Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7) (26 page)

“Of course,” Vara said icily, “for even a glimpse of her slattern face as it is will surely result in them being driven from the Northlands at the head of a mob with pitchforks and torches.”

“That’s what I like about you, Vara,” Terian said, “you just don’t ever give up a grudge.”

“I’d be prepared to give up a few, actually,” she said, “like I did with you, provided there was reason to.”

“I’m afraid in this case,” he said, starting to cast his return spell as the glimmer of light consumed him, “that these grudges aren’t going to be settled by anything less than the death of at least one of the participants.” He disappeared in a blaze of white light.

The former dark knight’s last words left them all in a grim and silent mood, seemingly fearful to talk, and the night began to close in outside.

The arrangements to shut the portal north of Sanctuary took two days to make; Terian arrived with Kahlee on the evening after their meeting, slipping up to the balcony under cover of darkness in their usual way. Cyrus tried to take note of which direction they approached from in order to discern who among his guildmates might be in Terian’s employ, but he did not see their arrival until they came in behind him.

“Don’t try and out-sneak me, Davidon,” Terian said with a broad grin, clearly cottoning to Cyrus’s intent. “I was a dark knight, you know. There’s a not a dirty trick out there that I haven’t perpetrated. Hell, I invented most of them.”

The binding was done in no time at all, just inside the door down the stairs, which all involved felt offered the greatest amount of privacy for Cyrus and Vara. “I promise,” Terian said, “I will knock hard on the inside of the door when I arrive and will not ascend the stairs until I know you’re either aware we’re here or I’m certain you’re not at home.”

“That’s damned decent of you, Terian,” Cyrus said dryly, “but I think we both know that the truth is that you’re afraid your wife will see my long bottom and become enamored of it.”

Kahlee frowned at him and did not say a word. However, her eyes drifted down almost surreptitiously, as if to check on Cyrus’s assertion.

On the morning after, once he’d eaten, Cyrus gave the order to Mendicant to close the portal, and the goblin went out under cover of invisibility spell to carry out his will. It was done in moments, and the wizard reappeared at the wall moments later, casting a cessation spell that revealed nothing before he slipped in through the front gate.

“What’s to stop them from reactivating the portal themselves?” Mendicant asked nervously as he rejoined Cyrus and the small war party forming just inside the gate.

They stood under a grey spring sky, the wind blowing harshly across the Plains of Perdamun. “Hopefully, the arcane and lost knowledge of how to do it,” Cyrus said. “While it’s hardly secret, neither is it a commonly taught spell in the Leagues.” He looked back at his group, which included Vara, J’anda, Mendicant, Samwen Longwell, Erith, and Fortin, as well as roughly one hundred others, and gave them a reassuring nod. With the exception of the rock giant and Mendicant, they were all mounted on horses. “We’re going to ride out, at guard, ready for anything. I don’t think there’s an army lurking out there, and should we find ourselves alone, our mission will be to run down the corpses dotting the plains around us.”

“We used a gnomish spyglass to get a rough position and count,” Vaste said, holding a parchment with a crude map of Sanctuary and the surrounding area on it. Small, crudely drawn skulls with X’s to denote the eyes and tongues stuck out marked the locations of the dead. Cyrus stared at the map with a raised eyebrow as Vaste continued to speak: “We’ve seen about fifty.”

“Reanimated corpses make for poor eating,” Fortin rumbled. “All in all, warlord, the meals since I have come back to guard this place have been exceedingly poor.”

“We apologize for the lacking in your culinary experience,” Vaste said with undying sarcasm.

“Your apology is accepted,” Fortin said.

“That wasn’t a—” Vaste began, then sighed. “Never mind.”

“All right, then,” Cyrus said with a thin smile, “let’s get started.”

They rode out onto the quiet plains, Mendicant casting cessation on a constant basis as they went. Cyrus had been torn when the strategy had been proposed; taking magic out of their defense seemed a poor decision to him. Vara had argued that it was their only true way to be certain there wasn’t an invisible army lurking, so he had acceded to her argument.

They rode without incident for nearly an hour, in a careful ring around the wall. The early kills were easiest, and they caught many of the dead unawares, riding them down with little trouble. Soon enough, though, the corpses began to run, and finding them via the map was becoming an increasingly difficult proposition.

“None of these seem to be where you say they are,” Longwell complained, putrid chunks of meat and flesh trapped on his three-pronged lance.

“Yes, it’s almost as if a necromancer is controlling these creatures and is now fully aware we’re slaughtering his pets,” Vaste said, eyes fixed on the map as though trying to decode some great secret from within the parchment. “It seems obvious he would start moving them to avoid that, doesn’t it?”

“How far away do you suppose he is from us?” Mendicant asked, on the back of a pony that struggled to keep up with the other horses.

“He could be a thousand miles away for all we know,” Cyrus said, looking for their next quarry. He spotted it in the distance, ambling off on rotting legs toward the horizon. “There.” The war party turned in that direction, hooves thundering. “Or he could be lingering near the river. Who knows?”

“If he’s a thousand miles away,” Mendicant said, bumping along to the uneven plains, “that’s impressive magical control.” He looked to J’anda. “Could you control someone that far away?”

J’anda nodded. “I have done something similar a few times. I can recall influencing people in Reikonos after teleporting back to Saekaj. The distance does not seem to matter in control, though proximity was required to set the original spell.” The enchanter stared off into the distance, clearly contemplating something.

“If the same holds true for necromancy,” Vaste said with a sour look of his own, “that means Malpravus was here at one point, in order to establish his control over these corpses.”

“That’s hardly surprising,” Cyrus said. “Someone had to drop these bodies here, after all.” He rode up on the next corpse and took its head off in a slashing motion. The body fell to the ground, its momentum and fall causing it to break apart. The stink made him blanch, the strong odor of rot creeping down his throat and threatening to start him retching. “It’s not as if they’re local.”

“Where do you suppose he got them?” Vaste asked. “And who do you think died in order to make the soul rubies that allowed him to revive them?”

“I don’t even want to know,” Cyrus said, sheathing his new sword with a rattle in Avenger’s Rest. The blade had acquired a deathly stink in the course of their hunt, but putting it away seemed to help.

They rode for another hour and killed half as many of the corpses as they had in half the time before. The next two hours produced similar results, until finally, some five hours later, they felt reasonably assured that they had rid the area of all of the undead spies left behind by Malpravus. The horses kept their distance while Mendicant cast a fire spell upon the last body, consuming it with flame. Lines of black smoke still puffed up on the horizon in all the places where they’d found a corpse, like signs of a war that had been waged and lost.

“Urnnnnnnngh,” Fortin said, grunting low and wheezing, shifting laboriously from side to side as he walked in a slow circle around the war party.

“You all right, Fortin?” Erith asked, guiding her pony nearer to the rock giant. Cyrus, having experienced firsthand what rock giant vomit smelled like, carefully guided Windrider in the opposite direction.

“I have not run this much in quite some time,” Fortin said, making a low gasping noise that sounded like rocks grinding against steel. “I find myself … unpleasantly fatigued … and perhaps a tad ill.”

Cyrus gave Windrider another slight jolt to move him away; the horse did not seem to require much encouragement. Cyrus cast an eye back toward Sanctuary. “Looks like we’re a couple miles out. You going to be able to make it back all right?”

“I just need … a minute to rest …” Fortin said, bending at the waist, placing his enormous hands on his knees. “Every time we caught one of those things, I thought maybe … we’d take a break … but no, we kept moving. You people and your horses. I need a mount.”

“Maybe a dragon?” Cyrus asked with vague amusement.

“I think he’d have better luck with one of those savanna cats,” Vara said, watching Cyrus edge ever farther from Fortin and taking a cue from him. She was following only a dozen feet behind him.

“Yes …” Fortin said, nodding. “A savanna cat … those creatures the size of three of your trolls. Those would be a worthy mount for a Grand Knight such as myself.”

Cyrus raised an eyebrow at the rock giant’s use of the title. “I’m not so sure they’d let you ride them, Fortin.”

“I would tame one,” Fortin said, taking a breath and seemingly inflating himself back to standing upright. The sound of rock rumbling rolled over the plains. “I would show it my fearsome strength and it would be cowed at my power. Yes … when this task is over, I will go to the Gradsden Savanna and find myself a worthy steed.”

Cyrus thought about replying. Any number of possibilities sprang to mind, most of them detailing exactly how fatal such an expedition would play out for the cat. He caught a look from Vara, though, and said nothing.
Let him dream
.

And so he said nothing, and the war party rode back to Sanctuary quietly, for no one else had the heart to quash the dreams of the rock giant, either.

The time between the sealing of the portal north of Sanctuary and the scheduled meeting with Governor Allyn Frost of the Northlands was another dragging series of weeks, time spent unproductive and stale, with few breaks in the routine.

One of them was a meeting that Cyrus scheduled even before he’d begun the process of sealing the portal. This one took place in the dead of the night, and was made possible by Mendicant undertaking a journey to Emerald Fields on Cyrus’s behalf. A day earlier he’d sent word to Cattrine by a different messenger requesting her to deliver a sealed missive into the hills above Emerald Fields, into the mines of Rockridge. This she did, and as a result, Mendicant appeared moments after he left, twinkling back into existence at his point of bind, the return spell carrying him back with a dwarf clutched tightly to him.

The dwarf was of medium height, hair and beard braided carefully, his face cleaned for the meeting, lacking the dust and dirt with which it had been covered when last Cyrus had met him. The dwarf looked around nervously as he appeared in Mendicant’s quarters. Cyrus was awaiting them both, leaning against the wall, the torch fires and the hearth burning. As they appeared, Cyrus looked out into the hall, checking to see that it was empty. “Hold on,” Cyrus said and then practiced his illusion spell by transforming the dwarf into J’anda, whom he knew to be in his quarters, asleep. “All right, let’s go.”

“So much secrecy,” Mendicant said softly, under his breath, as if in awe of what was being done.

“Come to my quarters in five minutes, Mendicant,” Cyrus said. “Knock softly on the door, and I’ll let you in as soon as our meeting concludes.” He smiled with reassurance at the goblin. “And thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Mendicant said, bowing, his robes dragging the floor as he stooped. “I am happy to be of service.”

“Follow,” Cyrus told the dwarf, who was now disguised as J’anda, complete with the staff. The dwarf, whose hands had been empty when he’d arrived, stared in wonder and pushed the illusion into the floor. It disappeared when it made contact with the stone, as if it had somehow been thrust into the floor and wedged there. “Don’t do that,” Cyrus warned, and the dwarf jerked the staff out again and followed him as he opened the door.

“Shh,” Cyrus said, beckoning the J’anda illusion forward. They ascended the stairs with only minor incident—the dwarf nearly tripped over his feet while trying to figure out how to reconcile what he saw of his taller dark elven self with his actual, shorter legs. When they arrived at Cyrus’s quarters, he opened the door and led the dwarf up after locking the door and then dispelling the illusion behind him.

“Hello,” Vara said as they both reached the top of the stairs. She was waiting on one of the chairs, a book beside her, clearly put down when she’d heard them approaching.

“Vara Davidon,” Cyrus said, making the introduction, “this is Keearyn.”

“Lady Davidon,” Keearyn said, quickly kneeling, “it is a very great honor to meet you.”

“No need for any of that,” Vara said, rising to her feet. She was dressed in her full armor and her sword was on her hip, clearly prepared in case the dwarf proved something other than compliant. Cyrus had met the dwarf before and considered the likelihood roughly equivalent to Vaste shutting his mouth when presented an opportunity to insult someone or Ryin passing up a chance to argue. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Keearyn.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve met, ma’am,” Keearyn said, bowing his head.

“It’s not?” Vara asked, her brow furrowing lightly. “I have to apologize, as I can’t seem to recall—”

“Keearyn is one of the slaves we freed from Gren two years ago,” Cyrus said, feeling a curious reserve tugging at him. “He was captured by the dark elves when they sacked Aloakna—”

“Caught me and my family on the road outside town,” Keearyn said, burbling with excitement. “And sacked is the right word for what they did to us as well—stuffed us in canvas and took us to the Depths, that hellhole—”

Vara frowned. “I recently had cause to visit the Depths, and I met one of your fellow dwarves there.”

Keearyn’s large brow rose up. “Truly? I pity that poor bastard. I could not conceive of a worse fate than being stuck there for any stretch of time.”