Most hands, raised to throw things, halted, hovering mid-air. A few thrown items passed my words by, their impetus deflected, off their mark. No few hardliners sought to still vent their anger and called out insults and curses. One brave lad broke from the protection of the herd to smack Lux on his face before vanishing into the milling depths.
I shook Lux slightly, throwing yet more dust into the air. “Does he truly deserve death, my friends?”
“Yes,” screamed a voice from deep inside the audience.
No few took up a new mantra: “Death.” “Death.” “Death.”
I shook my head, smiling. “He does not.”
The crowd stilled, muttering guttural threats before subsiding to await my next words. They may crave his blood, yet they will await my command before seeking it.
“The leader of the pack.”
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”
Opening my hand, I dropped Lux. He collapsed in the dirt at my feet. Enclosing himself into a fetal position, he covered his vulnerable neck with his hands. His knees drew up close into his chest. Though he didn’t cough, he drew in ragged pants as he suspected he would die within the next moments.
Sidestepping his body at my boots, I smiled into the crowd and waved airily at his submissive form on the ground. “Can a worm hurt us?”
“No.”
The word, muttered from mouth to mouth, swept across the town square like a wild wind. No, no, no.
“It cannot,” I said, smiling, walking about, my arms spread outward from my sides. “This one is but a worm, crawling in the dirt. Why must we kill it?”
“It’s awesome fishing bait,” called a sharp wit from deep inside the masses.
I laughed, and no few folk laughed with me. I scented the anger, hatred and fury dissipate like smoke after a drowned campfire on a summer breeze. Humor killed their fury and not the helpless Lux. Chuckles, giggles and numerous repeats of the jest wafted across the air to my sensitive ears.
“He’s an idiot,” I said, my voice carrying. “Idiots require our sympathy. Not our nooses, nor our vengeance. He’s been bloody rude but I do believe he’s learned his lesson. Hasn’t he?”
Yes. The word floated on the sigh of escaped breath. Yes.
I nudged Lux to his feet. He stood, swaying, all but catatonic in his primeval panic. Staring down at his boots, his sweat dripped to darken the dust between his ankles.
“I swore you’ll serve me,” I said. “What do you say, Lux?”
“He damn well better,” sniped the old man whose warehouse Burly threatened to burn down. His wife glared daggers at Lux as though he actually had. A few more heads nodded fiercely, as angry mutters still carried across the dusty air.
“Lux?” I asked, tapping on his brow with my finger. “Still with me, old boy?”
Lux blinked as though waking from a dark dream. He lifted his head slightly. “Um,” he muttered. “I will.”
I growled in my throat. “You will – what?”
Lux jumped as though I’d poked him in the ribs. “I will, my lord.”
“Much better.”
I called my sword to me, my power bringing the hilt straight to my hand. I cleaned it on Lux’s cloak, sheathed it, and grinned again.
“Go home, folks,” I said. “Show’s over. Be about your business and I’ll be about mine.”
Taking Lux by the shoulder I pushed him ahead of me, through the knots of annoyed citizens. Without any more drama to hold them together, they dispersed with avid chatter, laughter and camaraderie. A few still stood about as though wishing I had killed Lux, Burly and Troubadour, but they fell in with their more cheery fellows and walked away with disappointed shrugs.
“March,” I commanded, shoving Lux ahead of me.
He walked, his head down, his hands clasped behind his neck. A few townsfolk trailed in our wake as I crossed the square toward the Black Wolf Tavern, its doors still open in welcome. The sun had fallen behind the north-western mountains, only its last rays streaming red, orange and purple across the few clouds. Down below, early dusk brought out the lamp-lighters. Folk hurried through the gloaming toward home and hearth. The streets rapidly emptied.
“They will be shutting the gates.”
I nodded briefly in response to Darius’ comment. “I can get through, when I’m ready to go.”
The tavern’s common room looked the same, yet with no troubadour. Plenty of folk dined, drank, talked, laughed without his presence. As the gates closed at sundown, merchants and the more prosperous farmers stabled their beasts and bespoke sleeping chambers above. As it was almost filled to capacity, I was forced to pick a table in the middle of the room and sit with my back to the door. I didn’t like it, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“Find the innkeeper,” I told Lux in a low voice. “Remind him I paid already, and you’re to bring my food to me.”
Lux knuckled his brow before wending his way through the diners toward the kitchens.
A great hearth lit the room with its flames devouring huge logs spanned the eastern wall. Torches flared in sconces, pushing back the growing dark. Smoke eddied below the oak beams of the ceiling, adding its rich scent to the tantalizing odors of roast meat, peppers, fresh bread and hot oils. With them came the not-so nice smells of sweat, unwashed bodies and piss.
I kept my head lowered, my senses at their highest peak. My gut churned with hunger and unease.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
Why did I suddenly feel I made a horrible, ghastly mistake?
“Just go.”
“No.”
“Is your pride worth it?”
“It’s not my pride,” I snapped. “It’s my survival. I’m starving.”
“Dead wolves don’t eat.”
Lux appeared at the doorway to the kitchens, bearing a wooden platter. If anyone wondered why he and not a serving wench carried my food to my table, I didn’t hear the comments or raised questions. I felt no curious eyes watching. Saliva squirted into my mouth as I caught the scent of the hot beef swimming in gravy, fried chicken – smoking hot – bread and the soup. Ale, foaming over the top of the pewter tankard, dripped down the sides as Lux knelt.
On his knees, he served me.
He placed my food and my ale on my table, his eyes lowered in respect.
This caused a few curious stares of those close to my table, but those folk lost interest when I waved Lux to his feet. I tossed him a coin from my change, wet from the spilled ale.
“Get lost.”
He bowed and retreated, taking the coin I gave him and pocketing it. I didn’t watch him leave.
Hoping no one watched me eat with the manners of a wolf, I shoved a few mouthfuls of hot delicious beef and bread soaked in gravy into my mouth. As I knew it would, the food tasted wonderful and I burned my tongue. I spooned hot soup past my already sore lips –
“Hail and well met, Prince,” boomed Ja’Teel from behind me.
I knew his voice as well as I knew Ly’Tana’s.
“Uh, oh.”
“That’s the understatement of the century.”
“Try the millennia.”
My hunger and dinner forgotten, I listened to him enter through the door, heard the smacking of leather against flesh as he stripped off his gloves. I cocked my head slightly, catching his every sound, and knew when he stepped across the threshold. He tucked his gloves in his belt, his hair rustling across his mantle as he turned his face to the right, then the left as he surveyed the common room.
“Every first year apprentice,” Ja’Teel said, his good-natured tone carried clearly across the crowd of diners, “knows that transporting oneself even a short distance makes a very loud racket.”
I shut my one eye while inwardly repeating every curse I ever knew or heard.
He strode further inside, closing the door behind him. “I almost couldn’t believe my good fortune. Prince Wolf bouncing around this backwater cesspit like a rubber ball. My ears are still rin
ging.”
By now the folk eating their meals and drinking their ale knew when trouble walked through the door. I listened to the hasty clatter of chairs shoved backward, muttered curses, feet on the straw-strewn floor as folk cleared a path between us. Silence descended as the innocent merchants, farmers, men-at-arms, women, a few children and mercenaries hustled to either side of the common room. The innkeeper himself, wearing a stained apron and armed with a sword, appeared at the doorway to the kitchens. He seized a wench by the arm and shoved her behind him.
I stood up slowly, my back still turned to Ja’Teel. I turned my face slightly. “I’ll make your entire head ring.”
He tittered. “Think so? Your bastard brother obviously didn’t teach you well. You have magic, but you don’t know how to use it.”
I turned around.
Ja’Teel wore, in addition to the supercilious sneer on his harelip, a long cloak of hunter green over a pale blue tunic and dark blue breeches. By the knee-high cavalry boots and glinting spurs, I’d parted him from his horse. He’d swept his long brown hair behind his right ear, the scorpion tattoo dancing black on his cheekbone.
“You thought that once before, mutton-brain,” I said coarsely. “And your mistake almost cost not only your life but that of your Brutal master.”
He stiffened, the sneer forgotten. “You got lucky.”
“Did I?”
His sneer returned. “This isn’t your precious Arena, my lord Wolf. This is the real world. Here I rule.”
He sidestepped away from the door, his spurs jingling, his finger pointing, marking me. Civilians scattered, drawing away from him, retreating until their backs struck the walls. There they huddled, like sheep before a storm, waiting out the tempest while believing in the safety of numbers.
He dropped his hand. He tossed his chin in my direction, a faint grin curling the harelip. “What’d they use? An axe-handle?”
“A shovel.”
He tsked in mock sympathy. “If they had done the job right, I wouldn’t have to dirty my hands.”
“You just can’t get good help these days.”
His hazel eyes flattened. “My Brutal master, as you call him, wants you alive. And he’ll have his wish.”
I grinned, my upper lip curling away from my teeth. I didn’t so much as blink. “That’s bold talk from a man who can’t keep his britches dry.”
It wasn’t my insult that forced his hand. The snickering among the watching tavern folk, the sly grins and the nudging elbows really unraveled him. Though these people had no reason to find me preferable over Ja’Teel, or takes sides against him, for some bizarre reason they did. Their preference along with their humor found tender ground.
Ja’Teel foolishly allowed all of us to provoke him.
He screamed in inarticulate fury, his eyes nearly slitted shut. The fireball blasted from his upraised hands streaked toward me. If Brutal wanted me alive, that alone was enough to ensure he’d be very disappointed.
In the camp where Elder forced me, through Rygel’s magic, to accept my wolf self, I’d no idea how to create a shield, a barrier, to protect myself from another’s power. Either my skill level had increased or my instincts had, but they arrived with only a nanosecond to spare.
I willed an invisible barrier between Ja’Teel’s wrath and me.
His flames splashed harmlessly across them.
His fireball, or what was left of it, fell to my feet, where they set aflame the dry straw the innkeeper used to keep his floors clean. The straw ignited almost as quickly as I willed the sparks out. Smoke curled up lazily to join in with the torches’ offspring near the ceiling.
I almost laughed at Ja’Teel’s comical amazement. “Does it work something like that?”
Before he could recover, I sent my own blast of chilling magic toward him. Not unlike the power of an avalanche and twice as swift, my cold answer should have flattened him where he stood. As it was, his own shield parted my wave like a wood carver’s awl under the stroke of his hammer. My unchecked force struck the people behind him, knocking them flat to the grimy, straw-strewn floor.
“That won’t win you any popularity contests.”
Ja’Teel’s answering blow killed two merchants and a teen-age man-at-arms, his red pimples stark against the bloodless skin of his face and neck. All went down in flames, the area around their burning bodies also catching fire.
“Damn you!” I bellowed. “They have nothing to do with this!”
More people screamed, blind with panic, fleeing, trying to escape. As Ja’Teel stood between them and the door, they surged toward the only safe haven: the kitchens.
The innkeeper waved his sword and yelled at them, but ‘twas like trying to stem the sea’s tide with a broom. The human wave struck, cascaded, and rolled him down and under. They trampled out his life with as much thought as stampeding cattle might.
An old man, unable to walk without a cane, fought to keep his feet under him. Crying aloud, his eyes wide in panic, the elderly man fell beneath the wave of hysterical people. I knew he died almost instantly. Blood burst from his mouth and lungs at the very moment a merc’s heavy boot kicked him across his bald head.
“Some folk are just blessed.”
“How do you figure?” I snarled.
“He died quickly. Many here won’t be so lucky.”
Ja’Teel shouted to be heard over the din. “Surrender or I’ll kill an innocent for every ten seconds you resist me.”
The panicked mob, too many to fit through the small doorway, backed up like a river dammed by beavers. A lake of panicked, crying, shouting humans swirled and backed against one another. Knives flashed in the dim light as the armed cut down the unarmed. More sought to get through, striking, cursing, kicking one another out of the way. Many fled up the stairs, escaping up into the chambers above.
“– nine, ten,” Ja’Teel shouted and sent a bolt of lightning into the back of a young farmer. Dragging his screaming wife with him, he sought to flee up the stairs. His blackened corpse danced as though on a puppet’s strings before collapsing in a smoking heap at her slender ankles.
Hysterical, the young woman clawed at her face, drawing bloody lines, screaming. She bounced up and down, staring at the black husk that once had been her husband, too shocked and terrorized to escape.
Furious, I sent my own lightning blast into Ja’Teel, only to have it bounce from his shield and shoot into the walls to either side.
Ja’Teel laughed.
“You can’t win.”
“I’m going to kill him!”
“How many of these folk will die? Run like hell.”
“I’ve never run from a fight in my life.”
“Will you sacrifice their lives for your pride?”
I set my jaw, enraged, helpless, knowing Darius was right. Ja’Teel and I might fight until we killed each other, but it’s the townsfolk who suffered for it. Already several lay dead, the Black Wolf Tavern burned in many places and the fires were spreading.
“Flee to fight another day.”
“I’ll transport myself –“
“No. Run. Make him chase you. If you vanish, he’ll take his anger out on the innocent.”
Ja’Teel gleefully lifted an elderly merchant with invisible hands. With a sharp snap, he broke the poor gentleman wearing a dark red cloak and grey tunic in half as though cracking a branch over his knee. I heard his delicate spine shatter over the sound of the fires and the panicked shouts of those still trying to escape the burning building. The poor sap’s head rested against his butt, his arms flailing as he screamed and screamed. Blood burst from his mouth and nose the instant he died. Ja’Teel let the corpse collapse in a boneless heap, bloody eyes bulging in their sockets. Ja’Teel’s eyes burned hotter than the hearth fire, alive, unquenched.
“Smokescreen,” I muttered.
“Good thinking. Hide both yourself and the people. He may take potshots, but perhaps most will miss.”
I willed heavy smoke into the r
oom, forcing the hearth to overflow, conjuring thick roiling clouds of dense fog. Darkness fell inside the once well-lit common room, the hearth fire flickering dimly through its inky, swirling mist. I could still see shadows move through its murk, dogs, men, anything that tried to survive this horror.
More, I thought frantic, I need more.
Smoke billowed and boiled, gaining in darkness and density. People coughed and choked, wheezing for air, but not even I could see them. Ja’Teel cursed in the language Rygel often used for such purposes and sent a stab of lightning out and away. It flickered briefly through my impenetrable cloud and struck a table. I heard its shriek as its wood splintered into a thousand shards, but no humans cried out in horror or agony.
The smoke distorted sounds. Where I thought I heard the insane babble of the near the kitchens, the light of the hearth told me I gazed in the wrong direction. Ja’Teel’s curses came from my left, when he’d been standing to my right. He hadn’t struck any tables or chairs in changing locations, which told me he was still where I last saw him.
His lightning struck again, but this time hit the ceiling. Very informative, I thought. He’s just as turned around as I am.
“Well done. Now run and make a lot of noise.”
“Run where, exactly? I’ve no idea where the door is.”
“You do. Follow your instincts. He hasn’t stepped far from the door, and you can see where his light comes from.”
I understood. Not the door, but the window. I needed those great windows that fronted the tavern and once let in the late summer sunlight. Lots of room to crash through: the entire wall to either side of the door was glass.
“Wait, wait for it.”
Ja’Teel streaked his power again, blasting another table into kindling, its brief light illuminating the dark, roiling smoke. I homed in on the area several degrees to the right of that brief flicker of magic.
“Make noise and lots of it.”
Noise, I thought. Right.
Noisier than a bull in a tea shop, I charged across the room, blind, slamming into chairs and tables, stumbling, regaining my balance, striking two more and almost falling. Guided by my instincts, I kept running, on target, steering a straight course to the place I knew the window to be.
Prince Wolf Page 19
