“And…well, even a foal is much larger than a human baby,” I continued. “What do you think happens when the child is born? He kicks his way out of his mother’s womb and kills her in the process. There’re parasites, nothing less than parasites who are dependent upon humanity to survive and prolong their race. They claim to be wise, they claim to see the future, but really…they’re just parasites.”
I didn’t add that I’d witnessed a centaur birth myself, in a vain attempt to save the life of the mother. We had four healers and a dozen generalists, enough magic to reshape a city, and it hadn’t been enough to heal the poor girl. One of the other Guardians had snapped and vaporised the child with a burst of magic; none of us, even me, had moved to stop him. A girl might find a centaur to be the height of raw sexual attraction; a guy tended to find them disgusting. No centaur in his right mind would go anywhere near a large town.
“But…there was a girl who changed herself into a centaur,” Aylia said. “What about her?”
“Humans are stupid sometimes,” I said. I’d heard the whole story years ago. “She wanted to run with them, not to be one of their…wives. So yes, she managed to get a really top-class witch to run a series of transformations on her to allow her to become a centaur, with a horse’s ass where her legs should have been. She was quite attractive, I was told…and anyway, she gambolled into the woods, expecting to be greeted by her new people. They tore her apart.”
Aylia stared at me. “But why?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I think perhaps they considered her an abomination.”
I looked up as a shadow fell over us. A creature the size of a small aircraft was flying northwards towards Old Faithful. I had wondered if it had been a dragon, but it was something else, more like a flying serpent than a dragon. It didn’t have the same awe-inspiring immensity of a dragon, but something else, an aura that suggested trouble. The dragons didn’t really care – or so we thought – about what went on around them in our world. This creature, whatever it was, was involved. I snapped a handful of pictures with my digital camera and stored them for later analysis. The Circle would be glad to have them.
The path twisted and suddenly revealed a bridge, crossing a rocky gorge. I put out my hand to stop Aylia from stepping onto the bridge and examined it thoughtfully. It looked as if it had been there for an eternity – it was covered with moss and other plants – but I could see faith teeth marks on the stone. I looked up and down the gorge and saw no other way to cross. I might have been able to scramble across, but Aylia wouldn’t have been able to make it…and even so, we would still have to reckon with the owner.
Aylia blinked as she saw me opening my wallet. “We have to pay to cross?”
“It could cost you your life,” I said, pulling out a pair of gold coins. The owner was already coming into view. He had been hiding below the bridge. Aylia let out a gasp as the troll seemed to grow larger, his ugly green face turning to look down at the pair of us. I could have shot the creature easily, but what would have been the point? I didn’t need to kill him. “Ho, troll; may we use your bridge?”
The troll opened his mouth and we smelt his breath. If it wasn't banned under the Geneva Convention, I want to know why not. Trolls eat anything, up to and very definitely including humans, and have absolutely no sense of hygiene. I don’t know why that surprised me. They didn’t suffer from tooth decay or bellyaches. This one looked as if he had been posing as a rock before he'd woken up, hibernating down in the cold water. He was nothing like the troll I’d seen in Norway.
“One of you may cross and the other may cross into me,” the troll boomed. It was loud enough to shake the bridge, although I doubted it would collapse that easily. The trolls did good work. “Or you may riddle, or pay me…”
I smiled. I could have told the troll, quite easily, that our much fatter brother and sister were just behind us – trolls have been falling for that one since time out of mind; they’re really not very clever creatures – but it would have been cruel. I could also have manifested an image of a goat – trolls are terrified of goats – but why bother?
“I have a gold coin here,” I said. I held it up so that it glittered under the sunlight. The troll’s eyes followed it as a human boy’s eyes would follow a pretty girl. “I want to buy passage for us both across the river and into the werewolf lands.”
“Agreed,” the troll said. It held out a hand that looked more like a concrete shovel. I took the coin and placed it into his hand. It lifted its hand to its mouth, tasted the coin, and finally swallowed it. “You may cross my bridge.”
I took Aylia’s hand – my other was on my gun, just in case – and stepped onto the bridge. It felt surprisingly stable, despite its apparent age, and I relaxed slightly as the troll dropped out of sight below the water. Bridge trolls normally luck near the bridges they build and charge customers for their passage, or treat them as food. No one knows how their biology actually works, or how they mate; the only time we’ve seen bridge trolls roaming the land is when they’re looking for a new place to build a bridge. I glanced into the water as we reached the midpoint, but saw nothing. The troll was probably halfway back to sleep.
“My god,” Aylia said. She was shaking, probably with delayed shock. “I never…I never even knew!”
“No,” I said. “If we had stepped onto the bridge, the troll would have felt compelled to eat us. They are not nice creatures. They may be harmless if you pay them, but otherwise…we would have had to kill it to save ourselves.”
The magic was stronger on the other side of the bridge, with hints of something raw and…animal in the air. I suppressed an instinctive desire to run – I had the feeling that it would be useless – and opened up my own senses. The magic seemed to be in the air itself, but I was sure that I could sense…creatures moving out in the woods. Perhaps they were the hive-mind spiders – they’re not poisonous, individually, but as a group they’re lethal – or perhaps they were something else, maybe even the werewolves themselves. Strange sounds echoed out of the woods, some chilling the very core of my being, but I forced myself to carry on. Aylia hadn’t let go of my hand. I think that she was scared, but she showed no sign of it. She was a very brave girl.
I checked the guiding star and allowed it to pull us onwards as the path branched into two. One seemed to lead onwards into the woods, but the other seemed a sideline, leading down towards a valley. I had lost all sense of the area. We could be lost with miles upon miles between us and the edge of the wood. The magic had warped the whole area again, almost like Faerie. The thought reminded me that there was no Faerie Mound in Yellowstone, although no one knew why. It was a natural place for a Faerie outpost. Perhaps they had made a deal with the other supernatural creatures, I wondered, or perhaps they just couldn’t be bothered. Who knew?
Something heavy crashed through the woods and landed right in front of us. Before I could react, another crashed onto the path, and then another. The stream of massive wolves, ranging from around the size of a German Shepherd to the size of a large car, seemed endless. Their eyes were disturbingly human, but they were looking at us as if we were nothing more than a snack. I watched the leader, refusing to show any trace of fear, until finally he nodded and reared back. As I watched, he shifted back to human form, followed rapidly by his pack.
“Humans,” he said, as soon as he could talk properly. In wolf form, he could talk to his pack, but not to humans, or other creatures. “Why have you come to our lands?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
All human societies have passed through this primitive phase, and to this day a large proportion of mankind have no written law. Every tribe has its own manners and customs; customary, law, as the jurists say. It has social habits, and that suffices to maintain cordial relations between the inhabitants of the village, the members of the tribe or community. Even amongst ourselves — the “civilized” nations — when we leave large towns, and go into the country, we see that there the mutual relations
of the inhabitants are still regulated according to ancient and generally accepted customs, and not according to the written law of the legislators.
-Peter Kropotkin
“We have come to speak to Davan,” I said, keeping my voice as calm as possible. I had protections, and I had woven a few around Aylia, but none that would stand up to a concentrated attack. Some of the werewolves had magic of their own – I could feel it trying to burst free – and others were little more than beasts. “Please will you take us to him?”
The tension in the air grew stronger. I didn’t dare look away from the leader and he seemed to be staring back at me. He was naked, yet covered in hair, everywhere. I knew that the rest of the clan would be the same. Werewolves cared little for clothes when they were with their clan; they didn’t have the same taboos we had. They were all covered in hair.
“Davan may not want to talk to you,” the leader said, finally. I had the impression that it was harder for him to form words than I had expected, as if he was still partly in wolf form. “Why should Davan speak to you?”
“We come because of Felincia,” I said, throwing the name into the air with a silent prayer. The werewolves reacted at once, shifting around me uncomfortably. They might have been angry, or impressed, or merely already aware of her death. “We need to talk to her father.”
There was a long chilling pause. “You will follow me,” the leader said, finally. “Do not attempt to run or we will eat you.”
He turned and walked away, down the path. I shrugged and followed him, still holding Aylia’s hand. There was no point in trying to run. We couldn’t have outrun them and there was too much magic in the air to risk teleporting away, even if we had no other choice. The other werewolves fell into position around us, barely watching us, although I knew that they were aware of our every move. I looked from werewolf to werewolf; the girls reminded me of Felincia, even though they were naked and somehow more feral. The boys might have been far more dangerous. Some of them might well be considering a challenge. The presence of a new male would upset the status quo.
I wondered where they all came from. Some of them had been trapped in Faerie until the exodus back to our world. Others would have been people with werewolf DNA, unaware of their heritage until the magic returned and they found themselves turning wolf. The remainder would have been born to the clan after magic returned. The made werewolves, those who had been bitten by other werewolves and had survived the experience, would be living on the outside of the woods, if at all. They only turned into wolves during the full moon.
Aylia gave me a nervous look and I winked at her, trying to make her feel a little safer, even though it would have been a lie. Humans might have handcuffed or tied their prisoners, the werewolves were offering a quiet insult by just allowing us to walk behind them, knowing that we couldn’t fight the whole pack. There wouldn’t be a full moon for another couple of weeks and so they should be rational – born werewolves never fully lost their intelligence, but they were pushed by rage and hatred during the full moon – but they would be rational by their standards. The werewolves who had been born human would understand us, I hoped, but those who had lived in Faerie were from another time. They might demand all manner of things in return for their cooperation. They might also take my silver daggers as a challenge to a duel.
The werewolf village rose up in front of us and I studied it with interest. I had expected a primitive village, but it was surprisingly clean and modern, although it seemed to lack any traces of electric power. A handful of werewolf pups – each one cute as hell and far more dangerous – were running around like wild dogs, watched by a pair of older pre-teen girls. Werewolf society considers child-rearing to be a communal activity and every young werewolf had dozens of mothers and fathers. They had, in some ways, a communist society, but I doubted that they could develop it on a much larger scale. When a clan got too large, it tended to split into two clans and separate. Yellowstone was large enough for hundreds of clans.
“Wait here,” the leader said finally. We were standing right in the centre of the village. Dozens of werewolves were staring at us, wondering just what we were doing visiting them. Only a handful of pure humans had ever entered a werewolf village and returned to tell the tale. If we didn’t impress them, they might try to eat us, or turn us. The werewolves were always looking for new worthy clansmen.
Aylia looked up at me. “Why are we waiting?”
“They want to put us in our place,” I muttered back.
“That is not actually true,” a new voice said. “They merely wished to ensure that I held any discussions in the full glare of publicity, as it were.”
The pack leader, the Alpha Male, was an impressive sight. He was young – I would have placed him at thirty myself, although magic could make apparent ages deceptive – and very strong, and hairy, of course. His choice of words suggested that he had been born human, although with werewolf DNA, and I was surprised to find him leading the clan. It was more normal for the Alpha Male to be one of the werewolves who had been trapped in Faerie. They knew all the tricks.
“I understand,” I said. “I apologise for any offence.”
“Oh, none taken,” the Alpha Male said. He waved a hand at the grass-covered ground, inviting us to sit. “I am Davan, Alpha Male of this clan, and this is my wife.” I nodded politely at the silver wolf sitting beside him. His wife hadn’t bothered to return to her human form and I wondered if that was because of her origins. “Why have you come amongst us?”
It was politely phased, but it was more than a request. Werewolves don’t bother to waste time with polite inanities or enquiries after each other’s health. They tend more towards the simple and direct negotiation tactic, which tends to leave people feeling more than a little bruised afterwards. They won’t ever try to sweeten the pill or worry about another’s feelings. It’s not the way they work. If they fought a war with someone and won, there would be no attempt to save their enemy’s face. It was one of the reasons why werewolves were so popular among the Special Forces. They had the right mindset to succeed.
There was also little point in trying to lie. The werewolves had the sharpest sense of smell in the world. They would know pretty much everything about my emotional state from my scent, and Aylia’s as well; they would quite literally sniff out a lie.
“I am Guardian Glass, of the Guardians, working under the authority of the United States Government,” I said. I didn’t bother trying to be grand about it. Davan would probably respect the government, even if he didn’t like it. I dread to imagine what some people would have said about the werewolf village. Kids running around, barely supervised? “A child was kidnapped from a house a week ago and your daughter was murdered trying to prevent the kidnapping.”
Davan didn’t look surprised. I had the feeling that he already knew that Felincia was dead, although I didn’t know how. It could be as simple as a television set in one of the small huts, or maybe he’d heard from one of the made werewolves on the outskirts of the area. There were whole towns populated by made werewolves and little else.
“I will mourn my daughter in my own time,” he said, finally. I thought detected an undercurrent of grief, even through his flat tones, but it was hard to be sure. A werewolf would probably have picked up much more from him. “I wish that she had chosen to remain here, but…she was always one to pick her own path. I wished her well and let her go.”
He put one arm around his wife and held her close. “What do you wish to know from us?”
“We do not know how the kidnapping was accomplished,” I explained. I wanted to explore the issue carefully, but it wouldn’t be easy. “Can I ask you questions about her?”
“You may,” Davan said, finally. “I ask only that her murderer is handed over to us for judgement.”
I understood what he was offering me, but I hesitated. He would answer all the questions, even the embarrassing ones, but he would insist on me keeping my side of the bargain. There were few
secrets in a village like this one, but he might want to keep what privacy he had left. The trade was sincere, but could I keep my side?
“If I can hand him over to you,” I said, finally, “I will.” I remembered the sorceress who had killed Maxwell and scowled. “It may not be possible to take the murderer alive.”
“The Guardians are always faithful in their dealings with us,” Davan said, again. A new rustle spread through the assembled werewolves. “I will accept your word.”
“Thank you,” I said. I carefully didn’t look at Aylia. “How did your daughter enter Vincent Faye’s service?”
“Felincia was always the one who was most attuned to the human world,” Davan said. “She was born before the magic returned and never grew to love this place, or some of the other werewolves. Her discontent grew when some male werewolves accepted service to the Army or to other American services, but she had no such outlet for her own frustrations. Eventually, she heard that one of Faye’s subordinates was hunting for werewolves to join his service, and so…she decided to leave.”
Guardian Glass Page 25