Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7) (67 page)

“I’ve never raised an army of the dead before,” Quinneria said, stooped over on a step below them, breathing hard as she watched the Goliath forces begin to surge over the bottom lip of the temple’s first level like a mindless horde of ants, “but I don’t think they’ll survive without him, no.”

“I watched Curatio exorcise a whole army of the dead once,” Terian said, paused a step above Cyrus, looking like he wanted to continue charging up them without further thought. “Any chance you could do that?”

“Possibly,” Quinneria said. “Did he have any help?”

“He had the Red Destiny of Saekaj,” Aisling said, somewhat muted. “He channeled the souls into it, presumably so that Vidara could reabsorb them later, since they were stolen from her to begin with.”

“He was also very exhausted afterward,” J’anda said, casting a spell and sending purple light down into the middle of the army below. He shuddered, but an undulating line began in the middle of the ruckus as several of the dead began to tear into their own.

“So now that Malpravus has, uh … done what he’s done,” Longwell said, his lance pointed in front of him like it could shield him from what was ahead, “how do we stop him?”

“We get up there and kill his bony ass for good,” Cyrus said, waving them forward as he leapt a step above Vara and Terian. “However we can.” And he charged, his own armor rattling now as he hurried up to fight the last battle.

“I see you made it up here after all,” Malpravus said as Cyrus crested the last step to the top of the temple, his eyes penetrating into the dark ahead. He could not see the necromancer, but knew he was there from the voice, no longer disembodied.

Cyrus glanced backward quickly to confirm that his party was still with him. Fortin, Zarnn, and the cats had now retreated to the third level of the pyramid, the undead army swarming all around them, trying to scale the levels to flank them but failing. The four of them were holding together as a group and killing their way through the rising tide of the dead. For a moment, Cyrus watched bodies fly off the levels around them, in pieces, before he turned his attention to the others.

Vara and Terian were closest to him, their weapons still aflame like his. They stood just outside the temple arch, a simple squared lintel, after which began the darkness. Behind them were Quinneria, Vaste and Mendicant, followed by J’anda, Aisling, Longwell and Ryin. They were tightly grouped, and the apprehension was plain on every face he saw, the red light giving them all a bizarre tint.

Cyrus took a cautious step into the darkness and the sound of battle outside faded in his ears. Water dripped in the distance, echoing through the dark. The air in here was dank, as if there were a pool of water somewhere below. He saw stairs leading down and suspected there were catacombs beneath the main chamber. Another step and he could see a great seal in the middle of the floor, not unlike the one in the foyer of Sanctuary, though he could not make out the details in the dark, even with his swords shedding their crackling light.

“I really must thank you for this, my lad,” Malpravus said, his voice quiet and calm. “I couldn’t have done this without you.” He was still somewhere ahead in the dark, and Cyrus could not yet see him.

“How did I help you?” Cyrus asked, the sound of dripping in the distance like a quiet punctuation to their increasingly surreal conversation.

“It was Mortus,” Malpravus said. “Your conquest of him. Striking out against a god, you see … it’s simply not done, not these days. Bad form. Yet you did it, cleaving his fingers from his hand and proving once more a lesson long forgotten. Some looked at your victory, your conquest of a god, and marveled.
They are mortal. They are … weak
.” A low laugh echoed through the chamber. “I looked upon it and said,
They are stronger than I. How do I gather that power unto myself?
”

“So glad I could help you in your journey for personal excellence,” Cyrus muttered, taking another tentative step. He glanced back and saw the others following him slowly, all knotted together tightly in formation.

“You see,” Malpravus said, taking no apparent notice of his reply, “death is the great equalizer. We all end up as ivory-bleached bones, devoid of that softness and warmth that you seem to so prize … Except that some do not.” Now Cyrus could hear the smile in the necromancer’s words. “Some special few, perched upon their currents of magic as a leech unto a vein, live forever … and I mean to be one of them.”

“I don’t care for that notion at all,” Vaste said.

“As though I have ever given a fig for what the chattering masses want,” Malpravus said with a laugh. “You were barely worthy of my notice before, troll, and you have become positively inconsequential now.”

“Well, that’s wounding as well as troubling,” Vaste said.

“Because you are weak, you can be wounded,” Malpravus said. “Words are your most efficacious weapon, aren’t they, Vaste? Is that because healers were not allowed to carry swords—or is because your wit is sharp and your hands weak?”

“Why don’t you just stroll on over here and find out for yourself?” Vaste slapped the length of his spear-staff into his palm and it echoed through the dark space.

“Oh, I wouldn’t wish to waste my time,” Malpravus said. “As I told you, you are beneath me.”

“I’m actually quite a bit taller than you, short stack, which puts me above you,” Vaste said. “Again, step over here and find out.”

“A few of you,” Malpravus went on, now ignoring Vaste, “have the aid of the weapons of gods, I see.” He laughed. “I placed too little stock in those before, giving them to the Dragonlord when he asked, ignoring the benefits to myself when they could have been mine. The error seems clear in retrospect, but with so many gathered before me, now I see the aid they would bring. Power becomes clearer as one acquires more. Before it was hazier to me; now it is obvious as the nose on Quinneria’s face.”

Philos lit into a soft glow, and Quinneria spoke. “This is your perpetual problem, Malpravus. Now you overlook Vaste in your haste to declare yourself greater than he. Yet he might be the one who brings you low.”

“Don’t draw his attention to me yet,” Vaste hissed in a whisper. “I wanted to sneak up on him.”

“I am too high to be brought low by even you,” Malpravus said. He paused, and the sounds of battle seemed to grow louder outside. “My army approaches, and your rear guard falters. I see you all clearly … a lecher turned Sovereign—”

“I’m also a paladin now, thanks,” Terian said.

“—a diseased product of an earth-dwelling race, covered in glory because he sometimes walks upright and can occasionally cast a spell—”

“Is … is that supposed to be me?” Mendicant asked.

“—one hated and hounded in his own land as a deviant, too afraid and ashamed to even wear his own face for a hundred years—”

“You can look at my face now, if you’d like,” J’anda said with silky anger.

“—an outcast kingslayer from a dead land, noble of title but lacking in any actual nobility—”

“My slaying is not limited to kings alone,” Longwell said, “I’ve aided in the fall of gods, dragons, titans and more.”

“—a thief, a liar, and a whore—”

“You make me sound so saucy when you put it like that,” Aisling said.

“I think he’s talking about me,” Vaste said.

“—two unthinking beasts, fit more for fields with plows than fields of battle—”

“And Zarnn and Fortin aren’t even here to defend their own honor,” Vaste said. “If they were, you’d already be the pile of bones you’ve always aspired to become.”

“—a man who can’t even convince those he calls friends that he is anything other than a discontented whiner—”

Ryin looked around. “Oh, that’s me, is it?”

“Yes,” Vaste said.

“—the Sorceress herself, so afraid of the kingdoms of men that she abandoned her own child out of fear for her own neck—”

“In fear for his life,” Quinneria said hotly.

“—and then there’s the so-called ‘last hope,’” Malpravus said, and his voice took a mocking turn. “Born a miracle to a dying people, given everything she could ask for … and she threw it all away. You—you fool, you smug, high-horsed—”

“That is particularly rich coming from you,” Vara said with a raised eyebrow.

“You had more power than most could imagine handed to you, yours for the taking. You could have been a monarch before you reached your majority. Danay would have had no choice but to surrender the throne before the lightest of challenges from you—”

“Yes, he certainly seemed to be in a surrendering mood when last I spoke with him,” Vara quipped. “You know, between the threats to kill me.”

“You had everything—and you left it for nothing, to climb your way out of the abysmal depths of the Holy Brethren and join one of the mightiest guilds, only to get yourself struck down by your own foolish blindness, your—your—your love—”

Vara burned in the darkness, the fire on her blade leaping higher. “You think a betrayal by a loved one was the fault of my foolishness?”

“To not even see it coming marks you as the worst sort of fool,” Malpravus breathed, “and now—even now—you find yourself with another man who has it in him to cast you aside for greater power … and you ignore it.”

At this, Vara rolled her eyes. “I’ve just remembered something I forgot … you’re a great bloody idiot.”

“At least he took the time to insult you properly,” Vaste said. “He just ignored me, like I’m beneath his notice or someth—HEY!”

“You stand in their midst, Cyrus Davidon,” Malpravus said, “betrayed by so many of them, and yet you still cling tight to this notion of …
friends
, of this constructed family to replace the one that left you.”

“Not all of them left,” Cyrus said, bowing his head, “some of them died.”

“More will die,” Malpravus promised him. “Your Sanctuary will fall. Time will have its way with your little family, and you will be left alone, in the end … and all you will wish is that you had the power to make it all right again.”

“This is pointless,” Cyrus said, raising his sword, “because you will never understand. Not what draws us together, nor what keeps us together, nor why we fight with and for each other. You may be a necromancer, but you’ve always been dead inside, so hollowed out by your tireless pursuit of the one thing you think matters that you ignore all else at your own peril.” He raised Rodanthar in a high guard and brought Praelior low. “And that which you dismiss … will be the thing that kills you, Malpravus.”

“I see you make the foolish choice again,” Malpravus said, “but have it your way, childish boy who will never have the chance to grow up. If you prize these fools so highly—” At last, he stepped forward into the light, a skeleton finally in fact, glowing eyes staring out of an actual skull, bleached clean of flesh and covered only by robes, immense, now taller than even Vaste, leering down at them all. “Then you will die with them.”

The battle was joined faster than Cyrus could believe, spells flung at the enormous skeleton of Malpravus and his own rejoinders sent back, crashing into the walls of the temple with bellowing fire, shocks of lightning and bursting patches of ice. Malpravus’s attacks hit the floor and peppered the stone into exploding flecks, sending the entire party save for Quinneria diving for cover. Heat and cold ran over Cyrus’s skin, even through the armor, and his hairs, from the long ones atop his head to those down his chest, all stood on end at the sizzle of lightning.

Vara and Terian wisely circled around the skeleton, not striking immediately, though the thing that had been Malpravus held up one hand to cast spells and the other as if keeping it in reserve to hold off attacks; that hand stayed in the air, cocked as for a punch, as the spellcasting hand unleashed a tide of something horrible that Quinneria met with a magical rejoinder of her own. Malpravus’s crackled black and Quinneria’s glowed green. They warred with each other in a replay of what had happened in the Tower of the Guildmaster, the conjoining spells blasting a mighty hole in the stone ceiling. The rocky pieces fell and disintegrated in the pooling of magics, consumed whole as the room pulsated with the energy of the magical union.

“This is going to get terrible quickly,” Vaste shouted, aiming his spear at Malpravus and casting a beam of white out of the tip. Cyrus blinked at it, watching as the troll broke out in a sweat, enormous beads popping up on his forehead. “You mark my words!”

“Mark them with what?” Vara called, throwing a hand out and issuing a force blast that did not even move the immense, skeletal Malpravus.

“Mark them with the bodies of the dead!” Longwell shouted. Cyrus turned to see the Army of Goliath at the entry to the temple, Fortin and Zarnn standing in the way, trying to block the gaps. The dead streamed forward with screams on their lips, shattered to pieces by the hands of the rock giant and the troll, as Aisling and Longwell joined the rear guard. J’anda, too, pivoted about and began to shoot purple spells from the tip of his staff, increasing the frenzied chaos at the entry. Aisling was disappearing and appearing from place to place in the middle of it all, ripping asunder dead bodies with perfectly placed strikes then fading away again.

“We’re going to need more help very soon,” Ryin said, adding a blazing fire spell to Quinneria’s efforts against Malpravus, blending together with her green power that was pulsating against Malpravus’s black. “You don’t need to mark anything for me, just believe it when I say it!”

“I believe it,” Cyrus said, orbiting to the right with Vara, looking for an opening.
Leap in against Malpravus now, and all it’ll take is a second’s redirection of that spell for any one of us to be vaporized like the stones falling from the roof.
Cyrus looked up; he could not see the sky for all the magical energy that pulsed in the room.

“Perhaps we should try something different!” Vara called across the fray. “Terian—perhaps you should attempt some, ah … old magic.”

“I don’t know any old—” Terian started, and then got it. “Oh. Well. Sure, why not?” Before Cyrus could quite suss out the meaning, the dark elf reached down and poked the pointed tip of his axe into his own wrist and then raised a hand to Malpravus. It glowed faintly, darkly, and he straightened up, the pain clearing from his face. “Uhm … I don’t think that did anything.”