The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  While Oyard and Yero sorted out the packing, he drank tea and ate, then wrote a note to the Beltak priest in charge of the South Gate shrine.

  To the exalted sentinel of the shrine at South Gate, greetings and blessings in the name of Beltak, the Shining One Who Rules Alone. As Captain Kellas, chief captain of security for the lower palace, I address you, Exalted One. Business of my calling brings me to inquire if you have come into possession yesterday or today of a boy named Karladas, born in the Year of the Blue Lion. In the course of performing my duty in the name of King Jehosh I request the boy’s presence in my new office at the guardhouse to the lower palace where I have been installed at the king’s express command. My thanks for your attention to this matter. Sent according to the gracious power of the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, Shining Beltak to whom all are obedient, at the king’s service, Captain Kellas.

  He brushed the rice paper with sand and blew it dry, then found a neighborhood child to deliver the letter. Oyard called for a chair to convey him and at first he meant to refuse but the chief looked him in the eye and said, “For your consequence, Captain. You need to make a good impression if we’re to hold on to any advantage. We’ll follow with a wagon and the escort, to make you look important.”

  Kellas laughed, but he could not deny that Oyard was right.

  So it was that Kellas sat all the way from Wolf Quarter to the lower palace gate in Bell Quarter, dozing a little because it was hot and he was tired. The sway of the curtained chair woke him every time the bearers turned a sharp enough corner to jolt his back. At length he gave up trying to nap and drew the curtain aside.

  He remembered Bell Quarter as it had been fifty years ago, a warren of row houses, clan compounds, and markets stuffed with combs, cosmetics, perfumes, jewelers, apothecaries, and every kind of trinket and trifle to please a person who wanted to be entertained. The quarter was famous for its theaters, acrobats, singers, and the expansive Devouring temple, home to Ushara the Merciless One, where he had had sex for the first time like so many of the city lads and lasses back in those days.

  The theaters and entertainment houses remained but Ushara’s temple had long since been closed. Even the warehouses whose roofs he crossed on the night when he had made his infamous climb up Law Rock were gone. The lower palace with its sprawling wings and garden courtyards covered that ground now, overlooking the locks and Guardian Bridge.

  They passed the palace’s huge King’s Gate, the monumental entrance used for the king, the lords, processions and festival parades, and other notable arrivals and departures. Instead, turning a corner past the guard tower, their little procession halted at a more modest gateway, the lintels framed as a sea serpent grappling with a sinuous dragonling. A bored guard stood on either side of the gate, yawning as servants and officials and residents passed in and out. As security, it was a disgrace.

  Kellas went into the guardhouse. The young clerk on duty stammered, then fetched his supervisor.

  This official had the florid face of a man who drinks too much. “Captain Kellas? The Kellas who climbed Law Rock?”

  “The same. Although I wasn’t a captain then. Just a young man about your clerk’s age.”

  The young clerk had eyes like a fish. “I thought that was only a tale people sang.”

  The supervisor swatted him. “Show respect to your elders. My apologies, Captain Kellas. I thought you were dead.”

  Palace security was indeed ripe for change. “Not yet. I’m taking over this gatehouse from you, ver.”

  The man swatted the clerk again, as if it gave him something to do with his hands. “Lord Vanas sent a man to say you would be arriving. I will show you to your suite of rooms myself, if you will wait just a moment.”

  He vanished into the back and Kellas heard him peeing into a pot.

  He went onto the porch to wait. The architect had designed the approach so the gate guards could easily see who was coming. The lower palace was not a single building but rather an elaborate compound whose wings and additions surrounded a huge interior courtyard. Everything was built in wood and plastered white, high walls with no windows, only doors to each of the apartments where courtiers and officials lived who wished to dwell close to the upper palace or the junior queen.

  He walked back inside. “What’s your name?” he asked the young clerk.

  “Sefi, Captain.” The lad hunched his shoulders as if expecting a blow just for speaking.

  “Does this gatehouse have a kitchen and living quarters?”

  “Yes, Captain. The barracks sleeps one hundred and twenty but we’re only forty now.”

  Kellas grunted. “From now on you and other clerks will sit on the porch and take a record of every person who enters and leaves the lower palace. Day and night, using the bells to mark time. Arrange duty rosters so this gatehouse maintains a complete and constant record of movement in and out of the palace.”

  The young man stared, too stunned to respond.

  The supervisor returned. “Where is the tea?” He slapped the clerk on the head again. “Sefi, you should have already run to the kitchen to tell the cook. Now, Captain—”

  “I no longer need your services, ver. You may pack up your household and leave.”

  “But—”

  “I want you and your people out by the next bell.”

  He left Yero and Oyard to manage the changeover while he stepped back out onto the porch to study the gate. Once proper security was in place folk would grumble, and when those complaints reached high enough he would see who tried to interfere.

  A pair of Spears came trotting up. “We seek Captain Kellas,” they said to him as if he were just an old man loitering on a porch. “He has been summoned by Supreme Captain Ulyar.”

  “That was fast,” remarked Kellas, and the two soldiers looked at each other as if not sure whether to answer. “Sefi!”

  “Captain?” The lad bumbled out onto the porch carrying a ledger and brushes and ink. “I’ve got everything as you requested.”

  “Indeed you do. Tell Chief Oyard I’ve gone to see Supreme Captain Ulyar.”

  He walked over to the men with the chair, who were eating and drinking as they waited to be dismissed. “You will carry me to the upper palace.”

  The younger chair-carriers grimaced.

  He gave them a hard stare. “If you are not fit for the task I can hire another chair.”

  Their headman hastily bowed. “My apologies, my lord. There will be no trouble.”

  The two Spears stared as he got into the chair, but they hurried along after. It was such a long and uncomfortable climb up the thousand steps to the top of Law Rock that he had plenty of time to recall climbing the cliff face fifty-two years ago.

  The moonlight had cast its glow over the face of the rock all night long as he had felt his way from bump to knob to lip. It wasn’t the climbing that was hard. It was the height, and the chance of a fatal fall. The abyss chasing at his heels made every grain of stone and breath of wind keenly experienced. For years afterward he had chased danger so as to live as vividly as on that night. Once when he had stopped to rest, a tremor had stirred along his skin where it was pressed against the rock. A faint sound of tapping had brushed his ear, probably exhaustion causing him to imagine buried creatures seeking a way out as he had been seeking a way out of the tedium of his boring life. Death was a way out. Death would be easy. But he did not fall, not then and not after. In time he had discovered in the most unexpected place a better reason to live than forever pursuing the knife’s edge of disaster.

  The chair came to a halt and he got down.

  The floor of the supreme captain’s office was laid with fresh mats. The open doors in back overlooked a courtyard adorned with flowers in the foreground and a wide training field behind. Men were skirmishing with wooden practice weapons, swinging, ducking, grunting, waiting their turn.

  Kellas remembered Ulyar just as he remembered all of the Black Wolves who had been present on that awful day. Like ma
ny military men these days Ulyar had the looks of a man with a Qin grandfather. The supreme captain of the King’s Loyal Spears regarded Kellas with such suspicion that Kellas wondered for an instant if King Jehosh had set him up for a fall.

  But Ulyar did not intimidate him. With a calm smile Kellas sat on a cushion. An attendant brought tea. Ulyar spoke a blessing in the palace speech, mostly Sirni but with occasional words wandering in from the common language of the Hundred. They sipped politely, serenaded by the sparring of the soldiers in the courtyard.

  Ulyar observed through half-lowered eyelids, as if he were about to fall asleep. A sick dislike crawled up Kellas’s throat. Here sat an untrustworthy man.

  “Captain Kellas, I have been given to understand you have been called in to take charge of security in the lower palace.”

  He gave in to the urge to wrestle for dominance. “Security has gotten lax. I agreed to step in and correct matters.”

  “Yes, indeed, many criminal incidents have arisen that would have been stopped a few years ago. A Silver coachman was murdered while in the hire of drunken palace lads.” Ulyar pushed his teacup to the right and then back to the left. “Do you know about that?”

  “A brief mention has reached my ears. I’ve also been asked to make inquires regarding the disappearance of a woman who was meant to be followed along the river. That kind of thing would never have happened under King Anjihosh’s watch.”

  Ulyar stiffened at this reference to Lady Sadah. “Do not think I have forgotten the day you deserted your post guarding Prince Jehosh and came running back to King Atani’s retinue to make sure the king was dead.”

  If Ulyar meant to play that game, then Kellas would indulge him. “If King Atani’s retinue had protected him properly that day, I would not have been needed. As I recall, I found you in the rear guard, unscathed by the ambush. Unlike my factor, Chief Oyard, who almost died in the first attack.”

  “Are you calling me a coward?”

  “I beg your pardon.” Kellas affected a raised eyebrow. “I was merely observing that the ambush was planned with such dispatch and speed that the rear guard had not time to engage before I arrived. It was fortunate there were uninjured men I could rally to give chase.”

  Ulyar’s forehead wrinkled as he sifted through Kellas’s comment for a threat or an insult. “Yet still we failed. Do you know what I recall, Captain Kellas? I recall that you are a traitor.”

  The urge to leap up and punch him in the face surged so hard that Kellas had to grind his hands against the floor until it passed.

  His soft smile was inappropriate for the occasion, and usually he had better control of his expression, but he had no other way to let the anger leak out without it flooding in a storm. “Now that we have that out of the way, Supreme Captain, is there anything else you wish to say to me?”

  Ulyar folded his hands on his lap, looking content at his little victory. “So many curious coincidences, are there not? There was quite a fuss five days ago with the Herelian wedding. Did you see the Silver woman whose people paid Clan Herelia to marry her to their last son?”

  “I was not in Toskala five days ago.”

  “At the beginning of the lamp procession she pulled her scarf right away from her face. No one had ever seen a Silver woman’s face before. They scar their women, did you know? Everyone saw it, a tremendous scar that curved along her cheek. I find it shocking that the Silvers mutilate their women like that, don’t you? Savage, even.”

  Memory jolted through Kellas. His hand began to tremble, and he set down his cup and rested the hand on a leg before Ulyar noticed. “Gilaras Herelian must be about twenty-two years of age. Is his bride the same age?”

  “How are we to know? They are a secretive people. But what interests me is that Lord Gilaras’s bride comes from the same clan as that of the Silver woman we saw that day, the one who was with the wagon drivers. Is Clan Herelia up to its old tricks? Have they a plot in mind to insinuate their way into the palace and then kill King Jehosh as they did King Atani?”

  “A question that had not occurred to me, I admit,” said Kellas, too jarred by this information to spar with Ulyar.

  “No matter. Even if Lord Vanas were to support his nephews, which he claims not to do, Clan Herelia is too disgraced to have a chance of regaining past luster no matter how many warehouses full of coin the deal brings them.”

  How had such a gloating, petty, backstabbing man become the commander of the king’s most elite fighting force? Did no one respect the need for competence any longer?

  “As for palace security, that is why I have called you here today, Captain Kellas. Queen Chorannah holds an audience once a month. It is always her gracious wish to be acquainted with those who dwell under her wings. You will be expected to attend the next one, in three days.”

  “Of course, Supreme Captain. You may detail my responsibilities now or send me a note later, as you wish.”

  Ulyar looked past him and rose abruptly. Kel twisted to look behind. Two attendants swept past Ulyar’s sentries. Behind them walked a young man who wore his hair in the complicated looped braids of men in training to become priests.

  “Prince Tavahosh! This is an unexpected honor.” Ulyar bent almost double.

  Kellas got carefully to his feet spryly enough that he was pleased not to look slow. It never did to show them you were weakening. “Prince Tavahosh.”

  “So this is the infamous Captain Kellas, the man responsible for King Atani’s death. I can’t imagine why my father would give you responsibility for lower palace security. He must not love Queen Dia and my half brother Kasad as much as rumor says he does, ha ha.”

  The insult bothered him no more than a gnat’s bite. What mattered was that everyone in the upper palace already seemed to know he was here and why.

  The prince had a way of taking up room, like he wasn’t sure there was enough air for everyone. “Ulyar, I wish to move up the reeve convocation so it takes place in three days.”

  “At the same time as the queen’s formal audience?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not all the marshals may be here by then, Your Highness.”

  “They will be here. I want soldiers in place.”

  “May I be of assistance with any of the security measures, Your Highness?” said Kellas, using age as his excuse for sliding into a conversation to which he had not been invited.

  The young man’s gaze lit on him, surprised to find him still there. He opened his mouth with the pleased expression of a man about to snap out a cutting retort, but abruptly dropped tense shoulders as he changed his mind about what he had been going to say. “My thanks for your offer, Captain. Your assistance is not needed. One of Ulyar’s stewards will show you out.”

  A steward hurried forward and ushered Kellas out onto the entry porch, where he hovered as Kellas pulled on his sandals.

  “It must be gratifying to Queen Chorannah to see her son so interested in administrative matters,” Kellas remarked to the waiting steward.

  “This way,” said the man, showing him back to his chair.

  Dusk was coming on when he at last climbed out of the chair at the gatehouse to find lamps lit and the outer hall set with an eating tray. He was stiff and sore from the day’s exertions, but all that slipped away in the face of a very pleasant fish soup with leeks and ginger together with pickled vegetables and Yero’s excellent savory rice stew. When he was done Oyard brought him wine.

  “A young man has come by name of Adiki.”

  “Show him in.”

  The young man’s shoulders were slumped.

  “What did you discover, Adiki?” he asked as his heart plunged.

  “I asked around at all the city gates and finally found a guardsman who said he’d seen a lad picked up last night that could have been Karladas. Taken into custody for the crime of loitering without a laborer’s token.”

  “A laborer’s token? What’s that?”

  “I only received notice of the new law this af
ternoon while you were in the upper palace, Captain,” said Oyard. “Every resident of Toskala must apply for a token to show they reside in the city. Any person not a permanent resident must carry a token in order to labor. It’s the way things are done in the Sirniakan Empire, the palace officials are saying. Every person carries a token to show where that person belongs.”

  “How can the lad have carried a token if he did not know he needed one and if there was none to be had?” demanded Kellas, aware that he was tired and still angry.

  “That’s what I asked!” Adiki raised both fists like he wanted to hammer someone’s face in. “They said a new work gang was marched out this morning, at dawn. They said if I didn’t want to be arrested for tomorrow’s levy, I should take myself home.”

  A stab of frustration made Kellas’s vision blur, and he realized he was truly exhausted. “Do you know where the work gang went?” he asked, forcing his tone to be even and calm.

  “Some go to River’s Bend, some to High Haldia, but I hear most of them head south.”

  “Certainly there is a lot of building going on in the south.”

  Adiki stared daggers at Kellas. “Please say there is something I can do! Because I’ll do anything. The people sent off in those work gangs never come home.”

  Kellas met Oyard’s gaze. The chief’s arm had never fully recovered, and he limped badly, but he was a Black Wolf through and through, the real thing, not these jumped-up newcomers under the command of conniving Ulyar.

  “It may be that the only way we can find out is to find a man willing to be arrested and inked.”

  “Put a spy in the work gang?” Adiki considered. “That’s a cruel sentence because the ink can never perfectly be removed, and thus an innocent man will always be marked as guilty. But I would volunteer if it meant I could get my brother back.”

  “Think it over carefully. Meanwhile don’t return to this office. I’ll visit my clan tomorrow and speak to you then. Also, if you know anyone who can truly be trusted not to be swayed by bribes, send them to me. I need guards, and I’ll pay a good wage to people who can meet my exacting specifications. Go on, then.” He chased the lad out.