Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four

by Robert J. Crane

  “I can see that,” Andren said. “Working out a little of that unstated tension you’ve been feeling for the last few months?”

  “I have no reason to be tense,” she said, gritting her teeth again and burying her sword into another dark elf’s shoulder. The man screamed and she promptly finished him off by grasping his hair, whirling him around, and running her blade in a sawing motion over his neck. “Unless you’re referring to our present situation.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Andren said, and she heard the click of the flask opening again. “That’s what I was referring to, certainly.”

  “I can almost hear your eyes rolling.”

  “Would you like to try and convince me that what I’m thinking isn’t true?” He leaned against the wall now, safely under the stairs, using her still as protection from the dark elves bearing down on her in twos and threes. “That you’re not a little out of sorts because of Cy—”

  “I wouldn’t presume to believe you’re actually doing any thinking,” she said and her sword took on a life of its own, cutting through a rank of dark elves with maddening speed. “After all, your wine-sodden assumptions are worth less than the rotgut you fill your mouth and your days with.” She raised an elbow as a dark elf closed on her. She rammed her armored joint into the side of his head, twice; the first blow knocked his helm asunder and the second caved the side of his head in. He fell to the ground, bleeding from the ear and skull and she went on, impaling the next one to cross her weapon.

  “That’d be denial I hear,” Andren said.

  “You’d know the sound of that better than I, I rather suspect.”

  “Why would I deny what I am?” She caught a flash of him again out of the corner of her eye; two dark elves had stormed her and she was pressed against them, they were pushing her back and one was raising his mace to bring it down on her. “I’m a drunk, true enough, but that doesn’t mean I let a good drink get in the way of what I do. You, on the other hand—” The mace descended and she batted it aside, freeing her arm from where her armor had locked against one of the dark elves. The ball of the weapon landed on her shoulder, unspeakable pain followed as the force of the blow ran through the metal, then the padding, and she felt her shoulder break. Her sword fell from her hand and the other dark elf pushed her back.

  The mace came up again and she tried to raise her hand to block it but her arm would not respond. She dove low, at the legs of the two dark elves assaulting her, and felt their knees buckle even as she cried out in pain from the resulting blow to her shoulder as it struck an armored thigh. The dark elves were knocked off their feet and she felt them land heavily on her back. She rolled, already kicking them off her and got to her feet, reaching under her armor and sliding loose the extra blade she kept under her backplate.

  “See, now that right there,” Andren said, now in front of her after her move to counter the two dark elves, “that weapon you’re carrying looks very familiar and the place you’re carrying it looks familiar as well—I’m fair certain that Cyrus does just that exact thing, keeping an extra blade in just such a place in case he gets his sword stripped away from him.”

  She lunged at the first dark elf and buried the curved blade up to the hilt in his throat. She ignored his surprise and spun it loose, plunging it into the second one’s gullet, up through the jaw. She followed him to the floor and grasped the blade of her sword and picked it up, turning back to the melee ongoing in the foyer. “Perhaps he acquired the idea from me, did you ever consider that?”

  Andren’s hand reached out, and she felt the soothing balm of his healing spell as the bones in her shoulder knitted together. “Perhaps, but I think it would be nothing but small recompense compared to that broken heart he acquired from you.”

  She stood, frozen, watching the fight going on for a few seconds as the tide shifted in favor of the Sanctuary forces and no one seemed to pay her any mind. She let out a howl of fury and leapt forward at the nearest dark elf, using both blades in tandem to hack the startled warrior to death with swift, sure strokes, then the next, then the next.

  To finish the battle took less than thirty minutes, and when it was done she was soaked, disgusting, her own sweat and dark elven blood dripping all over her, the smell of steel and gore heavy in the air. She wiped her face and found it wet, slick from the work she’d done.

  “I believe there are some that would say you look like a bride of Bellarum right now, drenched as you are in the blood of your enemies.” Andren’s voice held a sarcastic edge and she turned on him to find him still there, malingering beneath the staircase, shadowed in the gloom with his beard and flask, the lecherous—

  “Who would say that, exactly?” she asked, taking steps toward him in a raw fury. “Who would say that to my face right now, would think it of interest, would dare to mention it to me?” She cast aside her secondary blade to the floor with a throw that caused it to lodge in a body. She watched Andren’s eyes widen as she reached out a bloody hand and grasped his white healer’s robes, leaving red on them, and dragged him forward and down to look her in the eye. “Are you a follower of Bellarum yourself?”

  “Nope,” Andren said, and took a long pull from his flask, even though his face was only inches from hers. He did not fight her grip, and the smell of strong gin came off him in waves. “But, you see, I know a fella who is. And he had this … all-consuming love for a girl much like yourself. Scary love, really, too scary to even admit to anyone, maybe even himself for the longest time, but it was there. It kept him away from others who might have wanted him, kept him isolated, alone … for years. When he finally went for her and got cut down … I think it hit him harder than anything, harder than losing his wife,” she blanched as he said it, “than losing his best friend. Yeah, I think that pretty much did it for him. But hey,” he took another swig, “what do I know?” Her grip on him slackened, and he pulled gradually away from her. “It’s been a few months now. He’s probably right as rain at this point. Moved along.” Andred shrugged, and uncrumpled the stained cloth of his robe where her hands had clutched him. “After all, it’s not like he spent years pining after that lady.”

  With a last shrug, the healer pulled loose of her, and she stood there, sword in her hand as the sound of horns blew in the distance, somewhere far over the wall, and she did everything she could to keep her face straight.

  Chapter 66

  Cyrus

  The retreat was long, aided by the wizards and druids. Fires burned through the night behind them, giving them a rear guard as they retreated, long flaming rows that stretched out along the plain in an infinite line, with only a gap for the river, as the flames burned in a curve to follow the bank. Cyrus didn’t feel the heat, not at the distance he was at; he watched a haggard Nyad keeping her eyes on the fire as they rode into the distance, trying for escape. After a few hours, the dim, distant noises of the scourge army faded, not to reoccur when the fire line came down. By morning, they were not even in sight as the sun came up.

  “Where do you reckon they are?” Partus asked Cyrus, atop a small horse that Cyrus believed had been Ryin Ayend’s.

  “Spread out along the plains,” Cyrus said, numb. The wind came from the north today, and it was all rot and death, cold and chill. The end of summer is most assuredly at hand and winter is well on its way. “Giving up on us to hit all the ripe, tender villages that are east and west of here. Gone to give some other poor bastards hell.”

  “Those things …” Partus said, shaking his craggy, bearded head, “those things are the legends of torment come to life. They truly are Mortus’s works. I’ve been in his Realm, many times, but these … these are staggering, those things. Monstrous works. They look like—”

  “Wendigos, a little bit,” Cyrus said. “But four legged, no arms. No hair. I’ve met wendigos that could talk, that seemed like they had a soul. None of that here, just a raw, feral savagery you don’t even see in wild wolves.”

  “Aye,” Partus said. “So many, they cover the whol
e ground and could cover the land like locusts in the harvest. They’ll eat Luukessia whole and everything on it.”

  “No,” Cyrus said with a fierce shake of the head. “No, they won’t.” He urged Windrider forward, toward the front of the column, and they rode on until midday.

  At midday they stopped by a stream; the armies of Actaluere and Syloreas had marched with them, their darker armor and distinctive flourishes marking them clearly—the Actaluereans had livery and surcoats, like Longwell’s, though they almost all were dirty and stained with the black blood of the scourge. The Syloreans, on the other hand, wore no such livery but their armors carried fur padding that stuck out of the neck and at the shoulders, to give it a different appearance than most kinds of armor Cyrus had seen, and a distinct look that fit the northmen well. There was no tent pitched, and Cyrus knew it was because this was to be a fast convocation. Somewhere to the north, he knew, somewhere below the mountains that stared down from the horizon, was an army that was as relentless as it was unmerciful.

  Cyrus took the cloth seat that was offered him again, his officers at his back. Tiernan was quiet, fingers caressing his unshaven chin, the first time Cyrus had seen a hint the man could grow whiskers. In Tiernan’s hangdog look, Cyrus caught just a hint of Cattrine, but he brushed that thought away with all the ease of scouring the remains of baking from a pan. Unger, on the other hand, stared straight ahead, his eyes flicking to and fro from the small, quiet circle to the horizon, as though at any moment the enemy would burst over it and he might have his revenge.

  “They’re going to keep coming,” Cyrus said after a moment of silence. Tiernan looked up at him as though Cyrus had drawn a sword; the King of Actaluere’s eyes were wide yet vacant, watching as though he were a child, bereft of understanding for what was transpiring. “We lack the numbers to stop them. We lack the punch.”

  “We killed at least ten thousand of them last night,” Briyce Unger said. The King of Syloreas appeared to have no desire to exit his seat, the usual twitch of his left leg muted, exhaustion heavy on the King’s frame. “And more still came. More than could be imagined, I think, though it would be hard to tell in the dark.”

  “Yes,” Cyrus said. “My elves tell me that they still filled the ground to the horizon, even after all we did. But there cannot be an endless supply of them.”

  “Whether there is an endless supply of them or not is wholly irrelevant,” Tiernan said with an exasperated chuckle that lacked any humor at all, “what matters is whether there are enough to block us from sealing that damnable gate through which they invade our land. There seems no way to be able to pull that one off, as they don’t break or back off even when confronted with overwhelming losses. As he said,” Tiernan raised a hand and gestured to Unger, “we killed numbers of them so staggering it would make any of our armies break and scatter from the loss. We lost few enough ourselves, and yet we were the ones who broke. Still they came on and would have kept pressing on us until we were finished had it not been for the western magic that saved us. Ancestors!” Tiernan said it as though it were a curse. “How do you fight an enemy that will stand before you and let you pound on his face and not even blanch whilst you do so?”

  “You pound away at him until he does blanch,” Cyrus said.

  “That might hearten me, if we were by some chance facing a human adversary with a human reaction,” Tiernan said. Unger watched, silent, while the King of Actaluere spoke. “These things show no sign that we may ever push them back, that we might ever reach the end of their will.” Tiernan threw up his hands. “They’re purest evil. There is no soul, no essence in these things, just an all-consuming hunger to take life.”

  “Aye,” Briyce Unger said at last, “and that is why we must face them again. Why we must hit them until we find their breaking point. You say yourself, you know—they are evil. They are consuming my Kingdom, eating it whole. Yours will be next, and Longwell’s, until there is nothing left of Luukessia.” Unger shook his head. “At this point, even if we went into the teeth of these beasts again, we stand only the chance to hold them back, not to win. We need more, Tiernan. We need more men. We need every man in the land with an able body. We need every army, every soldier, every farmboy who can wield a pitchfork and stand in a line.” Unger waved a hand toward the mountains. “This isn’t a fight to save Syloreas anymore, not that you were here for that anyway, but I say it because Syloreas is lost. It’s gone. I’m sending my soldiers right now, today, to the corners of my Kingdom and I’m telling them to let everyone know—Get out. Go south. Come to Enrant Monge, flee to Galbadien or Actaluere. Buy time because anyone who stays in the north is lost. They’ll all die, every last one.”

  “You paint a grim picture,” Tiernan said, his complexion ashen. “Yet you speak the whole truth, no exaggeration. So you would leave your lands behind, have your people flee into the south. What then? Not that they’ll be greeted unkindly by mine own or Aron Longwell’s—”

  “They’ll not be greeted at all by Aron Longwell’s armies,” came the voice of Samwen Longwell, and Cyrus turned to see him standing just at his shoulder. Longwell was tall enough already, but he seemed to have gained a solid five inches of height. “I am riding today for Vernadam.” His jaw was squared, straightened, and he spoke from a well deep within. Cyrus could feel the emotion crackling off the man he had known for over two years now but never in this way. “I will ride to Vernadam, right now, today, and I will bring back all the army I can to oppose these beasts. I will turn out every man who is able, and I will come back at the head of them to stand with you in beating back this threat to our land.”

  Unger traded a look with Tiernan then cautiously looked back to Longwell. “And if … when … your father opposes you?”

  Cyrus watched Longwell’s face carefully, saw the slight trace that came and went before the younger Longwell let slip a slight smile, a false one, to be sure. “Then he will be the King of Galbadien no longer. I will see to it.”

  There was a quiet that settled over the convocation. “Well,” Milos Tiernan said, breaking the silence that had settled on them as surely as the first snow, “this shall certainly be a winter for the ages.”

  “Aye,” Briyce Unger said, “and perhaps the last one the men of Luukessia will ever see.”

  Chapter 67

  After the meeting broke a few minutes later, Cyrus found himself walking beside Longwell back to the Sanctuary army. The lines of march had dissolved and men and women were lying about, scattered, some asleep and some not, all of them grizzled veterans now. How unlike they were when we left out the Sanctuary gates … when was that? Nine months ago? Ten? He shook his head in disbelief. How different were they when we left? Like newborns. Now they’re not new anymore, and they’ve seen more of war in this time than even most guilds have.

  “Sir.” Longwell spoke, jarring Cyrus out of his meditation. “I’ll need to be leaving soon, as soon as possible.”

  “I won’t have you go alone,” Cyrus said. “You’re talking about deposing your father. You’ll need some help.”

  “And I’ll have it,” Longwell said, tense, “but it must be from within Galbadien, not without. If I come to Vernadam at the head of the Sanctuary army, it won’t have the proper effect. It’ll be seen as an invasion. It will be an invasion, the west to the east, the conquering lord of Arkaria come to destroy the peaceful traditions of Luukessia. Of power over peace, of domination and control rather than what this is supposed to be—me taking my birthright to save the land that I love.”

  “You cannot possibly expect me to let you do this alone,” Cyrus said. “To go into the heart of the Kingdom of Galbadien as you are, without a single person to aid you? You’ll take an escort—not an army, an escort, so that you’ll at least have a healer and a wizard in case things become truly sticky. An enchanter seems useless against the scourge, so we’ll bring J’anda with us.” Cyrus gave it a moment’s thought. “Nyad, Martaina, Aisling and I will accompany you also, along with a heal
er and a couple warriors and rangers. Less than ten, total. That could hardly be mistaken for an army by most eyes.”

  “Yet to the eyes who know,” Longwell said, narrowing his, “that is more army than most of Luukessia could put together.”

  “Yeah, well, not everyone has to know that,” Cyrus said. “It’s a war of perception, not of force. Coming to Vernadam at the head of a foreign army doesn’t sit well with me, either. It’s when you come out that you need to be at the head of an army.”

  “Aye,” Longwell said. “What are your intentions for the Sanctuary army, then, while we’re away?”

  “Odellan will lead them,” Cyrus said, “and Curatio will take overall command. They’ll move with the armies of Actaluere and Syloreas as they continue a fighting retreat across the steppes trying to winnow down the scourge’s numbers while we’re absent. Perhaps they’ll get lucky and strike the great victory we’re looking for.”

  “Sir,” Longwell stopped his walk and laid a gauntleted hand on Cyrus’s shoulder. “You need not come with me. You are an army unto yourself, and more valuable here at the front than as an escort to me.”

  “I doubt it,” Cyrus said and felt a sharp pain within. “The army will fight here to hold back the tide, but they won’t actually be able to do it, not without more men. Actaluere is sending more, but having me at the center of the line is useful insofar as I can hold it better than perhaps anyone else, can kill more than any other soldier, but I can’t win the battle by myself, and I can’t make up for the weakness inherent in this army. We lack men. We lack mobility. We needed ten thousand of your dragoons in that last fight, and a wider front to press up against without the weak men that Syloreas stretched to shore up our formation. We need soldiers, real soldiers, not farmers and field hands. We need men who can swing a blade and throw an axe, and the men who can’t, who don’t have the experience, are nothing but chaff.”