Master (Book 5)

by Robert J. Crane

  “You should have said something.” She glared at him.

  “I didn’t want to be a bother,” he said.

  “You’re several years too late for that,” she muttered, and they went on, into the deepening cold of the woods.

  They came to a clearing, and Cyrus emerged from the cover of the trees slowly. It still bore all the signs of the darkness that crept about in the rest of the realm, but a path seemed to cut right through the center of it, worn ground bereft of grass. “Are we fools to follow the path here?” Cyrus asked.

  “We were fools to come here at all,” Vara said at his side. “Following a path seems to be the least of our sins at this point.”

  “I was just trying to—” Cyrus began.

  “I know,” she said, quietly. “You were trying to help. Arydni, this expanded version of Sanctuary you’ve created, you were trying to help them all.” There was something in the way she said it that provoked his interest, made him think there was something she was holding back.

  “But?” he asked. He stopped and watched her as she took a couple steps forward without him.

  She stopped and her head bowed, the blond hair drooping with her mood. She turned back to him, and when she spoke he could see the reticence melt away. “But … what we have done of late … the new men we’ve adopted from Luukessia? The mercenary way we’ve pursued payment for service? It’s not exactly the Sanctuary of old, is it?” She tilted her head to look at him. “With Alaric gone, we’ve not really stopped to ask ourselves how far off the path we’ve strayed. He would not even recognize Sanctuary as it is now.”

  “We were expanding before he died—” Cyrus said.

  “We were roughly five thousand strong on the day he left us,” Vara said. She spoke with cool detachment, bereft of the heat of passion he might have expected of her. “We are now more than fifteen thousand strong and have branched out into being an army for hire.” She kept her head down, not even meeting his eyes. “I have not protested any of the actions undertaken, because I understand the motives for all of them. However, we are rapidly becoming something other than the Sanctuary of old and are quickly leaving behind the days when we steered the course of our own destinies and were masters of our own fates.”

  Cyrus listened until he was sure she was finished. “I agree with everything you’ve said. But I don’t know what we could do any differently, other than surrender on upholding our obligations,” he lowered his voice, “My obligations—to the people of Luukessia.”

  “We are in an untenable situation,” Vara said, even more quietly. “I remain uncertain what can be done to preserve us as we were, other than shirking all these new responsibilities, and that is not the Sanctuary way, either.” She shrugged. “But I feel as though we have lost our way, and it pains me.” She looked around the clearing, and a leaf blew past her face. “In more ways than one.”

  “Yeah, well—” Cyrus turned his head at the sound of movement behind him. There was motion again in the darkness, a rustle of grass, and he saw red eyes staring at him from out of the dark. “Aw, hells.”

  “Yes, more of them,” Vara said. Her sword was in her hand. She closed the distance between them and stood at his elbow. Red eyes were appearing all around them, little glowing orbs in the dark. “It would appear that Vidara’s servants were plentiful.”

  “Well, she did run the Realm of Life,” Cyrus said, pushing closer to her and placing his back against hers. He heard the clink of his backplate lightly against Vara’s and stopped, adopting a fighting stance. “I would have expected she’d know a thing or two about how life is made, and made plentiful.”

  There was a pause as the red eyes began to grow larger, approaching.

  “Was that some crass joke about the Mother of Life being a harlot of some sort?” Vara asked.

  “What?” Cyrus whipped his head around. “No. More like an acknowledgment that she held dominion over making these creatures reproduce as quickly as—say, rabbits.” He caught a glimpse of her frown. “It’s an expression—‘breeding like rabbits.’ It’s what we say when we mean someone is having offspring rapidly.” He saw her frown dissipate. “You don’t have that expression?”

  “Not exactly,” Vara said, and her reply was laced with amusement. “In the Elven Kingdom, the closest approximation is, ‘breeding like humans.’”

  Cyrus gave a dry chuckle and was surprised to hear it echoed lightly by her. “I’ve rather missed this.”

  “Indeed,” she said, near a whisper. The figures were emerging from the darkness, almost beyond number. They had the same wide bodies, the same pronged antlers, and were covered by the same darkness as the ones that had come before.

  “Back to back,” Cyrus said. “Like on the bridge in Termina.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “save there is no friendly line to work our way back to here.”

  Cyrus looked at the red eyes, the dark creatures emerging from the woods of night. “Then I suppose we’ll have to kill them all, won’t we?”

  “If anyone could do it, I suppose it’s us,” Vara said, and he could feel her behind him, feel her for the first time in months. Not a cold shadow, but her, truly her. “Why is it always us?”

  “I assume we’re simply the best there is,” Cyrus said. The red eyes were unblinking, and he could feel them readying, preparing to charge.

  “And there’s the ego,” Vara said.

  “It could be that we just go looking for more trouble than most,” Cyrus conceded.

  “We should make a pact to stop that,” Vara said, and a furious stomping of hooves nearly blotted out what she said next. “If we survive this.”

  Cyrus felt a rough anger fill him, a fighting spirit that he’d found again on the Endless Bridge. “I wouldn’t worry about that. I’m much too frustrating to die.”

  “At last, a point upon which we can both agree,” Vara said. “But … I am glad it is you here with me.”

  “Because there’s no one else you’d rather have at your side for a fight like this?” Cyrus asked.

  She made a pfft sound with her lips. “Because I’d rather not have anyone else in Arkaria die in such a damned fool manner.”

  Cyrus nodded, still smiling, as the line of enemies around him broke into a charge. He backed tight against Vara and readied himself as the beasts came, heads down, at the two of them.

  Chapter 16

  “We haven’t laughed like that in a while,” Cyrus said as they walked on. Both of them were caked in blood, and Cyrus was covered in dirt. Vara’s shining silver breastplate had a streak of grass staining it where she’d hit the ground during the fight.

  The fight with the deer had been long and brutal, but their lives remained in little doubt. The deer failed to penetrate the tight circle held by the two of them, and they had rebuffed every attack until every last one of the creatures had been slaughtered. Cyrus ran a hand up to wipe a cold spot on his forehead, and found a bit of frozen gore stuck to his helm. It was growing progressively colder as they walked.

  “You were gone for over a year,” Vara said, walking at his side. Her sword was still drawn and tight in her hand. Black blood caked her gauntlet where Cyrus had seen her punch through the chest of a still-living deer, killing it. “And since, you’ve been—” There was a flash of darkness across her face as she crossed under the branch of a tree.

  “Otherwise engaged,” Cyrus said quietly.

  “I was going to say, ‘busy fornicating with a dark elven slattern,’ but then I never was good at speaking to your more delicate sensibilities.” Her voice didn’t carry as hard an edge to it now as he had become accustomed to in council, but it still contained bite aplenty.

  “A year is a long time,” Cyrus said. “Especially when—”

  “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 t
hat 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 bri
dge 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.”