The Red Wolf Conspiracy (45 page)

When Pazel asked her why, she frowned at him. Why not? She had no children. Her husband was long dead. What else should she do with the scant years left to her?

He almost asked,
But why help humans?
Something in her eyes, however, gave him to know that the question would cause deep offense. And Pazel at once felt ashamed for assuming that no Flikker could wish him anything but harm.

Through her window he saw that the river here was enormously wide. He could make out the far shore, miles away it seemed, and scores of islands thick with dense woods, over which gulls and other shorebirds wheeled.

“We're near the sea, then, Glindrik?”

“Very near,” she said. “The water's too salty even for Flikkers to drink. But there's a well on the hillside, past the apple trees.”

“Are there many auctions?”

“Every fortnight. But how did you learn Flikker, boy? Were you
raised
among us?”

They talked the morning away. She wanted to know all about his Gift, and was fascinated by his mind-fits, even turning to her books in search of some other way to prevent or delay them. “Night-blooming blacksap, maybe,” she said. “Chew the flowers: they dull the mind's sensitivity to spells. Worth a try, anyway.”

In the afternoon he napped, and when he woke again he felt perfectly cured. He dressed, and stepped ashore by the little gangway connecting her houseboat to the bank. Over her objections he took her hatchet and split several dozen logs into pieces for her wood-stove, and carried them in. Then Glindrik told him that in three or four days an elk-hunter would pass by, an “honest coot” who would take him back to Uturphe by land.

“How can I thank you?” Pazel asked her.

Glindrik smiled. “What do you want to do with your life, Pazel Pathkendle?”

Pazel looked at her, startled. “I've never been asked that before,” he said. “I don't know the answer, either. Sail like my father, I always thought, but the Code will keep me from that. So perhaps I'll go back to school, one day, if I find one that takes Ormalis. But first I have to stop this blary war, and find my family, of course, and—”

He stopped abruptly. An image of Thasha's face had suddenly leaped into his mind.

Glindrik put out her spindly hand and touched his own. “Complicated!” she said. “My own dream was never so hard to tell.” She smiled, rather sadly. “No, telling was easy.”

“What was it, Glindrik?”

She got up with a sigh. “After I fetch the water.”

“Let me,” Pazel said, jumping up.

She looked at him, considering. At last she said, “Fetch it, then, dear, but whatever you do, don't be long. You'll want to lie down again soon. I want you back in ten minutes, you understand?”

“Yes, Doctor,” he said, and Glindrik laughed, delighted.

The path to the well straggled up the sandy bank, through Glin-drik's vegetable patch and a copse of gnarled apple trees. There were bees and grasshoppers, and rabbits growing fat on her cabbage and kale. Pazel reached the well and threw back the wooden cover.

A chill touched his spine: he thought suddenly of hands on his arms and legs. Hands like Glindrik's, lifting and hurling him down a shaft very much like this one.

Shaking off the thought, Pazel filled the buckets and set them down to rest a moment. He looked north, where the broad loops of the river vanished into the Westfirth hills.
Dry land
, he mused. To think that one could set off into it, as a ship did the open sea, and travel months or years without reaching a shore. The idea always struck him as absurd.

He looked back down the hillside. He could not make out her houseboat, but through the low pines the sea winked back at him.
Twenty years, alone
, he thought.
What was that dream of yours, Glindrik?

Then he turned, and saw the graveyard.

It was laid out neatly beyond the apple trees: twenty or thirty graves in short rows, each one marked with river stones in the shape of the Milk Tree. Human graves, he thought: Flikkers did not worship Rin, or any god of humankind.

The scene might have been touching, but after the awful memory of his deceit in Uturphe, Pazel found himself alarmed, and suspicious. Glindrik had never spoken of those who died in her care.

Suddenly her voice rang out from below:
“Pazel! Pazel! Come back now, boy. Time to rest!”

Pazel didn't move. Why hadn't she mentioned the graveyard, when they had talked of so much else?

Glindrik shouted again, more urgently this time. He lifted the buckets and began to pick his way down the hill. But he dragged his feet. A terrible thought came to him: had she experimented on those boys? Tried out her brews and potions on humans first, to see if they cured or killed?

Pazel stopped behind a rambling shrub. No sound but the buzzing bees: Glindrik had stopped calling his name.

This is rubbish
, he thought,
she saved your life
. Yet some instinctive fear kept him where he was a moment longer. Then he took a deep breath and walked down the bank to the houseboat.

He thought she would be waiting on the shore, but she was inside.

He crossed the gangway and stepped down onto the deck. He heard her voice within the cabin.

But Glindrik was not talking to him.

“Very sick!” she was saying. “No use to you at all. And now he's gone and hobbled off into the woods. To die, I suppose.”

“Didn't I tell you?” said a male Flikker, laughing.

“You told me, Pradjit. I'll never learn, old fool that I am.”

Pazel froze. They were back, his captors. Silently he put the buckets on the deck.

“We should take his bones,” said another Flikkerman.

“His bones are mine!” said Glindrik, almost shrieking. “I bought him from you, remember? In any case he ran off days ago. No, friends, he's gone,
long gone!”

“Why do you shout, woman? Are you deaf?”

Pazel knew why. Heart pounding terribly, he stepped back onto the gangway. On tiptoe he crossed the plank. Once his feet were on firm ground, however, he found it impossible not to run. Up the hillside path he sprinted, then dashed through the garden, rounded the shrub—

—and collided head-on with a Flikkerman, who croaked, dropped his armful of apples, and stunned Pazel senseless with a touch.

When he woke it was quite dark. He was facedown in one of the narrow Flikker boats: it might have been the very one that brought him from Uturphe. His hands were tied behind his back.

“The lying hag,” a Flikker voice was saying. “This boy is perfectly healed; we'll get more for him tonight than we would have at last auction. Why does she lie, though? Why not sell them back to us?”

“She cheats,” said a second voice. “She must have another buyer. Why else would she fight so hard to save them?”

It was all Pazel could do not to beat his head against the hull.
Idiot, flaming idiot!
Glindrik was exactly what she seemed: a friend. She had wanted him back in bed to feign sickness once more, before Pradjit and his men turned up. Now Pazel was back where he started two weeks ago. How could he have been such a fool?

Groaning with rage, he twisted around and sat up. He could just see Glindrik's houseboat by the dwindling shore, and the old woman watching sadly from the deck.

His captors no longer called him
Shplegmun
. Already their boat was nearing an island: a great river island, its sandy shores glowing by moonlight. Low trees reared up beyond the dunes.

The boat struck sand; the Flikkers leaped out and pulled it ashore. There were other craft beached around them, and Flikker voices nearby. They pulled Pazel to his feet and nudged him onto the sand.

The voices came from a crowd at the edge of the trees: at least a dozen Flikkermen, with eight or ten captured boys. Pazel looked them over: most of these boys were tall and strong. They would sell fast enough. But one figure at the back of the crowd was very small. His captors were poking at him, grumbling:
No profit, wait and see, we'll be stuck with him at night's end
.

One yanked maliciously at the small boy's rope. The boy shouted back: “Leave off, you toad! That blary hurts!”

Pazel was thunderstruck. The high-pitched voice was unmistakable.

“Neeps!”

The small boy pushed forward through the crowd, and there he was, gaping.

“Pazel Pathkendle! I'll be blowed!”

“Neeps, you mad cat! How did they get hold of
you?”

“Dismissed for fighting!” said Neeps.

“Not again!”

“It was that lout Jervik's fault! Him and that crook Swellows, I should have—”

“No talking!” snapped the lead Flikkerman, his body sparking with anger. “Form one line! We go to auction!”

Up the dune they marched the captive boys. Pazel felt a strange clash of emotions: joy at seeing his friend, astonishment that he should be here, dread at the thought of what lay in store for them both. Worst of all, he felt a nagging suspicion that Neeps' dismissal had something to do with him.

At the top of the dune Pazel turned and looked back the way they had come. A broad river delta spread below them in the moonlight, a fan of rippling silver and black shadow-islands. Beyond lay the open sea. Hidden among the islands, however, was a cluster of ocean ships: fifteen or sixteen little brigs and schooners bobbing at anchor.

Neeps saw them, too. “Something tells me we won't be here long,” he whispered. “Belching devils, mate, I've been
such
a blary fool.”

Pazel thought that Neeps couldn't possibly have outdone him in foolishness. “But how did you
get
here?” he demanded.

“Later,” said Neeps. “They're watching.”

After the dunes came a muddy slog through the island's brush forest, where every nightbird that ever lived whooped and whistled and trilled and honked. Now and then Pazel caught glimmers of firelight through the trees ahead. When the wind turned he caught a smell of woodsmoke and frying fish.

Harsh laughter reached his ears. The path opened suddenly into a great clearing where bonfires roared. A crowd of hundreds had gathered here—eating, wrestling, guzzling liquor, trading jibes and insults. Except for some twenty Flikkers they were all humans, but none inspired Pazel with hopes of rescue. There were many sailors—one could always spot them by their leathery skin—but when they looked at him they showed no brotherly warmth. All carried blades. Some had bones or other murth-charms knotted up in their beards. Quite a few were missing teeth or eyes or fingers.
Rin save us
, Pazel thought,
they're pirates
.

The head Flikkerman drew a line in the dirt with his boot-heel, and the others arranged the boys along it by size. Was this a slave-market? Pazel wondered. Certainly it resembled what he'd seen during the rape of Ormael—except that no ownership papers were involved here, and no branding iron. And of course, the Flikkers were in charge.

They worked in pairs. One stood with his hand on the head of a captive. The other jumped onto a crate, raised his long-fingered hands over his head and sang the prisoner's qualities in a weird, half-rhyming chant:
“Strong-strong-boy, hop-a-long-boy! Clean-never-never-sick-head-thick-boy! See-how-tall-he'll-carry-all!”

And so on. When a customer shouted out a price, the lower Flikkerman pointed in his direction and began to glow softly. Then a higher bid would come, and the Flikkerman turned and pointed to the new customer, and glowed a little brighter, and his partner above would sing with more excitement and exaggeration:
“A perfect child! So-good-mannered-mild! Tough as a lion, wilt thou not buy 'im?”

When someone did buy a boy, the two Flikkers cried, “Eeech!” in unison, and the glowing one went out like a snuffed candle. The whole display appeared to have a kind of hypnotic effect on the pirates, who were spending money rather freely for people who went to such lengths to obtain it.

As his captors waited their turn, however, Pazel saw that the cleverer pirates knew better than to listen to the song. They poked and prodded the boys, examined their teeth and eyes.

“Too many sellers,” grumbled one of their captors. “We'll make nothing on these runts.”

“These brutes don't want quality goods,” whined another Flikkerman. “Any boy will do, when he's sure to be drowned or stabbed or cannon-blasted in a few months.”

“So inefficient! I don't understand why humans kill one another.”

“Neither do they.”

Then the first speaker gave a chirp of surprise. “Ehiji, look! It's Druffle, Dollywilliams Druffle! What's
he
doing out here?”

The Mr. Druffle in question was a most unusual-looking man. He had greasy black hair that hung limply to his shoulders, a long nose and a filthy coat from which his bony hands emerged like implements for poking a fire. Over one shoulder hung something slick and rubbery. As he drew closer Pazel saw that it was an enormous eel.

Just behind Druffle came four huge men-at-arms. They had black beards trimmed to paintbrush points; their muscles bulged against iron bands around their forearms. Each carried a spear filed to razor sharpness and thick with dried gore where spearhead met shaft. As their eyes scanned the crowd, even the fiercest pirates stepped out of their way.
“Volpeks,”
men whispered. And so they were: Pazel knew them from drawings in his father's books. Now here they stood in the flesh: the dreaded mercenaries of the Narrow Sea, who would fight and kill for anyone who paid.

Behind the Volpeks shuffled a line of eight boys, chained at the wrists. Their faces and skin spoke of many homelands. One trait they had in common, however: they were all rather small.

“… most certainly experienced!” Druffle was saying to the Flikkerman. “They won't have time to learn between here and Chereste!”

Pazel's heart skipped a beat. Chereste was home! It was the peninsula on whose tip stood Ormael City.

“But why dost thou another's bidding?” demanded the Flikkerman.

“Call it that if you will,” said Druffle. “I call it gold for easy service. And gold he has, a-plenty.”