Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (53 page)

             
Glynn sighed. She’d bared her body in front of Uman-Chi when weakened after her song. The Swamp Devil saw her as nothing more than a food source, and she could barely differentiate between the dog and the Man on an intellectual level, making this seem less personal.

             
At the same time there was no point in making the Man uncomfortable, so without preamble she rose up out of the water and crossed to her saddlebags, withdrew a cotton slip and donned it. When she turned back around, Jack was out of the water and hopping up and down next to saddle, yanking his pants up to his waist.

             
At least then she understood what the young girl saw in him.

             
“You two make less sense to me than the dog,” Zarshar said.

             
“That’s because she’s another fanged animal,” Jack countered.

             
Glynn opened her mouth to respond when she saw the face of an Uman in the brush past her horse.

             
His skin looked pale, as if he rarely saw the sun. Her eyes adjusted to the shade and she picked out more faces, more eyes, those of Uman and Men, one Toorian and then a second. All of them wore white robes. She turned to her left, to her right, seeing no less than fifty Druids.

             
She had no idea that there existed so many. She searched for Zarshar and found his eyes.

             
“I smelled them before you put your clothes on,” he said. “The dog had them before me.”

             
The dog rolled back over onto her stomach, her ears up, her tail thumping the ground. Much as she acted as some kind of guard, she saw no threat from these.

             
“You are well met, Sirrah,” she told the closest one, “and we are well convenienced in your grotto.”

             
He smiled and stepped from the trees. True to her counting, forty-nine others did the same.

             
She looked for one among them whose reputation she knew, a member of the Daff Kanaar called, “Dilvesh,” and did not see him.

             
Fifty-one druids then, no less.

             
“Your relation with the Emperor has you well benefited,” she noted.

             
“An it be so,” a young woman told her, of the race of Men, as tall as Glynn with glistening blonde hair down past her elbows and eyes blue as the sea.

             
“We are not met,” Glynn said, extending her hand, knuckles up in the manner of the gracious guest.

             
Not because she expected the other to recognize the Uman-Chi form, but in fact to ensure she did not. The first rule of any new encounter was to establish the other’s ignorance.

             
Her surprise was immeasurable, then, when this woman addressed her dainty fingertips with her own, in the manner of the welcoming host, in the feminine, and put her left foot behind her right heel, and curtsied.

             
“I am Vedeen, of the Lone Wood,” she said, “first sister among the brethren, and keeper of the One.”

             
“The One?” Glynn asked her.
One who fights as does the sun?
she thought.
Was this it, finally?

             
She spread her arms wide and rolled her wrists in the manner of the presenter, in the feminine. “The One,” she said. “This place, of course. The Lone Wood—One among the rest.”

             
Glynn sighed. She would have been surprised to find it that easy.

             
“We would ask a boon of you, however, in return for your safe passage.”

             
Glynn lowered her face and spread her hands, palms up, in the tradition of the humble supplicant. “If I can be at your service,” she said.

             
Vedeen smiled. “Then I would hear your song.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine:

             
Who Fights, as does the Sun

Slurn crept up out of the sewer into a crumbled courtyard surrounded by a battered wall.
To his left he saw a window that someone had boarded over. On the other side of that window, he would find Xinto of the Woods. The scent wafted unmistakable from within.

She whom he yearned for, this child of Men, called Raven, bid him come here, bid him find this thing, this Scitai, who spoke his language.

Always, it surprised him that he loved her so much. Even now his cold heart warmed for her, his mind held in it to one side the image of her face, the feel of her fingers on the side of his jaw.

So he’d hunted through the night, followed false trails, even found another Scitai hidden in a hovel, a vile creature reeking of the alcohol Men and Uman drank.
On more than one occasion he’d been seen by Uman, and once followed down into the sewer. He’d had to kill then, not that it bothered him.

He’d killed Uman before.

He slithered from the sewer grate he’d dislodged to the puddle of shadow at the base of the ruined wall. The ground felt dry against his scales, dead grass and leaves littering parched soil. He followed the wall to the stone base of the building, and that to the space under the window, ever watchful for some sentry or passerby who might see him. Sure he’d gone unnoticed, he raised saurian eyes to the base of the window, peeping inside through a crack.

* * *

Genna put her weight on the balls of her feet. She’d watched Xinto for hours, first wondering what he was doing, later marveling at his ingenuity. While he’d slept, she’d even gone so far as to obtain her own bundle of wire strands, storing them in the heel of her left boot. She could think of a million uses for them.

Xinto had expected someone to watch from a crack in the plaster or a peephole.
He hadn’t seen the mirror in the upper corner of the room by the door, or the groove in the wall beside it. Genna had watched him from three rooms away, through a system of mirrors, each larger than the one before.

Bounty Hunters, after all, had their
ways.

Xinto had been brought here with a sword.
He didn’t have that now. As a trained Bounty Hunter, he could kill with his hands if he had to, however he wouldn’t likely match a ready Master like her with a weapon drawn.

“You started all of this, you know,” she told him.

She watched the startled reaction. She knew Xinto of the Woods. He never blamed himself for anything.

“I did?” he challenged her, the quizzical expression under his beard almost comical.
“I suppose I should have left myself to the Bitch of Eldador—”

She shook her head, her long red hair brushing the naked skin on her back.
“I don’t mean this stupidity—this is nothing. This is a pretense to bring you home. Do you really think we care who spies on the Emperor?”

“Then what?” he began.

She wanted to
scream
. How could anyone be so stupid? Xinto was supposed to be one of their cleverest operatives, yet look at all of the trouble he had caused.

“He was a vagabond,” she told him.
“He was no one. So you put him in the possession of an Uman-Chi Prince, and you set him on the road to be an Emperor.”

“Mordetur?” Xinto demanded.
His eyes opened up wide as saucers. “You think that I—”

“Did you, or did you not, take pay from Ancenon Aurelias to assemble that team he took into Conflu?” she pressed him.

He sighed. “Of course—I put you with them, didn’t I?”

“And did you, or did you not, send him Lupus?”

Xinto’s shoulders slumped. “You couldn’t have expected me to know—”

“
Aiiiiii!
” this time she couldn’t contain her frustration. “You spent a month with him,” she said. “A month! I was with him less than a week before I knew there was more to him than a suit of armor and a sharp sword.”

“Then why didn’t you put him down?” Xinto countered, daring to take a step forward.
She took a tighter grip on her dagger and he stopped, seeing the warning in her eyes, no doubt. “You had him—from what I’ve gathered, you had him naked and unarmed. You could have taken him at any time—”

“By then I needed him to stay alive,” she hissed.
“By then I’d fallen for his charm, his wit, his evil way. By the time I could have taken him, I was struck down and, after that, he had that
bitch
watching over him, and
no one
could get to him.”

“And then you left,” Xinto said, taking another step.
He either had a weapon concealed or he thought himself fast enough to get to hers. “At the Battle of Tamaran Glen, you took to the trees, I assume, and you got out of range of his woman.”

Genna remembered that day.
The battle against an enemy that no one could have beaten, her elation when Shela fell, her shock and horror when Lupus charged out of the woods on his stallion, directly into the mass of the Confluni army, to kill himself without her.

That day she knew, no matter what else happened, he would never be hers.
On that day, she realized how much love a man could have for a woman, and she herself would never experience it. Not from the only man she’d ever wanted it from.

She’d leapt up into a tree and traveled for
daheeri through the canopy, leaving her allies to their fate. When finally she set foot on solid earth, she’d come to the gates of Tamara, where she took refuge in the Bounty Hunters’ lair.

A month later, she learned he had survived, with
her
, and they’d had a daughter and named her Lee.

She’d stayed in Conflu from that time until this, because she couldn’t bear to see him.
It wasn’t until she’d heard of Xinto’s actions that she’d decided it was safe to emerge. Of all of the Bounty Hunters on Fovea, and of almost all of the people, Genna counted herself among the very, very few who knew what Xinto’s actual crimes were.

“Yes,” she said, finally.
“I left. I couldn’t get near him, and I knew what you’d unleashed.

“If you’d have stayed in your cage,” she added, “you’d have lived, Xinto.
You’d have been returned to Trenbon, and you’d have been tried and found innocent. We’d have decided you didn’t know the nature of your assignment until you walked in on it. You were spying on the Uman-Chi, and no one would have guessed the Emperor could be there.

“But now that you’ve escaped, and so cleverly, you are mine, Xinto of the Woods.”

She let herself lick her lips, watching his hips, his hands. He planned to reach for something inside of his cloak—being a Scitai, it would be some sort of cross-pistol or blow gun, no doubt. She’d have him before he could finish it. She just needed to be able to say honestly that he’d attacked her first.

“You know what we do to escaped prisoners.”

Xinto planted his foot—he would attack now. She could tell any Wizard on the planet that what was about to happen had been done in self-defense.

She pulled back her arm, and the room’s one window exploded in a mass of wood and splinters as some giant lizard leapt for her, fangs and claws bared.

* * *

Zarshar growled low in his throat.
When he’d come here before, he’d seen, at most, five of these druids, and always smelled them coming.

This two-score and more had approached him from all four directions of the wind and left him oblivious, until in fact the dog detected them and tipped him off.

He’d come to appreciate the dog. When he had stood to fight, she’d backed him, fang for fang and claw for claw. He’d told no one, but she had laid her great head across his lap one night, and somehow managed to touch him with those soulful eyes.

This time, when he’d missed the signal in the trees, she’d picked it up for him, and let him know without the pathetic lecturing he’d come to expect from the Uman-Chi.

Now the Druids wanted to hear their song, and it seemed to the Swamp Devil they wouldn’t have asked if they didn’t suspect already what it told of.

“It is my pleasure to sing it to you,” Glynn informed Vedeen, “however it is my experience that
—”

She nodded, interrupting the Uman-Chi.
They hated nothing more. Zarshar did it as often as he could for that reason.

“If you would be so kind,” the
Druid said.

“Sing the damn song,” Zarshar told her.
“If they can’t hear it, it does no harm. If they can, then we can leave this place.”

Glynn frowned, then took her left hand in her right, before her belly, straighten
ed her back, and sang the song from beginning to end.

The words rang in his ears.
He’d already figured out what they would find—a dhar k’ten, one of the
old ones
, the fire-breathing, saurian menace from the Steel Mountains or the Great Northern Mountain Range. Wings, scales, fangs, terror—a close ally to the Swamp Devils, what Men called ‘dragons.’

The
Druids looked into each other’s eyes. Zarshar smelled the magic flow between them. The dog’s tail beat the ground, her ears up, her nose pointing first at him, then at the Man, Jack, then back at him.

Jack’s eyes moved from
Druid to Druid. Grudgingly, Zarshar admitted that, if any of them could hear the words, Jack would likely know it. The Man had a mind like a dagger, carving bits from his foes like an expert swordsman.

Glynn finished her song.
Zarshar saw her aura waver. This effort drained her. If she were an enemy, he would attack her now.

He’d already reconciled himself that she was not.
He wanted the Emperor dead and, on his own, he would have led two hundred Swamp Devils in an all-out assault against him on his next campaign, catching him unawares and unready.

He would have failed.
The Emperor had proven many times that overwhelming force wasn’t the way to take him.

“We are impressed,” Vedeen told them.
“For what few of us can hear the words, even we cannot pass them between us. It seems as if the All-Mother would keep her secret.”

The
Druids had discovered in moments more than the rest of them had in weeks. What this meant wasn’t lost on the Swamp Devil.

“Then you can hear the words,” Zarshar accused her.

She nodded. “Succinctly,” she said. “A few of the rest, the melody and, of some of them, the intent.

“You have a dilemma, my friends,” she said, sighing.
“You must have this one who fights as does the sun, but yet you seek the answer before you fully understand the question.”

Glynn frowned.
“I am no one to deny the wisdom of the Druids,” she said, and Zarshar recognized the condescension dripping from her words, “however I assure you, at the very least, all questions are understood.”

A chuckle arose from the
Druids. The dog’s tail kept thumping.

Three long steps brought Vedeen to the dog’s side.
She knelt by the beast’s shoulder and stroked the giant head. It laid its ears back and stilled its tail, the green eyes closing contentedly.

Vedeen turned her attention back to the Uman-Chi.
Jack had stepped up beside her. Zarshar kept his place on the rock—if he needed to move, he’d rather do it from here.

“So you have your one who fights as does the sun,” she said, squelching Zarshar’s theory.
“And now that you have her, what will you do with her?”

“Are you aware
—” Glynn began.

“You face the Emperor,” Vedeen told her.

“The One, who walks upon the Earth

The One, who is of War.

The One, who others wait upon

To fight forever more.”

“In truth,” she said, standing, “it could be no other, and none have been a better friend to our kind.”

“Would you turn on him?” Zarshar asked her.
All eyes turned to him. “Would you betray him, for a song you heard one time?”

Vedeen smiled to herself.
“It seems an odd thing, put that way,” she said. Another Druid opened up his mouth, but she raised her hand and stilled him.

“If you would have me as a part of your entourage,” she said, “then I would travel with you.
This will raise no enmity between Galnesh Eldador and us. The Emperor cannot think to tell us whom to travel with.”

“And when it comes time to fight him?” Zarshar pressed her.

She smiled. The dog stood up next to her, pressed its body to her leg. The Druids, if nothing else, were dear to animals, and they to them.

“When that time comes,” she asked, “then you should ask yourself, how does one fight, as does the sun?”