Requiem for the Wolf

by Tara Saunders

  “Gerud!” His mother’s voice cracked across his shoulders. “You wait til your Da hears about this, my lad. You know what we’ve told you.”

  The cub considered a final leap, but the look on his mother’s face warned against it.

  His body stretched and lengthened, projecting his essence in an aura that transcended physical appearance. Tawny fur rippled in a final burst of energy and was gone. His snout blunted, receded into his jawline, and his ears shrank. A straightening of shoulder and hips, and a boy smiled up at his mother.

  “Told you I could do it fastest, Ma. Dara always forgets about the ears.”

  “You shouldn’t Change at all so close to town and you know it!” His Ma tutted as she helped him into his clothes. “You know what they’d do to you if you were seen.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Ma. I can take care of myself.” Gerud puffed out his chest.

  A swat to his rear dismissed his posturing. “What about your Uncle Donnagh, then? Was he not able to look after himself? What good did it do him?” His Ma glanced over her shoulder into the concealing scrub.

  “I’ll be more careful, Ma, I promise.” For a wonder it seemed that Gerud meant it.

  “You’ll stick close to me day and night from now on, lad.” The woman grabbed her son’s hand. “There’s people coming, bad people. They’d hunt the likes of me and you. They’d skin us still living just to hear us screaming.”

  “Yes, Ma.” Gerud’s eyes held fear now. “I’ll stay close, I promise.”

  A thought struck him and he stopped dead. “Ma, do you think those bad people would hurt Whitey?”

  “They would, Gerud, no doubt about it.” Ma saw her chance to hammer the point home. “They’d hurt Whitey as quick as any of us. You need to be careful for her sake.”

  She glanced over her shoulder again as they crested the hill and hurried towards Dealgan. The trees were too close; too threatening.

  “Good lad.” She pulled her boy close and, point made, struggled for lightness. “Although why you called her Whitey I’ll never know. That goat’s black, for the Lady’s sake.”

  6

  Again, screaming shattered the quiet of the evening. A woman’s voice--or maybe a boy’s--beating a single note of exquisite pain.

  Unsettled, Carad dropped his papers to the board. The Allsayer’s role was vital, but pray Fearg he finished soon.

  The shrieks mounted in pitch, coming more and more frequently. Carad threw himself away from the desk to wear a track on the woollen rug by the hearth.

  He didn’t admire the Allsayer’s art. It took a very special disciple to master the refinements of torture, and Carad had neither the talent nor the inclination for it.

  The screams peaked, flowed into a single wordless entreaty and, finally, broke. They did not rise again.

  Carad reached for the goblet that waited on a carved table by the hearth. The wine had cooled now, and wasn’t as fragrant as when the innkeeper had placed it at his elbow. Her smiling civility made a welcome change from the common citizen’s sullen obligation. Her husband’s brother was a penitent, she had told him, her fingers threaded through the lightly curling hair at her boy’s nape.

  The youngster was maybe three summers old and had an enviable certainty about his own place in the world. Watching the child trot his wooden horse around the table’s legs made Carad’s insides ache. This proud young soldier lived a life leagues distant from his own first, desperate years.

  The rattle of the inn’s door pulled Carad out of his downward spiral of recollection. Nuada, on time as ever.

  Privately, Carad thought of his second in command as a horse. Intelligent enough to be useful, well enough trained to be reliable but ultimately existing only to serve. He even looked like a horse, with a long, flat nose, extended chin and a gangly manner of moving that could only be called coblike. A conscientious piebald with no aspirations past a warm stall and a full nosebag come evening.

  “Do you have a moment, Tánaiste?” Nuada drew up a short-legged stool and settled himself by the hearth without waiting for a reply.

  “Anything useful from this one?”

  “Nothing we didn’t know already. A stranger came from the North, stayed one night, and left towards Dealgan just before the trouble started there. None of the marks of the Unclean, the pale skin or the red eyes, just came and then went.” Nuada grimaced. “The Allsayer tried for more, but this one’s hand is a little heavy.”

  This wasn’t an Allsayer that Carad would have chosen for a duty that had the whole weight of his future balanced on it. But Bealach, a younger man and subtly amenable to the reason of pragmatism over the rigidity of faith, was unaccountably assigned by Donnchadh to duties elsewhere.

  No matter. Carad would make the tools he held in his hand work for him. If they didn’t, he would dispose of them and find others.

  He had made the mistake, once, of asking about a supplicant’s condition. He’d been a novice out on his first patrol and the screams had sounded through the night and morning, lingering in the ear like crows behind a deathcart.

  Do we treat his injuries now, he had asked, seeing as he really didn’t know anything? The blue-eyed disciple had looked at him without answering. Later, the patrol had ridden past the supplicant’s body strung up on a fencepost, sockets empty and tongue a stump.

  The promotion to penitent that Carad had expected later that summer had, unaccountably, gone to another novice.

  Carad learned fast. That message had been directed towards the supplicant’s family and friends, but he had no trouble interpreting it. The Brotherhood allowed only two options: inside or out. Carad knew well enough how dangerous it was to be on the outside.

  “We know what we need to.” Nuada’s voice overlaid past with present. “The rest we’ll learn when we get there.”

  Carad nodded. “We head out at first light.”

  Nuada left to draw his plough, or pull his cart, or whatever duty the moment brought. An able warhorse, too, when there was need.

  Carad collected his letters and struggled to return his attention to them, but their whispers of intrigue and veiled offers of support seemed dry and worthless. He wished for another goblet of warmed wine to cleanse the bitter taste from his mouth.

  Which of them had been screaming, the innkeeper or her boy?

  * * *

  Carad’s blood heated with a rush of satisfaction he was careful to keep from his face. No greater pleasure than to watch a division--a division he led--sweep in to subdue a town. His men moved with a fluid precision that all but promised him the Athair’s robes.

  Let it go right just this one time.

  His men thundered along the main street, stampeding the townsfolk into side streets and alleys. The town looked like every other they’d sanctified and left in their wake, with pinch-faced farmers and their shrinking womenfolk all complicit in standing between him and what he wanted.

  This morning, sheeting rain thickened the street’s dirt to ankle-grabbing mire. Carad high-stepped his horse to a standstill in front of the town’s biggest inn. From there he watched the townsfolk watching his men.

  The people gathered in clusters of two or three under awnings that sagged limply downwards. The more cautious of them kept to the rutted alleyways that twisted every direction but true, as though keeping their feet clean would shield them from his eye and protect them from what was to come.

  Didn’t they realise that the alleys leave a more permanent stain?

  Lining the street, soldiers in dark blue coats stood to attention, their eyes straight ahead, watching neither the townsfolk nor the Brotherhood. Torn between the people they came from and the Brotherhood they served, they would soon understand where their loyalties had to lie. At the line’s southernmost end, a straight-backed captain directed them with effortless control.

  Formed during the Purging, at first the army came together from sons and brothers. When the Ard called on his personal forces to ring the capital, spears turned outwar
ds, distrustful of his own people, those people looked for their own protectors and found nothing.

  The guard, with their long traditions and their baffling blinds of honour and obligation, had nothing to offer fathers or husbands when blood ran in the streets. And so the military had formed itself. Now, though, forty years had softened the threat of Lupes to tales at Dorchadas, and the army to the tools of the Brotherhood. Best for them they didn’t forget it.

  Nuada plunged from the gloom inside one of the peeling store-fronts, closely followed by a pair of disciples. Between them they dragged a skinny, brown-haired boy in apprentice whites.

  Clots of citizenry swelled and melted together to form a single beast of many faces. Carad could taste their dread.

  And so it began.

  Nuada snapped a sharp genuflection and gestured for his men to drop the boy at Carad’s feet. The apprentice vibrated with fear, his terror reflected back by the silently watching crowd until the air hummed taut as a bowstring.

  These people were Carad’s.

  “Stand straight, boy, if you have nothing to hide.” Carad was pleased to see the boy’s back straighten and his shoulders rise. Nuada always chose well.

  He turned to Nuada. “What brings this lad before me?”

  “A rumour, Tánaiste. They say this one was the first to speak to the Northman when he came to town.”

  The crowd muttered and stirred. Carad bit his cheek against a smile. They would pull one another to shreds to find out who was telling tales.

  The boy’s mouth opened. He sucked a breath and closed it again. Which way would he jump, deny or blame? This was the interesting part.

  “Is this true?”

  “I talked to him, but there wasn’t anything in it.” The boy’s voice cracked. “I only directed him to the market. What harm was there in that?”

  From the corner of his eye, Carad caught a leather-faced matron drag two squalling youngsters away through the crowd. At its edges one or two more slipped away. Most stayed, huddled together with the instincts of the herd beast.

  “More than that was said. He named himself Northman, did he not? You met him again before he left, did you not?” Nuada’s voice snapped with authority.

  “He said he only came from Treal, sir, only that far.” Tears choked the boy’s words.

  “You must see how it looks, lad.” Carad’s cue came again. “You were first to greet him, met him again before he left, you knew he was a Northman.” A pause, two beats. “Who else would we question?”

  Complete silence now, save for a low, hopeless sobbing. A mother, maybe, or a sister. Somebody with the wit to know that they played the boy like a squirrel in a box. Run, jump, flip over; no way out of the cage.

  “What about Terlech and his girl? They talked to him first.” The boy pointed towards a slack-jawed farmer dressed in no-colour homespun, who tried to slide through the wall of bodies and was forced back.

  Carad caught Nuada’s almost imperceptible nod to a pair of disciples at the crowd’s edge.

  “But you asked him questions and told him about the town, didn’t you? Who could know as much about him as you?” Carad played his role mechanically now. The end was near.

  “There’s Dermud, who had him at his inn.” The boy’s words tripped over each other in relief at having answers. “And Raghlan ate with him.”

  “You’ve done well, lad.”

  The voice flowed smooth and oily from behind Carad, making his teeth grit and his buttocks clench.

  “Come with me awhile.” The Allsayer moved to the boy’s side, rested a dimpled hand on his arm. “I’ve a question or two to finish this, then we’re done with you.”

  The boy responded with visible relief, warmed under the Allsayer’s twinkle-eyed reassurance and the smile that tugged at his short, white beard.

  They made a fine-looking pair as they walked towards the army’s headquarters, looking like nothing so much as a gangly lad and his stump-legged Granda off for an afternoon’s fishing.

  Each time it amazed Carad that a kind word and a pair of soft, brown eyes coaxed the supplicants off with this Allsayer like maids at a fair.

  This one would know better soon.

  Carad felt eyes on him. He turned to meet the frown of a guard who leaned grim-faced in a recessed doorway opposite. An age-whitened scar crawled from the man’s mouth to his temple, dividing russet hair for a fingerslength before it twisted into nothing.

  The guard nodded sharply, face set in a threat or a promise.

  Steady. There was more to be done here than take a Lupe in a market town. This thing must be managed subtly. There would be no Athair’s belt for a job half finished.

  Carad watched the guard turn and stride along the row of rigid soldiers. He caught a flashed look shared with their captain before the guard turned a corner and was gone.

  Interesting.

  * * *

  Nuada lounged in the inn’s common room, his long legs making the room look untidy. He used a filth-crusted boot to pull a bench close to the fire for Carad.

  “Why do we play this game every time?” Nuada ran both hands through grey-stippled hair. “Why don’t we just round them all up and hand them to the Allsayer? We don’t learn anything from this play-acting. It makes my bowels ache.”

  “We can’t have this conversation every time.” Carad ignored the seat. “We catch the town’s mood by doing it this way. Did you see how they were with the farmer?”

  Nuada nodded.

  “Think of them as deer. They abandon the weak to the predators and run for the hills in the time it buys them.”

  Carad motioned towards the long window. “We learn as much from who they protect as who they give up. I didn’t see anybody pointing to Raghlan.”

  “True. I just want to do this the way everyone else does and burn them all.”

  And that, my friend, is why I’m Tánaiste and you’re still pulling a plough.

  “Anything useful from the guard?”

  “Dead quiet. Feels like they’re waiting for something.”

  “Word from their leader, maybe. Our source said he left with the Northman.”

  “That’s right, left as soon as they put down the Lupe.” Nuada grimaced. “There’s something more, I can feel it.”

  “What about the ward? We need her here.”

  “Gone with the Northman, just like the guard. There’s more to that story than we’ve dug out so far.”

  “Get them back, quickly.”

  “Quick as we can.” Nuada nodded.

  “Innkeeper picked up?” Carad interpreted Nuada’s insulted expression as an affirmative. “And Raghlan?”

  “Left alone like you asked.”

  “We’ll give him a length more rope, see what he does with it. What’s the temperature of the military? I have a feeling their captain’s not as loyal as we’d like.”

  “Man name of Ardal, has a lot of family hereabouts. Like I always say, it’s a mistake to leave them where they’re bred. That said, he seems to have done everything right so far.”

  “Keep a sharp eye on him. If our purpose wasn’t to strengthen the military here I’d take steps, but for now the least disruption the better. I want to know immediately if he steps off his line.”

  Nuada nodded again. “Morning patrol picked up a herb-seller headed west. Might be nothing, the Allsayer can find out. He has a full play-room now to keep him occupied.”

  Carad’s stomach slithered sideways. “The information we got from the Ear here was useful.”

  “That it was. Saved us days of beating bushes.”

  “Have him called in tomorrow morning. I want to take his measure.”

  * * *

  The hunter slid on his stomach, silent apart from the faint squelch of decomposing leaves under his body. Behind him, a massive black shape hugged the ground. He travelled light, with only a sagging backpack humped between his narrow shoulderblades.

  If he wasn’t travelling towards Dun, if he wasn’t leaving
when he should have been under curfew, it might have been possible to believe that he was about his lawful business of hunting.

  Carad planted a boot in the hunter’s path, enjoying the surprise that flared in Raghlan’s eyes.

  His smile flattened under a roar that came close to emptying his bladder. The black beast reared high as his shoulder and with twice his breadth. Her mouth opened blood-red and fetid, her shining white teeth long as his hand.

  She lunged to rip his face off.

  The thrum-hiss of a loosed arrow sounded, and again. The bitch fell with a gurgle, a shaft buried in her throat and another in her flank. Carad felt the gust of her final breath warm on his ankles.

  Raghlan lurched forward, keening. Carad clenched his belt-knife in a shaking fist, but the hunter threw himself alongside the body of his pet. His words tangled into an indecipherable moan of despair.

  Carad took a long, calming breath and thanked Fearg that there hadn’t been time to disgrace himself. He had failed to plan for the beast. The mistake had almost killed him.

  “Cealg.” The hunter called the animal’s name again. He fixed watering eyes on Carad. His knuckles flexed over and over in a prayer to Flidais, old-time God of the hunt.

  Ridiculous superstition. Disgusted, Carad turned away and left the man to the disciples’ tender ministrations.

  “A close one.” Nuada spoke to the point, as always.

  Carad fought the urge to slide the belt-knife across his second’s throat. “Too close. Who loosed the shafts?”

  “Connlech’s throat shot first, Garbhan’s second. Conn claims the kill.”

  “No doubt there.” The brown-skinned, slight-built Connlech had been raised from novice only the past summer. He had been Carad’s last, reluctant choice for the mission, pressed on him by the Athair’s advisor, Giollaíosa. Carad normally took care to avoid men of the advisors’ choosing, but time had been short and his need strong.