Imperium Lupi

by Adam Browne

  “Very good,” Meryl said at length, mother-like. “Do you want to do another?”

  “Sure.”

  Meryl and Rafe took a plant each and set about their work, him doing his best to emulate her, glancing often at her deft paws; she doing her best not to outpace him too much and make him feel inferior. Slowly the row of lavenders grew and took shape.

  “Looking good,” Rafe commented.

  “Yes,” Meryl agreed.

  “The plants ain’t bad either.”

  After a moment’s pause, Meryl reproached, “Behave yourself.”

  Rafe laughed; Meryl too, quite unable to resist.

  At times like this it was easy to forget this wolf was the same beast that donned the frightening Eisenwolf mantle. A few weeks ago Rafe couldn’t walk, couldn’t even see, his bones and muscles choked by poisonous ash. Now look at him, bright as a button and joking as usual.

  The rogue.

  Whether Doctor Josef’s treatment had helped or not, Rafe’s was a miraculous recovery. But how many times could he claw his way back, Meryl wondered, as she watched him work Lupa’s polluted soil. How long before he waded so deep into an imperium-fuelled stupor as to sink forever, and all in the name of ‘justice’.

  Years yet, Meryl convinced herself. He’s still so young.

  “Rafe!”

  Meryl and her charge both looked up from their lavenders to see Janoah striding into the bleak ALPHA courtyard in full Prefect paraphernalia.

  Rafe stood up and saluted, ALPHA-style. Meryl refrained, not that Janoah noticed, or cared.

  “We’ve got a job, Stenton,” she said. “You can plant daisies another day.”

  “Lavenders,” Rafe tutted.

  “What?”

  “They’re lavenders, Jan. ‘En they Meryl?”

  “Yes,” Meryl replied absently. Kneading her grey paws she hurried over to Janoah, “Must you make him wear that horrid suit of armour again? He’s been doing so well.”

  “Rafe knows his duty, Nurse Meryl,” Janoah said patronisingly. “Do you know yours?”

  “I do, Prefect, but-”

  “Good, then you understand I wouldn’t be asking for Rafe’s help without reason.”

  “Of course not, but-”

  “I’ll return him to you in good health this time,” Janoah over-talked. “I promise.”

  Meryl nodded a little – Janoah was surprised she could nod at all in that suffocating collar and cravat. The wolfess dressed more cat than wolf.

  Rafe cupped a big paw on Meryl’s shoulder. “See you later,” he said with a wink and a click of the cheek.

  “Don’t you wink at me like Charlie Cricket,” she chided, grasping his paw in both hers. “Just come back safe.”

  Rafe said nothing, but roguishly kissed the back of one of Meryl’s soiled paws and rubbed it before accompanying Janoah across the courtyard.

  “Gardening, Rafe?” Meryl heard Janoah sigh.

  “Yeah,” Rafe replied, “it’s therapeutic.”

  *

  Pushing the hefty metallic door open just enough to slip inside, Janoah turned the knob on the wall, fuelling the imperium gas lamps overhead. With a cough and sparkle they settled down, bathing the room in their steady off-white glow, unmasking the secrets of this deepest, darkest dungeon within the ALPHA HQ. Barrels and boxes were piled high, pipes wriggled across the ceiling like worms, and the air reeked of oil and imperium. Racks of tools hung on the walls, wrenches, screwdrivers and tortured shapes Janoah couldn’t fathom. This was the mad Josef’s lair; she and Rafe were but guests.

  “Josef isn’t here,” Janoah informed Rafe, turning over the bundle of keys in her ruddy paws, looking for the right one to unlock the next door set in the wall ahead. “We might need Meryl’s help to get you into it.”

  “Nah, we’ll manage,” Rafe dismissed at once, stepping inside ahead of Janoah, fingers already unpinning his cloak, as if he couldn’t wait to be out of it.

  It’s been a few months, Janoah thought. Does he miss the power, the thrill?

  Do I?

  She watched the towering Rafe unpin his brooch and slip his limp, poncho-like mantle from about his mountainous shoulders. He wasn’t wearing a tunic beneath; he often didn’t bother. His rich brown fur was in good condition, slick and shiny and showing off his rippling back muscles as they rolled beneath his skin. Meryl had done her work and brought Janoah’s champion back to health – the nagging little nurse had her uses.

  Rafe thoughtlessly tossed his cloak over a barrel like a soiled rag, the brooch dangling down and hitting the side like a conker on a string.

  Tutting, Janoah marched over and began to fold the cloak.

  “What?” Rafe chirped, sensing her disapproval. “I’m gonna put it back on in a minute-”

  “This cloak represents ALPHA; don’t cast it aside like a snotty kerchief!” Janoah scolded. “In my old pack you’d be flogged if you got caught disrespecting the colours. You’re lucky ALPHA is so forward-thinking. Beasts get away with murder, here.”

  Pouting, Rafe awkwardly rubbed a huge, muscled arm.

  Laying the cloak tidily on a workbench, Janoah went to the second rusted door set in the far wall and, after finding the appropriate key, unlocked it and pulled it wide.

  A huge metal wolf stood in the dark recess within, at once tall and strong, yet hanging limp and lifeless. Its grille-clad muzzle rested slightly askew upon its bulbous, metallic chest, which was pitted and scarred like the skin of an old apple. Its long legs were somewhat bent and crooked, knees pressing against the naked bricks of the recess, whilst its Rafe-sized arms hung heavily by its narrow wolfen waist. The tinted round eyes stared down at Janoah, past the cobwebs of a few months indolence, melancholic whether Rafe was inside or not.

  “Are you sure you’re all right to go again?” Janoah said, as if addressing the empty armour.

  Rafe waited until Janoah looked back at him, then nodded and woofed confidently, yet softly, “Yeah.”

  Janoah nodded back and depressed a button on the inner recess wall.

  With an electronic, mechanical whirring the hefty suit slowly eased forward on its armour rack, metal-capped toes dragging slightly on the floor, until it stood proud of the alcove. Janoah removed the helmet, disturbing a long-legged spider, which hurried out of the suit’s empty neck and descended on a fine thread of web. Rafe ducked in and caught the tiny creature in both massive paws, ferrying it away to a dark corner.

  Janoah rolled her eyes as Rafe returned bearing an innocent smile. “You’re as bad as Rufus,” she huffed at him. “Always putting bugs out the window instead of swotting them.”

  Rafe detected a fondness in her tone. “You still care about him, don’t yer?”

  Janoah flicked her head, but said nothing.

  “What’s he really like?” Rafe pushed

  “It’s not safe to talk about a condemned wolf, Rafe.”

  “Oh come on, who cares?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “You can tell me about him. I won’t let Silvermane or anyone know-”

  “Rafe!” Janoah snapped, adding gently. “Leave it, all right?”

  The youth tucked his paws behind him. “Fine.”

  With a snort, Janoah threw Rafe his hefty helmet like a rugby ball. It hit him square in his muscled belly, making him wheeze as he rushed to catch it.

  “I see Meryl’s nursing has made you soft, Eisenwolf,” Janoah tutted playfully. “I’ll soon fix that.”

  Rafe nodded, “Glad to be back at work, Prefect.”

  They shared a chuckle.

  “Come on,” Janoah said, “Josef’s waiting.”

  In an ideal world, with money and trust flowing freely down from ALPHA’s upper echelons, Janoah would have at her fingertips a loyal crew of engineers sworn to secrecy. As it was this experimental, backwater project had but Josef, Meryl and herself to dress Rafe and maintain his gear, with Grand Prefect Silvermane occasionally deigning to peer in from time to time. Even with thei
r help, squeezing Rafe into his unyielding, half-inch-thick armour was a tricky business.

  The lower half was simple enough. Rafe simply stepped into his Eisenwolf legs like a pair of metal breeches, the smooth, silk-lined rubber coating aiding his feet on their passage down to the snug boots at the bottom.

  The middle was trickier. The cuirass was too heavy and unwieldy to lift over Rafe by paw, so Josef had rigged wire pulleys in the ceiling. Attaching the wires, Janoah turned the crank and lifted cuirass aloft, holding it in place. Rafe stood beneath the empty shell, arms up, whilst Janoah turned the crank again. Inch by inch the cuirass was lowered over Rafe’s powerful body, like an iron jumper. The big wolf slipped his rippling arms through the padded sleeves and squeezed his broad head through the heavily padded neck – just about.

  “You’ve grown,” Janoah observed, removing the pulley wires. “We’ll have to adjust it again.”

  “I’m a growing boy, Jan,” Rafe beamed.

  It wasn’t a joke; this enormous wolf was still a cub.

  Janoah hefted the suit’s impervious metal arms from the rack and slipped them over Rafe’s limbs of mere flesh and blood. With a twist, they clipped in place; left arm, then right. Rafe wiggled his fingers inside the gauntlets whilst Janoah lined up the waist of the breeches with that of the cuirass and twisted them together with a satisfying metallic ‘clunk’.

  Her Eisenwolf was really taking shape.

  Next came the backpack; a grey, metallic tangle of tubes, canisters, grills and dials, the workings of which only Josef really understood, or at least partially understood. Janoah hefted it from the rack, one long, black, wobbly pipe trailing across the floor behind her, and mated it with the matching, opposite depression cut into Rafe’s armoured back with another, even more gratifying ‘clunk’ than before.

  “Is it full?” Rafe asked, jiggling up and down. “Feels heavy back there.”

  Janoah tapped the dial that read ‘Liquid Imperium’. The needle stayed put. “Seventy-five percent,” she said. “Will that do?”

  “Depends,” Rafe replied. “Who is this Tristan anyway? He sounds familiar somehow.”

  Janoah retrieved Rafe’s helmet. With him leaning forward she slipped it over his brow, causing that warm, brown face to disappear beneath that cold, grey mask.

  “A Howler of some talent,” Janoah’s said vaguely, pulling up the suit’s concertina-like rubber collar that housed Rafe’s thick, muscled neck. She clicked it into the underside of the helmet; the Eisenwolf mantle was now air-tight and water-tight. “I know he’ll fight sooner than be arrested,” Janoah finished, “but we need him alive-”

  “Jan… I can’t breath!” Rafe wheezed metallically, thumbing round his back. “Me air supply! Quick!”

  “Oh!”

  Janoah hurried round and grabbed a black pipe trailing from Rafe’s backpack. She plugged it into the left side of his helmet, near his nose, then reached round and twisted the main valve on the backpack, the big red one. Within seconds the backpack thrummed into life. Dials whirred and the exhaust projecting near Rafe’s left shoulder coughed forth a stale pall of glittering ash, clouding the room.

  The chest segment of Rafe’s mighty cuirass heaved over the narrow waist below as the huge wolf gulped down air filtered through his backpack. Whilst Janoah choked on the ash Rafe’s suit excreted, he himself remained impervious. No gas bomb could affect him, no ash or poisonous vapour reached his lungs, not with his very own air supply filtered through a catalyst of white-imperium crystal mesh. Not even a black-imperium bomb could affect an Eisenwolf, Josef insisted.

  “You all right?” Rafe asked the spluttering Janoah.

  Waving a paw Janoah donned her helmet to filter out the ash; the mesh inside wasn’t as good as Rafe’s gear, but better than nothing.

  “Fine,” she rasped, through the bitter taste of ash.

  Rafe fumbled with his loose, wobbling air tube, but his armoured fingers and hefty limbs lacked the deftness needed to sort it out.

  “Here, let me,” Janoah said.

  With motherly care, she clipped the tube into place along the underside of Rafe’s armoured jaw and ran it neatly down the left side of his mighty neck so that it wasn’t exposed and liable to get snagged on anything.

  Janoah fetched Rafe’s folded cloak from the workbench and draped it over his hard, unyielding iron shoulders, obscuring the ugly backpack, the ungainly pipe and all the twisted workings round there at a stroke. Only Rafe’s exhaust pipe remained, the funnel poking up through a specially-made hole in his mantle. The seams of the hole were reinforced with a ring of beautiful, pattered stitches – Meryl’s work.

  Securing Rafe’s cloak with his ALPHA brooch, Janoah proudly took him all in, her towering champion of iron, muscle and imperium.

  “Let’s go to work, Stenton,” she said, patting his chest.

  “FOR THE REPUBLIC!” he declared.

  “Yes… for the Republic.”

  ~Blick v~

  “G, H, E, G, S… D.”

  “Good. Next line, please.”

  “Z, D, F… no, B? Uhm, N, H.”

  “Uh huh. Next.”

  “Uhm… J-J… 2? No Z! Z, that is. No numbers, are there?”

  “You tell me, Rafe.”

  A squint, a shrug, an exhale.

  “You can’t see past line three?” Meryl gasped, sitting beside Rafe.

  “Nah. Sorry.”

  Doctor Josef wrapped up the eye-test, literally snapping the chart upwards like a window blind. “Hmm, perhaps you are developing myopia.”

  “My…opia?” Rafe repeated,

  The cat sighed and tapped his own glasses. “Short-sightedness. You’ve never worn spectacles before, I take it?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You have or haven’t?” Josef snapped. “It’s a simple question.”

  “Well I don’t remember, do I?” Rafe woofed back. “Not since you all….” he trailed off.

  Meryl held Rafe’s paw, cooling tensions.

  Unmoved, Josef purred, “Well, you are reaching maturity and myopia can develop naturally in late teenagers. Your body has changed rapidly these past few months, which will happen quite apart from imperium uptake.”

  Meryl spoke up, “It’s clearly the rot, Doctor. It must be. Bright light hurts his eyes, doesn’t it Rafe?”

  “Well… uh.”

  “He needs rest and recuperation. I mean look at his fur, it’s lost its sheen! Janoah’s pushing him too hard.”

  Josef sniffed, “I’m the Doctor here, nurse, not you.”

  “That’s as may be, but I’m not a fool. Rafe’s undergone too many tests and assignments. It’s only a matter of time before he gives out altogether and then that’ll be an end to your project! He needs a break like any other Howler, especially after what happened in that warehouse last week.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  Rafe twiddled his thumbs and looked to the ceiling.

  “I know,” Meryl insisted. “It’s a miracle Rafe’s heart didn’t give out. I don’t know what Janoah’s trying to prove running around a Dead Zone tracking down sting dealers when Rafe isn’t ready-”

  “The Alpha is watching us, girl!”

  Meryl whirled round to see Janoah standing in Josef’s door, wearing the stormiest frown.

  “And we need to make an impression, for we have little time,” she finished, saluting, ALPHA-style.

  Meryl saluted also; Rafe too, eventually.

  Janoah stepped inside and cast her eyes over her Eisenwolf as he stood up, cloak draping from the enormous muscles of his chest and shoulders like curtains; how he’d grown, even in six short months

  “But you’re quite right, Nurse Meryl,” Janoah admitted, “Rafe deserves a break. He’s worked very hard and we’re all very impressed, even the Alpha.”

  Rafe beamed proudly.

  Janoah continued, “The Alpha is not a beast to show his emotions, but Silvermane tells me Mad Bront’s… ‘elimination’ has g
one down very well. He’d been eluding justice in the Bloc for years. Of course, ALPHA has not divulged the exact nature of his demise to the Den Fathers, but the point is it was successful and the Alpha knows who was responsible.”

  A short silence followed.

  Janoah waved her paw, “Well off you go. Your holiday starts now, Stenton. You’ve got a week; go do… something.”

  Meryl looked up at Rafe, then to Janoah. “Where can he go, exactly?” she asked, uncertain.

  “Go?”

  “Well, I mean away. He needs to go somewhere restful.”

  “Wherever you like. Just look after him, Meryl, that’s your job it seems to me.”

  Meryl dipped her chin, “I… I have an aunt in New Tharona. They have a house by the sea.”

  “Don’t all Eisbrands?” Janoah half-joked.

  “My old allegiance is neither here or there, Prefect, the fresh air will do Rafe good. It’ll be much better than lingering in Lupa.”

  At length Janoah huffed, “I’ll get it past Silvermane, just go before anyone notices. And be discreet, for Ulf’s sake, Rafe stands out in a crowd rather.”

  “He’ll be as quiet as a mouse monk, won’t you Rafe?” Meryl said.

  “Aye.”

  Janoah saluted, “All right, Stenton, dismissed.”

  “Yeah. Later, Jan,” Rafe replied cheerily, slapping her on the back in passing – Meryl tugged him into the corridor.

  Janoah sighed at Stenton’s dangerous informality; he was not himself. Then again, perhaps he was more himself when high on imperium than not, like an uninhibited drunk. He’d probably slap the Alpha himself on the back in this condition!

  Amnesia and quirky behaviour was one thing, but the eyes? Could he be so far gone?

  “Well?” Janoah hissed at Josef, once Rafe and Meryl had left earshot.

  “His eyesight’s damaged,” the cat confirmed breathlessly.

  “Irreparably?”

  “Not yet. But if he deteriorates after every little exertion he won’t be much use to us.”

  Janoah grimaced, “Little exertion? You weren’t there, Josef, you didn’t see it. The power he wields. He destroyed a Koda. Bront’s body was wrapped around a pole like a rag. I’ve never seen the like, not even from Rufus.”