by Robert Brady
“Where do you think Jack would go, if Jack were in Volkhydro?” I asked her. She’d been living here at least since War’s month.
She turned her face to the warrior. He stirred in his seat.
“There are bigger hills to the north,” he said. His voice was gravelly – like that of a heavy drinker or smoker. The northern Volkhydran accent was unmistakable. “If you go too far, you get into the ogre lands, but for another forty miles you can find some deep caves. You could weather a winter in many of them.”
A lot of things could, I thought. There were bears the size of grizzlies in the north of Volkhydro – things that didn’t fear the ogres at all. Then again, with a Druid, that could be an advantage.
“What is this place?” I asked again.
“This is the City With No Name,” the warrior said. “I am Byark Olgarson, and I lead here. Since the time when there was Volkha and Hydro, this city has been a way point for those who will have neither.
“When you came here, you pushed my countrymen north, and some settled here with their possessions. Some Andarons, as well, who wouldn’t go back to Andoron after such a loss, settled here.
“If you think this is going to be your next city,” he added looking right into my eyes, “then you came here with too few warriors.”
I smiled. “How about I leave you just like you are, for as long as you want?” I asked him.
“That is not the Conqueror’s reputation,” he informed me.
“Don’t be too sure,” Raven said. “Where he and I are from, to win without a fight is the best victory of all.”
He regarded Raven, then me. “She claimed that she came here from the lands of the North, as you did,” he informed me.
I nodded. “She is my countrywoman,” I allowed.
“But you hunt her,” he said.
I shrugged.
“We should be for bed,” Shela informed me. “We will have warriors and horses to tend in the morning, now that we have better shelter.”
I nodded, and rose. “Is there a room I can rent here?” I asked.
Byark nodded. “A tabaar for the night,” he said.
That was pricey as hell. It also wasn’t like I could go to the competition.
I fished into a pouch I wore on my belt, then laid the coin on the table. Byark called for two men, and they made it clear they were going to show us to an upstairs room.
“I won’t be going with you,” Raven said. “I still have work to do tonight.”
Shela frowned. “You need to rest more,” she said. “And you need to eat more red meat.”
Raven’s eyes widened a little.
“Magic isn’t good for the baby,” she added. “You should refrain until after.”
Raven nodded.
“I’ll get you a haunch,” Byark offered. Raven nodded absently.
We were led upstairs. The ten warriors who guarded me worked out a sleep schedule as we went, as well as checking out the stairwell, some of the adjoining rooms and the balcony before settling in. We took a room on the corner of the inn, which would be a little colder but easier to defend, and which let me see the camp where our men were already sleeping.
In the moonlight, that little camp looked bleak and cold. Blizzard stood abnormally near the other horses as they huddled for warmth.
“I don’t trust her,” Shela informed me, when we were alone.
“Nor I,” I agreed.
“She’s here as a shaman,” Shela continued. “Did you see how the Andarons looked at her? She’s been using her magic to heal them and to help them – that’s why they feed her.”
“Everyone’s got to live,” I said.
She helped me out of my armor, going on about how this was bad for the baby, and how she had a duty to make sure Jack knew he’d have a child.
She was the only mother of any of my kids who felt that way.
We settled into a lump bed with a too-thick quilt, in a drafty room, with guards snoring on the floor inside the door and standing at attention outside. Nothing happened during the night, so I had to suppose that was progress.
***
Shela woke with the dawn, as she usually did. I slept in an hour longer, then guilt and a full bladder got me up. I dressed out in my armor, mostly because the padding underneath was warm.
Like any inn, the main room downstairs was busy with people eating. An hour after dawn in the summer would find this room a lonely place. In the winter there was less to do and fewer hours to do it. People did less and ate more, and the place was full.
A table to one side was reserved for my Angadorians, and a place at that table was reserved for me. Shela had already commissioned a bench and was inspecting the health of the warriors individually. That had to mean she was already done with the horses.
A healthy horse could carry a sick man, not the other way around.
The lieutenant, Radmon Rukh, approached me and made a fist over his heart. He was of the race of Men, a beefy guy with short brown hair, clearly very impressed with his own looks.
“The men are all secure,” he informed me. “The horses are well- we had one who might have been sick, however her Imperial Majesty healed him. The men are a different story.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Wind soring,” Shela informed me without looking up. That’s what the referred to wind burn as. “A few colds that are going to take some effort to clean up. We should stay another day here if we can.”
We were losing a lot of time doing things that I’d rather not be doing, I thought. On the other hand, pushing too hard could cost us more time, and warriors, later.
“I’ll see to it,” I said. To Rukh, I added, “Continue the duty schedule, make sure that the men who are sick are getting rest.”
He nodded and I fished three more Tabaars out of my belt pouch. “Get three rooms, put the sick ones in there. They can benefit from a warm night’s rest.”
“Aye, sir,” the lieutenant agreed. He turned smartly on his heel and found one of the men who was tending tables.
I hadn’t seen a lot of women here. Then again, women of the race of Men didn’t really socialize with the males. It was the time of year when most children were born, and I hadn’t seen one of them, either, so I could imagine that there were more houses nearby with people in them.
No sooner had I left than Byark approached me. Raven was nowhere to be found.
“You’re staying another day?” he asked me. He must have overheard Shela.
I nodded. “If it’s allowable,” I said. “This is your city.”
He seemed surprised. Clearly this was not the reputation of the Conqueror. “You must pay for food. We have hay for the horses, if you want to buy it.”
I negotiated with him for twenty minutes. If the man was a warrior now, he had merchants in his past. Fortunately I’d brought a couple saddlebags full of gold and, in a pinch, I could send a team back to Hydrus for more.
During that time Raven made an appearance. She sat at a table, saw us, thought for a moment and then rose and approached Shela.
Shela ignored her, tending the warriors. Of the fifty, it looked like as many as eight were the worse for wear and would be making use of the rooms I’d rented.
Nearly twenty percent of my forces.
Breakfast was brought out to me – ham, eggs, a gruel that strongly resembled oatmeal, and a hot tea. I’d actually made that more popular here. With no coffee, I tended toward dark teas, and other people had adopted the tradition.
Another was set down for Raven, and another for Shela, both consisting of the same gruel but with eggs for Shela and more beef for Raven. I was disappointed to see no pickles, because they were popular among the Volkhydrans and a stereotype for pregnant women.
“What spell was that?” Raven asked Shela.
“A healing incantation,” she answered without looking up from the sick man. He was older and his hair was shot with grey. The end of his nose was actually chapped and the veins stood out in his ch
eeks.
“Can you teach it to me?” Raven asked.
“Can you tell me who your man was?” Shela returned.
That took Raven by surprise. She took a step back as Shela rose from the man.
“Back to duty,” she said to him. He nodded and put his helmet back on. He saluted her with a fist over his heart, she smiled and stroked the side of his jaw.
Then she turned to Raven, looked her up and down once in her furs, and sat down next to me, in front of her plate. Raven sat across from us at the round table, at her own plate.
To our left more Angadorian Knights were talking and eating. I had my back to the wall, Shela turned to my right. Behind Raven the room bustled with activity.
“Well?” Shela asked.
Raven looked down, then back up.
“Do you know Karl Henekhson?” she asked Shela.
I sputtered some of my tea. Damn right I knew Karl.
“The Hero of Tamaran Glen has fallen?” Shela pressed her.
Raven nodded.
“This is a sad day,” Shela said, then turned to her food.
“That’s it?” Raven said.
Shela took a mouthful of her oats, then looked up at Raven. She chewed, swallowed and said, “A shaman will see all of her friends die. If you wish to be one, then you should be ready for that.”
Raven didn’t respond.
“How – how did he die?” I asked.
She regarded me. “You put a bounty on his head, and on mine,” she said. “An Andaron with a bunch of Volkhydran warriors helping him tracked us to about twenty miles south of here. When they caught up to us, they ran down my dog and Karl’s horse fell on him. He was pinned underneath it, and I couldn’t fight them all, so I ran. I circled through the hills and found this place.”
I felt myself shaking my head, more than I was aware of doing it. Even if he faced me on the battlefield – even though he’d faced the Free Legion more than once – I’d mentored him, and he was the first ever to take on the Mark of the Conqueror. I arguably owed him my life.
I didn’t like the idea that I’d caused him to die – at all.
The worst part was that the order to collect him hadn’t come from me. Daggonin had put out the mandate after the battle for Hydrus. Hunting down and executing the leaders of a foreign enemy turned them into martyrs, and people would rally to their cause.
Xerxes of Persia had learned that when he advanced on Greece with the head of the Spartan King, Leonides, on a pike on the front of his litter. The Greeks saw that and went nuts, and defeated his army, outnumbered as much as three to one.
I almost asked where he was buried, but she wouldn’t know. In fact, if I was right, there would be no body. There’d be a weapon, and one of my kids likely had it already.
Shela looked sideways at me, then she nodded to Raven.
“An incantation,” she said, “is different from a spell, and different from your magic.”
They went on to discuss more about magic, but I tuned it out. I finished my meal and excused myself. Then I put on my travel cloak and went outside with the usual ten Angadorian Knights who guarded me personally.
The Angadorians kept a smart camp, inspired by my own. We saddled Blizzard and ten other horses, and we trotted out of the jess doonar to the other road we’d found, leading out of here.
That road took us to the northeast, toward Myr. We’d gone about a daheer when this road melded to another road. As we passed onto the new road, I turned to see that it was practically impossible to see the break onto the one we’d just left. I could see where we would have missed it, coming the other way.
This city was its own secret. In order to keep it, they hadn’t even named it. They had been keeping that secret for hundreds of years, as well. That had to be difficult.
Then Raven had found it without even trying, and Karel had as well. In a land with no magic, that was strange.
We trotted on. There was almost no sign on the road, but in general these people didn’t ride, and the ground was hard in the winter. There were tribes in the center of Volkhydro that moved between territories and they tended to wear hard-soled shoes, but where those would leave some mark here, there was none. At this time of year, we were somewhere that most other people didn’t travel to.
That was what I was hoping.
We pushed out five more daheeri. I didn’t see any game, but the sun was up and I really didn’t expect to. There were no wagons on the road, I saw no travelers. When I turned us around and returned to the city, almost missing the turn-off for the City with No Name, there were no changes.
We returned well past noon and found Raven and Shela deep in conversation. Shela kept touching her own stomach, so I could imagine what the topic was.
If Shela lacked one thing in life, it was a girlfriend. I didn’t know if she’d found that in Raven, or if she was just killing time, but I was hopeful.
I could forgive a lot if it benefited my wife.
***
We went to bed early and woke up before the dawn. The natives of the City With No Name weren’t happy to hear us enter the common room of their inn, looking for food so early.
Fifty warriors can eat a lot, but we never heard a complaint from the locals. That told me that they either had ample food stuffs, or we were paying them well enough for them to replenish late in the season. I never made it to their storage, so I wouldn’t know which was true.
We were getting ready to leave when Raven showed back up in her furs, and with Byark in tow. I was already mounted, Radmon Rukh orchestrating the dismantling of our jess doonar. I liked to leave as little evidence of our passing as possible.
Old habits die hard.
Raven approached me and put a hand on my stirrup. Again, I was surprised at how much she looked like Shela.
“If you find Jack,” she said, “you’ll tell him.”
I nodded. I’d have done that regardless.
“If you find Vedeen,” she continued, “you shouldn’t kill her.”
“Oh, no?”
Raven shook her head.
“I think it’s possible that Vedeen knows more than anyone else about that prophesy,” she said. “When I spoke to the goddess Eveave, she always told me that I was asking the wrong questions. Vedeen, I think, asked the right ones.”
I couldn’t let that pass. “Wait – you spoke to Eveave, the Taker and the Giver?”
Raven nodded. “I commune with her,” she said. “She visits me as an old woman in a café I went to in Portland, or sometimes in a field by a stream.”
That was odd. When I spoke to War, it was a disjointed voice in my head.
“Is she – does she,” I asked, then wet my lips in the cold.
“Has she hurt you?” I asked, finally.
Raven gave me a funny look. “No – why would she?”
I didn’t answer. The Knights were forming up in ranks, four across. Karel pulled Trickery up next to me.
“I won’t kill her,” I promised. I gave the signal to my lieutenant, and he ordered the command forward.
We left using the same road as the day before. Shela waited until we were out of earshot before she said, “She’s mad.”
“Is she?” I asked.
“No one speaks to the gods,” she said. “It’s forbidden – the Rule of the Gods.”
The legend was that Adriam had sealed this world from his children because they couldn’t be trusted. Earth, whom they believed we lived on, was here, and his wife, Water, was comatose, being rocked forever in his arms. Their daughters, Weather and Life, were here, and all of the other gods stood clear.
It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I’d decided long ago that the reason I was here was in part because I wasn’t ‘of Earth,’ and so the rule wasn’t violated when War wanted to talk to me.
On the night I first lay with Shela, she stood up to War for me. Either she’d forgotten, she’d dismissed it, or I’d imagined it, and none of those seemed too likely.
We marched on in silence after that. I had a lot to think about.
We pushed north that entire day, making mediocre progress, and then camped that night in a small grove of trees between two hills. Normally I wouldn’t camp on a lowland like that, but no way was it going to rain, and the top of a hill would be brutal in the wind and the cold.
We did the same on the fourth, and then on the fifth of Power. I could tell right away that the warriors had benefited from the single day of rest, and that Shela was right again.
On the morning of the sixth of Power, Karel was nowhere to be seen. We broke camp and were ready to commence traveling before he showed up.
“Anything?” I asked him.
There was frost in his beard, grown bushier since we’d come here. He looked up at me with those twinkling blue eyes of his and said, “We were followed from The City With No Name, which didn’t surprise me. Last night other scouts found those and warned them off. That bore investigating.”
I’d seen none of this.
“And?” I asked.
“And,” he repeated, “there’s a series of caves to the north, just like your little, dark-haired friend said, and they’re occupied. I saw one of Nantar’s daughters – Nanette, I think. The older one.”
We knew that Nantar’s daughters, Nanette and Thorna, had traveled at least as far as Myr with Eric and Nina. Karel had informed me later that they weren’t there now.
We may have found what we were looking for.
“How far?” I asked.
“A day’s ride,” he said.
I nodded. “Take four warriors and find shelter for our warriors somewhere near,” I said.
Karel snapped to attention in his saddle. “Sir, yes, sir!” he responded.
I shook my head. I really hated Karel of Stone.
“Please,” I added.
He nodded. “There should be a valley to the east of here, if I remember right,” he said. “It’s on the road to Kendo, but no one should be using it. We can send to Kendo for supplies if we have to.”
I nodded. “Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”
He picked out four warriors and they trotted off. The rest of us pushed north, as I had planned.
It turned out we overran the road, more of a trail, to the valley he was talking about, and had to turn around to go there. I put Radmon Rukh in charge and took Karel and Shela to find the caves he was talking about.