by Adam Browne
“I didn’t come back for that, I came back for….” Tristan trailed off.
“For what?”
Bvvv! Bvvvt!
It didn’t matter now, so Tristan admitted it. “The bee,” he said, clearing his throat. “It’s in the spare room.”
“Yes, I had a quick look. Can’t say I’m surprised, Heath’s a strange one.”
“It’s just a pet. He left it behind.”
Janoah stifled a laugh, “What were you going to do, post it too him in Everdor?”
“I don’t know where he’s gone.”
“We’ll see what you know back at ALPHA HQ,” Janoah said, flicking her pistol at the door. “After you, Howler.”
“I don’t think so,” Tristan spat.
“Resisting arrest are we? That’s guilty behaviour if I ever saw it.”
“This is no ‘arrest’. You’ve no warrant. Nothing! There should be an army of ALPHA Prefects here to take me, not just you. This is just your twisted vendetta against me for all the years I turned your husband’s head, isn’t it?”
Janoah growled, “Now that really is absurd.”
Tristan’s squinting eyes revealed the smile hiding beneath his helmet, “It kills you to know Rufus would have even me back before going near you, if I’d let him. You shouldn’t take it personally, Janoah, it’s not your fault Rufus can’t bring himself to fancy a twisted bitch like you. How’s his latest whim? Linus is it? Are you planning his downfall too?”
Janoah’s eyes flitted a little. Her finger played with the pistol trigger. “You really are clueless,” she said, even as her gulp betrayed the wound left by Tristan’s insults. “I’ve better things to do than worry about Rufus’s daft flings. I love him, yes… but I love Lupa more. My parents died for it, dozens of my friends died for it. I will not see it destroyed by selfish beasts like you! You’re going down; you, THORN and anyone else who’s in on this putrid plot. You’re going down, legitimately, so that Lupans know justice is being done and they can sleep easy in their beds.”
Tristan exploded, “Nobody can sleep easy as long as the current cartel continues to oppress the citizens and murder hyenas! If you truly want to preserve Lupa things must change.”
“So you admit it?”
“Whatever I admit to you here, I’ll deny it later,” Tristan claimed smugly. “Besides, Adal Weiss won’t let you embarrass ALPHA by throwing the book at me over such spurious claims. Thorvald will protect me and Adal knows it. There’s not an Elder jury that’d convict me and so give him the nod to send down any Howler he pleases. The Den Fathers will not set such a precedent; they do not want to give Adal more power.”
Janoah agreed, “Perhaps… but your THORN compatriots will soon incriminate you beyond all doubt and then not even Thorvald will want to save you, even if he could.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes. When Nurka rescues Noss Jua-mata from Gelb, as he must, your small part in this plot will be confirmed to us. It will also spell the end of THORN.”
Tristan’s duotone eyes widened.
Janoah beamed, “Praying mantis got your tongue? You see my dear Donskoy, there’s no way that terrorist Nurka could know about Noss’s continued existence except through me, Vladimir or Josef. It was our little secret. However, I’ve long suspected a certain someone has been tapping into Riddle Den’s phone lines. Yes, a certain pig, shall we say?” The wolfess rolled her eyes and sighed, “Vladimir and I can be so careless when we catch up, can’t we? Nattering away on the phone together, we give so much away. Or perhaps, only what we want to.”
Tristan hoped the surcoat folds gathered about his throat hid his gulp. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Janoah wagged a chiding finger, “Good old Werner told you about Noss, didn’t he? Yes. And you’ve passed it on to THORN like a good little spy. Now Nurka will be compelled to bust Noss out of Gelb. Oh, but I’m counting on the mad prince being there. He might be off his head on chunta, but he’s not so far gone; Rufus Valerio taught him better than that.”
Tristan growled, “What do you mean?”
“Concerned for your terrorist allies, traitor?” Janoah cooed triumphantly. “You implicate yourself with every word.” She readied her pistol, “Now I really can’t let you go, lest you run back and tell. I’d kill you first, believe me. So… let’s make a deal. Come quietly and put down all you know in a confession and I’ll see to it you get off lightly. You’re just a foolish boy, I’ll say, you knew no better. It’s what Blade-dancer would want and Ulf knows I owe him that much for all the stings he’s given Rufus.”
Tristan took a sharp, shaky breath, his eyes flitted down at Janoah’s pistol. Something passed between them, a cue, a feeling, a quiver in their mingling coronas.
“Thump you!”
Tristan went for it, diving behind the sofa in the same instance Janoah fired!
Crack! Toing!
Janoah’s pellet pinged harmlessly off Tristan’s armoured shoulder, tearing his surcoat and embedding itself in one of Heath’s many photos. The frame crashed to the floor with a cacophony of glass at the same instance Tristan hit the carpet. No sooner had he landed than Tristan rolled away from the sofa, saving himself from Janoah’s blade as she leapt over the cushions and thrust her rapier at him in a follow-up assault.
Scrabbling to his feet amidst a flurry of cloth and cloak Tristan summoned a flare of plasma to his gauntlet-clad fingertips. The blinding arc of burning imperious energy crackled through the air and slammed into Janoah’s chest, blasting her backwards over the head of the sofa and down onto the cushions.
“Ooaaaf!”
Whilst Janoah flailed about the sofa, Tristan seized the glaring opportunity and rushed to the door. Yanking it wide he was presented not by open space, but a metallic wall of heaving, riveted armour with a lupine head.
The Eisenwolf.
“You!” Tristan yelped, simultaneously backing up and drawing his sword as Janoah’s clunking marriage of iron and wolf squeezed through the doorframe.
“Rafe!” Janoah gasped, holding her smouldering chest.
“YOU ALL RIGHT, JAN?” the Eisenwolf asked in his thick, tinny tenor.
She nodded, gulped, and snarled, “Get him!”
Rafe’s blank round eyes turned on Tristan, his soulless mask peering down at him, somehow appearing much taller when there was but a few inches difference. The exhaust projecting from Rafe’s mountainous, cloak-draped back popped open and vented a noxious cloud of ash, instantly fouling the air in Heath’s flat and spraying a circle of black on the ceiling directly above him.
“PUT YOUR WEAPON DOWN, HOWLER,” he commanded.
“Not on your life!” Tristan growled, paws nursing the hilt of his great sword.
“I DON’T WANT TO HURT YOU.”
“Then step aside!”
Rafe shook his head a little. “I CAN’T DO THAT, MATE. PUT YOUR SWORD AWAY AND LET’S SORT THIS ALL OUT BACK AT HQ. NOBODY HAS TO GET HURT-”
“Wake up, Bruno!” Tristan woofed, adding, “That’s your name, not ‘Rafe’. You are Bruno Claybourne! Remember?”
Rafe said nothing, but his metal ears pricked, as did Janoah’s.
“By Ulf, look at you,” Tristan gulped, “look at what you’ve become; what you’re doing! I could never tell her. It’d break her heart to know.”
Rafe’s interest was piqued, “WHO?”
“Sara, you fool!” the Howler before him shouted. “Sara and Olivia! I’m trying to help them. Don’t you even care about them? Don’t you remember them at all?”
Rafe remained motionless.
Tristan explained, “Sara was your girlfriend, for Ulf’s sake. You loved her, didn’t you? You came on the train to see her all the time. That’s how we met, me and you.” The Howler ripped his helmet off, revealing his grey and white face. “It’s me, Howler Tristan. Remember? I tried to recruit you just before this… this manipulator got her claws into you and made you into a monster. I helped you get away from her age
nts that day, the day they took you away and… changed you.”
Slowly, Rafe cocked his head to Janoah. “OI, WHAT’S HE ON ABOUT, JAN?”
“A desperate ploy by a cornered roach,” Janoah huffed, rolling off the sofa and standing back with her rapier held towards Tristan. “Be careful though, he’s strong.”
Rafe stepped protectively forward, “STAY BACK, JAN, I’LL DEAL WITH HIM.”
Janoah nodded.
“Sara wouldn’t want this!” Tristan howled, scrabbling to don his helmet again as he backed across the room away from the giant. He bumped into a tiny table, knocking one of Heath’s many exotic trinkets to the floor; a squat beetle-god statue carved of wood. “She wouldn’t want us to fight!” Tristan asserted, sword ready in both paws.
“I DON’T EITHER, MATE,” Rafe sniffed metallically, raising an iron-gloved paw. Purple plasma licked between his thick fingers, snapping and popping in a fearful display of imperious power. “STAND DOWN AND WE WON’T HAVE TO.”
A tiny shake of the head and trembling intake of breath was all Tristan could manage in the face of Rafe’s corona flooding across the room and smothering his own, penetrating him right down to the bone.
Rafe grunted, “FINE.”
With a quick twist of the valve at his back, the massive Prefect squatted down and launched himself forward with unnatural speed and power. The very air behind him rippled and twisted, blasting pictures and paintings from the walls.
Tristan weaved to his right and swung his sword left at Rafe, plasma arcing down the blade, but the Eisenwolf parried the hefty blow aside with a twist of his armoured forearm and followed it up by jabbing his other plasma-licked fist into Tristan’s breastplate.
“Gagh!”
The blinding blast of plasma punched the Howler off his feet and sent him tumbling across Heath’s beautiful carpet to a cacophony of armour and rivets. His dented breastplate smouldering and blasted, Tristan scrambled to his feet as quickly as he’d fallen.
Prefect and Howler circled round one another, stepping sideways, Tristan with his sword held forth, Rafe with his mighty arms held stiffly and slightly away from his sides, like a circus bodybuilder walking into the ring.
It can’t be easy to move in that suit, Tristan thought, but move Rafe did, bearing down on his quarry a second time and cleaving the air with a crackling pawful of plasma so potent as to set Tristan’s fur standing on end beneath his armour!
Somehow the Eisbrand parried with his sword and hacked Rafe in the side, biting deep into his armour.
A hit!
In the next breath, if that, Rafe slammed his mighty arm down, trapping Tristan’s sword under his armpit whilst reaching round with his other paw. He grabbed the naked blade and, looking dolefully at Tristan with that anonymous mask, sent a shocking torrent of plasma shooting along the sword and up Tristan’s arms.
Yelping in agony the Howler released his weapon and staggered backwards, his arms at once numb and yet burning from the plasma. Falling to his knees he shook his paws and tucked them under his arms in a vain attempt to stem the pulsing waves of pain.
“Grrrrrfgh!”
Meanwhile, Rafe discarded Tristan’s sword and checked his own wound – his armour was cut deeply. Down to the flesh beneath? The watching Janoah couldn’t tell.
Either way, she knew it was all over.
The exhaust at Rafe’s massive back vented another cloud of choking ash, blackening the ceiling and turning the air in Heath’s flat an even unhealthier grey. Seeing this, Janoah retrieved her helmet from a table and slipped it on before she succumbed to the pollution. Then she stood guard by the door, rapier ready, lest the wakened Tristan thought to escape.
“HAD ENOUGH?” Rafe asked the wounded Howler.
With one paralysed arm held close to his body, Tristan reached under his cloak with a trembling paw, searching for the pistol tucked near his tail. “It’ll take more than that you… you abomination,” he growled.
“YOU CAN’T HURT ME WITH THAT POP-GUN,” Rafe said, somehow without a hint of arrogance.
Tristan pulled his ‘pop-gun’ from the holster and aimed at the mechanical accumulation of metal before him in the hope it might keep him at bay regardless.
“Wrap it up, Rafe,” Janoah said, glancing behind, “before we attract too much attention.”
Tristan leapt on her words. “Did you hear that, Bruno?” he said, with a slight laugh. “Better cart me off before anyone sees. That’s how she operates, picking off the strong, gaining influence and power-”
“That’s rich coming from one of Amael’s wolves,” Janoah countered.
“I’m nobody’s wolf… except Thorvald’s.”
“Yet you betray him?”
“Thorvald b-believes in fairness and equality!” Tristan stammered. “He’ll understand when we help bring it to Lupa, wolf, hyena, little beast… we’ll forge a new society based on democracy, as it was in ancient times.”
Janoah woofed, triumphant, “That’s a confession if I ever heard one. Did you hear that, Rafe?”
A metallic nod.
“That’s two witnesses, Tristan. It’s over.”
“The time of the Howlers will come to end,” Tristan went on, uncaring of his fate, “if not now then soon. Even Rufus says so; the rise of imperium technology will give power to the many and we’ll be thrown on the scrap heap. The best we Howlers can do is let ourselves down gently and help create a fairer world by building a democratic state!”
“Democratic indeed,” Janoah chuckled. “I fear Amael and THORN have been telling you fibs, Tristan. Amael’s bent on dictatorship; I know, I lay with him! Moreover, do you think hyenas want to live in harmony with wolves? They’ll tear us down and set themselves up in our stead the moment we let them, as would any rabbit or mouse were they able! Wolfkind created this city, the Founders fought and died so wolves could rule, that is our right! But… not one wolf alone. Never! Even if Amael proves benevolent his successor could be a mad dictator; that way madness lies. We packs may squabble, but in the end we rub along. Lupa remains stable. That’s how it must be, and ALPHA will keep it that way, regardless of what so-called technology comes along.”
“I think you’re the one being fibbed to, Valerio,” Tristan corrected darkly. “The Alpha is the one bent on dictatorship. I know… because I know the one who lays with him… and it’s definitely not you, or any other wolfess.”
Janoah’s eyes narrowed.
Tristan chuckled and tapped his masked snout.
Enough was enough. “Not too rough, Stenton,” Janoah commanded, “we need him in one piece.”
Rafe nodded and stepped forward, as unruffled by Tristan and his pistol as he would be by a cub armed with a cork gun.
“EASY, MATE.”
“You’ll not take me!” Tristan vowed, pressing the pistol under his jaw, where his otherwise all-encompassing Howler helmet didn’t protect him. “Grrrfgh!”
“Rafe!” Janoah barked.
In the instant he had, Rafe cast both paws at Tristan and released a blast of imperious energy so potent that the lamps all around the room flared up in a rainbow of colour. The air warped and twisted as Rafe’s invisible field threw Tristan against the nearest wall like a rag doll, cracking the plaster and knocking down a dozen pictures which rained down upon the Howler’s surcoat-clad back.
The pistol tumbled to the floor beside him and Rafe chipped it neatly aside with a metal boot.
Janoah leant sideways against the doorframe and sighed with relief, “By Ulf’s fangs. I’m getting sick and tired of these THORN fanatics killing themselves. We’ll have to check him for a capsule.”
Rafe stood over the Howler and judged by his weakened corona alone that, “HE’S OUT COLD, JAN.”
Janoah sheathed her rapier. “Good. Pick him up and throw him in the truck.”
Rafe went to do so, but looked to his right, to the corridor adjoining the upturned living room. He looked back to Janoah and asked, “OI, WHAT’S THAT?”
&n
bsp; “What?”
“THAT NOISE SOUNDS LIKE… BUZZING.”
Bvvvt Bvvvvvvt!
“I dunno,” Janoah lied, with a flick of her head, adding, “It’s probably the gas pipes or central heating. Come on, I can’t carry this Eisbrand oaf.”
Undeterred, Rafe clomped down the corridor, exploring the dark recesses of Heath’s flat.
“Stenton!”
“HANG ON.”
After a quick aural search the Eisenwolf opened one of the doors and a great, furry, six-legged ball squeezed past his legs and trundled down the corridor, walking over Tristan without a care in the world and into the kitchen.
“OI, JAN, IT’S A MASSIVE BEE!” Rafe laughed, following it to the kitchen. Peering round the door he watched the creature prise open Heath’s larder and turn out jar after jar of honey and jam, knocking them to the floor with its flailing, quivering legs until one of them smashed. The bee immediately pounced on the broken jar and stuck a long, black, tongue-like mouthpart inside, rapidly vacuuming up the contents.
“HAAHAHA! OI, LOOK AT THIS! AWW, ‘EN IT CUTE?”
Rolling her eyes, Janoah moseyed over for a look with a paw on her hips. “Adorable, until it stings you and you die from an allergic reaction,” she said, smacking her lips and tugging Rafe’s arm. “Come along, Stenton.”
“WE CAN’T LEAVE IT.”
“Oh yes we can.”
“IT’LL DIE THOUGH.”
“Just… just leave a window open, it’ll fly away. It’s a bee for Ulf’s sake!”
“ITS WING’S BROKE.”
Janoah came back to the door and dismissed, “Where? Looks fine to me.”
Rafe clapped a paw to his helmet then said, “SHE… SHE SAID IT WAS BROKE, AND IT DON’T GROW BACK.”
“What? Who?”
“THAT WOLFESS,” Rafe sniffed.
“What wolfess?”
No reply.
With a worried frown, Janoah reached round Rafe’s vast back and twisted the red valve. “You’re going silly again-”
“I’M FINE!”
With that sharp protest, Rafe clomped into the kitchen.
“Leave it!” Janoah shouted, snapping like a chiding mother, “Rafe Stenton will you do as you’re told!”