Crusader

Chapter 32

The next day dawned with a knock on his door, and when Cyrus stumbled out of bed to answer it, he found a steward waiting, a young boy no more than twelve. “Hot bath, sir?”

“What?” Cyrus asked, squinting his eyes.

“Would you like me to lead you to the hot springs under the castle so you can have a bath, sir?”

Cyrus felt the throbbing under his forehead and wondered if a bath would even be a good idea at the moment. “No, thank you, I’d rather sleep for a while longer.”

“Very good, sir,” the boy said, his mousy brown-haired head bobbing up and down. “I’ll wake you for breakfast, then. The King gave orders that the expedition will leave an hour after that.”

“Good enough,” Cyrus said, and meant it. “Just fetch me some bread or a chicken leg or something, right before we go.” He rubbed his eyes. “Let me sleep as long as possible, I’ll eat on the run.”

And he did so, as the boy returned to him an hour later with a mutton leg, and Cyrus ate it on his way out of the keep. His horse was saddled, cleaned, and waiting for him when he arrived, Briyce Unger himself holding the reins.

“Hello, Windrider,” Cyrus said with a burp, running a hand along the horse’s flank as he approached.

“Windrider?” Unger asked. “What kind of name is that for a horse? A bit girly, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t know,” Cyrus said, uncaring. “I didn’t name him.”

“Let’s be off, then, shall we?” Unger said, starting his horse toward the gate. “I trust you rested well.”

“I have a hangover,” Cyrus said, “but the sleep was fine.”

“No complaints with the hospitality?”

“I wish your servants had brought me less mead and ale,” Cyrus said, feeling a vein pulsing in his temple. “But that’s less a hospitality complaint and more one related to your servants helping me to curb my own bad instincts.”

Unger laughed, a deep bellowing one that grew deeper as they went out of the gate and found Terian working his way gingerly up the slope, looking incredibly uncomfortable in the saddle. “You look like you’re going to have a long day of riding ahead of you, lad.”

Terian grimaced, shifting himself awkwardly. “What happened to you?” Cyrus asked, drawing a pained expression from the dark knight.

“Let me tell you something about Sylorean women,” Terian said, bringing his horse into line next to Briyce Unger’s. “You may think this looks like a small town, and that perhaps their whores would be ignorant mountain wenches, unsure of which direction to ride a man. And you’d be wrong.” He shifted again in his saddle. “I have never in my life met a woman who did to me what that woman did to me last night. I hurt in places I didn’t know could hurt, was bent into positions I didn’t know I could be contorted into, like a braid of hair.” He shook his head. “And I’d love to go back, but I’m not sure I’d survive the experience.”

Unger let out another bellow of laughter. “You met Muna, did you?”

“Was that her name?” the dark knight asked mildly. “I didn’t hear it over the sound of my own screaming.”

Unger laughed again, and reached over to slap Terian on the back. “If you think she’s rough,” Unger said, “you should avoid Ashini. Muna takes it gentle on you folk from out of town as a rule.”

“The word gentle is not in her vocabulary,” Terian said with a cringe, “and not because she’s some ignorant mountain wench, but because she actually used a riding crop on me.”

“I’ve heard enough,” Cyrus said, blanching. “Keep your experiences to yourself.”

“Why?” Terian wore a nasty grin. “You starting to regret not coming with me?”

“I regret a lot of things in my life,” Cyrus said, “but not going with you last night doesn’t look to be one of them. I mean, it looks like you’re going to be walking bow-legged for a few days, which … maybe I’m old fashioned, but I thought it was supposed to be the woman who walks like that afterward, not the man.”

They rode down the mountain and out another gate, this one on the opposite end of town from the one that they entered the day before. Cyrus rode next to Briyce Unger, and they traveled in a companionable silence for almost an hour before Unger broke it. “You’ve come a long way to get here.”

Cyrus shook himself out of the daze of thought he had been in. “Aye. This is … five months? I think five months since we left home.”

“That’s not only what I meant,” Unger said. “You came here for your own reasons, but it was a long trek. At least I understood Partus’s motives. He wanted coin, and it was easy enough to part with gold for the sake of his use. But you? You come all this way for your friend,” he gestured to Longwell. “You help his Kingdom out-yeah, I know it’s his father’s, but that old buzzard will die some day and your friend will take the throne-but then you stick around and come north with us?” Unger shrugged. “Bit strange, you ask me.”

“I caused another problem for Aron Longwell,” Cyrus said. “I stayed to sort it out, came to Enrant Monge to help fix it. But when this …” he thought about it, and was unable to come up with a suitable word of his own to describe the creatures they were riding to find, “… scourge, came up, I suppose I …” He thought about it. “I don’t know, I felt obligated to come for some reason.”

“Are you a crusader of some sort?” Unger asked him, reserved. “Did you come here to spread the message of your gods? Because we’ve had that kind come through here before, trying to evangelize, get us to worship your western deities, and it doesn’t hold much interest for us in Luukessia. Our ancestors didn’t buy into it, and we don’t buy it either.”

“No,” Cyrus said. “I follow the God of War, but I don’t tend to do much evangelizing.”

“God of War?” Unger said, thoughtful. “Bellarum. That was his name, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Cyrus said with a nod. “That is his name.”

“That one I could understand,” Unger said. “God of War makes sense to me. But the others? Goddess of Love? Mischief? Earth, Air, Water and Fire? Feh!” He made a motion with his hand as though he were brushing them all away. “Don’t need gods for those things. I’ve got my father, and his father, and the line of their fathers all the way back to the beginning. They watch over us, keep the stars in the night sky, and the sun up in the day. Who needs your cold, uncaring gods when you’ve got your ancestors, people who strained in their lives along a line so far back it’s impossible to see to the end of it. All of them looking out for you, because you’re the one who’ll carry their legacy forward. No, I’ll take my ancestors to your gods any day. Gods don’t give a damn for you; with ancestors, you’re what they’ve left to the world.”

“What if they’ve got more than just you to worry about?” Cyrus asked, with wry amusement. “What if your father has several kids? Wouldn’t he be limited on how much time he can spend helping you?”

“No,” Unger said with a broad grin, giving Cyrus the feeling he was part of an inside joke by the King’s grace. “He’s dead, stupid. He’s got all the time he needs, it’s not like when you’re living.” He let out a barking laugh. “This is why I don’t discuss religion with westerners. Someone always comes out looking the arse.” Unger straightened up, turned serious. “So you didn’t come here to be a crusader for your gods. Did you come for the glory, then, to further the greatness of your name?”

“No,” Cyrus said. “There’s a war going on back home. If that interested me, I could make a hell of a name for myself in Arkaria about now.”

“Ah,” Unger said, nodding sagely. “It’s the other thing, then.”

“What?”

“When a man leaves his home behind to travel a world away-as far as yours is from Luukessia-he’s either running to something or running from something. For you, it’d be the latter, it seems.”

“Where I come from,” Cyrus said, feeling the shame creep across his cheeks, “a man doesn’t run from anything. Not a warrior, at least.”

“Where I come from,” Unger said, “it doesn’t matter if you run away for a bit, retreat, you know? Stay in every fight and lose, and what does it get you if you get ground under and lose the war? But a strategic retreat,” Unger’s eyes lit up, “that’s saved an army or two. But that’s not you, I’d wager. Not coming at the head of an army. So what are you running from?”

There was a pause, a long one, before Cyrus answered. “A woman.”

“Couldn’t have been anything else, I suppose,” Unger said with a chuckle. “Only thing that can make a man run this far.”

“I don’t like to run,” Cyrus said. “I’d rather not have.”

“I’d rather not have an army of beasts ripping apart my Kingdom and its peoples,” Unger said darkly. “So if it’s all the same to you, I’m rather glad you ran and ran here. It may end up doing me more good in the long run than that army you wiped out at Harrow’s Crossing would have in your stead.”

They rode north for another few days, the ground getting higher and the air colder. Snow-capped peaks became more and more commonplace, and they passed through villages built on the sides of mountains, where people greeted them with all the fanfare due an allied army on the march. Cyrus looked into their faces, the men dressed in the garb of farmers and goat herders, the women drab, wearing skins that were faded and worn, and the children dirty from their day of activity. He looked upon them all and saw himself somewhere else, with a woman of his own, and children, and he wondered where that could possibly be, the place he saw.

On fourth day after they left Scylax, they passed through a village with gates of wood, each post carved into a spike as a fortification. “This is the village of Shaheer,” Unger told him. Over their days of travel they’d spoken at some length, and Cyrus had managed to keep his emotions at bay thanks to Unger, who kept his mind focused on other things. “It’s the next village ahead that we’re going to. This scourge seems to have stopped in the valley over the next mountain; they only took four or five villages, one keep that we know of.” Unger’s face darkened. “Of course there are other towns north that we can’t hear from; likely as not, they all fell first-if these things came from the north.”

Deep in the mountains, they had reached a point where going outside at night, the temperature would fall enough for Cyrus to see his breath. During the days, the air had picked up a chill that Cyrus knew had nothing to do with the season-summer was in full bloom back at Enrant Monge, after all. The altitude and the cold together conspired to remind Cyrus of times long ago-and best forgotten, he thought.

The ride got harder. They went north again, this time over a pass that was relatively clear, a contrast to the times when they’d trudged their animals up hills and winding roads. When they reached the crest of the pass, they stopped. To either side of them were mountains, one double peak to Cyrus’s left, and a particularly tall mountain to his right, one that seemed miles high. Looking ahead of them, he could see hints of snow still patchy on the ground in the valley below, some of it obvious and hiding in the shadows of little forests that dotted the valley. The smell of pine needles was strong in the air.

“There,” Unger said, his finger extended, pointing to a collection of houses in the distance, miles away and nestled in an uneven fold of green ground next to one of the patches of woods. “That’s the village that’s held by this scourge. It’s called Pinrade, and it used to have about five hundred people living in and around it.”

“Do you think they’re all dead?” Cyrus asked. “That these monsters killed them all?”

“My instincts from fighting these beasts when we clashed with them tells me yes,” Unger said with a nod, “every man, woman, child and animal that remained in that village is dead.” He kept an even expression. “But I’d surely like to be proven wrong.”

“You intend us to move directly toward it?” Cyrus asked. “Or perhaps have something more subtle in mind?”

“We have an army in place in the valley east of here,” Unger said. “Not the full force available to me-that’s lurking a little south of Scylax, gathering along with additional conscripts we’re pulling from the reaches of the Kingdom-but a decent-sized force of five thousand or so that is battle-hardened. We’ll meet up with them and probe north a little, see how firmly dug in these blighters are.”

“They didn’t look capable of doing much digging,” Cyrus said wryly.

“Aye, but they come in force, making digging in irrelevant. They overwhelm you with numbers, crush you under the weight of so many of them.” Unger shook his head. “I have my doubts about doing this with five thousand, but it’s a fraction of what we’ve thrown at them so far.”

“How many men have died thus far?” Cyrus asked.

“I fought them with ten thousand men,” Unger said. “We met them on bad ground-for them, not us. They kept coming until I called the retreat, and never once did they show hesitation, even when the ground was covered with their dead.”

They moved east once out of the pass, down to some even ground, using a forest for cover as they left the road, the pace slowing as they made their way along a line avoiding the village by giving it a wide berth.

“Our men will be encamped a few miles from here,” Unger said.

“Are you sure they’re still there?” Cyrus asked. “I mean, if these things are as bad as you say they are, what’s to stop them from sortieing out and slaughtering your men?”

Unger chuckled. “Nothing, I suppose, but they won’t have gotten this army without a fight. So far they don’t seem to do much sortieing; they come in force, move in on a town, and swarm it. They sit there for a while after, like nothing’s happening … if you look at the town from a distance, you’ll see them … not exactly making merry, because these things don’t ever look happy, but they wander the streets, almost as though they’re strutting around their new conquest.” Unger bared his teeth in a feral grimace. “Bastards.”

They came up over a rise and stopped, all in a line, and Cyrus’s eyes widened in shock. Unger cursed, again, louder this time, and Cyrus made a gesture for him to shut up, which the King of Syloreas did, oddly enough. “Bastards,” Unger said quietly. “Bloody bastards. It would appear you were right.”

“I don’t want to be right,” Cyrus said. “I want to be wrong.”

The rise led down to an empty, flat plain, hidden from the sight of the village of Pinrade, still several miles away. A full-fledged camp had been set up in the area-and it was completely, utterly destroyed. Tents were shredded, pieces of their occupants strewn over bloody ground. Bodies were scattered all over the site, both humans and the creatures that Unger called the scourge, their grey, pallid and naked flesh obvious against the clothed and more pink human bodies.

“No campfires,” Terian said from next to Cyrus.

“They were told not to build any,” Unger said, still seething. “These were experienced men. They knew how to keep out of sight.”

“If that was a village of men in the distance,” Cyrus said, “you wouldn’t have thought it possible to keep an army out of their sight, not for weeks at a time. What made you think you could do it with these creatures?”

“Because they’re animals!” Unger shouted, his words echoing across the slaughter below. “They’re not men, these things, they’re less than criminals, they’re beasts, fit to be harnessed to a plow and forced to rip the ground of our fields. They’re mindless, thoughtless animals, lower in mean intelligence than a dog, and worth less in value of life than fifty mutts.”

“And apparently possessed of the same instincts,” Terian said, “if they tracked your people down and wiped them out.”

“Aye,” Unger said. “And I’ll kill them like a rabid one, without mercy or emotion.”

They wandered down the hill among the dead. Cyrus watched as the horses snorted, their exhalations sending little clouds of breath into the cold air. That’s life, the surest sign in this chill, someone’s breath fogging the air around them. He looked at the destruction around them. And there’s none here. “Curatio?” Cyrus called.

“I will try,” the healer said as they reached the bottom of the hill, “but don’t hold out much hope; it looks as if they’ve been dead for some time.”

“Answer me this question, then,” Terian said, “without an army at our backs, what’s the likelihood we’ll be able to take on whatever horde of beasts did this to them?”

“Not as good as if we had an army at our backs,” Cyrus said as Windrider picked his way around the debris and bodies. “Why do you ask questions that you already know the answer to?”

“Rhetorical,” Terian said. “Well, rhetorical and practical. Because, you see, those things,” and the dark knight raised his hand and pointed to the ridgeline above them, “they seem to be watching us.”

Cyrus cursed and drew his sword, dismounting from Windrider and slapping the horse on the backside after aiming him in a direction where there were no visible signs of the scourge. “Oldest trick in the book, isn’t it? They set a trap for us.”

“Stupid creatures,” Briyce Unger said, unslinging a mighty spiked mace from his back, so grand in scale that it looked to Cyrus almost as tall as the man himself and with spikes longer than a child’s forearm, “they’re not smart enough to do anything so sinister. They must have heard us approach.”

“You keep denigrating their intelligence,” Cyrus said, “but we’re the fools, the hundred of us, up against however many of them.”

They were situated in a neat bowl-shaped depression in the ground, with hills surrounding them and the mountain rising behind them. The only avenue of retreat was the way they had come. To their left was an oppressive rise, a hill that backed to a steep series of cliffs, behind them was the north slope of the mountain they had just avoided by taking the pass back to the east. Before them, strung along the hillside for a mile or more, was a waiting line of the scourge, the creatures on all fours, moving only slightly, in position, watching from the top of the hill. They could be here in thirty seconds, fall upon us in great number and force a conflict, Cyrus thought. “Why do they wait?”

“They fear us,” Unger said, clutching his mace and remaining atop his steed. “And they rightly should. Their numbers look small, weak. Perhaps they’re all that remains after my men destroyed many of them.”

“You seem far too sharp a battlefield commander to be taken in by bluster,” Cyrus said, trying to keep any recrimination or reproach from his tone. “Why don’t we assume the worst, and if it’s better than we think, we’ll be no worse off?”

Unger cursed behind him, and Cyrus heard the King of Syloreas let out a grim hiss. “Too right. Assume the worst. Perhaps they’re surrounding us? Setting us up for another hammer to fall?”

“They could be trying to draw us in,” Longwell said from beside Cyrus, still atop his horse, spear in hand. “You might do better fighting from horseback, especially with their disadvantage in height.”

“I’ve always been rubbish at fighting on horseback,” Cyrus said, “and with Praelior, believe me when I say you want me on the ground. I’m more dexterous and maneuverable than Windrider and faster to boot.”

“You’re also more vulnerable,” Terian said, “but that’s really more your issue than mine.”

“I will try to keep you all healed and protected,” Curatio said, “but against these numbers and with only one other healer to aid me, this could get fairly dirty, fairly fast.”

Cyrus twirled Praelior in a circle from his hand, catching hold of it and pointing it toward the hilltop where the scourge still waited, making little noise and moving even less. “I didn’t think keeping it clean was going to be an option.”

Cyrus felt movement behind him and turned to see Aisling dismounted, standing just behind his shoulder. “I’m not much use on horseback, either.”

“We could use a wizard or five right now,” Cyrus said, and then saw Mendicant’s pony step into line next to Curatio, the goblin’s scaly skin glistening in the cold morning light. “I suspect you’ll do well enough, Mendicant.”

“As well as I can,” the small goblin said, his claws looking particularly pointed. “I can put up a wall of flame twenty feet across when they charge, but I won’t be able to maintain it for more than thirty seconds or so; after that, I’ll be forced to engage one on one-or perhaps heave some fireballs into dense concentrations of the enemy.”

“Do what you can,” Cyrus said, feeling the tension flood him. “It seems they’re waiting for something, and that concerns me.”

“Another wave to flank us?” Terian asked, “reinforcements from the village? I wish they’d get to it.”

The sun was too bright, Cyrus thought, seeing the light shine off the armor in the formation around him. Only a few had chosen to dismount; Briyce Unger’s men remained on horseback, and besides Aisling, two veteran warriors of Sanctuary as well as Scuddar In’shara were the only others who had chosen to fight on foot. Scuddar looked particularly lethal, his robes a crimson red, his scimitar spinning in his hands in a display of swordsmanship that Cyrus never found less than impressive.

A wind kicked up around them as they stared across the hilly no man’s land between them and the scourge on the hill. Cyrus kept his eyes moving, looking left to the ridgeline, then behind him again, for any sign of another attack, for any idea of what might be delaying the creatures charge.

“Will anyone feel bad if we just charge them and get it over with?” Briyce Unger asked.

“I’ll feel bad if we do it and they sideswipe us with a flanking attack we ran voluntarily into,” Terian said.

“I’ll feel worse if we die of old age while waiting for their attack,” Curatio said, “and for me, that’s saying something.”

“J’anda,” Cyrus said, “I suspect you’re about to have to find out if these things can be mesmerized.”

“I was planning to try,” the enchanter said. “Failing that, perhaps I can take charge of a few and disturb their formation to start things off?”

“Can a spell even reach them out there?” Terian asked.

“For most, it would be impossible,” J’anda said, closing his eyes and raising a hand. “For me, it is merely another day.” A glow wrapped his fingers, a greenish-blue hue that encompassed him, and his eyes snapped open. “Oh. My. Oh, gods. This is … they are not mindless beasts. Not at all.” J’anda’s eyes widened and the enchanter let out a long, gasping exhale that clouded the air in front of him. “This … unfathomable … they … ahhhh …” His eyes rolled back in his head, he shuddered and shook in the saddle as Cyrus ran between the horses that separated them while the animals began to snort, shuffling back and forth on their hooves. The sounds of the horses took on an eerie quality, being the only noise audible other than the crackling voice of the flailing enchanter.

Cyrus reached J’anda’s side and grabbed him by the robes, jarring the dark elf. His eyes snapped open and looked down at Cyrus, wide, the enchanter’s usually unflappable calm gone. His breaths came in deep, rattling bursts, as though he were cold and winded, ragged in his breathing as his thin shoulders rose and fell in poor time. His eyes locked on Cyrus and they were wild, filled with undefinable emotion, as though the enchanter’s mind were overwhelmed.

“J’anda?” Cyrus asked, dragging the dark elf’s eyes to him. Cyrus could see the bloodshot element to them, the red, strained look that they carried. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” J’anda breathed, “and no. Not all right at all. They’re … you would not believe what they are.” He reached down and clutched Cyrus’s shoulder. “Who they are.” J’anda pushed off, balancing back on his horse and moving away from Cyrus. “They are not fools. They are not beasts. And they are not mindless.”

“Who are they?” Cyrus asked, spellbound by the enchanter’s seeming breakdown.

“Not now,” J’anda breathed. “Not now … I cannot even explain it, not now.”

“Why not?” Terian interrupted, and the dark knight’s eyes and voice burned with impatience. “What’s got you so addled?”

“Addled?” J’anda asked with a laugh, a loud, high, demented one. “You don’t know. Of course you don’t, you couldn’t. And it doesn’t matter right now, anyway, because we have to run.” The crazed amusement fled his face and he looked Cyrus straight in the eye. “We have to run, we have to leave now. We might stand a chance if we hurry, if we fly back to the pass.”

“What the blazes is going on here, J’anda?” Cyrus asked. “What are you talking about? What are these things? What is wrong with you?”

“I saw,” J’anda whispered. “I looked into the mind of one of them when I charmed him and I saw-what they are. Who they were. What they’ve been through. And I know,” he said hoarsely, “I know. And something else, too-” He looked away, stunned, frightened, back to the hill where they waited, still, staring down at the expedition.

“That more of them are coming-enough to destroy us all. And they’ll be here in moments.”