Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (19 page)

     I am sorry that this was done in a letter.  I wish you well and a good man and a huge family – they will be lucky people, all of them.

Best wishes,

    
It was weak, and a lie.  I felt like chicken shit for breaking it off this way but I didn’t want to look her in the face and do it either.  This was the easiest way, at least for me.  My relationships had always ended badly and likely always would – I just don’t trust women.  I paid the scribe and put the letter in a scroll tube similar to my own from the Dwarves and sent it on with Vled.

    
From Kendo we rode three more days to Vol which, again, looked a lot like Kendo.  They did less river trade and much more of a sea trade here however, with sailing ships actually plying up the Llorando to take shipments straight to the other Fovean nations.  I think that, had one of them been Trenboni, then I might have left Volkhydro right then, but no such luck.  The Harbor Master, when I asked him, assured me he knew of no ships bound for there in the near future. 

    
Two roads lead from Vol.  One goes south, to Hydro, where I could likely get a ship to Trenbon.  It was two days’ ride.  The other went west, to Volkha, a four-day ride.  On Blizzard I could likely make it to Hydro in one day.  However, I had been with these men for six days and had gotten to know them.  I couldn’t know if the thirteen remaining Uman mercenaries were on our trail, and the Confluni, as well, would be waiting.

    
Getting embroiled in merchant politics would be stupid, but it felt right for the time.  I trusted to my gut and, the next day, the seventh of our journey, we went west together on a well-worn road.  From what we heard, no wagons had come ahead of us and our best defense would be that whoever might be preying on wagon trains would not expect ours to be coming so soon. 

    
It didn’t make me feel much better.

    
Three nights later I sparred with two of the other men while the teamsters put the horses up and Tareen actually stood watch for a change.  We were using long, straight branches instead of our own swords and were wearing the padding for our armor.  My armor had been much the topic of discussion since leaving Vol, more so because I wouldn’t discuss where I got it.

I had the better of the other two and they finally confessed defeat.  I tossed my branch into the fire and we sat down, getting ready to sleep before our watches, those of us who had them that night.

     I had been thinking recently, on the long, quiet rides between the cities, that these were these men’s
lives.
  Riding in season, hopefully living through it, and then using the coin to provide for families, hoping to stretch the money to the next season, then doing it all over again.  No education, no “upward mobility.”  Live by your sword and the strength in your body until that gave out or someone better armed or luckier than you wanted what you were guarding and could take it.

    
An American has no idea of the opportunity before him.  I had met mercs in foreign ports while I was in the Navy, but never really wondered about them.  They were just losers to me – shiftless, ruthless, a lesser form of human.  Now I had eaten with them, looked in their eyes and been one of them. 

    
“You are a true son of War, Rancor,” Varne said, sitting next to me.

    
My ears perked immediately and I stiffened.  “How is that?” I asked him.

    
He laughed, the others with him.  “No offense, no offense.  It is just that you are as lethal as I have seen with that sharp sword and that big horse of yours, and the armor to boot.  Even without them you are the best swordsman here, including Tareen long shanks out there in the woods.”

    
I scowled.  “I didn’t think I was that good.”

    
Again they laughed.  Our new man, Krell, said, “You are as good as I have seen, Rancor, and I have seen many.  I took you for a bounty hunter or a gentleman in distress by your fancy Dwarf armor.  Where have you fought?”

    
I didn’t like that he recognized the armor and I didn’t like talking about myself.  I decided to change the topic and asked, “What
is
a bounty hunter, that I keep hearing things about?”

    
“Pah!” the third man, Chennog, spat.  “They are what scum as goes out and kills or hunts men down for money, Rancor.  And it is good that you don’t know what one is, that you should never be one.”

    
“Not the most popular of people, then?”

    
“Not by far,” Varne agreed.  “Think, Rancor, what is your opinion of someone who pulls decent men from their beds in the middle of the night and sells them to rich men for money?”

    
I didn’t see anything wrong with it, so long as the men were guilty of something, but I didn’t say so.  I nodded solemn agreement with all three. 

    
“There’s two types o’ them,” Chennog said.  “There’s the independents, jes’ startin’ out or them as is so good that they don’t need no help surviving.  Them’s the ones you see in bars and places, or looking for posters by the Master At Arms.

    
“Then there’s the guild – them that sticks together like maggots on puss and feed no different.”

    
“A bounty hunters’ guild?” I asked.

    
The other men nodded.  “They’re to be feared,” Varne said.  “They hunt down men for the wealthiest or those who want vengeance so bad that they will spend everything to have it.  They cost more, but they don’t fail.  If the first of them doesn’t get the man they’re after, they can send another.”

    
I filed this away in my mind.  I wondered if there were other such groups as these.

    
We would be in Volka tomorrow, and I would be leaving for Trenbon at my earliest opportunity.  I would change my name, as well.

    
That is when someone decided to put out the fire with Tareen’s dead body.

Chapter Nine

The Dead

    
Sparks flew up into the night and the horses screamed.  Varne swore as he went scrambling for his sword, Chennog and Krell right behind him.  Lucky for me that Krell had wanted to see mine before we were sparring; it lay right there where we were sitting.  I crawled to it through dirt and soot and put my back to what remained of the fire, searching the night with eyes not yet adjusted to the dark.  The moon was down so I had only starlight to see by, my toes and fingers doing more than my eyes to guide me.

    
This time the teamsters took the brunt of it – dying alone and in pairs, most screaming for help as the attackers rooted them out from under the wagons where they slept.  I heard more than one scramble into the woods, and possibly one or two pursuing them.

    
I thought to myself, “
If it were me, and I were this ready, then I would follow the assault up with arrow fire.”
As that thought occurred to me I dropped to the ground and, moments later, heard the first missiles sail over my head. 
Whip, whip, whip
– through the air.  I couldn’t tell how many archers.

    
Verne was still cursing a blue streak.  Krell and Chennog at least had the sense to be quiet.  I could hear men rustling in the underbrush – how many I didn’t know – looking for more of us.  As my eyes adjusted I couldn’t help worrying that at any moment I would feel one of their swords in my back.  I smelled the ashes from the fire in the musky odor of the dirt I pressed my body into.  The padding I wore under my armor was, unfortunately, white.  I could assume that they would find me pretty quickly.  The armor itself took a good twenty minutes to get on.  No way could I stall them that long, much less avoid the racket I would make donning it.

    
If I could get out of here I would have my horse and my sword and be no worse off than the day I had arrived on Fovea.  Varne, I reasoned, would be the easiest target and they would likely focus on him first.  While they were diverted I could make it to the horses.

    
On Blizzard’s back, anything was possible.

    
I wanted to do that so badly - to run, get out of here, put this danger behind me.  These men were here to kill me and that terrified me.  If I could get out of here they could loot the wagons, kill the other men and be satisfied, and likely never even miss me.

    
Until they saw a huge guy on a white horse running away, I knew.  Then the one with the bow would take me down.  If I panicked they would have me. 

    
So I forced myself to settle down.  In nuclear power you called this “emergency mode,” where you took on calmness to meet the crisis.  I had done it in hundreds of drills and I did it now, letting my heart slow closer to normal even as another arrow whipped through the air only inches above me.  At least I knew my white padding hadn’t given me away – if they could see it then I would already be dead.  I remembered where we had laid the saddles out and scrambled over there on knees and elbows, keeping as much in the dirt as I could.  Their having to search through that greater mass would buy me a few seconds.

    
Verne clambered twenty feet to my left, still swearing about his sword.  Krell lay about ten feet to my right, forcing as much of his body as he could beneath a log that we had pulled over to the fire to sit on. As I neared the saddles I could smell Chennog’s extreme body odor from his diet of over-spicy jerked beef.  He lay on the other side of them – I could make out his globular form in the dark.

    
I listened for our enemies, and could hear them moving through the camp.  At first I thought that they must be looking for us and I wondered why they hadn’t found me.  We weren’t well hidden, they likely had their night vision, and we weren’t many. 

Blizzard whickered about five feet from me.  I could make out his form distinctly.  They hadn’t gone for the horses yet.  They were still trying to spook us.

     “Chennog,” I whispered, more breath than sound.

    
A moment, then, “Rancor?”

    
“More quietly, my friend.”

    
“How many have you seen?” he asked me.

    
“There must be thirty of them.”

    
“No,” he said.  “Less than ten.”

    
“Not likely.  They’re thick on every side!”

    
Chennog grunted and I could hear him shuffle toward me.  We were on either side of his saddle; I could hear him fumbling with something underneath it.

    
“Do you have your sword?” he asked.

    
“I do,” I whispered.  “And you?”

    
“I have my spare.”  He meant a dirk he left behind his saddle.  I’d seen him pull it a couple of times.  It would be a good choice for a close-fighting brawl, and he had blackened the blade.

    
“Only one of them has a bow,” he said.

    
“How do you know that?”

    
“You want to live or talk?” he asked me.

    
I bit my lip and said nothing.  Chennog knew what he was doing and I knew that I didn’t.  I decided to follow his lead.  We waited there, quiet in the dark, as the attackers circled.  In my mind their numbers grew and grew.  Verne kept cursing a blue streak and called out for Chennog and Krell and me a few times.  I believed I knew what Chennog was waiting for and, cold-blooded as it was, I didn’t call out to Verne.  Moments later Verne still cussed up a storm and it sounded like he had finally found something to fight with.  No matter how many warriors they numbered, they wouldn’t wait forever.

    
I gathered my feet beneath me, hoping that our tack still hid me.  My sword hilt felt wet in my palm.  Chennog’s breathing slowed on the other side of the saddles.  I waited, every moment like an hour.

    
“Keep your head, lad,” Chennog whispered to me.  “You aren’t going to help him with an arrow in your guts.”

    
“Whoa – there you are, blast you,” Verne swore.  I heard him grunt, as if he had been punched in the stomach.  I was like a compressed coil now – still waiting, still waiting …

    
The clang of metal, another grunt, Verne again.  Then another grunt, and a groan, and finally I heard the sound of him hitting his knees.  I started to think that the opportunity had been wasted.  Chennog swore softly next to me.  He didn’t like it, either.

    
No more than three feet in front of me, the telltale creak of the bow.  Chennog hissed, having heard it too.

    
“Take ‘im,” he rasped.

    
I leapt up like a shot, the sword swinging.  The blade cut through the other man’s bow like it wasn’t there and took him straight across the chest, knocking him aside and piercing his rib cage.  I sprinted toward Verne now, hoping that most of them were around him, probably beating him into the ground.

    
I wasn’t wrong.  I saw seven of them ringed around Verne, barely visible in the night.  Swords flashed in the dim starlight.  Verne had fallen to his knees, a red pile spurting blood and occupied with dying.

    
I sprinted to the place of his murder - not to save him, because I knew he couldn’t be saved, but to rescue myself from his same fate.  Chennog had closed on the group of them in a crouch, his dark weapon out.  I took the first of them across the back before they ever saw me.  Chennog engaged the next attacker as I pushed my man forward, jamming my sword into the chest of the one in front of him.  Another turned toward me, his mouth open, his dark hair hanging wet in strands, a splash of red across his face.  Chennog jammed his dirk into that man’s back, up into his lung.

    
My second man dropped as the other four realized I had struck.  They were squat men with close-cropped black hair, with pug noses and slanted eyes.  They wore tight-fitting leather breast guards and fought with short, stabbing swords.  On the other side of Verne, Krell rose up like vengeance behind two of them, obviously having decided to back us.  His heavy broadsword rose and fell, and one of the two men dropped, screaming.  Two others turned toward him, and Chennog and I struck again.

    
I ripped my sword from my man’s chest and cut low, taking a new man below the knee.  He screamed and fell.  Chennog struck high and missed, and his man turned on him, delivering a stab right into Chennog’s stomach.  Chennog fell back, out of my line of sight.

    
Krell swung high and cleaved into the side of one man’s head.  There were two left, and the one closest to me had terrified eyes.  If he bolted, I would likely lose him and never know why this had happened.

    
He swung for my side and I parried.  His sword recoiled and he went for my head, making me parry again.  I heard a grunt from Krell’s direction and assumed that it was he.  My arms felt like lead, my head pounding and my vision cloudy.  The other man looked for an opening to break and I was afraid that I would give it to him.

    
He leveled his sword and drove the point at my chest with both hands.  This time I parried by hitting his blade as hard as I was able.  I had hoped that his blade would shatter but instead he turned his wrist somehow and pushed my weapon to the side.  The flat of his blade took me on the side of the head and knocked me off my feet, leaving me helpless.

    
He could have stayed and finished me or he could run and live another day.  He chose the latter.  I climbed awkwardly to my feet and looked to see if they’d left anyone else standing.

    
“Krell?” I said.  “Anyone? Is anyone else here?”

    
A long pause, then, “Yeah, I’m OK.  Not cut bad.”

    
The man whose leg I had amputated laid holding his stump and groaning.  The rest seemed to be clean kills.  I could hear the man who had run scrambling through the underbrush.

    
“Chennog is dead,” Krell said, having moved.  “So is Verne.  I don’t hold out much hope for Tareen.”

    
“Why?” I asked, simply.

    
“They were here for the wagons,” he said.

    
“Whom are they working for?”

    
“Probably out of Tamara,” he said.  “Stinking Confluni, secretive bastards, kill anyone who goes into their nation, doesn’t stop them from raiding into
ours
.  They are raiders, Rancor, and there will be more of them.  They come back with our wealth to show each other how brave they are.”

    
Krell stood and spat again, this time on the body of the dying man.  He wouldn’t offer the Confluni War’s Wages, and it didn’t seem like the little man would be asking.  We looked at each other for a long moment, but didn’t say anything.  This was what men with money hired men with swords to do.  This was our life.

     It took us an hour to get the fire started and then, with torches, to search the surrounding area.  The wounded Confluni died in that time.  My skin crawled, waiting for arrows or armed men to come swarming out of the woods, but it didn’t happen.

    
Tareen’s skin and face were charred.  Someone had come up from behind him and cut his throat.  Varne had taken no less than fifteen strikes to his body before he had died.  Chennog’s gut wound had gone through his spine as well, and he had fallen on his dirk.  We found the other two dead men with the teamsters.