and your own faith yourself.”
Aurian sat up and centred herself right in the middle of the Chamber of Winds, well away from the yawning drops on all four sides. She took the dull and lifeless Staff from her belt, and sat cradling it, running her hands along its polished, twisting length. “But how can I accomplish that?” she asked.
“Lift yourself free from your body, Wizard. Ride the winds With the Windeye, and see what you will find.”
Though the Mage couldn’t see how that would help, she was certainly willing to give it a try. She looked at Chiamh. “I’m ready to risk it if you are,” he told her, his brown eyes winkling.
“All right, Chiamh—I trust you.” Taking a firm grip of the Staff in one hand, she stretched out the other to grasp the left hand of the Windeye. As his eyes began to flood with reflective silver, Aurian breathed deeply, letting her body relax as her mind began to drift....
And suddenly, as easily as that, she was out and free, drifting like mist above her corporeal form and looking around at the translucent crystalline structure of the Chamber of Winds, which was also, she thought, the body of Basileus. It gave off a soft, warm glow like sunlight through the petals of rose. Drifting gently, the Mage let herself revolve until she caught sight of Chiamh, who hovered above his own mortal shell in the form of a swirl of golden incandescence. “Both of you are extraordinarily beautiful like this,” she told them.
“As are you, my friend,” Chiamh told her. “You look like a rirl of gems from the Jeweled Desert, or spindrift glittering the sun.”
“Instead of drifting around there admiring one another, I advise to get going.” Basileus cut in. “I thought you were here to fix the Staff?” Though his words were sharp, his voice, while the Mage was in this disembodied form, was like the slow, smooth pouring of honey.
She looked at the Windeye and a sparkle of amusement chased across his glowing golden surface. “All right, Basileus,” said. He extended a long, luminescent tentacle toward Aurian. “Come on, Mage.”
Aurian spun out a shimmering strand of her own and exuded it toward him. The two glistening limbs met in a flash warm brilliance, and Aurian felt waves of pleasure pulse through her, her own exaltation mingling with that of the Windeye to amplify the sensation. Chiamh reached out with another tentacle and caught hold of a current of moving air as it flowed past, and the two of them sped away from the pinnacle, like two glowing leaves borne swiftly along on a stream of light.
Swiftly they traveled, heading up toward the very topmost peak of the Wyndveil. The Mage relaxed and let the Windeye take her, simply trusting that he and Basileus knew what they were about. As they neared the summit, Aurian realized, with a shock, that they were no longer alone. Swimming through the air in front of herself and Chiamh, as though leading the way, were the twin serpents from the Staff, the Serpent of Might and the Serpent of Wisdom, moving as easily through the air as they had moved through the mysterious waters of the Well of Souls. It was only then that she realized that she no longer held the Staff of Earth, either in its mundane form or its incorporeal avatar. Dread and dismay coursed through her, causing her to tighten her grip involuntarily on the Windeye’s shining limb. Immediately, Chiamh slowed his speed, though he kept them drifting inexorably forward along the river of air.
“Is something wrong?”
“The Staff,” Aurian cried, “I’ve lost the Staff!” Again, the sparkle of amusement shimmered across the swirling golden mist that was the Windeye.
“Don’t fret—of course you haven’t. You’re here to heal and reclaim the Staff, remember—that means you’ll have to re-create it all over again.”
Aurian looked at him in some doubt. “But I...”
“Come on,” Chiamh told her. “You’ll do just fine.” Aurian realized that they were hurtling toward a dark hole: a gaping black maw set in the very apex of the mountain. Instinctively, she tried to shut her eyes, but in this incorporeal state, she could not. The next moment the great mouth seemed to leap forward and swallow them, and as it did so, the Windeye vanished. The Mage was surrounded by a cocoon of thick darkness, and was completely alone.—Aurian stopped moving—or thought she did. With all her senses muffled, there was no way to tell. The blackness pressed down on her; a cloying, muffling weight, that paralyzed and imprisoned her, as though she had been buried alive under thick, black loam. Though the Mage was striving to be calm, terror began to rise within her. There was no way out of here—she could neither see, nor struggle, nor call out for help. Has something happened to my body? she thought with increasing panic. Is this what death is like? But she had ventured into Death’s realm, and knew that it was not like this. Aurian’s scorn against her own fanciful idiocy braced her as nothing else could have done. Remember, she told herself firmly, this was always supposed to be an ordeal. It’s a test, a challenge; so stop being stupid, and get on and deal with it.
At first there seemed no way to light up the profound blackness that enmeshed her—until Aurian began to think of Chiamh. Where was the Windeye? What had become of him? Then the words that he had spoken in the Chamber of Winds came back to her: “You look like a swirl of gems from the Jeweled Desert, or spindrift glittering in the sun.” Of course! the Mage thought. I can use myself! She thought of her coruscating, incandescent form as the Windeye must have seen it, and poured all her energies into the image, trying to make it stronger and brighter.
Gradually, the black feelings of misery and dread that had pressed down on the Mage seemed to be lifting a little. In time, the physical darkness seemed to be less intense. Could it be working? Aurian concentrated on her incorporeal form, and remembered Chiamh’s words. She thought of the multicolored radiance of the Jeweled Desert; of the glitter of white surf; of sunlight glancing off the ocean in spangles of dazzling light; of stars on a frosty night; of moonlight on a field of virgin snow.