Sanctuary 5.5 - Fated in Darkness

by Robert J. Crane

  Terian regarded the open exit from the carriage with a surprising lack of nerves and nodded once. “This is it,” he agreed. He had not been here in nearly three years, and the thought of how he’d left this place lingered on him like a swarm of flies buzzing about him, harrying him as he stepped forth from the carriage to meet his judgment.

  2.

  Aisling

  Aisling Nightwind lingered about out of doors, on the grounds of Sanctuary, the breeze of the dark evening all around her. Corpses lay strewn about the trampled and muddied grass, bodies that had not yet begun to putrefy, fresh as the flowers that might have been popping out of the ground were it still the pristine, untouched landscape it had been when she’d left Sanctuary over a year ago.

  “Things change,” she breathed, so low that she didn’t think anyone could hear her.

  “Oh, they do indeed,” came a near-whispered reply that caused her to turn her head. Some thirty feet away stood a woman in a grey robe as dull as a cloudy sky. She clutched an ebony staff in her fingers, and had the vestment marking her as a wizard. Her face was unwrinkled but showed slight wear; Aisling could not have placed her age to the nearest millennium if she’d been suspended over a pit and forced to make a guess with her life in the balance. “But,” the woman went on, “as they change, I find they also stay remarkably close to the same.”

  “If you say so,” Aisling said with a polite incline of her head. Smoke rose from beyond the massive curtain wall of Sanctuary, and grains of dust still floated through the air after the mighty battle that had led to dark elves swarming over their grounds and breaking down the doors of the massive building at the center of the compound. Almost kissed death on that one. I saw the white-bleached skull, and his teeth were poised to swallow me whole.

  “I say so,” the woman said, inching closer, her staff thumping against the broken earth, slapping against the bodies beneath her as she walked. “Don’t you think it’s so? That no matter how much we think things have changed, they stay remarkably close to what they always were?”

  Aisling blinked, giving it consideration before replying. “When I left this place to go to Luukessia, it was whole. When I returned a few days ago, it was under siege. Now, the walls are cracked, and it is both filled with and surrounded by corpses too numerous to count.” She glanced down at a dark elven officer and rolled him enough to get at his coin purse. It was fairly light, as though he’d had liberty recently or not been paid for a while.

  “But it still stands,” the woman said. “Still houses the same guild, with the same loyalties.”

  “Alaric is gone,” Aisling said, parroting what she’d heard, oddly indifferent. “That is change.”

  “Yet things roll along,” the woman said, gathering up the hem of her robe as she stepped over the large body of a troll. “The wagon wheels still turn inexorably.”

  Aisling rolled her eyes. Elves. “Are you annoying me for any particular reason, or do you simply have nowhere else to be? Surely, there is room for a wizard’s work to be done around here, especially at present.”

  “Yes, a wizard’s work is never done,” she agreed, “always ferrying people to and fro; pushing off one’s own appointments to help others keep theirs. You have an appointment of your own, did you know?”

  Aisling stooped low, hand on another dead dark elf’s purse when the words reached her ears, and they froze her in place as surely as an ice spell to the back. “Do I?” she asked, as coldly as if such a spell had crawled all the way up to her face and forced its way down her throat, chilling her words as they spilled forth.

  “You do,” the woman said, now close enough to strike out with her staff if she chose. Aisling watched her cannily, out of the corner of her eyes, afraid to focus all her attention on her new acquaintance. “You have been gone a very long while, after all.”

  “I was not aware that anyone in Sanctuary had marked my absence,” Aisling said. “And I have been back for a few days, though rather busy with the business of the siege.”

  The woman stepped closer. She was not terribly tall, but she was a couple of inches in height greater than Aisling and looked down on her. The wizard’s pointed ears were nearly hidden beneath her grey hat’s wide brim. “You have obligations to those beyond Sanctuary. Obligations that your benefactors wish to insure you have not forgotten.”

  “I have a keen memory,” Aisling said, standing upright again. “I forget little.”

  “A valuable attribute in a servant.” The elven woman cocked an eyebrow at her. “My name is Verity—”

  “A fitting name for a spy,” Aisling said, so low that she was certain even the warriors passing fifty feet away could not hear her.

  “Indeed,” Verity said with a nod and a smile that hinted at a certain pleasure derived from the irony. “It was almost as though my parents named me with my eventual flexibility in loyalties in mind. When yours named you, did they have your …” Verity looked Aisling up and down, “… rather birdlike qualities in mind, do you suppose?”

  Aisling met her stare with a long-practiced ease, smiling lightly. “One would presume I was too small at the time to have displayed any of my current waifishness.” And my parents did not name me Aisling, in any case, but you don’t need to know that.

  Nobody does.

  “I am to take you with me,” Verity said, stepping closer, voice dropping to a raspy hush. “Dagonath Shrawn wishes a report on your progress.”

  Aisling let her eyes dart about the grounds, looking for something, anything, to excuse her from this task she didn’t want to fulfill. “We’ve just finished a siege. The grounds are in chaos; hunting parties still rage across the plains killing the last of the dark elves. The guild’s council is still meeting, and refugees from the land of Luukessia are pouring into this place by the thousands.” She felt the night close in on her, black and still and hard from above, not held at bay by the great torches and braziers that burned across the grounds and cast light across it all. She felt as an island in the middle of it all, unnoticed, as the darkness prepared to take her in its embrace.

  “A perfect time to slip away unnoticed,” Verity said with a slight smile. “We shan’t be gone long, and there is far too much occurring here for them to notice a slippery thief’s absence for just a small while.” Verity leaned in, whispering in her ear. “You are indebted. And you are here for a purpose. Or do you need a reminder?”

  “I recall all too well,” Aisling said with a nod of surrender. “Do as you must.”

  “Let us away,” Verity said, smiling, as she whipped the ebony staff into the air. “Hold tight to me; I will return us to the Shrawn estate directly.”

  Aisling hesitated before closing on the wizard, looking around her once more. Mail-clad warriors milled about in a formation of ten roughly a hundred yards away. A few rangers with bows stood atop the nearest segment of wall, their backs to Aisling and their green cloaks whipping in the gentle wind. The darkness was complete beyond the curtain wall, a night closed off to all outside. Their attention was focused beyond the gates, beyond the broken stone barrier that surrounded them. They were worried about great armies like the one that had sieged and surrounded them, fearful of dangers outside their gates.

  They should have more care for the ones that are inside them, Aisling thought as she closed her arms around the wizard in an unfeeling embrace. Verity smelled of herbs, of mint perhaps, and something lingering and artificial, one of the perfumes that the elves employed to cover their own aromas. She clutched to the grey robes as the energy of a spell consumed her, taking her along with the wizard back to a point of binding half a land away, and back to a destiny she could not seem to leave behind no matter how she tried.

  3.

  J’anda

  J’anda Aimant found the letter waiting under his door when he returned from Council, and he wondered how long it had been there. He had been gone for a very long time, over a year, far across the sea in a distant land, watching it burn and die in a way he had n
ot seen since the days of his youth, and the thought that all that while something so simple as an envelope with a missive might be awaiting him here had never once occurred to him. And why should it? he wondered. I thought anyone who cared enough to write me a letter was either with me or here the entire time, aware of my prolonged absence.

  The lettering was a simple scrawl, the hand of someone educated but not proficient in matters of calligraphy, and written in the language of the dark elves. His curiosity grew, but he tempered it like a sword dipped in water before hammering; he laid it upon his desk and savored the moment of curiosity, not quite ready to put an end to the sensation just yet.

  He stared at the faded parchment of the letter, sealed by simple wax without so much as a mark to suggest where it had originated. No, it was a simple spot of red, pressed closed by a circle without any identity of its own. It reminded him of himself when he left Saekaj; almost formless in its way, and keeping its secrets, giving away nothing to those who might look for them.

  He had almost resolved to open it and put to death the mystery when the knock sounded at his door. It was heavy and thudding, the sound of strength matched against wood, like a battering ram to a gate. It echoed in his chamber, resonated off the walls and in his ears. He smoothed his robes with tired, wrinkled hands and gathered them about him for the walk to the door. Before he had left, it would have been a simple jaunt, easy. Now his bones protested every step, and his muscles ached. He could not run as he used to, not that he often had before. He was an enchanter, and enchanters were meant to disguise themselves, to hide in plain sight if need be. He did not run, no, not unless he had to, but now, with his aged bones, it felt impossible.

  The weariness was the worst of it. Now he was tired in a way he had not been before he had left, before he had bled out his life’s blood, life’s energy, on those far distant shores, trading his magic to conjure food for a starving people, and trading his life for more magic when that power ran out. He glimpsed himself in the clouded mirror as he passed the full-length glass that stood in the middle of his quarters, and he stopped in shock.

  The vibrancy was leeched from his hair, which was straw-like and withered, and deep wrinkles were stitched in his skin like canyons cut through hard earth. The once vibrant, navy blue flesh of his face was now a shade paler, the furrows and folds those of an old man. J’anda stood, staring, blinking at the unfamiliar face in the mirror, his mouth falling open slightly as he raised a wrinkled hand to his cheek to inspect it by feel. Even his hand was not his own, but at least he recognized it. He looked at it every day, after all.

  The knock at his door sounded again, full of feeling and heavy with urgency. J’anda licked his cracked and dry lips and tried to remember the simplest of glamours. He ran a hand over his face as he struggled with his fatigue. He had been awake for days, and his mind could not concentrate as it once might have. The words did not spring to mind; he came to the second line of the language of his magic and it was utterly gone, as if it were a handful of dust thrown into the wind or a bottle of good wine set before a sumptuous dinner feast.

  The knock came once more, jarring him out of his attempt to remember the spell. “Coming,” he said, pulling himself away from the cruel reflection. There was so much going on; surely it did not matter if he had an illusion on his face. People were in need, after all, in need of help and food and everything else. His face and how it looked was the last of a long line of concerns.

  But for a man whose whole life had been the business of illusions, pulling himself away from that mirror with the job undone was almost an admission of surrender. Surrender to the perils of age that had overtaken him, to the fact that he had given up so much of his life in a land that he had never even heard of before he had gone there.

  And surrender to the idea that keeping up the illusion was perhaps a game for the young, and he no longer had the time to waste on such a trivial thing.

  J’anda opened his door slowly. It weighed more than he remembered, as though his stringy arms had somehow grown weaker in the time since he had left. They probably have, he reflected. I am not what I once was, and I am certainly not aging as gracefully as Curatio.

  As the door swung wide, J’anda found he had to look up—and up—to see the face of his visitor. Black robes wrapped his guest’s mighty frame, and he carried with him a staff with a glowing white crystal at the top.

  “I thought maybe you were trapped in your privy,” Vaste said as he barged past J’anda, giving the enchanter only a moment to step back before entering the quarters. “Or maybe luxuriating in a bath. Can’t have been an easy thing, traveling for a year without any opportunity to bathe yourself.”

  “There were forest streams, and the occasional castle,” J’anda said, surprised by the sudden entry of the troll, unbidden, into his quarters. “There was a waterfall, once, in the mountains, with the most crystalline water coming down from the snowcapped peaks far above. It was … picturesque.”

  “I’m certain it will make a fascinating anecdote in your inevitable travelogue,” Vaste said, stepping over by the bed and clicking his staff against the stones of the floor, head swiveling slowly to look over the room. “Though, I might suggest you hurry and get to writing that if you’re going to.”

  J’anda felt his eyebrow creep upward and did not fight it. “I beg your pardon?”

  Vaste’s dark eyes flickered in the light of the torches hanging in sconces on the walls. “Oh, come off it. Are we truly going to dance around this?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t feel much like dancing at the moment,” J’anda said, drawing the door closed with a gentle click of the mechanism. His eyes drifted back to the mystery of the sealed letter and he found himself suddenly aching with impatience to read it, to break open the seal with a satisfying tear, to hear the crinkle of the yellowed paper and feel its smoothness between his fingers.

  “As well you should not,” Vaste said, immovable, a pillar in the middle of his quarters. “Fine. I’ll just say it, then, since no one else has: J’anda, it doesn’t take the sharpest pair of eyes to see you’ve aged like one of those hole-riddled elven cheeses in your travel.”

  J’anda felt a stillness settle on his bones, a strange quiescence at this truth simply spilled forth like a knocked-over cup, its liquid contents running over stones in a race to find their level. “I can only hope that I am as delicious as one of those cheeses.”

  “I’m sure that many a young man would love to find out,” Vaste said, prompting a slight tremor deep within J’anda. To have it stated so boldly, even in passing, still curdled the blood in his veins even after all these years and far removed from the dangers of his particular brand of deviancy in Saekaj. “But,” the troll continued, “I’m more concerned about the possible effects of this change on your health.”

  J’anda ignored the momentary tremor that the troll’s first comment had prompted within him. More than a hundred years, and I still fear for it to be said aloud. “I feel fine,” he lied.

  “What did you do?” Vaste asked, the troll’s great green head shaking slowly left to right, but not enough to sway his gaze.

  J’anda found himself caught in a great sigh, one that drove home the weariness within him. “Something I do not regret,” he said, and found it to be perhaps the most honest thing he’d said since this peculiar conversation had begun.

  “You’ve killed yourself,” Vaste said quietly. “You’ve drained your days away with magics.”

  “To good purpose,” J’anda said, “but yes.” He looked at the hearth, softly crackling as it appeared to consume a log that no one had thrown upon it. None of the fine ash one would expect from such a thing was within the room, and its gentle orange light radiated out upon them, turning the troll’s skin a lighter shade of yellowish green.

  “Oh, J’anda,” Vaste said, shaking his head slowly. Was there a hint of mournfulness in there, somewhere?

  “Why, Vaste,” J’anda said in surprise, “are you concerned?”
>
  “Yes, I’m concerned,” Vaste said, “I’m concerned that if you die, I’ll be left on the Council with Ryin Ayend, without the required helping of intelligence to counterbalance his all-consuming idiocy.” The troll’s voice was higher than usual by an octave, as though he himself were trying to deny something he could not quite muster the force to make sound sincere. His voice lowered. “All right, fine. I am simply concerned, regardless of any Council idiocy.”

  “I have missed you, my friend,” J’anda said. “But you cannot mourn for me yet.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to mourn you at all,” Vaste said, and for the first time, the troll’s gaze was now downward, to his feet, to the stones on the floor. “You are young—”

  “I am over a century old,” J’anda said, wryly.

  “You are younger than me in the years of your people,” Vaste said, his yellow eyes coming up to regard the enchanter. “You could have lived some nine centuries more, perhaps.”

  J’anda let the words hang in the air for a moment before he replied. “There are many things we could have done in our lives, my friend. Many paths we could take; but only one I have chosen to take. And as I said, I have no regret for it.”

  Vaste’s massive shoulders bore the hint of a slump, a half-moon’s angle between one to the other, broken only by the rise of his mammoth neck out of the middle. It was an unusual look for the troll, whose buoyancy and absurdity were practically hallmarks of his liveliness. The despair hung heavy on him, weight his frame did not need added to it. “First Niamh. Then Terian went round the bend. Alaric … well … and you—” He shook his head. “It’s too much. Just … too much.” He sank back, onto the bed, his robes folding with him as he went. The bed’s frame shifted and strained under the weight, and J’anda fought back the urge to say something in concern for his furniture. “I just don’t know if I can wrap my mind around it all.”