The Wolf's Call

by Anthony Ryan

  Erlin winced as he looked at the rising sun. “Not for much longer. The Dien-Ven don’t bother patrolling the minor canals, but we’ll soon be nearing the locks. Then I suspect things will start getting complicated.”

  Chien finally came to a halt about an hour past sunrise, climbing the grassy verge fringing the canal, shading her eyes to peer at something to the north. Vaelin joined her, drawing up short at the sight that confronted him. It appeared to be a town of some kind, buildings and bridges clustered together in a confusing maze descending in tiers towards the shore of a huge body of water. To call it a lake seemed foolishly inadequate. It was more of an inland sea, the placid waters stretching away to a northern shore too distant to be glimpsed.

  “Nushim-Lhi,” Chien said, nodding to the oddly configured town.

  “Lock bridge?” Vaelin asked after puzzling over the translation.

  “More like Lock Town,” Erlin said. “Any town with a bridge bears the name ‘khi,’ and this one has many. The canals come together here. Boats are conveyed to the lake by a series of locks. It’s quite a marvel of engineering, one your sister would surely find fascinating.”

  “Will you look at that?” Sehmon breathed in awe. Vaelin turned to see him gazing towards the south. The source of his wonder wasn’t hard to find. The port city of Hahn-Shi stretched away to east and west, filling the horizon for at least fifty miles. Suburbs extended into the surrounding fields in dark masses, birthing roads that snaked across the orderly green landscape like the tendrils of some giant beast that had crawled from the sea.

  “You could fit ten Varinsholds into that,” Sehmon said, “and still have room for more.”

  “How many people live in this land?” Ellese asked Erlin, her expression more troubled than awed.

  “So many the Merchant Kings have a great deal of difficulty counting them,” Erlin replied. “When I last came here the census estimated some thirty-five million in the Venerable Kingdom alone.”

  “A million is a thousand thousands, yes?” Alum asked Vaelin.

  “It is.”

  The Moreska shook his head, letting out a grim laugh. “If my cousin hadn’t told me to follow you, I would now be insisting we turn back and find a ship to the Opal Isles. We cannot hope to remain hidden in such a land.”

  A faint snort came from Chien as she started down the bank and into the fields below. Vaelin heard her mutter, “Foreigners have the wit of pigs,” as she set off towards the east without looking back.

  “So, we’re not going to town,” Nortah observed.

  “Faith no, the Dien-Ven would catch us in minutes,” Erlin said, descending the bank and following in Chien’s wake. “Come along. As I recall it’s only a seven- or eight-mile walk from here.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Their destination turned out to be an unedifying ramshackle mill-house on the lake-shore. The aged planks that formed its walls bowed inwards and the roof sagged. A waterwheel turned slowly in the current flowing into a broad irrigation channel, and a thin stream of grey smoke rose from the chimney. Chien came to a halt some thirty paces from the mill-house, motioning for Vaelin and the others to do the same.

  “Say nothing,” she cautioned, continuing to stand as the seconds grew into minutes. Finally there came a rustle of disturbed vegetation and two men rose from the half-grown wheat stalks close by. They were each festooned with concealing leaves and faces blackened with earth. They also both carried crossbows, drawn and loaded with wickedly barbed bolts.

  “You are not expected,” the man on the left told Chien. He squinted in deep suspicion as his gaze tracked over her companions.

  “No, I am not,” Chien agreed. “Crab is inside?”

  Although her tone lacked any emotion, something about her bearing seemed to increase the pair’s agitation. They exchanged a brief glance before stepping back, crossbows lowering to point their bolts at the ground. Chien walked past them without another glance, hefting her stick at Vaelin in a beckoning gesture. He gained a keen sense of being closely observed as she led them to the house, although the windows remained shuttered and no further rustling could be heard in the wheat stalks.

  The door opened the moment Chien reached it, an old, stick-thin woman bowing low and standing aside. Following Chien inside, Vaelin blinked in surprise at finding himself in a brightly lit interior. Paper lanterns hung from the ceiling to illuminate a large space lacking stairs or rooms. Where the floor should have been there was a water-filled dock in which sat a narrow hulled boat some thirty feet from bow to stern. The mill-house, it was clear, was just a shell to conceal a hidden dock.

  “Esteemed sister!” a stocky man called from the stern of the boat, raising a hand in greeting as he stepped onto the walkway lining the wall. His grin was cheerful as he approached, Vaelin noting how he bowed to Chien before she bowed in return. The official status of women in this land, it seemed, was not mirrored amongst its outlaw society.

  “Esteemed brother,” she said. “Esteemed Father sends greetings, and a gift.” Her hand disappeared into her jacket and emerged with a small red lacquer box.

  The stocky man said, taking the box and removing the lid to sniff the contents, “Ah, Firebloom Balm.” He patted the small of his back and inclined his head in gratitude. “My old bones thank you.” For all his apparent affability, Vaelin saw a keen and possibly dangerous calculation in his gaze as it slipped from Chien to the foreigners at her back. “And you bring interesting company. A gift in itself, I always say.”

  “We require passage across the lake,” Chien told him. “Esteemed Father has given his word.”

  The man’s eyes betrayed another moment’s calculation before sliding back to Chien. “And his word will be honoured,” he said, bowing once more. “I am called Crab,” he went on, raising his voice and speaking in slow deliberate tones to the foreigners, as if addressing lackwit children. “I need no other name and have killed men who asked for it. This is my boat.” He pointed at the narrow-hulled craft in the water. “We go across the water when it gets dark. Until then, you eat.” His blunt-fingered hands mimed the passage of invisible food to his mouth before he rubbed his stomach. “Mmmmm.”

  “This one’s an idiot,” Nortah said in Realm Tongue, drawing a faint snicker from Ellese.

  “Quiet,” Vaelin said, smiling and bowing at the man who called himself Crab. “I suspect it might be to our advantage if he thinks we’re the idiots.”

  “Can’t risk a daylight run these days,” the boatman told Chien as they ate a short while later. The food, a pleasantly spiced pork and vegetable broth, was prepared by the old woman who had answered the door. From the energy with which she moved from one steaming pot to another, Vaelin was forced to wonder if she was as old as she appeared. Apart from her and Crab, no others had joined them, but the occasional creak from the shadowed rafters above made it clear they were still under close observation.

  “Too many folk coming south,” Crab went on. “More folk on the water means more Dien-Ven keen to tax what they’ve brought with them. Been going on since the spring rains. Soldiers go north, people come south. More by the day, and not all peasants either. I’ve had to remind some newcomers that these lakes belong to the Crimson Band, but not all are likely to heed the lesson, no matter how many ears I cut off. Esteemed Father should know this.”

  “Then send word,” Chien said. “There was news of a battle in the borderlands. What have you heard?”

  “Mostly just rumours and nonsense from beggared peasants. Lots of tales of the Harbingers of Heaven, of course, but that’s always the way when trouble brews. As for the battle . . .” He shrugged. “Some horde or other come out of the Iron Steppe for a good old rampage. They’ll piss off home when their saddlebags are full of booty and they’ve garnered enough slaves. That or the Merchant King will find a general to beat them. It happens every few decades. Ask her.” He turne
d to the old woman, raising his voice to a shout. “Seen it all before, haven’t you, Old Snake? Rampaging barbarians and such.”

  The old woman spooned broth into a bowl, barely glancing at him as she spoke in a dry, cracked voice, “You are a fool.”

  Crab let out a hearty guffaw at this, slapping his knee. “She loves to berate me, and what man would begrudge his great-grandmother her pleasures?”

  His merriment died when the old woman spoke on. Apparently, voicing more than a short insult was not her custom. “They called it the Year of the Tiger,” she said, the rasp of her voice soft but still easily discernible in the still air of the mill. “When the Steppe tribes rode all the way through the Venerable Kingdom to sack Hahn-Shi.”

  “The Merchant King was weak then,” Chien said. “A drunken wastrel they say.”

  “No.” The old woman shook her head. “He was just a man, as all kings are. Wise in some ways, foolish in others. And it is a fool who fails to heed the Harbingers of Heaven. Warning was given, but he did nothing and so the barbarians came to take all we had.”

  “Not for long,” Chien said. “The Merchant King was deposed and a great army raised by his successor, the grandfather of Lian Sha himself. The bones of every single barbarian who invaded these lands now lie beneath the Black Cliffs. So it will be if any come again.”

  The old woman sprinkled salt in her bowl and handed it to Ellese. She had already quickly downed one bowl and seemed grateful for a second. The woman gave her a fond smile, which faded as she turned to Chien. “Then you are also a fool to think anything in this world is eternal.”

  She took up Ellese’s empty bowl and, moving with a disconcerting speed, hurled it at Chien. The old woman’s speed, however, was mirrored by her target, who jerked her head aside, the bowl missing by a whisker to shatter on the wall behind.

  “All that is made can be unmade,” the old woman told Chien with a bow that didn’t match the evident disrespect in her eyes. “As you would do well to remember, esteemed sister.”

  “Great-grandmother earned her name well,” Crab told Chien as the old woman returned to her pots. “Quick as a cobra with a temperament to match. My father said he lost count of the bodies she sent to the bottom of the lake when we were still fighting the Silver Thread for control of the water.”

  Chien kept her face free of emotion but Vaelin glimpsed the small tic of fury in her cheek before she shrugged and returned to her own meal. “When do we leave?”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Once the moon had reached its peak Crab’s men lit a fireboat five miles to the west and set it loose upon the lake.

  “That should draw the gaze of any Dien-Ven on the water tonight,” the boatman said from the tiller. Vaelin and Alum had taken up the oars to propel the boat from the shadowed confines of the mill. Once they had reached clear water, a sail constructed of wicker and bamboo was raised and a stiff southerly breeze carried the craft towards the heart of the lake.

  “Deeper the water the better,” Crab said. “Smugglers keep close to shore, easier to beach and run for it if the soldiers show up.” He turned to Vaelin as he and Alum shipped their oars, raising his voice once more and pillowing his hands under his cheek. “You sleep now. Need rest for tomorrow. Understanding?”

  “Rest,” Vaelin repeated with a good-natured nod. “Yes.”

  “Good fellow.” Crab patted him on the shoulder and returned to the tiller.

  “Don’t be offended,” Chien said, catching sight of Ellese’s sour expression. “It’s commonly believed that foreigners possess brains only two-thirds the size of those born to these lands.”

  “And do you share this belief?” Vaelin enquired.

  “Oh no. I’d say . . .” She paused for a moment’s consideration. “Four-sixths, at least.” With that she disappeared into the roofed mid-deck of the boat.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Vaelin dreamt of the Battle of Alltor that night, something he hadn’t done for a long time. The images conjured by his slumbering mind failed to match his true memory of the event but that was ever the way with dreams. This time the Volarians failed to react when he charged towards them, standing in their orderly ranks as unmoving and indifferent as any statue. They made no effort to fight as he cut them down, regarding him with impassive faces rendered pale as alabaster in the dim light seeping through the smoke rising from the ruined city. Free Swords, Varitai and Kuritai all fell before him like wheat before a scythe, not even voicing a scream as blood gushed from wounds and stumps. This time Flame, the mount that had carried him all the way from the Reaches, didn’t fall to an arrow. Instead the warhorse bore him through the carnage he carved through the silent ranks and into the city.

  He expected to find Reva in the square, overlarge sword in hand as she greeted him with a smile, but today someone else was waiting for him. A slim, diminutive woman standing amidst a carpet of corpses, her black hair twisting like a wraith in the wind. As he picked his way through the surrounding bodies, he saw each bore a familiar face. Here was Dentos, an arrow jutting from his chest, lips drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of death. Here was Barkus, head severed from his body and features frozen in a final taunting grin. Ultin lay with a rope around his neck, face swollen and purple. Linden Al Hestian stared up at him with pleading eyes that begged for release from his pain . . .

  He froze at the sight of the next one. It peered into the smoke-clouded sky with dim eyes set in a face rendered near unrecognisable by the multiple slash and stab wounds that covered it. He hadn’t been there when Caenis met his end but had imagined it many times. However, the horrors crafted by his imagination hadn’t come close to matching this. His pain must have been unimaginable, he thought, staggering with the sudden weight of once dulled grief. I’m sorry, brother . . .

  “You couldn’t save them.”

  Vaelin’s gaze snapped to the slim woman. Her face was turned from him but he knew her voice as well as he knew the surrounding dead. When she turned, her eyes were white in the bleached angular mask of her face, the eyes that told of a spirit flying free from her body.

  “You couldn’t save me,” she went on. The thin robe she wore blew away like chaff in the wind, leaving her naked. There were no marks on her body, for she had died by a single touch. Nevertheless he could see no beauty in her now. Her skin he knew would be like ice to the touch, bled of all life.

  “What makes you think you can save her?” Dahrena enquired. “Is it because you loved her more? Was she the one you always really wanted? Is that why you let me die?”

  Her words sank into him with all the force of a hundred arrows, robbing him of strength, sending him to his knees, lips moving in whispered, nonsensical entreaties, for he had no words for her. All he had was guilt and sorrow.

  Dahrena blinked her white eyes at him as a pitying frown passed across her mask of a face. “Poor Vaelin,” she said. “Why didn’t you just stay in your tower? It wouldn’t have saved you either, but at least you would have had a few years of peace.”

  He breathed deeply, the smoke thick in his throat, making him cough as he sought to calm his racing heart. “The wolf . . .” he gabbled. “It called . . .”

  “The wolf.” She laughed, a sound harsher than anything he had ever heard in her voice in life. “For one who shuns gods with such fervour, you seem happy to abase yourself before a dying remnant of the Nameless. It called, that’s true.” She walked towards him, the thickening pall of smoke wreathing her naked form like a cloak. He stared up at her, as frozen as the Volarian army he had slaughtered, staring in terror at the hand she lowered to caress his cheek, her touch a blade of ice on his skin. “It called you to an early death . . .”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “Brother!”

  He came awake with the scent of smoke still in his nostrils, blinking at Nortah’s tense fe
atures. “What is it?” Vaelin asked.

  “Trouble, by the looks of it.” Nortah had unfurled the blanket that concealed his weapons and was busy stringing his bow. “And the smell.”

  Vaelin retrieved his sword from his own blanket and shook Ellese and Sehmon awake before leaving the cabin. Alum was already perched atop the roof, one hand gripping the mast as he gazed at something to the west. Catching sight of Vaelin he gave a grim smile and said, “It seems I have a talent for finding pirates, even far from the sea.”

  Dawn had risen to paint the surface of the lake a pale pink beneath a lingering haze, and it was easy to make out the object of Alum’s interest. A pall of smoke rose from a burning boat about a mile away. It was similar in dimensions to Crab’s vessel but appeared to be adrift, flames licking the length of its sail and covering its deck from stern to bow. Beyond it Vaelin could make out a confusion of other boats, two large like the first, surrounded by a dense cluster of smaller craft. The accompanying sounds were faint but Vaelin’s ears were well attuned to shouts of struggle and terror.

  “The Silver Thread,” Crab said from the tiller. He was speaking to Chien, both of them watching the distant turmoil with an aspect of professional disdain. “What’s left of them these days. They’ve taken to preying on the peasants fleeing south. Haven’t seen so many of the bastards in one place for a long time. Still, three boats full of swordless yokels was probably too tasty a meal to pass up.”

  “What do we do, Uncle?” Ellese asked, appearing on deck with bow in hand.

  “We do nothing, girl,” Chien told her before glancing at Crab. “Best to steer east for a time. No need to invite attention.”

  “We can’t just leave those people,” Ellese insisted, her gaze veering between Vaelin and Chien. “Uncle?”

  The doubt and confusion on her face was a hard thing to see, but it was the scream that decided him. Full of pain and despair, it rose from the beleaguered boats to echo across the water like a battle horn, plaintive and irresistible in its summons. Vaelin turned to Nortah and they exchanged a wordless nod.