The Tiger and the Wolf

by kindle@netgalley. com

  Even as he spoke, he Stepped, letting the Champion’s soul well up within him, falling forwards into its clawed embrace as if into the arms of a lover. He had a brief sense of a ripple of shock passing out through the watching Wolves, but after that he was the Champion, and the Champion did not care.

  For a moment, Sure As Flint paused, but he was not awed, just made cautious. He took two steps back and then dropped to all fours and was a great black wolf, heavy-built and snarling.

  They circled each other, the wolf padding softly, his yellow eyes fixed on his opponent. Asmander’s met them, unblinking.

  He leapt. He had not fought wolves before, but he reasoned they would be little different from lions or hyenas, and this big sack of hair was surely not so very quick.

  Sure As Flint was quick. He flinched aside from Asmander’s pounce, snapped at him to keep him back, and then lunged for his leg, one fang dragging across the Champion’s quill scales as they parted. Pushing for the initiative, the wolf was following him up immediately, taking advantage of Asmander’s surprise.

  The surprise was feigned. The Champion kicked off from the ground just as those jagged jaws lunged towards him. He came down askew across the wolf’s shoulders, ripping in with the curved claws of his feet, about to bite.

  His talons just scraped harmlessly off the beast’s hide. Beneath that hair he felt the shifting links of Flint’s iron coat.

  Then the wolf had shaken him off, sending him sprawling and then darting after him, ripping at his opponent’s stomach. Asmander got a rake across the wolf’s nose that discouraged the beast, scrambling to his feet and putting some distance between them. He could feel a dull knuckle of pain in his gut: a little blood drawn, and his own stone and cotton armour had barely slowed the wolf’s metal fangs.

  What he chiefly felt was exultation: not just at the ferocity of the fight, but at the knowledge that, should he survive this clash, he had found what he had been sent to find. Whether or not his father had truly believed in this myth, here was the supernatural strength of the north condensed into this alien metal.

  He made another two sudden sallies, relying on his speed to keep his hide intact. Both times he made his leap, caught the wolf in the flank and hung on for a second or two, and yet his enemy’s hide was impervious. Trying another tack, Asmander darted in, twitching aside from the hunger of those iron jaws, and then Stepped to human for the moment it took for him to lash his maccan along his enemy’s spine. The force of the blow staggered Sure As Flint, and yet all it achieved was to strip half the teeth from Asmander’s sword.

  There was a chant now building amongst the people of the Wolf. It was not the name of their fighter, but an invocation of their god. ‘Jaws of the Wolf! Jaws of the Wolf!’ they were shouting: the same phrase to cover where they came from, and where they sent their foes.

  Then Asmander was slightly slower than he should have been, and abruptly there was a bloody tear across one thigh, and now Sure As Flint was following him, pacing himself, driving his prey in a wide circle with red in his grinning mouth.

  And slower still now. Asmander was aware that he needed to bring matters to a close: he was wounded, and the weight of iron his opponent carried would not slow him down as a wolf, for all that it made him as invulnerable as a magical hero from the stories. And how do they kill such heroes, in the stories? Burn them, drown them, bury them. Hardly practical.

  But if I cannot pierce his hide . . .

  For a brief while they were circling, and Asmander was the faster, but the circle they fought in seemed to be growing tighter and tighter. He was running out of room and time. The chanting of the crowd was loud in his ears, voicing their concentrated desire for his death. They hated him: as a foreigner, as a creature of alien shape, as their lawful prey; they bayed for his blood. He took strength from it, from the pure-water honesty of it. He fed on their loathing and made it a part of him. And somehow it revealed to him how he must fight Sure As Flint.

  Then the wolf was rushing on him, assured of its victory, and he sprang sideways from it, and kicked out with all his strength, slamming his clawed foot solidly into the animal’s flank. He felt the jarring shock of hard contact, but the Champion was strong, and all that concentrated force was like a giant’s hammer-blow. He felt something give beneath that metal skin, and the wolf yelped, bowled over.

  Instantly he was on top of Sure As Flint, raking and lashing at his belly, finding the same shifting hardness there, but not trying to cut it now. Instead he held on with one foot and jabbed the other over and over into the writhing creature’s body, bludgeoning and bludgeoning. Then Sure As Flint was up, with Asmander leaping backwards to skitter away.

  Now the wolf was pacing around the far side of their circle, that seemed to expand and expand until it might have been the whole Crown of the World. Now Sure As Flint was limping, his hide intact and yet something within him broken.

  And what, though? I have not the teeth nor the claws to open his throat, and I will break my own bones before I finish him this way.

  But even as he had the thought, something landed at his feet, a sure cast from Venater’s hand. He saw it, and abruptly he had stooped into his human form to take it up. The sight of it, the intent of it, made him sick, but how could he deny the pirate’s logic?

  Such an innocent thing, a string of stones in twisted cloth, with a short wooden bar at each end. A pretty thing meant to go about a throat: the ‘red necklace’ they called it in the Estuary. For, of course, all the people of the Estuary were filthy killers who knew nothing about honour, and of all of them the tribe of the Dragon were the worst, and Venater the most villainous even of them.

  And Asmander Stepped back towards the Champion and approached Sure As Flint, who snarled at him, teeth gleaming with steel and strings of saliva. The wolf lunged but Asmander was on him, at first hanging on with tooth and claw, then with hands and locked legs as he fumbled for the beast’s throat.

  The wolf was quicker than he had thought: in a moment it was an armoured man he was grappling with, and Flint got an elbow in his face and flung him off, and then was on him in human form even as Asmander found his feet. He had his axe in his hands, but he was too close for it, and Asmander got his hands on the shaft and twisted it towards the other man’s thumb, ripping it away and casting it aside.

  He almost missed Flint’s dagger: a short iron blade driving up at his stomach in a gutting strike. His right hand drew out his own stone knife and he fell into a parry that Venater had shown him, as nasty a piece of work as any pirate ever knew. Lunging in, he pushed the thrusting dagger down, holding his knife, with a hand either side of his enemy’s blade. In a single twisting motion of his wrists he had his enemy’s metal blade clasped under his fingers, and the hard flat surface of his weapon was crushing his enemy’s thumb against Flint’s own dagger hilt.

  The Wolf warrior howled then, but Asmander had not finished with him, wrenching the man’s trapped hand up behind his back so that the dagger blade cut a gash out of his cheek, and that only because Asmander had not quite managed to drive it into the base of his skull.

  For those seconds, Sure As Flint had been too blinded by the pain to Step, but he seized control of himself just long enough, now mad to escape, and Asmander felt the hideous wrenching snap as his opponent spasmed into the shape of a wolf whose arm would simply not bend in such a way.

  He failed in his resolve then: the sensation of Flint’s shoulder shredding itself as he transformed sent a lash of revulsion and weakness through him, and he abandoned his grip, the dagger falling away. Flint, an iron wolf again, collapsed, then struggled up on three legs, and Asmander knew he must still finish the fight. This could only end with a death.

  He shouldered forwards, and this time he had Venater’s necklace in his hands, dragging it about the throat of the wolf so that the stones dug in, then twisting and twisting, twining the handles together so that it grew tight and then tighter. Flint was a man again instantly – a prisoner of his hum
an flesh the moment his neck was caught. He clawed weakly at the necklace with his one good hand, choking and gasping as the grip of the stones became ever more unforgiving.

  And Asmander knew this was it: this was the moment. The Many Mouths would remember him. Perhaps this was even the best way to win them: to kill one of their own in such a way, and wear his tormented ghost like a tattered shawl. Sure As Flint would die a man, and his soul would never pass on. He would haunt Asmander forever. For some that was a thing of horror, but there was a certain breed of hero in the stories who carried chains of ghosts dragging behind them as a tally of victories.

  Now the crowd were not whooping. Now the Many Mouths watched Sure As Flint’s face darken towards death, and the only sounds were moans of despair.

  I will have them now, Asmander knew, but he also knew he would not take them at such a price. His honour and his duty warred within him, and this time honour won.

  Abruptly he let go, loosening the handles, tearing away the red necklace, so that Sure As Flint jackknifed away from him, hacking blood first from a human mouth, then from the jaws of a wolf. As he Stepped, Asmander gathered up the dropped dagger and struck downwards with all his strength.

  The iron bit the iron, as though he had solved some magician’s riddle and found the one weapon that would truly kill his foe. He stabbed and stabbed, exhausting himself in rending that hide with gash after gash. By then, Sure As Flint was long dead, his soul flown free to find another birth, another life.

  19

  At first, living in Loud Thunder’s shadow was fearful. His home was not large, and he filled it, so that Maniye was constantly cowering, scurrying out of the way as he stomped past. In the early days, he seemed to forget that he had guests with each new dawn, regarding them every morning with a surly and suspicious scowl. They were in his way, that look constantly said. They were breathing his air, cluttering his house, eating his food, upsetting his dogs. Any moment, it seemed, he might throw them out into the killing cold or Step into his monstrous beast shape and devour them.

  Maniye’s answer to this was to make herself useful. She would fetch water from the stream, breaking the ice with stones and then filling the Cave Dweller’s clay pots and leather buckets. She would cut the firewood into billets, sweating and grunting with effort as she wielded a flint-headed hatchet she had found, wearing herself down as she learned through trial and error how the task was best accomplished. She once tried to cook, too, and that adventure had been the first time their host had actively deigned to notice them.

  He had hunched blearily out of the buried chamber that was his bed to find her at the morning fire, trying not to char some squirrels he had caught.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he had demanded. ‘You have burned it and you have not cooked it enough, all at the same time!’ He took one off the fire and hung his broad nose over it, inhaling deeply. ‘It smells of nothing but fire. Never do this again. This is a terrible thing.’

  At the time she had thought he was going to strike her, but instead he just busied himself with rectifying the damage, his anger – if he had really been angry at all – passing from him like water through loose-knit fingers.

  Often he left them in sole possession of his hall and went wandering off into the snow, sometimes with the sled and sometimes without. He always took the dogs, though. Yoff and Mat they were called, and at no time did they really warm to either Maniye or Hesprec. Their looks to their master seemed to say, You may have been fooled but we know a wolf and a snake when we smell them.

  Loud Thunder would leave for a handful of days at a time, coming back with fish, or with great loads of firewood for Maniye to cut up. It was that last which told her he was starting to accept his guests. Since she started that duty, he never stirred to attempt it himself, tacitly accepting her work as part of the host’s due.

  One day, with Thunder gone for two dawns, she emerged into the bright, cool sun of a crisp morning and Stepped, padding off as a wolf into the trees.

  She was on her guard, expecting the worst. The silent forest might hold anything, and she was constantly scenting the air for any sign of danger, whether it came on four feet or two. At any moment she expected Loud Thunder to suddenly appear and drag her back home. He had bargained for her, after all.

  And yet she passed, swift and quiet, through the brooding shadows of the forest, leaving behind her a trail of small prints. No terrible fate befell her. Out there, with the cold still world stretching on every side, and no master but necessity, she was free. Knowing that, she realized that she had never felt free before.

  Her first jaunt was brief, returning before the sun had covered much of its course across the sky. A few days later she was out again, and then again, sometimes as wolf and sometimes as tiger, as the mood took her; sometimes even as no more than a human girl.

  Sometimes she found the tracks of other winter-dwellers abroad in the snow. She ran down a deer, a young stag just short of earning its antlers, coursing alongside its blundering flight on wolf paws and then springing as the tiger springs to bring it down.

  When he saw the carcass hanging in his meat store, Loud Thunder just made a slightly surprised noise, and nothing was said of it. By then, she had begun to get used to the ways of this man who sought a life where human contact was the exception and not the rule. Saying nothing did not mean he was not marking each action.

  Before that, there was a time he had arrived home before her, and was standing at the entrance to his hall as she padded out of the trees. She had frozen, obscurely ashamed, waiting to see how he would react. And he had reacted just the same as he did to almost everything else: a moment’s blank stare, and then nothing. She was free to come and go as she chose.

  Later, the wolf pack came.

  She encountered them when she was toiling back from the lake with a bucket of water, the stream having frozen, then been chipped away to nothing by her depredataions. There were five of them, rib-thin and hungry. She knew wolves enough that she could see they were not mad-starving yet, but this was the leanest of lean seasons. They advanced from between the trees, spreading apart a little as they closed: not on the attack, not yet, still cautious of a human, but they were five and she was only one.

  She took two steps back, the bucket dropping heavily into the snow. For a moment she was convinced these were her people come to find her. They were mute, though. One day they would be reborn to her people as human children, but for now they were only animals.

  The Step to her own wolf form came instinctively, baring her teeth furiously, but it did not slow their steady approach. They were five and she was one, and smaller than the least of them. They would not hunt her now, but they would hunt these lands, and she would have to stay out of their sight and move on. That was the world’s way.

  Or she could join them. For a moment, the wolf soul in her felt the loneliness of the solitary hunter, an unfamiliar, powerful sensation. If she met them with the correct etiquette, deferred to their leader – or challenged him! – she might be accepted. She could run with the wolves for a winter, feast and starve as they prospered or pined away. It had been known: need or grief or simple alienation from human society had driven many to it, and many heroes of the stories were counted amongst their number.

  But that moment passed. She knew well how she could lose herself that way, the wolf soul growing until not only the tiger but the girl was cut away. She was too young to make that choice.

  Instead, she knew that she must put her tail between her legs, keep her head low, break eye contact and retreat. They would let her go, magnanimously. She need only cede the wood to them.

  Without warning, her wolf soul was forced aside by the tiger inside. She would not back down. This was her territory, and it was these interlopers who must move on. Maniye watched the contest within her with something close to detachment, feeling the swelling of an anger she had not realized was part of her.

  Even as the wolves drew closer she Stepped again, and this ti
me they halted in their tracks. As a tiger, she was a hair’s breadth larger than the greatest of them, burly and compact. She opened her jaws wide, snarling and yowling and hissing, her coat standing on its hairs’ ends to bulk her out further. The wolves paused, milled a little, each looking to the others. There were five of them, still, and had they been any more desperate, then likely they would have attacked, coming at her from all sides in a coordinated strike she could not possibly ward off. She could hurt them, though, with teeth and claws both. Winter was no time to be injured, to become the wolf who slowed the pack.

  And she would not give ground, feeling a fierce possessiveness over everything about her: the snow, the trees, the sky. It was hers, not these intruders’. Let them brave the tiger if they dared!

  And they wavered and they whined, but in the end they did not dare. As one, an unspoken decision made, they turned aside from her and padded off, away from the invisible boundaries of Loud Thunder’s home.

  Only when they were out of sight did she feel the fear, the soured excitement within her curdling in her stomach and making her realize what a dangerous thing she had done.

  When she returned to Loud Thunder’s hall that day, he looked at her a little differently, and she did not know if it was from a change in her or because he had somehow seen or learned what had gone on.

  At the start, she had been most worried about Hesprec. She was working hard to earn her keep, but the old Snake would not so much as step out into the cold most days, spending his time huddled by whatever was left of the fire, his Horse-made coat hugged tight about him.

  She had assumed that Loud Thunder would grow tired of him very quickly, but instead their host seemed to show Hesprec a wary respect, just as he might offer a real serpent. Probably it was the man’s claim to be a priest, for she guessed the Cave Dwellers put more stock in that than her own people had.

  But in any event, Hesprec did start to earn his keep, but how he did it was to talk.