Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles) Page 7

  You had to admire his skill. Still not beaten, still a threat. I stood outside of the range of his sword and, with two blows, cut his feet off.

  Which is what he should have done to me, but he wanted that glorious, killing blow.

  He would be every bit as dead as I wanted him in a few minutes.

  The crowd moaned again. I’d provided an inglorious end to a defining battle. As I had been taught, you could beat a better swordsman if you kept your wits about you and didn’t give up.

  I turned to the captain of my Wolf Soldier guard and with a whistle they stormed the gate and took the gate guard. We saw a little resistance, but most remained stunned by the site of the man painting the square with his life’s blood.

  The gate flew open and my heavy horse thundered in, trampling the bounty hunter where he lay dying. Yerel stood stunned to one side, his wife and a few kids around him. His eldest boy, probably thirteen by the look of him, looked up at me with hate in his eyes.

  I’d gotten awfully used to that look.

  Duke Jaheff of Uman City sat his throne uncomfortably. I stood beside him, this time as Heir, with the Eldadorian standard to one side of us.

  All persons in the gallery bowed low to their liege lord.

  “I am going to be really bad at this job,” he told me.

  “Nah,” I said. “Those who can’t, teach. Those who are really lost, lead.”

  He smiled up at me. “You lead a whole nation,” he noted.

  I looked down at him. “Those who don’t watch their tongue, often get to see that organ right in front of them, where it’s easier to watch.”

  He grinned up at me. “Good point, your Highness,” he said.

  I thought so.

  We held court. Some people wanted compensation for the damage they’d suffered during the invasion. We decreed that taxes be lowered to fifteen percent now. That went over big; Yerel had been a hold out to the old ways.

  He had a lot of soldiers here. He’d been waiting for us; he’d likely just hoped that it would take longer.

  The treasury held a bunch of gold, too, although not nearly enough to pay the city’s tax burden. I arranged to take a portion now and a portion later. I allowed Yerel to keep a son here for Jaheff to foster, and a daughter here for him to marry. Hopefully he’d learned enough as a court baron to at least tread water until he got the hang of things.

  Yerel came with me with his wife, his eldest son, and two more daughters. I couldn’t judge him as Heir, but I could take him prisoner as Lupus the Conqueror. It wouldn’t be hard to get Glennen liquored up and decree him to be a common, and then I could do with him what I wanted.

  I had already promised to foster his son. Yerel didn’t seem as concerned about the daughters, and he knew his own fate.

  So, after court, I poked around thinking these thoughts and wondering if I would be seeing the Free Legion coming late over the horizon when I found myself back outside of the throne room.

  So, for a lark, I walked down a hallway that led from there. It had windows on one side and rooms on the other.

  It ended in an octagonal room, with doors leading to different places. One hallway stood to my left.

  I followed that one, which had dust on the floor and a groove down the center, leading upward at a slight incline.

  This hallway led to a blank wall. Above it, up against the top of the wall, I saw what probably looked to any passerby as nothing more than an interesting design.

  But I could read Cheyak, and to me it said, “Outpost V”. I knew right then what probably lay on the other side of that blank wall.

  And suddenly, it felt really, really good to have an Uman-Chi who had bound himself to my future.

  His name was Avek Noir, of the House Noir, in disgrace in Outpost X.

  He had been a Viscount. I had no idea what that title meant. I really, really didn’t care. All Uman-Chi had titles.

  He stood a little over five feet tall – right around Shela’s height. His hair hung long down his back and around his shoulders, green in color and wavy. His face seemed more pinched than most Uman-Chi, who had longer faces. His nose pointed more like a beak, his chin was wide and flat and, like all Uman-Chi, his eyes were silver-on-silver. He had sworn on his honor, on his faith in Adriam, the All Father, and on the blood of his sons and daughters for all time, that he would be bound to me and be in my service, were I to give him the opportunity to prove himself again.

  When he saw the inscription, he about fainted. It took him a while just to stop sputtering.

  “You cannot know –“ he began.

  “I know exactly what is behind that wall, or should be,” I said. “I know that it will be warded with a trap that shoots poison darts that will slowly kill whomever they hit.

  “And I know that this city is built on the ruins of Outpost V.”

  “How is this possible?” he asked me. I knew I couldn’t tell him the theory of how some Outposts had been covered in The Blast. I could, however, explain to him how it happened in my world.

  “Over centuries, dirt tends to collect in something as convenient as a city,” I said. “Especially an abandoned one. You can bet that, when the first Uman settlers came here, they found the palace and half of the wall, and built their city on top of landmarks that looked like stone floors but where in fact stone ceilings.”

  “But the walls of Outpost IX are twice this high,” he said.

  “I am sure that, were we to dig deep enough, we would find that there is more to those walls than meets the eye, and that this palace had, at one time, stood on a hill.”

  He nodded. “We theorize that the royal palace at Outpost IX had been built on a hill, but that the Uman-Chi had slowly converted the hill as they needed more space.”

  “Ready to look behind that wall?” I asked him.

  He nodded.

  First, he looked for the Cheyak wards, which we knew were there. That turned out to our benefit, because they were clever and, on first pass, appeared to be gone. Had we believed that, then we would have had the bones in our bodies liquefied over the next month. It took until his third attempt to find the wards that he discovered and to destroy them.

  Then came the effort of taking down the wall. That was a big deal, because a palace runs on intrigue, and the moment we sent a building crew in here, there would be a bevy of people wondering why. Instead he spent three days devising a spell that would dismantle the wall and block the noise when it crumbled.

  In that time my riders returned, and with no sign of the Free Legion. I sent a fast rider to our camp on the Plains of Angador to find out what had happened to my allies.

  On the fifth day of the occupation of Uman City, Avek and I watched the wall deteriorate and two gigantic metal doors revealed.

  “They probably covered them because of the ward,” Avek told me. “The stones themselves were harmless, but touching the doors is lethal.”

  I bravely allowed him to push one open. He did so, and revealed a room stacked with moldering tapestries, rusted armor, and pitted swords. There were old, ruined paintings and a smell that said that a millennium had passed with no fresh air coming in here.

  I saw a healthy stack of gold bars, of course. Not Outpost X healthy, but good enough to make paupers into princes.

  Or disgraced Uman-Chi into favorites again. And that favorite would owe me everything, and be honor bound to remember it for as long as an Uman-Chi lives, which is a mighty long time.

  I looked at Avek, he looked at me. He smiled, his silver-on-silver eyes flashing.

  “I think things just got brighter for the folks at Outpost IX,” I said.

  Ancenon would regret blowing me off.

  Chapter Five

  Flips and Flops

  We saw the air temperature rise a bit during the month of Weather. We marched long days. I felt certain it would rain, and I didn’t want the whole army catching pneumonia and being useless to me for two weeks.

  Avek had left. He had taken a boat from t
he frozen wharves of Uman City to the Silent Isle, with 200 mercenary soldiers who had sworn him fealty, and 30 bars of gold.

  There would be no fire bond between him and I. I already had his fealty, and I had faith he wouldn’t break it. Not that I thought that he held me in any high regard or felt an extraordinary sense of loyalty, but that he had sworn it to his god, and I’d shown a real propensity for making his life better.

  At the very least he would wait the relatively short period of time that is a Man’s life before he decided that his debt had been paid and forget the Conqueror in favor of the glory of revealing Outpost V.

  I wondered now how many cities on Fovea were Outposts. Not Steel City, I had been all through there, and it didn’t come close. Not Eldador the Port. Waypoint had me thinking, and I hadn’t seen enough of any other cities to say.

  What if every Outpost held a treasure trove? There could be thousands of gold bars for me to find, if I could just locate them.

  And who even said that all of them were occupied?

  “You think too much,” Two Spears informed me.

  I smiled, lowering my head, seeing Blizzard’s man. I rode without thinking about it anymore. I moved with Blizzard and thought my thoughts, and planned my plans, and missed my girls more than I would have guessed possible.

  Lee’s smile filled my thoughts, even while I plotted out the Outposts, my enemies and my next move.

  “Planning something terrible to do to my poor sister?” he taunted me, reading my mind.

  “Been over a month, my friend,” I told him. “I’m more worried about what she will do to me.”

  “We raise our women hungry,” he said, and punched my armor. “If you fail to feed them, then they will bite.”

  “Tell me about it,” I commented. Bite, scratch, all manner of horrible things.

  “I did just tell you about it,” he said. “You want to hear more?”

  I laughed. Two Spears brooked no melancholy. He went through life as a force of nature.

  “No,” I told him. “You should be thinking of the girls in your harem, and which one of them you are going make your woman.”

  Two Spears laughed. “I think not, White Wolf,” he said. “I will have an Andaran when I marry, or I will marry not at all.”

  “That’s going to make some girls cry,” I said. I wanted to say ‘break some hearts,’ but caught myself. It would take too long to explain.

  “Women cry,” he said. “What can a man do?”

  Thinking of it, he could do a lot.

  The rain started when we were ready to make camp outside of Thera. We were in the outlying villages that surrounded the main city, where men and women who could not afford to live in the city made small farms and scratched out a living, in hope of being able to trade their produce at the prices that the larger city brought.

  I made the decision that we would march for four more hours in the dark, and be inside the city exhausted, rather than make a wet camp and wake up stiff.

  I didn’t get so much as a flicker from the men. I don’t think that anyone liked a wet camp. If you weren’t going to be able to sleep, you might as well be walking.

  While we traveled, I thought, “A year ago, I would have put it to a vote.” I knew now that they would have no respect for that. A vote in an army guaranteed that you had two sides angry at each other. It would breed dissention and it would have been my fault, and every last one of them would have known it.

  I fought alongside my men, and they loved me for it. I paid them generously, and they loved me for that, too. I knew when to push them and when to be hard on them.

  I didn’t ask their opinion, because I ran an army, not a proletariat. If they didn’t like it, they could do their time with me and bail.

  The rain kept coming, and it slowed us. The sun rose just as we dragged ourselves into the coliseum, now the Wolf Soldiers’ barracks. Men fell into their lean-tos and tents, whatever homes they made for themselves here, leaving watch to the reserves that I had left in Thera.

  I wanted nothing more than to join them, but I didn’t have it that easy. I had a nation to put out of my mind, and a duchy, before I got to sleep.

  Shela met me in the stables as I brushed down an exhausted and wet Blizzard. I had the stable boy mixing some hot mash for a feed bag, to open up his sinuses and prevent him from catching a worse cold, if he had one already. Teams of stable hands were rubbing down horses with linens and stoking coal fires.

  She flew across the dirt and hay into my arms, her lips all over my face. “I missed you, I missed you,” she told me. “I cried myself to sleep every night.”

  “You did?” I said. “Were there ticks in the bed?”

  She punched my armor and then kicked me. “I am told there was a bounty hunter,” she said.

  I nodded. “He wasn’t much,” I said.

  She grabbed the top ridge of my breastplate and pulled my lips down to hers. After a she gave my face a good covering, she smacked me, hard.

  “Do you see why you need me?” she demanded, her eyes burning into mine. “Do you see why you can’t go out alone?”

  I straightened up. There were tears in her eyes. I remembered the time in Conflu, where Ancenon had watched Thorn, Nantar and I in our mad dash through the forest.

  It hadn’t even occurred to me until know. She had seen the whole thing, without knowing my strategy.

  She had seen me fall in battle.

  I stroked her hair, and held her cheek, and let a few tears fall into my palm.

  “You know you can’t bring Lee into a battle,” I said. “And you know that you can’t leave her alone.”

  “I don’t want to hear your logic, White Wolf,” she said through gritted teeth. “I want to hear you telling me you love me and that I’ll be by your side where I belong.”

  “I love you, Shela,” I said. “And you know already that you belong at my side.”

  She hugged me through my armor. “It doesn’t mean I don’t still need to hear it.”

  I held her, exhausted on my feet, and let her have my love and my energy until she took her fill and released me.

  “You’re up early,” she commented, taking the brush from me. She started working on Blizzard’s mane. He would tolerate her now, barely. The groom was terrified of him. The blacksmith seemed ambivalent, but never even cleaned his hooves without chaining him. He had kicked his way out of a stall, slaughtered a gelding, bitten every single member of the stable staff, and crushed one. I put him up and brushed him as a kindness to them. The stable boy shouldn’t earn combat pay.

  “Actually, I’m up late,” I told her. “It started to rain, so I marched them through the night.”

  She nodded. “You must be tired. Shall I bathe you?”

  I shook my head. “You’ll put me to sleep,” I said. “What is urgent and what can wait?”

  She thought for a moment. “The Oligarchs of Thera have handled everything here, and are in constant contact with the Oligarchs of Eldador. Glennen killed a butler who asked him if he had had enough mead.”

  I winced. Glennen was getting worse fast.

  “We stopped an attempt to break into the palace,” she continued. “They got as far as our room. I think they were looking for me.”

  I grinned. “That would have been unfortunate for them.”

  She smiled. “I don’t kill everyone I meet, you know,” she said.

  “Do, too.”

  “Do not!”

  “Did they catch the invader?”

  “No,” she sighed. “You have a warrior there named ‘J’her’, who’s taken charge of the palace security, and he’s supposed to be attending to it.”

  I nodded. She put the brush up and looked into my face, deep into my eyes.

  “I think you can meet with your own Oligarchs and sleep,” she said. “You are of no use to anyone exhausted. I know that Ann has questions for you, so probably the others do, as well.”

  “Go summon them to our chamber,” I said. “And
call for a hot meal. I’m starved. Something heavy so I’ll sleep.”

  She kissed me and left. I had one thing to do for her before I went to the meeting, but it wouldn’t take long.

  I’d had this place built for me, and I’d done it with a few things in mind. One of them was that it would house a portal to Outpost X.

  While I’d been in Eldador the Port, D’gattis was supposed to come here, find a room I’d set aside, and create that portal. The room as a little utility place made of stone, adjacent both to the main house and the stables. You could walk through it and not think twice.

  You could be running away from someone and just disappear, if you knew how to kick the ward off.

  I closed Blizzard up in his stall and I dragged myself to the little stone room. A few bridles hung on the walls; there were cobwebs in the corners at the ceiling. Feed stands with metal linings stood to one side. The linings made them rat-proof.

  I pushed aside the bridles and found a drawing in the wall six inches wide. To anyone else it would look like a doodle by a bored child.

  I smiled to myself. D’gattis might not like me anymore, but he was a man of his word.

  A full stomach always made me sleepy. Eggs, oatcakes, strips of meat with heavy syrup and strong ale for breakfast had me yawning and belching at the same time. Shela had embarked on a mission.

  Ann, Def and Thebinaar sat with Shela, Lee and I around the table in my room. Def had insisted on two tellings of the battle with the bounty hunter, getting angrier and angrier in the process.

  “You should be dead, your Grace,” he told me. “Dead, like an apple with a knife –“

  “Def!” Ann snarled at him. Her eyes shifted between him and Shela. “I think the point is that he is not dead.”

  “I am glad he isn’t dead,” Thebinaar said, in his flat, accountant way. “I had a hard enough time training him right.”

  It came as close to humor as I’d ever heard from him.

  “You didn’t spend hours sparring with him,” Def said. He looked at me in disgust. “I would ask what you were thinking, but I know what you were thinking. Don’t think that way anymore.”