Crusader

Chapter 93

Vara

Day 209 of the Siege of Sanctuary

The rattle of the remaining siege engines rolling away from the wall was loud, but not overpowering. Vara stood on the heights, smelling the fetid waste in the no man’s land below her, watched the last few surviving siege towers limping away across the muddied plain and breathed a sigh that came out of her slowly, as though she could scarcely believe it was through. Another done. Another repelled.

“That’s right!” A voice cried to her left. She turned to see Thad, standing there in his red armor, waving his sword over the wall at the backs of the retreating dark elven army. “Remember this! This is what happens when you mess with the best!”

“Or in your case,” Vara said acidly, “the barely competent.” She tasted the burning on her lips of the words, as though they were real, as though they were vile in truth as well as content, and she shrugged involuntarily. She leaned heavily against the tooth of the battlement before her and felt her whole weight lean with her, armor and all. It felt heavy, in spite of the enchantments. It’s not the weight of the armor, it’s the weight of the burden. The defense of this place is dragging me down, it becomes all I’ve ever lived and all I’m living for. She ran a hand across her face and flipped up the nose guard on her helm, removing the little line from her vision where it sat to protect her face from harm. It is almost as though I can remember nothing before this.

“Nasty bit of business, isn’t it?” She turned her gaze to the side, where she caught Partus looking at her with a gap-toothed grin. “They keep coming, we keep slaying them. The Sovereign has to have thrown away fifteen, twenty thousand lives here thus far, and all on these half-arsed attacks we keep turning back. You’d think he’d make a concerted push sooner or later.”

“I don’t think I wish to see your definition of a concerted push.”

“It’d involve throwing more and more men at the gate,” Partus said, “taking up where their brethren fell, grabbing the battering ram when the men who hold it drop it-”

“Would you want to grab that?” she pointed to the gate where the last battering ram the dark elves had used was lying. It was long, about thirty feet, a felled tree with the ends sawed off, a massive log. The men who carried it lay dead around it, all of them in flames, as was the ram.

“Not as it is, no,” the dwarf said with a shrug. “But you put a wizard and a druid close up by it, they use a water spell to extinguish it, you throw another forty men under it and keep hammering until the gates give.”

“Our gates do not give,” she said simply, but her eyes remained on the flaming ram, where it burned on the once clearly defined dirt road that led to the Sanctuary gates. It had become indistinguishable from the fields around it, however, because of attacks during rainy times, and the entire verdant plain for several hundred feet around the Sanctuary walls had become nothing but a slick mudscape, a messy pit of dead bodies, discarded armor and weapons, and only a few stubborn patches of grass that had not yet been wiped out.

“Every gate gives if you hammer it hard enough and long enough,” Partus said, still looking at her and not the battlefield. “Take you, for instance-” She gave him a disgusted, scathing look and he held up his hands before him in surrender, with amusement. “Now, now. We’ve known each other a good long time, Vara, since the days of Alliance yore. I’ve always respected you-”

“You’ve rarely seen me, since I attended few enough Alliance functions and never went to the meetings.”

“Not after a time,” Partus said with a grin, “but at first you did, when you were new and sweetly innocent to the way things ran.” He ignored her searing look at the remark. “Anyhow, you’ve always had such a charming personality, I just can’t tell you how amazed I was when I heard that the one who finally broke down your gates was that blockhead Davidon-”

“Stop talking,” she said. This time there was no menace to her voice, only a whisper that sounded like thunder to her ears.

“Ooooh,” Partus said, hands still up in front of him. He wiggled his fingers and made an amused sound. “So it’s true, is it? I had always wondered if you’d ever melt for a man, but Davidon? Really? What is it about him that has women throwing themselves at his feet? The Princess of Actaluere, that smutty little rogue dark elf, and you-”

“Stop what you’re saying right now,” Vara raised her hand at him, “or I’ll-”

“Now, now,” Partus replied, waving his own hand, which was still pointed at her, “let’s not be hostile about things. Assuming you could fire off a blast before I did, which is a bit iffy because I’ve seen you work your magic and you’re just not that fast-but assuming you did, I don’t think it would end out well for you, my dear, because you know I wouldn’t go far, and I’d be back in mere moments to slaughter you-”

There was the sound of an explosive blast, and Partus was launched to the side, smashing into the battlement wall. Vara heard the crack of his bones as his leg and hip hit the stone and broke. His upper body was carried by the force of the spell into a flip, his hip the center of gravity. He tipped upside down and was flung, end over end, off the wall. Vara leaned over to look and saw the dwarf fall in a spiral from his momentum, and when he landed with a crack, he did not stir, eyes wide, staring up at the battlements, dead.

“You wished to leave Sanctuary, Partus,” came Alaric’s voice, to Vara’s right. She turned and saw him there, his hand still extended, even as he spoke to the empty space where the dwarf had stood only a moment before. “Now I have granted your wish.” Without bothering to look over the battlement at the fallen dwarf, the Ghost turned, walking back to the tower nearest them, and disappeared into the darkness without another word.