The Red wolf conspiracy

A Natural Scholar

1 Vaqrin 941

6:40 a.m.

After the Eniel rounded the headland, Pazel spent a dismal hour on the pier. The fishermen took a brief interest in him, told him life ashore was better here than in sprawling Etherhorde, where boys were snatched in broad daylight by the Flikkermen and chained to looms in the clothing mills. One old man even offered him breakfast. Before Pazel could accept, however, a shout of "Crawlies! Crawlies!" had gone up around the wharf, and the men stampeded for shore. Pazel sat shivering, working old nails out of the pier and tossing them into the bay, all the while silently cursing the name of Ignus Chadfallow.

The man was a liar, and Pazel his lifelong fool. In Ormael, where Pazel had lived with his mother and sister in a stone house overlooking the city, he had thought Chadfallow magnificent and kind. His own father, a sea captain, had brought the doctor for his first visit when Pazel was but six, introducing him to the family as "our distinguished friend from Etherhorde, city of kings." After presenting his wife, Suthinia, and daughter, Neda, to the doctor, he gestured to Pazel and boomed: "That is my son, Chadfallow-a quick wit, and a natural scholar." Pazel turned scarlet from the praise, although he had something else in mind for his future than books and learning. He wanted to sail on his father's ship.

Chadfallow was one of the few Arquali to have set foot in Ormael since the end of the Second Sea War. His deep voice and elegant strange clothes left Pazel speechless with admiration. For years he pictured Arqual as a land of soft-spoken gentlemen in waistcoats.

Six months after presenting Chadfallow to his family, Captain Gregory Pathkendle sailed out of Ormael on a scouting mission and never returned. Some terrible and total accident, it was supposed. A general dismay gripped the city. Sailors' widows left gifts on the doorstep: mourning lace for his mother and sister, a black scarf for Pazel himself Then a Rukmast merchantman brought the news that Pathkendle's boat had been spotted in the Gulf of Thуl, among a flotilla of Mzithrini warships. She had been repainted, and flew the gold-and-black pennant of the Mzithrin Kings.

Chadfallow was by then the Emperor's Special Envoy to Ormael, and lived in a fine house in the city. He visited Pazel's home often during those months of fear, and always insisted that Gregory might yet be alive, imprisoned by pirates ("they spawn like eels in the Gulf") or the Mzithrinis themselves. Pazel's sister Neda asked if the doctor's great Empire couldn't send ships to rescue him. Chadfallow replied that the Mzithrin Kings ruled a territory as great as Arqual's own. If they sailed against her, he said, no one would be rescued but many more fathers would die.

Nonetheless he was a comfort to them all. Pazel's mother Suthinia often persuaded Chadfallow to stay for dinner, after which he would kiss her hand in thanks. "A meal as lovely as its authoress," he would say, making the children squirm. There was no denying Suthinia's beauty, with her dark olive skin and startling green eyes. Like Chadfallow she was a foreigner, having come down from the highlands with a troupe of merchants, dealers in cinnamon and kohl, and even long after her marriage to Captain Gregory the neighbors still treated her with unease. Beauty was one thing, but those clothes, that laugh?

Chadfallow, however, had smiled on her from the first. He smiled at Pazel, too, in those days, praising his quick way with languages and sternly commanding him never to neglect Arquali. As months turned to years and warships of many nations were sighted offshore, Chadfallow was often called back to Arqual to consult with his Emperor. Returning to Ormael, he brought the children grammar books and dictionaries: useful gifts, if rather dull.

Then the news from the outer world darkened. Sailors brought rumors of bloodshed in distant lands, small nations devoured by larger ones, war fleets rebuilt. And it was at this moment of alarm that Pazel's father suddenly reappeared.

His old ship, still under Mzithrini flags, made a daring run past Ormael harbor at daybreak, firing shot after shot. Later it was noted that his guns hit few targets-perhaps none at all-but in the dawn confusion no one doubted that the city was under attack.

An Ormali ship immediately gave chase. Captain Gregory tacked north, almost dead into the wind, giving his pursuers many a fine opportunity to rake his sails with grapeshot. Soon Gregory's canvas was in tatters. He appeared to have trouble with his chaser-cannon, too: in any case, not a single shot was fired at his pursuers. The battle was brief: Ormael's little fighting ship emptied her guns into Gregory's, and as they neared Cape Cуristel they raised a flag for his surrender. Pazel's father was heard to shout "No!" while waving oddly from his quarterdeck. And then the Grygulv rounded the cape.

She was a 120-gun Mzithrini Blodmel, or "war-angel," one of the deadliest ships afloat. In a panic, the Ormali captain ordered his men to "wear the ship"-spin her hard about and run downwind. But the Grygulv was already upon them, and her broadside was furious. She blasted rudder and mast from the Ormali ship, and followed up with the most feared weapon in the world-a Mzithrini dragon's-egg shot, which burst in liquid flame across the deck. When the smoke cleared the Grygulv was making west, alongside Gregory's ship, and thirty Ormalis lay dead.

The city, which had mourned Captain Gregory for a year after his disappearance, instantly renamed him Pathkendle the Traitor, and to many of his schoolmates Pazel became simply the Traitor's Son.

Pazel suffered terribly. Even his best friends abandoned him. Some of his teachers considered it their duty to punish the sin of bad blood: they made him sit apart and called him a lazy fool if he gave a wrong answer (which he rarely did). When his mother complained to the headmaster, the man threw up his hands: "Why blame us? You married that villain!" Suthinia flew into a rage, chased the headmaster from his office to the science hall and beat him with a stuffed marmoset. Then she pulled Pazel from school and dragged him wordlessly home. No other school would take him after the incident, however, and in three weeks she slipped the headmaster a grotesque sum to forget the whole affair.

From that day on they ate smaller meals, and burned less coal on chilly nights. And when he returned to school his classmates greeted him with a song:

He's Pazel Pathkendle, his daddy went bad,

His mother went mad with a mar-mo-set.

It was enough to make him hope Suthinia would never again feel the need to protect him. But her master plan for her children's safety had not even begun.

Pazel's one advantage was Chadfallow, who still dined with the Pathkendles weekly. The Special Envoy was now the most popular man in Ormael. After the Grygulv disaster the mayor of Ormael sent him back to his Emperor to beg for protection. The doctor returned just as a wild rumor of invasion was spreading about the city-none could say how it started-and cheers greeted him as he disembarked in Ormaelport.

"Your plea has reached the Ametrine Throne," he told the crowd. "You shall hear from the Emperor shortly."

Pazel could not have found a better champion. Everyone knew that Arqual had fought the Mzithrin to a draw in the Second Sea War. Instead of the Traitor's Son, Pazel was now honorary nephew of the Envoy, the man who would save Ormael. The boy understood little of these matters, but he knew Chadfallow had reversed his fortunes, and loved him for it.

Just this once, moreover, Chadfallow had come with a better gift than grammar books. It was a kite in the shape of a hummingbird, which Pazel strung with fishing twine scavenged in the port and flew from the hilltops above the plum orchards. The kite was his prize toy for several months, until the day a sudden calm plunged it into the sea off Quarrel's Cliff.

Walking home that oddly still evening, Pazel remained a child, sniveling at the loss of a toy. But when he reached the stone house he found the courtyard packed with strangers. Big, sweat-soaked men. Gold helmets, shirts of metal plate, black spears crusted with gore. They were milling beneath his sister's orange tree, snatching fruit, breaking branches. On their shields was the gold fish-and-dagger symbol of Arqual. Chadfallow's brethren, come at last.

Children who have never known danger can sometimes grasp its essence in a heartbeat. Pazel stood there only an instant. Then he sprinted around the garden wall, climbed the grapevine at the corner, leaped onto the first-floor roof and slipped through his bedroom window.

The soldiers were in the kitchen downstairs, feasting and bellowing. Of his mother and Neda there was no sign. Pazel was barely eleven, but he saw clearly how everything that comprised his life would vanish into those snatching hands, that belching laughter, which were also Arqual: the real Arqual behind the doctor's finery and gifts. He took the skipper's knife his father had left him, and a thumb-sized ivory whale that had been his mother's nursery toy. Lost, he stood by his neatly made bed. He drank the water he had demanded the night before and then disdained, looking at his books and toy soldiers and model ships until the laughter reached the upstairs hall, and the doorknob turned, and Pazel fled.

From the plum orchards he saw the city burning, her great gates thrown down and the Arquali troops cheering from the wall. He saw twelve warships in port, and eight more stalled on the windless bay. The boom of cannon fire rolled up the hills, followed by the barking of dogs, hysterical and forlorn.

They caught him at dawn, quaking among the dew-damp trees. A gleeful corporal snatched the whale and the skipper's knife, then complained and kicked him because he hadn't kept the blade sharp. When he learned where Pazel lived the man kicked him again, and beat him. Where are the women? he screamed. Two beautiful women! I want them!

When Pazel made no answer the beating grew worse. He covered his head and tried not even to think of Neda or his mother. He feigned unconsciousness, but a point came when he was no longer pretending.

He awoke, bloodied, in a crowd of boys, some of whom he knew. They were all chained to the flagpole in his schoolyard, where a week before he had displayed the kite to jealous friends and boasted of his Arquali "uncle." On the roadside, Ormali captives passed by in horse carts, wearing heavy chains.

The days blurred to an aching trance. Once he woke to hear a voice shouting his name and looked up into the face of a man with mud in his hair and one eye bruised shut, who had somehow escaped his captors and rushed toward him. The apparition fell to his knees and touched Pazel's shoulder, wheezing as though about to expire: "Hold on, child, hold on!" The next instant two Arquali warriors fell on him with clubs. Only hours later did Pazel realize he had been looking at the headmaster.

That morning the soldiers marched them to the Slave Terrace at Ormaelport. The city had banned slavery in his grandfather's time; the Terrace had become a place where lovers watched the sea. But the old stockades where human beings were sold like sheep had never been dismantled, and the Arqualis saw their original purpose at a glance. In later years Pazel tried not to recall the horrors of that morning-the poking and haggling, the shrieks of pain and the sizzle of the branding iron, troublemakers beaten senseless or merely pushed into the harbor, chained. It was too awful; his mind tended to leap forward to the moment just before he himself was to be branded.

The boy just ahead of him was still screaming from the touch of the red-hot iron to the back of his neck, the slavemaster cursing as he pressed a shard of mountain ice to the welt to set the brand. Satisfied, he nodded to the men holding Pazel. But before they could chain him to the branding-post, an Arquali sergeant waded into the crowd and seized his arm.

"This one's already sold," he said.

He was an aging fighter, sighing at each step. He dragged Pazel to the far end of the Slave Terrace, then turned to look at the horrified boy.

"You've sailed?" he demanded.

Pazel opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. He had not spoken in two days.

"I asked if you've sailed."

"Sailed!" Pazel blurted. "No, sir, never. My father was Captain Gregory, but he didn't want me sailing. I'm a natural scholar, he said, and though I'm not a proud boy it's true I speak four languages, sir, and write three well enough for court, and know my complex sums, and he said I was not to be wasted on the mucking ocean when there was such a thing as school, which I rather enj-"

The sergeant slapped him with a leather-hard palm. "School's over, cub. Now listen: you sailed with your father, and you were never ill at sea. Repeat it."

"I… I sailed with my father, and I was never ill at sea." The sergeant nodded gravely. "You ask the old men, the sheet-anchor men, to teach you your rigging, and your knots, and your shipboard stations, your whistles and flags. You'll be learning a new language, see? The language of a ship. Learn it fast, natural scholar, or you'll feel that iron yet."

Then he had put an envelope in Pazel's hand. It was a fine, gilt-edged envelope, sealed with wax the color of a rooster's comb and addressed in an elegant hand:

Captain Onnabik Faral

The Swan

"You'll hand this to Faral," said the sergeant. "None other. You listening, cub?"

"Yes, sir!" But Pazel could not take his eyes from the envelope. The writing looked familiar. But who would help him? Who could, with the city ablaze?

He raised his eyes-and saw the answer looking back at him. Across the Terrace, at a table outside the oystermen's pub, sat Dr. Ignus Chadfallow. In the squalid crowd he looked nobler than ever, like a prince wandered into a ragpickers' fair. Pazel would have run to him at once, but the sergeant grabbed his elbow.

Bending close to his ear, the old warrior said, not unkindly, "The sea's better than chains, lad, but it's a deadly place to be anyone's fool. Beware of smiles, eh?"

"What kind of smiles?"

"You'll know."

With that the sergeant lurched away, and Pazel sprinted to the pub. But Chadfallow was no longer at the table. Pazel rushed inside but found only soldiers and the regular boisterous girls, bouncing on Arquali instead of Ormali knees now. He fled, ran from the shipyard to the stockades and back to the pub, yet saw no trace of Chad-fallow, nor ever again caught sight of him in Ormael. But on the chair where the doctor had been he found his mother's ivory whale and the skipper's knife-honed now to the sharpness of a razor.

Captain Faral took him on without question, and Pazel served more than a year on the merchant ship Swan as cook's aid and cabin boy. Just as the sergeant promised, the old sailors taught him his rigging, and knots, and a thousand unfamiliar words. Capstan, spritsail, binnacle, boom: he learned them all, and the roles they played in the great collective struggle that is sailing. Pazel was quick and good-mannered. His book-perfect Arquali made them laugh. But it puzzled them that he knew nothing of Arquali customs. Ormalis as a rule are more mystical than religious: Gregory Pathkendle had taught Pazel and Neda the sign of the Tree (the fist against the chest, opening smoothly as one raised it past the forehead), and drilled them in the first Nine of the Ninety Rules of the Rinfaith, and left it at that.

The old men of the Swan were indignant. "Tie him up! Leave him ashore! We'd be better off with crawlies aboard than this little savage!"

But few of them meant it. They taught him the simple but all-important prayer to Bakru, God of the winds, and were pleased when he swore to repeat it at every launch. They taught him never to laugh in the presence of a monk, never to turn his back on a temple door, never to eat at night without a glance up at the stars of the Milk Tree. They taught him his own job, too: how to fight the other tarboys for the right to freeze in a gale, swabbing rain out through the scuppers before it could leach into the hold, spreading sawdust on the quarterdeck for footing, mending ropes before anyone ordered him to do so.

They were patient, these old men. They had survived plague, scurvy, wax-eye blindness, the talking fever that killed one sailor in three during the reign of Magad IV, cholera, cyclones, war. Being old and penniless meant that they had also survived their own ambitions, and no longer blamed the world for each thwarting incident, as young men do. In his heart Pazel thanked the nameless soldier a thousand times for directing him to their care.

The Swan took him east, into the heart of Arqual. She had been pressed into service as a troop-carrier, but with the seizure of Ormael complete her captain returned quietly to trade, mostly in the bays of Emledri and Sorhn. Pazel supposed he would never see his mother or sister again, even if they had somehow dodged slavery and death. It was dangerous to think of them too often: when he did he became clumsy with grief, his mind filling with a bright, cold fog that frightened him. In any case there was nothing he could do.

When Captain Faral became a drunkard, Pazel found himself transferred to another ship, the Anju, so abruptly he had no time even to take leave of the old men who had taught him the ways of the sea. This time rumor preceded him: the other tarboys knew that some wealthy doctor had paid off the Swan and arranged for Pazel to be seized like a mailbag (as indeed he was) and flung into life aboard the Anju. Pazel was furious with Chadfallow. The Anju was a nastier ship in every sense: a whaler that stank of burned blubber and echoed with the laughs of men whose lives were butchery on a giant scale. Pazel hated it from the first. But a month after his transfer, a deckhand returned from shore leave with the news that the Swan had meandered in a fog onto the Lava Shoals at Urnsfich, shattering her keel and sinking in a matter of minutes. Of her ninety sailors, just three had made it to shore.

Life on the Anju was a terror. She leaked badly and her bilge-pumps clogged with whale grease. Her captain was violent and feared his own shadow. On calm days he lowered tarboys into the frigid seas to check for sabotage by murths or saltworms. During lightning storms he sent them aloft to tie live chickens to the topmasts, offerings to the demons of the sky.

None of these dangers ever touched the whaling vessel. Her end came when the crew, their wits addled by spoiled rye, sailed her at ludicrous speed into Pуl Harbor, where she would have rammed a Kings' clipper if the shore guns had not blown her to bits.

The Noonfirth Kings shipped the dazed crew back to Etherhorde, where her captain was beheaded, and Pazel transferred to a grain ship. After that, an ore-carrier, a barge on the River Sorhn, a signal-boat guiding warships through the Paulandri Shoals. Finally, just six months earlier, he had been assigned to the Eniel. After each of these transfers, a rumor would eventually inform him that a certain nobleman, a brooding fellow with gray temples, had made the arrangements. But Chadfallow never sent so much as a word of greeting to Pazel himself.

In the past half year Pazel had come to love Captain Nestef. The old navigator adored his ship and wanted a peaceable crew. They ate well, and had music after meals, and in each port the captain bought stories or travelogues or collections of jokes from the chandleries, and read them aloud on dull nights far from land.

Of course, he was still Ormali. Jervik in particular took care that no one forgot it. He despised Ormalis-despised anyone to whom he felt superior-and just last week had stolen his skipper's knife and ivory whale, the only objects Pazel cared about in the world. They would be Jervik's forever now.

But Nestef's kindness had made it all bearable. The captain had even talked of buying Pazel his citizenship, and helping him return to school. The very thought of reading again filled Pazel's mind with dazzling hopes.

And now Chadfallow had blasted them. He didn't know why the doctor was interfering again, but this time he had plucked Pazel from the best ship he could ever have hoped for. And what had he slipped into that tea?

He stood, threw a last nail into the water and turned to face the wharf. A new life: that was what he was choosing. A life without Arquali uncles. Without their protection, or their deceit.