Mortal Ties (11 page)

“That…doesn’t sound like Abe.” Rule’s voice loosened slightly. “Treachery doesn’t
sound like him, either, but to steal something that doesn’t work—to betray everything
for an object without value—Isen needs to hear this.” He started to move ahead. Stopped.

“Go,” Lily told him. “Cullen can walk me down. If we run into trouble, he’ll burn
it. It’ll do him good. Go.”

He hesitated a moment longer, then nodded and took off.

Lily and her fire-happy escort moved on in silence at the best pace her human feet
could keep on the rough slope. It was maybe five minutes before Cullen spoke. “The
prototype does work.”

She sighed. “Yeah. I know.” It was possible the thief knew about the side effects,
too. And wanted them. She didn’t know why, but maybe that’s what had kept that abstracted
look on Cullen’s face. Maybe he’d been trying to figure that out.

After a pause Lily added obliquely, “Abe matters to him.”

Cullen sighed back at her. “Yeah. He does.”

Lupi were very black and white about treason. Traditionally, it had only one punishment:
death. And traditionally, it was the Lu Nuncio who carried out that sentence.

R
ULE
stood at the center of the meeting field on his Rho’s right hand beneath glowing
mage lights that blotted out the brilliance of the stars overhead. His heart beat
slowly because he willed it so…but it was hard.

His Rho was angry. The stink of that anger rolled through him. He felt it in the very
pulse of the mantle—a hard pulse, steady but a shade too fast. Out of sync with his
own. This was something a Rho could do, use the mantle to pull any of his clan into
an intimate rhythm. Rhos did it most often to steady a clan member whose control was
slipping. Rule had done that himself. You didn’t have to pull on the mantle very hard,
not one-on-one. Control your own heart rate, allow the mantle to flow out, and the
heart rate of the other fell in with yours. Fast, if you wanted to move them into
action. Slow, if you wanted to calm them. Rule had never tried to spread his control
over so many at once, but Isen had, many times. Rule had experienced it from the other
side.

He should be experiencing it now. Standing so close to his father, his Rho, while
Isen pulled firmly on the mantle, no amount of training was enough for him to separate
his
pulse from that demanding beat. But he carried a mantle, too. And Leidolf did not
beat at Nokolai’s command.

He felt dizzy. Disoriented. He was Nokolai.

And he was Leidolf.

He’d known that since the Leidolf mantle was forced upon him. Known with his head,
at least, that the trace of Leidolf blood he’d inherited from a great-grandmother
had made it possible for Victor to force the mantle on him. Victor had meant to destroy
him with it. He’d failed.

Now he stood beside his Rho, surrounded by clan—by Nokolai—and his heart didn’t beat
with Nokolai. It beat for Leidolf. He held it to a slow, steady rhythm, and that was
hard, but not as hard as it should have been.

He was Leidolf. He knew that in his heart now. Literally. He was Leidolf, and Nokolai
did not command him unless he allowed it.

Isen was playing a dangerous game tonight.

“Bill Peterson,” a voice called from the left.

“On duty,” Pete said firmly. “Excused.”

Rule’s nostrils were flared, open to the night. The air was soft and cool and thick
with scent—dust and skin, sage and grass, fear and anger, a whiff of menstrual blood
from a young woman nearby. Most of all, it was heavy with the massed scent of lupi.

Nokolai. That was the strongest smell, the scent of clan reassuring even now. But
Leidolf as well, a scent carrying so many of the same notes, yet arranged to a different
tune. That smell, too, contented him, where it used to wake his nape to bristles.
Also Laban. A musky lot, Laban. And Vochi. Quiet, unthreatening Vochi. Leidolf, Laban,
Vochi…each was clumped up together not far from the center of the field.

Nokolai Clanhome was crowded these days.

“Josh Krugman,” another voice called. “And Celia Thompson.”

“On duty,” Pete replied loudly, his voice crossing the response from the woman standing
near Cullen saying the same thing. “Excused,” they both said, one right after the
other.

In normal times, most lupi did not live at their clanhomes. Nearby, yes, if they could,
but lupi had to earn a living just as humans did, which for most of them meant living
elsewhere. Some worked at Clanhome, either as guards or for the nursery or at the
clan’s construction firm. Others owned their own small businesses elsewhere or worked
for human employers or companies. But a large number worked at companies owned by
the clan in the three coastal states that comprised Nokolai’s territory.

This was unusual. Until the Supreme Court stopped the government from administering
the drug gado to any lupi it caught, Rule’s people hadn’t dared live together in large
numbers. Most clanhomes couldn’t house even half their clan’s members, and clans hadn’t
considered it safe to have too many of their members working at the same place.

Nokolai was different because of Isen…and Vochi.

Isen had known for a long time that lupi couldn’t continue to live secretly. The world
had changed too much. He’d planned for the day they came out into the open; he’d worked
with Wythe clan to make that happen, using the country’s legal system. Even before
that, though, he’d been preparing. First he’d created a pretext for gathering forty
or fifty clan to him—the fiction that Clanhome housed a religious cult. In addition
to the homes here, he’d built dormitory-type housing for “visiting brethren.” After
Nokolai went public, he’d added a second dormitory and additional houses.

Nokolai could, at need and with some crowding, house their entire clan.

Even so, and even now, not all Nokolai lived here. Many remained scattered in California,
Oregon, and Washington, keeping their ears perked and their eyes open. That was both
strategy and necessity. War was expensive. Nokolai was a wealthy clan, but even it
couldn’t afford to fully support all of its members for a long stretch. Not when a
large chunk of that wealth came from the businesses it owned, where its people worked.

The decision to operate businesses that employed clan
had been Isen’s. But he couldn’t have implemented it without Vochi’s help.

Vochi had always been a small clan, suffering even more than most from the limited
fertility common to those of the Blood. It had always thrown too many submissives,
too few fighters. Add to that a peculiar interest in accumulating wealth, and Vochi
could have been the skinny kid in glasses getting picked on by the jocks…or, during
times of clan strife, the skinny white guy who got caught on the wrong turf when the
Crips and the Bloods were slugging it out.

Vochi knew this. They’d first submitted to Nokolai sixteen hundred years ago. Nokolai
had defended Vochi ever since, and Vochi had done much in return for Nokolai. They
were the reason Nokolai was the wealthiest clan—their acumen and, more recently, Isen’s
understanding that money meant power in the human world. And for better or worse,
that was the world lupi lived in.

In, but not of. They had much in common with humans, but they were not human. The
clans could not be run the way humans ran their societies.

Human crowds reminded Rule of flocks of birds or children, unable to tolerate stillness
for long. He stood beside his father at the center of roughly three hundred mostly
still and silent people. Mostly, because there were humans in this crowd, too—female
clan, who were as quiet as they could manage. But most were lupi, with a wolf’s instinctive
understanding of the value of stillness. Most were Nokolai. Their Rho had called for
quiet. They obeyed. Even with that hard pulse stirring them, they could hold quiet
and wait…for now. As long as the rhythm didn’t pick up.

But not all here were Nokolai. Laban, Leidolf, and Vochi had each gathered into a
knot of their own, surrounded by Nokolai. They would be feeling the tension. They
were close enough to smell Isen’s anger. They’d hear the massed heartbeats around
them, like a distant ocean. Leidolf would react to this differently than the other
two. Rule held their heartbeats to a slow, steady rhythm. They were alert, but calm
in their stillness.

Laban and Vochi were still, too—for a wolf’s reason. Fear.

The gathering was not, however, completely silent.

“Your find didn’t work?” Lily said to Cynna, her voice very low.

Cynna shook her head. “Mountains are tricky. I can find through dirt, but even small
amounts of quartz will distort things unless I have a really good pattern. Which I
don’t. I’ll work up a more complete pattern, but that will take time.”

“Emanuel Korski,” someone called from the rear of the crowd.

“On duty,” Pete said loudly. “Excused.”

“Matt Briggs,” another voice called from up near the front of the crowd. Pete responded
with the same two phrases:
On duty. Excused.

Lily drummed her fingers on her thigh. “About Laban…they haven’t been subordinate
to Nokolai for very long, in lupi terms.”

“Less than thirty years this time,” Cynna whispered back. “But they’ve submitted several
times over the years to different clans. This is their third dance with Nokolai.”

“Because they’re combative. They have trouble controlling themselves, so they need
a dominant clan to sit on them. Vochi, on the other hand, throws a lot of submissives.
They need a dominant clan for protection.”

“Andy Carter!”

“On duty. Excused.”

Six of them stood in the center of the meeting field—Rule and his Rho at the very
center, with Pete at Isen’s left. Cullen stood behind them beside a short, angular
woman with iron gray hair, thick glasses, and skin that remained luminous in her seventh
decade—Isadora Bourque, the chief tender, who answered for those tenders excused from
the meeting, just as Pete was for the guards.

Lily and Cynna stood to Rule’s right with their heads together to conduct their soft-voiced
conversation. Lily had not run out of questions. No one else would answer them
here and now, but Cynna was Rhej. Isen couldn’t command her silence, and by answering
Lily’s questions she gave tacit permission for them to continue. Isen was ignoring
the whispered conversation. If Cynna had chosen to sit down and paint her toenails,
he would have ignored that, too.

But he hadn’t had to permit Lily within the small group in the center of the field.
Lily had assumed she would stay with Rule, but Isen didn’t have to allow it. He had.
There was a reason—with Isen there was always a reason, often several—but Rule had
no idea what it was. Isen hadn’t given him any private word, any guidance at all.

His heart beat steady and slow, out of sync with the rest.

Perhaps no one but he and Isen and Cynna heard Lily’s next question. She kept her
voice very low. “But the Vochi Rho himself is a dominant, right? He’d have to be.”

“Right.”

“And Vochi has been subordinate to Nokolai for centuries but has never been…what’s
that word? Oh, yeah—
subsumed
. That’s why Leidolf doesn’t have any subordinate clans. They used to, but they subsumed
them.”

“Becka Whitbourne,” a voice at the east side of the crowd called.

“On duty,” Isadora announced in her gravelly voice. “Excused.”

The obvious way to locate a traitor was to see if someone failed to appear. Isen wasn’t
calling roll, however; he was calling absences. Or having them called out.

Visitors—both
ospi
, or clan-friends, and nonresident Nokolai—had been told to report to Pete. There
were currently three clan-friends and two nonresident Nokolai at Clanhome, and they
were accounted for. Mason and the two adults currently helping him at
terra tradis
were excused, of course. Adolescents couldn’t be left unsupervised. Nokolai’s guests
from the other three clans had been told to assemble up front; Nokolai had been told
to gather in the groups they were assigned under the emergency evacuation plan. Evacuation
drills were held once a year, so this was a familiar way to assemble. Group leaders
had been informed
of the fire and the theft and told to pass that information on. Isen hadn’t called
for silence until they were all in place, and now the group leaders were announcing
any who were absent.

So far, the absences were all excused to other duty.

“That’s right,” Cynna said. “Bad habit of Leidolf’s—or of their mantle.”

“And Nokolai hasn’t wanted to subsume Vochi. Are they worried it might make them throw
submissives?”

“It’s not that intentional.” Cynna chewed on her lip while someone else called out
two names and was answered by Isadora. “I’m not sure I can explain it, mainly because
I don’t really understand. I think you have to be a mantle-holder to really understand.
But usually a subordinate clan gets subsumed when the mantles mesh too closely. The
dominant clan doesn’t do it on purpose. It just happens. Nokolai’s a good dominant
for Vochi because their mantles don’t mesh. Same with Laban.”