The Red Wolf Conspiracy (5 page)

“Crawlies! Muckin' sewer-sippin' whorespawned grubs! I'll kill ye!”

The evil word swept past them like fire.
Crawlies! Crawlies!
Boots shook the pier ahead and behind. A crowd of giants, two or three of them sober, pounded straight at them from the village. Others rushed to the rails of the nearest ships with lamps, squinting into the half-light. A bottle shattered, spraying them with grog.

“The barge!” cried Dri, and without hesitation flung herself from the dock. As she fell toward the water, the flaps of the swallow-suit billowed like twin sails. Diadrelu stretched out her arms, found the gauntlets sewn into the hem. The swallow's wingbones, heirlooms of her family, were fused to these gloves, and when her hands slipped inside them she became the swallow, a flying being, a woman with wings.

She barely pulled out of the fall: her feet grazed a wave. Then with four aching beats of her arms, she rose and shot to the deck of the barge, thirty feet from the pier where her people stood at bay. The barge was long and dark, and by the stillness of the lamps at the far end, she guessed its people had not yet heard the shout of
“Crawlies!”
That would change, though: in minutes every boat in Sorrophran would know of the “infestation.”
Ay, Rin! The
Chathrand
! They'll search her anew!

A thump among the fish crates beside her: Taliktrum had thrown the grapple already. Without her signal! There were two possible reasons for such a breach of protocol, neither of them good. Dri pulled her arms free of the gauntlets, dived for the hook and dragged the rope to the portside rail. In a matter of seconds the rope was tied fast: she gave two tugs, and felt it snap tight as Taliktrum bound it to the pier.

Down they slid, black beads on a string. When Taliktrum arrived seventh, his aunt could barely contain her fury.

“You might have struck
me
with that hook,” she said. “And as Talag's son you should be last down the rope.”

Taliktrum glared at her. “I am last,” he said.

“What?” Dri counted quickly.
“Where is Nytikyn?”

Taliktrum said nothing, but dropped his eyes.

“Oh no! No!”

“A boy did it,” said Ensyl. “Some fisherman's brat.”

“Nytikyn,” said Diadrelu. Her eyes never stopped moving, hunting threats among the crates and timbers stacked around them—but her voice was hollow, lost.

“He saved us,” said Taliktrum. “The boy was a fiend, trying to cut the rope and drown us. Who knows, Aunt? Maybe he's the same lad we heard blubbering for his ship. The one you found so charming.”

Diadrelu blinked at him, then shook herself. “We run,” she said.

They had no trouble on the barge, nor with the leap from her rails to the shrimper moored alongside. But once aboard the shrimper disaster nearly struck again: her crew was scrubbing the forecastle, and when the boat rocked, a wash of bilgewater struck them like a river in flood. But they locked arms, as ixchel will, and those at the end held fast to a deck cleat, and the torrent passed. Moments later they ran to the dark side of the pilothouse and scaled it to the roof.

One challenge more. A bowline from the
Chathrand
passed just above them, one of dozens of ropes tying the ship like a colossal bull to nearly every fixed object on the wharf. This line ran from the fishing pier—the very point they had been making for—looped low over the shrimper, and then rose sharply for a hundred feet or more to the
Chathrand'
s topdeck.

Leaping up to the bowline proved simple enough, but the climb was terrible. If you have ever scrambled up a wet and slippery tree, you might have some idea of their first minutes. Now imagine that the tree is not six or seven times your height but two hundred times, and branchless, and filthy with tar and algae and sharp bits of shell. Then consider that this tree lacks bark, lacks footholds of any kind, and heaves and twists with the slow rocking of the ship.

Up and up, hand over hand. When they were sixty feet from the deck the sun appeared on the horizon, peeking under rainclouds, and Dri knew they were exposed to the sight of any giant who glanced their way. Inch after scrabbling inch, hands bleeding from the scratchy rope. All the while she waited for the shout:
Crawlies! Crawlies on the line!

The last nightmare was the rat funnel: a broad iron cone threaded onto this and every other mooring line to keep the pests from doing exactly what they were attempting. The mouth of the funnel opened downward and spread, bell-like, farther than any of them could reach. Dri and Taliktrum had practiced for this moment on a real bell, in a temple in Etherhorde, but this was infinitely worse. The cone weighed more than all of them together.

Two of the East Arqualis climbed inside, set their shoulders to the funnel wall and pushed against the heavy rope with their feet. Gasping and sweating, they tilted the funnel to one side. Dri and Taliktrum gripped the rope with their legs as if riding a horse, and leaned the upper halves of their bodies over the lip of the funnel. “Go!” she snapped, and her people climbed over them, using their backs and shoulders like steps. Then: “Out, you!” to the pair inside the funnel, and beside her Taliktrum hissed. Dri felt it, too: the huge weight of the funnel, tearing at her ribs. The East Arqualis were crawling out past their legs, making an about-face on the rope
(Hurry, by Rin, hurry!)
and climbing, like the others, up her body and Taliktrum's. Her nephew's teeth were locked and his lips pulled back in a snarl of pain. But together they bore the weight.

“Climb, Aunty,” he whispered.

Dri shook her head. “You first.”

“I'm stronger—”

“Go! S'an order!”
She could not manage another word. Still he disobeyed! He glanced down at her straining ribs, seemed to consider. Then, with the same acrobat's grace as his father at twenty, he loosed his grip and kicked himself past the rim of the funnel.

Something ripped inside her. She cried out. The ixchel above seized Taliktrum as he leaped, turned him in the air by his ankles, and just as Dri's grip broke his hand descended and caught her own, and dragged her past the funnel's lip.

The last thirty feet were a red agony for Diadrelu. But when they gained the ship they were safe—the rope was cleated next to a lifeboat bound under a broad tarpaulin. They slipped under this rainproof cloth with ease. Dri found her people clustered about a message scrawled with charcoal on the deck. Ixchel words, too small for giant eyes:

DOOR AT STEPRAIL, NO LATCH, 8 FT 9 IN. STARBOARD. WELCOME ABOARD, M'LADY
.

Dri turned to look for the hidden door—and collapsed. The pain in her chest was like a swallowed knife. But at last it was done. Four clans brought aboard in as many days. Nine of her people killed on previous boardings, just one today.
Nytikyn
. He was to marry a girl in Etherhorde, wore her clan emblem on a chain at his wrist. Dri herself would have to tell her. And his parents. And the other parents, children, lovers of the slain.

Ten dead for this mission already. And we haven't left port
.

The Master and His Lads

2–3 Vaqrin 941

On a skysail mast, three hundred feet over the deck of the
Chathrand
, a bird sat in the dawn drizzle, watching the ixchel's progress up the rope with perfect indifference. He was an extraordinarily beautiful bird: a moon falcon, black above, cream-yellow below. He was smaller than a hawk but a better hunter, and quick enough to steal a fish from an eagle's claw if he took a mind to. When the she-ix flapped about in her feather suit, the falcon thought idly of killing her, out of pride more than hunger, for she was offensively ugly in flight. Not her domain. But the falcon knew his duty, and did not move as the little people staggered under the lifeboat, and a few last rats hurled themselves aboard by the gangplanks, and a toothless prisoner from the Sorrophran jail dabbed hot tar on the mast just a few yards below him, chattering foolishly:
“Lo, Jimmy Bird! Sailin' with the Great Ship, are we?”

There were prisoners all over the ship, sanding rough planks, tarring ropes against the months of salt spray ahead, driving brass pegs into transom and mast. The falcon noted them as he would cattle in a field: inedible, useless, no threat to him. In all Sorrophran, just one thing mattered: an ornate red carriage by the Mariners' Inn, eight blocks uphill from the water. The falcon's eyes were so sharp he could count the flies on the horses' rumps, but they could not pierce the tavern door, nor see who had arrived by that carriage in the night.

“’Ere's bread for a handsome Jim!”

The prisoner took a moldy biscuit from his pocket, snapped it in two and tossed half at the falcon. The bird did not deign to move. On the wharf, a great crowd was gathering before the
Chathrand:
street boys, staggering drunks, noncommissioned sailors with their pale wives and barefoot children, fruit-sellers, grog-sellers, Rappopolni monks in their mustard-yellow robes. All were held back from the
Chathrand's
main gangway by a wooden fence that cut the square in two. Imperial marines, their gold helmets winking in the sun, paced just inside the fence.

At last the door of the inn swung wide. The bird tensed. Onto the porch came a heavy, muscular man, slow of step, dressed in the uniform of a merchant officer: black coat, gold trim, high collar turned up at the back. Over his chest flowed a curly, rust-red beard. The man's eyes were bright and restless. He looked suspicious of the doorway, the horses, the very air.

The carriage driver scampered down from his seat, opened the passenger door and lowered the footstool. The red-bearded man paid no attention. After a moment a servant came from the inn bearing a tray. Upon the tray, a dish, and within the dish the falcon saw four of the tiny, sky-blue eggs of milop birds. The bearded man scooped them into his hand. The servant waited, the horses stamped, the carriage driver stood in the rain, but the man had eyes only for his eggs. With great patience he lifted each one, rolled it in his palm, and then with a surprisingly delicate motion cracked it between his teeth and drank it raw. He did this four times. Then he passed the eggshells to the servant and lumbered toward the carriage.

Now the falcon saw it: the odd, toe-pointing twitch in the man's left foot. Not quite a limp, but unmistakable—his master had demonstrated. Beard, eggs, twitch. It was enough.

The carriage door closed. The driver took his seat and whipped the horses into a trot. Nearly a mile away, the falcon leaped from the mast with a warrior's cry, startling the prisoner so badly he scalded his leg with tar. The ship was already forgotten: the falcon shot like an arrow into the thunderheads, beating west and screaming defiance of the wind. Shedding rain, delighted to be under way, he climbed until land and sea vanished utterly beneath the clouds, and then higher still. At last he burst through to sunlight, and skimmed low over a wild, brooding cloudscape, a kingdom of his own.

All day the bird flew west, hardly changing the tempo of his wingbeats. Toward evening a cloud-murth on a horse like white smoke chased him, leering and waving an axe, but the falcon beat the demon to the edge of the cloudlands, and taunted it with a corkscrew dive at the setting sun. Before dark he saw a pod of whales surging east, and a ship in pursuit.

Under the moon, his name-father, the bird flew faster than ever, and at midnight with a thrill of joy he felt the wind shift behind him.
I shall be early, early!
He passed gulls, terns, cormorants as if they were standing still. Now and then a wander-star crossed the heavens: one of the metal eyes the ancients hung over Alifros to spy on their enemies.

By the second day the wind tasted of Etherhorde. Marsh gases, city smoke, the sweet reek of farmland. At last it came: a bright coast, ships beyond counting, harbor bells and the barking of dogs, the rumbling, gabbling noise of the afternoon market, the children laughing in the slums, the fortresses, the black parade of the Emperor's Horse Guard. Etherhorde was the mightiest city in the world, and one day (so his master whispered) would be the only city where power dwelled, all others made its vassals.

Being a woken animal, the falcon lacked his wild brethren's terror of cities. Still, he could not ignore their dangers. Men fired arrows, boys threw stones. Thus the falcon took the same course always to his master's window: up the River Ool, past the cargo piers in the estuary where ships from all Alifros docked, past the marble mansions and the Queen's Park, the ironworks where cannon were made for the fleet, the home for veterans maimed by cannon fire, until at last he reached a grim stone compound at the river's edge.

Travelers on the Ool mistook the place for a prison; in fact it was an academy for girls. The unfortunate creatures trapped inside those walls knew the falcon by sight. One—the fair-haired girl who tended to sit alone by the catfish tanks—was looking up at him now. Too clever, that one. She watched him with an awareness that made the bird uncomfortable, as if she guessed his errand, or his master's name. But no matter. She was under the eye of the Sisters, and would never dare to throw a stone.