Wolfwalker! they returned. The dens in the east The safety of the darkness. They shot back an image of the lava tubes, narrow and crumbling and damp in the ground. Gray Hishn, in the valley, had already passed on Dion’s warning, and the Gray Ones who had hunted earlier now fled their open kill like mice from a growing storm. They reached the shelter of the trees and dispersed like dust in the wind. Wolfwalker! they howled.
Dion didn’t answer them. Her emotions were broadcast through Hishn, even if she were silent. She had no breath to concentrate thought, except to push her boys. Once they were in the caves, they’d be safe. The caves were rotten, but they were deep, and no lepa would follow them in.
But Hishn read Dion’s fear and the distance from the lava tubes, and the bond between them shocked tight. Wolfwalker, the Gray One howled. Dion felt the wolf’s strength lift her legs. Her eyes unfocused, the grass blurred, and then she went flat, face-first in the grass as her foot collapsed a digger’s hole. Danton heard her fall and half stopped. Instantly, she was up. She leaped toward him, snapping at him to keep going. The boy fled.
But even while her legs pounded and her hand half drew her sword, Dion’s blood froze in her veins. The meadow went dark behind her. She looked back. The shadow sweeping across the sun was a horde of black lepa. They had risen like an oil fire, blocking the sky with darkness. Seconds, seconds, and the bird-beasts would reach her, and her sons were not yet safe.
Hishn! she cried out.
The gray wolf howled. Yellow eyes gleamed. Energy, heat, power was thrust into her mind as if the wolves had channeled their own speed to her legs. Dion’s body jerked ahead. She chanced another look over her shoulder. Then, with lupine power filling her, she grabbed Danton and slung him up. He wrapped his arms around her neck, his legs around her waist. She didn’t feel his weight. But she could almost feel the wind from the wings that gathered overhead, and the furious silence of the racing flock was a nightmare running them down.
Olarun, ahead of her, faltered. “Get inside,” Dion shouted at him. “You’re safe. Don’t stop now.”
But the boy caught a glimpse over his shoulder of the sky as black as coal. The lepa had flocked into a massive fist, and as he watched, they seemed to hammer down from the sky. A rain of black predator bullets began to pierce the meadow, spearing the eerin that didn’t make the safety of the forest. Other lepa kept on, sweeping across the meadow. Olarun could see their wings. He could see their faces. He could see their slitted eyes. He froze, tripped, and fell backward mere meters from the cave.
“Get up,” Dion screamed, sprinting toward him. Olarun, his eyes wide and staring, didn’t move. She reached him, reached down, grabbed his arm and, spinning, slung him into the cave. Instandy, hot air thick with stench engulfed her. Danton screamed. Olarun cried out. The wolves howled in her head. Her feet, light with the Gray Ones’ speed, left the ground, but her leap toward the cave went on forever. The rock entrance filled her sight like an earthen maw, then shrank and fell away.
Talons dug into her backpack and hauled her into the air. Massive wings beat the air by her head. Her stomach dropped sickeningly as she soared up. She screamed and clutched at Danton, but other talons raked her arms. A blinding fury of greasy feathers and stabbing claws whirled and beat at her eyes. Abruptly, she was half dropped as three birdbeasts tore at each other for possession of her body. Another birdbeast dug its talons into the backpack and jerked her airborne again. The pack straps cut into her shoulders. Danton’s weight yanked her sideways. Something tore into her legs. Danton screamed. Olarun and Aranur were suddenly in her mind, and the gray wolves were thick behind those voices. She felt herself drop, was jerked sideways, and was hauled up again as a talon sank deep in her shoulder. She couldn’t help her scream. Vicious claws caught her right leg and shredded the boot from her calf. Fire lanced through her body. Danton’s arms loosened, and she screamed at him, clutching her son more tightly.
Your fangs—
Your steel—
Your sword—
The voices shouted.
With her left hand clutching Danton, her sword seemed to leap into her right. Her head jerked back as her warcap was torn away. One of the claws struck Danton’s cheek. He shrieked. She cut, wildly, one-armed, enraged. A spray of blood flashed out from a birdbeast who dove at Danton’s back.
Abrupdy, she was snatched like bread from one beak by another, her body slung sideways as the talons dug into her hip. Another lepa clawed at her arm. She screamed again. And then, suddenly, like a vision, she felt the rhythm of their attack. She kicked off a lepa that screamed in for a killing blow and slashed another, using the first birdbeast for sloppy leverage. Desperately, she twisted to keep Danton from the claws. The reek of blood splashed across her chin. She elbow-locked her sword arm on a wing that came too close to the boy and felt the wing-bone snap. Screaming, she twirled her blade. The steel cut beneath her, then across the neck of lepa who came in over the beast she had grabbed. She could feel the wolves gather, goaded by Hishn, as if to race to protect her. Hishn! she screamed. Stay back! Stay away!
Their instinct and fury sprang into her hands. She became an airborne demon, striking the beaks away. Thin bones snapped. Muscles tore. The lepa became a frenzied pack. The wing-slapped thunder blinded her; their grunting deafened her ears. A birdbeast grabbed at her calves, and she kicked, then clutched it with her ankles. Suddenly panicked, it beat against her with its wings, tangling another beast. She didn’t feel the jerk of a leg in her armpit as a limb caught for an instant there. But she felt the savage wrench as the pack straps cut again across her shoulders before they broke themselves. The pack was jerked away. She almost fell, but the talons in her hip held just before more sank into her sides and shoulders. She swung wildly, half upside down. Like a newborn babe, her back was bared to the lepa.
The sudden ripping, viciously deep, shocked her. Her hand spasmed; her sword flashed away, spinning down through the air. Curled around her, Danton jerked. Then the two of them twisted and rose sickeningly as one lepa tore her free from the rest. For an instant they rose above the horde. Danton was weak around her waist. She clutched him, feeling the slap of his legs, limp against her own. She screamed at him to hold on, and grabbed at her long knife with her other hand. There was a din in her mind that was not from herself, but from wolves and human voices. Aranur, Hishn, Yoshi, Olarun … They screamed terror into her fury.
The other lepa followed her up like a column of dirty black. Then they were on her again. A beak tore flesh from her thigh. A talon pierced her calf. Like a feather twisting in a vicious wind, she was jerked, pecked this way and that. They beat at Danton like chickens on corn. She tried to curl around his body, but her hands were slick with gore. Theirs, hers, his … Her elbow was ripped, and the boy was half torn from her grasp.
Enraged, she shrieked. Her knife flashed out; the steel fed. The air itself drank blood. Midair, legs flailing, she clawed her son’s weight back to her. She broke him free of the lepa’s grip, but the birdbeast who had her lost its hold. Both humans plummeted sickeningly. For a moment, she held her boy, face to face. Black hair, slick with blood; eyes torn; cheeks slashed. His mouth hung open, loose and slack, his soundless scream too late to reach her ears.
Then he was torn away.
The lepa screamed their triumph. Twisting, shrieking, Dion fell like a stone as her son’s body soared away. There were only talons and beaks in her face; only blackness in her sight. And then she struck the ground and felt it give way, burying her in stone.
There was pain and blackness and blood behind her eyelids, but some instinct moved her, made her fight toward a pocket of air. She left flesh on the rocks, and blood in the dirt. Her arm, broken and caught, made her shriek. The lepa tore at the ground, but her tomb was of rock and the blackness that swept into her mind. Danton, she whispered, but her lips didn’t move. Ola-run … Aranur…
Stones crushed against her ribs. The dust clogged her mouth. The rocks drank her blood. Her hand t
witched once. Two fingers clutched air.
In the silence, a wolf mother howled.
VI
What is Will?
And where do you find it?
—Questions of the elders at the Test of Abis
They half pulled, half dug her body from the narrow cave. Aranur had broken the rotten rocks that bound the entrance, throwing the lightweight stones to the side until he could see her torso. She was facedown, half twisted in the tiny tunnel down which she had crawled. Mud had caked raw muscle and leather together in ragged masses of filth. One arm was twisted, as broken as her body. In the dark, he couldn’t see her breathe.
He didn’t remember dragging and lifting her free of the tunnel. He didn’t know that he struck out at the men who tried to help him staunch those sluggishly bleeding wounds, or that he snarled back at Hishn as the gray wolf bit at him when he moved Dion from the earth. He had had to wait as darkness fell and drove the lepa away. Had had to wait, shooting the few beasts that warily worried the smoking entrance to damn’s cave and those that pecked at the broken ground where Dion had been crushed within. Had had to wait two agonizing hours until he could get to his son and convince himself that the boy really was alive. The fire Olarun had set had discouraged the lepa from following him into the cave, but not before the boy had been slashed in the shoulder. Olarun was cold with shock as much as with dread—the same dread that tore at his father.
With the gray wolf snarling into Aranur’s eyes and the sun closing down on the horizon, Aranur had felt every second of his son’s terror, every slash in Dion’s life. He had run out toward the caves even before the last lepa rose into dusk, throwing off the hands that tried to hold him back. And like an arrow, he had gone straight for his son.
Now Olarun, his arm and shoulder bound with thick bandages, watched his father without speaking. The boy’s face was white; he didn’t seem able to move. He whispered once, when he saw his mother’s body, but Aranur didn’t hear.
Aranur turned then, with Dion in his arms, and shouted for someone to put the boy on a dnu. The gray-eyed man looked once, long and hard, at the dusk meadow strewn with shards of lepa bodies torn apart by their own kind, then up at the moon-bright sky. The only sign of his youngest son was a single strap from the boy’s tiny pack, caught in the thorns near the cave. Aranur’s square features were masklike. Then he mounted, with Dion in his arms, and from the grass and open graves of lepa, they raced as if devil-drawn.
The wolves surrounded them like a sea of gray. Not just Hishn’s pack, but another had joined them at the meadow. The eighteen shadows that paced the dnu compounded the beasts’ nervousness. Already skittish from the blood scent and lepa, the dnu grunted and half reared on the road, but the wolves refused to shift away. As though they herded the riders, the wolves kept close, snarling and snapping at the riding beasts’ heels. Aranur tried twice to rein away from Hishn, but the massive wolf turned and growled with menace, and the gray wolf’s mate snapped at his calf. With a chill, Aranur cursed Gray Yoshi, but the gray male glared back and snarled.
They were barely onto the main rootroad when a third wolf pack swept out of the forest and merged with Gray Hishn’s pack. The riders with Aranur paled. Thirty-two wolves now ran before and behind them.
They rode in a thunder, fast—like a storm. They reached the turnoff for the small town nearest the meadow, and Aranur tried to rein in, but the wolves snarled at his dnu. He tried again to turn, and the wolves bit at his beast. He cursed. Jerking on the reins, he forced the dnu’s head to the left, but the wolves threw themselves at the riding beast, and the dnu squealed. Instinctively, Aranur drew up his legs, and the teeth missed his calves, skidding instead along the side of his riding beast.
“Hishn,” Aranur screamed, “let us turn.”
But the Gray One didn’t slow. The den, the home, her sons, and the darkness of shelter she knew … The urgent need for safety burned in the remnants of Dion’s mind, and it drove the wolves like fire. Three more wolves joined the sea of gray, and then another small pack of four. Aranur raced through a town and could not stop. The villagers leaped from the way of the wolf-human horde, stunned into silence as the gray sea flooded past.
Another town, and the wolf pack swelled. Thirty-nine became close to fifty. Hishn beat at them with need. The smell of blood, of earth, of sweat, of fear, of wolves beat at Aranur until he felt his own nostrils clog with urgency.
The wolf pack grew again, and the dnu began to sweat heavily with fear and exertion. The double weight of himself and Dion was beginning to tell on his mount. He tried to pace the dnu, so that the wolf pack slowed, but the Gray Ones bit at his heels. He tried to open his mind to Hishn, but the wolf refused to meet his eyes. He could only clutch Dion and strain to hear her in the packsong in his mind.
More wolves—too many wolves—surrounded the riders now. The weight of them filled Aranur’s sight so that the forest began to seem fogged. He could feel their gray mental threads; hear their packsong, thick and driven and dark. Dark? Darkening. Fogging more: Dion’s voice, so deeply woven into the song of the wolves, weakened, faded. Went still.
Aranur felt it and screamed, a hoarse, strange cry. Half-human, half-wolf, his voice shocked through the forest. Hishn howled. The wolves surged. Like a single wave, the packsong crushed through the stillness to the last whisper of Dion’s mind. They found her lungs and forced them to move. They found her heart and bit at it with their minds, driving it to beat. Seventy wolves sank their mental teeth into her soul and yanked it back from the path to the moons.
A heartbeat pinched through Aranur’s mind. Then a second tiny pound. Dion’s chest didn’t rise, but a shadow of breath seemed to whisper. Gray wolves, close and raging, refused to let her go. And finally her heart beat again and pushed what was left of her blood through her veins.
Aranur screamed again—a desperate sound, and again the wolf pack surged. This time it was physical. And, as if his own need had added to Hishn’s, the wolf pack picked up their pace. Urgency bit at his thoughts, as though it were he, not Dion, caught up in that bond. His eyes, which once had been a solid gray, seemed tinged with a glint of yellow.
One woman’s dnu began to falter, and the wolves bit at its heels. The riding beast, exhausted from the sprint to the meadow and the race that it could not now escape, squealed and jerked ahead. Olarun, clutching the saddle horn, felt his own blood chill. He had seen the eyes of the wolves who snapped at that dnu, and there was something there that he had not seen before. It had none of the gleam of the eager hunt or the steady gaze of the pack mother. Those eyes were not as he had ever seen them, and it terrified him like the eyes of the lepa.
He tried to stretch as his mother had described, letting himself hear the packsong. But what he realized was a roaring din, like a fire in the tops of the trees. Hishn was no longer a creeping fog—a light touch in the back of his mind. He had found the wolf’s voice, and it was not gentle or firm, but vicious and driving and wild. The boy tried to call out to his father, but he couldn’t seem to speak. He could only sit, with the burn of the gashes in his shoulder, while the wolves forced them toward home.
An hour passed, and the wolves refused to slacken their pace. Two more towns flashed by. The message relays had caught up with them, and the villagers emptied the streets, standing on porches and peering from behind their windows at the flood of lupine gray. A group of relay riders tried to join up from one town, but the wolves repulsed them viciously. Aranur shouted to the riders to get a relay of dnu waiting ahead in the villages, and the riders fell back while the wolves raced on.
They didn’t ride the main roads home—the wolves chose the shortest routes, the routes that Hishn knew. There were places where the dnu were forced at a run up steep, slick hills or through the rocky streams. Aranur could feel the trembling in the muscles of his own beast—the dnu ran more from terror than strength, but the wolves would not let it slow.
They came to another village, and there was a set of relay dnu w
aiting. The relay men, unmounted, started the dnu running free by whipping them with rope until the beasts scuttled ahead of the wolves. When the pack swallowed up the riderless beasts, some of Aranur’s men and women were able to transfer over. Olarun was half lifted, half thrown from one onto another saddle, but the man with whom the boy had ridden was not able to switch with him. The boy found himself, his mind dull with pain and exhaustion, clinging one-handed to the saddle horn. The stirrups, set for an adult, were too long for his skinny legs. He couldn’t hold his seat. A shaft of fear hit him as he felt his body slip.
Hishn, he cried out unconsciously.
The wolf howled back in his mind. The gray sea seemed to shift. A dnu was forced close, its eyes wild and rolling. Then someone’s hand crushed his on the horn. The boy jerked, but the weight was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and Tehena slid into place behind him. Her hard, lean arm caught him around the waist before he could slide off beneath the trampling hooves.
Hishn, he cried out again, unconsciously trying to reach his mother.
Only a snarling returned.
They rode.
Three villages and another hour passed, and the pack still swelled as if the night called them like darkness. The wolves now numbered eighty. The villages through which they flashed were blurs in their exhausted sight. The moons fled overhead, leaving a patch of sky dark as death in which the eyes of the stars stared down. And Aranur clung to his mate as though she could feel his strength around her. Only the sense he had of the gray wolves within her gave him hope that she still lived.
When they reached the outskirts of the Lloroi’s town, the wolves did not run around it. They drove straight through as though they could see the house that overlooked the town. Gray Hishn didn’t lead, but she snarled into the packsong, and Yoshi pushed his way forward. As though the other males had given way to Yoshi, they followed the gray male’s direction. Through empty streets, past knots of people standing in the dark. Through the outer hubs, then the center one, while the dnu hooves clattered on. Onto old stone roads from the Ancient times. And out again to darkness. Twenty minutes, Aranur told himself. Twenty minutes to their home.
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