Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four (90 page)

When the reply came, it was filled with amusement. “On this occasion, no. I think there is quite enough going on around us at this point to fill one’s mind with a certain heady sensation, something to make one feel lighter than air. Of course, when one can already become lighter than air with only a thought, it becomes redundant, but … perhaps you get the point.”

“Perhaps not,” Vara said, easing closer to the table from where she stood by the door. “What has happened to you, Alaric? You have never been so … bizarre.”

There was a pause. “I am merely musing. Contemplating what has happened, what has gone before. On who I am, on what I have done—the triumphs and the failures. The failures, I think, are the things upon which I most often dwell, but occasionally I think of the triumphs as well.” He paused. “Time is running out, you know.”

Vara blinked. “For Sanctuary?”

“For all of us.” There was clarity in Alaric’s voice now, a disturbing note that was foreign to his usual tone.

“What do you see?” She took another step in, resting her hand on the back of the nearest chair. Cyrus’s chair, she realized.

“I see much,” Alaric replied, and now the fatigue had bled into his voice. “More than most, less than the gods. Enough to disquiet me. I see that which I want to see, and that which I don’t care to see, and that which no one thinks I can see. All of these things.”

“Is that how you know so much?” Vara asked. “Is that how you’re always so vague and mysterious and all-seeing?”

“I am hardly all-seeing,” Alaric replied. “There are many, many things beyond my sight. For example, I can no longer see … him. He passed beyond my vision when he went across the bridge. Beyond the boundaries.” The Ghost’s hand gestured vaguely in Vara’s direction, and it took a moment for her to realize that he indicated Cyrus’s chair and not her.

“Cyrus?” She stared at him, then the seat. “You could see him? Before he left the shores of Arkaria?”

“I could watch him,” Alaric said, “just as I can watch a great many things whileethereal. But no more, now.”

“How do you do it?” She slid the chair quietly, and it made a screech that to her ears sounded as loud as if someone had scraped wood across stone harshly next to her head.

There was a moment of quiet as the sound of the chair sliding died away. “I suppose it would be asking too much for me to say it is merely magic and have you believe it?”

She thought about it for a moment. “There are things beyond magic in this world, Alaric.”

“There is nothing beyond magic in this world. Only things that you do not understand that you wrongly attribute to being beyond magic.” The shadows seemed to deepen in the room with his answer, as though he had summoned them to wrap him up in a cloak.

“What strains you so?” Vara asked, leaning forward in her seat, trying to see him. “What has you on edge for the first time since I’ve known you?”

There was a pause and a quiet settling over the room like the shadows, draping themselves over everything. Alaric’s answer was calm, measured, and covered over with the same quiet, but layered with deceit, she thought. “Nothing, child.”

“I am hardly a child,” she bristled. “Never before have you condescended to call me ‘child’ even though you knew I was the youngest of my race. You know I don’t care for that appellation and never have, and to apply it now, of all times, you had to know would raise my umbrage and suspicions in equal measure. So what is it, Alaric? Why do you sit here in the darkness, alone, meditating on the idea of leaving this world behind?”

She could almost hear the raising of his eyebrow. “I leave this world frequently; you have seen it many times. The meditation, perhaps, is new to you but not to me, I assure you. As for being alone … are there any of us here that are not so?” She waited as he finished, and could almost hear him add, “my child,” to the end of the question, though it remained unspoken.

“We are not all alone,” Vara said, “there are many among our number who have found companionship with each other, as friends, comrades …” the next words stuck, but finally came loose, “lovers, spouses. So, no, we are not all alone. And most of us do not spend our time considering abilities that we do not have—for example, the power to become insubstantial and watch others as they go about their business.”

There was a shrug from the figure in the shadows. “I assure you it is not as ominous as you make it sound; it actually is quite banal. But to the earlier point, about being alone … well, you are correct, after a fashion. There are friends here, companions, those who guard our gates against the outside world, who watch each others’ backs, find friendly company herein, and more perhaps—love, laughter, all these things. Yet when we leave this world, we do so alone. When we wander through it, much as we might make of having companions there, many of us do not share the load, shoulder the burdens of others. Then again, this should be no great mystery to you … since you have chosen to do so all the days I have known you.”

“I was betrayed,” she said quietly. “It takes a bit of time after that to—”

“I realize.” He was unflinching, she heard it in his tone. “But once you did move past it, you let your fear take hold of you, you acted on it without consideration—”

She laughed, a high, empty sound that was no more real than Alaric when he was transformed into mist. “It feels peculiar that you should lecture me about this.”

There was a quiet in the darkness. “I don’t mean to lecture.” Alaric leaned forward, suddenly, his chin visible through the gap at the jaw of his helm, and he was urgent now. “I only mean to tell you that however long you think your life is, if you go through it alone, it will drag. It will crush you, the weight of it, like a wagon filled to the top with no wheels to carry it on, pulled by a team of old horses. Those things you attribute to others—love, friendship, companionship—these are the wheels that make your passage go easy. True, there are ruts in the road that you would not experience had your wagon no wheels, but that is only because the day-to-day passage of the hours is all rut, all scrape, no smoothness.” The light in the room shifted and illuminated the holes where his eyes were, and she saw they were wild. “You made choices in fear because of what you lost. You threw away everything you had left, and like a fool I said nothing, too wrapped up in my own problems to acknowledge or intervene. But the day has come where you regret what you have done, where you know it was foolish, and yet I know you—and I know pride—and you are the second most prideful and stubborn invidual I have ever met in my long life. I warn you now—cast it aside. Be done with it. Your pride, your fear, is keeping you from the life you might have, is dividing you from all you could want.” He seemed to recede then, pull back in his chair, leaving only his hand stretched out across the table, as though he were reaching out to her.

She sat stiffly upright in the chair, his chair, her head pressed against the wood behind her. Her eyes burned from holding them open, so she let them close, and the darkness was little more than what she had already been looking at. The weight of her armor was more pronounced now that she was settled in the chair, and there was a gaping sound in her ears, a silence; even her breathing was not audible. “I hear your words,” she said. “But it occurs to me, Alaric, in all the years I have been here, that I have never seen you try to do what you encourage me to do now, that you have never moved beyond Raifa—”

“And I tell you this,” Alaric said in a hiss, “so as to steer you around my mistakes. Just as I always have in other areas, now I want to—need to—attend to this last concern.” He waved a hand and the torches flared to life, the hearth came roaring back to fire, and Vara’s eyes snapped open at the glow of orange. “Life does not last forever, unimpeded,” he said, and she saw the blaze in his eyes through the holes of his helm, as though the torches were reflected in them. “Not yours, not mine, not his. You have talked to others of regrets, of the ones you feared should he die first, and I tell you now, as someone who has felt it—I would not have given her up, not cast out her memory or done away with it had I a chance. I embrace the pain for the rest of my days in spite of it and would not wish to be rid of it if the alternative was to have never had it happen at all.” He flinched at his own words. “She was everything to me, Vara, and her loss has haunted me all these years. You say it seems strange to come from me because I live now as though I were dead inside, never moved beyond her. This is true; when she died, a part of me died with her, a part that will never come back to life. But if I had it to do all over, I would do it exactly the same, even if it meant experiencing the pain once more, because the alternative …” he swallowed heavily, “… would be to never have lived at all, truly.” He looked back up at her. “Consider what I have said.” She started to speak, and he waved her off. “Consider it.” With that, his eyes closed, and he began to fade, becoming smoke and mist, which drifted, slowly, out the crack under the door behind her.

The hearth flickered, and so did the torches at the last great rush of air as he left her behind, his presence departing and changing the currents in the room as he did so. She sat there for quite some time, wondering at his words, wondering at his change, and for some time after that … wondering what had prompted such musings on the finite lives of mortals.

Cyrus

The battles were long, the snow was deep and the cold was bitter. Cyrus had come off the front line after just under twenty-four hours; he had fought through the night, slaughtering more of the scourge than he could count. It was midday now, the snows had stopped but the wind blew, causing it to drift, blowing sideways over the flat lands upon which they battled. His nose was cold, frigid enough to feel like it was frozen stiff, but he sat in front of a warm fire now, a mile behind the battle, and heard the sound of the war in the distance.

“This is a peculiar way to fight,” J’anda said in the midday gloom. The clouds hanging over them were meager cover, casting a shroud of grey over everything. The enchanter had bread in his hand, nibbling at it. “I have never been part of a battle so large that it rages while you can leave it behind, take a break, use the latrines, then come back to find it still going.”

“It’s not exactly like anything I’ve ever done before, either,” Cyrus said, Aisling next to him, chewing on the nub of bread she held in her hands. “Can you imagine taking a breather like this in the midst of fighting the Dragonlord? Or the goblins in the depths of Enterra? Or on the bridge in Termina?” He shook his head and sipped from a skin of water that had been filled by Nyad with a touch and a word as he passed, dragging himself off the front line of battle.

“These things are utter madness,” J’anda said, looking to Curatio, who sat next to him, unspeaking, and Terian, who sat idly, not saying anything but staring at his gauntlets. “They throw countless numbers at us, watch them get ground up and die, but throw more yet. I was not exaggerating when I said that I could not determine how they think. There is no guessing, not from what I saw inside the mind of the one I tried to commune with. If our soldier was right, that there is a General of some sort out there, that may be the key.” He looked to Cyrus. “My view was somewhat obstructed, sitting in the back of the lines and of very little use for the first time in my life. Did you see it while you were up there?”

Cyrus thought about it for a minute then shook his head. “I saw something out there, big, but far in the distance. It never got close enough for me to catch much more than a shadow, even in the best light today.”

“I saw it,” Aisling said.

“Me too.” Terian did not look up from his gauntlets.

“Must be nice to have such fine eyesight,” Cyrus said. “What did it look like?”

“Like one of them,” Terian said, waving his hand in the direction of the battle, “but writ large; four legs, walking around like a dragon without wings. It kept low, though, lower than I think it normally would have, like it knew we had archers and it wanted to be low profile. It was out on the edge of sight, and it stayed there during most of the fight.”

“Most?” Cyrus asked.

“It came closer once,” Aisling took over for Terian. “Not much, but a little. At the beginning of the fight, when we got to the front of the line. That’s when I noticed it, when I felt its presence. After that it receded, like it didn’t want to be seen.”

Cyrus chewed that one over for a minute. “You think this thing is the mastermind? The brain of the operation?”

Terian chuckled. “If this operation has any brains other than the ones it eats on the field of battle, yes.”

“What if we made a direct assault at it?” Cyrus asked.

“Sounds like a fine way to lose your body,” Curatio murmured. “Have you seen what happens when these things start to lose any ground? They throw more at you, more of their numbers. Failing that, they hit you on either side, drive back the lines around you so you end up bulged, in a little pocket, sticking out like an arm, Then they winnow it, chopping into the sides at your weakest point until they can surround you; then it is over.” He slapped his hands together and the echoing noise was loud enough to startle Martaina, who had been sleeping nearby, into jumping to her feet, bow drawn and arrow already nocked. “Sorry,” Curatio breathed, and the ranger nodded, replaced the arrow and bow across her chest, and lay back down.

“You don’t think it’s possible to stage an assault on that thing without getting swallowed by the scourge army and destroyed?” Cyrus asked, chewing on a stubbornly hard piece of bread. The grains cracked in his teeth and the yeasty flavor lingered on his tongue. He stook a swig out of the water skin to wash it out.

“I think that you’re talking about trying to storm something alive as though it’s a fortification,” Curatio said carefully. “It moves, Cyrus. Let us assume you managed to cut your way across the field of battle towards it: what’s to stop it from retreating once it realizes what you’re up to? Soon enough you’re on a chase to wherever it leads, which, by the way, is halfway to perdition and with the whole of its army surrounding you.” He angled his head. “Unless you have some idea of how to escape that, which I am unaware of.”