Crusader s-4

by Robert J. Crane

  They lay on the grassy bank for a while afterward, her head on his shoulder, not speaking. “Why?” Cyrus asked, into the silence of the setting sun.

  “Why what?” Aisling’s voice came back to him, jaded, wary.

  “Why do you think I’m doing this?” he asked, spent, not even close to sure about what answer he would get. “Do you think it’s because I-”

  “I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Aisling said, and she rolled over, grasping at her shirt and pulling it on. “Though, I do occasionally put a gift in my-”

  “There’s the Aisling of old,” Cyrus said, not moving, feeling the hard dirt against his back. “I had thought that perhaps finally getting what you wanted would rid you of your desire to be crass.”

  He saw the subtle shrug of her shoulders as she knotted the strings that knit up her shirt. “Have I gotten what I wanted?” She didn’t look back at him. “I did get you, I suppose, and I did always say I wanted this, so I suppose in that way I got what I wanted.”

  “You were perhaps expecting me to be more … enthusiastic?” He rolled onto his side to watch her as she dressed, still squatting low and keeping her body down, out of sight of camp.

  “I could hardly ask for a more enthusiastic partner, at least on a purely physical level.” Her legs folded around in front of her like a gymnast and she slid into her pants, taking care to knot them back up. “Especially so soon after being an invalid.”

  “I’m not the same, am I?” He didn’t watch her now, he let himself lean back to the ground, felt his wet hair slop into the dirt.

  “No,” she said, but her voice seemed cavalier and uncaring about the whole thing. “But who of us stays the same for our whole lives?”

  “What would you have of me, then?” Cyrus looked up at the sky, the deepening shades of evening coming out now.

  “Nothing that I think you would be capable of giving at present,” she said, and he watched her put her boots on, one at a time, her white hair bound over her shoulder and leaving water marks on her tan shirt. “Which is why I don’t ask.”

  “Do you think me fragile?” He couldn’t seem to muster any umbrage for his question.

  “I think you’re already broken,” she said, and stood, looking down at him. “But that’s all right. We all break some time; and I’m here, willing to take what you’re willing to give and willing to give what you need right now. Your spirals don’t concern me; you’re a big boy, and you’ll work it out in time.”

  “Will I now?” He let a faint amusement creep into his voice, and he saw a whirl of white clouds tinged orange by the coming sunset. “That’s reassuring.”

  “Be reassured, then,” she straddled him, her cloth pants against his abdomen, and she leaned over to kiss him, deep and full on the mouth. He felt her passion behind it, the force, but he had none of his own to match it with, just the slight stir of something detached, and far away, a physical reaction that told him that if she stayed where she was, her clothing would need to be removed again …

  As if she could sense his line of thought, she broke from him. “See?” She gave him a faint smile, and the long incisors poked out of her lips again. Time was he would have thought them predatory, but now he saw the hurt, the edge behind her eyes, the strain that she didn’t intend to loose. She stood, and with a whirring of the grass, she took the first steps away.

  He lay there by the stream, trying to gather enough energy to bring himself back to the water the clean off the grit accumulated during his and Aisling’s lovemaking. He couldn’t find it, though, and remained there, staring at the sky, until the first body came drifting down the current only a few minutes later.

  Chapter 57

  Vara

  Day 1 of the Siege of Sanctuary

  There were no catapults hurling rock through the air, no siege towers making their way over the plains, no arrows filling the skies above the wall. There was nothing but the sound of an army outside, the raucous cheers, the battle hymns, the shouts and glee of the invaders poised less than a mile from the Sanctuary walls, waiting, as though they would come across the open distance and split the walls wide.

  “They sit, they wait,” Thad said, addressing the officers, who were gathered around the Council Chambers. “Of course they stop the flow of convoys along the major roads nearby, but that’s to be expected. We can’t see them, of course, but you know they’ll have taken all the grain that’s being shipped through the crossroad north of here.”

  Alaric watched Thad from behind templed hands, as always. This time was different, Vara thought, in that the Ghost’s brow was stitched together like storm clouds on the horizon, as though thunderheads were bound to streak down his face and unleash fury on the first poor bastard to cross before him. “Every day they hold the crossroads is another day they hold the Plains of Perdamun in their grip, another day closer to the harvest, another day closer to the eventual starving of Reikonos.”

  “Are we actively rooting for Reikonos now?” Erith said, causing everyone to turn and look at her. “I mean, I know we’re sympathetic to the humans, but the Confederation and the Council of Twelve? Bumbling idiots. They did want this war, after all.”

  “The city of Reikonos is the largest in Arkaria with over two million people,” Alaric said. “Should the dark elves take it, they will not be merciful to the occupants-or the human race.”

  “Oh, so we are rooting for the Council of Twelve,” Erith said, not chagrined. “Okay, well, that’s good to know.”

  “Personally, I’m more worried about me, then the rest of you, then our members, then the applicants, and somewhere down the list, the flower garden,” Vaste said. “I’ll worry about Reikonos and the rest of the human race when the destruction of all of the above is not hanging over my head. Especially the flowers because they’re so pretty.”

  “What chance do we have to push them back?” Ryin asked, turning his question to Thad. “A hundred thousand or more, yes? How do we break an army of that size? How many would we need to do it?”

  “More than we have,” Alaric said. “I suspect that they will not be driven away as easily as they were the first time now that they have reinforcements. We can defend the walls against that number by keeping them at bay, but by bottling us up, they achieve their directive-they hold total control over the plains. There is no way we can effectively guard against the predations of their soldiers against the farms without being able to move our army to do so.”

  “Perhaps we cannot control the Plains of Perdamun while they have us cornered so,” Vara said, speaking at last, “but we can give them pause and keep them from extending that control.”

  Alaric’s eyebrow came up behind his hands. “You mean to fight a small war, to distract them, to split their forces.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean to take a small force and do what they accused us of two years ago-find their convoys of stolen goods and strike them, then teleport back here with the spoils. They’ll be forced to move soldiers off the line of siege to escort the convoys, and as we move closer to harvest time that will be a larger and larger group necessary to keep them safe. With a druid and a wizard we’ll be able to teleport out of trouble before any army can reach us, and we can cause enough trouble and discord north of here to force them to keep splitting their forces.”

  “I like it,” Vaste said, nodding his head at a sideways angle. “It almost sounds like something that could really work, as though perhaps it had been done at some point in the recent past.”

  “It seems a shame to let our enemies have all the fun,” Vara said archly, “seeing as when Goliath and the goblins tried it, it worked very effectively at keeping all parties concerned fully off balance.”

  “Yes, and also prompted every power in the area to send in more troops,” Ryin said. “What’s to stop the Sovereign from doing so again?”

  “Just package up another division or five and throw them into the Plains of Perdamun?” Thad asked. “The Sovereign has to be reaching a
limit at some point. There are only so many able-bodied dark elven men still living in Saekaj. Sooner or later, the Sovereign will run dry of forces. He can’t maintain any semblance of a line south of Reikonos, keep armies on the eastern frontiers with the Northlands and the Riverlands to keep them from interfering with his siege of Reikonos, and still keep the River Perda buttoned up the way he does while sending fifty or a hundred thousand more troops to the Plains of Perdamun. Something will give.”

  “And let us hope it is not our walls, and our forces, and our flowers,” Vaste said.

  “So we send a force?” Ryin asked, looking around, as though gauging the response around the table. “We do what the goblins did to us, raid the transports of the dark elves, wreck their convoys and cause them to spread out their forces, pull them from here?”

  “It does seem somehow fitting,” Alaric said from behind his hands, “that the war started in that very way, and now we return to the beginning for our own purposes. Vara, since it is your idea, I would ask you to spearhead this attack force. No more than a hundred at any given time are to go with you, and no fewer than three spellcasters with the ability to cast a teleportation spell to return you here. I will not have us lose people to mere accidents. Keep a wary eye around you, even if you travel at night, and be certain to be doubly careful so as to avoid ambushes. The dark elves will not long tolerate us raiding the fruits of their thievery.” Alaric smiled and the hands came down. “I do appreciate the irony, though; they steal from local farmers, and we proceed to steal it back for our own purposes.”

  “Yes, it is somewhat delicious, isn’t it?” Vaste asked. “It’s like pounding your enemies as if they were mutton and then licking the tears off of their faces.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “Oh, as though none of you have ever done that.”

  “Where are you going to begin?” Erith asked, looking to Vara. “The Plains of Perdamun are huge, and traversing the whole thing, even with all the portals available to you-I mean, the Sovereign will have sent out wagons by the hundreds to collect the bounty of the plains.”

  “We start in the north,” Vara said, and she felt her mind harden in resolution. “Near Prehorta, the closest to their home and where they’ll be paying the least attention. Then we’ll move west, toward the river and then …” She felt a thin, malicious smile crease her lips, and she wondered idly if it stole the color from them when she did it. “If we do this right, we’ll keep them rather busy …”

  Chapter 58

  Cyrus

  The tent was stuffed, filled to the brimming with servants and clingers-on for both Syloreas and Actaluere. The men from Syloreas were big, of course, the rough and marked sort whom Cyrus had come to expect, with their beards and long hair and fierce looks. There were not many useless, effete ones surrounding Briyce Unger, but the few there were made up for the lack with annoying precision.

  The men from Actaluere, on the other hand, were swarthier, smaller on the whole, and reminded Cyrus of the men who worked the docks in Reikonos before the dark elves had moved in and taken over the labor force there. Their hair was short, the fighters were easy to tell from the talkers-and there were talkers aplenty who had come with Milos Tiernan.

  Cyrus sat on a cloth stool that had been provided for him by one of the talkers of the Actaluere delegation. It was a small thing, annoying in its way, and it made him yearn to stand, especially now that the most troubling aftereffects of his injury had passed. Every eye in the tent was on him, and he had just finished speaking about the bodies, the ones that had come down the stream while he had been there beside it only the night before.

  “You’ll forgive me, Lord Davidon,” Milos Tiernan said, a slight grimace on his face, as though the very news pained him, “but … how many bodies were there?”

  “More than I care to count,” Cyrus said. “I stopped trying after thirty.”

  “And they were men of Syloreas?” Tiernan asked, couching his words in a tone that sounded uncomfortable to Cyrus.

  “So it would seem,” Unger said. “I looked them over when Lord Davidon’s people came for me. They look like village folk from the foothills, judging by the goatskin clothing. I would presume that they washed down after their village had been wiped out.”

  “Fair to say.” Cyrus stood, hearing the clink of his armor, unable to bear sitting any longer, not on the tiny stool. “The scourge is sweeping out of the mountains it seems, coming south now, just as we expected.”

  “Have you been informed of our battle plan?” Briyce Unger asked, the smell of sweat thick in the tent, the breeze of yesterday gone and replaced by the hot sun overhead, which turned the tent into a makeshift oven. The mountain men around Unger were shifting, listless, even though most of them remained seated.

  “Seems simple enough,” Cyrus said. “Form a line in the middle of the plains north of here when we know they’re coming, sit and wait, and let them fall on us like wave after wave on the rocks.”

  “There’s a bit more to it than that,” Tiernan said, with that same slight grimace. “Though not much, admittedly. Every suggestion I put forward with the idea of a flanking maneuver was roundly rejected.”

  “If they come in as great numbers as we suspect,” Cyrus said, “we’ll be too busy protecting our own flanks to launch a counterthrust. With our healers at work, this seems like the best solution. If they come at us in a small number, we can get elaborate and envelop them. If they’re going to mass and swarm at us with the ridiculous amount of them that we think are lurking in the north, then we’re better off keeping it simple and defensive.”

  “Yet,” Tiernan said, and stood, “if we allow our army to become pinned down, will it not mean our defeat? Will we not be pushed back, lose ground and lose heart?”

  “Losing ground is an acceptable trade-off in this situation,” Cyrus said as he watched Briyce Unger nod his head. “We have hundreds of miles of open ground to lose before we butt up against a forest and have nowhere else to fall back. Losing heart would be foolish so long as we keep them from breaking through. If they flank us, we’re in trouble. If we can keep them in front of us rather than behind and continue to hammer them, we stand a chance. This battle is as much about standing toe to toe with them and bleeding them through attrition as it is about land and position. Let them have the whole plains,” Cyrus said with a wave of his hand to indicate the land around them. “So long as we can bleed them dry in the process and lose few enough of our own, we win.”

  Tiernan conceded with a slight nod of his head. “Very well. This has been explained to me more than once, but the way you say it seems to make more sense than the others.” He nodded in deference to Briyce Unger. “I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so.” Unger waved him off, and Tiernan went on. “Can you guarantee that your healers will be able to hold our lines together against the death and serious injury that these beasts bring with them?”

  “I guarantee nothing in a battle save for bloodshed and death,” Cyrus said, looking at Tiernan, a smaller man than he, as most were. He saw a hint of Cattrine in the King of Actaluere’s cheekbones. “You will lose men, no doubt, even if my healers were to perform miraculous feats. The army is too large and my healers too few to effectively protect the entirety. They will do their best, especially since your army will be holding the left flank, and I have no desire to see you take casualties that will weaken my defenses in that area.”

  “Fair enough,” Tiernan said, and his voice was graver than Cyrus had heard it at Enrant Monge. “Then I suppose we have our plan, we have our roles, and all that is left to do is to wait for my army, and then move north into the jaws of the enemy.”

  “Aye,” Briyce Unger said, “and let us hope that this time, we bring a morsel too large for them to digest, a bone that they might finally choke upon.” With that, the King of Syloreas stood, and as though his nervous energy was in need of a release of its own, walked briskly out of the tent without another word.

  Cyrus watched him go, and saw the members
of the Actaluere delegation begin to file out as well, save for a few-Milos Tiernan and two of his closest advisors, men Cyrus had seen at Enrant Monge. Tiernan caught Cyrus’s eye, and the meaning was clear-Wait a moment.

  Cyrus did as he was bade by the King’s gaze, and after only another moment, Tiernan’s advisors nodded in turn and left the tent, the flap closing behind them. The air was still now, and Cyrus stared at Tiernan, his piercing green eyes staring into Cyrus’s own. The King held a brass cup that had been resting at his side during the convocation and he drank from it now, his eyes never leaving Cyrus. “So, you’re the general of Sanctuary,” Tiernan said when the cup had just barely left his lips. “You’ve caused quite the stir since you came to our land.”

  “None of it was intended to harm your realm, I hope you understand.” Cyrus did not bend as he spoke, kept the deference he might otherwise have offered well out of his words. He said it harsh and firm, keeping it from being any sort of offering or concession.

  “I do understand,” Milos Tiernan said, though he kept his distance. “You trespassed, and I would have been content to let you do so, because there was little margin in me keeping you from crushing Syloreas so long as you didn’t turn against me afterward.” The King of Actaluere let out a bitter laugh. “Hell, even if you had, I would have been better off than opposing you while you were in the middle of my territory; having you come at us from the border with Galbadien would have been less sensitive than letting you sack Green Hill. That was a black eye for us.”

  “Yet you don’t seem that upset by it.” Cyrus watched Tiernan’s reaction; there was a subtle tightening of the man’s jaw as it slid to the side and his lips drew tight together, wrinkling as they pursed in an almost-smile.