The Wolves Of War

by Greg Curtis

  Perhaps the hardest thing though wasn't the walking or the cold. It wasn’t the weight of the straps as they cut into his shoulders. It wasn’t even the ever present threat of snow. No, it was his emotions. His entire life it seemed, had been reduced to a pack on his shoulders and a coin purse tied to his waist. He had no thought as to what awaited him in whatever town or city he finally settled in. Briagh felt weighed down by feelings of failure and uncertainty.

  How could it have come to this?

  Briagh had no answer to that. And as he met up with others along the way, he knew they had no answer either. Mostly people walked in silence, their faces downcast. And in the evenings when they gathered together in larger groups around the fires, there was more silence. More gloom. Even after three days on the road it was the same. There was no cheer.

  “You think she's gone?” asked Endria, the barmaid who had joined him on the trail that morning. She'd set off with him when they'd left the shelter of the camp, and stayed with him ever since. Others had fallen back. A few had marched ahead of them. But she had matched him step for step. Briagh wasn't completely sure why.

  He suspected it was mostly because she was young and she felt alone. She hadn't been able to find her family after the attack. The house had been burnt down and she feared they had been killed while she had been hiding in the alehouse with so many others as the wolves had prowled the street. He guessed she was trying to deal with her fear. And with her guilt for having left the city without finding them.

  Briagh could have told her she had no need for guilt. She had stayed as long as she could. Now she was simply looking for some sort of companionship. Anyone who could drive away the fear and guilt for a time.

  By way of answer Briagh shrugged. He knew who she meant of course. There was only one woman anyone cared about – the wolf mother. And they all hoped she was dead. But he had no answers.

  “And where did she get all those wolves?”

  Briagh shrugged again. He'd been doing a lot of that this day. She kept asking the same questions over and over again, and he still had no answers. Sooner or later she'd stop. At least he hoped so. Though he couldn't really blame her he supposed. She was young and scared and alone. Frightened she would never see her family again. As much as she kept bothering him he had to keep remembering that. For the next month he just had to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, and keeping his coat wrapped tight. But at least it was warmer in the north.

  “It's got to be some dark wizardry,” Endria continued, heedless of the fact that he wasn’t really responding. Maybe she liked listening to the sound of her own voice? “The criers were talking about the wildred. Saying that they were about.”

  She was right in part Briagh thought. The wolf mother, whatever else she was, had some form of magic. Druidic some would call it. Some way to call and control the creatures of the wild. But that didn't mean it was dark. Many people had magical gifts. Few were gifted – or cursed as he sometimes thought he was – as morphs like him. But the touch with animals and plants was common. Her gift was more powerful. She could control the wolves. But being able to do so didn’t make the ability necessarily dark. It wasn't like necromancy or demonancy where the ability was in fact a curse and could only lead to terrible outcomes. Rather it was the woman's mind that was dark. She was mad. As mad perhaps as the king, though in a much more savage way. He had seen her. Heard her. And he had recognised the grip that insanity held on her.

  Nor did he think it was the wildred's doing. He had heard the same rumours as everyone else. But the wildred lived in the various wastes and wildlands throughout Abylon. They weren't found in the cities. It was hard to see how they could be involved.

  But Briagh said nothing and carried on walking. Maybe it was wrong to ignore his companion as he did? Especially when she was young and scared. But she had been asking the same questions all morning and he was sick of answering them the same way again and again. Besides; he had his own problems to deal with – something that seemed to have completely eluded her.

  A growl suddenly split the air and Briagh forgot everything else.

  He looked up the road ahead, trying to pinpoint where the sound had come from. But he could see nothing. This part of the road was lined with tall straight trees – pines that someone had pruned so that they grew straight and could one day be cut down for timber – and they obscured most of the view to the sides. About two hundred paces ahead he could see more people marching. And though he couldn’t make out much about them he was fairly certain they hadn't made the sound and didn’t have a dog with them. Not when they too were all looking around like him, looking for whoever or whatever had growled.

  Suddenly the group ahead broke apart and ran for the trees on either side of the road, and desperately started climbing them. It was then he realised the truth. They were under attack! By more wolves.

  “To the trees!” Briagh yelled to Endria even as he took to his heels. And when she didn't move quickly enough, he pushed her as hard as he could in the right direction.

  “What –?”

  “Wolves can't climb trees!” He yelled at her and finally got her running. And by the time they'd made the trees she was at least alert enough to start climbing.

  Climbing the trees proved remarkably easy, as those who had pruned them had left enough low hanging branch stumps behind for them to grip onto. Between that and their fear they were soon both twenty feet above the ground, looking down at the road from their trees, trying to spot the wolves. They couldn't see them, though they could definitely hear them. The wolves were growling furiously; occasionally they howled at the sky as they hunted.

  Battle hadn't yet been met. Obviously the tree climbing tactic had proven effective, which was why he could hear the wolves growling but nothing more. But that still left them with a problem of what to do next. Until the wolves left they were stuck. He didn't have a bow with him. Though truthfully it wouldn't have helped much if he had. He hadn't used one since he was a child. There was simply no call for them in the towns and cities. And he certainly didn't have a rifle.

  “Can you see anything?” Endria asked, her face bone white under her dark, curly hair.

  Briagh just shook his head, his expression grim as he trained his eyes on the road. He couldn't see a damned thing. But he could hear the growling getting closer. It sounded big too. More like the sound a dire wolf would make than a normal wolf. And all he could think was that the wolf mother had survived and was hunting them once more. He couldn't hear her crazed laughter. But he couldn't explain what was happening any other way.

  Then again, maybe that was just his fear talking. His heart was racing, his palms sweaty and his mouth bone dry. It had been bad during the actual attack in the city. But then he had been locked away in his home behind sturdy walls. Here he was out in the open and he felt vulnerable.

  Finally, a wolf trotted into sight and his heart almost stopped beating.

  “Crap!” It was worse than he'd thought. The damned thing was white. It blended perfectly with the snow, making it hard to see, but he could still see it was a dire wolf. The size of a pony with wild, ragged fur, it could be nothing else.

  Now they were being hunted by a dire wolf! He almost couldn't believe that as he saw the beast coming toward them. Closer up he could see smudges of blood around the creature's snout, and realised that it had already hunted and caught others. Somehow Briagh doubted that whoever it had attacked had survived.

  Still, the basics held true. He hoped. The wolf couldn't climb. They would be safe up here. At least that was what he kept telling himself. It was just so hard to believe it when the beast was so big and so close. It was even harder when the wolf spotted them and started howling.

  Endria screamed in terror. Though it was pointless and probably called the wolf to them, Briagh couldn't blame her for it. He was terrified as well. And yet once his heart had stopped thundering as badly as it had, he found himself with a new and surprising question deman
ding an answer. Could he take it? Because despite his fear and the sounds that he had first thought had come from a whole pack, there was only one of them. Was it madness making him wonder that? Or was it anger? Because as the beast reached the tree's base and started searching for a way up, he certainly felt anger. Hatred too.

  Then it started clawing and biting at the tree and the fear returned. It was so big and powerful and the entire tree shook with its every attack. For a moment he worried that he might actually fall out of the tree, and his fingers turned white as he gripped to the branches for dear life. It didn't help any that Endria kept screaming.

  Bark flew off the tree trunk as it clawed and bit its way deep into the wood, and he began to worry that the beast could actually chop it down. Certainly the splinters of yellow timber he could see being torn out of the heart of the tree did not fill him with confidence. And it was then that he realised he had to act. The time for running and hiding had passed. He had to kill this thing. And by all the gods did he want to! He hated it as he had never hated anything before in his life. Maybe that was the Bloody God talking? The Lord of Vengeance. This beast or others like it had sent him fleeing from his home after all. But if it was the Bloody God who was talking, then his voice was loud. Much more so than Morphia's, the Goddess of his people. More so than Elm Tibesh too. He wasn't a thief just then.

  Trembling Briagh took off his jacket and laid it over a branch. Then he unbuttoned his vest and underclothing and did the same. Endria stared at him as he did so, a question in her eyes as to what he thought he was doing. But she couldn't ask him anything when she couldn't stop screaming. And her tree wasn't yet under attack. So he kept undressing, she kept screaming and the wolf kept tearing into the tree trunk.

  Once he was undressed he shifted into his panther form immediately. After that it was just a question of working up the nerve to attack. That moment came a few seconds later when the dire wolf shook the entire tree with its next attack, and he nearly lost his balance as everything moved. After that things became confused.

  Briagh leapt down on the wolf's back, claws extended, while it continued its assault on the tree. Landing on it he dug four massive gauges into its flesh before leaping off its back and onto the snow behind it. Then he sprinted for the other side of the road as fast as he could, expecting at any moment to have the wolf's claws in his own back.

  But that never happened. By the time he'd made the other side of the road, leapt into another tree and turned around, the wolf was barely getting started on its chase. It was too big to be quick and agile, and as a panther he was both. That both surprised and pleased him enormously. Especially when he heard its howl. He'd seen the dire wolf's size and those terrible teeth and assumed he could never fight such a beast. It seemed however that he could.

  Briagh was helped by the wolf's stupidity. Even as he was perched in a branch trying to plan his next move, the wolf hurled itself into another frenzied attack on the new tree, and he realised he had been offered another chance. Again he leapt, landing once more on the dire wolf's back, and shredded yet more of the wolf’s flesh, before leaping nimbly to the ground and racing back to his original tree.

  This time when he watched the dire wolf come after him, he couldn't help but notice the trail of blood streaming down its back. There was no doubt that he'd hurt it. But would it be stupid enough to fall for the same tactic again?

  Apparently not. It seemed to have enough intelligence that this time it looked up at him rather than attacking the tree. But not enough to keep its natural ferocity at bay and eventually it started attacking the tree again, giving him the chance he needed to leap on its back a third time. And this time when it howled it was with serious pain as well as fury.

  But then it should be in pain. If it had any brain at all it should have been in agony. It should have been running away. But at least, as Briagh watched the wolf closely as it came for him again, he saw that it was markedly slower than before. There was blood covering it from its shoulders to its rump and running down its legs. There was also a blood red trail running between the two trees. There was no doubt that he had hurt the beast. It now sported serious wounds and if it had had any sense it would have run away to start licking them and to recover. But it didn't do that. Fury overcame any thought of recovery in the dire wolf. And so it howled and raged and snarled at him, determined to kill him no matter what.

  Was that normal for a dire wolf he wondered? Were they not just larger and fiercer than their wolf cousins, but also filled with blood lust? It could be he supposed. He knew nothing about dire wolves. But whether it was blood lust or madness it proved itself to be too powerful for the creature to control. Something that became obvious when ultimately it decided on a new tactic. It leapt against the trunk of the tree and tried to climb it.

  That shocked him. Dogs and wolves couldn't climb. They simply weren't designed for it. And the dire wolf proved that a moment later as it found itself gripping on to the side of the tree, unable to climb any further.

  The result was inevitable. The wolf fell backwards, taking a good chunk of bark with it, and then it lay there for a bit, rolling around on the snow, trying to get back up on its feet, but seemingly confused. That gave Briagh another opening.

  He pounced on it again, this time finding the softer flesh of its side and tore more chunks out of it before sprinting away.

  After that attack the wolf was definitely in trouble. It had slowed measurably and was limping. It also didn't seem to have the same savage power as before. And the blood trails it was leaving were turning into small rivers. Just how much blood could it lose, he wondered before it simply fell down and stopped?

  Still, no matter how it kept refusing to fall, the battle was his. Though the wolf had grown smart enough to know not to attack the tree again or try to climb it, it had also grown slow and kept forgetting to look up. Too slow to turn quickly. Too heavy to bend fully. That meant it was vulnerable from behind. Briagh used that, getting a few more swipes in and ultimately severing the tendons in its back legs.

  It was then that the beast finally stopped moving forward and slowly collapsed to the ground. It wasn't dead. He could see its chest moving in and out. But it just didn't have the strength to stand any longer. It also couldn't pull itself forward on its front legs alone. Soon it was sitting there in a small lake of blood, its breathing becoming slower and heavier, its eyes closing, and it was then that he knew the battle was won.

  Of course while he might have won the battle, a new war was beginning. A war that began when he climbed back up his tree, shifted back into his proper shape and started dressing again.

  “You … you …” Endria kept saying that for some time. Accusing him of something. Of being a morph.

  Briagh didn't answer her. At least she had stopped asking the same pointless questions as before. His thoughts were only on dressing – it was cold without either clothes or fur – and of course on the dire wolf below, breathing its last.

  In time he finished dressing and started carefully climbing down the tree. It had been so much easier when he was a panther and could simply leap down on to a soft dire wolf. People simply weren't designed the same way.

  Once he was on the ground he walked back cautiously to the wolf, aware that it wasn't dead and that he wasn't nearly as fast on two legs as he was on four. But the dire wolf didn't look to be much of a threat any longer. It had collapsed the rest of the way to the ground and looked to be breathing its last. That gave him a chance to examine it. Or maybe just to stare at it and wonder where it had come from. And how such creatures could even exist in the world.

  It was still white he noticed. Underneath the blood its fur was the white of snow. That he'd never heard of. There were some white dogs around. And deep in the frozen south he'd heard of snow wolves that were mostly white. But he’d never heard of a snow white dire wolf. Although truthfully there weren't many dire wolves in Abylon. They had until recently been mostly fodder for the bards to sing about. Now they
were everywhere. A good camouflage he suddenly thought, for a winter that never seemed to end. White wolves of winter and an endless winter. Were the two things somehow connected?

  He didn't understand how they could be, and yet the coincidence just seemed too great to simply be chance. Besides, as the best card players always said; there was no such thing as chance. There were just other people's plans you didn't know about. So whose plan was this?

  Naturally he had no answer. And there was nothing he could do about it even if he had had one. There was also nothing he could do to to curb Endria’s fear of him now that his secret was out. The young woman was staring at him as if he was monster despite the fact that he had just saved her life. She also looked as though she wanted to start asking him more stupid questions or else accuse him of crimes.

  “We should move on.” Briagh was in no mood to listen to her accusations or to start answering her endless questions. He had a long way to go. With that he turned and started heading north along the road once more. She could follow him or not. He simply didn't care anymore. He just wanted to be gone from this place.

  Chapter Eleven