“J’anda,” Cyrus said, noting that the enchanter’s neck was thinner, and his skin paler than he remembered it.
“Somehow I knew I would see you again.” J’anda’s voice came thin and frail as silken thread, and he tried to move within the quilts, struggling against them, but was unable to. Cyrus at last felt urged back to action and came to the bedside, lifting the quilts enough that the enchanter was able to extend a quivering hand from beneath their covered depths toward Cyrus and the chair that waited next to him. A whiff of foulness came with the movement of the quilts, of illness and lingering infirmity, of a soul who had plainly not left the bed in some time. “Before the end, I mean.”
Cyrus took the proffered hand, removing his gauntlet and feeling the gaunt, bony fingers in his as he sat heavily upon the chair dislodging the book that sat upon it. It came to the floor with a loud thump against the boards, and Cyrus barely took notice. He set his gauntlet beside it, then took off the other, and clutched J’anda’s hand in his. “I don’t understand,” Cyrus said, looking furtively at Rasnareke, the staff leaning against the bed opposite him. “You have that. How can you—”
“I do not think these weapons grant immortality,” J’anda said, his voice scratchy, “and I would not want that in any case. My day is drawing to its end, and I embrace that end. What purpose would it serve for me to go on, unending but enfeebled?” He coughed, a long, racking one. “I am not now that which I was before Luukessia, before the long days, and I don’t wish to be that anymore.” He smiled faintly. “I would not take back my decisions, would not trade what I did there for another year, or another thousand years.”
“You’re a hero, J’anda,” Cyrus said, feeling that strange clutching again in his throat. “I assumed … after all we lost …” He felt his eyes close involuntarily, “… after the battles we’ve won … I thought we were done losing people.” He opened them again and found the enchanter staring up at him with a look of warmth, and just a tinge of pity.
“Oh, Cyrus,” J’anda said, “you fought the gods and won, you did not beat life itself. Mortus may be gone, Vidara may be gone, but life and death still stand as opposites, each having its day, claiming its prize—one gets glory in youth, the other glory in death. And I am glad of it. We have seen with our own eyes what happens to a soul given enough time to corrupt itself. I have no desire to become like them.”
“You could never be like them,” Cyrus said. “Curatio never was.”
“You knew Curatio for only a few years,” J’anda said. “Who knows what he was like for the other twenty-three thousand? He might have been a monster at some point, and we would not have one notion of it. I sensed a secret shame in him, some darker waters we did not fathom. And in any case, immortality is not for me. I seek peace, and a peaceful end.” A smile lay draped across his thin face like the quilts on his body. “And I will have it. But you, my friend …” The smile left him. “You, I worry about.”
“You need not concern yourself with me,” Cyrus said, trying to put on a false smile to hide what he felt.
“All of us that are left concern ourselves with you,” J’anda said. “It is what she would have wanted of us, as friends.”
The mere mention of her, even so indirectly, felt like a knife that made it through the cracks in Cyrus’s armor, and he looked away. “I—”
“I saw your heart’s desire,” J’anda said quietly. “I saw it on that day in the woods, in the first years you were with Sanctuary, and I saw it again in the depths of Saekaj, when Bellarum wounded you. It did not change, that which you wanted most, after all this time. I know what it is to lose great love.” A small tear slid slowly down J’anda’s cheek. “I know what it does to your heart to have it ripped apart by cruel fates, by cruel people. I know what bitterness does, how hope departs and despair settles where love once lived.” He clutched at Cyrus’s hand, squeezing, but it barely felt like a child’s fingers, the grip was so fragile. “I know what you mean to do.”
“I came to see you,” Cyrus said weakly, his protest feeble.
“You came to say goodbye,” J’anda said.
“Because you’re…dying,” Cyrus said, barely able to get the last word out. How, after all we’ve lost … how does this still hurt so godsdamned much?
“No,” J’anda said, shaking his head slightly. “You may lie to the others, Cyrus, but I have seen your heart’s desire. I have been where you are. I know what you are thinking, for I have been there myself. I remember, so clear, even through the years, what it felt like.” He squeezed Cyrus’s hand again. “What would you have told Vara if she’d seen you through to your death bed, and still had some thousands of years left in front of her? If things had been different, if life had proceeded as you planned and you spent all your days with her and left her youthful in your old age?”
Cyrus felt frozen, unable to move, a curious burning at his eyes. “I … I don’t …”
“You would tell her to live her life,” J’anda said. “Cyrus … live your life.” He squeezed again, and Cyrus felt the cold touch of his skin. “You have … so much of it still in front of you, if you but choose to take it.”
“I … I don’t want it, J’anda,” Cyrus said, holding it all in. “I’m like you … I don’t see the point in living forever now that the only thing I have ever wanted … ever really loved … is gone. It’s gone, J’anda,” he said, the words rushing out, like water from a streambed in a hard rain, “it’s gone, it’s taken, and she’s—she’s never coming back—and Sanctuary—Sanctuary is never coming back and—and what do I have left?” He felt the hot tears drift down his cheeks at last, and took one of his hands from the enchanter to dab at them.
Cyrus looked down at J’anda, and now he saw pity in the enchanter’s warm eyes. “I was going to ask you to promise me not to do this thing … this thing you are set on doing.”
Cyrus rubbed the back of his hand at his nose, not even caring about the feeling of weakness that was upon him. He didn’t even care if the dark elven woman who’d let him in was still watching. “And now?” he asked.
“I suppose it would be wrong of me to bind you to a fate I don’t wish for myself,” J’anda said, and he settled back on the bed, his frail body relaxing. “All I ask is … that you consider it for a while longer yet.”
“I have a lot of people to see,” Cyrus said. “I expect it’ll take some time to … wrap things up.”
“Good,” J’anda said, closing his eyes and leaning against his pillows, face going slack. “Time … time is good.”
“What’s so good about it?” Cyrus asked, more out of curiosity than any genuine venom. “It takes everything, given enough of itself to work with.”
“Because with time … perhaps you will find hope again,” J’anda said, not opening his eyes. “And hope … hope is time’s opposite, the giver of life, of vitality. If given long enough … perhaps you will find something … some hope to tether you yet back to life …” And his breathing slowed, and he fell into a deep sleep, a maddening smile perched upon his thin lips.
Cyrus watched the enchanter as he slept, listening to him breathe, reflecting on what he’d said. He stayed there with him, for a few days more, until the end came on a quiet morning, but J’anda never woke up, and never spoke another word. He died quietly, in peaceful slumber, the last casualty in a war Cyrus had thought ended months before.
111.
Cyrus
The depths of the lower chamber, Sovar, appeared somehow warmer to Cyrus than the upper chamber he seemed to frequent these days. He looked out over the expansive city in the ground, peering into the darkness. The differences between Sovar and Saekaj, where the palace lay, in the cavern somewhere above, were legion. Where Saekaj seemed to be a cultured, carefully maintained and regal city, worthy of the Grand Palace, Sovar was a slum. Structures of cloth and dwellings of clay and stone carved out of the very cave bottom itself stood at disparate heights all over the sloping, uneven hillside Cyrus looked down over.
“This is a hell of a thing,” Cyrus said, mostly to himself, as he stood looking down the long slope from the top of Sovar into the bottom reaches at the foot of the mighty hill that led away from the entry to the lower city. The buildings became less and less well constructed the further down the slope he looked, until the bottom seemed to be little more than a collection of buildings with a tent city somehow draped over it, though he was squinting hard into the darkness to make that determination.
Cyrus shook his head, watching the rooftops. The faint chill of the underground air still found its way through his armor, but as he started his way down, using Falcon’s Essence and following the slope into the Back Deep of Sovar, he kept his eyes watching for movement. He saw it, out of the tent tops to the buildings, people looking out to study the motion they must have caught through the folds of their tent and cloth dwellings. A little girl watched him cross in front of her and waved happily. He waved back and continued his descent, looking into the darkness ahead, his hand resting on Praelior to aid his movement.
He was almost two-thirds of the way down the slope when he saw the movement he was looking for. Something leapt from one cloth-covered roof to another, catlike agility allowing them to follow the rocky parts of the structure rather than placing a foot through the cloth and crashing into someone’s home. It was like a shadow, dim and barely visible, but he turned toward it, his footsteps tracing a path through the air as he hurried on, watching the shadow leap to another roof.
He closed in on his target, watching as the shadow ducked a cloth awning with a light jump between buildings, and then came down onto a shorter building. Cyrus was only a building behind now, chasing along the rooflines carefully. He could see lithe, thin legs carrying his subject along with careful motions, her leather armor making not so much as a squeak while she ran.
Aisling jumped from the rooftop and bounced with a carefully aimed kick off a dwelling wall carved out of the cavern floor. Her feet landed upon the shoulders and back of a bulky dark elf who had been running in the alley over which Cyrus now hovered, watching. She had her dagger out and pressed carefully against the man’s cheek, the shadows still cloaking her, Cyrus knew, against the eyes of anyone not carrying a godly weapon.
“Snatching purses in Sovar is like trying to drink the moisture from the desert sands,” Aisling said in a low, angry voice. She sounded furious, and the point of her blade was eating into the man’s cheek, drawing navy blood. Cyrus looked closer; the man was actually a youth, probably no more than twenty. “Why not ply your trade in Saekaj, where you have a chance to at least thieve from one of the old lords who has coin rather than some poor washerwoman with barely any?”
“Get—off!” the young man said, struggling against her weight on his back. He was having little luck.
“Why?” Aisling asked in an angry hiss. “So you can go knock over a little girl for the spare bronze pieces she’s saved through a lifetime of thrift? Why don’t I just free you so you can murder an old man for the threads of clothing right off his back?”
“I—don’t—do that!” he shouted as she ground his face into the mud with her elbow, digging it into the back of his neck. “I only takes from them that deserves it!”
“Oh, is that so?” Aisling leaned low and whispered sweetly into his ear. “And you decide who deserves it, do you? You make the determination on who has been parceled too much and not enough?” Her breath stirred the long, black hair. Cyrus shuddered involuntarily, remembering how she had once whispered into his ear in a similar manner, and it made his whole body tense. “How about I,” Aisling said, low and throaty, “decide who lives and dies in Sovar … starting with you?”
The boy went stiff as a corpse, eyes wide, then slowly tried to turn his head against the force of her elbow. “It—it was only thieving!”
“Don’t you remember when thieving was a crime they took your life for?” She had a very decided menace to her tone that made Cyrus step closer.
“Wait—no!” he shouted, voice echoing off the alley walls.
“I do,” she whispered and let him turn his head enough to look up. Finally he saw her, where she should be, and his eyes grew even wider. He doesn’t see her, Cyrus realized, because of her weapon. What was that thing called? Epalette?
“Please don’t! Please!” he shouted. Cyrus watched the alley approaches, but no one was coming, no sound of footsteps to spoil Aisling’s fearful fun.
“There’s honest work now, you know,” she said. “It couldn’t be found in days of old. But if I turn you loose and you don’t go looking for that … you will die face down in an alley with your throat aired out.” She pushed his nose and forehead back down, grinding them against the dirt and dust, and he coughed. She stood abruptly, lifted him up, and as soon as he found his feet, she shoved him away.
The boy stumbled blindly until he caught his balance, and then he looked back, trying to find his assailant and having no luck. Cyrus stifled a laugh, standing high above with his cloak wrapped around him. The boy swept his gaze at ground level. “Who are you?” he shouted again.
Aisling reached out and cuffed him hard across the ear, causing him to flinch away in pain. “The mother who should have told you thieving is wrong. Now get out of here before I take that ear off—or worse.”
The boy didn’t need to be told twice; he retreated at a run, hurried footsteps sounding, echoing through the alley.
“Looming over me like a carrion bird is a little ominous even for you,” Aisling said, once he was gone. “What, were you worried I was going to kill him?”
Cyrus stepped down into the alley and dispelled the Falcon’s Essence. Aisling watched him with dispassionate interest, her arms folded across her leather armor. “You’ve been known to dispatch a harder form of justice than I might agree with, but I probably wouldn’t have stopped you from slitting his throat.”
She seemed to recoil slightly from him at that, but he mostly saw it in the eyes. “You really are changed, Cyrus, and not for the better. I wasn’t going to kill him, I only wanted to scare him away from his current path.”
Cyrus had a sudden vision of what he’d done in Reikonos Square to Angelique, shivering in her bejeweled armor in the freezing fountain. “No harm in that, I suppose, though I expect that he’d disagree, what with his aching neck and cut cheek.”
“Barely a scratch,” Aisling scoffed. “He’d get worse visiting the wrong brothel in this town. Enough to remind him of my warning in days ahead, I hope.” She looked him up and down. “I presume you didn’t just come find me to pronounce judgment on what I’m doing with my time?”
“I did not,” Cyrus said. “I came to say …” He paused, the thought escaping him.
She cocked her head, waiting for his answer. “What?”
Cyrus opened his mouth to speak again, but no words marched forth. Why is it so hard to ask? “I came to see … if you were doing … all right.”
It was a slow frown that broke out across her face, and she blinked three times quickly. “I’m … fine,” she said. “Just … just fine.”
“That’s good,” Cyrus said, nodding once, perfunctorily. “I just … wanted to make sure.” He cast Falcon’s Essence upon himself, and turned, and started to walk away.
“Wait,” she said, and he turned back. “Is that really all you wanted to know?”
Cyrus thought about it for a moment. “I know that while we’ve fought together this last year and more, and it felt like everything between us was settled out adequately … yes, I wanted to make sure you were all right. Well, even. I don’t harbor any ill will toward you, Aisling. You’re smart, resourceful, brave, and now that you’re not under the thumb of a tyrant, you’re … you’ve been everything I could ever have asked for in a guildmate. You helped me through the tightest of pinches when you could have let me twist, so yes, I wanted to make sure you were well. I wanted to know that I didn’t leave you in a worse position without trying to help, so …” He tilted his helm at her, jus
t slightly, in salute.
“That’s … thank you,” she said, for once seeming taken aback. “I …” She started to say something and then stopped, chewing her lip.
He waited for her to speak, but she just stood there, staring at him, blinking. “Yes?” he asked at last.
“Nothing,” she said, stirred out of her contemplation. “I was thinking…never mind. Good luck, Cyrus.”
“To you as well, Aisling,” Cyrus said, smiling at her. And then he turned and walked away, over the rooftops of Sovar, leaving her far, far below within a matter of minutes.
112.
Cyrus
By the time he returned to the Grand Palace, Cyrus’s body was well and truly confused about the hour. Was it deep in the night? Was it early the next morning? The journey to Sovar had been long, and with a steep enough slope to the tunnel that he felt slightly winded coming back up, as though he’d climbed a small mountain. The flow of spider-drawn carriages and wagons below him had been steady, making him wonder if it was in fact the height of the day.
Cyrus ran over the rooftops of Saekaj with ease, looking down on the carefully manicured houses that would have looked so out of place in Sovar. He had heard the whisperings, of course, that Sovar had once been the lesser city in the days when Yartraak had been Sovereign. To Cyrus’s eye, it still looked to be lesser in most respects, but perhaps things had changed. There were certainly enough brightly clad people in the streets of Saekaj to make him think it could be so; he didn’t know much about Saekaj or Sovar, but he knew the wealthy did not adopt the bright dyes for their own fashion.
The guards merely nodded as Cyrus entered the palace, then the next set of guards nodded to him as he moved toward the doors that led to the throne room. Nods were all he received the entire way there, not a single challenge as a human in full armor and laden with godly weapons walked a straight path to the seat of power in the Dark Elven Sovereignty. Yes, Cyrus decided, things have changed here.
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