Finally, no form of communication with the outside world existed. The scrye waters in the cold room could tell him when or where magic had been used in the Four Lands, but little else. Clizia had left him the scrye orb, but given the circumstances surrounding his imprisonment, it seemed unlikely she would respond to any summons he sent her.
Besides, no one who might want to help him even knew he was here save Dar Leah. And if anything happened to the Blade, Drisker might remain trapped in Paranor for the rest of his life—whatever sort of life he might have left in this limbo world. He couldn’t even be sure of that. There was food and water within the Keep, probably enough for a few years if he used it sparingly. After that he would starve to death. In the meantime, he could not be sure what living in this half-life world was doing to him, anyway. Was he aging at the same rate? Was he being affected in ways he couldn’t recognize? How much was he changing without even knowing it?
If all this weren’t enough, there was the complicated question of why he was even still alive. It was hard to fathom. At Clizia’s urging, Drisker had summoned the Keep’s Guardian from the bowels of the earth, waking it for the express purpose of driving the Skaar from Paranor or killing them if they resisted. That it was capable of doing both was incontestable. But whether it could or would differentiate between those it had been woken to dispatch and anyone else it found in the process was unknown. It wouldn’t have been so worrying if he were still a Druid, but he had resigned from the order, abdicated his position as Ard Rhys, and then been placed in permanent exile by his successor. There was no reason for the spirit creature to spare him. Even Clizia must have felt certain he would be killed, given how she had left him—helpless to defend himself and entirely at the wraith’s mercy.
Yet for some reason it had passed him by. It had come down that corridor leaving only dead men in its wake and passed right over him—even through him, at one point—and left him unharmed. Why had it done that? What sort of distinction had it made between him and the Skaar? What had caused it to spare his life? He had never heard of this happening in the entire history of the Druids, all the way back to the time of Galaphile. What had been different this time? Because something must have been. He had mulled it over and still not found an answer that made any sense.
The Guardian was gone now, returned to the depths of the Druid’s Well, subsumed into its slumber to await a new threat that would require it to come to the Keep’s defense. It had cleansed its lair of Druid enemies—leaving it otherwise intact, if in limbo—and had disappeared.
His survival wasn’t a riddle that required an immediate solution, but it was troublesome to ponder. Drisker knew he would not be alive without good reason, and he had no idea at this point what that reason was.
He sat against a passageway wall midway between the exit leading to the west gates and the assembly chamber used for convening the entire Druid order, his knees up and his arms wrapped about them, as he stared into space. If only he had the Black Elfstone. Then he could use it to bring Paranor back into the world of men and make his escape. He could go after Clizia Porse. He could help find a way to deal with the Skaar invasion.
“Isn’t anyone else here?” he shouted into the empty silence, frustrated and angry.
He listened to the echo of his voice reverberate through the building and slowly die away. He looked up and down the hallway as if someone might unexpectedly appear, as if his words would bring them. Foolishness. There was no one here but him. There would never be anyone here but him. And eventually he wouldn’t be here, either. Not alive and breathing, anyway.
“How am I supposed to figure out what to do?” he muttered into the shadowy void, his voice deliberately emphasizing each word, so that it echoed in the silence before fading.
“A little common sense might help,” a thin, wispy voice replied almost immediately.
Drisker startled. The voice was right next to him. In the wall. He jumped up and faced its stone-and-mortar surface, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. The wall had spoken to him! There was no one there, so what else could it have been? Was the wall alive? Was the Keep speaking to him?
He dismissed this idea at once. There was no record of the Keep ever having spoken to anyone, not in its entire history—not since the day the first stones had been laid to form the foundation and the mortar between them layered with Druid magic.
He waited a moment. “Who’s there?”
“Your conscience, Druid! Your inner Drisker Arc.”
Drisker smiled in spite of himself. A wall with a sense of humor. “I find that hard to believe.”
“You need to apply common sense; remember when you had some? It served you well over the years. I should know. I’ve been watching you make use of it. You and I are not so different, you know. I was like you once, rash and bold. Clinging to my precious principles. Led me to a rather lengthy period of rethinking my life. Which in turn led me to end up like you.”
Drisker thought. To end up like me. Trapped in Paranor? For a second he couldn’t think what the voice was talking about. Then he remembered. All those hours spent reading the Druid Histories. Just ancient legends and useless information from times dead and gone, the other Druids had scoffed. Nothing there will help you with the present. Studying the world around you is all that matters. There is nothing to be learned by studying what’s over and done with.
Except that those who fail to pay attention to the past are doomed to repeat it.
“Cogline,” he said softly. “Is it really you?”
“Not really. Because I haven’t been me for a rather long time. Only a shadow of myself.”
A transparent figure detached itself from the wall, oozing through the stone in lines and shadings until at last it was standing before him—an old man so worn and weathered, so wrinkled and gaunt, even in his present ghostly form, that he almost wasn’t there at all. What there was of him was stooped and gnarled and skeletally thin, more an approximation than a representation of the man he had been when he was alive. Or so Drisker assumed, because Cogline had been dead for centuries, gone into the netherworld, another of its shades. No one had seen or heard from him since Walker Boh had used the Black Elfstone to bring Paranor back the last time it was banished from the Four Lands before facing the Four Horsemen in a battle that had claimed Cogline’s life.
Drisker now remembered the story of how the old man had been trapped inside the Keep after he had sacrificed himself to Rimmer Dall and the Shadowen in order to save Walker, there to remain until the Keep’s return.
And now, for reasons Drisker could only guess at, here he was again, returned in this half-life form.
“I suppose I must look a bit undernourished,” the old man observed, glancing down at himself. “But all things are finite, and I probably don’t have all that much time left.”