Wolf Hunting (74 page)

“The chamber was dark when we left.” Skea, confident. “I blew out the lamps myself.”

“Who’s there?” Lachen called out. Then in a lower tone, “We told everyone to stay away from here lest those creatures become suspicious about comings and goings. Why won’t they obey?”

The footsteps had resumed during this rant, and Firekeeper felt Blind Seer’s nose cold against her arm.

“Five,”
he said.
“The four who came to the stronghold and one male I do not know.”

Firekeeper touched his head in acknowledgment. There was no need to say that the best thing they could do was to wait, listen, and learn what they could. She hoped Truth thought the same.

The footsteps had reached the room, their sound widening as they struck the stone floor. A silhouetted figure intercepted the lamplight. Ynamynet spoke.

“It’s turned pretty low. It’s possible that there was a spark in the wick that slowly kindled in the oil. I’ll take a look around.”

She had turned up the wick now, and Firekeeper took care not to look directly at the bright center of the new halo of light.

Ynamynet moved around the immediate area, lighting a series of lamps hung from hooks set into walls or support beams. Firekeeper studied what had been revealed.

In this greater range of light, the place looked less like the natural ravine it had begun as and more like a human structure fashioned after a ravine. Firekeeper was reminded of the caverns beneath Dragon’s Breath in New Kelvin. There, too, the sorcerers had liked to work their incantations beneath the earth. Firekeeper wondered if they had reason for this other than the obvious security such places offered.

We know too little about magic,
Firekeeper thought fleetingly
, and too much of what we know is wrong.

Lachen had accepted Ynamynet’s suggestions, perhaps because with the coming of light he no longer felt so afraid. Humans put far too much trust in light. Lachen had moved to the gate, holding one of the lamps close so he could inspect the markings on the wall.

“We should have the significant parts cleared in another few hours,” he announced, “if we put our backs to it.”

This appeared to be a command of sorts, for Skea, Verul, and the last person now moved forward and resumed clearing away the rocks. This last was a very large man who reminded Firekeeper a little of her friend Ox, for all this man was colored like the Winter Grass people of Stonehold, with their golden brown skin and shining black hair. Lachen helped, though he talked as much as he worked.

“Found anything, Ynamynet?”

Ynamynet had moved in the direction Blind Seer had gone, and Firekeeper felt a trace of apprehension. What if the wolf had left a paw print to mark his presence? She asked him, and the wolf replied confidently.

“If she can read sign on stone, then perhaps, but I smelled many trails there. The dust and grit have long been muddled by these humans’ own passage. I ran clean-foot, so left nothing behind.”

However, Blind Seer might have carried mud between each toe for all Ynamynet would have noticed. Firekeeper saw that Ynamynet’s investigation was not for the floor, but for the various nooks and crannies about the edges of the room. Ynamynet stopped in one place, and Firekeeper’s heart began to pound uncomfortably hard, certain that Ynamynet had found some sign of their passage, but the woman was only studying with idle speculation another heap of fallen rock.

“I wonder where this gate goes?”

“Elsewhere,” Lachen grunted. He was helping Skea move a large slab. “When we are free of these intruders, perhaps we will look.”

“Hmmm …” Ynamynet said.

She left her perusal of the wall and continued her search. There was no urgency about Ynamynet’s progress, and Firekeeper suspected Ynamynet was searching mostly to humor Lachen and to avoid taking her own turn at moving rock.

Eventually, Ynamynet turned in the direction of the place from which Firekeeper and Blind Seer had been watching, but they had long since melted away, moving to where they could see both what Ynamynet had found and the men working over the stone heap behind them. Firekeeper had even remembered to take the candle with her so there would be no question of how it came to be there.

The wolf-woman had almost forgotten Truth, for the jaguar had been silent until now. Firekeeper had guessed that like them the great cat was watching and waiting, moving a few steps to avoid the traveling light.

Forgetting Truth proved to be a mistake.

Eventually, Ynamynet’s path brought her into the vicinity of the stair by which the trio had descended. She raised her lamp to look up the stair, and there on the lowest landing crouched the jaguar.

Truth was frozen in midmotion, one paw raised as if she would climb further up the stairs, her head turned as if she would descend the few stairs that separated her from the room below. Even her tail was held stiffly in mid-lash. Her blue-white eyes were the only things that moved, darting back and forth, watching something that none of the others could see.

“
She’s gone mad again,
” Blind Seer breathed in resignation.

Ynamynet’s response to finding the jaguar, so very strange with her charcoal coat and burning spots, was completely sensible as human reactions went. She screamed, her voice so shrill that in it Firekeeper heard the long-ago days when humans were still wild creatures, and such screams were meant to summon a distant pack.

The men responded as those long-ago men must have done, dropping their burdens and racing to the woman’s side. All but Lachen bore makeshift clubs, crafted from the furniture left in the administration building. They ran with these raised, but swift as they were, Firekeeper and Blind Seer were the swifter.

They did not run to put themselves between Truth and those who now lunged toward her, but leapt from behind. Blind Seer bore the ox-built man over, and Firekeeper heard the man hit with a solid, sickening crack. She did not think he would trouble them soon—if ever.

She had chosen for her target Verul, the big, fair-skinned Twice Dead. Keeping in mind her promise to Derian that there would be as little killing as need be, Firekeeper did not leap upon Verul’s back and put her Fang into his throat, but instead grabbed at his leg, tripping him so he stumbled and fell. In catching himself on his hands, Verul let his club drop and the solid bit of wood skittered off into the shadows.

But Verul was luckier than the other man, and caught himself successfully, rolling over onto his back and bounding to his feet with admirable ease. Firekeeper, joints and muscles still aching from fever, envied him and even hated him a little. That hate made what she must do next a little easier.

Verul was still casting about for who had hit him, for Ynamynet’s one lamp, held in her shaking hand, cast as much dancing shadow as it did light. In the cover of those shadows, Firekeeper came low and fast. Her Fang was sharp, and Verul’s light leather boots offered the blade little challenge. In one hard cut, Firekeeper sliced the tendon at the back of his ankle.

Verul bellowed in rage and pain, but for all his noise, his leg buckled beneath him nonetheless. He crashed to the floor, and this time he stayed down.

Blind Seer had now targeted Skea, but the dark-skinned man was proving more of a challenge than his fellows, and not only because he had some warning. Skea seemed able to root himself to the floor on which he stood, and also to understand that if Blind Seer leapt, the wolf would be for that moment vulnerable. Even so, there was no way that Skea would have attention for any other than Blind Seer for a good time to come.

Firekeeper glanced behind her. Lachen had fallen on his knees beside the big man Blind Seer had first attacked. His motions as he checked the man for signs of life were stiff and jerky. Clearly, he could hardly believe what had happened, that his plans had come to ruin so quickly. Ynamynet, however, remained on her feet, alert, standing between Firekeeper and Truth. It was to her the wolf-woman turned her attention.

The women locked eyes and Ynamynet tilted her chin up in defiance. Firekeeper shifted her grip on her blade, but she had been with humans too long. She could not bring herself to strike this unarmed opponent, especially with Derian’s anguish fresh in her mind. She was struggling to remember the human forms for demanding surrender—for surely the wolf’s way would only frighten this woman, if not kill her—when Ynamynet said something very strange.

“I have a daughter,” she said, her tone so carefully conversational that Firekeeper could hear the fear vibrating beneath every note. “Do you have any children?”

“No,” Firekeeper said, completely confused.

“Then perhaps you will not understand when I tell you I could not trust my daughter to the mercies of you and your allies—especially of you, given how I had betrayed our agreement there at the Setting Sun stronghold. Zebel attempted to assure me that you were a creature of honor, but I could not even trust him. I must do what I could to escape.”

“I do not want your daughter,” Firekeeper said. “I do not want you or this place or anything else, but having them I must deal with them.”

“If I order Skea to surrender, will the wolf kill him?” Ynamynet asked in that same too conversational voice.

“If the surrender is real,” Firekeeper said, “Blind Seer will not harm him.”

Ynamynet raised her voice. “Skea. Surrender.”

Firekeeper did not turn, did not trust this woman, but she heard the dull thud of wood as Skea dropped his club. She heard the crack as Blind Seer broke the piece of wood in his jaws, and hid a smile. Wolves had a sense of humor she understood perfectly.

“Are you surrender?” Firekeeper asked.

Ynamynet shrugged. “I am unarmed-unless I could turn this lamp into a weapon, which I cannot. There is a jaguar at my back, and you to the front. If you will accept my surrender I will give it.”

“I accept,” Firekeeper said. “Sit and …”

She stopped speaking, competing sounds claiming her attention. One was a rumbling growl from Truth, echoing from stone walls to reverberate like thunder. The other was an anguished shout from the almost forgotten Lachen.

“No! No! No! No!” Screaming on a rising note. “NO!”

Firekeeper wheeled and saw Lachen rolling on the floor. He was deliberately soaking himself in the blood that had flowed from Verul’s cut leg before that man had stanched the flow. Verul, seated on the floor, both hands gripping the makeshift bandage he had bound around his wound, was staring at Lachen in horror, a horror that grew to terror as Lachen began to claw at Verul’s hands, trying to force them from the wound.

Verul kicked out at Lachen with his sound leg, and Firekeeper heard bones break, probably in Lachen’s hand, but Lachen seemed to be beyond pain. He looked at the limp hand and his own blood dripping from broken skin and seemed more pleased than otherwise. He was muttering to himself, and in the words Firekeeper recognized the cadences of the older form of Liglimosh.

Before she could act, steam began to rise around Lachen, steam the rusty red of blood. It rose so thickly that Lachen vanished entirely from view. Then the mist began taking a form that made Firekeeper’s gut shrivel, something that touched her hindbrain with fear close to paralysis. The shape had something to do with long claws, something to do with fire. It was reaching for her, and she knew those long claws would pierce her brain, then penetrate directly into her heart.

Blind Seer snarled and interposed himself between Firekeeper and the mist, pushing her back. Claws meant to rip into her brain passed harmlessly over the wolf’s head.

In Blind Seer’s courage, Firekeeper found the will to move. Although every fiber of her wanted to bolt for some safe corner, she slashed out at the thing with her Fang. The keen blade met no more resistance than it would have in a mist, but one of those long claws connected with her knife hand and drew blood.

The mist darkened about her hand, and Firekeeper swore she could hear purring. She could hear Lachen laughing now, but there was nothing of merriment in the sound, only more fear.

Firekeeper jerked her hand free of the mist and stumbled back a pace. The mist could claw at her, but she apparently could not injure it. Blind Seer had also found his own attacks fruitless. Thus far, his fur and his cloth coat had protected him from injury, but that immunity would not last long.

“Back away!” Firekeeper cried. “We cannot hurt it this way.”

At that moment, Truth’s growl, which had been like thunder rumbling, cracked lightning into a snarl. The jaguar sprang directly into the place where the mist was darkest red, directly onto Lachen.

Truth landed squarely on Lachen’s chest. Unlike a wolf, Truth did not go for the throat, but ripped directly into the man’s face. Jaws that could break the thickness of a snapping turtle’s shell found no challenge in the bones of a skull. There was one solid crack, and then another, this sounding a flatter note.

The lamplight showed Lachen’s brains spilling onto the floor, but the rust red mist did not diminish. Firekeeper knew it was rooted in Lachen’s blood now, draining the hot fluid into itself, drinking gleeful sustenance, rejoicing in freedom from its maker’s death. With every moment the cloud grew larger and more dense.

Truth leapt free, contemplating what she had done—or at least contemplating something, for her gaze was active, though her body had frozen into immobility once again.

“Don’t go near the mist!” Ynamynet called. “Don’t let it touch you.”

Firekeeper was willing to obey, but then her gaze fell on Verul. The fair-haired man was trying to get away, but he could not rise without letting more blood flow—a thing he was loath to do, for clearly it would attract the mist to him. Firekeeper dodged the groping tendrils of mist and darted to Verul’s side. Grabbing him beneath the armpits, she dragged him away from the mist, avoiding the bright claws that continued to grope after her.

Skea had moved under his own power, bringing with him the inert form of the man Blind Seer had first attacked. Together, they watched as the mist struggled to reach them, but it seemed anchored on Lachen, and Lachen was not moving. Eventually, all that remained was Lachen’s corpse with its ruined head—and numerous long slashes along his arms, where, unseen to them within the mist’s red heart, he had apparently cut himself to feed the mist.