by Adam Browne
“I wish I could oblige,” the Howler professed. “You should’ve kept your big hyena mouth shut.”
“I’ll write it all down. I’ll s-sss-sign anything. Please!”
“Not good enough!” Vladimir rejected. “I need you alive, if plausibly punished. Should Elder Amael discover your whereabouts I’ll have my explanation for sparing you. You’re a prince. I thought we may need you in future negotiations with your people, but for your protection, and to stop your tribe rallying around your name, I engineered your ‘death’. He’ll understand my deception… then promptly kill you.”
“You believe me, then?” Noss said, raising his chin.
“Take consolation in that,” Vladimir said, “and in the knowledge that, one day, if all goes well and you do as I ask, I’ll set you and your family free. I swear it, on my honour.”
“And if all goes wrong?”
“Then I’ll see you in Gelb, if not the ant hills.”
“I look forward to it! Hahahahaaaaa!” Noss cackled deliriously, his head flopping down. “Hehehee-hahahaa!”
Leaving Noss to his madness, Vladimir offered a sting of white-imperium to the tidy-looking Josef. “When they come for him give him this,” he whispered.
“Venom?” Josef hissed. “Why?”
“Because I want him to survive. He needs the best possible start to get through Gelb. Don’t worry, by the time he recovers he’ll be collared and on the train.”
At length, Josef pocketed the sting, “Fine.”
“Not a word to anyone, Doctor. Not even Janoah, not until I sound her out.”
With that, Vladimir headed to the door, but paused a moment. “Listen out for me, Noss,” he said without even looking. “I’ll set things in motion when I’m good and ready. Play your part and you’ll see daylight yet.”
Stepping out, Oromov closed the door.
Once Vladimir had departed, Josef Grau stepped round in front of Noss, paws buried in lab coat pockets. The grey cat filled the hyena’s tear-blurred vision, his dark, round glasses catching the lights overhead.
“Typical,” he said, “I wait ages for a decent test subject then two come along at once and I get to keep neither for myself.”
Noss spat at the cat with what little bloodied saliva he could muster. “Rot!”
Josef simply purred, “You want more?”
Noss tipped his head back. “Come on, worm. Hit me! Hahaaa!”
“Hoping I’ll actually kill you by accident like Vladimir’s daft cover story?” Josef tutted. “Such a schoolboy error is beneath my expertise. If I had my way I’d dissect you right now to find out what makes you magnificent Chakaa tick, but Vladimir has his silly plans for you and I must humour him. He and Janoah between them keep me so busy with their plotting, and so well remunerated.”
Josef walked to the control panel and pulled a lever. The rack jolted and eased flat again. The Doctor then turned an innocuous-looking dial.
“It’s a living,” he sighed.
Noss braced himself, closing his eyes, breathing deep, clenching every muscle in his powerful frame – it made no difference.
“Gaaaaghaaagh!”
In an instant, white plasma racked Noss’s twisting body from paw to foot, the arcs of energy dancing randomly over his fur and flesh like a thunderstorm. Tiny streams of energy flowed between the top and bottom rows of Noss’s mighty teeth as he arched his back and twisted in agony, unable to escape, unable to think, his whole world collapsing into a chaotic singularity of bone-burning pain.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
Josef shut his monstrous contraption down and Noss fell back, mighty chest heaving, spotty limbs trembling, the distinctive smell of singed hair rising over his battered body.
Someone was rapping on the door.
Pushing his spectacles up his nose, Josef hissed. “Whoever you are, go away!”
The door knob slowly twisted. Josef had forgotten to lock it! He hurried over and grabbed the knob. “Who is it?” he demanded huffily.
“Janoah,” they replied, equally indignant.
Josef let out a slight growl of exasperation. Thinking fast, he opened the door, but only wide enough for him to slip out into the hallway where Janoah waited for him.
“What’ve you got in there, Josef?” she asked. “Or should I say who?”
“Just testing the new equipment,” Josef lied, firmly closing the door.
“I see,” Janoah said. “I hear Noss got cooked by your over-zealous application of the rack. Is that right?”
Josef glanced at the door, then frowned, “The hyena died suddenly, but-”
“But?”
“It wasn’t my fault; there was a power surge.”
“Power surge?”
“Yes. That’s why I’m testing the equipment. It won’t happen again.”
Janoah looked down at her feet, stepped forward, and met the cat’s bespectacled eyes. “I don’t care myself, good riddance to that deranged hyena, but I can tell you when Rufus hears of this I’ll be hard pressed to stop him administering his own ‘power surge’ to you. He loved Noss. He’ll want to look him in the eye to ask him why he did what he did. You’ve denied him that satisfaction and, as you know, my husband is not a wolf to be denied his... satisfactions.”
Josef acknowledged nervously, “It won’t happen again.”
Satisfied with her little exercise of intimidation, Janoah changed tone. “Glad to hear it. Now, my good doctor, let’s pop to Riddle Hospice and find ourselves a dying wolf to lend us his noble name.”
“Now?” Josef blurted.
“Yes, right now,” Janoah chirped, glancing around the deserted corridor. “Our little secret had to be out of here and on his way before Rufus is well enough to stop me.”
“Give me half hour, I just need to tidy up here.”
Janoah gave the cat and the door a suspicious look, before parting company with both. “I’ll be in the ambulance.”
*
Uther knocked back his beer and puffed on his ember, “So then I sez to Ivan, I sez, ‘It’s black-imperium, mate, we’d better get everyone clear of the train.’ He was panicking of course, as is natural, I mean, the black stuff’ll put the fear of Ulf into any one, even Blade-dancer.”
“Even you?” Rosalina asked from across the table.
“Even me,” Uther insisted. “I was scared, but I kept me head somehow. So we hops off the train and I start telling everyone to back off, calm-like, I didn’t want to start a panic. But then Ivan, bless him, he starts waving his paws and shouting, ‘It’s black-imperium! Run!’ and that was that, beasts couldn’t get off the platform fast enough. Like a stampede it was. Still it worked out pretty well.”
Lorna laughed between chews of her meal and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Then what?” she urged.
“We started to check the train for stragglers, but then this dark cloud starts pouring out the carriage!”
Monty nearly choked on his food. “I say! You actually saw black-imperium, Uther?”
“Nah, it weren’t black-imperium, Monty, just a mock-up.”
“Mock up?” Penny queried delicately.
“Ash bomb, marm, that’s the smoke you and Monty saw at the station. Pretty harmless, of course, though it will make a beast choke without protection. Just a sneaky hyena trick is all it was. He’d scarpered. Oh, and I found Ivan trying to take shelter in a ticket booth! Puh! As if that’ll save yer from real black-imperium, I sez to him.” Cackling, Uther took a draught of ember vapours and winked at the cats, “Of course, you two know what happens next.”
“That hyena scoundrel decked me!” Monty said to all. “Caught me off guard, mind! If I’d been ready I’d have shown him the what for. Fought for Felicia once or twice in me time; nothing like you chaps I doubt, but I’m tricky with a rifle and bayonet I dare say.” The cat whispered, “Incidentally that’s how I met Penny here. Got bally wounded didn’t I? She’d volunteered as a nurse at the time and the moment I clapped eyes on her that was tha
t, she afflicted me heart for life. Terminal case.”
“Oh Monty, away with you!” Penny dismissed.
Linus sat in silence, nursing his drink with both paws and nibbling the remnants of dinner, proffering smiles and laughter whenever appropriate. As the multicoloured haze and lounge-music of the saloon swirled around his ears, he watched Uther effortlessly entertain Lorna, Rosalina, the Buttles and several on-lookers, who secretly listened in to Uther’s mesmerising gruff tenor.
That’s an alpha wolf, Linus, fit, handsome and best of all charismatic; you’ll never be like him, even less a true legend like Rufus or Ivan. Stick to your books and your bugs, that’s what you know. You can’t even talk properly half the time. Stammering in front of Janoah, what must she have thought?
Linus suddenly stood up. Uther stopped chatting and everyone looked to him.
“You awright?” Rosalina asked, grabbing Linus’s paw.
“I’m…uh… I need some fresh air,” he excused, brushing her paw off. “I’ll be right back.”
Leaving his coat behind, Linus headed off, only to stumble on a chair leg.
“Steady, old chap!” Monty said.
“Thump me,” Uther cackled, “I do believe he’s pissed!”
Mortified, not least by Uther’s language in front of the Buttles, Linus pushed open the saloon’s inner doors, entering the lobby, then on through the outer doors to the lamp-lit street. Feeling slightly light-headed, he strolled over to Uther’s handsome green monobike and felt the smooth, shiny seat with a paw. With a glance at the saloon doors, as if worried Uther might burst out and tell him to get away from his precious machine, Linus sat on it and placed his paws on the cold kristahl steering bars.
Not every Howler could cope with such a powerful beast as the Giacomo Valerio Dragonfly, let alone Ivan’s legendary GVM-8 Spider, only those strong enough to tame the wild imperium gyroscopes within could hope to even go in a straight line.
You can’t even ride yet, Linus chided himself, you’d still fall off a little Springtail. Better hurry up. It’s not so far away, the long sleep. Ten years, twenty, even thirty; it’ll fly by. Then you’ll rot. Most do by then and you’re not special. First in class? Big deal!
Reaching into his coat, Linus took out a silken pouch with a draw string. He tipped it over his paw and the pearl he had bought from the Crab and Kettle tumbled into his palm, a perfect, iridescent green orb the size of one’s fingertip.
Green was the commonest useful sort of imperium, burnt in hearths and engines up and down Lupa, so the pearl hadn’t been very expensive, but it was absolutely pure and so far more potent than the rough green ore mined from the erde and shovelled into fireboxes.
“Linus?” someone said.
It was Rosalina, trotting towards Linus in her similarly imperium-green dress.
“You awright?” she asked again, tipping her hat.
“Yes,” Linus insisted, with much nodding. “Just tired.”
“I was worried you might be feeling sick or something. I know how it is with you lot.”
“You lot?”
“Howlers,” Rosalina whispered. “The pains, n’ all that.”
“Oh. I-I-I don’t get that much,” he replied. “Not yet anyway.”
Rosalina scrunched up her brown nose and scooted round the prickly subject. “Lovely mono,” she said, rubbing the bodywork with her gloved paw. “Looks like Uther’s.”
Linus spread his paws, “It is Uther’s.”
Rosalina tutted at her own perceived silliness, “Oh yeah, so it is.” She sat on the back of the mono with both legs one side of the wheel, as if it were a stool. “Whatcha got there?”
“Huh?”
“In yer paw.”
“Nothing, just a pearl,” Linus said, opening his golden fingers to reveal the perfect green orb. “I-I bought it from an otter earlier.”
“Really?” Rosalina said. “What for?”
“No particular reason. I just like to collect them.”
“Collect ‘em?”
“Yes. I have a drawer full of them. Should be in a cabinet really, but I don’t have the room. That’ll have to wait until I’m a Howler Captain, if I get that far.”
Rosalina was perplexed, “What do you do with ‘em all?”
Linus shrugged a little, “Not a lot. I… I practise with them sometimes.”
“Practise?”
Linus gave Rosalina a sideways look, then closed a paw over the pearl. His fist quivered a little and he emitted a tiny grunt of effort. When he opened his paw, the pearl was shining and shimmering with a ghostly green light.
Rosalina marvelled, “Oh! Whatcha do to it?”
“I freed some of the imperium’s energy,” Linus explained, shielding the pearl with his other paw so as to not draw too much attention to himself. “It’s what we Howlers do, after all.”
“Yeah,” Rosalina said, suddenly wistful. “I… I remember me dad doing somethin’ like this. He used to make things float about to keep me quiet. I was just a baby.”
Spurred on by Rosalina’s faded memory, Linus cupped his other paw above the pearl and, as if by magic, but in reality by the imperionic laws, the pearl rose up and stuck to his other palm!
“Like that?”
Rosalina gasped and giggled, “Oh! That’s it! That’s it!”
Linus laughed, “My dad did it too. I used to pester him to.”
The pearl dipped down, then rose up, oscillating to and fro until finally hovering level between Linus’s paws, spinning round like a tiny planet with pearlescent seas and continents. Rosalina could plainly read the concentration written on the Howler’s face as he performed the delicate balancing act.
“That’s real clever.”
“It’s nothing, really,” Linus shrugged. “A Den Father could do this with their sword.”
Rosalina shrugged, “Well, I’m still impressed.”
Linus let the pearl drop down and popped it back in its silken home. The show was over.
“I reckon you’ll be a Den Father one day, Mr. Linus.”
Mr. Linus literally winced. “Rosalina you don’t have to flatter me,” he said, absently playing with one of the bike’s chrome switches. “I mean, I know it’s your job to pretend that you find me interesting and… and all that, but this is all Uther’s idea and… well… what I mean is… uh….”
The wolfess dipped her chin and shook her head, “Oh no. You’re easy.”
Linus faced her. “Easy?” he squeaked.
“I don’t have to pretend, like. You’re fun, like Uther. I’ve not smiled like this for ages.”
“R-rrr-really?”
“Really,” Rosalina cooed. “Anyway, you don’t have to do something you don’t wanna do just to impress Uther. He won’t think any less of yer. He was probably just trying to help you come out of yer shell, ‘Woodlouse’.” Giggling, the Lupanar wolfess patted Linus’s knee and stood up, “Let’s go back inside.”
“Thank you,” Linus gulped, rising with her, “f-fff-for being so kind to me.”
Rosalina took Linus’s paw and scrunched her nose. She looked about to say something when a sizeable beast came barrelling out of left field like a rugby player!
“Oh!”
Before Linus knew what was what, both he and Rosalina had been barged to the ground. After a brief kerfuffle, the stranger took off, dashing down the main street. It sounded like a pig to Linus; trotters on cobblestones were always a dead giveaway.
“Oi, watch it!” Linus barked, his well-crafted, gentlebeast’s facade giving way to a moment of street-side brusqueness. He pulled Rosalina to her feet, “You all right?”
“Me purse!” Rosalina yelped at once, searching her belt. “He nicked me purse!”
“What?”
“All me money’s in there!” Rosalina wailed, paws clapping to her cheeks. “Everything!”
After a moment’s hesitation, Linus remembered who he was and what he was and took off in pursuit. “Thief! Stop, in the name of the Repub
lic!”
“Linus, don’t it could be dangerous!” Rosalina squeaked, before hurrying into the saloon to summon help. “Uther! Utheeer!”
Linus tore down the path, paws thumping in puddles, his golden fur intermittently illuminated every few seconds as he passed through the warm glow of street lamps. The hefty pig obligingly cleared a path for the wolf, barging pedestrians aside, so that all Linus need do on occasion was leap over shocked citizens still scrabbling around on the floor.
“Howler, coming through!”
The thief had a good fifty feet on the law, but even on a full stomach Linus was not going to be outrun by a pig; lagging behind a Chakaa hyena was excusable, but not a mere hog!
The thief veered into a dark alley, no doubt in an attempt to lose the Howler.
Linus stayed on him, weaving between dustbins and detritus, left turn, right turn, left, left, right, down the grim alleys, deeper into the dangerous Lupan labyrinth that connected the safe main streets of the Common ground.
The pig burst through a gate and slammed it shut. Linus rammed into it seconds later, but rebounded – locked!
The Howler instantly attacked the wall, climbing up and over with aplomb – he wasn’t one for jumping, but with an upper body like his any wall Linus could reach the top of was no obstacle.
The strong little wolf landed in a puddle and found himself in a junkyard, with scrap and ash piled high on all sides. There was no sign of the hog, but Linus heard trotters clopping away into the darkness. He hurried after them, following one of many clear paths snaking between the mounds of rusting metal and decaying imperium.
“Stop… in the name of the Republic!” Linus shouted, for the umpteenth time today.
After many twists and turns, he found himself in a clearing overlooking the broad River Lupa. The fire-belching furnaces of the industrial Greystone territory reflected in the quivering waters, whilst a mighty iron railway bridge spanned the gulf.
The Howler looked around, took stock; he was a long way from the warmth and comfort of the saloon.
“What am I doing?” he panted.
Unwilling to give in just yet, Linus ventured a little further into the mysterious junkyard, until he came to the railway bridge and what appeared to be a dead-end. The bridge arced high overhead, its brick struts creating a cave of sorts. It dripped and glistened by the light of a single imperium lamppost jutting out of the seas of garbage like a lonely lighthouse. A train screamed swiftly by, the light from its carriages playing invitingly over Linus’s face.