Maverick

by Curtis, Greg

  The wolves clearly thought along similar lines when he deliberately snapped a couple of twigs under his feet and he heard their growls suddenly stop. They’d heard the sound and knew he was near and their nature instantly told them he was food, but then that was what he wanted and coincidentally what they wanted as well. They didn’t realise he was a hunter and not prey, more deadly than even they, nor that he had protected himself by climbing into the lower branches of an elm. They were going to be disappointed he thought, but only for a heartbeat or two. Then they were going to be dead.

  He raised his longbow and waited for the first of them to appear.

  Less than a minute later he watched the boldest of the dire wolves slink its way through the undergrowth a hundred paces in front of him, trying to remain unseen as it hunted him out. It never stood a chance. Even if Marjan hadn’t been an accomplished woodsmen alert for every sound and movement, he had been waiting for it. His arrow claimed its life a heartbeat later and he notched another arrow even as the dire wolf gave one last, strangled howl before falling to the ground in a smoking heap.

  One wolf did not a pack make however, and while it died its mates were closing in, unconcerned. Their natural ferocity made them immune to such mortal concerns as fear according to the tales, while the feelings he was getting from them weren’t just those of natural creatures. There was something wrong with them, something dark and foreboding, even if he didn’t quite know what, and it troubled him. But that was a matter for later. For now he simply had to kill them.

  A second one came at him from the side, thinking to circle around behind him, but it too was out of luck and his arrow roasted it before the charging, slavering beast could do more than raise its head and growl.

  After that it became a waiting game. The wolves knew he was out there, knew he was alone, and fancied he would make a good meal. But they also knew that their pack mates were missing, and that confused them. He should already have been on the ground in bloody pieces by then, food for them all, but somehow their normal tactic had failed and they didn’t understand that. They didn’t have a plan for such a situation because it had never happened before. So they circled him uneasily, getting closer and closer all the time, making sure he couldn’t get away, and waited for the moment when they were close enough that they could simply rush him. Simple and direct, and of course ruthlessly efficient, exactly what dire wolves were known for.

  While he waited for them to attack Marjan climbed higher up the tree for a little more protection and to gain a little better view of the wolves. Eventually of course the wolves forgot about the strangeness and gave into their primal urges. It was the end of winter, prey was scarce and they were hungry. Hunger always triumphed over uncertainty in a predator.

  Marjan studied his foes from his perch high in the branches as the wolves started emerging cautiously from the trees, slinking towards him as a group, all trying to remain unseen as they wormed their way through the undergrowth, trying to get within biting distance. They should have known better by then, but dire wolves weren’t known for either their intelligence or fear, they were known for their ruthless savagery. It wasn’t long before they lost the last of their cover and started slinking their way towards his tree out in the open. They would have charged but his being in a tree confused them. He let them come, wanting them as close as possible before he loosed his arrows, not wanting to give them a chance to flee. With their hunger and savagery it wasn’t long before they were in range.

  His first arrow caught a wolf on the left flank eighty paces from him, and even as it died and growled, its pack mates understood little of it’s passing other than to stop for a moment in confusion. That gave him all the time he needed to fire a few more arrows into their midst, quickly accounting for another half dozen of the brutes while they howled their confusion at the sky, not knowing what was happening, where to run or even that they should. Of course by the time they did understand, he’d made sure that they were already dead.

  Then, a few heartbeats later, he realised with a little sense of surprise, that the pack had been killed. Eight massive brutes down and not one of them had managed to even scratch him. It was actually almost too easy.

  For a while after that Marjan sat on a branch and congratulated himself on his victory, though it wasn’t quite complete. The pack was gone but one wolf remained, and that wolf was of course the leader. The biggest, most powerful and apparently smartest of them as it had discovered caution. Marjan could just make out his form in the distance as he rippled through the undergrowth, disturbing the small bushes and ferns with his every careful movement, and he could hear his uncertain growls as he called for his pack and heard nothing.

  Did he understand that they were dead? As Marjan sat there, waiting to finish the task, he wondered about that. Wolves weren’t the cleverest of animals, but they did live in packs and had a social order, even dire wolves. In such a group surely they understood some form of loss when a pack member died. But he doubted that they listened to that feeling of loss when they were hunting, or when they were hungry, and these wolves, at least to him, seemed to have no understanding of such feelings at all. In truth he wasn’t even sure they were wolves of any sort. They were something else, something dark and violent and not of this world, even if they seemed to be dire wolves in form.

  Dire creatures of any sort, usually bigger, stronger and more dangerous than their brethren, were more or less still of their family. Formed by the intersection of stray magic and their conception so it was claimed, they still acted as did their kin. These were very different. They looked like them but inside they weren’t wolves at all. What they were though, that he couldn’t begin to guess. Something even more savage.

  Still a few minutes later it didn’t matter what they were as he watched as the pack leader finally committed himself to the battle, slowly, cautiously inching his way through the bracken and scrub, trying to get close enough to pounce.

  He was a big brute, surely twice the size of his pack mates and nearly the size of a horse, and for anyone else he would have been a terrifying handful. But perched up a tree as he was, his longbow already drawn and a properly enchanted arrow waiting to find the beast’s heart, Marjan wasn’t particularly worried. He was just patient, waiting for the clear shot that he knew was coming, and listening for any others that might still be out there. It was fortunate that he was.

  Just as the pack leader finally came into sight, creeping out from behind the bushes barely fifty paces from him, and as Marjan was thinking about loosing his arrow, a minor disturbance caught his eye and he turned aside to see another bush moving. It was lucky that he did. Between one blink of an eye and the next he had to duck as something came whistling past his face, all but taking his eyes out. Before he could think about it he loosed his arrow at this new threat, never even considering the fact that it couldn’t be a wolf, though of course it wasn’t. Wolves didn’t fire arrows, men did. But this was no man.

  His strike was true as always, but the man was armoured, covered in a thick leather jerkin, and that took a little of the power out of his arrow, a little, but not enough. The man stood up straight for one last time, his hand clutched to his chest and the arrow shaft, and screamed, a sound born not of human lungs but the fury of the underworld, before he collapsed in a ball of flame. A heartbeat later Marjan recoiled in horror and shock realising that he’d killed someone, a terrible crime he’d committed once before and vowed to never do again. In the blink of an eye he’d once more taken a life, and the darkness that clutched at his soul was terrible. But in time the truth came to him and it was even worse than that which he’d feared. Men weren’t covered with fur, they didn’t have great and terrible fangs in their mouths nor claws on their hands and feet, and above all they didn’t make that terrible sound. They couldn’t. Mere human lungs simply didn’t have that power.

  It was a werewolf.

  Marjan identified the foul creature even as its corpse slowly slid the last of the way down
the cold, muddy ground not a hundred paces in front of him, and then after knowing a sense of relief that he hadn’t killed a man, wondered at the impossibility of it all.

  In some ways it made sense. Neither man nor wolf but rather some strange magical hybrid of both, a werewolf could command a pack as this one did, and it could guide them, even select their prey for them. It could wear armour and use weapons, or it could choose claws and fur instead. If given reason with a simple command it could send its pack hunting little children through a twisted, all but impassable wood like the Allyssian Forest, even when more and easier prey was nearby. Werewolves were superb hunters and dangerous foes even for a wizard as their very essence made them hard to spot by wizard sight. In fact in some lands it was said they had once been used specifically to hunt his kind. They could also obey simple instructions, which made them excellent tools for dark wizards, and supposedly there were a few of them as well according to the bards. The only problem was that there weren’t any werewolves.

  The last werewolf in the Allyssian Forest, and for that matter the entire province of Gunderland, had been killed more than a century before, as had the wizard believed responsible for creating the beast. The use of such dark magic was an unforgivable crime. Since then not only had they been considered extinct, but the magic itself that allowed for the creation of such monsters had been banned. It was evil magic and it created evil things. Yet suddenly one was here. That could only mean it had come from somewhere much further away than Gunderland and its nearer neighbours. Just as had the dire wolves themselves.

  Marjan wondered about that until the pack leader finally stepped once more into his view and he loosed the final arrow into his flesh, sending him off to the afterlife to be with his pack mates. Then he wondered some more as he waited for the animals to tell him that everything was clear once more, that the danger had passed.

  A werewolf with a hunting pack of dire wolves. That spoke of not just dark magic, but also of the creature travelling from far away to reach his home. More then that it wasn’t travelling as it should either. Werewolves like other wolves were territorial and the only reason they normally travelled was to hunt for food. This one had travelled for a different reason. It was here because someone had sent it here, someone with either great power or great magic, werewolves responded to both. It spoke of other wizards who should have been on the lookout for such beasts, being somehow prevented from doing their job, of the guild laws being broken, and chaos running wild through the lands.

  The owls had shown him images of great battles being waged to the north, of people and animals dying, and his own modest magic of the spirit had told him of fear and panic gripping the land. The distant smoke every day fouling the skies to the north spoke of towns and villages far away being torched, and the faint stench spoke of flesh being burnt, human flesh, as he suspected. And now the werewolf told him of magic, wild and dangerous, being loosed upon the land and the forest. None of that was good, but put together it was far worse. It spoke of war. War both terrible and magical being unleashed upon the province. But who would attack Gunderland? And what wizard would dare to break the most fundamental of Guild laws?

  It was a peaceful province, for the most part comprised of farmers, foresters and miners, of humans and dwarves. There were few cities, only one in truth, and a lot of towns and villages, none of them large enough to be worth conquering, little gold unless the dwarves had some stashed away in their underground towns, and it held no strategic value. Besides, they were at peace with their immediate neighbours, had been for the best part of two hundred years. The trade between the two was more valuable to them all than any potential gold from a war. So who would attack them?

  Naturally he had no answer, but then he had been hiding out in his little cabin for nigh on a decade, insulated from all the news of the world. The most he heard of big things happening out there, was when he wandered in every tenday or two to the village of Snowy Falls to the south to sell a few furs, healing potions and a little silver from his river and purchase supplies, and maybe had an ale in the inn and played a few games of chance, and he hadn’t been there since the troubles had arisen. Nor had anyone mentioned anything out of the ordinary the last time he’d visited, not in Gunderland, not outside of it. Things were quiet, as they mostly were.

  No more when he listened to the conversations of the elves as they spoke across the fires far away, had they reported anything amiss, though admittedly it was a long way to the nearest of their realms, and he hadn’t listened that frequently. Yet it seemed someone had brought some sort of war to Gunderland. It was just a matter of whom.

  To the west and the north lay the mostly human realms of Tonfordia and Whitney, both of them prosperous lands filled with grand cities and rich lords. Neither of them would want to break the peace that had held between them all for centuries and potentially lose one of their largest sources of revenue, food and scarce goods. Besides the three lands were separated by the Liligoth Mountain Ranges, a vast collection of mountains and volcanoes with only a few narrow passes between them. Passes important enough to be filled with trading caravans day and night, but not large enough to pass an army, especially when they were guarded on all sides by the border patrols.

  North and east lay the great swamplands known as the Dead Men’s Wastes, not a particularly inventive name but an accurate one. Filled with savage creatures and terrible diseases, no one lived there except for the toad-men, if they could truly be considered men, and though there were lands beyond them, barbarian lands, none would risk running an army through them. The few roads that ran through the Wastes were little more than dirt tracks hundreds of leagues long, and none of them could be considered safe. Most who chose to travel from the barbarian realms, and there were a few, took the longer routes to the north which might add as much as a month to the journey. If an enemy had made the journey through the Wastes the likelihood was that half the army would be sick and dying before they reached Gunderland, and that was assuming they hadn’t got lost in the foul swamps or killed by the locals.

  East and south lay the gnomish province of Ellington, another peaceful land and one that traded with Gunderland for its very survival. The gnomes were master artisans and they could create fine wares, everything from clothes to swords, but their land was dry and lifeless and could sustain little in the way of crops, and they purchased food all year around. In fact Gunderland was one of their main shopping baskets for food, fur and timber. Besides, the gnomes had no such thing as an army, and their magic, had nothing to do with werewolves. Instead they seemed to favour the magics of smithing, charming, tailoring and shaping metals, something they could do with great precision.

  That left just the southern lands of Calibra, and it was true that there there were people who could perhaps create werewolves, and probably summon many other beasts as well including packs of dire wolves. The elves’ magic was both strange and strong, at least when it came to all things of nature. The only problem was that the people who lived there were elves, and regardless of their magical ability they practiced nothing of either evil or war. They would not create such monsters. Nor would they raise an army. They had powerful defensive forces in their rangers, but no armies, and in truth they were almost sickened by the thought of leaving their homelands. Nor were they raiders of any sort.

  In seven or eight hundred or more years of recorded history, ever since the unseen wars had ended, never once had there been an unprovoked attack let alone a war made upon the people of Gunderland by the elves, and he strongly suspected that even before that time the had same held true. They might be reclusive and magical, not to mention well armed, but they weren’t an enemy and evil wasn’t in their nature. Of course the dryads who shared their lands with them, weren’t complete pacifists. They had no true soldiers, little in the way of good steel weapons, and they didn’t even leave their groves and copses except under the most extreme of conditions, but they were individually capable warriors with magical weapons and p
owerful spell craft at their disposal. Still this didn’t seem like anything they would do either. They disliked large houses and big cities, hated anything that imposed on the natural order which the creation of were beasts certainly did, and never once had he heard of them going to war with anyone, not even the dwarves.

  Still that didn’t leave a lot of choices.

  It was as he was letting such impossible thoughts run wild, that Marjan became aware of the sound of birdsong resuming all around him, the occasional coughing of deer going about their usual business and the other sounds of woodland life that told him the danger was passed. It was time to shake a leg.