Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four

by Robert J. Crane

  The breeze was soft, even as Windrider galloped along, at a higher speed than normal. “Just a little farther,” he whispered to the horse. The warm sun tried to peek through the boughs overhead, but the shade was cooling, late summer’s wrath spent on the trees overhead, long before it got to him. He could smell the fresh air, the same air he’d been breathing for months, the pine almost blended behind everything else, the tinge of the horse’s smell, though it wasn’t as heavy now as when he was stationary. Terian. The latest in a long line of people to betray me, to harm me. What is it about them? About me? His eyes fell downward. Vara … why did you—

  The arrow hit him in the shoulder, glancing off his armor but causing him to jerk in surprise. Windrider whinnied and shied involuntarily, trying to compensate for Cyrus’s abrupt change of balance. Cyrus gripped the reins and tensed his abdomen, trying to right himself on the horse. The second arrow, however, hit him in the neck, putting to sunder any idea of maintaining his grip. The shock of the arrow caused Cyrus’s fingers to loosen, and he felt himself fall, the heavy impact of his body and all that armor hitting the ground caused his head to wash, as though he were floating on an ocean all his own. His fingers came up without thought, found the round shaft of the arrow protruding just above his gorget, tracing it back to the place where it was lodged in his neck.

  “Isn’t this fortunate?” A low voice scratched into his consciousness. Cyrus turned his head and saw a man in a dark cloak hobbling in the midst of a party of other men. Cyrus’s vision was blurred, his head felt heavy, but he knew that voice. Clarity struck his eyes, and the man came into focus for a moment: black beard that was thin, very thin and patchy, his pale skin even paler. “Now I can thank you properly for crippling me,” Grand Duke Hoygraf said, and Cyrus saw figures all around, beginning to circle him.

  Praelior. Cyrus’s hand moved to his sword, felt the rush of strength it gave him. He drew the blade and pulled to his feet, still feeling as though he were moving underwater. The men around him seemed to move at regular speed, and Cyrus blocked one of them who came at him with a polearm, cutting the man’s head from his shoulders, covering his blue livery and surcoat with blood.

  “Well, look at you,” Hoygraf said, maintaining his distance from Cyrus, watching him with a spiteful smile. “I suppose I’m not the only one of my wife’s lovers who refuses to die on command.” Hoygraf’s face twisted into spite. “The difference is, you’ll stay dead when I kill you.”

  “Didn’t … kill you,” Cyrus said, and felt blood bubbling out of his mouth as he spoke, the sour taste coating his tongue. “Stabbed you … bad enough you wished you were dead. Planning to do it … again … in a few minutes, but now I’ll do it so many times you’ll have to die when I’m done.”

  “You’re bleeding like a cow with a cut throat,” Hoygraf said with a sneer. “I don’t think you’ll last a minute the way you’re going now.”

  Cyrus felt a slow smile spread across his bloody lips. “I’ll only need thirty seconds.” Cyrus flung himself backward, sword first, sensing the presence of Hoygraf’s men behind him. He hit the first with a hard stroke between the eyes, the blade running down the man’s forehead and stopping after cutting out the mouth. The man dropped as Cyrus freed his blade and brought it around to the next attacker, catching him across the chest and cutting through the breastplate of his armor. The bottom of the man’s blue surcoat fluttered to the ground and Cyrus watched as he stepped on it, as he finished his stroke and blood spattered across the dirt and the surcoat. Two left, he thought, and they’re right over—

  The arrow hit him in the lower back and cut through the chainmail where he’d exposed it while in his attack. Cyrus felt a curious punching sensation and force, each in twine, arcing along his spine as he fell. Even the might of Praelior was unable to mask the pain or give him enough strength to fight off his knees. He sat there, wobbling, as a man with a sword shuffled, hesitant, over to him. Cyrus jammed Praelior upward with all the speed and strength he had left, and saw the sword enter the bottom of the man’s jaw as his mouth opened in surprise, and watched it flash through the man’s tongue, visible through his gaping maw, blood running down the blade it.

  A sharp pain in the back of his neck threw Cyrus facedown in the dirt, and he felt something hit him on the sword hand, hard. The world faded as Praelior was knocked away and Cyrus felt his body rolled onto his back. The branches above him were swaying, whether from the breeze of the late summer’s day or the swimming of his head from the wounding, he could not be sure. He tried to draw a breath but struggled, his chest heavy, every attempt so labored that it felt as though he were trying to lift a mountain to even partially fill his lungs.

  Grand Duke Hoygraf appeared at the edge of his vision, filling his eyes, another man next to him with a bow and arrow, a nameless, armored man in the Grand Duke’s livery. “You killed my men,” Hoygraf said flatly. Cyrus tried to reply but felt only the bubbling of blood on his lips. “You had your way with my wife,” the Grand Duke went on, “destroyed my home, left me an invalid, unable to walk straight.” The Grand Duke’s cane came down on Cyrus’s face, and another dull pain made its way through Cyrus’s consciousness.

  Curatio. He’ll find me. Aisling will help him. Martaina will …

  “You think you’ve hurt me,” Hoygraf said, kneeling in front of Cyrus’s face. “You think you’ve beaten me? Humiliated me? Did you think I would let that stand unanswered?” He spat, and curiously Cyrus could feel the warm spittle make its way down his cheek, and he tried to move a hand, go for the Grand Duke’s throat, just as he’d been taught—

  “No,” Hoygraf said, and Cyrus saw a dagger in his hand, saw Hoygraf catch his arm and rip the gauntlet off, throwing it away. Cyrus watched as Hoygraf lifted the exposed arm and stabbed the dagger through Cyrus’s wrist. The sharp pain was there, in the background, but Cyrus barely felt it. “Did you think I would simply let you have my wife, wreck my keep, leave me to die and merely forget about you? Let it pass?”

  J’anda. Mendicant. Odellan. Longwell. I need … help. The names ran through his mind one by one as though by thought he could appeal to them directly to come to him. Weariness settled upon him like a heavy blanket, dulling the pain.

  “I know your western magic,” Hoygraf said, and twirled the dagger in his fingers. “If I leave you here, as you are, they’ll find you. They’ll bring you back to life.” Hoygraf’s lips pursed and he shook his head. “I can’t have that. I need everyone—everyone—to know that you don’t trifle with me, not this way. And I’ll make sure … that you won’t come back.”

  Alaric … Cyrus’s thoughts were drifting now. Was Alaric even around?

  The knife flashed in front of Cyrus’s eyes, and then he felt a sharp pain in his neck, the blade’s edge against his flesh, sawing down.

  “They’ll have a hard time reviving you, I’d wager,” he heard the Baron’s voice say, “without a head.”

  The last thought through Cyrus’s mind before the flash was uncontrolled, unanswerable, and unexpected.

  Vara …

  Chapter 43

  Vara

  The Council Chambers seemed to briefly twist around her, the torches a blur of light in her peripheral vision as she honed in on the druid’s face as he spoke, a dull, tanned mass of flat nose and pale lips that she wanted to hit with the palm of her hand as she would slap an overripe melon to get it to crack open. Instead she pressed her armored fingers into the table and pushed, hearing a splintering sound that caused her to draw back her hand self-consciously. She looked up and saw Vaste staring at her with his pointy-toothed grin, and she gave him venom in return.

  “… so, of course, he’s keeping the army in Luukessia and marching them north, to meet and battle the scourge as it continues to come south,” Ryin Ayend finished with a nod of his head, perched atop that implausibly thin neck.

  “Oh, of course,” Vara said, letting sarcasm drip from every syllable. “Because the problems of another continent are so mu
ch larger than the enemies storming down our own gates.”

  Ryin’s jaw worked open and then shut, a quick motion that caused his lips to purse. “Of course we didn’t know over there what you were experiencing here, else we might have come back a bit quicker. However—”

  “This scourge,” Alaric said, interrupting. “You have mentioned the danger they pose, but you did not speak to the origin of these creatures.”

  Ayend’s face went ashen. “Ah, yes. Well, you see, that’s the other part of the problem and the reason Cyrus sent me back. He wants you to send reinforcements—”

  “Then he’s just as daft as ever he’s been,” Vara said, and she felt the twitch and contraction of the muscles at the corners of her eyes. “Unsurprising, given that he’s been operating out of contact for so long, but the idea that the war here would just run a pleasing and gentle course is ridiculous, and a supposed ‘master strategist’ such as Cyrus Davidon should damned well have known that the Sovereign of Saekaj wouldn’t be sitting idly by while he grew fat in his black armor, feasting beyond the eastern sea.”

  “You don’t understand,” Ayend said with a shake of the head. “He’s not just fighting the good fight for the sake of it over there—”

  “Because he’s never gotten involved in an ill-advised fight before?” Vara said, cutting across Ayend’s words.

  “To your advantage, I believe, not his,” Ryin said.

  “Yay, verbal fisticuffs,” Vaste said, “I have so missed the arguments in these chambers over the last months.”

  “I haven’t,” Alaric said, dark circles under his eyes now that his helm was removed. “Vara, if you might, please allow our esteemed brother Ryin to finish his train of thought without interruption … About the origin of this scourge …?”

  “Ah,” Ryin said, all contrition. “That is the sticky part, as I said.”

  “Something on the order of five times now you’ve said it was a sticky part,” Vara said, her fingers now on her face and ready to dig into the skin in lieu of anything else to squeeze her frustration out on. “Some of us grow weary of being sticky—”

  “Not I,” Vaste said. “I could do with more of it. Though not with any of you.”

  “Perhaps you might cut to the point of it and be done,” Vara continued, ignoring the interruption, “so that those of us who have other things to do—say, seeing to the defense of Sanctuary—could get back to that.”

  “Would you allow me,” Ryin said, irritation infusing his tone, “sixty uninterrupted seconds without the extreme pleasure,” he put emphasis on pleasure, as though it were the foulest curse, “of your sweet and indulgent voice, and I might complete a full sentence and thus end the story I am trying to tell.” His jaw worked as though he were chewing something heavy. “J’anda read the minds of these creatures and saw their monstrous origin, and then Cyrus and Aisling confirmed their creation by seeing—”

  “What a wondrous pairing, those two,” Vara said, and her hand dropped from her face to the table again, where she dug her fingers into the edge once more.

  Ryin ignored her. “—seeing how they were created. There is a portal, and it leads to Mortus’s chambers. The creatures are the souls turned loose after the God of Death’s—well, his death,” Ayend said, after struggling with the phrase. “They are the legacy of what we released when we killed Mortus.” A heavy silence covered the room before Ryin began to speak again. “Cyrus says he will stay until the end to defeat them to, ah …” Ayend pursed his lips, “… atone for his part in their release.”

  Vara’s eyes met Alaric’s, which were cool indifference, but she caught a glint in them that she ignored. “Well,” she said, suppressing the internal desire to scream, “isn’t that … noble … of him.”

  “He’s quite the honorable chap,” Ayend said coolly.

  “Interesting to hear you speak so favorably of him,” Vaste said with amusement, “seeing as you’ve always been his harshest critic.”

  “I’m everyone’s harshest critic,” Ryin said, sitting up straight in his chair, “because I don’t believe in letting ideas pass unless they’ve some virtue and until they’ve been considered carefully. Perhaps we made a mistake in killing Mortus, perhaps we erred in defending Termina for the evacuation, perhaps not on one or both counts; either way, there are plainly consequences that need to be dealt with by someone, both here and abroad. Whatever our prior decisions, we are stuck with the fallout from them now, and I see Cyrus trying as best he can to cope with his part. Luukessia is at war, these things are numerous, the land is fragmented and the coming war will likely be disastrous. Cyrus could use additional forces to drive these things back and finish them in order to have Curatio destroy the portal.”

  There was a long pause, and Alaric stared at Ryin from his place at the head of the table, the grey skies highlighted out the small windows behind him to the balcony. It might have been Vara’s imagination, but the sky seemed to dim further as Alaric wrapped a hand around his mouth as if trying to suppress any sound that might escape. “No,” he said at last. “His cause is, of course, just, and worthy, but the army we broke is not the last of what we will see of the dark elves. We cannot move to assist our comrades in Luukessia unless we know for fact that the dark elves have moved all their armies against other objectives.” He bowed his head. “I do not see us coming into an abundance of news in that regard, not anytime soon, not more than idle rumors.”

  Vara stared at him, at the specter of quiet and defeat that hunched the Ghost’s shoulders. We should protect our own gates, take care to watch our backs now. What has happened to these people of Luukessia is unfortunate, all the moreso because of our part in setting loose this scourge, but to send more of our army to aid them would be to sentence those remaining behind to defend Sanctuary to a terrible and bloody death, especially now that the Sovereign has learned how to breach our very foyer and send his troops in directly. No, further excursions would be a terrible idea, awful in its application and idiotic in the stripping of more forces from our own walls …

  Even still, she spoke. “Perhaps …” she said, “… if I went to the front south of Reikonos and spoke with my sister, who helps head the defense of human territory, we might gather some idea of how goes the war in general, and the disposition of forces. With that insight, we might know if it were safe to send another expedition to assist our beleaguered forces in Luukessia.” She clamped her mouth shut after it was said, and wanted to scream. Where the hell did THAT come from?

  “An interesting idea,” Vaste said. “And here I thought you were firmly against committing any more troops outside of our walls. I wonder what might possibly have shifted the weight in your mind against that idea.”

  “An outpouring of concern for our army across the sea, no doubt,” she said icily.

  “Because you spend a vast majority of your time concerned about the plight of our new recruits,” Vaste replied with a barb and a raised eyebrow.

  “I spend my time as an officer concerned about our entire guild, you miscreant.”

  “Of course,” he said contritely.

  The doors opened to the hall behind them, a slow creak of the hinges as Erith Frostmoor entered the chamber, her white hair bound behind her in a long braid, her robes tattered, the white thread now brown and smudged. “The hour is over,” she said as she took her seat, as though it were an explanation of itself.

  “The hour is … what?” Vara asked her with a cocked eyebrow.

  “Is over,” Erith said, her usual mischief faded, her eyes weighed down in hard lines, lips tight, the purple flesh that made them stand out from the blue skin of her face tightly compacted in a line that wavered. “The hour we have to resurrect people who might have been killed in the tower collapse is up, and they were still pulling bodies out of the stone when I left a few minutes ago.” She lowered her eyes. “It looks like a quarry where it came down, piles of block everywhere, and you can still hear moans and cries from inside, so all hope is not lost, but …”


  “A terrible day,” Alaric pronounced. “To see so many of our brethren fall in a battle that we didn’t even truly partake in. How many unaccounted for?”

  “Eighteen,” Erith said, her head hanging. “Some yet live, and our strongest are working to unearth them, but some are certainly lost. Then there are the consequences of the collapse. It looks like someone took the corner of the building and dragged it down, exposing all the lower floors to the air and elements. You’ll have to have someone more familiar with design tell you how that will affect things. We’ve lost a good many quarters, though, I can tell you that much.”

  “We have empty housing enough,” Vaste said. “Not to marginalize the loss of the tower or the deaths, which are unpleasant, no doubt, but we will make do. The bigger concern is if the dark elves come again, with more men, more war machines.”

  “The Sovereign is unpredictable yet spiteful,” Alaric said, still holding himself to his seat, pensive. “Yes, I think it might be wise to have you speak to your sister about the war’s progress,” he said with a nod to Vara. “We need to know what to expect, what will be coming and how it will hit us.” He brought his hands around to steeple in front of his face. “You will go immediately, and return as soon as possible.”

  “Very well,” Vara said, and began to stand.

  “Hold,” Ryin said. “I will take you to Reikonos, but there is one last thing I have to report.”

  “Oh, good,” Vara said, lowering herself back into her chair. “Because you weren’t overly dramatic enough with any of the other information you brought us. What pointless drivel have you left to—”

  “Terian,” Ryin said, and Vara stopped speaking, a knifeblade cutting into her under the armor, as though something unseen had stabbed her.