The Wolves Of War

by Greg Curtis

  And then there was Oster itself.

  The town wasn't just quiet. It was dead. There were no people in the streets, nor was there any sign of smoke issuing from the chimneys. The town’s small market was empty despite the flags being out. There was no noise of any sort. Worse, he could see crows flying overhead. The sight set all the hairs on Briagh's body standing. Crows flew where there was carrion. That was bad. Bad enough that the party had come to a stop.

  “Briagh.” The Captain summoned him.

  “Captain.” Briagh nodded to him as he drew up alongside him.

  “Do you know this town?” He nodded toward the small dead town in front of them.

  “A little Captain. It's Oster, a small farming town with maybe a thousand people. I spent some time there when I was young. They grow wheat and oats mainly, but also do some forestry.” Briagh looked again across the empty fields. “Now they seem to be raising crows.”

  “You did not pass this town on your way to Wynde Par?”

  “No.” Briagh shook his head. “I avoided the roads and the towns and ran across the fields. But along the way I came across cottages and farms that were empty. Some that had been attacked by the dire wolves. I assume from what Father Argen has said that those wolves had been heading to Abysynth. Reinforcements for the wolf mother's army.”

  But if they were and they'd simply stopped off along the way at isolated homes to hunt, had they also stopped off at small towns? He wouldn't have thought so. Then again he wasn't so sure of anything.

  “Then we proceed with caution.”

  “I could scout the town on four legs.”

  The instant the words left his mouth Briagh wondered why he'd said them. What was wrong with him?! He was no soldier. Taking risks was never part of his plan. Yet he also knew he was the one who should do this. On four legs he was faster and quieter. He could scout the town and run if he needed to. He would certainly be quieter than sixty men on horseback. Maybe he'd spent too much time around the rangers.

  “On your own?”

  “I can run.” Why did he keep saying things like that?! Briagh wanted to bite out his own tongue as the traitorous words kept tripping off it. There was something wrong with him. And yet it was true. If there were dire wolves in the town, he was faster than them. As a panther he was much faster.

  “Alright. We will set an ambush by the trees, just in case.”

  The Captain seemed to endorse the plan and Briagh quietly cursed himself for having suggested it. When would he learn to keep his mouth shut?! After all, it wasn't as if he knew or had any affinity with these men. He only knew Captain Hillaren and Father Argen. The rest were almost complete strangers. And it wasn’t as if he had wanted to come. He'd been forced. And that in turn had only happened because of his not thinking before he opened his mouth. He was making so many mistakes of late. Mistakes he would never have made only a few short weeks before.

  Still, when the Captain nodded he knew it was too late to change things. He'd foolishly volunteered for the mission and he supposed that now he would have to go through with it. At least it involved getting off his horse.

  Contrary to the Captain's thoughts, the horse wasn't upset when he shifted shape. But then it knew his smell and he didn't smell like a panther. It looked at him a little curiously, but concentrated on grazing. Briagh took it as a sign to leave the shelter of the tree line where all the rangers were standing, longbows at the ready, and head down the road to the town.

  The walk took longer than he had expected. But then, Briagh was moving slowly, as he searched the town ahead for any sign of trouble. He couldn’t see any. Or hear anything either. There was only silence. He hoped it wasn’t the silence of the grave.

  Oster when he finally entered it was much as he remembered it. A town of wide, dusty streets – with log buildings lining them. The gaps in the logs were filled with a crude mix of mud, horse hair and lime plaster to keep the chill out, making the houses warm in winter if not pretty. It was a simple construction system, but sturdy. And it worked. He'd never been cold indoors here that he remembered. Even in the cold winter months.

  There were only two main streets. One ran north south, the other east west, and where they met formed the town square. All up there were probably only two or three hundred houses and a score of shops, mostly facing the square. It was far from the largest town around. But he remembered that when he'd lived here as a child those streets had been busy. Filled with people and horses. With wagons and even the odd steam wagon hauling logs. The streets had been filled with the sounds of laughter too. The children in Oster had always been boisterous and filled with energy as they raced from one house to another.

  Not anymore. Briagh saw no children as he walked up the street towards the square. The businesses as he passed them, were silent. The blacksmith's forge wasn't lit and no one was standing there beating the steel. Instead the smith’s tools were lying out in the yard. It was almost as if he'd dropped them and walked away. The shops seemed empty as best he could tell without peering more closely in through the windows. The weavers had left their spinning wheels on the front porches of their homes, still with the wool in them – but they were nowhere to be found.

  It was as if the people had all suddenly got up, stopped what they were doing, and walked away leaving everything behind. But why? And where had they gone?

  None of his sharp senses could answer that question. All they could do was give him more. Things were completely silent in the town. He could hear no voices even with the hearing of a panther. He could see no sign of people or where even people had been despite his sharp vision. In fact the only sound he could hear was the wind. As a panther his eyes could show him the heat on the ground from where people had walked. But the ground was cold, indicating that no one had walked on it for some time. He supposed there could be people inside the houses – he couldn't see through walls – but he wasn't brave enough to look.

  But the one thing he did notice was a smell. An animal musk that he didn't like. And it was everywhere. Unfortunately he didn't recognise it.

  It was something most people didn't realise about morphs. They weren't actually the creatures they wore the form of. So while he could walk as a panther did he could not hunt as they would. He could not track his prey by scent. As a cat he had a sense of smell that was extremely sharp. Unfortunately he still had the mind of a man. So while he could smell hundreds and thousands of different scents, he couldn’t recognised them for what they were. Regardless, he didn't like the smell of this musk. It stank of danger to him.

  The other thing he noticed was that there were wagons in the street. No horses to pull them, but still several wagons, their yokes lying on the ground. That he'd never seen before. It was as if everyone had simply run away and left everything behind.

  He could tell however, that the people hadn’t been gone long. The windows were relatively clean. The plants that many of the towns folk liked to have in front of their homes all looked to be in good health, suggesting they had been recently watered. Nothing looked to be in a state of disrepair. This town was no long abandoned ruin.

  Briagh continued his journey along one of the streets, staying as close to the centre as he could. He was nervous and he guessed that if there were wolves around, they would be hiding inside the buildings. He wanted to be gone the instant they decided to come out and investigate.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, it didn't happen and so he kept walking further and further into the town, feeling with every step that he was walking into a trap.

  Soon he reached the end of the street and found himself in the square. Though calling it a “square” was perhaps giving it a title it probably didn’t deserve. Because it really was just a couple of acres of grass on which the market stalls had been set out, and where most of the town's trading would occur. It wasn't even square shaped. Still, it was the heart of the town and where he would normally expect to find hundreds of people. Not this day though.

  Ahead and to h
is left Briagh spotted a trader's wagon sitting on the grass. Someone had apparently come from outside the town to trade and had set up his stall and stayed.

  That in itself wasn't unusual. Traders often plied the roads between towns and set up in the squares. But where were the horses that had pulled the wagon? Briagh couldn’t see any sign of them. Nor any dead carcasses. Or blood. The animals had just gone. And it didn’t appear as if anyone had released them from their collars. Or that the animals had broken loose. Instead the collars were sitting on the ground where the animals would have been, and were still closed.

  Could the animals have somehow been magicked away, leaving only their collars behind? Briagh didn't know of a magic that could do that. Nor a technology. The only way he could see it happening was if someone had deliberately released the animals and then tied the collars back up as if they still had wearers. A sort of joke perhaps. But nothing about this empty town seemed amusing.

  In time he became aware of something else. Something new. He could hear someone. Or something. It was faint because of the distance and because it was quiet, but he could hear breathing. Briagh strained his hearing further and concentrated only on the faint sound and eventually he determined that the sound was coming from the wagon. Someone was inside!

  Briagh's heart began racing. He wasn't alone as he’d thought. In fact, he was now starting to worry that he’d walked into some sort of trap, and that its teeth were about to close on him. If he'd been on two legs he would have been sweating and his face would have turned bone white with fear. A fur coat hid a lot.

  Still, Briagh held his ground and Quietened his racing heart. It was only the sound of breathing he told himself. Quiet and regular. No one had got up. No one was coming towards him. And he still had to find out what had happened.

  Cautiously he approached the wagon. Once there, his heart in his throat, he stood up on his haunches, placed his front feet on the wagon’s back board, and pulled the back flap open with a claw. But then seeing what was inside he immediately wished he hadn't.

  Lying on the bed wasn't a wolf. But it wasn't a man either – or a woman in this case. It was something that was both and neither. A morph caught in mid change. She looked a little like Endorian. She had fur and bare skin. She must have been wearing clothes when the change began, because she was almost bursting from them. Her hands were clawed but her fingers, despite having become short and fat, were still fingers. And her face had a snout.

  Seeing her lying there sleeping, a world of questions flew through Briagh's mind. But at the same time he knew he'd discovered answers too. At least the answer to the biggest question that had plagued him ever since the attack on Abysynth. Where had the wolf mother's army of wolves come from? Now he knew. They had been people. Somehow people were being slowly transformed into wolves to fill her army's ranks.

  That he suspected was what the globe did. It changed people. Or maybe it gave the wolf mother the power to change them. And once she changed them it seemed she could control them.

  It was a curse of some sort. One passed on he guessed by saliva or blood, given that he could just make out the healing bite marks on the woman's shoulder.

  It was time to leave. Briagh realised that as he stood there, his claws digging into the wagon's back board, staring at the woman. He had the answers they needed. But he also had no idea what anyone could do with them. He would report back. Father Argen in particular needed to know. He was the one who seemed to have the clearest idea of what was happening in the world. And this he knew, wasn't just one woman's unfortunate fate. Uneasily Briagh wondered how many of the other log houses in the town were filled with people slowly changing. And how far along they were. Because when they were done he suspected that they would attack.

  Briagh dropped back down to the grass again and backed away silently. He wanted to leave this town unnoticed.

  It wasn't to be.

  Even as he turned he spotted a figure standing in the street barely fifty yards from him. A man half covered in fur, neither able to stand straight as a man nor walk on all fours. And as he spotted the man, the man in turn saw him.

  The man let out a howl – a sound that was neither wolf nor human – and then ran for him even as Briagh stared at the creature in horror and disbelief. But at least he wasn't fast. He ran neither on two legs nor four, but an awkward combination of both that did not cover the ground very quickly. But it wasn't the creature's speed that was the danger Briagh realised. It was the howling. The creature was waking the others up.

  Briagh exited the square at a run, and ran down the street he'd come up, as fast as only a panther could, knowing that he had to get out of this town before however many of these creatures there were came after him. And he was fast. But as quick as he was, he wasn't quick enough to disappear before more of the half wolves began emerging from their houses. And as he passed them, they too took up the howl, thereby waking up more and more of their friends. Soon the partly transformed villagers were pouring out on to the street in front of him, and into the gardens beside them and he knew he was in trouble.

  Briagh sprinted to one side of the street and then leapt onto an overhanging roof and then along to the ridge line. After that he sprinted across the roofs, jumping from house to house where the creatures couldn't reach him. But that didn't stop them trying and they chased him along the street all the way to the end, howling at him all the way. And while he was safe from them as long as he was up high, he couldn't help but notice how many there were. He estimated that they numbered in the hundreds. It seemed that the entire village had been transformed.

  When he reached the last house in the street though, Briagh stopped wondering about that. Instead he leapt to the ground with the creatures close behind, and then started sprinting for the trees and the rest of the party, all of whom he knew or he hoped would be waiting there with weapons drawn. Surely they had to be able to see what was happening? What was chasing him?

  On the open ground he was able to really gain some distance on the former villagers, being more than twice as fast as them. Unfortunately, there was a price for that speed and Briagh soon found himself running out of breath. Cats had never been built to run long distances. Still, by the time he was half way back to the party he had a good two hundred yards or more on the nearest of the creatures. Even slowing down to a trot so he could breathe he managed to maintain that distance between them.

  But he finished his run at a sprint when he saw the rangers all standing there, hidden in the trees, longbows drawn.

  “The wolves are the town’s people. They've been transformed somehow!” He gasped it out as he crossed the line, transforming into human form so he could speak. Message delivered he transformed back into his panther form and headed off into the safety of the forest. He found a suitable tree where he could watch the action and climbed up it. There he sat waiting.

  The battle was at least quick. The creatures were strung out in a rough and ready line from the town, and the rangers simply picked them off a few at a time. The transformed towns folk didn't even seem to understand what was happening. They just kept coming, shambling as quickly as they could, ignoring their fallen friends lying on the ground in front of them with arrows sticking out of their chests, intent only on the prey in front of them.

  So they kept coming and they kept falling and within only a few minutes it was ended. Several hundred of the creatures were down, and no more appeared to be coming. Was the town now entirely empty? Briagh didn't know. There could be more people in the houses, still continuing their transformations. Maybe some of them hadn't yet woken up? Maybe a few were further along and had already become dire wolves and were on their way to Abysynth – assuming that was the plan. But still, what mattered was that he and the party were safe. And that Briagh could breathe again.

  The battle over, Briagh jumped down to the ground and padded over to his clothes, changed and started dressing, while the others kept careful watch over the fallen creatures, just in case some o
f them did get back up. He wanted to be dressed and long gone before that happened.

  “Those are the villagers?” Father Argen joined him as he dressed.

  “Yes Father. They were in the houses, slowly changing shape, becoming dire wolves. The first one I saw was a girl. She had a bite mark on her shoulder. It's some sort of curse. I think this must be how the wolf mother has been building her armies.”

  “That's not the entire town?”

  “No.” Briagh shook his head. “Maybe a third. Some may still be in the houses still transforming. Some may have been killed. Some may have got away. Some may have been eaten.”

  “There are also no animals to be seen. No bodies or blood either. It's like they simply vanished while in their harnesses. They seem to have slipped their leashes.” He still didn't understand that.

  “And now we know,” Father Argen said cryptically.