Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (73 page)

    
“So much,” Karel gasped, looking at the gold.  “Enough to buy an empire.”

    
“Depending on the empire,” Arath said.  “Some aren’t for sale.”

    
Karel grinned up at him. 

    
I wondered if this was a dream or a nightmare for a professional thief.  More gold than he could imagine, and he couldn’t steal it because it already belonged to him.

    
Karel looked up at me with a look in his eyes that might have held the same question.

    
“Did you build Thera on this?” he asked me seriously.

    
I smiled down at him.  “I started Thera with this,” I admitted to him.  “Now Thera keeps me from here, except when I want to think and watch the rats.”

    
“I wondered if all of those emulating you were doomed,” Karel said.

    
“Some are,” Arath said.

    
“Some are not,” D’gattis warned him.

    
Karel grinned up at me. 

    
Wow, did I not like him.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Payback

    
“You don’t seem to want me around,” Karel told me.

    
I was losing favor with the Free Legion.  I spent too much time not being a part of what they did.  They had important conversations without me – things happening which I didn’t know about.  The Fire Bond didn’t provide enough reason anymore to tell me everything.  Karel’s addition and my position on Trenbon, as well as the Uman-Chi’s, restated that.  We all had our own lives going on and I had been the start of it.

    
I had caused the trouble we found ourselves in.  I felt that to the center of my soul.  Every day I thought I knew what War wanted from me now, and every day I thought that I might have learned more.  I served as the catalyst to a disaster that would be huge.

    
“No,” I agreed.  We were by the corral, where Blizzard and Shela’s horses ran.  There had been a few acquisitions, including a feisty pony that I planned to give to the little thief.

    
“Why?” he pressed me.

    
Direct for a thief.  Drekk would have just found out the information on his own and then swallowed it for his own security purposes.  Karel of Stone seemed more likely to attack the issue so that he could overcome it.

I looked down to my right at him.  We were leaning against the fence, him against the lower rail and I against the upper.  “I don’t know you, and I don’t trust you,” I said.  “Even in the fire bond, I think that if there is a way around it, then you will find it.”

    
“Already have,” he told me, looking at the pony.  I raised an eyebrow.  “Hire some friend of one of the many enemies you’ve made and tell him about why Outpost IX survived the Blast like Outpost VII.  Let him put the parts together and within a year Conflu will be in Outpost X, the gold will be gone and the fire bond dissolved.”

    
I thought about that.  “Not bad,” I told him.

    
“If you want to survive in this life you have to think about escape routes before you go in anywhere,” he told me.

    
“Kind of surprised you would be friends with D’gattis,” I said, seeming to change the subject.

    
Karel sighed.  “D’gattis and I go back pretty far,” he told me.  “I could have killed him the first time I sacked the treasury of Outpost IX.  He could have done the same to me the second time.  No idea why he didn’t, but we like each other’s company.  I steal for him from time to time and he made these leathers for me.”

    
“Magic of some sort?” I asked him.

    
He nodded.  “Soft as a baby’s butt, but stronger than steel.”

    
I turned from the corral and he followed me back to the estate. I needed to see if any of the Free Legion remained to say good-bye to.  Ancenon and D’gattis had stayed in Chatoos, and Arath had said that he planned to go soon. 

    
“Have you ever been to the Scitai-occupied portion of the Silent Isle?” Karel asked me.

    
I told him I hadn’t.

    
“Funny thing about that,” he told me.  “The Uman-Chi recently conceded that it constituted an act of aggression for them to maintain Tech-Ships off of our coast.”

    
I looked down at him as we approached the estate.  He didn’t look up, but kept his blue eyes focused straight ahead.

    
“Really?” I asked him.

     Karel left Thera soon after, Arath with him.  Since Drekk and Alekki’s death I had seen in the eyes of every one of my allies that they were guarded with me now.  I had been the first to pick his own nation over the Free Legion, regardless of the reason.  Ancenon and D’gattis were always loyal to Trenbon, but until now they had never stepped in front of one of us to defend it.  I acted specifically against their homeland now, and the fact that their own king wanted them dead didn’t make them any happier about it.  I am sure they reasoned that the proper discussion with their patriarch would smooth over everything, so long as I didn’t make it all impossible by acting directly against their nation.

    
Picking sides is a deliberate thing.  There is no easy way to break the decision to the loser, and it can be hard to recover from.

     The wind whistled cold down the Llorando in the middle of Power.  The mountain air poured south like the breath of the merciless god for whom the month is named.  With the fall harvest in and no one really doing much more than battening down for the winter, the ships and barges that plied up and down her banks expected and saw little in the scope of activity.

    
Imagine, then, the combined surprise of the Volkhydrans and Sentalans when a thousand armed warriors, Nantar’s Sarandi, landed across the river from Hydro, south of the Sentalan village called, simply, Sental One, and burned the southern-most Volkhydran/ Sentalan bridge to the ground.  They tumbled its stone ramparts and cracked its base.  What few guards were there to defend this link between two nations died in the first assault.  The Sarandi stayed one day, then marched up the river from there on the Sentalan side.

     No one thought it uncommon for an Eldadorian merchant ship to ply the Straights of Deception in Power with a load of goods.  It had become much more difficult for Dorkan to stop Eldador from moving through the Straights, but not impossible.  The Eldadorian garrison in Katarran had left and, although the city itself was a ruin, the port could be used as an anchorage with some difficulty.  A band of Dorkans made a temporary camp south of Way Point and a Dorkan Wizard could report back with intelligence to a counterpart on one of those ships.

    
The Dorkans could patrol the reef or moor in Katarran and, working in teams, strangle the connection between most of Fovea and the outer islands.

    
When three Eldadorian merchant class vessels began to pick their way through the Straights, five Dorkan warships debarked their anchorage off of the Straights and made way to intercept.  Following protocol, they would either ram the Eldadorians or sink them with catapult shot once they were clear of the Straights.

But it hadn’t been so easy this time – the very planks onboard their own warships resisted the Dorkans and began to twist and leak as soon as they neared the Eldadorians.  Taking water, these ships tried to make for land and were soon sinking too rapidly to save themselves.  All hands abandoned ship and all were lost in the icy-cold sea, their land-bound compatriots left powerless to help them.

     Two weeks later the incident repeated itself, and again a week after that.  By the first day of Desire the Dorkans had lost eleven vessels and were weakened in their effort at sea.

    
By that time a second and a third bridge had been burned between Volkhydro and Sental.  The Sentalans who had sought to stop the Sarandi had been slaughtered to a man.  Fighting in squads like Wolf Soldiers, the Sarandi defeated two and three times their numbers in foreign warriors on foreign soil.  Their losses were minimal.

     I suspected that D’gattis and Ancenon would wait in Outpost IX to see what I would do.  With Shela at my side, that could be anything.  Without exception all ships entering the port at Outpost IX were searched, but now merchants complained that those searches were more vigorous than usual.  They grumbled in the marketplaces about additional security and the impossibility of doing profitable business with these paranoid Uman-Chi.

    
The Trenboni government had obviously been tipped off.  An Uman-Chi had come to my estate and begged permission to see me on the offer of a ducal position in Outpost VII.  I had ordered him stripped and flogged and sent out to the street.  There was formal protest.  His magic had flared and been neutralized by Shela’s.

    
I did the same for the Volkhydran, Sentalan and Dorkan ambassadors.  In Uman City and as well in the port of Eldador those same nations’ ships were burned in port with all of their wares onboard.

    
It wasn’t enough.

     Many believed that the Scitai on the Silent Island had evolved from holes in the ground.  Others said that the Cheyak kept them as pets, like trained monkeys, or that they
had been
monkeys themselves.

    
When I landed five thousand Wolf Soldiers on their beaches in the middle of the night, using fishing vessels from Thera, I had the opportunity to look at their villages.  They carved their homes in still-living trees and were expert botanists, keeping these same trees alive.  They trained almost from birth with bows and arrows, slings and crossbows and a type of collapsible bow unique to their own people.  They lived in communities of twenty to fifty and had been here for over a thousand years.

    
When the blast had come it had avoided them.  They didn’t know why.  When the Uman-Chi had come, they had done the same for as long as possible, and then decided, much as had the Eldadorians with the Aschire, that there were no Scitai cities, therefore no Scitai nation, and that these were a subject people. 

    
Like the Aschire, the Scitai didn’t think a lot of the idea.

    
There were one hundred of them helping us to debark.  We couldn’t have done it without them.  They knew the beach and the hazards of the shoals.  Our ships had made a natural landing with no breakwater, which meant that we beached our ships and dropped brows to unload men and horses.  Karel guaranteed that, for every man we saw, there were ten more in the trees providing cover.

    
I don’t know how he pulled this off; Karel of Stone was not popular with his people.  His father, Therok of the Plains, had appeared with a frown on his face when the first of my ships landed.  They argued bitterly.  Karel obviously hated the Uman-Chi and thought that any action against them strengthened the Scitai.  Therok believed that there would be reprisals and, if Karel pushed too hard, then the Uman-Chi Wizards would arrive and solve the problem with the Scitai once and for all.

    
“The Uman-Chi need targets,” Karel informed them.  “When they come here they will find none.”

    
“A fire through the woods will find you wherever you hide, son,” Therok told him.  “And burn hotter than vengeance with Uman-Chi Wizards behind it.”

    
We were standing on the beach in the middle of the night.  The moon cast a bluish tint on all of us.  Two Spears marshaled the men and then drove them into the woods.  Each sergeant had orders to keep contact with his lieutenant, each lieutenant with orders to keep contact with his captain and the captains, each with a map of the Silent Isle, were keeping us spread out over miles.

    
Even if we were discovered, we were just a band of ten Wolf Soldiers here for no apparent reason.

    
Shela approached us, riding her gelding.  Lee remained in Thera with a wet nurse, guarded by a thousand men who knew that their lives were forfeit if anything befell her, not that they needed a threat.  Two Spears had done his job and done it well.  These men would lay down their lives for that little girl and sneer while they did it.

    
Shela looked down at all of us.  The two Scitai looked up at her, towering from over three times their height on horseback.  I stood with my arms crossed over my breastplate, waiting to hear what she had to say.

    
“No Uman-Chi draws breath within ten miles of this place, Therok of the Plains,” she said, her voice mystical as it always sounded when she used her power.  “None will while I walk this Isle.”