Crusader

went plummeting over an embankment by accident two days from Scylax. With the aid of the druid spell Falcon’s Essence, the body was retrieved and revived, but extra care was taken from then on. The fall drew the scorn of the experienced Syloreans, until a small rockslide sent two of their own to death, and Briyce Unger admitted, while Cyrus and he retrieved the bodies, that many a visitor to their city fell victim to the mountain roads.

“It’s a good defense,” Unger said. “Scylax has never been laid siege to, not in the six thousand years it’s stood.” He and Cyrus each carried a body over their shoulders, walking on air back up a steep embankment to where their party waited above. “But it’s rubbish for travel. My father’s grandfather had walked this path a thousand times but died to a rockslide on a summer day without even seeing it coming. Got him and his whole hunting party in a good slide, carried his corpse halfway down a mountain. They found the horses sticking out by their feet.”

“Not a good death,” Cyrus said, letting the curious sensation of his feet on solid ground carry him up, even though he knew his feet were neither on something solid, nor strictly speaking, were they on the ground at all.

“Not for a warrior like him,” Unger agreed. “A death in battle, that’s the way we go in Syloreas. An axe to the face, a chop to the neck, a greatsword through the belly, a dagger to the throat, all fine ways to go. A landslide? In your bed with a cough?” The big man spit, as they began to crest the edge of the road. “I’d sooner die of my heart collapsing in my old age, a woman rocking atop me.” The King seemed to consider that one for a long moment. “Actually, that one doesn’t sound too bad.”

They both laughed, and Cyrus gently put down the body on the ground before Curatio. The expedition was spread out along the road, a few of the Syloreans already working to push the fallen rocks from the slide over the edge of the mountain. Cyrus watched them roll, one by one, stirring a few more and then looked up. Snow capped peaks were above him some great distance, too far for him to fairly judge. The white was striking against the blue skies, almost looking like clouds that crowned the mountain, merging with the sky where the two kissed.

Cyrus caught sight of Aisling leaning against one of the rocks, giving it a hearty shove. He could see the sinews of her arm muscles straining, displayed by her sleeveless shirt, to push as a few of the Sylorean warriors stood back and watched, seemingly in awe of the blue-skinned girl who was less than half their mass and at least two feet shorter than they rolling a boulder by herself, albeit somewhat slowly. He watched her boots dig into the path as she put her bare shoulder to the rock and pushed. He saw her pants tighten as she bent to give it all her strength and he felt the heat within him and turned away as she launched it over the edge to a muted cheer of those observing. He turned away not quite in time, though, as she looked over, flushed with the triumph of her efforts, her skin a darker hue, and caught him looking for just a beat before he managed to turn away. Her look only changed a little, cooling slightly when she locked eyes with him, as though she knew the very thoughts within him and wished she didn’t.

He felt the scarlet of embarrassment on his face and grabbed his helm off Windrider, snugging it onto his head, letting the metal hide part of his cheeks as they blushed. The road was cleared moments later, and after the two dead were raised, he climbed back into the saddle, trying to focus his thoughts on the ride, on the road, on the perils of mountain travel.

After an hour of reflecting on the way the dark elven woman looked when exerting herself, moaning as she pushed the rock over the edge, he had to concede that somewhere, deep inside, Terian may have had something of a point. It was as though the Baroness had introduced a poison into his system. Fever and delirium were following it, a heat under his skin that Cyrus could scarcely control as it overran his thoughts and drove them from Vara to Cattrine to the nearest woman at hand. Aisling is pleasant enough to the eyes. And fit, gods know. Dexterous, agile, and amusing in her way … He shook his head again, rattling it inside his helm. And has lusted after you for nearly two years, only to turn cold in the last months. You could have had her freely any time, yet you have desire for her now, when she is the only woman of interest in view, and after being spurned and betrayed by two other women. This is petty lust, the basest of emotions, and unworthy of her, as a true and skilled guildmate who has saved your life more than once.

Yet thoughts of her lingered, interspersed once more with Vara and Cattrine, tormenting him, robbing him of sleep, causing him agonizing bouts that did not subside quickly or without pain. By the time the gates of Scylax were in sight he was grateful and deeply considering Terian’s advice, wondering if by a simple exchange of coins he could somehow purge the poison from his system, even if only for a few days or a week, and be done with it, clear-headed once more and ready for battle. I don’t remember it being this bad after Imina. But then, Imina never did anything quite like what Cattrine did, and certainly not with as much enthusiasm … nor as often …

They came around a bend in the road to see Scylax laid out before them. It was carved into the mountainside like villages he had seen when visiting the Dwarven Alliance but larger in scale than anything he could imagine dwarves building and less reliant on caves. There were multiple streets built into the mountain, some fifteen or twenty levels that were joined by stair-like rises in place of cross streets. It was as though someone had laid out a city map into the side of a mountain and turned the houses and notched the buildings into the mountain’s side. Cyrus could see houses exposed to the elements out front, on the face of the cliff, but they were carved into the rock toward the back of each level. There was even some greenery on the streets, from trees that could weather dry, frigid winters. Farther around the sheer surface of the mountain were paddocks for animals, huge numbers of them, and granaries carved into place on one of the levels.

Above it all, toward the peak, was the castle Scylax, squat and constructed on the edge of a plateau that looked down upon the city and up to the mountain behind it. It lacked the towering spires of Vernadam, instead using rounded construction for the masonry, bending with the curves of the cliff, the half dozen or so structures within the massive curtain wall being broad and circular, reminding Cyrus just slightly of a temple he had visited years earlier in the bandit land southeast of the Endless Bridge, back in Arkaria.

“You got something against building on level ground?” Terian asked Briyce Unger as they took in the city.

“Too easy to attack on flat ground, as our ancestors discovered,” Unger said with a wide grin. “When we Syloreans make an enemy, we tend to make it a good one. This town and castle can be defended by our women and children while the men are away, if need be, and can be held against a siege of ten thousand by only a few hundred.”

“Great, so why are we here to help you again?” Terian asked with a smirk. “Get all your people together, crowd them inside the damned castle and keep killing these creatures until they stop coming.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” Unger said with a shake of the head. “We could hold off a siege here for a few years, maybe, if need be, but not with the whole city in our gates. If it were men at our gates, I would consider it. Men can be beaten back, they weary, they fall to death and eventually wisen to the notion that holding a siege in a place like this is a poor idea. It’s not as though there’s an abundance of food or water to feed an army just lying about in the hills, especially not over a long period. But these things …” He shook his head. “I don’t know that they need food and water, they don’t seem to weary or fatigue, they just keep coming-relentless-when you kill them by the hundred. Lock ourselves in tight, even if we lasted five years, I think they’d still be waiting when we came back out. They’re beasts, not men.”

The road straightened along the cliff’s edge until they eventually reached the gates of the city. The path led them through into the middle of the town, where they were greeted by curious children, clapping at the approach of their King, and joined by washerwomen and men with pickaxes, covered in dust. Cyrus watched the men, and realized that whatever they were doing must involve digging into the mountain, as they were, every one of them, caked in earth.

“Miners,” Partus said, drawing Cyrus’s startled attention to the dwarf, whom he had not realized was by his side. “I didn’t know you humans had it in you before I came here.”

“There aren’t a lot of men who do it, that’s for certain,” Cyrus agreed. “Not many have a taste for rooting about in the guts of the earth the way dwarves do.”

“Not me,” Partus proclaimed. “I left Fertiss when I came of age, happy to get out of the dark. Never would have liked to go back to anything like it, if I could have avoided it.”

“What brought you here?” Cyrus asked. “To Scylax? Your hammer is more powerful than almost any I’ve fought, able to stand up to my blade. You know how to fight, at least well enough to get into one of the big three. So why Luukessia?”

“Because I didn’t want to be in Arkaria anymore,” Partus said with a grim shrug. “Shouldn’t come as a