Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Robert Brady

  She broke the kiss, and she said, “I didn’t know your sadness then. I think that I do now. In the months I sat alone in a cell, naked, nothing to do but think, I thought about the man you are, the man were, the man you are becoming.”

  She sobbed. “I am destroying you, White Wolf,” she said. “The things you do now, the things you do for me, these are not good things. My selfishness, my greed, it drives you, it makes of you a monster that others fear.”

  “No,” I said. “No, no–not you. Not ever you.”

  “Of course me,” she said, and sniffed. “How many did you kill at the Battle of Tamaran Glen? How many in the south of Andoran? How many now? For me, White Wolf. For me.”

  “The sack of Outpost IX,” I said. “The Battle of Thera. That wasn’t you.”

  “But afterward,” she told me, “after those battles, you did not cry. Your own people dead around you, and you did not cry.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It’s true–it had started to bother me less. I’d have burned Outpost IX to the ground; I’d sent my own warriors to be killed for a tactical advantage. I did what I had to do, and no, it didn’t bother me as much as it used to.

  But that wasn’t Shela’s fault. I was doing War’s will. I knew the consequences of displeasing Him.

  “Let’s go,” she said to me. She took my hands in hers. “Let’s leave for Wisex. You can be the chieftain of the Wolf Riders, you can have your magic city on the lake. Let Tartan Stowe have back his father’s kingdom, let the Foveans have their stupid wars.”

  I could almost see her eyes glistening in the dark. I didn’t need my eyes to see her. I knew every curve of her face. I knew every hair on her head. I could almost name them. I knew how her eyes looked when she cried for me.

  “The Bounty Hunter’s Guild would love that,” I informed her. “We have done a lot of things no one can forgive, my love. The last thing we can do is weaken ourselves and then dare them to come after us.

  “The Uman-Chi have long memories. The Andarans can smell weakness. The Confluni would love to have that city on Black Lake.”

  She took me in her eyes and she sobbed. She’d been a captive, all alone, for a long time. She had only her thoughts to comfort her. Finally, those things turned against her as well.

  It’s hard to turn into an object, when you were raised to be a woman. I could tell that now.

  We were back in Eldador the Port in three days. Eight ships, the full compliment, returned to Andurin across the Straights of Deception. Eight more returned to Thera, the rest to Eldador the Port. I stood at the bow of The Bitch of Eldador with Shela beside me in a flowing white dress she’d conjured from her possessions in the capitol. It accentuated the swell of her belly. Her black hair flew free behind her.

  More than a thousand stood cheering on the pier. The Regulars were hard-pressed to contain them. Fifty squads of Wolf Soldier home guard under J’her’s personal command lined the pier where The Bitch would pull in. People threw flowers in the water in front of the ship.

  Shela waved to them. They cheered louder. She smiled wide – it’s hard not to like being adored.

  I knew what was going on in her heart.

  We exited the ship on a gang plank for the solid wooden wharves beside her. Sailors made her fast and my corps of engineers were already scrambling to assess her damage. The brass end of her fire pipe was scored and cracked and it appeared these would have to be re-engineered.

  It still bothered me that one of the ‘specials’ had blown up the first time she tried to use her weapon.

  Hectar and his son approached me through the line of Regulars keeping the crowd back, marching past the lines of Wolf Soldier waiting to escort us back to the palace.

  “Well met, your Imperial Majesties,” he said. He took my forearm in his and then kissed the back of Shela’s hand.

  “You are radiant, my Lady,” he said. “Resplendent! In your glory.”

  “My feet hurt,” she informed him, leaning close, “and I need to pee.”

  He blanched, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have kids of his own.

  He turned and walked between us down the pier, his son behind us, the Wolf Soldiers falling in before and behind us all in their squads. “I’ve got the big carriage waiting for us at the end of the pier,” he said. “And of course Blizzard for The Conqueror.”

  I nodded. “Anything going on I need to know about?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Nothing from the Bounty Hunter’s guild,” he said. “I’m told Duke Ceberro has broken his engagement with that red-head. I didn’t think it would last.”

  I had my own thoughts on that.

  “How do you like being the inspiration for a war vessel?” He asked Shela.

  Shela made a face. “Your pardon, your Grace?”

  He pointed at the stern of my flagship, where her name was spelled out in great, bold letters.

  Shela’s jaw dropped.

  Her eyes flew to the stern of the flagship, and then back to me.

  “Really?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Not The Lady of Eldador, or The Andaran or She Sails Swiftly?” she demanded.

  “For the flag ship?” I returned. “A flag ship has to be terrifying.”

  “I’ll show you terrifying,” she informed me.

  “Well, it’s bad luck to rename a ship,” I said.

  She turned to Hectar. So did I.

  He knew where his bread was buttered.

  “The worst of luck,” he said. “Some men won’t even serve on one.”

  “I think The Bitch is more terrifying than She Sails Swiftly,” Hectaro chimed in from behind us. “And people are commenting on it already, how much the Emperor loves you, his contempt for his enemies, that he would turn a slur against you into something that will kill them.”

  Smart kid. I had to give him something.

  Shela was nodding and frowning appreciatively, then her face broke into a wide smile.

  “The first time I heard that was on the Silent Isle, and her first battle was with the Uman-Chi,” she said. “I guess that’s proper, then.”

  We walked down the pier and to the carriage. Blizzard was stomping and snorting and he nuzzled me as soon as I got close to him. Someone had managed to get his saddle on him, but his bit was over the saddle horn, and I had to feed it to him.

  Shela entered the carriage, waved to the crowd from the open door, and disappeared inside. I heard, “My darling!” and had to assume Nina and Lee were inside.

  The trip back to the palace seemed to take forever, but that was okay with me.

  I slept with my wife that night, for the first time in five months. We exhausted ourselves beforehand, much as the geometry of sex with a pregnant woman is a precarious thing. Where there was a will, there was a way, and if Shela was anything she was willing.

  Nina and a few hundred Wolf Soldiers slept in a nursery wing of the palace which had been renovated. Well, the Wolf Soldiers were probably not sleeping. When Shela had found out there’d been an attempt on Lee, she went ballistic and proceeded on a witch hunt for any other Bounty Hunters who might be lingering. If there were any, and they had a brain in their head, they were still running for the border.

  I drifted off to sleep with Shela’s head tucked under my chin. I dreamt of riding Blizzard once again, across a wide plain of grass, from nowhere to nowhere. His hooves pounded the grass, filling my nose with the good smell of crushed grass and horse sweat.

  Even as I dreamt, I thought, “I need to do this.”

  A familiar voice rang ominous in my mind, “So now you’ve wrested sea and land power.”

  I pulled Blizzard up short. He snorted and stomped the ground. He wanted to run, and I wanted to run with him.

  “Does that please you, Lord?” I asked the god War.

  “It suits my purpose,” He said. “Glennen is disposed of, his family no threat to you. While your enemies are lined up against you, your victories are clear. My followers grow.”


  That had to be important to a god. I didn’t know if it was safe to ask him about that and I couldn’t think of a thing I would gain for knowing, so I didn’t.

  “The enemies are more than I thought there would be,” I admitted instead.

  “They are all the world,” War told me. “The swelling power of a new nation terrifies them, and now you command the seas. Conflu especially looks seriously to the East.”

  Conflu would not like to see a united Fovea under me. They would have a very hard time keeping us out of their nation.

  “Even now your mind leaps ahead,” War said. “And this pleases me.”

  “I appreciate…” I said, and then had to choke back the emotions. “I appreciate that you answered my prayer, that you let me keep my family.”

  The sense of satisfaction that filled me flowed off of my god. It left me feeling enriched and dirty at the same time.

  These were dangerous games I played.

  “I come to you now for Wisex,” He said. “Your woman thinks you fought that battle for her, but I know the truth of this.

  “The greatness of a people is like the greatness of a man, and that is in knowledge,” He said. “And I know you plan to build a great city in Wisex, patterned after what you saw in your old world, and to fill it with the knowledge you will scavenge from the Cheyak.”

  My ultimate dream. War always stripped me to my most basic self. It was true–I was glad this gave me the ability to marry my Andaran plains girl, but in fact the purpose was to build a stronghold for the knowledge I planned to gather.

  What was the empire of Alexander best known for, if not the lost library of Alexandria? What was the first great thing the United States had to offer, if not the Library of Congress?

  When Genghis Khan conquered the steppe, he gathered every written word he could find and sent it back to Samarkand. When the Romans crushed the Greeks, they robbed the libraries and maintained the scholars.

  Knowledge is power. The greatness of a people isn’t just in its military; it’s in its library. Everything arose from there.

  Every step I’d taken, since I’d realized what War wanted of me, had been toward this. The Free Legion, then expanding into the Eldadorian peerage when that opportunity presented itself, taking over the monarchy and now hammering the Trenboni–it set one thing in motion:

  I had to go after all of the lost Outposts, and I had to rob their libraries, bring them back here and fill this place with scholars whom I could trust, who would take that knowledge and build on it.

  War had brought me here not just because I could ‘break the rule,’ not just because He could talk to me. War brought a history buff and a mechanic here. War wanted someone who could learn His lesson:

  The future of a place is buried in its past.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Report Card

  The essence of the god War, with Chaos and Power beside him, observed the wonderful fruits of his labors.

  “This suits us well,” Power agreed.

  Chaos for a moment burned hotter than the sun, then became freezing cold, then reverted to nothing but the smell of oranges.

  “It thinks it has found its way,” War said to them. “Without knowing how it serves me, it serves me well.”

  “I worried about the interference of the Andaran female,” Power said. “I had no desire to enter again into your machinations. But now that she is involved, I approve. The tidal wave becomes a tsunami.”

  Chaos rained down on them as water, then exploded and reformed itself as a little girl with a puppy. Then it devoured the puppy.

  “And you have heard nothing from Adriam, or Eveave?” Power asked.

  War became a darker color. “The universe is full of nothing but the word of Adriam and Eveave,” he said. “It is Life’s interference that concerns me.”

  “Life,” Power said, growing dark as well. Chaos became a beautiful woman with high, full breasts, dressed in gossamer, and licked its lips lasciviously at the other gods, as it melted like hot wax into a puddle.

  “The Almadain makes no sense,” War said. “It must oppose me–Life would never side with War, however it supports my instrument in all things, and gives him heart when he has none. I think I might have lost it in Conflu, had it not been for the Almadain.”

  “Then that concerns me,” Power said. “Have you attempted to remove the Almadain?”

  “My instrument cherishes it,” War said. “Yours as well, to some degree. It will prove difficult to remove from him now, and prior I did not expect it to live long. I sent minions to take it and they failed.”

  “Then your victories are not complete,” Power said.

  Chaos formed up from the puddle into a slavering demon, clutching at them with wicked claws and whipping its spiked tale back and forth. “Not complete, not complete!” it snarled.

  Beneath them, the instrument and his woman plotted for an Eldadorian Empire. Other nations moved like the pieces of a board game, like the parts of one of the instrument’s beloved machines. Cause and effect, action and reaction. The Eldadorians built ships, the ports throughout Fovea built walls. Spies sought the formula for Eldadorian Fire, other spies sought out the spies.

  Eveave’s favorites, the Bounty Hunters, sought out the instrument. His allies sought out the Bounty Hunters.

  Cause and effect. Attack and retaliation. These are the properties of the god War.

  This was how they worshipped Him.

  “My victories,” War said, “pile up around me. My instrument strikes fear in the hearts of the followers of other gods. They dare not stand before him.”

  “But they will,” Power said. “The whole of Fovea will turn on your tool before he is done.”

  “Before he is done,” War said. “He will have turned on them. Clearly you can see where he is going.”

  “I can,” Power said.

  “Then you can see what he will do,” War said.

  Chaos evaporated into a cloud of steam, exploded and was gone. The other gods waited for him to return, but he did not.

  By then, the instrument’s woman had given him a son. It wasn’t in the nature of the Eldadorian nation for a child of the ruler to be the heir. In fact, throughout Fovea, dynasties were rare. The children of the instrument, however, were as unique as he.

  Many seasons passed. The Instrument’s seed grew rich on Earth, although he didn’t realize it. A mortal’s life and vision are both brief, unlike those of a god.

  Power glowed a satisfied purple and regarded War.

  “It begins,” he said.