Crusader

mulling through … whatever you’re mulling.”

He gave her a slow nod of acknowledgment. “I will. Be safe.” He flicked a look toward J’anda and Cattrine, mobbed by the crowd, whose upthrust hands were gently clawing at them, waiting for bread. “Take care of them, will you?”

“J’anda I can promise I’ll take care of.” A dark look flickered over her. “The other … I’ll try.” She said it so grudgingly, it sounded as though she’d been turned upside down and had it shaken out.

“Yes,” Cyrus said. “Try. For me.”

There was a sigh of near-disgust and Aisling turned her horse around. “The things I do for you …”

Windrider began to move again without any action from Cyrus, and the warrior looked down in surprise. “Well, all right then.”

“You think they’ll be okay?” Martaina asked, coming alongside him as they rode, the wind coming from the north now, and carrying that faintest hint of the breath of Drettanden, that smell of death.

“We’re the ones who are riding toward the scourge, not away from it,” Cyrus said. “I’d be more worried about us, frankly.”

“I’m always worried about us,” Martaina said as the horses broke into a gallop, the line of refugees in front of them a thick column of filthy clothes and dirty faces. “I just figured I’d add a little variety.”

“You’re always worried about us?” Cyrus asked, cocking an eyebrow and looking over at her. “That feels like a commentary on my leadership in some way.”

“Your leadership is just fine, sir,” Martaina said. “But it does seem to point us in the direction of trouble more often than not. You’re like a bloodhound for trouble; you can’t stay away from it. I believe you might even thrive on it in some small way.”

He looked back to the horizon, at the downtrodden, the people without a home or hearth to call their own, fleeing their land and trying to escape death itself. “I think I’ve had quite enough of trouble for the sake of trouble after this excursion,” Cyrus said. “But I can’t deny that it seems to follow me about.” He looked back and could just barely see the shapes of Aisling in the distance, along with Cattrine and J’anda, still in the midst of the crowd. “In every possible way.”

Chapter 99

It was less than a day later when they reached the dragoons. Flat plains of sparse grass broken by lowlands and patches of swamp grass with hummocks of trees gave way to a large stretch of open ground. It was there that they found the horses and men, tens of thousands of them, enough that the camp was a sight in and of itself. The smell of food was in the air, real food, bread, even some meat. The wagons were just being reloaded when they arrived, tents being broken down. Refugees were being turned away, but there was only a trickle of them now, and Cyrus felt a grim discomfort at the thought of what that meant. That is the last of them, then. The rest have been taken by these things, by the last gasp of the God of Death. He watched the stragglers go, lingering as though they hoped to draw protection from the army of horsemen that remained in the fields and saw the supplymen shoo them away after tossing them odds and ends to eat, directing them toward the bridge. The last of the Luukessians.

When he asked a soldier, he was directed toward a cluster of men in the distance. The surcoats were familiar, of course, the majority of them being Galbadien soldiers. A few were men of Actaluere and Syloreas but very few. Galbadien was the Kingdom of the horsed cavalry. Now it’s an empty land, I suppose, desolate and filled with those … things, grazing on the remains of the dead, like crows. Cyrus pictured the scene of the loping fields of Galbadien in his head, tilled ground, green grass, the smell of death in the air, bodies choking the rivers and streams, and the scourge feeding on all of it. The sound of their screeches filled his ears as he imagined it, and he nearly choked at the thought.

They rode up to a small circle, and Longwell was there with Ranson, and both rose to meet them. “General,” Samwen Longwell said as Cyrus dismounted and took the proffered hand of the King of Galbadien- the Garden of Death, now. “We’d heard Caenalys was cut off,” Longwell said, “Actaluere’s army barely met up with our main force in time to save them from being shredded. We thought you dead,” he said with barely disguised relief.

“You know it takes more than a few of these scourge to kill me,” Cyrus said. “They came wide around Enrant Monge, didn’t they? Ended up flanking our holding action?”

Longwell nodded. “Two days after you left. They sent another army even wider around, through Galbadien, and it tore through the Kingdom. We had no warning to speak of.” Longwell shook his head, disgust etched on his face. “We saw the fall of Enrant Monge as we rode out of the unity gate. Those things … they climb walls as though they were-”

“I know,” Cyrus said. “We saw it at Caenalys. We had just gotten into the city when they hit, barely made it out via boat.”

There was a flicker of concern from Longwell. “The Baroness?”

“She’s safe. She, J’anda and Aisling stayed along the route to give bread to the refugees.” Cyrus let his hand fall on Praelior’s hilt. “We, on the other hand, figured we’d give whatever aid we could here. How far away are they?”

“Hours,” Ranson said, speaking up now. “We’re looking to use our horsed cavalry for the first time against them. With the snows around Enrant Monge and the rapid fallback over mostly wooded land, the flanking actions-we haven’t really had a chance to have a go at them. It’s our hope that the increased mobility of our horsemen will start to turn the tide of this war.” He caught the skepticism from Cyrus. “All right, well, we don’t think the tide will turn, but we’re hoping to do as much damage as possible before we reach the bridge.” His expression hardened. “I’d certainly like to pay these things back for the loss of my homeland.”

“You and countless others, I’m sure,” Cyrus said. “We’ll wait here with you, then, try and relieve the foot army when they arrive. I expect the melee will turn interesting fast, depending on how these things react to horsemen. The best we can hope for is to give the last of the refugees time to start across the bridge. If the scourge don’t decide to turn back, at least we’ve got an easily defended corridor.”

Longwell looked at him carefully. “You mean to orchestrate another bridge defense. Like Termina.”

“I mean to,” Cyrus said. “I mean to make it the last stand. I want to take so many of those things with us, cause so much havoc and destruction that by the time we reach the other side they’ve got a wall of their own corpses so high to crawl over that they’ll never make it without sliding into the sea.”

There was a pause and silence for a moment. “Lofty goal,” Ranson said.

“The alternative,” Cyrus said, “is letting them start to visit the same destruction on Arkaria as they’ve wrought here in Luukessia.” He felt a tired weight land upon him. “I cannot let that happen. There is nothing but broken ground between the Endless Bridge and the settlements of southeastern Arkaria. They can surely cross the Inculta Desert without great difficulty, and we’d be at a disadvantage fighting on the beaches, the forests, the sands and the mountains. Everything but flat plains, the scourge has mobility to beat anything we have for them.” He waved a hand at a densely clustered group of horsemen nearby. “Our only hope right now is that your dragoons can run over them like cavalry over infantry. Otherwise, we’re going to get driven back to a bridge that’s likely crammed so full of people it’ll be a slaughter, a shoving match where people get tossed over the edge without regard as panic sets in and they begin to stampede to get away.”

Quiet greeted this statement. Martaina spoke a moment later. “How many people would you estimate have gotten to the bridge?”

Ranson and Longwell exchanged a brief and telling glance. “Few enough,” Ranson said. “We have no real idea how many people lived in Luukessia before all this, of course, but the guesses were in the millions. I would estimate that only a hundred thousand, perhaps many less, as few as fifty, have made it out of the area that the scourge now dominate.”

Cyrus swallowed heavily and tasted the bile in the back of his throat threatening to come back up. Fifty thousand? Even a hundred thousand is a pitiful amount-one in ten or twenty or thirty survivors of this land? Imagine if only one in ten members of Sanctuary survived some attack upon them. “That … is a pittance.”