Trapped, slapped. The male snapped at her wrist.
Nori jerked her hand back. It was an unconcious move that instinctively yanked her mind away from the grey.
Rishte howled silently. He snapped again, this time to catch Nori’s fingers in long, sharp teeth and drag her close. The fangs bit down. Nori cried out at the unexpected physical pain as the white teeth bit in. Sharp fangs jabbed into soft flesh, so different from the burn-pain of running. Rishte loosened his jaw almost instantly, but did not let go. Instead, the young male now barely bit against Nori’s hand, his teeth a steel trap not quite closed.
Wolfwalker, the grey voice growled.
Vesh and Helt had stopped and turned. They watched with unblinking eyes.
Hesitantly, Nori tugged her fingers free. Then she reached out to the sweaty scruff. This time, the wild wolf suffered her touch. Oddly, it soothed them both. Nori let her breath out carefully, reveling in the oily feel of the fur. She barely noticed the loose tufts that clung to her sweaty palms. She crouched and carefully picked two burrs from his hair where they had tangled in his ruff. The wolf twisted to face her.
Their gazes met. Golden-to-violet, mind-to-mind. Human, lupine thoughts met and merged. Images shifted, shattered against each other as patterns clashed. Vision, too high for Rishte; for Nori, too close to the ground. Body heat, too hot for Nori. With the wind chilling her bare skin, it was cool-clammy for the wolf. In the wolf’s mind, harsh lines crisscrossed and twisted. They had human colors without lupine meaning. Contrast without movement. Images, concepts from a society that meant nothing to the beast. In Nori’s mind, nightmare creatures shifted and took shape like writhing fangs. She gasped, gagged on the tastes that seemed to run down her throat. The grey creature snarled like a feral dog. She choked out a cry of disgust. Then their minds began to shift around each other. Closer. Then closer again, like tumblers starting to mesh.
Dirt, soft beneath blackened pads. Musk-sweat, hot breath, gritty soil on tongue.
Breathing too fast, still sucking air, she thought. Cool breeze, lifting. Thank the moons, this is an old, packed trail . . .
East, rising light. Old trail. Rabbit den that way—smell it. Cold water up ahead.
Stone Ridge is behind me. Water, stream? Payne must be more than twenty kays south and east . . .
Human pack is moving, moving away.
He’ll be worried . . . Got to get the cubs to a new den. It will be morning before I can get back. Cold water? I have to wash. Have to get my sweat-scent down. Fourteen days to Shockton . . .
Sun-nights running, running trails. Wide trails? Man-trails.
Man-road, she clarified mentally. Willow Road. And wagons.
Behemoths that deafen the pack.
Chimera-bollusk, she agreed with a laugh.
She broke off midthought.
The wolf stared into her violet eyes. Chimera-bollusk. Wagon. He seemed to roll the concept around in his mind, tasting it from different angles. Wagon, he agreed. Noisy.
“Aye,” she whispered.
The wolf’s golden eyes gleamed, and he probed toward her mind again. Wolfwalker, he sent softly.
“Grey One,” she breathed. She touched the musky fur again. “You honor me.” Rishte’s lips curled back. Nori didn’t realize that her own had done the same.
Even with the pack’s wariness, need was developing between them. This was not just a fleeting attempt to link. The bond had truly begun. The idea of absence was already painful as they started to find and fill in the holes in each other’s minds. Soon, in days, maybe even in hours, even if Rishte understood how deeply the alien taint was set in her mind, he would not be able to leave her.
She stared into his golden eyes until she could feel him wrapping around her thoughts, making himself fast in her mind even as her head throbbed with the strain between the yellow slitted eyes and the golden gaze of the wolves. She pressed her fist to her temple, and the grey seemed to surge in answer.
She knew what to do with that lupine strength. She had been drilled in its use since she was a child. She hadn’t had a grey partner of her own to practice on, but she knew in theory how to do it. How to draw energy out of herself and focus it through the wolves to help them or heal herself. It was the Great Trade made by the aliens and Ancients: Ovousibas, and land to live on, in exchange for the barriers that would protect the birdmen’s offspring.
With Rishte, Nori could use that kind of mental focus to fix her own aches and pains—if she dared. Ovousibas, the internal healing, was forbidden. In the centuries that had passed since the aliens sent plague, internal healing had become a myth, carried only in the memories of the wolves. There were perhaps two dozen people who knew it was real. Only one—Nori’s mother—had mastered the technique. To do it now, without having the control to keep from being discovered by other wolves and, through them, by other wolfwalkers, was to chance being hunted down and killed. But oh, it was tempting.
Strain her thigh? Just reach for the yearling and heal it up. Break a leg, and knit the bone as neatly as melding clay. With internal healing, she’d be able to touch the packsong and seal muscles back together like book-matching a grained veneer. It wasn’t quite that easy, but it could mean the difference between life and death, between dragging a leg to get away and limping at a run. She’d never have to worry about gelbugs or weibers again. Not that she usually did—the taint had some advantages—but there were times when even those slitted yellow eyes did not protect her. But the grey wolves hated the taint in her, and the yellow eyes hated the wolves.
Rishte growled softly.
Choose, she thought, between yellow and grey. Choose her form of protection. She was tempted . . .
Wolfwalker, no.
She blinked. For a moment, she stared unseeing at the yearling. Then she sat back on her heels. “Aye,” she said softly. She was too tired, too unfocused, too distracted by fear and the newness of what was happening between them. “You are right. This is not the time.”
She shifted, felt the papers crinkle in the sling, and pulled them out to study them while she caught her breath. She’d grabbed what she could, but the bag with the message tubes would have been a better catch. Those tubes probably contained the letters and contracts of every ring-runner dead in the past two ninans.
The first was exactly that, a contract from one merchant to another. She moved to a brighter patch of moonlight and smoothed it out. She recognized the guild seal even if she couldn’t make out more than half the spidery writing. That could be passed on intact. Then there was a torn report from a caravan guide on the status of trade along a particular route. It would have been more useful if there had been more than the halves of the first two paragraphs. The third was a letter, this one written in symbols that looked like a Tamrani House code. If she’d had her scout book, she might have figured out enough of it to know which one. Ariye kept close tabs on the Houses, and there was almost always someone who could be bribed.
There was little enough on the last torn piece. She’d interrupted the raider before he had written much down, but the three irregular lines made her sit back on her heels abruptly. Code, and not a House or guild code. She couldn’t read it; it was new, but she recognized the structure. At least four other scouts had brought in samples like this one over the past year and a half. She knew, because she’d been birded just three ninans ago with a message from her mother. Six Ariyen scouts had gone missing after reporting to the council that they would try to get more samples. It was one of the reasons the Test council would be bigger than usual this year. The Ariyen Lloroi wanted to hear directly from the elders in the outlying towns. Something was coming, something was building up against Ariye; they just didn’t know what it was.
Nori was no elder, but even she recognized that raiders didn’t bother with code unless they were part of something much bigger than a single raider band. “Crap on a stickbeast,” she whispered. If the raiders at Bell Rocks survived the worlags, they could be on her trail even now
to retrieve their code and silence the one who took it. She jammed the papers back in the sling.
She had to get this to her parents, but staying on Deepening Road would be a mistake. It was the first place the raiders would look for her. And although she knew both scouts and ring-runners assigned in this part of the county, she didn’t know how to locate the contacts her parents used. Payne, not Nori, kept track of the web of informants, and people found Nori, not the other way around. There was an old weaver woman in Ayerton, but it would take Nori at least a day to reach her. With Test coming up next ninan, the woman might not even be there. On the other hand, Nori could make it back to Willow Road by morning if she managed to borrow a dnu. Then Payne could send the code by fast rider north to Mama and Papa.
The irony of what she was doing made her snort. The elders were so anxious to get her to do duty, but she’d been doing exactly that half her life. It was visibility they wanted, another Dione in the ranks, and that’s what she denied them. If she had a choice, she’d stay in the background forever.
Puzzled, Rishte stared into her violet-grey eyes. The trail? The two paths?
Nori caught the image of the wolf at a fork in the trail. It was the same image she’d had since she was a child, of the choice between yellow and grey. She smiled wryly. “Choice,” she agreed. “Of that, too. Soon enough.”
Rishte stared back into her violet eyes. He didn’t understand, but he recognized the sense of the slitted eyes, the sense of power that seemed to crackle around the image of her mother. Tendrils of that power had already seeped into Nori, but not through the wolves. The sense of Ovousibas didn’t bother the yearling, but the sense of the taint touching Nori’s grasp of power made him growl, as if he would challenge the yellow eyes. The slitted gaze seemed to flicker open.
Grey Vesh snapped.
Nori and Rishte jerked.
Vesh bared her teeth and glared. Tainted. Alien. The thought grated on the pack. It was why Vesh and Helt were so reluctant to let Rishte bond. A wolf–human link was an intimacy that clung to every level of thought. It would echo through the memories of the telepathic wolves. Accepting Nori meant accepting not only another human in the packsong, but also the things attached to the taint.
“No harm,” she breathed. “I meant no harm.”
Vesh backed off, but didn’t stop snarling.
Nori’s sweaty skin prickled. She shook it off, but her lips were still curled back with Rishte’s own, lower growl.
Wolfwalker? Rishte nudged her uncertainly.
She stared down at the yearling. Even under Vesh’s protectiveness, she could feel his need for the bond like her own.
Blood-scent, he sent. Sweat-scent, breath, hot breath, your breath, Nori-breath. Wolfwalkerwolfwalkerwolfwalker . . . Rishte’s voice was a simple song, the need for affirmation.
“I am here,” she whispered, projecting the words into his mind. We are together. She touched the grey fur again and let her finger run slowly along the ruff. Rishte’s shoulders rippled. Wild as he already was, he could allow only the edge of that contact, but she could hear the longing in his mind for the close touch he didn’t understand.
Human-thing, Nori-thing. Nori-mind. Mine. Wolfwalker, wolfwalker.
Vesh snapped irritably, and Rishte’s ears flicked at the pack mother. The yearling turned his golden eyes away from the wolfwalker. Contact broke. Her breath caught at the loss. The Ancients had engineered the bond to trigger off the optic nerve. With the link so new, the abrupt cessation of intimacy was like going blind at noon.
In front of her, Rishte turned to face the pack. His chest seemed to gain breadth as he growled at his pack mother and father. Nori-mine, he sent. Wolfwalker-mine.
Helt snarled. Human-thing. Tainted. Not-pack. Not-mine. Lobo. His ruff rose like a brush.
Rishte’s hackles rose in return. Nori-mine, he insisted. His lips wrinkled back like old skin. His white, curved teeth were bared.
Slowly, carefully Nori stood.
Vesh watched her with that unblinking gaze. Finally, the female snapped at Rishte’s shoulder. The yearling’s ears flicked back. Vesh snapped again, and he submitted with another snarl. The mother wolf glared at Nori. Danger. Danger-you. Old death, new death. Danger.
Slowly, Nori nodded. The other wolves were older and stronger in their minds than Rishte. They could see the taint in her like blood on the grass. Rishte could not see that danger clearly, not through the excitement of first-bonding, but the taint in her mind had brought the pack’s sense of nearby plague to the foreground.
“That kind of death is long gone,” she tried to reassure them. She let her voice help focus her words through her mind. “I’ll mark the place. My mother will check it out, but it’s just a memory. You have no need to fear it.”
New death, Vesh growled angrily. The female glared at Nori. Danger-you.
Nori didn’t argue, not with a full pack of wolves with teeth bared right in front of her. She understood completely: the mother wolf wanted the human-thing gone as soon as her pups were safe. She took a breath. Distance, she told herself. Focus on that, not the taint. “The men on the road,” she said instead. “They are still kays away. Are there any humans closer?”
This, the wolves could answer. There was a sense of Nori’s voice falling, falling away. Then a din of snarling grew far back in her mind. It thickened, blended, split apart. It came back more darkly before it tightened, like loose strings being slowly twisted into a thin cord. Moments later, the young wolf bared his lips as he gazed back into Nori’s eyes. No men. Poolah hunting to the east. OldEarth deer moving away to the west back to their night hideouts. Bollusk bedded down beneath the thickest blackheart trees. Nothing else on the trails. Men on the trail. Closest.
Two more kays, then. Maybe three to reach the road. She rolled her shoulders to ease their tightness. Three kays, max. She could do that.
Grey Vesh, impatient to get going again, pushed up beside Nori. The wolfwalker opened the sling. The mother wolf sniffed her pups, then looked up, met Nori’s gaze, and growled. The older voice was harsher, wilder than Rishte’s. It reminded her coldly that her link to the yearling was not yet set. It was barely clay or hard-packed sand, not twisted silk or stone.
Nori stared unblinking, unwilling to risk breaking that contact as she caught the depth of images and grey law that lay behind that voice. She suddenly realized that this was to be a lesson, the teaching of the young. For to the wolves, Nori was still young. She was not yet on her own, away from her pack, her family. Instead, she clung to the freedom of youth that her mother had fought to give her. It would not last. Eight ninans, and she would turn twenty-three, the final age of a Journey youth. It was the age at which even the Wolfwalker Dione must admit that Nori was grown. The wolves could read that point in her as clearly as if they counted the days to her birthday. Until then, as a yearling, she could still be influenced, could still be swayed toward the grey. Vesh had begun to realize that Rishte was already well caught. The pack mother had only this night to change the human-thing to better protect her child.
Nori sucked in her breath. You honor me, she sent reverently.
Vesh merely snarled more loudly. Behind the rough voice, the packsong seethed. This was not what Nori had seen through Rishte. That had been a wash of sound, like a hundred wolves howling from beyond the hills or the sound of surf near dunes. Vesh’s mind was deeper, clearer, more distinct. It was like looking at a painting and seeing the individual brushstrokes instead of mere shapes and shades. In its own way, it was as strong as the taint that twisted her guts together. She and Rishte would be like that someday—if they stayed together.
Nori stretched her mind toward that packsong, using Rishte as a focus. Like light in a lens, voices shifted from a din into lupine growls. Needs and urges broke against each other like children crying out, laughing, hitting each other in play. Distinct images swept past: field mice digging desperately down, away from the wolves who pawed at their bolt-holes. One pack, then another,
hunting eerin and deer into the brush. Packmates tumbling at a den, splashing across streams and nosing through sparse meadows for rasts and moles and rabbits.
The memories stretched back from yesterday, from last ninan, from years ago. Passed from one grey generation to the next, these were the images that formed the base of the packsong. Any wolf could tap into that ocean of memories. They could see from other wolves the trails that had become too deadly to run, places of predator fights, places the wolves avoided. They could see other memories, too: humans they had bonded with, humans scouting, human-things that had little meaning to the wolves. Old images were faint as smoked glass, but the recent ones like Nori’s run and the death of the messengers in Gambrel Meadow were sharp as heavy crystal.
Curious, Nori deliberately tried to ease into the image of the death-seep near the cliff that had reminded the wolves of plague.
Vesh growled louder.
Nori did not flinch. Slowly, she sent her question again. When was it there? she asked. What was it that formed the danger?
Uneasy, but caught by Nori’s violet eyes as much as the wolfwalker was by the grey, Vesh pierced the packsong with her question. The seeking swept out reluctantly. The answer came back with a snarl. Wrongness, unease, old danger burning—it was a jumble of need to avoid the area. It was also crisp, as if the urgency from Nori’s run had pulled it into the foreground and given it more focus. There was more than one seep at the cliffs. The wagon track was the remnant of only one memory where men had dug in the earth. Six other swamps had begun to stretch north along the ridges, and the wolves were getting nervous. Nori frowned. The wolves were shifting north and east, not just to escape the worlags, but also to avoid the ridge, to avoid places where men had been near the cliffs. Places men had died.
Show me, she sent.
There was a flash of fear, the scent of sickness, the odor of decay. In that instant, Nori saw trees, flat walls, charred wood in piles. Fear-sweat. Terror in men. Death, burning death, sick death, and something too deliberate.
Wolf in Night Page 10