Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (29 page)

    
“Well, that is it, then,” I said.

    
I remembered huge volcanic eruptions and tidal waves of past Earth.  Krakatoa, Pompeii, and Vesuvius to name a few.  I remembered watching the tides.   Water comes in, pukes up the bottom of the ocean, and then retracts.  Walls of water hundreds of feet high sometimes, depending on the force of the explosion.  This one had been huge. 

    
“You
are
here,” I said, as Arath reined in, Genna right behind him.  “You found it, the lost Outpost X.”

    
I took my sword and drove it hard into the ground.  Where it should have gone a few inches deep, it sank right to the hilt.

    
“In fact, you’re standing on it.”  

Chapter Fourteen

Getting Down to It

     We were quiet for a moment, all of us.  Arath rode into the clearing, Genna not far behind him.  He obviously wanted to say something, but didn’t just then.  I bent down and pulled my sword from the dirt.  As usual, it came away clean.

    
“Well, I know I didn’t bring a big enough shovel,” Thorn said.

    
“Oh, shut up, Thorn,” D’gattis snarled.

    
Thorn countered with his hand on the hilt of his sword.

    
“Stop it, all of you,” Ancenon intervened, laying his hand on my shoulder.  I guessed since I found the flaw in his planning, he figured I could fix it.

    
“There
is
a patrol coming this way,” Arath said, almost to himself.  “Let’s stop the shouting and decide how we get back to the ship.”

    
“We aren’t going back to the ship,” D’gattis said.

    
“Well, as sure as War’s Whiskers, we aren’t staying here,” Thorn said, his hand still on his weapon.  “And I don’t see us checking into a Confluni hostel any time soon, unless you can change our race -”

    
Nantar put his hand on Thorn’s shoulder, much as Ancenon had done to mine.  This had to be a cultural thing, but I didn’t get it.  Regardless, it worked; Thorn subsided immediately.  “Are we really sure that Outpost X is buried here?”

    
D’gattis nodded almost grudgingly.  “It makes sense,” he said.  “The age of the trees, the fact that no one else ever found the city – the more I think of it, the more sure I am that Lupus is right.”

    
“If not for the horses,” Genna said, “we could hide in the trees and let Confluni patrols go by.  That would give us a few days – “

    
“Not an option,” I said, looking instinctively at Blizzard.  I had exactly one friend on this world and I wasn’t about to sell him down the river.

    
“I agree,” said Thorn.

    
“They are
just
horses,” Genna said.  “We would have left
Drekk
behind if we had needed to – “

    
“I don’t answer for Drekk,” Arath said, “but my horse stays with me.  He wouldn’t leave my side anyway, and I am not about to put him down.”

    
“We will need them, anyway,” Ancenon said, stepping up beside me.  “We will be going west with all haste.”

    
“Deeper into Conflu?” Thorn said.  “Well, I guess they won’t be expecting
that
.”

    
“Precisely, and besides,” Ancenon said, already pushing me toward my horse, “that will be the direction to the entrance to Outpost X.”

    
Thinking of it now – I should have come to that conclusion by taking the whole problem that extra step, as Ancenon had.

    
Think back about eleven hundred years ago, my reality, not yours.

    
Fovea is a huge plain surrounded by a huge forest, set like a bowl with a mountain in the middle of it, the top of which is Outpost IX.

    
Your Cheyak race forms the chosen people of the god Power.  Basically, they hold a significant portion of the world under their influence or their thrall.  Two other gods, Order and Law, don’t quite like that, so they pick a fight with Power and they win.

    
Power decides to blame this on His people, and obliterates them by smiting the planet.  The blast – maybe a meteor strike – hits the ocean, which creates a huge tidal wave that turns a lowland plain into Tren Bay, destroys the southern portion of a mountain range (the Straights) and drowns or destroys all but two of the Cheyak cities.

    
The tidal wave that does this moves from east to west.  It is powerful enough to cripple Outpost VII, but that same city saves Outpost IX only a few miles away by parting the wave.

    
With the Straights destroyed, sea water rushed into the bowl with the force of an ocean behind it.

    
The tidal wave rushes across the bowl, fills it and dumps a ton of muck and silt on Outpost X.  That city is buried, and remains so for a millennium.

    
But there are relics from Outpost X. The one I looked at seemed to come right as the Blast happened.

    
How did it get out?

    
Ancenon sent us west through the woods as fast as the horses could take us.  Thorn and I took the lead.  Thorn was on lookout for an unusual break in the land, going downward.  I rode point because I rode the fastest and the biggest horse, and Nantar rode follow up because he and I had the best track record as warriors.

    
How that came about, I don’t know.

    
Genna performed our mobile recon again, sprinting forward, letting us overtake her.  She kept that pace on her unquenchable will and because the trees hindered the horses much more than they did her.  Arath broke to either side of our group pretty frequently, and Ancenon lead Drekk’s horse.  D’gattis rode right behind Thorn and me, his relic in his hand and his head moving constantly.

    
Genna came back once to say that she’d found another ambush ahead, and Ancenon quickly decided that the warriors served us better as a testament that we hadn’t passed this way than they would have dead, so we bypassed them.  I felt silently grateful.  An hour later, Arath came back with a similar story of a patrol that had tried to cut across our trail, but had timed it wrong and would cut about two hundred yards behind us.  Genna offered to mislead them, but there would have been no way for her to catch us, even with her speed.

    
The setting sun glared orange in our eyes and the horses lagged from exhaustion when Thorn suddenly brought us up hard.  D’gattis’ mount actually ran his head into Blizzard’s butt and the stallion bit him.

    
The wall of water, muck and silt had moved west and covered the city, dissipating its energy as it had done to Outpost VII and IX.  The huge walls, the towers, the flying bridges had all absorbed their fair share, and the city had been buried.

    
But there would be, just like in Outpost IX, an east and a west gate.  And the west gate, most likely, would be a way in.

    
Even if the city were filled up solid (not very unlikely), the interior of the outer wall, the towers, and the central palace would be accessible - at least, in theory.

    
Thorn stopped us where a huge boulder topped with trees marked a drop straight down almost a hundred feet.  Arath pointed out a gentle slope on both sides and an obvious path that said that patrols came here often.

    
“Certainly not here,” D’gattis said.

    
“Look at it,” Thorn answered, pointing at the boulder and the trees.  “That doesn’t belong here.  Boulders don’t just grow up out of the ground – there are no mountains and no flat spots.  That is the same kind of rock you see at the Straights of Deception.

    
“Tidal waves don’t move rocks that big,” I said.

    
“No, but the Blast could have fired it this far,” Thorn countered.  “Tidal waves don’t reduce mountains to rubble, but if you ever go to the Straights of Deception again, you are going to notice that they aren’t a reef, they are hard rock overgrown with sea life.

    
“Wow,” Genna said, simply.  That summed it up for me, too.

    
“It bounced through the city, came to rest at the gate, and the tidal wave covered it,” Thorn said.  “If we can move it, we’re in.”

    
Arath dismounted and walked up to the boulder, probing its edges first with the point of his sword, then with his fingers.  Genna had already raced into the woods by then, doing her reconnaissance.  I walked Blizzard sideways, down the slope to the west of the boulder, to see if I could find any evidence of a road or something to suggest that we had found the right place.  It would probably be twenty feet underground, but it made sense to have a look.  Thorn had joined Arath and, oddly, Ancenon followed me.

    
I let him catch up.  He had nothing to say, he just followed me, watching what I did.  I decided to ignore him and dismounted Blizzard, checked his stitches again (by some miracle, they were still not torn) and started poking around.

    
I found the same soft earth west of the boulder.  Looking at the fall-off from this angle, I could imagine the facing around the gates of Outpost IX.  The drop easily measured eighty feet.  The trees upon it crested the rise and grew another thirty feet higher.  Down here I found a little glen with only grass clumps and bushes growing, and Blizzard had already been sampling those.  The poor stallion shook with exhaustion and I knew how he felt.

    
“That boulder isn’t going anywhere, is it, Lupus?” Ancenon asked.

    
I looked at where it had rested for more than one thousand years.  “Nah,” I told him.  “Not today, anyway.”

    
“It appears,” he said, “that I’ve taken us even farther from rescue.”

    
I dropped my sword and, once again, it sank point first into the earth, this time only about halfway.  I made a little divot and looked into it, seeing the high water table and nothing else.  We must be near the Sea of Xyr, I thought.  I wondered how it got that name.

    
When I didn’t respond, Ancenon continued, “It is important, regardless of what happens, that some of us return to tell of the condition of Outpost X.”

    
“I bet it is,” I agreed.  I took about thirty paces back north and dropped my sword into the ground.  It did exactly the same thing.

    
“I can safely assume that you, Genna and I could survive, if we needed to,” he said.

    
I don’t like a leader whose game plan involves saving his own hide while condemning someone in his command.  Lord knows I saw enough of that in the Navy.  Junior officers especially saw enlisted men as a commodity rather than as people.  However, if he didn’t have this conversation with me, I felt relatively certain he would have it with someone else.

    
“Leave the rest to satisfy the Confluni?” I asked.

    
I dropped my sword another thirty feet to the north.  This time it sank to the hilt.  I pulled my sword and looked to see that the water table here ran much lower.  No water seeped into the divot I made.

    
“Precisely,” Ancenon told me.

    
I looked east and saw a big, old tree growing right up against the drop off where the boulder rested.  Here I saw almost no rise.  The tree had grown enormous, maybe two hundred feet high, dwarfing its brethren, its roots a gnarled mass sinking into the earth for yards on either side.

    
I chuckled, and looked at Ancenon.

    
“Guess you won’t have to make that decision today, my friend,” I told him.