Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (32 page)

             
“What’s going on?” she demanded.

             
Glynn smiled that irritating little smile again. “Raven,” she said, “You’ve heard my song, and you know Lupus is the One about whom we were warned,” she said.

             
She shook her head. “Oh, Glynn,” she said.

             
Xinto stepped forward. “Believe me when I tell you,” he said, “I am no more anxious than you to make an enemy of the Emperor Rancor Mordetur.”

             
“
You
,” Raven said, and wiped the tears from her cheeks and eyes with her blouse’s cuff, “are just afraid of him.”

             
“Of course I’m afraid of him,” Xinto said. “I’m afraid of him, she’s afraid of him, most of Fovea is afraid of him. You’d be afraid of him, too, if you knew him.”

             
Raven shook her head. “He’s been nothing but decent,” she began.

             
“You mean, he gives you things,” Xinto interrupted her, “but you’ve spoken to him, just as I have. What does your countryman want, Raven?”

             
Melissa had been thinking a lot about this. She reflected on that conversation she’d had with Shela after dinner one day, when she’d learned that Lupus planned to go conquer the rest of Fovea.

Forget the fact that he was probably going to take Bill with him.
He was going to go
conquer Fovea
. He was going to do it because he felt like it. They hadn’t done anything to him, they didn’t have anything he needed, he just
wanted to
.

Whose side was she actually on?

              Glynn stepped up next to Xinto. They were closing in on her. “What do you think he wants, Raven?” Glynn repeated.

             
Melissa leaned back against the stool.

             
“He wants more,” she said, finally. “He wants more land, more followers, more power. He thinks he can change the world, and he hasn’t even explored it all yet.”

             
“And what will the world be like, with a man like that running it?” Xinto asked her.

             
Melissa had never liked history. She’d never liked the human sciences. But she wasn’t stupid, either; she could see what was right in front of her. The Emperor of Eldador, fellow human or not, wanted to be the emperor of a bigger empire, and he was pretty-much convinced he could do it. More importantly, these people were likely in no position to stop him.

             
Lupus liked to call himself ‘the Conqueror.’ More importantly, he liked other people to call him that.

             
Melissa sighed.

             
“What do you want me to do?”

Chapter Seventeen:

              Free as a Bird

              Side by side, Blizzard and Little Storm pounded out the distance between Galnesh Eldador and the little sea village called Tonkin. There’d been a spring rain and the roads were wet and slushy, barely graveled and mostly mud. Spray from the horses’ hooves coated their sides as well as their riders from their feet to their noses.

             
Lupus leaned into his saddle and rode with his head close to the horse’s neck. Bill tended to want to sit back more, move with his hips, flow with Little Storm’s natural motion. More used to Appaloosas, a destrier like Little Storm gave a whole other ride. The stallion’s natural power surged through him, travelling up to Bill through his loins, letting him feel the raw energy of a tireless mount.

             
Lupus rode grim-faced and didn’t speak. Blizzard cantered along the road without as much effort as Bill would have expected. Normally he wouldn’t run a horse flat out like this—he’d want to trot and walk as well as canter so as not to leave the horse jaded.

             
Both Blizzard and Little Storm seemed to thrive on the punishing pace. Bill’s legs and butt were already burning, his back and shoulders aching from the effort. Three hours into the ride he was ready to call a halt when they saw wagon on the horizon.

             
Lupus turned to him and grinned. It was an almost evil sight. Right then, Bill saw his priority right then was not to save his daughter as much as it was to punish the people who’d dared to offend him, who’d dared to challenge him.

             
Bill’s heart constricted. Someone was going to die in a few minutes, he knew. He didn’t want to kill anyone, and he didn’t want to join them, either.

             
Lupus touched his steel heels to Blizzard’s sides and the stallion pressed on to a speed even faster than Bill had experienced during their race. Little Storm bore down and silently matched his sire. Side-by-side, they closed the distance between themselves and the wagon.

             
“I’ll take them head-on,” Lupus told him. “You ride past them, turn around and just block their horses. I don’t expect you to fight, but don’t you expect that you won’t have to. They have my daughter—they’ll know what I plan to do them.”

             
Bill nodded. His heart raced. He was sweating in the cold.

             
Someone stood up in the wagon. It was a simple, four-wheeled, open-topped flat wagon with at least two people in it. Bill imagined that he heard a shout, and then the wagon picked up its speed.

             
The horses pushing faster than he thought a horse could move sensed a race was on and pushed faster still. The wind actually stung Bill’s eyes and made his tears run.

             
Lupus had a long, shiny sword out. Its surface was so perfect it almost gleamed. Bill thought maybe he should pull his own sword, but drawing it over his shoulder on a moving horse, he was afraid he’d cut his own head off.

             
The person in the wagon stood back up and waved his hands over his head. Lupus didn’t slow down so Bill didn’t. The horses thundered on. It wasn’t long before they were less than a stone’s throw from the wagon.

             
The teamsters on the wagon reined in. Bill flew past them, then yanked the stallion’s reins to the left, turning the horse in front of the wagon.

             
Bill nearly sailed out of the saddle, his legs throbbing and almost too weak to grip the stallion’s barrel. He righted himself, the horse bobbing his head and pawing the graveled road. Bill pulled his sword out over his shoulder and faced the two steaming draft horses that had been pulling the wagon. Both were black in rope harnesses.

             
Lupus was speaking to the drivers in Uman. Both were clearly terrified. Either they knew him on sight or they saw the armor and weapon and knew they were no match for him. They were two Uman men with long white hair, dressed in white homespun over shirts and cloth pants, both with old, worn boots. Their eyes were wide with fear and they were speaking too quickly for Bill to follow.

             
Melissa—Raven—was the one who’d focused on Uman.

             
Lupus raised his head up and regarded Bill. “They say they don’t have her,” he said.

             
“Maybe they’re behind the ones we’re looking for?” Bill suggested.

             
Lupus nodded. He spat on the ground. “Shela wanted to come and I said, ‘No.’ I should have brought Nina. We could have asked her—she knows Chawny as well as anyone alive.”

             
Bill kicked Little Storm and the horse walked the distance to the wagon. The wind changed and Bill got a whiff of something he hadn’t smelled in a long time.

             
“You smell that?” he asked Lupus.

             
Lupus straightened and sniffed the air. Another father, he knew the scent right away.

             
“What do you two do?” he asked the Uman.

             
One of them responded, “As we said, your Imperial Majesty, we’re simple porters. We’ve a load, we’re paid to move it—”

             
“They’ve got a load alright,” Bill said. He pushed the horse a little farther forward, past the drivers to their wagon’s bed, and pushed an old, worn tarp aside from what it covered in the back.

             
Two baskets, each full of diapers.

             
No baby.

             
“War’s beard!” Lupus swore.

             
“What?” Bill said.

             
“I’ll bet those are Chawny’s diapers,” he said. “Someone paid these two to move them. That comes from Chawny—Shela detected it.”

             
Bill nodded. As much as anything that was magical made sense, that made sense.

             
Lupus sighed. “There’s a town near here,” he said. “I know its Baron. He has a wizard. I need to coordinate with Shela. You watch these two. I’ll be back in a bit.”

             
Bill nodded. He needed a rest. Lupus kicked his horse into motion and Bill had to rein his own horse in to keep him from following.

             
“A noble steed, my Lord,” one of the Uman porters said. “Is it one of Blizzard’s get?”

             
“I’m not a lord, I’m called ‘the Mountain,’” Bill informed them in Uman, even as he realized he
was
, in fact, an Earl. “And yes, this is.”

             
“You must be an important Man,” the other said. “There aren’t many who ride so well.”

             
Bill shrugged. He saw how nobility was treated here—they’d be more honest with him as a common. “He seems to like me,” he said. “I’m told, um, no one else can ride him.”

             
One of the Uman turned to the other. “The same as the Emperor’s Blizzard,” he said.

             
“I don’t understand,” Bill said.

             
The other turned back to him and said, “It’s said the Emperor was chosen by his horse, and not the other way around.”

             
Bill nodded. These men were afraid. They were making small talk out of nervousness. They didn’t know what was going to happen to them, and they had decided, as people would, that if they made a friend of him, then he’d have a harder time hurting them.

             
That wasn’t up to him, he knew.

             
“You’re porters,” Bill said, finally. “You move stuff with your wagons?”

             
“One wagon,” one of the Uman said. “It’s all we have. We’ve worked hard and earned these horses. Now we move larger loads, farther, and make more money.”

             
“There’s much trade in Eldador,” the other said. “More every year. There are so many in the capitol it consumes more than it can make for itself, so there is always a need to bring in more.”

             
Bill nodded. Probably true of every capitol.

             
“You—my Lord, you don’t know, I mean, can you?” one began, alternately trying to look him in the eye and looking down.

             
“If you were just moving a load with no idea why, I don’t know why the Emperor would hurt you,” Bill said, having a little trouble with some of the words.

             
They seemed openly relieved.

             
“You were afraid?” Bill asked them.

             
They looked like they couldn’t believe the question. “The Emperor is terrible in his wrath,” one said.

             
“There are a thousand stories of what he’s done to his enemies,” the other informed him. “You are his associate, you do not know this?”

             
“No,” Bill said. “What has he done to his enemies?”

             
They turned to each other. Scared, Bill thought. They didn’t want to say anything about the Emperor. This could be a trap.

             
“On my honor,” Bill said. “I’ll repeat nothing you say.”

             
“On your honor?” one repeated.

             
Bill nodded.

* * *

              “I’m bored,” Lee complained.

             
“Me, too,” Vulpe agreed with her.

             
Nina paced the nursery. Stupid, how could she be so stupid?

She hadn’t proved herself worthy, this much she knew.
She’d betrayed Lupus and Shela and lifted her hand against them. Now Chawny had been abducted, and who knew what would befall her.

             
“Nina?”

             
Nina immediately alerted to Shela’s voice in her mind.

             
“Yes? Does Lupus have her?”

             
“Lupus has overrun them, and found porters with dirty diapers.”

             
“Dirty diapers?” That made for an interesting trick. What the body left behind came of the body. As far as a spell behaved, one could be fooled, especially a mother desperate for her child.

             
“So, now we don’t know—”

             
“Lupus wants me to ask you if anyone has had interest in the disposal of our diapers.”

             
Nina knew the wet nurse, whose family made a few extra coins removing such things, supplying toys, weaving clean linens for the baby. She gave Shela their name, and dreaded their fate if they made more coin giving what they thought of as worthless to some enemy of the Empire’s.

             
“Baby’s cryin’,” Lee told her.

             
“Take care of—what?”

             
She turned her attention to the room around her, and sure enough, she heard Chawny’s plaintiff cry. A sound she knew as well as her own breathing.

             
Nina ran to the nursery from the playroom, and sure enough, she heard the cry from the empty bassinet.

             
“Oh, I don’t believe it,” she said. It seemed too simple.

             
“Edvagietye,” she said, and snapped her fingers—the simplest of all spells to dispel magic.

             
Angry at the Sun lay wailing in her bassinet, her diaper heavily soiled.

             
“Shela!” she called the Empress in her mind.

* * *

              “We’ve found another of the people mentioned in the song,” Xinto informed the young girl.

             
Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Say what you would, this girl loved that fat old Man for some reason, and she was very dedicated to him. That was Xinto’s way in.

             
People in general, no matter the species, wanted to feel like they were moving forward. Xinto had learned this as a child more than one hundred years ago, in his village in Conflu, playing with other children, both Scitai and Men. If they wanted to play a game Xinto didn’t want to play, it was always more effective to give them a better game than to refuse to play. If they wanted to go somewhere he didn’t want to go, he quickly learned to posit a more interesting place than simply to criticize their decision.

             
That simple philosophy and served him well from then to now. Not that this Raven could admit her benefactor might not be the best caretaker of her future, it was time to suggest a better one.