Crusader

Chapter 19

Vara

Four Months Later

There was a thundering sound, somewhere far above Vara, and one of the people across the foyer let out a shriek that overpowered the moans of the last few unhealed wounded. “Those damnable catapults,” she said, meaning it. The smell of smoke drifted in from outside, so thick she could taste it. The weight of her armor felt heavy on her shoulders, and it was seldom ever a bother.

“What has happened here?” Ryin Ayend stared around the foyer, the stone that had burst the window only moments earlier was still sitting in the Great Hall, in the midst of splintered tables.

“We are under siege,” Alaric answered him, crossing the distance between them and placing a hand on Ryin’s shoulder. “I am most pleased to see you, my brother, but unfortunately the news you bear will have to wait, unless you have anything life-threatening to tell us?”

“Not exactly,” Ryin said. “But I was sent back to let you know-”

Another thunderous roar filled the room as the entirety of Sanctuary quaked to the foundations. There was a moment’s respite from the fury and then the earth shook again so violently Vara was only just able to keep her footing. Others were not so lucky and landed on the floor in a heap.

“If I am not mistaken, we have just lost the southwest tower to a bombardment,” Alaric said, much more calmly than Vara felt.

“Lucky shot,” Vaste said, pulling himself to his feet. “There’s no way that was intentional, not with a catapult. Those things are hideously inaccurate.”

“You don’t have to be that accurate when you’re firing a ton of stone.” A voice whipped through the room and Vara saw Erith Frostmoor, a dark elven healer, cut down the stairs and take in the foyer in one glance. “I was on the battlements-we did lose the southwest tower, and it was a lucky shot, but the boulders they’re firing at us are bigger than any I’ve seen heaved from a catapult before. Two lucky hits and the tower came down, along with whoever was in it at the time.”

“Applicant quarters,” Vaste said. “Gods, that’ll be messy.”

“Healers,” Alaric said, looking to Erith and Vaste, “get to the wreckage of the tower and begin pulling the dead and wounded out. Any able-bodied warriors should join you. Rangers, I’ll need with me,” he said, voice tight, “along with anyone who can cast a spell. I believe it is time to give the dark elven host a taste of our fury.”

“Taste of our fury?” Vaste said with a frown. “That sounds awfully cheesy, Alaric. Why don’t you give them a taste of our bread and stew while you’re at it?”

“Because at this point our bread and stew are in a puddle on the floor of the Great Hall,” Larana whispered, so low only Vara heard her.

“Spellcasters,” Alaric said, “with me. All others, to your duties.”

Alaric was on the run, out the door and descending the great stone stairs that led to the grounds of Sanctuary. Green grasses of summer had grown in thick, and the sun was shining overhead as Vara ran across the grounds, a few steps behind her Guildmaster. It was a wide lawn, a massive open space in the land surrounded by Sanctuary’s curtain wall, big enough that it protected the enormous stables, a garden out back, a cemetery, an archery range, and other outbuildings that were not part of Sanctuary’s main structure.

The curtain wall was tall enough for them to repel a siege from, at least with archers and spellcasters and swords enough to fight off ladder-climbing invaders and siege towers. But not as tall as I would have made it, she thought. For this I would have preferred walls that stretched halfway to the sky, as can be found in Pharesia. Or a moat around the whole thing would be a wonderful defense, rather than simply letting them roll their damnable siege engines up to the wall and have at it. “What is our plan, Alaric?” she asked, wondering if she would catch the old knight’s attention.

“Their army is of little threat to us at present,” Alaric said. “But their catapults and siege towers present a slight problem. So we will deal with them.”

“A ‘slight problem’?” She looked at him in astonishment, but he did not turn back to acknowledge her, merely kept running toward the wall. A stream of others following his orders trailed closely behind and the smell of fire and smoke was strong the closer they got to the wall. “Alaric, they just sent the bloody southwest tower crashing to the ground! They launched a boulder into our foyer. If that is only a slight problem, then I fear the day that we face your definition of a major one.”

“Yes,” Alaric said, “I fear that day as well.”

They reached the wall, slipping into the interior of the heavy stone structure by means of a tower door. The wall was miles long and had passages with rooms and accommodations inside the towers that were placed at intervals along the length of it. Its thickness, with a solid mass of stone at the front, was able to stop most projectiles, but toward the interior facing, it made way for a corridor that spanned between the towers. Alaric started up a spiral staircase inside the tower, striding out into the bright daylight when he reached the top. Throughout, Vara followed on his heels, as close as she could keep up to the Guildmaster, who moved faster than his venerable appearance would have indicated he could. But then, she had long ago learned she should not underestimate Alaric.

When she stepped out into the sunlight on top of the wall, the roar reached her ears again, filling them with the sounds of thousands of voices. It was a cacophony of anger and fury coming from the army outside the walls, their battle lines formed in neat rows that Vara could see from where she stood far above them. They filled the plains around Sanctuary, more numerous than she could count, an army arrayed around them for one purpose alone-to break down the walls, sack Sanctuary, and parade the survivors along a celebratory death march back to Saekaj Sovar for the pleasure of their Sovereign. I’ll be certain to be good and dead if Sanctuary falls, she thought with a shudder. Surviving would bring with it unpleasantries I’d just as soon not deal with.

The wall was lined with bowmen, rangers who had strung their weapons and were loosing a tide of arrows down into the army below every few seconds while using the battlements for cover from the counter barrage of arrows. A shout made its way over the cry of the army below, and Thad, the castellan of Sanctuary, giving the orders to the defenders of the wall, cried out over the carnage, “Aim for the towers! Kill the dark elves pushing them!”

Vara came to the edge of the battlement and glanced out. Wooden towers built to the height of the curtain wall were sliding over the uneven ground, born along by the efforts of soldiers below. She looked left, toward the gate, and saw a battering ram working at the front as boiling oil was poured down upon it. A hundred catapults and trebuchets stood further back, behind the first ranks of the army, launching all manner of abuse into the air in addition to a rain of arrows that was being sent at the Sanctuary defenders. Vara ducked behind a rampart as an arrow missed her face by a matter of inches. “I do so love the weather we’re having today,” she said. “Pleasant enough temperature for summer, not overwhelmingly hot, not a cloud in the sky, unless you count the clouds of arrows-and I do.”

Alaric remained standing, tall, above the battlements, and an arrow flew past him, followed by another. Before Vara could cry out, one shot through his head, passing through him as neatly as if it had gone through another stretch of empty air. The Ghost did not even seem to notice it, though Vara felt the cry of warning and alarm die on her lips. “Weather aside, I hope we have a healer upon these battlements for those who are not quite as ephemeral as myself.”

“Ephemeral?” Vara stared at his receding back. “You just had an arrow fly through your head as though it weren’t there.”

“Which?” Alaric asked, halting to look back at her. “The arrow or my head? Because I’ve heard the latter mentioned to me before once or twice-in insult, usually.”

“Bugger it,” Vara said and charged to the next tooth in the wall, now only a few feet from where Alaric stood next to Thad, who was taking advantage of the cover offered by the crenellations. When a swarm of arrows landed around her, soaring through the gaps, she took to hands and knees, crawling the last few feet, shoving the bowmen out of the way as she passed.

“Lass,” Alaric said as she crawled up to crouch behind the crenellation beside Thad, “it would seem you’ve found a somewhat undignified way of hiding from the arrows.”

“Not all of us have insubstantial heads,” she said in irritation. “And I don’t want my quite substantial brains splattered all over the wall whilst I have no idea where the nearest healer may be.”

“Right here,” came a dull, accented voice from behind Thad. Vara leaned out, briefly, to see Andren, the scruffy elven healer, his back against a fortification, a flask in his hand as he calmly took a drink. A strong smell of booze reached her nostrils. Andren’s long, dark hair was tangled even moreso than usual. His beard was thick and seemed to have grown thicker in the last months, as though he were unconcerned about keeping it groomed at all. The bushy beard and long, tangled hair coupled with his white, frayed and dirtied healer’s robe, gave him the look of one of the vagrants found in human cities-and not at all like an elf should look.

“A sober healer,” she said. “I’d like one competent enough to perform a spell.”

“Oh, so that’s how it is,” Andren said mildly, sticking his fingers out and waving them in the general direction of a human a half dozen paces away who was screaming with an arrow sticking out of his palm. “I’m quite competent.”

“I said competent and sober.”

“Meh,” Andren said with some indifference. “I’ll pass on that last one; highly overrated, especially when you’re being bombarded with arrows, projectiles, and some fairly wounding insults, in the case of you.”

“Thad,” Alaric said, cutting off any response Vara might have made, “it would appear they’ve begun the assault on our gate.”

Thad smiled weakly. The younger warrior was human and clad in crimson armor, the steel bearing chipped paint that revealed the metal beneath. He had always reminded Vara of a younger, less adept and perhaps less handsome version of Cyrus. And for that, especially now, I hate him. “I guess you could say that. They started moving toward us with intent about fifteen minutes ago. Before that, they seemed quite comfortable to maintain their distance and keep us blockaded.”

“They’ve clearly changed to a war footing,” Vara said, watching one of the siege towers drawing close to the edge of the ramparts, “and I’d be fascinated to discuss how exactly that happened, but I’d rather do it after we’ve put these bastards to rest and repelled them.”

“Indeed,” Alaric said, and gestured behind himself. Vara turned to see a line of spellcasters-druids, wizards and a few enchanters making their way across the wall, taking positions of their own next to the bowmen at the ramparts. Larana was among them and truthfully the only one among them whose name Vara knew; all the rest were new people who had been recruited in the last few years. New people that I have to get to know and remember the names of. Is there any more annoying bane anywhere in my existence? The thought of the black-armored warrior flashed through her mind. Oh yes. Well, in the scale of things, he’s still rather new, I suppose.

“Let us dispense with this bombardment, shall we?” Alaric stood in the gap between the crenellations as Vara exchanged a look with Thad. “When I signal, spellcasters, unleash hell upon those towers.”

“What’s the signal?” Thad asked then flushed under his helm as Vara sent him a searing look.

“I think this will do,” Alaric said and extended his hand in the direction of the tower, which was creeping toward the wall only fifteen feet or so away from deploying its bridge to allow the troops within to storm the Sanctuary battlements.

Vara let out a scream of pure fury and stood in the gap next to Alaric. Bombard my home from afar, will you? Send your mindless foot soldiers to knock down our wall and drag us out? I shall show you, oh Sovereign, you bastard of bastards, you terrible and daft ruler of mine enemies. She threw out her hand and began to cast a spell of her own, just as Alaric’s went off, an incantation leaving his palm that shook the ramparts and blasted the stray strands of hair out of Vara’s face as it flew.

She watched the wave of force fly, distorting the air in a line following from Alaric’s palm to the siege tower, where it impacted a third of the way up the structure. The impact was immediate and obvious; the wooden tower splintered, chips exploding outward and showering the army below with splinters as a fearsome groan of breaking logs preceded the awful listing of the whole structure, which began to tilt forward. Cries from behind the rectangular creation’s wooden facade told her that the occupants of the thing knew what was coming and were perhaps powerless to stop it.

The whole contraption came crashing to the ground, the upper two-thirds tilting down, falling upon the army stacked up beneath it. Vara saw a wave of movement as the soldiers beneath it tried to flee, but it seemed unlikely that any of them made it through the panicked crowd; the crash of the tower splattered a hundred or more men beneath its shadow and pulped countless more who had been inside it.

With Alaric’s blast, a wave of spells leapt forward from the Sanctuary battlements-fireballs and bolts of lightning seemed the most popular choices. Vara saw the pale flash of a few charms fly from the enchanter ranks and watched as they took possession of the biggest and strongest warriors below them in the field, turning them against their own allies, the swords and daggers of the Sovereign’s own turning against their fellows. Vara saw Larana loose a particularly large blast of fire at a catapult that was several hundred feet back from the wall and it hit with the same force as Alaric’s burst, if not more; an explosion seemed to follow, launching the operators of the contraption away in flames and turning the whole thing into a pyre that blazed thirty feet high.

Vara’s own spell hit a bevy of soldiers below the wall, pushing them to the ground. She looked over to see Alaric had moved farther down the wall. His hand pointed at another tower as it burst, showering the army below with fragments of wooden refuse as it tilted and cracked, falling apart onto the dark elves in its shadow. She saw her Guildmaster begin his run down the wall, heading toward his next target, another siege tower.

“Has this been going on the entire time we’ve been gone?” Vara looked up to see Ryin Ayend, who had asked the question. He slid in beside her, behind the crenellation, as he loosed a fireball at a distant trebuchet, setting fire to the launch mechanism and sending its crew scurrying away. “You haven’t been under siege the whole time, have you?” he asked.

“No,” she said and fired another stunning blast at a thick cluster of archers, sending five of them to the ground, unconscious. “This army only showed up in the last few days, malingering at the edge of the horizon, interdicting travelers that came our way.” She pointed at a tent in the distance. “They’ve been interrupting the flow of our applicants, however, and we were debating what to do about it.”

“It’s an army,” Ryin said, shooting another fireball at the same trebuchet he had disabled a moment earlier. The flames from his burst began to lick at the contraption, and it caught fire after a moment’s hesitation, causing the druid to smile. “They don’t tend to spring forth out of nowhere, especially when the dark elves are already at war with the Human Confederation and the Elven Kingdom. What happened?”

“What indeed?” Vara muttered, so low she doubted he would have heard her. “The army comes from Aloakna, on the coast. The dark elves sacked the town a fortnight ago with a host of fifty thousand.”

“What?” Ryin’s eyes grew large; the human’s face was almost innocent, awestruck. “Aloakna is a neutral city! Why would they destroy it? They were a major trading partner to the dark elves.”

“And the elves, and the humans,” Vara said. “They didn’t have much of a standing army, relying on being neutral to protect them. By the accounts we heard, whatever mercenaries and guards they had on hand put up a spirited defense, but to little avail. The city was sacked inside of a week of siege, and the dark elves showed little mercy to the occupants, killing and raping in mass number, conscripting some of the surviving dark elven men into their army.” She felt her expression harden. “Then they came here.”

“But why here?” Ryin asked. “They have armies stalled in their advances against the elves in Termina and the humans in Reikonos still?” He waited for her to nod assent. “Why waste time on us now?”

A crashing sound interrupted her answer; in the distance, a catapult exploded as a result of Larana’s attack and another siege tower crashed to pieces down the wall. Below them, the dark elven army was in chaos as their own soldiers randomly turned against them, guided by Sanctuary’s enchanters. Vara watched as a hulking dark elf in heavy armor swung a mace through the heads of three of his comrades, splintering them, before he was brought down by a swarming attack of swords by several of his fellows.

“I daresay the Sovereign didn’t think he was wasting time,” Vara said with a slight smile. “After all, when you send a host of fifty thousand to attack something so small as Sanctuary, you likely think that your target will disappear from the map without difficulty.”

“But he knows we have the power of magic,” Ryin scoffed. “He’s not stupid, is he?”

A bolt of lightning arced down from one of Sanctuary’s wizards into the crowd below, crackling as it jumped from the metal armor of a whole platoon of men-at-arms, causing them all to fall, if not dead then at least unconscious. “I doubt it,” Vara said. “He’s been making some exceedingly shrewd moves thus far in the war, and they’ve been incredibly audacious ones at times, but we keep hoping he’ll overreach.” She let a grim smile come across her features. “Perhaps he finally has.” She let the smile fade. “And you lot? You’ve been gone six months, longer than you had any right to be without letting us know anything. What the blazes happened to you?”

Ryin’s expression turned pained, and for a moment they were both distracted by the explosion of another catapult in the distance. The armies at the foot of the wall were beginning to recede now, slowly pulling back, the lines breaking as the more fearful among them started to retreat. “They’re leaving,” Ryin said, watching, almost spellbound, as fire and lightning chased them away, a flurry of arrows felling whole lines of dark elves as they retreated in no formation at all while a few of their brethren remained behind, standing near the wall, motionless, still under the control of the Sanctuary enchanters.

“They’ll be back,” Alaric said, appearing behind them from within a fog, coalescing into his shape of armor and man, the expression on his face grim and unsatisfied. “Now that the Sovereign has an eye fixed on Sanctuary, he’ll send more, make no mistake. They’ll withdraw to a safe distance, interdict our new applicants, and bottle us up until their next hammerblow falls.”

“Where are the rest of your number?” Vara asked, turning back to Ryin. “With them, we could make an attack, drive the enemy back. They could increase our ranks by a third again, and all blooded veterans now, yes?”

“Yes,” Ryin said, “they’ve certainly seen battle. But … they sent me to tell you what happened.”

“Did you not go to aid Longwell’s father?” Vara jumped in before Alaric could ask a question.

“We did,” Ryin said, “and we succeeded in defeating his enemies-well, of a sort, anyway-”

“By all the gods, get on with it man,” Vara said, drawing a look of severe irritation from Ryin. “What happened? Did you beat the army that was invading them or not?”

“We did,” Ryin said with a sort of haunted quiet. He looked out over the wreckage of the battlefield and Vara’s gaze followed his over the ramparts. There were bodies, countless, armored, cloth-clad, and filling the ground for several hundred yards away from the wall. “We fought a battle at a place called Harrow’s Crossing, and we crushed the armies that were at the throats of Longwell’s people.”

“Very good,” Vara said brusquely, “and yet I see no army here, save for you, so I must ask again-what … happened?”

“Perhaps if you remained silent and let him explain,” Alaric said, drawing Vara’s searing irritation to her Guildmaster in the form of a glare.

I want to know where he is. Vara scowled. The man’s been gone for months, and when he finally sends a messenger, we get the bloody slowest of druids, a man who can’t seem to form a non-contrarian thought to save his unblessed soul. “Fine,” she said. “I’m waiting, though. You beat them at this place … this … Harrow’s Crossing? Defeated their enemies? Sent them scattering in utmost defeat?”

“We did,” Ryin said, and the smell of the fires began to waft in off the battlefield, causing Vara to cough quite unexpectedly. “It was masterful. Cyrus came up with a brilliant strategy to defeat the superior odds that were waiting for us in ambush.”

The druid smiled, and Vara wanted to slap him, to grasp him by the shoulders and shake him until the words she wanted to hear finally came out-That he’s alive and well. That they’ll be teleporting in later tonight, or perhaps tomorrow, hardened, veteran, ready to help us get about the business of throwing back this siege.

“But there was a problem after that,” Ryin said, interrupting her thoughts. “They won’t be back for quite a while.”

Vara felt the sudden pain, felt it where she least wanted to, and knew it affected her the way she didn’t care for it to, could tell in the sag of her face that she was exposing undesired emotion. I won’t ask about him. I won’t. I’ll wait, and he’ll tell us, tell us all, and I won’t have to ask. Because, after all, the general is with his troops, he couldn’t leave without them, of course, he wouldn’t … She tried to straighten her expression, tried to change it, but she was sure it ended up as a cringe.

Ryin went on, apparently oblivious to everything she knew was written over every inch of her face. “We ran into … well …” He hesitated. “We ran into a bit of a snag.”

“A snag?” Alaric spoke in the nick of time, halting the inevitable and fast approaching scream that Vara felt building, the pressure ready to cause her to explode. “Perhaps you could be more specific, brother.”

Ryin’s head bowed slightly. “All right. Well. The thing is, we beat the Kingdom of Syloreas in the battle. But there was another problem after that.”

“Oh for the gods’ sakes, man!” Vara blurted out, drawing every eye on the battlements around them and causing Ryin to take a step back. “Will you stop bloody stalling and get right the hell on with it? Is he all right? Did Cyrus die?”

“Yes,” Ryin said. “He died at Harrow’s Crossing, but he’s been resurrected from that.” Vara felt some of the tightness in her chest subside, only to be replaced by a deeper, more painful sensation only a moment later as Ryin went on. “But to answer your other question …” Ayend’s face drew tight again, seemingly unready to part with the information, as though it pained him to do so. “… He is most certainly not all right.”