Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7) (18 page)

When he was finally ready, they rushed down the stairs. Vara easily outpaced him, aided by the mystical nature of the enchantments on her armor. Cyrus clung to the grip of the morning star with his left hand and increased his speed enough so as not to be left completely behind by her. Their metal-booted feet clanged, the sound echoing through the central tower’s immense staircase as they hurried down.

“We should learn Falcon’s Essence,” Vara said, under her breath. “Perhaps Larana could teach us. It would make descents quite a bit easier; all we would need to do would be to open the balcony and run.”

“I’ll put that on my list,” Cyrus said tautly. “Though I admit, learning illusions is one of my priorities at the moment, now that I’ve got a good start on wizarding spells from Mendicant.”

“I find ‘return’ to be quite a boon, personally,” Vara said. “I had long wondered why paladins and dark knights were the only spellcasters who did not receive the use of that particular gem of the craft.”

“It would make armies too mobile,” Cyrus said, and when she looked at him in surprise, he elaborated. “Think about it—the ability for troops to move themselves swiftly from one point to another? It makes them less reliant on other spellcasters. Troops could defend two separate places almost at once. The power of an army would grow exponentially.”

“Only if they had countless knights rather than the handful produced each year from each of the two Leagues that is responsible for them,” she murmured, but he sensed her thoughts running away with her. “It also assumes that every member of said army could use spells,” she went on after a moment’s thought. “Clearly this is not so. Even now, even knowing the words to the spells, our warriors and rangers, with the apparent exception of you, with your mother’s magical blood, still cannot cast a spell.”

“True enough,” Cyrus said as they reached the bottom of the stairs and hurried across the foyer and out the doors. The starry night above them shone like a shimmering black tapestry made of silk and punctured with tiny holes, a torch shining behind it. They climbed the stairs at the wall nearest the gate, where a knot of troops was gathered, staring over the parapets.

Scuddar and Calene waited for them, along with Menlos and a dozen other guards, all of them alternating nervous looks over the wall and then back down it, seemingly afraid to take their eyes off the perimeter for fear of breach.

“What is it?” Cyrus asked before he reached the edge. He strode forward before the answer came, the wall’s guardians stunned into silence as he reached the nearest crenellations and looked out, Vara in the next gap to his. Cyrus stuck his head out carefully, as though an arrow might come launching at him. It didn’t, and in the faint moonlight he saw but a single figure standing before the gate, a shadow in the dark of knight. “Another messenger?” he asked.

“Of a sort,” Scuddar said in a low voice. “Light, please.”

Guards above the gate extended torches out of the crenellations and the light shone down on the messenger. Cyrus made a small gasp of disgust as the orange fire lit rotted features, exposed bone, and glazed, white eyes in the dark figure.

“Gods, it’s a wendigo,” Cyrus said.

“No,” Scuddar said, shaking his cowled head. “It is a corpse.”

Cyrus frowned and stuck his head out of the crenellations again. He peered down at the thing standing expectantly before the gate. It
was
a corpse, he realized, a dead body of some sort, putrefied enough that the smell wafted up at him. “I’m not used to seeing the dead walk of late, I suppose,” Cyrus muttered. “But you’re right. That’s …”

“Necromancy,” Vara said with a disgust of her own.

“It’s a gift, really,” came Malpravus’s voice, high and hissing, from the corpse’s mouth. Its white eyes glowed now as it looked up at Cyrus. “You of all people, dear boy, should know the value of a good display of power.”

“Your power doesn’t impress me, Malpravus,” Cyrus called down to the vessel waiting below.
That thing is a mere conduit for him to annoy us, just a means for him to reach out and extend the sound of his voice to our ears.
“It never has and it never will.”

“I hear there are dead,” Vaste’s voice said from behind Cyrus, the sound of his footsteps echoing on the topmost steps. He thumped his way over to Cyrus’s right and leaned out of the crenellations. “Well, shit. That thing’s dead all right.”

“It’s Malpravus,” Cyrus said.

“If only,” Vaste said with longing. “I’d exorcise his bony arse right now and this thing would be all over except for the crying. Well, the crying and Amarath’s Raiders, the Elven Kingdom, and the Human Confederation.”

“Plus all his assorted and annoying lieutenants,” Vara added.

“Maybe they’re all secretly dead puppets,” Vaste said.

“No one is dead in my armies,” Malpravus’s voice rose from the decomposing corpse. “Your friend Terian—he made sure that those forces of mine did not survive the war. A tragic waste, of course, but so it goes. Now I have new armies at my disposal, new allies—but you know all that.” The corpse lifted a hand, and clutched within it was another lock of dark hair, shining from the moon above. “I have many means at my disposal. Many … threads … to pull.”

“What did you do with Imina?” Cyrus asked, a cold chill unrelated to the winter’s night shivering down his back.

“She is safe,” Malpravus replied, and Cyrus could all but hear the smile in his voice. “For now. Much like yourself, though, her position grows more precarious by the day.”

“He’s going to offer you a very bad deal,” Vaste said in a whisper. “Whatever you do, don’t be stupid and accept it. You know the value of his word is less than that of a letter from Terian to Pretnam Urides.”

“I agree with the troll,” Vara said, “Malpravus is a liar. If you gave yourself up in hopes of saving Imina, you would find yourself beside her in death.”

Cyrus took a slow breath, and the truth sank in with the chill. “I know.”

“Come out, Cyrus,” Malpravus’s voice called. “I will offer you the same opportunity that Pretnam Urides did, with an additional benefit—your former wife will be returned, safe and sound, minus only a few locks of hair.”

“It seems to me that doesn’t settle your problem, Malpravus,” Cyrus called down to the corpse, which shuffled forward a step. “Because it’s not just me that the Leagues want now. It’s at least the entire Sanctuary Council, and you haven’t asked for them.”

“I remain unconcerned with the chaff,” Malpravus said. “I wish to harvest the wheat.”

“Oh, that’s charming,” Vaste sniffed. “I’ll have you know I’m at least twice the wheat of this man.”

“Come now,” Malpravus said. “You must know how desperately fenced in you are. No matter how many meetings you take trying to stir up allies, you will find yourself in the same pen, like an animal, the reins growing ever tighter, until the slaughter comes. At least now you can meet it at the hour of your choosing rather than wonder and worry for all the rest of your days.”

“Maybe you should be the one to worry, Malpravus,” Cyrus said calmly.

“Dear boy,” Malpravus said, the corpse gaping at him with a deathly grin, “I have denuded you of almost all your forces. My good friend Mathyas Tarreau took half your remaining number only last night. You have nine hundred and thirty-two remaining members of your guild in Sanctuary. Your friends the Luukessians are rightly guarding their own lands from reprisal by the elf king. Your friend the Sovereign finds himself in the same predicament, though I do not think he realizes how much his own realm would suffer from the armies of Reikonos marching upon his borders. And you and your pitiful remnant sit here, stewing in your own fear. It is like a rot, a putrefaction. With every month that passes, you will see more of the soft flesh peeled off until all that is left is the bone.” The corpse extended a rotted hand, nothing but ivory knuckles remaining of the limb. “And I think you know … rotted flesh and exposed bone is my servant, not yours. Sanctuary will die, and I will own its corpse.”

The chills prickled up and down Cyrus’s neck. “I don’t think so,” he said, filled with defiance. “Vaste?”

“You’re not the only one who exercises control over death, you prick,” Vaste said and extended a hand. With a flash of white, the corpse glowed, and then tumbled to the ground in pieces, the power of the necromancer expelled from it.

Into the quiet night, Cyrus pushed back from the wall, his teeth gritted and bared, his cold fury turned hot.

“Are you all right?” Vara asked, seeing him as she brought her head back inside as well.

“He looks well, actually,” Vaste said, flexing the massive hand he’d just cast the spell with. “Better than I’ve seen him in some time. More … certain.” The troll’s eyes flashed with extra meaning.

“I am certain,” Cyrus said, feeling as though his very spine had been reforged of quartal.
There is no doubt now.

We must destroy them.

“Think it over, dear boy,” came a voice from over the wall, drawing Cyrus and the others to look back out. Vara gasped as she stuck her head out the teeth of the wall.

The plains were dotted with corpses. A dozen, two dozen, more—stood, spread evenly across the ground before the walls, wide gaps between them. Their heads were tilted at odd angles, their shuffling steps making a soft noise through the grass.

“There must be … hundreds of them,” Vara said quietly.

“Consider my offer,” the corpses said in unison, Malpravus’s high voice echoing with mirth in a perverse chorus. “Before it becomes … too late.” A soft cackle crowed over the plains outside the walls of Sanctuary, causing that tingle down Cyrus’s back to reverberate even stronger.

We must kill them all.

However we have to.

Because our enemies … will strike at everyone we care about.

They will raise the dead to get at us.

There is no other choice.

We must kill them all.

Cyrus stared at the list in his hand, names upon parchment, written in clean strokes but blotched from haste. It had a distinct aroma about it, the deep scent of the ink, the rough smell of the parchment. Sniffing deeply, he remained unsure which fought harder for his attention. He knew only the urgency with which he read the names, over and over again.

Lady Voryn of the Emerald Coast

Lord Merrish of Traegon

Karrin Waterman—Governor of the Riverlands

Allyn Frost—Governor of the Northlands

Reynard Coulton—Governor of the Southern Reaches

“I would add Isabelle to that,” Vara said, staring at the smudged list. “As well as … perhaps Cora. Amti’s disdain for King Danay would mesh well with our efforts.”

“Cattrine has already spoken with them,” Terian said, standing in the shadows next to Cyrus. He smiled. “They’re most definitely in for whatever gets Danay out of their business.”

“Isn’t this exciting?” Vaste asked, rubbing his enormous hands together. It was only a day removed from their encounter with Malpravus’s undead messengers at the walls, and the troll had spent a long morning out on the plains, exorcising old corpses and having them piled up in a great pyre and burned while a bevy of archers watched them from the walls. There had been other dead lurking farther from the wall than Cyrus had wished to chance sending forces out, and they had remained there, watching. “Finally, we’re scheming and starting trouble in the houses of our enemies the way that they’ve been loosing discord on us from the beginning.”

“It is quite the relief to adopt the tactics of Malpravus,” J’anda said with a dose of irony and a measured smile. His eyes flitted to the fifth member of their party, locked into the Tower of the Guildmaster with the rest of them. “I don’t understand why we can’t just assassinate Pretnam Urides and Danay and be done with it, though.”

Aisling stood before the main hearth in the tower, her navy hands aglow with the light of the fire as she extended them over the blaze, seeking warmth. “If all you wanted was the leaders of those nations dead, we could do it.” She spoke languidly, with less feeling than Cyrus could ever recall hearing from her, except perhaps on the day that he met her in the Grand Palace of Saekaj after killing Yartraak. Her purple eyes glowed in the firelight and found his. “But of course, the falling out from that would be … swift. The Council of Twelve would appoint another head, one of Urides’s partisans, perhaps, or his opposition, and you would not know what direction they would take next, save that it would hardly stop their pursuit of you. Same with the King of the elves,” she said with a sniff, as if testing the fire for smell, though she showed no reaction to the sweet aroma. “Kill him, and at best you get a clean succession to the next in line for the throne. While the new Queen—Roma, I think her name is? might be less experienced, she would likely follow the guidance of the Leagues to move against you without hesitation, for why would she sway from the orthodoxy? Vengeance would be swift in coming, and you’d soon find armies outside your gates instead of mere corpses.” Aisling shook her head. “No. The reason for these meetings, these allies, is so that when the axe falls upon your foes, the succession goes the way you want, and those empires halt their pursuit because whoever is now at their head is either directed to reunifying their realm, or is actually a friend to you.”

“We seem to have found the right advisor when it comes to basest treachery,” Vara mused, but with considerably less sting in her voice than usual. “Goddess help us.”

“Let’s hope,” Vaste said cheerily. “So how do we make these people,” he gestured at the list cradled in Cyrus’s hand, “do what we want, and push their nations to leave us the hell alone?”

“Kill Danay and split the Kingdom,” Terian said, nodding, in thought, “forcing the Provincial Lords and Ladies to choose a new monarch. Get these few on your side, and along with Vara, you have a chance to push the succession to one of them, fates be willing to your new friend Oliaryn Iraid.” His eyes flashed in amusement. “He takes the simmering heat currently on Sanctuary and douses the flames, as he suggested to you,” he looked directly at Vara, “well … you know.”

“That still leaves us with the Confederation,” Cyrus said, staring at the top three names on the list. “And Amarath’s Raiders, before we get to Goliath.”