Indomitus Sum (The Fovean Chronicles Book 4)

by Robert Brady

  She ran as far as she felt she could sprint in three seconds, then threw herself into the dust, rolling in it, covering herself. She pressed her body flat into the Earth, and waited, barely breathing, waiting for the rider either to approach or to pass her by.

  The rider seemed at first to want to pass to the south, then noticed her horse and arced in toward her. The horse slowed at about a third of a daheer, and came in at a trot.

  She waited for the rider to rein in, take a look around, and then dismount.

  Her power swelled. She’d have a buzzing headache later, but she’d be alive and with a horse to experience it.

  The rider dropped like a sack of potatoes. Nina was wary. She waited several minutes, in case the other was pretending.

  The other horse began to crop scrub through its bit.

  Nina stood, approaching cautiously, ready to run if she had to. She finally stood over the prone body of the person who’d approached her.

  “Well,” she said to the open air. “That’s a surprise.”

  Chapter Seven

  Stranger and Strangers

  “Nothing, your Grace,” the scout reported. The Uman outrider was tan with dust, her horse so lathered it barely stood. Before realizing it, Tartan Stowe was planning for recovering the animal.

  More important things to think about now, he thought.

  “See to your mount,” he told the woman. She nodded and dismounted. His second in command, Captain J’lek, a blooded veteran of the Wolf Soldier corps who’d been ordered to transfer to the Angadorian command, stood silent in his long, chain armor. His nose stood out like an axe blade, his eyes set like a hawk’s under close-cropped, brown hair. Rumors spoke of his father as Supreme Commander J’her, however the Uman never broached the subject, so the Duke never inquired. If true, that made the Uman a spy, and Tartan had enough pokers in the fire in regard to the Emperor.

  Tartan looked J’lek in the eye. “We’ve lost him,” he said, simply. “He either kept going south, or came back through our lines.”

  “I could believe either,” J’lek said. “I personally inspected every Man in the company and none of them is the one we’re looking for. Supposedly this ‘Jack’ has a bull’s strength and, despite his age, could overpower one of ours.”

  Tartan hadn’t thought of that, but he filed it away. Where better to hide than in the ranks of those looking for you?

  With cunning like that, Captain J’lek didn’t need his father’s reputation to distinguish him.

  “We’re for Angador, then,” Tartan decided. If the Man was gone, then his original orders were to keep peace on the plains while other cities’ garrisons emptied out into this campaign of Lupus’. The Emperor trusted him to keep the homefront, not to be at his right hand when he went looking for a fight.

  “Might I suggest we go north, around the Lone Wood, then swing south?” J’lek interjected. He kept his face impassive—he might have been a statue. “There are a lot of refugees from Lupor out—bound to be some of them causing trouble for decent people.”

  Another good idea Tartan should have had. He nodded. “Let the company rest for today, we start fresh in the morning. Break out three kegs of that Koran ale we liberated—let the troops know they did what we expected of them.”

  “They didn’t,” J’lek said simply, coming as close as he ever had to questioning an order.

  Tartan turned toward his pavilion. “I know it,” he said, “but there’s nothing for it now. I don’t need them disheartened and looking to take out their anger on some unfortunate peasant. They tried, let them know we appreciate that they tried.”

  “Sir…”

  Tartan stopped, turned at the waist, and looked J’lek in the eye again. He’d failed, he knew. He’d lost some of their respect. Now they’d think could question him. Now, they’d test his mettle.

  Duke Two Spears had told him once that nothing ever went as planned,and the difference between a good leader and a bad one was how he handled failure and turned it into victory—if he could.

  “You know,” he drawled, his thumbs in his sword belt, “the Emperor tells a story of an Uman named ‘Sammin’ who, as his second in command,disrespected him in front of his men—do you recall what happened to Sammin?”

  J’lek raised an eyebrow and held his gaze for a moment, then smiled a thin, spare smile and let himself look away. “Every Wolf Soldier knows that story,” he said.

  “And every Wolf Soldier knows the consequences of failure,” Tartan said, “but these aren’t Wolf Soldiers, these are Angadorian Knights, so give them ale and let them know we don’t hate them.”

  “Immediately, your Grace,” J’lek said. He made a fist over his heart, and turned on his heel. “Alright, you dogs,” he roared, “we’re done for the day. I want the jess doonar in place, horses quartered, and then I’ve three barrels of ale need to be drunk, if you’re up to it.”

  There wasn’t a cheer, but there was a chuckle, and Tartan settled for it. He entered his pavilion, where his wife was trying to catch herself a nap.

  She slept a lot, and it displeased him, although he didn’t say anything. If her dreams comforted her when she had nothing else to do, at least she was the kind of woman who’d follow him out on the trail, much like the Empress. Most wives would wait in the safety of a husband’s palace.

  Wives like his mother. Dead more than a decade, and he still missed her, that sweet soul whose soft hands had held him, and who’d left this world too soon. He remembered the day his father had informed them what had happened to her.

  “The bastards killed your mother,” he’d sobbed. He’d never seen Glennen cry before. His father had been like the god Adriam, powerful and wise. “They tried to get to me, instead they killed her.”

  “Mama?” he’d refused to believe it at the time. Mama couldn’t be dead. She was…mama.

  He’d already started drinking. Tartan would never see him sober again. Even at the King’s funeral, he could smell the alcohol on the body, or at least imagined he could.

  “They killed her,” the King said. His sisters and his younger brother were already bawling. He had tried to stay strong. “I promise you, all of you, if I could have taken her place, I would have.”

  Probably said to make the children feel better, but his father had been invincible and immortal in his mind until that point in time.

  “What will we do?” Alekennen, his eldest sister, had asked.

  “I sent a man to vengeance,” the King had said. Some Duke, some new favorite in the peerage. Tartan had seen him, all steel and horns. He’d killed a Bounty Hunter in court—not many could do that. Afterwards, Tartan and his brother Terran had acted out the battle with their wooden swords, taking turns at being Lupus.

  Lupus had wreaked unholy vengeance on the people of Fovea for his mother’s death. He’d killed thousands, and returned a hero, a legend, to slowly take the throne of Galnesh Eldador, while Tartan’s father drank himself to death.

  Tartan missed his mother and his father but, even worse, he’d felt cheated by Lupus for taking a vengeance that belonged to his family. It had taken him a long time to admit to himself that most of what Lupus had done had been necessitated by Glennen’s failures.

  Now Tartan sat and drank chilled wine, and watched his plain, common wife sleep. Good enough he’d been given someone who actually seemed to love him; one who could resent the Emperor for many of the same reasons as he.

  The morning came red and bloody. The Emperor had once said that a red sky in the morning scared sailors, or some such thing, but Tartan didn’t feel like remembering it.

  His warriors had made short work of three barrels of Koran ale. Not enough for most of them to get drunk on, but the snoring had been impressive and the Duke hadn’t slept well. His wife had put on an impressive display of not being awake for any of it.

  He dressed as she arose and stretched, naked and inviting in their sleeping furs. Her three Uman maids were waiting to pack up the pavilion and its contents
for the trip north.

  The Emperor would have traveled with less, but then the Emperor’s wife saw opulence as having three horses.

  “Where to today, husband?” Yeral asked him, standing nude in their furs. Her maids immediately wrapped her in a cotton travel robe—one of the perhaps seven changes of clothing he could expect for her today.

  “North, around the Lone Wood, then between the Lone Wood and the Bay, and back to Angador. Perhaps a month’s journey.”

  He was ready to leave the pavilion and didn’t need to see his wife’s maids bath her. The thrill of that had left him long ago.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Leaving this kinsman of the Emperor’s uncaught?”

  “He evaded us,” Tartan admitted. “I can’t be expected to turn over every stone on the plains. Should we be fortunate enough to overtake him, then so be it, but we’ll likely never see him again.

  “He’s as like dead in a shallow grave by the hand of some farmer who wanted Little Storm,” he added. “What man wouldn’t kill him for a stallion of Blizzard’s seed? I know I planned to.”

  Yeral smiled a wily smile. “I thought you were awfully eager to fulfill the Emperor’s goals.”

  “I’m a loyal subject of the Empire,” Tartan sniggered, bowing to her. “However, the Emperor keeps the spoils of his campaigns.”

  “Go!” she shooed him. “You have better things to do than banter with me.”

  He whisked heroically out the tent flap and into the bustling army. J’lek already had the camp, the Wolf Soldier ‘jess doonar,’ half-disassembled and most of the men fed. Wolf Soldiers might be more efficient, Tartan thought, but Angadorians were not far behind.

  “Rider to the north,” he heard a scout report to J’lek. All heads in the vicinity turned to see a lone rider on a ridge two daheeri away, regarding them. The distance was too far to make out details.

  “Well, that’s a brave man,” J’lek drawled. “Third,fifth and twenty-second squads of mounted archers—bring him in or bring him down. If that man escapes me, none of you will.”

  Tartan knew what that meant and none of his Angadorians seemed willing to risk J’lek’s anger. Thirty mounted Men and Uman lit off for the north, breaking efficiently from the main force without the chaos that might have been expected from any other nation’s camp. Horses in the jess doonar are quartered within its confines, but not to the center. They wouldn’t be pilfered in the night, nor hindered when they were needed all of a sudden. The lone rider lit off with three squads in hot pursuit, two branching out to encircle him.

  “They’ll never catch Little Storm,” Tartan commented to J’lek.

  “Don’t be too sure, your Grace,” the Uman commented. “I know that terrain, and so do those squads, which is why I chose them. There’s an open bowl on the other side of that ridge, and loose slag on every side of it. In rainier months it’s a pond, but now it’s a trap, and by the time he’s through it, he’s going to be outflanked by our mounted archers.”

  “Then we should have him!” Tartan felt excited. If he could wreak victory now—

  “We have someone,” J’lek said, “and it’s not an Eldadorian—not armored like one, anyway. Not in an Eldadorian saddle and harness. But all of this ‘Jack’s’ tack came from the royal stables, and why would he, knowing right where we are, stumble upon us through a wash like that, once he’d escaped to our north?”

  Tartan nodded. Another important bit of information he’d missed, although he lacked the far-seeing eyes and the far-ranging years of an Uman. The race of Men ruled the Uman in Eldador, but this didn’t make Umankind weak or stupid.

  They hadn’t even finished disassembling the jess doonar before thirty horsemen returned with another in their midst. If it had been this ‘Jack,’ then he couldn’t have been on Little Storm.

  At a daheer away, Tartan knew it wasn’t their quarry. He looked to be a Man, but a small one, on a small, shaggy pony, as well. Based on the height, he wondered if they hadn’t caught a woman.

  Wonderful, he thought to himself. He’d captured a curious Eldadorian out of Andurin. Wouldn’t Groff be pleased?

  When the three squads reined in, the rider they presented looked like a Confluni, bound by his wrists to the back of a saddle with no proper saddle horn.

  “Confluni national,” the sergeant of the third squad reported, making a fist over his heart for his liege lord. “Claims he’s a prisoner and demands War’s Wages.”

  “War’s Wages?” Tartan looked at J’lek, who shrugged. Warriors demanded War’s Wages when they were defeated in battle. Essentially, to be put down instead of kept as prisoners.

  “You give dey War’s Wages,” the Confluni said, in broken Uman, “or War, he come after you!”

  The sergeant cuffed him in the back of the head.

  “How are you defeated in battle?” J’lek demanded of him. The Captain approached the pony’s stirrup and looked up into the Confluni’s eyes. The little Man’s short black hair framed his yellow skin. He dressed in the leather of the Confluni National Guard. Tartan had seen their kind in the second attack of Thera.

  But the Confluni didn’t ride.

  “I Confluni National Guard,” the Man said. “I outrider for Confluni invasion force, land Eldador this week.”

  * * *

  “Confluni National Guard?”

  The little man nodded. Bound on the ground by wrists and ankles, the hate on his face shone like a beacon. He’d been armed to the hilt,as well—a scimitar, triple-curved bow, a spear that could almost have been a lance, a long sword behind his saddle and enough daggers to pepper two squads. He wore the leather armor and cap that CNG wore—that and his yellow skin betrayed him, or Nina never would have guessed his origin.

  She’d had no idea whom she might have trapped, but if she’d been wagering, this would have come in with high odds.

  “What are you doing in Eldador?”

  “I demand War’s Wages,” he repeated.

  Nina sighed. She knew of this ridiculous tradition. The Aschire had nothing like it. One fought until one could fight no more. If captured, you found another way to resist.

  “I didn’t defeat you in battle,” Nina countered. “I owe War no wages, even if the Aschire had any fealty to War, which we do not.”

  “You Aschire?” the male looked suddenly extremely nervous.

  It had bothered her from time to time to hear what people thought of her outside of the palace. “The Emperor’s Attack Bitch,” “The Emperor’s Spare Bitch,” “The Royal Watch Dog.” Nina was seen to be cruel, terrifying, even evil in her single-minded duty to protect her charges.

  She’d taken an oath, and Krell’s daughter would betray no oath. That didn’t make her evil.

  However, if the legend of her had exceeded the reality of her, then why not make good use of it.

  “I am Nina of the Aschire,” she said, and stood. “Guardian of the House Mordetur.”

  She took a breath and she invoked the alias she hated the most, the one she’d heard whispered after her so many times, even by warriors.

  “Mistress of Pain.”

  Now the Confluni’s eyes were like Tabaars in the dusky light. He’d heard of her—he’d hear a lot about her.

  “War’s Wages,” he demanded, struggling. “You take now.”

  “I wonder if it would make you more compliant,” Nina speculated, pulling a dagger from her arm-sheath, “were I to relieve you of your manhood?”

  She squatted back down to the man’s level, at his hip, and laid her fingers on his thigh.

  “No!”

  If the man started screaming, and there were more of them, then she might end up in a fight she wasn’t ready for or, worse, having to abandon this one. She extended her will, being careful to use the slightest amount of her power, to congeal the air around his mouth and nose.

  He immediately began choking. The Emperor had explained to her and to Shela one day that sound existed actually as a movement of waves through the air, like the wav
es of the ocean, lapping at the shores of one’s ears. When she thickened the air, it passed no sound, and from there she and Shela had created a whole new discipline in moving sound, and even light, from place to place, or stopping it.

  “I can let you strangle, almost to death, then let you breath, and let you strangle again,” she informed the red-faced Confluni, “and you’ll live for weeks before your heart explodes. Or you can answer my questions, and I’ll make your death quick, as you wish.”

  “But in the end,” she said, and she leaned close, so he could feel her breath on his face, as the Emperor had taught her when interrogating a prisoner, “you’ll tell me everything you know, everything I want to hear. The only question is how much I leave of you to bury.”

  She released the spell, and he gasped for air, coughing and puking down his shirt, and then she congealed the air again. It took three times before he gave in and told her what she wanted to know.

  * * *

  “He dies!”

  “No, mother.”

  Lee watched her younger brother and her mother argue, almost as if she saw two strangers.

  She’d defied her mother before, especially in her training to be a sorceress. Her mother had been gifted, and she no less, and both knew it was the discussion and the disagreement that would build her will and make her the sorceress she needed to be.

  Little Vulpe had been singing at mother’s knee since he could form words. He adored her, he worshipped her. He had no ability to cast; he could be her little boy. Sometimes Lee had envied him that.

  Now he sat Marauder with his back straight and his hand on the pommel of the sword the dwarves had made for him, as a gift to the Emperor when he’d announced his son. Not as strong as father’s sword, nor as long, it was still real, and up to then his mother barely let him touch it. How he’d sneaked it along for this journey was beyond her.

  But he was sure touching it now. In fact, he’d sheathed it bloody. Like a good Andaran, Lee recognized the red splatter at the sheath’s open end.