Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (50 page)

             
She nodded, pressing into the Lone Wood with her mind, looking for some flicker, some indication of life, of magic.

             
Nothing.

             
“You hungry?” Jack asked, from behind her.

             
She nodded. “For anything but your bitter ale.”

             
Jack chuckled. “What are you doing?” he asked.

             
She shook her head and turned to face him. He had piled his sticks into a pyramid, as she had seen him do. He would stuff the center with dry grass, and strike a spark from a dagger he’d picked up and a piece of flint.

             
She, of course, would use her magic—by why bother if the Man was content with this? He cooked for her, as well. She found that those times when he was occupied with something other than his endless string of questions were best suited to her need to meditate and to refresh her power.

             
“I am looking for our friends, the Druids,” she said. She had found a patch of grass a little thicker than that around it, and thought she would be comfortable there. “I think we have caught them napping.”

             
“Sending a Man to his death,” she heard from behind her, “is not catching us napping. It is catching us forgiving.”

             
She turned and there were two of them, dressed in white robes and brown over-cloaks. Both were Men, younger by the look of them, no more than two decades in age. They stepped out of the forest as if out of a fog, directly into the plain.

             
“Who are you to send others to defile this sacred place?”

             
Zarshar was up off of his haunches with a roar, his talons and his teeth bared, taking on a fighting crouch. Comically, the dog took up a position beside him, her teeth bared and a growl low in her throat. Jack, a thick branch in his hand and the fire before him, stood and waited, looking to her for direction.

             
Glynn allowed her power to swell. Not flame, she thought immediately. They would have mastered flame. In fact, no elements at all—even calling down the lightning would be risky with Druids.

             
“I am Glynn Escaroth,” she proclaimed, throwing her green hair back over her shoulders with a shake of her head. “I am Baroness of Britt, keeper of the southern walls of Outpost IX, Duchess Escaroth. I prithee, name thyselves, that I might know thee.”

One looked to the other, then both back to her.
Now she wondered if these were, in fact, Men. They were slight of build, and Men were burly. Their hair was brown in the tradition of Men, but their ears had no lobes.

             
Uman? No—they didn’t
feel
like Uman.

             
She’d seen an Uman-Man hybrid among the Druids—she remembered him as Dilvesh, a member of the Daff Kanaar. Running into him wouldn’t be good for them—but this risk had to be taken. These, however, could be his kind.

             
“We are of the Order,” the one on the left said, meaning the Order of Druids. “We are guardians of the Lone Wood, and would know your business here.”

             
Zarshar stood behind her now, still in his crouch, however still taller than she. The dog flanked him. A word from her and both would pounce. She had more to fear that one would do it anyway.

             
“We are summoned to the Lone Wood,” Glynn replied, her left hand reaching out behind her to find the savage breast. She saw no point in lying—Druids were mighty. “If we may have the forbearance of the Druids, then we will be about our way quickly, we assure you.”

             
“Druids?” Jack asked. He approached the three of them, looking at the two Men as if they were art on display.”

             
“You are Druids? You—um—worship nature?”

             
Glynn shook her head—this wasn’t going well and it wasn’t getting better. She held the Devil; Zarshar could be restrained against attack unless provoked. However Jack’s questions couldn’t be guarded against.

             
“We recognize the Trinity,” one of them said, regarding the Man. “Weather, Earth and Water. We hold the power—”

             
Jack picked right then to do a curious thing: he stepped forward, and raised his right hand to his forehead, then to his belly, then to his left and right shoulders.

             
The stunned look on the faces of the Druids was unmistakable. They looked to each other, and then to him, and said a thing in a language she didn’t understand.

             
He shook his head, and repeated something back to them, and they smiled.

             
Until Zarshar roared and fell to his knees, his hands to his ears, as if they’d gone aflame.

* * *

              Slurn peeped out from the muck at the side of a stream he’d found. Although not as familiar to him as his home in the Slee Nation, he’d been able to make a decent meal for himself of frog and eel and, with a full belly, his outlook on life improved significantly.

             
That is, until he happened upon the source of his disturbance, two days hence. That rhythmic shake in the ground—the tread of thousands of feet, striking the face of Earth at the exact same time—brought back memories of home more realistically than any river could hope to.

             
The march of Wolf Soldiers—thousands of them—not from Galnesh Eldador or from Thera, but from Vrek, that meant the Emperor’s southern legions were on the march.

             
With the threat of Toorian renegades raiding up into much wealthier Eldador in the last few years, the Emperor had moved two thousand troops into Vrek under the command of Duke Ceberro. Men captured by the Slee had spoken of this, of the honor this meant for Ceberro, the only Duke alive to be given command of the Emperor’s elite forces.

             
Since installing his Wolf Riders and their own Wolf Soldier troops on the plains of Andoran, Slee had become increasingly interested in Wolf Soldiers. Where Andarans had been somewhat easy to avoid and easier to prey upon, Wolf Soldiers had fortified their position at what his people called
His Jaws
, the meeting of the Great Mid and the Safe Rivers.

             
Slurn knew a lot about Wolf Soldiers—and one of those things was that, when they marched somewhere in this many numbers, it was to kill something. Once when there had been famine and the Slee had raided Wolf Rider cattle, fewer than this had marched on the Slee Nation and left a bloody wake behind them.

             
Slurn turned in the muck and tucked his arms and feet beneath him, clutching his spear. With his tail to drive him and his snout to steer, he slithered swiftly down the little stream, which he surmised would empty into the Forgotten Sea just south of Kor. From there it would be child’s play to enter the city and find the woman he protected. She must know she lay in the path of Wolf Soldiers.

* * *

              Xinto found it irritating that Xareff would simply snub him, as he had. In the back of his mind, he still blamed the air-headed Man, Karl, for bungling what would likely have been a smooth negotiation, at the first sign of trouble.

             
He sighed, as his legs carried him near as fast as a Man down one of the side streets in what could best described as a bad section of Kor. Considering what passed for a
good
section of this place, a bad section made for a place he was less likely to want to go.

             
However, if he couldn’t have the Duke’s help, then there were others who could be relied on.

             
He approached the green door as it has been described to him—an ill-fitted aperture to an ancient stone building. Xinto wondered who had originally put
such
care into these old stone buildings, these huge walls and towers, and what happened to them to let them fall to seed as these had.

             
The Man who stood at guard beside the door carried a battle axe Xinto doubted he could lift, much less wanted to be struck by, and so instead he flashed the secret sign of a Bounty Hunter guildsman, his hand a flicker in and out of the sleeve of his robes.

             
The guard recognized him and stood aside, pulling the door open in its jamb. The will of Adriam himself had to keep the thing on its hinges, Xinto thought as he passed through it. He heard the huge Man wrestle it back closed behind him as he entered a gloomy room, very wide, the windows boarded over and light barely peeking in through the chinks.

             
“Those who die well,” someone prompted him from within—a male voice, older, Sentalan Uman by its accent.

             
“Paid double,” Xinto answered. He’d derived this challenge—it was one of his favorites.

             
“You always had a Mannish sense of humor about you,” the other said, and stepped from the gloom to reveal himself. He wore the heavy leather cuirass and leggings of a Fighting Hunter—one who killed by challenge—rather than a Stealthy Hunter, like Xinto, who worked by guile.

             
He would lead here, Xinto knew. The Fighting Hunters did not number many, but were recognized simply as more fit to lead, for the nature of their business.

             
“Tagarag,” Xinto recognized his old friend. His once-green hair had gone gray and left him with a widow’s peak. His thickset arms and almost Man-sized hands combined with a jowly face to mark him for his farmer-heritage.

             
“Xinto of the Woods,” Tagarag greeted him formally. “I was informed of your entry to the city, and disturbed you approached Xareff before coming to me.”

             
“My apologies,” Xinto bowed his head. “But these days I travel with air-headed Men, haughty Uman-Chi and even an Aschire, and I admit I am out of sorts.”

             
“We saw Nina of the Aschire,” Tagarag said, sweeping an arm backward to welcome Xinto into the lair. As his eyes adjusted, Xinto saw high-backed, comfortable chairs and newer caw-fee tables in the style of Eldador. For the squalor of Kor, this was a place where an outpost of the Bounty Hunter’s Guild could be expected to do well.

             
Xinto entered and leapt into one of the chairs, settling himself. A young girl, of the race of Men, dressed in nothing more than a twist of yellow cloth around her loins, knelt down beside his chair and began to pull his boots off for him. He pointed his toes and allowed her. There was another, dressed similarly, here, and as his eyes became even more accustomed to the dark, he made out the shadowy figures of four more Men and two more Uman, all dressed in the robes of Stealthy Hunters.

             
A lot to be in the lair at the same time, Xinto told himself.

             
The girl had his boots off and began to work his feet expertly. Such girls traded their services to the Guild for their upkeep. Before the Emperor’s economic changes, girls like these had been common as grass. Now they could find better employ, and some actually received a wage to perform their services at Guild Lairs.

             
“What news have you, then, Xinto of the Woods,” Tagarag asked him, seating himself opposite the caw-fee table from Xinto, in another of the high-backed chairs. “I have never known you to enter a lair without some story to tell.”

             
Xinto grinned within his beard. “Well,” he said, “I could begin by saying the Eldadorians and the Trenboni have formed a secret alliance against the rest of Fovea, and even now the Emperor marches his troops to war.”

             
Tagarag raised his eyebrows and frowned, nodding. “This is impressive news,” he said. “I knew of the Emperor’s trip to the Silent Isle to meet with Angron, but I had not guessed at that.”

             
“Working for the Confluni Emperor,” Xinto said, leaning back as the girl changed feet. “I eavesdropped on the Emperor himself, until I was captured by Karel of Stone and turned over to him.”

             
“You didn’t invoke Guild Sanctuary?” Tagarag pressed him.

             
Xinto felt his eyebrows drop. “No,” he said, guardedly.

             
“Because you’d spied on a Guild member,” Tagarag said.

             
The girl at his feet kept rubbing. The other Hunters stood as one; their weapons clear at their sides.

M
any weeks had passed since that had happened, Xinto thought to himself, but surely not time enough for the Emperor to—

             
“One Ancenon Escaroth, formerly an Aurelias, approached us on behalf of the Emperor,” Tagarag informed him, interrupting his thoughts. “He brought us to light on that, and on your original report that the Emperor invoked the Guild.”