The Red Wolf Conspiracy

by Robert V. S. Redick

  He found time for a last loony caper, this fellow. We were on the gangway. I had just seen the S——hidden away, and told the warden goodbye, when I saw him staring up at the Chathrand, transfixed. “I thought you had cleared the deck!” he cried.

  So I had: there was no one in sight but the sailors returning to their posts, and one other: a soap merchant named Ket. The man paces many nights away on deck—says he cannot breathe in his cabin—and it was he who somehow saved that nuisance Hercól. Mr. Ket looked up, smiled and bowed to each of us in turn.

  “Relax, he saw nothing,” I murmured. But the warden was gone. I turned and there he was, fleeing across the quay. He did not stop running until he reached the top of the stairs and had passed through the door of his prison.

  Knaves, fools, madmen: you see how I am surrounded, Father? As ever, I remain your obedient son,

  N. R. ROSE

  P.S. Mother is again demanding golden swamp tears. I tell her those bath crystals are hard to acquire, since they form only when lightning scalds an ancient cypress while its sap is running. Still she insists, daily now, and goes so far as to call me “an ungrateful child.” Would it tax you, sir, to explain the matter gently?

  1* “His Nastiness” appears in many letters and log entries by Captain Rose. Scholars debated his true identity until this letter was unearthed on Mereldín. Little doubt remains that the term refers to the Shaggat Ness.—EDITOR

  2* In several places Rose appears to have blotted out the word Shaggat before sealing the envelope.—EDITOR.

  Merchandise

  6 Modoli 941

  The Flikkermen tied Pazel's hands and feet and threw him into the well. He plunged twenty feet into black water, certain they meant to drown him and chop his body into fish food, and blind with terror as he was, part of him felt insulted to be considered so worthless.

  Seconds later he was dragged out of the water and up onto a cold stone floor. He sputtered and gagged. In the darkness ten or twelve bare-chested Flikkermen squatted around him, whispering and croaking. They soon stripped him of his gold, his knife and his mother's ivory whale. All three delighted them, and they patted his face with their round, sticky fingertips and said “Shplegmun”—good boy.

  Pazel had learned one thing during the invasion of Ormael: when a mob lays hold of you, do not fight. Become silent, docile, do as you're told. Above all, study your captors. It was easier said than done, in that dim room. But now and then one of the creatures would flash, as if releasing energy it could no longer contain. An awful sight: the Flikkerman's whole body would light up like a glow-worm, and through its translucent flesh Pazel saw veins and roots of teeth and the six pulsing chambers of a Flikker heart.

  “Swellows tricked him,” one said in their tongue. “Bought his trust with coins. Does he have all his fingers?”

  They worked swiftly, checking each of Pazel's joints as if to be sure his pieces were in working order, feeling his head for cracks. Then they began to argue his fate.

  The Flikker who had met Pazel at the gate was for selling him to the Uturphe Bladeworks, but another felt he was too small to pour molten iron, and would not fetch a good price. Another said they should sell him to a ship bound for Bramian, where hunters needed boys to lure tigers out of their caves. Still another knew a magician who wanted to replace his last boy assistant, whom he had turned into a block of ice for a party trick and then forgotten, until the lad melted and trickled away through the floorboards.

  They had many such fine ideas, and the debate wore on. At last the head Flikkerman burst into light. Since they could not agree, he declared, they would let the buyers themselves decide. The boy would go to auction.

  The others grumbled: the auction was quite far away, apparently. But their chief had spoken, and they obeyed.

  Soon Pazel was back in the water, this time in the bottom of a narrow boat like a cross between a decrepit fishing-dory and a gondola. With their flat feet on top of him, his captors poled down a long, dark, dripping tunnel. What it had been built for Pazel could scarcely guess, but it was clearly one of the secret ways the Flikkers moved children in and out of the city. They turned corners, ducked under low ceilings, opened moss-covered gates. Eventually they sat him up and pressed a flask to his lips. What he swallowed was sweet and briny and rushed to his head like wine.

  On and on they went. At length the Flikkermen began to sing. Theirs was a cold, swift, mournful music, like that of a river approached in darkness, and it made Pazel wonder for the first time just who they were, these Flikkermen, these people who never went to sea, and lived as a race apart in the cities of humankind.

  We cut the sod where the gold wheat grows.

  We dropped the seed of the poplar groves.

  Men all forget, we sing it yet:

  We still recall where the deep flood goes.

  We felled the trees for the conquering fleet.

  We dug the ore for the blacksmith's heat.

  Twilight to dawn and a century's gone:

  We lay the cobbles beneath your feet.

  Fearsome the wind o'er the stolen earth.

  Fearsome the morning of our rebirth.

  Dawn-light to day the Flikkermen say:

  We set the price of your children's worth.

  Do not tarry where the schoolyard ends.

  Do not linger where the alley bends.

  New blossoms pale, empires fail:

  We keep the coin the world expends.

  Wind shall tear pennant from heartless tower.

  River shall rise and wave devour.

  Men all forget on what road we met:

  We shall be kings in the final hour.

  The last words were scarcely out of their mouths when the next song began. Pazel's head still swam with the drink. Soon he found himself drifting into miserable sleep in which the voices sang on, conjuring stories of lost tribes and swamp banquets and Flikker queens with onyx crowns and shawls of butterfly wings.

  At some point he half woke, and found himself no longer underground. The boat was now gliding down a river under a brilliant moon. The banks were high, the land dew-soaked and desolate. A few stone farmhouses squatted in the distance, lamplight blazing in their windows, and once a riderless horse pranced and nickered at them from behind a fence, but there was no one to whom he might have shouted for help.

  He slept, and woke again, and it was day. The boat was surrounded by reeds and tall marsh grass; Pazel could not even see the open river. They were anchored, and the Flikkers were eating cold fish and hot peppers wrapped in some sort of leaves. When they were finished one propped him up and gave him another long drink of the salty-sweet wine. Then they checked his ropes, washed their faces with marsh water, and curled up in the boat to sleep. In a few minutes the wine did its work, and Pazel dropped forward among his captors.

  He woke after nightfall, sunburned and hungry. They were back on the river. Other boats ran close beside them; other Flikkermen had joined his captors' songs. Pazel saw prisoners bound like himself, weariness and terror mingled in their looks. The countryside was open and silver by moonlight, but there was no sign of farmland or any human dwelling. After another sip of the ubiquitous wine they fed him three mouthfuls of their leaf-wrapped fish. It was sour-tasting and sharp, but he ate it eagerly, and the Flikkermen laughed: “Shplegmun.”

  A short time later he noticed that his captors were watching the shore. Lifting his head Pazel saw a pack of ghost-gray dogs racing through the underbrush, studying them with eyes that glowed red as coals. Sulphur dogs. It was said that when they killed, they ate the flesh warm and chewed the bones to daybreak, grinding them to meal. How they communicated no one knew, for they never barked or howled. For a long time Pazel lay watching the pack run in silence, keeping pace with the boats.

  The next three days were much like the first—sleep by daylight, in some hollow or thicket or marsh; swift travel by night. But Pazel felt a queasy ache in the pit of his stomach. It grew hour by hour, and by the third
day he was shaking and chilled.

  “What's wrong with him?” the Flikkermen asked one another.

  “Fever,” Pazel told them, “I've got chills and a fever.”

  “Babbling. Delirious.” They shook their heads.

  “That fish would make a wharf-rat sick. Don't you have anything else?”

  They wondered aloud what tongue he was speaking. And Pazel bit his lips with rage, for he thought they were teasing him. Your tongue, you ugly louts! Only much later did he realize that they were right: he was delirious, and speaking Ormali, and he wondered if he might be starting to die.

  Time became even more fragmented: one moment it was a hot, fly-plagued afternoon, the next a damp and chilly midnight. Through all the pain, cold sweats and dizzy spells, Pazel suffered most in his mind. Questions preyed on him like vultures, one ravenous bird after another dropping out of the sky to peck at his brain. Was Hercól alive? Who had attacked him, and who had killed that Zirfet fellow? Had the ixchel realized that Thasha knew of their presence on the Chathrand, and slit her throat? What would the Flikkers do if he was too weak to sell?

  Clammy palms swept flies from his face. Wet cloths were pressed against his forehead, and something astringent rubbed on his chest. He was lifted in and out of boats. Warm broth was spooned into his mouth; plain water replaced the wine. Days and nights were like the violent banging of a cottage door in the wind: lamplight, darkness, lamplight again.

  Then a dawn came when Pazel realized with a jolt that his illness was gone. He was thinner and weaker, but his head was so clear it was like a stiff sea-breeze driving away the clouds, revealing a cool, clean starlit night.

  He was in a larger boat, with a roofed cabin. He was unbound and undressed, but wrapped in a blanket tucked snugly beneath his feet. A Flikker woman was crouching by a wood-burning stove, stirring a pot of stew and singing: Poor little field mice, lost in a storm, only a wildcat to keep them warm.

  She was very old. Her green-brown skin was dry and wrinkled, and the joints in her great hands were swollen and stiff. She glanced at him and gave a satisfied croak.

  “Awake!” she said, in the Flikkers' old-fashioned Arquali. “I knew thy heart was strong. Art thou improved, boy?”

  “I'm much better,” said Pazel, in her own tongue.

  The old woman lit up like a firecracker, and dropped her wooden spoon. “You speak Flikker!” she cried.

  “Where am I, please?” asked Pazel.

  She recovered her spoon, hobbled forward and whacked him smartly with it across the cheek. “Feel that?”

  “Why, yes,” said Pazel, holding his cheek.

  “Praise the blood of the earth! A few days ago your skin was numb—numb and cold, like a drowned man's. But look at you now! You're going to live, strange human boy.”

  Pazel saw his tattered clothes folded on a corner of her low wooden table. Scattered over the rest of the table, to his astonishment, were books. They were soiled, fourth-hand volumes, spines cracked and resewn, pages hanging in tatters. Nearly all were medical in nature; indeed the first book his eyes lighted upon was Parasites: An Appreciation by Dr. Ignus Chadfallow.

  “You've been caring for me, haven't you?” he said.

  “Right you are,” said the old woman. “Thirteen days.”

  “Thirteen!”

  With a kindly smile (an expression Pazel had not imagined possible on a Flikker face) she helped him out of bed and into a chair by the stove. Her name was Glindrik, she said: this was her home.

  “What happened to the others? They were going to auction me off.”

  She cackled. “Your illness took care of that. You slept right through the auction. Old Pradjit was so angry he wanted to finish you off, boil you down to bones, and sell 'em for half a cockle to the Slugdra ghost-doctors. Luckily I got to you in time. Keep that blanket over your chest, dear. And put your feet up on the fender; they're still cold as meltwater.”

  She served him a bowl of hot stew, then sat across from him and began to chatter. She was plainly a most unusual Flikker, and knew it—they called her Mad Glindrik of the Westfirth, she observed with a certain pride. It seemed that dying humans were her hobby. For two decades she had lived alone here, just across the river from the “auction,” whatever that was. And each time the Flikkermen from Uturphe arrived with a captive too sick to be sold profitably, Glindrik bought him cheaply, and set about saving a life.

  When Pazel asked her why, she frowned at him. Why not? She had no children. Her husband was long dead. What else should she do with the scant years left to her?

  He almost asked, But why help humans? Something in her eyes, however, gave him to know that the question would cause deep offense. And Pazel at once felt ashamed for assuming that no Flikker could wish him anything but harm.

  Through her window he saw that the river here was enormously wide. He could make out the far shore, miles away it seemed, and scores of islands thick with dense woods, over which gulls and other shorebirds wheeled.

  “We're near the sea, then, Glindrik?”

  “Very near,” she said. “The water's too salty even for Flikkers to drink. But there's a well on the hillside, past the apple trees.”

  “Are there many auctions?”

  “Every fortnight. But how did you learn Flikker, boy? Were you raised among us?”

  They talked the morning away. She wanted to know all about his Gift, and was fascinated by his mind-fits, even turning to her books in search of some other way to prevent or delay them. “Night-blooming blacksap, maybe,” she said. “Chew the flowers: they dull the mind's sensitivity to spells. Worth a try, anyway.”

  In the afternoon he napped, and when he woke again he felt perfectly cured. He dressed, and stepped ashore by the little gangway connecting her houseboat to the bank. Over her objections he took her hatchet and split several dozen logs into pieces for her wood-stove, and carried them in. Then Glindrik told him that in three or four days an elk-hunter would pass by, an “honest coot” who would take him back to Uturphe by land.

  “How can I thank you?” Pazel asked her.

  Glindrik smiled. “What do you want to do with your life, Pazel Pathkendle?”

  Pazel looked at her, startled. “I've never been asked that before,” he said. “I don't know the answer, either. Sail like my father, I always thought, but the Code will keep me from that. So perhaps I'll go back to school, one day, if I find one that takes Ormalis. But first I have to stop this blary war, and find my family, of course, and—”

  He stopped abruptly. An image of Thasha's face had suddenly leaped into his mind.

  Glindrik put out her spindly hand and touched his own. “Complicated!” she said. “My own dream was never so hard to tell.” She smiled, rather sadly. “No, telling was easy.”

  “What was it, Glindrik?”

  She got up with a sigh. “After I fetch the water.”

  “Let me,” Pazel said, jumping up.

  She looked at him, considering. At last she said, “Fetch it, then, dear, but whatever you do, don't be long. You'll want to lie down again soon. I want you back in ten minutes, you understand?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” he said, and Glindrik laughed, delighted.

  The path to the well straggled up the sandy bank, through Glin-drik's vegetable patch and a copse of gnarled apple trees. There were bees and grasshoppers, and rabbits growing fat on her cabbage and kale. Pazel reached the well and threw back the wooden cover.

  A chill touched his spine: he thought suddenly of hands on his arms and legs. Hands like Glindrik's, lifting and hurling him down a shaft very much like this one.

  Shaking off the thought, Pazel filled the buckets and set them down to rest a moment. He looked north, where the broad loops of the river vanished into the Westfirth hills. Dry land, he mused. To think that one could set off into it, as a ship did the open sea, and travel months or years without reaching a shore. The idea always struck him as absurd.

  He looked back down the hillside. He could not ma
ke out her houseboat, but through the low pines the sea winked back at him. Twenty years, alone, he thought. What was that dream of yours, Glindrik?

  Then he turned, and saw the graveyard.

  It was laid out neatly beyond the apple trees: twenty or thirty graves in short rows, each one marked with river stones in the shape of the Milk Tree. Human graves, he thought: Flikkers did not worship Rin, or any god of humankind.

  The scene might have been touching, but after the awful memory of his deceit in Uturphe, Pazel found himself alarmed, and suspicious. Glindrik had never spoken of those who died in her care.

  Suddenly her voice rang out from below: “Pazel! Pazel! Come back now, boy. Time to rest!”

  Pazel didn't move. Why hadn't she mentioned the graveyard, when they had talked of so much else?

  Glindrik shouted again, more urgently this time. He lifted the buckets and began to pick his way down the hill. But he dragged his feet. A terrible thought came to him: had she experimented on those boys? Tried out her brews and potions on humans first, to see if they cured or killed?

  Pazel stopped behind a rambling shrub. No sound but the buzzing bees: Glindrik had stopped calling his name.

  This is rubbish, he thought, she saved your life. Yet some instinctive fear kept him where he was a moment longer. Then he took a deep breath and walked down the bank to the houseboat.

  He thought she would be waiting on the shore, but she was inside.

  He crossed the gangway and stepped down onto the deck. He heard her voice within the cabin.

  But Glindrik was not talking to him.