Master (Book 5) (68 page)

I opened the door to find J’anda waiting outside. I have known J’anda for some considerable time. For as long as I have known him, he has worn many faces.

Since he returned from Luukessia, I have only seen him almost exclusively with one: his own, considerably aged, face.

I didn’t really know what to say. I invited him in, of course, and he accepted. “You should be at your party,” I said weakly, aware of the hypocrisy inherent in such a statement.

He looked at me with those deep eyes of his. Another thing I have realized in my long association with J’anda—in spite of his charm and the interest of countless women in him, his proclivities run in a different direction than I or any other woman of Sanctuary might provide. “I come back to you now for whatever time I have left.”

“Here to Sanctuary, I assume,” I said. “Not here to my chambers? Because I am ill-equipped to handle dying.”

“Aren’t we all?” he asked with that faint, charming smile. There is little about J’anda that is not charming.

“Why are you here?” I asked. “In this room, I mean. Obviously … coming back to Sanctuary for the time you have left …”

“I have had a great deal of time to think of late,” J’anda said. “And I realized I have never cast a spell of mesmerization upon you.”

I froze. I’ve heard about mesmerization spells, about what they do—what they show you. “I … I don’t really have any interest in exploring my heart’s desire, whatever that may be—”

“It’s a curious thing,” J’anda said, “in the nature of people. Anyone who learns what a mesmerization spell is, they come to some point their life when they come to me. They seek answers. Answers to questions they may struggle with. Many times, we wander through our lives without knowing exactly what it is we want.” He leaned in and looked me in the eye. “Of course, there are also those who fear to know what they want.”

I have had these conversations before. Well-meaning, always. Good-intentioned, doubtless. But it is the same conversation, every time, whether it is my sister or the newest warrior applicant who broaches the subject. Even Arydni—who has born the brunt of my tirades about the expectations of the Life Mother upon my female parts more than once—has tried to bring up the topic of Cyrus Davidon with me.

The same damned conversation.

And here is what I do. I smile. It puts them at ease, I think. Or terrifies them, perhaps. I don’t care, honestly. I count to five because to respond sooner would guarantee that the flames of Enflaga himself would burst from my mouth and consume them wholly. That’s not polite, my mother’s voice tells me. And then, in the lightest tone, I begin my counter-argument.

“J’anda, Cyrus is a human,” I said, well practiced, well rehearsed. These are the words of my mother, given life by me years after her death. “I am not. I could live for six thousand years—”

“You could die tomorrow,” J’anda said with a certainty that made me rattle slightly. “And what would you have? What would you leave behind you but an ocean of regrets?”

I did not quite flinch at that, but … I will admit to perhaps blinking a few times. “I … also have a reasonable collection of leather shoes.”

“I saw the desire of Cyrus’s heart on the day I mesmerized him some years ago,” J’anda said. “Through land and sea, death and life, errors …” he made a face, “… numerous errors … I know that the desire of his heart has not changed.” He laid a hand upon mine. “And I suspect all this work you do, the two of you, keeping yourselves apart … it is a tireless dance, but one that I have grown tired of. Life is uncertain. Death is uncertain.” He looked me directly in the eyes. “If there is something in your heart that you are certain about … it would be exceedingly wise not to waste the rest of your days adding it to the pile with your list of regrets … and your collection of leather shoes.” He shrugged at the last part. “I am sure they are very fashionable.”

“Damned right,” I said, but the certainty I had felt a moment earlier had faded. I had known the desire of my heart all along. It was obvious as the nose on J’anda’s face, when he wasn’t hiding it behind an illusion.

“You don’t have to be alone,” he said, and it forced me to look around—to really look around. My quarters were nearly bare, the product of a life that had been lived in a whirlwind, moving from place to place several times. Uprooted and starting over again. Being left to die. Learning to trust again.

I had lost Alaric, lost my parents, lost my trust at the blade of a knife. I looked down at my hands, bare, as I had left my gauntlets on the table when I had come in. They looked lonely, each finger without another to intertwine with. I stuck my hands together self-consciously, and though they matched, it did not feel right.

“Do not enslave yourself to your past,” J’anda said, moving toward the door. He walked with a slump to his shoulders and disappeared into the hall, shutting the door behind him.

I sat alone for another ten minutes, thinking over what he said, staring at my bare walls, and feeling the strange absence as I interlaced my fingers in a spectacle that would have looked bizarre on anyone but Malpravus. I should be proud that it only took those ten minutes—well, ten minutes and however many years—to make my decision. I am an elf, after all, and my life is long. Ten minutes to realize that I didn’t want to spend it alone is practically a snap of the fingers. I left my empty quarters behind and ascended, searching him out. I felt like I was climbing toward my destiny—

Cyrus snapped the diary shut, the emotions bubbling over. He pushed them away, forced them down, cleared his throat, feigned a cough. He looked out the window, sparing only a glance to look back at Vaste. The troll’s head was still down, still on the pages of Alaric’s journal.

Cyrus walked, slowly, across the floor of the Council Chambers, avoiding the shattered debris that littered the room. He passed Vaste and walked toward the stairs, stopping when he heard the voice call to him from behind.

“You aren’t alone, you know.” Vaste’s tone was crisp, clear.

“I know,” Cyrus said and began his descent.

The foyer was still a disastrous mess, stone and rubble strewn everywhere. He passed through the doors and onto the grounds, the scorched grass stretching out from the stone steps. He marched toward the remnants of the curtain wall, passing under the remains of the gate only moments later.

He stood and looked across the plains, empty, desolate. When he had passed this way days earlier, the spot upon which he stood had been a crater, a jagged, lifeless hole in the earth.

Cyrus turned his gaze to the monument, the only sign that had marked this place other than the crater. It was massive in its own right, a headstone as wide as he was tall. The story it told across the top was one he was all too familiar with. He ran a finger over the text, giving it only a cursory glance.

And then he reached the bottom, the list of names that ran columns wide, row after row.

The dead.

The fallen.

He had read them all before, every one, and on each occasion he did so, it felt like he drowned in his own despair, as though he’d fallen in deep water and no one had reached a hand to help pull him back out again. It was cold and crippling, as icy as Reikonos air in the heart of winter.

Cyrus stood before the stone, his heart barely contained. He kept his eyes closed for fear of being seen and subtly looked back toward the gates. They were empty, a clear path all the way back to the foyer. The gaping darkness loomed inside Sanctuary, a mouth of despair that threatened to swallow him whole.

But not just yet.

He read the names, starting at the top. He did it stoically, containing the emotion that threatened to burst loose of him. He did well in this, he had to admit. The grey skies threatened to open up on him—again—but he kept his own emotions bottled through every single column, every single row.

Until the name at the bottom.

He let his eyes drift to it as a man seeking pain picks at a fresh scab. It gave him the desired result: sharp agony, fresh, dredged back to life.

Cyrus Davidon felt the wobble run through his legs and hit his knees, the shock of the impact rolling up him, all the strength gone from a warrior who had challenged the gods.

Fought death itself.

Plucked the eyes from dragons.

Freed a land.

Five words, carved in stone, were enough to render the warrior in black armor weak beyond measuring. They brought him low without fail, took him down, ripped from him whatever he had left.

But as Cyrus stared at the words, unable to take his eyes off of them—perfectly carved as if a quill had etched them into the stone—he had to concede that … there simply was not anything else left to take. His eyes drifted over them once more, and the stabbing, searing pain clawed its way into his heart again at their mere sight:

The wind howled over the Plains of Perdamun, over the monument to the fallen, grey skies dark over the lonely and abandoned towers of the Sanctuary guildhall—a perfect match for the man in black armor who knelt at the foot of the stone … and was lord of all the emptiness he looked over.

So…was that my most emotionally brutal ending ever? Discuss. But not here, because you'd basically be yelling at your e-reader (if you've not already thrown it).

If you're fighting the temptation to throw it, let me reassure you – I've just revealed something fairly huge (obviously). This is book five of eight (main volumes; when you count in 4.5 and 5.5, I guess it's a ten book series. Unless you add in the tales…). Point is, the story is NOT over.

Bear with me. I think, when we get to the end of this, you'll be happy you read. It's gonna take a while longer to get to the end, though. After vacillating somewhat (and realizing how much is left out of the Saekaj storyline by the fact that Cyrus couldn't be present for the revolution), I've decided to go ahead and write Fated in Darkness: The Sanctuary Series, Volume 5.5. It'll cover what J'anda, Aisling and Terian were doing during the events of this book and bring Terian and Aisling's stories as started in “Thieving Ways” (available in Sanctuary Tales) and “Thy Father's Shadow” (Sanctuary 4.5) to their respective closes and fold them back into the main story. After that, I will not be writing any more half-measure volumes, it'll be volumes 6, 7 and 8 to finish things out for this series.

That said, it's still probably going to be a couple years to finish this thing. I wrote ten books in 2014, and I'm aiming for ten in 2015. I even managed to squeeze in three Sanctuary books this year, not that most people noticed. (Sanctuary Tales and Volume 4.5 did not do all that well, comparatively – which is fine. As your author, I want to give you more of what you want. Except for that scene that just happened in the epilogue. You obviously didn't want THAT.) I'm aiming to get Volume 5.5 and 6 out in 2015, and I think that's very possible, though Warlord (Volume Six) could be as big as Crusader (about 1.5x the length of this volume). We'll see.

To bring this ramble to a close, if you want to know when the next book(s) become available, take sixty seconds and sign up for my NEW RELEASE EMAIL ALERTS by
CLICKING HERE
. Don't let the caps lock scare you; I don't sell your information and I only send out emails when I have a new book out. The reason you should sign up for this is because I don't like to set release dates (it's this whole thing, you can find an answer on my website in the FAQ section), and even if you're following me on Facebook (
robertJcrane (Author)
) or Twitter (
@robertJcrane
), it's easy to miss my book announcements because…well, because social media is an imprecise thing.

Come join the Sanctuary discussion on my website:
http://www.robertjcrane.com
! It's more fun that ranting at your e-reader.

Cheers,

Robert J. Crane

Jo Evans, Nicolette Solomita and David Leach each did a read or twelve (David) on this book, helping improve it in the process and making sure the author didn't lose his damned mind and slip into insanity.

Kari Phillips long ago gave me a great idea about using a goddess to create an infinite number of soul rubies, so thanks to her for that one. And more. Probably more, too.

Karri Klawiter once again provided a flashy and eye-catching cover.

Sarah Barbour provided editorial guidance and helped keep me between the lines on this crazy roller-coaster ride of a novel. It ain't easy producing a work of this size, but it'd be impossible to do it this cleanly without help like she provides.

Jeff Bryan gave this book a final read-through that helped me stamp out some persistent errors and made it a better read.

My kids helped push that sanity dial in the other direction. I love them anyway.

My parents helped keep the kids from pushing that dial too far. They came and stayed for a week during which I managed to write at least a quarter of this manuscript, which was a huge help in getting it back on track.

My wife helps me hold it all together. She's kinda of the crazy-glue for our operation. Minus the crazy. That's my dominion.

Robert J. Crane is kind of an a-hole. Still, if you want to contact him: