Chapter 14

"At such a point in time, knowing all that has transpired and has been revealed to me, I cannot honestly say I clearly know where my allegiances lie. I can only hope that a clear mind and perhaps some sort of sign will push me over to make the right decision. What passes for right though these days, is making less and less sense."

- Lord Ursempyre Remis, Letters, Vol. IV p .221

He woke up feeling refreshed. He sat up and flexed his arms and legs, all the time his gaze towards the direction of the bullhorns. It had been a more than pleasant change to find themselves under the shadow of the immense structure that seemed to blot out the suns quite effectively, making the whole area have a different feeling all together.

The one thing they noticed almost immediately was the different climate. Instead of the scorching heat and sticky moisture, they felt they could have actually been back in their own world during a hot summer overcast day.

The heat was much more sensible, and their sleep had felt much more relaxing and refreshing than before. The moisture was still a bother, but it was not as aggravating as before. And there was no night time to worry about the chilly wetness that would brew through their bones. It was an almost pleasant, almost comfortable climate.

Even the vegetation seemed to be somewhat different. The trees for one thing were visibly smaller, and the canopy above them evidently thinner. Even though the shadow let less light through, the canopy was thinner and let even more of it through. Lighting conditions were about the same as before: a twilight of sorts that though eerie at times, did not put a strain on the eyes.

The greenery was still lush but it looked as if it had shrank a notch; the leaves were smaller and thinner while the stems resembled those in normal plants instead of the monstrously thick greens they were starting to get used to. There was less rotting vegetation on the ground and a lot fewer dropped leaves. It almost felt like a weird forest that could have been somewhere on one of the far away lands of the Territories, like the south where it was said plants like no other grew.

Amonas decided not to go for a little exploratory walk as he had done so before, so as not to alarm Hilderich a second time. Now that they were in the bullhorn's shadow he knew they were on the right track and all they had to do was keep going in the same direction. It seemed only a small matter of time before they'd reach the huge structure proper.

He would have to worry about what they would actually do only when they got there. For now, he was more than content to feel a gentle rush of air which was quite a novelty in contrast to the non-existent wind in the sunlit parts of this place.

Water was an issue but Amonas thought they could rely on that strange hard-skinned fruit with the sweet watery juice inside. He could see clusters of the trees that bore it at various distances, and a nearby tree had even shed some of its fruit of its own volition. Amonas thought they would probably be most ripe and quite sweet, if trees worked like they did back home.

The word 'home' even though only uttered in his mind brought his thoughts to a halt. He looked at the ground reflectively with a fleeting sadness worn on his face. It was not just that he longed to see Celia again, even though they had not been apart for more than a week:

It was the worrisome feeling of being unable to protect her that wore him down. He had told his kinsfolk to keep their distance from her, even if something happened to him and he would be unable to be there for her. More so, especially if something happened to him.

As luck had brought things about he was far away and out of reach, with no means to communicate that he still drew breath. His people would probably think him dead, or at the very least running for his life, fearful of getting caught.

With each passing day without hint of him, without a message of some sort, without some kind of proof, they would eventually silently accept the fact that he might not have escaped the clutches of the tyrants.

If he was being kept alive, reason would dictate that they'd somehow manage to know as they usually did and perhaps hope he would still be alive when the uprising began in earnest; which if all had been carefully arranged, was a matter of days.

But men had been known to completely vanish before; men that had attracted the ire and viciousness of the ruling scum that still chose to wear the facade of divinely appointed men of honor.

He was just one man after all. He would not hold it against them if they already believed him dead, drowned at the bottom of a lake or butchered and fed to wild boars or roaming dogs. They had seen it happen before, they all knew the dangers and the ignominious ways the Patriarch and the Castigator chose to dispose of their enemies.

But he could not bear the thought of lovely Celia thinking him forever lost, never there to return her trusting gaze, never more to hold her when the nights were cold. He wondered then, how did she take the news? What did she make of them? Was she drowned in sorrow, was her spirit broken?

He never thought of her as a fragile thing, a snowflake that melt by touch alone. She was not a little woman or a hapless gal. She never did mind her own business, and she always spoke her mind. She was proud of her accomplishments, and knew her strengths and weaknesses well.

That was though what he feared most. He was one of her few weaknesses, now that he was gone. He felt a knot in his stomach at the thought of her giving up, burying him in that little ritual they buried their dead kinsfolk with no body to say her farewells too.

He could picture her dancing to the tune of a weeping song in his memory, and then losing herself in the hills and fields, roaming the lands like a ghost of her own self. Until her days became unbearable; until the thoughts and memories crushed her like a millstone crushes seeds, grinding them to oblivion.

No, he thought with a sparkle erupting in his heart and his gaze shooting upwards through the canopy toward the uncaring, seamless sky. She was with child, she would try and burn the world itself before anything happened to their child.

She would come through this, she would endure. Even if the thought of his death weighted her down, she would find a way to use it as a focus. She might even go as far as to think of avenging him. She was a fierce woman, he knew. She would be a terrible force to behold indeed; mother to a newborn, grieving wife to the man that meant the world to her. He would definitely not want to get in her way.

The thought made him grin with a sense of pride and amazement, as well as renewed optimism. He told himself in his mind that since she would be fine, he had no reason not to do as well.

He decided to rouse himself into action, and started off towards the fallen hard-skinned fruit he had glimpsed earlier, when a sound like a man desperately gasping for air mixed with what reminded him of creaking wooden hulls of ships made him pause in his stride and turn around to meet the source of the cacophony.

It was Hilderich and nothing more, awaking with a clatter and a show that Amonas had never thought possible even more so in their current circumstances, without even a blanket in hand. Still, Hilderich somehow managed to give off the impression of someone who had been very violently and quite against his wishes woken during a lusciously promising dream after a night of heavy drinking. And all that with nothing but soil and fallen leaves under him to call a mattress.

Amonas waved a hand and boosted his voice just for good measure before asking:

"Nice of you to join the ranks of the living once more. Going to get us some of those watery sweet hard-skins, care to look for anything else while I'm at it before we move on?"

Hilderich yawned with his mouth forming an impossible angle. For just a moment Amonas thought his jaws would fall out of place and his skin would snap in horrible ways, blood and bone spurting forth.

Thankfully that did not come to pass but he was still mesmerized by the way Hilderich's mouth could stretch. He still didn't know the young curator as much as he wanted to, but he had seen enough to know that he was a indeed a man full of surprises. It's not that he didn't trust him or that he felt wary of him. It was just that he made him go wide-eyed with shock and surprise at the most curious of places.

"Ehm? Hrm. Ah, the hairy brown ones you mean. The brown ones. A brown one to quench my thirst would be fine. I slept wonderfully, thank you; almost better than back at the curatorium. There was this recurring bad case of insect infestation, terrible buggers really. Never mind. Oh, and some food would be most appreciated, while you're at it. Don't worry, I believe I can get the fire going by myself."

"Refreshing sleep, I must say. I'll try for some of those mushrooms but if I can't find any, you will be the one scavenging these woods next my friend. And don't throw all the gin in one go."

With that, Amonas picked up a brisk pace and walked off into the distance, not needing to hack his way through the much less denser vegetation. Hilderich languidly got up, his gaze flicking all around him, looking for an inviting bush or hopefully a bunch of fallen branches somewhere nearby.

He rested his hands on his waist and surveyed the landscape around him. He would inevitably have to engage in a wider search than merely browse just by standing in one place.

So he set off as well into the direction of what looked like a promising cluster of older-looking trees, their barks craggy and laden with moss, happily whistling a tune he could not possibly remember what it was.

Amonas seemed to be well-versed in surviving skills and at ease with finding his way through this remarkably chaotic mess of a forest. Hilderich on the other hand knew his own limitations in orientation, an ability which had failed him more than once even in the simple confines of his master's curatorium.

So he used what he thought was a quite practical way of keeping track of his whereabouts: he took off his cloak and cloth shirt and hanged the white linen shirt on a tall yet thin green stalk; he decided he would stray only as far as he could keep an eye on his shirt. Unless he went blind or some mysterious lurking thief of the wild came along and stole his shirt, he felt safe enough to wander away in search of some hopefully less than soggy firewood.

When Amonas came back with his sack filled with various edibles, he was surprised to see Hilderich naked from the waist up sitting next to a few piles of wooden branches and bulkier logs sorted by size as far as he could tell.

Hilderich was sitting down on the ground idly with his back propped up against the trunk of a tree, legs sprawled nonchalantly. He looked expectantly at Amonas sack and said in a casual manner:

"What took you so long?"

Amonas put the sack down, laughed cordially and began picking up wood from the pile to build a fire.

When it was time to move on again their hearts, especially Hilderich's, were not in it. The pleasant environment in combination with their full stomachs was a major disincentive to even stand up and stretch, much less start hiking again in a brisk pace.

Even though the ground was totally flat and the only variations in height came deceivingly from the various degrees of thickness in vegetation, it was still an activity that required some degree of energy and patience.

In any case, all their energy now seemed to be drained from the need to digest. They had indeed enjoyed a small feast: brown nuts, some other green horn-shaped fruit with soft sweet flesh, as well as something that resembled wheat in taste and form, but was over-sized and purple in color. Then there was another kind of crisp fruit with red flesh on the inside, wonderfully juicy and marvelously mellow.

With Hilderich displaying genuine culinary audacity mixing various fruit-stuffs together and roasting them in small leaf parcels, they had indeed made the best of what Amonas had come up with, which was surprisingly and thankfully, quite a lot.

Amonas had joked about how sorry he was for having been unable to find the pack of boars for which the piles of wood had seemed to have been amassed. Hilderich had insisted that Amonas had been gone for quite some time and it was perfectly logical that having nothing much else to do, he would have kept picking up more wood if he hadn't felt stiff by the effort.

They seemed to have thought about it and decided it would be better for them to let their stomachs do some work first before they set off, so they talked at length, something which in the short time they had known each other they had not found ample opportunity for.

So they lied down around the embers of the fire with hands behind their heads, comfortably peering through the canopy of the forest wherever they could, invariably seeing not a wisp of a cloud.

Hilderich talked about his curator's apprenticeship and master Olom. Amonas shared his memories from a time that seemed remote now, when master Olom was a close visiting friend of his father's; a time when Olom had not become shunned by most of his peers and practically forced to live as a recluse and a hermit, rather than an esteemed member of the Curatoria Prefecta. He also talked to Hilderich about how him and Olom united their efforts with the same purpose of liberating the people first from ignorance and then from the dogmatic yoke of the oppressing Ruling Council, relaying to him how bright and hopeful those times had seemed.

Amonas took some more time trying to make Hilderich picture what he had seen when he had stepped through the pillar of light and came back to tell the tale. He hoped Hilderich would understand the significance of that accursed place better than he could. Unfortunately, Hilderich seemed to be almost as much at a loss as Amonas was.

All he could make of everything was that there was much more behind the Ruling Council than their rule of tyranny and oppressive dogma, something which eluded him still. Hilderich believed what Amonas had seen was open to many interpretations, all of them though bleak and chilling to think of.

In the end he seemed to agree that if nothing else, his master's demise and their current predicament had shown him that nothing's well with the Territories and indeed the bases of their society were rotten to the core. Hidden artifacts beneath the Disciplinarium, curators being killed or driven away as if in a purge. Hilderich truthfully told Amonas that he didn't know if he believed everything he had been saying, but he now believed little of what he had learned growing up, and that was enough to side with him not only in their quest to return home, but also to uncover what lay beneath all the lies he had been fed. He was living on a strange new world; what more proof did he need that the Law was a lie, and if not a lie and simply in error, what then of its divine and infallible nature? All was not well in their world, and Gods were not in the heavens.

Amonas had been heartened to know Hilderich had changed his mind to see truth on his own. But their talk was brooding and soon became a blemish in their mood. He promptly changed the subject back to the happier times in their lives, and told Hilderich certain anecdotes about his late master that he might have been too self-conscious to admit himself. Hilderich had then been surprised to know that Olom was in fact a gin connoisseur and Amonas even remembered he had brought a distill of his own as a gift once. Hilderich somehow thought better of the old man now, though saving his life as he did seemed to have been reason enough to respect him immensely.

Hilderich asked Amonas politely about Celia, having seen him reading some of her letters; Amonas was somehow reticent to talk about her intimately though. He apologized to Hilderich saying that it was not an appropriate time for such a discussion, but promised him that he would be more than happy to introduce her to Hilderich when they both got back and had left this sordid affair behind them.

After a time period of grace that Amonas seemed to be less than averse to and once they both felt they could do so without pain and anguish from bellies about to burst open, they started off towards what Amonas had declared to be the proper direction.

Soon Amonas was showing signs of uneasiness, stopping every once in a while and trying to feel the brush of air. He craned his neck as if the air had a strange scent about it, something intangible but yet evident all around them. Hilderich could not smell anything out of the ordinary or feel something out of place. He noticed though at some point while they were walking a tingling sensation, some of the hair in his back and hands rising as if a chill had settled in.

Hilderich asked Amonas about it:

"You are uneasy. Even I can tell. What is the matter?"

Amonas puzzlement showed in his voice. He was hesitant, reticent; as if looking for the right words.

"I feel ... Weird. I cannot put it in words. Nothing specific. But, there's something in the air. I cannot tell for certain. It feels ... Somehow unnatural. Even wrong."

"This whole place is wrong. The suns are wrong. There's no night to sleep by. What could be stranger than that?"

"Don't you feel it? A reek of sorts. Something permeating the air, something impalpable. As if a bad taste is circling in my mouth. It makes me nervous, I admit. You have felt nothing wrong? Nothing different?"

Hilderich shrugged, and gestured with his shoulders in uncertainty.

"Nothing in the way you put it. Nothing intense. I did notice my hair rising slightly from time to time. Perhaps it's the air, getting colder."

"This is not because of a chilly breeze, Hilderich. There's something about the place. The sense grows stronger the closer we are getting to the bullhorns. Keep a wary eye and mind. This place might not be as peaceful and indifferent to us as it seems."

Hilderich nodded thoughtfully in acknowledgement and asked Amonas with some anxiety in his voice:

"Do you think we are in danger? Of the immediate kind? Someone following us? Waiting to ambush us or something of the sort?"

Amonas sighed warily and resumed walking, his pace less energetic than before. His gaze darted around him, watching for something he felt like he wouldn't be able to see until it was too late.

Hilderich pulled his cloak tighter in an instinctive motion, as if it could protect him and ward him from unseen danger.

At length, even with their slowed down pace and their almost paranoid wariness wearing them down they finally reached the base of the bullhorns. They could visibly tell because the vegetation thinned out to small bushes and insignificant groves abruptly.

In the hazy background they could indeed see a wall of sorts engulfing their field of vision. Once they were past the last few trees and plants, a trench of sorts lay there; it was mossy but clearly man-made with clear-cut lines and angles defining it, not deeper than the height of a man.

Beyond the trench was where the bullhorns' front face dominated the view, defying the senses in a manner none of them thought possible.

It was indeed a gigantic thing, blocking out the suns with ease. To their left and right, all they could see was the front face of the bullhorns for what seemed to be almost miles. The horizon was almost incapable of containing its view, an immaculate black mat wall with the appearance of obsidian.

It seemed to be shaped like a huge mount, wider at the base and narrow on top, like a solid triangle of sorts; a tetrahedron master Olom would call it, Hilderich thought. On a second thought the term 'pyramid' popped in his head, seemingly the right word for what they were seeing. The characteristically huge horn-like towers on the top seemed to be what distanced it from the shape of a pyramid. It seemed as if it was painstakingly constructed of large bricks or blocks of whatever material it was built from.

The wall face rose with a small inclination, the blocks forming steps that seemed to be possible to climb with some difficulty because of their dimensions. The huge horns could be seen further higher and farther away, sitting majestically atop a tall summit that could easily be as high as any mountain of the outer Territories.

Amonas urged Hilderich onwards.

"Astounding, isn't it? A man made mountain. Come, let's have a feel for it."

"Is that wise? Much more importantly, is it prudent? I think I am tingling intensely. You don't feel strange?", Hilderich said with a worried frown on his face.

"Oh, more than ever. But this is what we have been walking for all this time. We have to know what this thing is," Amonas replied while still gazing all over the surface of the immense wall.

"Can we even pretend we might be able to? I mean, look at it. An immense megalithic structure in the middle of a huge exotic forest. Not to mention that it's not unique and there are many more like it, probably innumerable from what we saw from that hill."

Hilderich seemed troubled, perhaps a bit scared as well. Amonas thought it was to be expected and perhaps even wise considering their situation. He cast his own doubts aside though and concentrated on appeasing Hilderich's fears, trying to appeal to his logic:

"Even grains of sand in a beach can be counted, if one has enough time and dedication. Focus at what's in front of you Hilderich, don't fret over things we don't have to care about immediately. You're a curator, so where is your analytical thinking? How do you know it's made of stone? You said megalithic. If it was made of obsidian, it would at least have some shiny quality to it, wouldn't it? This looks quite different. Ever seen matte black stone like that?"

"I had never seen brown hairy hard-shelled fruit with sweet watery juice and white flesh before, but I drank and ate more than one. That proves nothing. Plus, it was logical to assume it's made of stone. Didn't think you would feel comfortable with such vocabulary though."

"I can read too, Hilderich. How can you know what it's made from if you don't even touch it?"

"We could poke it with a stick or something, and see if it's dangerous."

"It's a wall, Hilderich. Whatever's strange around here, it's not just the wall. Besides, can you honestly feel serious about yourself when suggesting that a wall could be dangerous?"

Amonas' voice was mockingly serious; he wanted to relax Hilderich's doubts and make him focus on finding out as much as they could about this unreal structure. He definitely needed Hilderich's clear and precise thoughts, not a muddied assortment of insecure comments, defeatist thoughts, and morose attitude.

"I never thought I could be displaced in a place where the suns look sick and the nights have vanished, just by stepping into a column of light but here I am. Indeed, here we both are. After that, I would expect pretty much anything in this place."