by Robert Brady
That had touched off a very subtle man-hunt to determine where or what they might be now.
Three of my Dorkan Wizards now stood in front of a blank, stone wall under and arch that, if you read Cheyak, said, “Outpost I.” This was the first of their Outposts, from a people whom we knew now had lived in the depths of what Conflu is now.
One was sweating, the other two supporting him. All dressed in long, grey robes representing the Wolf Soldier magical corps. All had shaved their heads, and two wore gold hoop ear rings, a sign of their accomplishments from when they were Dorkans.
As that nation’s successes had dwindled in my new world, more and more of their wizards had found their way to the Wolf Soldiers Wizards’ Corps. Dorkan itself was barely a Fovean nation anymore, being more focused on relations with the islands in the Forgotten Sea, and supposedly to some nation to the North.
I had told people that I came from there, at one point. That was a rather unfortunate lie.
A week after the conquest of Charancor and these three finally had the way cleared. Four days ago they’d sworn to me that there wasn’t a ward on the wall.
That’s when there had been four of them.
“You’re sure this time?” I asked.
One them, a younger bald man in his Wolf Soldier grey robes, slapped the cold, white stone wall with his bare hand.
“See?” he challenged me. I was halfway waiting for a flock of needles to appear along his arm, but nothing happened.
I nodded. Normally this was a job for a team of workmen, but that would be more people who knew what we found here.
Instead I stationed a Wolf Soldier guard at the end of the hall, and I departed the palace on Blizzard with fifty mounted Wolf Soldiers. We traveled through the city streets, where people were still repairing the damage involved with overrunning the place, to the tower that the Daff Kanaar had purchased for ourselves so many years ago.
That part of town was a lot nicer now – mostly because Ancenon couldn’t stand the idea that it wasn’t, and had been buying, repairing and reselling properties there. I don’t know that he made any real profit on it, but it wasn’t like any of us were starved for gold, and if it made him happy, what did I care?
Once in a while as we passed, someone knocked on our armor, even mine. It was a conveyance done by Men, symbolizing good luck. That Andarons were doing this so quickly made me really, really suspicious, but there was an argument to be made that this was Ancenon’s part of town, and the people here felt less Andaron than the rest.
The tower looked like I remembered it – even the butler we’d hired was the same guy, just a little fatter and older. For a moment, I thought, “I’ve had three kids since I last saw this guy,” when it occurred to me that, in fact, I’d had seven.
That kept rolling up on me. As I dismounted Blizzard and a groomsman took his bridle, I thought about the two Andaron girls I’d fathered, not to mention Eric. His mother was a blonde like me, with blue eyes like mine. I couldn’t say I was surprised that he looked so much like me – if I resembled anyone here, it was the Volkhydrans. I think that, more than anything else, really stabbed Vulpe in the heart when he saw it.
He’d grown really close to Eric. They’d fought together in Volkhydro, and then come here together. Young princes don’t get a lot of opportunities to make real friends, and the betrayal that came with that made the hurt so much deeper.
I left the Wolf Soldiers outside and entered the tower on my own. On the second floor I found D’gattis’ room and, pushing aside a tapestry depicting some ancient Uman-Chi, found the focus that he’d left here, which tied this place to Outpost X.
I closed my eyes and put my hand on the center of the focus. When I opened them I was in the well-worn throne room in Outpost X, under Confluni soil.
I didn’t need to close my eyes, but the transition made me woozy when I didn’t. There used to be snakes and rats down here, but our continued returning had scared them away. At some point one of the group had cleaned up the place (or had someone else do it – you never knew, and it wasn’t like Ancenon or D’gattis to pick up a broom), so it wasn’t as musty as it had been when I’d first come here with Genna.
I could not believe I’d conceived a child with her. For that matter, I was hard pressed to believe that she was still alive. Staying quiet in a corner wasn’t exactly the little recon-marine’s way. I stepped away from the focus and waited in the quiet and the semi-dark. What light there was here shone through glass-covered sky lights, and a river of some kind flowed over them. It made for bizarre patterns of light over the floor and walls. Sometimes I’d come here just to watch them like television.
This focus drew on D’gattis’ power. When I used it, he knew it because it drew on him. It was the same effect as asking a bull to pull an empty bucket, but he was aware of it, and that’s what I needed.
Because, nosey as he was, unless he was hip-deep into something, he was going to come here to see who else was here, and that was the same as me calling him, without Shela’s help.
Shela had been in bed for a week. She’d woken up a couple times, long enough to eat and relieve herself, but then she was right back to sleep, and I couldn’t help thinking that a lot this wasn’t physical recovery.
On that thought, D’gattis stepped out of the focus as if it were a door. His silver-on-silver eyes might have swept the room, but it was hard to tell.
Immediately after him came a warrior, a young man with blond hair and blue eyes, dressed in a long chainmail shirt with a hood, and a skull cap with a metal bridge down between his eyes. He bore a pink scar, barely healed over, down the left side of his face, starting just under his eye.
Eric, my son, the Holy Avenger.
I don’t know if he drew first or I did. It really didn’t matter, because I couldn’t do anything to him, and I felt reasonably sure that D’gattis had explained that to him as well.
“I might ask why you brought him here,” I said, sheathing my sword, “but it’s his right to be here, so I guess it really isn’t any of my business.”
Eric sheathed his sword then turned around, his blue eyes sweeping the gloom. “What is – where are – we’re underground, aren’t we?”
D’gattis nodded. “Your father, Black Lupus, found Outpost X for us when we were pursued by the Confluni, more than a decade ago.”
“Black Lupus,” Eric repeated. He looked at D’gattis in his white robes, then down at the white question mark, turned upside down on his chainmail.
“Yellow D’gattis,” he said. Then looked at me. “White Eric.”
“It’s how we refer to each other,” I said. “Come on – let me show you what you’ve inherited.”
We walked to the vault, the way made more clear for the years we’d spent traversing the path. We’d shorn up the hallway and cleared the piles of dirt, torn down the cobwebs. The thick steel door which had nearly squashed me was now a bridge, and actually most of the gold was still there.
And a little more from some of the other Outposts – a deal with the rest of the members for their help in taking them.
Eric took it all in. “So – so much,” he stammered.
“As much as you can imagine,” I told him. “If you want to make your brewery a bigger brewery, if you want to buy enough vassals to be a count, or a duke in Volkhydro, you can.”
He turned on me. “Why?” he demanded. His blue eyes flashed. I had to wonder if mine did that.
“So you can take it? So you can conquer it, with your armies?”
I smirked, even though I was sure it would make him angrier. “I couldn’t, not that I want to,” I informed him.
“All Daff Kanaar – our ‘Free Legion’ - are pledged under the god Adriam never to raise a hand against another. We cannot lead each other into harm, we cannot be silent and let harm befall another. We are held under a fire bond, under Adriam.”
“I follow Law,” he protested.
D’gattis shook his head. “All are beholden to the w
ill of Adriam,” he said. “He is the All-Father, and let me assure you, the fire bond is real and, when you took on the mark, you were bound by it. Your father will raise no hand against you, neither can you against him. Neither can you rally armies against him, nor he against you.”
This was a lot for Eric. Still he was taking it pretty well. I had a son at twelve who was blooded and considered a man now – and one at sixteen who was married. Maybe on his way to being a father.
Suddenly I was wondering why Nina wasn’t with him.
“So, if I’d wanted to stop you at Chatoos…?”
I smiled again. D’gattis answered, “You informed me that you took on the mark when your weapon clashed with your father’s. After that moment, had you positioned yourself between him and his goal, he could not have advanced against you, no.
“However,” the Uman-Chi continued, crossing his arms in front of him, “your father is a part of a plan which involves the entire Daff Kanaar. His goals are ours, and should be yours as well.”
“Speaking of that,” I said, “I brought you here because we’re ready to open the vault at Outpost I.”
D’gattis cocked an eyebrow and Eric’s blond eyebrows knit in a scowl. “What’s Outpost I?”
We explained to him that the Cheyak were the lords of Fovea before the coming of Men. In fact, the Uman were a slave race to them, and the Uman-Chi a product of their mating with their slaves. We told him about the Blast, and the fall of the Cheyak, and the thousand years of darkness before civilizations returned.
“In that time, we wondered where the Cheyak Outposts had gone,” D’gattis said. “We found the one, Outpost IX, and knew there had to be more.
“Again, your father puzzled out their locations, and these wars that rage across Fovea serve the dual purpose of reclaiming those Outposts.”
“Then Chatoos is your ‘Outpost I?’” Eric asked.
D’gattis and I nodded. “And if you want to see what’s in its unopened vault, you’re welcome,” I informed him.
Eric didn’t like me, and I can’t say that I blamed him. From his perspective, I abandoned his mother and I conquered his people. From mine, I didn’t know about him, but I can’t say that it would have stopped me.
Or even that it would have changed what I did. I saw the look on Shela’s face when she realized I had other children. She wasn’t going to take this well.
He nodded. “I want to see it,” he said. “If this is why you’re doing what you’re doing, then I need to understand it.”
He looked me right in the eye. “I need to know if I’m going to let you keep doing it,” he informed me.
That was his prerogative. I might have argued with him, but why? First of all, what he was about to see might convince him – it had, the rest of us.
Second and more important, I wasn’t going to convince him until he trusted me more, and that wasn’t going to happen if I didn’t treat him like someone whom I was going to trust.
I was called The Conqueror, and my kid was ‘The Holy Avenger.’ My symbol was black and his was white.
The gods weren’t being too subtle here!
***
D’gattis took us back to the tower in Chatoos. From there we found horses for D’gattis and Eric and rode back to the palace. Plenty of people recognized him, and there was a lot of discussion of why two enemies were now riding side-by-side.
Not to mention about how much we looked alike, now that we were sitting next to each other.
He regarded Blizzard. “I don’t suppose I get one of those?” he asked me.
I laughed. “I have a few of his foals,” I informed him. “I lost one to another man from… where I’m from. Most are too wild, but we could try you out on one, if you want to go back to Galnesh Eldador.”
He shook his head. “He came from The Herd that Cannot be Tamed,” Eric informed me. “I mean, from there.”
I shrugged. I don’t know if he caught it through my armor. “You can try,” I told him. “I know that others have, since I was successful. The hardest part isn’t getting to the herd, it’s getting past the Dwarves.”
Eric nodded. The Dwarves of the Northern Mountain Range didn’t like people traveling to the Lake of Tears, up the Llorando River. Sometimes they would turn you around, sometimes they would just kill you.
“The son of the Emperor might have a better chance,” he informed me.
I couldn’t answer to that. He was probably right.
Unsurprisingly, the newly renamed city of Charancor had a pretty large stable, and we put our horses in there. I was somewhat surprised to see that Shela was waiting for us.
She was dressed in one of her palace dresses, a tight bodice and big, blousy skirts both showing off and hiding her figure, all in Eldadorian green and white. She’d adorned her rich, black hair with jewels. For the first time ever I saw a little grey at her temples.
This had been a hard year for her. It wasn’t getting any better. She didn’t know that Lee was alive yet, and she’d just seen that I had two other daughters, one of them a match for her and from the same place.
She didn’t say anything until I dismounted Blizzard and put him in a stall we’d refitted for him. If you didn’t double-reinforce the walls, sometimes he’d just kick them down to prove a point. Then it was hell for the groomsmen to try to catch him.
She threw her arms around my neck and buried her face in my chest. I still had my armor on, but still I felt like I could feel the warmth inherent in her. I enveloped her in arms made so much larger with padding and steel, and I let her get the emotional energy that she needed from me.
She broke the embrace, Eric and D’gattis standing silent behind me, and looked into my eyes. Hers were red-rimmed.
I couldn’t think of a single reason not to tell her, “I spoke to Nina on the day of the battle, after the enemy quit, and she spoke to Lee a few days before that. She’s left on a fast ship to Galnesh Eldador and is probably in the capitol already.”
The look that washed over Shela’s face was a mix of joy and outrage. The joy I could understand – the outrage took a moment.
Nina should have stayed to tell Shela everything she knew, no matter how long it took. She might have said that she had to go with her man, but that man was standing right behind me.
Shela’s mind moved pretty quick.
She stepped away from me and picked out Eric.
“My lady,” he said, and bowed to her at the waist.
“Have you seen my daughter?” she demanded.
“I have not,” he said. “I rejoice at your news, however. I know how deeply –“
“And you?” she said to D’gattis, interrupting the young man.
The Uman-Chi’s silver-on-silver eyes could have been pointed anywhere. “I have not,” he said. “But on the sixth day of this month, I escorted your son to Galnesh Eldador and met with Tartan Stowe, who is representing you in regency. At that time I met the Emperor’s other son, Lupennen, son of Genna.”
He cleared his throat. “Tartan put Genna to death for her crimes against the Eldadorian Empire.”
That surprised us all. I think for Eric to learn he had another brother, Shela and I to hear that Tartan Stowe had done that in my name. Genna had kidnapped Shela and Lee, requiring her brother, Vulpe to rally troops to free them. She certainly deserved the death penalty – I was just kind of surprised that Tartan had carried that out.
Frankly, I was surprised that anyone could get a step ahead of Clear Genna.
“You saw the body?” Shela asked. Her voice was a little unsure. She probably thought the same thing.
The Uman-Chi nodded. “She’s interred in the Stowe cemetery.”
That was another surprised. Traitors usually got tossed into the Bay when the tide was going out. There was something that D’gattis wasn’t telling us.
“We are away?” he prompted us.
I straightened. I looked at Shela and said, “We’re about to open the vault.”
She nodded
and took my hand. I didn’t need to bother to invite her, because she was going anyway.
It wasn’t a long walk to the vault, where a squad of Wolf Soldiers was still standing guard. I’d brought twenty from the stables and returned the rest to duty – this many armed people in front of a hallway to nowhere would draw the attention of the palace staff, and that was never good. Karel of Stone used the palace staff in other nations for his most reliable spies, and I had a hard time believing no one else had ever had that idea.
We were used to it. “No one passes,” I informed the guard. They nodded and pushed the lookers-on out of eyesight of the hall. The four of us started toward the vault.
Shela caught my attention and looked between me and Eric several times. I pointed to the question mark, turned upside-down on my armor, then I shrugged. She nodded.
It’s like that when you marry the person who is, most likely, your soul mate.
D’gattis regarded the wall at the end of the hall. With the exception of Outpost X, these were all the same. ‘Someone’ had come and built a solid, stone wall over the door to the vault in order to disguise it, then set some really brutal, magical booby traps to back that up.
In Lupor, once known as Kor, they’d actually used the traps to punish people. I about lost it when Green Dilvesh enlightened me to that practice.
“I can detect no evidence or residual magic here,” D’gattis said. His face turned up as he regarded the wall. “I don’t imagine you’ve some of your Dwarfish masons handy?”
“Stand back,” Shela told him. He didn’t hesitate a moment, because sometimes that’s all you got with Shela.
“Are you sure?” I asked her.
She threw me a dark look and the wall crumbled. Her power was based on the desires of men, and a lot of people wanted what was in that vault.
D’gattis furrowed his eyebrows and the rubble scrambled like little mice to line the wall to our left. It all sounds very convenient, but I knew it was going to take workmen a week to clear all of that, meaning that they couldn’t begin until we both emptied and secured the vault.
We didn’t want spies reporting back to Angron Aurelias that we were raiding the treasuries of lost Outposts, or we were going to meet the full strength of Trenboni magic.
