Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7) (42 page)

“I have never seen you worship a tree, come to think of it,” he said, pretending to give it a thought. An inadvertent grin split his face. “Though I suppose I have seen you with something a bit like—”

“Don’t,” she said with a shake of the head that compelled him away from the remark before he made it. She let them stew in the silence for a few seconds before she broke it. “When do you leave?”

A knock echoed in the tower before he could answer her. “Right now, I would guess,” he said. “Come in!”

The door squeaked open to admit J’anda with his purple-tipped staff, Vaste with his spear-tipped one and Longwell with his lance. Vara took them all in with a glance. “Well, I’m certain that your current entourage, with their impressive collection of staves, shall surely capture the imagination of Reynard Colton, for he sounds to my ears like a man who will be impressed by a large stave.”

“Mine’s more of a lance,” Longwell said, frowning.

“Mine’s a spear now,” Vaste said, holding it aloft, the pointed end with the crystal in its middle glinting in the sunrise.

“I believe we might have walked in on a conversation midstride,” J’anda said, frowning, “and I don’t believe that she meant that in a flattering way. In fact, I think she might have been using ‘staves’ as a sort of stand-in for—”

“Yes,” Vara said with a pleased smile. “That’s exactly what I meant.” She shot Cyrus a look, one of concern thinly veiled under sarcasm. “Take great care, husband, for any man you would not normally care to have as an ally is not the sort you should trust.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek then his lips, then she stepped back to allow the others to gather around him.

“I’ll watch out,” Cyrus said, catching her eyes. She smiled at him with obvious reservations as J’anda, Vaste and Longwell all filed in behind him.

“I’ll watch out, too,” Vaste said, looking down at Cyrus. “Though you should really join our club and get a tall weapon. Maybe a spear? One of those very long swords the Northmen use? You know the ones, tall as an average human man—”

“I’d settle for just getting my old one back,” Cyrus said, once again feeling the need to adjust his belt, and the odd weight there.

“Watch your back,” Vara said as J’anda began to cast the teleportation spell, glow lighting the Tower of the Guildmaster around him.

“I’ll watch his long bottom for you,” Vaste said as they began to disappear. “Mmmm. No, that just doesn’t compare favorably with mine at all …”

Cyrus watched Vara’s blue eyes turn green in the reflection of the spell-light and disappear as he was taken away, away from her and to a place he did not truly care to go.

“You know, I’ve been to some lovely towns in my time,” Vaste said as they made their way across Idiarna, a small southern town at the very edge of the Human Confederation, “but this isn’t one of them.”

“Well, it did get rather thoroughly sacked in the war with the dark elves, as I recall,” J’anda said, wearing the guise of a human, illusory vestments identifying him as a healer. He had somehow cast his illusion spells between the moment they’d disappeared in the tower and when they’d arrived, or else had done so before they left, though Cyrus could not quite fathom how he’d managed it. “Very difficult for a town to look good when it is recovering from being burned to the ground … what? Three years ago? Four?”

“Somewhere in there,” Cyrus agreed, scanning the town around them. It had very much the same look as Santir, the buildings wooden and plain, the architecture different from that found in Emerald Fields. It was a peculiar thing, Cyrus thought, how wildly divergent the styles of human architecture were even when they used the same building materials. Idiarna did look bigger than Santir as a whole, however, though it seemed to pale when compared to Emerald Fields. “Idiarna and the western Confederation in general has always been the poorer part of the human state. They don’t have anything but crops, and they’re not as fertile as the Riverlands. They lack the mines of the Mountain District or Northlands, and they don’t have the ports like Taymor in the southeast. Trade with the elves and farming is about all they’ve got nowadays, and both took a big hit after the war.” Cyrus shrugged. “Maybe if Terian opens trade to this part of the Confederation … but my suspicion is that he’s not the one blocking it, since I’ve seen any number of dark elven merchants plying their wares in Reikonos.”

They walked the muddy streets, flat ground stretched before them. Cyrus could see a keep, a wooden fort in the distance, looking much like it was new as well. It lacked the imposing presence of Isselhelm’s keep, its crude design reminding him of a titan fort or the troll city of Gren. It had the same jagged pikes circling it, though at least it had a dirty moat to section it off from the rest of the city.

Even the tallest buildings were not more than two stories, and Cyrus began to wonder if there was some reason they did not build taller buildings. It was an idle curiosity, though, and one he did not intend to indulge when he met Governor Coulton.
This certainly doesn’t look like a regional capital …

The streets were busy, horses clomping along the muddy streets, their smell heavy in Cyrus’s nose, the stink of laborers, animals, and piss in the streets. One animal left droppings in front of him and Cyrus steered his party around it without comment, walking them past a boarding house that had black clouds billowing from its chimney.

The keep was straight ahead on the wide road, the avenue wider than the average streets in a town of this size. Cyrus looked back and saw the portal behind him and beyond it, the outskirts of town only a few blocks past. In the opposite direction, toward the keep, he could see nothing past the wooden fortress. At the next cross street, he looked both ways and noted that it was not particularly far to either end of town to the east or west.

“How many people do you figure live here?” Cyrus asked, mostly talking to himself.

“Perhaps ten thousand,” J’anda said, having apparently taken the same note Cyrus did. “Do you suppose there were more before the sack?”

“Almost certainly,” Cyrus said, whisper quiet, walking along with his illusory druid robes swishing around him. “I think Idiarna got caught by surprise. They might have lost over half the town.”

“Another tragic chapter in this entire history,” J’anda said with a sad shake of the head.

“It’s true,” Vaste said, surprisingly solemn. “Remember when we sacked Gren? And by sacked I mean, ‘Only killed the people who attacked us’? And when we ‘sacked’ Saekaj, leaving it standing entirely and only missing its god? And Enterra—”

“I take your rather obvious point,” Cyrus said, smiling in spite of himself. “And … thank you.”

Vaste leered down at him from behind the broad face of a human. “For what?”

“For reminding me that even when we’re doing our worst, others do much, much worse,” Cyrus said.

“I was really just reminding you how amazing I am as an officer,” Vaste said smarmily. “I mean, the guild I lead is really quite tremendous, and I’m clearly a moral compass—”

“There was the time we conspired to have the titans wiped out,” J’anda said with a smile of his own.

“Well, of course they deserved it,” Vaste said.

The keep bridge was down, the gate open. There were no guards at the end of the bridge, but Cyrus could see them ahead, on either side of the crude gate. He proceeded with his parchment invitation in hand, ready to present it.

The sounds of the keep were quiet ones, the waters lapping at the base of the bridge below them. This bridge was a sturdier, shorter one than he’d crossed in Isselhelm, as seemed to befit the moat. This moat was slightly less dirty, though still very brown with some various floating objects in it, including a log. The guards were wearing boiled leather of the cheapest variety, and their expressions were surly.

“We’re here to meet with the governor,” Cyrus said softly to the first guard, who was scrutinizing him with a disinterested air, perhaps because Cyrus’s illusion gave him an aura of respectability.

“In you go, then,” the guard said after a quick look at his parchment, handing it back to Cyrus with care. He gestured with his spear and Cyrus went on, through the gate and into the bailey of the keep.

The bailey was no more impressive than any other part of the keep or, indeed, of the town of Idiarna in general. It was a new building, hastily constructed, and the ground was a mud-filled mess, no hint of greenery in its midst. At the center of the bailey was an old stone tower that looked a little like a nub rising out of the earth. Only three stories, it towered over the rest of the town, but at its top was a flat roof of wood that did not look strong enough to hold even a single defender.

The bailey itself had two guard towers on this side of the stone tower but circled around with the wall behind it. Cyrus suspected there would be two others hidden in the shadow of the tower, at the back of the circular wall that ringed the keep. The guard towers were all lashed-together wood, crudely made, plainly built on a very small budget.
I wonder if Governor Coulton has two pieces of gold to rub together at this point?

Cyrus made his way toward the stone tower’s doors just ahead of him, sweeping the bailey courtyard with a impassive gaze as he moved. If there was to be trouble, he fully expected it within the tower itself, where his freedom of action would be constrained, as Frost had done.
Hopefully Coulton won’t get any stupid ideas about asserting himself, because I am in no mood to—

He heard the quick steps before he saw their origin, but when he turned to look, his mind barely registered what he was seeing. A blur came from his left, a glowing blue blade held high and an ululating battle cry preceding it. Cyrus’s breath caught in his throat and he stared, dumbstruck, as the blur ceased less than ten feet away from him, crisp lines resolving into a scarred mouth turned upward in a nasty grin—

Rhane Ermoc.

Marching boots behind him forced him to glance back. The dark elven woman who had been with Goliath at the ambush in Reikonos was coming around the left side of the tower with a complement of troops, all armored to the full, mystical steel covering them from boots to helm, and their weapons looking twice as dangerous as the sword that hung so awkwardly from his belt.

“Well, hell,” J’anda said softly as the female dark knight held up her hand and stopped the march of her small army only a few feet from Cyrus to the left. “Sareea Scyros,” the enchanter said.

“None other,” the woman said in a voice that suggested to Cyrus that she was quite pleased with herself. The sound of marching boots came from behind Rhane Ermoc as well, and Cyrus turned his head to find a phalanx of armored warriors falling in behind Ermoc in neatly layered lines.

A
thunk!
at his feet drew Cyrus’s attention to an arrow fired in the earth. When he followed its slant upwards, he saw Orion grinning at him from the tower behind him to his left. Spinning around, Carrack waved from the one behind him to the right, as the gates were already closed by the guards who had just let him in, the two of them chortling at what they’d done.

“We’re—” Cyrus began.

“I believe the word you’re searching for,” Rhane Ermoc cut him off with a wild grin, brandishing Praelior and speaking so fast he was barely understandable, “is … trapped.”

“You find yourself in a nasty situation, Davidon,” Rhane Ermoc went on, words flying out of his mouth like spittle, “but then, I always knew you’d come to an ugly end.”

“I’m not ended just yet, Rhane,” Cyrus said, looking around, searching for any weakness. The illusion disguising Cyrus faded in an instant. Cyrus shifted slightly, and the mud that surrounded his boots made a soft, wet slurping sound.

“If you think you’re still alive by anything other than the grace of the fact I’m going to taunt you for a while before I start depriving you of life,” Ermoc said, still grinning, “you’re dumber than you look.”

“Says the man with the scar across his lip that probably came from poor table manners,” Cyrus fired back, keeping his hand clear of his scabbard. It wouldn’t do any good to reach for it in any case, because the advantage granted by his current sword was less than nothing against Praelior.

“Is that so?” Ermoc shot forward, and Cyrus felt a burning pain in his own lip before he could move. He grimaced, knowing in his heart what Ermoc had done before he even reached a hand up to touch it.
The bastard split my lip right good, probably half an inch toward my cheek.

“Hah!” Orion crowed from behind him. “That’s right, give him some souvenirs before we kill him. Make him so ugly even his wife won’t recognize him when Malpravus walks his corpse up to the gates of Sanctuary.”

Cyrus compelled the muscles at his mouth to rest and then, quietly, his hand behind his back, murmured a healing spell and felt the pain cease immediately.
What the …?
He blinked as Ermoc grinned.
They can’t possibly have been so stupid as to fail to cast a cessation spell, can they?
He tried not to let his eyes widen as he turned his head slightly, looking for something, anything, from the rest of his party. He got a subtle arching of the eyebrows from J’anda, and the trace of a knowing smile from the enchanter, whose fingers were glowing purple as he cast a spell.

Need to stall
, Cyrus thought.
Need to give J’anda time to work.
Otherwise
…

We’re dead.
And Malpravus really will be walking my mangled corpse up to the Sanctuary gates …
His heart plunged in him.
That’d sink the guild right there, break the last bit of morale, and send Vara into a spiral of anger or sadness …

“Take good stock of your situation,” Ermoc said as Cyrus turned slightly to see Vaste frozen in place, looking quite alarmed, his spear-staff pointed to their left at the dark elven woman J’anda had called Sareea. Longwell, for his part, had his lance pointed to Ermoc’s forces at the right. “I can tell you’re feeling the pinch, but let me rub it in for you, salt in the old wound. Carrack is just sitting up there,” Ermoc pointed to the tower behind Cyrus. “Ready to rain the fire on you. Of course,” Ermoc grinned, “I’d rather make your death personal. Very up close.”