Wolf's Blood (53 page)

“Remember that Virim recruited us all because we shared a certain idealism. However, I fear that not much time needs to pass for idealism to become dogmatism. This was the case for many of my associates. They became dogmatic, but not regarding the same things.”

Firekeeper wondered what dogs had to do with ideas, but thought she understood. Dogs, like wolves, were pack animals, but unlike wolves, dogs retained a juvenile desire to follow. So these spellcasters had been Virim’s dogs, and when this stiffening happened, they had become even more dog-like, It made sense in a way.

“Some few of us, and here I will admit that I was one,” Bruck went on. “realized that this loss of resilience was the first indication that other losses threatened us. We would begin to age, to weaken, perhaps to die. When this awareness became general, three ways were suggested to remedy the situation.”

“Three?” Firekeeper said. “You not worried you die first?”

Bruck gave a dry laugh. “Querinalo was still granting us sufficient power that we did not need to worry about that. Indeed, some of the most dogmatic among our number refused to admit anything deleterious was happening to us at all. They held that while it seemed true that querinalo was no longer working quite as it had. still nothing all that important had changed. To all the senses, we remained much the ages we had been when the grand project began. As most of us had been relatively youthful to begin with, that meant we were all in quite good condition.”

Firekeeper nodded, wishing that Derian were there to explain some of Bruck’s more ornate words, but not wishing to show herself vulnerable by asking for explanations. She thought she had gathered enough.

“So three things.” she prompted. “What?”

Bruck ticked off on raised fingers. “One was to find what had happened to alter the fiber of our original curse and mend it, returning the curse to what it had been. A second possible course of action was to find a supplementary way of sustaining our lives and youth. Those who favored this course pointed out that even if querinalo was repaired, it no longer had anything like the pool of magically talented to draw upon that had once existed. Something more would be needed in any case.

“The third course of action suggested was that we remember our original goal—which had been to protect the New World from the Old. We had done this, and now our next move should be to accept what was happening. We should use what life remained to us—and that would be many years to come—to reinsert ourselves into the human world. Even with spellcasting reemerging as an art, any one of us should be a match and more for any, even all, of the Once Dead. We should make ourselves this new generation’s teachers, trying to educate them so that the arrogance and destructiveness that had dominated in the past would not arise again.”

Firekeeper thought of the Once Dead who had reigned on the Nexus Islands before the actions of herself and her allies had broken their power, and wondered if this last course would have had a chance. Surviving querinalo, especially as a spellcaster, seemed to create the very arrogance that these idealists had wanted to prevent.

Blind Seer said,
“Ask Bruck which of these courses Virim favored.”

“I wish I knew for certain,” Bruck replied when Firekeeper had translated the wolf’s query.

“You not know?” Firekeeper asked.

“I don’t think,” Bruck said, “that Virim ever really thought about what the consequences of querinalo would be. He knew he wanted to stop the conquest of the New World, but I think that somehow he overlooked the death and destruction his choice would bring to the New and Old Worlds alike.”

“
And how did your ‘pack’ react to this lack of certainty on Virim’s part?”
Blind Seer asked.

“There had always been factions,” Bruck responded, looking at Blind Seer as if Firekeeper’s voice were the wolf’s own. “Now the factions grew more fractioned than ever.”

“Even to factions of one.”
Blind Seer said,
“such as one human letting himself be ruled by his curiosity, Although good sense as voiced by all those around him says he should remain within the safe walls of his den with his pack all around him?”

Firekeeper translated, and Bruck nodded. “Even so.”

Blind Seer stood and shook, a motion akin to a human clearing his throat. His next words were for Firekeeper alone.

“Let us call Elation from her high watch. I feel certain we will not have trouble from Bruck’s allies for some time yet, and I would speak to you apart from our guest. I am not completely certain he doesn’t understand more of our speech than he is letting on.”

Firekeeper frowned.
“Will Elation alone be enough?”

“Enough to scream warning,”
Blind Seer said, and with this Firekeeper had to agree.

Elation came down at the first short howl.

“I was thinking of landing soon in any case,”
she said.
“The forest is so still that rabbits are grazing in the open but a glade away. The only motion I hare seen from our type has been going in the direction of the keep.”

The wolves explained their need, and Elation concurred.

“Tell him if he stirs in any fashion I don’t like
,” the peregrine said,
“that I will have his eyes for dinner. Flying makes me hungry, but I spared no time for mice and rabbits.”

Firekeeper passed on the warning to Bruck, adding, “And we not be far. We go to check one thing or so. Know, too, that the arrows ready in my quiver have iron heads.”

Bruck looked suitably impressed, and Firekeeper felt confident leaving him in Elation’s care.

She and Blind Seer went a short distance away and settled themselves so they could share the watch between them without losing sight of each other. It was a thing they did so automatically that the only strangeness Firekeeper felt about the precaution was that she even noticed herself taking it.

“So Little Two-legs, you haven’t asked me how I could see and defeat that ‘warning’ those Bruck angered sent after him.”

Firekeeper shrugged. “There hasn’t exactly been time for long conversations. I did wonder, though.
”

“Remember what I told you about back on the Nexus Islands,” Blind Seer began, “about my talent?”

Firekeeper nodded.

“I did not tell you what choice I made then,” Blind Seer went on.

“I think I guessed,” Firekeeper said, speaking her thoughts aloud, “when I remembered that you dreamed you had killed the mountain sheep that was Virim. You kept your magic, didn’t you?”

“Do you hate me for that choice?”

“I feel just a little as if I don’t know you,” Firekeeper admitted. “Magic of that sort seems a thing for humans.”

“Such was my first thought as well,” Blind Seer said. “I wondered if in fighting as I did to keep an ability I hardly knew was mine, I was somehow becoming less than a wolf. I avoided times when spells must be worked because I now could feel myself reaching out for understanding. I think the ability had been with me all my life, but in the New World there was nothing for it to fasten upon.”

“Like waking on a night with neither moon or stars,” Firekeeper said, “and reaching to touch to see if your eyes are open or closed because the darkness is so complete.”

“Except that until querinalo showed me what lay within me,” Blind Seer said, “I was as unaware of what I could sense as a newborn pup who has never opened his eyes and believes that the world is all smells and tastes and sounds.”

“That avoiding,” Firekeeper said, “that’s why you didn’t travel by means of the gates unless you absolutely needed to do so. You said you didn’t like the sensation of their working, but it was this, wasn’t it?”

“That is so. Talents do not trouble me. They are something worked differently by each and every one who has them. They are not spells. After our group took command of the Nexus Islands, Ynamynet was the only spellcaster. Enigma learned to operate the gates, but he has bad memories of Ynamynet’s kind. and has not shown a tremendous interest in learning more than how to use the gates and a few minor tricks. There were times I longed to talk with him about what he was feeling, but to do so would have been to admit to an attraction to my own ability, and I could not do so.”

Firekeeper did not need to ask Blind Seer why his aversion to his ability should be so much greater than Enigma’s. She and Blind Seer belonged to the same culture, one that had much in common with Derian’s own in its aversion to magic. On either side of the Iron Mountains, humans and Royal Beasts alike recounted the histories of the uses to which great magics had been turned, and of their even greater abuses. The only difference in these tales was that the Royal Beasts felt themselves separate from such horrors, victims but never perpetrators. How horrible for Blind Seer to find himself one with his nightmares!

Enigma, like many of the yarimaimalom, shared the view of the Liglimom. In their religion, Magic was a goddess. An unpredictable one, and one whose gifts should not be abused, but nonetheless the child of Water, the granddaughter of Earth and Air, niece to equally unpredictable Fire, and in her way more akin to her uncle than her father.

Firekeeper felt a funny surge as these thoughts flickered through her mind. She was Fire’s Keeper, or so the Liglimom chose to interpret her name. What if Blind Seer was Magic’s? An unsettling thought, but one that brought her odd comfort, putting her once again within that partnership of opposites, male and female, human and wolf that had come to define her relationship with Blind Seer.

“It was a spell they sent after Bruck,” she said, “and somehow you could see that spell at work.”

Blind Seer relaxed slightly when she articulated what he had done, for there was no disapproval in her words.

“That is so. It was so clear I was startled when I realized you could not see it. The spell tapped something within him, making his life flow away from him, rather than circulate through his body as it should.”

“If you say so,” Firekeeper laughed. “I have only seen life flow out of a body, never within it.”

“I ripped apart the conduit that was draining him,” Blind Seer explained. “I did it with my fangs, for I had no idea how to use a spell. I learned two things from this. First, I can affect spells, although I do not know if I can create them. Second, Bruck was right. The spell his fellows sent was inhibited by the iron we bound on him, but …”

He paused and Firekeeper could read the mingled uneasiness and delight in his bearing.

“But, Firekeeper, I was not affected by the iron in the least. The same element that causes Bruck’s skin to blister does not seem to affect me at all. I don’t understand why. There is so much I do not understand.”

Firekeeper believed him. The uneasiness she had felt when the Meddler had shown her the dream vision of Blind Seer searching through scrolls ebbed somewhat. She still didn’t know how Blind Seer would react if the spellcasters were to offer him an apprenticeship, but she felt certain that he was not planning to abandon her to pursue his new gift.

“We cannot leave Elation for much longer,” she said. “Birds need to eat even more frequently than do humans, and she has soared high and long today. Do you have any thoughts as to what we should do next?”

Blind Seer responded immediately. “From what Bruck tells us, this is a pack without a One. Here we are, two Ones such as these humans have never met. I think we know what to do. We make ourselves their Ones, and then we remind them that wolves are obedient to those who rule them.”

Firekeeper grinned at him. The thought was pleasantly direct, as familiar as the turning of the seasons.

“A pack without a One,” she said. “Yes. I had thought so much about their power I had not considered what Bruck was telling us. If the situation is as he says, we do not face a pack, but a collection of dispersed tail-lickers, each seeking advantage over the others. We will give them the wolf’s choice: death or submission.”

Her moment of confidence vanished nearly as quickly as it had arisen. There was another side to that simple choice. What if she or Blind Seer were defeated? She knew she could not submit, and she had no great desire to die.

“But can we defeat them, even one or two at a time? These are the last of the great spellcasters, the ones who subdued all the world through their command of fire and lighting and creatures such as none living have seen in over a hundred years.”

Blind Seer gaped his jaws in a wolfish grin.

“Remember,” he said, “we have iron on our side, iron and the strengths of wolves. Remember that, and the hunting will be sure.”

XXVI

  WHEN DERIAN AND Ynamynet informed the gathered Nexans that the Islands were probably going to be invaded sometime before the summer had passed, Derian had expected disbelief. After all, what proof did they have but a young woman’s dreams and the word of a jaguar known for being unable to sort reality from visions?

But the reliability of the report was accepted without question, and discussion moved immediately to what the Nexans could or should do about the situation.