Crusader

safely out of your sight.”

Alaric stiffened in his battered armor, the dark green tinge to it looking almost black in the cloudy light filtering in from behind him. “But if you mean to make a difference and live up to the mission of this guild, put your humor aside and let us work to end this siege, so we can make good on repairing the consequences of our error in killing Mortus.” With that, Alaric grabbed his helm and put it on his head, straightening it so that the slits where his eyes were visible were shadowed and Vara could see only the hint that he was behind them. “The time for light- hearted fun is over; these are dark times, perhaps darker than we can safely bear. This is a time for adults, for the things of grown-ups, for battles, a time to leave the simpering humor behind as we struggle with our burdens. The hour grows late, and for the young, it is past your bedtime. Leave us, if you want no part of serious things. But for those who remain … go to work.”

With that, he became insubstantial, a fog that rolled toward the doors behind him and out of the balcony, disappearing over the edge in a fine mist, as though the air outside were reabsorbing him.

“So …” Vaste said, as the four of them stared out the window at the exit of their Guildmaster. “Who put the caltrops in Alaric’s chair today?”

Vara turned from the table, casting a look at Ryin, who nodded and followed her to the space in front of the door. “Perhaps it was something you said,” she told Vaste, who remained in his chair with a look of quiet unconcern. “Or perhaps it was everything you say.” The winds began to pick up around them, stirring the stuffy air in the Council Chambers. Vaste said nothing as the maelstrom of the teleportation spell caused the walls to dissolve around her, and the last thing of Sanctuary she saw was the troll’s green face, a second’s hesitation showing in the puckered brow and downturned lips as the whirlwind carried her far, far away from him.

Chapter 44

Reikonos was a town astir, the streets quiet and yet frenzied, the long stretches of thatched-roof homes canceled out by the bigger buildings with wooden beams making up their construction. It was a hodgepodge of old and new, of stone buildings and wood shacks, and the streets were both calm and chaotic in alternating segments. Vara walked along with Ryin trailing a few steps behind her as they headed toward the southern central gate through the city’s walls. The sun seemed to be higher in the sky here than it had been at Sanctuary, and there were few enough clouds that the late afternoon warmth was still present and cooked her in her armor as she moved through the quiet then the chaos.

“Lines,” Ryin said, “for the communal ovens.” The druid was right, though she didn’t want to acknowledge it. There were clusters of people, women mostly, around the places where there were ovens for public use. Not everyone has their own, after all, as this is not Termina. A rueful thought occurred. Even Termina is unlikely to have those things, now. “In time of war, meat must surely be limited, so daily bread is likely the cornerstone of their diet at this point.”

“If they’re just getting to the ovens at this time of day, it’s going to be a late supper,” she said.

“True enough.” He came alongside her, trying to match her pace. “But I suspect that the grain shipments put them at the mercy of whichever merchant has some that day-there’s likely a line for that as well. Rationing, shortages, all that.”

“What fun,” was all she said and tightly at that.

The street vendors who were normally set up on this, the busiest thoroughfare in the city, were noticeably absent this day, giving the streets an even more abandoned feel, quieter than she had seen even in the years she had lived in the city. Cyrus would not like this, not at all, came the thought, as unbidden as it was frustrating. She increased her speed, pumping her legs to a faster walk, as though she could somehow leave that line of thinking behind if she were to just walk fast enough to outpace it.

Ryin kept up, his superior height his only saving grace. The walk was long, and the walls of the city came into sight after a while, tall, grey stone that rose up in a curtain wall around the buildings nestled within. It was nowhere near as high as the one built around the elven capital of Pharesia, but it still stuck a hundred and fifty feet in the air and circled for miles in either direction, a monumental effort of stonework that gave the city a washed, sandstone look that was out of place in the more northern environs where one expected darker stone-for some reason she couldn’t define.

The southern gate was open, enormous, wide enough for fifty men to walk astride through it and even for a few elephants to be carted out simultaneously on each other’s shoulders, as Vara had seen once in a magic circus when she was younger. There was little enough traffic on the road by this point; the ovens were all well back in the city, and the houses closest to the gate became more of the ramshackle variety and less of the carefully orchestrated stone, the roofs declining in average height precipitously and the woodwork growing older and older as they went. Who lives here? she wondered. The guards that man the walls, likely, if they’re not housed in barracks. Farmers who work just outside the gates, perhaps? Working people, not merchants, who would be near the markets and shops. Not quite the poor, but not the wealthy or aristocratic.

They passed beneath the gates and under the wall, which stretched almost a hundred feet from entry to exit. She stared up into the faces of guards who looked down on them, bows at the ready in case some trick was attempted, some effort at siege tried. Guards milled about in the passage under the gate as well, picking at the wagons and people trying to pass through. She and Ayend, on their way out, garnered nothing but a few suspicious looks from the men in armor and pointed helms, their spears and swords aimed at those trying to gain entry into the city and unconcerned with those attempting exit.

The horizon was darkening in blue as they emerged from under the portcullis and the whole world opened up around them. There had been shanty houses creeping toward the outer walls for some time, but some enterprising soul-probably that bastard Pretnam Urides and his laughable Council of Twelve-had had them burned, and all that remained was twisted wreckage, scorched wood and little else, a graveyard of destroyed hovels for hundreds of yards around the walls of the city. They followed the dirt path onward, the vegetation sparse in this well-trodden area, with all the trees and grass that had grown nearby charred by the flames.

The walk was over an hour, and the road grew more congested toward the end. There were tents about, plenty of them, old, billowing, lined neatly along the rolling hills of the city outskirts. There were farmhouses, too, older ones that had been commandeered by the army, and troops marched in formations up and down the road. Vara stopped and asked the captain of one of them about the guild Endeavor and was pointed down the road. “Another mile, perhaps two. They’re toward the front, but there’s several miles between us and the enemy positions,” the captain said, weeks of beard growth on his tanned face. “Been like that for a few months, staring across at them, but they’re not moving right now.”

“Thank you,” Vara said simply and went on, Ryin in tow. When they passed the last ranks of horsemen and began to see the armor take on a fancier sheen and the weapons carry the glow of mystical power, she knew they were close. The tents were less weathered and between the combatants being better attired and the presence of attendants whose sole purpose appeared to be serving the fighters rather than engaging in any sort of battle themselves, she veered from the road and asked only one skeptical warrior for direction before she was pointed to the largest tent in view, one with a flag out front on a pike.

Vara approached with a slow, steady walk, eyeing the troll guards as they stared back at her, assessing. “My name is Vara,” she said, holding her position a good twenty feet from the front flap entry of the tent. The tent was enormous, at least fifteen feet high at the center, circular, and large enough to house thirty men under it. “I am here to speak with Isabelle of Endeavor.”

The troll on her left grunted, his armor a poor fit for his oversized bulk. He was close to twice her height, and his grunt brought with it a foul odor, even at the distance she had maintained. She curled her nose and held a hand in front of it. Trolls. I forget sometimes how civilized Vaste is compared to some of their number.

“No see,” said the troll on her right, marginally shorter than the other, but with eyes that burned with slightly more intelligence. “Miss Isabelle not to be disturbed.”

“I can see from your grasp of the human language that we’re about to reach a tragic impasse in this