Master (Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

“All of them,” Erith said, and another tear crept down her cheek. “They’re seven days late returning. There’s no sign of them, no hint … nothing.” She bowed her head. “They’re just … gone.”

  Chapter 10

  “So,” Andren said, “now you’ve got another problem to deal with.” The elf stood next to Cyrus, tankard in hand. A fresh breeze blew around them as they stood out on the archery range along the side of Sanctuary’s massive structure, the southwest tower casting its long shadow over them, the sun invisible behind it as it continued to set.

  “Yes,” Cyrus said, his left hand tautly squeezing the grip in his hand. It was a training weapon that he’d pulled it out of the nearby storage shed along with a dozen training arrows. He pulled it up and nocked an arrow, drawing it back to his cheek. There was a cool sensation as he held it there, the breeze blowing over him. His stomach rumbled at him for leaving the smells of dinner behind.

  Cyrus released the arrow and it flew at the straw target at the end of the range, lodging firmly in the torso.

  Andren let out a dry snicker. “What are you doing? Got delusions of being a ranger?”

  “Warriors were required to learn every possible weapon at the Society of Arms,” Cyrus said, drawing another arrow from the ground, nocking it and pulling it to his cheek. “I’m not as good with one of these as, say, Martaina Proelius, but I can use one in a pinch.” He let the arrow sail and it stuck in the throat of the straw man. “And not terribly badly, if I might say.”

  “I’d be more impressed if the straw man were moving,” Andren said, taking another slug. The smell of the booze washed over Cyrus. It was a thick, hearty stout that caused his stomach to rumble again. “I’ve seen Martaina on the hunt before, and it’s quite a sight to behold.”

  “Oh?” Cyrus asked. “She does seem to do well with animals, doesn’t she?”

  “I was talking about killing people, but yeah, I’m sure she’s good with them, too.” Andren’s beard twitched, his mustache frosted with the foam of his ale. “Although the way she looked doing it …” He let his voice trail off in suggestion. “I might consider breaking my ‘No elven women’ rule for her. I bet she’s a feisty one.”

  “Where did Arydni fit into that rule?” Cyrus mused, loosing another arrow. This one lodged in the groin of the straw man.

  “She was the origin of it,” Andren muttered and gestured at the straw man. “For about that reason, I might add.”

  “Didn’t seem like you were too put off by her when she was here.” Cyrus paused, pulling an arrow from where he’d stuck it in the earth and twirling it in his fingers. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “Well, you know, I have some fond memories of her,” Andren said, nodding. “Some things I wouldn’t mind reliving, if you know what I mean—”

  “I didn’t drag you away from dinner to discuss your rampant libido,” Cyrus said, turning back to the straw target. A cool breeze blew over them, cutting through the lingering heat from summer’s end.

  “Nor yours, apparently,” Andren said. “Can we talk about Aisling’s bedroom manner yet? I’m a mite curious—”

  “No,” Cyrus said and released the string. The arrow flew wide of its mark. “Dammit.” Cyrus turned to Andren. “I brought you out here to talk about the Daring.”

  The elf nodded. “Right, yeah. You’ll have to forgive me, though, as it’s not quite as exciting of a topic as dark elven sex.”

  “A missing goddess and a missing guild,” Cyrus said, drawing another arrow from the ground, “what are the odds of those two things happening at the same time?”

  “What are the odds of you being pursued by a Baroness, a thief and a paladin all at the same time?” Andren asked. “I mean, up until now you’ve not exactly been a stud horse, if you catch my—”

  Cyrus cut him off with a look. “What is wrong with you today? Can you possibly get your mind out of the rut you’re in and listen to me?” He paused. “About something that isn’t related to lusty bedroom activities?”

  “I’m sorry, we’re not all presently fending off every woman in Sanctuary with a blunt instrument, are we?” Andren said with a scowl. “Even the cook fancies you, always sending those tentative looks your way and fixing your favorite meals.” He sighed. “A couple years ago, I was on top of the world with the women around here, and you couldn’t find a scabbard for that sword in your breeches. Now, I’m sitting here competing with all these Luukessian men for a limited number of women, longing for a former wife I haven’t touched in a century, and you’ve got—”

  “The Daring,” Cyrus said, utter exasperation infusing his tone. “Forget it, I can’t talk to you about this now.”

  “Maybe you could find a sympathetic ear in Vara,” Andren said with a chortle.

  “Will you lay off?” Cyrus’s tone went acid.

  “Fine, fine,” Andren said, waving a hand at Cyrus as though to lower his temper. “So the Daring went missing. So what? We haven’t been allied with them for years.”

  “Not officially, no,” Cyrus said, plucking an arrow from the ground and drawing back. “But on the day our alliance was dissolved …” he let his voice trail off, “… an offer of help was extended to them, if ever they should need it.”

  “By Alaric, you mean,” Andren said.

  “Yes,” Cyrus said. “By Alaric. I can’t help but feel that if they’re missing, our assistance is needed.” He looked down the shaft of the arrow. “And I owe Cass Ward a debt of my own.”

  “Lovely,” Andren said, and Cyrus could hear him shuffling his feet. “What did he do, offer you advice on how to make your armor as bland as possible? I mean, you wear black, he wears grey—”

  “Har har,” Cyrus said, picking up the last arrow. “At least unlike the goddess conundrum, I actually know what to do about this one.”

  “Oh?” Andren asked, and Cyrus could see him out of the corner of his eye, tipping the tankard toward his mouth. A soft breeze whispered through the grass as the straw target rustled before him. “What’s that?”

  “Follow their path of patrol,” Cyrus said, “with a hunting party.” He let fly the arrow, and it struck the straw target squarely in the head. He looked at the skewered straw man, arrow jutting from where the forehead would be. “And fortunately, I know someone who can trace their path.”

  Chapter 11

  They rode from the gates of Reikonos on the following day, crossing under the mighty wall that protected the city through the westernmost gate, called the Elf Gate because it guarded the roads leading to the Elven Kingdom. As they crossed under the wall, Cyrus stared up into the murder holes where soldiers looked down at him with little amusement through the slitted eyepieces of their helms. There was almost no traffic; trade had been severely diminished by the war.

  They rode with the sun overhead, the clear plains around them buffeted by gusty winds. Cyrus could smell autumn in the air, even without the presence of trees anywhere nearby to give a hint of the turning of the leaves. He could almost taste apple cider on his tongue, a vaguely familiar sense from his days as a child when he remembered the apples flooding in from the Northlands to the markets in Reikonos.

  He had a small army behind him, a thousand or so, roughly the size of the one he’d traveled to Luukessia with. The sun shone on his armor as he pondered that comparison briefly. Hadn’t thought of that when I made up the grouping. At least half of them were Galbadien Dragoons, masters of horseback combat. Their horses stamped along the rutted, dried-out road as they made their way toward a gradually setting sun. They made camp an hour after midnight, set out a watch, and Cyrus bedded down early—alone.

  In the morning they reassembled just after a breakfast of wizard-conjured bread and good hard cheese they carried in their packs. As Cyrus chewed on hard deer-meat jerky, he caught a sidelong look from J’anda, who was chewing on conjured bread and stroking his fingers through his greyed hair. He wore no illusion.

  “What?” Cyrus asked the enchanter.

  “Noth
ing,” J’anda said with a shake of his head. He disappeared under an illusion, turning his lined face into that of a much younger human. “I was just thinking how much more pleasant it is to be back in the halls of Sanctuary nearly every night instead of sleeping in the wilds and the woods like we did in Luukessia.”

  Cyrus caught the aroma of campfire smoke in his nose. “We’re never really going to outrun what happened there, are we?” He looked back at J’anda. “It left its mark on us all.” Cyrus chewed on the jerky and looked at the illusory face that the dark elf wore to hide his real one, the one that looked so much older than when he had left Sanctuary for Luukessia. “Some of us more than others.”

  “I notice your gorget hides that ugly scar on your neck,” J’anda said. His human visage wore a tight smile.

  “And your illusion covers your wrinkles and the discoloration of your hair,” Cyrus replied, suddenly no longer hungry.

  “I don’t think anyone who was with us in that land came away without some sort of mark to remember it by,” J’anda said, tossing aside the conjured bread.

  “No,” Cyrus said, looking at the army around him, the Luukessian Dragoons already saddling up. “I don’t think they did.”

  They rode west with the rising sun at their backs. Martaina was at the fore with Erith at her side, the healer following the ranger as though she might miss some critical clue at any moment. Cyrus watched it all with the eye of one who wanted little to get involved, but as the second day wore on and Erith’s horse never moved far from Martaina’s, he began to suspect that difficulty lay ahead.

  “Erith,” Cyrus said, pushing Windrider to close on the healer near the front of the formation, “may I speak with you for a moment?”

  “But of course,” Erith replied, her horse not removing itself from a direct path following Martaina’s. The ranger glanced back at Cyrus with a cryptic look that Cyrus managed to decode from his long association with the ranger: This woman is driving me nuts.

  “Over here, Erith,” Cyrus said, gesturing to her to fall back. “In private.”

  The sun was high overhead. The healer’s navy skin was darker than the blue of the skies, her lips pursed as she reined her horse back with greatest reluctance. Cyrus would have sworn he heard Martaina muttering a thanks in elvish under her breath.

  “Erith, you can’t keep following Martaina about,” Cyrus said when the dark elf’s horse was walking abeam his own. “It’s torturous.”

  “What?” Erith’s face twisted in outrage. “I’m trying to offer aid to her. I know these people, and I—”

  “You are annoying Martaina, who is trying to do her job by finding them,” Cyrus said as Windrider whickered.

  “I can be useful in this,” Erith said.

  “How?” Cyrus asked. “Are you going to tell Martaina what Cass Ward smells like so she can sniff him out?”

  Erith looked as though she were about to say something then stopped. “Well, he smells a fair sight better than you.”

  “There’s no need to be hurtful,” Cyrus said with a frown. “We’re all here for the same reason. I know you’re anxious about your friends—”

  “I left them,” Erith said, her face twitching with emotion as she said it. She turned to face forward, leaving her profile visible to Cyrus. “When things got unpleasant with the Alliance, when Goliath and our members were boxing you into a corner, I abandoned them because I thought Sanctuary needed my help more.” She smiled almost ruefully, then sniffled as her face broke and her shoulders heaved once. “I left them to join you in the most horrible of times, and now I’m the only one who gives a damn that they’re gone.”

  “You’re not,” Cyrus said, clutching Windrider’s reins in tight hands. “Plainly.”

  “Which opens an interesting line of inquiry,” Erith said as she sniffled. “Why are you so keen on this? You know there’s no money in it.”

  “Not everything is about gold,” Cyrus said tightly. “Sometimes it’s about repaying those who have done you a kindness in the past. Paying your debts. Cass Ward was kind to me in a time when few were.” He let the reins slip through his fingers, playing with the leather as he stared off into the blue skies in the distance, the occasional white cloud gleaming in the sunlight.

  “Well, they were my family when no one else was,” Erith said, looking sidelong at Cyrus. “Cass, Elisabeth, some of the others. They were my friends. They adopted me when I was poor and just starting out, after I’d left Saekaj Sovar. I owe them for that.”

  “If they’re able to be found, we’ll find them,” Cyrus said with a nod.

  “And if they’re not?” Erith was chewing her bottom lip. “Able to be found, I mean?”

  “Then we’ll figure something out,” Cyrus said. “I won’t leave them forgotten if there’s any lead left to be pursued.”

  “I believe you,” Erith said, and Cyrus turned his head to look at her. She was staring back at him, and he could see the certainty in her eyes. “You and I are the only ones who would have gone looking, though.”

  “You and I are the only ones with a personal stake in seeing them found safely,” Cyrus said. “Us and …”

  He saw her looking at him out of the corner of his eye. “You were going to say Alaric, weren’t you?”

  “Curatio too,” Cyrus said, turning his face away from her. “But he’s distracted at the moment.”

  “I’ll stay back,” Erith said, “from Martaina.” She almost looked contrite as she said it. “I’ll just keep my peace and ride along.” She tried to smile but failed. “It’s not easy, this feeling of roiling inside. It feels like I need to do something, anything, to quiet it.”

  “Aye,” Cyrus said. “But there’s nothing you can do. Just sit back and know that you’re doing everything you can for now just by riding along and keeping your silence.”

  Erith began to steer her horse away from him, and he caught the faint smile upon her lips. “I don’t think I’ve ever been any good at keeping my silence. I suppose this is as good a time as any to give it some effort.” She slowed the pace of her horse and folded back into a group of spell casters to Cyrus’s left without another word spoken.

  Cyrus urged Windrider forward, bringing him alongside Martaina, who was keeping a steady pace on the path forward. “I trust if you’d seen anything of note, you’d have told me by now.”

  “Not a thing, sir,” Martaina said with a quick glance at him. “Did you just remove a painful tick from my backside?”

  Cyrus looked backward at Erith, who was barely visible in the throng of spell casters, slightly slumped over in her saddle, her long white hair catching the sunlight, but her complexion looking dim, her eyes downcast. “She’s hurting, Martaina. Worried about her friends.”

  “And you?” Martaina asked, drawing his attention back to her. “What are you worried about?”

  “Me?” Cyrus asked, saying it aloud while buying a moment to muse it over. “I’m worried about what would cause an entire guild to simply disappear this far into human territory. We’re hundreds of miles from the front; this patrol they were sent on, it was bandit hunting, pure and simple.” Cyrus looked ahead to the horizon, where he could see a few copses of trees to break the flat monotony of the plains ahead. “They were a hundred strong, with spell casters of their own.” Cyrus shook his head. “I have no idea what they could have run into this far from the war that would make an entire guild disappear.”

  “Dark times,” Martaina said. “Missing friends, missing gods. Why, hard to say what might take leave of us next—”

  He caught the wry expression on her face and cut her off. “If you say my senses, be aware I’m fully expecting it and well aware that no one seems to believe me in full possession of my faculties any longer.”

  “I prefer to tread the paths that others do not,” Martaina said, sniffing a little, as if in umbrage, “so I would have said your ‘reason’ had departed.”

  “Because that’s dramatically different from what the others are saying.�
�� He turned his eyes forward, surveying the blank horizon. “What do these roads tell you?”

  “Little,” Martaina said with a frown. “The traffic on this route is but a fraction of what it was before even the battle of Termina. The King of the Elves has shut down the crossings. The most important traffic going between the Kingdom and Reikonos is now moved by wizards; otherwise it is done by large convoys protected by armies and inspected at the northern crossing. Whole armies move with them; mercenaries and regulars from the Kingdom or the Confederation.”

  “So they learned the lessons of the plains raids of years past,” Cyrus mused.

  “Some of them, anyway,” Martaina said carefully. “You ask what the roads tell me? They tell me that local traffic dominates these paths; small wagons traversing from town to town, settlement to settlement, house to house. Individual horses and the occasional army pass through, though there is a month between them, if not more.” She sniffed the air. “And perhaps something else, though it is too muddled to sift it out. Something baser than horses and men or elves, earthier than dwarves.”

  “Dark elves?” Cyrus suggested.

  “Perhaps,” Martaina said with a shrug. “Give me more time, perhaps I’ll determine it. It could just be new goblin traders, or gnomes. The signs are hard to read from what I’ve seen, the scents are so scant and faded as to keep me from being certain.”

  “Fair enough,” Cyrus said. “I have five more days before I have to return to Reikonos to keep an appointment with another of our armies. I’ll meet you again after that at the far portal near the northern crossing.”

  “A busy general indeed,” Martaina said with a little irony. “A conquering man who leads while his soldiers follow close behind him.”

  “All that would sound more impressive if you didn’t dose it with a fair helping of your scorn,” Cyrus said.

  “It is fairly impressive when you consider how many men and women are at your command,” Martaina said, and there was something grudging about the way she said it.