The Black Wolves

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  Part One

  1

  The whole business stank of rotting fish.

  From his position braced high in the branches of a sprawling lancewood tree that overlooked an unremarkable trail cutting through forested hills, Kellas felt the familiar warning itch between his shoulder blades. Something about this ambush wasn’t going to go right, and yet he had a job to do and a secret to hide and no choice except to stick it out to the end. If those cursed smugglers didn’t show up, he’d be no closer to the truth than he had been a month ago when he’d joined this company of Black Wolves on the hunt for a traitor in their ranks.

  A breeze blew into his face off the nearest height but he smelled nothing except the dense scent of vegetation and the memory of rain. Birds had long ago resumed their chatter and song, no longer disturbed by the presence of six men.

  The soldiers had set up an ambush point at dawn. They’d been slipped information that stolen goods would be smuggled down this specific trail under the guard of a demon and its armed confederates. The subcadre commander, Denni, had picked this spot because of the sprawling canopy of the lancewood tree and a flat patch of ground where they’d been able to dig a pit. By now it was midafternoon.

  Kellas’s vantage in the tree allowed him to study his companions hidden in the surrounding undergrowth. He was certain one of the other five was the disloyal Wolf leaking information to the very outlaws they were meant to capture.

  Which one?

  Crouched on a branch below Kellas, Ezan breathed noisily. On the stream side of the path, Oyard and Battas shifted around, brush rustling loud enough to almost drown out the gurgle of the distant stream. They were all so cursed loud.

  Maybe they were all in on it.

  On the mountain side, Aikar whispered to Denni. Idiot. Didn’t he know how voices carried on a still day? Maybe he hoped his words would carry a warning on the breeze. Kellas wanted to signal Aikar to be silent, but Denni was senior of this subcadre and thus in charge. Any initiative Kellas took might give away his cover of pretending to be a lowly tailman new to the Wolves.

  As if the restlessness of the others made him doubt their careful preparations, Denni tugged experimentally on the pit rope where it stretched across the path under cover of artfully layered ground litter. They hoped to trap a demon on one of the stakes set in the pit and cut off its skin. It was a good plan, if it worked.

  A new sound teased at the edge of Kellas’s hearing, a slapping that he identified as the thud of feet falling on dry leaves and dusty earth. A moment later a voice floated on the air.

  “Sure, the king claims he’s sending in his best troops to protect us, but then we’re the ones who have to feed and house them above what we already pay in taxes.”

  Two men strode into view. Both carried hunting spears.

  “He’s like a baker selling bread for what seems like a good price, only then you discover he’s been mixing sawdust in with the flour all along.”

  “Would the pair of you keep your mouths shut?” said a woman who was not yet quite visible beyond a bend in the path, although movement flashed through the dusty leaves. “You’ll warn off the pigs before we have a chance to strike.”

  As Kellas tried to estimate heads and bodies in an oncoming group that he still couldn’t really see through the leaves, a glimmer of pale cloth caught his eye.

  The hells!

  The most infamous demon of all wore a white cloak. Was she guiding the smugglers in person? He had accomplished a lot of things in the last eight years but he’d never tangled directly with a cloaked demon and its perilous magic. A racing clamor of excitement disturbed his concentration but he calmed it with slow, measured breaths.

  The two spearmen in the front passed over the pit without noticing the give in the ground and headed under the wide canopy of the lancewood tree.

  And there she was! Wearing a white cloak and armed with a bow and quiver, the demon strode into view and turned to signal to someone unseen behind her. Right on target, Battas and Oyard each loosed an arrow from their hiding place. Both arrows struck her in the chest just as a gaggle of fourteen youths carrying bows and spears appeared on the trail. They had the gawky eagerness of children out on a thrilling expedition, sacks slung over their backs. The ones in front stopped short as the demon choked out a warning. Their stunned, horrified expressions were so heartbreaking that a kick of fury made Kellas tremble even as he held his position in the tree.

  The demon was using adolescents to cover its tracks, exactly the kind of cold calculation that made cloaked demons the most dangerous creatures in the Hundred, the true threat to the peaceful rule of the king.

  A second woman appeared at the rear of the band. She was also wearing a white cloak.

  With a shock Kellas realized both women wore the braided headbands and ritual white capes common to acolytes of the Lady of Beasts, who was both hunter and healer.

  Neither of these women was a demon. They were priestesses dedicated to the goddess, leading a cursed practice hunt for training their youth.

  He shouted, “Halt! Halt where you are! Denni, pull the trap now before the kids fall in!”

  He grabbed for a rope he had strung from a higher branch of the lancewood, vaulted off the branch, and swung down, gauging distance and depth as he tucked up his legs. He planted the two men with a foot in each chest. The impact slammed him to a halt as they went down. He flipped in the air as he released the rope, and landed on his feet behind them.

  Denni snapped up the rope to release the trap. The ground gave way to reveal the pit and its deadly stakes. As the children cried out in confusion, the injured woman staggered like a drunk, then slipped into the pit. She screamed as a stake impaled her.

  One of the men Kellas had knocked over scrambled up, jabbing at him with his spear as he hissed out hoarse words. “Cursed cowards! Pissing dogs! You promised us no one would get hurt!”

  A pair of arrows—Aikar’s reds—slammed into the man’s back and he toppled forward.

  The wounded priestess was still bellowing, voice ripped raw by pain.

  “Run! Run!” shouted the woman at the rear, and the children scattered uphill.

  Denni shouted: “Round them all up! They’re all under arrest!”

  The other spearman rolled up to his feet and jabbed at Kellas’s back. Kellas sidestepped with a spin and in the same motion drew the sword from his back. The man thrust again. Kellas slapped away the haft, cut in, and struck with the pommel under the man’s chin. The man staggered back, then cut the point of the spear toward Kellas’s head. Kellas ducked under the haft and again stepped inside, striking the man in the throat with the hilt of his sword. With a grunt, the man sagged into him, toppling him back. Kellas let the weight carry him down and rolled sideways out from under as the spearman collapsed to the ground.

  Turning, Kellas saw Battas, Oyard, Aikar, and Ezan racing up the path after the children.

  He cut a length off the swinging rope and tied the prisoner’s feet and hands. Denni slid carefully down into the pit to the
woman thrashing below. He stabbed her through the eye; a mercy, seeing how a stake had pierced her raggedly through the belly, a wound no one could heal. Then Denni grasped the cloth of her cloak in his hand and looked up with a shake of his head.

  “It’s just ordinary wool, not a demon’s skin,” he said to Kellas.

  The hunter shot by Aikar clawed at the dirt, hacking out an incomprehensible word before going limp. Kellas made himself watch as the man’s life drained away. Some demons could also see a person’s spirit rise out of the dying. Kellas saw nothing except red blood, withered leaves, and gathering flies.

  The other four tromped back into view, herding the frightened children, with the second woman trussed so tightly she could barely keep up as Aikar prodded her along. One youth was missing.

  “Heya, Kel!” shouted Ezan. “You can’t follow orders and help us capture these? What are you doing? Standing around looking pretty?”

  “What kind of heartless people march their children into harm’s way?” said Denni, which was exactly the question Kellas wanted to ask. Of all the awful things he had seen in his eight years in the king’s service, adults abusing their own children or callously using them as bait and bargaining chips disgusted him the most.

  Young Oyard scratched his smooth chin as he pursed his lips thoughtfully. He did not look much older than the youths they had just captured. “Someone passed us bad information.”

  “Throw all your bags to the ground,” said Kellas curtly, and of course the youths obeyed, too terrified to do otherwise. They were only carrying a few days’ stock of humble food: flat bread, cold rice wrapped in nai leaves, and sour balls of cheese.

  “What, you hungry again?” Ezan asked jokingly in his usual ass-witted way, ignoring the dead woman and the crying children as if their grief and pain were of no more interest than the trees.

  Kellas sniffed at the pungent, salty goat cheese. “Neh. Just checking to make sure they’re not smuggling valuable goods. I think the real smugglers are somewhere else. They purposefully sent this training group along this path guessing it was a good place for us to set up an ambush and figuring the king’s soldiers would not attack two priestesses and their pupils.”

  Ezan laughed mockingly. “Whsst! Where did a small-time criminal like you get so smart?”

  Kellas grinned, pretending sheepishness as he decided on a plausible lie that would deflect any suspicion that he knew more than he ought. “Eh, you’ve caught me out, me and my shameful ways. I got arrested for smuggling, me and a bunch of lads. We used to round up neighborhood children and have them carry the goods while the militia was searching us instead. It worked for a while until one of the kids got hurt and we got beaten up by the neighbors and turned in by them for endangering their little ones.”

  As he spoke he watched the eyes of the surviving man and woman, hoping they might betray their comrade with a glance, but they kept their gazes fixed to the ground. Both had the stunned look of people who haven’t yet made sense of what has just transpired. He had to wonder if they were actually ignorant and had been used as unsuspecting bait. Yet when Denni slapped them, asking what they knew about the smugglers and if they were part of a decoy plan, they stubbornly said nothing.

  “I can make them talk,” Ezan boasted.

  “Shut up, Ez,” said Denni. “Let’s go.”

  His words broke the surviving priestess’s silence. “What about our dead?”

  Denni gave her a glare that made her cower. “We leave them. Chief Jagi will decide what’s to be done and whether he’ll allow your people to come back and fetch them.”

  The youths began to cry again, and several, weeping copiously, wrapped the dead priestess in her cloak and arranged her hands on her chest in the traditional custom observed for the dead.

  They made an uneasy group as they hiked out of the steep upper valley with the sobbing youths and the two uncommunicative adults. In his capacity as tailman, the newest and supposedly least experienced and thus most expendable member of the cadre, Kellas took the rear guard. He was sure they were being watched and there was in fact still one youth unaccounted for, but he heard nothing and saw no one except, once, a crow perched on a fallen log in a clearing. Its black eyes were trained on them with the inhuman intelligence native to crows. When he swung around and took aim with his bow, it took wing and vanished over the treetops.

  He grinned briefly. He’d never have skewered it, as some men might who took pleasure in the killing rather than in the challenge. He allowed himself three breaths to savor the empty path, the fragrant air, and the peaceful forest. A pillar of sunlight cut down through an opening a fallen tree had made in the forest cover. Its lustrous brilliance illuminated a patch of the vivid flowers known as sunbright that had grasped this chance to bloom. Their simple beauty staggered him, like the kiss of an ineffable joy.

  A branch snapped, but when he looked that way he saw nothing moving among the trees. As the noise of the others faded, he left behind the sunlight and the flowers to follow them.

  After a while they passed a pair of upcountry farms ringed by stockades that protected against deer rather than armed marauders. Their commanding officer, Chief Jagi, waited with his command staff just beyond the village where the path forked in three directions. He took their report, then delegated a different subcadre to fetch the two bodies and haul them down to the crossroads at the market town of Sharra Crossing where the two dead people would be strung up as a warning to others not to break the king’s law and trouble the king’s peace.

  “You think they are in league with the smugglers, Chief?” Denni asked.

  Like all of the officers in charge of companies of Black Wolves, Jagi was Qin, a foreign soldier who had arrived in the Hundred sixteen years ago together with the man who had brought peace to the land. In his month with this company Kellas had not heard Chief Jagi raise his voice, not once. But beneath his pleasant voice and mild temper ran the steel of a man who got what he wanted by never slacking. He turned his gaze on the prisoners, who went as still as rabbits sensing the shadow of a hawk.

  “As it happens, I just received word that this morning, while we were up here setting our ambush, the king’s portion of hides and sinew being stored in a warehouse near Elegant Falls went missing. Someone stole the tithe set aside for the king while we waited for smugglers who never came. Those who participate in a decoy are part of the conspiracy and thus are criminals. Unless you are willing to speak and convince me otherwise I must assume this supposed hunting party was part of the plot, which therefore means the two who died today are guilty of crimes against the king. According to the law, the bodies of criminals shall be displayed after execution as an example to those who might think to follow them.”

  Kellas could not help but put in, “The local folk won’t like seeing one of their holy women hung from a post until her flesh rots away and her bones fall to the earth like so much rubbish. They’ll see it as disrespect.”

  “Then they shouldn’t have used holy women and innocent children as pawns in their game, should they? String the corpses up according to the law.” Chief Jagi ignored the stony stare of the surviving holy woman and the outraged gasp of the other spearman as he turned to Denni. “Escort the prisoners to the fort. The two adults shall be taken before the assizes, and judgment passed. Assign a steward to find the parents of the children. Tell the steward the parents must pay a fine to get them back. Afterward you and your subcadre can take liberty until your regular duty tomorrow.”

  They marched the prisoners to the fort and turned them over to the sentinel-guards—regular soldiers under the command of a Hundred-born captain, not Black Wolves under the command of a Qin chief—who were in charge of the cages. Instead of lying down to rest, they washed thoroughly in the tubs while the soldiers who had been stuck in the fort surrounded the washing planks to find out what happened.

  “Told you there’d be nothing up in the hills,” said one fellow who was engaged in an ongoing duel with Ezan. “But we g
ot some news. Besides the stolen hides, a farmer up by Elegant Falls saw a ghost woman out walking in the night.”

  “Same as the other?” demanded Ezan. “Cloaked in a pale demon’s skin?”

  “Think you’ll get a chance to kill a demon, Ez?” Denni laughed as he rinsed off his sweaty, sodden hair. “For fifteen years Wolves have been chasing the last four cloaked demons, and never took one down. Heya, lads, what say we go down to that thrice-rotted inn and drink what passes for decent rice wine here in this cold-cursed valley?”

  Chief Jagi rarely offered spoken praise to the Wolves under his command, but he had other ways of showing that their performance had met with his approval. So Kellas swaggered out with the others—swaggering was necessary—and they put on their cold-weather cloaks and hurried down the main road to the village of Feather Vale. It was a thirsty walk with dusk sinking down over them.

  Chief Jagi had made an arrangement with an inn on the outskirts of the village. His men could take their liberty there as long as they did not fight with the locals and broke nothing, and his steward paid up the bill at the end of each week. The place was nothing special: It had a long porch where folk stowed their sandals and boots before going inside. The inn’s single room was floored with old rice-straw mats and made comfortable with low tables and threadbare pillows for seating. Here in the hills it actually got cold at night in the season of Shiver Sky, so the room was cunningly fitted with small, lidded iron pots that had vents and a grated bottom with a plate beneath to catch ash; in these, charcoal burned to warm a man’s legs.

  Aikar hadn’t bothered to wear a cloak. None of the locals gathered for an evening’s drink were wearing cloaks, either; it wasn’t cold to those accustomed to upcountry weather. The two women who worked in the tavern carried plain wooden trays and poured rice wine into crudely glazed cups, farmers’ ware. The smoke from the warming stoves stung Kellas’s eyes. Images from the skirmish in the forest flashed in his mind: A fern spattered with blood. Aikar shooting the man who had spoken. The missing youth. The way the spark of life vanished from once-living flesh. How did it leave? Where did it go?