Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four

by Robert J. Crane

  “No, it’s true,” Partus said. “I didn’t know him well, but I knew him in passing. He was my mother’s youngest sister’s fourth son. Went to the Society of Arms in Fertiss, and he died down in the depths of Enterra.”

  “I didn’t see you at his funeral,” Cyrus said coldly.

  “I’ve got a lot of cousins,” Partus said with a shrug. “One hundred and twelve, I think? A hundred and twenty by now, for all I know. I said I knew him in passing. It’s not like we were best of friends. I could pick him out of a crowd and he could likely do the same for me. I remember when he died, and you’re right, I didn’t go to the funeral. I thought, ‘what a shame for his mother,’ and then I went on living my life.” He shrugged again. “No reason to get all fussed about a near-stranger shuffling off; if I did, I’d spend all my days in mourning, because I know a lot of strangers that got kicked loose just a month ago as your army rode right through them—”

  “Yeah, all right,” Cyrus said, “so you don’t have to get broken up by every person you’ve ever met that’s died. Still, he’s your blood, you might have shown a little compassion.”

  “Perhaps you missed that number,” Partus said. “One hundred and twelve first cousins. Ten brothers and sisters. ’Course they’re all still living back home, but me, I’m out. If I was to worry about attending funerals for people just one generation back from me and those related to me like your friend, I’d be forever going to funerals.” The dwarf straightened in his saddle. “And get damn near nothing else done, like folk back home do.”

  “Wow,” Cyrus said. “You’re a real wellspring of humanity.”

  “I sense your sarcasm,” Partus said with unconcern, “but you should hardly be surprised. After all,” the dwarf said with a glint in his eyes, “I’m not human at all.”

  They came to a crossroad. To Cyrus’s right, the cliff’s edge loomed. When Cyrus looked over it he saw the next level down carved into the mountain, only fifty or so feet below, and the next below that. It looks much steeper from this perspective than it did on the approach. Cyrus followed Briyce Unger’s lead as the road sloped steeply, and a herd of goats was moved out of their way by a shepherd who drove them down a side street. The road rose at a steep grade, and Cyrus worried he would fall out of the saddle, or worse still, that his horse would buck slightly and they would both tumble end over end off the mountain, but somehow he hung on, as did Windrider.

  “Unforgiving avenue,” Mendicant said from somewhere behind him. “What happens if someone slips on this?”

  “They fall,” Terian said. “All the way down.”

  “All the way?” Mendicant looked over his shoulder, and his green scales seemed to dim in color. “Oh.”

  They made their way up the hill to the front gates of the castle Scylax, and Briyce Unger waved them forward. “We’ll stay here for the night, enjoy my hospitality, and tomorrow we’ll be on our way north again.”

  “How far are we going?” Cyrus asked.

  Unger’s smile faded slightly. “Not as far as I’d like. It seems that this scourge has moved south rather quickly. They’re only a week north now. Seem to have stopped their forward movement for a bit, for whatever reason.”

  “Consolidating power?” Longwell asked, looking around from horseback down the hill. “Awaiting reinforcements of some kind?”

  “Hard to know if they’re awaiting reinforcements when we don’t have a bloody clue where these things are coming from,” Unger said with a shrug. “Perhaps if we can drive them back, far enough north, we’ll find the source of their numbers.”

  “How far north does your territory stretch?” Cyrus asked.

  “A good ways,” Unger said. “All the way until the land gets too inhospitable, where the weather is bitter cold, even in the summertime. Our farthest town north used to be a village called Mountaintop, nestled in the last valley before a terribly tall peak with sheer slopes. There were trails where you could go farther from there, but between the wolves and all else, if you struck out to go farther your odds of coming back became exceedingly poor.”

  “So the real wonder,” Cyrus said, “is if these creatures came from north of there.”

  They followed Unger up to the castle Scylax, which was even more impressive upon Cyrus’s inspection. A steward offered a tour, taking them through the grand entry (which was not so grand as Vernadam’s) and around. The curtain wall extended around the cliff’s edge, providing a fine look off the side of the mountain below. The only direction one could assault the castle from, Cyrus conceded, was the town of Scylax below, and even that would be a disastrous feat to attempt for any army. Any assault up a steep road would come under an approach covered by bowmen as the gates to the castle were surrounded on both sides by two long protrusions of the wall. The last fifty yards in particular were totally exposed to arrow fire from both sides of the approach.

  Within the keep Cyrus found the towers to his liking. They were more wood than stone, and furs were used for decoration far more than cloth. Instead of blankets on Cyrus’s bed, he found a bearskin, big, shaggy, and comfortable. Wood floors, wood furnishings and a chest decorated the room. He sat on the bed after being showed to his quarters and reflected that although it wasn’t nearly as comfortable as the one at Vernadam, it was good and somehow reminded him of the Society of Arms.

  Dinner was a raucous affair, with mead and ale flowing far more generously than they ever had at any of the other, more formal meals that Cyrus had taken. The Syloreans laughed and bellowed, all activity in the room stopping when a fight broke out. Briyce Unger presided over two young men as they proceeded to punch the snot out of each other to the cheers of the crowd. When one of them finally stayed down from a blow that made Cyrus’s jaw hurt to watch it, Unger raised the young man’s hand in victory to the cheers of the crowd.

  Terian had left, Cyrus knew, after dinner, disappearing out of the room, heading toward the town, he suspected, and the brothel somewhere below. A raw, aching sensation bothered Cyrus, something unsettled about Terian, about women, about everything, but he ignored it by taking frequent drinks from his flagon of mead, which was constantly refilled by a serving woman, a middle-aged one who began to look better and better as the drinking continued. Which was to say she was passable by the time Cyrus found the motivation to get back to his bedchamber—alone.

  Cyrus drifted off that night under the influence of too much mead, too much ale, and too many thoughts of Cattrine and Vara. They became some sort of demonic swirl in his head, the two of them, and were joined by a third before he finally fell asleep, the vision of the three women in his mind spinning with the room around him.

  Chapter 32

  The next day dawned with a knock on his door, and when Cyrus stumbled out of bed to answer it, he found a steward waiting, a young boy no more than twelve. “Hot bath, sir?”

  “What?” Cyrus asked, squinting his eyes.

  “Would you like me to lead you to the hot springs under the castle so you can have a bath, sir?”

  Cyrus felt the throbbing under his forehead and wondered if a bath would even be a good idea at the moment. “No, thank you, I’d rather sleep for a while longer.”

  “Very good, sir,” the boy said, his mousy brown-haired head bobbing up and down. “I’ll wake you for breakfast, then. The King gave orders that the expedition will leave an hour after that.”

  “Good enough,” Cyrus said, and meant it. “Just fetch me some bread or a chicken leg or something, right before we go.” He rubbed his eyes. “Let me sleep as long as possible, I’ll eat on the run.”

  And he did so, as the boy returned to him an hour later with a mutton leg, and Cyrus ate it on his way out of the keep. His horse was saddled, cleaned, and waiting for him when he arrived, Briyce Unger himself holding the reins.

  “Hello, Windrider,” Cyrus said with a burp, running a hand along the horse’s flank as he approached.

  “Windrider?” Unger asked. “What kind of name is that for a horse? A bit girly, wou
ldn’t you say?”

  “I don’t know,” Cyrus said, uncaring. “I didn’t name him.”

  “Let’s be off, then, shall we?” Unger said, starting his horse toward the gate. “I trust you rested well.”

  “I have a hangover,” Cyrus said, “but the sleep was fine.”

  “No complaints with the hospitality?”

  “I wish your servants had brought me less mead and ale,” Cyrus said, feeling a vein pulsing in his temple. “But that’s less a hospitality complaint and more one related to your servants helping me to curb my own bad instincts.”

  Unger laughed, a deep bellowing one that grew deeper as they went out of the gate and found Terian working his way gingerly up the slope, looking incredibly uncomfortable in the saddle. “You look like you’re going to have a long day of riding ahead of you, lad.”

  Terian grimaced, shifting himself awkwardly. “What happened to you?” Cyrus asked, drawing a pained expression from the dark knight.

  “Let me tell you something about Sylorean women,” Terian said, bringing his horse into line next to Briyce Unger’s. “You may think this looks like a small town, and that perhaps their whores would be ignorant mountain wenches, unsure of which direction to ride a man. And you’d be wrong.” He shifted again in his saddle. “I have never in my life met a woman who did to me what that woman did to me last night. I hurt in places I didn’t know could hurt, was bent into positions I didn’t know I could be contorted into, like a braid of hair.” He shook his head. “And I’d love to go back, but I’m not sure I’d survive the experience.”

  Unger let out another bellow of laughter. “You met Muna, did you?”

  “Was that her name?” the dark knight asked mildly. “I didn’t hear it over the sound of my own screaming.”

  Unger laughed again, and reached over to slap Terian on the back. “If you think she’s rough,” Unger said, “you should avoid Ashini. Muna takes it gentle on you folk from out of town as a rule.”

  “The word gentle is not in her vocabulary,” Terian said with a cringe, “and not because she’s some ignorant mountain wench, but because she actually used a riding crop on me.”

  “I’ve heard enough,” Cyrus said, blanching. “Keep your experiences to yourself.”

  “Why?” Terian wore a nasty grin. “You starting to regret not coming with me?”

  “I regret a lot of things in my life,” Cyrus said, “but not going with you last night doesn’t look to be one of them. I mean, it looks like you’re going to be walking bow-legged for a few days, which … maybe I’m old fashioned, but I thought it was supposed to be the woman who walks like that afterward, not the man.”

  They rode down the mountain and out another gate, this one on the opposite end of town from the one that they entered the day before. Cyrus rode next to Briyce Unger, and they traveled in a companionable silence for almost an hour before Unger broke it. “You’ve come a long way to get here.”

  Cyrus shook himself out of the daze of thought he had been in. “Aye. This is … five months? I think five months since we left home.”

  “That’s not only what I meant,” Unger said. “You came here for your own reasons, but it was a long trek. At least I understood Partus’s motives. He wanted coin, and it was easy enough to part with gold for the sake of his use. But you? You come all this way for your friend,” he gestured to Longwell. “You help his Kingdom out—yeah, I know it’s his father’s, but that old buzzard will die some day and your friend will take the throne—but then you stick around and come north with us?” Unger shrugged. “Bit strange, you ask me.”

  “I caused another problem for Aron Longwell,” Cyrus said. “I stayed to sort it out, came to Enrant Monge to help fix it. But when this …” he thought about it, and was unable to come up with a suitable word of his own to describe the creatures they were riding to find, “… scourge, came up, I suppose I …” He thought about it. “I don’t know, I felt obligated to come for some reason.”

  “Are you a crusader of some sort?” Unger asked him, reserved. “Did you come here to spread the message of your gods? Because we’ve had that kind come through here before, trying to evangelize, get us to worship your western deities, and it doesn’t hold much interest for us in Luukessia. Our ancestors didn’t buy into it, and we don’t buy it either.”

  “No,” Cyrus said. “I follow the God of War, but I don’t tend to do much evangelizing.”

  “God of War?” Unger said, thoughtful. “Bellarum. That was his name, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Cyrus said with a nod. “That is his name.”

  “That one I could understand,” Unger said. “God of War makes sense to me. But the others? Goddess of Love? Mischief? Earth, Air, Water and Fire? Feh!” He made a motion with his hand as though he were brushing them all away. “Don’t need gods for those things. I’ve got my father, and his father, and the line of their fathers all the way back to the beginning. They watch over us, keep the stars in the night sky, and the sun up in the day. Who needs your cold, uncaring gods when you’ve got your ancestors, people who strained in their lives along a line so far back it’s impossible to see to the end of it. All of them looking out for you, because you’re the one who’ll carry their legacy forward. No, I’ll take my ancestors to your gods any day. Gods don’t give a damn for you; with ancestors, you’re what they’ve left to the world.”

  “What if they’ve got more than just you to worry about?” Cyrus asked, with wry amusement. “What if your father has several kids? Wouldn’t he be limited on how much time he can spend helping you?”

  “No,” Unger said with a broad grin, giving Cyrus the feeling he was part of an inside joke by the King’s grace. “He’s dead, stupid. He’s got all the time he needs, it’s not like when you’re living.” He let out a barking laugh. “This is why I don’t discuss religion with westerners. Someone always comes out looking the arse.” Unger straightened up, turned serious. “So you didn’t come here to be a crusader for your gods. Did you come for the glory, then, to further the greatness of your name?”

  “No,” Cyrus said. “There’s a war going on back home. If that interested me, I could make a hell of a name for myself in Arkaria about now.”

  “Ah,” Unger said, nodding sagely. “It’s the other thing, then.”

  “What?”

  “When a man leaves his home behind to travel a world away—as far as yours is from Luukessia—he’s either running to something or running from something. For you, it’d be the latter, it seems.”

  “Where I come from,” Cyrus said, feeling the shame creep across his cheeks, “a man doesn’t run from anything. Not a warrior, at least.”

  “Where I come from,” Unger said, “it doesn’t matter if you run away for a bit, retreat, you know? Stay in every fight and lose, and what does it get you if you get ground under and lose the war? But a strategic retreat,” Unger’s eyes lit up, “that’s saved an army or two. But that’s not you, I’d wager. Not coming at the head of an army. So what are you running from?”

  There was a pause, a long one, before Cyrus answered. “A woman.”

  “Couldn’t have been anything else, I suppose,” Unger said with a chuckle. “Only thing that can make a man run this far.”

  “I don’t like to run,” Cyrus said. “I’d rather not have.”

  “I’d rather not have an army of beasts ripping apart my Kingdom and its peoples,” Unger said darkly. “So if it’s all the same to you, I’m rather glad you ran and ran here. It may end up doing me more good in the long run than that army you wiped out at Harrow’s Crossing would have in your stead.”

  They rode north for another few days, the ground getting higher and the air colder. Snow-capped peaks became more and more commonplace, and they passed through villages built on the sides of mountains, where people greeted them with all the fanfare due an allied army on the march. Cyrus looked into their faces, the men dressed in the garb of farmers and goat herders, the women drab, wearing skins that were
faded and worn, and the children dirty from their day of activity. He looked upon them all and saw himself somewhere else, with a woman of his own, and children, and he wondered where that could possibly be, the place he saw.

  On fourth day after they left Scylax, they passed through a village with gates of wood, each post carved into a spike as a fortification. “This is the village of Shaheer,” Unger told him. Over their days of travel they’d spoken at some length, and Cyrus had managed to keep his emotions at bay thanks to Unger, who kept his mind focused on other things. “It’s the next village ahead that we’re going to. This scourge seems to have stopped in the valley over the next mountain; they only took four or five villages, one keep that we know of.” Unger’s face darkened. “Of course there are other towns north that we can’t hear from; likely as not, they all fell first—if these things came from the north.”

  Deep in the mountains, they had reached a point where going outside at night, the temperature would fall enough for Cyrus to see his breath. During the days, the air had picked up a chill that Cyrus knew had nothing to do with the season—summer was in full bloom back at Enrant Monge, after all. The altitude and the cold together conspired to remind Cyrus of times long ago—and best forgotten, he thought.

  The ride got harder. They went north again, this time over a pass that was relatively clear, a contrast to the times when they’d trudged their animals up hills and winding roads. When they reached the crest of the pass, they stopped. To either side of them were mountains, one double peak to Cyrus’s left, and a particularly tall mountain to his right, one that seemed miles high. Looking ahead of them, he could see hints of snow still patchy on the ground in the valley below, some of it obvious and hiding in the shadows of little forests that dotted the valley. The smell of pine needles was strong in the air.

  “There,” Unger said, his finger extended, pointing to a collection of houses in the distance, miles away and nestled in an uneven fold of green ground next to one of the patches of woods. “That’s the village that’s held by this scourge. It’s called Pinrade, and it used to have about five hundred people living in and around it.”