by Robert Brady
Dilvesh laughed and the two embraced. There existed an easy camaraderie between fellow members of the Daff Kanaar. Even with Lupus himself, Ancenon could actually let his guard down, allow himself to be a little more Ancenon, and less the former Prince of the Realm, High Priest to Adriam.
“He’s not my liege lord,” Dilvesh corrected him, turning to head down the dock. A little taller than Ancenon, the Duke followed him, both of their white robes swirling around their feet in the spring breeze, coming in crisp off of the Forgotten Sea.
“You serve his nation,” Ancenon pressed him. He loved to match wits with Dilvesh, the closest among them to his equal. “You govern his new city.”
“One of his new cities,” Dilvesh pressed him, “or has he not begun the campaign yet?”
Dilvesh looked sideways at him, and Ancenon shrugged. As they stepped off of the dock into the wharf proper, six companies of Wolf Soldiers took up positions around them. Even the Emperor was not so closely guarded.
“Trouble in your command?” Ancenon noted.
“Not too much,” Dilvesh countered, approaching the city’s outer gate. The towers on either side had been broken once, and stood now at different heights. The gate between them had clearly been massive, with a triumphal arch now broken at either end. It was being remade with timbers from the forest around them, banded in steel.
The walls, once massive, with merlons and parapets, looked like an old gaffer’s shattered teeth on top, where they hadn’t crumbled.
So went Outpost III.
“It is in the nature of all things to resist change,” Dilvesh added. “Some are better at it, I’m afraid.”
Ancenon smiled. Were Dilvesh to catch fire, as Lupus had once said, he would do no more than fan himself and remark on the unseasonably warm day.
“I came when I received your message,” Ancenon said. “Although I would not have been long otherwise. The outer islands are a wealth of new trade, and I was plying my wares. Now I see new opportunities in Lupor.”
“One new opportunity, at least,” Dilvesh agreed as they passed through the main gates. “Have you been able to find her?”
“Clear Genna?” Ancenon remarked. He frowned. “I can sense her to your west, a little north now, certainly moving in that direction. She’s blurred, as with a host.”
Dilvesh nodded. “The Trinity speaks of a great conflict, and I don’t think it means of armed men.”
“This child of Lupus’,” Ancenon inferred. He sighed. “I spoke with Taffer Roo on the subject, when I was able to contact him. He assured me the timing is impossible. He certainly touched her before Shela, however the illness from her affliction would have killed an unborn child and, even had it not, the woman was clearly not pregnant at the Battle of Tamaran Glen.”
Dilvesh nodded, and they continued to walk side by side. Everywhere, artisans and craftsmen were rebuilding, repaving and recreating this lost Outpost. Merchants were tenuously hawking their wares on street corners. Ancenon had never been here before and seen fewer whores, and not even a single dead body in the street.
“You’ve done passably well,” he admitted with a wave.
Dilvesh wouldn’t be distracted. “What if the affliction that crippled Genna forced her unborn child into some hibernation?” Dilvesh pressed him.
“What if aurochs learned arithmetic?” Ancenon asked him, smiling. “Sirrah, I am assured, there is no way. The timing doesn’t work out. She would have had to have birthed, then, when we were training after the sack of Kattaran. We saw her every day then, and she did not.”
“But she left that night before Lupus and Shela spent months recruiting, before she tried to get him killed by the Bounty Hunter in Galnesh Eldador,” Dilvesh argued.
This was less fun, for the simplistic nature of it. “My friend, were you the product of a woman?” he demanded. “Know you nothing of these things? They gestate over ten months, or nine, some eleven, but never more than that, and no viable offspring before.”
“You know very little of the poison used at the door to the vault in…that place,” Dilvesh said, looking around him, his distress so intense he’d almost risked the wrath of Adriam by speaking the name of Outpost X. Now Ancenon gave him more attention.
They climbed the stone steps to some municipal building. The palace lay miles deep in the city. This was either a resting place or, preferably, one to provide them with horses.
Months at sea had not prepared Ancenon for long walks.
“Admittedly,” Ancenon continued, as they stepped into a dimly lit building, through a solid steel door, “I do not.”
He noted the Wolf Soldier guards didn’t follow them in. Dilvesh didn’t command them, they simply seemed to know better.
The smell of rot hit him from within. Ancenon stepped into a room full of beddings, some formal, some mattresses on the floor.
Uman women in the garb of healers moved amongst poor wretches, their arms and legs almost fluid, who lay moaning through shriveled lips and black teeth. Some lamented lost hair, some showed eyes that had flowed down their cheeks like fluid. Their skin was sallow and grey, some rotted away to where the bones showed.
Ancenon gasped.
“A previous ‘Earl’ of Kor discovered a wall which, if you touch it, this happens,” Dilvesh said.
“Adriam’s mercy,” Ancenon muttered.
Dilvesh shook his head. “You won’t find it here,” he said. “Nor a cure with it. I’ve sent for the Empress but can’t find her. Something is afoot in Eldador right now, and it isn’t something good.”
“How—how long, how old?” Ancenon was at a loss.
Dilvesh shook his head. “They lose their sanity in as little as six months,” he said. “This sisterhood has been caring for these poor wretches for more than a generation. It seems none of them, regardless of race, ever dies, unless you cut them mortally. Even then, their blood spills out like a jelly, and it can take a week.”
“This is the same poison, then…?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Are there, I mean, Sirrah, have you seen…?”
“I’ve seen no children,” Dilvesh said, and Ancenon allowed himself another sigh. “However, I’ve seen whores with child, and placed my hand upon their stomachs, and known there is life inside.”
“Vile,” Ancenon gasped. “Vile, vile, monstrous.”
Dilvesh turned and ushered Ancenon out the door. He allowed himself to be guided, though the sunlight did nothing to burn what he’d seen from his eyes.
The Cheyak were many things and, much as he revered them as his forefathers, he recognized them for their heinous capacities.
“I dread the fate of the spawn of these,” Ancenon said, finally.
“Especially if one actually came to fruition,” Dilvesh said, “as I suspect has transpired between Genna and Lupus.”
Chapter Ten
The Eldadorian Land
Ten thousand Theran Lancers assembled on the Eldadorian plains, to the south of Thera and directly north east of the Lone Wood. The Wolf’s Head banner and the green and white pennons of Eldador snapped on their wooden lances, stood emblazoned on tabards and shields and saddles.
Jack sat Little Storm at Vulpe’s right hand. The boy never strayed far from him. He had an analytical mind, even if a young one, and he already knew about things like forage and supplies and training and how to build a defensible outpost on the plains. Jack and Two Spears—Tali Digatishi as Shela called him—advised him about scouts, and argued with him about tactics, and kept him from ordering a charge before his men were ready.
He’d wanted to charge when the first two thousand assembled. If pure bravery could win the battle then they should have. Jack knew better. Warriors were nodding and smiling to each other, proud of this Prince who’d taken up a sword to fight alongside of them in his father’s name. Severely outnumbered, they’d be just as dead as any other soldiers, so they’d gotten Vulpe to wait.
Jack thought it insane to march at odds of
five to one, even mounted, but Two Spears assured him they had the advantage, and this was Two Spears’ world.
“Shela and three wizards from my own city will be our magical defense,” Two Spears informed them. Three Uman with white hair and long, grey robes were huddled by the Empress and Nina of the Aschire. “Nina will stay with the Prince and be solely responsible for his protection.”
“My father never—” Vulpe began.
“I had your father’s back from the moment I met him,” Shela admonished him. Jack chuckled and she glared at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and bowed his head. “We say the same thing in my world—you must have learned that from the Emperor.”
Shela smiled. “He says it all the time,” she admitted, then turned her attention to her son. “Your father could barely do the slightest thing without me—and every time he strayed—”
Two Spears cleared his throat, a wide smile on his face. He’d warned Jack that when she didn’t have her eyes right on him, Shela worried over the Emperor constantly and did everything she could to be at his side. Her abandoning the capitol came as a surprise to him, only in that it had taken so long.
“My life before his,” Nina promised them, placing a hand on his arm. “I didn’t spend so much time raising him to lose him now.”
Vulpe made a face Jack had grown accustomed to—a kind of grimace that said, “I’m not a little boy anymore.” For these people, he wasn’t. Take the life of another, and you’re a man here.
Jack had watched Vulpe cut that man down. He’d stood in the middle of a small squad of Wolf Soldiers, and he’d fought just as they do. Shield men held the line, men with long spears stabbed over their heads, and when Vulpe gave the word, the shields parted just enough for swords to slip out and stab. Vulpe could have stabbed at a tree or an ox for all he knew—it was pure luck his low height had come under the bounty hunter’s guard, took him on the inside of his leg and sent blood spurting in a crimson fountain all over them.
But that made him a man here, and Jack was going to be damned if he’d die so soon after, because of it.
“We should have moved at dawn,” Vulpe informed them, a scowl on his face. “We should be fighting now, not just outfitting. We should—”
Jack shook his head, and that quelled him. He’d discussed this with all of them before and, much as it was his idea, and he was a salesman, not a warrior, sales worked like any other battle, where the rules usually consisted of, “There are no rules.”
“We’ve been gathering for a week,” he said, “so they know how much strength we have. We know they caught one of our envoys to your father, so they know we sent for help. We see their scouts every day, and they see ours, and they know we rest in the day and train in the dusk light.
“You’re safest against an enemy when they don’t think you’re up to anything. Logic says that we should wait for your father and his superior numbers, and crush them. They haven’t run, so they plan to attack you one morning, soon, when they think you’re not ready and they are. If they can kill or capture the Emperor’s son and wife then they have a hell of a hand against the Empire.”
“We should have called for the garrison at Galnesh Eldador,” Shela complained. “Lee is back with Hectaro—we could have another four thousand Wolf Soldiers in ten days—”
“They’ll attack in ten days,” Two Spears argued. “Eti Kawnatay is right—we catch them entirely unaware, now, and half will be dead before they can pick up their swords. The rest of them will either surrender or run.”
Two Spears had dubbed Jack ‘Eti Kawnatay,’ the Old Hunter. Well, the old hunter didn’t think it would be that easy, however it still remained their best chance. If their envoy hadn’t been captured, then maybe they could have waited, but not now. These people would be stupid to wait, and Jack knew better than to count on that.
It worried him. He didn’t know anything about swords and fighting. He didn’t know these people or how they made war, what they were capable of or what might limit them. Although he felt queasy about the odds, they claimed Shela’s sorcery was so powerful she could kill most of them herself. That kind of made the whole thing irrelevant, then, didn’t it?
Mostly, however, Jack wanted to know who these ‘reinforcements’ were. That, he felt, would be the key to everything. Another lesson from a life of sales, “Don’t make your pitch until you have all of the facts.” He’d learned to call that ‘pitching in the dark,’ and sometimes when you did you ended up beaning the batter.
Sometimes the pitch came back at you and hit you in the face.
In sales, you lost your commission. Here, the stakes were a lot higher.
* * *
Tartan Stowe stood on the Eldadorian plains, 4,000 Angadorian Knights behind him, watching an enormous army of Confluni marshal on a wide, vast plain.
Normally he’d expect to see as many head of aurochs, but this army had commandeered those. Farmers driven off of their land had come to him for his protection. They formed a side camp, where their daughters were plying his men for coin, and their sons were trying to decide if life might be better on top of a horse instead of staring at the arse of one, with a wooden plow in their hands.
Yerel stood to his left, J’lek to his right, and this scout who’d crossed their path, Jean, before them.
The woman had turned out to be a godsend, able not only to skirt the fringes but to penetrate this Confluni army. She’d spent a day within their camp, gathering information for them.
“You’re sure?” Yeral insisted.
“As I stand before you,” the woman said. She was in her thirties, gray in her hair, crows’ feet at her eyes. She had the body of a dancer, in skintight leather, covered in daggers and a cross-pistol on her thigh. Tartan noted from her belly she’d birthed at least one child.
His wife regarded the side of his face; however Tartan remained focused on the army. He’d seen the Emperor do this—staring into the enemy camp as if into the face of an adversary, as if to read its eyes.
Tartan had never understood that, until now, with his own men at risk.
She’d found Glynn Escaroth, Xinto of the Woods, and a Man whose name he recognized, Karl Henekhson, in that camp, not as prisoners but as allies.
Karl Henekhson—the Hero of Tamara, the bravest Man ever to set foot on Fovean soil, had sided against Lupus the Conqueror with the stinking Confluni.
Tell his warriors that, and there would be no stopping them from attacking. He himself felt the rage. No one could more deeply betray the Emperor—not even he, himself.
It gave Tartan Stowe a whole new perspective on things. Did he want people to feel about him the way he felt about Karl Henekhson now?
“I will have his guts,” Tartan swore, his own voice sounding strange in his ears.
He felt his wife’s hand on his shoulder, delicate as a rose petal. He knew her mind. If they could capture this one and hide him from the Emperor, they’d have a capable ally to train their warriors.
He’d have his head on a pike, Tartan thought. He’d throw it at the Emperor’s feet.
“Love me—I won’t do this!”
The thought shocked him.
“There’s another army on their other side,” Jean informed them. “Theran Lancers flying the Imperial banner and the Wolf’s Head as well. Means that—”
“Someone from the Imperium is there,” Tartan finished for her. You didn’t get to sport the Wolf’s Head unless you had a Mordetur among you.
“Duke Two Spears,” Tartan said, and looked sideways at his wife, mounted on her palfrey. “I don’t think the Empress will be outside of Galnesh Eldador with an army on the field, and I sincerely doubt she sent her children.”
Yeral looked away from him. Jean grinned.
“Who knows what a woman will do for her man?” she said. She alone wasn’t on horseback. She claimed she didn’t need to be. For her age, there was no doubt she moved light on her feet.
“They train at night and rest all day,
” Jean said. “The Confluni have been getting up an hour before first light. They’re getting ready for a fight—no doubt of that. The Therans, if they’re smart, are just here to minimize the damage until Lu—the Emperor can bring his army up north.”
Tartan nodded. Over one hundred thousand strong, he’d eradicate these Confluni, reinforcements or no. If Lupus the Conqueror had been successful against anyone, it was the Confluni.
“Dig in,” Tartan said. As Lupus had told him, ‘When you aren’t ready to make your move yet, make sure your enemy sees you as too big to attack or at least not worth the effort.’ “Establish the jess doonar, and keep a hot feed for the horses.”
“Hot feed?” his wife questioned him. That meant a lot of corn, fresh cut grass, a lot of protein.
He nodded. “Two Spears is an Andaran,” he said. “He’s just crazy enough to attack that enemy and, if he does, then we’re in it as well. We’ll be making long, sweeping charges on their flanks while he engages them at their middle.
“Meanwhile, I want a detachment to the south looking for the Emperor. If he takes the field, we’re going to cut north and block this army’s escape, or drive them unsuspecting into the Wolf’s jaws.”
J’lek nodded and, without another word, turned and left, Jean right after him in the other direction.
Tartan looked back into the camp. He felt sure they could see him, and he didn’t care. ‘Let your enemy know you’re coming,’ Lupus taught him. ‘If they run in fear, then you win without fighting. If they stand their ground, make sure it’s on shaky legs.’
“With the Hero of Tamara,” Yeral began. Tartan held up his hand for silence.
He didn’t want to hear her nattering at this point. He knew her mind without hearing her words. To her credit, she kept her peace and waited next to him.
Two questions ran through his mind, and the other one was, Who are these reinforcements?
* * *
Raven sat on the ground, on a big, soft fur Karl had given her, sharpening the edge of her sword and watching the people watching their army from the ridge to the south.