Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles) (39 page)

     I chuckled.  “This time I won’t have to conquer it,” I said.

     “Not what all of those graves to your north are telling me,” Kvitch said.

     Now I squared off on the little man.  He’d managed to find a sore spot that I felt like I shouldn’t have.  “If you’re not up to the task,” I informed him,
“then these ships can take you right to Sental.”

     Kvitch frowned. 
“Oh, if Men can think of it, then Dwarves can make it real,” he assured me.  “If your wife can call an island up out of this lake, then we’ll reinforce it, build a bridge to it if we have to – we’ll do what is needed for whatever you want to build.”

     He turned his back on us, and looked out over the lake’s black water, where the currents ran fast and crazy
and a swimmer could be swept away five feet from the muddy banks.

     “I’ll give you your first step to an Eldadorian Empire,” he said.  “But you’re the one who will do the rest of the walking.”

     “He’s right, you know,” Dilvesh informed me.

     He, Shela and I were sitting in the pavilion that had been Shela’s and my home since we’d come here.  I’d thought it might be nice to switch to the Sea Wolves once they got here, but Shela had grown up living this way and she’d come to miss it.  Our warriors and civilians had been inter-mingling a good bit, the Andarans teaching my Wolf Soldiers their ways, and one thing they’d done is to skin all of the dead horses from the battle.  There were horse-hide tents and clothing all over the place now, and uncounted implements made from horse bones.

     My Wolf Riders were looking more like a tribe every
day; however they’d harvested wood from the Confluni forests and built stables, warehouses, even a few homes.  This tribe wouldn’t roam the plains when the weather changed, they’d be staying here.

     “Right about what?” Shela asked him.  She’d cooked us a dinner of wild herbs and venison.  Nina had helped her.  Now she and Lee were playing a game with Lee’s bebe in a corner of the tent.

     “Kvitch said that this was the start of an Eldadorian Empire,” I said to her.  “Wisex is a colony on Andaran soil; the Wolf Riders are my colonists.”

     “He’s right,” Dilvesh repeated.

     “It takes more than one colony to turn a kingdom into an empire,” I informed the Druid.  “It takes a lust to grow, to collect more power, to absorb other people and cultures.”

     The Druid looked me square in the eye.

     He drove me crazy sometimes.

     “What if this
is
the start of an Eldadorian Empire?” Shela challenged us.  She leaned forward on her collapsible canvas chair – we travelled with these, made of leather and bone, because they were easy to move and somewhat comfortable.  “What if Eldador expands to other lands, if that is the gods’ will?”

     “That all depends on which gods,” Dilvesh said, leaning back.  His eyes wandered the
canvas top of the pavilion.  “Certainly Law and Order don’t seek for Eldador to spread its power.”

     I was more concerned with War, Shela with Power, but neither of us said so.

     “This needs to happen, regardless,” I said.  “If Eldador is now an empire, then the rest of Fovea is going to have to live with it.  Conflu is an Empire and no one seems to mind.”

     “Accept for us when we’re killing them,” Dilvesh said, not looking away from the ceiling.

     Dilvesh knew what he was talking about – this I had to remind myself of.  Dilvesh had revealed more to me at the Battle of Tamaran Glen than he’d intended.  I hadn’t shared that secret, even with Shela, because it wasn’t mine to share and because Dilvesh would know instantly if I did. 

   
And because I needed Dilvesh, and Dilvesh knew that, too.

     Everyone was up the next day with the sun, on the 15
th
day of Power, and stood looking out at the lake.  We still hadn’t given it a name, not that we hadn’t tried.  Nothing seemed to fit.

     I’d have liked to have D’gattis here, but I wasn’t sure how to lay hands on him and it seemed to me he was probably still angry enough with me that he’d just do his nay-sayer thing until we threw up our hands in frustration.

     As I’d said so many times, this needed to happen.  Wisex fit into my future plans on almost every level.

     “There’s enough rock in the lake bottom to do what you want,” Kvitch informed us.  “This probably wasn’t here before the Blast, and the two rivers parted because something like a set of hills parted them.”

     That made no sense to me – there Mid River flowed right out of Conflu.  Even if the Safe River were created by the Blast, it didn’t flow up backwards to a tributary and then start and then correct itself.  He knew more about this sort of thing than I did, so I kept my mouth shut.

     “I can sense the collection of hard stone,” Dilvesh informed the Dwarves and Shela.  They stood just where the black beach began to meet the water, myself and a couple squads of Wolf Soldier guards
behind them.  Nina held Lee in her arms and bounced her, while my daughter, hugging her bebe, did her best to go back to sleep.

     “So if I can raise that up, you can keep it all together?” Shela asked him.

     “Molding it all into one piece shouldn’t be a problem,” Dilvesh answered, “but that is a
lot
of rock.  I don’t see how you can – “

     “His plans,” Shela cut him off.  “My power derives from what others desire.  The stronger the desire – “

     “But he’s only one man,” Dilvesh argued.

     “He isn’t the only one who wants it,” she said.  “If he’s right then I become the avatar for a million unheard voices.”

     “And if he’s wrong?” the pessimistic Dwarf asked her.

     She turned her head to look down on Kvitch.  “Then a lot of my countrymen just died for nothing.”

     The little Dwarf said nothing to that, and Shela didn’t expand on it.  She and Dilvesh moved right out to the water’s edge, and they began to chant.

     It occurred to me both that they’d worked together several times now to combine their magic, and that Shela had informed D’gattis once that, if she weren’t with me, then she’d be with him.  I suppressed a little ripple of jealousy right then, and focused on what I wanted.

     What I believed my god wanted.  What I had to think Shela’s god, Power, wanted as well.

     I felt something move through, kind of like a flush.  I shuddered but I couldn’t shake it off.  People from the tribe I’d created and the Wolf Soldiers gathered around behind us to see what we were doing.

     Shela raised her hand before her, her long, black leather raider cloak falling off of her shoulders.  She took a step to the side as if she were getting a better stance to lift something.

     Maybe she was?

     Lee cooed from Nina’s arms and she lifted up one hand like her mother.  Dilvesh spread both hands before him.

     The lake began to churn.  People were pointing and commenting behind us.  Shela began to incant, the strain clear in his voice.  Dilvesh did the same beside her.  Lee began to make nonsense sounds in imitation of her mother.

     The churning increased.  A shelf of black rock peeked up out of the center of the lake, a sheet of water flowing off of it.  More rose around it, then started to level off.  They were creating a huge shelf, I couldn’t tell yet how wide.  The rock stood out as black as the water around it- the color from the lake might be taken from the bottom, I thought.

     Lee was shouting now in her self-made baby-language.  Nina was bouncing her.  The level from the lake didn’t change as this rock was simply a rearrangement of the lake’s bottom.

     This was going to create even more crazy channels in the lake’s currents, and probably dump a ton of silt into the swamp downstream.

   
I might be dealing with a lot of angry Slee.

    All at once, Shela stopped her chanting.  Dilvesh continued for a little while longer, then he stopped, too.  They both stared out at what they’d created for a minute or two afterwards, and then they both turned to face me.

     Shela looked exhausted and Dilvesh could barely stand.  They approached me and Wolf Soldiers ran out to support them both.  Shela almost fell into my arms from theirs.

     We took them to the pavilion and laid them down to sleep.  Nina entered after us with Lee in her arms, and laid the baby down next to her mother on a mat on the floor, her bebe next to her.

     “Did you see that?” Nina asked me.

     “I was right there next to you,” I informed her.

     Outside of the pavilion, the Wolf Soldiers and the Andarans were chattering about the amazing thing they’d seen.  I could hear Kvitch arguing with a captain of one of my Sea Wolves that he needed to go out and inspect this new island right away, and the captain was saying that he wanted some time to study the new currents.

    
Nina clucked her tongue at me. 

     “I meant Lee, Lupus,” she said to me, in that exasperated way kids have.  “Did you see Lee?”

     “Yes,” I said.  I squatted down next to my sleeping girls and pulled a blanket over them.  Shela would likely sleep through the day.  Lee was anyone’s guess, and Dilvesh pretty much did what he wanted to.

     “That was very funny,” I said.

     Nina actually smacked me.  I turned to look over my shoulder into her angry grey eyes.

     “She joined in the
spell
,” Nina informed me.  “I can’t even do that.”

     I felt my eyebrows drop and my scar twitch. 

     “Your daughter’s a sorceress,” the little Aschire girl informed me.

Chapter Twenty

              Reconstruction

     I stood on a wide field of stone, miles across, the surface rough and uneven and black, in the middle of a lake where the current twisted like a tangle of snakes and the sun beat down in the autumnal month of Power, sacred to my woman’s god.

     It would be winter here.  Supposedly the Andaran plains were always temperate, but this had turned into a cold month.  On ‘the rock,’ as I’d been calling it in my mind, it seemed pretty warm to me.

    
“We can use this,” Kvitch informed me.  Other Dwarves were nodding.  “This is a good base – we can build your city on this, if you want it.”

     It wouldn’t have happened without my daughter’s interference. She wasn’t just a sorceress, she showed the raw abilities to be a powerful sorceress.  Shela and Dilvesh were wracking their minds to try to figure out where her power came from, while the Dwarves were doing the same thing in regard to this lump of rock we’d given them.

     “Of course, you’re going to have to defend it before we’re finished with it,” one of the Dwarves said.  Her name was Grellia – a red-bearded Dwarf with fine fingers and long eyebrows.  “The currents dumped a ton of silt into the Mid River and the Slee who live there aren’t going to put up with that for long.  They’re going to come looking for a reason why, and if what I’ve heard of them is true, they’re not going to like the reason.”

     What was scary was how right they were.

     “If the Slee can weaken you, then the Andarans will sweep in right behind them,” Two Spears informed me.  “My people have made peace with you, but they did it because they had to, not because they want anything to do with you.”

     More good news.

     “So my question, thin-brained Man,” Kvitch asked me, crossing his arms over his stomach and looking up at me with those soulful brown eyes, “is, ‘Do you want it?’”

     Daughter whose powers were going to exceed her abilities and endanger us all, enemies on every front, most of whom I’d gone out of my way to piss off, expense uncertain and future unclear; hell, yeah, I wanted it, and I said so.

     “Build it,” I informed him.  “Make it tough enough to withstand the combined Fovean armies if it has to.  Whatever you need, just tell me.”

     I turned on my heel and started back to the barge that would take me back to the Sea Wolf, that would take me to the shore.  The currents were too crazy for it to be trusted to go too far – in fact, the Sea Wolf would have to push itself into a position to block that current for the four strong Men who rowed the barge to move it from the stone shore to the
ship’s side.  We’d already lost a rowboat down the Great Mid River and two squads of fast horses hadn’t been able to get to it before it bore its occupants down into the Slee swamp.  Nothing came out of there alive.

    
It was all creeping over me, I admitted to myself.  It was becoming too much.  Being a monarch, being a warlord, being a husband, a father; keeping it all together.  I couldn’t move ahead anymore, I was just fighting how much farther I fell behind.

     If this kept up, I was going to crash, and I didn’t do anything small.

    
If you went upstream of the Black Lake, as we were calling it, into Confluni territory, you came to a mountain range that sat as an escarpment to the north of the Great Mid River.  The Dwarves claimed that the rock from there was good enough for what they wanted to do.

     Before they left, Aschire scouts verifi
ed that there were no Confluni patrols in that part of their territory.  No one came to this part of Andoran, and so the Confluni saw no point in guarding it.

     We pillaged the forest, we’d pillage the rock escarpment.  We could build a city out of nothing and call it ‘Wisex.’

     I don’t even know where I came up with the name.

     I left on a Sea Wolf back to Eldador the Port with my wife, Nina,
Tartan and our horses.  The Wolf Soldier contingent and associated Theran Lancers were going to winter here, and then I’d make a decision on how many stayed through the summer based on the city’s progress and how many Andarans I attracted.

     Two Spears would stay in command for a while.  He’d met a girl he liked, a
short brunette named ‘Soft Eyes,’ whom Shela had sent his way.  Sisters named their brothers in Andaran culture and picked out their wives, and despite everything else that might be going on, Shela tended her men and performed her duties as an Andaran woman.

     She kept it all together
way
better than I did.

     Dilvesh actually absented himself before we realized it.  The next morning he just wasn’t there.  He’d brought that big horse of his, and it was gone, too; I had to assume that, whatever Druids did, he was off doing it.

     We pulled in to Eldador’s busy port on the twelfth day of Desire, after a long and arduous sea journey.  The wind blew cold over Tren Bay and it was misery to man the rigging of a Sea Wolf.  Barefoot sailors crunched across swaying decks sometimes slick with ice, or through freezing rain, with a strength I wasn’t sure I possessed.

     There wasn’t much of a crowd to greet us – the weather didn’t len
d itself to cheering crowds and we hadn’t announced the arrival.  We pulled directly into a slip next to the part of the wharves I’d walled off, and only did that because another Sea Wolf was being finished in that place.

     We’d construct a temporary wall here if we had to, however it was fast-becoming pointless now.  We could point to five Sea Wolves now and we’d double that before the spring.  I couldn’t keep them all in the Black Lake, even if I wanted to.

     I walked Blizzard off of the ship and led him down the wharves with his tack on his back, because it was too slick and dangerous to ride him.  Shela did the same with her gelding.  Nina carried Lee, whom we’d dressed in a fox-fur parka.  Of course, her bebe had to have one, too.

     J’her met us half way down the wharves with fifty Wolf Soldiers.  He wasn’t smiling.

     “How bad?” I asked him.

     That got a little smirk from him.  “Bad enough,” he informed me, turning so that he could walk next to me.  The Wolf Soldiers formed up around us. 
Blizzard stomped and snorted at them, not liking to feel hemmed in.

     Sea travel was always hard on him.

     “The Andarans have complained that you illegally invaded their nation,” J’her said, “and they’ve called an emergency session of the Fovean High Council.  You’ve got a week to respond, but Dorkan is already pledging two thousand warriors to the conflict, and the Confluni and the Toorians are willing to support them, magic aid included.”

     “That was fast,” I commented. 

     “You supposedly killed a lot of people and left a sizable army behind you,” he said.  “There’s also a rumor that you made the lake down there even more impassable, and now the Toorians are saying you’ve ruined irrigation systems that took them decades to build.”

     I felt my scar twitch.  “I didn’t know they did that?” he said.

     J’her shook his head.  “No one did,” he said.  “No one goes to Toor.  No one knows what they do down there, and I didn’t think that you could do
anything
that far upstream of them that could affect their nation.

     In fact, I
did
know that silt could travel for hundreds of miles downstream of a disturbance like the one we’d created.  I’d been worried that we’d create natural dams that would raise that lake’s level and overrun the island, but apparently that’s not what happened.

     “We have to be in Outpost IX in a week?” Shela asked J’her.

     The Uman nodded.  “That’s what we’re informed,” he said, “however I think you’d be crazy to go.”

     We were passing through the market place and approaching the city gates.  They’d been constructed of wrapped timbers which had proved difficult to maintain and which always looked like they were about to come apart.  I needed to have them remade.

     Hitler worried how he’d widen the streets of Berlin so that it could function as the capitol of the world, as his troops fell back on every front, too.

     “You think that the Uman-Chi will arrest him the second he puts a foot down on Trenboni soil,” Shela said, looking sideways at me.

     “I would,” J’her agreed.

     I wouldn’t, but I don’t act like most of the people here.

     “If I don’t go, then they’ll try to invade me before I make that place too strong to invade,” I said.  “I guess this isn’t something that the delegates I employ can handle for me?”

     “That’s a question better asked of Duke Hectar,” J’her said, looking straight forward.  “He’s been running the actual government while you were away.”
     “How’s
he
been doing?” I asked.

     J’her shrugged inside of his armor. 
My officers wore scalloped steel sleeves and tooled steel greaves outside of their grey tunics, with their breastplates underneath, while the regular enlisted just wore tunics over leather or steel with single-piece, plain covers on their lower legs and upper arms.  “He’s had a lot of practice so he’s good at it.  He wouldn’t complain to me, if he had any.”

     I sensed some tension there but it wasn’t worth pursuing.  I could let them work it out and intervene if one of them asked me.  There were just some things here that I had to let go, and this was one of them.

     We walked the rest of the way in silence, until we found ourselves inside of the city proper.  J’her had a big, black carriage waiting with six black horses to pull it.  Everyone but me climbed in – I knew Blizzard wouldn’t trail behind it so I rode him in its wake.

     Sitting atop him, I
saw passersby recognize me and wave.  I waved back as much as I could.  I’d dressed out in my armor because the padding kept me really warm, a few of the braver people, mostly Men though some Uman, too, actually approached me and knocked on it.  I’d been told before that knocking on a warrior’s armor was a wish for him to have good luck in combat.

     I had to order the Wolf Soldier guards to let them pass, of course.  I think most of them would have bashed some heads, had they had their way.  They took my safety pretty seriously and an attempt on my life by the Bounty Hunters’ Guild was still fresh in their minds.

      I reached down and let some of the commons touch my gauntlet.  Some of the women would take it and kiss it.  A few of the kids tried to touch Blizzard but I warned them off – he didn’t have a friendly reputation.  The Wolf Soldiers had to step in a few times on that account.

     It took an hour but we made it to the palace.  No one got hurt.  That’s pretty good for me.

     I clipped my helmet to my belt and I entered the throne room while court was still in session.  Hectar w
as listening to some fat guy with no hair describing his need for tax relief from the State.  The Duke looked for all the world like he’d rather be hanging by his thumbnails in the dungeon than sitting where he was.  His face expanded in a smile when he saw me and I could almost hear him saying, “Good – you do this now!”

     “His Majesty,” the court crier, an older Uman whose baritone had gotten him the job, called from next to the gallery, “Rancor the First, of the House Mordetur, King of Eldador.”

     “King of Eldador,” I corrected him, striding down the length of the throne room as guests and subjects rose, “and of the city state of Wisex on Black Lake.”

     “Wisex on Black Lake, your Majesty?” Hectaro asked me.  “I do not know this part of Fovea.”

     “Black Lake is the joining of the Great Mid River and the Safe River,” I said, “and Wisex is the Andaran village next to it, as well as the name of the island at the center of it.  Both are claimed by the Wolf Rider clan, of which I am chieftain.”

     “My congratulations, your Imperial Majesty,” Hectaro said, standing.  “Although I believe that the Fovean High Council may well have an opinion as to Eldador’s expansion.”

     I trotted up the steps to the stone throne and took Hectaro’s forearm in mine.  He stepped down a step and I stepped up, turned and sat in my throne.

     The court sat as well.  The old, fat guy at the foot of the stairs to the throne just stood there trying to smile, and probably wondering if he’d have to repeat his whole story again.

     “How do We interest this gentleman?” I asked Hectaro.

     Hectaro smiled a political smile and said, “This Baron of the
town of Jellith is justifying to me why we should forgive him his taxes.  He’d also like to rename his village to
Lee’s Hope
, after your daughter.”

     I smiled despite myself.  That was pretty creative.  If I allowed it, then half of the country would be named after my family before the year was out, and I didn’t like looking like that sort of narcissist.