Wolf in Night

by Tara K. Harper

  Outside, Murton added, “I don’t see why you’re so upset, neBentar. They say she’s been looking out for you for years every time you two hit the trails. She’s old enough now to not to want The Brother tagging along every time she leaves the train. In fact—” He gave Payne a sly look as he picked a burr off his dnu. “—she was walking out with B’Kosan last night. She’s probably riding the frontage trail with him and not wanting to be disturbed.”

  “I’ll look into it, thanks.” He spurred his dnu away at a canter.

  Murton called after him, “Give my regards to B’Kosan.”

  “Moonwormed pissant,” Payne muttered to his dnu. Nori might be more at home on the trails, but she hadn’t walked out with B’Kosan. She’d had to rebuff that chovas ever since the man had joined them. It had been B’Kosan who followed Nori around, not she who encouraged the guard. Hells, for Nori to walk out with B’Kosan was like a wolf stepping out with a dog: it was bound to end in violence. Not just from Nori, either. Last night, when Nori had gone to gather night herbs from the verge, Payne had barely had time to sling on his swordbelt when B’Kosan had come back to fireside. Payne had smothered a dark satisfaction. The chovas had been limping.

  Payne looked along the wagon line, then out again at the forest. No moonbeams penetrated the thick, textured folds of black-greens. The only lights now were the glowing road, the lanterns inside a few of the wagons, and the four moons overhead. On the ghostly road, the spoked wheels made illusive, hypnotic patterns. Payne listened as much with his mind as his ears, but the moons glowed silently above the rumbling wagons. He breathed, “Nori-girl, where are you?”

  No wolf howls answered him. No badgerbear roars or bihwadi cries broke the quiet on the other side of the verge. If there were Grey Ones nearby, he could not hear them. Just the stuttered trot of the wagon teams, and the tiny cries of the tree sprits. He muttered another silent curse and rode forward along the line.

  V

  Grasp: “Things are looking up, friend.”

  Grasp’s Friend: “That’s because you’re blind.”

  —from Playing with Swords, traditional staging

  Nori was two kays south of Ironjaw Creek, running hard for the water. She had husbanded her strength, but her breath came now in urgent rhythm. Her hands were slick with sweat.

  She turned onto a wide game track that, even in the dark, felt familiar. The wolves snarled, but she refused to change direction. They were adding distance to her path, distance the worlags didn’t have to run. She built a picture of human scouts and projected it desperately into the packsong. Men. Where are the nearest men?

  Rishte caught the sense of the question and passed it on to the grey. From him, it swept out from wolf to wolf, pack to pack in the night. The images snarled back. Men at the rock circle, men at the fork, men on the wide river trail . . .

  Without the eye contact, Rishte’s voice was too thin to understand. A river trail? Perhaps Deepening Road? It was the major route along the steep, rugged canyon that contained the River Phye. She knew dozens of scouts along that route and half the council ring-runners. But Deepening Road was seven or eight kays away, at least four oldEarth miles, too far with worlags behind her.

  Men at the fork—she didn’t get that. Pira Forks, perhaps, but that was clear on the other side of the cliffs. It might as well be on a moon. The men at a circle of rocks felt closer, north and west on a hill. Bell Rocks was in that direction. It was a scout camp, only four kays away, off the main trails on a side loop. This time of year, with the worlags hunting, someone else might have been forced there to wait out the night. She felt a spur of hope. Ariyen scouts were well armed.

  She projected a memory of the place, and Rishte growled. One of his packmates nipped at her heels as the wolves again tried to turn her off the track. Death, death. Danger. Rishte seemed to beat the words into her mind.

  “Armed men,” she managed. “Bell Rocks is safety.”

  But Rishte growled again, and his teeth seemed to bite at her thoughts.

  Danger like the cliff? She didn’t realize she had projected the question so strongly, but Rishte answered.

  No. New death, cold death and marrow.

  She gagged. She could almost taste the marrow. Cold death—cold bones? The wolves feared the cliff because it reminded them of plague. There was no sense of plague up ahead. So they avoided Bell Rocks for some other reason. Carcasses would draw worlags and bihwadi, so this was probably just an instinctive reaction to avoid the predators. Men would never butcher an animal where others might later ride. She tried to form an image of the slinking, doglike bihwadi, then of poolah with their tooth-ringed maws.

  All she got back was a wary sense of danger. It was scavengers, then. The idea was actually a relief. She couldn’t chance running into more worlags, but she could easily outclimb bihwadi. Rishte sensed her determination to go on and snarled into the pack. Another wolf snapped back, then slammed into Nori’s thigh to try to turn her away from the loop path. She was almost thrown from the trail. Rishte snapped at the other wolf, but Nori shoved through them both. The other wolf didn’t hit her again.

  Ahead, Rishte whipped under a heavy log. Nori dove after him and rolled, following through a scurry of leaves and rotting twigs. She was spitting out debris when she realized that she could as easily have vaulted that log as rolled through underneath. She was too close to the wolves, too caught up in their urgency. It was now affecting her judgment. She pushed back the wolves, hit her stride, and went into the clearing in a full-legged run.

  And tripped on the half-fleshed corpse.

  She tucked up and jumped awkwardly, but her toes caught the bloody rib cage. Tangled bones tumbled thickly into a wash of moonlight. She landed in a crouch and whipped around, her breath ragged and tight.

  Human. Dead.

  New death. Near death. Cold.

  Now she understood. “Gods—” She couldn’t help the word. And not one body, but two. The wolves had known. That’s why they had tried to herd her away.

  She took in the scene as fast as she could. Scavengers had already eaten most of the flesh and guts. The doglike bihwadi had had their meals first. The dung and musk marks were a dead giveaway for the sly, pink-eyed creatures. The antlike largons had started in after the bihwadi, their insect jaws tearing out perfect half-circle bites. Now thin lines of writhing black led away through the crumpled grasses. The tiny nightants were still working where the largons had had their fill.

  She squatted and quickly lifted leaves away from the bones. The edge of a metal button gleamed under a fern like a forgotten note of fear, and she identified the guild pattern as she turned it over in the moonlight. Messengers, then, or what was left of them. But all the way out here? She was in Gambrel Meadow, at least a full kay off the main trail. The only claim this clearing had to usefulness was as a hunter’s meadow, and that was in early fall. In spring, with the worlag packs scouring the woods, it was as dangerous as an off-trail swamp. There were thick logs jammed up against the trees where flooding along the creek had wedged them in—good for shelter or for defensive fire, or for forest cats or poolah. Nearby she caught sight of the bolts permanently sunk into the trees from which to suspend the gambrels. Now a long, stained rope dangled from one set and twisted in the cold wind. Nori felt suddenly sick. There were older bones in a rough pile to the left, cracked and missing their marrow.

  She stumbled across the clearing and yanked at the weeds already growing through the barely cleaned bones. There were rotting clothes and skulls for at least four skeletons. Her hands trembled as she pushed aside a scapula and caught a dull gleam of light too clean and regular to be natural. It was wire, and it circled two wrist joints still held together by taut-dried ligaments. She stared back at the fresh bodies, as if the moonlight lied. Then she groped for her scout book. She needed to mark this down, get this information to her father. But her hand scraped only air. “Oh, heckfire and damnation.”

  She had no scout book and only a few
minutes to spare. She looked around to set what she could in her memory, but she was missing something. The boots, she realized, and the socks were gone. There weren’t any packs or belt pouches, either. She lifted the trampled grasses near the fresh corpse and found five small message tubes opened out and empty. Heavy brush, trussed limbs . . . The ring-runners hadn’t been caught on the loop trail. They had been marched here barefoot, through hotflowers, blackthorn, and brambles. Which meant the raiders who had caught them were staking out the main trails.

  Death. Fresh death. The wolves had known. They hadn’t wanted her to take this trail, nor to risk their cubs at Bell Rocks. They had known: the kill trail led like a road map from here to the creek to the camp. She’d find no scouts at Bell Rocks now. It was raiders up ahead.

  “Dammit, godsdammit.” She didn’t even notice she cursed as she sucked in air to catch her breath. She could go on, could try to get around the camp, but if the raiders noticed her in the dark, she would look like another ring-runner. Raiders were always eager for news of a rich shipment or merchant train. Men like that would not lift a hand to help her. They would laugh while the worlags tore her apart outside their circle of fire. Then they would search her for any message tubes, and burn her limbs for their panbread.

  Moonlight shafted through the trees, lighting the bloody bones. Black shadows darkened further with the brightening light, and the grisly skeletons stretched into distortions of human beings. The night breeze lifted and fell, and her sweat grew cold and clammy. Then, behind her, the worlags’ chittering burst out excitedly. They had caught the smell of the decomp bodies—and her fresh blood smell on top of that. Nori’s spine turned to ice.

  A blood-rush surged in the wolves’ mental voice. Wolfwalker, the worlags, Grey Vesh snapped.

  Nori took off across the clearing. Rishte snarled and raced after her. On the edge of the wolves, she snarled back. For an instant, the two tones meshed. Her legs pounded faster. Her hands stretched out. Voices blended, emotions caught. Fear met and fed fear. The fragile communication twisted, clung. Her mind and Rishte’s began to turn in the same direction till the link became a stronger cord, wound with lupine fury. It was the strength of hunting and feeding, of fighting for food against a stronger beast. It was the strength of survival, and it blinded her.

  She slammed shoulder-first into a tree. “Dik spit!” She staggered back out of the roots.

  Rishte snapped at her, as shocked by the abrupt, broad pain as she was. Even the pack stiffened with their link. The bond, the link, the change—

  Her mind shifted through pain, and the wolves poured in more smoothly. Speed, they urged. Run, run.

  Half deafened, half paralyzed by the pack, by Rishte’s voice, Nori stumbled back onto the trail.

  Hurry. Fight-protect. Pups. Run. The wolves passed each sense along through the faint mental voice of Rishte. Mud, darker, wetter—that way. And, footworm there. Jump over—

  She could hear the rush of water now. The fear that ate at her throat would choke her soon, and the wolves were feeding that terror. Everything her mother had told her was clear as claws on glass. The wolves, the bond, the creeping grey in her mind that turned into a torrent. The need to run, to turn and slash at the worlags that hounded her. The desire to bristle and bite at the danger up ahead. She tried to wrench back from the mental snarls as she’d been told to do when the bond got too intense, too uncontrolled. Her mind twisted to the right, up, out of the fog. Away from the grey, just as the Ancients had been taught to do, just as the alien birdmen had taught the Ancients themselves. It cleared her vision abruptly. The silence cut like a knife, both ways.

  Rishte howled.

  Nori cried out.

  The worlags raised their voices.

  With dull human sight, Nori plunged toward the stream. She glimpsed the tiny whitecaps that topped its slick black expanse. The light of the fourth and seventh moons glistened dully on the waters. She risked a glance back.

  Forty meters.

  Moons help her, but the worlags had seen her even as she saw the stream. They were spreading out to trap her, to catch her against the bank. Their chittering grew as they closed.

  “Rishte,” she cried out. “Upstream, quickly. Two-Log Crossing.”

  Rishte howled back into her mind. There was an instant’s struggle, as if they pulled at each other with their teeth. Nori snapped the command. Abruptly, the younger wolf obeyed. He disappeared into shadow. Four of his packmates went with him, but Helt and Vesh hovered by Nori, lunged away, and came back to their pups again. Vesh snarled with the desperate need of a mother who will do anything, use anything to save her cubs. Grey Helt felt his mate’s need, but like the others he hated the nearness of the human. Even as he had been engineered to trust that wolfwalker bond, he feared the taint in Nori’s mind. But the human had his cubs. It was an intolerable tension to the male, and Nori’s own fear made it worse.

  He leapt in front of her, planting his feet. Nori stumbled to a halt.

  Wolfwalker, he snarled, glaring into her eyes.

  “I can cross,” she snapped back. “Get to safety.”

  Our pups—

  “I have them,” she snarled. “Now go, if you want us to live!”

  She ducked past him, slipped in the clay, and dodged through the rocks toward the stream. It was fast and thick with spring runoff, but the worlag’s chittering was almost loud enough to hear over the rush of the water. She grabbed up a thick, muddy branch that was jammed among the rocks and splashed in without looking back. Her shoulders were tight as if the worlags’ claws would catch in her skin before she abandoned the bank.

  The icy water was a shock to her heat-tightened skin. Her calves cramped like hammers. She gasped, staggered over the rocky bottom, knee-deep in the black surge. Quickly she jammed the stick in the rocks to catch her balance. She risked a glance over her shoulder. “Dear gods.” She backed almost blindly.

  Ten meters separated them, the woman and the worlags.

  Ten bare meters between her and those claws, between her and the beetle fangs. In the moonlight, it could have been inches.

  But the worlags halted on the bank, pacing, chittering, watching her in the water. One tested the creek, but jerked its claw back from the white-tipped water. Another eyed her and scuttled upstream, seeking a shallow crossing. Its six legs carried it over the rocks like an exaggerated skeleton.

  Two worlags dropped to their fours as they watched her wade farther out. Their smaller, middle arms wrapped around the notches between their bellies and upper bodies. The semi-vestigal limbs would stay out of the way until they were needed to climb over boulders or rocks, or to start carving up her flesh with their more articulate claws.

  A fifth beast chittered sharply and tested the few rocks that stood above the water near the bank. Nori’s hand clenched on the branch as if her fingers would somehow find a knife, a sword, any kind of blade instead of brittle wood. The wolf cubs were very still in the sling. She hugged them closer, then steeled herself and turned her back on the worlags.

  The frigid water in her boots burned grittily on her hot feet even as it chilled them. She refused to look back at the beetle-beasts. Instead, using the branch for balance, she worked her way into the stream.

  The worlags chittered, scuttled, watched with unblinking eyes while swift water wrapped her trousers tightly around her legs. A broad, flat boulder squatted in the middle of the stream, tall enough that its upper half was dry. It tempted her as a place to rest, but she moved away from it, angling upstream toward a broader curve. There were deep pockets at the base of such rocks, places where the stream had eaten away its bed. A raft or kayak could be pulled in and under. Nori would be sucked down like a twig.

  She forced her breathing to slow. In the gloom, it took her a moment to realize that the worlags were gone from the bank. If they weren’t scuttling after the wolves, then they were seeking some other ford. They couldn’t swim, but they went into the water often enough. They simply let the curren
t sweep them along till they fetched up on the other bank.

  In the distance, Grey Rishte felt her thrill of fear at the thought. Even without eye contact, his faint voice was still with her. She reached, focused, strove toward the grey. Before, there had been nothing to grasp into but a wispy sense of fog. Now she felt something more concrete. Now she felt an Answer.

  The voice disappeared, wisped back in, then began to solidify. It wasn’t just the young wolf, she realized. The other wolves had recognized the link that was forming between Nori and Grey Rishte. They put their own strength behind the yearling and pushed that force at Nori. On. Move on.

  The wolves felt urgency, not fear now. The worlags must not have followed them upstream, but found some other ford, or she would have sensed the wolves’ need to flee from an immediate danger, not just to return to the cubs.

  Meet, need, agreed Rishte.

  “To meet up?”

  Rishte seemed to acknowledge that, and Nori’s calves almost cramped again with the force of the grey wolf’s sprint.

  “Hurry,” she tried to send in return. Her boots slid on slick rock, and she stumbled in the stream. “I need you to see for me.” She didn’t know how much he understood, but at least she knew he was coming.

  She staggered out of the water and collapsed on a log. She took precious minutes to empty her moccasins, wring out her soggy trousers. Then she worked the limp clothes back on, adjusted the sling with its tiny balls of warmth, and scrambled up toward the trail.

  VI

  Who rides closer on the road:

  The friends at your side,

  The ghosts in your mind,

  Or the dangers to which