Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Brady, Robert

  I stepped back up to the dais. They were quiet now. I could just barely hear the creaking of Aschire and Scitai bows as they sighted delegates and guardsmen or supported my lancers.

  I had played this moment over in my mind. What could I say that would keep them from attacking me again? I could slaughter them as an example, but that wouldn’t change anything. Their nations would just send more and paint me a massacring maniac with goat horns. I could tell them what I knew but why waste time making accusations if the law wouldn’t punish the accused? Why point blame if the guilty didn’t care who caught them?

  Sometimes the world needs to not feel good about what it is doing. Sometimes the pain of a woman who didn’t do anything but love her husband and her kids needs to be felt by all.

  Sometimes it’s just personal. Alekki had been a sweet soul, and Drekk a good friend.

  So I looked out at these delegates, these collected ambassadors.

  “You came for me and mine,” I said to them. “Your own assassins tried to kill me, my wife, my friends, and my king in my home. You failed.

  “An innocent women, the Queen of Eldador, paid the price. Tortured to death by your orders.

  “Now I’m the one with all of you at my mercy.”

  I looked at them, let that all sink in.

  “Now you fear for your lives, as she did,” I told them. “Come after me and mine again, and I promise you you’ll pray for death.”

  Let them see the two things that might give them pause: my utter contempt for this High Council and my ability to step outside of their rules and strike them where they felt the safest.

  How many had sputtered in surprise at the thought of anyone attacking Outpost IX when I first came here?

  “You men and women who think you are in power,” I told them, “you believed you could intimidate me with the force of it. I’ve done this to remind you: when you make an enemy and give him nowhere else to go, you may think you’ll break him, but you run the risk instead of making him stronger than ever he could know.”

  I turned on my heel and I left. I mounted Blizzard beside my wife and her gelding and I lead my Wolf Soldiers from Outpost IX. My lancers cleared the streets before us and my soldiers set fire to everything that they could burn, hurling torches through open doors and broken windows. Archers shot flaming arrows into buildings and rooms. Their Wizards now had to choose between fighting us and saving what remained of their city.

  The main gate had been closed and spelled before we could return to it. The Bitch of Eldador raised one hand in defiance to the Uman-Chi spell casters while her acolytes held off the magical barrage that built up against us. In moments the gate exploded from its mountings to fly almost a mile into the harbor.

  No sooner did it happen than one of our Wizards fell from his horse, a green slime where his eyes used to be. I saw Shela waver and then rematerialize, her gelding neighing nervously as this happened.

  “Be quick, White Wolf,” she told me. “We don’t have much longer before we meet their best and most dangerous.”

  So much for the moral dilemma over “save the city or kill the invaders.”

  I nodded and called for double-time march out through the main gates. Two Spears torched the remains of the market outside of the city gates while my archers kept theirs pinned down, covering their withdrawal from the towers.

  We’d gotten out of the city alive, but we hadn’t won yet.