The Red wolf conspiracy tcv-1

by Robert V. S. Redick

  "Stuck again!" someone was saying. "A night full of spooks and specters, and a downed tree every mile, and now these blary sinkholes! Are we cursed?"

  The lead wagon had indeed fallen into a hole-a wet cavity in the sand nearly six feet deep and apparently hidden from view. Neeps and Pazel exchanged a look. This was no accident. Someone was trying to slow them down.

  Arunis gave a sharp hiss. The bog-lamps, like hounds unleashed, darted back into the shadows of the Fens.

  "Take the divers ahead on foot," he said. "But first let them eat a little."

  Pazel gripped the bars of the wagon. Two Volpeks were moving toward the food sacks in Thasha's wagon. Run! he wanted to shout-but then he recalled Arunis' warning: the men would shoot to kill. It was too late, they would find her. And "Mr. Ket" could hardly fail to recognize the Mzithrin Bride-to-Be.

  The men unlaced the tarp and threw it back. There was no one in the wagon. Pazel and Neeps sat back with a sigh. Thasha at least was no fool. She had slipped away in the night.

  The wagon was opened, the prisoners ordered out. Biscuits were placed in their hands, and a waterskin carried from prisoner to prisoner. It was foul water, but Pazel's thirst had been more than a dream: he felt instantly better when he drank.

  A quarter mile beyond the stream the brush ended in a wall of dunes. The sound of waves was quite close now. The path wriggled up the dunes through stands of yellow sea oats, and Pazel could see by a gouge in the sand that something had been dragged seaward here not long ago: something wide, smooth and massive.

  The day promised to be hot. Up the dune they slogged, among the popping of sand-crickets the same bright yellow as the wild oats. Then down the far slope, and up and down again, and now the sand began to burn their feet a bit.

  Neeps looked back over his shoulder. "Where do you suppose our little friends are now?" he asked softly.

  "Who knows?" said Pazel. "But they'll be back. They came all this way to learn what Arunis is up to, and they won't quit now. Thasha's the one I'm worried about. She can't pass for a sponge-diver girl with three feet of golden hair."

  "Maybe she's just heading north, away from Simja and her blood-drinking prince."

  Pazel shook his head. "I wish she would. But she'll never leave us in such a fix."

  They were nearing the top of the highest dune yet. Pazel saw that the boys ahead of them were holding still, gazing wordlessly at something below. He scrambled up the last few yards, and stopped dead himself. There at his feet lay the Haunted Coast.

  He had never seen anything like it: a pale beach two miles wide, stretching south to Cape Cуristel, north as far as the eye could see, and broken everywhere by dark tooth-like rocks, some no larger than carts, others tall as castles and snagged with mist. There were long, finger-like islands thick with brush, and pale sandbars winking above the foam, and a great oblong area of darkness beneath the water like a sunken forest. The patches of mist were low and extremely dense, cotton wool sliding among the rocks. Yet between them the air was clear, the sun brilliant: Pazel could see for miles. And all along that terrible coast lay shipwrecks.

  They lay on dry sand, and in the breakers, and in the deeper sea. The closest was a mere skeleton, eighty feet long or so, its encrusted ribs combing each wave like a woman's hair. Farther out, an ancient merchantman lay wedged between rocks, her hull burst open at the waist by the endlessly pounding surf. Black hulks like stranded whales littered the beach in the distance. Leagues from shore, old masts tilted like gravestones.

  But not every ship was a wreck. Close to shore a broad, clumsy two-master stood at anchor, very much alive. Men were busy on her deck-more Volpeks, to judge by their size. Some four miles out stood a much larger ship, a mighty brig, her double row of guns on full display.

  Between these, in the center of the dark patch of water, stood the oddest vessel of all. It was something like a river barge: flat, squared off, free of guns or rigging. She was crowded with men and surrounded by smaller craft.

  Mounted at one end of her deck was a massive cargo crane. And dangling from a chain beneath it, directly over the main hatch, was a gigantic brass ball. In the midday sun it dazzled their eyes. The sphere looked to be twelve or fourteen feet in diameter, and impossibly heavy. A row of porthole-like windows ran around its midline.

  But there was more to the scene. At the other end of the barge from the crane, a sturdy scaffolding of iron rose from the deck. Attached to this little tower was a pair of ropes that ran taut above the waves all the way to the mainmast of the cargo ship, and from the latter right over the breaking surf to a great rock outcropping on the beach, where they entered some sort of pulley apparatus. Wagons, tents and horses clustered at the foot of the rock. Two men with telescopes kept watch at its summit.

  A whisper passed among the youths. Bathysphere. That was what the brass ball was called; someone had heard of such things. But no one knew what they were for.

  Lying still in the sea oats at the crest of a dune, Thasha watched the Volpeks march their prisoners onto the beach. She was seething with frustration. Escaping from the wagon had been easy. Tagging along in darkness had been far worse: the Fens mist shaped itself into wraiths that groped at her, trying to drag her from the road. She had fought them with her bare hands and with a Lorg Academy chant ("My heart is sunlit, my soul is the Tree, my dance is forever: I fear not thee!"). If she attacked them head-on they dispersed like smoke. But they always came back, and their touch was deadly cold: it turned the sweat in her hair to beads of ice. Thasha knew she could not face a whole night of them alone.

  Nor could she take on fifty Volpeks and a sorcerer. And now the tarboys were crossing the wide-open sand. If Thasha followed she would be seen in an instant.

  There were even more fighting men at the camp by the shore. And nowhere to turn for help. As far as she could see in any direction it was the same. Dunes, fens, rocks, ruined ships. They were in the heart of a wilderness, and she still didn't know why.

  She slid down the back side of the dune. Every time Pazel got near her something terrible happened to him. Blast those tarboys anyway! I ran off to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

  As she lay there, raging, a flicker of movement caught her eye. She looked left-and froze in astonishment. Men were crossing the dunes. They moved in single file, crouched low, appearing to her sight for just an instant through a gap between two higher dunes. They wore black leggings and short black tabithet cloaks, and carried long swords strapped to their backs. Thasha caught her breath. She had never seen such men-and yet she had, a hundred times. They were the soldiers in countless "victory paintings" in the military households of Etherhorde. The dead soldiers. Mzithrinis.

  It took just seconds for the figures to pass. Thasha scrambled headlong up the side of a dune to where it looked as if she might catch sight of them again-but when she reached the top she saw only a few snapped sea oats and dimples in the sand. She threw herself down the dune's far side and clawed up the next. There they were. Five men lying flat below her, raising their heads just enough to study the Volpeks and their prisoners. She could see their neck tattoos-a small symbol for their kingdom, a calligraphic letter for their tribe.

  What were they doing here? How had they come? Surely they wouldn't dare to attack so many Volpeks?

  If I could just talk to them. And suddenly she thought what a fool she had been, what an unforgivable fool, not to learn Mzithrini when she had the chance.

  Yet she had learned a little, despite herself. She could still hear Pazel's exasperated voice, reciting: I enjoy, you enjoyed, we would have enjoyed.

  Oh, Pazel.

  She squirmed backward down the dune until she was out of sight. Then she rolled over-and found herself inches from a sword-tip.

  A Mzithrini stood over her, sword in one hand and knife in another. He was gaping at her blond hair. Above the black dabs of kohl on his cheekbones his eyes were wide.

  He spat out a word-nothing she was meant to answer, s
he thought. Then he flicked his knife sharply: Get up. Thasha stood. The man whistled softly, and in seconds a pair of his comrades stood beside him. All three stared at her wordlessly. Then they began to talk. She heard "Arquali girl" and a few other familiar words, but she could not piece them together into any sort of meaning. She tried gestures, pointing toward the shore and shaking her head: I'm not with them. The men paid no attention.

  At last the one who had found her sheathed his sword-but not his knife-stepped forward, and took her roughly by the arm.

  To a thojmйlй-trained fighter like Thasha, his moves (sheathed weapon, casual grab) told her all she needed to know. He expected nothing from her but weakness and fear. She let him pull her a few steps. Then she whimpered, planted her feet. She gave a little tug of protest, blinking as if on the point of tears.

  The other two men had not moved. The one who held her scowled and released her briefly-long enough to strike her backhanded across the face. Thasha cringed, penitent, and followed him weeping down the rest of the dune.

  She could taste her own forced tears. No, that was her blood. Wrong! Hercуl would have shouted. That is distraction! What matters now, girl? Her foe's impatience. The slide of his feet. The way he fingered the knife.

  When a good twenty feet separated them from the men above, she blundered into him as if by accident. She floundered and cried out-still the frightened little girl. The man turned, perhaps to hit her again, but in that instant Thasha leaned back into an elbow-thrust that snapped his head sideways with the force of a wooden club.

  He was enough of a fighter to stab at her even in his shock, but not enough of one to land the blow. Her right hand caught his wrist; her right knee drove up into his now-exposed belly, and as his own knees buckled her left fist smashed down against his jaw. Then she snatched the knife from his hand.

  He could not even gasp. His eyes rolled, astonished. Before he fell she had the sword off his back and turned to face the others, her mouth blood-smeared and furious, a blade raised in challenge in each hand.

  Plunder on the Haunted Coast

  4 Teala 941

  82nd day from Etherhorde

  The guards drove the prisoners on. As they neared the base camp, another facet of the operation came into view. Iron cages dangled from the ropes between the land, the cargo ship and the sea barge with its bathysphere. Shielding his eyes, Pazel saw that the ropes were threaded through a gear-and-pulley network in an enormous loop, and that the dangling cages were moving between the vessels and the shore. On the towering rock beside the shore camp, Volpeks were turning a heavy crank like a ship's capstan.

  Even now a cage was making its jerky way out to sea. And inside the cage, he saw with another start, were a dozen prisoners.

  "So that's how we get to the wreck," said Neeps.

  "I want to go home!" sobbed the small boy. The round-eyed Tholjassan girl held him by the shoulders, then bent and whispered in his ear. The boy sniffed but cried no more.

  At least twenty well-armed Volpeks were at work in the camp. Besides the gear-turners and the lookouts, a great many were clustered about a heap of what at first glance looked like no more than slimy, vaguely colorful rocks. Using picks, chisels or their bare hands, the men attacked the objects: tearing out weeds, cracking coral deposits, stripping barnacles. In most cases they found nothing but stone. In a few, however, the objects' true forms came suddenly to light: here a sea chest, there a broken amphora, elsewhere a bust of some forgotten prince. There was a birdbath fashioned from a giant clamshell, a stone eagle with a broken wing, a curling elephant's tusk banded with gold. The men pushed these treasures aside with hardly a glance. They were clearly after something quite different.

  "Is it the Red Wolf they're seeking?" Pazel asked a guard.

  "Of course! Now step back!"

  Another cage was nearing the shore, also heaped with plunder. It passed above a tall mound of freshly dug sand.

  "Hold!" shouted someone. The gears stopped; men scrambled up the mound with nets and poles. One pulled a latch and the bottom of the cage swung open like a trapdoor. Out tumbled the salvaged artifacts, into the waiting nets. A guard-captain looked around until his eyes settled on the newly arrived youths.

  "Ten divers!" he shouted.

  Quite at random, the Volpeks seized ten, among them Pazel and Neeps, the round-eyed girl and little boy. All were marched up the sand mound, then lifted one by one into the air.

  "Grab the bars! Climb in!" roared the guards.

  The young people could just reach the swinging cage. In they went, shaking with fear, and clung to the sides with hands and feet. When the last boy had entered, the men latched the trapdoor anew.

  "Rest easy," they jeered. "Enjoy the ride."

  Another shout and the cage began moving seaward. The prisoners gripped the salt-slimy bars, looking down as sand turned to foam beneath them. The cage moved slowly: Pazel had time to look back and see Arunis' covered wagon being carried, not rolled, over the dunes.

  Then Neeps cried, "Look!" and Pazel turned in time to see the brass sphere vanish-no, plunge-from the arm of the crane straight down through the barge's main hatch. There came a distant boom and a spray of water from the hatch; then a great chain began to slither through the crane into the depths. And Pazel realized that he was not looking at a hatch at all but rather a square opening built right through the hull.

  A diving portal. Of course.

  "They're going to put us in that thing, aren't they?" said Neeps.

  "Yes," said the girl.

  "You seem to know a lot about diving," said Pazel. "Can you guess how deep it is out there?"

  She frowned at the waves. "Twelve fathoms?"

  "Lord Rin!" cried Neeps. Twelve fathoms was over seventy feet. How could anyone dive so far? But the girl remained calm. She had the look of someone almost irritatingly calm, Pazel thought, although the talk of ghosts had rattled her a bit.

  "There's something wrong with the water," she said, pointing to their destination. "See how green it is? I think that wreck is in a kelp forest."

  She was right about the water: nearly all of it near the spot where the bathysphere had plunged was shimmering green.

  "But that will make finding anything much harder, won't it?"

  The girl just nodded, her face expressionless. Her name was Marila, she told them. She had been diving for sponges in the coves around Tholjassa since she was twelve. The frightened little boy, Mintu, was her brother.

  "This sorcerer's mad," she said. "Nobody ever gets away with treasure from the Haunted Coast. Everyone knows there's a curse on it. See that wreck?" She pointed at a single, tilting mast in the distance.

  Pazel nodded. "What about it?"

  "That's a Mzithrini Blodmel, ninety guns. Tholjassan ships turn away from land if they're close enough to see her. They say she had a captain who noticed something shiny at low tide. He dived himself and came up with a golden Star of Dremland. One little star. He tossed it up to his son, told him the seafloor was covered in jewels, and dived back for more. It was just twenty feet deep, but he vanished."

  She made a little poof gesture with her hands.

  "The ship left him and retraced its path exactly. But this time there was a reef, where there had been nothing before. It split them wide open. They abandoned ship, and a storm blew up and swamped the lifeboats, and the only one who made it out was the man who had thrown the gold star back into the water. You can't take so much as a shell from this place, everyone knows."

  The Mzithrinis did what Thasha feared most. They waited.

  It gave them time to think, to recover from their amazement at the defeat of their brother in a matter of seconds by an unarmed girl. She was unarmed no longer, but she was still alone.

  They waited, and in seconds the remaining three fighters, those who had stayed behind to watch the Volpeks, appeared over the dune. They looked at the golden-haired apparition, the man groaning and twitching at her feet. Then all five Mzithrinis drew their
swords and whirled them with easy grace, advancing.

  Thasha had one skill even Hercуl considered exceptional: she made choices with lightning speed. Those five spinning blades drove her next decision, and it surprised her almost as much as the Mzithrinis. She threw her own sword away.

  Reason caught up with instinct a split second later. Oh, thank the Gods. For she knew now that to fight them was to die. The blade was strange to her, narrow at the hilt, broad and heavy near the point. She could not have prevailed against one man trained to use it, let alone five.

  The men stared at her, but paused only for an instant. She still held the knife.

  Thasha's next decision took longer. Run? Impossible. Surrender? Not likely-the man she'd fought could well have been taking her aside to murder her. She dropped to her knees. Seizing the wounded man by the shirt, she hauled him up against her chest and set the knife to his throat.

  Now they stopped dead. The man was waking from his daze: she pressed the blade hard until he felt it. His eyes blinked open, and Thasha felt his muscles tense. For a moment nothing moved but the sea oats in the breeze.

  One thing he would not do was throw himself on the knife: suicide was forbidden by the Old Faith. They were all trapped. It gave her time to think again.

  Mzithrini phrases danced before her eyes. Who shall wed? Thasha and His Highness shall wed.

  "I… I promise-" she stammered.

  Again they were amazed. "You speak Mzithrini!" said one, apparently their leader.

  "Little, little! I am friendly!"

  "Friendly."

  Blood trickled from the nose of the wounded man. He put a weak hand on her arm. She pressed the blade harder against his throat.

  The men crept a step nearer. Could she possibly tell them she was the Treaty Bride? How could they believe her?

  At last the words came back: "Hear my vow, ye many!"