Master (Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  But stabbing him in the back with a black lace dagger and letting him bleed to death while he tried in vain to do his duty?

  No.

  Oh, no.

  I did not see that coming, not even from a woman who I have run out of terrible names for. Well, I suppose I have one left, but I would rather save it for a less auspicious occasion and less polite company.

  If there was one thing I would not have been able to predict even more than who would lay him low, it was who would save him when death was assured.

  Terian Lepos.

  I didn’t entirely trust him, of course, but I was grateful for the help. It’s not as though I was blind to it, after all; I was there on the field of battle when he raised his axe to Cyrus’s aid.

  But I wasn’t there when he’d turned his weapon against Cyrus, and part of me still found that unforgivable for some reason. Silly, I suppose, but I felt it nonetheless.

  I saw Cyrus when they stripped him of his armor. His mouth gaped open, his dark hair hung in wet strings. I watched, watched as they did their work upon him. I saw the scar in his back and remembered the one in my own. In roughly the same place, no less. I thought it odd, at the time, and still do … but at that moment, I saw another way—annoying as it might have been—that Cyrus Davidon was like myself.

  A single, long chuckle from Vaste broke Cyrus’s concentration. He stared at the troll, but Vaste had not moved. His head was deeply in the book, on the pages before him. Learning the answers to some burning questions he’s had for a long time, I’d wager … Cyrus turned his attention back to the diary in his hand, and read on.

  I was sure he was dead, and I was as vengeful as Cyrus Davidon had ever been. I came at Yartraak with everything I had, sword aflame with fury so righteous it burned the air itself, strength given to me by my armor. I watched Cyrus flung through the air by the swing of a god, and was fully intent on slicing that grey-skinned devil apart.

  Or die trying. I was far enough gone that I found that an acceptable alternative, oddly.

  “You cannot think you stand a chance against me,” the God of Darkness hissed. “I have already destroyed your—”

  “Shut your gap-toothed mouth!” I slashed him across the arm and pounded upon him with a fury of blows. I opened his flesh in more places than could be counted by most peasants without resorting to their toes and blasted him back with spellcraft. I leapt into the light and was—more than a little—surprised to find Cyrus waiting for me there, battered, but still holding his weapon.

  Then he was struck again, the idiot, this time intentionally—why, Goddess, why must his bravery occasionally outweigh that intelligence I claim he does not have? It’s as though he’s acting stupid to spite me. Once more, the fool was blasted out of the room, except this time, thanks to the presence of two torches, it was clear he was still completely held together.

  “What the—” Yartraak said.

  I blasted him in the bloody back with a spell. Just pounded him. Did not wait for him to turn around, simply sent him flying through the doors behind Cyrus.

  No, it was not at all paladin-like, but—and I presume that the elven paladin masters would agree with me, were they asked very specifically about my case—when battling a god, the rules go right out the nearest bloody window.

  I followed them out at my leisure—oh, who’s kidding whom, I ran like mad, through another room, over a bridge, out a gate—and found that Cyrus had now lost his weapon. You know, the one thing that allows him to move faster, strike harder, stand up to the gods—yes, he drove it into Yatraak’s back and failed to retrieve it, the fool. Made me reconsider his intelligence yet again.

  I caught up with them on a major avenue outside the palace. Soldiers were assembling. Cyrus was dangling loosely from the Sovereign’s grasp. And I spat out some fiery challenge, ready to have it out with the bastard once and for all. Of course the coward used him as hostage; I’d been driving him back all along. I could smell the fear on him, it hung like the darkness when he had a chance to gather it about him.

  The battle went on, mad, swirling, my blade against Yartraak with only a minimal amount of help from the supposed hero in the black armor. Oh, he certainly fought against those army fellows that charged in, but I was battling something ancient and evil. And then, when he finally inserts himself back into the fight, he does so to grab hold of his sword and get flung to the ground.

  I saw him drop, and … my heart dropped with him.

  And then he flung his sword at me.

  I could feel it the minute it touched my hand. Through my gauntlet, the power flowed. I was righteous before, but this made me invincible, and I could see the look on that bastard’s face as he realized it, too. He tried a goad, and it failed. I swiped his head clean from his body. He said something to Cyrus before his face had the good grace to realize it was dead, but by that point … I was good and done. I did my best Cyrus Davidon impression and sent the locals fleeing. Watched them run down the street as though they were trolls and I was … well, him.

  And then?

  We loosed the Goddess of Life from her chains, set Terian about the business of freeing Reikonos from the dark elven hordes, I had one last opportunity to call the dark elven harlot a slattern (as opposed to the other word, which I will not use), and then …

  … and then …

  Cyrus Davidon did something countless crusaders have pledged to do over the years and steadfastly done not a damned thing about.

  He freed the last slaves of Arkaria.

  Her admiration was worth the price every resurrection spell had ever exacted on him. He stared down, looked the pages, looked at the ink, spotted with age and exposure to the elements. He felt elements of his own—water, fresh from his eyes, added unto the ravages of time, and he hurried to read the last bit. He’d read it already, but it was his favorite passage.

  The day that J’anda Aimant returned to us will be a day I cannot ever forget, for more reasons than one. The party stretched into the night, of course; since the day I joined Sanctuary, they have been a joyful lot. They celebrate at the slightest inclination, and adding that wine-sodden (though now quite sober) idiot Andren to the mix has increased our proclivities in that direction.

  I, of course, have a very low threshold for the amount of merrymaking I can withstand. Oh, it all starts out to the good—there’s a freeing sort of spirit on the event, a happy chatter that precedes such an occasion. But it inevitably sinks into idiocy, into maudlin sentiment, and these are things I cannot abide. These and leather clogs.

  I had safely made my escape, retreated to my haven in the tower, when the knock sounded upon my door. Naturally, I was not expecting anyone, because … well, I never expect anyone, especially during festivities of any kind. Who enjoys being in the company of a misanthrope during a celebration, after all?

  I opened the door to find J’anda waiting outside. I have known J’anda for some considerable time. For as long as I have known him, he has worn many faces.

  Since he returned from Luukessia, I have only seen him almost exclusively with one: his own, considerably aged, face.

  I didn’t really know what to say. I invited him in, of course, and he accepted. “You should be at your party,” I said weakly, aware of the hypocrisy inherent in such a statement.

  He looked at me with those deep eyes of his. Another thing I have realized in my long association with J’anda—in spite of his charm and the interest of countless women in him, his proclivities run in a different direction than I or any other woman of Sanctuary might provide. “I come back to you now for whatever time I have left.”

  “Here to Sanctuary, I assume,” I said. “Not here to my chambers? Because I am ill-equipped to handle dying.”

  “Aren’t we all?” he asked with that faint, charming smile. There is little about J’anda that is not charming.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. “In this room, I mean. Obviously … coming back to Sanctuary for the time you have left …”
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br />   “I have had a great deal of time to think of late,” J’anda said. “And I realized I have never cast a spell of mesmerization upon you.”

  I froze. I’ve heard about mesmerization spells, about what they do—what they show you. “I … I don’t really have any interest in exploring my heart’s desire, whatever that may be—”

  “It’s a curious thing,” J’anda said, “in the nature of people. Anyone who learns what a mesmerization spell is, they come to some point their life when they come to me. They seek answers. Answers to questions they may struggle with. Many times, we wander through our lives without knowing exactly what it is we want.” He leaned in and looked me in the eye. “Of course, there are also those who fear to know what they want.”

  I have had these conversations before. Well-meaning, always. Good-intentioned, doubtless. But it is the same conversation, every time, whether it is my sister or the newest warrior applicant who broaches the subject. Even Arydni—who has born the brunt of my tirades about the expectations of the Life Mother upon my female parts more than once—has tried to bring up the topic of Cyrus Davidon with me.

  The same damned conversation.

  And here is what I do. I smile. It puts them at ease, I think. Or terrifies them, perhaps. I don’t care, honestly. I count to five because to respond sooner would guarantee that the flames of Enflaga himself would burst from my mouth and consume them wholly. That’s not polite, my mother’s voice tells me. And then, in the lightest tone, I begin my counter-argument.

  “J’anda, Cyrus is a human,” I said, well practiced, well rehearsed. These are the words of my mother, given life by me years after her death. “I am not. I could live for six thousand years—”

  “You could die tomorrow,” J’anda said with a certainty that made me rattle slightly. “And what would you have? What would you leave behind you but an ocean of regrets?”

  I did not quite flinch at that, but … I will admit to perhaps blinking a few times. “I … also have a reasonable collection of leather shoes.”

  “I saw the desire of Cyrus’s heart on the day I mesmerized him some years ago,” J’anda said. “Through land and sea, death and life, errors …” he made a face, “… numerous errors … I know that the desire of his heart has not changed.” He laid a hand upon mine. “And I suspect all this work you do, the two of you, keeping yourselves apart … it is a tireless dance, but one that I have grown tired of. Life is uncertain. Death is uncertain.” He looked me directly in the eyes. “If there is something in your heart that you are certain about … it would be exceedingly wise not to waste the rest of your days adding it to the pile with your list of regrets … and your collection of leather shoes.” He shrugged at the last part. “I am sure they are very fashionable.”

  “Damned right,” I said, but the certainty I had felt a moment earlier had faded. I had known the desire of my heart all along. It was obvious as the nose on J’anda’s face, when he wasn’t hiding it behind an illusion.

  “You don’t have to be alone,” he said, and it forced me to look around—to really look around. My quarters were nearly bare, the product of a life that had been lived in a whirlwind, moving from place to place several times. Uprooted and starting over again. Being left to die. Learning to trust again.

  I had lost Alaric, lost my parents, lost my trust at the blade of a knife. I looked down at my hands, bare, as I had left my gauntlets on the table when I had come in. They looked lonely, each finger without another to intertwine with. I stuck my hands together self-consciously, and though they matched, it did not feel right.

  “Do not enslave yourself to your past,” J’anda said, moving toward the door. He walked with a slump to his shoulders and disappeared into the hall, shutting the door behind him.

  I sat alone for another ten minutes, thinking over what he said, staring at my bare walls, and feeling the strange absence as I interlaced my fingers in a spectacle that would have looked bizarre on anyone but Malpravus. I should be proud that it only took those ten minutes—well, ten minutes and however many years—to make my decision. I am an elf, after all, and my life is long. Ten minutes to realize that I didn’t want to spend it alone is practically a snap of the fingers. I left my empty quarters behind and ascended, searching him out. I felt like I was climbing toward my destiny—

  Cyrus snapped the diary shut, the emotions bubbling over. He pushed them away, forced them down, cleared his throat, feigned a cough. He looked out the window, sparing only a glance to look back at Vaste. The troll’s head was still down, still on the pages of Alaric’s journal.

  Cyrus walked, slowly, across the floor of the Council Chambers, avoiding the shattered debris that littered the room. He passed Vaste and walked toward the stairs, stopping when he heard the voice call to him from behind.

  “You aren’t alone, you know.” Vaste’s tone was crisp, clear.

  “I know,” Cyrus said and began his descent.

  The foyer was still a disastrous mess, stone and rubble strewn everywhere. He passed through the doors and onto the grounds, the scorched grass stretching out from the stone steps. He marched toward the remnants of the curtain wall, passing under the remains of the gate only moments later.

  He stood and looked across the plains, empty, desolate. When he had passed this way days earlier, the spot upon which he stood had been a crater, a jagged, lifeless hole in the earth.

  Cyrus turned his gaze to the monument, the only sign that had marked this place other than the crater. It was massive in its own right, a headstone as wide as he was tall. The story it told across the top was one he was all too familiar with. He ran a finger over the text, giving it only a cursory glance.

  And then he reached the bottom, the list of names that ran columns wide, row after row.

  The dead.

  The fallen.

  He had read them all before, every one, and on each occasion he did so, it felt like he drowned in his own despair, as though he’d fallen in deep water and no one had reached a hand to help pull him back out again. It was cold and crippling, as icy as Reikonos air in the heart of winter.

  Cyrus stood before the stone, his heart barely contained. He kept his eyes closed for fear of being seen and subtly looked back toward the gates. They were empty, a clear path all the way back to the foyer. The gaping darkness loomed inside Sanctuary, a mouth of despair that threatened to swallow him whole.

  But not just yet.

  He read the names, starting at the top. He did it stoically, containing the emotion that threatened to burst loose of him. He did well in this, he had to admit. The grey skies threatened to open up on him—again—but he kept his own emotions bottled through every single column, every single row.

  Until the name at the bottom.

  He let his eyes drift to it as a man seeking pain picks at a fresh scab. It gave him the desired result: sharp agony, fresh, dredged back to life.

  Cyrus Davidon felt the wobble run through his legs and hit his knees, the shock of the impact rolling up him, all the strength gone from a warrior who had challenged the gods.

  Fought death itself.

  Plucked the eyes from dragons.

  Freed a land.

  Five words, carved in stone, were enough to render the warrior in black armor weak beyond measuring. They brought him low without fail, took him down, ripped from him whatever he had left.

  But as Cyrus stared at the words, unable to take his eyes off of them—perfectly carved as if a quill had etched them into the stone—he had to concede that … there simply was not anything else left to take. His eyes drifted over them once more, and the stabbing, searing pain clawed its way into his heart again at their mere sight:

  Vara Davidon

  Shelas’akur

  Beloved Wife

  The wind howled over the Plains of Perdamun, over the monument to the fallen, grey skies dark over the lonely and abandoned towers of the Sanctuary guildhall—a perfect match for the man in black armor who knelt at the foot of the stone �
�� and was lord of all the emptiness he looked over.

  And Now For A Word From Your Author

  (Because the last 177,000 were not enough, apparently.)

  So…was that my most emotionally brutal ending ever? Discuss. But not here, because you'd basically be yelling at your e-reader (if you've not already thrown it).

  If you're fighting the temptation to throw it, let me reassure you – I've just revealed something fairly huge (obviously). This is book five of eight (main volumes; when you count in 4.5 and 5.5, I guess it's a ten book series. Unless you add in the tales…). Point is, the story is NOT over.

  Bear with me. I think, when we get to the end of this, you'll be happy you read. It's gonna take a while longer to get to the end, though. After vacillating somewhat (and realizing how much is left out of the Saekaj storyline by the fact that Cyrus couldn't be present for the revolution), I've decided to go ahead and write Fated in Darkness: The Sanctuary Series, Volume 5.5. It'll cover what J'anda, Aisling and Terian were doing during the events of this book and bring Terian and Aisling's stories as started in “Thieving Ways” (available in Sanctuary Tales) and “Thy Father's Shadow” (Sanctuary 4.5) to their respective closes and fold them back into the main story. After that, I will not be writing any more half-measure volumes, it'll be volumes 6, 7 and 8 to finish things out for this series.

  That said, it's still probably going to be a couple years to finish this thing. I wrote ten books in 2014, and I'm aiming for ten in 2015. I even managed to squeeze in three Sanctuary books this year, not that most people noticed. (Sanctuary Tales and Volume 4.5 did not do all that well, comparatively – which is fine. As your author, I want to give you more of what you want. Except for that scene that just happened in the epilogue. You obviously didn't want THAT.) I'm aiming to get Volume 5.5 and 6 out in 2015, and I think that's very possible, though Warlord (Volume Six) could be as big as Crusader (about 1.5x the length of this volume). We'll see.