Diplomacy of Wolves: Book 1 of the Secret Texts

by Lisle, Holly

  “We’ve found half a dozen young women who would serve as mates for you,” his father said. “Choose one of them.”

  “They’re sheep. I don’t want a sheep. I want someone like me.”

  “Maybe you do, but you don’t expose your throat to an enemy when you sleep. And how could you lead the Wolves when your father steps down, with such a consort as that?”

  Ry said, “I’ll take my chances. Besides, you assume I’ll receive the acclaim of the rest of the Wolves when Father wearies of leadership. But the Trinity already are positioning themselves to take over someday.”

  Both his parents snarled, and his mother said, “The day they take over is the day every decent Wolf is dead.”

  Which was basically true. The Trinity—the cousins Anwyn, Crispin, and Andrew—were loathed by every Wolf who could call himself human with a clear conscience. Which didn’t mean Ry had any desire to fight with them for leadership within the circle of Wolves.

  But he had years yet to worry about that. His father was still hale and quick and powerful. Ry’s immediate problem was finding a mate. He stood thinking about the young women his parents had presented to him. Girls who carried the Karnee strain in their blood in safely small amounts, but who had none of the Karnee fire. Dull, passive creatures who simpered at him and tittered and giggled, and who owned not a single original thought among the lot of them.

  He hadn’t seen this Karnee woman at the party—he could tell she was young from her scent, but he couldn’t tell what she looked like. She might be hideous. That wouldn’t matter, though. Not if she was intelligent. Not if she was fiery, tempestuous, spirited . . . and she would be, wouldn’t she? She’d survived. Her scent had been full of passion, full of suppressed rage, full of her curiosity and overt delight at everything around her—and even at that moment, well away from her, he could feel her tugging at him as the moon tugged at the sea.

  He said, “I’m sure you’re right. She wouldn’t be suitable.” And he excused himself. His parents returned to the path, and to building the power that they would have to have in the next week. He was not permitted to walk the path—those who walked the path became Scarred by it and had to hide themselves away. His work for the Family was still in the outside world.

  And in breeding, of course. He stalked up the steep stairway, glowering. When he’d produced a suitable number of living heirs, he’d be pulled from whatever work he was doing out in the world and placed on the path with the rest of the wizards, and his world would narrow down to the research libraries and the artifacts that those who still went freely outside brought in, and to the making of dark magic.

  His future had been determined by others from the time of his birth. Now, though, he sensed a different direction that it might take—rather, he sensed a direction in which he might take his future. The possibility of action and choice both elated and frightened him.

  Chapter 4

  Galweigh House covered all of the first peak along Palmetto Cliff Road, and its balconies, carved from the living marble of the cliff and studded with chalcedony and turquoise and set with glowing mosaics of colored glass, comprised the whole of the cliff face beginning after the soaring stone span of the Avenue of Triumph and only ending where Palmetto Cliff intersected with the obsidian-paved Path of Gods.

  The Galweighs did not build the House, though they had added to it and decorated it—both the stained-glass panels along the balconies and the inlaid semiprecious stones were Galweigh conceits. The House predated its inhabitants by more than a thousand years. Once it had been a winter estate for a man of unimaginable wealth and power who had in his summers inhabited the city of St. Marobas, far to the south. The man and his wealth were dust, and the city of St. Marobas was a perfectly circular patch of water named the St. Marobas Sea down along the eastern coast of the deadly Veral Territories, but the House survived. Over the course of a thousand years, its shining white balconies had lost some of their luster, and from time to time a stonemason had to be called in to repair a pillar or bearing wall that the jungle had damaged before the Galweighs found the House and claimed it, but those small imperfections only gave Galweigh House character. It was the finest known surviving artifact of the Age of Wizards, and was of wizardly make and magical nature.

  Part of its magic lay in its beauty, which was unsurpassed, and part in its vast size, which could only be guessed at. The Galweighs had not finished mapping the House, though they had lived in it for better than a hundred years. Some portions of it they knew well. The ground floor, which was the story that ran along the top of the cliff, had been mapped and explored and filled up; it was the floor that held the grand salons and the beautiful fountains, the vast baths, the exquisite statuary, the broad promenades, and the gardens both public and private. The first floor, reached by gorgeous curving staircases from any number of points on the ground floor, held rooms for business, courtrooms and holding rooms, rooms for private entertaining, classrooms for children, workrooms for adults.

  The floor above that held the Family apartments, more gardens, and several aviaries, as well as a fortune in artworks both ancient and modern and an entire gallery of curiosities from around the known world. The Family, and the spouses and concubines of the Family and their children, and frequently their children’s children, all lived there—over a hundred people when the place was emptiest, with plenty of room for more. The third floor was for the servants of the Family (as opposed to House servants, who lived on the first subfloor), and its apartments were as spacious and graceful and lovely as those the Family occupied. It was commonly known throughout Calimekka that the servants of the Galweigh Family lived better than the richest of men outside of the Family.

  Two floors lay above the last of the occupied floors, testament to the grandeur that had been before the Wizards’ War, and to the promise, at least in the eyes of the Galweighs, of the grandeur that would be again.

  The great House was ringed with massive walls of ancient make, high and smooth-sided as if formed of glass, harder than anything save diamond or the unrusting steel of the dead wizards, so that the people who lived within the upper stories of Galweigh House feared little, and had little reason to fear.

  But the House had a second face and a second character, as some people do; a darker side hinted at in the secret passageways and rooms sometimes accidentally happened upon aboveground by a child at play, or by a servant intent on cleaning who pressed a secret panel or tripped over a slightly uneven flagstone. At those moments, the maps of Galweigh House grew by inches; and the Family sometimes acquired another oddity or two for its collections; and depending on the character of the passageway, and where it went, and what it disclosed, sometimes the servants acquired a new cleaning headache. Sometimes, one or more of them quietly disappeared, along with the news of their discovery, and stories circulated for a while among the staff about accidents.

  That hint of darkness became more pronounced in the subfloors, which lay below the ground floor. The first subfloor held kitchens and pantries and servants’ work halls, and seemed as comfortable and knowable as the aboveground floors. But below it lay ten more floors. There, the open, breezy beauty of balcony rooms carved along the edge of the cliff were characterized by their vast panoramas of the beautiful city that lay below, and occupied by downstairs servants and adventurous guests, by loud revelries and late-night explorations of uncounted types. Moving in toward the heart of the great hill, those rooms gave way quickly to halls lit only by torches even in broad daylight, and deeper in, to hallways left unlit, where light never reached and the last feet to leave tracks had become nothing more than dust on the floor some ten centuries earlier.

  The secrets of the Galweigh Family resided, as most secrets do, in the darkness and the silence, in the unventured depths. The Galweigh Wolves kept themselves contained within the very heart of this darkness, ten levels below the bright and public world of the main Family, where not even the most curious of children dared to explore, and where n
ot even the most ardent of young lovers dared tryst.

  In the perpetual gloom of windowless rooms, in the stillness that was more than silence, the Wolves, who were their own law, and who were the secret and hidden power behind the Galweigh Family, kept the power flowing and kept their enemies at bay and humbled. They worked with ancient books and records, with instruments of their own devising, and with those that had survived a thousand years and a final war of unimaginable devastation. They studied the one forbidden science of the world of Matrin—the science of magic—and learned, and put their learning into practice in every way they could devise. They were the new wizards, and the unheralded kings, and the unworshiped gods.

  Unhampered by the restrictions of society, equally unhampered by the restraint of conscience, they pursued every avenue of personal curiosity, indulging in experiments in every conceivable area of magic, and in doing so touched areas of pure good and pure evil. And like all wizards and all kings and all gods, they eventually came to discover that the pursuit of goodness imposed uncomfortable confinements, and the pursuit of evil for evil’s sake became wearying after a while, and lost its novelty—but that the pursuit of power never failed to enchant.

  * * *

  Fog blanketed the city of Halles so that the dark houses, shutter-eyes shut against the dark, became formless cliffs; and taverns ejected their rowdy customers with a whisper, not a roar; and ghosts welled up out of the darkness from nowhere and vanished again, leaving only the faintest clicks and clanks to mark their passing. Kait moved along a narrow cobblestone street, noting the way the scents grew richer in the dark and the damp. She could have tracked any of the dozens of people who’d trod the streets before her by scent alone, and never mind that others had passed by long after them, and laid new scent trails over the old.

  The moon rode overhead, fat but not full, casting murky light into the swirling mists—light that, fighting through the fog as it did, illuminated nothing. It glowed ahead of Kait and off to the right like a dull clot of turned milk viewed through cheesecloth. Sharply to her right, the rich stink of sewage roiled out of an open gutter. To her left and just ahead, the wine-and-piss stench pinpointed a drunk curled up beneath mildewing rags. Somewhere farther ahead, meat . . . but overcooked. Her mouth hungered for the warm taste of raw meat—the wild Kait, the one she preferred to deny, had not been satisfied by the dainty foods of the Naming Day party, and growled dissatisfaction.

  . . . hunting, running, fur and ripped and bleeding flesh torn from its fur-coated package and the first hard gush of hot, thick, iron-salt blood . . .

  Ahead, three men waited at the mouth of an alley. They discussed their night’s take in gloating tones, and Kait wondered, briefly, if the man under the rags who had smelled so strongly of wine had fallen there on his own or if the thieves had robbed him . . . had maybe killed him. She had not heard his breathing, she realized.

  Deep inside, the darkness coiled tighter, urging her to confront the men, taunting her, naming her caution cowardice.

  She clamped the rage tight. Moving silently, she crossed to the other side of the street; the fog hid her, and she passed the trio without any of them suspecting she had been near.

  The slimy feel of evil that pervaded the night lay thicker in the direction she traveled. It became an added dimension to the fog, and for an instant she wondered about Hasmal son of Hasmal, and how he had kept the vile grasping tentacles of hatred and despair at bay.

  She did not hold the thought long. The roads of Halles, narrow and twisting, full of dead ends and maze-like alleys, were at that late hour cheek by jowl with thieves, rapists, and other trouble, and required her full attention. She kept the moon in front of her, though twice she had to double back when she took a wrong turn. She knew by feel where the Galweigh Embassy lay; she simply did not recall the precise combination of roads that would take her directly to it. This city was not hers; she did not feel it the way she felt the streets of Calimekka. So she walked, patient. She didn’t fear the night. She had little to fear; her eyes and ears and nose told her everything she needed to know to stay safe; and if by some chance she found herself trapped between trouble on two sides, she felt certain she could guarantee that her attackers never bothered anyone again.

  She’d been tried only once, but that once had given her the courage of experience.

  At the age of thirteen, when her parents first moved her into the Galweigh House from their secluded farm in the country, she’d been unable to sleep. So in the middle of the night, she got up to go prowling. Following her restless urges, and a nagging, tickling sense at the back of her skull that insisted something about the night was wrong, she’d slipped through the residential corridors and down a back staircase. She loved the House—loved its grandeur and its endless secrets, its immense age and air of mystery—and she had quickly learned ways from place to place few others knew. Stalking by impulse, following instinct, she’d traveled downward, using every trick she shared with the House. She slipped through a hidden corridor, glided down a banister, skulked behind rows of statues, used the noise of the fountains to cover any hint of her approach.

  One man down in a dark back corridor carried a lumpy bag over his shoulder, the bag human-shaped, human-smelling. Another man, redolent of blood not his own, crept behind him watching their backs. Neither spoke, and Kait could not identify their scents, but the blood she smelled belonged to her oldest sister. Kait heard no sound from Dulcie. Fear caught in her throat, and the darkness and the rage that always waited inside of her broke free. She remembered lunging at the men, her body ablaze with the Shift, teeth bared, lips curled back, the exultation of the glorious madness pulsing in her veins and the scent of her sister’s blood sour in her nostrils. She remembered the satisfaction of rending and tearing, claws digging, teeth sinking in, the singing of her blood in her ears . . .

  The sounds of screams alerted the guards. They came running, to find two men dead with their throats torn out, and Dulcie Galweigh unconscious and bleeding in a bag on the floor. When they looked further, they found the guards who would have been protecting the Family lying in a back stairway with their throats cut. The guards never found Dulcie’s avenger. No one knew the meaning of the animal tracks smeared in blood across the pristine white floor. Among the House staff, rumors grew that the Galweighs were protected by a terrible ghost, that the spirit of a great wolf hunted the halls of the House seeking to avenge any hurt that came to the Family.

  Neither Kait nor any of the other Galweighs saw fit to correct this story.

  * * *

  Dùghall met the carriage at the door. But only Tippa was in it, and Tippa wore the terrified expression of a doe that had barely escaped the ravages of a leopard. Dùghall’s stomach twisted. Where was Kait? His heart thudded, and he felt his blood drain to his feet. In an instant, Kait in a hundred forms flashed before his eyes. Tiny Kait-cha with dark eyes and dark hair and flashing white teeth, grinning up at him from the floor where she played in her parents’ country home—seven years old, or maybe eight, the first time he’d met her. Enchanting girl, like a wild creature all shy and curious, stepping closer bit by bit, ready to escape should she sense danger. And Kait running, hair flying behind her like pennants, out in the walled yard with a daisy chain around her waist. Kait at fourteen, astride a horse, urging it over a gate, the two of them sailing like a single bird through the air, then thundering across a meadow. Kait in a tree, calling down to him. Then Kait, older yet, staring wistfully out a window, yearning for places she’d never been. Kait suddenly angry, running from the room so fast she seemed to blur even in memory. And Kait at seventeen, overjoyed when he told her he’d convinced her parents that she would be a perfect ambassador for the Galweighs, that she could begin training.

  And now Kait missing. And if anything happened to her, he could only blame himself. He should have pulled her out the instant he saw the treacherous Sabir stalking through the courtyard . . . but if he had, he would have blown his own cover, and h
e hadn’t thought anyone would try anything against an ambassador—even such a junior ambassador—at such a public party, and on Naming Day.

  He forced his mind to stillness. Maybe Tippa had some logical explanation for coming home alone.

  “Where is she?”

  Those bright, terrified eyes stared up at him. “She . . . stayed behind. Something was the matter, but she wouldn’t say what. She got so fierce. . . . And the princes . . . they treated me nice, but Kait fought with them . . . and she made me come home on my own.” Tippa started to cry.

  She stank of wine, and the flush in her cheeks and the brightness of her eyes told him how drunk she was. Chaperoned closely, she should never have been allowed to get drunk. And what princes had been nice to her? The Families held little regard for the pretenders after long-vacant thrones, and in Ibera any princes she was likely to meet would have been of that sort. Kait was a sensible girl—she’d seen trouble coming, and had pulled Tippa out of the party and sent her home.

  Then what? Had she gone back to deal with the princes? A lone girl in a strange city, in the home of people who had been her Family’s sworn enemies for more than a hundred years? Would she do a thing like that?

  No. Kait was a sensible girl. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been that.

  Tippa looked too drunk to be of much use, though for Kait’s sake, Dùghall hoped she would be able to tell them something of value. He’d take her inside, rouse the embassy physick, and make the man give her something to sober her up. Meantime, he’d chase down the security staff and send them out looking through the streets. He couldn’t get into the private parts of Dokteerak House—not without an army—and at this late hour, and with most if not all of the guests surely gone he wouldn’t even be able to come up with a convincing excuse for getting into the public part of the House. But he could send the Galweighs’ trusted men to look around the outside of it without being seen.