Ghosts of Sanctuary

by Robert J. Crane

  “As strange as we may sound,” Alaric said, “and as strange as some us may be—”

  “He’s talking about you, you know,” Vaste said, elbowing Vara. She shot him a scathing look. “What? You sleep with a seven-foot tall human in black armor with a pathetically underwhelming arse. Some elven icon you are.”

  “She sleeps with someone a whole city worships,” Cyrus said smugly. “Beat that—troll.”

  “You don’t know what you’re getting into,” Shirri said, raising her voice at last. “If you do this—it won’t end with just getting my mother back.”

  Alaric still smiled. “I expected not.” He wheeled his attention to Cyrus. “General?”

  Cyrus took a quick breath. He was ready for this. “If this Machine is what you say it is, we’ll need to roll across their operations in this part of the city quickly to prevent any sort of response. It’s a little like conquering a whole map in one night—I assume they’re entirely headquartered here in Reikonos, nothing outside the gates?”

  Shirri made a very strange face. “No. There’s nothing outside the gates.”

  “We need to at least overwhelm their entire presence in this area,” Cyrus said, “but if we could, I’d recommend we hit everything they have in the city. Every office, every building—we treat it like a war to be won, and we take it to them without mercy. No survivors to let them know what’s coming, just a straight up attack on their forces and outposts until we find our objective.”

  “I might have some qualms about the ‘no survivors’ bit,” Alaric said stiffly, “making allowances for any secretaries or other non-combatants we find in these places—”

  “If this criminal enterprise is what she says it is, Alaric,” Cyrus said, trying to hold back a little, “they’re aiding and abetting slavery, forced prostitution, general thuggery, and who knows what else. Anyone who dabbles in that is hardly innocent.”

  “Perhaps not,” Alaric said, “but neither does it make them subject to summary execution at the edge of our blades. You may kill all those who raise a weapon against you, but to strike down the unarmed and surrendering—”

  “Aye,” Cyrus said, burying his further objections. They welled within him, along with perfectly good arguments—There is no justice in this city, they have committed great offenses against the weakest—but he held them in his heart and they did not pass his lips. “But we need to be prepared, then, for a reprisal—and much sooner than we might have otherwise see.”

  “Any reprisal they sit fit to levy, we shall both endure—and cram back down their throats as though they were our own blades.” Alaric paused. “Which is likely to happen, us burying our blades in them.” Vaste cleared his throat, and then waved the head of his staff. “Or whatever you carry,” Alaric conceded.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Shirri muttered.

  “Do you have objections?” Alaric asked.

  Shirri just stared at him. “Yes. I have objections. I have worries, concerns, fears—I have all of those.” She bit her lower lip. “But I also have a mother who’s been taken by these criminals, and so I have no hope left … save for you.” Cyrus detected an insult she bit back at the last. “So …” She gestured with an extended arm down the street. “Shall we?”

  “Let us,” Alaric said, and they began to walk once more.

  “I have a question,” Vaste said, coming up alongside Shirri now, “oh, expert of our day. What ever happened to the trolls?”

  Shirri looked at him, most peculiarly. “A … what?” She stared, then seemed to get it. “Oh. Is that what you are?”

  “What do you think I am?” Vaste asked. “Never mind. You have no idea, do you?”

  “I haven’t been outside Reikonos,” Shirri said, and here Cyrus detected a hint of self-consciousness. “But I’ve never heard of anything that looks like you.”

  “What about the goblins?” Vara asked. Shirri stared at her blankly. “The gnomes? The dwarves?”

  “I … there are some from other lands,” Shirri said. “Dwarves, I mean. And gnomes, I guess? Small people, about yea tall?” She held a hand to her knee, then raised it to her waist. “And dwarves?” When Vara nodded, she said, “I’ve seen some of them, coming in on ships from Coricuanthi and Imperial Amatgarosa and Firoba, but …” She shrugged. “If there were any on Arkaria, I don’t know of them.”

  “This is clearly Vara’s fault,” Vaste said gravely.

  “My fault?” Vara asked, giving him a vicious look. “Explain.”

  “After you died, the elves were so grieved that they decided to wipe out your most hated foe—the gnomes,” Vaste said. “And after they had accomplished that small task—”

  “Har har,” Curatio said.

  “—their bloodlust could not simply be sated by going home and chewing on vegetables, as your kind does for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. No, then they must have widened their war, and the dwarves, goblins, and even the trolls surely felt their ancient and pointy-eared wrath.”

  There was a second’s pause, and Shirri said, “That’s not—”

  “A most illuminating speculation,” Vara said, “and just as delusional as any descriptions of your arse that don’t include the words ‘fat,’ ‘oblong,’ and ‘a waste of space.’”

  “See?” Vaste said, pointing at her. “Elves are unrelentingly vicious.”

  “What about Saekaj Sovar?” Alaric asked, a tightness in his voice.

  “Yes, Alaric is worried about his progeny, the Lepos clan,” Vaste said.

  “It’s … still there,” Shirri said, frowning. “Tough to believe, I know, but at least a quarter of the ships that come through Reikonos come from there.”

  Something about what she’d said prickled Cyrus’s ears. “Why did you say that it’s tough to believe Saekaj is still there?” he asked, drawing in a deep breath. Despite their recent feast, the smell of fresh bread from a nearby bakery was making him hungry again.

  Shirri just stared back at him, skepticism drenching her features. “Come on. Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

  “Of course we know,” Vaste said grandly, “it’s why we’re asking you stupidly basic questions about the shape of the world; we desire to make ourselves look like fools in front of a near total stranger who is already using us to rescue her mommy. It’s the only way to spend your days, striking down gangsters in back alleys and then asking elementary questions of the people you save, trying to convince them that you’re long dead adventurers from better days, back when people weren’t so starved for meaning in their lives that they’d be driven to worship empty heads of cabbage mounted on a set of black armor.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I knew,” Cyrus said, ignoring Vaste’s fusillade. “You’ve said a few things that have left me wondering—you mentioned the gates haven’t been opened in a thousand years; that this Machine has nothing outside Reikonos’s walls.” He let his eyes wander. “Everything else is so built up in here … I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t have expanded the city outside the walls by now, given how crowded it seems to have become. And then you talk about … these other races that are simply … gone from these lands.” Cyrus stared at her, watched the suspicion cloud her small face. “What has happened here? This obvious thing you think we know?”

  She watched him for a moment, still as a statue, then gave a light snort. “You are a fine thespian.”

  “My swordplay is no act,” Cyrus said, “and neither is my demeanor now. Answer me—and tell the truth. What lies beyond the gates of Reikonos? What happened in the land beyond that would make Saekaj’s survival … unbelievable?”

  She stared at him, her eyes slightly wider. “Truly, you don’t know?” They narrowed just a little. “You don’t just take me for a fool?”

  “I take you for a person who seeks aid,” Cyrus said, trying to keep hold of his thinning patience. “This is my price. Now answer me.”

  “Fine, then,” she said, shifting her gaze to her toes. “You ask what is beyond the gates
? A moat—hundreds of feet wide, and deep, too.” Shirri looked up. “And no way across it, save to swim.”

  A grinding, worrying feel crawled into Cyrus’s guts, a thin trickle of worry like a thread being spun stronger. “And … beyond that?” Reikonos never had a moat before … to dig such a thing would be … an undertaking of gargantuan proportions … why would they …?

  She did not speak for a long moment, studying him as though pressing to see if some facade would break, and he would laugh, confessing to trying to trick her. He did not, and after long seconds, she answered. “What waits beyond is … death, of course. For any who are thrown over and choose to swim rather than drown. Death waits beyond, in all the lands between the River Perda and the Sea to the east. Death that came—supposedly in the days after you left.” Disbelief was audible in her voice. “Came across the lands like a sweeping plague, devouring all life swept before it. A horde, a grey-skinned horror that came from out of the mountains northeast—”

  “No,” Cyrus whispered, his mouth suddenly quiet dry.

  “Damn,” Alaric said, bowing his head.

  “It can’t be,” Curatio said, looking quite stricken.

  “Torrential, uncontrollable shits,” Vaste said, his deep green paling by several degrees into a near grey.

  “No, I don’t jest …” Shirri shook her head. “They are out there, still, waiting—in case an airship crashes, and they occasionally do, losing all hands, should those things reach them before a rescue ship can … They wait beyond the moat, afraid to cross, as they have for the last thousand years … this eternal enemy … this …”

  She started to say the name, but Cyrus raised his voice, and they spoke as one:

  “Scourge.”

  13.

  Cyrus’s world spun around him, vertigo creeping into his head like a titan had bound him to a giant maypole and flung him in the air. His nose filled with the scent of fear, like blood, and it pounded through his veins and in his head, throbbing beneath the temple. He could almost taste the vile stink of putrid death coming from the east, over the horizon, as he would have thought of it, but it was not just east, and it was not over the horizon—

  It was close. It was just beyond the gates.

  Cyrus’s legs felt suddenly weak, as though bordering on collapse. A stone seemed to have formed in the center of his chest where his heart had been. Oh, it still pulsed in there, but now it was weighted, threatening to drop into his belly, into the bile that churned there. He put his face in his hand and, distantly, he could hear Vara say his name, feel her touch him on the shoulder.

  “Dammit,” he said, the world faded in sound around him. The distant buzz of some herd creature had stilled and he was left with a question that boiled out. “How did they get from Luukessia to here?”

  “The same way the Protanians originally reached Luukessia to kidnap me,” Alaric said, next to him now, and speaking in a slow, soothing voice. “There is a land bridge that connects north of Fertiss to the very northern portions of Syloreas. Indeed, I myself encountered the Protanians for the first time around the place where I believe you first met the Scourge.”

  “Pinrade,” Curatio said, looking quite pale. “That was the name of the place.”

  “In my day it was Pinradeonage,” Alaric said, “but yes … I expect that was the place. Beyond it lay a few further villages, after which it became entirely too cold for a human to survive long, even in the summer. But a Scourge …”

  “They must have showed up after we left,” Cyrus said. “Worked their way through the cold lands … and … fallen upon Arkaria …” His voice sounded otherworldly, from some other plane of existence beyond this, it was so faded and hoarse. He looked to Shirri. “And they got … all the lands? From the sea of Carmas to—”

  “To the river Perda,” Shirri said, surprisingly calm. Didn’t she realize what this meant? How they had destroyed—

  “They must have destroyed the bridges on the Perda,” Curatio said.

  “And Reikonos?” Vara asked. She, too, seemed paler, but composed. “How does it still stand?”

  “The Lord Protector enlisted every man and able woman and child into service once the Scourge arrived and began to sweep across the lands like a blight,” Shirri said, still looking at them all as though they were simpletons for not knowing this. “They began outside the main gate, anything that could be used as a shovel was to be used. And they dug a trench moat, spreading in either direction from that point, deep as a river, until finally they hit the ocean—”

  “He had them build a moat,” Cyrus said in quiet awe. “Around the entirety of the city. That must have taken … astounding resources.”

  “Every person available,” Shirri said with a shrug. Plainly this was just dead history to her. “Using discarded boards and old axes and their hands if they had nothing else. A trench in a ring around the city. They called it the Miracle of Reikonos.” When everyone stared at her, she seemed to take it as a prompt to go on. “Because while every other city west of the Perda fell, Reikonos stood.”

  “But Saekaj Sovar—” Alaric said.

  “Like I said, it’s there. I guess they barricaded themselves in for a while, and somehow now they have a tower from which to launch airships.” Shirri shrugged. “I don’t know how that happened or how it works, but … they have one. And it keeps out the Scourge, I guess.”

  “Brother …” Alaric said, putting a hand on Cyrus’s other left shoulder, while Vara had one on his right. “We all share blame for this.”

  “Indeed,” Curatio said, voice scratchy and hollow. “We are all culpable in our own ways.”

  “Our actions are directly responsible for—” Cyrus cut short his thought. “It was bad enough when it was Luukessia, but now our … our sins have come home to Arkaria and …” His stomach tightened and for a moment he thought he might vomit.

  “There is no act without some consequence,” Alaric said. “Every move we make carries the seed of some further tree of action in the future. And when you deal with undertakings such as ours, to cleanse the land of gods, the consequences can be … unforeseeable.”

  “My failures,” Cyrus said, “are innumerable, and the consequences so vast and blighted as to beggar belief.”

  “Yes,” Vaste said, “they truly are. How did you get promoted to god again? Talk about failing your way to the top.”

  “These were not your actions alone,” Alaric said.

  “I struck at him, Alaric,” Cyrus said. “I—”

  “You did not strike at him at all, in fact,” Alaric said.

  “You shoved me out of the way and stood in my place to be struck down,” Vara said calmly. “If anyone bears fault in this, it is Mortus for trying to murder me, not you for trying to sacrifice yourself in my stead.”

  “While I would blame myself for not shoving you out of the way first,” Curatio said. “Or taking your place.”

  “And I bear the blame because I should have seen Mortus coming and hurried our evacuation,” Alaric said. “Bellarum later admitted to manipulating him into leaving their meeting in his realm early, simply to spite us and drive him into our path. A bit more alacrity on our parts—or even perhaps a little more begging and humility on mine—and we might have walked free from that place.”

  “I, on the other hand, was a perfect saint,” Vaste said, “at least, compared to all you blame-shifting fools who decided to war with a god. I came to the aid of my friends in their hour of need and helped strike down an evil son of a bitch who imprisoned countless souls after death to the point that once he shuffled into death they all came screaming in rage at anyone who moved.” He examined his clawed fingernails. “Why, I’m a damned hero, helping to free Arkaria from the yolk of false gods who tried to grind the land under their boot for ten thousand years. Too bad no one remembers me that way.”

  “Vaste has a point,” Alaric said.

  “Damned right he does,” Vaste said, then lowered his voice to whisper, “Hero,” while pointi
ng at himself.

  “If Mortus hadn’t built his power on imprisoning the souls of the dead, none of this would have happened,” Alaric said. “While we had our own role in his death, it was hardly for us to predict what would happen afterward.”

  Something about that sat badly with Cyrus, but when he saw Vara and Curatio nod, he decided not to argue—for now. “Perhaps,” he allowed. “It just …” He closed his eyes, still stinging under the weight of emotion that welled up every time he thought of those grey-skinned, rotting things. “It’s hard not to believe that we had a hand in making this mess.”

  “We did,” Alaric said softly, “and we will do all we can to make right our mistakes—if indeed we made one. I cannot justify the consequences of what we have done … but neither could I justify letting the land of Arkaria sit under the yolk of the gods. Bellarum moved us all into these positions and cared little for the consequences. Now he is gone, and the consequences are ours—and we shall deal with them. But first—” And he turned to Shirri. “There is a more immediate need for our help right now.”

  Shirri blinked a couple times. “Oh … are you all done with your … history lesson? Debate? I don’t really know what you’re doing here, honestly.”

  “We’re girding ourselves for a tea party with your mother, obviously,” Vaste said. “And if she’s as cheerfully lovely as you, girding is going to be necessary.”

  Shirri blinked, taking a slight step backward. “I’m not—I mean, I’m … nice.”

  “I’m sure you’re a perfectly wonderful person under normal circumstances—” Alaric started.

  “You’re self-involved enough to make our living god over here look humble in contrast,” Vaste said, pointing at Cyrus. “No mean feat, that.”

  Cyrus felt a low growl begin in the back of his throat. “Will you leave me out of your insults for once? Perhaps you’re so flighty and empty of skull that the consequences of our actions past carry no weight, but I, for one—”

  Vaste sighed loudly enough to interrupt Cyrus. “Oh, it’s to be this way, is it? Fine. Fine. I believe there’s a hero—and a villain—in all of us.”