Master (Book 5) (37 page)

The smell of cooked meat filled the air, tickling Cyrus’s tongue and making his stomach rumble. They stood in the mess hall, the place where the assembled Society ate and spoke, met and talked. There was fellowship and the filling of bellies, Blood Families sitting across from each other, huddled over the bowls, taking a drink of their tankards, clinking them together in companionship.

Cyrus stayed in the shadows. He ate on the floor. The hall was divided neatly in two, half the tables for the Able Axes, half for the Swift Swords. He knew his place, and it was to sit against a wall out of the reach of flickering candles and watch that which he never had. He would take his food quickly, sullenly, not a second to be spared, and he would leave the hall as soon as he was done. Sometimes he missed directives, orders handed down from the instructors. That was the price he paid for staying alive, for being clear of the hall before the rest of the trainees got done. He had already found his bedding place for the night by the time the first of them left the hall, and it was always, without exception, somewhere that he could not be approached without considerable noise. He liked to creep about on the tall beams of the dining hall after dinner, sleep against the rafters where he could not be seen, tucked against the red pine so tight that if he rolled so much as an inch in the other direction he would lose contact with the former tree trunk that he wrapped himself around. He had grown accustomed to no blanket.

This was the way of things, the reality and the cold truth. It was the life of Cyrus Davidon, outcast of the Society, and he had hardened his heart to any possibility of hope.

“None of us is ever alone,” Cass Ward repeated, speaking to a whole table of those his own age and older. He was a leader, strong-backed and tall. He fled no one and nothing, did not have to pick his battles like Cyrus. Cass Ward never doubted that he had a family at his back, a Blood Family to be the currency that backed his every statement and threat.

Cyrus did not make threats. He chose moments to strike when needed in exercises. He fought singly wherever possible. He had no gold to back a threat if he made it, and his enemies were legion and would overwhelm him with numbers should he antagonize them too greatly. They had already tried on more occasions than he could count. He had defeated them every time they had come, exacting a terrible cost that made them want to stay away from him.

Still, it was a lovely thought, the idea that he was not alone. He finished the last of his stew and left the bowl in the shadows. The kitchen staff never complained about it, which was a minor and nearly unbelievable gift in and of itself. In the Society, every misstep, however slight, was catalogued and thrown back at the transgressor. Leaving his bowl was an affront to the Society and to the discipline of keeping your own space clean. Still, Cyrus did not push his luck and simply said a prayer to Bellarum that he’d get away with it for another day; leaving the shadows to place this bowl in the spot where the other dishes were collected would have tipped his departure to the entire hall. His shroud of secrecy depended upon it, and it was luck, sheer luck, or perhaps a kind member of the kitchen staff, which spared him this particular disadvantage that could lead to death.

He crept from the room, threading his way through the darkened hallways of the Society. In the hour following the end of his dinner, Cyrus went to the arena, the area of challenge. Tonight was no exception, and—in the shadows, of course—he used a wooden sword to practice the latest movements that had been taught today. With no enemies about to hobble him, he was able to plan, to work the moves into his mind before the tests on the morrow. He imagined a swordsman across from him, fast and agile, testing him, laughing with him, practicing as they drove each other to greater heights of skill.

But there was no laughter here in this place with him; he was alone, always.

When the first laughing voice reached his ears, he put the sword back on the rack without leaving the shadows and fled the arena. Others would come, as they always did. Cyrus watched them, but never once did they pick up swords. They gathered and gabbed, talking their hearts out as they sat in the seating around the arena. Never once had he seen them enter the dirt floor itself, the place of trial and learning, at least not while he was there. They practiced in the day and left their nights free for spoken glee and shared jest; they were a lazy and complacent lot to Cyrus’s eyes, but they outnumbered him as a plague of flies outnumbers the wasp. He was content to stick to the darkness and hide from their eyes, counting the days and months and years until he would be free.
Free of this place. Free to seek my fortunes unfettered by people constantly eyeing me with ill thoughts.

Though I suppose the outside world will leave me just as alone and threatened as I find myself in these walls.
He heard Cass Ward’s ringing words in his ears and scoffed mentally.
Not being alone is a hobble for the weak; my strength is my lack of attachment. No one to drag me down, to slow me. No one to rely on me, to bind me to them.

I am alone, and it is my power.

He made his way through the halls as silently as any thief. When he reached the dining hall, he avoided the doors and climbed the nearby stairs. Pausing on the landing, he listened for any sound of glee, or mirth, or breathing. Hearing none, he climbed using the layered bricks, carefully and quickly, squeezing through the small gap in the wall at the top. His feet touched silently upon one of the beams that stretched across the top of the hall. It was only a foot wide and paralleled on each side by matching ones. Ten of them provided the support across the hall, with a much larger one intersecting them in the middle and holding them up.

The candles in the hall were all dimmed, only one in five now lit. In the dinner hour, they shed their flickering light in nearly every direction, forcing him to seek out the farthest place from their radiance. Now the place was all shadows, his domain. He made his way across the beam as silently as he had stolen through the halls and pivoted adeptly at the center beam. It was three feet wide, made from a tree larger than any he had seen with his own eyes. It was long and straight, a sword with ten crossguards. He made his way to the far end, over the massive doors that led out of the hall.

He was almost to the end, to that narrow bed where he slept, when he realized he was not alone. He heard more than he saw, could sense more than his eyes could inform. He froze, the fear of being discovered in this place wrenching his still-full stomach, and he hoped that his senses deceived him.
No. This has been the best, by far of my hiding spaces. I can’t
—

Cyrus looked over the side, down to the hall below. There was a figure in the dark, a brown-haired male still lurking in the back of the hall, where Cyrus had eaten his meal. There was the slightest sound of a clatter, and the figure emerged into the candlelight in the middle of the room bearing a bowl—Cyrus’s bowl.

Cass Ward made his way slowly to the kitchen, the bowl in hand with his own. He carried them toward the kitchen, where the scent of the ovens’ still-burning embers persisted. He placed both bowls on the counter with the rest, making nearly no sound.

Cyrus watched with amazement and dread, suspicion clouding every sense.
Why …?

Cass Ward, his task finished, made his way back to the entrance of the dining hall quietly, with nary a step turning up more than near silence. He paused at the entry, his head slightly bowed. “None of us is ever alone,” he said into the empty hall.

With a single look skyward, his eyes fell on the place where Cyrus stood in the darkness, and Cyrus felt a chill.
He knows.

Cass disappeared through the door quietly, shutting it behind him, the slight thump of the wood on wood echoing only for a moment after he had passed.

Cyrus lay awake that night, and the next, and the next, fearing the worst. He watched the shadows, waiting for the inevitable attack to come creeping out of the dark. When he slept, it was fitful and brief, coming in spells that were brought on by extreme fatigue and ending when he awoke from his nightmares in a cold sweat.

It was two weeks before he realized that the attack was not coming, and over a month before his sleep returned to normal, deep and placid, his only refuge.

It was not long after that when Cyrus realized that every time Cass Ward said, “We are none of us alone,” in his presence, he was always—without exception—looking at Cyrus when he said it. After that whenever he heard them, Cyrus thought of them differently, a strange resonance plucking at a string deep within him, and it gave him the faintest flicker of hope.

Cyrus stared up at the desecrated corpse of Cass Ward, feeling empty inside save for one, lone note, the pluck of a chord in his soul, the resonance of it echoing within.

Fury.

It coursed through his veins, reckless, hateful, consuming him with anger that ran like a river current over him. The shadowed body above shuddered with the foul wind off the swamp, and Cyrus shook in his armor, his hand vibrating to that pitch coming from inside.

They are hateful, spiteful, disgusting, worthless, destroyers of all that is worthwhile and good.
He looked up, remembering the righteous rage that had flooded him when Narstron had died. It came back with a new face, red eyes shining down from Cass’s head.

“Cyrus?” Vaste’s voice was a distant sound, the call of a friend on a clear summer’s day, far from the deepening sundown in which he stood on the edge of the world, in a place that was home to the beasts that had killed his father, destroyed his childhood, left him at the mercy of people who hated and drove him and flayed the decency out of him.

I have no decency remaining.

His hand found Praelior, and the world slowed around him.

“Get Vara,” Vaste said from somewhere behind him, a dragging sound like he was stretching every word for comic effect.

The world was awash with that color yellow, turning red as the sun sank further behind the pillar. It was flame on the horizon, flame the like of which he’d seen Verity turn loose.
Flame like I’ll see her turn loose again.

Soon.

Cyrus drew his sword as he stared, taking a slow circle around to see his surroundings. The only troll in sight was Vaste; but there were bodies, people, as far as his gaze could see. Half or more of them were bedraggled, haggard, creatures wearing cloth or less, fresh scars, fresh wounds, old wounds, infections, puss-laden sores and worse visible on their bodies. They were barely recognizable as the living, barely knowable as people—gnomes, dwarves, humans, elves, the occasional goblin, even. He felt no hate for the goblins; he had known too many of them by now, known them as friends and foes, in war on both sides of the fight.

Cyrus’s eyes fell on Vaste, and he saw the alarm in the troll’s eyes. It was wisdom, wisdom in the yellow eyes, wisdom that told Cyrus that the troll knew his mind.

“Why Vara?” Nyad asked, from behind Vaste’s elbow. “Don’t you think it should be Aisling? Or Curatio?”

“
Get Vara
,” Vaste said, certainty and alarm flowing in equal measure. Nyad disappeared into the crowd behind Vaste, heading swiftly back the way they had come, robes rustling as she moved down the avenue.

Cyrus took a breath of the dank, foul-smelling swamp, slave-market air, a breath of disgust and vitriol that cleansed him of any doubt. He had fought trolls, more than he could count, and only one had been worth a damn. “Get behind me, Vaste,” Cyrus said.

Vaste’s hands came up, palms facing the warrior, his staff resting against his shoulder. “Don’t do this.”

Cyrus spun once more about, taking in the refuse, the wastes, the dregs of the market around him. They stared, the drifting, aimless flotsam barely alive. His eyes fixed on an elven woman who caught his gaze, her brown hair twisted and ragged. Her nose was slightly angled, but she had been pretty once. Under the dirt, under the markings of the whip that showed on her bare shoulders, there was a hint of something familiar. He brushed his way through the crowd as gently as if he were stirring aside the cloth that had hung over the cages, careful not to knock anyone over.

“Elisabeth,” he whispered, and the elven woman looked up at him in faint surprise. “Elisabeth, it’s you.”

She opened her mouth slightly, and there was a flicker of recognition. “I know you,” she said.

“It’s Cyrus,” he said. “Cyrus Davidon.”

“Cyrus Davidon,” she murmured. “I knew a Cyrus Davidon once. A long time ago.”

“It is I, Elisabeth,” he said, and he reached out with his left hand to brush her cheek. She pulled away abruptly with a gasp, jerking her hands up as if to defend herself from his touch. “I’m Cyrus. The Cyrus you knew.”

She squinted at him, shaking her head. “No,” she decided finally. “He’s long gone by now. Long gone. They’re all gone.”

“Who is all gone?” Cyrus asked, staring at her. The rage was curdling within, rising with her every word. He longed to strike out but not at those around him. It was the ones beyond that, the ones in the mud homes and buildings around the square. His mind was clear enough to recognize the victims, to separate them from the tormentors.

And, oh, how he wanted to greet the tormentors. To open their arteries, to make their necks sing through new and gaping holes that he himself did carve. His world was chaos and pain, conquest and fury, and he knew it well. He spoke the language fluently, and it spoke back to him through the sword in his hand.

“They’re all gone,” Elisabeth said sadly again.

“Cyrus,” Vaste said.

“Not now,” Cyrus spat bitterly back at him, not even bothering to turn.

“Cyrus.” This came from Erith, tinged with loss, and he wondered when she had come into the square. He did not turn to look at her either, afraid that his fury might be loosed on one of them unintentionally.

Cyrus made to touch Elisabeth’s arm, but she shuddered, flinched away again, blanched at the hint of his motion, falling to her knees and out of his path. He walked past her as the newly freed slaves made way for him, ducking away as though he were an overseer or the lash, reaching out for them. They parted like gates allowing for his passage. And pass he did, through the square, around the cages, threading through the knot of living beings that had been reduced to this; unthinking, unfeeling, frightened, bloodless creatures that knew naught but pain.