Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart

by Jane Lindskold

  She settled herself onto the hearth rug again.

  "Now, how we get inside?"

  Various plans were suggested but all came up against the same problem—even if one or more of their company did get inside, no one knew how to find their way about. The innkeeper's boy's statement that the interior of Thendulla Lypella was a maze kept coming back to trouble them.

  "And even," Elise said, rubbing her eyes as she repeated a point raised earlier, "if we do get someone inside, only two of us speak the language with some facility—and neither Wendee nor myself are the people I would pick for a dangerous raid."

  "Not plan to talk," Firekeeper growled. "Plan to take."

  "Nice in theory," Wendee said dryly, "but it may not be so easy."

  "I say," Edlin said, somewhat diffidently. "It seems to me that our problems fall into two categories, what?"

  They all turned to look at him.

  "Well, there's how to get inside—we've worked out several possibilities for that: the laundry or grocery way, checking out the sewers, finding a way over the walls, hunting for secret passages…"

  He grinned. This last had been his own suggestion.

  "We've figured we can do disguises, too. So that's one category. The other problem is how to find our way around when we're inside."

  "That's right, my lord," Derian said politely.

  "Well, I say," Edlin said. "Is there any reason we can't make a map? I mean, the birds—when they come back—they've been up over the place. They can tell Firekeeper what they've seen and she can write it down for us."

  Firekeeper looked at Edlin with the same sort of astonishment most people would show if a dog started talking sense. Then she frowned.

  "I no can write," she admitted a bit shamefacedly.

  Her failure to learn to read and write was a matter of ongoing contention between her and her various advisors. Only recently had she admitted that there might be a use for the skill, and then only privately to Derian.

  Derian hastened to intercede before what seemed like quite a good idea could be ruined by a technical detail.

  "We can work something out," he said. "You could translate for the birds and I could do the writing. Actually, we may want to draw a map. I'm not much good at that but…"

  "I am," Edlin interrupted, blushing slightly. "I mean, I've had some training. Part of the education to be a war leader someday, you know."

  "Then," Firekeeper said with some reluctance, studying her adopted brother through narrowed eyes, "we work together like a pack."

  Edlin beamed.

  Even through his relief that at least an intermediate solution had been found, Derian resolved to stay in the vicinity while the map was being worked on, just in case. Firekeeper might be needed to translate for the birds, but he suspected that he might be needed to translate for Lord Edlin.

  Grateful Peace would have brought his concerns about Lady Melina before Apheros immediately, but the Dragon Speaker was in conferences and could not be interrupted—at least for anything short of a declaration of war or some other major disaster.

  Suspicions about the moral character of an ally, especially one whom Apheros was coming to increasingly favor, did not fall into that category.

  Before Grateful Peace could obtain the private audience he required, news came from the Granite Tower that the mirror had been forced to yield up at least some of its secrets.

  Peace hastened to witness the report of the research group before the Healed One and Dragon Speaker. The meeting was scheduled to permit the researchers time to change from their drab working robes and scarlet face paint to something more suitable for such an important audience.

  Peace, however, could not get Apheros alone even for a moment. He was too busy preparing himself for the audience. Finally, Peace resigned himself to waiting until later.

  Lady Melina, her eyes now glittering crystalline ornaments around which a serpentine pattern made its painted course over the upper portion of her face, was the modest and self-effacing heart of the trio who reported their success to Apheros. Yet for all that either of her companions—Posa the Illuminator and Zahlia the Smith—spoke three sentences to any one from her, Peace had the eerie sensation that Lady Melina was the one who commanded.

  "After several days spent attempting promising rituals and incantations left to us in the writings of the first Healed One," said Zahlia in impressive rolling cadences far richer than the shouts she used when working over her forges, "we accepted the suggestion of our esteemed foreign advisor, Lady Melina Shield, and attempted to combine our incantations with manipulation of various carved portions on the frame of the mirror itself."

  Posa took up the report, offering first a slight bow to Lady Melina, as if acknowledging that she only sang her praises.

  "Early investigation had revealed that several portions of the mirror's frame concealed small compartments. Analysis of these compartments showed that despite the passage of time and many years in clumsy barbarian hands, traces of powder remained.

  "We analyzed the powder and, when merely manipulating the mirror did not prove sufficient—even when combined with the wondrous incantations of the first Healed One—we tried refilling the compartments with appropriate powders."

  Lady Melina smiled upon king and minister both.

  "To our joy and wonder," she said, her voice filling the chamber despite the superficial softness of its tone, "the experiment worked. A shadowy figure clad in a blue robe of a hue that all confirmed was not present in the tower room at that time appeared in the face of the mirror."

  Zahlia took up the tale again, seemingly unaware that she had been upstaged for the most important single part. As she droned on about the duration that the apparition had appeared, about plans to renew the attempt and confirm what was essential, and similar details, Peace scanned the room as was his custom and duty.

  On the faces of those privileged to witness this audience he saw a variety of responses—astonishment, pleasure, awe, joy, even a trace of jealousy from those members of the Defeatists who had been loudly proclaiming that magic was not the means to power and prosperity.

  His training alerted him to something peculiar about the dynamics of the gathering, even before his conscious mind could isolate what it was. As Zahlia and Posa droned on, embellishing on their plans and all but openly bragging about their success, Peace isolated the wrongness.

  All about the room, the little person-to-person interactions that would be usual at such an audience—even one where the Healed One was present—were reduced. They still went on where those of comparatively lesser importance were grouped—a nudge, a wink, a quick whisper or scribbling of a note. Among those of highest rank—even those members of the Defeatists who should be thinking of how to shift this development to their own advantage—there was nothing.

  They listened to the speakers with rapt attention, nodding or frowning when appropriate, even laughing at an inadvertent pun on Posa's part, but still there was a singular lack of spontaneity among them. Peace noticed how their gazes continually drifted to the trio of speakers—even when it might have been more appropriate for one or more to be glancing at the Healed One or Apheros—to judge their reactions.

  After a time, Grateful Peace became certain that it was not the entire trio they were looking toward, but rather to Lady Melina alone.

  Once he became aware of the wordless pull the foreign woman was exerting, Peace himself realized that he had to struggle not to look into her eyes whenever she glanced in his direction.

  Each time her gaze drifted through the quarter of the room where he was seated, Peace found himself fighting a luxurious lassitude similar to the sensation of drifting off into sleep. He succeeded mostly because of the nature of his location in the room—as usual he was set off to one side where he could watch and report rather than in the front—and because Lady Melina continued to dismiss him as less than important.

  Or maybe, Grateful Peace thought, a cold chill penetrating to the ve
ry center of his heart, she believes me already lulled and thinks that she need not renew her hold on me. What sorcery might she have worked during our long talks in the sleigh on the way to Dragon's Breath? Certainly, I talked more freely to her then than I usually would to some dubious foreigner.

  The idea was so startling and so terrifying that Peace nearly lost track of what was being said. Long practice made it possible for him to scan the room without seeming to move even his eyes. What he saw frightened him to the core.

  Apheros, the Dragon Speaker, listened to the report with solemn dignity, gravely shifting his attention from one speaker to the next. Yet to Peace, who had known him for years—who had long ago been chosen as a member of this Dragon's Three—there was a diminution of the animating spark.

  This was the Apheros the outer world regularly saw—the act he put on his constituents. What was missing was the true Apheros, the signs of which Peace had long ago learned to watch for. Anger and arrogance were as natural to Apheros as were gravity and dignity—and more normal. They were the fires from which his ambition to power had been lit: anger when things were not done as he thought they should be, arrogance that his way was best.

  And his gaze never drifts to me as it usually would, Peace thought. That's what I've been missing! That casual looking that is not looking, the checking to learn what I have seen so that he may anticipate trouble or encourage a supporter. Apheros is like an actor expertly playing the part of a politician, but the politician is not there.

  The thaumaturge had no doubt who was writing Apheros's script. His only question was how she had managed it. Surely it had something to do with how her gaze restlessly played over the room. Under the guise of awed foreign visitor inspecting the gathering of the Primes, she was keeping her hand tight on invisible reins.

  With a sudden chill Grateful Peace realized that here in this very chamber sorcery was being performed, sorcery so subtle that perhaps only a victim on the edge of the spell's power could have detected its workings.

  This realization was followed by one even more terrible. After a lifetime devoted to the reawakening of the power of magic within his land, Grateful Peace looked upon the invisible force of sorcery and realized that if this was magic he wanted nothing to do with it.

  Treasonous as the thought might be, Peace recognized that what he felt as he looked upon true magic was not desire, but fear.

  Chapter XXVIII

  Making a map of Thendulla Lypella proved to be a laborious process. First of all, it could not be escaped that the birds saw differently not only from humans, but from each other. The falcon's eye was keener, meant to distinguish the movements of field mice and rabbits among often self-colored surroundings.

  The eye of the crow was more oriented toward the general, more, Derian thought, like that of a human. Where Elation saw movement, Bold saw difference—that which had not been present at an earlier time. This was necessary, of course, for a creature who made many of its meals from carrion.

  Moreover, neither crow nor falcon tended to distinguish man-made landscape features from natural features. That these two were Royal Beasts, sophisticated beyond their lesser cousins and educated by experience, made the task simpler. After a few requests, they learned to state whether the feature they were describing was natural or created—or at least if they were uncertain.

  Had Derian not been responsible for Firekeeper's earliest education in human society—a time when she, too, had struggled to grasp that oddly shaped hillsides might be made by humans and called houses or castles—he might have given up in frustration.

  Then there was the problem of Firekeeper herself. Although she was learning to use maps, even beginning to accept that flat two-dimensional sketches might represent a much more complex reality, it was another matter to have her to look upon the work in process and tell whether or not art represented reality. Oddly enough, the birds themselves intervened before the situation could become a deadlock. They were accustomed to seeing the landscape from above and thus had less trouble accepting the "bird's-eye view" that cartographers had adopted as a convention.

  Once they understood how a circle might represent an entire tower, how a pair of lines might represent a road, how a thicker line might represent a wall, they were quite willing to critique Edlin's efforts. Bold, with his sharper eye for detail, was the harder to satisfy, but in the end even the crow was satisfied.

  The spire in which Bold had pinpointed the New Kelvinese at work was situated among many surrounding buildings. Distances would have been difficult to estimate, for the wingéd folk rarely worried about any distance that could be traversed in a short flight, but here the towering height of the spires themselves assisted.

  Lord Edlin had little trouble estimating the spires' relative heights and distances from each other, a thing Firekeeper found untellingly annoying.

  "If he do that," she complained to Derian after they had finished and the birds had been sent off to continue gathering information, "why we do all this with the wingéd folk? He just draw from his own eyes then. Surely even he see that towers must rest on earth even if we cannot see that."

  Derian shook his head. They had stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. The air was crisp, the light almost impossibly clear and bright. He had seated himself on a bench backing the stone wall of the house. Cold seeped up through his coat and trousers.

  "Don't be a pig, Firekeeper," he replied wearily—the mapping had been hard on him, even if he hadn't had to draw a line. To him had fallen the job of translating for Firekeeper as she translated for the birds.

  "We needed to know what lies between the spires," Derian went on. "Many of them—as you well know—are mounted on the tops of other buildings. Since we can't fly, we're going to need to go in from the bottom up. That means knowing what's at the bottom—where the paths are, where the guards are, where the cover is, even where we might create the best distraction from outside."

  Firekeeper grimaced, but accepted Derian's reprimand without protest. It was, Derian thought, one of the advantages to her wolf mentality. She accepted criticism and correction—when merited—far more easily than most humans her age did.

  Fleetingly, Derian thought of his sister, Damita, and her increasingly frequent arguments with their mother. Dami was a few years younger than Firekeeper, but as she grew into her woman's body she was less willing to accept her mother's guidance, was more and more eager to prove herself an adult.

  But Firekeeper, Derian thought with a sudden flash of understanding, doesn't need to prove that to anyone. She's proven herself to wolves and humans alike—and now apparently to the Royal Beasts as well or they wouldn't have given her this task.

  Thinking of Damita made Derian fleetingly homesick. He knew that Elise had begun writing home now that it would be impossible for Baron Archer to force her to return. Derian thought he should start doing so himself.

  If I can find the energy, he thought, heaving himself to his feet. Firekeeper—and the ever-present Blind Seer—had vanished while he was lost in thought and when he opened the kitchen door he could hear her inside chivying Edlin.

  "But what is that?"

  "A map of the exterior of the spire we need to get inside," Edlin replied.

  Derian waited for him to add "What?" or "I say!" or another of his numerous verbal ticks, but none followed.

  Firekeeper said slowly, "But the tower—tower is spire, yes?"

  "Pretty much," Edlin said, "though usually spires are thinner, pointed on top. Towers can be any tall building, either part of a building or standing on their own. Spires are usually on the tops of towers, right?"

  Derian hurried back inside. It sounded like trouble was brewing. When he entered the surgery, which, because of its superior lighting, had been turned into a drafting room, he found that Firekeeper had crossed to a window and was looking out across the skyline toward the complex in question.

  "Why," she continued, ignoring Derian's entry, "do we then call Thendulla Lypella the
Earth Spires? Some have points, but some do not."

  "I say," Edlin said, moving to stand next to her, "you're right, you know. There are as many towers as spires. I really don't know why they call it that."

  Derian interrupted.

  "You'd need to ask Elise about that," he said, "or Wendee. They're our translators."

  "Oh."

  Firekeeper gave one more hard stare out the window, then drifted back to inspect Edlin's latest sketch.

  "This is the tower-spire?" she asked. "The one we need to get into?"

  "That's right," Edlin replied. "From what you told me earlier—from what Bold and Elation told you, what?—I knew how many levels there were. I can even see some of the windows from here. I thought we might like a sketch onto which we can add our notes—you know—this window looks in on a small room, this onto a big one, what?"

  "I say!" Derian said. "That's a great idea."

  Only after the words had escaped him did he realize he'd fallen into unconscious mimicry. Edlin's pattern of speech was contagious. He bit his lip, terrified that the young lord would take offense, but Edlin had only heard the praise.

  "Pretty good, eh?" he said complacently. "It should help save time. No need to go charging in through a door if we know it leads to a closet or something."

  Relieved that he hadn't given offense, Derian forbore from commenting that a window wasn't likely to be wasted on a closet. Edlin's logic was good, even if he wasn't the best at expressing what he meant.

  Firekeeper, however, stood scowling at the drawing.

  "But it is," she waved her hands in the air, miming straight lines, "like this—a box. The tower-spire is a round."

  "Cylinder," Derian said automatically.

  Edlin shook his head at her.

  "Never happy, what?"

  He picked up the stick of charcoal he'd been using to rough out his drawing and sketched in a few more lines. Derian wasn't sure how he managed, but suddenly the elongated rectangle possessed a visible quality of roundness.