Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Robert Brady

  Whose side was she actually on?

  Glynn stepped up next to Xinto. They were closing in on her. “What do you think he wants, Raven?” Glynn repeated.

  Melissa leaned back against the stool.

  “He wants more,” she said, finally. “He wants more land, more followers, more power. He thinks he can change the world, and he hasn’t even explored it all yet.”

  “And what will the world be like, with a man like that running it?” Xinto asked her.

  Melissa had never liked history. She’d never liked the human sciences. But she wasn’t stupid, either; she could see what was right in front of her. The Emperor of Eldador, fellow human or not, wanted to be the emperor of a bigger empire, and he was pretty-much convinced he could do it. More importantly, these people were likely in no position to stop him.

  Lupus liked to call himself ‘the Conqueror.’ More importantly, he liked other people to call him that.

  Melissa sighed.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Chapter Seventeen:

  Free as a Bird

  Side by side, Blizzard and Little Storm pounded out the distance between Galnesh Eldador and the little sea village called Tonkin. There’d been a spring rain and the roads were wet and slushy, barely graveled and mostly mud. Spray from the horses’ hooves coated their sides as well as their riders from their feet to their noses.

  Lupus leaned into his saddle and rode with his head close to the horse’s neck. Bill tended to want to sit back more, move with his hips, flow with Little Storm’s natural motion. More used to Appaloosas, a destrier like Little Storm gave a whole other ride. The stallion’s natural power surged through him, travelling up to Bill through his loins, letting him feel the raw energy of a tireless mount.

  Lupus rode grim-faced and didn’t speak. Blizzard cantered along the road without as much effort as Bill would have expected. Normally he wouldn’t run a horse flat out like this—he’d want to trot and walk as well as canter so as not to leave the horse jaded.

  Both Blizzard and Little Storm seemed to thrive on the punishing pace. Bill’s legs and butt were already burning, his back and shoulders aching from the effort. Three hours into the ride he was ready to call a halt when they saw wagon on the horizon.

  Lupus turned to him and grinned. It was an almost evil sight. Right then, Bill saw his priority right then was not to save his daughter as much as it was to punish the people who’d dared to offend him, who’d dared to challenge him.

  Bill’s heart constricted. Someone was going to die in a few minutes, he knew. He didn’t want to kill anyone, and he didn’t want to join them, either.

  Lupus touched his steel heels to Blizzard’s sides and the stallion pressed on to a speed even faster than Bill had experienced during their race. Little Storm bore down and silently matched his sire. Side-by-side, they closed the distance between themselves and the wagon.

  “I’ll take them head-on,” Lupus told him. “You ride past them, turn around and just block their horses. I don’t expect you to fight, but don’t you expect that you won’t have to. They have my daughter—they’ll know what I plan to do them.”

  Bill nodded. His heart raced. He was sweating in the cold.

  Someone stood up in the wagon. It was a simple, four-wheeled, open-topped flat wagon with at least two people in it. Bill imagined that he heard a shout, and then the wagon picked up its speed.

  The horses pushing faster than he thought a horse could move sensed a race was on and pushed faster still. The wind actually stung Bill’s eyes and made his tears run.

  Lupus had a long, shiny sword out. Its surface was so perfect it almost gleamed. Bill thought maybe he should pull his own sword, but drawing it over his shoulder on a moving horse, he was afraid he’d cut his own head off.

  The person in the wagon stood back up and waved his hands over his head. Lupus didn’t slow down so Bill didn’t. The horses thundered on. It wasn’t long before they were less than a stone’s throw from the wagon.

  The teamsters on the wagon reined in. Bill flew past them, then yanked the stallion’s reins to the left, turning the horse in front of the wagon.

  Bill nearly sailed out of the saddle, his legs throbbing and almost too weak to grip the stallion’s barrel. He righted himself, the horse bobbing his head and pawing the graveled road. Bill pulled his sword out over his shoulder and faced the two steaming draft horses that had been pulling the wagon. Both were black in rope harnesses.

  Lupus was speaking to the drivers in Uman. Both were clearly terrified. Either they knew him on sight or they saw the armor and weapon and knew they were no match for him. They were two Uman men with long white hair, dressed in white homespun over shirts and cloth pants, both with old, worn boots. Their eyes were wide with fear and they were speaking too quickly for Bill to follow.

  Melissa—Raven—was the one who’d focused on Uman.

  Lupus raised his head up and regarded Bill. “They say they don’t have her,” he said.

  “Maybe they’re behind the ones we’re looking for?” Bill suggested.

  Lupus nodded. He spat on the ground. “Shela wanted to come and I said, ‘No.’ I should have brought Nina. We could have asked her—she knows Chawny as well as anyone alive.”

  Bill kicked Little Storm and the horse walked the distance to the wagon. The wind changed and Bill got a whiff of something he hadn’t smelled in a long time.

  “You smell that?” he asked Lupus.

  Lupus straightened and sniffed the air. Another father, he knew the scent right away.

  “What do you two do?” he asked the Uman.

  One of them responded, “As we said, your Imperial Majesty, we’re simple porters. We’ve a load, we’re paid to move it—”

  “They’ve got a load alright,” Bill said. He pushed the horse a little farther forward, past the drivers to their wagon’s bed, and pushed an old, worn tarp aside from what it covered in the back.

  Two baskets, each full of diapers.

  No baby.

  “War’s beard!” Lupus swore.

  “What?” Bill said.

  “I’ll bet those are Chawny’s diapers,” he said. “Someone paid these two to move them. That comes from Chawny—Shela detected it.”

  Bill nodded. As much as anything that was magical made sense, that made sense.

  Lupus sighed. “There’s a town near here,” he said. “I know its Baron. He has a wizard. I need to coordinate with Shela. You watch these two. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  Bill nodded. He needed a rest. Lupus kicked his horse into motion and Bill had to rein his own horse in to keep him from following.

  “A noble steed, my Lord,” one of the Uman porters said. “Is it one of Blizzard’s get?”

  “I’m not a lord, I’m called ‘the Mountain,’” Bill informed them in Uman, even as he realized he was, in fact, an Earl. “And yes, this is.”

  “You must be an important Man,” the other said. “There aren’t many who ride so well.”

  Bill shrugged. He saw how nobility was treated here—they’d be more honest with him as a common. “He seems to like me,” he said. “I’m told, um, no one else can ride him.”

  One of the Uman turned to the other. “The same as the Emperor’s Blizzard,” he said.

  “I don’t understand,” Bill said.

  The other turned back to him and said, “It’s said the Emperor was chosen by his horse, and not the other way around.”

  Bill nodded. These men were afraid. They were making small talk out of nervousness. They didn’t know what was going to happen to them, and they had decided, as people would, that if they made a friend of him, then he’d have a harder time hurting them.

  That wasn’t up to him, he knew.

  “You’re porters,” Bill said, finally. “You move stuff with your wagons?”

  “One wagon,” one of the Uman said. “It’s all we have. We’ve worked hard and earned these horses. Now we move larger loads, farther, and make more
money.”

  “There’s much trade in Eldador,” the other said. “More every year. There are so many in the capitol it consumes more than it can make for itself, so there is always a need to bring in more.”

  Bill nodded. Probably true of every capitol.

  “You—my Lord, you don’t know, I mean, can you?” one began, alternately trying to look him in the eye and looking down.

  “If you were just moving a load with no idea why, I don’t know why the Emperor would hurt you,” Bill said, having a little trouble with some of the words.

  They seemed openly relieved.

  “You were afraid?” Bill asked them.

  They looked like they couldn’t believe the question. “The Emperor is terrible in his wrath,” one said.

  “There are a thousand stories of what he’s done to his enemies,” the other informed him. “You are his associate, you do not know this?”

  “No,” Bill said. “What has he done to his enemies?”

  They turned to each other. Scared, Bill thought. They didn’t want to say anything about the Emperor. This could be a trap.

  “On my honor,” Bill said. “I’ll repeat nothing you say.”

  “On your honor?” one repeated.

  Bill nodded.

  * * *

  “I’m bored,” Lee complained.

  “Me, too,” Vulpe agreed with her.

  Nina paced the nursery. Stupid, how could she be so stupid?

  She hadn’t proved herself worthy, this much she knew. She’d betrayed Lupus and Shela and lifted her hand against them. Now Chawny had been abducted, and who knew what would befall her.

  “Nina?”

  Nina immediately alerted to Shela’s voice in her mind.

  “Yes? Does Lupus have her?”

  “Lupus has overrun them, and found porters with dirty diapers.”

  “Dirty diapers?” That made for an interesting trick. What the body left behind came of the body. As far as a spell behaved, one could be fooled, especially a mother desperate for her child.

  “So, now we don’t know—”

  “Lupus wants me to ask you if anyone has had interest in the disposal of our diapers.”

  Nina knew the wet nurse, whose family made a few extra coins removing such things, supplying toys, weaving clean linens for the baby. She gave Shela their name, and dreaded their fate if they made more coin giving what they thought of as worthless to some enemy of the Empire’s.

  “Baby’s cryin’,” Lee told her.

  “Take care of—what?”

  She turned her attention to the room around her, and sure enough, she heard Chawny’s plaintiff cry. A sound she knew as well as her own breathing.

  Nina ran to the nursery from the playroom, and sure enough, she heard the cry from the empty bassinet.

  “Oh, I don’t believe it,” she said. It seemed too simple.

  “Edvagietye,” she said, and snapped her fingers—the simplest of all spells to dispel magic.

  Angry at the Sun lay wailing in her bassinet, her diaper heavily soiled.

  “Shela!” she called the Empress in her mind.

  * * *

  “We’ve found another of the people mentioned in the song,” Xinto informed the young girl.

  Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Say what you would, this girl loved that fat old Man for some reason, and she was very dedicated to him. That was Xinto’s way in.

  People in general, no matter the species, wanted to feel like they were moving forward. Xinto had learned this as a child more than one hundred years ago, in his village in Conflu, playing with other children, both Scitai and Men. If they wanted to play a game Xinto didn’t want to play, it was always more effective to give them a better game than to refuse to play. If they wanted to go somewhere he didn’t want to go, he quickly learned to posit a more interesting place than simply to criticize their decision.

  That simple philosophy and served him well from then to now. Not that this Raven could admit her benefactor might not be the best caretaker of her future, it was time to suggest a better one.

  “Where?” Raven asked, and sniffed.

  “To the south,” Glynn said, stepping forward. Xinto wanted her to stop crowding the young girl but couldn’t think of a way to tell the Uman-Chi to stop. Men were especially aware of their personal space and would react unpredictably if trapped.

  He finally stepped to one side, away from the girl toward the bed she shared with the old man. The quilt stank of the smells of Men, but he ignored it.

  The girl sighed, a little more relaxed.

  “We must go ourselves, and find this one,” Xinto informed Raven. “We need you to come with us.”

  “Why not just tell the Emper—tell Lupus?” Raven argued.

  Xinto looked into her brown, doe eyes. The girl had already answered this question in her own mind. Xinto just needed to reinforce it.

  “Because if we tell the Emperor, he’ll send one thousand Wolf Soldiers and capture this person,” Xinto said. “Most likely, he’ll kill the man. We can go ourselves and speak with him. He’s already identified himself to Glynn—he knows her and he’ll trust her.”

  Melissa sniffed again. “So we’ll bring him back?”

  Xinto and Glynn exchanged a glance. Raven saw it and stiffened. She wasn’t foolish, this one, she could at the very least keep up with them, if not exceed them.

  “We need to know what this new person can tell us,” Xinto said. “The addition of a new member to our group has brought another member each time. You arrived and added Glynn. Glynn identified you and added me. I was brought here and this new person arrived.”

  “He’s here?” Raven asked, squinting her eyes.

  “He was,” Glynn said.

  Xinto wanted to curse her into silence. The girl might have the wisdom of a century and a half, but she had been taught to be so self-assured as a Caster she couldn’t believe the whole world didn’t see things her way, if properly educated. This made for an ally who could undo his plans without trying.

  “He left, from fear of the Emperor,” Xinto said, covering for Glynn. “We suspect he could be a Wolf Soldier deserter.”

  Raven nodded. She looked past the two of them to the door.

  “How can we get out of here?” she asked.

  * * *

  The Andaran warhorse Melissa rode was nothing like the palfrey she’d ridden in Outpost IX. For a week she’d been trying to get used to it; its fearlessness, its tendency to want to put its head down and push things out of its way. A mare, it didn’t know a lot of fear and it relied on a lot more attention from its rider. A twitch to the reins could have it wheeling to one side or charging—responses that could save a warrior’s life but which came as a huge surprise to a novice rider.

  Xinto rode behind her, his hands on his waist or creeping to other parts of her anatomy. He complained about every bump in the road, every quick turn, start or hesitation. Her father would have described him as a guy in an expensive car complaining that the radio was too loud.

  They’d informed her they’d found another person mentioned in the song, and Glynn had arranged to meet him in the south. The Emperor would never allow them to leave on their own; he’d prefer to send a thousand Wolf Soldiers to the place where Glynn knew he was hiding and capture him. Melissa knew Lupus well enough to believe Glynn and Xinto on this. She needed more information on these people mentioned in the song; she needed time away from the influence of the people who would cage her.

  With the Emperor chasing after his own daughter and the palace and the city already having been searched, it wasn’t all that hard to get out of the city through the Imperial stables. They acted as if they were doing what they were told to do, and they kept Xinto out of sight. They rode out of the gates with nothing more than a wave to Wolf Soldier guards.

  No sooner was Raven out the gate than she saw that same movement in the winter hay to the west of Galnesh Eldador again. Her ‘not there,’ a whisper through the hay where
there was no breeze, gone before she was really sure that she’d seen it. She rode her mare with an eye to the left as both horses moved south, but never saw it again.

  They travelled less an hour than before they met the first Wolf Soldier patrol. Fifty warriors with an officer on horseback leading them. They marched north along the road to the capitol and met the three of them moving south.

  “My Lord,” Glynn said, inclining her head to the mounted officer.

  “My Lady,” he said. He was a Man, dressed in Wolf Soldier greys with steel sleeves on his upper arms and steel greaves on his shins.

  “What is your purpose on this road?” the officer demanded of them.

  “We were bound for the capitol but were turned away at the gates,” Glynn lied to him, her face unreadable. “I’d thought to be received in the High Court.”

  The officer tipped his head to Glynn. “I apologize, my Lady,” he said, “however the capitol is closed for at least the day. I believe there are estates to the south…”

  “Yes, yes, Sirrah,” Glynn assured him, and painted on a smile. “We stayed at one last night and will be returning, I fear. Perhaps better luck to us on the ‘morrow?”

  Melissa and Glynn reined their horses over to the side of the road and let the Wolf Soldiers pass. A few looked curiously at the pair but most simply stared straight ahead. Xinto kept himself hidden behind Melissa the entire time.

  When they passed, she said, “Little man, if you like those hands attached to those wrists, then keep them out of my lap.”

  Glynn sighed and Xinto chuckled. They kicked their horses and pressed south.

  * * *

  Bill returned to the capitol with Lupus, their horses lathered, just as the sun was setting. The Empress met them with a compliment of Wolf Soldier guards, her children and Nina.

  The latter seemed shy around the Emperor. M’den Grek knew why.

  He’d had a report made to him, as J’her’s second in command, that the Emperor’s Watch Bitch had actually snapped at her master last week, and he’d rewarded her with a beating. He’d asked about this when he saw her limping, and seen bruises under her clothing when she moved, which could only come from combat. In general even Wolf Soldiers feared the purple-haired guardian whose gaze found anyone within a stone’s throw of the children. Behind her back, they often called her ‘Mistress of Pain.’