The Red Wolf Conspiracy (54 page)

“So that's how we get to the wreck,” said Neeps.

“I want to go home!” sobbed the small boy. The round-eyed Tholjassan girl held him by the shoulders, then bent and whispered in his ear. The boy sniffed but cried no more.

At least twenty well-armed Volpeks were at work in the camp. Besides the gear-turners and the lookouts, a great many were clustered about a heap of what at first glance looked like no more than slimy, vaguely colorful rocks. Using picks, chisels or their bare hands, the men attacked the objects: tearing out weeds, cracking coral deposits, stripping barnacles. In most cases they found nothing but stone. In a few, however, the objects' true forms came suddenly to light: here a sea chest, there a broken amphora, elsewhere a bust of some forgotten prince. There was a birdbath fashioned from a giant clamshell, a stone eagle with a broken wing, a curling elephant's tusk banded with gold. The men pushed these treasures aside with hardly a glance. They were clearly after something quite different.

“Is it the Red Wolf they're seeking?” Pazel asked a guard.

“Of course! Now step back!”

Another cage was nearing the shore, also heaped with plunder. It passed above a tall mound of freshly dug sand.

“Hold!” shouted someone. The gears stopped; men scrambled up the mound with nets and poles. One pulled a latch and the bottom of the cage swung open like a trapdoor. Out tumbled the salvaged artifacts, into the waiting nets. A guard-captain looked around until his eyes settled on the newly arrived youths.

“Ten divers!” he shouted.

Quite at random, the Volpeks seized ten, among them Pazel and Neeps, the round-eyed girl and little boy. All were marched up the sand mound, then lifted one by one into the air.

“Grab the bars! Climb in!” roared the guards.

The young people could just reach the swinging cage. In they went, shaking with fear, and clung to the sides with hands and feet. When the last boy had entered, the men latched the trapdoor anew.

“Rest easy,” they jeered. “Enjoy the ride.”

Another shout and the cage began moving seaward. The prisoners gripped the salt-slimy bars, looking down as sand turned to foam beneath them. The cage moved slowly: Pazel had time to look back and see Arunis' covered wagon being carried, not rolled, over the dunes.

Then Neeps cried, “Look!” and Pazel turned in time to see the brass sphere vanish—no,
plunge
—from the arm of the crane straight down through the barge's main hatch. There came a distant
boom
and a spray of water from the hatch; then a great chain began to slither through the crane into the depths. And Pazel realized that he was not looking at a hatch at all but rather a square opening built right through the hull.

A diving portal. Of course.

“They're going to put us in that thing, aren't they?” said Neeps.

“Yes,” said the girl.

“You seem to know a lot about diving,” said Pazel. “Can you guess how deep it is out there?”

She frowned at the waves. “Twelve fathoms?”

“Lord Rin!” cried Neeps. Twelve fathoms was over seventy feet. How could anyone dive so far? But the girl remained calm. She had the look of someone almost irritatingly calm, Pazel thought, although the talk of ghosts had rattled her a bit.

“There's something wrong with the water,” she said, pointing to their destination. “See how green it is? I think that wreck is in a kelp forest.”

She was right about the water: nearly all of it near the spot where the bathysphere had plunged was shimmering green.

“But that will make finding anything
much
harder, won't it?”

The girl just nodded, her face expressionless. Her name was Marila, she told them. She had been diving for sponges in the coves around Tholjassa since she was twelve. The frightened little boy, Mintu, was her brother.

“This sorcerer's mad,” she said. “Nobody ever gets away with treasure from the Haunted Coast. Everyone knows there's a curse on it. See that wreck?” She pointed at a single, tilting mast in the distance.

Pazel nodded. “What about it?”

“That's a Mzithrini Blodmel, ninety guns. Tholjassan ships turn away from land if they're close enough to see her. They say she had a captain who noticed something shiny at low tide. He dived himself and came up with a golden Star of Dremland. One little star. He tossed it up to his son, told him the seafloor was covered in jewels, and dived back for more. It was just twenty feet deep, but he vanished.”

She made a little
poof
gesture with her hands.

“The ship left him and retraced its path exactly. But this time there was a reef, where there had been nothing before. It split them wide open. They abandoned ship, and a storm blew up and swamped the lifeboats, and the only one who made it out was the man who had thrown the gold star back into the water. You can't take so much as a shell from this place, everyone knows.”

The Mzithrinis did what Thasha feared most. They waited.

It gave them time to think, to recover from their amazement at the defeat of their brother in a matter of seconds by an unarmed girl. She was unarmed no longer, but she was still alone.

They waited, and in seconds the remaining three fighters, those who had stayed behind to watch the Volpeks, appeared over the dune. They looked at the golden-haired apparition, the man groaning and twitching at her feet. Then all five Mzithrinis drew their swords and whirled them with easy grace, advancing.

Thasha had one skill even Hercól considered exceptional: she made choices with lightning speed. Those five spinning blades drove her next decision, and it surprised her almost as much as the Mzithrinis. She threw her own sword away.

Reason caught up with instinct a split second later.
Oh, thank the Gods
. For she knew now that to fight them was to die. The blade was strange to her, narrow at the hilt, broad and heavy near the point. She could not have prevailed against one man trained to use it, let alone five.

The men stared at her, but paused only for an instant. She still held the knife.

Thasha's next decision took longer.
Run?
Impossible.
Surrender?
Not likely—the man she'd fought could well have been taking her aside to murder her. She dropped to her knees. Seizing the wounded man by the shirt, she hauled him up against her chest and set the knife to his throat.

Now they stopped dead. The man was waking from his daze: she pressed the blade hard until he felt it. His eyes blinked open, and Thasha felt his muscles tense. For a moment nothing moved but the sea oats in the breeze.

One thing he would not do was throw himself on the knife: suicide was forbidden by the Old Faith. They were all trapped. It gave her time to think again.

Mzithrini phrases danced before her eyes.
Who shall wed? Thasha and His Highness shall wed
.

“I … I promise—” she stammered.

Again they were amazed. “You speak Mzithrini!” said one, apparently their leader.

“Little, little! I am friendly!”

“Friendly.”

Blood trickled from the nose of the wounded man. He put a weak hand on her arm. She pressed the blade harder against his throat.

The men crept a step nearer. Could she possibly tell them she was the Treaty Bride? How could they believe her?

At last the words came back: “Hear my vow, ye many!”

It was awkward, but they understood. Thasha indicated the knife. “I give this.”

“Yes,” said the Mzithrini leader. “Do that.”

“And you … you … don't touch any of my goods.”

It was the old
Polylex
phrase. The Mzithrinis looked at one another. Then they advanced another step.

“We won't touch you, girl,” said their leader. “Don't worry. We're friendly.”

The man she was holding actually laughed. Only by twisting the knife even harder against him did she make them pause again. They had spread around her. She had to turn this way and that to see them all.

Suddenly the wounded man let his hand fall from Thasha's arm. He gave a low gurgle; then his body went limp. Thasha cried out. His head flopped down against her wrist.

“Oh
no
!” Thasha shook him, horrified, she had never killed, never wanted to—

He erupted beneath her. Bit her arm. Struck the knife from her hand. The other Mzithrinis charged with a roar. Their captain raised his broad sword in an arc over her head.

And fell slain. His chest riven with arrows. The wounded man dropped beside him, a shaft piercing his neck.

Thasha leaped to her feet. Down the dune behind her rushed six or eight men, tall and gray-clothed, swords held high. They clashed with the gaping Mzithrinis with cries of
“Syr-ahdi Salabieác!”
And Thasha's heart leaped: those words she knew. They were a prayer Tholjassan warriors spoke before closing with the enemy.

The Mzithrinis begged no quarter. Their heavy blades flashed in the sun with terrible speed and rang as they met the lighter Tholjassan swords. But they were doomed: two had fallen to arrows, two more in the first moments of swordplay. The last pair rushed together and stood back to back, swords a-whirl, snarling their defiance.

“Enough!” cried a Tholjassan.
“Maro dinitie!
Fight no more, and live!”

The Tholjassans paused, giving their foes time to consider. The Mzithrinis, however, leaped once more to the attack. In a matter of seconds both lay dead at the Tholjassan's feet. But Thasha stood rooted to the spot, wondering if she had taken a blow to the head. She looked at the man who had spoken.
That voice!

He wiped blood from his sword against his breeches. Then he turned to face her—and in broad daylight, far more clearly than the night before, Thasha saw a ghost.

Pazel winced. The iron cage was salt-corroded, the bars rusty and sharp against his skin.

They had left the surf behind and were nearly at the cargo vessel: a wide teakettle of a ship. Her captain rushed back and forth with his telescope, watching the commotion around the barge, the guns on the Volpek brig. He spared barely a glance for the prisoners in their iron cage, rumbling by on pulleys slung between his masts.

“The Customer's reached the shore!” boomed a lookout in the crosstrees. “And Druffle too, that old straggler! Looks like they're heading our way!”

“I can see the beach!” shouted the captain. “Keep your eyes on the deep water! If we're caught off-guard I'll make you sorry, by the blazin' Pits!”

The prisoners left the cargo ship behind. No one had addressed a word to them.

Neeps shook his head. “Druffle's back. Think he's missed us much?”

“I doubt it,” said Pazel. But he was thinking:
Caught off-guard by whom?

The day was brilliant and clear—except for those strange clots of mist, which seemed to prowl willfully among the offshore wrecks. Suddenly the cage picked up speed. Pazel steadied himself, then turned to look at the barge. Volpeks were straining at the capstan, two men to each bar. They were winding in the chain, winching the bathysphere up to the surface again.
That's some job
, he thought.

“Up here, lads and ladies.”

Ten heads swiveled up. A Volpek crouched atop their cage, waving. He could only have come from the higher masts of the vessel behind them, but no one had heard him climb aboard. His round, bald head put Pazel in mind of a sunburned ape. He gave them a rascally grin.

“The Red Wolf!” he said. “That's your goal. Silver is sweet and gold is gravy, but we must find that red iron wolf, come storm or sunstroke. Not one of us is going home without it, see? So don't leave behind anything that might have paws. That's rule number one.

“Rule number two is stay alive. The sphere has plenty of air, but you can only take one chestful at a time down into the wreck. Search your hearts out, and when you can't hold your breath any longer, give three tugs on your rope. Then watch out! We'll haul you in faster than you can say ‘drowned doggy’!

“At the end of your ropes you'll find a sack, a ring and a hook. Little treasures go in the sack. Big stuff you wrap up tight with rope. Then clip the hook to the ring and give two tugs—just two, for merchandise—and don't forget to hold on yourself!

“You'll see the keel of the
Lythra
soon as you reach the seabed. The rest of her's spread out east of here, or maybe north. She wedged between two rocks, see, and at some point the tides just snapped her in two. Her innards have been washing about these forty years.”

He paused, then gave a smile of forced good cheer. “As to the little matter of sea-murths: rubbish! Fishwife talk! There ain't been murths in the Nelu Peren for over a hundred years! Mankind's rooted 'em out. You'll do better to worry about tanglin' your line in sharp coral, or that blary weed. It's easy to get lost in a kelp forest, and this sort—ribbon kelp—is the worst of all. Greenery's worse than ghosts, mark my words.”

His speech was interrupted by shouts from the barge. Men were crowding around the dive portal, waving encouragement to those working the capstan. The latter threw themselves into a final shoulder-straining heave, and with a sound like a breaching whale the bathysphere rose from the hull portal. Water gushed from it; long ribbons of weed trailed back into the sea.
To bring such a thing here!
Pazel thought.
In secret! Along with wagons, three ships, maybe a hundred men. All for an iron wolf?

As they drew nearer, a rope ladder dropped from the bottom of the sphere. A man on deck caught the trailing end and secured it to the crane. At once a line of youths began to descend. They were shaking and slow. All looked rather ill. When they reached the deck they let themselves collapse.

Next to emerge were baskets of the kind of loot the Volpeks had been busy with ashore. These were handed up into a separate cage on the shorebound side of the pulley system. Then it was the newcomers' turn.

The bald Volpek climbed down the outside of their cage. “Stand back!” he cried, and kicked the trapdoor open with his foot. A man tossed him the end of another rope ladder. It ended in a pair of short ropes, and these he tied swiftly to the bars of the cage. Then, “Down! Down!” he cried. “Don't make me step on your fingers!”