Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Robert Brady

  “Agreed,” Zarshar growled.

  “Everyone in front of him,” the old Man commanded the rest.

  “Sirrah,” the Uman-Chi began.

  He turned to her and said, “Otherwise he’s going to say, ‘I didn’t know that one was a part of your group’ after he beheads one of us.”

  The Uman-Chi looked to the Scitai, who nodded. As a group they lined up where he could see them, including their horses.

  “Now swear it all, at the same time,” Jack instructed him.

  They had him. For a moment he thought it might be better just to kick his own legs out and break his neck, but that would be admitting someone from the race of Men had bested him, and that was almost as bad as being torn apart by the Slee.

  He swore.

  “Happy, lummox?” Xinto chided him.

  “No, but I can live with it,” Jack said. “Untie him.”

  “With your permission, of course,” Xinto inclined his head. Jahunga ordered his men to approach him, and Zarshar had to wait for the hour it took to release him.

  In that time, the large man left with a Volkhydran. As his legs were being unbound, they returned with a raw haunch, large enough to be from a stag or a young horse.

  “Feed,” the Volkhydran, Jerod, said, and tossed it on the ground before him.

  “You are kind,” Zarshar inclined his head.

  “Thank this one,” Jerod corrected him. “He said you were going to tell us you had hunger pains, it was our fault, and then attack us.”

  Jack smiled a satisfied smile. Xinto rolled his eyes. A dark female in Andaran clothes walked up to this ‘Jack’ and kissed his cheek, bending her left leg at the knee as she stretched to his height. She perhaps enjoyed him—it was impossible to say.

  Zarshar hadn’t thought of that, but he would have. Hunger would have pained him, and he would have struck without explanation. He could not claim now their causing him the pain of hunger was intentional. Power was not so naïve a god.

  “You vex me, Man,” he said to Jack. “I like you, but I assure you that, when the time comes, you will be the first to die.”

  This Jack didn’t seem scared, but the female clearly felt threatened. “You can’t tell me—” Xinto began.

  The last knot came untied, and Zarshar leapt to his feet as fast as any of them could follow. Slurn had his spear in place as quickly, the Toorians only slightly slower. The dark-haired female gripped Jack’s belly and the Uman-Chi raised a hand white with power.

  Zarshar had the Scitai in his grip in one sweep of his hand. Xinto’s head emerged from his thumb and forefinger, his legs kicked free past the heel of his hand, as Zarshar lifted Xinto from the ground.

  “Rest assured, I would have marched to your picket and killed every horse you own,” he said. “I would have forced you either to attack me or watch them die horribly.

  “Your Man is someone you are wise to listen to. He knows my mind, and I do not like to be bound.”

  He expected the usual complaints of Men, the irritating reasoning of Uman-Chi, the Slee to threaten and the Toorians to argue to attack him—which he would have considered an assault.

  He got none of these. Instead, the female Uman-Chi sang her song again.

  * * *

  Glynn sang, and Jack listened to the now familiar lyrics.

  He almost liked mentally sparring with this Swamp Devil, much as it was a lot more serious than negotiating with a stubborn client. Zarshar had been right in that Jack knew its mind. Xinto thought he had history with this thing, and that it knew him and liked him.

  It hadn’t killed the Scitai when they met before, but that didn’t mean anything to it. Zarshar knew it could kill Xinto later. Jack saw the truth in its red eyes, the way it licked its lips, wanting to fight. Jack had seen Zarshar’s type in sales people who ripped their clients off because they liked it, not because they needed the money—people like that don’t take a vacation from it.

  Jack watched Zarshar, and Zarshar watched Glynn. The Devil’s red eyes first widened, then narrowed, and all the while the hand that held the struggling Scitai lowered until finally the song was over and Xinto stepped out of his grip to the ground.

  Xinto fussed and straightened the lumpy gray robe that never actually fit straight, and altered the feathered cap on his head. He made sure to step away from Zarshar and in among the Toorians where he wouldn’t be snatched up again so easily.

  “I heard your words in my native language,” Zarshar said, predictably, “but your lips moved in yours. If I had more of my power I would know for sure, but I think you are not the originator of this magic.”

  “I am not, I swear it, Sirrah,” Glynn said. Jack didn’t know how much that would mean to the Swamp Devil, but he knew how little it meant to him.

  He hadn’t considered that this Glynn used her magic to trick them, but what if the real magic was her making them believe her? Could she have fooled Shela? He couldn’t ask her now.

  “And I can tell you do not lie,” Zarshar said. “For the now, I will accept that this song of yours is prophecy, much as it upsets me a great deal.”

  “Then you aren’t here to wage the war against the Empire?” Xinto asked him.

  Zarshar shook his horned head. “I honestly can’t say why I came here, except that being here is all I could think about for all of the last month and, having resisted it as long as I could, I departed for here, and came across you.”

  “I know the feeling,” Jerod grumbled, looking at no one.

  “I am familiar with this as well,” Jahunga admitted. “I left everything I had accomplished, everything I was to be here.”

  “And now one of you—the guardian—must guide me to ‘the sacred place,’ Zarshar surmised.

  The thing showed intelligence, Jack admitted to himself. He put his arm around Raven, already stuck to him like glue. She feared that they would be separated, but she needed time away from him to reconcile for herself why she felt so attracted to him.

  If she left him now, he would miss her. At the same time, it would hurt less than when he finally let his guard down, as he knew he would soon do.

  “Clearly, we have two goals,” Glynn informed him. “The one is to collect this last part of the prophecy—the one who fights as does the sun. The other is to commence to ‘fight the battle from inside.”

  “We must move on to Kor,” she said, “and from there, we must lay plans against the Eldadorian Empire.”

  * * *

  Melissa sat at a counter, in a dinette, on a vinyl-covered stool. The place was familiar, but she knew she hadn’t been here in a very long time. There were laminated menus and stainless steel knives and forks, cheesy linoleum counters and tiny white coffee cups.

  The whole thing wasn’t right, she knew. She shouldn’t be here. She had something else to do.

  “Back she comes, like a bad penny,” an older woman told her.

  She turned to her right and saw a woman with silver hair, wrinkled skin, dressed in a yellow sundress and white shoes. She smelled of Sunflowers perfume.

  She hadn’t smelled that smell since…

  Since…

  Since that night in Augusta, when she’d done the worst thing she’d done in her whole life, ever.

  “You picked you a hard row to hoe, missy,” the older woman told her.

  Eve, Melissa remembered. She called herself Eve.

  That name meant a lot more to her now.

  “My, look how you’ve growed,” Eve commented, her face lighting up in a smile. She reached out and touched the back of Melissa’s hand. “You were barely a girl when we first met. Now you’re all a woman.”

  Melissa looked down and saw that she was dressed in her Andaran leathers, all boobs and belly. The back of her jacket hung over the stool. Her black leather mini rode up on her.

  “I wanted to thank you,” Melissa said, finally. She looked into Eve’s eyes. “That money you slipped me, in that pack of cigarettes—I used it to start a new life. I—well, I think y
ou kind o’ saved me.”

  Eve made a shooing motion. “You was too pretty a girl to be turned out on the streets,” she said. “I jess did for you what you’lda done for yourself, but faster.”

  Melissa smiled. She hadn’t heard a real Maine accent in a long time, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it.

  Of course, this wasn’t a Mainer—this was a goddess, and her name wasn’t ‘Eve,’ though it was close.

  “Am I doing what I should be doing now?” Melissa asked her.

  The waitress behind the counter, a middle-aged woman who had also been here that day, came and set a cup of coffee in front of her, cream and two sugars. It smelled wonderful, and Melissa couldn’t resist it. They had nothing like it here.

  “I think you know the answer to that,” Eve told her.

  Melissa did, but she still wanted to ask. They were stuck. Glynn had decided they were going to some pirates’ den named ‘Kor,’ and the closer they drew to it, the more certain she was that this was the wrong direction.

  “We can’t figure out what to do next,” Melissa complained. The coffee cup was warm in her hand, she steam rising up into her face. She’d left lipstick on the rim, but she didn’t remember putting on lipstick.

  Eww, she thought. Dirty mug. But no—it wasn’t. She’d left lipstick on it herself—she touched her mouth and came away with pink fingertips.

  She looked up at Eve—the goddess Eveave. This meant something, she knew it did. Eveave wanted her to make a connection.

  “That doesn’t mean anything to you, does it,” Eveave asked her.

  “No, ma’am, I’m sorry. I—it—I don’t want to seem stupid.”

  Eveave shook her head. “Stupid is pretending that you know when you don’t. You’ve got friends of yours, they are the ones being stupid, heading off into creation with no plan and no plan for a plan.”

  Melissa smiled. She thought the same thing. Taking off with no plan was worse than doing nothing.

  She looked back into the cup, and the lipstick had vanished from its rim. She pressed her lips together and could still feel it. She couldn’t have drunk the lipstick from the coffee cup rim—it didn’t work that way.

  There wasn’t a trace of the lipstick—she didn’t see it on any part of the rim.

  The lipstick that had been left there had been removed. Or maybe it still remained, and something hid it from her?

  She didn’t have enough information to solve this puzzle—but she could ask her new friends. As likely this would mean something to one of them.

  She saw Eveave nodding. The waitress took her coffee.

  “You’re the taker and the giver,” Melissa challenged her. It occurred to her that this didn’t necessarily come free.

  “What I gave, you have,” Eveave told her. The goddess looked Melissa level in the eye.

  “And what I’m taking, you lost already.”

  Raven awoke with a start, Jack next to her. She could still see the darkness of the plains, the night sky dotted with stars above them. The Swamp Devil was crouching by their one fire, far too close to it for safety, staring into its depths. She sat up and it turned to her with evil red eyes, and flashed its red teeth in what could have been a grimace or a smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Three:

  Teamwork

  Glynn shook her head. “What you describe cannot happen,” she informed them.

  Raven had awoken Jack, frantic, demanding that he raise the rest of their little party. Jack admitted to himself he had done it more to quiet her than because he believed her story, and here he saw he wasn’t the only one.

  “It violates the Rule,” Xinto informed her.

  “What rule?” Jack asked him.

  Xinto sighed. They sat around the campfire. At the head of their meeting sat Glynn, Jahunga on one side of her and Xinto on the other. Next to Xinto sat Zarshar, and next to Jahunga, Jerod. Next to Jerod sat Slurn, then Raven, then Jack between her and Zarshar.

  Jahunga’s Toorians stood out on the plains, all of them roused, ensuring that no one listened in on them. They’d already conducted a service for their fallen, committing them back to the Earth they believed had born them. Like Men, they’d wept openly for their lost allies, extolled their virtues and made promises to them in their afterlife.

  “The Rule of the Gods,” Glynn informed them. Jahunga and Jerod both nodded. “Set forth by Adriam to protect the children of Earth and Water, he decreed that no god or goddess can affect any of Earth’s children directly in any way.”

  “We aren’t Earth’s children,” Jack said immediately, before thinking.

  All heads turned toward him. Most didn’t know this, and Lupus had warned him to be jealous of his secrets.

  Lupus wasn’t here, though—and this was an Uman-Chi secret.

  “We weren’t born here,” he said. “We were brought here from another world, possibly even another reality. We are from a world entirely different from this one. Raven, me, and the Emperor.”

  “Another…world?” Jerod seemed skeptical.

  Who could blame him, Jack thought. It sounded like something a crazy person would say.

  “There are those who believe,” Glynn told them, “that there are worlds like balls, that circle the sun, and other suns, and there are people living on them, just as people live here.”

  The rest were quiet for several minutes. Then Jerod broke out laughing.

  “How could people live on a ball?” he demanded. “The ones on the side—”

  “At the bottom would fall off,” Jack finished for him. “When we have more time, I’ll explain it to you, but for now just pretend that it’s right. Where I’m from, the moon is nothing like yours, the people are nothing like the ones here, and there is no magic.”

  “There are people with no magic,” Jahunga said. “The Confluni have very little. My own people—”

  “They think of magic, like you think of the Earth being a ball,” Raven told them.

  “And if that is true,” Zarshar said, “then they are not of Earth, and the gods can speak directly to them.”

  “And if they are the Emperor’s people…” Jerod let the idea trail off.

  They were quiet for a long while after that. Jack had felt the same way when he’d seen Shela levitate glasses for them, back in Outpost IX. It violated fundamental reality.

  Slurn hissed something, and Xinto translated it.

  “If the Emperor is advised by War, then what possible chance could we have against him?”

  “If that is true, then we are advised by Eveave,” Glynn said, “and She is a greater god.”

  “Eveave, you say She tried to show you that something right in front of you can be hidden?” Jahunga said.

  Raven nodded. The rest fell quiet again.

  “A cup,” Xinto said. “A circular rim, paint on it, then gone.”

  Jack knew it was lipstick, but paint would do.

  In sales, he had learned to ask interrogative questions. No one could know enough about a client before they met to make a sale so, in essence, a good sales person asked the client how to sell him, and the client then told the salesperson, never himself the wiser.

  “Tell me something,” he said, and all eyes turned to him. “How can you tell a sacred place from, say, a normal place?”

  Jerod sighed. Jahunga tried to look into his eyes, to read him. Zarshar’s red tongue ran over his red fangs—Jack noted that the end was forked.

  “You know,” Xinto said, poking the embers of their fire with a stick, “that is a pretty good question.”

  “It is?” Jerod asked him, his eyes narrowed.

  “Indeed,” Glynn answered. “We take these things for granted, but Eveave wants us to see through new eyes. How do we know that the Tears of the World, for example, is sacred to Earth and Water?”

  “That’s easy enough,” Jerod told her. “If you approach the Llorando, you hear that crying sound—a man on the Volkhydran side, a woman on the Confluni.”

  “An
d it tastes of tears,” Xinto added, and shuddered. “I couldn’t drink from it—it wasn’t even fit for my pony.”

  “Well enough,” she said. “And the shrine to War at Thera, installed by the Emperor. How do we know it to be holy?”

  They were all quiet. Jack thought it figured that Lupus would build himself his own shrine.

  “I’ve seen it,” Jerod admitted. “It’s huge, with that rare black marble from the Ogre lands. I’m for Adriam, not War, but I looked at it and I didn’t want to go in there.”

  “So you had a feeling that it must be holy,” Jahunga said. “In your heart, you knew.”

  Jerod nodded. Jack thought Glynn must be moving somewhere with this.

  “I myself have seen it,” she said, “and seen the Tears of the World, and I can tell you the Tears of the World is the first place where the Emperor’s boots touched Fovea.”

  “Well, that makes sense, with his horse and all,” Jerod said.

  “But the Emperor, then Rancor, didn’t know the Tears of the World is holy,” Xinto said. “I know this right from him. He thought it just another polluted lake.”

  “Hmph,” Jerod said. Zarshar put his hands on his hips and chuckled.

  “How about a holy place, at the center of Eldador, just like this cup, where anyone who went there would know, ‘That is a holy place,’” he asked.

  Xinto’s shoulders slumped, then Jerod’s. He turned his head to Jahunga, looking on curiously, but even as the Volkhydran opened his mouth, Jahunga came to his own conclusion.

  “The Lone Wood,” Glynn said for all of them. “Of course—the home of the Druids, a place that even the Emperor will not invade.”

  “Druids?” Raven echoed her. Jack felt her hand take his upper arm. “I know that word. We come from a place with Druids.”

  “In truth?” Glynn pressed her. She seemed more interested than she usually allowed herself when it came to the two humans. “But you claim to have no magic.”

  “That’s why the Guardian must go with me,” Zarshar said. “Only I could hope to protect him inside the Druids’ domain.”

  “The Druids we know had no magic,” Raven said.