The Tiger and the Wolf (23 page)

Asmander held himself very still, waiting. Either he was going to
have to fight, or all of them were – and they’d most likely die if
it was their little band against the whole of the Many Mouths.
This other chief of theirs seemed to be winning some of them
over, though, enough that the certainty of a bloodbath was now
becoming something muddled and unclear. For a moment
nobody seemed to know what would come next, and the old
chief’s firebrand son had lost his momentum. Then a burly
hunter was stepping out from the throng: a big, scarred man of
Venater’s age.

‘I will fight the black man,’ he stated. ‘I will give his blood to
the Wolf. For Seven Skins I will do this.’
‘Sure As Flint,’ the chief’s son named him. ‘You were my
father’s fiercest warrior. Fitting the honour should be yours.’
‘You have any idea what you’re doing?’ Venater growled in
Asmander’s ear. ‘Only, I heard you were supposed to be recruiting this mob. Just let them have a Horse girl to cut up.’
‘Honour,’ Asmander told him. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
Venater rolled his eyes, but then gave a sharp nod, and
Asmander saw the chief’s son, the angry one, approaching,
sizing him up.
‘Champion,’ he spat, glaring at Asmander.
‘You have such warriors, among the people of the Wolf?’
A sneer. ‘We are all Champions. Prepare your soul, black
man. When you are dead, your friends will go with you to the
altar of the Wolf,
all
of them.’
‘Oh, well done,’ Shyri remarked, as the man stalked off.
‘You’d just have thrown them one of our number, would
you?’ Asmander asked her, genuinely interested.
‘Harsh seasons, harsh measures.’ She shrugged. ‘There are a
lot of them. It won’t be fun fighting clear of here, once your
corpse hits the floor.’
‘Such optimism!’
‘Well, you’re the one come to buy their service, because
they’re such terrifying warriors,’ Venater pointed out. ‘We get to
see just how good, then? That was your plan?’
‘Plans are overrated.’ Asmander shrugged. ‘Get my armour. I
don’t know much about souls but I’ll prepare my body.’
So he pulled on his quilted cuirass, with the plates of obsidian
nestling in each diamond panel. About his waist went his belt of
twisted cloth, with a panel of layered cotton to guard his groin.
He had a bracer of interwoven hide strips for his left forearm,
and greaves of the same make for his shins. A little tortoiseshell
buckler slipped over the knuckles of his right hand. So he
donned all the fragments and pieces of his life, and the ritual
was a comforting, centring one. At his heels went his sickle-shaped jade spurs, and in his hand his stone-toothed
maccan
sword.
Sure As Flint was coming now, having made his own preparations, no doubt just as much a ritual, drawing the spirit of the
Wolf about him just as Asmander had cloaked himself in the
invisible influence of Old Crocodile.
Venater’s low whistle of appreciation was the only sound. The
watching Wolf tribe had gone reverentially quiet.
Here
was what
Asmander had come to find. Here was one of the legendary Iron
Wolves whose fame had spread as far as the Riverlands.
He wore a wolf’s pelt, cut so that the beast’s head topped his
own, fitting over a cap of leather and fur. The dead beast’s
hollow sockets seemed to fix Asmander with a judging stare, and
he wondered if the creature’s soul was bound inside there, a
spectral ally for the man who bore its skin.
Sure As Flint had bracers from wrist to elbow that were
leather set with bronze discs. Above that was his coat, that fell
from neck to knee. Asmander had never seen anything like it. It
was a coat of iron hairs, all twisted into curls and interlinked
with each other. Wires, he realized, like a jeweller might draw
from gold or silver, and yet who would ever have made armour
out of wire?
But this was the Wolf-iron; this was the magic these people
guarded so carefully. He felt almost privileged.
In the man’s hands was an axe with a curved blade that
gleamed like the moon.
‘Black man,’ said Sure As Flint, shrugging his shoulders a
little to shift the weight of his iron-hair coat. ‘You have a name?’
‘I am the First Son of Asman.’
‘Let no man say the Son of Asman lacks courage,’ the Wolf
stated. ‘I promise you a good death.’ His eyes twitched to cover
the other travellers, an acknowledgement that the same consideration would not be extended to them.
Asmander let himself settle into his fighting stance. ‘Come
then. I’m sure we both have other business to attend to.’
Even as he spoke, he Stepped, letting the Champion’s soul
well up within him, falling forwards into its clawed embrace as if
into the arms of a lover. He had a brief sense of a ripple of
shock passing out through the watching Wolves, but after that he
was the Champion, and the Champion did not care.
For a moment, Sure As Flint paused, but he was not awed,
just made cautious. He took two steps back and then dropped to
all fours and was a great black wolf, heavy-built and snarling.
They circled each other, the wolf padding softly, his yellow
eyes fixed on his opponent. Asmander’s met them, unblinking.
He leapt. He had not fought wolves before, but he reasoned
they would be little different from lions or hyenas, and this big
sack of hair was surely not so very quick.
Sure As Flint
was
quick. He flinched aside from Asmander’s
pounce, snapped at him to keep him back, and then lunged for
his leg, one fang dragging across the Champion’s quill scales as
they parted. Pushing for the initiative, the wolf was following
him up immediately, taking advantage of Asmander’s surprise.
The surprise was feigned. The Champion kicked off from the
ground just as those jagged jaws lunged towards him. He came
down askew across the wolf’s shoulders, ripping in with the
curved claws of his feet, about to bite.
His talons just scraped harmlessly off the beast’s hide.
Beneath that hair he felt the shifting links of Flint’s iron coat.
Then the wolf had shaken him off, sending him sprawling
and then darting after him, ripping at his opponent’s stomach.
Asmander got a rake across the wolf’s nose that discouraged the
beast, scrambling to his feet and putting some distance between
them. He could feel a dull knuckle of pain in his gut: a little
blood drawn, and his own stone and cotton armour had barely
slowed the wolf’s metal fangs.
What he chiefly felt was exultation: not just at the ferocity of
the fight, but at the knowledge that, should he survive this clash,
he had found what he had been sent to find. Whether or not his
father had truly believed in this myth, here was the supernatural
strength of the north condensed into this alien metal.
He made another two sudden sallies, relying on his speed to
keep his hide intact. Both times he made his leap, caught the
wolf in the flank and hung on for a second or two, and yet his
enemy’s hide was impervious. Trying another tack, Asmander
darted in, twitching aside from the hunger of those iron jaws,
and then Stepped to human for the moment it took for him to
lash his
maccan
along his enemy’s spine. The force of the blow
staggered Sure As Flint, and yet all it achieved was to strip half
the teeth from Asmander’s sword.
There was a chant now building amongst the people of the
Wolf. It was not the name of their fighter, but an invocation of
their god. ‘Jaws of the Wolf! Jaws of the Wolf!’ they were shouting: the same phrase to cover where they came from, and where
they sent their foes.
Then Asmander was slightly slower than he should have
been, and abruptly there was a bloody tear across one thigh, and
now Sure As Flint was following him, pacing himself, driving his
prey in a wide circle with red in his grinning mouth.
And slower still now.
Asmander was aware that he needed to
bring matters to a close: he was wounded, and the weight of iron
his opponent carried would not slow him down as a wolf, for all
that it made him as invulnerable as a magical hero from the
stories.
And how do they kill such heroes, in the stories? Burn them,
drown them, bury them. Hardly practical.
But if I cannot pierce his hide . . .
For a brief while they were circling, and Asmander was the
faster, but the circle they fought in seemed to be growing tighter
and tighter. He was running out of room and time. The chanting
of the crowd was loud in his ears, voicing their concentrated
desire for his death. They hated him: as a foreigner, as a creature
of alien shape, as their lawful prey; they bayed for his blood. He
took strength from it, from the pure-water honesty of it. He fed
on their loathing and made it a part of him. And somehow it
revealed to him how he must fight Sure As Flint.
Then the wolf was rushing on him, assured of its victory, and
he sprang sideways from it, and kicked out with all his strength,
slamming his clawed foot solidly into the animal’s flank. He felt
the jarring shock of hard contact, but the Champion was strong,
and all that concentrated force was like a giant’s hammer-blow.
He felt something give beneath that metal skin, and the wolf
yelped, bowled over.
Instantly he was on top of Sure As Flint, raking and lashing
at his belly, finding the same shifting hardness there, but not
trying to cut it now. Instead he held on with one foot and jabbed
the other over and over into the writhing creature’s body, bludgeoning and bludgeoning. Then Sure As Flint was up, with
Asmander leaping backwards to skitter away.
Now the wolf was pacing around the far side of their circle,
that seemed to expand and expand until it might have been the
whole Crown of the World. Now Sure As Flint was limping, his
hide intact and yet something within him broken.
And what, though? I have not the teeth nor the claws to open his
throat, and I will break my own bones before I finish him this way.
But even as he had the thought, something landed at his feet,
a sure cast from Venater’s hand. He saw it, and abruptly he had
stooped into his human form to take it up. The sight of it, the
intent of it, made him sick, but how could he deny the pirate’s
logic?
Such an innocent thing, a string of stones in twisted cloth,
with a short wooden bar at each end. A pretty thing meant to go
about a throat: the ‘red necklace’ they called it in the Estuary.
For, of course, all the people of the Estuary were filthy killers
who knew nothing about honour, and of all of them the tribe of
the Dragon were the worst, and Venater the most villainous even
of them.
And Asmander Stepped back towards the Champion and
approached Sure As Flint, who snarled at him, teeth gleaming
with steel and strings of saliva. The wolf lunged but Asmander
was on him, at first hanging on with tooth and claw, then with
hands and locked legs as he fumbled for the beast’s throat.
The wolf was quicker than he had thought: in a moment it
was an armoured man he was grappling with, and Flint got an
elbow in his face and flung him off, and then was on him in
human form even as Asmander found his feet. He had his axe
in his hands, but he was too close for it, and Asmander got his
hands on the shaft and twisted it towards the other man’s
thumb, ripping it away and casting it aside.
He almost missed Flint’s dagger: a short iron blade driving
up at his stomach in a gutting strike. His right hand drew out his
own stone knife and he fell into a parry that Venater had shown
him, as nasty a piece of work as any pirate ever knew. Lunging
in, he pushed the thrusting dagger down, holding his knife, with
a hand either side of his enemy’s blade. In a single twisting
motion of his wrists he had his enemy’s metal blade clasped
under his fingers, and the hard flat surface of his weapon was
crushing his enemy’s thumb against Flint’s own dagger hilt.
The Wolf warrior howled then, but Asmander had not finished with him, wrenching the man’s trapped hand up behind
his back so that the dagger blade cut a gash out of his cheek, and
that only because Asmander had not quite managed to drive it
into the base of his skull.
For those seconds, Sure As Flint had been too blinded by the
pain to Step, but he seized control of himself just long enough,
now mad to escape, and Asmander felt the hideous wrenching
snap as his opponent spasmed into the shape of a wolf whose
arm would simply not bend in such a way.
He failed in his resolve then: the sensation of Flint’s shoulder
shredding itself as he transformed sent a lash of revulsion and
weakness through him, and he abandoned his grip, the dagger
falling away. Flint, an iron wolf again, collapsed, then struggled
up on three legs, and Asmander knew he must still finish the
fight. This could only end with a death.
He shouldered forwards, and this time he had Venater’s necklace in his hands, dragging it about the throat of the wolf so that
the stones dug in, then twisting and twisting, twining the handles together so that it grew tight and then tighter. Flint was a
man again instantly – a prisoner of his human flesh the moment
his neck was caught. He clawed weakly at the necklace with his
one good hand, choking and gasping as the grip of the stones
became ever more unforgiving.
And Asmander knew this was it: this was the moment. The
Many Mouths would remember him. Perhaps this was even the
best way to win them: to kill one of their own in such a way, and
wear his tormented ghost like a tattered shawl. Sure As Flint
would die a man, and his soul would never pass on. He would
haunt Asmander forever. For some that was a thing of horror,
but there was a certain breed of hero in the stories who carried
chains of ghosts dragging behind them as a tally of victories.
Now the crowd were not whooping. Now the Many Mouths
watched Sure As Flint’s face darken towards death, and the only
sounds were moans of despair.
I will have them now
, Asmander knew, but he also knew he
would not take them at such a price. His honour and his duty
warred within him, and this time honour won.
Abruptly he let go, loosening the handles, tearing away the
red necklace, so that Sure As Flint jackknifed away from him,
hacking blood first from a human mouth, then from the jaws of
a wolf. As he Stepped, Asmander gathered up the dropped
dagger and struck downwards with all his strength.
The iron bit the iron, as though he had solved some magician’s riddle and found the one weapon that would truly kill his
foe. He stabbed and stabbed, exhausting himself in rending that
hide with gash after gash. By then, Sure As Flint was long dead,
his soul flown free to find another birth, another life.