House of the Wolf (Book Three of the Phoenix Legacy)

by Wren, M. K.

  Two dark shapes came between him and the sky.

  “Come on, you. No good giving us trouble now.”

  You. Why didn’t they call him by his name? He had a name now. He knew who he was, where he was, why he was here.

  The span of chain between his manacled hands rattled when he raised them for assistance, teeth clenched as the SSB guards pulled him out of the ’car. They weren’t unnecessarily rough, it was simply that the smallest movement, even breathing, even the hammering beat of his pulse, was painful. The SSB psychocontrollers had been given less than eleven hours and a man who admitted himself military commander of the Phoenix.

  And now Alexand sagged, doubled over in his guards’ support, and wondered if he could even stand upright.

  The wind was a battering roar; it evoked some new shape of fear in him when he thought he knew all its shapes. Yet he couldn’t feel it. He could feel the chill of the spring evening, but not that howling wind.

  “Can he stay on his feet?” He could barely hear that indifferent question over the wind roar.

  Alexand answered it. “Yes . . . I can. . . .”

  Rich—oh, Rich, help me. Reach out to me. . . .

  Rich had been here, looked out at this world from this place, looked out from within a body flayed with a different kind of pain, looked out at his own death without fear.

  The wind beat louder as he straightened, testing his balance, making sure he had both feet squarely under him.

  Rich, stay with me; let me see this, understand it, accept it, meet it, with your eyes.

  And the pride that’s my only heritage from my name.

  He wore the blue-and-silver uniform the Concord recognized as evidence of one identity. In the SSB DC, when he was ordered to put the uniform on, he didn’t recognize or understand it. He did now.

  But he would die as the Lord Alexand DeKoven Woolf.

  The helions were on, washing white the red reflections of sunset on the buildings, and the Plaza was a solid sea of humanity.

  Concord Day, and the Fesh and Bonds gathered to see their rulers in splendid panoply, gathered to see and cheer, and he wondered why they cheered.

  But the Fountain of Victory was stilled.

  It wasn’t Concord Day.

  And the wind he could only hear, bludgeoning his ears, wasn’t a wind.

  The crowd wasn’t cheering on this day. Another sound he couldn’t name; something pounding with brute ferocity. The crowd had become that equivocal entity he had always recognized as potential behind the cheers. He stood in a space of white solitude. Between him and that unkenned entity, a barrier of black shapes, golden-helmeted Directorate guards, a motionless line that, followed to its culmination, brought his eye to the lightless monolith of the execution stand.

  Rich, stay with me. . . .

  He took two steps and nearly fell; his aching nerves seemed incapable of conveying his commands from brain to muscle.

  I will not be carried to that stand. Rich was carried only because he had to be. I can walk. I will walk.

  I’m not a saint; all I have is pride.

  Pride on the one hand, Rich on the other, and Adrien as a presence realized without conscious thought behind every thought, Alexand walked, step by step.

  Rich had been afraid. Only now did he understand that. Rich had chosen the manner of his death, yet when he crossed this endless few meters, he was afraid.

  How could the space take so long to traverse?

  At first he tried to count his steps, but after six lost track. The physical act of making them took too much concentration, and the wind . . . no, the crowd. It was an aural centrifuge. He looked out through the barricade of guardsmen. Faces, unique, individual, yet in their open-mouthed, shrieking fury, they forfeited individuality and humanity to become mere fragments in a blurred tapestry.

  “It is the Brother!”

  That shard of sound caught at him. He stumbled, depending on his guards for support until he reestablished the nerve-muscle sequences that moved his body forward.

  “The Brother! It is the Brother! The Brother of the Lamb!”

  One face loomed out of the tapestry. An old man robed in the green and brown of a Selasid Bond, stretching forward, crying out, while the guardsmen pushed him back.

  “It is the Brother!”

  Alexand turned away.

  Impossible. Hallucinating. He was hallucinating.

  Why did they make this distance so long? Why stretch it when he was so near the end of his strength and will?

  “The Brother! The Brother! The Brother!”

  Bruno Hawkwood used one of the side entrances into the Hall of the Directorate, but the hood of his cloak was back, and he wore no face-screen. He’d have used the front entrance if it weren’t closed, and the Conpol officers and Directorate guards he encountered didn’t concern him.

  Orin Selasis would pay any price for Hawkwood’s head, but he didn’t dare seek assistance from the Concord. The last thing he wanted was for Hawkwood to fall into Concord hands. Master Ranes would be charged with procuring his head. He would fail. Like his Lord, he never truly understood human nature, only human weaknesses. Ranes wouldn’t look for Hawkwood here any more than Selasis would.

  There was only one guardsman at the entrance, and one inside at the check station. Guard ranks in the Hall had been stripped to fill those outside in the Plaza. Hawkwood studied the screens behind the station desk; the prisoner was being escorted to the execution stand. The volume on the speakers was low, yet something in the quality of that mass roar aroused an ambiguous uncertainty.

  Had he read the Signs correctly?

  In two hours of alpha meditation, the alignments of the metagraph had yielded the same results thrice times three. Adrien Eliseer Woolf was the Prime Sign. As long as she lived, the Lord Alexand could not die. That was the first link of predication.

  The images were wavering. He blinked to clear his focus and reminded himself to make allowances for the poison. It would slow his reflexes.

  “Evening, Master Hawkwood.” The station guard greeted him with wary courtesy. “Uh . . . your business here, sirra?” Standard procedure. Still, he seemed reluctant to pry into Bruno Hawkwood’s affairs even so circumspectly.

  Hawkwood said for him and the recorders, “I have an important message to deliver to the Lord Selasis.”

  The guardsman nodded and waved him to the position marked on the floor in front of the metal detector.

  “I’ll have to run you through the scanner, sirra. Any metal on you?”

  Hawkwood opened his cloak and let him see the Wheel of Destiny medallion.

  “This. And my wedding ring.”

  “Um-huh. Right.” He checked a screen on the desk in front of him. “You’re clear, sirra. Thank you.”

  The green light went on, and the shimmer of the shock screen barricade disappeared. Hawkwood stepped onto a pedway that carried him toward the center of the Hall.

  Perhaps he should wait until the execution resolved itself. That was a key link in the chain of occurrence, one that read dimly. He was only sure that it wouldn’t play itself out as the Concord, and Orin Selasis, expected it to.

  Still, he wasn’t a Reader. Perhaps he should—

  No. He’d calculated the time and the amount of poison closely. He couldn’t change his plans; this was now Written. Under his cloak, his hand went to his waist and the crucifix of the Dagger of Will.

  This was Written.

  “The Brother! The Brother! The Brother!”

  Hallucination. That wasn’t even the same voice, wasn’t even one voice. The black barricade ahead sagged, then with a fusillade of laser flashes and anguished cries, restored itself.

  The process of moving his body within the strictures of pain and pummeling sound occupied his
mind totally, yet he must free part of it to understand this phenomenon.

  The old man. Alexand focused in near memory on that one face. He knew it; he’d seen it before.

  “The Brother! It is the Brother—the Brother—Brother—Brother—”

  New voices. More voices.

  Izak. There was the name. Izak, Elder Shepherd of the Selasis Estate Compound B.

  Izak had looked at the man named by the Concord and uniformed as Commander Alex Ransom of the Phoenix, and had recognized the Brother. Impossible. The uniform alone would blind Izak to the face of the man in it.

  It is the Brother.

  The emphasis on the verb. Verification of something doubted, but something he’d been led to expect. Izak had been told that Alex Ransom was the Brother.

  No one outside the Phoenix could tell him that. No one except—

  Orin Selasis. Ussher knew.

  The steps to the execution stand. Alexand had to devote his full attention to them and to containing the surge of nausea.

  Seven steps. He remembered that; Rich remembered it. Rich remembered the figure standing at the top of the steps dressed in mourning black, face-screened, motionless, present as a testament of faith.

  Alexand looked up and saw the figure there, looking down at him, and at first it didn’t seem unreasonable. But this man wore the black helmet of the SSB.

  The stairs. If they’d give him a little time, he could manage them, and if he could explain to the guard on his right that holding that arm only made it harder.

  Rich, stay with me. I’ve made it this far. . . .

  That battering wind of sound. He could feel it now. The stand vibrated with it; he felt it through the soles of his boots, and there was terror in it. He was panting; not enough air. Not enough air in this huge Plaza for their rage and for him.

  And was it not a righteous rage?

  Overhead in hovering ’cars, peering out from alcoves and windows, PubliCom vidicams were recording the execution of justice for all the Concord, for history.

  A righteous rage, and he understood it.

  “The Brother! Brother! Brother! Brother! Brother of the Lamb! The Lamb! Lamb! Lamb! Lamb!”

  That he didn’t understand.

  Or perhaps he only feared it more.

  He paused when he mastered the last step, and his escort allowed him that. Perhaps they needed the pause, too, to try to make sense of what was happening in this crowd.

  The sky was a glory of pink and scarlet, and from this level, the whole of the vast tapestry of beings filling the Plaza was visible, dazzling under the helions. Along the promenades were lines of Directorate guards, gold helmets flashing, and on the roofs above them, white-helmeted Conpol squads manned X4 laser cannons. The execution stand was lined on three sides with more black uniforms. SSB. He noted that as an anomaly. Below the stand, stretching all the way across it, was a close-spaced rank with helmets of gold. At the top of the tiers of steps, guarding the entrance to the Hall, was a Conpol rank armed with shoulder-mount X3s. Above them in the clefts of the Hall, more X4 squads were posted, and above the buildings, black Conpol aircars hovered.

  The Concord was ready.

  But for what? Who had foreseen the metamorphosis taking place in this crowd now?

  The roar was stunning, mounting incredibly beyond the limits of tolerance, but it was no longer a shapeless sound that might be mistaken for a storm howl.

  “The Brother! The Brother! The Brother! The Brother!”

  It beat back and forth across the expanse of the Plaza, smashed into the faces of the buildings, recoiled, swept back to strike another wall, recoiled again.

  This righteous rage belonged to the Bonds, rage against the man they called holy because he was the brother of a saint; the man who betrayed them by being someone else, by being a man arrayed in uniform, a man who commanded war and death, and a man who tried to kill the noblest of the noble, the strong and gentle father-leader of the Concord.

  The tapestry was shimmering like a desert mirage; the hammering clamor seemed to set the air in motion. Great masses of double hues were coalescing, Bonds in their House tabards, consolidating into solid entities within the larger entity. And as those took shape, the excluded particles, the Fesh, shifted toward the periphery of the mass, making room for the expanding bicolored aggregations creeping amoeba-like toward the execution stand.

  “Oh, ’Zion, we’re down for it now!”

  The voice was less than half a meter away or he wouldn’t have heard it. One of the SSB escort.

  Alexand turned, trying to keep his eyes in focus as he looked toward the center of the stand. The faceless man in the red uniform waited there by the stabile laser.

  Rich, I’m afraid. Where did you find that light that was never quenched until death put it out?

  Was I not proud, too, my brother? Did I not know how many people depended on my courage, then and for the future?

  You were one of them.

  Alexand took the first step toward the executioner.

  This was Written.

  Bruno Hawkwood looked down into the Plaza from a second-level windowall where a place was made for him by the Fesh crowding for a view without his asking it by word or gesture.

  The brute volume of the sound from that vast multitude was audible even behind glass ten centimeters thick. It was a sound to inspire fear, and he felt it around him, passing like an electric charge from one person to the next.

  It was happening, the turn of Destiny the Concord and Orin Selasis hadn’t foreseen.

  Yet something in that reading sounded a dissonance.

  Weaver of Now, let me see

  The warp of then since past,

  The woof of then to be.

  The scene shifted out of focus, and that served as a reminder. He counted out ten beats of his heart, gauging the intervals. Time enough, but not time enough to answer questions already answered.

  Two narrow halls took him back to the central well and the lifts. He’d made a brief detour to seek that vantage point at the windowalls and, once away from them, found himself virtually alone. When he reached the lifts, he floated up one level, then traversed a short arc of the well and turned into a broad hallway of white marble, as solemnly proportioned as a cathedron nave. It was fifty meters long and ended at the great history-carved doors of the Chamber of the Directorate.

  A silent place now; he could hear the roar of the mob outside as a malevolent murmur. Normally, there would be guardsmen at the lifts and at least four at the Chamber doors where only one occupied the check station; he was apparently immersed in the screens behind him.

  The sixty fluted columns ranked along the hall seemed delicate, even airy, in proportion to the height of the ceiling, yet they were two meters thick at the base. Hawkwood walked among them in dwarfed silence as he might in a forest. But he wasn’t entirely alone.

  Behind one of the columns, ahead of him and to his right, someone was hiding. He heard soft footsteps, glimpsed something dark disappearing behind the column.

  Perhaps he had underestimated Master Ranes.

  His pace didn’t falter, but he veered closer to the column as he proceeded. If someone were waiting in ambush for him, he would probably delay until Hawkwood passed and had his back to him. Hawkwood let the regular beat of his footfalls serve as reassurance until he reached the column.

  Then he lunged around the near side, and in a few quick, precise movements had the potential assailant pinned against the fluted marble, his hand at the throat in a grip that with a slight increase in pressure could be lethal.

  Hawkwood also had the muzzle of an X2 pressed against his own chest at the level of his heart.

  Yet he loosened the grip on the throat that might have provided a bargaining lever with the laser. The woman caught in hi
s counterambuscade looked at him with a fearless, unwavering gaze that bespoke deadly intent, but she hadn’t come here to kill Bruno Hawkwood.

  He stepped back, hands falling to his sides, and bowed.

  The Lady Adrien Eliseer Woolf.

  The Prime Sign.

  Now he could be sure.

  Alexand took the first step toward the executioner.

  Had they forgotten the drum roll?

  Official murder needs ceremony to make justice of it.

  No doubt they hadn’t forgotten, but even on ampspeakers it was too frail a sound to assert its presence in this battering torrent.

  The face of the Shepherd, Izak, flashed in and out behind the rampart of guards as he flailed through the crowd, staying abreast of Alexand in his long, last walk. When Izak saw Alexand looking down at him, he flung himself at the living barricade, arms outstretched, hands reaching out, palms up.

  “My lord! Oh, my lord . . . my lord . . .”

  Alexand couldn’t hear the words, but he recognized the shape of them on the old man’s lips before he disappeared, thrust back into the tumultuous human currents.

  The words, the hands reaching out, not in angry fists, but in open-palmed appeal, and the grief written in that ancient, skeletal face, stopped Alexand in mid-step.

  “Izak! The God help me—Izak!”

  Rough hands pulled at him, impelling him forward, toward the executioner.

  “Come on! No help for you out there!”

  He fought for balance, staggering with the impact of realization. The guard was wrong; he was only stating negatively what he feared.

  There was help for him out there.

  He had misjudged the timbre of the voices when the Bonds took up the name of the Brother. He’d thought it anger, thought they believed themselves betrayed by their holy man.

  Had he learned nothing about them in all these years? The judgments of the Concord were as incomprehensible to them as if they were spoken in an unknown tongue. These Bonds were calling out the name of the Brother in resounding shock and grief, and their rage wasn’t for him, but for those who brought him here to kill him.