Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Robert Brady

  It could have been anyone’s fight if Raven had kept her mount under control. Instead she crashed into a shieldman, fell and landed in between Slurn and Nina, before Nina had the opportunity to dispel her energy.

  The moment she touched Raven, Nina flew like a missile into the backs of the pikemen, limp as a corpse. Jahunga’s Toorians advanced, Jerod with his own troops closing on the other side, but the sergeant proved to be a smarter man, leaping for Raven and taking a handful of her hair at the scalp, dragging her to her feet, his sword at her exposed stomach.

  “You’ll see her guts,” he said, his shieldmen falling in around him, “if you don’t stand back from me.”

  Raven reached reflexively for her hair, and he shook her. She knew she couldn’t reach the dagger in her boot. Jerod made an exasperated face and motioned for his men to fall back.

  No! Raven swore to herself. She refused to play the helpless girly. She wouldn’t be the damsel in distress. That was Melissa—she was Raven.

  She reached down to the man’s thigh, felt the muscle through the leggings, took a firm grip and said, “Burn!”

  With everything in her, she yearned for the man to explode into flames. She focused her mind on the burning, the heat, the screaming, the dread, even the smell of cooking meat.

  She felt the wetness at her side from the edge of the blade at her skin. He kept his sword sharp.

  But then it fell away, and he stood back from her. She turned to see his hands reaching for his face, the skin blistering, the eyes bulging from his head. He opened his mouth to scream, and flames licked out to singe his upper lip.

  His eyes exploded, then his skin within his shirt, and he fell. Flame shot in two plumes from his ears, bathing the plains around him in steaming blood and cooked brains.

  Raven’s hand flew to her mouth as the guilt washed over her. It was horrible, unimaginable, to die that way. She looked for sympathy to those closest to her, and saw the horror on their faces.

  Wolf Soldiers. One of them transformed before her eyes from shock to rage. She had killed one of them, and now she stood right there.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. She raised her hand between them and they flinched, fearful of receiving more of what their sergeant had received.

  Nothing. Then four slow smiles.

  They had her.

  “Pain!” she screamed, pointing at the nearest of them. Nothing. He flinched for a moment and then advanced on her, hefting his sword.

  Slurn swept in once again, quick as a flash, his spear prodding one man’s shield. On the other side of the fight the Men with Jerod advanced, their spears finding Wolf Soldier pikes.

  Raven’s body had started shaking, full of energy, full of power, like a spring that had been compressed and released, but hadn’t sprung yet. She’d cast a spell and expended her energy, but now she had more, and no way to expel it.

  Jerod looked her in the eye, the concern plain on his face. The sergeant’s corpse smoldered next to her—it wouldn’t take long before those Wolf Soldiers decided that the sergeant had the right idea—that she was their weakness, after all.

  No! She opened her mouth to try another word, but she couldn’t form it. She worked her jaw, trying to overcome something that felt like a dam to her brain, and something else that made her feel like she would throw up.

  “Are you alright, girl?” Jerod shouted at her. His voice sounded at the same time right in her ear, and a million miles away.

  “Girl!”

  She couldn’t even tell who said it. She looked to her left, and a bush exploded in flame. Then to her right, where her eyes landed on the back of a Wolf Soldier. The warrior exploded, scorching the land around him, burning pieces of flesh flying out among them, the Man’s terrified scream spooking the horses.

  Her mind became a wash of red heat and angry flame. Suddenly too large for her body, her awareness fled out over the plains grass, scorching it in a blast pattern that radiated from her. Small creatures, rabbits and birds, flew screaming and burning into the air, fleeing her great wash of flame. Wolf Soldiers bolted from their formation, one after the next exploding in a ball of fire. The Toorians ran after them, even though her magic hadn’t touched them.

  She felt it getting away from her, and somehow she knew that, if she lost it, then the flame would eat her, and her friends, and run wild across the plain. She forced herself envision the flame dying, the smoke fading. Her mind took her from the burning plain to a dark place, quiet and tranquil, and then plunged her into cool, dark nothing.

  * * *

  Thorn sat his new mount, an Eldadorian mare with too much spirit and too little stamina, next to Nantar, who’s shed his armor for soft leggings and an open cotton shirt.

  Nantar rode a gelding. It had that lack of spirit geldings had—Thorn preferred the mare since his own horse had grown too old to campaign, and he hadn’t had the time to go to Andoran for another.

  He missed his home country. He’d planned to spend the War months with Nantar’s daughters there, but this new plan had come and ruined everything.

  “You sure you want to wait?” Nantar asked him.

  He nodded, saying nothing, stewing in his own juices.

  “How do you like the Eldadorian horse?” Nantar commented.

  Nantar tried to draw him out. Nantar did that. He kept everyone around him and smiling. Sometimes Thorn expected him to joke with the corpses he made.

  “It’s not as good as ours,” Thorn commented, peeking out from his melancholy.

  They led five thousand. They’d marched out on the plains now, spread out in their squads, twenty-five across and twenty deep, with a gap between each as wide as a squad, making them seem four times their already enormous size.

  Nantar’s Sarandi, Thorn’s scouts, they formed the vanguard for the Free Legionnaires, the fingers and the fist of their army, probing the land before them.

  Not crushing—they were in Eldador. Supposedly friendly.

  Thorn kept his eyes on the edge of the horizon. He’d seen some dust—not a lot, but there wouldn’t be this time of year with the ground still wet. Just enough to tell them of the approach, and most would miss it.

  Not Thorn. No Andaran, no Hunter, would miss something like that.

  “You should ask for one of Blizzard’s get, I think,” Nantar said.

  “About time a Daff Kanaar had one,” Thorn agreed, his eyes straining to the horizon.

  There! Topping the rise between them and the horizon, the flash of his armor. Thorn grinned, and it felt satisfying.

  “Marked him?” Nantar asked.

  “Halfway to us,” Thorn said. He shifted on the mare. He didn’t feel comfortable with her. Shela would have a better mount for him, he knew. As Nantar suggested, he’d ask for one of Blizzard’s lot. Shela would understand.

  “Where?”

  “He cut between two rises, ahead of his army,” Thorn said. “Look there for the flash of steel from his armor.”

  Nantar strained to see it. Thorn pointed an outstretched finger, not where the rider hid, but where he soon would be.

  Sure enough, he saw the flash between two hillocks.

  “He should have darkened his horse and his armor,” Nantar commented.

  Thorn shook his head. “He wants to be seen,” the Andaran said. “He wants me to admit I taught him and he learned it.

  Nantar grinned a big, furry grin. “Well, you did teach him.”

  “Never thought he’d learn it, though,” Thorn answered. The flash came closer now—he would run out of places to hide soon and come at them at a dead run.

  “He likes to pretend he knows everything already.”

  “That he does,” Nantar agreed. “Mostly he likes to learn what you teach him and show you what you missed.”

  Thorn nodded. “I hate it when he does that.”

  Nantar laughed. “You hate it when it works,” he said. “And you hate it when it works with something you taught him, when you didn’t see it first.”

/>   “Well, I see him coming this time,” Thorn said, but he immediately became suspicious. He shouldn’t be seeing this.

  They heard Blizzard’s challenge, not from before them where the rider approached, but from between them and their army, from a pit in the ground someone had covered with a mat and grass.

  Lupus leapt from the pit on his horse, rearing and snorting, and then pounded toward them, his lance lowered.

  Half the squads bolted forward, into the other half that didn’t move without orders. The gelding Nantar rode reared and the mare bobbed her head.

  He stood before them a moment later, his horned helm on his head and his childish grin on his face underneath it, offset by his cruel scar. Taller than Nantar, he seemed a big child sometimes, and Thorn faulted him regularly for not being serious.

  “That wasn’t bad,” Nantar commented, reaching forward to clap the shoulder of his armor.

  “It would have been bad if we had marched into that,” Thorn argued. “And if we had kept marching, we would have.”

  Lupus shook his head. He still wore the same corrugated Dwarven armor he had on when they met, over a decade earlier. He still rode the same giant stallion, who should be getting too old to ride now but wasn’t.

  “My men on the other side of that ridge watched you coming. They started forward in time to bring you to a halt,” Lupus said, still grinning. Blizzard stepped closer than most horses would, his instinct just as Thorn remembered it—to intimidate the other horses. It worked, and Thorn had to fight the mare as she tried to withdraw.

  “I knew you would make me come to you,” Lupus, said, looking directly at Thorn.

  What could Thorn say? Lupus was right. It was irritating.

  Nantar just laughed. Nantar always laughed. For a killer, he really had no bad side. As mean as he could be, there was no meanness in him. It made him a good best friend.

  “How many of you are there?” Lupus asked, serious without notice. He became the Lupus Thorn liked—the man who knew how to make war, who knew the gravity of the world.

  “Five millennia of Sarandi in the van,” Thorn said. “His warriors and my scouts. Another ten millennia of regulars in the main force, with five more of heavy lancers.”

  “Veterans?” Lupus pressed him.

  Veterans were important. Lupus had taught them how to fight in squads, how to turn green men into soldiers in just eight weeks. But you had to mix them with veterans, or they could fall apart. The very worst mix was fifty percent, and usually they kept seventy-five percent.

  “If we had moved last year as I wanted,” Thorn said, making what he felt had to be the most important point, “we would have had five thousand less but moved with eighty percent veterans. We recruited heavily, but as you know the work for the Volkhydrans against those ogres—”

  “We’re at fifty-five percent,” Nantar interrupted him, with a sideway glance at Thorn. Thorn scowled and bit the end of his own tongue.

  “Fifty-five?” he looked out over the troops, struggling back into the rank and file. There would be a few bruises, both to eyes and to egos, as the veterans literally beat the RIT back into place.

  ‘RIT.’ That is what Lupus had taught them to call the new ones. Recruits in training.

  “How are they?” Lupus asked Nantar.

  He did that, too. He used certain of them for certain information, and he never asked Thorn about the quality of anything.

  He didn’t like Thorn’s honesty, apparently.

  “Bad,” Nantar said, a grin in his black beard. “You saw. They came apart when one man surprised them. What do you think will happen when a few thousand shafts come over the horizon?”

  “I was thinking about war games—” Thorn began, but Lupus waved one hand and nodded.

  “Yeah, I can hit them with a few practice runs of Wolf Soldiers,” he said, “but every nation has spies in Eldador. We don’t want to make it too obvious they are as bad as they are, and we don’t want to get that idea into their heads, either.”

  “So they walk confidently to their doom,” Thorn challenged him. He kicked his mare forward. He was sick of waiting. They had a long march to Galnesh Eldador before them.

  Nantar whistled for their sub-commander and kicked his gelding in the ribs. Lupus sighed and followed them on Blizzard.

  “I have a whole millennium I can summon,” Lupus said. “You can kick their ass.”

  “Wolf Soldiers?” Nantar asked him. Lupus laughed.

  “You are dying to put your Sarandi up against my Wolf Soldiers, aren’t you?”

  Nantar just grinned.

  “Ancenon informed us there is another Man who is actually from your home?” Thorn asked him, changing the subject. He’d heard this argument before.

  Lupus fell quiet for a moment, and after a while, Thorn wondered that the big blond man wouldn’t answer. He could be like that, one moment full of energy, the next full of melancholy. He would charge into the fray with his sword singing, and a day later weep for the dead.

  “There were two of them,” Lupus said finally. Their horses met a rise, and they began to climb it. The spirited mare snorted, wanting to go around, fighting Thorn’s hand on the reins.

  “And if you haven’t already heard, yes, I am not only not from Fovea, I am not from this planet.”

  “That explains a lot,” Thorn grumbled.

  Lupus ignored him. “I hadn’t really missed that place,” he said. “Not until I could speak ang-lesh with them, hear it from them, talk about—” and then a bunch of words that made no sense.

  The melancholy after the action. Lupus spoke more to himself than to them, Nantar and Thorn changing glances and listening politely, even though much of it sounded like blathering.

  Lupus had always been hard to understand.

  Chapter Twenty-Five:

  Man's Best Friend

  Nina of the Aschire awoke in the darkness, the pain in her wrists and her ankles telling her she’d become a prisoner, even before it occurred to her what had happened.

  She remembered the stand on the plains, the trap, the confrontation. Something had attacked her from the scrub, held her until…

  Until—something. Something, then sleep, and now she’d awakened.

  “You lived,” a gruff voice from the darkness informed her. She remembered fire. She lay on a blanket of some kind, still in her leathers. She could tell from the feel of them that she had been searched.

  “Of course I lived, you fool,” she said to the darkness. “Why not tell me how I fell, instead?”

  A chuckle. Did she recognize…Xinto? No, the voice pitched too low. Certainly not Raven or her Mountain. She didn’t hear the gravelly accent there.

  Raven—she had touched Raven, and she had been casting a spell. She had called the fire on—

  “If you’re alive you should know how you fell,” the Man said. “But it was Raven who disabled you. I don’t know how.”

  “I was spell casting,” she said. “Was it you I was going to kill.”

  Her eyes began adjusting. She saw Toorians in their white robes sleeping not twenty feet from her, and a picket with two horses. She didn’t see her Wolf Soldiers, and she didn’t see either the Scitai or the girl, Raven.

  “If killing me is what you wanted,” the Man said, “then that didn’t work out for you.”

  She knew this person, without knowing his name. She knew his fame, a friend of the Emperor’s. Troubadours sang of his deeds.

  “You’ve fallen in with the enemies of Eldador,” Nina told him. She doubted it would matter, but it could be worth a try. “I am on his official business.”

  “So I saw,” he said.

  She shook her head. “You are not a Man who should be killing Wolf Soldiers,” she said. “If your Emperor needs you—”

  “He is not my Emperor,” he said. “He was a Duke when I knew him, and he wasn’t my Duke then, either.”

  She felt her lip curl. “He is the Conqueror,” she began.

  “That he is,�
�� he interrupted. “I was there when he got that name, and I don’t want to be conquered.”

  “You should be back at his side,” she accused him.

  He laughed.

  “What is this, then?” that voice she knew. She recognized Xinto, right behind her. She strained her neck and saw nothing but a grey glob. “Are you trying to corrupt our poor Jerod?”

  “Jerod?” she challenged him. She knew better.

  “Leave it alone, little man,” the Man warned the Scitai. “She’s an Aschire, and they’re crazy.”

  “Who did you think he was?” Xinto pressed her. She knew in a moment—the Scitai hadn’t figured it out. The Man was a betrayer; he had betrayed these, too.

  If she could divide them, she could escape. Her next action became obvious.

  “I know who he is, one of my Wolf Soldiers recognized him,” she said

  * * *

  Xinto approached the Aschire woman, her wrists and ankles bound, her weapons removed. Normally he would want to gag a witch like this, but Raven’s power was to drain her victims dry of their magical energy. Nina would wear the gag tomorrow, but for now he considered her safe.

  Now Xinto heard the kind of news he liked. He’d had no idea of Jerod’s actual identity, although now it seemed obvious. Such a man would be a powerful asset; his secret even more. Right now only Xinto knew it, other than this plains witch who wouldn’t be talking.

  “Is that true?” Xinto asked Jerod, knowing the truth already. Too many things fit. The Wolf Soldiers being unwilling to attack him, his knowledge of the Emperor, his reluctance to be seen by him or his.

  “It’s true enough,” Jerod said, a blob in the dark, his face unreadable.

  “So that scar…”

  “By the hand of Lupus the Conqueror himself, to reflect his own,” Jerod said.

  “We will wear our medals for our lives, for all to see,” Xinto quoted the Emperor.

  “Yeah,” Jerod said. “He likes to say things like that.”

  “And you turned your back on him,” Nina said, struggling in her binds. “You filthy traitor.”