Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (45 page)

             
‘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.”

             
Jerod stood. Xinto sat, watching. Jerod’s kept his emotions and his thoughts deep below the surface, so it was interesting to see—

             
The foot that caught Nina underneath the jaw interrupted Xinto’s thoughts as well, knocking her onto her back. She made a sound between a snarl and whimper, and her teeth clacked together.

             
“You shouldn’t kill her,” Xinto said, as calm as he could be. If Jerod decided to kill the woman anyway, it wouldn’t be Xinto who stopped him, and a race for Jahunga would assure her death.

             
“You scum,” she swore, spitting out a gob of something that could be either blood, spit, or the end of her tongue.

             
The toe of his boot caught her in the side, lifting her off of the ground. Now Xinto stood—he had no doubt where this headed.

             
“We need her,” he soothed the Volkhydran.

             
“We don’t,” Jerod argued.

             
“Our Raven…” Xinto began.

             
Jerod lifted his heel, held it over the Aschire’s head. He regarded Xinto, his face unreadable in the dark.

             
“You think this one can help us?”

             
“I think she’s our best chance if we don’t hear from Glynn.”

             
“You think she will?”

             
“If she doesn’t,” Xinto said, “she still has a head, you still have a heel.”

             
Jerod put his foot down next to the other, towering over the prone girl. He turned his head and he spat to one side.

             
“Xinto is going to ask you some questions,” he said. “Answer them. I don’t want to hear anything more about the Conqueror from you.”

             
She mumbled. It was a comment on her strength, Xinto couldn’t help thinking, that she remained conscious.

             
Jerod’s sword was out quick as a flash, its point at her throat. “I didn’t hear you,” he said.

             
Xinto had heard the same from what the Emperor called ‘drill sergeants;’ his trainers among his Eldadorian regulars.

             
“I said ‘I will,’” she snarled. “What’s wrong with her?”

             
“Of that,” Xinto said, “we aren’t sure.”

* * *

              Nina of the Aschire found herself hauled before a woman sleeping in her leathers on the plains grass, with the sun rising red and angry to her east.

             
She recognized Raven, but a different Raven than she remembered.

             
The hair remained black, but singed on the ends. The skin on her face was reddened, burnt by flame. She had no eyebrows. Her fingernails had been melted and scorched at the ends. She had been too near a fire, and she’d caused it. Nina knew the signs.

             
“She’s been spell casting,” Nina said, feeling her jaw thicken from where she had been kicked. Her stomach ached as well, but she didn’t plan to give them the satisfaction of seeing it.

             
“She wondered where the energy she absorbed went,” Jerod explained.

             
“So why not try to use some of it?” Nina let her tone mock them. Stupid people, what the Empress called ‘mundanes.’ People whose minds had not yet grasped the
ultimate truth
, or whose minds never would.

             
Invest yourself in politics, in armies, in worlds, and you will fall short. They are nothing, come and gone on whims. Even gods themselves could come and go.

             
The most powerful thing in existence is a thought. A thought births it all, and in the end a thought will finish it.

             
This Raven had thought wrong.

             
“She might have the black mind,” Nina informed them. It wasn’t unheard of. “She wielded power without being prepared for it. She might be like this for the rest of her days.”

             
Jerod’s hand immediately pulled back. Nina winced without wanting to. Xinto stepped in once again to rescue her from Volkhydran wrath.

             
“Can you tell for sure?” he asked her, painfully formal. He acted too friendly, too polite. Nina had seen the Emperor do this when he plotted against someone. He would be too kind, and then far too cruel.

             
“If you will unbind my hands, then I will touch her mind and see if I can rouse her,” she said. “If she can be roused, then she doesn’t have the black mind, and is merely resting.”

             
“That would be real nice of us,” Jerod sneered at her. “Letting you go and all of that.”

             
Xinto shook his head. “She has no magic,” the Scitai said. It was true enough. “She can’t outrun your horse on the plains.”

             
Jerod’s scowl showed clear even through the dusk’s beginning. “Wake your lizard and the Toorians first,” he said. “If she wants it, then I don’t want her to have it, no matter what ‘it’ is.”

             
“Fair enough,” Xinto said to him. Nina couldn’t repress a sigh of relief. If she became useful, she remained alive. Jerod wanted an excuse to kill her and, given time, he would find one. Nina’s mind already leapt to the next service she could provide, that would be too good for them to turn down, without betraying the Emperor.

             
Jerod’s sword leapt out in a flash, and this time the point was not for her, but found its way to the Scitai’s wiry beard.

             
“On your life, little man,” Jerod told the Scitai, his eyes like steel. “If she deceives us and the girl suffers, then after I have her life, I
will
have yours, and this song be damned.”

             
Xinto looked Jerod right in the eye, his jowl nestled against the steel sword. Nina knew the look of a man who had stared his fate in the face before and not blinked.

             
Xinto might be wary of the Man, but that was a far cry from being afraid. Nina wondered whom exactly she’d fallen in with.

* * *

              Many tiny villages surrounded Thera, none of which could be trusted.

             
There were free holdings as well—persons from other nations, or from the cities of Eldador, having staked a claim to the land and registered with the nation. If they could get a writ from Galnesh Eldador and then could pay their taxes, they could keep the land.

             
Some peasants had made themselves fantastically wealthy on that plan. Glynn saw it as a travesty. Money to the commons fed their debauchery and their baser instincts. Money needed to be in the hands of nobles who knew what to do with it.

             
But then, Glynn reminded herself the Emperor had begun his life a common. He could be expected to know no better.

             
Jack had picketed their two horses and Zarshar had hunted down a wild antelope for them to eat. Their newest charge, this great, drooling beast, lay beside their tiny fire, its great head across the Man’s leg, having already taken a haunch and crushed the bones in its great maw.

             
The race of Men used beasts for so many purposes—this skill had always eluded the Uman-Chi. In fact, the Cheyak’s most favored people would have no beef were it not for the efforts of their Uman servants. Even their own gallant horses had to be trained by others.