Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (75 page)

   When the horse engaged, f
ire and lightening rolled out of every open window and down from every flying bridge on the street, straight toward them.  I winced, thinking they were lost now.  Not even Shela could repel all of that so quickly.

     A
nd she couldn’t, so instead she and her acolytes attacked the buildings and the bridges themselves.  Stones exploded out of ancient buildings and bridges crumbled under Wizards who had prepared themselves for her assault but not the stone around them.  Outpost IX was the objective; Outpost IX was the focus of Power.  Outpost IX, then, became her weapon against them.

    
The energy dissipated, crisping but not burning my heavy horse.  Men swore and horses screamed, and then suddenly Two Spears found his troops in a dead run down the street, toward the palace, my infantry behind him in full charge.

    
Both horse and footmen annihilated double and triple their number in city watch and Trenboni regular army, fighting heroes’ style, trying to keep us from the palace.  The heavy lancers rumbled down the main street like thunder, leaving dead and dying in their wake.  Archers from the rear of our army, Scitai and Aschire, answered the Trenboni with deadly accuracy, clearing towers, rooftops and flying bridges.  I marched past shattered lances covered in blood and dead Trenboni in rent armor.  Here and there a widow wept alongside a fallen warrior, or a family gathered together to watch in shock as we marched past, our steel cleats clinking on the cobblestones.

    
No one believed that they would ever see foreign warriors advance in triumph through the streets of Outpost IX.  No one who lived here thought that anything would disrupt his or her way of life.  Blood flowed red through the gutters like a river into the sewers beneath the city, in what had once been thought the safest place in Fovea.

    
We marched down the main street where I had once ridden Blizzard.  Again and again, the enemy massed and charged in a mob.  My shieldmen held them, my pikemen stabbed them, my swordsmen slashed at them if they found their way around our edges.  If they pushed a squad back or overwhelmed them then a portion of the horse wheeled back and overran the defenders.  We’d driven deeper into the city now, and we could use their side streets to move our horse back and forth past our lines.  We proved once again that organized warfare would prevail against an armed mob.

    
Swarms of arrows buzzed through the air, met by the crackle of energy from spell casting or finding marks among the Uman warriors of Trenbon.  Aschire would send their arrows arcing high, over our men, and the Trenboni would have to raise their shields.  Scitai would pepper them from between our troops, finding marks I would have thought impossibly difficult.  Then they’d switch and kill even more. 

    
Finally we were there, approaching the royal palace at Outpost IX ahead of a bloody swath through the city.  Here tens of thousands of fresh Uman royal guard had massed, men who spent more time standing motionless at doors than swinging swords on a battlefield.  The interior gates were closed, the merlons on the palace walls manned with archers, with catapults, with steaming buckets of oil.  Surely, they were thinking, these troops were worthless against that fortress, especially considering that we had come so quickly, and left so many possible enemies behind us.

    
Which is why we peeled off to the right and proceeded directly to the coliseum of the Fovean High Council.

    
We met almost nothing to stop us.  It seemed like an entire lifetime since I had been here.  A perfunctory guard of fifty Uman warriors in the royal crest of Trenbon crumbled before a single sweep of my heavy lancers.  What few archers they maintained on the walls fell pin-cushioned by my Aschire and Scitai bowmen.  Even that same, greasy Uman from so long ago, whose breath I thought I might still smell hanging on the air, lay bleeding on the cobblestones.

     I stepped up to the dais before the assembled Fovean High Council.  No one in history had attempted such a thing before, and the delegates screamed in outrage.

    
Uman-Chi arrogance had made it possible.  The proper training and planning, the proper patience, had made it happen.  I let my steel heels clang on the stone steps as I walked.  I had known that Ancenon or D’gattis would betray me; I had counted on them to focus all of the city’s attention on an attack coming in by the Bay, stripping the city garrison to man their navy.  Xinto had taught me that the Uman-Chi barely considered the Scitai at all when they thought of their Silent Isle.  Now Karel of Stone, much as I didn’t like him, had helped to make this happen.

    
My men ringed the coliseum and my archers had taken up positions along its walls.  Two Spears had engaged the Trenboni Royal Mounted Guard.  A thousand Trenboni horsemen with swords tried to match an almost equal number of armored knights with lances.  I had confidence in my blood brother and most trusted Captain.

    
“Silence!” I ordered the collected delegates.  They shouted their outrage at me and to each other.  Why should they listen to me?  They were the sacrosanct ambassadors to the Fovean High Council.

    
I drew the Sword of War and, stepping down from the podium, plunged it into the chest of a Dorkan Councilman.  One of his peers stood for a moment and started to speak, sparks dripping from his right hand as he raised it.  A moment later blood flowed from his ears and eyes as he fell back dead in his chair.  Shela just sneered at him, her arms crossed beneath her breasts.

    
Two Uman-Chi delegates took their chance and stood with power dripping red gobbets from their outstretched hands.  Before they could complete their casting, Scitai archers pin-cushioned them with arrows.  Surviving delegates cast nervous glances one to the other.  Many had magical skill but we had the drop on them.  Between Shela and the archers they couldn’t be sure of their lives.

    
I stepped back up to the dais.  They were quiet now.  I could just barely hear the creaking of Aschire and Scitai bows as they sighted delegates and guardsmen or supported my lancers.

    
I had played this moment over in my mind.  What could I say that would keep them from attacking me again?  I could slaughter them as an example, but that wouldn’t change anything.  Their nations would just send more and paint me a massacring maniac with goat horns.  I could tell them what I knew but why waste time making accusations if the law wouldn’t punish the accused?  Why point blame if the guilty didn’t care who caught them? 

    
Sometimes the world needs to not feel good about what it is doing.  Sometimes the pain of a woman who didn’t do anything but love her husband and her kids needs to be felt by all.

    
Sometimes it’s just personal.  Alekki had been a sweet soul, and Drekk a good friend.

    
So I looked out at these delegates, these collected ambassadors. 

    
“You came for me and mine,” I said to them.  “Your own assassins tried to kill me, my wife, my friends, and my king in my home.  You failed.

    
“An innocent women, the Queen of Eldador, paid the price.  Tortured to death by your orders.

    
“Now I’m the one with all of you at my mercy.”

    
I looked at them, let that all sink in.

    
“Now you fear for your lives, as she did,” I told them.  “Come after me and mine again, and I promise you you’ll pray for death.”

    
Let them see the two things that might give them pause: my utter contempt for this High Council and my ability to step outside of their rules and strike them where they felt the safest.

    
How many had sputtered in surprise at the thought of anyone attacking Outpost IX when I first came here?

     “You men and women who think you are in power,” I told them, “you believed you could intimidate me with the force of it.  I’ve done this to remind you: when you make an enemy and give him nowhere
else to go, you may think you’ll break him, but you run the risk instead of making him stronger than ever he could know.”

    
I turned on my heel and I left.  I mounted Blizzard beside my wife and her gelding and I lead my Wolf Soldiers from Outpost IX.  My lancers cleared the streets before us and my soldiers set fire to everything that they could burn, hurling torches through open doors and broken windows.  Archers shot flaming arrows into buildings and rooms.  Their Wizards now had to choose between fighting us and saving what remained of their city. 

    
The main gate had been closed and spelled before we could return to it. 
The Bitch of Eldador
raised one hand in defiance to the Uman-Chi spell casters while her acolytes held off the magical barrage that built up against us.  In moments the gate exploded from its mountings to fly almost a mile into the harbor. 

    
No sooner did it happen than one of our Wizards fell from his horse, a green slime where his eyes used to be.  I saw Shela waver and then rematerialize, her gelding neighing nervously as this happened.

    
“Be quick, White Wolf,” she told me.  “We don’t have much longer before we meet their best and most dangerous.”

    
So much for the moral dilemma over “save the city or kill the invaders.”

    
I nodded and called for double-time march out through the main gates.  Two Spears torched the remains of the market outside of the city gates while my archers kept theirs pinned down, covering their withdrawal from the towers.

    
We’d gotten out of the city alive, but we hadn’t won yet.