by Robert Brady
Shela after me, Dilvesh after her.
And a lot of Confluni, once they figured out what we did.
“Close that thing,” I told Shela.
“It takes time,” she answered, and pushed a hand through her long, black hair.
“And cannot be done once they start to use it,” Dilvesh warned.
He raised a hand that glowed red and green.
If I’d had the Sword of War, I’d have just cleaved the wall. I actually had nothing but one of Genna’s daggers. That was, literally, not going to cut it.
I put my hand on the portal. It was trembling. The Confluni weren’t stupid – they saw us leap through a wall, they knew that was a threat, and they were going to eliminate it if they could.
Then they’d scour the whole place for other threats. They’d find our tower in Andoron, and the portals to Wisex, Eldador and recently, Luparren in Dorkan.
“En nomene patri,” I began.
I froze – the son! What was the Latinate of the ‘the son?’
“Get out of the way,” Shela told me.
I could actually feel the people coming through the conduit. I think I was holding them back.
“Black Lupus…” Dilvesh warned me.
Fili!
“En nomine patri, et fili, et spiritu sancti!” I shouted into the portal.
The explosion threw me back against the far wall, no less than 15 feet behind me.
As I blacked out I thought, “Wow, personal best.”
***
I woke up in a room I didn’t recognize, laying on a hard floor. Shela was on one side of me, Dilvesh on the other.
Ancenon and D’gattis stood over us. They didn’t look real pleased.
“You should be dead,” the latter informed me.
“Great to see you, too,” I answered.
“We were made aware of you from the shockwave that ruined Outpost X,” Ancenon informed me. “I can’t fathom why you would do that.”
“It was overrun,” Dilvesh informed them. D’gattis was kneeling at Shela’s side. She had a bloody gash across her forehead and the ends of her hair were singed.
“The Confluni found it,” I added. “We created a portal, and when we retreated through it, they were going to follow.”
“They would have found all of the other portals,” Dilvesh said. “I do not recognize the spell Black Lupus used, however if it destroyed Outpost X, that’s a blessing.”
“I cannot agree,” Ancenon told us.
I sighed and pushed myself up to a sitting position. Everything hurt, but it was a dull pain.
“They already had the gold,” I informed him.
“Oh,” Ancenon said.
Shela mumbled to herself. D’gattis stood. “Still, the historical loss –“
“It was bound to happen, cousin,” Ancenon informed him. “Be glad it wasn’t other Uman-Chi. They would not have been caught unawares.”
Dilvesh turned to me. “What power was that, which you used?” he asked me. “I recognize it from your countryman, Jack, but I was not aware you possessed it.”
“It was an invocation,” I said, the word being strange on my tongue. Without the sword, I actually spoke these languages. “It is from my home world.”
“Where they have no magic,” D’gattis said.
I nodded. “I said it all of the time there,” I told them, “and nothing exploded.”
“And here,” Ancenon said.
“I’d really rather not play around with it, if you don’t mind.”
Shela pushed herself up next to me. “That could be a good idea.”
***
The loss of Outpost X was a big, tactical disaster to overcome when we didn’t need another one. It called for drastic, immediate action.
On the 15th of Eveave, with Shela recovered, she called to her every member of the Free Legion. As many people wanted the fall of the Free Legion to happen at that point in time, it wasn’t as hard for her as I thought it would be.
Thorn had been with Arath, in Wisex. Nantar was with Eric. Karel was fortunately on Trickery, but then we had to move the pony to the stables. The rest of us were already here.
What made less than no sense was that Nina showed up, and with a jade question mark, turned upside-down on her leather breast plate.
I’d never even seen her wear that before. It was probably against the cold as much as anything else.
Shela plunked herself down, exhausted, on the lowest step to the stone throne of Hydrus, soon to be Hydro again.
“What is this?” Eric demanded. Nantar put a hand on his shoulder to calm him.
“What is this?” Ancenon demanded in return, pointing at Nina.
“It showed up a few days ago,” Nantar said. “She can’t remove it.”
“And so, with every new occurrence, another,” D’gattis informed us. “I would have said that this meeting was needed to call an end to the Free Legion, however it seems to me that the god Adriam would have other plans.”
“This is more of Eveave, than Adriam, I would think,” said Ancenon.
“The end of the Free Legion?” Arath demanded. He shook his head. “So long as Outpost X –“
“Outpost X is no more,” Dilvesh said. “It was overrun by the Confluni, and when discovered by Shela, Black Lupus and I, the Emperor destroyed it with an en hoc aye shun. I admit that I do not know this magic, but it comes from his home world.”
Thorn turned to Nantar, then to Arath. “With the gold in Outpost X at their disposal, the Confluni could field such an army –“ he began.
I shook my head. “I think we caught them before that,” I said. “They were loading and piling the gold they found when we caught them. I know that Eric had unloaded some of it, but I don’t think they got much more.”
“D’gattis encouraged me to take as much as he could move,” Eric said. “I am glad I listened.”
“Where is the gold looted from the other Outposts?” Arath asked.
“Wait – wait,” Nina said, waving a hand in front of her. “Outpost X, other Outposts – what is all of this? I don’t understand.”
“It is her right to know,” Ancenon said.
“What have you already told her?” D’gattis asked Eric.
Eric looked down, then back up. “About the fire bond,” she said. “That we are a brotherhood. That, now, none of you can betray her, or she them.”
Because he was the best at telling it, D’gattis told her the rest – the trip to Outpost X, then stores of gold, later learning of other Outposts and their untapped treasuries. One thing became clear to her right away.”
“You didn’t care about uniting the Fovean nations,” she said. “You wanted the Outposts.”
“I wanted both, really,” I said. “I wanted the lost lore of the Cheyak, to be able to unite Fovea and end the wars.”
“Under the god War, oddly,” D’gattis remarked.
“Whose instrument I no longer am,” I said. I spread my arms. “See – no more Sword of War.”
“We face a new threat,” Nantar said, “and I think War is to blame for it. The Men of the Great North march into Volkhydro, and the former King, Gharf Bendenson, would have let them.”
“I am the new King,” Eric proclaimed. “I will fight – Volkhydro will not fall.”
Arath grinned to himself. “Are you, now?”
Eric’s hand fell to the pommel of the black sword at his side.
All eyes opened wide, then he removed it.
“I apologize,” he said. “I forgot myself.”
Nina put a hand on his shoulder and she turned to her. “No one of us can lift a hand against another or, through inaction, allow another to come to harm.”
Karel perked up and he stepped into the middle of us. “We need Chesswaya here,” he said, suddenly.
“My daughter?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because when I was in Andoron with Vulpe and Eric,” he began.
“She predicted that Outpost X would fall,” E
ric finished for him. “I remember it, by the fire.”
Karel nodded. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”
“And I wasn’t a member of the Free Legion yet, so I didn’t know what it meant,” said Eric. “I hadn’t thought of it since.”
I turned to Shela. “Can you summon her?” I asked.
She nodded. She looked down for a moment, and then looked up.
“She is on her way,” Shela said.
“We can’t tell her about the Free Legion,” D’gattis insisted.
“Apparently, she already knows,” Karel informed him.
“And you said nothing to her?”Ancenon pressed Karel.
The Scitai shook his bearded head. “I had just realized that Eric, Chessa and Dagi were all brothers and sisters, and I’d already discovered that Eric was Black Lupus’ son. I made a riddle of it for her, and she told me a real riddle.”
“Something about how what you thought was keeping you together, you had lost, and something about…” Eric began.
Chessa entered the room with Dagi in tow.
D’gattis opened his mouth but Shela and I both shook our heads. Separating them wasn’t going to happen.
Chessa closed the throne room doors behind her without touching them, and entered the room.
She walked right up to Karel. “So finally, you know my riddle,” she said to him directly.
He nodded.
“This is a prophetic time,” she said, and turned to the rest of us.
“You have lost what you were meant to lose,” she said, matter-of-factly, “and are finding what you need to find?”
“What can you tell us?” D’gattis asked of her.
She smiled. “The question,” she answered him, looking directly into those ambiguous eyes, “is ‘What can you understand?’”
“You question the Uman-Chi mind?” he challenged her.
“Your mind leaves a lot to question,” Chesswaya said back.
D’gattis bridled, and Ancenon stepped in, as he usually did.
“I think the correct question,” he said, “is, ‘What would you have us know?’”
“Wisdom is the way of the wise man,” Chessa said, not turning from D’gattis. “Knowledge unprepared for is a lodestone.”
“Riddles, riddles,” Thorn said.
“These are all I have for you, my countryman,” Chessa told him. “If you want straight answers, speak to the one you call ‘Jack.’”
“Jack?” Thorn turned to me.
“He’s here?”
I nodded. “I fought him in the north,” I said. “I think it drove him insane.”
“Madness is the wisdom of the superior mind,” Chessa told us.
More riddles.
We grilled her as hard as I and Dagi would let them, and then we broke up. Shela returned Eric, Nantar and Nina to Eric’s marching army, fast-approaching Vol. I’d decided to meet him there.
Thorn and Arath returned to Wisex. Dilvesh brought them there, claiming he had more research to do.
Shela went to sleep early that day. I invited Dagi and Chessa to a private dinner that night. Of course, Karel showed up. He was on his way back, anyway.
“What do you know of the Free Legion?” I asked Chessa.
“As much as is needed,” she answered.
Karel sighed.
“She’s always been this way,” Dagi said. “For as long as I’ve known her. Before that, as a child, she didn’t have her power. I think she was different, but I don’t know.”
“I am as is the wind,” Chessa informed us. “It is constant, although you might think it not.”
“You can’t just say what’s on your mind,” I said, “because there’s no way to express it. The words don’t exist.”
“That makes no sense,” Karel said.
“And is wisdom profound,” Chessa added.
“Jack has the words,” I said, “but the words are the problem for him. They don’t express what he means, and he can’t reconcile it.”
Chessa nodded. No one else, I think, might have really understood this, because no one else spoke to a god.
No one else knew how hard it was for them to express themselves to us, because of how primitive we were in comparison to them. It was like educating a Neanderthal in quantum physics. You were so removed from a common reference that you couldn’t do it.
It wasn’t a comment on the Neanderthal, really.
“Who is Nina to you, then?” I asked her.
Chessa looked at me. “An Aschire, a woman, a wife, a mother soon, though she doesn’t know it.”
Neither did I.
“These are all of your words?” I asked.
Chessa frowned. I could tell her what I wanted, but then I would taint it. I needed to hear this from Chessa, as Chessa would tell me.
I needed common ground.
Chessa smiled. She looked at me. “She is new in her status as a Daff Kanaar,” she said, using the Uman for the Free Legion.
“And Eric?” I asked.
“What is this game?” Dagi insisted, but Chessa raised a hand and quieted her.
Bigger smile. “A King,” she said. “A husband, a father, a warrior for the people, sacred to Adriam and Law; afraid of his status in the Daff Kanaar.”
“And me?” I asked. Now we were ready for the answer.
She reached out and she stroked the side of my face.
“A dear one,” she said. “The father of my heart, doomed never to have another child. Husband of a barren wife, whose love supports him. Master of a doomed mount, whose love supports him.”
That was not good news.
“You are a focal point, a crux – you are the man with the terrible knowledge who can never lose, and who cannot succeed.”
It took more courage than I thought to ask, “And?”
She smiled. “Black Lupus is as Black Lupus was, but Black Lupus is no more. His camp fires are ash, and must be restoked. Until they are, Black Lupus is a ghost.”
If she’d smacked me in the stomach with a sledge hammer, it would have been a relief.
***
We left for Vol a couple days later – Shela and I, Karel, Lee and Dagi, Dragor and 300 Wolf Soldiers. It was warming up a little – the winter was coming to an end.
Once again we saw those former Myran mercenaries – looking much the worse for wear. We sent Karel to inform them that their former Count was now their future King, and that they had a future with him, if they wanted. They looked very skeptically at Karel until he remembered to inform them that Eric was their former Count, not Tessen, whom I’d eliminated.
The Duke of Vol was an older man named Oleg. Supposedly no one knew whose son he was – he’d risen up as a war lord under Gharf and then taken this Duchy when the older Duke had died childless.
The Duke had been Gharf’s brother, and that left a lot of speculation.
Oleg greeted us on horseback a daheer south of the city. He only brought a couple advisors, counting on me to not just annihilate him here.
“Are you finally come to take my city?” he asked me frankly.
I shook my head atop Blizzard. “I’ve come to meet your new King.”
Oleg snorted. “Just take the city,” he said. “Eric of Myr is not my king.”
I regarded him. “OK,” I said, finally. I turned to Shela.
“Kill him,” I said.
Shela raised a hand white with power. Oleg’s eyes widened. One of his entourage’s horses reared.
“Wait – wait,” he said.
Shela made a fist and the white power went away. The horse settled.
“You let Dragor keep his life – I heard he’s back in power,” the Duke said.
“You’re not Dragor,” I said.
“But – but,” the older Man stammered. “I’ll swear the fealty – I’ll be part of Eldador.”
I laughed. “I have a dozen Earls and Barons who want this city, if I take it,” I said. “Why would I alienate them, and keep you alive?�
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“Eric’s children will be mongrels,” he said. “I’m not burdening my children –“
“Ah,” I said. “Now I understand.”
I turned to Shela. “Don’t kill him – just castrate him.”
She nodded and said, “Get off your horse.”
“No!”
“I have bad news for you, your Grace,” I said to him, leaning forward on my horse. “The Great North has breached the northern mountains, and they’re filling up the center of Volkhydro as we speak. Gharf Bendenson was going to let them do it, so he didn’t have to fight.”
Oleg turned his head and spat on the ground.
“Eric will fight,” I said. “As a member of the Daff Kanaar, we have to support him, 100%. Do you understand that? We cannot let him come to harm.”
Oleg bit his lower lip under a thick, blonde beard.
“So you can have any other king – any other – and then you can fight the Great North on your own and, when you lose, I’ll come in and conquer you both while you’re weak.
“You chose.”
Oleg didn’t need to think about that for too long. It made a lot of sense. I simply hadn’t estimated what it meant for the regal line to be pure Volkhydran blood, and I don’t think anyone else did, either, but there’s a big difference between honoring a tradition, and following it to the grave.
Oleg let us into the city, put up our guards, and settled us in appropriate rooms. Karel made it really clear to him that, if we died somehow, then Eric had to raze the city to the ground.
Whether Oleg believed it or not was immaterial. He had a lot to chew on without making more of his own problems.
Later that night, a knock came at the door to our chambers. As the Wolf Soldier guard answered it, I expected it to be an advanced guard from Eric’s army.
So I was pretty surprised to see Kvitch.
Chapter Eighteen
A Change of Hands
Kvitch came in to my chambers with three Dwarves I didn’t recognize and a package on a pole.
I hadn’t seen him since I was made a King. I stood up, smiling, and reached out to him, taking his forearm in mine.
“War’s whiskers, Kvitch,” I said to him, “isn’t it about time you died of old age?”
