Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Brady, Robert

  “Why not just have our ship pick us up in the Sea of Xyr?” I asked. I knew there had to be a reason, but I wanted to hear it.

  Nantar shook his head. “The mouth to the Sea of Xyr is closely guarded. The north-side installation has four heavy catapults and a team that is supposed to be so well trained that they can keep one missile in the air constantly for over an hour. An armada couldn’t pass it with the catapults intact, and our one merchant ship would be no match.”

  “Even if it were, Trenbon would be embarrassed before the Fovean High Council, perhaps indicted in an international incident,” added Ancenon, as ever a champion of Trenbon. “That price, I cannot pay.”

  “Can I assume that you have some means to be in contact with your ship?” Nantar said.

  Ancenon nodded. All were curious now.

  “And regardless, we are all getting an equal share of the wealth from the treasury?” I continued.

  D’gattis bristled. “That wealth is Uman-Chi -”

  “Cheyak,” Thorn interrupted.

  “Don’t you even try -” Drekk warned.

  “-can kill you where you stand,” said Nantar. Ancenon took a surprised step back, and Arath had his hand on his sword.

  “This was never discussed,” Ancenon said.

  “But fairly assumed,” Arath said. “We get our fair share, or we take all of it, and leave you here for dead.”

  I shook my head. Wealth and Power: one a passion and, on this world, one a god. My world was no different, if you thought of it. Men would kill for either just the same – and held no friendship closer to the heart.

  “All immaterial if we have to fight our way back to the shore,” D’gattis argued. “I believe that it should be agreed that the survivors split evenly what they can escape with.”

  “Knowing full well that you will be back with Trenboni guardsmen for your second trip, to take it all,” Thorn argued. “What needs to be agreed is that it is all ours, D’gattis. This group found it, and this group will maintain it, for so long as we are alive.”

  “That is more wealth than any one Man could spend in ten lifetimes,” Ancenon said. I would have said “condescendingly” except for his growing angrier.

  “I am willing to try,” said Nantar.

  “As am I,” said Arath, his hand still on his sword.

  We spent the remainder of that day drawing up a grand design of what we wanted to do with the wealth that remained. I still had Genna in my head, and listened peripherally. It bothered me that this woman, whom I really cared for, meant so little to me now that she was dead. I didn’t even think that I would miss the sex. I could conjure up her image but, in fact, I knew in my heart that there would be others.

  Just as I knew in my heart that I would survive this disaster. In fact, as these men wrangled and connived among themselves, I had already made my plans.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Free Legion

  Arath, Drekk, D’gattis, Ancenon, Nantar, Thorn and I put our hands out as we stood in a circle, and clasped each other’s wrists. Seven of us, to vow to never rob the others of this gold, to work together to spend it for our own common good, to never raise a sword against the others, and to support our mutual cause.

  We called ourselves a Free Legion, and Ancenon sealed our pact right there in the sight of Adriam. This ritual to a foreign god made the gorge rise in my throat and my brain sear with pain – I knew my god, given a choice, would have none of it. Yet I saw no other way. No one of us would be able to escape with the gold we had found, and no one of us trusted the others well enough to just leave here without some guarantee.

  When Ancenon said the last word of the oath and as we all, as one, agreed to it, fire engulfed the space between our hands. From where hands clasped wrists, a bright red ball formed from nothing, rose and divided seven ways, striking each of us in the chest. I saw a bright flash and then my toes as I flew backwards across the room, to land in the muddy water along the walls of our common area. I shook my head and wondered idly if my armor was dented.

  I saw Nantar across the room from me, also shaking his head. A question mark, turned upside down, had been burned in red into his breastplate. It ran from his cuirass to just above his swordbelt.

  I looked to my left and saw Thorn, five feet from me. He turned to stand and, as he faced me, I saw the same mark, the same way, but colored tan. To my right Ancenon wore the mark in purple across his breast, and next to him D’gattis in yellow upon his white robes. Arath had been marked in dark brown, interlinked through his chain mail and, next to him, Drekk’s mark was gold.

  I looked down at my armor and, across the ridges of my plate, I bore that self-same mark, but in black. I would have thought that color more appropriate for one of the Uman-Chi, but who was I to argue with the All-Father?

  I touched the mark gingerly, and it didn’t feel hot or come off. I scratched it with my fingernail, then with one of Genna’s daggers, but still it remained.

  “Amazing,” D’gattis said, in complete awe.

  “A sunrise is amazing,” Ancenon told him, fingering the mark up on his previously bare breastplate. “This is prophetic.”

  “You foresaw this?” Drekk accused him. I didn’t think that the man who dressed entirely in black liked the color of his mark.

  “I could not bear the tabard of the Royal House on my breast because of it,” he said, simply. “Even when forced by affairs of state, I couldn’t sustain it – I literally ripped the insignia from my body.”

  “I think that is one oath we won’t be breaking, my friends,” Nantar said, his usual, jovial self. I laughed. We still had to bring back our gold and bury Genna where the rats wouldn’t disturb her. I had spoken with Nantar and we had formed something of a bond, with Thorn at the periphery of it. I went to him now, his hand still on his breast as if the mark were attacking him. Thorn drew his sword and planted its point in the ground, watching me. He could hear whatever I said to Nantar from where he stood.

  “Would you two come with me?” I asked. My voice wavered as I said it. I just didn’t want to go alone and I didn’t want to go with everyone. A small party, a solemn funeral for the girl who did nothing wrong other than challenge the world.

  Thorn watched Nantar, Nantar looked me in the eye. For such a capable fighter and such a violent man in battle, he had this soulful expression when he wanted it. It felt like he could read my heart sometimes. I wondered if fighting and killing for a living did that to you, of if that was just Nantar.

  He smiled, clapped me on the shoulder, and nodded. Thorn saw this and nodded, too.

  As usual, Ancenon took charge. He led us because leadership came naturally to him. He told Arath to go up out of the hole through our glamour to make sure that the Confluni were no closer to finding us. That used to be Genna’s job, now it belonged to Arath. D’gattis went after him, disappearing with that snap and flash.

  Nantar, Thorn and I left down our passage to the sewer opening. We didn’t talk because we had nothing to say. Ancenon would likely wait an hour or so before he sent the rest of our Free Legion after us to start cleaning up, counting and allotting for our gold.

  Down through the sewers, up outside of the throne room, every twist and turn a memory of Genna. Already it felt distant to me, like when I left Aileen. I wanted to miss her but I couldn’t. She was gone. What I would miss about her I couldn’t get from just anyone, not the sex but the funny little friend who wouldn’t stop charging forward. I liked that no one could stop her or slow her down. Her death burst that bubble, I supposed.

  “This looks familiar,” Nantar commented as we entered the Cheyak throne room.

  “Outpost IX?” I asked. It would make sense to me that all of the Outposts looked the same.

  He and Thorn both shook their heads. “Not just that,” the bearded warrior said. “All throne rooms – all the ones that I have been in, anyway, and that is a few.”

  “All of the Eldadorian duchies,” Thorn said. “The great hall in Chatoo
s. Long hall, raised dais, gallery on the side.”

  He pointed to the ruined stands on the left of the hall. “In Chatoos, I stood right there.”

  Nantar nodded.

  It made sense, like on Earth where Roman international law prevailed to this day. People copy the first people who did it right.

  Thorn looked at me, his face bland, and his mud-brown eyes gentle in his face. “Where is she?” he asked.

  “Through that door,” I said, pointing at the ruined entrance. “Down that hall, to the left up a ramp.”

  “Want us to...” Nantar said, his voice trailing off.

  I shook my head. “I should do it.”

  We turned to the doorway and there she stood, holding the frame. She was missing a few knives, and her leathers were torn. Her face was pale and shaking and her hair looked like a bird had nested in it. There were bloody marks on her face where the needles had stabbed her.

  “You should do what?” Genna asked us.

  A millennium is a long time on a poison. It might have mellowed with age, or she might have gotten over it, or this might have been what the poison did. It would make sense that the Cheyak would want to interrogate someone who got into their treasury.

  She’d been left weak but alive. She wouldn’t be running through the woods any time soon. While Nantar and Thorn and Arath dragged gold bars to the throne room from the treasury under D’gattis’ supervision, across the steel door that we used as a bridge over the pit of spikes, I sat with our horses, Drekk, Ancenon and Genna.

  “I don’t know what I can tell you,” Drekk said. “She’s alive from a poison that kills. She’s weak. She may get stronger, she may still die.”

  “That’s comforting,” Genna remarked, leaning against my armor. I felt like I should hold her, but it felt like snuggling a corpse. Her skin felt cold and clammy, like her body had died and forgot to tell her brain.

  “I have heard of a punishment,” Ancenon said, “called the walking death, where the Cheyak cast a spell that ruined your body but didn’t affect your mind. You were supposed to suffer while you became steadily weaker, and then died.”

  “Is that what this is?” I asked.

  He looked me in the eyes. “I wanted to ask you,” he said. “You speak all of their languages, I thought you might know their history.”

  I shook my head. “No better than you,” I said. “Is there some spell you can cast to make her well?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Ancenon said, standing over both of us. “If I knew the cause, I could possibly counteract it, but if I have no idea I could kill her in an instant trying to help her.”

  “So I die,” Genna said, frankly. She took my hand and gripped it. I gripped her back.

  “So, you live,” Drekk answered, standing next to Ancenon. “While you are alive, you survive as best you can. You were dead and now you are better. Who is to say you won’t get better still.”

  “That does make sense,” I said. “In a few days you will be running through the trees like a wild thing.”

  She touched her face where the blood had crusted into little beads, like pox. They hadn’t bled when I left her.

  She had been dead.

  Genna couldn’t join the fire bond. The strain would kill her, of that we had no doubt. She swore by Adriam and Eveave to be bound as we were, but she couldn’t take the vow.

  Drekk had already told me that he didn’t trust her; Ancenon and Nantar as well. The Fire Bond felt like a burden and a relief at the same time – we found it easier to rely on Adriam than in each other.

  The gold had all been hidden under the dais in the throne room, protected by wards and glamour and a few nasty traps that Drekk had derived. If anyone found their way to the throne, found the catch in the dais, disabled the spell and took apart the traps, D’gattis would know of it immediately. Before we left the place as secure, I saw him inscribe a mark in one of the walls with a dagger.

  “What is that?” I asked him.

  He regarded me as a parent might a nosey child. “A focus.”

  “A focus for what?” I asked.

  He finished it with a flourish of his dagger. “A spell to bring me back here.”

  “Like you did with the horses?”

  “Quite.”

  “The focus makes the spell easier,” I surmised. “You can travel farther between two points like that.”

  He regarded me with his silver on silver eyes. “Yes,” he said.

  I nodded. It made sense as much as anything magical made sense.

  “You are an odd one, Lupus,” he told me.

  We were alone in the throne room. It tired Genna too much to crawl through the sewers, and the rest were making ready for us to leave. My “fun part” was coming.

  “Just noticing?” I said.

  He smiled one of his rare, sarcastic smiles. “No, just mentioning it,” he said.

  He squared off and continued, “I do not understand how you could read dead languages of Cheyak and know nothing of their history. I can see you understand very complex things, like resonance and a focus and the spell poison that is in Genna. Yet you are surpassed by basic concepts that everyone knows, like the Blast and the Outposts.”

  “Well, I am not from around here,” I said. I regretted it as I said it.

  “I would guess that when you say that, you mean much more than Conflu, even Fovea.”

  I shrugged inside of my armor. When I said nothing he continued.

  “There is a fable of a man who built ‘peer – mehds’ who appeared for a Cheyak king before the Blast. He turned sticks to snakes and moved huge boulders with a finger tip.”

  That sounded frighteningly familiar on more than one level.

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “He became an advisor to the king but grasped for the king’s power,” D’gattis said, looking at me as directly as someone who has no pupils can seem to look. “So the king had him killed.”

  “So much for peer – mehds,” I said.

  D’gattis nodded and turned from me. “And so,” he said.

  The allusion wasn’t lost on me.

  Thorn and Nantar were already mounted when I returned to our base camp at the Outpost X murder hole. Blizzard waited saddled and ready.

  I laughed. “Who managed that?” I asked, pointing at the stallion. Blizzard wasn’t notorious for letting anyone else touch him, and he had gotten crankier for being cooped up.

  “I held his head while Thorn did it,” Genna said. She lay next to Ancenon on some ticking that Arath had brought down here for her. “He only bit me once.”

  I nodded. “Thanks,” I said.

  She looked in my eyes, surprised. I didn’t know why and I didn’t ask.

  “All speed to all of you,” Ancenon said.

  I mounted and stepped Blizzard up next to Nantar’s horse. D’gattis intoned a few words, and we waited for the snap and flash from before.

  The instant transition from one place, cold and dark, to another, full of light and new smells, spooked the horses. After fourteen days in the gloom, the sun struck me like a hammer in my eyes. The smell of fresh air, of light filtered through leaves and trees, filled my senses. As soon as I had Blizzard under control, I turned south, Thorn and Nantar not far behind me. We moved as fast as we dared on horses that had been ill-used. Even as we were leaving, Arath and D’gattis were scrambling up out of the hole.

  We had eight hours to get south. We traveled light – some little grain, food for ourselves to eat in the saddle, and water. After that we had just about every weapon we could carry. I had Genna’s cross-pistol on my hip now and her daggers in my boots and up my sleeves. She hadn’t asked for them back and I hadn’t offered. The Sword of War hung tight over my shoulder, the metal scabbard bound so that it wouldn’t clank as we rode.

  We spoke very little. Blizzard got his wind after the first hour and it was all I could do to keep him back with the slower horses. Thorn watched him chomp at the bit as we rode, sayi
ng nothing. I had learned of Andaran pride in their horses, but Thorn’s didn’t compare to mine. Even dyed green again, he was an incredible stallion.

  We only rested when the horses could no longer keep the gait and even then remained in the saddle.

  I saw a sapling and had an idea. Taking the reins in my teeth to free my hands, I drew my sword and kicked Blizzard in the ribs to move him to it. I reached out with my left hand to take a firm grip on the sapling as, with my right, I easily cut the inch-thick tree with my sword. I think that with a normal sword I would have had to chop and saw at it, but this one passed easily though the young wood.

  Nantar and Thorn watched as I sheared branches from the sapling, quickly fashioning it into a lance with a pointed end. I had to cut it to eight feet to keep it from constantly hitting the canopy of tree limbs overhead, but then I jammed it into my stirrup between its interior and my boot. I looked up from my efforts and saw Nantar and Thorn regarding me as if I were insane.

  “What is that,” Thorn asked.

  “It’s a lance,” I said.

  “What’s it for?” Nantar pursued.

  “You kill people with it.”

  They were quiet for a minute.

  “You mean, if they fall out of a tree?” Thorn asked.

  I shook my head and pulled the lance from my stirrup, then couched it under my left arm, sheathing my sword.

  I looked for a target and saw a broken branch hanging at about six feet off of the ground, ahead of us. I kicked Blizzard into a run and, leaning forward in my stirrups, aimed the lance at the branch.

  Thank current and past gods for David Eddings and his writing, because I couldn’t have done this if I hadn’t read his Belgariad. I caught the center of the branch by luck and, with the combined momentum of the horse and my own weight, ripped the branch from the tree and knocked it several feet into the forest. The lance bent but didn’t break, although my underarm felt as if someone had punched it. I sheathed the sword, switched the lance back to my right stirrup and walked Blizzard back to Thorn and Nantar.