Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (30 page)

    
“And why is that?” he asked.

    
I pointed at the tree.  “There’s your gate guard,” I told him.  “The boulder just happens to be there.”

    
Nantar, Arath, Thorn and I tunneled like mad into the roots of the big, old tree.  I don’t know enough about trees to tell its species – maybe an oak or elm.

    
But I worked construction and I know a lot about sinkholes.

    
Sinkholes can form either when the water table drops suddenly, as in a drought, or when underground currents moving through the water table erode the soil from the underside up, creating pockets of water or air that destabilize the upper soil.  These sometimes catastrophically fail, resulting in a hole.  In Florida this is an almost daily occurrence.  Entire roadways, houses, even a car dealership in Orlando have disappeared in an hour or less.  The problem was always there, but you can’t look for them everywhere all of the time.

    
But there are sometimes signs.  Plants live on water, and where the water flows, the plants grow.  Where the water flows better, the plants grow faster, which can explain a green patch in a lawn where your water line is leaking, for example.

    
Where the water flows deep, roots have to dig down deep to get it.  Where the water table is high, roots will grow shallow and spread wider, which is more efficient.  Wider roots mean a stronger, healthier tree.

    
All of these things combined told me that the sudden drop in the water table, and a tree that grew so much faster and shallower than the rest around it, marked an underground stream.  To me, that meant that it followed Outpost X’s west road right into the city.  If it did, then the roots of the tree would grow all around the opening, getting easy access to the water.

    
The blast of fetid air that hit us in the face, coming up from underground, confirmed it for me.  We all felt it at the same time and looked at each other wordlessly.  I looked down through a dark maze of roots into a black void, cleared by hatchet and hand to reveal a city lost for more than eleven hundred years.

    
Finally, Genna said, “We might get down there, but the horses won’t.”

    
I had forgotten.  How many times had I said, “It’s just Blizzard and me on this world”?  How could I forget the big stallion now?

    
“Once I am there, I can bring in the horses,” D’gattis said.  Ancenon nodded.  “But I don’t think it wise that I be the first to go –“

    
Thorn snorted rudely.  Nantar grinned and beat his hands on his armored thighs.

    
“Lupus and me, I think,” he said.  “Anything living down there, one of us can handle.  Anything we can’t, we aren’t getting past anyway.”

    
I chuckled to myself and sheathed my sword over my shoulder.  I walked over to the hole we had made, smelled the hot, stale air still rising up from it, and lowered my legs into the dark, supporting my weight on tree roots with my upper arms.  I positioned myself over the hole and let myself slide into the void.

    
I dropped a good ten feet, landing with a shin-jarring
clank
into two feet of silt.  In retrospect, that was a stupid thing to do.  If the silt hadn’t been there, I would have broken my legs.  If it had been deeper, my armor would have drowned me.

    
I moved to the left about three feet – if I hadn’t done
that
, Nantar would have landed on me, the worst fate of the three.  His crash sounded a lot louder that mine, and he fell on his butt after.

    
“Wow,” he said.  “That hurt.”

    
“Not the smartest idea we ever had, huh?” I asked him.  I could barely see him in the dark, our only light wafting in from the hole we had dug.  The air stank of rot and mold, and I could feel the slime on the floor seeping through my boots.  I drew my sword for some sense of security, and it glowed dimly in the gloom, surprising me.

    
“I wondered if that was an enchanted blade,” Nantar said.

    
I held it like a snake in my hand.  I had always known that it had some magic to it, but the light seemed eerie.  Still, War had been generous.  I thanked Him quietly.

    
Nantar got up with my help, and we looked around the cavern.  I could about tell that there were walls under the slime that dripped down from above.  To either side I saw the shape of walls that could have been the towers that had framed the main gate, and that we were in the same sort of murder hole that guarded Outpost IX.  Nantar pointed out heavy hinges that still dangled ten feet above us.

    
“We go deeper?” I asked him.

    
Nantar shook his head.  “We get D’gattis down here,” he said.  “He will be able to get the rest down, and we will be safe from the Confluni for a while.”

    
“Yeah,” I said.  “A few thousand years, anyway.”

    
“Not the way we tore up the roots to the tree up there, my friend,” he said.  He looked me right in the eye.  “Ancenon wasn’t stupid – he brought in good swords like you and Arath and Thorn and me.  He didn’t do that to just haul away plunder.”

    
I nodded.  Together we went back to the tree roots where we had entered.  Squinting up through them, seeing Thorn’s waiting face, it seemed as if a circle of clutching claws surrounded the plainsman, each trying to keep him at bay.  It looked spooky and I shook my head to be rid of the illusion.

    
“It’s all right, D’gattis,” Nantar yelled up into the void.  Thorn nodded and disappeared.  Moments later the Uman-Chi slid down into Nantar’s waiting arms, his white robes billowing out around him.

    
“Umph,” Nantar grunted, putting him quickly down.  “Think you could have left the sword on your horse?  It gouged me in the ribs!”

    
“I could go back and try again,” D’gattis said dryly, to which Nantar had no comment.  The green-haired Uman-Chi regarded my sword first with his ambiguous eyes and, saying nothing, looked about the small passage.

    
“Anything I need to know about?” he asked Nantar.  The big warrior just shook his head.

    
“Very well, then,” he said, and reached into his belt-pouch.

    
From it, he withdrew a little vial, like a test tube with a cork stopper, and shook it.  The contents, which as far as I could tell had been clear, turned a luminescent green immediately.  He mumbled something that I couldn’t understand and stooped to pick up a handful of silt before I could ask anything, the next thing I knew Nantar was pulling me away from him by my upper arm.

    
“Not from around here, are you?”  he asked.

    
I smiled.  “Not hardly,” I answered.

    
“I don’t mean Conflu,” he pressed me.

    
“Neither do I,” I answered.

    
I think that Nantar liked my swordsmanship, so he wanted to get to know me.  I had no problem with that, so long as he didn’t get too close.  I had only begun to get an inkling of what War wanted with me, and I didn’t know if Nantar figured in it.

    
“I didn’t think so,” he said.  We were about fifteen feet away from D’gattis now.  He stood framed in the light from the hole in the ceiling while my sword cast ghostly shadows of us on the slime oozing down the walls.  I had no idea how deep into the hill/city the passage led, but I imagined more than saw a wall of mud there somewhere.

    
“I see Dwarven fighting style in you,” Nantar continued, “but you place your hips funny.”

    
I looked into his eyes.  “Oh?” I asked.

    
“Don’t get me wrong, not criticizing,” he said, in the frank way of a professional killer. “It gives you some real strength in the blows you strike, and with that sword you really only need to connect once.”

    
“It
is
a pretty good sword,” I agreed.

    
“If you ever change weapons, though,” he continued, “it is going to turn on you.  I’ll spar with you some more and show you how to pull your hits.  You should be able to strike killing blows one after the other for close fighting.”

    
I remembered him fighting one man per side when mounted on his horse against the Confluni footmen, and how his sword had flickered though the air like it weighed nothing.  I could use that skill.

    
“I would like that,” I said, still looking him in the eye.

    
He nodded and said nothing.  This would pass as friendship between us, I assumed.  We both returned to watching D’gattis.

    
The conversation couldn’t have taken two minutes, and the Wizard was still at work.  I assumed this had to be spell casting.  He’d claimed that he could bring the rest of the team down here after him.  I hoped he was right.  I really didn’t want to have to try to ride out of here with Blizzard before the heat wore off.

    
“How old is he, do you think?” I asked Nantar.

    
“Two hundred, fifty-six years,” Nantar told me without looking.  “They invited me to the party.  Ancenon is about twice as old.”

    
“Wow,” I said.

    
“Yeah, don’t know as I would want to live that long, not that I have the choice.  I guess you have pretty much seen and done everything by your second century.”

    
“Maybe that’s why they wanted to find this place so bad,” I surmised.

    
Nantar looked at me.  “How do you mean?” he asked.

    
I shrugged, a motion lost within my heavy armor.  “What happens when you live long enough to be as wealthy as you want, to know everything you think you need to know, and to have had every conversation you want to have?  You can see how bored with life they are.  Maybe they’re searching for this place just for something to do.”

    
“Now there’s a thought, Lupus,” Nantar said to me.  “Now they can spend years negotiating for rights from the Confluni, decades excavating, and centuries restoring Outpost X.”

    
“Probably the other way around,” I said.  “But you are right.”

    
Both our heads turned.  I heard a snap, such as a steel rod makes when it suddenly breaks, and a flash, like a light bulb when the filament burns out.  The wind blew in my face and, when I cleared my eyes, Blizzard was nuzzling my chest with his huge nose.

    
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that.  I used to make the typical “Beam me up, Scotty,” comments of any good trekkie but I never expected to see it.  We were all together again, and Arath and Thorn already had their heads back in the hole by the tree roots, as if this was the last place either of them wanted to be.

    
“No way are you two going to be able to cover that from in here,” Genna called up after them.

    
“I can perform a glamour,” Ancenon told her, taking her upper arm in his thin-fingered hands, “which will hide the entrance from all save for those who can see through glamour.  But it would not do to have someone just fall through the hole, now, would it?”

    
In the next hour I saw more spell casting than I had seen since I had come to the region of this place called “Fovea.”  Rather than in combat, I saw magic used as a utility, much as I had used a toaster or electric toothbrush where I had come from.