Queen of the Wolves

by Tanith Lee

  Why does she say she wants to kill me? What have I done to her?

  The nose of the ferry-boat grated into the ice.

  More madness. She and I went off across the solid ice, to see the Ice-Fair, (her idea, of course) and like friends, arm-in-arm, because she took my arm. Ngarbo, knives and rifle, swaggered behind.

  ‘I ought to stop hating you, Claidi,’ she said.

  ‘Please do. Then can I go?’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  Would not ask her why she hates me. The Wolf Tower? My run-in with the Tower Law – how could it be that, I destroyed the Law – or tried to. Do these Ravens like the Law? They seem not to like the Wolf Tower itself.

  The fair idled round the ice-crags which gleamed. They’re called icebergs (she said). They never melt entirely, but sometimes a crack thunderingly appears. Slabs of ice that weigh a ton crash off and thump on to the people below. All good sport, it seems.

  Torches burn on poles, and braziers stand around flaming on the ice. It’s so thick, only the slightest moisture forms around these.

  Skaters, like at Peshamba, sailed by.

  Winter Raven bought some hot roasted nuts in a cloth. She offered one to me. ‘No thanks.’

  What does she think I am?

  Stalls on the ice sell everything. Marvellous colours. Another time, it might have been very fascinating … the silks and furs, the books with gold lettering on their covers, some in letters that look like curls or other strange shapes. The different foods – I’m hungry, but will not say so. The jugglers and other performers. A bears’ dinner-party – I think they were bears, very big and well-groomed and hairy. A man sawing – I almost yelled – a girl in two pieces – in half they called it. How? As each ‘half’ emerged from behind the screen, the girl had become two identical girls.

  None of this was like the dreary shore with the town of Ice-Walk.

  My life too has been cut in two pieces, and changed. Despite all misgiving and fright, I was almost happy. It wasn’t, wasn’t Argul.

  But then … where is he? While here I am, captured again.

  ‘Oh, look,’ said Winter R, sounding like an excited kid, ‘a fortune-telling bird!’

  Up we skidded over the ice, bell-tinkling from her boots.

  I looked at her in the torchlight. One minute she was like some haughty commander. Then like a child of five—

  The bird sat on its perch. It was large, with sunset feathers and a long straight bill.

  Winter Raven held out a coin. But the man seemed to know who she was, and waved the coin aside. ‘Honour, lady. Good health to your Tower!’

  The bird shuffled along its perch, jumped down and landed in a big dish of sand. There it walked about, then dived in its beak, and came up with something, which it presented to WR.

  Grinning – she even looks beautiful when she grins – she unwrapped the sparkly paper.

  She read out, very seriously, ‘Today is a day for making new friends.’

  Oh yeah?

  The man was bending over the bird’s claw-marks in the sand, as it hopped back to its perch.

  ‘But also, lady, beware. An enemy —’ he looked genuinely uneasy for her.

  ‘Oh, that,’ she said. She gazed at me. ‘Is that you, Claidissa?’

  I turned away, and the bird whistled mockingly.

  ‘Your men have pulled Jelly out of the box,’ I said flatly. ‘They’re rolling him along the ice.’ This made me feel very uncomfortable. I added, ‘I don’t think they’d have got the better of him in the first place, if he hadn’t already been hit and knocked out and bruised.’ She only glanced. ‘Rolling him along? Hit and bruised? Good,’ she said. ‘Wolf Tower scum.’

  Then she dragged me sliding off.

  Her men did everything she told them to, even to loading Jelly back in the box again, but not until one of them had kicked him.

  When this happened I went over and slapped the man’s face. He looked surprised and raised his fist – and she shouted, and he put the fist down.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ said her man, who I’d heard her call Vilk, to me. ‘Fancy him, do you? Eh, grandpa, lady fancies you.’

  Jelly (who wasn’t that old) looked rather ill, but blank. As if none of us were there. His skin, under this dusk-day sky, also seemed darker, sort of blue, and his scalp-stubble was growing through fast. His feet are so big. He’s disgusting – but, well, what harm has he done me really? He may even have helped.

  ‘I only thought,’ I said, ‘kicking him like that, you might have hurt your poor leg, Vilk.’

  ‘Come on,’ said she.

  We walked through the rest of the Ice-Fair, as if it were invisible.

  The further shore was steep. The Raven men helped the horse pull Jelly. She and I helped the graffapin. He kept sliding and sitting down. We had to be careful, though Graff didn’t seem upset.

  ‘The snow-road up there is better,’ she said. ‘He’ll be all right on that, won’t you, boy? What’s his name?’

  ‘Graff.’

  ‘That’s what they’re all called. Couldn’t you even name him?’

  This was beneath me. (He had come with that name.) I ignored it.

  We arrived on the far shore. Now we were across the river, in The North. In the winter-white snowland.

  Right then, the snow didn’t fall, but the sky must be full of it, ceaselessly making it.

  There was no landscape. It was a forever of white, which even in the gloom shone like the moon does.

  But the road was there at once, and you couldn’t miss it. Though nothing else stood out on the landscape, the entrance to the road did. It was marked by two enormous stone beasts. A hundred feet tall? They were shaped almost like square, four-legged tables, with long necks which rose and rose. White stones, splotched with a sort of pinkish stone in patches.

  ‘Giraffes,’ she said to me. ‘The town’s full of live ones. Long-haired, of course, for the cold. Your Graff is part giraffe. He’s going to love it there. Cheer up, Claid. You’ll like it too.’

  ‘You think so.’

  ‘I haven’t been fair to you, have I. Mother’d go on at me.’

  I tried to picture Winter with a mother, going on, telling her off.

  ‘She’s a lady of the Raven Tower,’ I said.

  ‘The lady of the Raven Tower.’

  ‘Right.’

  Winter looked at me long and hard.

  ‘You really haven’t worked it out, have you?’

  ‘I’m very slow.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘It’s been good, paying you out.’

  ‘Paying me out for what?’

  ‘But not fair,’ she infuriatingly went on, ‘no, I haven’t been fair. Look, there are the zleys.’

  I looked where she pointed, and at the zleys. Four high-fronted vehicles, carved, painted rich reds and magentas, and gilded, strung with bells like her boots. They have runners, which glide over hard-packed snow, as if on a road. Each zley was drawn by a team of three, cream-white panthers.

  ‘She bred the panthers,’ said WR.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My mother. She’s really a genius. Bred the graffapins too.’

  ‘And she can also make extremely life-like dolls, real enough to be taken for human beings – is that her as well, this genius?’

  Off-hand, ‘Oh, yes.’ As if she’d known even very slow Claidi would work it out in the end.

  But this had begun to sound like Ustareth-Zeera. Yet I know she is dead. Who then, is this one, this Raven woman, who makes clockwork people – or however she does it?

  ‘Who is your mother?’

  ‘Thought you’d never ask. You’ll know the name.’ Something crossed her face – anger, a jeer. Then, almost preparing me – pity. ‘My mother is Twilight Star.’

  As they were pulling the wrapped bundle off Jelly’s horse and into one of the zleys, I walked over and lifted the cloth away. There he was. There it was. I’d told myself I must get a look at the doll, to make sure. I’d been
dreading it rather. Now – I just looked.

  Argul lay there. Only not Argul. Lifeless, solid metal, clockwork … It no longer even looked like him, somehow. Oh, when it had been with me, it had been made to seem to breathe, to blink, to think. But – how could I ever have thought, even for one second, this was Argul? You see what you expect. Get what you look for. I’d been thinking he would behave as Blurn had done. And they had made him behave exactly like that. But oh, again, how had I been fooled?

  I tapped its chest. Hard, metal, un-human—

  My legs nearly gave way.

  It was Ngarbo, moving in as if to catch me when I swooned, who brought me round. I straightened up and glared.

  ‘Why don’t you undo that man, I mean Jelly. At least don’t keep him all folded up like a sandwich. There are six of you after all. Or maybe you’re still too scared of him?’

  ‘What,’ said he, all charm, ‘the Wolf Tower bod? We’ve already loosed him. Can’t have him getting uncomfy. Not yet, anyway.’

  They had undone the ropes. Even tucked him in the zley under a fur. But Vilk and Vilk’s gun were Jelly’s seat-mates.

  The men took three zleys. Winter was driving this zley with me. She rapped her command into the dark air. Part of the snow leapt forward – the panthers. We were off.

  CHYLOMBA

  Shall I describe this room first, or the town? Or the zley-ride? That might have been glorious, under other circumstances.

  The icy, lemonady speed-wind, rushing spangle-sprays of snow, runners going zzsrrrh, and all the jingling bells.

  Graff trotted fast behind, steady on the solid, frozen snow. The horse had no trouble either, particularly without Jelly or the doll-thing. Sometimes the Raven men sang or shouted. And Winter Raven joined in the song. (Her voice, of course, is very good.)

  Only Jelly and I kept quiet. A lot to think about, Jelly and me. I wish I didn’t feel so much abrupt kinship with him. He too is my enemy. But we are now both prisoners of the Raven Tower. Even if – even if Twilight Star is my mother.

  Everything has seemed to link to Twilight, in a way. Or does so now. If – I am her daughter, then Winter is my – sister. We’re not much alike. I’ve never been sure what Jizania said about my parents was true. Am I now really going to learn? If so – when?

  The town is called Chylomba.

  It’s encircled by walls, which, where the snow is melted off them, burn with colour. The whole town does that. Even when the sky fills with night – which anyway eerily reflects back the snow and the lamps, and goes a kind of metallic tangerine. Lamps light everywhere. The streets, the town hills and the buildings. But these lamps are also coloured, like cats’ eyes or gems.

  Snow never stays anywhere for long, except on the roads, where gangs come by to pack it down hard. Even if snow covers the buildings, it melts off soon, due to a form of underbrick heating. (So the old servant says.)

  Chylomba looks, from up here, like a toy. Lots of coloured towers, and also all these little terraced hills, on which little pavilions or small towerlets perch, and they are the most colourful of all. From my high windows, I can see several of these hills. One is mauve. By which I mean every terrace, and its crowning pavilion too, is a mauve shade. Then there is one which is all a sparkly crimson. Over there, facing the sunrise, if ever the sun comes out, one hill blazes gold – I do mean gold, not yellow. No, the primrosy yellow hill is over there, more southwards …

  All this, with the snowed-white straight streets and squares cutting through, makes the town, more than a toy, look like a board game.

  I don’t like that. For if the buildings and hills, streets and squares of Chylomba are the board of a game – whose game? And who are the game-pieces, the counters or whatever?

  High up, birds wheel. Actual ravens, I suppose. But if so, their way of flying is odd, and also they look too big.

  This room is very big. Always warm.

  Everything velvets and assorted furs. So many furs I was relieved when the old servant told me most of these are false fur, man-made, as they do it at Peshamba.

  The ceiling is painted like a summer sky. With, naturally, a flock of ravens painted in.

  The day sky is seldom blue outside, over Chylomba. Now and then a break comes in the cloud. It never lasts. Frequently snow falls, thin, like a mist. Once, muffle-thick.

  ‘Is there ever a thaw?’

  ‘No,’ said the kind old servant. ‘This is a warm season.’

  I watch the buildings go white, then all the colour melt back through.

  Always, day and night, lots of coming and going. Along the streets, zleys rush, drawn by panther-teams. Riders trot along, some on horses, or on graffs.

  The giraffes pass too, like stately towers on table-legs. They have long, grey-white fur, mottled almost with the markings of leopards. No one rides them, they just seem to roam at will. Once I did see one relight a lamp which had gone out, using a sort of wand lifted in its mouth. A giraffe-accompanying crowd applauded, and then fed it things.

  I’ve been here, in the Guest House, since yesterday. Nothing has happened, except down in the streets.

  At first it was nice to wallow in a hot bath, to find clean, glamorous clothes that fit, hung ready in a cupboard.

  The old man, or a girl, take my requests for food and bring me anything I ask for, even though I’ve tried to ask for things they couldn’t bring.

  ‘Where do you grow pineapples in this snow?’

  ‘The hot-houses,’ said the kind old man.

  I’d heard his name. It had sounded familiar. Perhaps it’s like the name of someone I’ve known. What was it? I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.

  I’m not quite a prisoner. I can leave my room and trail about through the Guest House (now and then meeting other ‘guests’, who all seem either in a Chylomba-type hurry, or as dazed as I feel).

  Am I a ‘guest’? The town is also, they say, free to me. I can go where I want, I’ve been told. (Graff is ready in the stable. Or they can lay on a zley.)

  Yesterday, on arrival, I asked about the two relevant matters, but only once. I asked Ngarbo.

  ‘Where are you taking that man Jelly?’

  ‘To be questioned.’

  ‘Oh.’ I’d shaken inside, wished I hadn’t asked. ‘Questioning’ may mean all sorts of cruelties. I did say, ‘I know he’s from the Wolf Tower, but I don’t think he knows much, really.’ Though even I didn’t believe that.

  Lofty, Ngarbo said, ‘Leave it to us, lady.’ Patronizing twerp.

  We were by then standing on the steps of the Guest House, in the new-falling snow. Despite everything, I’d dozed off in the zley, and woken up coming in at the town gate, guarded by guards in black and gold, under a weird snow-light sky. Next moment it seemed the zley stopped. She, Winter Raven, sprang down and was gone, tossing the panther-reins to a groom in passing. Not a word to me. She’d probably said enough.

  In the lamplit snow and muddle of moving figures, I lost her at once.

  Stuck-up Ngarbo then took charge of me. He took me to the Guest House. We were on the steps when I asked my two questions. (Which I’d have asked WR if she had stayed.)

  The second was, ‘When am I to meet Twilight Star?’

  As I might have guessed, he just looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Are you meeting Lady Twilight?’ he drawled.

  ‘Yes.’ What other outcome could I expect? ‘So, tonight?’ I said. ‘Tomorrow?’

  But Ngarbo only said, ‘Search me.’

  I hadn’t been able to see what happened with Jelly, if they mistreated him again while dragging him off somewhere.

  Before I could think of anything else to demand (uselessly) of Ngarbo, an old man undid the Guest House door.

  ‘Tower guest,’ said slap-deserving Ngarbo. He didn’t give the servant my name. He told me the servant’s name – no wonder I don’t remember.

  I don’t want to ask the servant what he’s called.

  I’ve been a servant myself – I was the l
owest sort, a maid. And it seems so ignorantly insulting, immediately to have forgotten his name.

  This is the END!!! (Which I thought had already happened.) (Several times.)

  I stamped back to this posh room and threw things and shouted, just like some spoiled brat – Jade Leaf at the House, for example—

  Now I’m sitting here, and in a minute one of them is going to come and knock, ever so courteous and flirty, on the door. ‘Oh, Claidissa, are you ready yet?’

  And I have to go out with them, pretend to be – well, not pleased – but pleased-in-spite-of-myself. In order to find out what is going on. If that’s even possible. Which I doubt.

  Because this is all a game. All of it. That becomes more and more obvious. I am angry. So very—

  Sorry! I apologize. I mean, I know you’re perhaps used to me by now, but you don’t know, do you, what has happened.

  Right, I’ll tell you.

  This being my second day here, and nothing having changed, no one arrived to speak to me or summon me – I thought I’d have to make a move.

  I keep thinking how I was stuck at the Rise. I have a kind of sore place in my mind where I recall Dagger saying to me that night I found the Hulta, ‘It doesn’t sound like you – didn’t you try to get away or do anything?’

  It’s as if I have to keep on an extra amount now, to shut up her voice in my head. I keep wondering if I’ve gone soft, or sloppy. I mean, should I have tried to run away yesterday – or at least tried to get to see this woman Twilight, who may – or may not – be my—

  My mother.

  Anyway.

  Today was getting on for sunset. The purple cloud had cleared a lot westwards, and a flaming band of apricot sky appeared, where the sun was thinking of sinking.

  I went out through the very straight corridors here, which snap one into another, all alike, with endless doors and silk hangings. Then down a straight wide stair.

  Below was a long room I hadn’t seen before. Its walls were hung with what looked like carpet. Two posts at the stair’s bottom had ebony ravens carved on them. There were carvings of ravens everywhere else too, and even painted portraits of ravens. Flying, sitting, doing clever things – like holding little flags in one claw, or, in one case, riding on a large rabbit. Under these pictures were brass plates. They said things like, ‘Ninth Raven Imperial: Jorthrust.’ ‘Twenty-second Arch Raven: Squawky.’ ‘Lady Maysel’s Raven: Parrotine Inkblot.’