Master (Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  “And does it lead to Luukessia?” Vaste asked. “Because if so, I think I’ll just wait here for death to come and get me.”

  “It leads back to the portal in the Reikonos catacombs,” Curatio said with a shake of the head. “Or a few other places, if you know how to use it. For our purposes, the Reikonos catacombs will do, I think.”

  “Ominous,” Vara pronounced as Cyrus exchanged a look with her. I’d have to agree, he thought.

  “Since you mentioned it,” Cyrus said, “could that portal be the means through which Vidara was abducted?”

  “Unlikely,” Curatio said, seeming to ponder it, “but possible, I suppose.”

  “Who would be able to access her through it?” Cyrus asked, taking the lead as Curatio began to move forward.

  “I do not know,” Curatio replied.

  They drew closer to the hedge, and Cyrus could see the bare branches jutting from the top like skeletal fingers. Cyrus sensed movement at his side and looked to find Vara there, sword in hand, walking alongside him. They exchanged a glance, but only that. She said nothing.

  There was a gap in the hedge that Cyrus could see ahead, a small opening no more that half his width. The hedge ran off in either direction as far as his eye could discern. There was a heavy smell of rotting leaves, less pungent than rotting meat, but still unpleasant.

  “I’ll go first,” Cyrus said as he reached arm’s length of the hedge. Part of him expected it to swipe at him.

  “I hope it eats you,” Vaste said. Cyrus turned to favor him with a frown. “Better you than me,” the troll added.

  Cyrus shook his head and turned back to the hedge. The gap awaited, just a short space. Cyrus turned sideways and began to ease through. It was no more than a couple feet deep, and he could see open space on the other side.

  He heard the scratch of thorns and branches breaking against his armor. His breastplate met resistance from a stubborn limb and he forced himself through. Cracking branches caused a rustle in the hedge, like a ripple across a pond that traversed the entire row.

  Cyrus broke through to the other side and nearly stumbled, catching himself before he fell. Once he was back upright, he looked back. He could see the others through the gap. “Nyad, you’re next,” he said to the wizard. By the light of Vaste’s staff, he saw her eyes go wide.

  Still, she stepped up. He watched her gather her robes before he turned and began to slowly look left and right. There was another hedge just beyond, just as wild and brambly, extending off in either direction. He could see an end in both directions, a parallel sort of maze that wended into corners either way.

  “I think this hedge is trying to expose me!” Nyad said. Cyrus turned to find her tugging at her robe, trying to pull it off of some wayward branch that had hold of it.

  “Won’t it be disappointed when it finds out how much easier that is with a simple bottle of Termina Cognac?” Vaste said. “All that effort for naught.”

  “Very funny,” Nyad pronounced, finally tearing herself free with the sound of ripping cloth. She exhaled sharply and adjusted her robes as if she were gathering her dignity and then came to stand by Cyrus.

  Cyrus said nothing, resuming his slow survey of the hedge path in both directions. He moved his head slowly but regularly, trying to keep watch on his left and right without being too obvious about it.

  “Do you see anything?” Nyad asked as Vaste struggled through the gap in the hedge with exaggerated effort. His staff was through now, helping to light the area around them.

  “I see thorny hedges,” Cyrus said, continuing his watchful pattern. He took a step forward and heard the crunch of desiccated brown leaves that had fallen from the hedges. They crackled underfoot. The smell of them was more pervasive here, and they felt a little wet. The cold seared his lungs, and Cyrus listened carefully but could hear nothing save for the last struggles of the troll to get free of the hedge.

  “Well, it would appear that you were not the only one that the hedge wished to see naked,” Vaste said, stepping up to join Cyrus and Nyad. “Though I believe it tried harder with me, probably because of my powerful animal magnetism.”

  Nyad let out a sound of low disgust. “Who would want to see you naked?”

  “I think the question you should be asking is, ‘Who wouldn’t’?” Vaste replied.

  “Me,” Cyrus said, and heard Vara chorus with him from somewhere through the hedge.

  Curatio came through next, and his finger twirled, blazing with Nessalima’s light, a spell that shed a pure, white luminescence in the dark. Cyrus watched the healer squeeze through the gap, robes barely touched by the stray thorns and branches.

  When Vara’s turn came, he saw Curatio dim the spell. The paladin harrumphed as the darkness rose again around them, broken only by Vaste’s glowing staff. He pointed it toward the space where Vara was now clawing her way through, her sword out and actively slashing into the hedge, which seemed to be shrinking around her. Cyrus started to move forward to help her but stopped when Curatio’s hand caught his arm. By the time he turned enough to see the healer’s gentle shake of the head, Vara was through.

  “Well, that seemed very difficult for you,” Vaste said as Vara brushed broken twigs from her silver armor. “Based on the difficulty you had squeezing through, it would seem that I’m thinner than you.”

  Cyrus looked from the wide-bodied troll to the thin elven woman in the gleaming armor; a greater contrast between them there could not be. Vara was not only nearly half of Vaste’s height, but she was easily half his width.

  “More likely the hedge found me to be a tastier and more appealing morsel than you,” she said stiffly. “But as I do not allow my private parts to dangle freely beneath a simple robe, it found me a more difficult seduction.”

  “I don’t think I was seduced by it, exactly,” Vaste said, feigning pensiveness, “although that would explain the twigs it pushed up my robe when my back was turned—”

  “Ahem.” Curatio cleared his throat. “If I may suggest we be on about our business?” His tone of voice made it clear he was not suggesting.

  Cyrus turned to look left, then right. He’d gotten distracted while the last three had come through the gap in the hedge and had forgotten to check. There was nothing moving to either side, but he would have sworn something was different, that there was a subtle shift in the hedges somehow.

  “Oh, look, our path of retreat has disappeared,” Nyad said without even a hint of surprise.

  “That’s all right, I didn’t want to go back there anyway,” Vaste said. “Damned cold place to stay, and the vegetation was much too grabby for my taste. I like it to take me out for a night on the town before it gets too forward, you know, allow me some time to talk and get to know it—”

  “Must you babble ceaselessly?” Vara’s voice whipcracked through the darkness, and Cyrus turned to realize that things had moved again. The hedges still seemed roughly the same, but something had shifted. Vara stood in front of him, her back turned. Vaste, Curatio and Nyad stood opposite them, almost ten feet away, facing Cyrus and Vara like game pieces on a board. Weren’t we all standing together a moment ago?

  “Vara, Vaste,” Curatio said, “please do stop your quarrel for now.” The healer, too, seemed to be watching the hedgerows, and Cyrus had a vague feeling they were closing in on them.

  “Does anyone else feel like—” Cyrus began.

  “Yes,” Curatio interrupted him, and his voice was one of infinite calm. “When we become separated, work your way forward. Always forward, never back. Do not even spare a glance back, save for to look at your comrades.” He shifted his piercing gaze to each of them in turn. “Do you understand?”

  “Do you think you’ll be abandoning us soon, then?” Vaste asked, and Cyrus could hear a change in pitch in the troll’s voice.

  “We’ll be pulled apart soon enough,” Curatio said, supremely calm—something Cyrus wished desperately he felt. “Keep your wits about you, fight with everything you have at you
r disposal, and you’ll come out the other side.”

  “When all else fails, I’ll raise my robe and start whacking them with my—” Vaste started.

  “SHUT UP!” Vara said. “Do you find this funny? To be trapped in the realm of a goddess gone missing? To be surrounded by ill things and shadows that move when your back is turned? To be faced with very real separation from your comrades so whatever evil lurks here can slowly carve the heart and spirit out of you until it breaks apart the empty shell for its own amusement?”

  “No,” Vaste said, and there was a very real quiver in his voice. “I don’t find it funny. But if I don’t at least try to make light of the situation, I’ll weep at the thought of potentially losing you all—my friends.”

  A silence fell over them, and Cyrus exchanged a look with Vara, whose cheeks were flushed red. She averted her eyes after a moment, turning to look toward the hedge.

  There was a rustling as the wind kicked up, a powerful gust that shook the walls, blowing branches into the air around Cyrus. The ground shuddered beneath their feet, and Cyrus was nearly knocked to the ground by the force of it. The walls moved, the rows of hedge marching while Cyrus tried to regain his balance. He felt something anchor to his arm and realized it was Vara’s gauntlet. He met her gaze as he fell to his knees and she fell beside him.

  The realm stopped shaking a moment later. The wind died down. The long, thin corridor that Cyrus had been looking down only moments earlier was now truncated in front of them, an impassable hedge standing where Vaste, Curatio and Nyad had been.

  “Curatio!” Vara shouted, dropping her grip on Cyrus’s arm and scrambling to her feet. “Nyad! Vaste!” she called into the depths of the bleak hedge, not even a rustle within the thing to indicate that there was anything behind it.

  Silence answered her call, silence … and a sickening feeling that permeated Cyrus’s heart.

  Chapter 14

  She only took a moment to compose herself, Cyrus noted. The smell of rotting greenery was still heavy in the air, and Cyrus wished he could block it by thrusting his gauntlet to his nose. Instead he took a breath through his mouth, and nearly gagged as the smell of rot seemed to become more potent, dancing upon his tongue.

  “What now?” she asked, and Cyrus did no more than glance back to see her standing with her head bowed, staring at the hedge.

  “Come on,” Cyrus said, and he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her forward with his free hand while he drew Praelior with the other. She came without resistance, and he heard her draw her sword with her other hand. “You heard Curatio—we need to move forward and not look back.”

  “Where do you suppose they went?” Vara asked after they had walked through the hedge for a few minutes. The twists and turns became less obvious, and the hedge began to dissolve into individual trees and patches of brush. The first tree Cyrus was able to distinguish was gnarled, with a trunk twisted as though a windstorm had spun it about at the base, sculpting an upward spiral into the branches as it rose. The bark was hardened as if it had become fossilized, reminding Cyrus of a valley of stone trees he’d seen once in the Northlands.

  “I think they’re being pushed along, like we are,” Cyrus said, and he maintained his grip on her arm. She didn’t protest, so he didn’t let it go. She was walking along with him, leading as much as he was, and he did not fight her when she turned to adjust their course, nor she him when he did likewise. “Whatever’s pulling the strings in this place is trying to separate us. Divide and conquer, I think.”

  “It’s doing a fine job with the first half of that,” Vara said. Her tone was only a little brusque.

  “Indeed,” Cyrus said, and they moved into a wood, the path dissolving before them in a thicket.

  They were now in a brambly forest, all the trees as twisted and ugly as the first they’d encountered. It seemed like the woods had crept in around them, marching to encircle them in a moment when they had paid little heed. Cyrus knew they had been walking, had come into it on their own, but it felt different, like it was gradually drawing them in.

  Deeper into the dark. Into the depths of it.

  “This feels utterly wrong,” Vara murmured.

  “Without doubt,” Cyrus said, feeling her arm stiffen even through the armor.

  “I have heard tales of this realm for as long as I can remember,” Vara said. “Tales of the great trees that speak to the weary traveler, that love the Mother of Life and her ways, that would answer questions and tell you of the days when they were young and barely more than saplings. This is supposed to be a place of magic, of life, of holiness.” Her voice took a harder edge. “To see it perverted into this darkness and gloom is an insult to all who worship the Life Giver.”

  They walked in silence, the dark, brambly woods quiet around them. The place was shrouded in an eerie calm, and Cyrus tightened his grip on Vara’s arm as a fog began to seep in. The air around them became hazy and he stepped closer to Vara, allowed his pauldrons to clink against hers. She, for her part, did not seem to mind.

  “So …” Cyrus said after a few more moments of silence. It was beginning to grow unbearable.

  “Not now,” Vara said as they passed a tree with bark gnarled in such a way that it almost looked like it had a face.

  Cyrus looked at her with a frown. “Not now what?”

  “Not now for any conversation of depth or emotionalism you might wish to have,” she said, not looking at him. Their pace was even, and he had to walk faster than he might have otherwise in order to keep up with her long strides. “I doubt whatever foul evil runs rampant in this realm will allow us the time for a leisurely conversation about the mountain of unresolved emotions we might have built over these last months and years.”

  “So you do have unresolved emotions for me,” Cyrus said with a slight smile.

  “If you would be so kind,” Vara said searingly, barely turning to look at him, “try not to be an arse.”

  “That could be difficult,” he said, looking into the fog enshrouding the trees ahead. She did not reply.

  They walked on, Cyrus uncertain of the direction they were taking. Gnarled, ugly trees continued to seemingly spring up in the middle of the heading he had taken. There was no point of reference in the distance—no light, nothing to break the monotony of the glade.

  “This plane is not unruly,” Vara said as they steered around the massive trunk of a tree that reminded him of the King’s garden in the palace in Pharesia, “it is full-out evil, and darkness drenches every surface of this realm.”

  “What about the servants?” Cyrus asked and paused. Something just beyond his sight was moving, and he heard it in the brush, rustling.

  “I cannot imagine they would escape the touch of whatever is claiming this place for its own,” Vara said, her voice full of caution. She stood next to him, eyes fixed in the same direction as his, and he would have sworn he saw her pointed ear twitch.

  “What kind of servants would the Goddess of Life employ?” Cyrus asked, feeling his hand tense on the hilt of Praelior. He could see the grass moving now, something shuffling just beyond his sight.

  “What you might expect to see in a glen, according to legend,” Vara said, every word strained. She watched with him, the anticipation growing taut. “Her land was to be a natural and pure haven for life.”

  “So—” Cyrus did not get another word out before something burst from the brush in front of him.

  Chapter 15

  It was a deer—or perhaps had been at one point. Where smooth, brown and white fur might once have been, now was a raven-colored pelt, matted down. It charged at Cyrus, massive pronged antlers pointed directly at him. He did not react in time and one of them caught him in the shoulder and spun him about.

  Vara went tilting in the other direction, and Cyrus lost track of her as he hit the ground. He kept his grip on Praelior, wondering how it was possible that some hart bursting from the bushes had been faster than he.

  I have my sword in hand. He sh
ook his head, trying to clear it. That thing is fast.

  Cyrus started to his feet and something hit him squarely in the back, ramming him hard to the ground. Hooves stomped at him, pummeling his backplate and racking him with pain.

  He thrust his sword blindly up and hit something. A harsh snort filled his ears, and the dark forest was still. Cyrus rolled and the deer fell from his blade, dead. The black evil that covered it melted with its fall, disappearing like black water draining off onto the ground. It vanished into the earth as Cyrus watched, still down on one knee, leaving the deer's corpse behind.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Vara, who stood, a little crooked, just on the other side of the deer.

  “I’ve just been run over by a four-legged animal,” she said, and he noticed she was leaning heavily on her sword. “I believe it’s broken my shoulder.”

  Cyrus took a breath and felt a pain in his chest. His exhalation came out as a visible mist in front of him. “Can you fix it?”

  He could see her glare from where he stood. “Possibly,” she said with a great deal of sarcasm, “if you might find it in your cold and unrelenting taskmaster heart to give me a moment to catch my breath.”

  He nodded, trying to shift his body to see if he could make the pain subside. “I don’t think I’m the one you’re going to have to worry about rushing you along. The master of this realm is much harsher than I.”

  “Bloody hell,” she whispered, and a light appeared at the tips of her middle and forefinger on her right hand. It sparkled in reflection on her breastplate, and then she stood straight again. “Yes, well, good enough.”

  “Okay,” Cyrus said, trying to find his bearings. The thicket that the deer had burst from was straight ahead of him, and a slightly less thorny path ran just to the left of that. “This way.” She fell in beside him and they went on.

  Every step he took was agony, a fire traveling down his side as though someone were jabbing a knife in his back every time his boots hit the ground. After a moment he saw a light in Vara’s hand again, and the pain subsided. He gave her a look.