by Robert Brady
Eric was just standing back, watching. D’gattis raised his hand to the steel doors, covered in white dust and rust, that had stood for uncounted centuries behind the wall. The doors trembled and a score of little steel darts flew out, clattering harmlessly against opposite walls.
A trap like that had reduced Genna to a shell of herself until Shela had cured her, back in Outpost X. The only things that had saved me were my height and my armor. I didn’t need either this time.
D’gattis regarded me for a moment, then raised his hand again and the doors swung outward, pushing more rubble aside.
Behind them was the usual pit, just inside of the doors, too wide to jump across and filled with spikes at the bottom – a final effort to protect the treasure within. It was covered with the remains of a wooden floor – probably thin enough to let you take a few steps onto it before it crumbled. Weather and age had removed most of it.
Shela took four steps and leapt across it. Eric gasped but I barely flickered. Her magic carried her as far as her muscles couldn’t, which in fact wasn’t that far. Ten years ago she probably wouldn’t have needed her magic at all. Once inside, she took one look around, pointed to something we couldn’t see against the interior wall, and a draw bridge slid out from the left, planted its one end on our side of the pit and its other on the other. It was steel and some hardwood, and other than the dust could have been built yesterday.
Still D’gattis let me cross it, then Eric before he chanced it. Shela watched me for signs that the bridge was another trap, but barely looked at Eric. At this point, she was more concerned with the contents of the vault.
There was the usual stack of gold. Not at much as in Outpost X, but enough were a common could buy a Duchy and still expect his great-grandchildren to lead a lavish life. There were the books I wanted – tomes filled usually with spells and history. The Cheyak were prolific writers and, by now, we had more than a dozen scholars fluent in their language.
Some art – mountainscapes and plains, horses being ridden by tall, thin men and women with flowing hair. Uman were in attendance in some, Scitai in others.
The little people dated back to the days of the Cheyak. That had come as a real surprise to Karel of Stone.
We saw some old armor that might have looked good in a museum, but which wouldn’t be worth anything now. Either the Cheyak didn’t have the ability or the inclination to mix their magic with their weapons.
Eric approached one suit, a full metal cuirass, sleeves and greaves, a helmet with cheek pieces and a very Roman-looking bristle on the top. He wrapped it with his knuckles and it sounded solid.
“Can I have this?” he asked, turning to me.
I shrugged. “If you want it,” I said. “I can have you a suit made by Dwarves which would put that relic to shame. I’d hit it with a sword or a spear before I relied on it.”
He nodded and looked around for something to pile it onto. His eyes lighted on a tapestry with an old man with long, white hair stitched into it.
“No!” D’gattis gasped. I had to think that was kind of funny. The tapestry was probably worth the value of a warship to any Uman-Chi, and the armor wasn’t worth melting down.
“It’s a drape,” Eric complained.
“Look at it more closely?” D’gattis said. “What do you see?”
At first, I didn’t see anything, then it occurred to me.
That wasn’t a Cheyak, that was an Uman-Chi. It had silver-on-silver eyes, and that meant that it was an Uman-Chi, but some other race had created it.
More evidence that the Cheyak had survived the Blast, and shut these places up.
“Is that?” Shela began, then shook her head. “No, it couldn’t be – but it looks like him.”
“What?” I asked her.
“Angron Aurelias,” D’gattis said. “The King of Trenbon. No, Lady Shela, I think it is not him, but it might be his father.”
Angron Aurelias was almost 1,000 years old, and his father had survived the Blast. This we knew from our own history.
But the Uman-Chi were considered slaves to the Cheyak – we’d learned this from the lore they’d left behind. Who would do such a regal tapestry of a slave?
“We’ll bundle it all off for Wisex,” I said. I turned to Eric.
“If you’re staying the night, I’ll have this moved to your rooms,” I told him.
“I’m not,” he informed me.
“Nor am I,” D’gattis said. “Since you so eloquently plied for peace among the Fovean nations, only to turn ‘round and attack Andoron unprovoked, there are issues of state in abundance on the Silent Isle. My council is sought heavily.”
I nodded. “You know you can’t let your King see that,” I informed him.
More dark looks.
I sighed. “I’ll have a cart brought for the armor. D’gattis, I assume you’re returning him from wherever you came from?”
I knew better than to ask from where.
“If I may have a moment of your Lady’s time?” the Uman-Chi asked me.
That was new. I shrugged and he was off with Shela, probably to tell her something he didn’t think I was smart enough to understand.
Eric just stood there, looking at me.
Hard to imagine what was going through his head.
Chapter Three
Whatever Makes Mama Happy
“I need to return to Galnesh Eldador,” Shela informed me.
We sat at dinner in the palace of Charancor, at the formal dining room, where Andaron servants brought us meals native to their land. It was mostly beef and vegetables, which was fine by me.
Shela was still wearing her palace dress. I’d changed into my usual leather pants and plain cotton overshirt. The table was no less than 30 feet long, and we occupied all of a corner of it.
Apparently Geeguh Digatish, the former warlord, used to have big parties here all the time. This port city sat at the mouth of the Safe River and had always benefited from almost all of the trade with the Andaron tribes. The addition of Wisex didn’t hurt them as my sailors used this as a liberty port.
The table was stained with the wine that these people loved to drink. The tribes tended toward fermented mare’s milk, but I didn’t see any trace of that awful stuff. Unlike my own dining hall, there wasn’t a giant bay window that looked out over the water, but instead several smaller windows without glass which looked out over the plains.
I swallowed a chunk of beef.
“Why?” I asked her. I wasn’t about to tell her, “No,” I just wanted to know what was going on.
“Central Communications can be repaired,” she told me. “The Green One and D’gattis have been there and done their part. I’m the only one who can tie the cities back together.”
Central Communications was a conduit the three of them had created between Galnesh Eldador and the rest of my cities. Rather than relying on fast messengers and carrier pigeons, wizards spoke to each other directly and in real time. It gave us a huge advantage over other nations and had really sparked our success in economics and our military.
We missed it sorely, once it was gone.
“Any idea what broke it?” I asked her.
She nodded, took a sip of red wine, and shuddered a little from its potency. “Our daughter, Lee,” she said. “As far as D’gattis could tell, when Angron came through the portal, she didn’t have the knowledge to battle him, and she didn’t want to be taken prisoner, so she tried to unravel the magic.”
I felt my eyebrows shoot up my forehead. “Didn’t you tell me that those magix –“ I began.
“Should never be tampered with,” she finished for me. “And had any wizard less than the King of Trenbon tried to salvage those works, Galnesh Eldador would be a smoking crater, filling with water from a larger Tren Bay.”
Wow.
“I didn’t think that Lee had the power?” I said.
Shela shook her head and took a small bite of beef. “She doesn’t,” she informed me. “But just as it is e
asier to break a sword than to forge one, unraveling the magic is much easier than weaving it.”
I nodded. That made sense.
“I’ve a couple Sea Wolves in port,” I said. “One is a special. That should be safe enough to get you home.”
She nodded, looking down into her plate.
She knew where this was going.
“You can take the Empire back from Duke Stowe,” I told her. “He’s been there too long. According to the reports I’ve been receiving, he and J’her are at each others’ throats and Toorians have been hunting in Angador.”
“All bad news,” Shela agreed, not looking at me.
She didn’t want to go. I admit, I didn’t want to send her.
The plan had always been that I would lead the battles, she would keep the home front. Our wizards were sufficient to meet most of the magic we’d encounter, and our armies made up for where the wizards might fail.
She didn’t like it when she couldn’t keep an eye on me, and that was a fact.
“I’ll miss you,” I informed her.
“And I, you,” she agreed.
We retired to the suite of rooms I made our own here. The love-making was almost fierce, as if she had to get everything she could out of me to hold her.
***
The first day of the month of Law saw her ship leave over the horizon with a full complement of Wolf Soldiers, and my own troops marching for Talen, the Andaron city that sat next to the Aschire.
We’d come here with 25,000. We’d lost an astounding 3,500 thanks to my new kids. It would take 2,000 to hold the city, and that left me 19,000 who could march, and around 500 who were needed for other duties.
There was a barge that ran up and down the Safe River, moving goods between Wisex and Charancor. Our enemies had used it and some like it to set a fire in the middle of the Safe River, in order to render it impassable to my Aschire archers who’d been hiding in the Confluni forests, prior to the conquest of Chatoos. I’d called for new crews to walk new aurochs here to replace the teams, and commissioned new boats to replace the ones burned. I planned to load them with the booty from the Outpost I vault, when I was informed that the crew needed to see me.
That was exceedingly rare. I rode Blizzard out with the first load, which included the first boat. Dual teams of aurochs stood yoked together, waiting with their tenders to be hitched to the boats. The boats would be dragged up the river by the aurochs, and then simply tended on the way back. Training the aurochs, however, was better done on the trip down, where if they had to cut a boat loose, it just went where it planned to go anyway.
Millennia of Eldadorian Regulars had been marching toward Talen for three days, leaving one every other hour for 10 hours a day. Tomorrow the last of them would leave, and that one would be outside of Talen in eighteen days.
We’d be better rested than the troops who came here, but we were fewer in number. If I’d followed the plan I set for Vulpe then all of those troops would have arrived over two days.
I wanted it to seem like a never-ending wave heading for Talen. On the plains you could see a full ten daheeri (by definition – a daheer was one tenth the distance to the horizon on a flat plain). Our camps would stretch back to the horizon for four days.
This also made feeding them easier. I was shipping Sentalan grain and milk that we pasteurized in Eldador using my Sea Wolves. Vulpe had relied on a train, and the Andarons had attacked it during the battle. That put us in a fix here.
I turned my back to the line of warriors tromping to Talen and faced eight of my Wolf Soldiers on the bank of the Safe River.
I recognized one of them right away – Drenten. He was an older Man, a committed drunkard and a fearless warrior who’d been up and down the ranks of the Pack. He’d been with me since the sack of Outpost IX.
He walked up to me with a giant smile on his face, which was a shame because his teeth were in pretty bad shape from years of drinking. I could tell right away that he was sober.
“Lupus,” he said, saluting me. “Thank you, Sir. Thank you fer comin’.”
“This better be important, Drenten,” I informed him. The last time I’d encountered him he was using a giant mallet to smack the heads off of Confluni prisoners in a distance competition I didn’t approve of, and I’d busted him down to regular soldier for it.
“Lupus,” he said, and he actually put his hand on my leg, still in my stirrup on top of Blizzard. “I’ve seen yer daughter. She’s alive, Sir. She’s alive!”
I was off of my stallion fast enough to scare him. Blizzard stomped angrily and looked for something to charge. I’d been told that Lee was alive, but I didn’t know much more.
“You’ve seen her?” I said. I took his shoulders in my hands. “With your own eyes.”
His smile was infectious. All off the Wolf Soldiers caught it. I can’t imagine I was the first one hearing his story.
“When I heard she’d been lost,” he said, “I swore to Adriam and War, if she could somehow survive, then I’d give up the liquor, and by Their holy names, Sir, I haven’t had a drop since the eleventh day or Water’s month, and I never will.”
When we had to go to Outpost IX, my blood-brother, Two Spears, had help up Lee, then an infant, before the assembled Pack and asked them, “Who among you would fight for her, against those who would make her a slave?”
Drenten had been there for that event. My soldiers loved my children in various degrees. They loved Chawnee, my youngest, and they fought for Vulpe.
But that event put the veterans and Lee in a very special category. Yes, I could believe that he’d made such a vow for her return.
Less that he’d keep it. Faith is a funny thing, especially after you get what you want.
“Where?” I asked him. I was actually getting a little choked up.
“She was in a Confluni junk, come up the Jeng-Jeng River, with the young prince Hectaro, her horse Singer, and his, that big son of Blizzard,” Drenten informed me. “Later she told me that when she was attacked in Galnesh Eldador, she stepped into a void, and a Druidess guided her to Conflu, deep in, and had to cross a few mountains and fight a few battles before she could come back to us.”
This was a lot, and not all of it good. I knew of a female Druid with enough power to sniff out an open void, and we were not friends.
But why would she send Lee and Hectaro to Conflu? That should have been a death sentence. I was two days’ ride into Conflu and it was a miracle that I’d escaped.
“She gave me this, for the archives,” Drenten added, handing me a piece of parchment. The archives were the library that formed the center of Wisex, and would be the biggest library Fovea had ever seen.
I opened the parchment and found in it a map, showing me the Fovea that I knew, and the parts of Conflu that she’d been to, apparently. I recognized where she’d marked Wisex and the cities that she’d been to, and not bothered with the ones that I would already know, except to mark them for reference.
Shela and I had both insisted that the kids learned map-making. Apparently that had paid off, and then some.
Drenten continued to tell me what he knew from Lee. Apparently she’d had the power to call her horse (and Bastard, Hectaro’s horse) from Galnesh Eldador, tack and all, and then to fight off Confluni, Scitai, and anyone else she came across.
I really wish that Shela had been here to hear this. Figures, just as soon as I sent her home, I’d need her. What’s worse was, when I told her all of this, she was just going to want to hear it for herself.
Finally that light dawned on me.
“Lieutenant!” I called to my personal guard.
A Volkhydran stepped forward, a more manicured version of a shaggy warrior from the Volkha side of Volkhydro. I’d recruited him years ago, after the first invasion of Thera.
You could see that sleeves and greaves made him uncomfortable. His brown hair might be combed neatly, befitting an officer, but his brown eyes were constantly looking for an enemy to fix on, darti
ng back and forth under wind-burned skin.
“Lupus?” he answered me.
“Transfer this man to the First Millennia,” I told him. “Replace him with one of the 500 extras from the marching army – work it out with your Major, make it happen today.”
The Lieutenant made a fist over his heart, as did Drenten, and the former pointed to the troop of Wolf Soldiers who had accompanied me here.
Transfers like this happened all the time as we needed more warriors or replenished veteran ranks. I didn’t have to tell Drenten to repeat all of this to Shela, because nothing was going to stop him.
We dropped the boat in the water and filled it with tomes covered in plains grass and oiled leather. The grass would protect the pages from the leather, the leather would protect the books from the river spray. Packed tight, it should arrive in Wisex pretty much like we sent it.
I had things to get ready.
***
Mounted warriors could make it from Charancor to Talen in under a week. In fact I could have beaten the army there without trying too hard, but that wouldn’t have worked out real well for me.
Daggonin was in the first Millennium that would arrive there, on the 16th of Law if everything went well. I left Charancor on the eighth in order to meet with him on the 15th, and then ride in with my pennons waving with that Millennium. We’d beat huge drums for a day before – the sound would carry across the plains and echo from Talen’s city walls. The idea behind that was to dismay and terrify the enemy.
The Mongols did it under Kublai Khan and half the time he ‘conquered’ empty cities.
If we were in control of Talen at the beginning of Law, then it would be too late for the Fovean armies to assemble and come after me. They would likely decide to embargo my nation, as well as the Volkhydran and Andaron shores, believing that I couldn’t maintain my campaign on Eldadorian resources that had been severely limited by an invasion by Conflu.
In fact, that’s what I was hoping would happen, and if I could arrange for it, I would.
