Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (34 page)

    
“Well, I am not from around here,” I said.  I regretted it as I said it.

    
“I would guess that when you say that, you mean much more than Conflu, even Fovea.”

    
I shrugged inside of my armor.  When I said nothing he continued.

    
“There is a fable of a man who built ‘peer – mehds’ who appeared for a Cheyak king before the Blast.  He turned sticks to snakes and moved huge boulders with a finger tip.”

    
That sounded frighteningly familiar on more than one level.

    
“What happened to him?” I asked.

    
“He became an advisor to the king but grasped for the king’s power,” D’gattis said, looking at me as directly as someone who has no pupils can seem to look. “So the king had him killed.”

    
“So much for peer – mehds,” I said.

    
D’gattis nodded and turned from me.  “And so,” he said.

    
The allusion wasn’t lost on me.

     Thorn and Nantar were already mounted when I returned to our base camp at the Outpost X murder hole.  Blizzard waited saddled and ready.

    
I laughed.  “Who managed that?” I asked, pointing at the stallion.  Blizzard wasn’t notorious for letting anyone else touch him, and he had gotten crankier for being cooped up.

    
“I held his head while Thorn did it,” Genna said.  She lay next to Ancenon on some ticking that Arath had brought down here for her.  “He only bit me once.”

    
I nodded.  “Thanks,” I said.

    
She looked in my eyes, surprised.  I didn’t know why and I didn’t ask.

    
“All speed to all of you,” Ancenon said.

    
I mounted and stepped Blizzard up next to Nantar’s horse.  D’gattis intoned a few words, and we waited for the snap and flash from before.

    
The instant transition from one place, cold and dark, to another, full of light and new smells, spooked the horses.  After fourteen days in the gloom, the sun struck me like a hammer in my eyes.  The smell of fresh air, of light filtered through leaves and trees, filled my senses.  As soon as I had Blizzard under control, I turned south, Thorn and Nantar not far behind me.  We moved as fast as we dared on horses that had been ill-used.  Even as we were leaving, Arath and D’gattis were scrambling up out of the hole.

    
We had eight hours to get south.  We traveled light – some little grain, food for ourselves to eat in the saddle, and water.  After that we had just about every weapon we could carry.  I had Genna’s cross-pistol on my hip now and her daggers in my boots and up my sleeves.  She hadn’t asked for them back and I hadn’t offered.  The Sword of War hung tight over my shoulder, the metal scabbard bound so that it wouldn’t clank as we rode.

    
We spoke very little.  Blizzard got his wind after the first hour and it was all I could do to keep him back with the slower horses.  Thorn watched him chomp at the bit as we rode, saying nothing.  I had learned of Andaran pride in their horses, but Thorn’s didn’t compare to mine.  Even dyed green again, he was an incredible stallion.

    
We only rested when the horses could no longer keep the gait and even then remained in the saddle.

    
I saw a sapling and had an idea.  Taking the reins in my teeth to free my hands, I drew my sword and kicked Blizzard in the ribs to move him to it.  I reached out with my left hand to take a firm grip on the sapling as, with my right, I easily cut the inch-thick tree with my sword.  I think that with a normal sword I would have had to chop and saw at it, but this one passed easily though the young wood. 

    
Nantar and Thorn watched as I sheared branches from the sapling, quickly fashioning it into a lance with a pointed end.  I had to cut it to eight feet to keep it from constantly hitting the canopy of tree limbs overhead, but then I jammed it into my stirrup between its interior and my boot.  I looked up from my efforts and saw Nantar and Thorn regarding me as if I were insane.

    
“What is that,” Thorn asked.

    
“It’s a lance,” I said.

    
“What’s it for?” Nantar pursued.

    
“You kill people with it.”

    
They were quiet for a minute.

    
“You mean, if they fall out of a tree?” Thorn asked.

    
I shook my head and pulled the lance from my stirrup, then couched it under my left arm, sheathing my sword.

    
I looked for a target and saw a broken branch hanging at about six feet off of the ground, ahead of us.  I kicked Blizzard into a run and, leaning forward in my stirrups, aimed the lance at the branch.

    
Thank current and past gods for David Eddings and his writing, because I couldn’t have done this if I hadn’t read his
Belgariad
.  I caught the center of the branch by luck and, with the combined momentum of the horse and my own weight, ripped the branch from the tree and knocked it several feet into the forest.  The lance bent but didn’t break, although my underarm felt as if someone had punched it.  I sheathed the sword, switched the lance back to my right stirrup and walked Blizzard back to Thorn and Nantar.

    
Nantar seemed impressed.  Thorn didn’t.  “If you hit another armored man with that, he would just as likely knock you from your saddle as you would knock him from his,” he argued.

    
By the laws of simple physics, he was right, I thought.  But hey, two million English knights could
not
be wrong!  I kept my lance.

     We left right after, Thorn guiding us past one patrol and then through another, which raised an alarm and set dogs after us as we passed.  The dogs kept pace with the horses and bayed until we dispatched them with our arrows.  It made for good practice for mounted archery and left me feeling a twinge of regret for beasts that had only served their masters loyally.  Funny how you could kill a man and feel nothing, and then weep over a dog’s death.

    
From then on it was an actual horse race.  We just galloped headlong south, nothing fancy, making for the catapult battery.  D’gattis would be watching us with some spell he maintained, and Ancenon would be coordinating between D’gattis and his ship.  We would both arrive at the northern point of the entrance to the Sea of Xyr as close to the same time as possible.  This would give the battery something to be looking at when we stormed them.  If there were only a few men, then we would destroy them.  If there were too many, then we would turn north, get picked up by the ship, and find a Tech Ship.  I carried a bar of gold in my saddlebag – it would be enough to pay an Uman-Chi captain to hold off the battery until our ship could pass.  If not, then a letter from Ancenon rested in Thorn’s saddlebag to increase our chances.  

    
That was our worst possible option.  The battery was reputed to be more than a match for a single tech ship.  It also involved the Trenboni in the offensive, which we didn’t want.  The Trenboni didn’t need to know that we were here, much less that we had been successful.  Ancenon and D’gattis couldn’t tell them of the gold, but they didn’t have to stop them if the Uman-Chi should figure things out for themselves.

    
We managed to rest one more time later that day.  All three horses were tiring, and according to Thorn we had about two more hours of time left to us.  We had seen neither hide nor hair of another Confluni patrol, assuring us that one was due.  Nantar made me fashion him a lance, and Thorn made his own, demanding a slightly thicker sapling than what we had.  I didn’t question him. 

    
“We have to be getting closer,” Thorn said.  “I can smell the ocean to either side, so the peninsula is narrowing.  I think we will be early instead of late.”

    
He would have said more but his head came up suddenly and Nantar and I needed no more warning to run to our horses.  Thorn mounted before us and circled to get the direction of the sound that he had heard.

    
If you hear a sound in the forest, it will echo from all of the trees and confuse you as to where it came from.  There is a theory that the last echo is the true direction, but then, if your hearing is a little off or you are making noise, how do you know that the last echo you heard was actually the last one?  A real woodsman moves and knows that all of the reflected sounds are weaker than the actual ones – and figures it out that way.  Don’t ask me how, because I can’t do it.

    
Thorn pointed due south of us, and Nantar and I kicked our horses.  We had ridden right through the last patrol because they weren’t ready, but we were going to have no such luck this time.  No matter what we did, we were going to be outnumbered and facing arrow fire.  This would be bloody.  I couched my lance back under my sore left shoulder and held my sword in my right hand, seeing Nantar doing the same.  Thorn held his lance in his left like a spear and had a crossbow out as well.

    
We topped a rise and caught them coming up the other side.  Quick and dirty, I charged Blizzard down the other side, letting his speed make life harder for the enemy archers.  A quarrel from a crossbow whizzed right in front of my eyes, and another rang off of my right shoulder, which exploded with pain.  I pressed down the hill as other missiles sped by.

    
The lance took one Confluni right between the eyes and broke as I tried to free it.  Obviously I needed to develop a lighter touch with it to use it more than once.  I came up on a second man on my right and sheared his head half off his shoulders as he tried to strike for Blizzard’s legs.  Another on the left took my lance’s broken end in the face as his partner on the right back pedaled and merely got a nasty scratch across his chest.  He let me have it at close range with his crossbow, catching me in the left arm.  Then I pushed through and gave Blizzard his lead to get clear as quickly as I could.

    
I looked behind me to see that Thorn and Nantar had followed me in like fashion.  Nantar had seen my mistake and taken two with his lance, and two more with his sword as he passed.  He also got a nasty crease across his thigh in the process.  Thorn had shot one man dead with his crossbow, pinned another through the stomach to the ground with his lance/spear and brutally cut the forearms from the last man as he hefted an ax to strike.  The downhill advantage and our speed saved us; all ten in the patrol had been accounted for.  I could see light ahead of us and we rode on.

    
I leaned to my left again and held Blizzard up long enough to shear a thicker sapling.  This time I left a few twigs but hacked the top from the shaft as I rode, making a wicked point on the end that I knew would bend if it hit metal.  I couched it under my sore left shoulder and held my sword in my sore right hand as I pressed on with Nantar and Thorn right behind.

    
The quarrel had struck me between the upper and lower sleeve of my left arm.  I could feel the tip of it in the upper arm, pulling in and out painfully as my arm moved.  My bicep tightened and I knew I’d lost strength there.  If I got into another fight it would betray me.

    
I looked up from my arm in time to see the sun burst from the forest as Blizzard leaped onto the end of a peninsula, right into a very surprised mass of men.  I saw a flat compound, one low building to my right and a battery of catapults loaded and ready before me.  One soldier manned a tower to my left, armed with a telescope of some kind.  Yellow faces and wide, dark eyes looked up at this monster on a green horse with a big stick coming from his chest, and they faltered.

    
I would have been dead if they hadn’t.  They numbered too many.  Here we should have pulled back and caught the ship, but I’d been surprised and moved in too fast to turn around.  Thorn and Nantar later agreed that they would have shot us both down with arrows had I tried.