Master (Book 5) (36 page)

“You’ll find they’re not much different from the homes of the very poor trolls,” Vaste said, “save for a paddock out back for—”

“Goat buggery, yes,” Cyrus said.

“Well, they also eat the goats,” Vaste said. “You know, presumably after their grotesque and wandering eyes have moved on to a younger, prettier nanny.”

“Much like J’anda, I could do without the details,” Cyrus said, taking his march left around the square in a slow, circular arc. He spared a glance to his right and saw Vara waiting, impatiently, for the first ranks of Cyrus’s army to clear the edge of the square. A second division was splitting off, he could see; so well orchestrated were their maneuvers that no orders had been called. They marched entirely on the motion of a hand.
Handy skill to have in the event of a lockjaw curse.

The flat, mud-built huts down the avenue gave Cyrus little impression of the peoples inside. The yellow sky, tinged almost green, came from a glow that had settled low over the buildings to his right. Every building carried a browned look, like sun baking had hardened the mud against the elements. They were tall enough, he realized, bigger than the mud huts he’d seen fishermen use in the Riverlands or the sand-glassed buildings of the desert dwellers of Inculta. They were troll-sized buildings but made of the dirtiest material he’d ever seen used. There was none of the artifice of elven stonecutters here, nor of dwarven tunnelers, nor of human craftsman with their brick and wood. This was something of a low art, a functionality that bordered on the basic, like a house a child could build on a city street, doomed to be washed away in the next rainfall.

“How long have these homes stood?” Cyrus asked, unintentionally aloud.

“Ten years, perhaps,” Vaste said. “The oldest twenty, maybe?”

Cyrus looked down the desolate, abandoned street. “Why?”

“Quinneria destroyed Gren,” Vaste said. “Leveled it to the ground.”

Cyrus blanched. “But the people—”

“Oh, they had a chance to flee first,” Vaste said. “After the second battle of Dismal Swamp, the one where she broke our defense with a single spell, she marched in at the head of the allied armies. In a booming voice, one that swept over the hillside and down to the town below—not that far off from what you just did, actually—she commanded them to leave, and then lit the plains outside the gate with the most fearsome display of spellcraft you could probably imagine. Then she advanced it toward the city a few feet at a time, warning the people that if they did not run before her, she would leave nothing remaining of them.”

“And they left,” Cyrus said.

“But of course,” Vaste said. “They may be slow, but they’re not entirely stupid. Word had reached the people of Gren when their broken army came fleeing back to the homeland. It was a smaller city then, we were spread around the coast and further out. Dwellings in the higher parts of the swamp, and even as far down as Nalikh’akur. All of them, the refugees, they’d been driven north, hiding behind the—well, there no walls at the time.” Vaste stroked his chin, and let out a short, barking laugh. “We didn’t think we needed walls. In any case, the people fled. Grabbed their children—and their goats,” he sent Cyrus a cockeyed look, “and they ran. Hid in the fields, in the swamps. And they watched …” He hesitated, face suffused with a sort of awe that Cyrus could see came from deepest memory, “… watched the once-wondrous city of Gren, a marvel of the ancients and the elves, as that witch’s magic leveled it into near nothingness.” He looked at the center of the square, to the broken pillar, covered in vines, which remained.

“So it wasn’t always mud huts and swamp grass,” Cyrus said, and they started down the avenue toward the slave markets. There was nothing in the air but the lingering of Vaste’s words and the march of the army; the street ahead was as abandoned and lifeless as the one left behind. Not a single resident of Gren remained out of doors.

“No,” Vaste said, with a note of regret. “The death of my people’s imperial ambitions signaled the end of their cares for outside influence. Where once there were spires and grandeur here, the remainder of an outpost of the ancients turned into elven town, abandoned by time and added to by the foremost minds of our people—” he cut off. “Now it’s mud huts. Mud huts and pig pens, here and there.” He glanced to his right and indicated with a wave of the hand exactly that: hogs in a wooden enclosure, stinking, sulfuric mud mixed with the reeking air. Cyrus caught a whiff of it as he passed, and the faint oink of one of the hogs was audible over the sound of the army’s marching.

The glare of the yellow sky matched Vaste’s eyes, and Cyrus found himself struck by the glare of the troll’s anger. His face fell to a sullen expression, resentment mingled with regret in a combination Cyrus had not seen from his friend before. “You fit in better before the fall of the Troll empire, didn’t you?”

He glanced sideways. “We were still a slaving people then. Vicious, violent, gleeful in the destruction of others.”

“The Society of Arms is all those things,” Cyrus said quietly. The relentless march of the Sanctuary army filled the air around them.

Vaste paused before saying any more. “Yes. I fit in better here before. At least then there was hope, there was aspiration, growth and a future for the trolls. There was an intelligentsia that either died in the last war or was killed in the upheaval and recrimination that followed our failure. They believed we could be more instead of scrabbling to be less. Now we are the lowest form of life on Arkaria, and there is no doubt we will remain so. Even the hated goblins have a better chance of a bright tomorrow than we do.” His face flickered with anger as the road widened ahead into a market. “We no longer even try. Servants of the Sovereign, that’s all we’re fit for because we have no brains of our own.”

Cyrus held his reply, casting an eye over the market ahead. Cages were present, iron-wrought, strong in their construction. They seemed out of place in the midst of all the mud huts and low buildings. Their dark metal was intercrossed in small squares, big enough only for a human to squeeze a hand out, perhaps. Latticed bars an inch wide and with a thickness that hinted at their strength. There was a sound of chains, a sound of metal rattling, as Cyrus entered the great market. A few clumsily hung cloth tarps were strung carelessly over a cage here and there, meager protection against the rain and chill for those fortunate enough to be under one.

As Cyrus drew closer, he realized that the silence was the most shocking part of it all. There were figures huddled in the cages, bodies of hundreds or thousands of beleaguered. The nearest cage stood right in the path, and he could see the eyes more than the thin frames. They found him, they watched him, they were near disbelieving as they followed him. Followed the army on his heel.

“Not possible,” came a whisper on the wind. The voice of a slave in a cage.

“Don’t dare to hope,” came a woman’s reply. He could tell it was female only by the highness of the voice.

They were all of them dirty. Black hands, soot-stained faces, hair matted and filthy. He could see that some of them had had their hair shorn off like sheep. Cyrus grew closer and the smell of human filth was near staggering, worse than the troll streets and houses. It filled his nose and mouth, gagged him, and made him want to cover his face with a blood-stained gauntlet.

“The man in black,” came another whisper, childlike.

“Cyrus Davidon—”

“—of Sanctuary—”

Cyrus felt his pace slow, felt his feet draw into short steps. “Set them free,” he said, but his voice sounded choked to his own ears. “Smash open the cages, break their chains.” Silence fell. “Set them free,” he said, louder this time. “Let them loose.” Even his own voice sounded slightly thick with emotion, desperate emotion trying to claw its way out of his mouth and eyes.

“Free—?”

“Don’t dare to hope,” came the voice again.

“This is a dream, isn’t it?” came the child-like voice under the sudden, rising sound of low voices. “This isn’t real, is it?”

“This is as real as it gets,” Vaste said quietly, more for himself than for the speaker, Cyrus realized.

Cyrus watched his army move forward, snaking into lines, running through the gaps between cages like water running into the cracks in a patch of dirt. They moved with spirit, and he saw them breaking open the cages, forcing fine steel swords into the gaps and prying the metal free. The cages swung with squeaks, muted surprise from the occupants who still murmured among themselves. Some came running out with glee, others rested on the floors within, dull eyes not seeming to take in anything of their surroundings.

Others watched him, emotionless, no thought or reason or action behind their irises.
The living dead, truly.

Cyrus stood in the middle of the surging army, heard screams and cries of battle on the far side of the square, and felt no call to join them.

“Slavers putting up a last fight,” Vaste said. “Probably what that is, anyway.”

Cyrus nodded. He looked into the center of the market, where a lone pillar stood. It looked familiar, and he knew instantly it had been one of the few spared by the wrath of the Sorceress.
A construction of the ancients.
He wondered at her intention, and an answer came to him:
She wanted them to remember. Wanted them to remember how she’d humbled them. Beaten them. Wanted them to remember the price for what they’d done.

“She took everything,” Vaste said, as though he were reading Cyrus’s mind. He was only inches away, and his quiet voice stood out over the sound of the army. The battle clamor had died away at the far end of the square, and now there were slaves mingling with his own people. His height gave him clear view of the whole spectacle.

And the pillar.

“She wanted to make us feel alone,” Vaste went on. “Wanted us to feel like we were isolated in the world, bereft of any assistance. She destroyed the portal, of course. Cut us off. The humans and the elves would not trade with us, and almost no one else would come here. Why bother, after all? It is not as though the swamp is a place of great import.” He gave a mirthless chuckle. “Or great exports. We have nothing of value to add to the rest of Arkaria. Nothing but our violence.” Vaste bowed his head. “We are alone.”

“None of us is ever alone,” Cyrus said, his voice dull and dead, the words spoken by rote instinct, driven forth by the sight in front of his eyes.

“That’s poetic, but false,” Vaste said. Cyrus could feel the troll’s eyes burning into the side of his head. “You’ve been saying that a lot lately. Is that your new motto?”

Cyrus started slowly forward, his legs barely moving with every halting step. “Not new.”

“Old, then?” Vaste fell in beside him, and the crowds of soldiers and slaves parted for them as Cyrus wove his way slowly between the cages. “Your old motto?”

“Advice from an old friend, I suppose,” Cyrus said. The cages were arranged in a circle with the giant pillar at the center. It stood tall as a titan, a centerpiece for the slave markets, a sight for all to see from wherever they stood.

“Oh?” Vaste said. “And who gave you this piece of feel-good advice that would warm the coldest heart on the most frigid eve? Was it Alaric? It has the ring of something he would say.”

“No,” Cyrus said, ducking his head slightly to avoid an overhanging cloth. It brushed the top of his helm and he could hear it tear as he proceeded onward. “This was before Alaric.”

“So, there was hope for the man in the black armor before he came to Sanctuary,” Vaste said, trailing in his wake. The crowds parted, and Cyrus saw the base of the pillar ahead, old stone like that of the Citadel in Reikonos, but more weathered. Vines sprouted from the ground and crawled up the sides like a thick tapestry woven around the base. There were long, shredded tracks where the vines had been torn away, worn by the movement of ropes and chains along the length of the pillar.

“Always,” Cyrus said, brushing the cloth overhang free from where it caught his helm. The sky swelled above him at the removal of the dark cloth, the sunset shades growing more orange all the time, fire casting the pillar that stretched above him in shadow, blotting out the sight of its apex to the point he could scarcely see it.

But he could still see it.

“There is always hope,” Cyrus said quietly, “all the way until the end.” He almost hoped Vaste did not hear it.

“No hope for this poor bastard, then,” Vaste quipped, gesturing to the figure atop the pillar. “This is where they make the examples for all the slaves to see.” He made a rough gesture. “They cut him up before they put him there, but the odds were good he was alive for at least a day after it happened.” There was a snuffling of anger in the troll’s words. “Where was his hope, I wonder? Not in Gren, I suspect, for as you heard before we opened the cages, no one dares to hope here. It is a lost place, suitable only for the forsaken.” Vaste’s voice lowered and hardened, and he pointed at the spectacle of the body chained atop the pillar, an example to all. “And as much as I hate to contradict you, my friend, this man died alone. We all die alone.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Cyrus said, voice faint, near to cracking. He looked up, and saw in the shadow cast by the pillar, the faint darkness where once there had been the eyes of Cass Ward, hidden under the shorn head and mutilated chest of a warrior true.

19 Years Earlier

“None of us is ever alone,” Cass said to his assembled team. They listened, they hung upon his every word, this twelve-year-old leader of men and boys and girls and women.

And behind them, in the darkness, Cyrus Davidon, also twelve years old, listened for himself and imagined the words being spoken directly into his ears by a caring voice, one that left off all the malice.

No one spoke to Cyrus save for the Society instructors. Speaking to him was forbidden; he was outcast, with no Blood Family to call his own.

Cyrus stayed in the shadows, held to the shadows, hoping no sight of his face remained. This was not a time of testing and yet, here in the Society, every moment was a test. He kept to the shadows as much of the time as he could. It was easier that way, to remain out of the way of the older children in the Society. They were not allowed to kill him in plain view of the instructors, after all. And the instructors were about often, but not all the time. The shadows had become a habit, and looking over his shoulder had been a talent he’d learned in the last few years.