Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Is good title,” Zarnn opined.

  “Mine is ‘Grand Knight of Sanctuary,’” Fortin said.

  Zarnn made a rumbling noise. “Is good, but not better.”

  “He’s also Lord Fortin of Rockridge,” Cyrus said.

  “Less impressive still,” Zarnn grunted. “Should stick with ‘Grand Knight.’”

  “I generally do, these days,” Fortin agreed.

  “You’re having a staring contest in front of the garden?” Cyrus asked, looking from the troll to the rock giant.

  “It seemed the best place,” Fortin said, not looking up from the troll’s eyes. “Out of the way, hardly visited anymore. A proper staring competition takes hours.”

  Zarnn made a low noise of agreement. “Best to be outside, where bright light will give advantage over cave-dweller rock.”

  “Rock giant,” Fortin corrected, sounding as nonplussed as a grumbling creature with rocky skin could, Cyrus supposed.

  “I should be troll giant,” Zarnn said. “Need title, too. Would go well with gold and power Zarnn intends to find.”

  “I suppose that search is going a bit fruitlessly at the moment, eh?” Cyrus asked, putting a little more humor into it than he might have had he felt Zarnn would fully take his meaning.

  “Not searching now,” Zarnn said. “Staring. But will win gold when win contest.”

  Cyrus frowned. “Did you … put money on this?”

  “Only a gold piece,” Fortin said, squinting at the troll in front of him. “I assume that’s a bounty for a swamp troll, though.”

  “Is very much,” Zarnn agreed. “Too much. Is why Zarnn cannot look away.”

  Cyrus started to ask whether Zarnn had a piece of gold, but stopped himself just in time. If he doesn’t, it’s just going to humiliate him and possibly enrage Fortin … which would end badly for all of us standing within twenty feet of the fight that would almost surely break out. “How long have you two been at this?”

  “Hours,” Fortin said.

  “Days?” Zarnn asked. “Unsure. Stomach grumbling, but is ignored. Riches to seek.”

  Cyrus blinked his eyes, trying to decide if he even had anything else to say in this matter. “Good luck to both of you,” he finally decided and then steered his path away from the both of them, snaking his way to the bridge and crossing it, glancing down at the pond below, still in the windless day.

  “Is good Guildmaster,” Zarnn said behind him, voice a low rumble.

  “A better warlord you’ll not meet,” Fortin agreed. “I pity Goliath and their bony leader. I bet his flesh will taste like rotten meat.”

  “Rock giant eat dark elf?” Zarnn asked.

  “I don’t think Malpravus is a dark elf,” Fortin said. “I think he is in fact a very stretched and desiccated human, tainted with evil and possibly some of those disgusting elvish spices.”

  “Elvish spices bad,” Zarnn agreed. “Taste like sweaty nethers.”

  “Mmm,” Fortin said. “I don’t think I have ever tasted sweaty nethers. Are they flavored at all like gnomes?”

  Cyrus increased his speed to avoid hearing the answer to that particular question and found himself drawn toward the small shrine on the other side of the pond. He glanced into its shadowy confines, looking for the candles that had been lit within when last he’d been there. There were none, only a darkness, as Cyrus stepped up to the carefully constructed memorial to Alaric Garaunt.

  “I don’t think you’d believe the conversation I just overheard,” he said, feeling the cool shadows embrace him as he came in out of the sun. “Hell, I don’t believe the conversation I just overheard.” He took off his own helm and set it on the altar where Alaric’s own had rested once upon a time. He stared at the unthinking action, peering at his own helm, and drew a long breath. “Huh. I rather doubt anyone’s going to be around to construct a memorial to me when I die the way we did for you. Not that you’re dead,” he added somewhat hastily, as though Alaric were in the air, listening to him.

  Cyrus held still in the quiet, listening to the faint hum of a troll saying something in the distance and a rock giant responding. “We’re on a bit of a downturn at the moment, Alaric. We haven’t seen numbers this low since before Ashan’agar. And the things I’m having to do to fight this fight?” Cyrus laughed ruefully. “I know you wouldn’t approve of them. Part of me is bothered by that.” His face went slack in the darkness. “The other part of me … I guess is starting to get used to the idea that you left. That for whatever reason, you left. And you didn’t just leave, you kind of left me in the dark.”

  Cyrus raised his hands in the dark interior of the shrine. “You didn’t tell me you killed my mother. You didn’t tell me that she was a heretic. That would have been nice to know. Maybe you really were just guarding against what might happen if I found out.” Cyrus smirked. “Fat lot of good that did. They’re all after me now anyway. Supposedly you were protecting me all along, but I guess you’re pretty well done with that now. Maybe not, though, since apparently you had some hand in sending Terrgenden to save me from my own recklessness. I’d thank you, but we lost a lot of good people in that fight and, well, now that I’ve been declared heretic and the Council has joined me, we’ve pretty much wrecked Sanctuary, so I’m not sure I have much to thank you for.

  “Gratitude is a problem for me, I guess,” Cyrus went on, running his fingers through his hair. It was starting to get longer again. “All I can see lately is what I’ve done, and the chain of events that’s spun out of every choice I’ve made since I got here. I can see a line from Niamh dying at the hands of Mortus’s assassins to Luukessia dying after we killed Mortus. I can draw a course from Narstron’s death in Enterra to Orion betraying us to the Dragonlord to the sack of Reikonos and now to Goliath hanging over us like a hawk swooping down on a field mouse. Whether it’s the first encounter I had with the titans or the goblins setting loose raiders on convoys, I feel like everything that’s happening now has its roots in the past, like it’s all tied together in some grand and horrifying way. And that goes for you as well, being my mother’s killer, my protector, and later my Guildmaster.”

  Cyrus took a breath of warm, sticky air. “Most people don’t live lives this complicated. There was a time I might have thought it was a blessing that I had so much to deal with, that I had found that much-vaunted purpose you always tried to tell me about.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Now it appears my purpose is not to protect Arkaria but to sneak up on my enemies in the night and fell them in a way that you would never have condoned. The worst part is …” Cyrus felt a grim desperation settled in. “… I think it truly is the only way.”

  He let out a long breath and smelled the dank air, so different from that waiting just outside in the sunlight. “I don’t know why I said all this just now. I don’t think you’re listening.” He picked up his helm and put it on his head, feeling the sweat still on it. “Wherever you are, I imagine you have your reasons for being away. I just know that … I always felt like you knew far more than you were letting on. In fact, now I begin to suspect you might have seen further than any of us. That you could tell me how all these things are connected, what I’m missing, and help me see if there was some …” Cyrus paused, and a pang of sadness rang inside him, “… some way out of this with honor, some path I’m blind to. But instead I’m forced to do things you never would.” The sadness fled, replaced by faint resentment. “I guess that’s why I’m not you. Reason number … hell, I’ve lost count of them all. They’re innumerable. I’m a warrior, Alaric. A warrior who casts spells, but a warrior nonetheless. An enemy presents his back to me, I stab him, just like that.” He lowered his head. “If there’s a way out of this, I’ll take it, honor be damned. My purpose is to see my people through, and that’s all there is.” He raised his head once again and started toward the sunlit aperture outside, with its sweet smell of fresh air, and he stopped just before it, feeling the shadow of the shrine still cooling him, holding him in its embra
ce. “But if you wanted to show up, maybe point my eyes in a different direction, I damned sure wouldn’t mind, Alaric.” He waited for a few seconds, but there was no reply, not even the sound of the wind. Cyrus left the shrine and walked alone back to the front of the guildhall with its trampled paths leading away from the door.

  55.

  “Today is the day,” Vara said as the sun rose over the Waking Woods in the distance, somewhere beyond the open balcony. Cyrus could see the Bay of Lost Souls faintly in the distance, a dark shade on the horizon. He strained to look, imagining that on a clear day he could see almost to the ruins of Aloakna, a ghost town wrecked by the dark elves in the war. “Are you ready?” Vara asked, snapping Cyrus out of his reverie.

  Cyrus shifted, adjusting his belt and scabbard, making a face as he did so. “Ready as I’m going to be, I reckon.”

  “You’re making a face,” Vara said, glancing back at him. “What is that face supposed to mean?”

  Cyrus paused, trying to think back over the last few seconds. “I … oh. It’s this belt.” He adjusted it again; it was the same one that he always wore. “It doesn’t feel right, I think. Probably the new sword.” He didn’t even look at it, just nudged the hilt. He hadn’t so much as drawn it to practice since he’d beheaded Danay. He hadn’t wanted to look at it, not really, and for the first time in a very long time, he had no desire to feel his sword in his hand.

  “You still feel the loss of Praelior, then,” Vara said, standing in the rising sun, her hair glowing in the light.

  “It’d be hard not to,” Cyrus said, adjusting the belt again and tightening it a notch. It rested oddly on his hips; not uncomfortable, so much as simply not what he was used to. He was aware of it dimly, but did not care to focus upon it. “Having a weapon such as that at my disposal for so long only to lose it …” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I suppose it’d be a bit like you losing your arm—or your armor.”

  “Yes,” Vara said, sounding much more reserved. “Well, as you know, I have in fact had a treasured sword stolen from me before. And it is certainly no easy thing to cope with, though I was dealing with other emotions at the time.”

  “I can only imagine,” Cyrus said. He paused, peering at her. “Wait … so Archenous still wields your own blade against you? When you fought in the Mountains of Nartanis?”

  “Indeed he did,” Vara said, sounding more than a little resentful. “I would have taken great pleasure in cleaving his hand off and reclaiming it, then turning it against his waiting neck. Unfortunately, that was not to be.” Her lips were pursed with dissatisfaction.

  “Well, I don’t think our account with him is settled just yet,” Cyrus said. “I expect you’ll have another chance to remove his head.”

  “I do hope,” Vara said. “It’s truly my fondest wish, right up there with seeing Malpravus impaled upon a spear and carried forth with it jutting out of his mouth like a roasted pig.”

  “Not much meat on that pig,” Cyrus said. “He’d look like a scrawny rat with a stick shoved up his arse.”

  “Regardless, it would be satisfying, no?” Vara asked, staring off into the distance. She sighed with some gusto. “When are we leaving?”

  “We’re not,” Cyrus said, striding over to the desk and snatching up the parchment note upon it. “You’re staying here to mind the wall.”

  “The blazes you say,” Vara replied.

  “Relax,” Cyrus said, giving her a smile. “J’anda, Vaste and Longwell are coming with me.”

  “I suppose that makes me feel marginally better,” she sniffed. “But why do you feel the need to exclude me from this?”

  “Because Reynard Colton is a notorious xenophobe,” Cyrus said, adjusting his belt once more and sighing when he caught himself. I need to stop doing that. Praelior is not coming back on its own; I need to find Rhane Ermoc and take it back, but until then, I need to stop fiddling with my damned belt. He did not glance down. And perhaps put in some practice with this sword so as not to be utterly clumsy and incompetent with it if I find myself in need of it.

  “So you bring a dark elf, a troll, and a man from across the sea to meet with him?” Vara’s eyebrow was raised. “I thought you were supposed to be some sort of strategic genius, but I’m beginning to think I had the right of you when I called you an idiot all those times …”

  Cyrus shot her a smile. “J’anda will be in disguise, Vaste will be intimidating, and Longwell’s a human. Colton’s bile is mostly reserved for elves and dark elves, the latter because he was recently at war with them and the former because ‘Those pointy-eared tree-worshippers didn’t do a godsdamned thing to help during the war.’“When she looked at him with slightly more umbrage, he shrugged. “Colton’s words, allegedly. Certainly not mine.”

  “He sounds like a true treasure.”

  “We don’t get to pick our allies when we’re trapped in a tight corner,” Cyrus said by way of agreement without agreeing. “But you’re right—under normal circumstances, a year ago, I wouldn’t have stepped in this man’s territory even if avoiding it required a five hundred mile detour.”

  “Well, now all it requires is failing to mention your ‘pointy-eared, tree-worshipping’ wife, I presume,” she said.

  “I have never seen you worship a tree, come to think of it,” he said, pretending to give it a thought. An inadvertent grin split his face. “Though I suppose I have seen you with something a bit like—”

  “Don’t,” she said with a shake of the head that compelled him away from the remark before he made it. She let them stew in the silence for a few seconds before she broke it. “When do you leave?”

  A knock echoed in the tower before he could answer her. “Right now, I would guess,” he said. “Come in!”

  The door squeaked open to admit J’anda with his purple-tipped staff, Vaste with his spear-tipped one and Longwell with his lance. Vara took them all in with a glance. “Well, I’m certain that your current entourage, with their impressive collection of staves, shall surely capture the imagination of Reynard Colton, for he sounds to my ears like a man who will be impressed by a large stave.”

  “Mine’s more of a lance,” Longwell said, frowning.

  “Mine’s a spear now,” Vaste said, holding it aloft, the pointed end with the crystal in its middle glinting in the sunrise.

  “I believe we might have walked in on a conversation midstride,” J’anda said, frowning, “and I don’t believe that she meant that in a flattering way. In fact, I think she might have been using ‘staves’ as a sort of stand-in for—”

  “Yes,” Vara said with a pleased smile. “That’s exactly what I meant.” She shot Cyrus a look, one of concern thinly veiled under sarcasm. “Take great care, husband, for any man you would not normally care to have as an ally is not the sort you should trust.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek then his lips, then she stepped back to allow the others to gather around him.

  “I’ll watch out,” Cyrus said, catching her eyes. She smiled at him with obvious reservations as J’anda, Vaste and Longwell all filed in behind him.

  “I’ll watch out, too,” Vaste said, looking down at Cyrus. “Though you should really join our club and get a tall weapon. Maybe a spear? One of those very long swords the Northmen use? You know the ones, tall as an average human man—”

  “I’d settle for just getting my old one back,” Cyrus said, once again feeling the need to adjust his belt, and the odd weight there.

  “Watch your back,” Vara said as J’anda began to cast the teleportation spell, glow lighting the Tower of the Guildmaster around him.

  “I’ll watch his long bottom for you,” Vaste said as they began to disappear. “Mmmm. No, that just doesn’t compare favorably with mine at all …”

  Cyrus watched Vara’s blue eyes turn green in the reflection of the spell-light and disappear as he was taken away, away from her and to a place he did not truly care to go.

  56.

  “You know, I’ve been to some lovely towns in
my time,” Vaste said as they made their way across Idiarna, a small southern town at the very edge of the Human Confederation, “but this isn’t one of them.”

  “Well, it did get rather thoroughly sacked in the war with the dark elves, as I recall,” J’anda said, wearing the guise of a human, illusory vestments identifying him as a healer. He had somehow cast his illusion spells between the moment they’d disappeared in the tower and when they’d arrived, or else had done so before they left, though Cyrus could not quite fathom how he’d managed it. “Very difficult for a town to look good when it is recovering from being burned to the ground … what? Three years ago? Four?”

  “Somewhere in there,” Cyrus agreed, scanning the town around them. It had very much the same look as Santir, the buildings wooden and plain, the architecture different from that found in Emerald Fields. It was a peculiar thing, Cyrus thought, how wildly divergent the styles of human architecture were even when they used the same building materials. Idiarna did look bigger than Santir as a whole, however, though it seemed to pale when compared to Emerald Fields. “Idiarna and the western Confederation in general has always been the poorer part of the human state. They don’t have anything but crops, and they’re not as fertile as the Riverlands. They lack the mines of the Mountain District or Northlands, and they don’t have the ports like Taymor in the southeast. Trade with the elves and farming is about all they’ve got nowadays, and both took a big hit after the war.” Cyrus shrugged. “Maybe if Terian opens trade to this part of the Confederation … but my suspicion is that he’s not the one blocking it, since I’ve seen any number of dark elven merchants plying their wares in Reikonos.”

  They walked the muddy streets, flat ground stretched before them. Cyrus could see a keep, a wooden fort in the distance, looking much like it was new as well. It lacked the imposing presence of Isselhelm’s keep, its crude design reminding him of a titan fort or the troll city of Gren. It had the same jagged pikes circling it, though at least it had a dirty moat to section it off from the rest of the city.