Warlord (48 page)

Cyrus took a breath and shared a look with Vara, whose rage had plainly mellowed. “Fine,” Cyrus said, still viewing her with some suspicion. “I’m going to take you up on that.”

Cora kept her face almost impassive—almost, but not quite. The faintest of smiles played on her lips even though it was obvious in its fakery. “I look forward to it,” she said, but that subtle flicker in her expression put the lie to it before she bowed to Cyrus and then walked away.

“Terian,” Cyrus said, greeting the Sovereign of Saekaj Sovar at the gate where the dark elf waited, his own entourage—the healer, Dahveed, the druid, Bowe and that enormous warrior, Grinnd—standing off from him about twenty paces. The warrior and healer smiled politely at passersby, but the druid sat with legs crossed, hands up, meditating, a cushion of three feet of air between his backside and the ground.

“Cyrus,” Terian said grimly. “Vara.”

“Thank you for coming,” Cyrus said. “Your presence in this hour is … much appreciated.” He looked around, but other than Terian’s three servants, all the others from the funeral had already passed through the Sanctuary gates.

“Well, I did know all the officers that died,” Terian said. “So I appreciate you allowing me to come and pay my respects.”

“I think I speak for both of us,” Vara said, “albeit rather surprisedly … but you are welcome at any time.”

“Perhaps not in the middle of the night,” Cyrus corrected, “unless it’s an emergency.”

“Davidon, you aren’t getting me out of my comfortable bed in the middle of the night
unless
it’s an emergency,” Terian said. “Besides, I have messengers for the minor stuff now, like, ‘Vaste needs a swat upside the head, it’s been too long.’”

“A persistent problem,” Cyrus agreed.

“Have you heard from Ehrgraz yet?” Terian asked, a little tentatively given his position as leader of a nation.

“No,” Cyrus said, frowning. “I assumed that was a good thing, though, given …” He let his voice drift off. “Do you know something I don’t?”

“Not really,” Terian said, but there was hesitation in his voice. “I introduced Bowe over there to my sources in the Ashen Wastelands.” He nodded at the druid, hovering placidly. “He’s been trying to check in daily, but … nothing.”

“That could be good, right?” Cyrus asked, looking from Vara to Terian. “The dragons are cloistered up, debating the course of revenge?”

“Maybe,” Terian said, more than a little skeptically. “I would have thought Ehrgraz would have come to you by now, though, or at least sent some word. He has his spies and sources, after all …” Terian lowered his head. “Silence … not generally good from one dragon. When you’re getting it from all of them, and all their lesser kin …” He blew air out of pale blue lips. “It’s worrying, let’s put it that way.”

“Well, he wouldn’t be the first ally to abandon us of late,” Cyrus said a little acidly.

Terian looked pained. “I heard about Danay. I didn’t think he’d do that, honestly, but …”

“But it was a possibility in your mind?” Vara asked.

“Everything is a possibility in my mind, lately,” Terian said. “But every conversation I had with Nyad or others about the King suggested that with the exception of my own, he was possibly the least warm and loving father of all.”

“True,” Cyrus said. “This feels like something else other than fatherly regard. Pride, perhaps. Whatever it might be, it loses us an ally when we should all be steadfast in our opposition to the titans.” He looked up at Terian. “Still, the fact that you stand with us … and sent … uh … your ambassador to help us …” He raised an eyebrow, trying to stay away from condemnation. “Well, I appreciate it, even if I didn’t exactly expect the form that help took.”

Terian turned quite serious. “She helped me with the Sovereignty in invaluable ways. And when she did what she did to you, she was in a difficult spot—”

“She was a traitorous whore,” Vara pronounced with sheerest loathing, “and the only positions she was in were on her back, and astride—”

“Let’s not,” Cyrus said, grimacing, “get into exhaustive detail.” He paused. “My regards to her nonetheless.” He tried to ignore the scandalized look in Vara’s eyes. “She saved our lives.”

“She owed you considerably more than that for the gift of the scar that graces your lower back and that still seems to ache in moments of exertion—”

“There’s an argument and I’m not part of it,” Terian mused idly, “I feel like I’ve done something wrong.”

“I have another question for you,” Cyrus said, changing the subject. “Uhm … about your armor, err … Alaric. Has he ever …” Cyrus took a deep breath, “… appeared to you, in, say … the Tower of the Guildmaster?”

Terian’s eye bucked upward, then settled as he went from surprise to amused resignation in the space of a few heartbeats. “He appeared to you, too, huh?” He nodded, now resolute. “That makes sense. It’d be the two of us, I guess.”

“Oh, you’re both so very special,” Vara said acidly.

“Well, I think we just need more help than you,” Terian said.

“You’re about to need help of the sort only a healer can render—”

“What did he say to you?” Cyrus asked.

Terian blushed a deeper navy. “He … encouraged me … taught me to be a paladin, actually, in those moments.” He reached back, slowly, and pulled the black axe from behind him, then muttered something under his breath as it flamed to life, drawing a gasp from Vara. “He taught me this.”

“That bastard,” Vara said, “pretty soon he’ll be teaching that to everyone.”

“You’re still special,” Terian said with a grin.

“Healer, you’re going to be needed over here.”

“Peace,” Terian said, extinguishing the flame. He paused then nodded to Cyrus. “What did he tell you?”

“He reminded me I wasn’t alone in the fight with Yartraak,” Cyrus said simply, giving Vara a look that immediately caused her own to soften. “And more recently, someone else summoned me to the Tower while invoking his name—Terrgenden, the—”

“God of Justice,” Terian breathed, nodding. “He’s quite the fellow, isn’t he?”

“And now
you
sup with gods?” Vara asked, under her breath. “This land has gone truly mad.”

“I met him and Vidara both, actually,” Terian said, drawing an even more ireful look from Vara. “She seemed nice, your goddess. They named you after her?”

Vara’s eye twitched. “Yes.”

“She seemed … calmer,” Terian said. Vara’s reply was lost under her breath.

“You think he’s still alive, then?” Cyrus asked.

Terian seemed taken aback at that. “Actually, I thought I was having a delusion, but now that you’re telling me you saw him in the exact same setting—and I assume he sort of … pulled you out of the middle of a battle going unfavorably?” Cyrus nodded. “Then yes, I think …” The white knight nodded, “… it stands to reason he’s still alive, somewhere, somehow, though how he’s doing this is a bit mystifying.”

“Any idea what we should do about it?” Cyrus asked, the wind whipping around him.

“Have you thought about searching your quarters thoroughly?” Terian asked with a grin. “Maybe look under the bed?”

“I assure you, no one could have survived under there the last few months,” Cyrus said, earning him a gauntleted slap to the upper arm from Vara that rang out under the grey afternoon sky.

“If he’s appeared to us but is not showing up,” Terian said with a shrug, “then I daresay he doesn’t want to be found. And while trying to hunt a ghost through the countryside of Arkaria sounds like so much fun—stopping at every house, ‘Hey, have you seen a man who can fade into insubstantial mist?’ slamming of doors in your face, repeat endlessly—” He shrugged once more. “He’s the Ghost. What he does is at least as mysterious as how he does it, and if he doesn’t want to be found …”

“Then we’re on our own, I suppose,” Cyrus said.

“I think that might be how he wanted it,” Terian said slowly, and when both Cyrus and Vara were looking at him, he went a little further. “Think about it … he was the Guildmaster of Sanctuary. While he was here, I might have always had somewhere to run back to, and while you were the General, you had essentially topped out on how far you could go in this guild.” He gestured to the central tower somewhere hidden behind the wall at his back. “But now … well, look at us. You’re the Lord of Perdamun, I’m the Sovereign, she’s the Guildmaster’s woman—” His grin broke loose and he received a slap of his own from Vara, hard across his vambraces, the metal clanking as he broke into laughter. “Kidding! Only kidding!” His smile disappeared. “We were in his shadow. But now …”

Cyrus stared at the dark elf, taking his meaning. He exchanged an uneasy look with Vara, all thought of reprisal for Terian’s comment clearly struck from her mind by one that was causing worry lines to crease her brow. “So we really are on our own,” Cyrus said, and this time no one answered, for none of them had one that gave them even the slightest feeling of reassurance.

The knock at Cyrus’s door sounded as he was almost ready to extinguish the torches for the night and call it an evening. The white silken sheers that stood in front of the four balconies in the Tower of the Guildmaster were wafting lightly in the wind. Vara was still absent, gone down to the foyer some hours earlier to “put in an appearance,” as she had said it, kissing him before she had left. It had been necessary, he figured, for one of them to go, but he did not feel like putting on the brave face, not this evening, though at the sound of the knock he marshaled his reserves for that very purpose.

“Come in,” he called, his armor still on, rising from the chair in the corner of the room as the door squeaked open down the thin slit of the stairway passage.

He waited where he stood, knowing full well that Vara would not have knocked unless she brought someone with her, and when he saw the green cloak and cowl, he relaxed a little. “Martaina,” he said.

“Guildmaster,” she said, oddly formal, looking around. Her eyes fixed on a white sheer as the wind caught it, and Cyrus struggled to remember if she had been here before.

“What can I do for you?” Cyrus asked, easing toward her, his armor making soft noises, metal boots scraping against the stone floor.

Her passage toward him was slower, with yet more reserve, hands threaded behind her back, but her eyes were clear as they took in the details of the tower around them. Her bow was absent and so were the blades she kept on her belt. It was a curious thing, seeing her like this, and he realized at last her bun of hair was freshly done, though poorly. “There’s nothing you can do for me,” she said, finally looking directly at him. “I’ve come to tell you … I’m leaving.”

Cyrus felt as though a physical blow had struck him, as though he might teeter back and fall into the seat he’d just left. “Leaving? Now?”

“It seemed the time,” Martaina said, voice a little hoarse.

“There are others that might be more opportune,” Cyrus said, “such as when we have not just had funeral rites for—”

“I know full well how many we just said our farewells to,” Martaina said with more than a little edge. “I trained those rangers myself, two of them from farmers with no skill, one from a simple shop clerk in a small town, and the other three from little experience.” She did not blink. “And of course I knew all the others, though two better than most.” She bowed her head. “And one of them I had known almost all his life.”

Cyrus blinked, looking up. “You knew Thad since …?”

“Since when he was a child,” she said succinctly, “and I was most definitely not.”

Cyrus let the quiet hang between them as he digested that. “Where … would you go?”

“Amti,” she said simply. “Gareth is there for a reason. Amti is the place in Arkaria most like where we were raised.” She drew her arms up across her chest, cradling her own elbows. “I see in that jungle the seeds of olden days, the days of my childhood long gone. I see people in need of hunters—”

“We need you here,” Cyrus said.

“I have nothing more to give to Sanctuary,” Martaina said simply, “and if I stay, I will be hollowed out and left as empty as I heard Terian once accuse you of being.” She met his gaze with something akin to guilt. “I will be on hand to help as I can between now and the end of this present crisis with the titans, because it benefits my new home, but after that …” Her voice faded, and she made her retreat, pausing at the top of the steps, “seek me no more, for you will not find me willing to return to this place.”

Cyrus tried to find some words to say, some small comfort, even something so little as
I know how you feel,
but he found it rang false in his mind. He faltered, and she lingered only a moment longer, then retreated as silently as ever, shutting the door so expertly he was not even sure she was gone until he walked up to the edge of the dark of the stairs and checked for himself.

The Council Chambers were once more marked with quiet on the following morning, an air of mourning still hanging over them. Cyrus wondered if it would ever lift again, but seeing only a few days separated them from the event itself, he did not dare to call into question the finite nature of grief, instead tending toward more prosaic matters—even the ones that were not at all pleasant to contemplate.

“Martaina, too?” Erith’s shocked whisper penetrated the silence. Dark clouds were gathered outside the windows behind Cyrus, and the torches and hearth burned with quiet warmth that he found himself deeply grateful for. “Gods, we’re losing the old guard quickly now.”

“Yes,” Vara said, “with the exception of Curatio, I am the longest-serving member of the Council now.” She shook her head. “Next in line stand Cyrus, Vaste and J’anda.”

“I’m olllllllllld!” Vaste cried, leaning his head back. “Why, I’m practically the Elder at this point.”

“You’ve been an officer for five years,” J’anda said, a little nonplussed.

“The same could be said of our esteemed Guildmaster,” Vaste said, pointing at Cyrus, “and just look how it’s aged him!”

Cyrus suddenly longed for a mirror. “I … uh …” He looked at Vara and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Am I really that aged?”

“Like a good cheese, dear,” she said, “better with time and all that.”