The Red Wolf Conspiracy

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Howling, the Shaggat whirled. “Betrayed! Betrayed! Kill the sorcerer, kill every—”

  He broke off. A tarboy was looking him in the eye. And Pazel touched him and spoke the Master-Word.

  It was like an earthquake beneath the sea. Pazel felt that it was not him but the entire world that had spoken, every part of it at once. The sun turned black, or else too bright for human eyes. Clouds in the distance were torn to shreds. But there was no wind, no waves—and already the Word was gone from his mind.

  All about the deck, men stumbled in a daze. What had just happened? What had changed?

  Pazel lowered his hand. Before him stood a statue of a king with one dead arm, raising his withered fist in the air. Within that fist lay the Nilstone, unchanged. But the Shaggat was no more.

  Arunis looked at the statue and then whirled to face Pazel, his eyes bewildered and lost. It was as if he were seeing the tarboy for the first time—and seeing too his own impossible defeat.

  “A child,” he said, his voice deadly quiet. “A lowborn brat. What madness moves you, boy?”

  Then Diadrelu spoke, for Pazel's ears alone. “Hold your ground. Have no fear of him. If his knife-hand moves I shall slit his throat.”

  Not a man stirred on the Great Ship. But one creature did: Ramachni. Moving gingerly, the black mink walked into the circle and looked up at the mage.

  “The dragonlords of old had a saying, Arunis,” he said. “No one fondles fire and escapes unburned. How careless you have been! You raided libraries, stole many books. You knew the Nilstone could make your Shaggat invincible. But had you read further, you would have learned that every mortal man who has touched it since the time of Erithusmé has died on the spot. For what is the Nilstone, Arunis? You have spent your life craving it. Surely you know?”

  “It is the greatest weapon on earth,” said Arunis.

  “No,” said Thasha from behind them. “It's death.”

  No one had heard her approach. Ramachni looked at her and nodded.

  “Death given form,” he said. “And none who fear death in any corner of their heart may wield it. The Fell Princes drank an enchanted wine from Agaroth, the twilit land that borders death's kingdom, before they touched the Nilstone. Drinking, they knew no fear, and so they took the stone and used it for unspeakable evil. But they had only so much wine. And you have none at all.”

  Ramachni shook his head. “Arunis! All your will has been bent to the unleashing of violence—a war, a warlord, this evil Nilstone. You thought to control it, as you controlled the Shaggat Ness. But we are never long the masters of the violence we unleash. In the end it always masters us.”

  “Reverse the spell,” hissed Arunis. “Make the Shaggat flesh again. Remember that Thasha Isiq is mine to kill.”

  “But you will not kill her,” said Ramachni.

  “Will I not?” screamed the mage suddenly. “How is that? Will you stop me, weasel?”

  “I already have,” said Ramachni. “You see, Arunis, I did not spend my power fighting the fleshancs, as you wished me to. I spent it long before. A great deal went into teaching Pazel his Master-Words. Very much worth the trouble, as it turns out.”

  Pazel smiled despite himself.

  “Yet two problems remained,” Ramachni continued. “One was the curse on Thasha's necklace, which I could not break. Tell me, did Syrarys know that she was condemning Thasha to death when she used your silver polish?”

  Arunis made no answer. Pazel saw Thasha glance suddenly across the deck, to where Lady Oggosk stood beside the captain. Pit-fire, he thought. Was the old woman trying to save Thasha when she sent her cat to steal the necklace? What's her blary game?

  “The second problem,” Ramachni went on, “was that so many people were willing to murder the innocent, should the Shaggat die. Not just you, but Sandor Ott, Drellarek, the Emperor himself. So I dared not kill the Shaggat, or even allow him to die.”

  “Then the spell can be reversed!”

  “It can,” said Ramachni, “but Pazel cannot do it. Nor can I, nor anyone aboard. The Shaggat will become flesh again when one soul aboard Chathrand—and I shall never tell you which—dies. It may be Thasha, or this boy before you. Or Rose, or Uskins, anyone at all. The minute that one dies, the Stone-Word shall be reversed.”

  “Is that the best you could do?” cried Arunis. “Let the Shaggat be stone, then, until we cross the Ruling Sea and meet his army of worshippers! He will be far less trouble! Once on Gurishal I shall no longer require these men. And I shall kill them: all six hundred, if need be. I shall find your spell-keeper!”

  “And when you kill that person,” said Thasha, eyes wide with understanding, “the Shaggat will turn back into flesh, and the Nil-stone will kill him. Oh, Pazel! How did you know when to speak? You were wonderful!”

  “And you are without friends, Arunis,” said Hercól.

  Rage clouded the sorcerer's eyes. He looked sharply at Thasha and raised his hand. “I do not have to kill her to make her suffer,” he said.

  Thasha's necklace gave a savage twist. She could not even scream. Her face turned crimson and tears sprang from her eyes.

  Pazel's first thought was to beg the augrongs to stomp Arunis to death once and for all. But only Arunis could make the necklace stop—Ramachni had just said as much. Thasha staggered, her eyes rolling back in her head. Pazel caught her as she fell.

  In the face of Eberzam Isiq, something snapped. He drew his old sword and flew at Arunis, shouting a war-cry. Just in time, Hercól leaped into his path and dragged him aside. Arunis laughed in the old man's face.

  Then they all heard it: the flat sound of metal striking stone. Arunis whirled. There was Neeps, a lump of iron in his hand, smashing the toes of the Shaggat Ness.

  “We don't have to kill him to make him a cripple!” he said.

  On his last word the Shaggat's big toe shattered to dust.

  “Stop! Stop!” bellowed Arunis. “You shell-island scum! Very well, I release her—for now.”

  Thasha gulped air, writhing in Pazel's arms. Her throat was red and raw. Eberzam Isiq dropped heavily to his knees beside Pazel, and together they held her.

  Sergeant Drellarek came forward. “Sorcerer,” he said, “you speak with contempt of the Shaggat Ness. You are no believer. Why make use of him? Why did you not take the stone for yourself?”

  “Keep to your own affairs, Turach,” snarled Arunis.

  “That's an easy one,” piped up Druffle, from the edge of the crowd. “He was afraid! Didn't know what he was afraid of, exactly, but whatever the risk, he wanted somebody else to take it. The Shaggat's just your hand-puppet, ain't he, you louse?”

  “The Shaggat is everyone's hand-puppet!” screamed Arunis.

  “Or no one's,” said Ramachni.

  “Idiot mage! Why do you meddle in the affairs of my world? Have men not done enough harm in your own? Look at that beast!” He stabbed a finger at the Shaggat. “Made for slaughter! A curse on any land, a plague-bearer, a despoiler of all he sees! If he ever conquers Alifros he'll find himself the emperor of ashes!”

  Pazel looked up at the sorcerer. Then why are you helping him?

  “You are wrong about humans,” said Ramachni. “There is evil in them, of course. But there is also sublime beauty, and a thirst for good. It is that thirst that makes them change, and grow, and wake each day a bit more fully.”

  “They can no more change than His Nastiness here,” said Arunis. “They are statues. Gargoyles. Souls of stone.”

  Ramachni shook his head. “They are fluid souls. What they can feel, and imagine, and rise to—not even they yet appreciate.”

  “Even the Shaggat is more than just a statue,” said Hercól.

  Sergeant Drellarek raised his hand. “Enough! This is a stalemate, wizard. You cannot beat them, nor they you. Leave the deck! You have already come close to sinking the Great Ship. If it is true that the Shaggat can be restored to life, then our mission will go on. I know nothing of curse-stones and magic wine, but
I have my orders. The girl will marry and fulfill Ott's prophecy. We shall feign our own wreck and vanish into the Ruling Sea, and Captain Rose will see us safely across her. You, sorcerer, will have months to prove that you are smarter than three youths and a mink.”

  Arunis' hands clenched in rage. “You, Throatcutter—you and your kind sought to kill me forty years ago. My body hung from a noose on Licherog, but my spirit lived. Death is my servant, not my master. I will free the Shaggat. And Thasha will marry, or die at my feet. This I promise you.”

  “Then the Emperor's will be done,” said Drellarek, and his warriors cheered: “His will be done! His will be done!”

  “Rin help us, the idiots,” Dri whispered to Pazel. “They're cheering for their own deaths.”

  Arunis looked from face to face, his eyes shining with hate. Last of all his gaze fell on Chadfallow.

  “What says the good doctor?” he sneered.

  Pazel and the others looked as well, hardly more friendly than Arunis. Chadfallow dropped his eyes.

  “The Emperor's will be done,” he said.

  The Wolf-Scar Oath

  6 Teala 941

  The olive-green mountains of Simja rose in the west. Already the sea was festooned with sails: ten, no, eleven men-of-war, sporting flags of Arqual and Ibithraéd and Talturi, racing like the Chathrand toward the city between two empires. Thasha's marriage would be well attended, if it happened at all.

  The Shaggat Ness was lowered through the tonnage hatch and chained to a bulkhead. Arunis screamed for the king to be put in his own cabin—but no one wanted the sorcerer left alone with the Nil-stone. Drellarek set a day-and-night guard on the statue, and a more discreet watch on Arunis himself.

  Farther aft, Hercól stood guard as well: just inside the closed door of the stateroom.

  “You will have to shut that book at some point, Thasha,” he said.

  Thasha, her neck wrapped in a cotton bandage, looked up at him and smiled. She closed the Polylex. “I was reading about the Mzithrini diet. It says they eat beetles fried in sesame oil.”

  “Nonsense!” said Eberzam Isiq. “And what does it matter to you?”

  “I have to go through with it, Prahba,” she said quietly.

  “No you don't!” shouted half a dozen voices at once.

  “Shame on you, Thasha,” said Neeps. “Haven't we promised to get you out of this?”

  “Arunis will kill me,” she said. “I'm only alive because he needs me to marry.”

  “He makes mistakes,” said Pazel. “Ramachni's already fooled him once.”

  All eyes turned to the little mage. He was crouched beneath the dining table, beside a basket where Felthrup lay asleep, looking very frail. Ramachni did not look quite right either. Something was gone from the sheen of his fur, the glitter of those wonderful eyes. He looked up from his patient.

  “Felthrup bleeds beneath his skin,” he said. “I have put him in the healing-sleep, but that may only be a gentler way for him to die. I cannot tell: either he will wake, and live—or never wake at all. But there is another who needs our attention, Hercól.”

  He gazed over his shoulder. On the bench under the gallery windows stood Niriviel, Sandor Ott's falcon. A black hood covered his head, and his leg was tied by a leather strap to a hook on the windowsill.

  Hercól and Ramachni approached him, and the Tholjassan removed the hood. Ramachni leaped to the bench.

  “Will you speak to us now?” he asked.

  “I will,” said the bird in a voice like tearing canvas. “But what are you going to do to me?”

  “Nothing whatsoever,” said Ramachni. “We are not your judges.”

  The bird cocked an eye at Hercól, suspicious. “You hate my master,” he accused.

  “Never,” said Hercól. “Remember that he was once mine as well. But I have outgrown him, Niriviel. Oh, not in skill at arms—that I hope will never be tested. My heart has outgrown him, outgrown the cage in which Ott prefers all hearts to dwell. The cage he cannot live without: I mean love of Arqual.”

  “That is no cage!” shrieked the bird suddenly, flapping his wings. “Arqual is the hope of all people! It brings safety, riches, order, peace! It is our mother and father! Arqual is the glory of this world!”

  “But Arqual is not the world,” said Ramachni. “Alifros is vast, and many of her people love their homelands as deeply as you do yours.”

  “One day they will all be Arqualis,” said the falcon. “And you traitors. You shall go to Licherog and break stones.”

  “When I watched you from the gardens of the Lorg,” said Thasha, approaching, “I used to think you were the freest soul in Alifros. But I was wrong. I don't think you know what freedom is.”

  “Remove this strap from my leg and I will show you what freedom is.”

  “That is what I hope for,” said Ramachni.

  He put his teeth to the leather strap, and in four bites chewed it through. Hercól, meanwhile, raised a window. Instantly the bird leaped to the windowsill. He leaned forward, wings lifting—

  —and drew back. His sharp eyes darted here and there in amazement.

  “You release me! Why?”

  “Because we do not enslave,” said Ramachni. “And you should ponder the form of slavery to which you are accustomed. Those bonds only you can break.”

  The bird fidgeted on the sill, one eye trained on Ramachni. “You're a mage,” he said at last, “but not so very wise.”

  Thus speaking he dropped from the window, shrieked once and was gone.

  “A child,” said Ramachni, his voice heavy with sorrow. “I would hazard that he was Ott's creature long before his waking, and took the spymaster's faith and cause as his own from the first hour. A terrifying process, waking: some do not survive it with their minds intact. Others need a God or cause or enemy to anchor them, for above all they fear choice, that great abyss.”

  “Ramachni,” said Hercól. “There is an abyss before you as well.”

  “I haven't forgotten that,” laughed the mage. “Trust me, I feel it in every hair.”

  “Feel what?” asked Thasha.

  “The need for a healing-sleep of my own,” said Ramachni. “My fight with Arunis occurred in more realms than those visible to the eye. The match was close, and it has cost me. My time here is almost spent.”

  “Spent?” cried Neeps. “What are you talking about? You can't go anywhere! We need you here!”

  “If I do not go while I have the strength to walk away, Mr. Undrabust, I shall still depart—by burning out like a candle.”

  “But this is a disaster!” said Neeps. “Arunis isn't defeated yet, and Ott's still out there somewhere, and Thasha's getting married tomorrow! And what about Pazel? If he says the wrong word at the wrong time, maybe he'll blow Simja to the moon!”

  “When will you come back, Ramachni?” asked Pazel.

  “Not for a long time.”

  The news hung like a raincloud over the room. At last Neeps broke the silence.

  “We're sunk.”

  “Undrabust!” said Eberzam Isiq. “In the navy you'd be flogged for throwing that word around! Here, what's that on your wrist?”

  Neeps looked startled. Then he held out his arm. On his wrist was a small red scar. “Look close, it's the strangest thing,” he said. “A bit of iron from the Red Wolf struck me, while it was still hot as Pitfire. But it's not just any burn. It's wolf-shaped!”

  So it was: a perfect, unmistakable wolf, scarred deep into his wrist.

  “And matters are stranger than you know,” said Hercól. With that he lifted a corner of his shirt. Burned into the flesh just below his rib cage was the dark outline of a wolf. “They are identical. And see, a forepaw raised, exactly like the Red Wolf.”

  “Anyone else?” said Neeps. “I say—Pazel!”

  He was holding out his left hand; the others crowded round. The burn on his palm was deeper than the other two. It had blistered, and bled a little at the edges. “It's a wolf all right,” he said. “
And it's as hard as leather. But I have no idea what it means.”

  “It means you are in the grip of a spell,” said Ramachni. “But not an evil one, I think.”

  “Well that's just blary perfect,” said Pazel. He wanted no more to do with spells, evil or benign. Then he looked at Thasha, and saw dejection on her face.

  “You weren't burned by the iron, were you?”

  Thasha shook her head. “Got lucky, I'm happy to say.”

  She sounded anything but happy. Pazel didn't know what to say, or what to think. He caught Neeps' eye; his friend looked as troubled as Pazel felt.

  “Anyway,” Thasha said with a forced smile, “I'll always have this.”

  She held up the hand she had mutilated years ago, with the rose stem at the Lorg. The others stopped what they were doing and looked at it. Or rather stared. Presently Thasha turned her palm over and looked herself.

  The scar was transformed. Nothing had changed on the back of her hand, where she had stabbed herself. But the mark on her palm had become a wolf—the wolf, unmistakably the same.

  “What's happening?” whispered Thasha. “Ramachni, did you …?”

  “I have not interfered. Nor would I presume to do so, without great cause, when a spell has been laid down with such care.”

  “Laid down by whom?” asked Pazel.

  “A spirit dwelled in the Red Wolf,” said Ramachni. “You heard the howl when its shape succumbed to fire. But whose spirit? I cannot tell you, but you would do well to find out.”

  Thasha was still looking at her scar, old and new at once. “I think I know,” she said at last. “I think her name was Erithusmé.”

  Ramachni looked at her curiously: not quite surprised, but very intrigued. “Erithusmé,” he said. “The greatest mage to draw breath since the time of the Worldstorm. How did that notion come to you, child?”

  “I don't know. The Mother Prohibitor told me part of her story, and I've been searching the Polylex for the rest ever since. Impossible book! I still haven't found a word about her. But I'm sure she's part of this, Ramachni. As sure as if she'd walked up and told me herself.”