Imperium Lupi

by Adam Browne

  The Eisenwolf unpinned his black mantle and threw it over the bee like a net. Tossing the buzzing, wriggling bundle over his right shoulder, he then returned to the living room and draped Tristan over his left.

  “RIGHT. LET’S GO.”

  Janoah shook her head, “You’re unbelievable sometimes, Stenton, you know that? Unbelievable! If Silvermane ever saw your insubordination in the field, you’d be finished.”

  “AWW, LEAVE IT OUT, JAN. COME ON, LET’S GET BACK TO HQ.”

  Whistling a ditty, Rafe moseyed out the door, Janoah following in his wake.

  “Ulf almighty!” she cursed.

  Chapter 31

  Linus awoke with a start. It was still dark, but a hint of dawn stained the smoggy air outside the window with a pale green hue – four or five in the morning the Howler judged.

  ‘I should go,’ he thought, throwing his armoured legs off the bed and stretching. Linus had slept on top of the sheets, sword in paw, dressed but for his helmet, which he now grabbed from the bedside table and buckled about his wedge-shaped wolfen head. He checked his reliable shield; it had likely saved his life on the train yesterday and bore a fresh scar to prove it, the Bloodfang crest chipped by that overenthusiastic Prefect’s pellet.

  To the door and a timid glance up and down the narrow lamp-lit hall; there was nobody about. Howlers and their paid company were sleeping soundly in their beds. Linus felt the coronas of snoozing Howlers as he passed the numbered rooms, often feeble, rarely strong and never remarkable. Living and working in Riddle Den with some of the brightest Howlers had spoilt Linus, the young wolf sometimes thought. The fiery imperium furnaces of Uther, Ivan and Rufus reduced most other Howlers to spent embers smouldering in an ash tray by comparison, and to be away from them of late was to feel cold and lonely.

  ‘ROOM 23’

  Linus rapped gently on the door three times, then a pause, then once more – the agreed code. Within seconds the latch turned over and a brown wolfess in a green night dress opened the door enough to peep through – Rosalina

  “They’re still asleep,” she whispered directly, glancing back into her room. “Shall I wake ‘em?”

  “No, it’s all right,” Linus replied, “I was just checking up on you all before I go.”

  Lorna appeared behind Rosalina. “You off, partner?” she asked, brushing her fur.

  To which Linus nodded. “I’ve got to report back to the Den by six or I’ll be done for skiving,” he explained. “Tell Sara and the others that I’ll try and get hold of Tristan once I’m off duty and send him this way, if he’s inclined to come. One of us will drop by later, I promise.”

  Linus trailed off as a Howler tramped down the corridor in full regalia – a burly-looking Greystone, sandy yellow cloak hugging his thick, armoured body and pistols rattling about his thighs. He eyed Linus up in passing and descended the stairs to the lounge, doubtless heading out the door to return to his Den; just another satisfied customer.

  “Don’t let anyone know they’re here,” Linus finished. “Keep them in your room.”

  Lorna scoffed, “Well we can’t lock ‘em up, Linus, nor lock Audrey out.”

  “No but… you know what I mean.”

  “We do,” Rosalina insisted, glancing back at Lorna. “Don’t worry, Linus, you get back to Riddle. This ain’t the first time we’ve hidden someone in trouble. We’ve done it for Uther.”

  “Thank you. I-I-I’ll pay you back.”

  “Don’t be daft. We’ll see you later. Go on.”

  With much nodding and fussing with his cloak, Linus took his leave, following the path the Greystone had walked a minute ago, along the hall and down the creaking stairs into the lounge and bar.

  “Enjoy yourself, Howler?”

  Linus nearly leapt from his hide at the recognisably crackly ember-fuelled voice belonging to Lady Audrey, the head wolfess, or whatever one might call her – Linus wasn’t sure. Whatever her usual role, she was wiping tabletops and setting them for breakfast at the minute.

  “Yes,” Linus replied at last, turning to her, “thank you.”

  “My girls pleased you then?” Audrey pressed further.

  “The best night I’ve had in a while,” Linus blustered, convincing nobody of his sincerity, least of all Audrey.

  “Glad to hear it, Howler,” she said, adding, “Only… I noticed you didn’t stay in Rosa’s room. Mind you it was likely a little bit crowded in there.”

  “Crowded?” Linus repeated.

  “Yes,” Audrey crackled slowly, “what with the two wolfesses you snuck in with yesterday.”

  “Oh, uhm. I-I-I can explain-”

  “Look, love, this is your first time, so I won’t make a fuss, but this is an establishment for Howlers only. So, if you wouldn’t mind taking your ‘friends’ with you we’ll say no more about it, all right? There’s a good lad.”

  Kneading the back of a chair with both paws to calm his racing heart, Linus settled upon the only course of action left open to him and delved into his cloak for his wallet.

  Audrey leant on the table she was polishing and watched the Howler count out a wad of colourful lupas, as if she fully expected it.

  Linus approached the savvy old wolfess and pressed the money into those bony, ember-stained white paws. “I’d be grateful if my friends might stay awhile, Lady Audrey,” he said with intent. “If they could be fed and watered as well, I’ll remunerate you, but… I need you to be discreet about their presence here.”

  Audrey’s slender muzzle cracked a smile. “Say no more, love,” she said, slipping the crisp lupas down her purple petticoat. “I’ll take good care of the young ladies.”

  “There’s… also a bear round back,” Linus hazarded clumsily.

  “A what, love?”

  “A bear; he’s sleeping in the alley behind your establishment. If you could perhaps bring him inside and put him up in a room I’d be further in your debt-”

  “I can’t bring no ruddy great bear in here, Howler!” Audrey woofed. “This is a wolfen establishment!”

  “Please. This is the last place anyone would look for him. I only came to you because Uther’s often expressed to me what a-a-a kind and b-b-beautiful wolfess you are.”

  “Y’what? Uther said that?”

  “Absolutely. He’s told me a hundred times that Lorna and Rosa are lucky to have you to look out for them.”

  “Oh Howler, I do try to accommodate, but-”

  “My friends will be gone in a few days. Please, marm.”

  At length, Audrey gave in. “Well… as you’re partnered with that handsome rogue Wild-heart, I’ll see what I can do this once. But don’t make a habit of this, all right?”

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Linus said, “I’m grateful. I should be back tonight, and if not me an Eisbrand by the name of Tristan – my friends know him.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out, Howler,” Audrey said. “You have a good day, now.”

  “And you, marm. Thanks again.”

  Linus took his leave via the front door and hurried down the steps, sneaking along the foggy street with his cloak hood pulled up over his helmet in a subconscious attempt to pass unseen. He felt awful, entrusting Sara and the others to the money-greased paws of a stranger like Audrey, but surely Rosalina and Lorna would keep things together. They were Audrey’s best girls, Uther had once said over a pint, and had some clout with the ‘wily old bag’, as he had so indelicately put it.

  Linus allowed a fond smile over his rough-tongued friend as he hurried along the path.

  Beep! Beep!

  A standard Politzi car in Bloodfang livery pulled up beside Linus, headlamps beaming, engine chugging.

  By Ulf this is it, Linus thought, as the car matched his pace, I’m being arrested for getting in ALPHA’s way. No, stay calm; mere Politzi don’t have the authority to mess with you.

  The car’s dew-laden window was flipped open revealing a familiar rotund hog stuffed behind the wheel.

  “Werner?” Linus pi
ped in surprise.

  “I thought I recognised that stocky outline,” the hog snorted pleasantly, tipping his red cap. “Need a lift, sir?”

  “I’m all right, thank you.”

  Werner checked his pocket watch. “You sure, sir? You’re cutting it fine, if I may say. You need to be back at HQ and I’ll be passing that way. Hop in.”

  Upon second thoughts, Linus accepted the offer. Werner stopped the car as the Howler ran round to the passenger side door and climbed in.

  “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure, Howler.”

  Crunching gears, Werner pulled away down the street, the Bloodfang Territory in his sights. “I thought you had a mono now, sir,” the hog hummed, nursing the steering wheel.

  “I do. I just left it… somewhere.”

  “Can’t remember?” Werner chortled, cocking his flabby jowls to one side. “Must’ve been a right knees-up, sir. You won’t find it in this smog, I dare say. Can’t see my snout in front of my face!”

  “Indeed,” Linus coughed, pushing back his hood. He knew perfectly well his Springtail was parked outside Heath’s flat, but the less Werner or anyone else knew of his movements of late the better he could deny them. “What’re you doing in the Common Ground?” he asked, attempting to deflect further inquiry.

  “Same as yerself,” Werner snorted wryly.

  Linus looked at the hog and, after a brief exercise of his brain to comprehend what Werner meant, forced a polite chuckle – better to let him think anything but the truth.

  *

  Dawn. The sun struck the mountain peaks first, transmuting their snowy caps to gold, before trickling down the valley slopes and warming the dozens of giant ant mounds erupting from the barren terrain like enormous barnacles.

  Time was short.

  Kneeling on the unforgiving concrete into which his stake was set, Rufus twisted his wire-bound wrists for the hundredth time. That they were raw and bleeding was of no consequence when facing dismemberment by ant. If he could just get his paws up to his throat he could at least risk blasting the collar off, or perhaps the chain. Rufus knew he would as likely remove his head along with it, or cripple his paws for life. He had been fortunate not to do so yesterday, but that had been no lucid decision. The hogs had pushed him over the edge and the red mist had descended.

  A little swirl of that mist would be useful right now.

  “Grrrrrffffgh!”

  No use, the wire wouldn’t give. Rufus fell back against his execution stake, panting and afraid. He was trapped in a giant ant field, unable to so much as raise his paws to protect himself.

  “Schmutz!” he seethed, trying to recall his meeting with Silvermane and Janoah a couple of months ago. “How’d you talk me into this one, Jan?”

  You know how, his brain replied. You soft fool.

  The crunch of stones shifting somewhere over Rufus’s shoulder set his frayed heart somersaulting.

  Was it a scout ant? Am I a dead beast?

  Rufus daren’t turn around lest any sudden movement triggered an attack. Ants were deaf and almost blind, relying on vibration and scent to find their way. Taking heart that he was upwind in relation to the creature, Rufus breathed lightly and remained perfectly still, and prayed to the wolfen god he didn’t even believe in for deliverance.

  Whatever it was back there spoke.

  “They say talking to oneself is the first sign of madness, Howler Rufus,” it said, in a harsh, gravely tone.

  Ants didn’t talk.

  Rufus turned around to find a robust hyena dressed in striking black and white attire. The powerful beast stood with one foot resting on a rock, paws tucked nobly behind him, purple eyes squinting with inquiry. His thick, armoured legs were pattered with a beautiful black and white zigzag decor, as was his handsome Howler-like cloak. His face was masked by a white helmet that resembled a skull, complete with a set of presumably fake teeth, leaving only his rounded-off ears and black lower jaw visible.

  “Forgive our tardiness, Red-mist,” he said, “but we had to be sure this wasn’t a trap.”

  Rufus articulated a reply, “Trap?”

  “Yes. If the plan was to use you as bait to capture us, I’m sure you’d have been extracted before dawn and the… ants. As it is you’re still here. Amael Balbus’s message must be genuine.”

  A second hyena crunched across the wastes, bigger than the first, tall and powerful, his cloak hugging his massive, rounded shoulders and chest. His armour and cloak were similar to the first hyena, but of a labyrinthine design, a dazzling maze of black and white right-angled passages. In his paws he held a hammer with a grip as long as Rufus was tall, its imperium-laced head the size of a brick.

  “Is this him?” the fellow scoffed, in a deeper and yet softer tone. “He’s so… small.”

  “Can’t you feel his corona?” seethed the first.

  “Humph.”

  “Forgive my comrade’s rudeness,” the leader excused. “My name is Nurka, this is Themba-”

  “The two bullies who turned Uther over in the Riddle refinery, I know,” Rufus replied brusquely, twisting his wrists. “Look, if we could skip the pleasantries and get on with it before the ants carry us off, I’d be grateful.”

  The hyenas exchanged purple-eyed glances. Themba stepped forward and growled, “Do you want me to crack your head in, wolf? You’re addressing a chieftain!”

  “Themba!” Nurka snapped.

  “But he insults you!”

  “Shut up and break the chain, I’ll untie him.”

  With that, Nurka set about unravelling the bloody wire from Rufus’s raw wrists. The Howler grunted in pain as Nurka observed sarcastically, “And yet we’re cruel? Look to your own kind, wolf.”

  Rufus said nothing.

  Meanwhile Themba lay the Howler’s chain on the concrete and hefted his hammer, taking aim.

  “What’re you doing?” Rufus asked, barking, “Don’t!”

  Undeterred, Themba struck the chain, crushing it between hammerhead and concrete. With a flash and bang of imperious energy, the links exploded in a spray of molten sparks and Rufus was freed. The peal of the explosion tore across the valley floor, over the mounds and back again, like a distant imperium cannon.

  Taking his paws from his ringing ears, Rufus seethed, “By Ulf’s fangs; are you two stupid?”

  Themba bellowed at him, “What did you say, wolf?”

  “Shout and compound your idiocy, why not?” the Howler replied sarcastically, gathering up his loose chain and throwing it around his shoulders like an absurd iron scarf. “If the ants weren’t stirring before they are now. Which way to your car?”

  “Car?” Nurka repeated questioningly.

  “Your monos then, truck, whatever you’ve got.”

  The hyenas exchanged looks. “We walked, Howler,” Nurka said. “Any vehicle would kick up too much dust and we’d be discovered. We’ve been hiding in the mountains for days waiting for you to be staked out, as planned.”

  “It’s a long walk back to camp,” Themba added with malicious glee.

  Silence.

  “Marvellous,” Rufus sniffed at length. “Well then, lead on, sir.” He flicked his paws at the hyenas, “Quickly now. Come on, come on!”

  Somewhat disconcerted by Rufus’s audacity, Nurka fumbled a moment. “Yes… uh, follow me. Themba, you take the rear.”

  Themba grunted disapprovingly, but did as bidden.

  The trio picked their way across the sun-glanced valley floor, their long shadows rippling over rocks and sparse vegetation, Nurka in the lead, Themba at the back, Rufus stumbling along in the middle, dishevelled and dirty compared to the magnificently-dressed hyenas.

  “Looks like we’ve got away with it,” the wolf whispered, passing a seemingly quiet ant hill. “And I thought hyenas were supposed to know a thing or two about the wilds. Is it customary amongst your tribe to ring the dinner bell in the middle of an ant field, or is it peculiar to THORN members?”

  “What do you mean ‘dinner b
ell’?” Nurka asked.

  “Vibrations excite most bugs, my good hyena; and that chap back there just woke the dead with that almighty gong.”

  Nurka replied to Rufus’s caustic tone in his considered, if naturally rough voice. “I understand you’re a wolf trained in what you call science, but Themba and I grew up in the Reservations, Howler. No ants live there, just roaches and the occasional giant hundred-legs that come to carry cubs off in the night. I was warned these ants emerge at dawn, nothing more. I apologise for our ignorance.”

  Faced with Nurka’s humility, Rufus guiltily cleared his throat, “Not at all. Live and learn, eh?”

  The group filed silently past a mighty mound of erde and rocks the size of a house, larger than any so far, but still an ant hill. Rufus could tell by the regularity of the massive conical structure; no geological process piled rocks like that, no wolf or other beast either. The ants had dug a great tunnel system beneath Rufus’s feet and simply piled the excavated rocks and dirt outside the nearest exit, thus slowly building up a mountain. The scale and scope of their endeavour was the equal of any civilised mine or erdeworks.

  As Rufus admired nature’s work, one of the mound’s many constituent rocks tumbled down the loose, scree-like piles, rolling past him at speed.

  Several more clacked down the slopes, drawing Rufus’s eye up the mound to its summit. At the top he spied a pair of dark, club-like appendages tentatively stroking the rim of the sun-baked peak.

  Another set appeared. They were the antennae of some giant insect and no mistake.

  “Is that them?” Nurka whispered at Rufus.

  “Yes,” the Howler replied.

  Unpinning his handsome zigzag cloak and letting it fall at his matching armoured feet, Nurka revealed not only his amazing physique but a beautiful metallic bow and quiver he had been concealing. The impressive hyena slipped the bow from about his body and an arrow from the quiver, and notching shaft to string drew back, taking aim at the ants. His arrow was tipped with a sharp yellow-imperium crystal, which glimmered in the sunshine like a wicked boiled sweet.

  “Don’t!” Rufus seethed, as loudly as he dared.

  Keeping his string taught, Nurka looked sideways from under his skull-like mask at Rufus, but said nothing.