Crusader

“Fear not,” the enchanter said. “You have never looked more unthreatening than you do right now.”

“Glorious,” Cyrus said, “my life’s ambition, fulfilled.”

“Look at me,” Martaina said, “I’m no different than I was.”

“I am,” Aisling said, holding out a tanned, browned hand. “Human is not a good look for me.” She swiveled to look at Cyrus. “Is it?”

He favored her with a once-over. “I don’t mind it. You look good.”

She gave him a slow nod. “Maybe I’ll keep it on. For later. Variety, you know.”

There was a silence around them, broken only by the sound of the horses’ hooves hitting the road. “What a fabulously misplaced use for my beautiful magics,” J’anda said mournfully.

“Try and pretend you haven’t used them for the same purposes or worse,” Aisling snapped at him. The enchanter shrugged with a slight smile of mystery.

The flat, dark colors of the stone wall were rising at them. The gates were open-thank the gods-as they came along the last few hundred feet. Guards were in the shadows, Cyrus could sense them, and they stepped out upon the approach of the party on horseback. Cyrus stared at them.

“What have we got here?” the head guard asked, utterly disinterested.

“I’m escorting a party of holy women into the Temple of Our Forebearers,” J’anda said. “You know, helpers to prepare the dead for their departure.”

One of the guards shot his partner a look. “You know the city is closed to exit? Once you go in, you don’t come out until it reopens.”

“I’m quite fine with that,” J’anda’s human face smiled. “Once I’ve dropped the ladies off, there are a few locations I’m keen to visit. Traveling with holy women … you understand. It provides little enough comfort.”

The guard guffawed. “All right, then. In you go. It’s after dark, and martial law is in force, so be quick to your destination. No loitering about in the streets, or you’ll be arrested.” He lowered his voice and leaned toward J’anda. “If it’s female companionship you’re looking for, try the Scalded Dog out near the seaport. Very fine wenches there and reasonable as well.”

“Oh, I’ve heard good things,” J’anda said. “But as I believe your sailors say, ‘any old port in a storm,’ yes?”

The guards shared a laugh at that one. “Too right. Be on your way, then. Don’t dawdle.”

“Oh, I shan’t,” J’anda said, spurring his horse forward to lead the way. “I’m in too much of a hurry to get where I’m going to linger for long.”

Another laugh filled the night as they went on, crossing through the torchlit dark under the portcullis. There were murder holes above, Cyrus saw, archers with arrows pointed down at them as they passed. Cyrus kept his mouth shut, waiting for the tension to subside.

There was a definite quiet as they went, and when the tunnel underpass for the wall opened up, they found themselves on a wide avenue. Small buildings lined either side of it, most of them three stories, set back off a dirt path in the center that was deeply rutted with wagon tracks. It had turned to mud, Cyrus realized, from spring rains.

Ahead was clearly the palace, and palatial it was, with columns and a dome that reached into the sky. There was a bridge ahead, one that dipped over a canal running through the city. There are dozens of them, allowing the citizens to navigate on water as easily as they do on the streets.

There was a commotion behind them, something atop the wall, and Cyrus turned to listen. He saw Martaina freeze, her face hidden behind a conjured mask that covered her features save for her eyes. That was plenty enough to give Cyrus the impression that something was desperately wrong. Just behind them, the clanking of the portcullis as it began to descend and the shouts of “ALARUM!” rang over the wall.

“What is it?” Cyrus asked, grasping at Martaina’s shoulder. “What’s wrong? Is the Army of Actaluere here already?”

“No,” she said with a shake of the head. “Worse.”

There was scurrying atop the walls, and screams, shouts that were undistinguishable to Cyrus’s ears. Bells began to ring in the streets, and suddenly an aroma hit him, overpowering, with the wind that rushed through the rapidly closing portcullis-death, rot … fear. In the blackness beyond the lowering gate he could see nothing but the tingle ran over his flesh nonetheless and his mouth filled with a bitter, acrid flavor as the blood pumped through his veins. He watched as the gates began to close behind that latticed portcullis, as it clanged to the ground and reverberated through the tunnel. A single word bubbled to his lips, and he knew by all that happened around him that he was right, even before Martaina confirmed it.

“Scourge.”

Chapter 93

Vara

Day 209 of the Siege of Sanctuary

The rattle of the remaining siege engines rolling away from the wall was loud, but not overpowering. Vara stood on the heights, smelling the fetid waste in the no man’s land below her, watched the last few surviving siege towers limping away across the muddied plain and breathed a sigh that came out of her slowly, as though she could scarcely believe it was through. Another done. Another repelled.

“That’s right!” A voice cried to her left. She turned to see Thad, standing there in his red armor, waving his sword over the wall at the backs of the retreating dark elven army. “Remember this! This is what happens when you mess with the best!”

“Or in your case,” Vara said acidly, “the barely competent.” She tasted the burning on her lips of the words, as though they were real, as though they were vile in truth as well as content, and she shrugged involuntarily. She leaned heavily against the tooth of the battlement before her and felt her whole weight lean with her, armor and all. It felt heavy, in spite of the enchantments. It’s not the weight of the armor, it’s the weight of the burden. The defense of this place is dragging me down, it becomes all I’ve ever lived and all I’m living for. She ran a hand across her face and flipped up the nose guard on her helm, removing the little line from her vision where it sat to protect her face from harm. It is almost as though I can remember nothing before this.

“Nasty bit of business, isn’t it?” She turned her gaze to the side, where she caught Partus looking at her with a gap-toothed grin. “They keep coming, we keep slaying them. The Sovereign has to have thrown away fifteen, twenty thousand lives here thus far, and all on these half-arsed attacks we keep turning back. You’d think he’d make a concerted push sooner or later.”

“I don’t think I wish to see your definition of a concerted push.”

“It’d involve throwing more and more men at the gate,” Partus said, “taking up where their brethren fell, grabbing the battering ram when the men who hold it drop it-”

“Would you want to grab that?” she pointed to the gate where the last battering ram the dark elves had used was lying. It was long, about thirty feet, a felled tree with the ends sawed off, a massive log. The men who carried it lay dead around it, all of them in flames, as was the ram.

“Not as it is, no,” the dwarf said with a shrug. “But you put a wizard and a druid close up by it, they use a water spell to extinguish it, you throw another forty men under it and keep hammering until the gates give.”

“Our gates do not give,” she said simply, but her eyes remained on the flaming ram, where it burned on the once clearly defined dirt road that led to the Sanctuary gates. It had become indistinguishable from the fields around it, however, because of attacks during rainy times, and the entire verdant plain for several hundred feet around the Sanctuary walls had become nothing but a slick mudscape, a messy pit of dead bodies, discarded armor and weapons, and only a few stubborn patches of grass that had not yet been wiped out.

“Every gate gives if you hammer it hard enough and long enough,” Partus said, still looking at her and not the battlefield. “Take you, for instance-” She gave him a disgusted, scathing look and he held up his hands before him in surrender, with amusement. “Now, now. We’ve known each other a good long time, Vara, since the days of Alliance yore. I’ve always respected you-”