Semper Indomitus: Book Five of the Fovean Chronicles

by Robert Brady

  It took a whole day. Night was falling when we were done, and we built up our fire and examined all of our feet. One of the Dwarves had cut his foot really badly and needed stitches. We should have left him behind for his own safety, but he wouldn’t hear of it, and we needed the whole team to do what we planned to do.

  From there, it was the hills and mountains that were most comfortable to Dwarves, and we moved as fast as I could keep up. The month of Weather turned into that of Earth as spring approached and the freeze ended. We shed our cloaks during the day and kept them at night, when it was still bitter cold. We kept our campfires low for fourteen days, then non-existent for another two, when we came across foot prints clearly from Men.

  They were wide-spaced and deep – a runner of good size. The tread was pronounced and showed where the boot normally wore a cleat. One of the Dwarves pointed out that a cleat like that would be perfect for an icy mountain pass. We had no doubt that this was evidence of the Men of the North.

  Two days later, we were proven right. As the sun was setting to the West, we saw the smoke fires of a large camp, spread out against the mountains. We saw dozens of fires, pickets, small buildings that could be used for shelter or storage. This was a staging area for the Men of the North.

  “This is good,” one of the Dwarves, Shekla, a woman with a red beard and grey in her hair, told us. “That camp is very obvious – they are very confident that they are strong here.”

  Another Dwarf, G’lenn, nodded his head. “I think two of us should go back along the mountains, then into them to find a pass to short-cut them.”

  F’mekken, their leader, a woman with iron-grey hair and beard, who dressed in wolf skins and who could simply melt into the country-side if she wanted to, said, “I’ll go with young Bekkor. If we get in trouble, he can run the fastest – he would come back to you and tell you –“

  Dregg, the Dwarf who’d hurt his foot, shook his head. “I should go,” he said.

  F’mekken shook her head. “I’ve seen you limping,” she said. “You’re going to be useless to us soon, except as someone to leave behind to hold them if we all run. I want you well. You stay, Bekkor goes with me.”

  Bekkor was a Dwarf woman with blonde hair that barely curled her cheeks. She lacked the round stomach of the older Dwarves – in fact, she’d been running point as we moved.

  Dregg chewed his moustache but couldn’t argue. We all fell back out of sight of the camp and set up a guard schedule among those of us who weren’t going, and then settled down in our cloaks to sleep.

  I had the first watch. I was glad of it because I was eager to observe this enemy as closely as I dared get. I lay down at the periphery and picked myself a good place to observe them.

  There were more than 200, that was certain. They had no horse. They didn’t do anything similar to our ‘jess doonar,’ in fact I didn’t see much rhyme or reason in their set up. The buildings weren’t on anything like a causeway, they put their stores where they would be dry.

  They hadn’t even dug a latrine – they were going to an area behind some natural brush and boulders. In a large army, that was a guarantee of dysentery. These may be a war-like people, but their methods were barely more than tribal.

  If we could keep them to a small area and stop their ability to refresh fallen soldiers, we wouldn’t have to beat them, they would beat themselves.

  I tore myself away after an hour and walked my post. I looked for evidence of anyone who’d found us, who would be watching us while we watched them. I saw no footprints at all – which wasn’t good. There should be older ones from when they first came here – any new army would walk out a few daheer and make sure they weren’t on top of something they didn’t want to face. Not seeing that could mean they were smart enough to cover their tracks.

  I circled the camp one time and saw nothing, to I turned back around and circled it again, backwards.

  Sure enough, in twenty-minutes I found a half-covered shoe-print, fresh. Someone had already found us.

  If these guys were on the alert, we’d never accomplish our goal. I pretended that I’d missed the sign and kept going, my ears straining as I kept my eyes forward, seeming to search the ground.

  A footstep just ahead of me, on the other side of a rise in the ground. Someone was getting ready to pounce.

  I took a step forward and leapt back.

  The other warrior charged into the space I had vacated. I pulled my new sword and struck. Quick as a leopard, he met my sword with his.

  The clash of steel was going to bring someone.

  He turned on his instep and charged me, ready to fight. His short, stabbing sword flashed for my head, my thigh, my arm, my head. I countered and countered again, giving ground, absorbing his offensive, trying to get him to over-extend.

  He didn’t make that mistake. He pulled his last hit and he observed me.

  He was tall – as tall as I. His hair was jet black, his eyes dark brown. He was clean shaven in shaggy furs, but I saw chain mixed in with them. There were nicks up and down his sword – he was no stranger to fighting.

  I lunged and withdrew, and he attacked again, more sharp, precise blows with specific targets, meant to cripple right away. Peripherally I sensed one of the Dwarves approaching low. There were probably more.

  Then again, he might not be alone.

  I ducked and he swung right through the space where I had been. I thrust upward with my new sword, taking him through the jaw and pushing his cap off of the back of his head.

  I yanked the sword and turned, expecting another warrior. There were none.

  “That was brutal,” F’mekken said, approaching with the other Dwarves behind her.

  “Are there more, do you think?” I asked her, looking for the back of a Man, running for the encampment.

  “I think not,” Dregg said, pulling on his beard, a war axe in his hand. “I don’t think they’d just let their fellow die here. In fact, I don’t think he was a patrol. I think we caught someone wandering.”

  F’mekken nodded. “A patrol would have reported back,” she said.

  “Or reported back and left someone to watch us,” I said. We could already be caught

  The Dwarf shook her head. “Watchers watch,” she said. “This one attacked.”

  “This one liked to attack,” Shekla told us. She knelt down by the body, and searched through his armor. “He fell for it, every time you baited him.”

  I nodded. I’d noted that, too. It was how I beat him.

  “This is strange armor,” she added. “The chain mail loops right through the furs. The person who wears this barely goes outside of his house, where he doesn’t expect to fight.”

  That could be the danger of the Men of the North, I thought.

  F’mekken straightened. “Bekkor and I leave now, and we’re bringing Shekla,” she said. “If we find a place to cut off that trail, we’ll just do it.

  “The rest of you,” she added, “will go back two more daheeri, and wait a week. If you haven’t heard from us, you assume we’re captured and one of you run back to the Kingdom, the rest of you try to succeed where we failed.”

  “I should go with you,” I said. She shook her head.

  “You don’t have the stealth of Dwarves,” she said, “but you are a great fighter. If we are caught, those who follow will need the fighter, more than the stealth.”

  I nodded, not liking it.

  The three melted into the mountain range, the rest of us back into the hills. We’d encountered the people of the Great North another time, and once again what we found surprised us.

  ***

  A week passed both quickly and slowly, watching the camp.

  He hid the body of the fallen warrior, not that anyone came looking for it. We became more and more certain that he wasn’t a patrol.

  It also told us how loose the organization of this army was. If one of my Wolf Soldiers or Vulpe’s Eldadorian Regulars missed a watch, it was investigated. These people might
not even know how many they had.

  In that week, more than 2,000 new warriors came in from the north. They walked in by groups, sometimes ten or more, sometimes as many as 100. They were met and they were drilled for a few days, and then they were sent to the West.

  Our theory may have been correct.

  In all that time, there was no sign of our other three Dwarves, nor any sign that they’d been found. No group of Men came out of the pass with heads on a post or trophies of a battle. There was no surge of patrols that would say they’d caught our Dwarves, interrogated them and found out about us. What ever happened in a week, it was possible that these warriors knew nothing of it.

  In that time, we nursed Dregg’s foot back to near-perfect health. It was in fact decided that he would run back to the Kingdom, and report what had happened.

  “If we are successful,” I said, “your fellow Dwarves will go back to you. If they’ve fallen, I’ll leave a marker on a stone on our route, for the Battle of the Two Mountains.”

  He nodded, turned on his heel and ran.

  I was left with two male Dwarves, Brehn and Tor. Both were youngish, dark brown hair barely to their shoulders and thick, short beards. Both carried the type mace that Kvitch had preferred, hanging from their belts. Each had a pack with tools in it.

  We addressed the hills, following the path where F’mekken had entered. Tor had no problem at all picking up her path, much as I saw nothing before us but rocks and dirt.

  We followed them all day and until the night prevented us, and then we made a cold camp. By our best estimates we were less than an hour past where they had been when they first rested.

  On the second day we went even further, passing their second camp around midday. We could see where they’d stood a watch, where they’d buried their leavings. There were no other tracks – no one had followed them from the camp.

  We still behaved like we were going to overrun someone.

  On the third day we could hear Men coming down the trail. Tor and I waited while Brenn went forward and marked it. When he came back, he informed us that someone, probably Shekla, had done the same thing. We found where they had proceeded to the north, and so did we.

  It was dusk on our third day, which would have been their fourth, when we found them.

  Or rather, what was left of them. They’d found a plateau 100 feet above the trail, an overhang connected to the mountain, with a subtle fault line. What they’d clearly planned to do was to expand that fault, drop the rock and block the trail.

  What had happened is they were probably seen on that plateau. Unhidden tracks proceeded down, and crossbow bolts littered the ground. Most were bloody, and bloodier as they came nearer to the trail. That said they’d been hit, and slowed, and then made easier targets.

  The Dwarves had told me that the Men of the North hunted Dwarves for sport. What they had not told me is that they ate them. We found the cook fire, the clothes cast aside, the spit and the bones, with the entrails.

  Tor and Brenn were stoic. I was ready to kill something, and to do it in a painful way.

  “That plan wasn’t good,” Brenn said.

  “Ya think?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Dropping that overhang,” he said. “It would have been too easy to clear. F’mekken wouldn’t have wasted her time.”

  “Unless we’re only seeing part of her plan,” Tor said.

  I looked down the trail. Nothing was coming. I drew my sword, and found a boulder that would hide me. Tor and Brenn crossed the trail and scouted the other side.

  It was an hour before they returned I was almost ready to go after them. Tor was grinning, Brenn was still grim.

  “The other side of the trail is rigged,” he said. “Drop the overhang, and that triggers a greater land slide on the other side.”

  “Why do that, thought?” I asked.

  “They wanted to kill some of the northern warriors,” Brenn said. “They were going to lure the enemy forward, and then drop the mountain as they had in the Battle of Two Mountains.”

  I understood that. They wanted payback.

  “They hadn’t counted on the crossbow bolts,” I said.

  Both nodded.

  The sound of Men coming down the trail came to our ears right then. In the echoing canyon, they could be a daheer away still, or just a few hundred yards.

  “For the three?” I asked them.

  Tor smiled. Brenn nodded. I went back to my boulder.

  It wasn’t ten minutes before a group of several dozen appeared on the trail. Tor had shown me where they had to be – I told them that we didn’t know how fast they were, so be prepared to drop it faster.

  When they looked like they were a short sprint to the target zone, I stood up from behind the boulder.

  “Fight me, you cowards,” I bellowed, my sword out.

  As predicted, that’s all it took. They didn’t kneel down with their crossbows, they charged with their swords.

  The overhang slid down to my right.

  The cliff trembled to my left.

  It didn’t fall, Something had gone wrong.

  I could hear that they were already climbing the rock pile. We hadn’t hit any of them with the first pass.

  I looked up and to my left, and Brenn was sprinting like a mountain goat across the cliff face. He was grabbing hand holds that I couldn’t see, to get to the drop point that would shake the side of the mountain free.

  A crossbow took him in the shoulder, another in the buttock.

  He kept going. I winced for him. I almost wished that they would make it over the slide, that they would engage me.

  “You are cowards,” I roared. “You are weak!”

  “J’ktak, get back!” Tor shouted to me.

  I realized that I was in the drop zone. I turned and ran.

  The mountain rumbled. Brenn had made it somehow to the drop point.

  I turned and saw the brave Dwarf with another bolt in his chest, laying against the cliff face as it began to slide into the pass.

  The ground beneath me shook as I kept running. Finally I turned again, and the entire pass was gone, just an enormous pile of unstable rubble that would take months even for Dwarves to clear.

  Tor met me on the pass, where I simply stood, as if waiting for the miracle that would send Brenn to us. That wasn’t going to happen. Like the three female Dwarves, he had given his life.

  “Now,” Tor said, without looking at me, “we go down the pass, and we find somewhere to end this whole thing permanently.

  “Let them clear that rubble and learn that there is no way to cross the rest of the mountains.”

  It took another day to find what we needed: an overhang from a cliff face that had to be crossed, hanging over a ravine hundreds of feet below us. Tor dropped it without preamble, closing this pass to the enemy.

  It was time to go home.

  Chapter Twenty

  With the Cat Away

  It took a week to get back to the Llorando, and two more days to get to Myr. It would have been great to find the Volkhydran army there, ready to go, but that was asking too much. We were two days into the month of War, and that meant we’d entered the War months.

  News in Myr was that the Great North hadn’t waited – a month ago they’d marched on Vellock and taken it in a bloody battle. Senta had cried out for aid, but Eric had no way to answer. His army was proceeding up the center of Volkhydro, the Eldadorians with him.

  People who recognized me were torn as to how to treat me. On the one hand, I had invaded their nation. On the other, I was saving it. When I wasn’t riding a great white stallion, there were those who doubted whether I was the Emperor at all – especially since I no longer had the Sword of War.

  Crazy people weren’t uncommon in times of war.

  I tried to look up Jack and Elle, but both had died years ago, and the tavern was renamed and belonged to someone who didn’t know me. I had a hard time imagining I’d be welcome at my son’s brewery, or that m
y former employer would be glad to see me, so I bought a horse, and I rode it south west.

  Volkhydrans were moving everywhere. Some wanted to join the army, and some wanted to flee it, depending on which you were talking about. Over the next seven days I saw numbers thicken, and I also saw where Volkhydrans had encountered Men from the Great North.

  In most cases, it didn’t go well for the Volkhydrans. The battle sites I found showed initial man-to-man fighting – a skirmish line in the dirt – then the Volkhydrans breaking and running, overwhelmed. Where the Volkhydrans prevailed there were very few Men of the North, or they were caught surprised.

  We weren’t facing an even fight.

  It was at the end of that week, on the 9th day of War, when I actually came across some Volkhydrans from Eric’s army.

  They were bloody and battered and scared. Some had thrown away their weapons. Of the twenty in the little band I found, to a man they were eager to move to Eldador.

  “Eric tried to engage them on a battle field,” one told me, a swarthy man with a bloody bandage on his head and his beard shorn off from the left. “We tried to line up like Eldadorian Regulars do, but the troops wouldn’t have it, and they broke out into a straight fight.”

  I sighed. I could have told them that would happen. You can’t just assume men who think that heroes-style fighting will distinguish them will take naturally to formations.

  “The Men from the Great North fight like they don’t care if they live or die,” he told me. “One will throw himself on a line of pikes so that his friends can step over his body with their swords. You stab them and you can’t even tell if you got through that armor they wear.”

  “What of the Volkhydran army?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Half gone,” he said. “Eric rallied them and pulled them back. Last I heard, the Eldadorians are rounding up the West and getting ready to meet with a second army under Henekh Dragorson. Everyone hopes that Henekh won’t make the mistakes that Eric made.”