Wolf's Blood (51 page)

“
He wore good shoes for walking in the forest,
” Blind Seer commented. “
And I smell oiled metal, so he may carry a blade.
”

Firekeeper acknowledged the wolf’s warning by drawing her own Fang and making sure the man saw it before she approached him. He stopped flailing some then, and in response the bent sapling bobbed less intensely.

From far above, Firekeeper heard a thin cry from Elation, a reminder that the falcon was keeping watch above. Blind Seer remained alert to threats from below. They all knew better than to let their guard lapse as humans might. Firekeeper could give her full attention to their captive, knowing her back was being safely watched.

“What you speak?” she asked in Pellish.

The man pressed his lips into a thin, white line. His face was getting pinker from his reversed position, but she didn’t think he was in danger of blacking out quite yet.

Firekeeper grinned, and said, “I think Pellish, at least. Now. Hold still.”

The man didn’t respond, but neither did he grab at the wolf-woman when she stepped closer. Alert to any movement on his part, Firekeeper bent and grabbed both his upper arms. Twisting them behind his back, she bound his wrists, drawing the knots snug, but not cruelly tight.

Next she raised the gathered fabric of his robes. A sheathed knife did hang at his belt, along with a few small pouches. Firekeeper considered the situation, then unbuckled the entire belt, drawing it free in one swift motion as the man’s robes tumbled down to swaddle his head and shoulders.

He began to struggle again, and Firekeeper took mercy on him, cutting the loop that had closed around his lower leg and letting him fall the short distance to the ground. Before he could recover himself, she sat on him and twisted lengths of iron wire about his wrists and ankles, making sure the metal touched his bare skin. From what they had learned from Ynamynet and the other Once Dead, if this man had the ability to cast spells, he would now find it difficult to do so.

Her prize secured, Firekeeper got up off the man, grabbed a fistful of robes in the vicinity of his upper chest, and hauled him to his feet. Still tangled in his robes, he stumbled, but Firekeeper used her free hand to clear the tangle of cloth from his head and he managed to retain his balance.

As he did so, Firekeeper studied his face. There was something very odd about the skin. Superficially, it showed very little weathering, very few lines, but even so there was something old about it. She was reminded of tanned and oiled leather, superficially supple, but lacking the glow of life.

She sniffed, and would not have been surprised to find the man smelled musty, but what came to her was the usual odor of male sweat, mingled with a touch of blood and a hint of urine.

Firekeeper released her hold on the man. She didn’t think he would try to run, not with Blind Seer right there, not with his hands bound behind him. Still, humans were often reassured by being told what to do.

“Don’t move,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

The man pressed his lips together again, and for a moment Firekeeper thought he might refuse to speak, or, perhaps, foolishly pretend he didn’t understand Pellish. That last would have been pure idiocy. Although he had not replied to anything she had said to him. his reaction had shown he understood. However, humans frequently thought that refusing to vocalize meant that they had not replied. This was no great surprise given how much many humans loved the sound of their own voices.

“What do you want to talk to me about?” the man said. His voice was reedy and nasal. His Pellish held a strange accent, closer to how some of the Nexans had spoken than to how Derian did, but Firekeeper could understand him clearly enough.

“About querinalo,” Firekeeper said, adding, in case he did not know the sickness by that name, “the Plague. The Fire Plague. The sickness of the Burning Times. The Sorcerer’s Bane. The sickness that killed all the Old World rulers—except for a few.”

The man looked at her. “Except for a few. What is it you wish to know?”

“More things than to learn standing here,” Firekeeper said. “I take you to my camp. We talk there.”

She bent and picked up his belt, eyeing the various little bags and pouches fastened to it. She slid the knife a finger’s width or so out of the sheath and saw the warm yellow-brown of bronze. Sharp enough to cut, but not damaging to the abilities of one who would use magic.

“Who are you?” the man said, although Firekeeper suspected he must know. How could he not if the Royal Beasts served these humans? Still, humans loved asking things they already knew.

“Am Firekeeper,” she replied. “Also Lady Blysse of House Kestrel and Little Two-legs of the wolves when I was small. And you?”

“I am Bruck,” he said.

The name reminded Firekeeper of that of Derian’s younger brother, Brock. She wondered if it was the same name, or if this man simply couldn’t speak Pellish right.

“Bruck,” she repeated. “But not Once Dead, I think.”

The man gave an odd smile. “No. I’ve never been dead, and I’ve been alive a long, long time.”

She had been leading Bruck along a narrow game trail to her camp while they spoke, and he had followed, made docile as anyone sane would be made docile with Blind Seer padding silently behind. Now she motioned for him to take a seat on one side of her dormant fire.

“I tie your hands in front.” she said, “if you give promise to be patient while we are talking.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

Firekeeper snorted. “How could I talk to you if you is dead? No. I not kill you.”

“But what about once I have talked to you? What’s to keep you from killing me then?”

Firekeeper gave a slow smile. “I think that people who worry a lot about whether others kill them have maybe done a lot of killing. Maybe I leave your hands behind.”

Bruck scowled. “I could sit more easily if they were in front.”

“So I think. You he patient while we talk, not think to do something like scoop dirt and try and throw in eyes? I promise it not work. and I would be very angry.”

Bruck bit his lip. “I promise I’ll be a good prisoner. I can’t promise I won’t try and get away, though.”

Firekeeper shrugged. “Be my job, my and Blind Seer to keep you, then. Now hold very still. The furred wolf is not the only one with teeth.”

She unbound his hands and refastened them in front of him. As she did so, she glanced at his wrists. Tiny blisters. less than those nettles might cause, were rising like a second bracelet. He was sensitive to iron then. But she had thought he would be.

Firekeeper let Bruck make himself comfortable, then ran a loose hobble between his ankles.

“So you not run too easy,” she said. “Now, about querinalo. Tell.”

Bruck frowned. “in one sense, there is a great deal to tell, in another very little. It might help me if I knew why you wanted to know.”

Firekeeper glanced at Blind Seer.

“I don’t see how we can keep that back forever,”
the wolf replied.
“Why not see what he says?”

“We want to find how to stop it,” Firekeeper said. “Cure or ending or whatever. We want no more querinalo in all the world.”

“Even if this means the rise of sorcery again?” Bruck countered.

Firekeeper sighed. “Is again rising, in Old World. Querinalo wounds now, sometimes deeply, but does not kill always.”

Bruck twitched the corner of his mouth into a half-smile that held no humor at all.

“What if it could be made to kill again?” he asked. “Wouldn’t that be better?”

Firekeeper considered. “I have had querinalo. I not wish it even on an enemy. An arrow to the heart is kinder.”

“Of course,” Bruck said. “you have never had an arrow in your heart.”

“And you,” Firekeeper growled, “no have had querinalo, I think. But I think you know too much of it.”

“Aren’t you afraid to keep me here?” Bruck asked. “You don’t think my friends will come rescue me?”

“I think your friends might come,” Firekeeper said. “but I not think they could rescue you.”

She drew a spare knife, one from Liglim that she had kept because it was well balanced for throwing. In a moment, it quivered in the earth next to Bruck’s foot.

“An eye is easier.” she said. “Softer. If your friends watch. and I am sure that someone watches, they will know this now. You are good to let me show.”

Bruck was so fair-skinned that Firekeeper saw the blood drain from his face. She reached out and grabbed him before he fainted.

“This is an odd human,”
she said to Blind Seer.
“He speaks easily of death and killing, but his own death seems to frighten him too much.”

“Humans can be that way,”
Blind Seer replied.
“Still, I wish we were a larger pack than we three. My nose tells me that the forest is filled with those who could harm us if they didn’t care to preserve this Bruck.”

Firekeeper shrugged in wordless reply. That had always been the risk. She still felt fortunate that they had managed to capture a human, even if it was this fainting Bruck. She had thought they would need to begin with a Beast, and hope a human would come in time.

“It all seemed like a great and noble adventure at the start, you know,” Bruck said, his voice thin and wispy with shock. “I don’t expect you to believe me, but that’s how it seemed.”

“‘It’?” Firekeeper asked, tilting her head to one side in a wolfish expression of confusion. “I not understand.”

“I didn’t make myself very clear, did I?” Bruck pulled himself from Firekeeper’s hold, then sat up. “I don’t suppose you would let me move to where I could lean against that tree truck. Sitting on the ground this way, not being able to support myself with my hands, is making my muscles ache.”

“Not try anything,” Firekeeper warned, tapping her Fang. “If promise, then you can lean.”

“I do promise,” Bruck said, accepting her help in getting to his feet, then shuffling a few steps over to the indicated tree. “You see, I think I want to tell you about it—about our great and noble venture, and what came from it in the end.”

XXV

  “IT WAS A great and noble venture.” Bruck began again, sitting straight, his posture somehow managing to suggest that he was holding up the tree and not the other way around.

Firekeeper settled in to listen. Wolves like stories. Having no writing, that is how they pass along everything that is important and many things that are merely interesting or amusing. Firekeeper listened to Bruck’s voice feeling itself into the words as wolf would listen, hearing those words, but never losing awareness of the rhythms of the forest around her.

If this offer to tell a story was all some sort of trick, something meant to distract her from watchfulness, then Bruck would be sadly disappointed.

“Do you know anything of Virim?” Bruck asked. “Of Virim and his great vision?”

“Know some of Virim.” Firekeeper said. “Tell of this vision.”

Bruck nodded. “Virim decided that he wasn’t going to let the New World be destroyed by those who ruled the Old. Virim’s creed—if you can call it a creed; his system of belief, rather—was neat and logical, and differed on one key point from those beliefs held by most of those in the Old World. In the Old World, those who ruled believed that because humans and their magic had come to dominate those lands we knew, then they could do the same wherever they went. Is that fairly clear?”

Firekeeper nodded, frustrated that Bruck could talk so much and say so little, yet unwilling to slow this flood of talk. She’d learned that freely speaking humans often said more than they intended.

Bruck went on. “Virim believed that if humans wanted to dominate those places where there were no other inhabitants than humans and what you would call Cousins, well, that was fine. However, when it came to dominating places where there were already intelligent inhabitants, then he believed they should show some respect for those who had come there first.”

“But not if they were humans,” Firekeeper said, making sure she understood this, “or Cousins.”

“That’s right,” Bruck said. “Virim was realistie in his thinking. He felt that humans had always competed with other humans, even if, or maybe even especially if, those humans didn’t look particularly like them. He thought that humans had done a fairly good job of either dominating, destroying, or avoiding Cousin-kind. However, he thought that the Beasts of the New World fell into a new category and should be respected as such.”

Firekeeper blinked.

What else could Beasts be thought of as being?
she thought, wishing she could ask Blind Seer, but unwilling to voice anything until she was certain just how much this Bruck understood.
I supposed that humans might have thought of the Royal Beasts as being like another type of humans, just with another shape. That would be very human. Never having lived close to other bloods, never having seen how different wolf is from bear is from puma is from deer, they might well believe that all thinking creatures were merely humans despite their skins and senses and ways of living.