Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (26 page)

    
Nantar had clearly been brought along as muscle.  He made me look like an idiot when we sparred, and even then I had a hard time telling if I was getting his best fight from him.  For someone who supposedly made his livelihood by killing, he had a huge, friendly smile buried in his black beard and, when you got to know him, laughing eyes.  Muscle bulged on every inch of him, and when our swords first met my wrist felt like someone had hit it with a hammer.

    
Ancenon had married the Trenboni King’s daughter in order to be adopted as his son.  He was very old – hundreds of years - and derived some sort of power from extreme favor from the god Adriam, the All-Father.  I saw him in prayer on three of three mornings underway, which included singing and chanting.  No one else participated with him – not even the Uman sailors.  They gave him (as well as the rest of us) a wide berth.

    
Drekk was an enigma – dressed in black, including weapons of dark metal that didn’t glint, and none too friendly.  He had been accused of pilfering from governments, important men and even chapels, and wore the talisman of Chaos, the god of anarchy.  I think I heard him say ten words over the entire three days. 

    
D’gattis was the opposite, cultured and flamboyant, conservative in his ideas but liberal in sharing them.  I didn’t doubt that we were all beneath his station save Ancenon, whose favor he curried openly.  If he spoke to the priest and another of us approached, he stopped the conversation until we left.  He only spoke with us to lecture on what he foresaw and what he expected of the team.  As a powerful wizard it seemed obvious what Ancenon had brought him here for, at least to me.  Still, he left no doubt in my mind that he had his own agenda.

    
Genna turned out to be the local equivalent of a for-hire reconnaissance marine.  She and I had sparred, both in bed and out.  Both were the same with her – first a direct intrusion to the situation, followed by feints and parries at close range.  Once she had acquired her target, she collected her data, and she either pursued or withdrew with all of her conviction.  Once on ship’s deck she actually threw a dagger and hit me handle-first in the nose-guard, followed by a two-handed attack to the arm-joints in my upper armor from which I barely defended myself.   In bed she was no less aggressive, and left me feeling like conquered territory when we were done.

    
Woods lined the coast of Sental almost down to the shoreline.  I thought this odd for a salt-water bay like the Tren. Twice as we approached we saw different bands of warriors in black and green come to the water, look at the ship, and leave.  How any nation could afford to maintain border patrols that efficient and that numerous was beyond me.

    
“Made us again,” Thorn said to Ancenon, and any other who cared to hear, as we were pulling away from the second band.  We wanted to beach by the Sea of Xyr, on the north side, but the shore looked too heavily guarded.

    
Ancenon sighed a frustrated sigh.  D’gattis stepped in. “I can make us such that they do not see us,” he said matter-of-factly.

    
“And such that we cannot see ourselves, much less our ship,” Thorn added.  “We couldn’t land a ship we couldn’t see, D’gattis.  We would wreck and kill us all.”

    
Nantar nodded, and D’gattis subsided.   Genna stepped up, dressed out in her leathers and green paint on her face.  Without saying anything to any of us, she dove over the side of the ship, into the water without a splash.  We were no less than one hundred fifty yards from the shore, and she swam most of the distance before her head bobbed above water.

    
She sank back under in a second – I didn’t know if I could have exhaled and inhaled air that fast.  There hadn’t been a bubble between her and us.  Next we saw her creeping up out of the water on fingers and toes, straight into the forest without a backward glance.

    
“What will she do?” I asked. 

    
D’gattis snickered and walked away.  Ancenon looked up over his shoulder to where I stood behind him.  “She will do what she does, Lupus,” he said.  He hadn’t flickered or hesitated once on the name change.  “She will clear out that patrol so that we can land, and do away with the bodies.”

    
“What if she can’t take them?”

    
“Then you will have to lay someone else at night,” Thorn said, standing his ground right next to me.

    
My hand clamped down on his throat before he could react, which was saying something for a man like Thorn.  He pulled a dagger from his belt and stopped when I pressed my left thumb into his eye.

    
“Any other comments from you, little man?” I asked him.  If I pushed my thumb through his eye socket, into his brain, he would die and he knew it.  Still, he faced me with the same pinch-faced determination that he always had.

    
“I am not afraid of you,” he said.

    
“I can change that.”  I don’t know why the comment pissed me off so badly but it did.  Genna didn’t want for heart but we’d seen no less than ten men in that patrol, and that’s a tough fight for anyone. 

    
“Need to not do this,” Nantar said quietly.  I could see peripherally where Drekk and Nantar had moved to either side of me and D’gattis had turned around.  I knew Ancenon had positioned himself behind me, as well.

    
I released him and dropped my hands.  He swung on me immediately, the hard handle of the dagger flashing toward my cheek.  Ready for it, I pulled my head back and, as the swing passed, I caught him across the back of head with the steel guard on my forearm.

    
I stepped back and pulled my sword.  These people knew each other but they didn’t know me, and I wasn’t going down without a fight.  I had already resolved to take Drekk first, so I could focus on Nantar.  If I couldn’t drop him before Thorn got back on his feet, they’d have me anyway.

    
The arrow that hit the deck right them came as a complete surprise to us all.  As one we turned involuntarily to see Genna step out of the forest, then back in, drawing no more attention to herself than absolutely necessary.

    
“Well,” Ancenon said, making us all jump a second time.  “We need to be beaching.  I assume that this can wait?”

    
I looked at Nantar and Drekk, who looked at Thorn, getting up off of the deck.  Thorn looked me right in the eye; again, the same pinched face.

    
“It can wait,” he said angrily.  Nantar sheathed his sword and I sheathed mine.  Under Ancenon’s quiet direction, the sailors brought the ship around and beached it at half sail, landing us with a jolt.  They had the horses coming up out of the hold, Blizzard first, in moments and we were all leaping off the side of the ship minutes after that.  I had barely mounted when the ship pulled back out – the entire evolution couldn’t have taken five minutes.

    
We were under the cover of the trees faster than that, and Genna emerged right after.  She seemed to melt out from the forest stepping right up to Ancenon’s horse, taking his shin-guard in her hand. 

    
“There were ten,” she whispered, “but I got rid of them.  No noise.  I need to know what direction the patrols are moving in and how many.  Paint the damn horses green, Ancenon – I told you they were a bad idea, I saw you from a few hundred yards away, especially the white one!”

    
Then she vanished, melting once again into the brush and trees.  Thorn dismounted his horse and Arath with him, breaking out supplies from their saddlebags.  I dismounted when I saw Ancenon and D’gattis doing so.  Drekk, on a black mount, stayed put.

    
“Here,” Thorn said, tossing me a clear jar with something dark green in it.  “Paint that stallion.”  I caught the jar and opened it, finding a green paste inside.  I dabbed some on my finger and smeared it on his coat, seeing how a little of it would go a very long way to giving me a green horse.  It took me about ten minutes, then I took the pot back to Thorn as he finished up as well.

    
“Thanks,” I said, handing it to him.

    
He barely looked up from his horse’s hoof.  “Keep it,” he said.  “You will need to reapply if it rains.”

    
That came as close to making up as we were going to get.  I was good with it.

    
We spent that day moving slowly and keeping low.  Genna checked in about every hour, give or take a few minutes.  Each time, she spoke softly with Ancenon as we all crowded around to hear, with the exception of Drekk who kept an eye to the trees each time.  It seemed to me that the Uman didn’t care enough to bother with Genna’s reports.  He would deal with whatever arose.

    
We had landed well north of the mouth to the Sea of Xyr, just above the peninsula.  We were moving south.  Patrols were thick here, about an hour apart, coming in from the west and then going south or north.  They would be onto the missing one later today or tomorrow, and then they would be thicker and more vigilant.  We didn’t know if they patrolled at night but we knew we were going to find out.

    
Luckily, they followed routes and Genna had us off of them by the third hour.  Once she sprinted to us just minutes ahead of ten men and had us with the horses on their sides just in time to let them pass.  I had lain across Blizzard’s neck to keep him down, Genna at my side.

    
“Picked a fight with Thorn, huh?” she whispered.

    
“Something like that,” I breathed back to her.

    
She kissed my cheek.  “Not every day that someone defends this lady’s honor,” she said.  She’d pulled her hair back in a bun and covered with black cloth, but she still tried to shake it.  It must have been a reflex action with her.

    
The patrol passed.  Genna left again.  We moved on.

    
That night we camped, cold and dry.  We stood the horses together by a bank of saplings that we found, making them one large blob of darkness rather than several small ones.  We set guard duty, me taking the first one.  After a quick meal of water and jerked beef, most were asleep and the rest drifting.

    
We agreed to take three-hour watches, measured by an hourglass we brought, but I didn’t feel that tired and took a fourth.  Drekk had the next watch, and seemed to know immediately that he had slept too long.

    
“Don’t do that,” he said.

    
“What?”

    
He looked up at me, pulling his leathers on, checking his weapons.  He wore sandals rather than boots, and slept with them on. 

    
“Don’t deny yourself any sleep,” he said.  “You have a job, here.  You need to keep fresh, and you do that with sleep.  I am not going to replace you in a fight, pretty much just stand and watch unless I need to defend myself.”

    
I nodded.  “Won’t happen again.”

    
He nodded, strange Uman eyes regarding me as he did so.  He didn’t do it the way Genna constantly sized me up, and it felt somewhat threatening.  Drekk saw me as a commodity – a sword to defend him, nothing more.  He wanted that sword sharp when he needed it.

    
“Sleep,” he said, and stepped into the dark night.

    
I curled up in a blanket, putting most of it beneath me.  The ground will take your heat faster than the air, and I didn’t want to wake up stiff.  I saw that Thorn had wrapped himself in a shaggy skin, and Nantar slept in a breechclout on a bearskin, his sword by his hand.  Ancenon had set up some sort of tarp lean-to, D’gattis with him.  I saw no sign of Genna.

    
I slept with my sword beside me, and only woke for a moment when Genna tossed a blanket over both of us during the night.  She smelled like the forest, fresh and green, as she pressed her hot skin against me.  I laid a hand on her naked breast and buried my nose in her hair as I went back to sleep.  When I awoke, the sun just peeping through the trunks of the trees, I slept alone, although I could still smell her.  D’gattis had taken the third watch and had broken out breakfast rations.