Crusader s-4

by Robert J. Crane

  “And now?” Cyrus looked at him expectantly. “You think I’ve suffered enough?”

  “I don’t think you have any idea how much you’ve suffered,” Terian said, turning away from him as the snowfall intensified. “I don’t think you have any idea how much you will continue to, as the man you are now. The changes you’ve made, that have happened to you, this jading, this winnowing of decency-I don’t know how to explain it other than that-you’re an empty man, walking forward with each step following a path laid out long ago.” The dark knight smiled, but there was no mirth in it. “What do you even believe in anymore?” He gave Cyrus a ghostly grin across the rampart.

  “Duty,” Cyrus said. “Loyalty. To my brethren in Sanctuary. I believe I unleashed this scourge that is costing a great many people their lives, and I aim to correct it.”

  “And what after that?” Terian asked, but his head was bowed and he no longer looked at the warrior. The snow had begun to accumulate now, just a little bit, a faint white dusting, but it came down heavily enough that all the land was cut before him, and Cyrus could see only a hundred feet off the wall at best. “What will you do if you fail?” He blinked and turned his head to Cyrus. “What will you do if you succeed? Where will you go? What will you fight for?”

  “I’ll go home,” Cyrus said, but he didn’t feel it, not really, not in the emptiness within. “I’ll fight whoever next crosses the path of Sanctuary-just like I always have.” He turned away, brushing the wet snow from his shoulders as he began to make his way back to the tower. “What about you, Terian?” he asked as he walked away. “You’re no longer welcome in Sanctuary, unless Alaric finds some measure of deep pity for you. What will you do? Where will you go?” He turned and looked back, but the dark knight was all shadow now, just an outline, a silhouette in the rising frenzy of the snowstorm as it blew around him. “What will you fight for?”

  “The same thing I have been since the days when I lost all my belief and care, like you have,” Terian answered, the wind muffling him as he spoke. “Myself. And I’ll go wherever the road takes me.” He turned away, and the next words were nearly lost to the wind. “If I’m not much mistaken, it won’t be that long before you do exactly the same.”

  Chapter 80

  The snow had come heavily, all through the night. Cyrus did not sleep, but he lay down next to Aisling in the tower room, the fire crackling and shedding warmth now. The sweet smell of wood smoke harkened him back to thoughts of Sanctuary, but he found less comfort in them than he would have imagined. A dull, gnawing feeling ate at him from the thought of it, of going home, he realized. The smell of meat pies came back to him, whether from thoughts of Sanctuary or memories of the days before, when he was a child in a home of his own, with a mother and father, he knew not which. Alone. It’s how I lived, from the day Belkan dropped me at the Society to the day I … what? Made my first prayer to Bellarum? Met Narstron? Perhaps. Married Imina? He grimaced. Doubtful. She knew I felt the call to war more than to stay with her. From the day I …

  There was the flash again, in his mind, of blond hair, of a sword in motion, laying open foes on a battlefied. Of a sharp voice and sharper wit, of her fluid motion in a fight, and of her face … oh gods, her face …

  From the day I joined Sanctuary. Even the echo of the words only in his mind was as loud as any battle; it resonated in the quiet night of his chamber, and even the presence of Aisling against his side, almost purring, was no consolation.

  Dawn found him unrested, and he wondered if he had shut his eyes at all after returning to bed. Terian’s words rattled in his head, thoughts of the man he was plagued him, of who he had been.

  He rose, ate breakfast with the others in a somber feast in a room at the bottom of the stairs, the brothers quietly bringing them porridge. No one spoke, not even Martaina, though she looked to be of a mind to say something at one point. When finished, they filed outside. The courtyard had filled with snow during the early morning hours, and still it came down heavily, lying already in drifts up to mid-calf on the women, Cyrus noted upon seeing Aisling slip into it. She cringed and he knew that wet slush had fallen into her leather shoes, low as they ran to the ground.

  The horses were saddled and waiting, and the same stable boy brought Cyrus his reins. He took them wordlessly, the lad’s shining face not adding any brightness to an already dim mood. The snowfall was lighter now than it had been last night, but the crunch of it underfoot, the way it drowned out all the distant noises and made the land still and quiet was deeply unnerving, especially before battle. The remnants of his cinnamon porridge, sweetened with cream, still hung on his moustache and beard, and he could taste the sugar still lingering on his tongue. He pulled tight his cloak again once he was on Windrider’s back, and the horse started off right away, without even a prompting from him, heading toward the north courtyard, following Longwell’s lead in this case.

  Briyce Unger and Milos Tiernan were already waiting, having a quiet conversation with aides behind them, ahorse. As Longwell approached they each gave a nod of courtesy and were off, toward the gate north, out through it and then the second gate beyond, where the world opened up before them. The snowflakes forced Cyrus’s eyes to squint every few minutes. He blinked them away when needed, but a few minutes later they would return, and he would brush them off his face. It was a steady path to madness, he was certain, but his coat began to become wet, and his armor chill, the inside padding saving him from the worst of the cold.

  They rode out, and the army of Galbadien joined them past the forest road, falling into line behind them. Others rode out from the east as well, the other armies of Actaluere that had filtered up. Cyrus rode at the front-the tip of the spear, he liked to think of it-with the Kings and his own command. He looked back and wondered, trying to see through the snow, stealing a look at the army of Actaluere.

  Tiernan caught his eye when he looked back around, and there was a slight smile on the King of Actaluere’s face. “He’s not here, of course.”

  Cyrus blinked at Milos Tiernan. “Who?”

  “Hoygraf,” Tiernan said with a smug look. “Can’t be of much good since you gutted him; he remains in his lands, along with a considerable contingent of Actaluere’s troops.” The smile was gone now, and it became somewhat shrewd as a look, giving Cyrus the slightest hint that the King was holding something back.

  “Wouldn’t we be better off with his men coming along with us?” Cyrus asked, keeping his eye on Tiernan.

  “We have about a third of them with us,” Tiernan replied, now turned to look in the direction he was riding, giving Cyrus a sideways profile. He had not noticed before, but the King’s chin was weak, withdrawn. “The rest remain as a sort of reserve-insurance, if you will, against any sort of strike by Galbadien or Syloreas against our holdings.”

  “Speaking for Galbadien,” Longwell said from his place not far away, on the other side of Cyrus, “we have no intention to strike at you, nor do we have any forces left in our country with which to do so if we wanted.” He shrugged, his pointed helm with a hawklike visor giving him a predatory edge. “Though I suppose if you wanted to, Baron-I’m sorry, Grand Duke Hoygraf-could just about march to Vernadam without any sort of serious opposition.”

  “Good to know,” Tiernan said without any sort of pleasure. “But my greater concern is the refugees of Syloreas that pour through my borders unfettered even now. We give them all the charity we can, but it is a risk, however slight, that they may decide to turn on my people. The troops who remain are there to keep the peace. Refugees are hungry, after all, and sometimes desperate, and I don’t wish to see my people bear the brunt of an angry, starving mass cutting a rugged path across our landscape.”

  “What exactly do you think they’ll be doing,” Briyce Unger asked, “this hungry, starving mass of desperation?” The umbrage was obvious from the way he said it. “Capturing Caenalys? Sacking your treasure room?”

  “I worry more about the farmers in the northern reaches
,” Tiernan said bluntly. “Starving people do desperate things-like, say, murder a man for food. Form a mob and destroy a town while trying to get fed. I am doing what I can for charity, but I must also preserve my people’s safety. I would hope, were our roles reversed, you would understand that.”

  Cyrus could see that Unger did not, but the King of Syloreas did not voice whatever irritation he held. He guided his horse away from the discussion, though, away from Tiernan and back to a thick knot of his aides who rode at the front of the formation. Cyrus could see them casting glances every now and again, though, and he did not like the look of them at all.

  With the snow slowing their pace, and even more the walking speed of the men on foot, the great army of Luukessia took the better part of the day to get to the flat lands that had been marked for the site of their battle. There were no tents set up when they arrived, but fires were set. The whole camp was a buzz of subdued activity; quiet in the gloom, the snow still coming down. There were whispers, rumors, flat-out lies, and all of them reached Cyrus’s ears as he walked through the encampment, alone, his feet crunching through the snow. Men were huddled near fires for warmth; and every once in a good while he saw a woman in armor or with a sword. There was thin stew cooking and not much else. A skin of ice was broken off a nearby creek for drinking water and for boiling, and latrines were set up over a hill to the rear. Coming back from them, Terian said, “I suggest we try and lead the scourge in that direction when they come; it’ll be certain to send them running back to the north.”

  “Even on such a cold day as this?” Martaina had her bow out and was fletching, working on arrows, putting tips upon shafts she had carved while gathering wood earlier. The shafts had a wet look to them, and when she caught Cyrus looking she shrugged. “I work with what I have.”

  The night came upon them early, and no sign of the aurora was to be had under the cloudy, still-snowing skies. It was quiet in the camp, though Cyrus wondered how many men were actually sleeping. The snows came down on them, and still no tents had been set up; the need for mobility and a quick retreat trumped comfort, and so tens of thousands of men and a few hundred women lay beneath a sky that wafted snow down upon them. Aisling lay next to him, of course, and as much as she had tried to take his mind off of all matters, it had not worked as it did before, and he lay awake again, unease hanging over him as he hoped sleep would claim him, yet knowing that it would not.

  Dawn was a grim affair, and the snow went ever on, unhalting, now almost a foot deep. It flurried hard in spurts then reduced to a manageable few flakes before picking up again. The wind howled, sending icy slaps hard against the men who were standing around fires that were whipped with every gust. They kept their heads low, their cowls and collars up to get warmth by any means they could find.

  The first messenger for the army came an hour after daybreak, when pickled eggs, hard cheese and bread were being eaten by the armies of Actaluere and Galbadien. The Sanctuary members ate conjured bread and water with their supplies. An uneasy quiet hung in the air until the messenger appeared, a half-elf, half-human warrior whom Cyrus knew only in passing. The man was exhausted, it was obvious, his eyes red with fatigue. He whispered a few words to Curatio and then stumbled into the nearest bedroll, not even bothering to care that it wasn’t his own.

  “They’ll be here within hours,” Curatio said. “Perhaps two, perhaps a little more, depending on how well our efforts to hold them back go. The whole line is exhausted; which should not be surprising, as they’ve been performing a strategy of engaging and falling back for months now. When we left them a week ago,” he gave a quick nod to Terian, “I wondered if they’d be able to hold for as long as it would take. I suppose they have.”

  “How is our force doing?” Cyrus asked.

  “Faring well,” Curatio said, snow turning his hair white. “They’ve never once been the cause of a retreat. It’s become obvious, though, that these things are drawn to life, absolutely drawn to it. They doggedly come at us, ignore the possibility of pulling a wide flanking maneuver; we’ve seen them break off in numbers when we pass a village that still has occupants. They go, they slaughter, they return with bloodied faces. I honestly thought they’d take longer to get here, but it would appear the army is wearier than even I thought.”

  Cyrus looked at the messenger, already well asleep. “We’ll give them as much rest as we can afford. Hopefully this fresh army pouring into the fight will allow us to push forward.”

  Curatio smiled and nodded. “Let us hope.”

  “They’ve changed,” came the muffled words of the man laying on the bedroll, the half-elf. “They’re more dogged now, trying to flank more.” He didn’t roll over, but turned his head slightly. “They come at our weaknesses, too; not that they didn’t before, but Odellan says it’s worse now, as though they can exploit them, sense their flaws and approaches. More strategy, less brutal anger. There’s something else, too.” The half elf rolled over and looked at Cyrus through half-lidded eyes. “There’s a master, we think. One that stays in the distance, but we see him. Tall as two men, a four-legged creature, and it bears a mark of sorts. It stands off, growls at the others, and they move almost like it tells them to. We’ve had archers try and kill it, but it stays out of range of spells and arrows.” He looked directly at Cyrus. “We think it’s their General, the thing that leads them.”

  Cyrus felt the cold wind pick up in a gust just then, carrying the sounds around his ears like a howling of the wind. The snow fell on, down around them, and the quiet descended again, except for the wind, as he sat there near the fire-and derived no warmth from it at all.

  Chapter 81

  The snowfall was at a blessed slowdown as they stood all in a line, a quarter mile from the campsite. Cyrus’s nose hairs felt well frozen, and every breath just added to the searing pain behind his cheeks and eyes, as though someone had taken a frozen hammer and tapped behind them gently for quite some time. His sweat had frozen to his skin, and whatever breakfast he’d eaten-he could little recall now what it had been-was sitting poorly, and threatening to come back up. The cold had seeped to the bone and all was quiet save for the roar of the wind when it picked up. It ran with near continuousness now, driving the snow sideways at its worst and at a forty-five degree angle at best.

  It was the sound that reached them first, the yells and battle cries of men weary and desperate. They saw them shortly thereafter, in the distance, through the haze made by the snow.

  “This is an ill time and place for a fight,” Terian said, and Cyrus glanced over to realize that the dark knight was next to him.

  “Because we can see little, our cavalry is unable to operate in the heavy snow and our infantry is slowed to being unable to advance?” Cyrus let the irony seep in as he said it.

  “Also, it’s colder than your elven girlfriend’s touch and we’re relieving an army that’s likely to break from fatigue as soon as they realize we’re here to take up for them.” His eyes glittered in the bare light of a sun that none of them could see. “If they manage to let us take over as the front line without breaking, it will be a miracle of military discipline of the highest order.”

  Cyrus looked forward to the line stretched in front of him, and saw others closer, the walking wounded, and a few carrying men on makeshift stretchers made of bedrolls and all manner of other things. “Would I be wrong in assuming there won’t be many wounded?”

  “Most have been left behind,” Terian answered. “It became obvious after you left that our healers were not nearly enough to handle the entire army under sustained assault; they lacked the magical energy to come close to saving everyone. The Luukessians played it carefully after that; if a man fell and ended up behind the enemy’s line, he was given up lost so as not to cost five more trying to recover him.” The dark knight set his jaw. “It’s an ugly thing, what they do to those who fall. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Our rangers nearly ran out of arrows putting the poor bastards out of their misery.”
/>   “We lose any of ours that way?” Cyrus asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

  “Couple of disappearances,” Curatio said from behind Cyrus. The army of Galbadien and Actaluere sandwiched the small group of them on either side. “Likely fell in the night and we didn’t see or hear them, you know … in the heat of the battle.”

  You mean in the midst of all the men screaming, Cyrus thought, but did not say. Hard to tell if the scream comes from a man of Sanctuary or one of the Luukessians when you’re bunched tight together along a front line.

  The army before them was still falling back in tatters, only a few scant rows deep. Cyrus could see the Sanctuary numbers, the largest part of the force. The army of Actaluere was much reduced over when last he saw it, easily a quarter the size. There were almost none of the Sylorean civilians remaining, the farmers and villagers that had been on his right when they’d fought at Filsharron. The Sylorean army looked smaller, too, and ragged, though it was hard to tell since they had been the most ragged at the outset of the fight.

  “It’s the New Year today, did you know that?” Terian looked over at Cyrus. “The Solstice will be here in only a week or so.” He flashed his gaze to the fight, now only a few hundred feet away. “Do you suppose this will be over by then?”

  Cyrus felt his jaw tighten; talking to Terian was the most natural thing in the world when he didn’t think about it. When he did … “I doubt it. Depends on how many there are, I suppose.”

  Terian gave him a pinched smile. “Do you suppose we’ll ever get to that cave with the portal?”

  “That’s the goal,” Cyrus said, irritated.

  “Do you believe we’ll get there?” Terian turned to him as Cyrus tensed; the battle was close now, only a minute or two away.