“We move,” Malpravus said, and the first of his revived army stood around him now, bringing with them the unmistakable smell of death and rot, even though the corpses were fresh. Terian thrust his gauntlet next to his nose, the oiled metal covering only a portion of the stench. “After all,” the Goliath Guildmaster said, still grinning, “it would be a shame to allow all those fresh bodies down there to escape our grasp when our army still has so much more room to grow …” He kicked his horse into motion in the descent, the gleeful look still frozen on his face.
“Move out,” Terian said, swallowing his emotions as he raised his sword, urging them down the hill. He gave one glance back to see Goliath’s forces behind them some ways, at the base of the hill, with the rest of the train of the army. He saw a brigade of trolls that had yet to see combat, their green skin and enormous frames a standout even in the growing dusk. The rest of the dark elven army following them was still waiting, at a distance, letting Terian and his vanguard march with the dead.
He took another look toward the valleys and forests ahead, and mentally calculated. A month, perhaps two. That’s all we have before it’s over. Before we crush the Confederation’s lines of supply and doom them to starvation. He watched Grinnd start down the hill, watched his father go as well, hurrying on to destroy the village of Sarienlass below, and felt a rare dash of horror well up in him.
The Confederation will fall.
Millions will die.
He placed another boot before him, matching the step of his fellow soldiers, catching a sidelong glance from Dahveed, who gave him a knowing look, all humor gone from the healer’s face. He knows. He doesn’t say anything, but he knows.
That this plan—the destruction of the Confederation, the slaughter of all these people … all of this … is almost entirely my fault.
13.
J’anda
J’anda found Curatio in Sanctuary’s Halls of Healing, leather-bound journals spread out before him on a desk that was piled high with spare parchment. There were candles burning on half a dozen surfaces, and night had closed in around them. The healer had a furrow in his brow deep enough to plant with seed, and a hand propping his face up on the desk as he read by the light the flickering wicks provided.
“Most of us simply use torches in sconces,” J’anda said, standing in the doorway tentatively, as though he expected the calm old healer to react violently to his presence. “But you, you do things differently.”
Curatio looked up at him and smiled weakly, his platinum hair practically gleaming in the candlelight. “I am rather older than you; my eyes are weaker and require more light.”
“Somehow I doubt that is true,” J’anda said, taking Curatio’s greeting as invitation to step further into the room. A slightly greasy scent of melting wax lingered in the air.
“Do you come to summon me to Council?” Curatio asked. “For I already know that we are meeting in half an hour, and am simply trying to draw some of my search to a close beforehand.”
“No. I wanted to talk to someone about regrets,” J’anda said simply.
“There is certainly no shortage of members of Sanctuary,” Curatio said, tiredness sketching dark circles under his eyes that J’anda could not recall seeing before, “surely you can find no shortage of regrets among our number.”
“You know as well as I do that most of the members of Sanctuary are but children compared to even my years,” J’anda said. “I suppose we must all seem like flies compared to your span of time.”
“Keeping in mind I have married some of those ‘flies,’ as you put it,” Curatio said with a weak smile, “and not that long ago. People are people, J’anda. One does not march through even a life as short as twenty years without accumulating at least a few regrets. And I daresay there are a few of our younger members, those who have already experienced the general wear of war, who could enumerate a few regrets that might make even an old one such as myself blanch from the telling.”
“I have a great regret,” J’anda said, moving to look out the window just beyond Curatio’s desk. It was open a crack, and the cool night air seeped in. J’anda felt it on his face like he had dipped his chin in a basin of water from the mountains.
“I presume you wish to tell me about it,” Curatio said, patient as always.
“Not really,” J’anda said, looking out the window toward the great curtain wall that surrounded Sanctuary. The cracks and holes that had been gaping in its sides when he had returned from Luukessia only six months past were gone now, replaced with mortar and stone so expertly that he could not even tell where the rents in their line of protection had been. Great watch fires burned atop the wall, and men and women moved back and forth atop it, pacing the lines of their patrols. Always on guard for the dangers that lurk in the night. “But I want your advice on what to do about it.”
“A curious request,” Curatio said, “to ask my advice regarding a problem you will not describe to me. Rather like asking me to strike blindly in a direction of your choosing in hopes I will smite some unseen foe for you.”
“I see the foe clear enough for both of us,” J’anda said, staring out the window, the night breeze rustling his grey hair, “I merely need to know if this is a regret worth spending the waning time I have left to me chasing.”
“What can you tell me, then?” Curatio asked, crisp in the quiet night. “To aid me in helping you to this decision.”
“When I was young,” J’anda said, staring at the movement outside as his eyes followed the natural paths of the patrols, “I was a loyal man of the Sovereignty. Of the Sovereign.” He felt a tinge of shame as he said it. “I went to war for what I thought was good cause, and I fought well enough to help kill many of the enemy.”
“To regret one’s service in war is not surprising, especially if that service was given over to a tyrant such as Yartraak,” Curatio said, and J’anda found himself jerking his head around to look at the healer. “Yes, I know who the Sovereign is.”
“Few do, that are not dark elves,” J’anda said with a whisper. “Even fewer would dare to speak his name aloud. A hundred years ago, I fled his service. I have not yet found the courage in myself to part with his name.”
“What did he do to you?” Curatio asked. “To call into question your loyalties in such a way that you felt cause to flee all you believed in and knew?”
“Something terrible,” J’anda whispered. “But he was not alone in this.”
“Terrible deeds are seldom without accomplice,” Curatio said. “The worst of them practically beg for it, as though they cannot bear to be done alone and quietly.”
“He took everything from me,” J’anda said. “In that moment, he took my belief, my conviction, my pride and my work … and he tore them all away, crumpling them the way one dispenses with the paper covering a gift. He did it all with the smug assurance that he was doing what was best for me.” J’anda felt his impassive mien break into a scowl, the hatred flowing out. “And now, the architect of my humiliation taunts me. He has convinced the Sovereign to imprison a friend of mine for receiving a letter from me. One of the few friends I have left outside of Sanctuary.”
“Is this truly about regrets?” Curatio asked. “Because regrets are things of the past, immutable. This sounds more like current events.”
“My nemesis,” J’anda said, caressing the word as it flowed off his tongue, “invites me to face up to my ‘crimes.’ To come back to Saekaj and plead for mercy for my friend, thinking it will be my end.”
“And would it be your end?” Curatio asked.
J’anda felt the pinch of pride. “I can almost see a way where I could turn toward his, instead.”
“Ahhh,” Curatio said. “So now we come to it. Revenge.”
“I have foresworn revenge,” J’anda said, turning back to the healer, “on so many occasions as to defying the counting of them. I made my life here, and I have been content with it. What passed before was in the past. But this …” His face
tightened, his hatred momentarily given expression, “I do not think I can let this pass any longer.”
“You are in a somewhat unique position as compared to me,” Curatio said, his face a thin mask; something waited beneath it, but J’anda could not quite determine what it was. “I have nothing but time.” He stretched a hand over to idly flip a page of the nearest journal and scanned the flowing words written therein as he considered what to say next. “Yet still, I hasten to resolve events for fear that the touch of unanticipated death could be at my back at any moment. A fear I suspect you are becoming more intimately acquainted with by the day.”
“It is always on my mind now,” J’anda said. “I do not know how long I have—”
“No man does, truly,” Curatio said. “Nor woman, either.”
“But I know the limits to my days are shorter than they were a year ago,” J’anda said, “and by considerable margin. I suspect I could live another five years at most; and probably much less.”
“It should not change how you live your life,” Curatio said quietly, “and yet I fear it must. Do you want revenge?”
“I want to help my friend,” J’anda said. “I want …” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Perhaps I do want the satisfaction, but I have been too much of a coward to risk my life … until now, when there is little life left to risk.”
“A terrible conundrum,” Curatio agreed, “and a choice I would not want to face. Still, and all—”
A knock interrupted them, and J’anda’s eyes fell to the door, where Thad, a warrior in armor of red, stood, looking embarrassed at interrupting them. “Sorry, gentlemen,” he said in his low, guttural accent, “but your meeting is about to begin.”
“Thank you, Thad,” Curatio said, allowing the briefest smile. It faded as soon as the warrior disappeared out of the door, and the healer suddenly looked more tired than ever.
“You look like you are reaching your end,” J’anda said.
“What?” Curatio asked, looking up, eyes weary. “I don’t sleep much these days.”
“Because of Vidara?” J’anda asked carefully, waiting to see what response he might get.
“Because of many things,” Curatio said, his lips thinly pursed. “Because of the guild, the weight it places upon my head. Because of this search—” His face pinched with pain, and he thrust a hand forward, knocking the nearest volume off his desk with barely concealed anger. “This fruitless, pointless search.”
“Curatio—” J’anda said, surprised at the level of vehemence the usually calm healer had put forth.
“She is dead, did you know?” Curatio asked, staring sullenly off into the distance, the candles casting a gold aura on the walls of his chamber. “Vidara, I mean. The Goddess of Life, in death’s embrace.” His mouth twisted down in disgust and fury.
“Are you certain?” J’anda asked. “You haven’t said anything in Council—”
“No, I am far from certain,” Curatio said, maintaining his frown and adding a strain of petulance to his reply. How peculiar, J’anda thought, to see him thus. “If I were certain, I would not waste my time doing this, I would be devoting it entirely toward finding the guilty party and going at them with all I have.” He reached down and grasped at a mace next to his desk, brandishing it as he stood. “But I have no answers in this. All I have is pressure and fury, and nowhere to direct them.” He looked up at J’anda, with his lips still an uneven line. “You wish my advice? Get your revenge, while you can. Settle your affairs, especially as pertains to such unrepentant shits such as Yartraak and his various minions. If you can make a hole in their bellies and want to, do so, and I would gladly add my hand in aid, should you need it.” With a flick of a button, two-inch spikes burst forth from the ball of the mace. “For life is too short, even in my existence, to continue letting those dedicated to its destruction to draw precious air while they extinguish it everywhere they find it growing.”
14.
Terian
The keep ahead was called Livlosdald, but no matter how many times Terian tried to pronounce the human word, he couldn’t quite seem to say it the way Malpravus did. “Live-los-dolled?” he asked.
“Live-los-dalld,” Malpravus said, gently correcting him. They were both on horseback, somewhere in the middle of the growing army. The latest counts had put it at fifty thousand strong, many of them recently dead humans who had been bent to Malpravus’s will. Terian tried not to think about that as the horse’s gait dipped him left and right with each step. It was enough to make him nauseous without the aid of the motion. “It is the gate to the Northlands, the single most important keep from here onward.”
“But no pressure,” Terian said, surveying the troops before them with a serious air. They had the smell of the dead, the rancid scent of rotting flesh and purged bowel. Many of them had come from the graveyards of the towns that they had passed in addition to the fields of slaughter they’d left in the cities and towns along the way. The rest had been dark elven dead recently repatriated from the Reikonos front. “I’ve looked at the diagrams our scouts have provided of Livlosdald keep; it shouldn’t be difficult to break.”
“I don’t expect it will be,” Malpravus said, eyes narrowed, “but our presence in these places has surely been communicated to Pretnam Urides in Reikonos by now. I expect reinforcements, though I doubt they will arrive in time.”
“He doesn’t have much to give,” Terian said. “He could pull them from Reikonos, leaving their capital open to our continued assaults, or he could try to marshal the men of the north—”
“Many of whom are already at arms around Reikonos,” Malpravus said thinly, “or now part of our army.” He smiled.
He doesn’t even care what he’s doing. Terian withheld a shudder and kept his tongue from saying what he might have otherwise. I am among my enemies. I have no options left but to keep my thoughts to myself, lest my parents and Kahlee bear the brunt of my opinions.
“You should be smiling,” Malpravus said with a grin. “Our successes in this campaign and the one taking place in the Riverlands right now are all down to your urging.”
“It doesn’t take much to win with a vastly superior force at your disposal,” Terian said, looking off to the woods at his left. “I think I was more in my element before, when we were outmatched.” Of course, I wasn’t in control then. General Grennick still had strategic command of the armies then—before he lost his head.
“I can read your thoughts,” Malpravus said smoothly. “You fear the newfound position you are in. You fear you will come to the same end Grennick did for his failure.”
“Some failure will happen,” Terian said, trying to find a thought to soothe him, “that’s a definite. We just don’t know the when and the how of it, but it will happen. We have so many enemies that it would not surprise me if one of them managed to score a victory against us even in our strengthened state.” He shook his head. “No, I’ve laid all the groundwork I could with the Sovereign on that. I just hope that after Grennick’s miserable failures, he’ll find room in his heart for one or two from me.”
“I suspect after some of your initiatives begin to bear fruit,” Malpravus said, skeletal hands on the reins of his horse, “there will be currency aplenty for trade in failures, should one come. And we have certainly begun to build—”
A cry from ahead drew the attention of both of them, causing Terian to snap his head around immediately. What’s this? An officer appeared a moment later, one of the living ones, tromping back to where Terian and Malpravus rode two ranks back from the front of the marching column. “Report, Lieutenant,” Malpravus said.
“Holes on the sides of the road,” the lieutenant said, his eyes low, as though the topography were somehow his fault. “Look to have been dug.” He hesitated. “Like traps.”
“They know we’re coming,” Terian mused, adjusting his helm with a clank of his gauntlet against the metal next to his ear.
“It will not help them,” Malpravus said. “Go on
, Lieutenant. Narrow the columns. Keep us on the road.”
“Aye, sir,” the lieutenant said, bowing his head and retreating, probably grateful to still have said head.
“We haven’t heard from our scouts in a while,” Terian said, pondering it. “We’re … what? Three miles out?”
“Something of the sort,” Malpravus said, his lips a narrow line.
“I think we should put the trolls up front,” Terian said.
“Agreed,” Malpravus said, nodding. “I will also have Goliath’s ranks moved up in the line, remove some of the cannon fodder so that we can more aggressively respond to any army that happens to be there.” He smiled, and it was an eerie sight. “Of course, when they see their own dead start to rise against them, it will probably do the trick.”
Terian inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment as he gave the order to have the troll brigades brought to the fore. He barked and heard his command carried off to the waiting ears of the officers. Trollish grunts of acknowledgment reached his ears from their positions in the back, their enthusiasm obvious. We’ve kept them out of the fight long enough to give them an appetite for it, I think.
“General Lepos,” a voice came from his side, and Terian turned to see a dark elf clad in the green of a ranger slip out of the woods to his right. He almost pulled his horse toward the woman, but stopped himself at the last second.
“What is it?” he asked as the ranger approached, her navy skin a clash against the forest-green cloak she wore to conceal herself when scouting.
“There’s an army ahead,” the scout reported.
“As we suspected,” Malpravus said, sniffing. “Do you know who this army is?”
She nodded her head, but the eyes would not rise. “Anyone would, sir. It’s the Army of Sanctuary.”
Sanctuary 5.5 - Fated in Darkness Page 9