The Red Wolf Conspiracy

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Neeps pointed into the gloom. About sixty yards away, against a great black rock, stood the other half of the Lythra. Her shattered beam-ends anchored her in the sand. Her figurehead, an angel, spread her barnacled wings and gazed forlornly at the sky. A row of gaping cannon-shot wounds ran down her hull, straight as punches in a leather belt, as though she had been fired on at point-blank range.

  And gazing from one of these holes was a young boy.

  “Mintu!”

  He waved, and his voice carried faintly to them. “Pazel! Neeps! They changed you, too?”

  A murth-girl's shy, mischievous face appeared behind him.

  Mintu laughed. “She's my friend!”

  The boys were so delighted to find him alive that they forgot all about Pazel's impending mind-fit. Swimming toward the wreck, they heard the musical laughter again from inside the kelp forest. When the next spell of darkness came they saw the murth-girls glowing faintly in the weeds.

  More laughter above. There were the other missing boys: dangling from the Lythra's main topgallant, holding a slender murth by hands and feet so that she swayed between them like a hammock.

  “Why are there only girls?” Neeps asked. “Not that I'm complaining, mind.”

  “Maybe because we're only boys,” said Pazel uneasily. “We'd better be careful.”

  “Just you be careful not to insult them again.”

  It was no use protesting: Neeps was positively convinced Pazel had said something nasty in Murthish. They swam up to Mintu and clasped his arms. He had a girl's silver hair-clip in his own brown locks.

  “She fed me clams,” he said. “And she healed a cut on my foot. I don't think murths are half as bad as people say.”

  “Your sister nearly drowned looking for you,” said Pazel. “You'd better get back to the sphere and let her know you're alive.”

  “Oh! Yes, I … I will.” Mintu looked reluctantly back toward the coral arch.

  “Go on,” urged Pazel, “or she'll try it again. She's in no shape for that.”

  Mintu looked at his murth-girl playmate. She drew back into the ruined ship, eyes pouting, as if she knew their game was over.

  “I'll come right back,” he said.

  Pazel watched Mintu swim all the way to the arch. Then he turned to see Neeps sitting cross-legged on the seabed, inches from a murth-girl in the same position.

  “Hello, dream,” said Neeps.

  They were making faces at each other. The murth-girl laid a finger on his worm-wound—and it vanished, melting into his skin like a snowflake.

  “Thank you!” laughed Neeps. “Pazel, how do you say ‘thank you’?”

  Pazel didn't answer. He looked up at the two boys and their friend. They had released the topgallant and were holding hands in a circle, serenely sinking. Another murth-girl, almost completely hidden in the weeds, looked out as they passed.

  “They're ready, Thysstet,” she told the girl as she passed.

  “Almost!” laughed the other.

  Ready for what? Pazel knew how to ask the question. But what if they vanished again at the sound of his voice?

  The girl in the weeds leaned out farther. Pazel's heart leaped: it was her, the one who had touched him. Suddenly nothing else mattered. He swam toward her as fast as he could. Their eyes met. She was beautiful!

  She was gone.

  He felt stabbed in the chest. One glance and she had fled into the weeds.

  And when he looked down, Neeps had vanished, too. There on the sand lay his collecting bag, hook and ring—the latter with the rope still attached.

  “Neeps! Neeps!”

  Pazel flew toward the sole remaining murth-girl. She saw him and cowered behind the two boys.

  “Stop!” they growled at him. “What's the matter with you! She's ours!”

  “It's a trap!” he cried. “They're separating us! And you've lost your ropes!”

  “Who needs ropes?” laughed one boy. “Who needs them blary Volpeks and their bath-a-spear?”

  “But how will you get back to land?”

  “Swim! Walk! Who cares? Maybe I'll wait a week. All I know is that I'll go ashore far from Arunis! Ha! We can even say his name down here. What's he going to do about it?”

  “Arunis! Arunis!” shouted the other boy.

  The murth tickled him from behind. But she still watched Pazel with fear.

  He begged the boys to help him find Neeps, but they called him killjoy and swam away. Pazel shouted for Neeps again. How far did his voice carry underwater? And where should he search?

  Quite at random he circled the bow of the Lythra and the massive rock. No Neeps, no murth-girls. Only fish, a few spiny lobsters, and in the distance a red, swift shape like a flying carpet: a scarlet ray. Pazel had never seen such a huge one—it was easily twelve feet from wing tip to wing tip—and he kept his distance. Scarlet rays were not aggressive, and they had no teeth, but the stingers in their whip-like tails were notorious. In Besq, Pazel had seen a fisherman stung on the hand by a scarlet ray tangled in his net. He had passed out from sheer agony.

  He set off among the rocks and weeds. Shouting for Neeps, but thinking despite himself of the girl, the girl, the girl. Of course she would be frightened to hear a human speaking Murthish. But so frightened? And what had she meant by Mine?

  His rope went slack. He reeled it in, more alarmed by the second. Something very sharp had cut the rope, and he hadn't felt a thing. Not one of them was tethered to the bathysphere. And only he was aware of the danger.

  What could he do? He rose. At thirty feet below the surface most of the reef was below him. A little farther and the kelp closed around him too. He could see nothing at all until his head broke the surface.

  Where was he? The wind had risen and the waves had grown. The sun was bright as ever, but the shore seemed to have changed shape. Then he caught sight of the barge and realized he was much farther north than he had guessed. He could see the Volpeks on her deck, and in the smaller craft around her, looking anxiously at both shore and sea. Far out in the Gulf of Thól the heavily armed brig still waited, brooding. He turned to face the shore—

  —and dived, just in time. A longboat was driving straight at him, making for the barge. Pazel watched as it passed a yard above his head, four pairs of oars pulling swiftly. Then he rose until his eyes just cleared the water.

  Arunis was standing upright at the prow, in a dark cloak, his tattered scarf flapping in the wind. The white dog stood beside him, motionless. The sorcerer waived irritably at his men.

  “Faster!” he shrieked. “Can't you see that fog bank, Druffle, you louse?”

  Mr. Druffle was indeed among the rowers. Looking miserable and cold, the wiry man glanced southward. Pazel looked, too: there was indeed a broad mantle of fog upon the Gulf, two or three miles off. Like the shreds of mist he had glimpsed from the dunes, it was thick as white wool, an unnatural sight under the gleaming sun. But this fog bank stretched in an unbroken line from the southern shore deep into the Gulf. And it was creeping relentlessly their way.

  Arunis screamed at the rowers again, and they increased their speed. Pazel flipped over and swam straight down. One calamity at a time.

  Below, he found no sign of man or murth. Clownfish darted; the scarlet ray swept by near the wreck. Otherwise the sea was still.

  A hunch came to him suddenly. Before he sank any farther, Pazel moved well into the ribbon kelp. Then, hand over hand, he pulled himself into the depths. If the weed could hide murths it could hide him, too.

  After descending another thirty feet he held still. He could see the whole clearing, from the Lythra to the coral wall, but it would take a sharp eye indeed to spot him.

  No one came. No silver laughter reached him. But strangely, the scarlet ray kept up its circling of the wreck. What was it up to? Not feeding: scores of fish passed right under its nose, and the giant ignored them all.

  Long minutes passed. Then the ray did something odd. It stopped, pivoted its huge, flat body left and
right and dived behind the wreck.

  Pazel burst from the weeds. That was no normal behavior for a ray. He swam low, hiding behind the wreck as long as possible. When he could go no farther he shot upward, across the topdeck, and peered down along the side of the ruined hull.

  The ray was hovering beside a gunport, its deadly tail writhing. Pazel heard its voice, like that of a weird overgrown bird: “Gone-gone-gone, Lady Klyst! Come out, find your kin, land-boy loses, murth-friends win.”

  The ray withdrew slightly and the girl's face appeared—his girl. Timidly she pulled herself halfway through the gunport. The golden joy coursed through Pazel again. He could not be silent.

  “Klyst!”

  She looked up in horror. And vanished back into the wreck. The ray, however, turned with a furious roar. “Land-boy! Land-boy! Kill you! Kill you!”

  Pazel knew he was no match for a humiliated scarlet ray. He kicked off the broken gunwale and shot down the length of the Lythra's topdeck with the beast howling behind him. He would never reach the kelp beds: the wreck itself was his only hope. Under the broken foremast he swam, dodging a skeleton snagged on the pinrail. The foreward hatch was blocked with debris. He swam on desperately. The ray's fleshy horns brushed his toes.

  He jackknifed through the main hatch. The ray roared and stabbed with its tail, missing Pazel's head by an inch. Pazel seized at timbers, dragging himself farther inside as the ray tried to squeeze in after him. It succeeded, but it could not spread its wings in the cluttered wreck, and only managed to beat the algae, sand and debris into a whirlwind. Pazel choked (he was breathing it, after all) but pushed on, slamming a rotted compartment door behind him.

  He passed dark cabins, broken ladderways. One of the fanged fish that had so alarmed him before rushed out of the gloom. Heedless with longing, Pazel smacked it away.

  She was still there on the gun deck, her body glowing behind a mass of broken beams. She saw him and turned to flee.

  “Don't go!” he cried out, and his words froze her where she stood. Amazed, Pazel swam a little closer. “Come out, Klyst, if that's your name. Why are you so afraid of me?”

  She stepped out, hugging herself, literally shaking with fear.

  “You could be miles away by now, if I'm so frightening. Why did you stay? Please explain all this to me!”

  Her sharp teeth were chattering. She shook her head. “Can't go. Can't disobey. I love you.”

  “You love me! Why on earth? I mean … that's extremely … Why}”

  “You used ripestry. Humans shouldn't! Humans never could!”

  Pazel's Gift told him that ripestry was Murthish for “language.” But then he started. It was also telling him the word meant “magic.”

  “What! Are they the same thing, to sea-murths?”

  “They}” she said.

  “Ripestry and ri—” Pazel stopped. Even his Gift couldn't provide another word. It was true: language and magic were one notion to her. To speak was to enchant.

  “But for Rin's sake,” he said, “you were the one doing love-ripestry to me. Weren't you?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “But when you said my name you turned it back on me. And since I'd already touched you I … I—”

  She leaped forward and wrapped her strange arms around his legs. She pressed her face to his knees and wept—“Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!”

  Her tears glowed luminescent as they left her eyes, in the instant before the sea diluted them.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Land-boy! Land-boy! I love you!”

  Her charm had backfired: he was free, she was madly in love. He tried to make her stand up.

  “I'll release you,” he said. “Just tell me how.”

  “HOO-HOO-HOO!”

  “Klyst!” he said as gently as he could. “Please stop crying. We'll find a way out of this.”

  At once she made an effort to hold in her tears.

  “That's grand,” he said. “Now tell me, why did you give us water-breathing, and make us love you?”

  “Can't help it,” she said. “We have to drive you away.”

  “Well, that's a blary strange way to do it!”

  She shook her head. “It always works.”

  “But why not just talk to us?”

  “Because you're monsters,” she said. “Your people, I mean. Wherever you go the ripestry dies. And then so do we. Starved for ripestry, starved to death.”

  Her silver eyes stared into his, beseeching, and Pazel stared back without a word. The Volpeks were right, in a sense: the murths were dying out in the Quiet Sea. And if he understood her, mankind was the reason. Men dispelled magic; and her people could not live without it.

  “But you have ripestry,” she said at last, smiling. “You can stay! You can stay with me!”

  Darkness. She began to kiss his hands.

  “There are many men here,” he said.

  “Too many,” she said. “They've been coming for weeks, and more all the time. Always before, for centuries, men feared the murths and ghosts and spirit-tides, and hurried off. But these men are not afraid. There is an evil ripestry with them that breaks our spells. My father says we must abandon these gardens, where we have lived for ten thousand years—move south, away from the monsters. But our elders are too weak for such a journey. They'll certainly die.”

  “You don't have to go!” Pazel said. “I know what they want. And I promise you, Klyst, they'll leave as soon as they get it. They serve a mage called Arunis. He's the one with the bad ripestry. But all he wants is some Red Wolf.”

  The light returned; he saw her look of disbelief. “That thing? That old iron wolf?”

  “You know it!” he said.

  “Of course. It went down with this ship forty years ago, when my father was a boy. But the Red Wolf is … ugly, bad. Why would anyone care about it?”

  “I don't know. But believe me, Arunis won't leave without it. Will you take me to it, Klyst?”

  “Will you marry me?”

  What could he tell her? The truth? That except for a few moments under her spell he had never thought of marrying anyone, never longed in that way for anyone, except (in moments of lunacy or insight) for a land-girl named Thasha Isiq?

  Feeling rather a cad, he said, “I can't breathe water forever, now, can I?”

  She beamed at him. “You can if you're with me! A kiss on the hand, that's good for a whole day. You can stay as long as you like. The others will be getting air-thirst soon, of course.”

  “Air-thirst? What's air-thirst?”

  Klyst just looked at him. Then she crossed her eyes and made desperate motions with her mouth: gulp gulp gulp.

  “Drowning!” he cried. “They'll drown soon? We've got to find them! Oh, Neeps! Where are they, Klyst, where?”

  “Different places.”

  “Take me! Please, hurry!”

  Obedient as ever, she caught his wrist and tugged him out through the gunport. Her friend the scarlet ray was still circling the Lythra. Klyst gave a sharp cry and it swooped down on them like a thunderhead. As it passed overhead Klyst grabbed its wing just behind one eye, and she and Pazel were whisked away through the kelp at breakneck speed. Coral mountains whizzed by. The bathysphere flashed by like a golden apple. Then she let go of the ray and sank with Pazel toward a little trench in the seafloor.

  “Too late,” she said.

  The pair of boys from the bathysphere were in the trench, feet pointing skyward, dead. At the bottom of the trench was a bed of clams—monstrous clams; the smallest were as broad as dinner platters. Some yawned wide, pearls like goose eggs shining in their pale flesh. Two had snapped shut on human wrists.

  Klyst swam up to the nearest boy and bit him smartly on the foot. “Still warm,” she said, chewing.

  “Neeps!” shouted Pazel. “You've got to take me to Neeps! The other boy!”

  Off they went again, flashing by a staved-in yawl, an octopus gliding among blue anemones, an anchor with a broken fluke. Suddenly the ray turned
in a circle, halting.

  “Blood,” it said.

  “Human blood,” said Klyst, sniffing.

  Bakru! Spare him! thought Pazel. “Where is it, Klyst?”

  She swam in a circle, eyes shut and lips smacking oddly. She was tasting the sea.

  “Hurry!”

  Klyst stopped and looked upward. Pazel did the same. Halfway to the surface a body drifted, backlit by the sun.

  “Neeps!” Pazel raced upward, dazzled by the brightness above, fighting a sob that wanted to burst from his chest. He seized the body by the arm.

  It was a Volpek. Pazel turned the dead man over. The mercenary's throat had been slit. Blood still trickled from the wound.

  “Others, too,” said Klyst, pointing. Some yards away were three more Volpek bodies, sinking slowly. Among them, Pazel saw with a gasp, was the captain of the cargo ship. The water about him was clouded with blood.

  “Your people did this?” Pazel asked.

  “No!” said Klyst firmly. “We don't kill this way, with knives and mess. And we hide the bodies afterward. Humans fear most what they don't see.”

  Who had killed the Volpeks, then? Had someone attacked the cargo vessel? He glanced at the sunny disc of the surface overhead. What was happening up there?

  Then he started—Neeps was still missing. “Onward!” he begged Klyst. “While he can still breathe!”

  The ray bore them a little farther, to the mouth of a dark cave. Pazel caught a sickening glimpse of skulls and rib cages, and a well-fed eel. But no fresh bodies, and certainly no Neeps.

  “He's not here, Klyst!”

  The murth-girl looked surprised. “Vvsttrk always brings them here.”

  “Well, she's turned over a new leaf! Klyst, he's my best friend! Please, think! Aren't there other places you do … this sort of thing?”

  At best friend her face grew hard. “Neeps.” She said it the way one might say mumps or hives.

  “Listen, girl,” said Pazel, “if he dies I'll be very unhappy. With you. Forever.”

  The murth-girl's jaws worked. Then she called the ray back to her side, and together they shot off into the kelp.

  Two minutes later they were at the stern half of the Lythra. She took him to the orlop deck, through a shattered door and down two levels, to what might have been the ship's brig. Old prisoners' bones (and a few not so old) lay shackled to the walls. That was all.