The Red Wolf Conspiracy (4 page)

Pazel nodded, but he knew the bosun was hiding something. Tar-boys rarely tasted pumpkin ale. What was Nicklen up to? Not mutiny, or dealing in deathsmoke: he was too old and slow for such crimes. Nor did the customers, joking about “the little sentry” and tussling his wet hair in an annoying way, seem much like criminals.

An hour later the bosun appeared with a second fritter and an old sheepskin to keep off the rain. He was bleary-eyed and frowning; his very clothes stank of ale. “Still awake!” he said. “You're a good lad, Pathkendle. Who says Ormalis can't be trusted?”

“Not me, sir,” mumbled Pazel, hiding the fritter away for breakfast.

“I never did hate 'em,” said Nicklen, with a look of distress. “I wouldn't be party to such a thing—hope you know, if it were
my
choice—”

His eyes rolled, and he lurched back into the bar.

Pazel sat down on the steps, bewildered. Nicklen couldn't honestly be worried about the captain. Nestef disliked carousing, true enough. But he had better uses for his time than chasing his old bosun about in the rain.

Hours passed, drunks came and went. Pazel was half dozing under the sheepskin when he felt something warm and velvety touch his bare foot. Instantly awake, he found himself looking into the eyes of the largest cat he had ever seen: a sleek red creature, its yellow eyes gazing directly into his own. One paw lay on Pazel's toe, as if the animal were tapping him to learn if he were alive.

“Hello, sir,” said Pazel.

The animal growled.

“Oh, ma'am, is it? Get along with you, whatever you are.” He shrugged off the sheepskin—and the cat pounced. Not on him, but on his second fritter. Before Pazel could do more than swear, the animal had it out of his hand and was bounding for the alley. Pazel rose and gave chase (he was hungry again and quite wanted that fritter) but the lamps were dark now, and the cat vanished from sight.

“You fleabit thief!”

Even as he yelled, the sickness came rushing back. It was worse than before: he stumbled against a rubbish bin, which fell with a crash. The bitter flavor again coated his tongue, and when a voice launched insults from a window above him the words seemed pure nonsense. Then, just as suddenly, the sickness vanished and the words rang clear:

“… out of my trash bin! Blary urchins, always up with the birds.”

Fuming, Pazel walked back to the tavern. But there he stopped. It was true: the birds
were
in fact starting to sing. Dawn had arrived.

He pushed open the tavern door. The barman sprawled just beyond the threshold, looking rather drowned.

“Uch! Get on, beggar brat! The party's damn well done.”

“I'm not begging,” said Pazel. “Mr. Nicklen's here, sir, and I'd better wake him up.”

“Are ye deaf? We drank the house dry! Nobody's here.”

“Mr. Nicklen is.”

“Nicklen? That putty-mug lout from the
Eniel?”

“Eh … right you are, sir, that's him.”

“Gone hours ago.”

“What?”

“And a good riddance, too. Moaning all night. ‘The doctor! The doctor paid me for a wicked deed!’ Nobody could make him hush.”

“What doctor? Chadfallow? What was he talking about? Where'd he run off to?”

“Softly!” groaned the barman. “How should I know what doctor? But Etherhorde, that's where! Said they were sailin' before dawn. Didn't pay for his last drink, either, the tramp—slipped out the back door. Uch!”

Pazel leaped past him. The place was utterly empty. Fooled, fooled by Nicklen! And what had the man overheard? Sailing
before
dawn?

He rushed back to the street. The rain still pelted Sorrophran, but in the east the black sky was changing to gray. Pazel flew back the way he and Nicklen had come, turned the corner, pounded down a flight of broken steps, passed the red cat devouring his fritter, knocked against more rubbish bins, turned another corner and sprinted for the wharf as if his life depended on it.

The fishermen were back from their night at sea. They whistled and laughed:
“Seen a ghost, tarry?”
He dashed through their barrels and gutting-troughs and heaped-up nets. The great hulk of the
Chathrand
loomed straight ahead, men crawling about her in the grayness like ants upon a log. But in the corner of the wharf beyond her there was no ship named
Eniel
to receive him.

He raced to the end of the fishermen's pier. He spotted her in the harbor, sails filling, picking up speed. He tore off his shirt and waved it and bellowed the captain's name. But the breeze was offshore, and the rain muffled his voice. The
Eniel
did not hear him, or did not care to. Pazel was homeless.

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.