Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7) (65 page)

“Gren seems like a safer place than this presently,” Imina muttered but stepped aside with Cattrine.

“Ryin,” Cyrus said, and the druid came forward. “Would you kindly escort these ladies to Emerald Fields and then bind your soul there?”

“No,” Ryin said, shaking his head. “I’ll get them there, but then I’m coming back. I won’t be your messenger and miss this. I’m coming with you.”

“You’ve come a long way since the days when you poo-poo’d everything ever suggested,” Vaste said with a certain respect.

“The sky is red,” Ryin said, “Malpravus is speaking in a voice that can be heard miles away, the end of civilization seems to be nigh …” Ryin smiled bitterly. “A contrarian in this case might suggest simply running, but I don’t have that in me. Not for this.”

“Then hurry back,” Cyrus said grimly. “Because whatever Quinneria says, I expect a battle.”

“I shall return,” Ryin said, stepping over to Cattrine and Imina and disappearing in a blast of wind that seemed quicker than usual.

Terian came running out the front steps a moment later to rejoin them, leaping from the top and landing with a slight stagger. “All right, then, people, let’s not go wasting daylight … or … whatever the hell this is.” He gestured vaguely to the red sky.

“I’m with Ryin,” Longwell said, falling in on the march to the stables, “looks like the end of something is coming.”

“Hopefully not us,” Mendicant said, scampering along, “because I was just learning some most interesting things. In fact, this last year has been easily the most fascinating and wonderful of my life.”

Cyrus stared back at the goblin in wonder of his own, and then his eyes met Vara.
Has it really been less than a year since we married? It … it has, hasn’t it?
“Mine too,” he said and smiled at her. She smiled back, and they made for the stables, ready to ride off into the red horizon together.

They rode hard under the crimson sky, the awful light tingeing all of them, turning Vaste a sickening shade of reddish grey and J’anda almost black. Cyrus stared at each of them in turn as they galloped hard toward the Waking Woods ahead, only the nine of them remaining—Cyrus, Vara, J’anda, Vaste, Terian, Mendicant, Quinneria, Longwell, and Aisling, who rode at the back of the formation by herself. Of all of them, she seemed the most anxious, the worry obvious on her face, as though she were thinking of how to make an escape if need be.

“You don’t have to be here,” Cyrus said, pulling up on Windrider’s reins to come alongside her.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be here,” Aisling said, stretching in the saddle, “I just … would rather not die here, if it’s going to come to that.”

“Point to the one of us you do think wants to die here,” Vara said.

“Probably Mendicant,” Aisling said, causing the goblin to look at her cockeyed, a strange look on his small face. “You’ll get hit with some unusual magic and think, ‘Oh, well, if I had to go out, at least it was at the hands of a bizarre new spell.’”

Mendicant opened his mouth to speak and then thought long about it. “That sounds right,” he said after a space.

“We have company,” Vara said, pulling up her reins.

“Ryin, probably,” Cyrus said. “Touching speech of his aside, waiting didn’t seem prudent, given that Malpravus is malingering out there, turning the sky red.”

“It’s not Ryin,” Vara said, shaking her head. “Or, I should say, it’s not only Ryin.”

Cyrus brought up Windrider short, the Waking Woods ahead only a few hundred meters. The horse turned, but not as quickly as Cyrus brought his head around. When he did, the spectacle behind them was such that Cyrus nearly fell off.

Tearing across the plains after them were not one, but two immense savanna cats, easily three times the length of Windrider and possessed of considerable muscular bulk. Riding high atop one was the Grand Knight of Sanctuary himself, Fortin the Rapacious, his red eyes still burning bright even with the shades of the world turned awry. Next to him, on a slightly smaller cat rode Zarnn, covered head to toe in cobbled-together armor that gleamed with the look of mystical steel. Ryin held tightly to the troll’s waist as the savanna cats bounced up and down so furiously that Cyrus feared for Ryin’s safety after watching for only a moment.

“He damned well did it, didn’t he?” Longwell asked with measured awe. “He tamed a damned savanna cat.”

“Two of them, no less,” J’anda mused. “Truly, this is a day of marvels.”

“Nothing about Fortin surprises me anymore,” Vaste said. “But that Zarnn … he makes me think maybe I was wrong about trolls.”

“Ah hah!” Quinneria said, pointing a finger at Vaste accusingly. “Even you have to acknowledge that your people—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Vaste waved her off, “I still didn’t kill ten thousand of them.”

“If you’d been at Thurren Hill you would have,” Quinneria said, her amusement vanishing in an instant. “You know why?”

Vaste just stared back at her, and there was a hint of anger in the way his jaw worked back and forth soundlessly a few times before he mustered an answer. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

“For the same reason you’re about to kill Malpravus,” Quinneria said, staring straight ahead into the dark reaches of the forest. “Because if not, the consequences would be too much for your conscience to bear.”

“Oh, that’s not the reason you did it,” Vaste said.

“No, it’s not the reason I did it,” she agreed. “It’s the reason you would have done it … and the reason you’ll face Malpravus now. Because you’re not willfully blind to a grave threat.” And she brought her horse around and angled it toward the forest as Fortin and Zarnn skidded their cats to a stop, ripping up great swathes of plains grass as they did so.

“What the hell is this?” Terian called in greeting. “The Brotherhood of the Savanna Cat?”

Fortin looked at Zarnn and made a grunting noise. “An excellent name.”

“Mmm,” Zarnn seemed to agree. “Brotherhood.” He turned his head toward them. “Came to join you.”

“And I as well,” Ryin called from behind Zarnn, “since you didn’t, in fact, wait for me.”

“We were going to, but the sky just seemed so cherry red, and we decided to charge off to stop that,” Vaste said. “Figured maybe by the time you got back, it’d be very blueberry again, or maybe lemony.”

“You’re still thinking about pie, aren’t you?” J’anda asked.

“Well, I’m damned sure not going to think about Malpravus if I can avoid it,” Vaste said. “Do you realize how much mental regurgitation I do every time this bastard shows up? He’s like the equivalent of that piece of gristle you just can’t chew through, no matter how hard you try, except he’s like that for my mind. Just over and over and over again, I can’t stop thinking about him.”

“Admittedly it’s been a while, but the last time I felt that way about a man,” J’anda said, “we just called it love.”

Vaste made a grunting noise more akin to something Cyrus would have expected from Zarnn. “I’d
love
to kill him, does that count?”

“I have felt that way as well,” J’anda said with a smile and a nod.

“About Malpravus or your last great love?” Vaste asked.

“Both,” J’anda said, “but mostly it is Malpravus I would like to kill.”

“I doubt there’s anyone who doesn’t feel that way about Malpravus,” Quinneria said. “In fact, I suspect you dealt with the last in Sanctuary who harbored those sentiments just last night.”

“Well, now that we’re all here,” Cyrus said, turning Windrider around once more, “I suppose we should get back to it.” He felt his face grow tight. “There’s probably an army between us and him, after all.”

“I doubt it,” Quinneria said quietly. “Remember, he called you. He wants you to come.”

“Time to answer the call, then,” Cyrus said, and Vara came alongside him. They met eyes once more, and then they kicked their horses and raced back toward the forest.

At the edge of the woods they slowed their pace, the heavy branches of the forest pooling blackness around them and hiding much of the red sky. It was like night in the Waking Woods, but the sounds were unnatural compared even to when last Cyrus had been here. The rattling and howling of the ghouls was all gone, and so, too, were the normal noises of animals and insects. The air was silent and still, neither hot nor cold, and that alone gave Cyrus a strange chill.

“I think this is actually worse than Zanbellish,” Ryin said from the back of Zarnn’s jungle cat. It was hard to tell which discomfited him more, their current environs or being on the back of a cat so much larger than he.

“It’s certainly not as romantic as when last we were here,” Cyrus muttered, and saw Vara smile slightly.

“You guys came here without me?” Terian said, faking disappointment.

“I hope you’ve been here since I came with you both,” Aisling said, “because there wasn’t much romantic about that time.”

“I, uh … kind of forgot that you showed up for that,” Cyrus said, cringing as he looked back at the dark elf.

“She left you in the dark to die,” Aisling said.

“I did not,” Vara said. “I was watching him all the while, he was fine.”

“You were watching me?” Cyrus asked with a frown.

Vara shrugged. “I didn’t want you to get hurt. Much,” she conceded a moment later. “It was a long time ago.”

“It was three years,” Cyrus said.

“Practically an eternity around here.”

The forest continued to darken, the trunks of the trees closing in around them. The faint red light that made its way down from above was enough to make Cyrus remember the time blood had poured down over his eyes in a fight.
Which time was that?
he wondered.
Hell, too many times to count.

The utter silence was unnerving, and Cyrus pulled Windrider’s reins to the left slightly as they passed under a small gap in the boughs above. He caught a glimpse of a pyramid in the distance, a series of increasingly smaller longwise rectangles stacked upon one another, forming an enormous triangle as they drew to the point at the top. He could see a dark entry at the topmost level and shuddered staring into it, even this far off.

“Looks like a more angular version of what we saw at the Temple of Death in the Bandit Lands,” Vaste said.

“Aye,” Cyrus said, “that one looked more like a cake to me.”

Vaste paused. “It did look like a cake! Like the one at your wedding, but less delicious, more stony, and just a tad more aesthetically pleasing.”

Vara frowned. “The cake or the temple?”

“The temple,” Vaste admitted. “Sorry.”

“I didn’t design it,” Vara said with a shrug.

“I did,” Quinneria said with a deep frown. “And …” She seemed to give it some thought. “Damn, it did look a little like that temple.”

“It feels strange that you know so much,” Vaste said. “I mean … you were at your son’s wedding and he didn’t even realize—”

“Vaste,” Cyrus said, feeling a pinch of emotion. He caught Vara looking at him and smiled back to reassure her. “Not now,” he said to the troll.

“But later?” Vaste asked, splitting his look between Cyrus and Quinneria.

“Later,” Cyrus said, and it carried the weight of a heavy promise in his mind when he said it.

They rode on quietly, no longer at a gallop, but instead at a canter, searching out the danger they knew to be ahead. The occasional break in the trees confirmed their position, as the pyramid drew nearer and nearer with each passing gap. It jutted into the sky, and Cyrus realized he had never been this close to it before in all his years at Sanctuary.
Never wanted to be, either.

“I see them,” Vara said, peering into the darkness between the trunks. “The army of Goliath.” She snapped a quick look back at Cyrus. “They’re here.”

“Of course they are,” Vaste said. “How else were they going to counter our might army of four hundred and …” He made a face as he concentrated. “How many do we have left now?”

“Four hundred and fifty-two,” Cyrus answered immediately, and caught Terian’s eye as he said it. The Sovereign gave him a solemn nod of respect. “Four hundred and fifty-two loyal souls.”

“When this is over,” Terian said, “you might consider issuing a call to every city, offering any who want to return a chance to come back. I bet you’d have an enormous number of takers.”

“You didn’t seem to believe that’d be the case before,” Cyrus said, raising his eyebrows at the Sovereign of Saekaj.

“Times change,” Terian said with a smile. “You’ll have utterly bested every one of your foes against impossible odds. If that’s not a reason to join a guild, I don’t know what is.”

“I’ll think about it,” Cyrus said.

“If we get through all that …” Longwell said. “I mean … this is it, isn’t it? The last enemy to be defeated?”

“Gods willing,” Cyrus said under his breath. He could see the Army of Goliath through the trees now as well.

They came out at a clearing beneath the foot of the temple. The Army of Goliath was there in impressive rows, and now Cyrus could see the size of them in a way he hadn’t properly since their last actual clash at the fields of Leaugarden in the Riverlands.
Where Malpravus defeated me, completely and utterly.
There was a far greater number here now, though, than then, and all turned in proper order in a way that reminded Cyrus of the halcyon days of Sanctuary when he’d led his armies of this size into formidable clashes.
If Terian’s right, if we come through this, and it solidifies our reputation … I could do it. I could issue that call, and all those fair-weather friends that fled might just coming running back to join the winning team.

And I could lead an army again.

He took a breath and found the air still strange, still … still. There was no movement, even with the army lined up ahead of them. He could see a couple of figures lingering at the base of the stairs that led up to the temple, and he knew them immediately.

“Rhane Ermoc,” Cyrus said, pointing at one of them. “And that’s—”

“Sareea,” Terian said tensely. “She’s mine, does everyone hear me?”

“That sounds serious,” Vaste said. “I hope she at least gave you an extremely communicable disease in order to earn that ire you’re carrying for her.”