The Wolf's Call Read online

  The cheering was unexpected, perhaps because I assumed none of the people gaping up at us possessed the strength for it. But cheer they did, a thin, tremulous thing at first, like a chord struck to the strings of a lyre by untutored hands, growing by the second to something full and vibrant. Hands raised in gratitude, people went to their knees, others wept, but they all called out in worship to the Darkblade.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” I said when he finally turned away from the supplicant throng. I recall his expression as being strangely lacking in either triumph or exultation. Instead he wore a small smile of satisfaction that reminded me of when my mother put the final stitch in a well-crafted jacket.

  “Oh, cheer up, little colt,” he told me. “After all, I just made you sister to a god.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  And so we stayed amongst the slaves, or the artisans, as my brother insisted they now be called. Although we were two amongst many, no hand was raised against us. I soon came to understand that Kehlbrand had captured them that first day; his words now bound them tighter than any chain. We lived in their huts and suffered their stink whilst he organised the construction of sturdier homes, finding those amongst the artisans with building skills and setting them up as foremen. Hovels were duly torn down and new houses were crafted from the great piles of rubble that surrounded the tor. Every night we would eat with a different family and my brother would speak to them of our great mission.

  “Your enslavement was a crime,” he would tell them as they listened, gazes rapt and tongues stilled by awe. “A crime visited upon you by a cabal of wicked men who call themselves priests. Long have they led the Stahlhast astray, long have they shielded us from the true word of the Unseen. Your liberation is but the first step towards the day when the crimes of the priests will be punished. For now we must build, craft something of such greatness they can never pull it down.”

  At his insistence I spent most of my time tending the sick or teaching the Stahlhast tongue, always with a kindly smile on my lips I knew rarely touched my eyes. The artisans never regarded me with the same awe as they did my brother. Instead, I was treated with a wary respect, sometimes even reverence due to the blood I shared with their divine liberator.

  “What am I doing here?” I asked him one evening as we sat together in the mean hut he had chosen for us. Kehlbrand had forbidden a move to one of the new houses until they were all completed. He had spent the day at work, as was his wont now, labouring under the guidance of a master builder who only weeks before had been nearly whipped to death for dropping an ore basket. Every day my brother rose with the dawn and worked until dark, although he never seemed to tire. I, however, sat slumped by the fire, wearied by a day that had made me witness the prolonged death of an infant boy from the flux.

  “You don’t need me for this farce,” I added. “It’s you they worship.”

  “I do need you,” he insisted. “I will not always be in their midst. In my absence you will be the Darkblade’s eyes. And more than that.” His expression grew more intent, voice lowering a notch. “You will also be my hunter.”

  “Hunter? For what.”

  “How many thousands reside in the shadow of the Fist? How many more will we find at the other tors?”

  I gave a tired shrug. “A great deal, I suppose.”

  “Yes, a great deal. And amongst so many, is it not reasonable to assume there are others like you?”

  My weariness dissipated as understanding dawned, replaced with a growing unease. “You wish me to hunt out slaves with the Divine Blood.”

  “We no longer use that word, dear sister. But yes. You will find them, and bring them to me.”

  I lowered my gaze as unease gave way to fear. “The Laws Eternal dictate . . .”

  “Any not of the Hast found to have the Divine Blood are to be killed, I know.” Sensing my fear, he shuffled closer, laying the hard muscular branch of his arm across my shoulders. “Since when have the Laws Eternal troubled us?”

  “If they find out . . .”

  “When they find out, you have my assurance it won’t matter.”

  “How can you be so certain of everything? How can your path be so clear? I have dreamt none of this.”

  His arm tightened, drawing me into the comforting heat of his body. “Because I answered the second question, remember?” he said, fingers playing through my hair. “Would you like to know the answer now?”

  To my surprise, I didn’t. I recall a sense of disorientation in that moment, as if the world had shifted around me bringing change and knowledge I neither wanted nor understood. Even so, I had to know, for my fate was ever bound to his. “Yes, brother,” I said.

  He hugged me tighter for a moment before gently easing me away and turning my face towards his. “‘What is the true nature of a god?’ That’s what the old bastard asked me. It is, of course, a ridiculous question. You can no more discern truth from the divine than spin gold from water. That was our brother’s answer, incidentally. Possessed of sufficient vagary and basic insight to be acceptable, for the priests are not interested in elevating a Mestra-Skeltir with genuine wisdom. They care only for power, cherishing their petty luxuries and privileges won through the blood and toil of the Hast and these beggared creatures.”

  He paused, a reflective smile playing on his lips. “I could have just given them Tehlvar’s answer, or some variation of it that would have satisfied the Great Priest, alleviate his growing suspicion. But I find I enjoy his discomfort far too much to do that. And so I told him. ‘Fear,’ I said. ‘Gods are not born of love, sacrifice, scripture or faith. Gods are born and succoured by fear. Take you, for example. Your service to the Unseen is absurd. You shun the company of women, at least publicly, and spend your days grovelling to something you have never set eyes on, a voice you have never heard. All because you fear the chance it might actually exist.’”

  Kehlbrand’s smile turned into a laugh, soft and short. “He surprised me then, little colt. I had expected rage, you see. I had expected, even wanted him to rail at me, call me a blasphemer, a vile heretic. Had he done so, I would have laughed at him for a time and walked away, for I am tired of their rituals. I have long suspected that shunning the priests might provoke discord amongst the Hast, but there are no Skeld who can now stand against me, so what does it matter? But he didn’t rage or rail. Instead he grew very still and pale of face. ‘What causes you to imagine,’ he said, ‘that I have never heard the voice of the Unseen?’

  “For a time we just stood and stared at one another. I heard truth in his words, Luralyn. Disgusting old hypocrite he may be, but in that moment he was not a liar. To him the Unseen remains real, as real as you and I. And so I found a new answer to the second question. What is the true nature of a god? Fear is part of it, yes. But also power. The power that comes with belief. The power to render slaves into willing servants through carefully applied kindness, coupled with the fear that it might all be taken away. Power that could bind the Stahlhast to a bunch of grasping old men for centuries through promise of the Unseen’s favour and fear that its loss will bring the crushing shame of defeat. But their power is limited, made pitiful by their failure to realise its potential. To wield such power so that it might change the world, I must not merely believe in a god, but become one.”

  He frowned at the troubled scowl on my face and reached out a large, warm hand to cup my cheek. “Have no fear for me. My mind is not broken, merely enlightened. You ask the source of my certainty. This is it. For what manner of god would I be if I couldn’t divine the future?”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  The first I found was a girl. No older than fifteen and born to the tor. A lifetime of squalor and infrequent rations made her appear little more than a child. Her head barely reached my shoulder, and her limbs poked like pale, unwashed spindles from the sacking she wore.

 
“Your name?” I asked her in the southland tongue, receiving only a fearful shake of her tousled head in response. She kept her eyes lowered, rendered incapable of meeting my gaze by a lifetime of subservience. She shuddered as I reached through the veil of matted hair to cup her chin, gently but firmly raising it until the greasy tendrils fell away to reveal her face. It was a soot-smeared white oval, striking in its resemblance to a porcelain-faced doll I had once owned as a child.

  “Look at me,” I told her, keeping hold of her chin until, slowly, she opened her eyes. Tears streaked through the soot on her cheeks as she gazed at me, terror plain in the wide, black pupils.

  “You must have a name,” I said, and she shook her head once more.

  “Girl,” she murmured, soft as a breeze. “They only call me girl.”

  “Your mother? Father?”

  Another shake of the head, accompanied by a shift in her bony shoulders. “Never knew ’em.”

  She spoke just loud enough for me to discern an accent this time, a coarse echo of the dialect native to the borderlands. I saw a tic of annoyance pass across her face as my hand lingered on her chin, and sensed a small flicker of something inside her, the same something that had led me to her. A fractional widening of her eyes told me she had sensed the same thing in me.

  “You are very special,” I said. “I shall call you Eresa. It means ‘jewel’ in the Stahlhast tongue.”

  “Jewel?” she asked. The genuine puzzlement on her besmirched brows brought a smile to my lips, the first real smile in weeks. I have come to understand these many years later that this was when it began, when my heart began its long journey away from my origins. This small, wretched girl and her simple curiosity had stirred something new within me, something not of the Hast.

  “A shiny precious stone,” I said. “Very rare, like you.” I took her hand and led her away from the midden where she had been picking bones from the accumulated muck. “Come along. I believe it’s time for you to have a bath.”

  Eresa, it transpired, had the power to conjure sparks from thin air. They were little more than small flowers at first, brief fluttering blue embers lighting the gloom of our hut much to our mutual delight and my brother’s satisfaction. In time, with a judicious amount of coaxing and encouragement, her flowers grew into sustained and powerful bursts of pure energy. This wisp of a girl was soon capable of birthing flame in any combustible object or stopping the hearts of rats and, some years later, the soldiers she would face in battle.

  I found another a month later, a tall youth who had gained considerable muscle thanks to the improved diet Kehlbrand provided. I felt his power blossom as he worked the pick into a slab of stone in the quarry, the tool biting deeper than the others, too deep in fact to be the result of his improving frame.

  “It only works with stone, mistress,” he said, shuffling uncertainly under my careful scrutiny. “I just look at it and it crumbles. Kept it hidden all this while. It seemed for the best.”

  “Indeed it was,” I assured him. “Don’t call me mistress. My name is Luralyn, and it’s the only name you need address me by. What is yours?”

  It shames me to say I cannot recall his true name now, for at the time it scarcely seemed to matter. I named him Varij, the ancient word for “hammer.” Following this it became my habit to name all those I found. Casting away their former titles was a way of binding them to the Darkblade. “You are reborn,” I would tell them, words that soon became a mantra. “You are made new in the sight of the Darkblade. You will be his shield and his lance in the battles to come.”

  I could find no more Divine Blood at the Fist, despite three months of searching. By then the transformation of those who toiled in the quarries from slaves to artisans was complete. The provision of improved housing and better food had succeeded far better in increasing the amount of ore hewn from the tor than any amount of terror or whipping. But I knew it was more than just full bellies and sound walls that spurred them to such feats of labour. I could see it on every face as the Darkblade made his farewells with the promise of a return the following year: complete and utter devotion. Truly, he had made himself a god.

  I watched Kehlbrand prepare to leave with a dull ache in my chest and a familiar cloudiness in my head that came from a troubled sleep. “You dreamt last night, didn’t you?” he said, pausing in the act of strapping his quiver to his saddle. “You always get the same look on your face when you dream. Like you’ve eaten a sour apple but can’t remember where you found it.”

  “It found me,” I said. “I didn’t go looking for it this time.”

  He raised an eyebrow at the gravity in my voice, sensing more than just my frequently expressed bitterness at being left behind. I was to take Eresa and journey to the other tors, freeing the enslaved and spreading the Darkblade’s word, whilst also searching for more jewels with particular talents. He would take Varij and the warriors of five Skeld south into the borderlands.

  “There’s an outpost of the Venerable Kingdom we’ve never been able to storm,” he told me the night before. “Walls too high to scale. But with our new brother”—he gave a meaningful glance at Varij—“I believe they won’t stand so high for much longer. Once it’s gone we’ll have a hundred miles of border country to raid at will.”

  Now I watched him tug the ties on his quiver tight, regarding me with a faint but discernible resentment. As the years went by the certainty with which he pursued his plans increased, but so did his dislike of anything that might disrupt them. “So, what did you see?”

  I gave a small shake of my head, which did little to dispel the clouds. It is always this way with unbidden True Dreams. The unasked-for gifts of Heaven are often vague but always troubling.

  “A man,” I said. “Tall, like you. Strong like you. I saw him fight, and he fights well.”

  “You’ve watched me kill men who stood a head higher than I,” he responded with an amused snort. “Stronger too. As for fighting well, who can fight as well as a god?” His voice held a mirthful note, but not, I noted, as mirthful as when he first began to describe himself as such.

  “It wasn’t just that.” I closed my eyes, trying to recall the details of the vision. It had been partially formless, the figures ghostlike, insubstantial, except for the tall man. “He was on a boat, killing men,” I said. “He saved a woman, children . . .”

  “How noble.” Kehlbrand’s hand slapped against the pommel of his saddle as he prepared to haul himself onto the back of his horse. “I’ll be sure to compliment him if I ever meet him . . .”

  “I heard his name,” I cut in. “It is also your name. The name I found for you.”

  Kehlbrand stopped, his foot lowering slowly from the stirrup as he turned back to me. The moment I began my journey away from the Stahlhast had come when Eresa’s besmirched and puzzled face brought a smile to my lips, but this was when I took the first true step away from my brother. It was a backward step, in fact, provoked by the depth of malice made stark in the suddenly ugly mask of his face. It was a face thousands would behold in years to come, some with love, more with terror. This was my first glimpse of the Darkblade and it brought tears to my eyes, for I hadn’t known until this moment that my brother could ever be rendered so ugly.

  “And where do I find him?” he asked, voice mirthless now and soft with lethal certainty. “This thief of names.”

  It took me the space of several hard, chest-aching heartbeats to answer, so transfixed was I by his expression. “He bore the name long before you did,” I said, my voice shot through with a tremor I detested almost as much as his transformed face. He had never made me afraid before, and I found I had to cough before speaking on. “And you will not find him. He will find you.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The carriage heaved beneath him before taking on a sustained tremble as its wheels shifted from the smooth brick surface of the road to something rougher. Cobbles perhaps? Va
elin wondered. If so, it might mean they had come to a city and this journey could finally be at an end.

  He was alone in the carriage save for a small mouse that had somehow contrived to gain entry during one of the nightly rest stops. Vaelin would feed it crumbs from the bread shoved through the slat in the base of the carriage door once a day, along with a small amount of water in a wooden bowl. The mouse never came close enough for him to reach, its small but apparently keen mind having calculated the length of his chains. They were heavy and short, fixed to an iron bracket in the floor. On the first day of the journey, he had tested his strength against the bracket, promptly concluding it would take the strength of ten men to have any hope of dislodging it.

  This mobile prison featured wooden walls of thick timber. Like the door they had no window, and he could discern only faint glimmers of daylight through the tiny gaps in the planking. He kept track of the days by counting the meals, now amounting to fifteen. In that time he had seen no other living soul nor heard another voice beyond the muffled conversations of the guards and drovers.

  His years in an Alpiran dungeon had habituated him to both solitude and confinement, also the folly of dwelling on the fate of friends. But in those days he had still possessed his song, and the walls that held him were no barrier to its reach. Now he had only his memories and the nagging, persistent need to know what had become of Ellese and the others.