Wolf's Blood (69 page)

Only his gaze was changed from this first time they had met him. No longer was he hanging upside down, waiting for rescue from a trap; now he studied them with calm, inquisitive eyes.

Firekeeper did not wait for Bruck to speak, for she suspected that would be to allow herself to become trapped within the spirals of the fragment of Virim’s personality that was Bruck.

“We are here to meet with Virim,” she said.

“Virim is dead,” Bruck replied. “I told you this.”

“Then we would meet with the One who has taken over in his stead,” Firekeeper replied.

“There is no One,” Bruck protested. “Life is not as simple as you wolves seem to believe. There are ramifications, complications, issues, contingencies.”

“Show me those then,” Firekeeper said.

And he did.

Bruck fragmented. No longer did a single weedy, fair-haired man stand in front of them. Instead, they were surrounded by a crowd larger than Firekeeper could easily count.

There were old men with trailing beards and young men whose skin had never known the faintest fur. There were vital, warlike figures clad in glistening armor and bearing staffs topped with sharp blades, and bent aesthetes in robes so heavily embroidered that the thaumaturges of New Kelvin would have melted in envy. There were neat, scholarly figures, businesslike and professional, glancing into crystals set atop their polished staffs as they spoke. There were rough-clad woodsmen wearing buckskin trousers rather than robes, bows slung over their backs and their staffs shod in metal to protect the foot from wear.

There was even a mountain sheep, curved horns faceted like diamonds, and delicate hooves shining with gold.

Firekeeper immediately noted that for all the many, many differences between these men they all bore features in common. It was harder to tell with those who wore beards that covered their faces and trailed down their chests, but even in those whose eyebrows were so bushy as to be nearly another beard, she thought she saw something alike in the shape and pale greenish grey of the eyes.

Again, although the warriors and woodsmen were upright figures, carrying themselves with unconscious strength and health, they still shared something with the most attenuated of the aesthetes, with the most bent of the greybeards, even with the wicked, twinkling eyes of the mountain sheep.

“One and the same,” Blind Seer said, “one and the same. This nose tells me if your eyes do not.”

“My eyes see enough,” Firekeeper confirmed. “So it is as we thought. Virim either never had a group of followers, or those followers are dead and dust now. All that is left is Virim.”

“Virim,” said Blind Seer, his hackles rising although otherwise he remained calm and controlled, “is quite enough.”

Firekeeper nodded and pressed her hands to her ears. The many Virims had one other thing in common. They talked and talked and talked and talked. Old voices, cracked from too much use. Young voices, breaking high or low when they most desired gravitas. Bellowing voices, accustomed to command. Strong, clear voices that spoke softly yet carried, reminding Firekeeper somehow of the howling of a wolf. Intermixed with this babble of human voices was the bleating of the mountain sheep, the flat, animal noise still sharing something in common with all these shades and tones of human sound.

And they talked of ramifications, complications, issues, and contingencies.

“We must do something, else the New World will be lost, her uniqueness destroyed by the unbridled power of the Old World.”

“Let the New World learn to find her own strength. If we intervene we will find ourselves weakening the very thing we seek to protect.”

“There is no time, no time, no time!”

“The Beasts deserve protection, just as they deserve respect.”

“What of humans? What of those who rely upon the magic you would eliminate?”

“Natural? What is more natural than magic?”

“We cannot give way. If we do, all we have invested in will vanish. Where will I be then?”

“Ebbing away, going who knows where … Why not use it? There is nothing wrong with that.”

“Gain? Gain from what should be an act of the purest altruism? You are mad. It will corrupt the effort.”

“Who wants to live forever?”

“Forever? Just long enough to make sure that the world is safe. Just long enough. Surely just long enough.”

“Weaken the curse. Why not? Just a little. Surely those to survive those fever fires would not then abuse the gift they have been permitted to preserve. Surely not.”

“They call themselves Once Dead. Many are as bad as any from whom they are descended. Perhaps the taint is in the talent.”

“Then what of our talent, my talent, this talent we have turned to good, to death, to preservation, to death, to life, to live.”

And the mountain sheep bleated and although Firekeeper knew the language of the Beasts she did not learn anything from what it said, for all it did was laugh.

“They argue out what brought them to this point,” Blind Seer said. “It is as you said. Humans live within their heads. In Virim’s mind, this is more real than the world without—the world he has clawed so deeply that it still bleeds from the wound.”

Firekeeper nodded. “Virim argues with himself. They do. He does. How strange it is. Even they—or he—does not seem to know if he is one or many. Which is the truth?”

“Both,” Blind Seer said simply. “Have you never seen a buck try to break both right and left, and so freeze in place? His body is holding still, but in his muscles he is running. So it is here.”

“What can we do?” Elation shrieked over the clamor. (Not one head turned at the sound. It seemed that the Virims heard only themselves.) “We cannot ask these for an end to the curse or even for its intensification. We could argue until summer became winter and then summer again, and never reach resolution.”

“Yet the answer we want is here,” Firekeeper said, clenching her fists in frustration. “I know it.”

She looked at Blind Seer for help, but the blue-eyed wolf only huffed his own confusion.

No wonder
, Firekeeper thought with sudden insight.
Like them he is trapped within an unresolved conflict. Like them, he has taken one step down the trail and found the scent no more clear.

She reached out and touched Blind Seer in sympathy, anchoring herself in the immediacy of the tickling guard hairs, in the denseness of the fur beneath. She could feel the warmth of his body, the rise and fall of his breath, the beating of his heart beneath.

And from this an idea came.

“Make Virim face reality,” she said. “That is our only answer. For too long—maybe even from years before he created the curse of querinalo—he has lived mostly within his own mind. Let us drag him out, make him face what the world has become.”

“How will we do that?” Elation cried.

“We will take him with us,” Firekeeper said, “back to the Nexus Islands.”

The clamor from the arguing Virims did not still one bit, but Firekeeper suddenly felt as if she, Blind Seer, and Elation were isolated in a pocket of silence. Almost instinctively she understood the nature of that silence. They had been trapped within the chaos of Virim’s mind, and in that chaos there was no place for anything but what Virim thought. Her decisiveness had encapsulated them, as it were, within her own mind.

At that moment, she noticed a fourth, a man standing a step away as if waiting to be invited to join their little group. At first she thought this was one of the Virims come, perhaps, to speak for the rest. Then she recognized the long iron-grey hair, the amber eyes that always seemed to hold a trace of mocking laughter.

“Meddler! You are here?”

The Meddler bowed neatly from the waist.

“I am indeed, Lady Wolf. You know I have tried to remain close to advise and assist you. A place such as this is not really very hard for me to manifest within.”

“I thought you said that Virim’s stronghold was protected from intrusion by such as you,” Firekeeper said sharply.

“It is,” the Meddler replied. “But when you entered, I was given a way in as well.”

Firekeeper felt rather than heard Blind Seer’s growl. She had never quite gotten around to explaining to him the strange price the Meddler had extracted from her in exchange for his help back when their initial search for Tiniel and Isende had led them into some very dangerous places.

She hoped she would not be forced to do so now—and hoped even more intensely that the Meddler would not take it upon himself to explain. She had no desire to explain to the wolf that she had let the Meddler kiss her, and that if he had asked for more, she would have felt honor bound to grant that favor as well.

And with that on your conscience,
she thought
, you had the temerity to criticize the Bound for their fidelity to Virim. It seems that you might be no wiser in your alliances.

But Blind Seer did not press, nor did the Meddler confide, and Firekeeper hurried to fill the awkward moment with words.

“We are taking Virim back to the Nexus Islands with us,” she said. “Perhaps he will find it harder to argue when he is among those who will die when the invaders come.”

The Meddler threw back his head and howled with laughter.

“That is wonderful!” he said. “Tell me, how are you going to force a sorcerer of such power to do your bidding?”

“As before,” Firekeeper said, reaching into the pouch at her belt. “With iron. I am not sure that it harmed Bruck who was Virim as much as he made it seem it did, but I must believe that he fears it.”

“Good,” the Meddler said, and Firekeeper thought that she saw him move back a pace or so, as if he, too, reflexively stayed clear of the metal. “And how will you get him back in time?”

Firekeeper frowned. “In time?”

“Before the invaders arrive,” the Meddler said. “Summer is upon us. Remember the fleets that I showed you? They have set sail and will reach the Nexus Islands long before Bear Moon reaches her first quarter. You cannot hope to travel back to New Kelvin and use the gate there to arrive in time—especially if you are slowed by a captive and the Bound harry your heels.”

Before Firekeeper could retort that Derian and the rest would not fall to the invaders without giving a good fight, Blind Seer interrupted.

“We will use the gate to return,” he said in a rumbling growl.

“Gate?” the Meddler repeated.

“Gate?” Firekeeper echoed, almost in the same breath.

“Gate,” Blind Seer repeated firmly. “There must be one here. The sorcerers of old relied upon them too greatly for Virim to have done without. We will find it, and if it does not go directly to the Nexus Islands, then I think it will take us to some point from which we can more easily reach the Nexus Islands.”

She thought she saw annoyance flicker in the Meddler’s amber eyes.

So he knew
, she thought,
or at least suspected.

The Meddler schooled his expression into one of admiration.

“I think you are right. There probably is a gate of some sort. However, how will you operate it?” He turned his attention wholly to Firekeeper. “I could operate the gate for you, Lady Wolf. You may recall that I have done such for you in the past.”

And been paid with a kiss,
she thought
, and apparently with access to my thoughts and dreams. That’s a higher price to pay than I knew.

Blind Seer huffed a laugh nearly as mocking as the Meddler’s own. “We have no need for your services, Meddler. When we find the gate, I will operate it for us.”

It was the blue-eyed wolf’s first admission of his power and abilities that was not tinged with shame. Indeed, he held his head with the pride of a hunter who knows he can outdistance the pack and earn the honor of the kill.

The Meddler looked delighted, but Firekeeper suspected that delight was feigned. She had no doubt the Meddler would have opened a hundred gates for her. She thought his interest in her and her ventures was sincere, but that didn’t mean it was an interest free from self-interest.

“Virim first,” she said. “Only after we have him will all this else matter. Elation, you have the sharp eyes of your kind, tell me this. How many greybeards are there in that muddle?”

The falcon, who had never ceased to watch the throng of arguing Virims, replied without pause. “More than I have talons upon my feet.”

“And beardless youths?”

“Some fewer, but still a good number.”

“And warriors clad in armor?”

“Two feet of talons at least.”

“And serious-eyed scholars?”

“More than that, of many ages and wearing countless styles of attire.”

“And mountain sheep?”

“One.”

“One only?”

“One.”

“Then that one is our prey.”

As Firekeeper reached into her pouch to find appropriate lengths of iron wire, the Meddler asked, “Why choose that one, simply because there is only one?”

“Not only,” Firekeeper said.

She considered her bow, but she did not want to kill Virim or even risk wounding him severely. She would need to hunt without using either that or her Fang.

The Meddler was looking at her as if he still desired an explanation, and she could see no harm in giving him at least a partial one.

“Virim’s resentment of the Old World and its power over the New dates from his youngest years, perhaps to the very time he realized his inborn ability would mean separation from home and all he loved, so that his masters could train and control him. We know this not only from the stories, but from the fact that there are quite young Virims amid those in the crowd.

“I think that each of those figures represents a time that Virim doubted himself, each time he came up with a path he could or could not take, a course of action that might or might not bring him his goal. In the century and more since he created the curse that would create genocide among those who had been not only his enemies and his rivals, but his friends, confidants, teachers, and perhaps even family, Virim has had much time for guilt and to argue with himself over the rights and wrongs of his actions.