Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (7 page)

Dith wiped the blood away from his upper lip and rode on,
trying to ignore the babbling from the voice in his mind.  Had he known he
would be so cursed––

“Cursed, oh no, no, you’re not cursed, boy.  No, cursed
are those poor sods who laid waste to my keep and found nothing.  I wonder that
their masters even let them live.”

Masters, Dith mused.  Mages of sufficient power to destroy
Galorin, even in an army—an army!—submitting to masters?  What manner of
masters might those be, and what were they seeking?

“Well, I should think it obvious that they were looking for
me.  Not just me, methinks.  Then again, I can’t be certain they knew…”

Knew?  Knew what?

“Oh, stop your prying. You will know what I know when you
need to know and not a moment before.  I’ll not have you distracted, not now. 
Pyran is our first goal and Byrandia beyond that.  Trust that Syon will take
care of itself.  All else, yes, even your lovely dancing Bremondine, is a
distraction.”

Dith frowned slightly.  That the vision mark left an
impression of Galorin in his mind was strange and invasive enough, but for that
impression to invade his private thoughts, especially his thoughts of Gikka,
was a problem.

“I could tell you to stop thinking about her, but I
learned long ago never to tell someone not to think of a sewer rat unless you
want him to think of exactly that.  So if I told you to stop thinking about her
lovely body…  Hah!  I touched a nerve.  Fear me not, boy.  Your private
thoughts are your own, and I will keep myself out of them even if you do not. 
We must work together, and I will do nothing to jeopardize that.”

The Abbey of Bilkar the Furred, Syon
Marketday’s Eve

The smooth polished doors swept closed without a sound
behind the two cerulean blue mantled knights, pushed precisely into place by
several barefoot postulants.  In the stillness that settled over the vestibule
of the abbey, Lady Renda, Knight of Brannagh, found herself questioning yet
again the wisdom of her decision to come to the abbey.

Cardinal Valmerous, late of the temple of Vilkadnazor the
Unshod, was well and truly dead.  He, his cadre of priests…all dead.  Of this
she had no doubt.  She’d stayed in the place she had come to think of as
Pegrine’s Glade, spending a few minutes she was not sure were hers to spend to
see his body reduced completely to ash and to kick those ashes into the wind
and scatter them for eternity.  She’d buried his fire-hardened white teeth
separately in the forest surrounding the glade––a superstitious rite, to be
sure, but she was taking no chances.  At last she’d been satisfied.  The evil
Hadrian cleric was obliterated and could never return.  At the same time, she
had no reason to believe that his mysterious god could be defeated so easily.

Easily, indeed.  She recoiled at the word, and the measure
of her loss threatened to overwhelm her. 

I only wish…it could be over for you, too.

Her heart ached for her niece, Pegrine, a loss as fresh as
it had been just a season ago.  She’d watched helplessly as her family castle
was blasted to pieces before an army of knights and mages allied with Maddock
and his angry mob, and she’d had to ride away. Her mother, Nara, everyone who
had been counting on them to defeat the cardinal and return to lift the siege… 
They were all gone.  There was nothing easy about it.

No.  The seasoned strategist in her heart clung cruelly to
the word, clung to the truth of it, used it to drive off her naked grief with
rage and focus her mind.  Objectively, their victory had been too easy.  Bishop
Cilder had bungled the sacrifice meant to free Xorden and had created Pegrine
undead, but in the process, he’d rendered Xorden’s own altar her sacred place
of death.  Between that and Valmerous’s failure to destroy her in either her
place of life or her place of repose, Xorden must have known He could not
possibly have prevailed in the glade, not against the knights, and certainly
not against B’radik once she was freed.  Perhaps even Valmerous had known, but
judging by the look on his face when he saw Pegrine transformed and B’radik
freed, she thought not.

Still, while His cardinal may have been defeated by one
failed ritual in a glade, she doubted the god Himself would be, certainly not
with any permanence.  This Xorden, this strange Dhanani god, had waited
patiently in exile since the end of the Gods’ Rebellion, somehow, somewhere,
gathering tiny sips of power where He could until He could bind B’radik,
Vilkadnazor and, she feared, many of the other gods besides.  His few priests
had been strong enough to conceal their natures from her and her father, even
under scrutiny, which was no mean feat, although in retrospect, she could not
recall having seen them do much else.  They certainly hadn’t saved the lives of
any of her knights in hospice, she recalled bitterly, not even as part of their
ruse.  So perhaps they were not as powerful as she’d thought. 

In retrospect, of course, it was so obvious.  The battle in
the glade was no more than a diversion––a diversion which had brought five gods
to bear and destroyed the last of the fighting force which had vanquished the
demon Kadak but two years before.  Still…  She swallowed hard.  It was only a
diversion, just like the plague which had left the land bare of hands to farm
it and knights to defend it. 

It had been too easy.

The sickness is only a very small part of what you fight;
it’s meant to keep you from the real battle.

Strategically, she had no choice but to consider Xorden’s
departure a retreat and nothing more, which meant two things.  The first was
that the danger to herself, her father, and what few of their allies remained
grew by the hour, and those allies were now scattered to the winds.  They were
at war again, as surely as they had been when they fought Kadak, and now their
enemy knew the measure of their weakness.  He would wait only as long to bring
the battle to them as it would take to regain His strength and find them. 
Better He should confront them all together than pick them off one by one. 
Second, she was mindful that many of the other gods were likely still weakened
or bound.  How many or which ones, she had no way of knowing, and the thought
sickened her.  She could not count on their help.

B’radik was free, but without Her priests, She would be of
little use.  Renda had to hope that Bilkar, the god to whom this abbey was
consecrated, was free as well.  If somehow the incorruptible Bilkarian monks
had been corrupted after all and the fearsome Bremondine god of winter was
bound, Renda may well have marched her father and herself, two of B’radik’s
only remaining protectors, right into their enemy’s hands. 

The only question was whether she would know before it was
too late.  She hoped so.  She could not afford to be wrong.

Precision, efficiency, simplicity…  Even without His being
bound, the hallmarks of this particular god could work for or against the
knights.  The intolerance for weakness and waste was clear enough, given their
god’s harsh demeanor and demand for self-discipline and strength above all, but
one could never know what they would perceive thus.  Bilkarian priests might
stop to pet a three legged dog but just as calmly snap the neck of a slow
witted child.  Misunderstandings had led to deaths in the past, leading the
Bilkarians to restrict themselves to their abbey for most of the year, which of
course only served to feed the mystery surrounding their order.

Gikka had shared many stories from her youth of all the time
spent living in the temples of various gods, and while she still held a certain
fondness for the followers of Bilkar, even she stepped carefully around them.

In the patchy snow surrounding the abbey, Renda had seen a
few places where the monks had taken what must have been a small deer, where
even the bloodstained snow beneath the fallen animal had been scraped up and
carried inside, not a bit to be wasted.  Other than the tracks of animals in
the snow, she saw nothing, certainly nothing that led her to think anything was
amiss. No stray light, no curls of smoke or sloppily placed footprints betrayed
any obvious corruption.

Then again, Cilder had been B’radik’s bishop long before he
was corrupted by Xorden, and all the other cardinals and priests who had fallen
had likewise started as loyal followers of their gods and knew their orders’
ways.  Was it any wonder, then, that they were able to fool her and everyone
else?  No, she would need to set her assumptions and, more importantly, her
hopes aside to concentrate her energies on examining the priests themselves and
the abbot.

She could second guess herself again and again, but lacking
any other information, she had approached the abbey with the loosely held
assumption that the Bilkarians had not yet succumbed, an assumption so welcome,
so seductive, that she continued to be wary.  Her uncle, Brada, had told her
many times that the lies we want to believe are ever the most difficult to
perceive.  She needed her perception to be clear.

The austerity of the abbey was just as Gikka had described
it to her during the war. The large and unremarkable square keep was all that
remained of an ancient Bremondine castle that had fallen sometime during the
first war between the Bremondines and the Hadrians when Cardon of Brannagh’s
ruthlessness put an end to both sides’ ability to fight, and brought the war to
an end, at least for a while.  The gutted castle and its grounds were given to
the Bilkarians as their sanctuary, and since that day, no sheriff nor knight of
Brannagh had set foot there, not even during the Five Hundred Years War. 
Still, these monks owed their continued existence to the House of Brannagh
following the Bremo-Hadrian Wars, and she hoped they would remember.  She hoped
it would be enough.

The ruins of the outer castle walls had long since crumbled
and vanished into the forest growth, but the keep itself was so well
maintained, it looked as if it might have been built within the last year. 
Inside, the mortar between the stone blocks was almost invisible and perfectly
smoothed beneath the plaster.  The floors were spotless, dry of even the sloppy
wet boot prints she and her father had just tracked in.  The novices had dried
them before padding off down the corridor to fetch the abbot.  She’d seen no
evil about them as they worked, and novices could not deceive as easily as
bishops or cardinals.  She took this as another good sign and bucked up her
courage.

Daerwin of Brannagh leaned heavily on his daughter, cradling
his burned arm.  The last of the salve Chul had given him had done what little
it could against the ongoing burn and worn off long since.  In spite of the
cold, Daerwin’s brow was speckled with sweat, not from fever but from pain
which had all but stolen his wits from him.  “Renda,” he gasped, “Are you sure
this is wise?  Bilkarians…and I am so…weak…”

She looked around them at the empty corridor, fear creeping
in at the edges of her thoughts again.  No one stood between them and the
doors.  She was sure she could lift the bar in a trice, and they could be
away.  Maybe taking the time to seek out the abbey had been a mistake.  They
could be at Windale just after nightfall if they pressed on.  Then again, with
no word from Kerrick since he’d returned to his father’s lands and no idea what
that might portend, it were better to find some help for her father first. 
Without him…  They had already lost so much.  She simply would not consider the
possibility of having to carry on this fight without him.

A slender shadow appeared at the far end of the corridor and
paused for a moment, evaluating, scrutinizing.

“Hush, Father,” she whispered, shivering slightly even
beneath her heavy cloak, brushing a hand lightly over the familiar hilt of her
sword.  “All will be well.”

Presently, the shadow resumed its course and approached them
without any wasted motion.  As his face came into the light, Renda recognized
the hardened Bremondine abbot who yearly brought his barefoot monks down
through the snows to Belen to celebrate the Feast of Bilkar.  They would have
had their celebration tomorrow.  But there could be no celebration this year,
not now.

She looked at the priest carefully, watching the cold
efficiency of his step, the absolute focus in his gaze.  She was always taken
with how young he looked for an abbot, having only a wisp or two of gray mingled
with the rest of his long, dark brown hair, and a few faint lines around his
dark eyes that betrayed his tendency to smile.  But that he was a Bremondine,
she might have thought him closer to her age than her father’s.  As it was, he
might have as much as a century on them both.  She squinted slightly to see his
aura, which was a perfectly brilliant cascade of ice blue tight about his
features that not the slightest bit of his god’s energy might be wasted.  No
sign of corruption.  It was another good sign, but still, she would be
cautious.  She bowed slightly.  “Abbot Laniel, on behalf of my father and
myself, I thank you for taking us in.”

“My Lord Sheriff, Lady Renda,” he smiled in return and
offered his hand to her, which was surprisingly warm in the cool air of the
abbey.  He looked them both over as he spoke.  “We hope you have found
challenge in your path this morning.”

“Challenge, indeed, my Lord Abbot…”  She almost choked on
the ritual words, remembering the events in the glade, “for which we are most
grateful.”

“Then it is already a good day,” he replied with a smile. 
“As to taking you in,” he added, “We of Bilkar owe too much to the House of
Brannagh ever to repay, yet by your grace, this debt is not made
uncomfortable.  Rest assured, we of Bilkar would never turn away those of
Brannagh.”

“For which we are twice grateful.”

Even as she spoke to him, she watched his attention focus in
that curious Bilkarian way on Daerwin’s injury as if the rest of the world,
including her, had vanished from his thoughts.