Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Brady, Robert

  “Not from around here, are you?” he asked.

  I smiled. “Not hardly,” I answered.

  “I don’t mean Conflu,” he pressed me.

  “Neither do I,” I answered.

  I think that Nantar liked my swordsmanship, so he wanted to get to know me. I had no problem with that, so long as he didn’t get too close. I had only begun to get an inkling of what War wanted with me, and I didn’t know if Nantar figured in it.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said. We were about fifteen feet away from D’gattis now. He stood framed in the light from the hole in the ceiling while my sword cast ghostly shadows of us on the slime oozing down the walls. I had no idea how deep into the hill/city the passage led, but I imagined more than saw a wall of mud there somewhere.

  “I see Dwarven fighting style in you,” Nantar continued, “but you place your hips funny.”

  I looked into his eyes. “Oh?” I asked.

  “Don’t get me wrong, not criticizing,” he said, in the frank way of a professional killer. “It gives you some real strength in the blows you strike, and with that sword you really only need to connect once.”

  “It is a pretty good sword,” I agreed.

  “If you ever change weapons, though,” he continued, “it is going to turn on you. I’ll spar with you some more and show you how to pull your hits. You should be able to strike killing blows one after the other for close fighting.”

  I remembered him fighting one man per side when mounted on his horse against the Confluni footmen, and how his sword had flickered though the air like it weighed nothing. I could use that skill.

  “I would like that,” I said, still looking him in the eye.

  He nodded and said nothing. This would pass as friendship between us, I assumed. We both returned to watching D’gattis.

  The conversation couldn’t have taken two minutes, and the Wizard was still at work. I assumed this had to be spell casting. He’d claimed that he could bring the rest of the team down here after him. I hoped he was right. I really didn’t want to have to try to ride out of here with Blizzard before the heat wore off.

  “How old is he, do you think?” I asked Nantar.

  “Two hundred, fifty-six years,” Nantar told me without looking. “They invited me to the party. Ancenon is about twice as old.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yeah, don’t know as I would want to live that long, not that I have the choice. I guess you have pretty much seen and done everything by your second century.”

  “Maybe that’s why they wanted to find this place so bad,” I surmised.

  Nantar looked at me. “How do you mean?” he asked.

  I shrugged, a motion lost within my heavy armor. “What happens when you live long enough to be as wealthy as you want, to know everything you think you need to know, and to have had every conversation you want to have? You can see how bored with life they are. Maybe they’re searching for this place just for something to do.”

  “Now there’s a thought, Lupus,” Nantar said to me. “Now they can spend years negotiating for rights from the Confluni, decades excavating, and centuries restoring Outpost X.”

  “Probably the other way around,” I said. “But you are right.”

  Both our heads turned. I heard a snap, such as a steel rod makes when it suddenly breaks, and a flash, like a light bulb when the filament burns out. The wind blew in my face and, when I cleared my eyes, Blizzard was nuzzling my chest with his huge nose.

  I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that. I used to make the typical “Beam me up, Scotty,” comments of any good trekkie but I never expected to see it. We were all together again, and Arath and Thorn already had their heads back in the hole by the tree roots, as if this was the last place either of them wanted to be.

  “No way are you two going to be able to cover that from in here,” Genna called up after them.

  “I can perform a glamour,” Ancenon told her, taking her upper arm in his thin-fingered hands, “which will hide the entrance from all save for those who can see through glamour. But it would not do to have someone just fall through the hole, now, would it?”

  In the next hour I saw more spell casting than I had seen since I had come to the region of this place called “Fovea.” Rather than in combat, I saw magic used as a utility, much as I had used a toaster or electric toothbrush where I had come from.

  “Hav-nash!” D’gattis barked with a snap of his fingers, and the slime in the walls glimmered with the same blue light that came from my sword, revealing a ceiling from which cobwebs and stalactites of mud hung like talons.

  “Mahurin, gavganesh mahurin, ohlman mahurin, G’hest!” Ancenon intoned, turning slowly with his arms wide. He stopped all of a sudden, facing west, looking into the gloom made less gloomy with D’gattis’ light. His ambiguous eyes were penetrating, as if he could see through the dirt and darkness to the center of Outpost X.

  “There are open spaces,” he told D’gattis. The other Uman-Chi nodded.

  This went on for another hour while the rest of us, the mundane worker-bees, hunkered down and got cleaning. The horses were picketed east of the opening in the ceiling, where the ground looked safe. I found a high spot that would keep their hooves from rotting.

  “The air is thin but breathable if we don’t light torches,” D’gattis said to us, explaining as if to children. “There is a supply coming from somewhere, and we are drawing on it by breathing it. We were correct to assume both that mud and silt had filled the city more than one thousand years ago, and that this left wide, empty spaces as well. These will be our goal.”

  D’gattis and Ancenon could find these spaces from their resonance, sending pulses through the earth. One of them would place his hand on the slimy wall, intone some spell softly and exhale against the surface. The exhalation worked like sonar, a spell that pulsed out and then back, telling him where they went.

  We would spend our time down here exploring where those pulses went.

  I spent my first hour redirecting the flow of water from the Sea of Xyr into our temporary home. I found a loose stone in the floor and, with a rope and a spike and Blizzard pulling, dislodged it slightly. It worked like a drain and the water that had been seeping into our shoes flowed away.

  Ancenon smiled when he saw it. “You have found the sewers,” he said. “D’gattis will explore the floor and find a safe place to open a passage, and we will use that to travel through the city.

  “He can do that?” I asked.

  The Prince nodded. “He will send pulses of energy through the floor. That will let him know where it is weak and where it is strong, and that tell us where we can dig.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  He waved his hand dismissively. “I would be surprised if you could, Lupus. You are not a man of magic.”

  That bugged me but I bit my lip and went looking for something to clear the muck from the floor. When it dried it would be dirt and then it would get into everything. It would be easier to clear as mud.

  My armor clanked unaccommodatingly, and I was sweating and swearing in no time. Arath and Thorn were occupied with the tunnel in the ceiling, and Nantar tended Drekk. Finally I felt delicate hands on me and turned to see Genna with her fingers stuck in the straps of my armor.

  “How does this come off?” she asked.

  “There are catches on the inside,” I said, and showed her where. She unhinged them and then helped me peel away the breastplate, leggings and sleeves, leaving me in the padding underneath.

  “Are you wearing anything underneath that?” she asked me, her lips twisted in a cocky smile.

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Short pants with no back,” I said. “I can shift this thing when I need to, but I can’t unbutton buttons.”

  She nodded and went to my saddle, still on Blizzard until we could clear a dry spot on the floor. A moment later she returned with my leather pants over her arm.

  “Strip, big man,” she told me.<
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  I laughed and peeled off the padding, kicking off my boots in the process. The short pants were cotton and worked like underwear for me. I all but leapt into the pants, feeling as if every pair of eyes focused on my naked behind.

  “You are so self-conscious of your body,” she said.

  I sat on the floor, pulling on my boots over the pants. “It’s my body,” I said.

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “So?”

  “They have all seen the parts you are hiding,” she said.

  I looked up at her from the floor, the moisture cold and uncomfortable on my butt. I met her pretty green eyes.

  “So?”

  Genna looked down at me, her hands on her hips, her hair over her shoulder, imperious and untamed. She had cleaned up a little and, although still covered with twigs and mud, had a wide, clean circle on her face.

  “So get over yourself,” she said. “It’s nice, but no one is going to name a ship after it.”

  I laughed, Nantar with me, having been eavesdropping.

  I looked around the passage, seeming smaller and less foreboding with the stone floor starting to show and the walls glowing, then back at Genna.

  “Is this my boring part?” I asked.

  “Nah,” she told me, stepping up and straddling my legs. This put her belly about two inches above the top of my head, and I had to strain my neck back to see into her eyes. “There must be something creeping around down here.”

  I nodded - a slow smile on my face.

  “Wasn’t sure we would survive this,” she said.

  I nodded again. “I think we got lucky.”

  “Welcome luck,” she told me. “Take luck where you can get it.”

  I agreed and said so. “So, this is just your boring part?”

  She shook her head again, her hair flying out nicely around her face. I wondered if she was conscious of it and decided that she was likely conscious of everything she did.

  “Be plenty for me to snoop around in,” she told me.

  “Not really your element, though.”

  “No – but snooping is snooping.”

  “Going to be needing me for point man?”

  “Thought you were never going to offer,” she grinned down at me.

  “Thought you were never going to ask,” I countered.

  She humphed and walked away, most likely to tell Ancenon we were a team. I watched her butt twist her leathers as she went. The ground felt cold and wet and the horses were already fouling up their portion of the floor – which would clog up our drainage if we didn’t do something about it, which probably meant me. I needed to work something out along the lines of a waste trough for them.

  All in all it beat being in prison, of that I had no doubt.

  Chapter Fifteen

  My Life as a Mole

  We were two weeks under the dirt, probing here, digging there, and performing this survey or that. I learned a lot, and not all of it about Outpost X.

  I sparred with Nantar or Thorn every morning and every night. They were right – I’d become too dependent on my weapon. We sparred with other weapons and I learned a lighter touch, a faster attack, and better feints. Again and again they beat me, but each time by a little less. I could tell that I could exceed Thorn’s abilities and possibly even match Nantar’s, given time.

  “You use different styles all the time,” Thorn complained to me.

  “What?”

  Nantar nodded. “You wade in like a dwarf. Your weapon is dead level to the ground, right over your head, protecting high and aiming low, so you have me thinking about my feet.

  “Then you engage like an Uman, which is strange – you thrust right in, probing your enemy for weaknesses like chinks in his armor or a slow step. Now I am not thinking about my feet anymore, I am thinking about my hips and shoulders, and if I have a shield it is too low, and my face is exposed.

  “So I engage you, and you fight to the left and right – and who knows where that comes from? I see some value in it if you are used to fighting more than one at a time, but now you have me holding you off with my shield and my sword, and my middle is opening up.”

  “And that seems to be your strategy,” Thorn said, “because then you jump right in with that directness Volkhydrans fight with, and either your enemy is dead or you are so far off your balance and over extended, that all I have to do is withdraw to get you.”

  “I have trained with Dwarves,” I admitted, “and with Volkhydrans and Uman-Chi. But I thought fighting was just, well, fighting. Kill the other guy before he kills you.”

  Nantar smiled like he always did. “Well, there’s a lot to be said for the other guy dying first,” he agreed. “But sometimes you want to spar, especially if you’re feeling him out for new moves, or if he’s better than you are and you’re holding him off to stay alive. Your problem is that the first fighter better than you are will kill you.”

  I had always considered that unavoidable, if it wasn’t, I felt eager to learn how.

  I sparred with Genna too, as I had aboard ship. We always spent the better part of every day together, working out, talking or exploring under D’gattis’ direction. He would have us enter a tower where no one currently alive had set foot, or travel for miles underground to unearth a relic that could help us. In what must have been some sort of mausoleum, we found a chamber whose murals told us stories unknown for more than one thousand years.

  Genna’s eyes searched the pictures, willowy men and women with light skin, dressed in white tunics with clasps on their necks, drawn in a style that reminded me very much of Egyptian art.

  Squiggles and runes drawn throughout the mural twisted into words for me, and I read them to her.

  “We are descendents of gods,” it said. “Noble and proud, beloved of Power, created to rule. Even when we lay down with our Uman slaves, we raise up with hybrids that are closer to gods than to Uman.”

  “You should be reading that to D’gattis and to Ancenon,” Genna commented. “They would like it very much.”

  “Maybe I can mistranslate it?” I offered. “Tell them that is says that one will come with blond hair that is meant to rule them.”

  “Or just to take their money.”

  “Then you should read them to yourself, not aloud,” D’gattis said in his usual bored tone.

  I jumped, Genna with me, at the sound of his voice. I saw one entrance to the room, lit by the blue light from my sword. A stone coffin lay on a stand in the center of the floor. The walls had been covered with murals. I saw no sign of D’gattis.

  “The upper corner, behind you.”

  I turned and saw a little globe in the corner. “You can talk through that?”

  “And see you, so don’t do what you usually do in these places,” he said dryly.

  I blushed crimson but Genna seemed to enjoy the idea. “Perhaps one last performance?” she asked.

  “Those – um, those are in every room down here?” I interrupted her, knowing what would happen if Genna decided that she liked the idea too much.

  “No, unfortunately, neither do they all work,” D’gattis said. “However this one does, so I am using it. Keep reading, Lupus.”

  I turned back to the wall, happy to have something to consider besides the thoughts running through Genna’s mind, and read tales of a fallen Cheyak King, Uflufestan, and his wise rule.

  In circumstances like that, my unique ability to decipher any language helped us a great deal, and we filled our Uman-Chi’s brains with knowledge. I could read languages that even the Uman-Chi couldn’t understand, languages that had been lost for centuries. Apparently there were secret languages even among the Cheyak.

  Most of it made no sense to me, even if I could understand the words. Some words, as I spoke them, left my head buzzing, and I suspected they were spells.

  “How do you do that?” Genna asked me as we crawled through the sewers, away from the prying eyes of our Uman-Chi leaders.

  “I squat down and ignor
e the pain in my back,” I told her. I wore my full armor, as I always did when we explored. We were never sure what we would find.

  I felt her kick me in the butt. “No, lummox, how do you read languages that no one could have taught you?”

  Was I ready to give that up? I knew the sword made it happen. I knew that, even without the sword, once I knew the language, I retained it. It felt like spiders scuttling around in my mind sometimes, threads of languages that I didn’t fully understand intertwining with the ones I did, drawing similarities of expression as well as diction, forming a web of new language.

  I decided to face the question head on, like a man.

  “I dunno.”

  “You don’t know?” she parroted me.

  “Nope.”

  “How can you not know how you know a language?”

  “I dunno.”

  “That’s your story.”

  My eyes were fixed forward, following the sewer. We were looking for a way up, traveling by the light of my sword.

  “Yep.”

  “So you aren’t ready to tell me?”

  “Nah.”

  “Time for that later, I suppose.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Time later.”

  We traveled in silence for quite a while, her eyes boring into my back.

  We had plenty of time for lovemaking with all of that going on. I believe we christened every room we found. Genna’s appetite was insatiable and I found myself no less hungry for her, although I did require that there not be one of those globes in the room, working or not. Afterward she loved to look up into my eyes, to murmur things and promise me that she felt deeply, totally in love.

  I felt none of it. No one would confuse Genna with Aileen, not that I planned to go back to her. I saw this excursion as a temporary arrangement and Genna as a part of it. I refused to promise her my undying love because I didn’t want to share that with her. She refused to believe that I didn’t, in my heart, have that to offer.