On the corral fence, the boy and three men watched her disappear into the forest. The youngest man sent the boy to retrieve Dion’s cloak. “I wonder if she’ll come back,” he murmured.
The oldest man picked a splinter from the fence to chew on. “Might not, I’m thinking,” Muraus said. “She’s close to the wild, not us.”
They were comfortably silent for a moment.
“There was that wolfwalker down about a hundred years ago,” Muraus commented.
Pratton picked his own splinter to poke at his aged teeth and frowned around it at white-haired Muraus. “Old Marl? Hundred and seven years ago, if I recall rightly.”
“Hundred seven,” the other man agreed amiably. “Ran trail with his wolf for forty-two years. Wolf got old, but wouldn’t come in to the village, and old Marl had to live in the forest. Took off one day and didn’t come back. Left his cloak and sword, even his boots on the trail.”
Pratton tugged absently on his trimmed, gray beard and nodded consideringly. “Some say worlags got ’em.”
Muraus chewed his toothpick. “Some say it was poolah. Jemeni’s grandfather saw footprints near a kill ’bout two months after Marl disappeared.”
Pratton grunted his agreement. “They say he still haunts the trails over Backaround Ridge. You can hear him in the howling.”
The white-haired man nodded toward the forest. “We’ll hear her, too, more than likely.”
“ ’Less the Ariyens take her back.”
“ ’Less that,” he agreed.
“Sometimes she acts more hunted than hunter,” Ire said softly.
Muraus gave the young man a sharp look. “Aye, that she does.”
Ire gazed toward the mountains. “I wonder if she really went all the way north, really saw the birdmen.”
Pratton gave Ire a sly look. “You could ask her when she comes back. You brag enough about your handsome face and how women do anything for it.”
The younger man grinned. “It’s not my face they love. Besides, it’s you who should ask her when she returns. You got along fine at the shooting games yesterday.”
Pratton shrugged uncomfortably. “She’s a good shot and a master healer, and my hip ached like a wounded worlag. Besides, she doesn’t need some gray-haired old man prying about in her head.”
“That’s not where you’d be prying if you had your way.”
“And what way would that be?” Pratton retorted.
Ire merely said obliquely, “The old women in this town don’t hold their tongues any more than you do, and their bedtime stories are better.”
Muraus hid his grin in his white beard.
Ire’s eyes got a distant look. “Would be something, wouldn’t it, to see the breeding grounds, get a glimpse of one of the beasts?”
“A wise man doesn’t bother the wolf,” the oldest man murmured.
They were silent for a moment. Then Pratton offered, “She wouldn’t be sticking her knife in you for asking a simple question.”
Ire grinned slowly, unaware of how much his manner was already like that of the two older men. He added his own persuasion. “Even if she did, she could sew you back up like a split pillowcase as long as she found all your stuffing.”
Pratton chuckled at the reference to Muraus’ thickening belt line, but Muraus gazed toward the forest. “Have you looked in her eyes?” His voice was soft, almost breathed into the wind as if he was afraid of its being heard.
Something in the old man’s voice struck a chill along Ire’s spine. “Have you?”
“Aye.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw . . .” Muraus’s voice trailed off, and the old man shook his head. “Energy. Power. Something cold.” He ground his toothpick absently into shards against the rail. “I saw secrets,” he said softly.
All three glanced involuntarily north to the distant peaks, then surreptitiously made the sign of the moons’ blessing. The birdmen, those creatures who lived in the north, who watched what humans did, who killed those who approached—they held plague in their talons and hung that threat over the world like an ax hung by four spider threads. Disturb them, and the blade would fall again over human cities. Eyes in the sky, the younger man thought. He knew, when the wolfwalker returned, that none of them would ask.
II
Talon Drovic neVolen
Life is fire;
Fire, ambition;
Ambition, tragedy;
Tragedy, life.
—from “Circles,” by Wile neRaya, Kiren songster
It was near dawn, and the shreds of fog that clung to the low hills waited with Talon in silence. Four of the nine moons floated overhead, but their fading light no longer bleached the ground between the shadows. Instead, pale dawn rinsed the moonlight to a dull gray and threw the small valley into harsher darkness.
Talon stared at the faint, gray ribbons of road. Long ago, they had been half built from new rock and half from the slag-stone of the Ancients. Now they echoed with the quiet, and the echoes settled like night spiders along Talon’s broad and bony shoulders. It was late summer, but he had been cold for over a month. Now even the streets gave him chills. It was as though he stared at headstones, not hundred-year-old sections of paving.
He glanced around, making sure that no gear glinted. With Drovic’s men and women, it was an automatic, not a necessary check. These riders were experienced, skilled, hardened. Most had three or more years of scouting or fighting; some had more than six; and two had more than a hundred. Two-thirds had joined Drovic after the fight that had left Drovic’s band decimated and Talon more dead than alive, but some, like Sojourn and Darity, had been with Talon’s father long enough that they seemed to execute the man’s thoughts more than his orders. Those people were the lethal heart of the group. Now they rode for Talon.
“Anything?” Sojourn asked in a low voice.
Talon let himself open to the echo of gray. Long ago, that faint sense of wolves in his skull had been a thicker fog. Now there was too much blood on his hands. The pack could take no comfort in the killer he had become: Lone wolf. Lobo. Worlag wolf. Still, three, four months ago something had changed in them—or in him, perhaps as a result of his wounds. He was susceptible now, weakened and open to the gray. They gnawed at the edge of his thoughts even in the daytime, worrying him like a marrowed bone, urging him north to the cold. They were too much like him, trapped by the will of another, and they snapped at his thoughts as they fought to find their release from men. He would have freed them if he could, but it was not he who had trapped their minds in his skull.
He stared into the dull darkness as if he could see their yellow-black eyes. They had to suspect what he would do that day, and with their engineered abilities, had to know that it was wrong, but they sent nothing to him but their own urgency, a growing need, and the blind frustration that accompanied both. “Not yet,” he finally answered.
In the dark, the slender man’s murmur was dry. “We trust your eyes, son of Drovic.”
Talon kept his expression calm. Some time ago, a swath of beetles had passed through the woods and left the shredded bark clinging to the trunks like shrouds. With the wolves heightening his senses, he could smell the torn bark better than Sojourn, but it had been they, not he, who had found the hill in the dark. With his father’s hatred of wolves and wolfwalkers, Talon’s use of the Gray Ones was not a wise confession.
He tuned out the slight sighing sound of the trees and listened instead to the dark. Beetles, birdbeasts, gelbugs, worms—in swarm years like this one, the world itself seemed to gather and strike at humankind. Raiders such as Drovic swarmed with it. They gathered in the shadows like worlags and struck out with anger and vengeance. That same urgency for blood filled Talon. He had once clenched at dreams; now he struck out almost blindly at others. Rage, entrapment, frustration, rage—not even the dark could obscure that circle. He felt his jaw tighten as he watched the road below. That valley road was a snake of gray-white legend made by the Ancien
ts. The colonists had sworn to return to the sky and had died instead of the plague they brought down on themselves. Like the tension that coiled Talon’s hands, the stone-road snake that was their legacy tried to writhe up as he did, from the dirt toward the taunting stars.
Beside him, Sojourn glanced at the sky, then murmured softly, “Soon.”
Talon fought the urge to turn on the other man, and he gripped his sword hilt with long, lean fingers that wanted to clench and draw and strike. Worlag piss, but of course it was soon. It was nearly dawn. Did the man think his weakness made him blind as a summer stokal?
He knew that the other man watched him closely for any signs of weakness. They had ridden together for how many years? And still, Sojourn watched him. The other man had a right, Talon admitted bitterly. The past few months had left Talon so lean as to be almost gaunt. His black, close-cropped hair framed a hard, sculpted face; his high, harsh cheekbones only emphasized the hollow lines that had changed his looks so severely. He had a square jaw, a nose that had been broken at least twice, and dark eyebrows that sat heavily above icy gray eyes. He was not handsome. He had his father’s looks instead: too much power, strength, and will; and little to soften the lines.
The sun shifted closer to full dawn, and Talon forced himself to relax. Eight hundred years ago, he would not have played such games as those he would today. Hands like his would have gripped the controls of a skyhook or guided a spacecar up from the mountains and into the starry void. He would have flown starships and explored a dozen different worlds, not bathed in blood each ninan. His father claimed that blood and steel would give him that dream again, but Drovic’s vision had twisted in like a shark that savages itself. Now, Drovic strove more for revenge than for any sort of future. Talon wondered when he, himself, had turned from the world to follow his father instead.
He shifted irritably. His saddle creaked in the dark. Five, six more minutes, and the watch down below would change. The village guards would relax, and those who slept would rise to break their fast while others began their chores. Talon could feel it like a voice in his head—the routine that screamed to be broken. He heard the hard speed of his heart and welcomed the iciness that gripped his mind. His thoughts ticked off the seconds. The tension, the cold steel, the creak of saddle-warm leather—yes, those things felt right and natural. It was the town below that felt wrong.
From behind him, some of the riders shifted. Jervid, a large-framed but oddly ropy man, muttered just loud enough for Talon to hear his words: “. . . still think we ought to go in on the south side.”
Talon’s lips tightened at Jervid’s gall, but he kept his mouth shut.
“It’s a fool’s ride to go through an exposed field when you can approach beneath the trees,” Jervid added, a touch louder as Talon did not respond. “And more fool to take our flight through a cluttered woods when you could have the speed of the open fields. Backwards, that’s what it is. Bass-ackwards like a fool.”
Talon’s eyes narrowed, but in the gloom, the others could not see it. Someone chuckled, and a woman—Oroan perhaps, or Roc—said something that silenced the laughter abruptly, except for a dry comment too low to hear. Talon had listened closely, but it could have been Fit or Morley or Mal who had laughed at Jervid’s complaint.
But Jervid wasn’t finished, and the man’s voice grew louder as he found he was not challenged. “Every father thinks his son can lead,” he scoffed softly. “ ‘Put him back in the saddle,’ he said. ‘Get the blood back on his blade.’ It’s too soon, if you ask me—just look at this approach. I’m the one who knows these trails, but did they listen to me? Not by the hair of a stickbeast.” The stocky man did not bother to keep his voice low any longer. “Fools we are, to sit up here. Addled like winter poolah.”
For a long moment, Talon held his breath. It did not calm his growing rage, and he thought he might crack apart in the ice of his own fury if he tried to breathe again. Slowly, he twisted to regard the other man. There was something so menacing in Talon’s posture that even in the gloom, Jervid, who had opened his mouth to speak again, broke off and became very still.
Talon turned back to the village.
At his side, Sojourn nodded almost imperceptibly in approval, and Talon felt some of his tension ease. The muttering behind him was quiet.
Four minutes, and the sun shifted up to hug the jagged skyline. Far below the mountain ridge, the town was swallowed in darker relief. Talon found himself closing his eyes. He felt oddly frozen, caught between dark and light. A year ago, he would not have thought twice before trying to save one of his rider’s lives. Even a month ago, things had been different. There was that bollusk stampede, when Sojourn had been knocked from his dnu. Talon had barely hesitated before racing in and catching the man up. He had nearly gone down himself—the effort had torn his shoulder again where the muscles were weak as paper. But a ninan ago, Wakje had been trapped by fire in a barn, and Talon had stared through the flames at the other man as if weighing his life before charging through to reach him. It was as though Talon no longer had the conviction that these riders—his riders, his own men and women—were worth the trouble, and that was a guilt that ate at his guts like acid.
The dull pound in his temple wore on, and the din of the Gray Ones cut at his ears. It took him a moment to realize that he was fingering the pouch at his belt. Deliberately, he withdrew his hand. It had become a challenge to hold off taking the medicine as long as he could. That, and the pain would come harder later, and he would need the herbs more then.
He glanced over his shoulder at the two dozen riders who squatted like a curse on the hills. He resisted the desire to look at the outvillage guard who was now silent at his post. The warning bell—too heavy to saw down—had been wedged still, its clapper carefully wrapped with moss, and it hung silently while the guard’s corpse sprawled close. The man’s death had been clean—Harare was nothing if not efficient— and the body now lay half obscenely against the bole of a nearby tree, its legs spread and its face as slack as an empty waterbag. The skin around the guard’s lips and eyes had already whitened; the blood that had not spilled out to soil the ground had begun to settle and swell out the lower half of the body. The thought persisted that the man had died carelessly, and Talon’s anger at the sloppy guard disturbed him. Rage, every day—it was now a regular meal. Or had he simply been sick so long that he was now sick of others’ blood?
He signaled curtly to the riders around him. “Gear check.”
Around him, the riders rustled. Weapons first, then torch bags, then the padded bags for the science they hoped to steal. In over eight hundred years, humans had achieved little since they had landed on this planet. What technology they did create, they hid underground like rats hiding their young. Now it was chemistry, bioform science, and mining worms that were sought, traded, stolen. Those bits of knowledge and technology were gems that would pay for a year’s worth of leisure. To Talon, that knowlege was power and the reason to push toward the stars; to his father, it was a weapon to aim at a county’s head. Someday, Talon would take what they stole and build instead of destroy. But, he thought, his lips thinning with a bitter grin, today was not that day.
He checked the torch strapped to his saddle. The contents of the two bags fitted over its end would not mix until the torch was withdrawn. Then there would be heat, flame, and light. That, at least, they had not lost—the crude chemistry of the Ancients.
Talon raised his open hand in the gloom and signaled the riders again. “Ready.” His voice was sharp. The air seemed to tense with the sound. He hid his wince as he held the signal— he must not let pain blind him or allow himself to look weak. So he held the gesture and reveled in the growing agony in his shoulder, then in the sharpening pain in his side where the muscles strained as he breathed. Something changed in the town—the light, perhaps, or a sense of clumsy movement. His forearm tensed. The riders hung on his breath. He clenched his fist and pumped it.
There was no cry or shout
from his men, just a sudden, silent releasing as the riders spurred their dnu with him. Their surge was a flood of darkness. Talon held his fist up to continue their charge, but he could not have stopped them now. They were away and down the hill, and the thunder of hooves was a growing cascade of sound.
Something flickered in Talon’s side vision, and he realized that Jervid was splitting off. He whistled the short command to stay in formation. The other man ignored him. Talon cursed viciously. If Jervid’s charge roused the south end of the village, Talon’s escape route would vanish. But the other man raced away, and Talon shouted sharply, “Roc, Morley, Eilryn—break off! Back Jervid!”
The three riders turned their dnu in a wide curve to race away after the other man. Talon swore again under his breath as his force was split. If Jervid thought Talon would follow with the entire group, the man was mistaken. The stables and target accesses were at this end of town. “Damned, bollusk-brained idiot,” he cursed. With Jervid gone, he would lose one of his attack angles. It would be a shorter attack—more a rush than a search—and less to gain because of it. The center riders would have no left flank to protect them and draw the return fire. He raged at Jervid silently.
They swept through the first field, trampling the brittle grains. His ears were full of dirt-dulled thunder and the whistling of a gallop wind. His hand tightened on the steel. No oldEarth horse had been born on this world to carry men like the wind. These engineered dnu, with their spindly legs and six-legged gait, covered the ground like a dry-grass fire, a fire that Talon now guided, a blaze as heady as wine.
The thick hedges between the fields muffled the full force of the charge. There was only a single pair of startled shouts as they broke across a low separator hedge and swept onto the road of the Ancients. Then the thunder drowned the voices, and the dawn farmers were left behind.
Two riders split off and fell back. They would wait and draw fire from the village to suggest that the escape route was on their side of town. And if that didn’t work, they would simply fire to confuse and divide the townsmen and make Talon’s escape easier. It was a trick that Talon had proposed two months ago, and that Drovic now used almost every time in one pattern or another. Talon did not look back to see the two riders slow, but he knew when they pulled to a stop: the lupine eyes that followed his charge also watched that false rear guard.
Silver Moons, Black Steel Page 3