Crusader s-4

by Robert J. Crane

  “What a complicated little web we find ourselves in,” J’anda said.

  “M’lady,” Curatio said, with a faint, almost patriarchial smile, “there will be no healer for you next time, you realize this, yes?” His hand swept the length of her. “No one will be able to save you from your husband when next he puts the whip to you, and none of us will be close at hand to soothe the damage afterward.”

  Cattrine stared at him dully, then turned her back to him and let the robe slip to just above the small of her back. The other healers, humans, young-gasped at the scars, but Curatio managed to hold any reaction to himself. “I have never before had the luxury of protection from my husband, sir.” She paused, and Martaina could read the regret and fear in equal measure hidden underneath the bravery on the Baroness’s face. “And for the benefit of my people, that is a burden I will have to accept again.”

  Chapter 48

  Cyrus

  The world swirled about him, to and fro, and he caught glimpses of darkness and light in twain, lamps and the sun. Everything hurt from the neck down, and other times everything hurt from the neck up, but the divide was there, at the neck, and consciousness was a fleeting thing.

  His mouth was dry, appallingly so, like someone had opened it and poured sand in until it ran over his lips and out, down his face and off his chest, leaving everything scratchy and dusty. He could smell old, dried blood, that more than anything, but oil was in the air, too, and fire, and other smells, familiar ones, like plants or an ointment, and moldering flesh. Faces blurred in front of him, forcing him to thrash about. He felt pressure on his arms, saw Martaina before him, and Aisling, Curatio at least once, but they were gone again a moment later.

  “He has a fever,” Curatio’s disembodied head told him. The words echoed through the dark space he was in, like booming words lit out of the clouds and born on thunder.

  “Searing hot to the touch,” Aisling said, but she was not disembodied at all, he could see her plainly, see her naked, her dark blue curves hidden in the shadows around him, suggestive, and he took a deep, gasping breath as he looked at her.

  “Is he awake?” That was Martaina, and he saw her as well, but she was headless, just the green cloak and attire of the ranger was visible, only a flash or two of a head being where it was-where it SHOULD be, dammit. “His eyes are open.”

  Cyrus could feel his eyes, too, and they were crusty, like someone had dropped stones in the corners of them, and no matter how much he blinked or rolled them, he couldn’t get them out. “… pebbles …” There was no answer from any of the three of them to that, even though it made perfect sense to him somehow, just that one word. Wasn’t it a perfect way to describe everything that was happening?

  It felt like a day passed, or possibly an age, or maybe only a few minutes. It was brighter now, a lamp overhead shining. The sand was everywhere, the dust, encroaching, filling his eyes and face. It was just like the last time, exactly like it, and Cyrus was suddenly six again, and very, very far from home, if ever there had been such a thing ….

  “The Arena is where you will learn to fight,” the Society of Arms Guildmaster told him, him and a half a hundred other strays and orphans, all his own age. Most were smaller than him, he thought as he looked over the crowd. A few roughly the same size. None bigger. “Where you will face your fears and put them to death. Where you will learn to serve Bellarum and the needs of war.” He was a big man, the Guildmaster, and he spoke from the far entrance. The entire thing was sand, sand around the feet, all the way to the edges. One might have expected something like the coliseum, a place he had been once with Mother, but it wasn’t; no stands around the edges for spectators, just a single, boxed enclosure where the Guildmaster stood with the other adults-a man in a white robe, and two others in armor.

  “Fear is weakness,” the Guildmaster said, his face knit with scars on each cheek and rough skin on his forehead. He looked older than Mother, older than the man who had brought him to the Society, but beyond that, Cyrus couldn’t tell his age. “Weakness is the sum total of all your flaws, all your faults, all the things that can get you killed in battle. We purge weakness here; we don’t coddle it. If you fear something, face it down. Run it to the ground. Beat it out of you.” The Guildmaster looked them all over, and there was nary a flinch from him, though Cyrus heard the sobs from some of the others. “If you fear to be hit, then you’ll need to face it. Many of you wish to go back to your comfortable places, even if those places are the streets. You won’t find comfort here, because comfort is weakness.”

  With that, the Guildmaster left the enclosure and walked into the arena; some of the crying subsided, and Cyrus could hear the soft crunch of the sand against the Guildmaster’s metal boots, his steel armor scuffed with age. Cyrus wanted to cry, could feel it, but his tears were already gone. More than half when Father died, all the rest when Mother went. He was as dry in the eyes as the arena floor, dusty but wracked with emptiness. He’d gone along when the big man-Belkan was his name-had led him here; after all, with Mother gone, what else was there?

  Cyrus looked to the boy next to him, who wore rags, browned and barely covering him. It was winter now, and cold outside. How could one not be cold out on the streets, wearing something such as that? The boy’s eyes flashed at him; he was one of the ones that was Cyrus’s size, one of the very few, and his brown hair was over his eyes, long, unlike Cyrus’s short cropped bangs that barely touched his forehead where his mother kissed him every night-or had, before-

  “Fear is weakness,” the Guildmaster said again. “It is in your nature to be weak. We will make you men-or women, as the case may be,” he said with a nod toward two girls who were in the front of the crowd of children. They weren’t crying, Cyrus thought, oddly, though he heard other girls crying among all the boys sobbing around him. “Breaking fear is nothing more than looking it in the eye and spitting in its face, finding your courage, and daring it over and over again. Pain is nothing to fear. Pain only hurts. Battle is nothing to fear, because it brings only pain. Commitment to your cause will draw out your fear, excise it, take it away. You must subsume yourself in the cause of war in the light of battle, and learn to love the draw of combat. The crack of bone and hand, the slash of sword and steel, the rending of flesh with axe, these will be your daily prayers, the things that you commit yourself to, to draw out the fear. I can make you fearless.”

  The crying didn’t stop at that, it seemed to get worse, but Cyrus felt the little flecks of dust fall out of his eyes and he realized for the first time that that was what he wanted, what the Guildmaster had offered. He had cried when he had learned that Father died, cried hard, and even worse after Mother, though for a shorter time. He had stayed with the neighbors, though not for long, until Belkan had come for him. All that time he had felt the gnaw of fear, felt it chip at his bones, awaken him in the night when the tears had come, felt it eat him at him like it would someday come and take him whole, drag him off into the night where he would never be seen again.

  “Who among you,” the Guildmaster said, “wants to be fearless?” The words echoed in the arena, over the sand pit, and there was silence apart from the sobs, a quiet that settled among the crying children, all so far from home, wherever that was to them.

  Cyrus felt his hand go up, as though it were out of his control. It went up above the others, the first, a silent flag to mark his surrender-and his desire to be free of the fear-once and for all.

  Chapter 49

  Vara

  The Council Chamber had emptied quickly after the meeting, as though everyone had other things to deal with, other urgencies to be handled. Erith and Vaste, she knew, were both balancing the responsibilities of the Halls of Healing, keeping it running while Curatio was away. She wondered if Ryin had even set foot in his own quarters since returning to Sanctuary to find it under attack. Alaric, however, remained in his seat, as though carved out of the same material as the chair, not a Ghost at all but a mountain lain down in the
middle of the room, growing out of the stone floor. His head was bowed and his helm lay upon the table, as it always did. A kind of darkness enshrouded him, like the clouds that hang over a peak at midday, hiding it from the view of the world, and she could tell naught about his mood or intentions save that they were present and as hidden as the man’s face usually was.

  “You have something on your mind,” Alaric said, breaking the silence between them, his eyes not finding hers but remaining fixed on the edge of the table.

  “Always,” Vara said, not sure where she found it within her to be even slightly smartass. “It’s the peril of thinking, you know.”

  Alaric did not smile, did not return hers because she did not have one to return. “What is on your mind, lass?”

  “You’ve proven to have an uncanny knack at guessing what sort of things might be on the minds of others.” She shifted her hands to her lap, letting the steel gauntlets clink against the metal of her greaves. They were like a second skin by now, she had worn them for so long, but in moments such as this, they found ways to remind her, subtly, that she was different than even many of the women of Sanctuary. “So why don’t you tell me … what is on my mind?”

  Alaric let a long sigh, his head settling back down to look at the edge of the table rather than her. “Your mind is on Cyrus, in Luukessia-”

  “My mind is on our guildmates,” she said hotly, “facing the consequences of our mistakes, in a foreign land-”

  “One of whom is our General,” Alaric said calmly, “a man with whom you are developing a somewhat tangled history, even if you don’t wish to admit to it.” She didn’t bother to interrupt him again, but she felt the burn all the way up to the tops of her ears, which was enough to tell her that her pale face was, by necessity, flushed. “You needn’t bother denying it, and nor do I care. I did not allow Cyrus to casually disentwine himself from admitting his feelings for you, even when he didn’t want to, and if you want me to speak your mind for you, don’t pretend to be offended when I speak to you what is truly on it. Yes, you worry about our troops, and our guildhall, and Sanctuary, but your emotions sweep you, old friend, and your emotions-the ones you don’t care to admit-are so loudly proclaiming your thoughts for the man in black that I cannot ignore them in favor of anything you might say.”

  “It is my fault, Alaric.” She heard the echo of the words in the silence, even though they were no more than a whisper. “We went to the Realm of Death for my people-to save my people, to find out why Mortus wanted me dead. And he killed the God of Death-”

  “I killed the God of Death,” Alaric said, and there was menace in his voice, “lest you forget.”

  “But Cyrus threw himself in the path of Mortus.” Vara’s head was up now, and she stared down the Ghost. “I should have died there, and none of this would have happened. But he threw himself in front of Mortus and cut the hand, and we fell upon the God of Death like crows upon a piece of carrion. If he were still alive, Luukessia would be … I don’t know, not being overrun by these creatures. We’re responsible … I’m responsible, Alaric! It’s my fault.” She felt the strong emotion, and it caused her to shut her eyes, to cover her face with her hand. “It’s all my fault.”

  “Because you made him love you?” Alaric’s voice was oddly distant, and Vara looked through her fingers to see him on his feet, back to her now, facing the window and looking out across the plains. “Because you forced him to defend you in your time of need, follow you when Mortus’s assassins pursued you, and try to save you when you had lost all hope?” Alaric still did not look at her. “Yes, I can see how this is entirely your fault.”

  “I know it sounds absurd.” She rose from her place at the table but did not move closer to him, merely stood, as though she were a child in the Holy Brethren again, answering an instructor’s question. “But it is so, that his …” she struggled with the word, “… feelings for me, they caused him to act, to set things in motion, and what I did afterward sent him over there, where our people face … whatever those things are.”

  “A scourge, I believe they call them. And a scourge I believe they are.”

  “How do you reconcile a thought like that?” She let the words hang before asking her next question. “You said you killed Mortus, and I suppose you did, struck the final blow. But we all killed him together, all of us, and you may have struck the last, but Cyrus struck the first, and he did it in my name, for me, binding us all together in some grand pact that has unleashed untold hell upon people who I had never even heard of until this last year. How do you … handle that? How do you not let it weigh upon your thoughts every waking moment of the day? How do you live with the idea that someone so dear and frustrating and annoying and noble and fearless is facing the consequences of what you’ve wrought, that they could die so far from home, and never return to …” She almost coughed, overcome with annoying emotion. “How do manage that, Alaric? How do you bury that and get on with things?”

  The Ghost was quiet, his broad shoulders almost unmoving beneath his armor, his silhouette against the shadows of the evening sun outside. “I don’t know that you can, lass. What I would advise … is that you recognize that what is past is past, and that no amount of agonizing or wishing will change the outcome of that day in Death’s Realm, and that no excess of cogitation will change what happened that night in your quarters. No matter how much you think and dwell and wonder, no other outcome will make itself known but what has happened.” Alaric’s hand reached out to the window and he touched it, the fingers of his metal gauntlets clicking against the glass, as though he were trying to touch the orange sky beyond. “You can scarce change the past or what has gone before. All you can do is dwell in the moment, and work to change the course of things from here on.” He turned his head to look at her. “That is what I would advise.”

  “Is it?” Vara asked, and she let her fingers clench inside her gauntlets. “Then why is there a pall over you, Lord Garaunt? Why does it seem that darkness has settled on the Ghost of Sanctuary, and that the ephemeral Guildmaster seems weighted down even more than he has ever been before? If dwelling in the past does not change the course of things then why are you still there, every day, every night, and letting it own you, become you?”

  Alaric made no reply at first. “It would seem that I am not the only one for whom an uncanny knack for guessing the minds of others has become a standard. I said that the advice I gave you is what I would advise. I did not suggest that it was in any way what I, myself, was doing.”

  “You think about it, too, don’t you?” She left the table behind carefully, walking toward him, halting a few paces away. “It is on your mind, always, what has happened, what we allowed to happen, by our actions and inaction-”

  “Yes,” Alaric said, and his head went back to the window, which his hand had never left, still touching the glass. “It is a … difficult thing to lose guildmates. When we lost Niamh, I was once again torn with indecision. We have lost several in the last few years, and that is to be expected, normal attrition for a guild of our size and the way that we run things. But Niamh … was precious. She had been here almost since the beginning of Sanctuary, twenty-odd years ago. To see her lost, not to some raid but to a deliberate attack by an assassin, was wrenching. I questioned myself in ways that I had not in years. Not since …” he shook his head, “… Raifa. For everything that followed, that led you and Cyrus into peril at Termina, that took you into war-every single thing that happened-I questioned my choices, my thoughts, the distance that I had allowed you to operate at. And even though there was not a single thing I would have done differently than either of you, from the moments before Niamh died to the night on the bridge when you held off an empire, I still questioned. Even in Death’s Realm, when I tried to bargain with Mortus, I wondered in the moment if sacrificing one guildmate in order to save the rest was the right choice.” He bowed his head and his hand came free of the window.

  “The truth is … I was relieved when Cyrus j
umped in front of Mortus’s hand. I wished I had had the courage to do it myself, to die so that none of the rest of you would have to. I was relieved because his courage spared me from the cowardice of consigning one of you to death, to making the impossible decision of entering battle with a god or letting one person die as a sacrifice. Cyrus made the choice I couldn’t find it in myself to disagree with. He spared your life, and …” Alaric’s eyes found her then, “… and I was glad, glad that the God of Death died that day, because the alternative would be to lose you, and that would be …” He did not finish.

  “So it weighs on you, too,” Vara said, though she did not touch him, did not so much as place a hand on his shoulder. It would be unseemly, somehow, between the two of them. There was always much unsaid, and Alaric was no more profligate with his touch than she was; two distant people, so bizarrely different than someone such as … say, Niamh.

  “It weighs on me,” he said. “But it need not weigh on you if you should follow the advice I give you-”

  “Rather than the example you set for me?” Vara felt the taste of the irony on her tongue, and it was not to her liking. “That should be the first time, I would think.”

  “I rather suspected you would not listen, preferring instead in your infinite stubbornness to do things your own way,” Alaric said with a note of melancholy. “Or my own way, if you prefer.”

  “Stubbornness is hardly a quality reserved for the officers of Sanctuary,” Vara said, “but if I may boast, I think we bring it to such a level that few could ever hope to master it in the way we have.”

  “True enough. But my counsel is sound; if you would heed it, you would agonize less.”

  “And you would agonize just the same,” she said. “And I would still …” She shook her head as though the mere action could cleanse the bitterness from her palate, “… worry. About-”