Wolf's-own: Koan (2 page)

Wolf had taken him then, made him Kamen, and Malick-now-Kamen had dragged Umeia with him.

A whole new sort of beauty opened up to the
Temshiel
Kamen, Wolf's-own. The beauty of vastness and things unseen by mortal eyes, and knowledge impossible to attain within the narrow stretch of a mortal life.

Hunting was easier now. It took him almost two decades to learn how to use the spirits properly, how to be just cruel enough to be sure you were getting the answers you needed, but not so cruel as to hasten their slow slide into true insanity. Malick did Wolf's bloody work while he learned, and when he'd learned enough, he'd hunted down his father—an itch in the back of his mind for
years
—and made his mother's murderer look him in the eye,
know
his son, as Malick strangled him. A knife would have been quicker, a simple surge of power easier, but he'd wanted to feel the pulse slow and sputter, he'd wanted to watch the life spark out of those eyes that were too like his own.

Malick generally got what he wanted.

Wolf's law wouldn't allow Malick to bury the corpse and so bind his father to the earth. Malick sulked a bit as he watched the pyre, but he obeyed. He was Kamen Wolf's-own, and he respected his god.

And then, out of the blue and all unlooked-for, there had been Skel.

Malick hadn't been impressed by Skel's perfect face. Malick hadn't been impressed by Skel's raven-black hair, or his cobalt eyes, or the lines of his body, or the way he moved it.

Malick had been impressed by the carefree nature with which Skel approached life; the hard practicality with which he lived it. Skel was fierce and beautiful and whimsical and foolish. When he'd tested Malick in a seedy tavern—Malick somewhat drunk and grieving his mother all over again, grieving all those he'd already outlived, still smelling of the smoke and incense from his father's pyre, and wondering if acquiescing to being the bloody hand of Wolf's long arm on mortal lands had been such a brilliant idea after all—Malick had been struck not by the pleasing angles of Skel's face, or the open invitation in his too-blue eyes; Malick had been struck by the tiny hints of fracture behind the reckless audacity. The singular pinpoint of satori that Skel was just as broken inside as anyone else; perilous enough to be interesting, and yet still strangely safe.

Skel was
Temshiel
. Skel couldn't die.

He'd been beautiful in his way, in more than the aesthetic sense, though he was, of course, extraordinarily aesthetically gifted. His sense of justice was perhaps a bit rigid, to Malick's mind, but it lit his soul with such a bright fiery blaze sometimes that Malick couldn't look away. Blinded. Skel was beauty and distraction and laughter and forgetfulness. Skel was friend and sometime-lover; touchstone and confidant; role model and bad example.

Malick had thought Skel wouldn't take a cudgel to the face for anyone. He'd been wrong.

There had been Asai and foolish choices and betrayal and bewildered grief, and then there had been no more Skel.

Malick finally felt the true weight of what he was. What he'd chosen. What his god had made him, and what he'd allowed himself to become. Malick looked Kamen in the eye, and... flinched.

He retreated.

Umeia didn't need to. Umeia was much better than Malick at being what they were. Still, Umeia had come with him. Malick would regret that eventually, but at the time, he'd been grateful.

Always enamored with beauty, and now it hovered just out of Malick's reach. No matter how many drinks he poured down his throat, no matter how many beds he fell into. He searched for it in the wrong places—pink lips, light-stubbled chins, firm breasts, muscled backs, pleasing faces, sweet-scented skin—he
knew
he was looking in the wrong places, but he couldn't bear to look within. If he found it, he might lose it. He loved with little splinters of himself he didn't mind risking, and nursed with liquor and more liquor the shriveled part of his spirit that hunkered inside him and hardened into a snarling little knot.

He observed the world around him with ever-growing contempt, nurturing his useless craving for vengeance, while he watched and waited.

And then, out of the blue and all unlooked-for, there had been Fen.

Malick had thought, right up until Fen had shot him that first hate-filled glare, that he'd been waiting for a chance at retribution. He'd been wrong.

He'd thought at first that he was enamored with Fen's aesthetic beauty. Angular and sharp-boned, every slant and slope in exactly the right place. Eyes like storm clouds over a roiling sea, flecked through with the light of the suns forcing their way from the other side in scattershot amber. And oh bloody hell, the fucking
hair
.

He'd thought it was Fen's face: perfectly proportioned, perfectly angled, perfectly exquisite. He'd thought it was Fen's body: deliberately sculpted and honed, and all the more beautiful for the intrigue of the scarred map of self-inflicted sanity. He'd thought it was Fen's hair: an outward symbol of inward bondage, and the bit of rebellion in the choppy fringe that hid his eyes, but never well enough. He'd thought it was the way Fen moved and glared and spoke and sneered. He'd thought it was the way Fen snarled and spat and fought and came
this close
to actually winning.

And it was. It was all of those things. Except all of those things Malick could have walked away from. And yet somehow, he couldn't walk away from Fen. Malick told himself it was because he just didn't want to.

Fen was not whimsical. There was no laughter with Fen. Fen's approach to life was not carefree. Fen's approach to life was wholly self-destructive, and yet Fen wouldn't permit that destruction until he'd saved everyone he loved. The
way
Fen loved was, in and of itself, a prelude to suicide. Fen was not safe.

Fen was a black hole, all unknown and unwilling, sucking those around him into hopeless orbit. Malick had passed the event horizon almost the moment he'd plunged into amber-shot gray banded by indigo.

Not merely fractured inside, but shattered, and yet Fen wouldn't just accept a cudgel to his beautiful face for those he loved; Fen would wield one. Fen would learn the heft of it, how to swing it with the most precision, which point of the body to target, and he'd do it better, faster, and with a strange elegance that wasn't elegant at all, but still dangerously seductive. He'd take your cudgel to the face, then snatch it away from you and very efficiently set about killing you with it. And then he'd make you thank him for letting you take the image of his terrible radiance to hell with you.

There was a feral beauty in that sort of brutality, one that took that pedestal Malick had set in his heart, decades and lifetimes ago, and rocked it. One that made it all too imperative for him to irrevocably accept Kamen into his skin.

Kamen
was necessary to save Fen and Jacin and Jacin-rei.
Malick
was necessary to care enough to keep the trinity from splintering into irretrievable pieces.
Kamen Malick
was necessary to show Fen that living in the same skin with all of the parts of himself, without losing any of them, was possible.

It had, apparently, never really been about aesthetics for Malick.

There were probably some things Shig would tell him, things about broken dolls and wanting to fix them, or damsels and wanting to rescue them; Umeia would speculate that Fen's unwilling and oh so carefully hidden vulnerability appealed to Malick's predatory instincts. Malick knew some of those things might be a little bit true, but they weren't all of it.

It was the beauty in the shards of a riven soul; it was the beauty in watching that soul pick up each jagged piece, examine it, judge its worth, then discard it with learned indifference, or fit it back into the mosaic of Self, use it. The very
tragic
beauty in watching Fen do all of that not for himself but for everyone else. A cudgel to the face was nothing, when compared to forcing life and sanity you really didn't want on yourself because someone else needed you to.

Malick would have liked to say he'd known he was in trouble from the start. He'd dismissed it when Samin warned him, scoffed when Umeia did. Umeia thought she knew him, but she only knew Malick; she'd never understood Kamen. Malick had told Umeia she was being absurd, she didn't know what she was talking about, and in many ways she hadn't. Still, in that one thing, she'd seen when he had refused to, and it had almost cost him everything.

He'd denied he was in deep when he'd watched the trinity that was Fen shatter then rebuild itself on a lonely road in the middle of the night; he'd denied it when he'd watched Fen put a knife through the eye of the man he'd loved nearly all his life then pry his heart from his chest and stomp it; he'd denied it when he'd spoken the words and told himself he'd only said them because Fen needed to hear them. He'd even denied it when he'd found himself not just willing but eager to break the laws of his gods to save Fen.

When Fen stepped in front of Kamen's sword, Malick couldn't deny it anymore. When Malick understood what had been hidden beneath “Untouchable” as life bled from the wound Kamen had inflicted, Kamen stepped in again and forced life where it was not wanted.

He remembered wondering if Wolf had known all along, if it had all been planned exactly as it had played out, and he supposed it was likely. If Husao had seen all of the esoteric and mercurial reasons why Fen would become life and breath for Malick, it was almost blasphemous to imagine that Wolf hadn't. Just as blasphemous for Malick to raise his fists to the sky and curse Wolf for it, though he sometimes did it anyway.

Kamen never did. Kamen understood. Malick grudgingly admitted that he did too.

Asai had failed mostly because he'd underestimated Fen, but partly because he'd only glimpsed Malick through Skel. Asai had known Kamen; he'd never known Malick.

Kamen was Wolf's, but Malick was Fen's, and he would no longer deny it. For Fen, Malick could be just as fierce and merciless as Kamen ever was.

It wasn't going to be easy, showing Fen what he was now, watching as Fen came to understand the necessity of living. The onus now strapped to his back of doing so for others yet again. It was hard and cruel and just fucking tragic, and Malick bled with it.

Cruelty had never come easily to Malick; Kamen, however, had been born of it, had suckled at the teats of ruthlessness and brutal malice.

And he was, after all, neither Kamen nor Malick, in truth; he was one or the other and neither and both. He was Kamen Malick. He was Wolf's-own.

So, then. Wolf's will be done.

There was a vicious sort of beauty in that.

Change-month, Year 1322, Cycle of the Wolf

"It's a panther,” Samin said, fairly confident, though he'd never seen a real one. The fact that this one seemed a docile, playful thing, and not the sly, vicious beast he remembered reading about once upon a time, gave him some doubt, but the black, glossy coat and the teeth were rather indicative, so he stuck with his assessment.

"Panther,” Morin breathed, fascinated. He peered up at Samin, asking.

Samin merely shrugged then watched as Morin crossed the street and approached the woman who held the big cat's leash. The apparent mascot of The Lucky Panther Theater in front of which it lounged, the panther's ears pricked up a little as Morin neared, its yellow eyes attentive but only mildly so, its concentration more on the thorough stroking the woman was giving its lazily switching tail. Several men waiting in the queue for a serving of vinegary rice rolled in spicy tuna from the little booth next door eyed the panther with interest, but they appeared to be more intent on lunch than entertainment. Samin couldn't hear what Morin said to the woman as he pulled up in front of her, but she smiled wide then threw her head back and laughed, and nodded assent. She looked up and winked at Samin as Morin dared a touch to the panther's head. The great, rumbling purr of the thing—
that
Samin could hear.

"Aren't you going to pet it?” he asked Shig.

Shig squinted over her shoulder with a twist of her eyebrows then followed the tilt of Samin's chin across the street. She looked the panther over critically for a moment then dismissed it. “Naw. Too tame."

Samin snorted. If it was tearing through the streets and ravaging innocent passersby,
then
she'd probably try petting it. Shig was definitely unique. Samin was still smiling and watching Shig tease a rat-sized monkey—waving the last piece of her fried sticky dough on the end of a stick as the monkey chittered at her from its perch atop its owner's fruit stall—when Morin ambled back across the street, flushed and grinning.

"Aw, that big thing with all those teeth and you still have all your fingers?” Shig finally let the monkey have the pastry, chuckling when it snatched the stick from her, too, then waved it at her with an indignant squawk. “How are you going to get yourself any lovely battle scars to attract the girls if you won't tease vicious animals properly?"

"What are you talking about?” Morin shot right back, grin stretching. “I tease my brothers all the time."

Samin shook his head and ruffled Morin's hair then gave him an affectionate cuff. He was glad they'd come along. Besides getting accosted every five seconds by some hawker or stall owner trying to shove their wares down his throat, Samin was having fun.

"C'mon, then,” he said and chivvied Morin and Shig ahead of him along the market's crowded thoroughfare. “I think the smoke shop is down that way,” he told Shig. The day was getting on, and Joori would probably be fretting by now. Not that Joori fretting was anything unusual, but they'd been out and about long enough for Samin's feet to start hurting anyway, and he didn't like to cause any of the boys distress if he didn't have to. Balancing Morin's wish to go everywhere and see everything
right now
with Joori's inability to leave Fen to his own devices and keep both Fen and Morin in his sight at all times was a little bit taxing, but Samin did what he could. Anyway, Samin agreed that Fen shouldn't be left unsupervised just yet, and with Malick out for the morning on some mysterious errand, Samin had approved of Joori staying behind. At least this time. Samin rather thought—