Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Brady, Robert

  “It is a part of our heritage,” D’gattis said, indignantly.

  “It hasn’t been sacked yet,” Thorn countered. D’gattis glared at him. I thought the answer more likely.

  This also tended to explain the patrols. The Confluni likely knew as much about the legend as the Uman-Chi. A city like Outpost IX, left for plunder, would be worth a lot of gold.

  D’gattis sighed and looked at Ancenon. “I tell you, we are here,” he insisted.

  “I agree, cousin,” Ancenon said, “however I don’t see it.”

  “Um, I am sorry about all of the questions,” I said. I wasn’t but it seemed a nice way to intrude on their conversation. “But how long ago are we talking about, for this Blast thing?”

  “You don’t know?” Thorn asked.

  “Everyone knows that,” Nantar said.

  “Let’s assume I don’t,” I countered.

  “You speak Cheyak, yet you don’t –“ D’gattis began.

  “Look, just answer, OK?” I didn’t like the direction that lead.

  They looked at each other, then at me. I could hear a horse approaching. I really hoped it would be Arath.

  “About 1,100 years,” Ancenon said.

  “Big tidal waves, water rushing in?” I said.

  “Yes, though I wasn’t alive for it. In fact, the whole world was traumatized. The Outposts were taboo for centuries, which is how so many of them were lost.”

  “Well, that is it, then,” I said.

  I remembered huge volcanic eruptions and tidal waves of past Earth. Krakatoa, Pompeii, and Vesuvius to name a few. I remembered watching the tides. Water comes in, pukes up the bottom of the ocean, and then retracts. Walls of water hundreds of feet high sometimes, depending on the force of the explosion. This one had been huge.

  “You are here,” I said, as Arath reined in, Genna right behind him. “You found it, the lost Outpost X.”

  I took my sword and drove it hard into the ground. Where it should have gone a few inches deep, it sank right to the hilt.

  “In fact, you’re standing on it.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Getting Down to It

  We were quiet for a moment, all of us. Arath rode into the clearing, Genna not far behind him. He obviously wanted to say something, but didn’t just then. I bent down and pulled my sword from the dirt. As usual, it came away clean.

  “Well, I know I didn’t bring a big enough shovel,” Thorn said.

  “Oh, shut up, Thorn,” D’gattis snarled.

  Thorn countered with his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “Stop it, all of you,” Ancenon intervened, laying his hand on my shoulder. I guessed since I found the flaw in his planning, he figured I could fix it.

  “There is a patrol coming this way,” Arath said, almost to himself. “Let’s stop the shouting and decide how we get back to the ship.”

  “We aren’t going back to the ship,” D’gattis said.

  “Well, as sure as War’s Whiskers, we aren’t staying here,” Thorn said, his hand still on his weapon. “And I don’t see us checking into a Confluni hostel any time soon, unless you can change our race -”

  Nantar put his hand on Thorn’s shoulder, much as Ancenon had done to mine. This had to be a cultural thing, but I didn’t get it. Regardless, it worked; Thorn subsided immediately. “Are we really sure that Outpost X is buried here?”

  D’gattis nodded almost grudgingly. “It makes sense,” he said. “The age of the trees, the fact that no one else ever found the city – the more I think of it, the more sure I am that Lupus is right.”

  “If not for the horses,” Genna said, “we could hide in the trees and let Confluni patrols go by. That would give us a few days – “

  “Not an option,” I said, looking instinctively at Blizzard. I had exactly one friend on this world and I wasn’t about to sell him down the river.

  “I agree,” said Thorn.

  “They are just horses,” Genna said. “We would have left Drekk behind if we had needed to – “

  “I don’t answer for Drekk,” Arath said, “but my horse stays with me. He wouldn’t leave my side anyway, and I am not about to put him down.”

  “We will need them, anyway,” Ancenon said, stepping up beside me. “We will be going west with all haste.”

  “Deeper into Conflu?” Thorn said. “Well, I guess they won’t be expecting that.”

  “Precisely, and besides,” Ancenon said, already pushing me toward my horse, “that will be the direction to the entrance to Outpost X.”

  Thinking of it now – I should have come to that conclusion by taking the whole problem that extra step, as Ancenon had.

  Think back about eleven hundred years ago, my reality, not yours.

  Fovea is a huge plain surrounded by a huge forest, set like a bowl with a mountain in the middle of it, the top of which is Outpost IX.

  Your Cheyak race forms the chosen people of the god Power. Basically, they hold a significant portion of the world under their influence or their thrall. Two other gods, Order and Law, don’t quite like that, so they pick a fight with Power and they win.

  Power decides to blame this on His people, and obliterates them by smiting the planet. The blast – maybe a meteor strike – hits the ocean, which creates a huge tidal wave that turns a lowland plain into Tren Bay, destroys the southern portion of a mountain range (the Straights) and drowns or destroys all but two of the Cheyak cities.

  The tidal wave that does this moves from east to west. It is powerful enough to cripple Outpost VII, but that same city saves Outpost IX only a few miles away by parting the wave.

  With the Straights destroyed, sea water rushed into the bowl with the force of an ocean behind it.

  The tidal wave rushes across the bowl, fills it and dumps a ton of muck and silt on Outpost X. That city is buried, and remains so for a millennium.

  But there are relics from Outpost X. The one I looked at seemed to come right as the Blast happened.

  How did it get out?

  Ancenon sent us west through the woods as fast as the horses could take us. Thorn and I took the lead. Thorn was on lookout for an unusual break in the land, going downward. I rode point because I rode the fastest and the biggest horse, and Nantar rode follow up because he and I had the best track record as warriors.

  How that came about, I don’t know.

  Genna performed our mobile recon again, sprinting forward, letting us overtake her. She kept that pace on her unquenchable will and because the trees hindered the horses much more than they did her. Arath broke to either side of our group pretty frequently, and Ancenon lead Drekk’s horse. D’gattis rode right behind Thorn and me, his relic in his hand and his head moving constantly.

  Genna came back once to say that she’d found another ambush ahead, and Ancenon quickly decided that the warriors served us better as a testament that we hadn’t passed this way than they would have dead, so we bypassed them. I felt silently grateful. An hour later, Arath came back with a similar story of a patrol that had tried to cut across our trail, but had timed it wrong and would cut about two hundred yards behind us. Genna offered to mislead them, but there would have been no way for her to catch us, even with her speed.

  The setting sun glared orange in our eyes and the horses lagged from exhaustion when Thorn suddenly brought us up hard. D’gattis’ mount actually ran his head into Blizzard’s butt and the stallion bit him.

  The wall of water, muck and silt had moved west and covered the city, dissipating its energy as it had done to Outpost VII and IX. The huge walls, the towers, the flying bridges had all absorbed their fair share, and the city had been buried.

  But there would be, just like in Outpost IX, an east and a west gate. And the west gate, most likely, would be a way in.

  Even if the city were filled up solid (not very unlikely), the interior of the outer wall, the towers, and the central palace would be accessible - at least, in theory.

  Thorn stopped us where a huge boul
der topped with trees marked a drop straight down almost a hundred feet. Arath pointed out a gentle slope on both sides and an obvious path that said that patrols came here often.

  “Certainly not here,” D’gattis said.

  “Look at it,” Thorn answered, pointing at the boulder and the trees. “That doesn’t belong here. Boulders don’t just grow up out of the ground – there are no mountains and no flat spots. That is the same kind of rock you see at the Straights of Deception.

  “Tidal waves don’t move rocks that big,” I said.

  “No, but the Blast could have fired it this far,” Thorn countered. “Tidal waves don’t reduce mountains to rubble, but if you ever go to the Straights of Deception again, you are going to notice that they aren’t a reef, they are hard rock overgrown with sea life.

  “Wow,” Genna said, simply. That summed it up for me, too.

  “It bounced through the city, came to rest at the gate, and the tidal wave covered it,” Thorn said. “If we can move it, we’re in.”

  Arath dismounted and walked up to the boulder, probing its edges first with the point of his sword, then with his fingers. Genna had already raced into the woods by then, doing her reconnaissance. I walked Blizzard sideways, down the slope to the west of the boulder, to see if I could find any evidence of a road or something to suggest that we had found the right place. It would probably be twenty feet underground, but it made sense to have a look. Thorn had joined Arath and, oddly, Ancenon followed me.

  I let him catch up. He had nothing to say, he just followed me, watching what I did. I decided to ignore him and dismounted Blizzard, checked his stitches again (by some miracle, they were still not torn) and started poking around.

  I found the same soft earth west of the boulder. Looking at the fall-off from this angle, I could imagine the facing around the gates of Outpost IX. The drop easily measured eighty feet. The trees upon it crested the rise and grew another thirty feet higher. Down here I found a little glen with only grass clumps and bushes growing, and Blizzard had already been sampling those. The poor stallion shook with exhaustion and I knew how he felt.

  “That boulder isn’t going anywhere, is it, Lupus?” Ancenon asked.

  I looked at where it had rested for more than one thousand years. “Nah,” I told him. “Not today, anyway.”

  “It appears,” he said, “that I’ve taken us even farther from rescue.”

  I dropped my sword and, once again, it sank point first into the earth, this time only about halfway. I made a little divot and looked into it, seeing the high water table and nothing else. We must be near the Sea of Xyr, I thought. I wondered how it got that name.

  When I didn’t respond, Ancenon continued, “It is important, regardless of what happens, that some of us return to tell of the condition of Outpost X.”

  “I bet it is,” I agreed. I took about thirty paces back north and dropped my sword into the ground. It did exactly the same thing.

  “I can safely assume that you, Genna and I could survive, if we needed to,” he said.

  I don’t like a leader whose game plan involves saving his own hide while condemning someone in his command. Lord knows I saw enough of that in the Navy. Junior officers especially saw enlisted men as a commodity rather than as people. However, if he didn’t have this conversation with me, I felt relatively certain he would have it with someone else.

  “Leave the rest to satisfy the Confluni?” I asked.

  I dropped my sword another thirty feet to the north. This time it sank to the hilt. I pulled my sword and looked to see that the water table here ran much lower. No water seeped into the divot I made.

  “Precisely,” Ancenon told me.

  I looked east and saw a big, old tree growing right up against the drop off where the boulder rested. Here I saw almost no rise. The tree had grown enormous, maybe two hundred feet high, dwarfing its brethren, its roots a gnarled mass sinking into the earth for yards on either side.

  I chuckled, and looked at Ancenon.

  “Guess you won’t have to make that decision today, my friend,” I told him.

  “And why is that?” he asked.

  I pointed at the tree. “There’s your gate guard,” I told him. “The boulder just happens to be there.”

  Nantar, Arath, Thorn and I tunneled like mad into the roots of the big, old tree. I don’t know enough about trees to tell its species – maybe an oak or elm.

  But I worked construction and I know a lot about sinkholes.

  Sinkholes can form either when the water table drops suddenly, as in a drought, or when underground currents moving through the water table erode the soil from the underside up, creating pockets of water or air that destabilize the upper soil. These sometimes catastrophically fail, resulting in a hole. In Florida this is an almost daily occurrence. Entire roadways, houses, even a car dealership in Orlando have disappeared in an hour or less. The problem was always there, but you can’t look for them everywhere all of the time.

  But there are sometimes signs. Plants live on water, and where the water flows, the plants grow. Where the water flows better, the plants grow faster, which can explain a green patch in a lawn where your water line is leaking, for example.

  Where the water flows deep, roots have to dig down deep to get it. Where the water table is high, roots will grow shallow and spread wider, which is more efficient. Wider roots mean a stronger, healthier tree.

  All of these things combined told me that the sudden drop in the water table, and a tree that grew so much faster and shallower than the rest around it, marked an underground stream. To me, that meant that it followed Outpost X’s west road right into the city. If it did, then the roots of the tree would grow all around the opening, getting easy access to the water.

  The blast of fetid air that hit us in the face, coming up from underground, confirmed it for me. We all felt it at the same time and looked at each other wordlessly. I looked down through a dark maze of roots into a black void, cleared by hatchet and hand to reveal a city lost for more than eleven hundred years.

  Finally, Genna said, “We might get down there, but the horses won’t.”

  I had forgotten. How many times had I said, “It’s just Blizzard and me on this world”? How could I forget the big stallion now?

  “Once I am there, I can bring in the horses,” D’gattis said. Ancenon nodded. “But I don’t think it wise that I be the first to go –“

  Thorn snorted rudely. Nantar grinned and beat his hands on his armored thighs.

  “Lupus and me, I think,” he said. “Anything living down there, one of us can handle. Anything we can’t, we aren’t getting past anyway.”

  I chuckled to myself and sheathed my sword over my shoulder. I walked over to the hole we had made, smelled the hot, stale air still rising up from it, and lowered my legs into the dark, supporting my weight on tree roots with my upper arms. I positioned myself over the hole and let myself slide into the void.

  I dropped a good ten feet, landing with a shin-jarring clank into two feet of silt. In retrospect, that was a stupid thing to do. If the silt hadn’t been there, I would have broken my legs. If it had been deeper, my armor would have drowned me.

  I moved to the left about three feet – if I hadn’t done that, Nantar would have landed on me, the worst fate of the three. His crash sounded a lot louder that mine, and he fell on his butt after.

  “Wow,” he said. “That hurt.”

  “Not the smartest idea we ever had, huh?” I asked him. I could barely see him in the dark, our only light wafting in from the hole we had dug. The air stank of rot and mold, and I could feel the slime on the floor seeping through my boots. I drew my sword for some sense of security, and it glowed dimly in the gloom, surprising me.

  “I wondered if that was an enchanted blade,” Nantar said.

  I held it like a snake in my hand. I had always known that it had some magic to it, but the light seemed eerie. Still, War had been generous. I thanked Him quietly.

  Nan
tar got up with my help, and we looked around the cavern. I could about tell that there were walls under the slime that dripped down from above. To either side I saw the shape of walls that could have been the towers that had framed the main gate, and that we were in the same sort of murder hole that guarded Outpost IX. Nantar pointed out heavy hinges that still dangled ten feet above us.

  “We go deeper?” I asked him.

  Nantar shook his head. “We get D’gattis down here,” he said. “He will be able to get the rest down, and we will be safe from the Confluni for a while.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A few thousand years, anyway.”

  “Not the way we tore up the roots to the tree up there, my friend,” he said. He looked me right in the eye. “Ancenon wasn’t stupid – he brought in good swords like you and Arath and Thorn and me. He didn’t do that to just haul away plunder.”

  I nodded. Together we went back to the tree roots where we had entered. Squinting up through them, seeing Thorn’s waiting face, it seemed as if a circle of clutching claws surrounded the plainsman, each trying to keep him at bay. It looked spooky and I shook my head to be rid of the illusion.

  “It’s all right, D’gattis,” Nantar yelled up into the void. Thorn nodded and disappeared. Moments later the Uman-Chi slid down into Nantar’s waiting arms, his white robes billowing out around him.

  “Umph,” Nantar grunted, putting him quickly down. “Think you could have left the sword on your horse? It gouged me in the ribs!”

  “I could go back and try again,” D’gattis said dryly, to which Nantar had no comment. The green-haired Uman-Chi regarded my sword first with his ambiguous eyes and, saying nothing, looked about the small passage.

  “Anything I need to know about?” he asked Nantar. The big warrior just shook his head.

  “Very well, then,” he said, and reached into his belt-pouch.

  From it, he withdrew a little vial, like a test tube with a cork stopper, and shook it. The contents, which as far as I could tell had been clear, turned a luminescent green immediately. He mumbled something that I couldn’t understand and stooped to pick up a handful of silt before I could ask anything, the next thing I knew Nantar was pulling me away from him by my upper arm.