Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7) (51 page)

“Why wouldn’t they?” Terian asked. “It’s not as though they have any idea there’s a back door to this place.” He swept an arm in a wide circle. “They’ve probably got archers on every rooftop, too, in case we try an assault from the air, maybe even guards with Falcon’s Essence patrolling the skies.” His grin broadened. “This is going to come as quite the shock, I imagine.”

“It already did, at least to some of them,” Vara said, stepping over the smoking corpses of the guards Cyrus had struck with lightning. She brushed past both of them en route to the stairs that ringed the circular building. “Come on, you loafers. Let’s be about this business and get it done.”

Cyrus fell in behind her and they started up the steps. They climbed floor after floor, passing doors that opened into office areas, complete with desks, chairs. The torches and hearths were dimmed for the night, coals lighting the rooms. Cyrus stuck his head into every one as they passed, not wanting to be caught unawares if one was hiding a guard force that could flank them after they passed, but there was nothing but silence in each of them.

“Clearly no one here works late,” Ryin said, pacing along behind Cyrus a few steps. “Appalling work ethic.”

“Or more likely,” Vara said, “they cleared the entire Citadel in order to place the guard and guarantee security for the council.”

“Which begs the question,” Terian said, frowning, “where are they? I mean, we’ve been here before, and the stairs end at the main Council Chambers, the ones where they deal with public debate and inquiry, and I doubt they’re all just sitting there, waiting to render judgment on us as we enter.”

“There are other floors above that,” Mendicant said, sniffing as he hurried along, low to the ground, on all fours. “The staircase stops, but resumes behind the council desks and goes to the upper floors where the Council of Twelve keeps their quarters and private meeting rooms.”

“Well, that’s fascinating,” Terian said. “What’s more fascinating is—how do you know that?”

“It was in the same book that contained the spell for the portal,” Mendicant said.

Terian frowned. “What book was this?
A Visitors’ Guide to the Secrets of the Citadel
?”

“I doubt it,” Mendicant said, shaking his head. “It was very old, with hand-drawn maps. And the council chambers don’t look anything like what we saw when last we were here with Lord Soulmender.”

It was Cyrus’s turn to frown. “You were here with
me
. I was leading that expedition.”

“Ego,” Vara whispered.

“But without Curatio, we wouldn’t have been there at all,” Terian said darkly. He huffed slightly as they passed another room, which Cyrus checked and found empty. “Gods, this tower is maddeningly huge. What a shame the Guildmaster of Requiem didn’t just let it get destroyed when the ancients fell; maybe the Council of Twelve would have built something with fewer stairs.”

“And likely something less vulnerable to our current attack,” Kahlee said, very sweetly.

“An excellent point,” Vara said. “Clearly, this woman has all the reason in your marriage.”

“I hear that’s a common thing among the married,” Kahlee replied.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Vara said.

“Why don’t you just marry each other, then?” Terian said with a roll of his eyes. “Then you could both be ‘reasonable’ together and cease inflicting it on the rest of us.”

They passed the next few floors in silence. Gradually, Cyrus became aware of a sound behind them not unlike the snorting of a pig. He turned around and looked back, catching Vaste with his hands on his knees. When he saw Cyrus looking at him, he said, “It was Zarnn.”

“Not Zarnn!” Zarnn called from a little ways back. He was taking the stairs in stride. “Zarnn run around lawn every day, climb many stairs, not huffing and puffing over this.”

“Oh, fine, it’s me,” Vaste said, standing back up straight. “I do stairs every day, too, it’s just I don’t have to do them in quite this hurry most of the time. Clearly I need to have assassinations in mind when I climb back up to the officers’ quarters after dinner, so I can run up them instead of just leisurely making my way up.”

“Don’t get lazy on us now, Vaste,” Cyrus said, “we’ve only got about ten floors to go.” He poked his head into the next room on his left and saw display cases lining the walls, and a long empty one in the middle of the room.

“Hey, is that where—” Terian began.

Cyrus looked out the wide window built into the stairwell to his right, big enough that someone small could squeeze through. “I believe it is. Kind of surprised they’ve kept it as it is. I mean, Amnis was stolen … what? Six years ago now?”

“It’s not as if they have any other godly weapons to put in its place,” J’anda said, huffing along, his staff shedding purple light faintly in the hallway.

“We didn’t think the dark elves had any other godly weapons, either,” Cyrus said, staring at the enchanter’s weapon, “but then you showed up with that one.”

“Yes, but it’s hardly as well known as Amnis, Ventus, Torris, Terrenus, Letum or Ferocis, is it?” the enchanter asked with his usual enigmatic smile. “No one even knows what it is, in fact, save for a very few. And that is its strength, to walk unknown.” He sighed, moving quickly up the stairs without complaint. “In fact, its aid is the only reason I can even join you on these endeavors anymore. Without it, I’m afraid I would be reduced to walking a few feet and needing a break, like Vaste.”

“Oh, rub it in, why don’t you?” the troll wheezed from behind them. “Apparently I need a godly weapon, too.”

They climbed the next few floors in silence, reaching the main Council Chamber to find it empty, though they could see that the old wooden furniture that had been destroyed when last they’d been here had been replaced with new, carved very finely in the elven style.

“I guess we know what the Council of Twelve did with those millions of gold pieces we gave back to them after the war,” Vaste said, staring at the new wooden furnishings, the rails and seats throughout the room beautifully carved, visible under the faint glow of the tower’s stones.

“Honestly, that was probably only a million of it,” Vara said, giving it a quick glance. “Elven craftsmen are so proficient that it doesn’t take them nearly as long as you’d think to do something of this sort.”

“Mendicant, where is this—” Cyrus began, but the goblin scampered ahead, through the rail that separated the Council of Twelve’s long wooden desk from the gallery where the spectators sat. He rushed past and suddenly Cyrus saw a door hidden against the wall that he had not noticed before. It was paneled in the same style as the wooden backing, though more obvious now, somehow, since he was looking for it. The goblin pushed on it and it opened without a sound.

“And here we go,” Cyrus said, charging through first. What he found on the other side was more of the same: a narrower staircase than the first, threading around the back of the council room in a tight spiral to the top of the dome that crowned the Citadel.

A full orbit later he found another of the ubiquitous doors that led to the interior of the Citadel. This one did not open into one large room but rather a small area centered around double doors that were presently open. Beyond he could see a long table with twelve chairs headed by a large one at the end, twin hearths on either side of the room.

Vara frowned as she looked in but shook it off as they continued to climb up the stairs another floor. This time the door opened into a long hallway that looked vaguely familiar. Cyrus paused at its entry and counted the doors before him; there were eleven, with the last being directly ahead and five others on each side.

“This is …” Vaste muttered quietly, peering down the hall. “Does this …”

“This looks like the officer quarters at Sanctuary,” Terian said, staring in, his brow furrowed. “And the floor below … it was like …”

“The Council Chambers,” Vara said, frowning.

“This will be the Council of Twelve’s living space, then,” Cyrus said. His eyes followed the staircase. “And if the pattern holds, then—”

“Then someone totally copied someone else here,” Vaste said.

“It would explain why a book in our, uh, library,” he glanced down at Mendicant, “has the layout for the Citadel in its pages, I suppose.”

“I never noticed the similarities in design on the maps,” Mendicant said, staring down the hall, “but truly, seeing it like this … the resemblance is remarkable.”

“Well, we find it an efficient enough layout, don’t we?” Vara asked, shaking her head. “Shall we split and do this, or strike first at the council members and then go on to the top floor?”

“Split,” Cyrus said, his voice croaking slightly. “Four to five people per door. Kick them down when—”

“Wait,” Mendicant said, and his hand glowed orange. “The doors will all be unlocked now.”

“Well, that’s a handy spell,” Vara said, frowning down at him. “Can you use that anywhere?”

He shook his head sadly. “Only upon buildings constructed by the ancients. They made their designs with magic and—”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Cyrus said, nodding to Terian. “You want Urides or the chaff?”

“I’ll supervise down here, make sure it gets done right,” Terian said, his axe in hand. “You take Urides; you’ve got more personal business to settle with him, I suspect.”

“True enough,” Cyrus said, and started up the stairs. Vara followed him immediately, and he beckoned for J’anda and Vaste. “Also—”

“I’m coming with you,” Larana said, plunging ahead, scooting around Vaste and J’anda and ensconcing herself in the middle of their party before Cyrus could protest. She kept climbing, and he was forced to hurry to keep ahead of her.

“Thirty seconds,” Cyrus hissed back down the stairs, trusting that one of the elves who had come with them would make the necessary announcement to the war party.

“I don’t think we’re going to have thirty seconds,” Vara said, and her eyes widened as she heard a thump below as someone opened a door loudly. “I think we’re going to need to do this immediately.”

Shouts and cries echoed through the stairs and Cyrus pounded his way up the last few steps to a door set squarely in the middle of the staircase. He reached for the handle and it opened with a turn. He plunged inside and found himself in a narrow stairway, exactly like the one in the Tower of the Guildmaster.

“Curious,” Vaste said as Cyrus ran up the stairs into a room with balconies at each of the four compass points, a small outgrowth at the top of the immense Citadel, barely a wart upon its apex.

There was a bed in roughly the same spot as in his own quarters, and someone was emerging from it, clad in a robe, a staff in hand. Pretnam Urides did not look like himself without his wire-framed spectacles, although there was a curious spot on either side of his nose where they normally rested.

The walls glowed blue and the hearth blazed, and the head of the Council of Twelve stood looking at them furiously, leaning on his staff, his own eyes afire like the hearth. “How did you get in here?”

“We invaded your city and destroyed your army,” Cyrus replied with a smug smile.

“I doubt that very much,” Urides said with contempt, and his nostrils flared as he took a deep breath. “But if it’s so, I’m sorry to tell you: your journey here has been fruitless.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Cyrus said, smirking. He listened for just a moment, heard the screaming below. “We’re killing your council even now, and you—well, you’re just standing here …”

Urides did not smile; in fact his lips turned even farther downward. “You don’t think I’m defenseless against heretics, do you?” And he extended his staff so quickly that Cyrus doubted he could have countered it even with Rodanthar. From its tip came a burst of pure wizard flame, aimed right at Vaste, and from his other hand, druid lightning raced toward Cyrus without so much as a word spoken or a second of warning.

Cyrus caught the lightning on Rodanthar unintentionally; it arced toward his blade and hit the metal, crackling against the surface and dispersing harmlessly as Urides looked on, the lightning flashing back in his eyes.

The fire Urides cast, however, shot toward Vaste like dragon flame, the helpless troll staring openmouthed at it—

A blast of water like a torrential flood met it, fountaining from Larana’s hand and dissolving into a burst of steam that billowed around them like smoke. Cyrus saw another glow from her and the sound ceased, both water and fire. “Cessation spell is up!” she shouted, louder than he’d ever heard her speak.

“I should have done that first,” Cyrus muttered as the last of the lightning crackled away to silence on Rodanthar. “Who knew that the head of the Commonwealth of Arcanists was also secretly a heretic?”

“My faith in the Leagues is at an all-time low, I think,” Vaste shouted through the hissing steam, “and I’m including in this the fact that they booted me from training for being a troll.”

“Their hypocrisy does suddenly seem rather blatant,” J’anda said, inching toward Cyrus, his staff before him, the purple glow lighting the steam that obscured their view. “It seems very ‘It is for me, not thee’ of them. Very superi—”

The clash of metal upon metal drew Cyrus’s attention, and he saw J’anda holding up his staff as Urides slammed his own down upon it with tooth-rattling strength. “It is not for you,” Urides hissed, much like the steam, “for you are trash. Worthless—”

“You didn’t feel that way about us when we were saving your Confederation from the dark elves,” Cyrus said, moving to attack him. Urides took a few steps back and vanished into the cloud.

“I didn’t say ‘useless,’” Urides called from somewhere within the cloud. “You certainly had your uses. I said worthless, for you have lost any value you once had.”

“Stick close together,” Cyrus said in a low voice and watched Vaste and Larana draw nearer, Vara circling around behind them to take the left flank opposite him. J’anda moved to the middle, clutching his staff before him, clearly ready to use it to physically attack Urides. “When we see him, we swarm.”

“How like a pack of wolves you have become,” Urides called. “Seeking any vulnerability in larger, stronger prey.”