The Red wolf conspiracy tcv-1

by Robert V. S. Redick

  The old woman dropped her eyes and shrank into her corner. For several moments they lurched along in silence. Then with a sudden "Whoh!" the driver pulled the horses up, bounded from his seat and flung open the door.

  A black man stood framed in the doorway, clearly ready to enter the coach. He wore a dark vest over a white silk shirt, and most incongruously, a round woolen hat such as Templar monks donned for traveling. In one hand he held a parchment case, in the other a black bag with two rough wooden handles. The bag was old and worn and filled nearly to bursting. The man bowed courteously to Oggosk, then to Rose.

  "Who in the nine fiery pits are you?" bellowed Rose, his nerves breaking at last.

  "Bolutu, my name is Bolutu." The man had a precise voice and an unfamiliar accent. He appeared quite unaffected by Rose's outburst, which irked the captain further.

  "Get along, you've no business here."

  The stranger cocked his head. "No business? Perhaps that is literally true. Irrelevant, however. For although I must leave my business behind, I have orders to respect-or ignore at my peril."

  "What's this Noonfirth prig raving about?" shouted Rose with a glance at his seer.

  "He's no Noonfirther," said Oggosk flatly.

  "He's as black as a tarboy's heel."

  "I am a Slevran, Captain Rose."

  Momentary confusion. Lady Oggosk dropped her pipe. It would scarcely have been more startling if the man had claimed to be a lynx. The Slevrans were savage men of the far interior, nomads of the steppe. It was they who attacked and slaughtered caravans making west to the Idhe Lands. The Emperor sent legions to exterminate them, but they merely withdrew into the hills and waited for the soldiers to grow bored and hungry, and as soon as these expeditionaries left the raids began anew. Were they even men? some asked. Did they have morals, language, souls?

  "You're a liar as well as mad," said Rose. He waved impatiently at the bewildered coachman. "Drive on, you. We've a commission to respect."

  "I have the same commission," said Bolutu, his hand still on the door.

  "You're a barking Noonfirth dog!"

  "No, Captain, I have never been to the Summer Realm. But you will be taking on a cargo of animals at Etherhorde, and I am a veterinarian. And I am ordered, by His Supremacy Magad the Fifth, to take my place as such aboard the Chathrand. I yet hope to soothe your anxieties about my person."

  "Why do you wear a monk's hat?"

  Bolutu smiled. "I was raised by the Templar brothers, and keep the journeyman's vows. Some call me Brother Bolutu, but Mister is quite acceptable."

  "If you're not a Noonfirther, where'd you learn that tea-and-pastries talk?"

  "In Yelig House."

  Shocked silence again. The man was claiming to be an intimate of the Chathrand Trading Family. Rose looked at Oggosk, but the witch drew the hood of her cloak over her head, whispering and muttering. The black man climbed into the coach and sat beside her. Relieved, the driver raised the footstool and slammed the door shut.

  The trip resumed. Oggosk muttered in Swalish, which the captain did not speak. Having been at sea for forty years, however, he knew a smattering of words in many tongues: jult, which Oggosk said many times with happy emphasis, meant "disease." At her side the black man sat motionless, eyelids half lowered. Rose thought suddenly of how he would look tumbling over the Chathrand's bulwarks, head over heels into the waves. Then he recalled the Special Protection every captain of Arqual swore to provide friends of the Company. If harm befell this Bolutu, a Company inspection would follow. Merely to be the subject of such an inspection would mark one for life.

  "Is your cat a woken animal, Duchess?" asked Bolutu suddenly.

  Oggosk made a rude sound in her throat: "Glah."

  Bolutu was unperturbed. "Do you know, Captain, that the frequency of wakings is exploding? How many such animals have you heard of, in all your life? Three in twenty-eight years, for my part, and just one-a lovely bull with a taste for choral music-did I meet with face to face. But this year all bets are off! Just last month a she-wolf on Kushal pleaded for her life: sadly the hunters killed her anyway. From Bramian comes news of a stork eager to talk gold miners out of poisoning his lake. And several cats have been heard to speak in the alleys of Etherhorde itself. The Mariner had a report."

  Sniraga purred, sliding among their legs. Rose stared out through the window. Accidents, he thought. So many kinds of accidents…

  They had nearly reached the port: he could hear a vague roaring that could only be the muster of the crew. Then the carriage stopped again. The door opened, and before him stood Ignus Chad-fallow.

  This time Rose was prepared, if not pleased: the doctor was Special Envoy-at-Large to His Supremacy, dispatched throughout the world as the human seal on certain Imperial promises. Where Chadfallow sailed, Magad's word was kept. Rose should have guessed the doctor would be tossed into the bargain.

  Chadfallow himself, however, looked stunned. His eyes were fixed on the captain, his face visibly paled. He made no move to enter the carriage.

  "Rose," he said.

  The carriage driver, holding the door once again, began to tremble. From the folds of her hood, Oggosk laughed.

  "Climb in, Doctor," said Rose. And then, with a glance at Bolutu: "If you don't mind the company."

  Chadfallow didn't move.

  "Of course, you won't have the use of the stateroom this time," Rose added. "That goes to Isiq and his family."

  "But there's some mistake," said Chadfallow. "You were in the Pellurids."

  "I was," said Rose. "But that is not your concern."

  "You cannot have been given the Chathrand."

  Rose pitched forward, rage contorting his features. Oggosk touched his arm. The captain twitched in her direction, then paused and sat back. One finger stabbed out at Chadfallow.

  "We're ashore, Doctor, where your tongue is your own. But tomorrow we sail. Remember that. For I am the captain of the Great Ship. And if you mean to board her, I warn you, envoy though you be: on the water there's no law but mine. The law of Nilus Rotheby Rose. There's a thorn in that name, and a bee-sting, and a blade: my kin knew what they were about when they named me Nilus-dagger. Climb in!"

  "No," said Chadfallow, slowly shaking his head. "I won't sail with you, no."

  Their eyes met. Rose looked caught between satisfaction and offense.

  "Well," he said at last, "that is between you and your Emperor. Don't expect me to beg. Driver!"

  The driver abruptly shrank three inches, his knees buckling.

  "Drive on, you dumb, staring, scrofulous cur!"

  Moments later the carriage was vanishing around the corner of the street. Chadfallow stood motionless, alarmed as he could not remember being in his life. When the porters reached the tavern door with his sea chest he did not know what to tell them.

  A Natural Scholar

  1 Vaqrin 941

  6:40 a.m.

  After the Eniel rounded the headland, Pazel spent a dismal hour on the pier. The fishermen took a brief interest in him, told him life ashore was better here than in sprawling Etherhorde, where boys were snatched in broad daylight by the Flikkermen and chained to looms in the clothing mills. One old man even offered him breakfast. Before Pazel could accept, however, a shout of "Crawlies! Crawlies!" had gone up around the wharf, and the men stampeded for shore. Pazel sat shivering, working old nails out of the pier and tossing them into the bay, all the while silently cursing the name of Ignus Chadfallow.

  The man was a liar, and Pazel his lifelong fool. In Ormael, where Pazel had lived with his mother and sister in a stone house overlooking the city, he had thought Chadfallow magnificent and kind. His own father, a sea captain, had brought the doctor for his first visit when Pazel was but six, introducing him to the family as "our distinguished friend from Etherhorde, city of kings." After presenting his wife, Suthinia, and daughter, Neda, to the doctor, he gestured to Pazel and boomed: "That is my son, Chadfallow-a quick wit, and a natural scholar." Pazel tur
ned scarlet from the praise, although he had something else in mind for his future than books and learning. He wanted to sail on his father's ship.

  Chadfallow was one of the few Arquali to have set foot in Ormael since the end of the Second Sea War. His deep voice and elegant strange clothes left Pazel speechless with admiration. For years he pictured Arqual as a land of soft-spoken gentlemen in waistcoats.

  Six months after presenting Chadfallow to his family, Captain Gregory Pathkendle sailed out of Ormael on a scouting mission and never returned. Some terrible and total accident, it was supposed. A general dismay gripped the city. Sailors' widows left gifts on the doorstep: mourning lace for his mother and sister, a black scarf for Pazel himself Then a Rukmast merchantman brought the news that Pathkendle's boat had been spotted in the Gulf of Thуl, among a flotilla of Mzithrini warships. She had been repainted, and flew the gold-and-black pennant of the Mzithrin Kings.

  Chadfallow was by then the Emperor's Special Envoy to Ormael, and lived in a fine house in the city. He visited Pazel's home often during those months of fear, and always insisted that Gregory might yet be alive, imprisoned by pirates ("they spawn like eels in the Gulf") or the Mzithrinis themselves. Pazel's sister Neda asked if the doctor's great Empire couldn't send ships to rescue him. Chadfallow replied that the Mzithrin Kings ruled a territory as great as Arqual's own. If they sailed against her, he said, no one would be rescued but many more fathers would die.

  Nonetheless he was a comfort to them all. Pazel's mother Suthinia often persuaded Chadfallow to stay for dinner, after which he would kiss her hand in thanks. "A meal as lovely as its authoress," he would say, making the children squirm. There was no denying Suthinia's beauty, with her dark olive skin and startling green eyes. Like Chadfallow she was a foreigner, having come down from the highlands with a troupe of merchants, dealers in cinnamon and kohl, and even long after her marriage to Captain Gregory the neighbors still treated her with unease. Beauty was one thing, but those clothes, that laugh?

  Chadfallow, however, had smiled on her from the first. He smiled at Pazel, too, in those days, praising his quick way with languages and sternly commanding him never to neglect Arquali. As months turned to years and warships of many nations were sighted offshore, Chadfallow was often called back to Arqual to consult with his Emperor. Returning to Ormael, he brought the children grammar books and dictionaries: useful gifts, if rather dull.

  Then the news from the outer world darkened. Sailors brought rumors of bloodshed in distant lands, small nations devoured by larger ones, war fleets rebuilt. And it was at this moment of alarm that Pazel's father suddenly reappeared.

  His old ship, still under Mzithrini flags, made a daring run past Ormael harbor at daybreak, firing shot after shot. Later it was noted that his guns hit few targets-perhaps none at all-but in the dawn confusion no one doubted that the city was under attack.

  An Ormali ship immediately gave chase. Captain Gregory tacked north, almost dead into the wind, giving his pursuers many a fine opportunity to rake his sails with grapeshot. Soon Gregory's canvas was in tatters. He appeared to have trouble with his chaser-cannon, too: in any case, not a single shot was fired at his pursuers. The battle was brief: Ormael's little fighting ship emptied her guns into Gregory's, and as they neared Cape Cуristel they raised a flag for his surrender. Pazel's father was heard to shout "No!" while waving oddly from his quarterdeck. And then the Grygulv rounded the cape.

  She was a 120-gun Mzithrini Blodmel, or "war-angel," one of the deadliest ships afloat. In a panic, the Ormali captain ordered his men to "wear the ship"-spin her hard about and run downwind. But the Grygulv was already upon them, and her broadside was furious. She blasted rudder and mast from the Ormali ship, and followed up with the most feared weapon in the world-a Mzithrini dragon's-egg shot, which burst in liquid flame across the deck. When the smoke cleared the Grygulv was making west, alongside Gregory's ship, and thirty Ormalis lay dead.

  The city, which had mourned Captain Gregory for a year after his disappearance, instantly renamed him Pathkendle the Traitor, and to many of his schoolmates Pazel became simply the Traitor's Son.

  Pazel suffered terribly. Even his best friends abandoned him. Some of his teachers considered it their duty to punish the sin of bad blood: they made him sit apart and called him a lazy fool if he gave a wrong answer (which he rarely did). When his mother complained to the headmaster, the man threw up his hands: "Why blame us? You married that villain!" Suthinia flew into a rage, chased the headmaster from his office to the science hall and beat him with a stuffed marmoset. Then she pulled Pazel from school and dragged him wordlessly home. No other school would take him after the incident, however, and in three weeks she slipped the headmaster a grotesque sum to forget the whole affair.

  From that day on they ate smaller meals, and burned less coal on chilly nights. And when he returned to school his classmates greeted him with a song:

  He's Pazel Pathkendle, his daddy went bad,

  His mother went mad with a mar-mo-set.

  It was enough to make him hope Suthinia would never again feel the need to protect him. But her master plan for her children's safety had not even begun.

  Pazel's one advantage was Chadfallow, who still dined with the Pathkendles weekly. The Special Envoy was now the most popular man in Ormael. After the Grygulv disaster the mayor of Ormael sent him back to his Emperor to beg for protection. The doctor returned just as a wild rumor of invasion was spreading about the city-none could say how it started-and cheers greeted him as he disembarked in Ormaelport.

  "Your plea has reached the Ametrine Throne," he told the crowd. "You shall hear from the Emperor shortly."

  Pazel could not have found a better champion. Everyone knew that Arqual had fought the Mzithrin to a draw in the Second Sea War. Instead of the Traitor's Son, Pazel was now honorary nephew of the Envoy, the man who would save Ormael. The boy understood little of these matters, but he knew Chadfallow had reversed his fortunes, and loved him for it.

  Just this once, moreover, Chadfallow had come with a better gift than grammar books. It was a kite in the shape of a hummingbird, which Pazel strung with fishing twine scavenged in the port and flew from the hilltops above the plum orchards. The kite was his prize toy for several months, until the day a sudden calm plunged it into the sea off Quarrel's Cliff.

  Walking home that oddly still evening, Pazel remained a child, sniveling at the loss of a toy. But when he reached the stone house he found the courtyard packed with strangers. Big, sweat-soaked men. Gold helmets, shirts of metal plate, black spears crusted with gore. They were milling beneath his sister's orange tree, snatching fruit, breaking branches. On their shields was the gold fish-and-dagger symbol of Arqual. Chadfallow's brethren, come at last.

  Children who have never known danger can sometimes grasp its essence in a heartbeat. Pazel stood there only an instant. Then he sprinted around the garden wall, climbed the grapevine at the corner, leaped onto the first-floor roof and slipped through his bedroom window.

  The soldiers were in the kitchen downstairs, feasting and bellowing. Of his mother and Neda there was no sign. Pazel was barely eleven, but he saw clearly how everything that comprised his life would vanish into those snatching hands, that belching laughter, which were also Arqual: the real Arqual behind the doctor's finery and gifts. He took the skipper's knife his father had left him, and a thumb-sized ivory whale that had been his mother's nursery toy. Lost, he stood by his neatly made bed. He drank the water he had demanded the night before and then disdained, looking at his books and toy soldiers and model ships until the laughter reached the upstairs hall, and the doorknob turned, and Pazel fled.

  From the plum orchards he saw the city burning, her great gates thrown down and the Arquali troops cheering from the wall. He saw twelve warships in port, and eight more stalled on the windless bay. The boom of cannon fire rolled up the hills, followed by the barking of dogs, hysterical and forlorn.

  They caught him at dawn, quaking a
mong the dew-damp trees. A gleeful corporal snatched the whale and the skipper's knife, then complained and kicked him because he hadn't kept the blade sharp. When he learned where Pazel lived the man kicked him again, and beat him. Where are the women? he screamed. Two beautiful women! I want them!

  When Pazel made no answer the beating grew worse. He covered his head and tried not even to think of Neda or his mother. He feigned unconsciousness, but a point came when he was no longer pretending.

  He awoke, bloodied, in a crowd of boys, some of whom he knew. They were all chained to the flagpole in his schoolyard, where a week before he had displayed the kite to jealous friends and boasted of his Arquali "uncle." On the roadside, Ormali captives passed by in horse carts, wearing heavy chains.

  The days blurred to an aching trance. Once he woke to hear a voice shouting his name and looked up into the face of a man with mud in his hair and one eye bruised shut, who had somehow escaped his captors and rushed toward him. The apparition fell to his knees and touched Pazel's shoulder, wheezing as though about to expire: "Hold on, child, hold on!" The next instant two Arquali warriors fell on him with clubs. Only hours later did Pazel realize he had been looking at the headmaster.

  That morning the soldiers marched them to the Slave Terrace at Ormaelport. The city had banned slavery in his grandfather's time; the Terrace had become a place where lovers watched the sea. But the old stockades where human beings were sold like sheep had never been dismantled, and the Arqualis saw their original purpose at a glance. In later years Pazel tried not to recall the horrors of that morning-the poking and haggling, the shrieks of pain and the sizzle of the branding iron, troublemakers beaten senseless or merely pushed into the harbor, chained. It was too awful; his mind tended to leap forward to the moment just before he himself was to be branded.

  The boy just ahead of him was still screaming from the touch of the red-hot iron to the back of his neck, the slavemaster cursing as he pressed a shard of mountain ice to the welt to set the brand. Satisfied, he nodded to the men holding Pazel. But before they could chain him to the branding-post, an Arquali sergeant waded into the crowd and seized his arm.