Wolf's Blood (52 page)

“When the rulers of the Old World decided that the time had come to push west of the mountains, deeper into the New World, Virim tried to dissuade them. He failed, and decided to take more direct action.”

“To make querinalo,” Firekeeper said, impatient now. “And we know it worked.”

Bruck’s smile turned sly. “But isn’t knowing how it worked what you have come here to learn? Listen just a little more.”

Firekeeper felt a bit ashamed of herself.

“Talk,” she said. “Please.”

“Querinalo,” Bruck said, “is less a disease or illness in the conventional sense than it is a magical curse that mimics the course of a disease.”

Firekeeper nodded.

“A curse,” Bruck said. “A draining curse, a wasting curse, a curse that would remove the threat to the New World we had sworn to protect. We thought ourselves noble. We thought ourselves virtuous. It was not until the corpses began to accumulate that we realized we were also genocidal.”

Firekeeper tilted her head to one side, not knowing that last word. She thought about asking Bruck what it meant, but there was a strange look on his face, and she held her silence.

“Can you believe we thought about killing without thinking about the deaths?” Bruck asked.

Firekeeper nodded. She could indeed. She had seen that years ago, when angry human had fought angry human in a venture they called “war.” Only afterward had any seemed to consider that the “enemies” that they had fought were also mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, each one and every one, no matter how poor and how small, beloved by someone.

Bruck must have seen her understanding, for he went on.

“But what we had done was worse than that. We knew we would be draining away. We thought—someone thought, I can’t remember just who after all these years—that it would be a pity if all that life, all that energy, went to waste. So something else was added to the curse. We ad …”

He froze in midbreath, in midword, bound hands rising to claw at his throat. He made choking sounds, guttural and wet, smothered as if his breath was being squeezed from him.

Horrified, Firekeeper watched as the color began to drain from Bruck’s face. Bruck’s skin was naturally pale already, but this was different. The living pinkness of his skin was draining away from top to bottom, so his forehead was white in contrast to his nose, then his nose in contrast to lips suddenly white. Even his hair seemed to have less shine.

Firekeeper wanted to help the struggling man, but although she surged to her feet, Fang in hand, she could see nothing at which to strike, although that nothing was strangling Bruck. She thought it could not be a good thing to have his head lose blood, so she thrust her Fang back into its Mouth. Grabbing Bruck, she turned him so his feet were higher than his head.

Color did not return immediately, but Bruck seemed to breathe a touch easier. She was about to see if she could turn him completely around, perhaps hang’ his legs over a tree limb, when a low growl warned her back.

“Keep watch,”
Blind Seer said.

Then the great grey wolf leapt at Bruck, but stopped the merest distance away from the strangling human. By preference, wolves bite for the throat or the belly. Blind Seer’s attack did not seem to follow that pattern. Rather than biting and ripping, he was slashing at something, not attempting to take a hold or keep it, but as if he were cutting.

Firekeeper could not tell what manner of creature—if creature it was—was her partner’s target, but she could tell that Blind Seer was achieving some sort of success.

Bruck’s hands fell onto his chest, and he leaned back on the ground, dragging in breath in ragged gasps. Color was returning to his skin, rising from bottom to top, as it had fallen from top to bottom.

Firekeeper had not forgotten Blind Seer’s command that she keep watch, and she did so. Bruck was not going anywhere, not with his feet hobbled. Yet there was a listening silence in the surrounding forest that she did not care for, and she remained alert in case all of this was some sort of feint preceding an attempt to free Bruck.

She spared a glance to where Blind Seer appeared to have battered his invisible opponent to the point that a new form of attack was necessary. He was no longer slashing, but had bitten into something and was shaking it hard, shaking and twisting as if he sought to break bone and sinew.

No blood flowed from whatever wounds he had inflicted on his opponent, but the wolf himself had not been so fortunate. Long narrow weals trailed down his flanks, the fur stripped away as if removed by razors. Blood beaded from these marks, but Firekeeper saw no evidence of punctures.

She longed to learn if her Fang might find a target, when Blind Seer gave his prey a final violent shake, then sank back on his haunches. battered but without a doubt victorious.

Firekeeper tensed with alertness. Any hunter knew the time to strike was when the prey believed the hunters had been driven back. She spared a glance over at Blind Seer and satisfied herself that his injuries, while doubtless painful, were not severe.

“What was than?”
she asked.
“I saw nothing, but you went at it as an arrow does from a bow.”

Blind Seer shook, tiny splatters of blood catching the sunlight as they flew, then began licking his injuries.

“Ask Bruck what it was,”
he said.
“I think he must know.”

Bruck had clawed about so that he was seated trembling on the ground. His color had returned almost to normal, but his shivering increased as Firekeeper turned her attention on him.

“What was that?” she asked in Pellish.

“That was a waring,” Bruck said. “A warning to me that I am talking too much. Your pack mate broke the spell’s force. However, I suspect that the iron you wrapped around my wrists and ankles kept the spell from harming me as it might have done.”

“Some warning,” Firekeeper said, impressed. “It seemed that whatever it was tried to kill you.”

“Well,” Bruck said with a shrug, “my death would keep me from talking now wouldn’t it?”

Firekeeper glowered at the spellcaster.

“Is not enough.” she said. “Who was warning? Was some creature made by spell?”

Bruck looked indecisive, as if having narrowly escaped whatever weird death had been intended for him, he had no desire to risk such again. Firekeeper lowered her hand to where she wore her Fang sheathed at her hip, and Bruck was reminded that there were other dangers than whatever had sent the warning.

“My associates, my pack, if you like that term better … those are the ones who were warning me away from telling you too much. They tugged at what binds us to each other, reminding me that I cannot survive separated from them.”

“Virim’s pack did this?” Firekeeper asked, focusing on what little she had understood in this odd declaration.

Bruck’s lips thinned in a grimace so tight that for a moment Firekeeper thought something was attacking him again.

“We were Virim’s pack, but some moonspans past, under very strange circumstances. Virim died. Since then what unity that remained among us has dissolved.”

Firekeeper fought the urge to glance at Blind Seer. If these spellcasters didn’t know that Blind Seer had killed their One, better she did not give the blue-eyed wolf’s secret away.

“That is how it often is when the One dies or falls lame,” she said. “So those who would be One fight among themselves.”

Bruck grimaced again. “Rather say this fight had been going on for many years now. I don’t know who finally managed to kill Virim, but there had been those who wanted him gone since long before you were born, long before your parents were born, quite probably.”

Firekeeper shrugged. By her best estimate, she was at least twenty now. She had no idea how old her parents had been when they had joined forces with Prince Barden and attempted to colonize the lands west of the Iron Mountains. Twenty at least, probably. Maybe older.

So, Bruck spoke of a conflict that had been brewing for forty years at least? Had Firekeeper not met humans, this would have been difficult for her to comprehend. Wolf battles, for all their brutality, are short and those who live and still bear ill will after them leave and find a new pack. If they are particularly slow in realizing the magnitude of their wrongdoing, they are driven away.

Blind Seer said,
“Ask Bruck if we are safe staying here, or if we need to move. Since his life is in at least as great a danger as our own, I think he will answer honesty.”

Firekeeper translated the question.

Bruck considered. “I think you—we—are as save here as we would be anywhere in this vicinity. You have trapped this area rather carefully, haven’t you?”

Firekeeper grinned, but said nothing.

Bruck sighed. “I know you did. Our spies watched and reported. The order was to remain inside, but I was curious about some of what had been reported. so I slipped out. After all, who were they to give me orders?”

“Who were they?” Firekeeper echoed. “Maybe you tell. Maybe we keep you alive better then. Were these those who shared what you call this ‘great and noble venture’ thing?”

“All of us were, at one time,” Bruck said, “but Virim gave in to a weakness, and that weakness has been both our preservation and our destruction.”

Firekeeper glowered, and Bruck raised his bound hands to his face, as if to guard them from a blow.

“Stop frightening him, Firekeeper,”
Blind Seer said, not entirely unamused.
“You forget how terrifying you can he to those who do not know your impatience rarely goes further than growls.”

Firekeeper didn’t think that frightening Bruck was such a bad idea, but she obeyed Blind Seer’s direction. She banished the scowl from her face and reached into one of her belt pouches for one of the little jars of soothing ointment she had carried with her.

“Hold out your hands,” she said. “I not take iron wire off. but there is no need for you to feel more pain than must. While I put ointment on, you talk.”

Reassured, Bruck lowered his hands to where Firekeeper could reach them.

“Where was I? Oh, right. I was about to tell you about Virim’s weakness. I told you before how what you call querinalo is generated by a curse that drains away magical power and the life that is intertwined with it. That’s the key element to remember. It doesn’t destroy the power—except in the sense that the person to whom it originally belonged can no longer use it. It drains it, and what is drained away still exists.

“Now if you drain water away, it either forms a puddle—if the surface isn’t porous—or it disperses into the surrounding matter. If you prepare a receptacle for it, then you can collect it and take it elsewhere or use it for something.

“The same can be said to be true of this magical ability and the life that is intertwined with it. It doesn’t just vanish. It can be collected. If no effort is made to collect it, then it eventually disperses into the greater energy that surrounds us all. Do you understand?”

Firekeeper nodded. “I think so. Like water—goes or can be kept.”

Bruck nodded, reminding Firekeeper for a moment of Harjeedian in one of the aridisdu’s more officious moments. She found herself actually liking the spellcaster a little for that familiarity.

“Now, I think that originally Virim intended to let this magical force simply drain away. I don’t know if he had the thought himself, or if someone else suggested it to him, but somehow the idea arose that if the freed mana that resulted from querinalo’s operation could be collected, it could be used for something else, something very important.”

Bruck paused and swallowed hard. “It could be used to prolong the lives and youth of those who had joined in this noble venture. The spells to do so would be difficult, but compared to those we had created when crafting the curse that became querinalo, they were a minor challenge.

“I’m not going to pretend that I was among those who believed that this was a dangerous course of action. I wasn’t. I wasn’t among those who realized that in benefitting in such an intimate and essential manner from the creation of the curse, we were tainting our effort. I was young and ambitious and possessed of power. I was pretty easily convinced that prolonging my life—and thus extending my ability to serve as a guardian of the innocent Beasts of the New World—was a very good thing. At the worst it was payment, and, as someone pointed out, a good hunter eats what he kills.”

Firekeeper, fingertips busy daubing ointment on the leaking sore that now encircled one of Bruck’s ankles, couldn’t hide a shiver of revulsion. That last justification seemed a perversion of everything she and the wolves who had reared her held dear. She might have voiced her revulsion, but Blind Seer growled.

“The Story of the Songbirds all over again. The shape is different, but the justification all too similar. We are not so unalike, these humans and we Beasts.”

And Firekeeper remembering that tale and the shame of the wolf who had related it to her and Blind Seer long ago. held her tongue. However, she no longer wondered that Bruck’s fellows had been willing to kill him rather than let him speak. This was ugliness, a deep rot that corrupted any ideal.

“So that’s what we did.” Bruck said simply. “Before this plan came up, we had resolved to live out our normal lives in service to the cause. Now that service became the means of enabling us to prolong the cause forever. Forevermore, the New World would be safe from the magics of the old, but a few generations ago. something changed.”

Firekeeper looked at Bruck, willing him to raise his eyes to meet her own. He did, and she saw both puzzlement and shame there.

“Querinalo changed. The nature of our curse changed. No longer did it slay outright. Instead it tortured, but permitted the sufferer—if that one was sufficiently devoted to the magic within—to live with some magical ability intact. Believe me when I say I do not know why it changed. I have some suspicions, but I do not know, nor can I claim either credit or blame.

“Something else changed when querinalo changed. Our immortality began to become—it is difficult to explain. None of us began to age, nor did we lose our vitality. Rather it was as if what was resilient within us began to stiffen. Traits of character became not merely habits, but defining elements. I suppose for me that it was fortunate—or unfortunate, given my current situation as your prisoner—that one of my defining traits has always been curiosity. Curiosity is one of the seeds of creativity, so that remained to me as well, but many of my associates were less fortunate.