Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four

by Robert J. Crane

  The sun was not against the far horizon, not yet. It hung in the sky at an angle that told Cyrus it was one, perhaps two hours until sundown. He looked at it then back to the encampment, not so far distant, and then to the river. “Sometimes life is not about desire, or belief. Sometimes it’s about crossing the void between big moments, about putting one foot before the other as you navigate the spare areas where nothing remains in a blighted heart. The only thing I can do for now is to keep going, to hold to my duty of fighting the battles placed before me, seeing to the tasks appointed me. You want me to believe? You want me to hope? This is hardly the first time in my life that I’ve been hollowed out, not the first by far that I’ve lost hope. In those moments, I’ve learned to keep walking, to keep going, to hold not to hope, but to whatever I can. I won’t be the same man I was before, but I won’t be like this forever, either, I doubt.” He let show the faintest, most rueful smile. “The thought that I would … doesn’t bear consideration.”

  “When will we see this new Cyrus?” she asked as he resumed his course toward the river, the smell of the grasses carrying over him, the light whipping of the wind at his armor a pleasant distraction.

  “Whenever I get to him,” Cyrus said, and he heard her footsteps cease. He did not look back, but he knew she was not following him any longer. “Whenever I meet him.”

  Chapter 56

  The river was not fast moving, nor was it much of a river at all. It was somewhere between a creek and a river, a halfway between thing, not deep enough for Cyrus to worry much about wading across if he so desired, but deep enough for him to stick to the riverbank. He undressed himself and then sat upon the bank and let go of his sword. There was no one around, though he could see Martaina in the distance, between him and the encampment. A split from the river was visible, something that wended much closer to the camp, indeed almost through it, and he wondered why she had suggested this place for him before the reason of privacy dawned upon him.

  He sat upon the bank and let the sun crawl lower in the sky, unconcerned. His head no longer swam, and his breathing was deep and steady, taking in the plains air. The grasses here were different than those around Sanctuary, fuller—more oats, he thought, less tamed. The Plains of Perdamun were broken and dotted with farms; these grounds were spotted only occasionally with settlement. He dipped his feet in the water and felt the coolness run over his toes. He looked to the direction of the light current and realized it came from the north, from the mountains in the far distance, where the enemy lay.

  He stood and slid into the water, wading in on his knees, as it covered him to the waist. His knees touched the thousand pebbles on the bottom of the stream, and he let the current run over him, let himself fall back, let his hair submerge, long black locks clinging to his head as they dampened. He kept his face above the water then dipped it under for a moment, felt it run into his nose and he broke the surface sputtering, snorting it out.

  “Finally reached the point of trying to drown yourself?” There was a quiet voice nearby, and he looked up to see her watching him, squatting near his armor.

  “No,” he said, ignoring the levity in her voice. “Just trying to remove the accumulation of weeks of sweat and sick smell.”

  “Not a bad plan, as such plans go.” Her clothing hung loose, no cloak or armor visible from where he sat. She was down to the barest essentials, the daggers on her hips staring at him like they had eyes of their own. Her curves were smooth, and the shirt she wore had enough of a gap at the top that he was left not needing to imagine the breasts he had seen so many times of late. “Did you have any reason for it besides just the feeling of uncleanliness?”

  “Yes.” He nodded slowly.

  “Must I inquire why?”

  He stared back at her, waiting, with her head cocked, her slightly pointed incisors hanging out of her deep blue lips. “Must I say it?”

  She squatted there, and he wondered if she was visible to Martaina, as low as her profile was, with the grass swaying and almost touching her cheeks. “Before, I’ve been content to let it pass. But now, yes. I want to hear you say it.”

  “Because I want you,” Cyrus said. “Because I crave you and the relief you bring.”

  “Relief?” She unknotted the strings at the front of her shirt and shrugged out of it there in front of him, let her dark blue skin show to the world. She stepped out of a boot with a half-step, not ever leaving the ground but coming to her hands and knees. The other boot came off with ease, as she crawled toward the bank of the stream on all fours, naked to the waist. Her cloth breeches came unlaced with only a minimal effort from her, and slid off just as her hand reached the rocky edge of the water.

  He waited for her, felt the rising tide within him, and when he felt her first kiss, it was as though the call within him were answered, the raging tide rising was dismissed. They were there for quite some time, the splashing of the water around them the evidence of a particularly noisy bath. Cyrus neither knew nor cared whether Martaina saw; she doubtless knew anyway. It matters not, he thought in the midst of it. But in truth, he knew otherwise.

  They lay on the grassy bank for a while afterward, her head on his shoulder, not speaking. “Why?” Cyrus asked, into the silence of the setting sun.

  “Why what?” Aisling’s voice came back to him, jaded, wary.

  “Why do you think I’m doing this?” he asked, spent, not even close to sure about what answer he would get. “Do you think it’s because I—”

  “I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Aisling said, and she rolled over, grasping at her shirt and pulling it on. “Though, I do occasionally put a gift in my—”

  “There’s the Aisling of old,” Cyrus said, not moving, feeling the hard dirt against his back. “I had thought that perhaps finally getting what you wanted would rid you of your desire to be crass.”

  He saw the subtle shrug of her shoulders as she knotted the strings that knit up her shirt. “Have I gotten what I wanted?” She didn’t look back at him. “I did get you, I suppose, and I did always say I wanted this, so I suppose in that way I got what I wanted.”

  “You were perhaps expecting me to be more … enthusiastic?” He rolled onto his side to watch her as she dressed, still squatting low and keeping her body down, out of sight of camp.

  “I could hardly ask for a more enthusiastic partner, at least on a purely physical level.” Her legs folded around in front of her like a gymnast and she slid into her pants, taking care to knot them back up. “Especially so soon after being an invalid.”

  “I’m not the same, am I?” He didn’t watch her now, he let himself lean back to the ground, felt his wet hair slop into the dirt.

  “No,” she said, but her voice seemed cavalier and uncaring about the whole thing. “But who of us stays the same for our whole lives?”

  “What would you have of me, then?” Cyrus looked up at the sky, the deepening shades of evening coming out now.

  “Nothing that I think you would be capable of giving at present,” she said, and he watched her put her boots on, one at a time, her white hair bound over her shoulder and leaving water marks on her tan shirt. “Which is why I don’t ask.”

  “Do you think me fragile?” He couldn’t seem to muster any umbrage for his question.

  “I think you’re already broken,” she said, and stood, looking down at him. “But that’s all right. We all break some time; and I’m here, willing to take what you’re willing to give and willing to give what you need right now. Your spirals don’t concern me; you’re a big boy, and you’ll work it out in time.”

  “Will I now?” He let a faint amusement creep into his voice, and he saw a whirl of white clouds tinged orange by the coming sunset. “That’s reassuring.”

  “Be reassured, then,” she straddled him, her cloth pants against his abdomen, and she leaned over to kiss him, deep and full on the mouth. He felt her passion behind it, the force, but he had none of his own to match it with, just the slight stir o
f something detached, and far away, a physical reaction that told him that if she stayed where she was, her clothing would need to be removed again …

  As if she could sense his line of thought, she broke from him. “See?” She gave him a faint smile, and the long incisors poked out of her lips again. Time was he would have thought them predatory, but now he saw the hurt, the edge behind her eyes, the strain that she didn’t intend to loose. She stood, and with a whirring of the grass, she took the first steps away.

  He lay there by the stream, trying to gather enough energy to bring himself back to the water the clean off the grit accumulated during his and Aisling’s lovemaking. He couldn’t find it, though, and remained there, staring at the sky, until the first body came drifting down the current only a few minutes later.

  Chapter 57

  Vara

  Day 1 of the Siege of Sanctuary

  There were no catapults hurling rock through the air, no siege towers making their way over the plains, no arrows filling the skies above the wall. There was nothing but the sound of an army outside, the raucous cheers, the battle hymns, the shouts and glee of the invaders poised less than a mile from the Sanctuary walls, waiting, as though they would come across the open distance and split the walls wide.

  “They sit, they wait,” Thad said, addressing the officers, who were gathered around the Council Chambers. “Of course they stop the flow of convoys along the major roads nearby, but that’s to be expected. We can’t see them, of course, but you know they’ll have taken all the grain that’s being shipped through the crossroad north of here.”

  Alaric watched Thad from behind templed hands, as always. This time was different, Vara thought, in that the Ghost’s brow was stitched together like storm clouds on the horizon, as though thunderheads were bound to streak down his face and unleash fury on the first poor bastard to cross before him. “Every day they hold the crossroads is another day they hold the Plains of Perdamun in their grip, another day closer to the harvest, another day closer to the eventual starving of Reikonos.”

  “Are we actively rooting for Reikonos now?” Erith said, causing everyone to turn and look at her. “I mean, I know we’re sympathetic to the humans, but the Confederation and the Council of Twelve? Bumbling idiots. They did want this war, after all.”

  “The city of Reikonos is the largest in Arkaria with over two million people,” Alaric said. “Should the dark elves take it, they will not be merciful to the occupants—or the human race.”

  “Oh, so we are rooting for the Council of Twelve,” Erith said, not chagrined. “Okay, well, that’s good to know.”

  “Personally, I’m more worried about me, then the rest of you, then our members, then the applicants, and somewhere down the list, the flower garden,” Vaste said. “I’ll worry about Reikonos and the rest of the human race when the destruction of all of the above is not hanging over my head. Especially the flowers because they’re so pretty.”

  “What chance do we have to push them back?” Ryin asked, turning his question to Thad. “A hundred thousand or more, yes? How do we break an army of that size? How many would we need to do it?”

  “More than we have,” Alaric said. “I suspect that they will not be driven away as easily as they were the first time now that they have reinforcements. We can defend the walls against that number by keeping them at bay, but by bottling us up, they achieve their directive—they hold total control over the plains. There is no way we can effectively guard against the predations of their soldiers against the farms without being able to move our army to do so.”

  “Perhaps we cannot control the Plains of Perdamun while they have us cornered so,” Vara said, speaking at last, “but we can give them pause and keep them from extending that control.”

  Alaric’s eyebrow came up behind his hands. “You mean to fight a small war, to distract them, to split their forces.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean to take a small force and do what they accused us of two years ago—find their convoys of stolen goods and strike them, then teleport back here with the spoils. They’ll be forced to move soldiers off the line of siege to escort the convoys, and as we move closer to harvest time that will be a larger and larger group necessary to keep them safe. With a druid and a wizard we’ll be able to teleport out of trouble before any army can reach us, and we can cause enough trouble and discord north of here to force them to keep splitting their forces.”

  “I like it,” Vaste said, nodding his head at a sideways angle. “It almost sounds like something that could really work, as though perhaps it had been done at some point in the recent past.”

  “It seems a shame to let our enemies have all the fun,” Vara said archly, “seeing as when Goliath and the goblins tried it, it worked very effectively at keeping all parties concerned fully off balance.”

  “Yes, and also prompted every power in the area to send in more troops,” Ryin said. “What’s to stop the Sovereign from doing so again?”

  “Just package up another division or five and throw them into the Plains of Perdamun?” Thad asked. “The Sovereign has to be reaching a limit at some point. There are only so many able-bodied dark elven men still living in Saekaj. Sooner or later, the Sovereign will run dry of forces. He can’t maintain any semblance of a line south of Reikonos, keep armies on the eastern frontiers with the Northlands and the Riverlands to keep them from interfering with his siege of Reikonos, and still keep the River Perda buttoned up the way he does while sending fifty or a hundred thousand more troops to the Plains of Perdamun. Something will give.”

  “And let us hope it is not our walls, and our forces, and our flowers,” Vaste said.

  “So we send a force?” Ryin asked, looking around, as though gauging the response around the table. “We do what the goblins did to us, raid the transports of the dark elves, wreck their convoys and cause them to spread out their forces, pull them from here?”

  “It does seem somehow fitting,” Alaric said from behind his hands, “that the war started in that very way, and now we return to the beginning for our own purposes. Vara, since it is your idea, I would ask you to spearhead this attack force. No more than a hundred at any given time are to go with you, and no fewer than three spellcasters with the ability to cast a teleportation spell to return you here. I will not have us lose people to mere accidents. Keep a wary eye around you, even if you travel at night, and be certain to be doubly careful so as to avoid ambushes. The dark elves will not long tolerate us raiding the fruits of their thievery.” Alaric smiled and the hands came down. “I do appreciate the irony, though; they steal from local farmers, and we proceed to steal it back for our own purposes.”

  “Yes, it is somewhat delicious, isn’t it?” Vaste asked. “It’s like pounding your enemies as if they were mutton and then licking the tears off of their faces.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “Oh, as though none of you have ever done that.”

  “Where are you going to begin?” Erith asked, looking to Vara. “The Plains of Perdamun are huge, and traversing the whole thing, even with all the portals available to you—I mean, the Sovereign will have sent out wagons by the hundreds to collect the bounty of the plains.”

  “We start in the north,” Vara said, and she felt her mind harden in resolution. “Near Prehorta, the closest to their home and where they’ll be paying the least attention. Then we’ll move west, toward the river and then …” She felt a thin, malicious smile crease her lips, and she wondered idly if it stole the color from them when she did it. “If we do this right, we’ll keep them rather busy …”

  Chapter 58

  Cyrus

  The tent was stuffed, filled to the brimming with servants and clingers-on for both Syloreas and Actaluere. The men from Syloreas were big, of course, the rough and marked sort whom Cyrus had come to expect, with their beards and long hair and fierce looks. There were not many useless, effete ones surrounding Briyce Unger, but the few there were made up for the lack with annoying precision.

/>   The men from Actaluere, on the other hand, were swarthier, smaller on the whole, and reminded Cyrus of the men who worked the docks in Reikonos before the dark elves had moved in and taken over the labor force there. Their hair was short, the fighters were easy to tell from the talkers—and there were talkers aplenty who had come with Milos Tiernan.

  Cyrus sat on a cloth stool that had been provided for him by one of the talkers of the Actaluere delegation. It was a small thing, annoying in its way, and it made him yearn to stand, especially now that the most troubling aftereffects of his injury had passed. Every eye in the tent was on him, and he had just finished speaking about the bodies, the ones that had come down the stream while he had been there beside it only the night before.

  “You’ll forgive me, Lord Davidon,” Milos Tiernan said, a slight grimace on his face, as though the very news pained him, “but … how many bodies were there?”

  “More than I care to count,” Cyrus said. “I stopped trying after thirty.”

  “And they were men of Syloreas?” Tiernan asked, couching his words in a tone that sounded uncomfortable to Cyrus.

  “So it would seem,” Unger said. “I looked them over when Lord Davidon’s people came for me. They look like village folk from the foothills, judging by the goatskin clothing. I would presume that they washed down after their village had been wiped out.”

  “Fair to say.” Cyrus stood, hearing the clink of his armor, unable to bear sitting any longer, not on the tiny stool. “The scourge is sweeping out of the mountains it seems, coming south now, just as we expected.”