The yearling’s thin voice sharpened as she caught his gaze. It triggered a flash like lightning in the grey. Time stuttered. Nori sucked in a breath as lupine paws seemed to clench around her heartbeat. Then the sense of wild, grating voices smoothed into the rhythm of her pulse. She felt herself reach toward him. Rishte?
Golden eyes dug into her mind. The deafness caused by a thousand faint sounds flooded into her ears. Tastes and dirt and odors and fur filled her mouth, sank down into her throat. Wolfwalker.
It was the sense of a name, a faint Calling, a hint of recognition. Rishte? she sent more sharply.
Do not! the mother wolf snapped across human and lupine minds.
Nori choked on the grey.
The young wolf veered off like a frightened deer. The packsong bristled, and Nori dragged in air that was flat and wrong. The voice of the yearling hung for a moment on the edge of the din, howling as he snarled at Vesh. Then he slipped back into the grey. Nori bit her lip till it bled. The loss . . . hurt.
Hold the cubs, the mother wolf snapped. Grey Vesh was old enough to have strength in her voice and force in her Call. Once Vesh had touched the human mind, she didn’t need to meet the human’s eyes to force the human to listen. But the human was reaching toward Rishte again, and Vesh could see how their voices matched. The mother wolf snarled. There was a cold spot in the human, a death-spot like the fire that went with the wagon tracks. It made the mother wolf’s hackles raise. To bond a packmate to this one? Even if it was meant to be, the grey beast snarled even more sharply and warned her yearling back.
But Nori could taste wolf in her lungs.
Fear. Hurry. Worlags. Run. Water ahead, water on the legs. The impressions cluttered her mind.
Water on her legs? They wanted to ford the creek, but that would only delay the beetle-beasts. Vesh didn’t understand her answer, and she tried to focus her thoughts. The ridges were close, right there, to the east. All she had to do was climb to safety.
Water, swift water. The grey insisted.
Nori snarled back. She couldn’t outrun them that far.
The Grey Ones tasted her sense of helplessness, of being weaponless and weak. It angered them. They gathered their minds and threw energy at her like a war bolt. She knew what to do with that mental power. She’d been taught almost from birth how to use it when it would finally be offered to her. But her contact with the pack was too new, too fragile. She barely touched the edge of that strength before it ripped past. She could grasp none of it on her own, hold nothing for more than an instant.
The wolves snarled at her ignorance, at the roughness between them, at her insistence to head for the cliffs. Gathered themselves more tightly, turned their minds, and speared her with urgency. It was a blinding sliver through her brain, twisting, turning, diving down. The needle cut deep. She cried out, unable to be quiet.
Instantly the wolves drew back. She twisted with them, seeking the mesh and easing of pain. They shrugged with her, pulling her mind left and in, left and down. For a moment, her mind struggled against them. Then she felt the other. Deep in her thoughts, that older, more ancient, yellowed pattern fought to assert itself against the lupine weave.
The greysong stiffened in shock. Then Rishte howled in over the harshness. It was a wash of grey that smothered the alien patterns, like a rough-nubbin cotton after scraping against bark. It wasn’t just strength she received. It was the confidence, the assurance of the pack, no longer through Grey Vesh and Helt and the others, but solely through the younger point that was Rishte. Nori’s feet were suddenly lighter. The pups in her arms weighed nothing. The wolves were ghosts in the twilight, and she was a specter of fire on their heels. They fed her energy through their yearling, and she paced them now almost easily. Pounding, drumming the earth with her feet.
Finally the pack leader pulled them all back, forced Rishte to let go, to withdraw their strength. The point of power that was Rishte faded with the grey. Nori shuddered and stumbled. Without the packsong, she seemed more of a shadow, less than a wolf, less than human, and less somehow than herself. Where urgency had swamped her aches before, her calves now burned, and her arms were seared from the thorns. And she was tiring. She staggered as the ground suddenly collapsed beneath one foot. Dik-dik tunnel, rast hole—it didn’t matter. She didn’t stop; she merely caught herself on one hand like a sprinter at the mark, and hurled herself back to her feet.
Grey Helt snarled, but Rishte’s voice was stronger. Worlags, worry, fear. Run. Hurry. Hurry.
She nodded. She was beginning to understand him. Chittering, clacking feet on leaves—that was the sense of the worlags. Urgency: hurry. Fear: run. The impressions themselves formed a language.
Behind Rishte, the grey din wasn’t just some sort of fog, but the sounds of a hundred distant wolves. Each was distinct, like a point of light, but together they blended until there was only one song. It was the individual notes she was starting to hear. Each physical blow of her feet on the earth expanded her senses so she could hear them better. Each brush of a branch on her arms burned in a thousand more nerves on every point of skin. She had never felt the wolves like this, not this deeply, not on her own. Always before they had been a shadow, no more than the sense of a dream.
Since they’d left the den an hour ago, she had heard Rishte more and more clearly. Now she knew his name, his young strength, his open eagerness. She knew, too, that he was a year old, wild as spring eerin, and already set in the wolf pack ways. For kays he had led her away from the wagons, out along the game tracks before he’d allowed her close. With the taint in her mind, Nori hadn’t been surprised when the pack mother had not been pleased. She could soothe a dnu or dog in seconds, but Grey Vesh saw through her soft voice easily. It was the danger of worlags that had finally forced them to accept her. The beetle-beasts had staked out the wolf trails and moved in while the rest of the wolves were hunting. Rishte’s pack had barely come back in time to help Nori save the cubs.
It should not have been so difficult for her to offer help. The wolves had been engineered to work directly with humans. But Nori was tainted, and the Grey Ones could smell that like sulfur. Only because they could also sense the grey in her, not just the taint, and because their need to defend the pups was stronger than their fear, had they gone after the worlags and let Nori climb out with the pups.
Now their senses meshed with hers like a tapestry, thick with hundreds of years of fear. The oldEarthers had given them racial memories, not just mental communication, and the packsong tied them together from wolf to wolf, from birth to death. Deadly encounters with worlags had been burned into their minds like a brand. They poured it all into Nori.
Fear, fear. Feet, faster. Heart, strong. Hurry. Hurry.
Wolfwalker—The yearling’s voice was urgent and sharp. Close. Closing like badgerbears.
She didn’t waste thought to answer. She could almost hear through his ears that the worlags had hit the blackthorn stand just over a kay behind her. Now they were thrashing through. A kilometer. One kay. It was all the lead she had. She tried to pick up the pace, but she could not chance her final run. Not till she saw the cliffs for herself and a place to start her climb.
Boulders seemed to throw themselves at her feet, while branches clutched her shoulders. Stickbeasts scrabbled away in the trees, and sprits flew into her face. The snap of broken dills and the crackle of winter’s littered leaves—they were careless sounds, the sounds of prey being run down. The forest held its collective breath to listen. A hunt like this could end only one way, and creatures watched with unblinking eyes, waiting with hungry, hard-earned patience for the tens of small meals that would follow.
And then, suddenly sharp, Vesh’s voice, Not there. This way, through here.
Nori caught a glimpse of white rock and almost ran over a wolf who dodged close to herd her away. Rishte’s sense of danger flared, and slitted eyes flickered open in the back of Nori’s mind. She tasted metal, mold, dust, death. The wolves felt the tainted gaz
e deep within her and recoiled like a snake. Death, they howled. Power. Old death. Burning, new fire, new death.
The slitted eyes seemed to glow.
“Don’t—” she cried out.
The packsong blasted back through her, cascading over the slitted gaze. Her mind seemed to right itself, twisted up and out, back to the clarity of chill night. Yellow eyes faded. Wolves nipped at her thigh and turned her away from the fork. Blindly she obeyed.
“Old death?” she tried to ask. “New death?”
Grey Vesh ignored her question. Not that way, First Mother snapped instead as she tried to look back. Hurry. Clumsy human.
That last was an afterthought, almost a goad, and Nori forced herself after the wolves. The Grey Ones feared the fork toward the cliff even more than they feared the worlags. What shocked Nori enough to follow was the sharpness of their fear. Old death, fevers, and burning pain—she recognized the taste of disease. But it should be faded, faint in their minds. Moons, but it should be years, even centuries old. There was only one thing could make such a memory:
Plague.
She’d seen it. She’d felt it. Her mother had made sure she could recognize it through the memories of the wolves: The slight tremors and rising fever. The convulsions that could snap a man’s arms and back as his muscles contracted like vises around his bones. The blinding fire that burned in the veins and twisted a man’s mind into coma and death. Full half of the colonists had perished in the first wave of alien plague. A third of those left had died in the second epidemic. And then there had been the martyrs. Even after eight hundred years, it was still viable, the plague.
Nori had been to the Ancients’ domes twice, where the colonists had lived at Landfall. There had been bones there, hundreds of human skeletons, strangely lit rooms where the walls glowed without sign of a single lantern. There had been papers that had fractured or powdered when she touched them, odd equipment she didn’t understand. Plague lived there, in the ruins of the first county halls. No one knew what caused the disease, only that the Aiueven, the alien birdmen, had sent the plague, and man could still contract it.
Plague here, in the forest? Nori must have misunderstood. With the bond so new, the fear of worlags was simply confused with other images. It was impossible to catch the death-disease away from the Ancients’ domes.
But Grey Vesh nipped at Nori’s knee, and another wolf bit at her heels when she tried to turn again to the cliff. She jerked back onto the forest trail. They snarled and pushed her into a wide arc around the ridge where they shied from death.
“Dammit,” she cried out. “It’s safety. I can climb out at the cliffs.”
Death, death. Grey Vesh slammed into her thigh and snapped at her elbow.
She staggered left and missed another game trail that led toward the stone ridges. “Damn you, it could save your pups.”
Burning death, Grey Vesh snarled back in her mind. Dead wolves, dead pups. Dead humans, the wolf finally snapped.
She had no more breath to argue. The best she could do was glimpse the rocks, pale and steep. In the moonlight, the cliff bit at the earth like a stone jaw half sunk into flesh. There was a darker scar on its face, as if the rocks had broken in recent years. It gave the ridge the look of a snarling poolah. She noted the location in the back of her mind, then raced on in the midst of the wolves. Now there was only Ironjaw Creek three kays away and shallow as a bigot.
Behind her, the thick trees swallowed the rancid scent of a drying seep and its rotting richness of reeds. She never saw the turquoise sheen of the shallow puddles that the rain had been diluting. Never saw the faint, yellow-green glow from the dying lilies that wept into the swamp.
IV
An ally makes a good friend,
Except when he’s at your back.
—Nadugur saying
East, on Willow Road . . .
Payne’s sister didn’t turn up at Wakje’s wagon, nor among the crafters, nor with the last of the cozar wagons. Payne was about to check with yet another merchant when he caught sight of the wagon’s chovas. The man riding guard was Murton, the Sidisport chak who had dumped him in the river.
The chovas glanced back and caught sight of him. “Hey, neBentar,” the man called out. “Sorry about that dunking.”
Inside one of the wagons, three men went still. Then there was a flurry of quiet action. The blond man snatched the lists and papers on the table and stuffed them into his jerkin. The second man grabbed a map they’d had handy and laid it out over the now bare wood. The third reached back and picked up a packet of trade agreements to spread out over the map. As Payne’s dnu reined in beside Murton, the three inside began a quiet murmuring about trade routes in the east.
Payne hid his disgust at the greeting. Murton’s voice had been, of course, loud enough to catch the attention of every outrider nearby. The man got on Payne’s nerves like a splinter in his shorts. But Payne smoothed his expression. With a ninan left to reach the Test town, he figured he’d better get used to splinters. “I’m asking along the line,” he said shortly. “Have you seen my sister in the past few hours?”
“Black Wolf?” The outrider gave him a speculative look. “Moons, neBentar, you worry more about her than a rabbit in a lepa’s den.”
He shrugged.
The older man said dryly, “If you can’t find her, it’s probably because she doesn’t want to be found, especially after that leaf trick. How she knows where to find those things . . .” The chovas shook his head. “She’s probably waiting near the front of the line.”
Payne kept his voice steady. “No one’s seen her ride forward.”
But the man caught the undertone anyway. “Dik spit, neBentar, you’re not thinking of calling a search? That’s a hell of an overreaction.”
Payne dropped his pretense of a smile. “Not if she’s actually missing.”
“Don’t get your shorts in a twist, boy. Black Wolf will laugh her head off when she turns up at Chileiwa Circle after you’ve started a panic. Your parents will have a field day when they hear about that.”
Payne stifled his instinctive response. There might be ten folk left in the county who didn’t know he was the youngest son of Aranur of Ramaj Ariye and the famous Wolfwalker Dione. Attention from the girls he didn’t mind. Taking flak from a chak like Murton was a different story. It was one of the reasons he preferred traveling with the cozar when he wasn’t in a hurry. The cozar didn’t care if he was Aranur’s son, only that he worked his share of the line. In fact, with few exceptions, the only real ranks or titles used among the cozar were those of location, not lineage. A message master was the wagon with the birds and ring-runner supplies, not the person most skilled at writing, carving, or hawking. Duties rotated, depending on who was in the train, and people were judged by what they did, not by how they were born. Only the -van at the end of a task indicated someone whose skills were high enough to hold a permanent title, and the -van was used only for strangers who required the formality. Among themselves, the cozar were known simply by their rep-names, like Repa Ripping White or Tatsvin Ten-Bones, or in Nori’s case, Black Wolf.
Murton cast him a sideways look. “She’s probably out planning tonight’s antic in spades,” the man prodded again. “The painted faces on the dnu? The wheezing saddle? You should watch your backside more. She’d pick on a lepa if she thought it would bite The Brother.”
There it was. Payne shrugged grimly. He should have expected Murton to get his name in sooner or later. The cozar had called him The Brother ever since he was twelve, but every time Murton said the rep-name, it turned into an insult. Payne prayed the rep-name didn’t stick past his Test. It was depressingly accurate. His life in a nutshell: always watching out for Nori, always responsible for her. Sometimes, hearing “The Brother” made him want to pound some bones in, as if he would never be a man himself, just one more appendage of Nori.
Murton shook his head at Payne’s shrug. “Even if she’s out on the trail, she’s four times as skill
ed there as you. You might as well worry that a poolah can’t find its own den.” The man’s dnu danced nervously at a crackling sound, but the chovas controlled the beast easily. “She’s playing a joke, nothing more. She’ll be back by fireside.”
“She’s already played her prank for the day, and she would never make me worry on purpose.” Not when it could rouse the cozar. The caravan folk would descend on the forest like a flock of pelan. They’d pick apart every bush in case she’d fallen or been set upon. They’d scour the creek banks, check every ravine. She’d never intentionally cause the kind of search she herself had led so often.
“She’s made no bones about not wanting to Test.”
“Doesn’t matter. This is my Test, not hers. Besides—” He shrugged and hid a wince at a deep bruise. When it came to the fighting rings, his sister was no gentle teacher. She had fists like small steel hammers, elbows even harder, and a stubborn determination to train him up right for rank. Compensation, most likely, for not being able to Test herself. With the specialized training she had received, he might never achieve her skill in the rings, but at least he could best almost any student anywhere near his own age. He tried to force another smile, as if it was indeed a joke. “She’d never miss watching me get thrown around by a dozen ranking fighters.”
The older guard chuckled. “That’s not something I’d miss, either. I hear you’re finally taking your firsts in Abis and Cansi. Been a bit of speculation as to why you haven’t done so before. I would have thought the son of a weapons master would be encouraged to Test early, not late.”
Payne’s smile thinned. “Rank isn’t everything.”
Murton nodded. “I hear that a lot from the unranked. I mean no offense, of course.”
“Of course,” Payne bit off.
Inside the wagon, the men grinned slyly at each other. They had two bets riding on The Brother. The first was when Murton would get him to challenge. The second was how badly the outrider would crack the boy open once he had him down. They had argued briefly over the near-accident on the bridge, but had finally decided it didn’t count toward the bet. They were hoping for blood on the boy, not just for a missing body.
Wolf in Night Page 5