Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (69 page)

    
Only the Free Legion and the Wolf Soldiers had lancers.  Even the Eldadorians were unwilling or unable (ok, unable) to adopt the fighting style, mainly because we wouldn’t teach the simple rudiments of lancing.  Without knowing how to couch the lance, how to pick a good lance, how to train the horses appropriately, lancers were like Nantar, Thorn and I had been in Conflu – guys with long sticks that broke after the first pass.

    
Lancers had to charge in a line and slash the enemy diagonally, or they were engaged and then had only the advantages of men on horseback.  Barding had to be built to add momentum to the charge, not hold back the horse using it.  The mounts had to be strong enough to bear a knight but fast enough to be useful in the hit-and-run battle that made lancers
so
devastating.  They required constant training, specialized armor and continuous upkeep specific to an elite troop of men who did essentially nothing else.  It was all hugely expensive, even if you knew what you were doing.

    
My Wolf Soldiers with this training were called ‘Theran Lancers,’ and Two Spears excelled among them.Kills with a Glance complained bitterly to me to send back his son, my blood brother, so that he could glean that training, but Two Spears seemed perfectly happy with me (and a bevy of female admirers willing to do anything to wed the brother of Rancor the Just).  For his performance, he had been rewarded with the Mark of the Conqueror.  Two Spears wasn’t a Wolf Soldier, but he commanded them, and they loved him.

    
“I’m doing new things with them,” I said, feigning as much false indifference as they were, “and I’m not ready to commit them to campaigns yet.  Besides, I am a daddy for the first time.  I think I want to enjoy that.”

    
Alekki sighed, bouncing Lee lightly in her arms.  Neither Glennen nor Nantar looked happy.

    
“What if Ancenon calls you?” the latter asked.

    
I shrugged.  “I will deal with that then,” I told him.

    
“Is that fire-bond thing still in effect?” Glennen asked,
way
too personally.  A cross look bristled through Nantar’s beard.

    
“It is never not in effect,” I answered him truthfully.  Not until we spent all of the gold from Outpost IX, anyway, therefore as good as never.  “But it doesn’t commit me to every Free Legion campaign.”

    
Nantar straightened and so did Glennen, and I saw the storm on the horizon.  Who I felt committed to remained a sore-spot for both the Free Legion and Eldador – more-so because I felt sure that there had been offers to act
against
Eldador recently, and Ancenon couldn’t be sure which side I would be on if he dared to accept one of them.  Quite frankly, I couldn’t be sure, either.  I loved Eldador in-as-much as I spent a huge portion of my life, but I owed that life to the Free Legion.

    
Right then the door burst open and Nantar’s wife, Lanette, burst in, her dress torn and a scar on her shoulder.  I stood up with Nantar and Glennen, the Sword of War in my hand before I realized it.

    
She flew into Nantar’s huge arms.  He wrapped her in them like a cloak of muscle and bone.  Her lower lip trembled and she looked up into his eyes.

    
“Drekk is dead,” she told him.

    
Drekk liked to hang out at the estate in Thera because of its central location that let him go back and forth between other nations with the goods and information that he pilfered.  I let him have the run of the estate, the wharves, Free Legion Shipping and the warehouse that I had given him.  We kept it all hush-hush as an integral part of the Free Legion Intelligence Branch that consisted solely of him.

    
Or so I had thought.

    
Two hundred Wolf Soldiers ringed the warehouse where he and Lanette had met to discuss some trinket that she wanted for Nantar on his upcoming birthday.  According to her, ten men had dropped out of the rafters and attacked the both of them, for what purpose we did not know.  Drekk had laid down his own life to back her out through an alleyway door to safety.  A
very
subtle sooth-saying by Shela confirmed that she told the truth and hadn’t been involved in the killing in some way.

    
The warehouse had been built three thousand feet square, one of the smaller ones but entirely adequate for Drekk.  He had stacks of crates against one wall that had been broken open and a desk that had been rifled through.  His body had been stabbed at least a dozen times, although blood puddles on the floor around him where he lay by that one door showed that he had not died alone.

    
Yet Drekk had never been a warrior – anything but.  His weapons involved stealth and secrecy and knowledge only guessed at, the shadow in a shadow and the dagger in the night.  He didn’t fight and he didn’t raise armies, but he knew more of the facts about what actually went on than any of us could guess at.

    
He didn’t look like he had seen this coming.

    
Shela had come with Glennen, Nantar and I, borne on a litter with Lee.  Arath and Dilvesh were in the Lone Wood, and fast riders were on their way.  Shela had already informed Ancenon and D’gattis, and they were going to find Thorn.  The Wolf Soldiers were marshalling.  I already suspected what I would find out here, and this would be expensive for someone besides me.

    
“Murder, plain as it gets,” Glennen said.  He looked at Nantar with brown eyes softer than they normally were.  “I
am
sorry,” he added. 

    
Nantar nodded, then looked at me, then Shela, then back to me.  Lanette had stayed with Alekanna, but we obviously needed Shela’s unique talent.

    
“Can she do anything?” he asked simply.

    
I turned to Shela.

    
Giving birth had done nothing to weaken her magical reserves.  If men seeking Power did this murder then she’d know. Otherwise, it became a matter of how well they had protected themselves.

    
Looking down at the dirt floor with a tight grip on Lee, Shela incanted something low in her throat.  The baby lay quiet and oddly inactive while her mother performed her casting, reaching out with a chubby hand.  I didn’t know that much about babies but for three days old this one seemed to make her presence known pretty well and to react to what went on around her.

    
Shela barked a command and six puddles of blood glowed an unhealthy green throughout the room, lighting the night in a sick radiance.  Outside a horse neighed and, by one crate, a rat scurried out of the packing and across the floor towards the door.

    
Shela stopped as abruptly as she began, and looked at me with tear-filled eyes.  I didn’t know if she had any relationship with Drekk other than passing, yet I had seen them speak and I knew they shared confidences.  She would have to tell me in private how she felt about our assassin.

    
Four Wolf Soldiers, of her personal guard, carried her litter.  Without her telling them they carried her to the four corners of the room, and stopped by Drekk’s dead body.  It had been necessary for us to leave him in his own blood, spilled out on the dirt floor.  His vacant eyes looked up at the ceiling, the bloody dirk still in his grasp. Whoever had killed him had disturbed him, yet still left his testament to the battle he had fought and lost.

    
“It is as Lanette says,” she said softly, her voice cracking.  “But what she could not know is that the men came only to kill her and Drekk.  The sacking of the warehouse is a sham and nothing was taken.  They would have put the whole place to the torch if they had the time.”

    
“If
who
had time?” Nantar pressed her.  I don’t think the idea of someone going out of his or her way to kill his wife sat well with him.

    
“I see a talisman of great power, used to speak with Drekk after his death,” she continued.  “I see the signature that it has left here and, through that, I see
it
. I see Uman warriors placing this on Drekk’s dead breast.”

    
“Mercenaries,” I said, after a moment’s thought.  “Uman killers.”

    
“I see the talisman being placed in their leader’s hands by a Man Wizard,” Shela said.  “I hear his words.”

    
“
Dorkans
?” Glennen said, incredulous.  “This isn’t like what Dorkans do.”  He looked at me.  “A plague in your house, your water running dry, your crops dying, some subtle magical thing – that is what Dorkan wizards – “

    
“There is no arguing, though,” Nantar said.  “My people have few Wizards.”

    
Glennen looked pissed-off.  I went to the litter and took Shela’s tiny hand in mine, looked up into her eyes.  “Are you sure about that last part?” I asked.

    
She shook her head.  “There can be no doubt,” she said.  “The amulet they placed on Drekk’s dead body absorbed most of the secrets from his head.  That left a powerful signature behind – I can see that amulet as if it were right in this room.  It is for that reason I know so much of what has transpired here this night.”

    
She spoke that way when she used her magic – she became this other, mystical person.  She
knew
things.

    
Drekk had designed the security at the estate in Thera.  Why else take him out first?
     “The estate,” I said.  I caught Glennen’s eyes, held them with my own.  “That’s why they killed Drekk.  He designed the security at the estate.”

    
Wolf Soldiers guarded the periphery of the Casa de Mordetur. I left a good quarter mile of open space between the walls and the nearest stand of trees or building, and they had created no secret ways in or out.  All of my security hadn’t stood up for a second against twenty Uman mercenaries with knowledge of the best ways to gain entry.

    
Lanette had survived again, but Alekanna and the house staff had not.  This time the evidence of torture was plain for anyone to see.  The merc’s had wanted the rest of us, and badly.

    
“She screamed and screamed,” she sobbed into Nantar’s shoulder.  She had hidden herself under Shela’s and my bed and had still been there when we had burst in looking for her.  I felt suspicious that they had missed her, but then they may have already thought her dead.  Shela’s truth telling showed that she hadn’t conspired with the enemy.

    
“They wanted to know where Glennen and Lupus were,” she continued, sobbing and perhaps going into shock.  “Alekanna told them, but they didn’t believe her.”

    
“Twenty Uman mercenaries,” Nantar said. “You’re sure?”

    
“A Man leading them,” she said.  “I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them.  Some had Volkhydran accents.”

    
“So the Wizard
was
a Volkhydran,” I said.

    
She shook her head.  “I don’t think so,” she said.  “The one leading them had that thick, Dorkan voice.”

    
“So all of the mercenaries weren’t Uman,” Glennen said.

    
I was thinking on this now.  Something made deadly sense.  I looked at Nantar.

    
“Genna was a Volkhydran,” I said.

    
He looked into my eyes.