Master (Book 5) (13 page)

“You need not explain yourself,” Vara said abruptly. “Your time across the bridge was quite a metamorphosis.” She seemed to bristle slightly as she said it, her posture changing to bring her more upright and stiff.

“I think some of that change might have happened before I left,” Cyrus said, and he hazarded only a slight look across at her as he said it. They walked on in silence.

When they came to another clearing, Cyrus paused on the edge and Vara held position with him. “Do you think the paths are changing to respond to whoever is pulling the strings here?” he asked. The field before them was covered in a dusting of snow, pristine and lacking in any sign of the path, which had disappeared under the layer of snowfall.

“Possibly,” she said. “I wouldn’t know, having not been here before and being bloody uncertain of exactly what we’re dealing with.”

“Let’s hope there’s not an army of deer waiting to ambush us this time,” Cyrus said.

“Why? Are you growing weary in your old age?” Vara wore a smirk.

“You’re older than me,” Cyrus reminded her.

“Yes, but I age with considerably more grace than you,” Vara said, still smirking. “I think it’s beginning to show.”

“I’m not sure how you could tell under all this icy blood I’m apparently wearing on my face,” Cyrus said with a slight frown. His fingers brushed his forehead and found dried ichor frozen to his brow. He found more on his cheeks, splattered on in the heat of battle. “Exactly how drenched in entrails am I?”

Vara rolled her eyes and let out a small, amused noise. “Don’t let your ego run away from you by presuming anyone is present who cares how you look.”

“Well, that’s lovely,” Cyrus said and started across the field before him. His boots crunched in the snow. The cold was becoming bitter, an aching chill that seeped into him through his plate mail. He reflexively clutched at his armor, clinking his gauntlet against his vambrace. His hot breath came out in a mist in front of him.

He could hear Vara’s steps following behind him, the same sound of snow crunching. A flake went past his nose, surprising him. “Oh, great,” he muttered, and took his next step.

Something gave out beneath him with a sickening crack, and he thought for a moment he’d fallen down by accident. Then his boot filled with an icy shock of water, and the rest of his armor followed.

Cyrus plunged into the dark water. His vision cut out like he had placed the darkest curtains over his face and the brutally cold water rushed over him. He almost exhaled but couldn’t, the frigid water paralyzing any attempt.

Cyrus lost track of which direction was up, and there was no light to guide him. Blackness seeped in all around, and the weight of the water held him down. The cold stole the air from his lungs, and he did not even feel it go. His whole body felt like icy fingers had run over it, crawled over every inch and started to squeeze.

The water rushed into his nose and he had a brief flash of the Temple of Ashea only days earlier. This was different, though, worse somehow. He had Praelior tight in his hand, slowing down the world.
If only I knew which way to go …

A light flared somewhere above him, a faint glow, like a lamp someone had set out to show him the way home in the dark of night. He thrust his arms and swam toward it. As he got closer, his vision sharpened in the brutally cold water. A hand was reaching down toward him, reaching for him, sunlit day shining behind them—

He grasped it and felt it pull, yanking him up. His head broke the surface and he found Vara there, prone across the ice. She started to crawl back, clutching his hand in her own, their gauntlets freezing together in the frigid air.

She pulled him onto the flat ice shelf. As the water rushed from his ears he could hear voices, shouts, urgent, coming closer to them from somewhere in the distance. She stared at him as he dripped, and he felt the ice beginning to form on his armor and within it, freezing from exposure to the frigid air. “Well,” she said after a moment, “at least you got rid of all that blood on your face that you were whinging about.”

He chuckled and stayed prone, as did Vara, and he followed her as she crawled back across the snow-covered ice toward the forest’s edge. His armor scraped across the surface, and he heard crackling as it strained under his weight. By unspoken agreement, neither of them stood until they were almost back to the treeline. Vaste, Nyad and Curatio were there waiting for them.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Vaste said, almost nonchalant.

“Do you mean freezing to death after this lunkhead nearly drowned himself in a lake?” Vara asked, shivering in the cold, “or do you mean here, as in the Realm of Life in general? Actually, never mind, I don’t fancy any of it.”

“Looks like you found your way through the hedge maze,” Cyrus said, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

“No,” Vaste said, “we’re actually all dead and possessed by that same black ichor that’s taking over the animal life around here, you just didn’t notice because Nyad and Curatio are always so quiet.”

“You ran into those too, huh?” Cyrus asked, shuddering from the cold and the memory of the deer. “Nasty bit of local wildlife, those deer.”

“Oh, you got deer?” Vaste seemed almost amused. “You lucky devil. We were attacked by an army of squirrels, chipmunks and hedgehogs.”

Cyrus exchanged a look with Vara. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“That’s because you didn’t have to pick a hundred blackened quills out of a troll’s arse,” Nyad said without amusement.

“I did so appreciate that,” Vaste said. “It’s not like I could easily reach them myself.”

“Here,” Nyad said and her staff belched a line of flame at him after a moment, burning through the snow on a nearby shrub and lighting its withered branches on fire.

Cyrus huddled closer to the bush and Vara followed behind. She gave him a reproachful glare. “What?” he asked. “You didn’t know it was a pond either. It could easily have been you falling through that ice if you hadn’t been so tentative.”

“Tentative?” Vara asked, nearly at a screech. “This from the man who epitomizes the old adage about fools rushing in where gods fear to tread.”

“Can’t blame the gods for avoiding treading around here,” Vaste said, “what with the evil hedgehogs and all.”

“We shouldn’t tarry here too much longer,” Curatio said calmly, cutting across any further discussion. “If I recall correctly, our destination is just on the other side of this lake.”

“And what awaits at our destination, I wonder?” Vara mused. “Ten thousand badgers possessed by evil? A nest of dark hornets?”

“Bears,” Vaste said. When everyone had turned to him, he said, “Well, you have to admit, as far as scary animals go, they’re right at the top.”

“Hm,” Curatio said, and he started to turn to walk around the shore, his hands kept close to his body beneath his robes, “I would have gone with dragons, personally.”

There was silence for a moment as the healer began to walk away, and then Nyad spoke. “Dragons? Dark dragons? Oh gods.”

They followed along behind Curatio, skirting the edge of the frozen lake. A parting of the trees highlighted a path, and Cyrus watched Curatio follow it wordlessly, leaving footprints behind in the snow with each step.

Soon they came upon two stone pillars; dark grey towers warding either side of the path. Curatio led on, Cyrus and Vara only steps behind him, trying to keep up with the healer. Cyrus cast a look back every few moments to assure himself that both Nyad and Vaste were still behind him. After the sixth time, Vaste began to wave coyly and wink at him each time.

“Still here,” Vaste said the next time just before he turned around.

“Of course you are,” Vara muttered, “it’s not as though you could vanish for very long.”

“Did you want me to be gone for longer than last time?” Vaste asked.

There was a supremely long pause, and then Vara quietly said, “No.”

Cyrus waited, but Vaste did not say any more on the subject, his large feet leaving wide tracks in the snow.

The forest opened up before them, the snowy ground becoming uneven. It rose up in mounds here and there, then swept forward to a bridge ahead of them. Cyrus walked between the mounds toward the bridge, following Curatio, the cold still chilling his skin, his fingers numb in his gauntlets.

“Not much farther now,” Curatio said.

“This looks awfully familiar for some reason,” Vaste said, “and I’m fairly certain it’s not because I’ve been to the Realm of Life before.”

Curatio halted, stopping in the middle of the path, his head bowed and shadowed. Cyrus could not see the expression on the healer’s face but he could see his gloved hand balled into a fist. “Because it looks like the garden behind Sanctuary.”

Cyrus blinked, the frosty air in his eyes affecting his ability to see. He surveyed the ground again and realized that Curatio was right. The bridge led over a low spot that might have been water, like the pond on the Sanctuary grounds. The mounds, frozen, bereft of the sweet-smelling petals that dotted the Sanctuary landscape in spring and summer, he now recognized as flower beds.

“It’s exact,” Cyrus whispered. “Like someone pulled the garden off the Sanctuary grounds and plopped it into the Realm of Life.” He looked to Curatio, still turned away. “Is whoever is behind this mucking with the realm? Changing it on us to—”

“No,” Curatio said with a shake of his head, then turned to look at the four of them. His eyes were lined, and slightly swollen. “It was always like this here. Other than the snow and darkness, obviously.” He looked back toward the bridge as though he were surveying it. “Our garden has always matched this one.”

There was a pause before Vaste spoke. “And why exactly would that be?”

Curatio didn’t answer at first, taking a few steps forward before a low mutter made itself heard. “Because Alaric made it so.”

“Alaric lives on in mysterious spirit if not in fact,” Vaste said under his breath, “not only leaving tantalizing mysteries behind, but teaching his successor to half-answer with vagaries that keep us all scratching our heads in wonder.”

“Shut up,” Vara said.

There was the silence of a fresh snow falling even as the temperature grew colder as they crossed the bridge. Cyrus ran a hand over the railing of the bridge and stared down into the fresh white powder below. He suspected it was as deep as the pond in the Sanctuary garden—only a few feet at most—but it was covered over with snow so thick he could not tell.

“So,” Vaste said, creeping up next to Cyrus, “a walk in the woods alone with Vara.”

Cyrus felt a strain inside and gave him a sidelong look to match it. “What of it?”

“Was it everything you hoped for?”

Cyrus looked past Vaste to Vara, who, he was sure, was pretending to take no notice of their conversation. She had not worn her helm on the excursion, and he could see her ears were red from the frigid temperatures. “It was cold, frightening at points, and ended with me being soaked in freezing water.”

“So …” Vaste said, “… about like you would expect?”

The snow streamed down now, illuminated by the light from Vaste’s staff. Curatio, too, held a hand out and light flared from it as though he held a white fire in his palm. Just beyond where the boundary of the garden would be in Sanctuary stood a circle of tall stones, something strange and out of place about it. They stood at oblong lengths, some pointed and others flat, holding a center of smooth snow that was trampled by only a single set of footprints that Cyrus saw as he and the others crossed into the circle.

“This is it,” Curatio said, stopping in the middle next to a footprint that was already becoming covered over by the falling snow. He brushed his shoulder, dislodging the flakes falling there as though it were of no concern to him, and looked up. “This is where Vidara held her court, and it would be where anyone looking to usurp her power would be.”

“You will find no usurpers here, Curatio,” came a voice from behind a distant stone. It sounded oddly familiar, and a man-shaped figure emerged from behind one of the oblong spires of rock, the one with the set of snowy footprints leading up to it. His steps crunched faintly in the new-fallen snow, and he began to walk toward them.

“Who are you?” Vaste asked, squinting into the dark. He lifted his staff to try and cast illumination at the figure making its way toward them, but it revealed only a dark cloak with a cowl over it.

“One who knows your heart and mind all too well, troll,” came the reply.

Cyrus chanced a look at Vara and saw her usually pale face flushed blood red, her sword hand shaking with the rage that she could barely contain. “Are you responsible for the disappearance of the Goddess, you loathsome—”

“I am not, Shelas’akur,” came the voice in reply again, and Cyrus recognized it now. The figure crept closer and closer. “I am but a humble intermediary—a messenger if you will—here but to ward those who might step into this wayward realm and send them on their ways.” He stopped, and Cyrus could see the outline of the face beneath the cowl now, but the expression was masked in shadow. “I am a sentinel, here to warn—”

“Why don’t you just cut out the protestations of your innocence,” Curatio said, annoyance cutting through his voice, “as it is doubtful we’ll believe them in any case, and get down to delivering whatever message you are here to give … Gatekeeper?”

“You have no idea what you have stepped into,” the Gatekeeper said in a low drawl. He swept the cowl back off his face and he was obvious now, the same figure that Cyrus had been dealing with for over two years in the Realm of Purgatory.

“I am going to guess we’ve stepped into an overly dramatic and self-righteous monologue,” Vaste said.

“I would have said dung,” Vara added, her eyes never leaving the Gatekeeper and her sword still clenched in her hand.

“The fate of gods and men hang in the balance from the events that have transpired in this place—” the Gatekeeper went on.

“I hate it when I’m right,” Vaste said then shot Vara an apologetic look. “Well, I suppose we both were.”

The Gatekeeper continued, acting as if he hadn’t heard either of them, snow falling around him but not seeming to touch him at all, “—this very realm falls into turmoil with the loss of its mistress.” He turned to look at Cyrus. “I believe you have seen the results of a realm in turmoil before?”