Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (18 page)

Now someone watched them
—someone close. She only had to think of it, and he knew.

* * *

Xinto of the Woods had a reputation for a lot of things, not all of them nice. This included acting as an ambassador between rival nations. He had a skill for ending wars and finding common ground. Since the Daff Kanaar had become a presence in Fovea, he’d found this a very lucrative trade to be in.

He also acted as a spy, for sale to the highest bidder.
That bid right now came from Conflu.

Conflu had an emperor, just like Eldador.
Trenbon had summoned one emperor to see something it had found. The other emperor wanted to know what—especially considering what usually went on between two emperors.

He had listened to Glynn Escaroth’s song, nonsense as it might seem.
Now, from a chink in the stone wall within the palace of Outpost IX, crouched in one of the many air ducts that ran through the building, Xinto listened to the blatherings of Men in a language he didn’t know, which seemed strange because he understood them all.

He had understood clearly when Shela had offered to kill them both, but that had been spoken in Andaran, and either these other two Men didn’t understand that, or they had nerves of steel.

When the conversation suddenly stopped and Xinto felt a tingle in his gray beard, he knew the Empress had figured out that he watched her, and the time had come to go.

He had enough to report.
He started to scoot backwards through the air duct, to a linen closet where a different passage would take him to the exterior wall.

Or would have, had not Karel of Stone stood in that closet waiting for him, with a self-satisfied grin on his face.

Xinto was a Scitai—Scitai are the smallest of the races, few being over three feet tall. Scitai were born in two places. Most came from Trenbon or, more specifically, the Silent Isle.

Xinto didn’t hail from that part like Karel of Stone.

“My lord ambassador,” Karel said, his sword in his hand and the silver hook symbol prominent on his bearskin outer-garment.

Xinto had a dagger out in a second. The flat of Karel’s sword smacked the heel of Xinto’s hand and disarmed him, leaving his right arm numb from the elbow to the fingertips.

“Do that again and I will take that hand,” Karel warned him.
“I don’t feel any allegiance to you.”

Where Xinto’s features looked swarthy, with a gray beard and brown hair, a cloak full of pockets and a cap with a rakish orange feather always on his head, Karel appeared as the opposite.
Dressed in bear skins, impossible blue eyes much like the Emperor’s, brown hair and clean-shaven with milky skin.

“Cut off my hand,” Xinto said.
“Compared to what the Bitch of Eldador will do to me, it would be a blessing.”

Karel grinned a wicked grin.
The Bounty Hunter’s Guild had labeled Shela Mordetur as ‘the Bitch of Eldador’ when she had killed one of theirs in the Eldadorian court in defense of her mate.

Xinto had given them the reason to want him dead, and he felt quite sure the Emperor knew it.

“You’re an ambassador,” Karel said, indicating the door. “Talk your way out of it.”

He sighed and opened the door.
He could reach the knob—not always true in this world of giants. In a fair fight, he didn’t think he could defeat Karel of Stone, who made his living by his sword, so he resolved not to fight fair.

“Don’t think that I won’t,” he said, as the door swung open.

And there he stood, tall as a mountain, angry as a storm, in his bare feet and leggings, as blond and stupid as when Xinto had met him on the streets of Outpost IX.

“Xinto of the Woods,” he growled in Scitai.

“Your Imperial Majesty,” Xinto said, shocked. Had Shela turned the whole house out?

The fist felt like an
anvil as it took him in the side of his head.

* * *

They were comical little men, Melissa thought.

One had that upside-down question mark symbol on his chest, in silver.
He called himself ‘Karel.’ He took her hand and kissed it, and told her in Uman she was a pretty picture to see.

They called the other Xinto.
He looked smaller than Karel, and wore a lumpy gray cloak that they took from him. They tied him to a chair with some twine Karel had.

For her benefit, they spoke Uman.
She interpreted for Bill as best she could. It seemed to her that Xinto had betrayed Lupus somehow. Now Shela had caught him spying on them.

Lupus seemed upset about it, but Shela acted just spitting mad.
Lupus, to Melissa’s surprise, turned Shela around and gave her bottom a good, hard smack when she kept going near the bound and unconscious Xinto. That actually quieted her down, and she sat on the corner of the coffee table and glared at the little man.

Bill just watched everything.
She saw him mouthing words, so he must be trying to pick up the language.

Melissa sat down next to Shela and put a hand on her thigh.

“Does he hit you often?” she asked Shela in English.

“He hit one time,” Shela said.
“He haf strong hand.”

“No,” Melissa said.
“Does he usually hit you?”

Shela gave her a funny look, then she seemed to get it.

“He hit me when a wife need to be hit,” she said.

Melissa bristled.
“You allow this?”

She shrugged.
“I his woman,” she said. “He tell me no talk, I talk, he hit. Is what a good husband do.”

Yikes!
Melissa took a sip of brandy just to quiet herself.

Oh, God
—they hit their wives?

It dawned on her
—she’d found herself in a feudal society. Women had been voting in America for less than 100 years.

Who did you call to report the Emperor, especia
lly when you didn’t have phones?

“He not hit you?”

That roused her.
“Bill?” she asked. “Bill not hit me, no.”

She nodded.
“He old,” she said.

“No,” Melissa was almost offended by it.
“He’s not old, he loves me.” She felt glad she had learned the word.

“What he do when you bad wife?” Shela asked, and seemed to be uniquely interested in the answer.

Melissa shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, “but not hit. Yell, talk, not hit.”

Shela shook her head.
“He learn,” she said. “Young wife, lot of trouble. Need to know who husband is.”

So she
believed
a wife needed to be hit, Melissa thought. On the other side of the room, Xinto seemed to be returning to consciousness. Shela stood, and waited. Finally Lupus turned to her and beckoned. She went right to his side, her hand on the small of his back.

He hit her, and she loved him for it, Melissa thought.
What made it worse, he hit her in front of other people, and she expected it.

Where the hell did she find herself?

Chapter Ten:

             
A Key to a Kingdom

Xinto woke up to pain in his wrists, his head, his ankles, his arms and his back.

And his neck
—oooh, his neck! This didn’t seem fair—he didn’t even know where he had woken up!

Yes, he did
—he’d been in the royal palace of Outpost IX, spying on Rancor Mordetur, and he’d been caught.

He raised his head, and there he stood
—the Conqueror himself.

He didn’t look happy, but Shela looked uniquely angry, sitting on the corner of a caw-fee table with a girl who could be her twin.

Lupus stood in front of him with his arms crossed over his chest. Next to him stood that old giant the Uman-Chi had pulled out of oblivion, the thief Karel of Stone, and an Uman-Chi he had met in court named Glynn Escaroth.

“My lady,” he said to Shela directly.

“Speak to my husband, you scum,” she hissed at him. He hadn’t seen hatred like that in his life before, and he had seen a lot. “If he lets me, I will dip you in honey and bury you in an ant hill. I will use my power to keep you alive until the youngest Uman-Chi are old.”

Xinto raised an eyebrow and looked to the Conqueror.
“I think it best I speak to you, your Imperial Majesty.”

“I think it best you take this a lot more seriously than you are,” Lupus said.
He spoke in Uman, probably so these newcomers could understand him. That struck him odd, seeing as they were Men. However, when he had spoken to Xinto before, it had been in Trenboni Scitai.

“You have a blood debt to this one,
Yonega Waya
,” Shela said in Uman, mixing in the Andaran for ‘White Wolf.’ “He confessed you to the Bounty Hunters. It took years before they gave up on trying to kill us. They even attempted to kill Lee.”

“No attempt was ever made on the Princess,” Xinto argued.
Out of the blue, the Emperor backhanded him.

             
He tasted the salt taste of blood in his mouth. “Liar,” Lupus hissed. “I bought you dinners, Xinto. I called you friend.”

             
“You invoked the Guild,” Xinto demanded, angry despite himself, his lip already swelling.

             
“I didn’t know any better,” he said. “I’d only just come here.”

             
“And if we had done nothing?” Xinto asked. “Would you have kept doing it? Would you have continued to call yourself ‘Bounty Hunter?’”

             
“I
did
continue to call myself ‘Bounty Hunter,’” Lupus said, and smacked him again.

             
There he told the truth, sadly enough, and the Bounty Hunter’s Guild that killed kings and nobles and powerful merchants, peasants and holy men, had failed uncounted times to pay him back for it. In his home, in the Eldadorian throne room, in other cities, at his inauguration, on the sea, through his food—nothing worked. He detected poisons, killed assassins, turned out operatives and tortured them. Finally, the Emperor had sent a message:

             
“Come up with a solution you can live with, or I’ll come up with one that kills all of you.”

             
A threat like that would normally have been laughed off by the Guild, but this came from the Man who’d sacked Outpost IX. They reached a compromise. Lupus could be admitted to the Guild and his crimes would be made moot. You can call yourself a member if you are one.

“As a fellow member of my Guild, then,” Xinto said, blood flowing in a trickle from his lip to his beard, “I call on Guild Sanctuary.”

              “The Guild does not spy on the Guild,” Lupus said, surprising him. He hadn’t thought the Emperor would bother to read the Guild Charter.

             
He should have known better.

             
“Then I call for a trial of three Masters,” Xinto demanded. He had this right. They would kill him for spying on a member of the Guild, but more mercifully than Shela would have done, if allowed.

             
“I will turn you over to the local authority instead,” Lupus said, grinning fiercely. “I am sure Angron will be impressed with having you.”

             
The Uman-Chi would never invoke the wrath of the Guild from the precarious spot they currently found themselves in. Lupus would know that—he bluffed to see if Xinto had any fear of them.

             
He would turn the tables and see how much the Emperor trusted these new allies.

             
“What makes you think he doesn’t know I’m here?”

             
Lupus turned on Glynn with an unpleasant expression. The Emperor acted as a force of nature—get him going in the right direction and he leveled everything in his way.

             
“I don’t pretend to know the King’s mind,” Glynn said. “However I see no reason to bring you here, give you these advantages, and then betray you.”

             
“Unless he wanted to know if it worked,” Lupus countered.

             
“How else would I know of her song?” Xinto pressed him.

             
“What?” Glynn demanded.

             
Lupus and Glynn looked at each other, then at Xinto.

             
“Did you hear her sing tonight?” Lupus demanded.

             
“What of it?”

             
“Did you?”

             
He opened his mouth to sing a few words of it, but couldn’t. It felt as if his throat closed.

             
“He heard it,” Glynn said to Lupus, in Uman-Chi.

             
“He can’t sing it—only you can, but he’s trying,” Lupus said.

             
The giant asked Lupus a question in their language, and the Emperor answered it. His female stood and approached them, bent over and looked in his face, her pendulous breasts hanging sweetly under the neckline of her blue dress.

             
She looked back to Lupus and Glynn, and said in Uman, “I do not know him.”

             
“It seems you do not need to,” Lupus said.

             
Glynn looked skeptical. “Which would he be?”

             
“We should kill him,” Shela insisted, in Andaran.

             
“No,” Lupus said. “We’ll keep him. Let’s see if more are drawn to us. It would be nice if they all just turned up together.”

             
He looked at Xinto. Lupus didn’t have his sword, he wasn’t wearing his armor, but he looked no less threatening for it.

             
“Consider yourself a prisoner of the Eldadorian Empire,” Lupus said to him, and he didn’t make any effort to hide how glad he was to say it.

“I don’t mind waiting to dispatch this one.”

* * *

             
The Eldadorian Empire took Xinto of the Woods into custody, meaning they took him in chains to the hold of
The Bitch of Eldador
and locked him in a cage barely large enough for him to turn around. Bill and Melissa returned to their rooms and Glynn to hers. It was impossible to miss the contempt the Uman-Chi caster regarded her charges with, and in fact Shela tended to notice things like that.

             
She could like that girl, she thought. If this dark-haired, younger woman kept her focus on this older man, then she could be a good friend.

             
Friends were rare for the Empress of Eldador. She herself had been the confidant of the previous Queen of Eldador—Alekanna. That sweet woman had cherished their time because Shela sought nothing from her.

             
She’d died horribly and it had destroyed Glennen, the former King. Her Yonega Waya had sacked Outpost IX in retaliation.

             
Shela missed that friendship. Now it was she whose favor others curried, to whom they listened with glazed-over eyes, waiting for the proper moment to ask for something, to suggest something, to do whatever it was they wanted to do to further their position.

             
The next morning, sitting in the captain’s cabin of
The Bitch of Eldador
on a swaying deck while the three Sea Wolves pushed south, Shela listened to her husband and these outsiders, and thought these thoughts and wondered at the prophecy she’d heard.

They will fall, who walk with her

They will fall, who oppose her

They will fall, for the power

Of the goddess, who chose her.”

             
One thing was certain in Shela Mordetur’s mind: whether they walked with this champion or opposed her, no matter what it took, they would
not
fall.

* * *

              “Have you ever heard of Greek or Byzantine Fire?” Lupus asked them.

             
They sat in the captain’s cabin of the
Bitch of Eldador
, the flagship of the Eldadorian fleet. The deck swayed beneath them. It bothered Bill, but Melissa loved it.

             
“No,” Bill said, and suppressed a burp.

             
“Yes,” Melissa said. “It was a chemical that burned in air, lighter than water, and was used by the Byzantines to keep their remnants of the Roman Empire alive. Even now, no one knows how they made it. Some say only Constantine and his descendants knew.”

             
Lupus grinned. He was still in his leather pants and white shirt, but now he dressed in leather boots as well, with a chain over the instep like a biker, and kept a sword over his left shoulder.

             
Melissa and Bill sat with Glynn. She’d traded in her white robes for a grey travel dress and bound her green hair back. Xinto in a brown travel cloak and Karel, in his bearskins were seated on short stools opposite the room’s one door, under a sealed, circular window less than a foot across. The ship was a three-master with square sales, and it plowed the waves southeast, from Trenbon to what they called ‘Galnesh’ Eldador, meaning ‘the Port of Eldador.’ The sailors seemed to be all grim-faced Wolf Soldiers. A huge funnel ran from the ship’s stern to its bow, where it described an arc ten feet ahead of the ship.

             
“It wasn’t hard to figure out,” Lupus said. “Once you think about it.”

             
“It has baffled every scientist for centuries,” Melissa argued.

             
“Did it?” Lupus asked. “Or did they realize how simple it was, and keep their mouths shut? It burns hot enough to warp steel, you know. In the modern Navy, you still wouldn’t want to be hit by Eldadorian fire.”

             
“Eldadorian fire?” Bill asked.

             
“The same thing,” Lupus said. “Spray it on the water and you better not run your ship through it. Spray it on your ship, and all you can do is jump off. It spreads faster if you throw water on it.”

             
“Because it is lighter than water,” Melissa said.

             
“Exactly,” Lupus said.

             
“And this technology?” Bill said. “If your enemies have it?”

             
Lupus grinned. “Right you are,” he said. “But it isn’t good enough to have Eldadorian Fire. If you open the vats to study it, they have this irritating tendency to start burning.”

             
“Ah,” Melissa said. “White phosphorous is one of the ingredients.”

             
“You’re a chemist?” Lupus asked her, leaning forward.

             
“Two years—University of Maine,” she said. “Got A’s, though.”

             
Lupus frowned appreciatively and nodded. “You know I interrogated someone with Nitrous Oxide once?”

             
“You made Nitrous?” she admitted being intrigued.

             
He grinned a very satisfied grin and informed her of his brilliance.

             
He’s vain, Melissa knew of him. He felt very pleased with himself that he could get away with the things he did. His constant warnings and sudden, serious inquiries into their knowledge told her he was also terrified of someone coming to take it away from him. He hadn’t impressed the locals with his skills and rose to lead them, he’d taken out anyone in his way. After talking to him for two days and listening to his stories, she knew that he didn’t care what he had to do or whom he had to hurt to get what he wanted. In every one of his stories he boasted about how he screwed someone whom he felt deserved it.