The Red wolf conspiracy

Clan

1 Vaqrin 941

5:23 a.m.

Twelve feet below, amidst the slosh of outflowing tide, the wet blip-plip of barnacles and the groans of old timbers, a woman's voice hissed in sympathy.

"Chht, what a sorrow! The lad's missed his boat. What will happen to him, I wonder?"

"You and your questions," answered a young man's voice. "All I want to know is, what's to happen to us?"

"Perhaps he could tell."

"What sort of nonsense is that, Diadrelu?" "My own," said the woman. "Give us some bread."

A gull upon the water might have seen them, if it studied the shadows beneath the pier. They sat on cross-boards forming a long X just over the waterline: eight figures in a circle, and a ninth standing watch, each one about the height of a man's open hand. Copper skin, copper eyes, the women's hair short and the men's tightly braided. Within the circle, a feast: black bread, slabs of roasted seaweed, an open mussel shell with the flesh still moist and quivering, a wineskin you or I might fill with two squirts from a dropper. By every knee, a sword, thin and dark and swept back in an eyelash curve. Many also carried bows. And one figure wore a cloak of the tiniest, darkest feathers, taken from a swallow's wings, which gleamed like liquid when she moved. This was the woman, Diadrelu, whom the others watched half consciously from the corners of their eyes.

She wiped her hands and stood. One of the men offered her wine, but she shook her head and walked out along the board to face the harbor.

"Mind your footing, m'lady," muttered the watchman.

"Oppo, sir," she replied, and her people laughed. But the young man who had spoken first shook his head and frowned.

"Arquali words. I've heard enough of them for a lifetime."

The woman made no answer. She listened to the boy above them shout, "Captain Nestef! Captain, sir!" until at last his voice broke into sobs. Homelessness. How could anyone who had known it feel no pity?

Sixty feet away there came a flash of light: the old fisherman was cooking his breakfast of shrimp heads and gruel on the deck of his lunket, a kind of patchwork boat made of hides stretched over a wooden frame. Lunket: that was Arquali, too. So was her favorite word in any tongue: idrolos, the courage to see. Her own language had no such word. And without a word to hook it, how the thought wriggles away! That old man knew idrolos: he had dared to see the good in her people, who mended his threadbare sails and fixed leaks in his vessel by night. And that seeing had given him a further courage: to carry them here, four clans across four fishing nights, pretending not to hear them in his hold or to notice them leaping from the stern as they docked in Sorrophran. They had never spoken, for to transport ixchel was a crime punishable by death, and only the fisherman and Diadrelu knew how she had woken him once, standing on his night-table, holding out a blue pearl larger than her own head and worth more than he would make in two years dragging nets along the coast.

"Finish your meal," she told the clan, without turning. "Dawn is come."

Her command silenced them all. They ate. Diadrelu was glad of their appetites: who knew how hungry the months ahead would prove? Good as well to find an order Taliktrum could obey without grumbling. He was insolent, her nephew. Already sniffing out the power he assumed would come to him. As it would, no doubt. When her group joined that of her brother Talag, the two of them would share command, and Taliktrum would be his father's first lieutenant.

She remembered the boy's birth in Ixphir Hall, twenty years ago. A hard birth, an agony for her sister-in-law, who had screamed so loudly that the Upper Watch sent a runner to warn that the mastiffs on the old admiral's porch (directly over Ixphir House) were cocking their heads. Then out he came, open-eyed like all ixchel newborns, but also gripping his umbilicus: an omen of great valor, or madness, depending on the legend you preferred. Little Taliktrum-Triku, they'd called him, although he soon forbade even his mother to use the nickname. Would he still obey her in his father's presence? Yes, by Rin, he would.

She stepped up to the watchboy, held out her hand for his spear.

"The last trawler's coming in now, m'lady," he said. "We've got a path."

She nodded. "Go and eat, Nytikyn."

"There's a crab, m'lady."

Diadrelu nodded, then detained him with a hand on his arm. "Just Dri," she said. Then she turned to face them all.

"You newcomers don't believe me," she said. "And I know that customs differ in East Arqual, where some of you were raised. But I meant what I told you last night. From here forward we are a clan of ixchel-just so. And until our next Fifthmoon Banquet or wedding, my name is Dri-just so. Or if you insist, Diadrelu. Such was always my preference in Etherhorde, in Ixphir House, and I don't mean to change it now. Discipline is one thing, servility another. Turn and look at that monster behind you. Go on."

Unwillingly, they leaned out over the water. It was a sapphire crab, wider than a human's dinner plate, clinging to the moss with its fish-egg eyes trained on them and one huge serrated claw flexed open. Such a claw, they well knew, could cut any of them in two at the midsection.

"Crabs don't say m'lady. Nor will that assassin, that Red River cat, if the hag Oggosk brings her aboard. Nor will the necklace-fanciers."

At the word necklace they shuddered, then dropped their eyes with shame.

"There will be one or two," she said. "You know this. So tell me: can I hide from them behind my rank? Then I won't let you hide from me behind formalities. Or from your duty to think. When all are counted we shall be four hundred and eighty. The giants will outnumber us three to one, and if we don't out-think them at every turn from here to Sanctuary-Beyond-the-Sea we shall all be murdered. Warriors, children, your old parents waiting in Etherhorde. By Rin, people! I'm not smart enough to do this alone! No one is. The thought you'd spare me out of meekness could be the one that saves our lives. Who doubts what I say?"

Silence. Low slap of water on wood. Far off in the village, temple bells, ringing the dawn.

"Let us board our ship, then," she said.

"Dri!" they cried, soft but earnest. All save Taliktrum. He liked ranks and titles, and would be Lord Taliktrum soon enough, when his father declared him a man.

They stood and stretched, buttoned their shirts of eelskin and sailcloth, washed their faces in a pool of rain. Then, with Diadrelu in the lead, they ran.

To see an ixchel clan set its heart on being somewhere is like watching a thought race quicksilver toward its goal. This clan of nine swarmed up the wooden piling as though mounting stairs, dashed along an upper beam that shook with the boots of fishermen inches overhead, reached a knot-hole in the boards, made a ladder of their bodies and, in a heartbeat, pulled one another up and onto the pier.

No giants saw them. A great ravenous gull did, and hopped straight for Dri, but four needle-sharp arrows met its breast in an instant and it blundered shrieking away. This was the worst now: the open run, the wide gaps and jagged splinters in the boards, and any variety of deaths along the way. Ixchel run in formation, a fluid diamond or arrowhead, and Dri was pleased with the tight cohesion of a clan that had not existed four days ago.

It started well. The fishermen obligingly kept their toes to the harbor. A wharf-rat froze at the sight of them, hair on end and a slashed-off stump of tail twitching alarm, but it proved a wise creature and let them pass unchallenged. It even hissed a greeting: "Fatten up, cousins!" — which in rat terms is high courtesy.

Best of all, the wind slept. Two weeks before, Dri had lost a boy on this very dock when a sudden gust knocked him sidelong into the waves.

Mother Sky, we might not lose a soul today! thought Dri.

But halfway to land a sailor, flat on his back and reeking of pumpkin ale, came to sudden life and groped for Ensyl, the youngest of their company. Had he used his boot he might have killed her, drunk as he was. His hand, however, was bare, and Ensyl turned like a seasoned battle-dancer, her sword a blur, and cut off his forefinger at the second knuckle. The man howled, waving his mutilated hand.

"Crawlies! Muckin' sewer-sippin' whorespawned grubs! I'll kill ye!"

The evil word swept past them like fire. Crawlies! Crawlies! Boots shook the pier ahead and behind. A crowd of giants, two or three of them sober, pounded straight at them from the village. Others rushed to the rails of the nearest ships with lamps, squinting into the half-light. A bottle shattered, spraying them with grog.

"The barge!" cried Dri, and without hesitation flung herself from the dock. As she fell toward the water, the flaps of the swallow-suit billowed like twin sails. Diadrelu stretched out her arms, found the gauntlets sewn into the hem. The swallow's wingbones, heirlooms of her family, were fused to these gloves, and when her hands slipped inside them she became the swallow, a flying being, a woman with wings.

She barely pulled out of the fall: her feet grazed a wave. Then with four aching beats of her arms, she rose and shot to the deck of the barge, thirty feet from the pier where her people stood at bay. The barge was long and dark, and by the stillness of the lamps at the far end, she guessed its people had not yet heard the shout of "Crawlies!" That would change, though: in minutes every boat in Sorrophran would know of the "infestation." Ay, Rin! The Chathrand! They'll search her anew!

A thump among the fish crates beside her: Taliktrum had thrown the grapple already. Without her signal! There were two possible reasons for such a breach of protocol, neither of them good. Dri pulled her arms free of the gauntlets, dived for the hook and dragged the rope to the portside rail. In a matter of seconds the rope was tied fast: she gave two tugs, and felt it snap tight as Taliktrum bound it to the pier.

Down they slid, black beads on a string. When Taliktrum arrived seventh, his aunt could barely contain her fury.

"You might have struck me with that hook," she said. "And as Talag's son you should be last down the rope."

Taliktrum glared at her. "I am last," he said.

"What?" Dri counted quickly. "Where is Nytikyn?"

Taliktrum said nothing, but dropped his eyes.

"Oh no! No!"

"A boy did it," said Ensyl. "Some fisherman's brat."

"Nytikyn," said Diadrelu. Her eyes never stopped moving, hunting threats among the crates and timbers stacked around them-but her voice was hollow, lost.

"He saved us," said Taliktrum. "The boy was a fiend, trying to cut the rope and drown us. Who knows, Aunt? Maybe he's the same lad we heard blubbering for his ship. The one you found so charming."

Diadrelu blinked at him, then shook herself. "We run," she said.

They had no trouble on the barge, nor with the leap from her rails to the shrimper moored alongside. But once aboard the shrimper disaster nearly struck again: her crew was scrubbing the forecastle, and when the boat rocked, a wash of bilgewater struck them like a river in flood. But they locked arms, as ixchel will, and those at the end held fast to a deck cleat, and the torrent passed. Moments later they ran to the dark side of the pilothouse and scaled it to the roof.

One challenge more. A bowline from the Chathrand passed just above them, one of dozens of ropes tying the ship like a colossal bull to nearly every fixed object on the wharf. This line ran from the fishing pier-the very point they had been making for-looped low over the shrimper, and then rose sharply for a hundred feet or more to the Chathrand's topdeck.

Leaping up to the bowline proved simple enough, but the climb was terrible. If you have ever scrambled up a wet and slippery tree, you might have some idea of their first minutes. Now imagine that the tree is not six or seven times your height but two hundred times, and branchless, and filthy with tar and algae and sharp bits of shell. Then consider that this tree lacks bark, lacks footholds of any kind, and heaves and twists with the slow rocking of the ship.

Up and up, hand over hand. When they were sixty feet from the deck the sun appeared on the horizon, peeking under rainclouds, and Dri knew they were exposed to the sight of any giant who glanced their way. Inch after scrabbling inch, hands bleeding from the scratchy rope. All the while she waited for the shout: Crawlies! Crawlies on the line!

The last nightmare was the rat funnel: a broad iron cone threaded onto this and every other mooring line to keep the pests from doing exactly what they were attempting. The mouth of the funnel opened downward and spread, bell-like, farther than any of them could reach. Dri and Taliktrum had practiced for this moment on a real bell, in a temple in Etherhorde, but this was infinitely worse. The cone weighed more than all of them together.

Two of the East Arqualis climbed inside, set their shoulders to the funnel wall and pushed against the heavy rope with their feet. Gasping and sweating, they tilted the funnel to one side. Dri and Taliktrum gripped the rope with their legs as if riding a horse, and leaned the upper halves of their bodies over the lip of the funnel. "Go!" she snapped, and her people climbed over them, using their backs and shoulders like steps. Then: "Out, you!" to the pair inside the funnel, and beside her Taliktrum hissed. Dri felt it, too: the huge weight of the funnel, tearing at her ribs. The East Arqualis were crawling out past their legs, making an about-face on the rope (Hurry, by Rin, hurry!) and climbing, like the others, up her body and Taliktrum's. Her nephew's teeth were locked and his lips pulled back in a snarl of pain. But together they bore the weight.

"Climb, Aunty," he whispered.

Dri shook her head. "You first."

"I'm stronger-"

"Go! S'an order!" She could not manage another word. Still he disobeyed! He glanced down at her straining ribs, seemed to consider. Then, with the same acrobat's grace as his father at twenty, he loosed his grip and kicked himself past the rim of the funnel.

Something ripped inside her. She cried out. The ixchel above seized Taliktrum as he leaped, turned him in the air by his ankles, and just as Dri's grip broke his hand descended and caught her own, and dragged her past the funnel's lip.

The last thirty feet were a red agony for Diadrelu. But when they gained the ship they were safe-the rope was cleated next to a lifeboat bound under a broad tarpaulin. They slipped under

this rainproof cloth with ease. Dri found her people clustered about a message scrawled with charcoal on the deck. Ixchel words, too small for giant eyes: DOOR AT STEPRAIL, NO LATCH, 8 FT 9 IN. STARBOARD. WELCOME ABOARD, M'LADY.

Dri turned to look for the hidden door-and collapsed. The pain in her chest was like a swallowed knife. But at last it was done. Four clans brought aboard in as many days. Nine of her people killed on previous boardings, just one today. Nytikyn. He was to marry a girl in Etherhorde, wore her clan emblem on a chain at his wrist. Dri herself would have to tell her. And his parents. And the other parents, children, lovers of the slain.

Ten dead for this mission already. And we haven't left port.