Semper Indomitus: Book Five of the Fovean Chronicles

by Robert Brady

  No more promise to me than to them, I thought. Well, it’s a start.

  I tugged on Blizzard’s reins and we turned east toward the trail that would lead to the road. It was approaching noon, and we wouldn’t be moving at Blizzard’s speed any more. We’d be lucky to make camp before dark.

  I expected Eric to ride up next to me, but he hung back with Nina. It turned out that Dagi was the one who rode up next to me, that shield of hers over her back and her sword in a scabbard attached to her saddle. She looked for all the world like an Andaron warrior in Volkhydran clothes.

  We stayed silent for a while. I think she might have been waiting either for Shela to replace her or for me to send her back, but neither happened and Shela was actually pretty deep in discussion with Lee.

  “My mother married a Long Manes warrior,” she said, finally. “She has two sons.”

  I nodded. “Have you thought of adult names for them?”

  She looked at me. “So you know our traditions?”

  “Hard not to,” I said.

  She nodded and was quiet for a while. We were coming up on the main road.

  “Did she stay with Chesswaya’s mother after her tribe dissolved?” I asked.

  “After you destroyed it, and formed your Wolf Riders, you mean?” Dagi accused me.

  “Yes,” I said, looking straight at her.

  She met my eyes. Hers were every bit as cold as I knew mine could be. She was going to feel me out and decide if I was worth staying with. That’s what I would have done as a kid, too.

  “No,” Dagi said. “Chesswaya’s mother went to the Sure Foot, then the Hunters when they had no women. I met Chesswaya at the Long Manes’ tribe last year, when she came to learn her craft. We didn’t know that we were sisters until the demigod Steel told us.

  Whoa – didn’t see that one coming.

  “Steel?” I asked. “The Savior. Steel came to you?”

  Dagi nodded.

  “In a dream?”

  She shook her head. “While we were playing chunkee with Nanette and Thorna,” she said.

  I looked back at Nantar’s daughters, riding side-by-side with spears in their hands, just ahead of Eric. If there were a fight, they were positioned to come charging into it.

  We turned onto the road. The sun overhead gave me a little warmth, but not much. I was going to need to go somewhere and buy furs.

  “What did Steel have to say to you?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”

  Dagi was silent for a moment. She looked up at me from her horse and she said, “He came to see the daughters of the Daff Kanaar. I thought that He meant Nanette and Thorna, and He said, “No, the other daughters. He meant Chesswaya and me.”

  I nodded and stayed quiet.

  “He told us that it was a new age, and that we needed to go north and to learn a song from a Druid in Volkhydro. He warned us that nothing would be the same.”

  That was news.

  “We waited for the men to come back from Toor, and most of them did. We went north on strong horses and we found our brother, Agtani Chewla, and then our other brother and his wife.

  “We saw the war come to our land, and we heard Eric, whom we named Usdi Waya, tell us that if Chatoos fell, then our land would never be the same.”

  Usdi Waya meant ‘Little Wolf’ in Andaron. Eric had a lot of foresight.

  “Then we met you, our father,” she said. She was looking straight forward now. “We would have known you, if Steel had never met us.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded, still not looking at me. “Chesswaya has your eyes,” she said. “I have your lips and your nose. Mother had described you without naming you – and Chesswaya felt your presence before she met you.”

  “Chesswaya has great power,” I commented.

  That got a look from Dagi. “As does Lee,” she said. “Vulpe can sing, and singing is important. Lupennen speaks with animals – I can’t imagine a more powerful gift.”

  “And Eric is Daff Kanaar,” I said, “and you wonder, ‘What of poor Waya Daganogeda? What does she inherit from the Emperor?”

  She looked up at me again, and this time I thought I could see some hurt in her eyes.

  “Yes,” she said. “What of Dagi, who has nothing but her mouth?”

  An Andaron who ‘has nothing but her mouth,” is usually a woman who’s a gossip, or a complainer. It’s a derogatory term for a spinster, or one who is going to be a spinster if she doesn’t change her ways, because no one wants a woman who’s always giving her opinion.

  “Maybe you’re more my child than any of them?” I told her.

  She regarded me but said nothing.

  “I can’t speak to animals,” I said. “I can’t cast spells. I can’t stun a crowd with my song, and I had to go to Conflu to get the mark of the Daff Kanaar – no one clashed swords with me and put it there.

  “I’ve never had anything but my mouth,” I said. “It served me well.”

  “You forget the horse you ride,” she said. “The sword you carry. You forget the stories about you, sung in every language.”

  I nodded. “But I got them without magic,” I said. “Without song.”

  She wasn’t looking at me, so I reached down and I stroked her long, brown hair. She looked back up at me and I asked, “Do you want to learn these things?”

  She frowned and looked forward.

  Finally, when I thought I wasn’t going to get an answer, she said, “Yes. I want to know everything.”

  Good enough, then!

  ***

  The sun was setting when we made it to the Angadorian camp. The wind had come up and it was plenty cold. Shela had communicated with the camp wizards that we were coming, and the pavilion was still up and heated for us when we arrived.

  Chesswaya was there, once we’d put up our horses. She had a stew prepared and we all sat to eat.

  “Is this the sort of thing you did with Vedeen and Jack?” I asked them.

  “They didn’t have a pavilion,” Vulpe said immediately.

  “He meant did we sit and eat together, stupid,” Lee scolded him.

  “You’re stupid,” Vulpe immediately retorted.

  At least that hadn’t changed.

  “Yes,” Eric said, interrupting them both. “They would take times like this to tell us stories. Usually involving the prophecy and what Vedeen thought of it.”

  “Anything about that you’d like to share with me?” I asked.

  He looked to Nina immediately. Probably too early to ask a question like that – he must have thought I was going to turn them against Vedeen and Jack, like they’d tried against me.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything you feel you shouldn’t,” I said. “Everyone has a right to their own life.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Nina said. “She would tell us, for example, that the shield wasn’t a weapon, but then maybe it was most important, and that’s why Dagi felt drawn to it and to the sword.”

  I looked at the shield where Dagi had dropped it in the corner. “Why did you change to that from the spear?” I asked.

  “I liked the spear,” Dagi said, “but it didn’t like me. I can’t explain it. The sword I have – it doesn’t care at all about me. When I carry it, I feel like ten warriors aren’t enough to beat me in a fight. I like that feeling.”

  “Mother said the dagger made her feel like someone was leering at her,” Lupennen said. “She put it under her pillow one night and had dreams that upset her.”

  “My sword makes me want to fight all the time,” Eric said. “It also – well, when I wield it, I break other swords. It’s like the sword was designed to break them.”

  “There are swords like that,” I told Eric, “but they aren’t shaped like your sword. I’ve never seen a blade so black as yours.”

  Eric sopped up his stew with a crust of bread. He was starting on a scant, blond beard. I might have warned him that it was a lost cause – the hair would simply never fill in – but he needed to le
arn some things himself.

  “This staff shows me miracles I’d never conceived of,” Chesswaya said. When she spoke, she kept this ethereal tone to her voice. “I think that, soon, I’ll be able to reach into the void that my sister, Lee, traveled.”

  That’s when I realized that my oldest daughter wasn’t there. Her fox was sitting in a corner of the pavilion, eating from a bowl, but no Lee.

  “Where?” I asked, then about jumped out of my skin when I felt the hand on my shoulder.

  “Got you, father,” she whispered in my ear. The other kids laughed.

  One thing I thought very highly of was my sense of hearing. My engine room ears had saved my butt on more than one occasion, but I had no idea that Lee was sneaking up behind me.

  “Whoever has the spear can do that,” Dagi said. “When I had it, I slipped past your Wolf Soldier guards and led us off of your battlefield in Chatoos.”

  “One who eludes prying eyes,” I said.

  “Vulpe,” I said, getting my son’s attention. “You have the sword Arath gave you,” I said. “The one he found on the site where he killed the Toorian?”

  He nodded.

  “Stand up for me,” I said.

  Vulpe put his bowl down, then stood. Without being asked, he pulled the sword and held it by the bone handle.

  I pulled the dagger I’d kept from Genna, and held it by the handle. “Hold still,” I told him.

  Before he could react or complain, I heaved the dagger at him, flipping it so that the handle, not the point, would hit him.

  It made a solid, hollow knock as it bounced off of the front of his shirt.

  He looked down at the fallen dagger. “I didn’t even feel it.”

  Nantar had told me that the Toorian was immune to his weapons. He had to overpower and strangle him to kill him.

  “One who can’t be touched,” Shela said.

  I nodded.

  They were the weapons. More accurately, the weapons were meant for them, and then they could invoke whatever powers were inherent in them.

  Vulpe picked the dagger up, turned the point toward the palm of his hand, and stabbed gently.

  Then with more force, but it didn’t matter, because the dagger couldn’t penetrate his skin.

  Then his brother Eric, sitting behind him, reached forward and flicked him behind the ear.

  “Hey!” he complained.

  “Not completely invincible,” he said, and took another bite of bread and broth.

  Vulpe sat down and tossed the dagger back to me.

  I sheathed it in my belt where I kept it.

  Eric had found his sword on the battle field where I’d fought the Swamp Devil – a devil born and raised. Nina had found Dagi’s sword and shield where Karl Henekhson had died with that dog of mine they’d befriended.

  And the shield bore the face of the dog.

  “Wasn’t one of the ones mentioned in the prophecy a dog?” I asked.

  Chesswaya nodded. “One of your special dogs,” she said. “It ‘fights as does the son.’ It doesn’t actually attack, it circles and knocks riders from their saddles. It bides its time and lets what’s going to happen, happen.”

  “Like the War months give Men the opportunity to fight,” Dagi said.

  So… why a shield, then?

  There were plenty of questions to be asked, then answered. We didn’t get to them all that night. One-by-one the kids started dropping off to sleep, finally it was just Shela and me left.

  We’d been together for almost two decades, and she still wouldn’t go to sleep before I did.

  “Well?” I asked her.

  She was sitting next to me. Lee’s head was in her lap, the fox tucked in under her cloak. Vulpe used to like to fall asleep like that, but he was a man now, and a man didn’t fall asleep in his mother’s lap.

  His sister should have already picked him out a new name.

  “You have many children,” she said, finally. “And they have many gifts.”

  “Dagi actually thinks she should have a gift, and doesn’t,” I said.

  Shela snorted. “Dagi is more like you than the rest,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought,” I said.

  She leaned against me and she kissed me.

  “These children are a part of a prophecy we thought we’d beaten,” she said. “It is not good that we find out, instead, that it might have just begun. Everything we’ve done so far may have been for nothing.”

  “Well,” I said, “not nothing. We increased the size of the Empire, eliminated our enemies. When we go back to battle in the War months, we should absorb half of Conflu.”

  “That is nothing to a god,” Shela said, looking into my eyes. “They think in terms past what we can dream, with more layers than we can imagine.”

  I nodded. I already knew that to be true.

  It wasn’t easy to think of myself both as out-classing all those around me, while being out-classed by the being pulling my strings.

  “If this is actually the beginning,” I said, “then it changes everything but who the One is, I think.”

  Shela looked in my eyes. “However you question that, too, don’t you?”

  No one knows me better than Shela.

  “If I’m not the One,” I said, “then we have an enemy out there that we don’t know about, and that we might not even have met. We think we’re ahead, but we’re actually losing and don’t know it.”

  “If that’s true, then we’ll overcome it, as we have everything that’s ever come our way,” Shela informed me.

  “It’s a prophecy, and a prophecy is a warning and a prediction. It need not come to pass.”

  Otherwise, I thought, why bother having one?

  “Something else concerns me,” she informed me.

  I watched as she pushed Lee’s head off of her lap. My oldest daughter made sleepy ‘mmf’ sounds and reached out for a fur to use as a pillow. Shela skooched herself closer to me and looked in my eyes.

  “Today you used the power that Jack used against us,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I have never felt power like that,” she said. “So… raw. You wielded it without consequence, in defiance of your god; perhaps of all of the gods.”

  I hadn’t mentioned War’s displeasure to her, but she could easily have sensed it through Power, whom she was very much in tune with.

  “Where did you come by that magic?” she asked.

  I sighed and leaned back against a saddle we’d brought in. She cuddled up next to me and laid her head on my chest.

  “I told you that, where I am from, we had one God, and that was it,” I said. “He is all powerful.”

  She nodded and looked up at me.

  “Those words are a worship of him,” I said. “Of a part of Him, of His son.”

  “He is his own son?” Shela asked.

  I was not going to go down a road that had been either perplexing or pissing off scholars for more than 2,000 years.

  “Druids speak of a Trinity,” I said. “We have one, too. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. They’re different aspects of the same deity, who fulfill different duties and accomplish different thing for worshippers.”

  Before she could ask more, I added, “The language that you heard, was the dominant one when His son walked the earth among us.”

  “Like Steel, the Savior, walks among us,” she said.

  “Very similar,” I said.

  “Druids, in fact, speak some of those words,” she said. “But they don’t command the power. That is what concerns me – when a spell or an incantation is spoken, it invokes a response. Even if the one who speaks it isn’t gifted, if he or she says the words correctly, there is a reaction.”

  “Because the words have power,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I thought about this.

  “If I say ‘E pluribus unum,’” I said, “those are words of that language. Nothing happens – I have said ‘Out of many, one.’ Again – nothi
ng.”

  “Very well,” she said.

  I pushed myself up. She rose with me, and she handed me my warm fur. I was already missing my armor. She dragged on a leather cloak she liked, we put on our shoes and we went outside into the cold.

  We walked through the jess doonar, past the pickets, past the guards. I topped a hill with her, and we walked down the other side. She raised her hand and used white power to let us see.

  “Give me your dagger,” I told her.

  She pulled her sickle dagger from her waist and handed it to me. It was well balanced.

  There was a scrub tree about 20 yards from us. That was a hell of a throw, but I took aim and pitched the knife at the tree.

  “In nomine patre, et fili, et spiritu sancti,” I said.

  In the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost.

  The dagger glowed brilliantly and morphed into a thing of pure, silver power. It literally dripped energy, scorching the earth below it, until it hit the tree.

  The tree exploded with more force than a small bomb. It left a crater in the dirt. Behind us, we could hear the horses rearing and calling out their challenges.

  “War’s beard!” Shela swore.

  I’d tried this on my own after Jack pulled his little trick on the way to Hydrus.

  We returned to the pavilion and met Nina, Lee and Chesswaya half-way there. The energy had roused all three of them and they’d seen us missing. Just as I was realizing who was approaching me, I saw two more figures on the edge of my vision and, by their spears, I assumed that they were Nanette and Thorna.

  “We thought to wake our brothers,” Chesswaya said, “but they were long on the road and need their sleep.”

  “We came to see what you were doing,” Lee informed us.

  “We all knew the source of that magic,” Nina added.

  They walked us back through the pickets and to our tents, Nantar’s daughters preceding us. The guards were getting ready to go to full alert and I shut that down. When we were finally back in our warm tent, we shed our cloaks and boots. I lay down on my back and Shela lay down with me, the three girls finding their spots again. Outside of the pavilion I heard an Angadorian Knight on watch, crunching along the frozen ground. How long ago was that me, just a guard on watch, doing his job.