Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7)

by Robert J. Crane

  “I don’t care for that notion at all,” Vaste said.

  “As though I have ever given a fig for what the chattering masses want,” Malpravus said with a laugh. “You were barely worthy of my notice before, troll, and you have become positively inconsequential now.”

  “Well, that’s wounding as well as troubling,” Vaste said.

  “Because you are weak, you can be wounded,” Malpravus said. “Words are your most efficacious weapon, aren’t they, Vaste? Is that because healers were not allowed to carry swords—or is because your wit is sharp and your hands weak?”

  “Why don’t you just stroll on over here and find out for yourself?” Vaste slapped the length of his spear-staff into his palm and it echoed through the dark space.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t wish to waste my time,” Malpravus said. “As I told you, you are beneath me.”

  “I’m actually quite a bit taller than you, short stack, which puts me above you,” Vaste said. “Again, step over here and find out.”

  “A few of you,” Malpravus went on, now ignoring Vaste, “have the aid of the weapons of gods, I see.” He laughed. “I placed too little stock in those before, giving them to the Dragonlord when he asked, ignoring the benefits to myself when they could have been mine. The error seems clear in retrospect, but with so many gathered before me, now I see the aid they would bring. Power becomes clearer as one acquires more. Before it was hazier to me; now it is obvious as the nose on Quinneria’s face.”

  Philos lit into a soft glow, and Quinneria spoke. “This is your perpetual problem, Malpravus. Now you overlook Vaste in your haste to declare yourself greater than he. Yet he might be the one who brings you low.”

  “Don’t draw his attention to me yet,” Vaste hissed in a whisper. “I wanted to sneak up on him.”

  “I am too high to be brought low by even you,” Malpravus said. He paused, and the sounds of battle seemed to grow louder outside. “My army approaches, and your rear guard falters. I see you all clearly … a lecher turned Sovereign—”

  “I’m also a paladin now, thanks,” Terian said.

  “—a diseased product of an earth-dwelling race, covered in glory because he sometimes walks upright and can occasionally cast a spell—”

  “Is … is that supposed to be me?” Mendicant asked.

  “—one hated and hounded in his own land as a deviant, too afraid and ashamed to even wear his own face for a hundred years—”

  “You can look at my face now, if you’d like,” J’anda said with silky anger.

  “—an outcast kingslayer from a dead land, noble of title but lacking in any actual nobility—”

  “My slaying is not limited to kings alone,” Longwell said, “I’ve aided in the fall of gods, dragons, titans and more.”

  “—a thief, a liar, and a whore—”

  “You make me sound so saucy when you put it like that,” Aisling said.

  “I think he’s talking about me,” Vaste said.

  “—two unthinking beasts, fit more for fields with plows than fields of battle—”

  “And Zarnn and Fortin aren’t even here to defend their own honor,” Vaste said. “If they were, you’d already be the pile of bones you’ve always aspired to become.”

  “—a man who can’t even convince those he calls friends that he is anything other than a discontented whiner—”

  Ryin looked around. “Oh, that’s me, is it?”

  “Yes,” Vaste said.

  “—the Sorceress herself, so afraid of the kingdoms of men that she abandoned her own child out of fear for her own neck—”

  “In fear for his life,” Quinneria said hotly.

  “—and then there’s the so-called ‘last hope,’” Malpravus said, and his voice took a mocking turn. “Born a miracle to a dying people, given everything she could ask for … and she threw it all away. You—you fool, you smug, high-horsed—”

  “That is particularly rich coming from you,” Vara said with a raised eyebrow.

  “You had more power than most could imagine handed to you, yours for the taking. You could have been a monarch before you reached your majority. Danay would have had no choice but to surrender the throne before the lightest of challenges from you—”

  “Yes, he certainly seemed to be in a surrendering mood when last I spoke with him,” Vara quipped. “You know, between the threats to kill me.”

  “You had everything—and you left it for nothing, to climb your way out of the abysmal depths of the Holy Brethren and join one of the mightiest guilds, only to get yourself struck down by your own foolish blindness, your—your—your love—”

  Vara burned in the darkness, the fire on her blade leaping higher. “You think a betrayal by a loved one was the fault of my foolishness?”

  “To not even see it coming marks you as the worst sort of fool,” Malpravus breathed, “and now—even now—you find yourself with another man who has it in him to cast you aside for greater power … and you ignore it.”

  At this, Vara rolled her eyes. “I’ve just remembered something I forgot … you’re a great bloody idiot.”

  “At least he took the time to insult you properly,” Vaste said. “He just ignored me, like I’m beneath his notice or someth—HEY!”

  “You stand in their midst, Cyrus Davidon,” Malpravus said, “betrayed by so many of them, and yet you still cling tight to this notion of … friends, of this constructed family to replace the one that left you.”

  “Not all of them left,” Cyrus said, bowing his head, “some of them died.”

  “More will die,” Malpravus promised him. “Your Sanctuary will fall. Time will have its way with your little family, and you will be left alone, in the end … and all you will wish is that you had the power to make it all right again.”

  “This is pointless,” Cyrus said, raising his sword, “because you will never understand. Not what draws us together, nor what keeps us together, nor why we fight with and for each other. You may be a necromancer, but you’ve always been dead inside, so hollowed out by your tireless pursuit of the one thing you think matters that you ignore all else at your own peril.” He raised Rodanthar in a high guard and brought Praelior low. “And that which you dismiss … will be the thing that kills you, Malpravus.”

  “I see you make the foolish choice again,” Malpravus said, “but have it your way, childish boy who will never have the chance to grow up. If you prize these fools so highly—” At last, he stepped forward into the light, a skeleton finally in fact, glowing eyes staring out of an actual skull, bleached clean of flesh and covered only by robes, immense, now taller than even Vaste, leering down at them all. “Then you will die with them.”

  94.

  The battle was joined faster than Cyrus could believe, spells flung at the enormous skeleton of Malpravus and his own rejoinders sent back, crashing into the walls of the temple with bellowing fire, shocks of lightning and bursting patches of ice. Malpravus’s attacks hit the floor and peppered the stone into exploding flecks, sending the entire party save for Quinneria diving for cover. Heat and cold ran over Cyrus’s skin, even through the armor, and his hairs, from the long ones atop his head to those down his chest, all stood on end at the sizzle of lightning.

  Vara and Terian wisely circled around the skeleton, not striking immediately, though the thing that had been Malpravus held up one hand to cast spells and the other as if keeping it in reserve to hold off attacks; that hand stayed in the air, cocked as for a punch, as the spellcasting hand unleashed a tide of something horrible that Quinneria met with a magical rejoinder of her own. Malpravus’s crackled black and Quinneria’s glowed green. They warred with each other in a replay of what had happened in the Tower of the Guildmaster, the conjoining spells blasting a mighty hole in the stone ceiling. The rocky pieces fell and disintegrated in the pooling of magics, consumed whole as the room pulsated with the energy of the magical union.

  “This is going to get terrible quickly,” Vaste shouted, aiming his spear at
Malpravus and casting a beam of white out of the tip. Cyrus blinked at it, watching as the troll broke out in a sweat, enormous beads popping up on his forehead. “You mark my words!”

  “Mark them with what?” Vara called, throwing a hand out and issuing a force blast that did not even move the immense, skeletal Malpravus.

  “Mark them with the bodies of the dead!” Longwell shouted. Cyrus turned to see the Army of Goliath at the entry to the temple, Fortin and Zarnn standing in the way, trying to block the gaps. The dead streamed forward with screams on their lips, shattered to pieces by the hands of the rock giant and the troll, as Aisling and Longwell joined the rear guard. J’anda, too, pivoted about and began to shoot purple spells from the tip of his staff, increasing the frenzied chaos at the entry. Aisling was disappearing and appearing from place to place in the middle of it all, ripping asunder dead bodies with perfectly placed strikes then fading away again.

  “We’re going to need more help very soon,” Ryin said, adding a blazing fire spell to Quinneria’s efforts against Malpravus, blending together with her green power that was pulsating against Malpravus’s black. “You don’t need to mark anything for me, just believe it when I say it!”

  “I believe it,” Cyrus said, orbiting to the right with Vara, looking for an opening. Leap in against Malpravus now, and all it’ll take is a second’s redirection of that spell for any one of us to be vaporized like the stones falling from the roof. Cyrus looked up; he could not see the sky for all the magical energy that pulsed in the room.

  “Perhaps we should try something different!” Vara called across the fray. “Terian—perhaps you should attempt some, ah … old magic.”

  “I don’t know any old—” Terian started, and then got it. “Oh. Well. Sure, why not?” Before Cyrus could quite suss out the meaning, the dark elf reached down and poked the pointed tip of his axe into his own wrist and then raised a hand to Malpravus. It glowed faintly, darkly, and he straightened up, the pain clearing from his face. “Uhm … I don’t think that did anything.”

  “You are the prick of a pin to a titan,” Malpravus said, pouring more energy into the ball growing in the center of the room. “I am become greater than all of you combined, with all your weapons and artifacts and spells …”

  “He’s too strong right now!” Quinneria called over the roar of the energy, which was starting to burst loose in great rolling blasts that scoured the room the way it had in the tower. “He’s absorbed too many souls and too recently!”

  “Perhaps a cessation spell?” Mendicant called quietly, biding his time at the floor, yet to cast a single attack in Malpravus’s direction.

  Quinneria shook her head, doing a little sweating herself, her hair frizzy and tangled again like when she had played Larana. “It would just leave him with godlike strength and abilities—and it wouldn’t do a damned thing to stop the flow of his army, because they’re already reanimated and likely to kill us if left unchecked.”

  “I love hopeless fights!” Vaste called. “I try to get into at least one per year! I really upped the quotient this year, though, and seriously, to do it here, in this ugly, frightening, ominous place—”

  Quinneria’s eyes widened in the light of the coruscating magic. “That’s it.”

  “If she got an idea to save us from Vaste, I’m going to have to veto its use,” Terian called, still holding his place on the other side of Malpravus, axe at the ready.

  “No, it’s brilliant,” Quinneria breathed.

  “Of course it is, it came from me,” Vaste said.

  “The seal!” Quinneria said over the crackling energies, the hole in the ceiling widening by the moment.

  “NO!” Vaste called. “That’s not brilliant at all! This situation will not be made better by Yartraak or Mortus’s avatars being let loose!”

  “Mortus and Yartraak are dead, fool,” Vara said.

  “They have no more avatars!” Quinneria shouted, her hands shaking in front of her. “But the seal—”

  Cyrus looked down at the seal in the center of the floor, lit by the magic before him, a strange carving of two faces—he recognized them as Mortus’s and Yartraak’s, in side profile, with skeletons and dead bodies beneath them in the circle. “Is it … what? Made to hold him?”

  “It’s a channel point for the energy that runs through this place!” Quinneria shouted, wavering. “And it can be blocked—stoppered—with him on the other side!”

  “This is all foolishness,” Malpravus said tauntingly, “grasping at the threads of life as I take them away from you. Power is all there is, and you have little of it remaining. I see you, Sorceress, yes, pouring out your stores to stop me, but you were already weakened, your stock depleted before you even came to me … and I am fresh as a newly made corpse.”

  “So, putrid and rotting, then,” Vaste said. “Okay, I like the plan better than simply being overwhelmed and dying. What do we do to make that stoppering business happen?”

  “He needs to bleed on the seal,” Quinneria said, straining under the attack. Her skin was wavering with light, and Cyrus would have sworn he saw a wrinkle appear on her forehead that had not been there before.

  “He’s a skeleton,” Terian said. “They’re not known for bleeding!”

  “It’s a—it’s not an illusion, but it’s a form change,” Quinneria said. “Trust me, he can bleed … and you’re going to have to make that happen now.”

  Cyrus looked to Vara and then Terian, with a quick glance spared at the entry to the temple, which was completely engulfed in a furious melee, the line growing ever closer all the time. “Okay,” Cyrus said, nodding at the two of them. “This one’s on us.” And he let the fire fade from his sword as he leapt forward.

  Cyrus swept in to attack and Malpravus shed his cloak in an instant, his rib bones splitting from his breastbone and swinging loose. They morphed and grew before Cyrus’s eyes, skeletal phalanges sprouting from the tips to form additional hands.

  “Holy shite! I thought he was ugly before!” Vaste screamed.

  Terian came around the back as three arms swung out for him and the dark elf threw his axe up to meet them. The blade struck bone and the bone shattered, splintering and showering Terian as Malpravus screamed with laughter.

  “Fools … all fools!”

  Vara came at him from the side and Malpravus caught her strike with a punch of his free hand, stopping her attack mid-slice. The blade came right back at Vara and she staggered away.

  The rib cage on Malpravus’s right side came apart and angled six arms toward Cyrus. He saw them coming, growing digits and hands the way the bones that had gone after Terian a moment earlier had. Cyrus took it as a personal challenge. You want to send six my way? I’ll show you I’m worth it.

  With swords in hand, Cyrus could feel the effect of both working for him. The world moved slower than ever it had with only one, and he felt stronger, more sure-footed. The hands were moving at normal speed in a world that was not normal, and now he knew the truth of the matter—Malpravus was strong, but he was not invincible.

  Cyrus came at the lowest arm first and cleaved it whole from the growing wrist with Praelior, the sound of bones splintering under his assault like a drumbeat in his ears. The next he caught with Rodanthar in the middle of a grasping hand and split cleanly down the middle, shearing it off and rendering it useless. He swept up with Praelior and caught two at the nubs, ripping them off before they had a chance to reach for him, and the last he got with Rodanthar, cutting them cleanly off and sending them rattling across the floor toward the altar behind Malpravus.

  He stepped in to deal another blow, this one to the solid spine now exposed, but something yanked at his ankle, and he lost his footing as his leg was ripped from beneath him.

  He looked down as he stumbled, and saw a disconnected, bony hand tearing at him, another climbing along on fingers behind it, scrambling for him. He started to shout to Terian but then caught a glimpse of the dark elf beset by the three hands he’d cut
loose, climbing up him as he swung his axe ineffectually at them, trying to sweep them from his body—

  He turned to Vara, only to see a bony, disembodied hand wrapped around her neck, her face red and her fingers tugging at the choking fingers. The veins in her temple were bulging, blood running from between the ivory fingers. Her eyelids were squeezed, only a slit of blue and white visible between them. She was dying. The panic on her face sent a frosty chill through Cyrus as the severed hands pulled him down, ripping at his armor, climbing him—as behind him, the dam burst at the door and the army of Goliath’s dead flooded into the chamber.

  95.

  The ball of magical energy where Quinneria, Vaste and Ryin’s spell had met Malpravus’s was turning black and glowing, the necromancer’s dark magic winning yet another fight, at least as Cyrus saw it from the floor where he lay, cheek pressed against the cold seal in the floor of the temple, defeat all around him.

  Dead members of the Army of Goliath were coming into the chamber now, flowing in on both sides, even as Aisling moved around trying to destroy them and Longwell tried his best to press them away with his lance. A burst flew off the magical energy flashing in the middle of the room and put an accidental end to three of the dead, missing Longwell by mere inches as he threw himself down a set of steps to the left of the entry, disappearing over the edge.

  Terian was still staggering, smashing bones with the flat side of his axe, turning them to dust while flailing wildly at his own breastplate. He was shouting but Cyrus could not hear him over the sound of the spells mingling in the middle of the room, another peal of energy bursting off and sizzling past Vara’s ears—

  Vara was still choking, now upon her knees, her eyes rolled back in her head and fingers wet with her own blood as the disembodied, skeleton hand sunk its fingers into her neck. She went limp and fell, her armor making a soundless crash to the stone floor as she landed.