Imperium Lupi

by Adam Browne

  “Who’s Tristan?”

  “Don’t joke!” Meryl snapped. Checking her tone lest Rafe really had forgotten, she continued, “The wolf you arrested in Heath’s flat was the same one we saw talking to that hog. Remember, back in New Tharona? I know you didn’t have a choice in the matter, it’s your job to carry out ALPHA’s will, but if you told Janoah after-”

  “I didn’t,” Rafe said, simple as that. “Look, I didn’t even remember him until I walked into that flat.” The big wolf kicked at the floor, “I was gentle with him. He… he tried to shoot himself-”

  “Oh no!” Meryl gasped.

  “It’s all right, Meryl. I stopped him. I had to.”

  The nurse breathed out with relief, and yet sadness, “Then perhaps he is guilty.”

  Rafe shrugged a little. “This might sound funny coming from a boxer ‘en all, but I don’t like to hurt anyone, Meryl, not really. But when someone’s out to cause Lupa harm I got to fight back. We all do. Even you, in your own way. You help me, so you’re fighting too, you know. I couldn’t do it without yer-”

  “Oh Rafe stop it. You make me feel so guilty!”

  “Guilty?”

  “How can you stand me, snapping at you like that?” Meryl seethed, covering his eyes a moment. “You’ve been bedridden on and off for weeks; gone blind for days on end. You’ve suffered so much; more than any wolf your age should, even with the rot. Yet you’ve never once snarled, or said an angry word to me, not even at your lowest ebb. You’ve kept on smiling and joking, from the very first moment when Josef called me in that day, to now. You know, sometimes I wish… I wish I had the rot too.”

  “Don’t be daft!” Rafe tutted, adding, “What for, eh?”

  “Then I could sense your corona,” Meryl explained, “like Janoah does. You two share something that I never will. She knows your pain; understands it.” The nurse looked off into space, “I-I get so jealous. I try not to hate her, but when I see you two laughing and joking when it’s her fault you get so ill, I just want to march over there and box her right on the-”

  “Meryl!”

  The nurse covered her muzzle with both paws lest she dug any deeper. The damage was done. I’ve lost him. It’s over. Why did I open my stupid mouth, by Ulf, why?

  Letting his helmet clatter the floor without a care, Rafe swept Meryl into his embrace. He held her tight, silent, unmoving. Why? What did it mean?

  Slowly, the mighty Eisenwolf, ALPHA’s champion, began to snuffle and shake.

  “Oh Rafe!” Meryl realised. “Rafe, don’t cry. I’m sorry!”

  Meryl knotted her arms tight about her patient’s vast ribcage as he heaved and trembled with the fitful snatched breaths of bottled-up grief and torment. For longest time nothing more was said, nothing need be; all was touch and knowing as nurse and patient rocked gently to and fro in the stark ALPHA corridor.

  Suddenly Rafe snapped his head back and wiped his moist eyes, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Meryl sniffed back. “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have said-”

  “No, it’s fine,” Rafe beamed. “Really. I mean it.”

  Meryl smiled briefly.

  “I-I-I dunno who I am half the time,” her Eisenwolf admitted through a false, toothy smile. “Sometimes… it’d be so easy to give up. But I won’t do it, Meryl, not with you to look after me. I’ve been given this power to protect others. It’s a gift from Ulf. I believe that, I do! I’ll fight as long as Lupa needs me.”

  Swallowing her tears, Meryl nodded appreciatively throughout Rafe’s assertion. Rubbing the Eisenwolf’s immense upper arms, as if trying to massage the rot from those big bones, she said through a slight laugh, “Well I’ll always need you, even when Lupa’s at peace, so you’d better go on fighting long after then. Do you hear me, Rafe Stenton?”

  A smile, a nod, a laugh.

  “Listen to me, I’m being so selfish,” Meryl scolded herself.

  “No you’re not,” Rafe snorted. “You give up so much time for me. Read to me. Everything.”

  “What else could any right-thinking nurse do?” Meryl dismissed modestly, “I’d do the same for anyone.” She looked to the water-streaked window, seeing nothing but her own thoughts, “You know… I despise Doctor Josef now. I used to think he cared about you, but he’s already searching for another Eisenwolf candidate. And him a doctor. It’s disgusting.”

  Rafe grunted a little.

  “I’d leave his employ, leave ALPHA,” Meryl asserted, “but I worry what’ll become of you. So I stay and help Josef despite my every natural inclination.” She rubbed her arms and shivered, “To think I helped him induct you. He told me you were dying, you know, that to save you, you had to become a Howler. Often it’s true, it is the only path left, but I realise now he lied. You were sick, yes, but you’re so strong you could have survived, if you had moved to Everdor and lived a healthy life. You could have kept your memories, your old life, and Josef and Janoah knew it.”

  “I don’t want that life-”

  “You don’t remember it!” Meryl shouted. She fought a wave of tears, “And we never asked you, Rafe. We never asked what you wanted, we just… foisted ALPHA’s needs upon you as if we had right to. You must hate me for it.”

  Gently turning Meryl’s steel-grey muzzle with a big brown paw, Rafe said, “Stop it,” and pressed his lips to hers before another incriminating word passed them. Meryl’s eyes opened wide in shock, but she didn’t fight it.

  This time it felt right.

  Bvvvvvt! Bvv!

  Upon Toggle’s rude interruption, Rafe drew back as quickly as he’d dived in, “Sorry! That was stupid. I’m sorry, Meryl-”

  “No,” a dazed Meryl replied, swallowing, “not at all.”

  Rafe squirmed with mortification, wringing the front of his cloak he emitted a mirthful snort, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Did I do it wrong or something?”

  “No no.”

  “I’ve never tried it before. Well, except that time last year.”

  “Last year?”

  “Yeah, at your aunt’s. Remember? I tried to land one on you and you bailed out.”

  Meryl could breathe at last, “Yes! Yes, of course I remember. I’m just glad you do to. So very glad.”

  “This is the real me, Meryl,” Rafe insisted, leaning in. “I might forget a thing or two, even myself… but never you.”

  “Yes. I know that now.”

  Taking each other’s paws they touched their noses together, Meryl rubbing Rafe’s dark, plasma-scarred palms with her rough pink, washer-wolf’s thumbs. Putting aside all inhibitions, every concern, every wolf but each other, they slowly joined, awash in the rain-warped light rippling through the window.

  *

  “Took your sweet time, Stenton!” Janoah barked, as Rafe sprinted across the rain-lashed ALPHA courtyard and all but leapt into the back of Josef Grau’s van, making the whole vehicle shake.

  “Sorry,” Rafe panted, sitting heavily on the bench beside Janoah.

  Doctor Josef sat opposite in his black coat and tinted spectacles, umbrella at the ready; Rafe’s empty Eisenwolf mantle hung limply beside him like a surreal sculpture.

  “Did my assistant keep you?” the cat guessed expectantly.

  “Nah,” Rafe lied, raising his voice over the patting of rain on the roof, “I was just spending a penny.”

  Nodding at Rafe’s plausible excuse, Janoah slammed the doors and rapped on the metal partition. “Let’s go, and make it snappy!”

  “Yes marm!” the driver replied.

  Its engine being already started, the van pulled away without much ado, through ALPHA’s gates and down the road. There were no windows in the back through which to see HQ shrinking into the distance, and the only light source was a lamp set in the ceiling.

  Janoah rummaged around in a trunk. “Here,” she said, passing Rafe a folded black cloth, “put it on.”

  Even with his face obscured by his helmet, Rafe was visibly confused as he unfurled what tur
ned out to be a black Prefect’s cloak, identical to the one he was wearing surely.

  No… no it felt different, somehow – cold and heavy, almost like the finest chain mail.

  “It’s special,” Janoah explained, since she knew Rafe would only ask. “It’ll help dampen your corona. It’ll still be strong, but hopefully nobody on the Elder Train will be suspicious of you.”

  Rafe held the cloak up, looking for some clue as to how it might go about dampening anything. “How’s it work?” he asked inevitably.

  Janoah broke out an ember, “Never you mind.”

  “It’s one of my old inventions,” Josef declared instantly, “black-imperium-weave. Quite illegal.”

  Rafe froze, save for his widening eyes.

  “It’s all right,” his doctor purred, those short tidy whiskers rising as he smiled. “It won’t kill you. Do you think I’d be sitting here in this enclosed space if I thought it could?”

  “But how? I thought-”

  “The black-imperium has been isolated, stabilised, within the body of the thread,” Josef clarified, in distilled terms. “Even if minuscule amounts do escape, say when a thread breaks, it’ll be no more damaging than breathing in a day’s worth of Lupan air, say.”

  Even so, Rafe emitted a shaky breath. He’d seen the twisted corpses of suicidal THORN members and didn’t relish such a death himself.

  “Just keep it away from fire, whatever you do,” Josef advised cryptically.

  “Fire?” Rafe piped.

  The doctor spread his grey paws, but didn’t elaborate further than, “Trust me, it would be very bad.”

  Not wishing to probe further lest he didn’t like what he heard, Rafe slipped his normal cloak from his shoulders, his damp fur steaming from the telltale body heat of vigorous exercise – he had dashed through HQ at quite a clip after leaving Meryl. With unusual care and Janoah’s help, the Eisenwolf draped the new cloak about him. It weighed against his chest and shoulders with unnatural force.

  “It’s weird,” Rafe breathed uneasily, adding in a jocular fashion, “Heavy, ‘en it?”

  “Dense,” Josef corrected, “black-imperium is the densest material known to science. Given time it’ll always find its way to the bottom of anything… rather like me.”

  Janoah pulled the loose lengths of Rafe’s special cloak over his right shoulder and pinned it in place with his shining black and white ALPHA brooch; it behaved as any normal mantle.

  “There,” Janoah said, sitting back and running a paw down Rafe’s body, “you look very smart; smart enough to stand with the Alpha.”

  “It’s so… black,” Rafe observed.

  “Of course,” Josef huffed, “it’s black-imperium.”

  Rafe rubbed his cloaked chest, “Yeah. I guess so.” He suddenly looked to Janoah and beamed even through his helmet, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Is it working or what?”

  Janoah didn’t let on the sudden chill she felt now Rafe’s burning corona had left her. It was still there all right, lingering on the peripheral of Janoah’s field, pushing on her, but Rafe felt like a lesser wolf, diminished, like any number of Howlers she had passed in the street, their feeble shells of imperious energy unable to breach her own.

  “Can’t you tell?” she chuckled, side-stepping the question with her own. “I’m being blocked out as much you’re being blocked in.”

  “Oh, right. Yeah.”

  “Don’t worry,” Janoah sighed, blowing orange ember vapours at the subtly flickering light. “You don’t have to pretend you even notice my feeble corona these days.”

  Rafe could but snort sharply, “Don’t be stupid, Jan; I can feel you across HQ.”

  Janoah could but smile, “Flatterer.”

  Josef quietly marvelled at Janoah; she didn’t usually tolerate such familiarity from anyone but Rufus, certainly not being called ‘Jan’, let alone ‘stupid’. Any wolf who’d dared would’ve been soundly slapped down, but not her Rafe. He had crossed a special threshold of late.

  “I’ve another present for you,” Janoah said, reaching under the bench and pulling out a long, clearly substantial object tied up in red velvety cloth and white ribbon.

  Rafe felt its heft, “What is it?”

  “Open it.”

  The Eisenwolf did so, yanking at the ribbon like a giant cub on his birthday. The fine red cloth fell away at the top end, revealing the marvellous black hilt and white grip of what had to be an enormous two-pawed sword!

  Woofing in surprise Rafe glanced at Janoah, who chuckled in that knowing sort of way.

  “The work of the finest Greystone smiths,” she claimed proudly. “The sword of a traitor has been… repurposed for a worthy cause.”

  “Whatcha mean?”

  Shrugging, Janoah went on, “You seemed rather taken with it the other day. And as you said, it only would’ve rusted away in the archives. So I spoke to the Alpha about it. Rafe needs a weapon worthy of him now he’s a proper Prefect, I said. He agreed.”

  It hit Rafe then, whilst slipping the rest of the cloth from the gleaming, polished blade, that this was Tristan Eisbrand’s marvellous sword! The silver hilt had been somehow turned black, and the blue-imperium snowflake etched into the crosspiece had vanished, presumably ground out, replaced with the A symbol of ALPHA, rendered in pure white-imperium crystal. It must’ve cost Janoah a small fortune, or had she put it on ALPHA’s books?

  Rafe held the sword up, its tapering tip nearly scraping the van’s roof, “Aww, Jan, it’s beautiful.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I… I forgot all about it, you know.”

  “After making such a fuss?” Janoah hummed knowingly. “It’s not your fault; the imperium’s been doing the talking lately. Still, you’re in good health now. We can’t have any strange behaviour whilst you’re guarding the Alpha. Try and keep it together.”

  Rafe angled the sword down. “I will,” he said. Then something else hit him, “Proper Prefect, did you say?”

  Puffing on her ember, Janoah explained, “The Alpha agreed to that as well.”

  “Wait. So… I’m a Prefect? Like you?”

  “That you are. Welcome to ALPHA, ‘proper’ Prefect Bruno.”

  “Bruno?” Rafe woofed with yet more surprise.

  “That’s right. Get used to it. That’s your cover name.”

  Rafe laughed at the novelty, but Janoah remained steadfastly serious.

  “You’ll stand out in a crowd whatever you’re called,” she said, “but we don’t want the world and his wife to know Eisenwolf Rafe is defending the Alpha. At least under a different guise and with that cloak there’ll be a modicum of doubt as to who you really are; especially with the Alpha telling anyone who’ll listen that you’re just one of his bodyguards, as he will be.”

  “Why Bruno though?”

  “What?” Janoah huffed defensively, leading Rafe, or Bruno, to strongly suspect she had picked the name. “Don’t you like it?”

  “No, I do,” Rafe professed, moving to mollify any hurt feelings. Looking along the length of his sword he raised the shining blade to his grille-clad snout, peering at his anonymous helmeted reflection. “Bruno… Bruno,” he said, whilst Janoah and Josef exchanged a look across the width of the van, “It has a nice ring to it.”

  Whilst Rafe pondered his new identity, Janoah reached under the bench again. “One more thing,” she said, presenting her champion with a furry, limp, brown caterpillar, or so it appeared for a moment.

  “What’s that?” Rafe woofed.

  “A prosthetic tail,” Janoah replied with a chuckle. “It won’t wag, but it’ll have to do.”

  “I’m not wearing that!”

  “It’s necessary for your disguise.”

  “But it’s so stupid! I don’t mind if beasts know I ain’t got a tail, it’s the hiding it that’s embarrassing.”

  Janoah glanced at a smirking Josef, then hissed at Rafe, “If you walk about with a ribbon for a tail beasts will
ask questions. Who is he, how did he lose his tail? Was it amputated so he could fit into an Eisenwolf suit?”

  “Nobody’s gonna say that,” Rafe snorted.

  “Some might. You’re still just a rumour, Rafe; let’s not become fact. Not yet. Legally ALPHA is not a pack and not bound by the laws that prohibit the Eisenwolves, but in theory you could still be arrested and executed merely for existing.”

  Rafe snatched the tail. “Fine,” he sulked, wagging it at Janoah, “but I’m keeping me lucky ribbon on me.”

  Chapter 36

  Linus slumped heavily on the bed, already exhausted by this pretence and the Elder Train hadn’t even left the city yet!

  Ash billowed by the tiny, rectangular window of his trembling cabin, partially obscuring the ramshackle roofs of a slum passing down below. Linus imagined the deprived residents jealously eying up the train, glimpsing through its glittering windows the finest interior décor Lupan taxes could buy, just as he had done as a cub. Now he was aboard, Howler Linus, couched in luxury with his very own bed, chest of drawers, bedside lamp, wardrobe, mirror, even a tiny grooming sink, all made of beautified wood, enamel and glass. It was cramped, yes, much like Linus’s quarters back at Riddle Den, but leagues above the rotting corrugated piles down there.

  The crosshatch struts of an iron bridge whistled by the rain-speckled window as the Elder Train chugged over the vast grey waters of the River Lupa, which looked grimmer than ever under the drizzling firmament.

  Making landfall again, the train continued west, passing an industrial complex and some canals, before approaching an interior arm of the Lupan Wall, looming large and grey. In times of conflict these internal stretches of the Lupan Wall mattered, but during peacetime they were hardly more of an impediment than the invisible district lines. The great gates were already open and the Elder Train billowed through unchecked, thus departing Riddle District and the Bloodfang territory altogether

  They had now entered one of Lupa’s most run-down areas – the so-called Bloc. The Bloc was home to packs with which Linus had had nothing to do with and knew little about. Bloodfang, Greystone, Eisbrand, Hummel, even ALPHA if Vladimir’s measure of their ambition was right; these were the packs that held the most land and riches, the ones beasts remembered, sat up and took notice of. Yet, into a territory smaller than any other, save the Common Ground, were crammed a host of lesser packs all competing for the big five’s table scraps. Holding puny lands denoted by ever-changing boundaries, often just a few districts, sometimes just one, each of the Bloc packs harboured funny ways and strange by-laws that were hopelessly outdated by the standards of the big five. It was a dangerous quarter for a Howler to serve in too; the war had never quite left it. The so-called ‘Den Fathers’ of the Bloc packs were being eternally murdered and setup anew by feuds and plots, to the effect that the stable big packs credited the weak, bickering Bloc lot with very little clout.