Imperium Lupi

by Adam Browne

  Was it enough?

  The little beasts turned their cannon around, ready to fire once the ship had passed overhead and into range on the other side, but Angus put paid to that idea.

  “Och, no! You’ll hit the town you fools!”

  Thus everyone stood helpless, heads craned skyward, as the airship passed overhead at surprising speed, like a great mechanical fish, belching smoke, propellers thrumming.

  Vladimir unconsciously covered his already grille-clad nose with a kerchief, as if that might guard against any cloud of deadly black-imperium – it would not. But there was as yet no such cloud, just light, hot, rising smoke that, to an experienced imperiologist like Vladimir, in no way resembled cold, dense, black-imperium vapours.

  Something strange did catch Vladimir’s eye. Fluttering white squares, like confetti, were raining down overhead.

  Paper?

  “What do you reckon?” Angus asked.

  “I think it’s going to make it,” Vladimir replied.

  “Aye, me too.”

  “It’s not dropping black-imperium, though.”

  “Aye, not yet anyway,” Angus puffed worriedly.

  After a few minutes, some of the mysterious papers made landfall and rolled across the fields, catching on the long grass.

  Vladimir chased one down and grabbed it.

  “Ah’m going back tae town,” Angus declared, climbing in the driving seat of the Hummel car. “You all stay here!” he told his bemused little beasts, some of whom were inspecting the tumbling papers for themselves.

  Against his better judgement, Vladimir hurried over and joined Angus in the car just as he was pulling away.

  “What’s that?” the Consort asked, glancing at the sheet in Vladimir’s paws.

  “Propaganda.”

  “Aye? Is that good news or bad news?”

  As the car turned onto the road, Vladimir looked up at the dirigible, “I’m not sure.”

  *

  “Hahaaaa!” old Thorvald gruffed, patting Den Father Flaid’s shoulder. “Look at that, young Flaid, a marvel of the modern age. Not even you Greystones have such a device.”

  “Indeed,” Flaid grunted, shuffling in his seat.

  A panicked Greystone Howler whispered something in his Den Father’s twitching brown ear, but Flaid irritably waved them away.

  The Howler backed slowly away, then ran down the steps.

  “What’s up with him, Flaid?” Thorvald asked.

  “Toilet.”

  “Hah! Indeed.” Old Thorvald checked his silver pocket watch. “Yes, I thought so; it’s early by an hour. Did you change the flyover time, Den Mother Cora?”

  “Nae,” Cora replied sharply, her fingers clawing at her seat.

  “Hmm, must be the wind behind her. Still, I would’ve thought Monty had taken that into account. Got chatting to him at the symposium, you know. Fascinating beast, ex-soldier, been to all sorts of places. Made me feel quite sheltered-”

  As Thorvald blathered on, ignorant of any danger, so the similarly uninformed crowds enthusiastically turned to witness the approaching spectacle.

  Not all were so ignorant.

  Cora and Adal watched tens of Howlers and Elders in the seating below begin to stand up and leave, pushing through the crowds with unseemly haste.

  By Ulf it’s true, Cora knew then. It’s all true. Thank Ulf I sent the girls away.

  Thorvald was right too, the balloon had come unexpectedly early even for the conspirators themselves. Did they know what it was carrying, that it was going to choke everyone, or was its arrival merely understood as a general signal for a THORN attack of some kind?

  Either way, Adal noted the faces and the names of all the Elders that dared to leave, consigning them to his mind – he knew every last one of them by heart. Den Father Flaid remained stoically seated and calm. Was he too proud to run, or simply not involved at all?

  To Adal’s frustration Flaid stoically remained unreadable.

  The Alpha looked down over the railing, watching Horst and Duncan most carefully. Neither moved a muscle, save to knock back beer and chat cheerfully to his neighbour in Duncan’s case, or, in the event of Horst, to bluster and tug pompously at his medals.

  All was well with them.

  Adal sat back, mind whirring. So, it’s just you, Nikita? Or has Silver played us all for fools. Maybe he’s in with Janoah and her pet Eisenwolf. Maybe Rafe will run the world once we’ve all rotted!

  The Alpha burst out laughing.

  “What’s so funny, Adal?” Cora hissed, as the balloon bore down on Hummelton, propellers fighting to be heard over the cheers of the crowds.

  “Nervous laughter, Cora,” the Alpha dismissed drily, looking up as the enormous sleek balloon eclipsed the morning sun. “Just nervous laughter.”

  Cora chuckled as well, “You’re nae gonna run then?”

  Adal just huffed and pulled down his ALPHA helmet, hoping against hope its white-imperium filter might yet protect him.

  *

  The smoke inside Nimbus was getting thicker as her canvas shell burnt away. Hurrying along, Uther spotted wind-fanned flames glowing to the right of the main walkway, just beyond the felitium bags.

  Suddenly one of the bags caught fire ahead of him, burst and deflated, falling limply on the walkway and staying Uther’s advance. However, the felitium within didn’t explode or even burn particularly, it was just the canvas on fire.

  Penny knew her stuff.

  Uther wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Better these hyenas go down in flames! But, then again, Linus had said if the dirigible burned-up with black-imperium aboard it would be carried far and wide.

  Leaping over the burning canvas, Uther kept going.

  Wild-heart’s helmet filter guarded his lungs from the swirling smoke. However, unlike the three Chakaa and their modified Howler helmets, the ordinary hyenas aboard had no such protection, not even gas masks. But, even as they spluttered and choked in the smoky atmosphere, the THORN zealots fought on, some firing up at Uther from stairways with pistols and rifles, others charging wildly at him with their spears.

  Saving his last pellet for Nurka, Wild-heart engaged his lesser hyenas paw-to-paw, or rather rifle to spear. Parrying thrusts and then clubbing or plasmatically blasting them aside as they came at him, the THORN fanatics proved no match for a well-trained Howler.

  Twisting a final terrorist over the railing and not even stopping to watch him bounce off the gas bags below, Uther descended a compact spiralling staircase into the deepest reaches of the Nimbus.

  It was suddenly quieter, and, as with any fire, the air was clearer down low. It was easier to breathe, but easier to be seen as well. Uther kept his rifle ready as he crept speedily along the narrow walkways beneath the lowest gas bags, ready to stab, parry, club or even shoot, depending on who emerged to challenge him next.

  He felt nobody, but of course the un-afflicted hyenas had no auras to give them away.

  In the end Uther made a clear run. There was nobody back here. Why not? ‘Black-imperium’, Uther’s mind cheerfully replied, ‘Nurka’s sent everyone else far away so they don’t rot when he opens up the canisters… like you will.’

  Puh! Thank you brain.

  Parking his worries, Uther approached a silvery door. It was shut. Locked; there was no obvious locking mechanism, but the door felt wedged.

  Casting his eyes about for another way round, Uther quickly concluded there wasn’t. If the door was barred Nurka must be behind it.

  Slinging his rifle, Uther took a run up and shoulder-barged the door with all his might. To his yelp of surprise the door proved extremely light and flimsy. Breaking clean off its hinges it fell in two and Uther tumbled over the wreckage, flailing ungracefully into the dark space beyond.

  Rolling once, he immediately sprang to his feet with his rifle up and ready.

  The room was large, dark and with taping U-shaped walls consisting of the dirigible’s ribs and stretched canvas shell. There was a blind
ing, rectangular blue light in the middle of the floor.

  Not a light, but an opening to the sky beneath!

  Standing courageously by this heavenly abyss, bathed in blue and green light like some god, was Chakaa Nurka. He was armed only with stacks of paper in his paws. A speckled a white moth clung to his shoulder, like a suckling infant, its lovely wings ruffled by the wind.

  “Halt!” Uther barked, emerging from the gloom and taking aim at Nurka’s head.

  Nurka looked at him.

  “Don’t thumping move!” Wild-heart reiterated.

  Taking a deep breath, Nurka simply parted his paws and let the papers slip through his dark fingers. The majority fell through as a solid stack, but the top and bottom leaves instantly peeled away and fluttered about the room.

  Nurka stood, waiting for the end, paws trembling.

  Uther’s finger tickled the trigger, the immensely powerful Greystone rifle in his steady paws coming to within a whisker of blowing Nurka’s head clean off.

  No, something stayed Uther, the paw of Ulf, or Linus’s words, he was not quite sure what it was.

  “Paws up!” he commanded.

  Nurka remained quite still, watching the town of Hummelton pan below him, the crowds, the mighty towers of the Den, all passing within a few brief seconds, and with it went his last chance.

  He closed his eyes, “Thembaaaa… forgive me.”

  “I said paws up!” Uther reiterated. “Don’t think I’m gonna miss at this range, mate!”

  Suddenly, Nurka’s unnervingly bright purple irises focused on Uther. “If you will not kill me, Howler,” he pleaded, tears dripping out from under his helmeted chin, “then for the love of Mother Erde help me!”

  Uther’s brow twisted. His rifle lowered just a little and he heard himself utter, “What?”

  Nurka carefully gestured left and right, and the ominous canisters standing in the darkness, their spherical sides marked with single black X’s

  “Help me! Please!”

  *

  The dirigible thrummed over, low, fast and, the crowd at large came to realise, on fire!

  “By Ulf’s fangs!” Thorvald thundered.

  Gasping, pointing, screaming even fainting, Howlers and little beasts alike stood in their droves and watched flames and debris erupting from the airship’s left flank. The canvas skin peeled away in cinders like a newspaper tossed in a fire, slowly revealing a metal skeleton and releasing a great billowing pall of black smoke.

  Black smoke, or perhaps something worse.

  Adal and Cora, almost alone amongst a thousand, remained seated, even visibly shrinking into their chairs as the black clouds streaming from the dying dirigible played across the face of the sun and loomed large over Hummelton.

  The airship vanished over the Den’s towers, out of sight; the smoke continued to tumble and swirl in its wake, hanging forever. It floated west with the wind and gradually thinned out, dispersing, and certainly not raining down as it should have were it something more than smoke.

  Slowly, but surely, Adal Weiss stood up. “That’s just smoke,” he said.

  Cora followed suit. “You’re sure?” she dared hope.

  “Yes.”

  Flaid heard them and loosened his cloak a little.

  Breathing a secret sigh of relief himself, Adal’s eyes came to rest on a sheet of paper tumbling down from the smoky sky. There were hundreds of papers, thousands, rolling and twisting in the breeze, landing gently all across the fields, the town, the Den and the crowds gathered within, like so much litter.

  One leaf fluttered within Adal’s reach. He leant over the grandstand banister and snatched it.

  Cora came over. “What is it?”

  Adal passed it to her. “Not black-imperium, just black propaganda.” Whilst Cora inspected the leaflet, the Alpha nursed the banister. “Or perhaps it’s not so black?”

  *

  The Nimbus was losing height as the fire spread, the ground rising to meet her; Nurka just hoped his memory of Everdor geography served.

  “There’s a lake to the west of Hummelton!” he called over the wind. “We can drop the imperium into it!”

  “Puh!” Uther scoffed, rifle up. “So you wanna secretly pollute the water, then? Kill Hummelton that way?”

  “No! The flasks can be retrieved intact, Howler.”

  “Give over!”

  “By the Wind, use your brain! If I wanted to rot everyone I would have twisted open every canister I could before my flesh fell off. That was the plan. The black-imperium should be pouring into this room and blowing out through the hatch by now. You should have rotted the second you broke through that door. You didn’t!”

  Uther squinted, unsure. Was this some hyena trick?

  Nurka went on, “If we throw the imperium onto land, or if we crash and burn with it aboard, it will be much worse for you, for all of us. The canisters should survive falling into water. But the lake is small. I cannot move all the flasks by myself in time. You must help me, Howler. Please!”

  Uther’s eyes explored the dark, checking the canisters, looking for some hidden hyena, or trap.

  “I… apologise for what I did to you at the refinery,” Nurka rasped over the howling wind, recognising that distinctive black and white coat. “Uther, is it? The Wild-heart?”

  A nod.

  “You’re a great warrior, even Themba says so, and he’s the greatest warrior I know!” Nurka cackled fondly. “He’s killed more hundred-legs than anyone.”

  Uther declined to reveal he had shot that great warrior Themba a few minutes ago.

  Nurka dipped his chin, stared beyond the hatch, at passing fields and woodland. “I… I have come to realise, too late perhaps, that we great warriors must not stoop to murdering helpless beasts, lest we become those that oppress us. Madam cat back there is right. Prince Noss, Red-mist, Tomek… Madou, all of them fought so hard to stop me. I outwitted and outfought all them and yet… and yet they were right and I was wrong. I should have listened. I should have asked others what they thought, not wrapped myself up in my own bed of hatred, as Arjana and so many others have done! I should have been better.” He returned his gaze to Uther, “I will not disgrace my people any further. I have delivered THORN’s message. It is enough. Now help me dispose of my mistake, Wild-heart. I ask you, as warrior to warrior. Help me.”

  Uther’s rifle quivered slowly to one side, his trust fighting his prejudice all the way, until the rifle clacked to the metal floor.

  “All right, mate. You got it.”

  Nurka nodded and stroked his moth, calming its nerves and perchance his own.

  Suddenly the ground beneath the hatch transitioned from rolling hills of green to a flat calm of blue water.

  “The lake!” Nurka barked. “Hurry!”

  The hyena led the way, grasping the nearest, hefty, X-emblazoned canister and hurling it into the gulf like a mad beast. The lethal, round container tumbled silently for a few seconds, before splashing into the water.

  No sooner had Nurka rid Nimbus of one unit of black-imperium than he threw another overboard, and another and another! His strength was phenomenal and Uther could not match him, even less fully overcome the primal fear in his gut that, at any moment, a canister might leak or even burst altogether, rotting them both where they stood.

  Grabbing a canister on the opposite side of the hatch to Nurka, Uther rolled it towards the opening like a barrel of beer into a cellar, sending it overboard. After a few seconds spiralling and shrinking before Uther’s eyes it splashed into the lake. Had it survived, or split open, poisoning the lake? There was no way to tell, Uther just had to trust Nurka’s judgement.

  Just another twenty to go.

  As wolf and hyena ran back and forth, dumping the deadly cargo flask by flask by their own chosen method, Nurka suddenly stumbled to the right, canister in paws, and fell against one of the durametal ribs.

  The canister, a sphere but for its feet, rolled away from his grasp, past Uther, and into a dark
corner.

  Uther hadn’t noticed until now, but the dirigible was listing heavily to the left and nose-down, thus making his job of rolling flasks uphill harder. Just like water weighing down a sea ship on one side and capsizing her, so this air ship was losing felitium on one side faster than the other.

  And with the felitium went altitude.

  And time.

  Realising Uther was struggling, Nurka offered to swap sides. The usually proud wolf didn’t protest for once and set to work rolling flasks effortlessly downhill; all they needed was guidance so they did not miss the hatch. Nurka hefted the others up hill and threw them in, tireless.

  Smoke began to fill the room, rising from nose to tail as the Nimbus sank. Uther’s mind strayed to Linus, Penny and Monty back in the gondola; it seemed to him that the nose was the worst place to be.

  “If we’re going down nose-first they’ll be killed!” Uther told Nurka.

  “It will not… matter where… they are!” Nurka panted back. “Not if a black-imperium flask splits open…. Keep going, Wild-heart!”

  Uther did, and soon he and Nurka had cleared the room but for the lone stray canister that had rolled away into the far corner of the cargo hold. With the Nimbus’ growing list making things difficult, Uther and Nurka tackled the last flask together and as one ferried it towards the hatch.

  “Chief!” someone bellowed.

  Nurka froze, Uther too. “Themba?” the former replied.

  Themba stood in the cargo hold’s mangled doorway, blood staining his cloak. He staggered inside and looked about.

  “Nurka. What’re you doing? Where’s the imperium? What is this?”

  “Themba. Themba, listen to me!”

  “Traitor! You’re with them! They’ve turned you!”

  “No, Themba!”

  Themba charged across the hold like a beast possessed, barging Nurka aside and sweeping Uther up into a bear-hug. The black-imperium rolled away, back to the corner where it hit the wall with a loud metallic clang.

  Uther’s ALPHA helmet emitted a barely lesser clang as Themba threw him to the floor and set about punishing his body with both fists, punching him left and right, breaking ribs with gusto. Wild-heart didn’t stand a chance and was quickly beaten into submission.