by James Hunter
Sam slipped down the staircase, moving like a shadow, holding his breath for fear of being heard. After dropping twenty feet, the staircase let out into an enormous chamber, but unlike the natural cavern above, this place was some sort of ancient temple sunken into the earth. Sam had never seen anything like it. Fluted columns ran along the natural stone walls, supporting an elaborate vaulted ceiling, which, in turn, supported a trio of huge chandeliers crafted from black wrought iron and pale bone. More black candelabras decorated the columns, all filled with yellow tallow candles which burned with sooty orange light.
At the far end of the chamber was a raised dais adorned by a looming statue of some great horned beast with a lupine face, standing upright on powerful legs, clawed hands raised in supplication toward the heavens. Positioned in front of the statue was a crude stone block, which Sam guessed was a sacrificial altar. The bloody body splayed out across the surface of the table went a long way to supporting his theory. Attending to the altar was a Wolfman wielding a ceremonial dagger of black glass and green emerald. The Shaman’s fur was a pale silver, and brown woolen robes hung from his gaunt body like ill-fitting hand-me-downs.
This was bad but maybe not impossible. After all, there were no other Wolfmen present. It would be one on one; Sam had the element of surprise going for him, and since this guy was a spellcaster… Sam would probably only have to land a couple of solid hits to put him down for keeps. Plus, killing a Wolfman in the middle of a sacrificial ritual would undoubtedly win him some serious points.
Yep. He could do this. Feeling a sudden boost of confidence, he raised his hands, his Shuriken Tomes zipping to the front. The book covers spread, ready to unleash paper fury… which is precisely when an enormous, callous-covered palm closed around his throat, razor-sharp claws pressing against his tender flesh.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I wouldn’t were I you, morsel,” came a growling rasp, the words guttural. A pair of Wolfmen stepped into view on his left and right. One was a hulking male with tawny fur while the other was a lithe female with a jet-black coat. Both wore dark brown leather armor and carried wicked, single-edged blades that looked more than sharp enough to cut him in two. Clearly, Sam had vastly overestimated his abilities, and now, he was going to pay the price. He briefly considered attacking anyway but dismissed that idea since he would likely die before he ever even got a single spell off.
Reluctantly, he dismissed his floating books, which returned to Bill’s Soul Space in a glimmer of magical light. The pressure eased up minutely around Sam’s delicate throat, and his captor growled, “Wise choice.”
Wisdom +1!
The tawny-furred guard produced a pair of heavy shackles from a leather satchel hanging at his side and quickly clamped the irons around Sam’s wrists. That done, the Wolfman let go of Sam’s throat entirely—a welcome relief—then roughly shoved him into motion. The silver-furred Shaman watched Sam through golden eyes as the guards marched him across the chamber and secured him to the wall with another set of heavy-duty chains.
Bill muttered inside his head, sounding rather smug.
“Failing to see how ritual sacrifice is a good thing,” Sam hissed as he watched the lead guard—the thug who’d nearly choked the life out of him—exchange harsh words with the Shaman.
“That can’t happen, Bill. We need to get out of here. Isn’t there something you can do? Some Bibliomancer trick you haven’t taught me yet?”
“Bring him,” the Shaman Wolfman barked at the red-furred guard in the guttural Wolfman tongue before gesturing toward the altar with one claw-tipped hand.
“No, no, no!” Sam hissed, panic surging through him. “This is not how my story ends. I made it too far to die here. I refuse to let these things kill me, just to respawn right in Octavius’ hands. But what could possibly…?”
Well, there was one thing he hadn't tried. As the guard approached, Sam hunched his shoulders, lowered his eyes, and raised his chin in submission, mimicking the body language that he’d learned in his dungeoneering class. Then he pressed his eyes shut—mind whirling like mad—as he attempted to conjure the strange phrase he’d heard the Wolfman from his class say. “Greetings, fur brothers. Ruazhi noare vragnik, ibois najstarkei vragnu prinosit velichayshuyu silzha.”
The guard faltered, ears flicking back, confusion flashing across his muzzle then capering through his muddy-brown eyes. He glanced back at the Shaman over one shoulder. The Shaman looked equally skeptical, lips pulled back from gleaming fangs, golden eyes narrowed in suspicion. The Shaman waved the guard off, then approached, nose sniffing at the air as though he might be able to smell Sam’s deception. “How is it you speak our tongue, Mageling?”
“Who is it that taught you those words?” the Shaman barked back in the Wolfman tongue. “Choose your words wisely. If I sense any trickery, I will see you dead before you can blink twice.”
Check. No deception or trickery.
“The Mage’s College,” Sam blurted out. “I took course on Wolfman word-speak. Class Alpha had captured one of your Scouts, a Wolfman name…”
Sam faltered, mind straining for the name of the creature. Velman? No. Veklek? No, that wasn’t quite right either, but it was close. He pressed his eyes, picturing the creature with his course, gray fur and amber eyes, not so different from the eyes of the Shaman. Unable to translate, he finished with, “Velkan of the Redmane Tribe.”
“So, you are of College of magic,” the Shaman snarled in the human tongue. “An enemy to The People.”
“No! Not!” Sam practically spat the words out while vigorously shaking his head.
“I speak truth!” Sam continued, ignoring Bill entirely. “I’m enemy of Mage training group! I just like you. I train for while. Tonight I’m no friend of Mages no longer. That’s why I’m out of after dark. I’m on runaway. Rogue Mage. I stole big meaning books and made unhappy kill-on-sight on way out.”
The Wolfman Shaman rubbed at his chin with a clawed thumb, a dangerous gleam in his eye.
“Pups,” he growled after a beat, “this one shall serve us in other ways. Prepare to move the Traveler. We will take him to The O’Baba and let her decide his fate.”
Sam simply watched blankly as words were exchanged that he couldn't understand, not knowing how much they would change his future.
***
The steely gray pre-dawn light had invaded the sky by the time Sam finally saw the jagged teeth of the wooden outpost poking up through the canopy of the forest. The trip had been an uncomfortable one; the Wolfmen had tried to take Bill, but when they realized the chain connecting Sam to the book couldn’t be severed, they settled for hog-tying Sam, gagging him, and carrying him like a sack of potatoes. Unlike the Hardcores, who had so badly underestimated him not long ago, the Wolfmen were taking no chances with a potential enemy Mage in their midst. They treated him like a cobra—powerful, deadly, and liable to strike at any moment.
The Wolfman outpost itself was the size of a small town and was entirely surrounded by a tribal-style wooden palisade at least twenty-five feet tall. The Wolfmen had cleared back every tree for a hundred feet from the wall, ensuring that no sly Rogue or d
aring adventurer would be able to sneak in under the tree cover and infiltrate the camp unseen. Curiously, though, the trees inside the palisade remained fully intact. Ancient ash trees and thick-trunked oaks lifted leafy branches skyward like saints in prayer, while the lower boughs supported a variety of wooden huts, all connected by a series of narrow walkways and precarious-looking rope bridges.
Those weren’t the only oddities about this strange tree-village or perhaps… military outpost? The oddest thing of all was that there wasn’t a gate in the palisade—no visible way that Sam could see for getting in and out of the settlement. That didn’t seem to deter the Wolfmen in the least. Sam watched as one of the many guards patrolling the grounds scampered up the face of the palisade as effortlessly as a spider, using its long claws to reach the top of the battlements in seconds before simply leaping into the air, catching a dangling rope, then swinging over to a nearby platform.
It was like watching a Tarzan flick, except this time, the vine-swinging ape-man had contracted a bad case of lycanthropy. Sam’s captors exchanged a few guttural phrases with the guards patrolling the perimeter and were then waved through for admittance to the camp.
The Wolfmen lowered a rope cradle which they used to haul Sam to the top, knowing that there was no way he was scaling the wall trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey. The others scrambled over the wooden wall without so much as breaking a sweat. Sam had to admit it was a pretty remarkable display of speed, strength, and agility.
Though a number of huts adorned the thick tree boughs, the larger communal buildings were built on the ground. Unlike the human capital, Ardania, which was laid out in a neat grid—a place for everything and everything in its place—the Wolfman village was a haphazard sprawl that didn’t seem to have any real rhyme or reason behind the layout.
Rather, Sam reminded himself, there didn’t seem to be a reason he could figure out. To the Wolfmen, it probably made perfect sense. Although a great many of the buildings were constructed from wood, several were meticulously constructed from stone. The thunderous *clang-clang-clang* of steel striking steel drifted from one such building—probably a smithy, though the building was not marked in any discernible way.
Sam and company wound their way through the village, earning curious glances from onlooking fur-faced residents, eventually finding themselves outside a hulking long-house that appeared to be some sort of central meeting hall.
Finally, after what felt like hours, the Wolfmen unceremoniously dropped Sam into the dirt, plucked the gag from his mouth, then cut the bindings securing his feet and legs so that he’d be able to walk on his own. When he tried to stand, he nearly fell right back over; his legs had gone to sleep on him. Fuzzy pinpricks raced along his lower limbs, and his feet felt like a pair of lead weights tied to the end of each ankle.
“Wait here,” the Shaman tersely instructed the other guards before grabbing Sam by the nape of the neck. His claws were pressing down hard enough to draw blood, and Sam was being steered through the wide doors and into the longhouse proper. Every step felt like a perilous endeavor thanks to his uncooperative legs. Sam was expecting the inside of the hut to be crude but was surprised yet again.
The floor was covered in a lush carpet of flawless green grass, accented in spots by the colorful blooms of wildflowers. There were a number of low wooden tables spread throughout the hall, obviously meant for eating, though you would need to sit on the floor instead of using a chair. There were also colorful tapestries decorating the walls, woven from gossamer silk and decorated with intricate, Celtic-like knots and hard-edged geometric patterns. The Wolfmen weren’t human, and their society was obviously vastly different from the human version… but these were no savages.
The Shaman forcefully guided Sam past the tables, then pushed him through yet another door that connected to a large kitchen area. The floors were polished cobblestone, the walls were wood, and a massive fireplace lurked against the far side of the room. Granite countertops lined the other walls, all covered with an assortment of pots and pans, knives and cleavers, racks of spices, and mounds of meat. There was a square, waist-high worktable positioned smack-dab in the middle of the room. Standing behind it was the kitchen’s sole occupant—an ancient female Wolfman.
She stood at the counter, carving up a slab of blood-red meat with an enormous cleaver. She had to be the single oldest Wolfman Sam had ever seen. Her size was rather small, her back bent from age, fur a nearly metallic silver speckled with white. She wore a silk shawl draped across her back and shoulders and a long leather apron that covered her front.
“O’Baba,” Sam’s Shaman captor growled in the Wolfman tongue, hunching in on himself until he was smaller than the bent she-wolf carving up the meat. “This is the one of which I sent word.”
She surveyed Sam for a moment with eyes that were so gold they almost appeared to be a burnt orange, her nostrils flaring wide as she tasted the air. “You have done well, BrightBlood. Honor to you and your house.”
She dipped her head just a fraction of an inch in respect. “Now leave us.”
The Wolfman hesitated for a beat. “Are you sure it is safe, O’Baba.”
Her eyes narrowed, and her fangs flashed. “I can handle the whelp well enough on my own, pup. If you think otherwise, I would be more than happy to demonstrate my prowess as Alpha Female.”
The cleaver in her hand began to bleed a septic black light that looked like juiced death. The male Shaman’s eyes widened visibly in shock, quickly turning to fear. He lowered himself even more until he was nearly bent in two.
“That will not be necessary, great O’Baba.” He bowed himself back out of the room, never exposing his back to the crone and never taking his eyes from her face.
“Whelps these days,” The O’Baba muttered, this time in accented English. After a moment, she sighed and turned her fiery gaze squarely on Sam. “You. Mage-pup. Before you get any funny notions, know that I could kill you without batting an eye, ya? Now, if I understand correctly, you are an outsider. A Rogue Mage. One hunted by your own people. Is this true?”
Sam licked his lips, eyes fixed on the heavy cleaver in her hand. Considering the outright terror he’d seen in the Shaman’s face, he had to assume this woman was the leader of this group of Wolfmen and was probably far deadlier than she appeared to be on the surface. Lying to her or trying to trick her in any way would probably end with him dead, his head adorning a spike somewhere as a warning to other would-be heroes. He would respawn, but he wanted to avoid that if he could. After all, they’d kept him alive for this long, which meant he had a real possibility of getting out of this mess in one piece.
“Yes,” he finally said. “All of that is true.”
“So. If we were to let you live, let you run,” she waved her free hand as though shooing a bothersome fly, “what would you do, hmmm? Where would you go?”
Sam paused and frowned. Of all the questions he’d expected, that wasn’t among them. His frown turned into a grimace as he ran a host of potential options through his head. “Honestly? I don’t know. There’s no life for me back at the College, but I have a cool new class, which I kinda want to keep. I’d rather avoid starting over if I can.”
He seesawed his he
ad back and forth. “I suppose Ardania is big enough for me to hide in? There’s got to be a way for me to fly under the radar, so chances are I’ll try to vanish. Keep out of sight of the guards. Maybe work to sabotage the Mage’s College; they have it coming.”
The she-wolf regarded him for a long, long time, her inhuman gaze cutting deep, flaying him all the way to his soul, exposing his every thought and motive. She was weighing him, measuring him… but for what?
“What if there was another option, young pup?” She finally allowed after what felt like an eternity. “You are an outsider now—you have said as much yourself.”
She paused, licking her fangs, then returning to her work with the cleaver, chopping at the slab of bloody meat on the table. “You are no fan of your own people. You seek the destruction of the Mage’s College, as do we. We could help you. Might be, you join with us instead of your own ilk. There would be many advantages.”
“Wait. I’m sorry? Are you trying to recruit me?”
“I thought the Wolfmen… hated humans?” Sam was doing his best to ignore Bill.
“Hate? No.” She shook her shaggy head. “We honor our enemies. There is no hate in it. Rather, it is a matter of survival, young pup. Your kind or mine. Only one may survive, unbroken. It seems that you work against the best interest of your own people anyway, so why not help us? We need eyes and ears inside the walls of Ardania. We need saboteurs.”
“The benefits of such an arrangement are many. Should we win the conflict to come, you will be a Lord of our people. You are also a Mage. We have many Shamans and books that even the College knows nothing of. Unlike the Mages, we will not gouge you with exorbitant fees or force you into ‘Accords’. We offer training. We can give you a new soulbind location, here among our people. We even have assets inside the city to help as needed.”