The Champion went for him again, a smooth transition from stalking to leaping that caught Asmander by surprise. The old pirate had been waiting for it, though, rearing up onto his hind legs and then abruptly becoming human, trying to vault over the swift bulk of his enemy. He almost made it, too, but the high crest of the Lion’s back knocked him aside, sprawling him on the ground.
Asmander was aware of many eyes flicking towards him, wanting to know when he would intervene to save his companion. He wanted to – moment to moment he wanted to – but it was not his place. Venater would have cursed him for it.
Venater was up on one knee, breathing heavily under the yellow gaze of the Champion. He drew the greenstone of his meret up to his mouth and licked its edge as though seeking the taste of blood there. He stood up slowly, watching the Lion pace, weathering the fire of the Champion’s presence. He looked like a man waiting for execution.
Then the Champion was rushing down on him again, but three steps into his charge the Lion stumbled, his wounded foreleg folding unexpectedly. Venater was on him immediately, seeming for a moment to be grappling the creature, and then he had brought the dense weight of his blade down across the Lion’s back and ribs with a single solid stroke.
The Champion yowled in pain, knocking Venater flat with a blow of his paw but not following up, instead backing away, limping and favouring one side. For a second he was a warrior again, staring at Venater in bafflement: Why aren’t you dead yet, old man? Asmander knew that look well enough.
Then they had both Stepped back to their fighting shapes, but this time it was Venater who was advancing implacably, and the Champion fell back, one uncertain step at a time. The venom in the Lion’s veins was not enough to kill, but the great beast’s strength was being sapped moment to moment. He would need a quick victory over Venater, and yet, when courage was most needed, the man was failing.
Asmander found himself silently urging the Lion on, Champion to Champion, willing the man to stand and fight. What would I do, if I were he? Of course he would like to think that he would go on until the death. Was it really true though? Surely every man’s courage was a rope of uncertain length, hauled hand over hand out of clouded waters. Who knew how suddenly that rope’s end would whip up into the air?
Then the Lion Champion was a man again, standing impassively, staring at the black length of the dragon lizard before him. He closed his eyes, letting his axes fall, and then he had dropped to one knee – not submission so much as being unable to stand any longer. A current of anguish and despair murmured through the Lion raiders as they saw it.
Venater regarded him, bluish tongue flicking. He took another lethargic step forwards.
‘Back,’ Asmander told him. ‘Enough.’
A shudder of annoyance rippled down the lizard’s body.
A fistful of threats came to Asmander, invocation of the powers his clan had gained over the defeated pirate, the oaths of fealty that had bought him his life. In the end, though, all he said was, ‘No doubt you will enjoy your fill of Champion’s blood, old man, but not today. Your chance will come.’
Venater was abruptly human again, staring back at him. Asmander’s meaning was heard and understood. When he had won his name back from the First Son of Asman, there would be a settling of scores.
‘These things are known,’ he growled, and Asmander nodded.
The Lion raiders were retreating back up the ragged rocks on the bank. One of the Horse Society was dead, two injured but not in imminent danger. Venater moved his torn shoulder, wincing and feeling for the damage.
‘Let them see to it,’ Asmander advised. He thought the pirate would refuse, but then a tired expression came to Venater’s eyes and he nodded wearily.
A familiar pressure came to Asmander then, and he looked about to find Shyri still sitting at the water’s edge but in her human form now. This time she did not look away.
‘You would have killed him, of course, or let Venater kill him,’ he observed to her.
She shrugged. Seeing that the Horse had brought all their boats to shore and were cutting away the two ropes restricting the river, he abruptly sat down beside her.
‘How far has your mother sent you, Laughing One?’
‘What makes you think I am sent?’ Her stare was intrusive, like a prodding finger.
‘How far will you go, then? All the way to the cold?’
‘Wherever I wish, however far I care to.’
‘And will you follow me?’ he asked her.
Her eyes flared wide. ‘Longmouth, you flatter yourself,’ and she was suddenly up and stalking over to the boats, leaving behind only Asmander – and Venater’s faint laughter.
9
What surprised Maniye was how well she could run. For all her life she had been tethered to Akrit’s hall and to the scatter of mounds that was the village of the Winter Runners. At best she had gone as far as the treeline perhaps, or ventured between the fields and pens that spread out beyond the mounds. She had never known what it was like just to run, to give her paws free rein and let them tear up the miles.
The wolf inside her knew, though. It had been born to the wilds and, from the first time she had Stepped, those wilds had been planted in her like a yearning that grew and grew.
She had the best of both worlds. A true wolf would have felt the cold far more, but she had swallowed up three layers of wool and deer hide when she Stepped, and carried that extra warmth with her, husbanding her strength rather than spending it profligately on fighting the chill.
If she had been traversing the forest on two feet, with only the senses of a human girl to aid her, then she would have become lost very swiftly, gone in circles and never known it until her father’s people caught up with her. The wolf in her could not get lost. Her nose was the gateway to a world of a thousand thousand clues, where every tree was a wealth of information to navigate by. With each inhaled breath the world told her where north was, with the promise of snow borne on white wings. She knew instantly the paths her mute brothers the wolves used when they crossed the forest, and knew to avoid them. She knew where the boars had rooted, where the deer had run. Her nose marked where the owl had stooped and the sinuous track the marten made. She knew the grave of every mouse, the buried hoards of squirrels. Every moment told its story, and all those myriad stories joined together in her mind to weave a picture of countless threads, telling her exactly where she was and which way she must go.
She never ventured deep into the forest, but kept the edge of the trees at the periphery of her attention, hiding from view and yet cutting the shortest path. Sometimes she forgot the burden on her back that no natural wolf would bear. Sometimes, for short spaces, she even forgot what she was running from. The running had become an end in itself.
She surprised small animals, even birds. She killed a young deer, bursting out on it in a moment of mutual surprise and then lunging forwards, hooking her teeth into its haunches and tasting the sudden salt rush of blood. She brought it down in a furious struggle, clumsy and panicking at first, but then riding her instinct to rip at the kicking beast’s throat. Afterwards, her wolf jaws fed ravenously while her human mind commended her prey’s soul to its totem to be reborn anew, perhaps as a mute beast again, or perhaps as one of the Deer’s tribe.
As she ate, Hesprec Essen Skese slithered from her back and Stepped into his old human bones. She regarded him warily because, if he wanted to talk, she might have to join him in that shape, and she did not want to. The wolf was warmer than the girl might have been. The wolf was freer too.
He tore himself a little meat, in tiny scraps that he could swallow raw – certainly nothing that he might have needed to chew. What he ate would not have sated a stoat, and yet it seemed to be enough for him. Perhaps the serpent in him needed little sustenance, slim as it was.
After she was fed – and resisting the sudden urge to find somewhere to curl up – she whined at him urgently. He was squatting on his heels, watching her thoughtfully, appa
rently just as grateful as she not to resume their sparring of before. Now he Stepped once more, back to that little sliver of sliding shadow that must be the smallest snake he could become.
This time, taking his place in her pack, his cold ridged body climbed up her flank to get there. This did not seem as objectionable as she had expected and, once he was in place, his weight between her shoulder blades was almost familiar. Perhaps she would even have missed it, had he been left behind.
She followed her nose, in the end, and her sense of the sloping ground. She had travelled this way once before, many years ago, when the Horse had first established a trading post in Winter Runner lands and her father had taken a hunting party to go and impress them. She had been too young to Step back then, denied all these clues to help her find her way, but she had still possessed eyes and a mind sharp enough to remember. Now she could analyse those memories and know that she must scent out running water, for the Horse had made their camp on the banks of the Sand Pearl river. Even such meagre clues were enough to guide her to where she wanted to go.
When there was smoke on the air, she turned away from it. Since leaving the Winter Runners she had not seen anything that wore a human shape except the Snake priest, and the more she looked on him, the less sure she was that he was entirely human. Seeing him in daylight had been a shock, because he had hardly any more colour to him than he had under the moon. She had not seen him close up when her father had brought him in, and memory had smudged the edges of her recollection. Now she saw that his skin really was white, as though all the blood and colour had been drained from him, save where old tattoos crossed his sunken cheeks and high forehead, faded diamonds of orange and purple making a snakeskin trail that led across to his covered scalp. His eyes were almost colourless, the skin around them pinkish and unhealthy-looking. She had never seen eyes so wide and round before; they looked as though, should he ever be truly surprised by something, they would pop from their sockets entirely.
They had stopped to let her rest and to eat a little more of their dwindling provisions. Seeing her critical regard, he smiled thinly. ‘You must ssee few travellers here in the north. I cannot imagine why.’
She looked disdainful at that, especially as the Crown of the World was not north. North was the highlands and the mountains, the Bear and the cold. North was the Crystal Valley People of the stories, so beautiful that no traveller who saw them ever wished to return home. ‘We have the Horse,’ she pointed out. He looked quite different from the Horse people, though, and for a moment she felt very small when thinking on how far he must have walked to reach the lands of the Wolf.
And what a wasted journey, in that case. But, after all, if not for him, where would she herself be? Perhaps he had been sent by Wolf or Tiger or by some greater invisible power that had chosen to meddle in her life.
He was carefully adjusting the cloth about his head, pulling the strips tighter, but his pale eyes were smiling still. Rested and warm, she could hardly equate him with the desperate creature of that previous night, who had begged her to carry him.
‘You have a plan, of course,’ he observed, ‘for when you reach wherever you wish the Horse to take you?’
She did not rise to the bait. No, she had no plan – or rather the plan was just away, and any finer details would have to wait.
‘Why do you wrap your head?’ Always better to turn the questions back on him. ‘Have you hurt it?’
He gave her an amused look. ‘History and reverence.’
‘You have a lot of long words that say nothing.’ She put her hands on her hips, wondering if she should demand proper answers, or else refuse to carry him in the pack again.
He gave a croak of laughter. ‘Stone River’s daughter, you are a fierce huntress. Will you track down all my old man’s habits and tear out their poor throats?’ His words were still soft about the edges where his teeth should have shaped them, but he was working hard on compensating for the loss. ‘As Serpent dwells under the ground – under the ground everywhere – so we hide ourselves likewise. To go bare-headed under the sun where our god cannot would be disrespectful.’
‘If your Serpent is under this ground, he is frozen.’ She was not sure why exactly she wanted to dent his comfortable composure, but the urge was strong in her.
‘No doubt you are right.’ Her words glanced off him and left no wound, but they left him thoughtful nonetheless. ‘I am a long way from home and, though I know that he is with me, that he moves in the earth even here, sometimes it is hard . . .’ His next smile was touched with pain. ‘Perhaps we should be on our way?’
She followed the scent and sound of fresh water until she found one of the innumerable streams that laced the Crown of the World like filigree. Running alongside the water took her to what she guessed must be the Little Sand Pearl, a swift-flowing river still fierce and angry after its journey from the highlands before it joined its big sister. Her best judgement had taken her downstream, and now she was rewarded with a tangle of smoke from a score of fires, and the unmistakable sight of the Horse trading post.
Actually seeing it there, a testament to her impromptu navigation, gave her a sudden surge of hope. She was just a girl, a pup, a cub, and yet she had travelled for two days on fleet paws, and found herself arriving exactly at the target she had set. Which of her father’s hunters could have accomplished the same?
Almost all of them, came her own caustic response, but she shook it off, bounding along the Sand Pearl’s banks with fresh energy.
I will sleep under cover tonight, and in my human form, she told herself. Save for brief rests and the odd word with the old Serpent, she had held to the wolf’s form almost entirely. And we will get food and warmer clothes. For the air was just starting to fill with falling snow and she was starting to feel the chill through her pelt and the clothes inhered beneath it.
And Hesprec will make them take us away from here, she thought.
And then . . . and then . . . To get out from under the Wolf’s Shadow, that was enough. What choices there were she would make as a free woman and without her father’s heavy hand twisting her course.
The Horse Society post was not like anything else in the Crown of the World. They did not raise hills to build on: instead there was a wooden wall of stakes encircling their compound, with a gap opening on to the river and another, opposite, on to the land. Within, the Horse had built round houses of sticks that were set up on stilts high enough that, as a child, she had crawled under one.
Although the walls would plainly allow the Horse men to defend what they had, the effect of the whole was curiously meek and unimposing. Without a grand earthen mound, such as the least of the Wolf dwellings was set up on, the trading post did not dominate the landscape but seemed almost to hide in it. Despite all that heavy wood, and the work and time invested in the construction, the trading post had a curiously temporary air, as though the Horse might at any time simply pack it up and haul it elsewhere.
Outside the walls were a motley assortment of tents and the smoking remains of campfires. She remembered there being more when she had travelled here as a child but, with winter coming on, the itinerant traders of this land would be heading home, whether they had obtained what they sought or not.
By the time she had trotted closer, the snow was thickening and the air had grown cold enough that she wondered if even the swift Sand Pearl might see some ice. She walked between the tents cautiously, spotting almost nobody. The traders themselves would no doubt be hurrying to conclude their business within the palisade, and their wives and hearth-husbands had laced the tents shut against the weather.
Nobody stopped her from entering the trading post, although she drew plenty of looks as people satisfied themselves that she was Stepped, and not some bold little animal come in from the woods to steal a supper.
Although that may yet be necessary. She was aware that, no matter how much she had excelled so far, she would now be at the mercy of her companion. She had nothing to
barter – or nothing she was willing to barter – that might gain her anything from the traders of the Horse Society.
She slunk around the wall of the nearest propped-up house until she was out of the wind and the worst of the snow. Stepping into her true shape meant immediately feeling the bite of the cold, as her fur was stripped away.
Shivering a little, she placed her pack on the ground and prodded it with her foot until the snake reluctantly emerged. For a moment the little reptile just coiled in upon himself, writhing against the chill, but before he could grow sluggish, Hesprec Essen Skese Stepped out from its twisting loops and hugged himself, mouth twisted in a toothless grimace.
‘You’re glad we’re going to head off south now, aren’t you,’ Maniye told him grimly.
He managed to raise a smile, even then. ‘Ssave me from women who must always be right.’ He took a deep breath, and the following exhalation plumed on the air. ‘Let us seek out some dignitary of the Horse and petition him. At the least, let us hope they offer us the hospitality of a roof, even if it is just for as long as our words with them last.’
There were still a few people about despite the snow, and they quickly found a couple of Coyote traders heading back for their tents, satchels bulging with whatever the Horse had bartered to them. The Coyote were a familiar sight all over the Crown of the World, mocked as a tribe that would be Wolves if they only could. Still, Coyote himself was a clever trickster, and his people survived the winters and the Wolves’ disdain equally well.
Hesprec held out a hand to attract their attention, bringing it back vertically to his lips in an odd, ritual gesture that must have been a habit of his homeland. The two Coyote men stared at the mismatched pair and exchanged glances. Maniye was uncomfortably aware that they probably thought she was the old man’s thrall, or worse. Hunched in his borrowed sheepskin jacket, Hesprec asked them for directions without ever really speaking, his hands talking for him, and one of the traders singled out a hut with a jab of his finger.
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 11