The Black Wolves

  Tyras sighed as he fumbled at his sash, fingers clumsy with cold. “Getting into a knife fight with your rich cousin is just the stupid kind of thing you always do, Gil. Especially over some cheap flower girl. I heard your cousin will sire children but always walk with a limp. It was a close thing.”

  “It wasn’t close at all.” Gil laughed, because if he didn’t laugh he would break something. “I knew exactly where I was cutting.”

  “So you say.” Tyras finally produced a small knife and thrust it into Gil’s hands. “For the love of the Opener, could you get on with it?”

  Gil worked the knife’s point against the door’s lock. “Careful. People at court are only allowed to curse in the name of Beltak the Shining One.”

  “Go fuck goats, Gil!”

  “Quiet!” When Gil used that tone, his friends always obeyed.

  A gust of wind blew a drenching burst of rain over them. They waited, shuffling restlessly while wind and rain did their worst. Gil gave a grunt of satisfaction. He pulled out the knife, turned the handle, and swung the door open.

  A body tumbled out.

  “Drunk!” proclaimed Kasad sagely.

  “Dead,” said Gil as blood from the blow that had stove in the back of the coachman’s head melded with rainwater in the gutter and flowed away down the street.

  The dead man’s silk head covering had begun to unravel. The fabric swirled around the man’s pale fingers and caught over his gaping mouth like a gag. His lips and face were contorted in a grimace of agony. Dead, the man looked horrifically gruesome. But the two silver bracelets on each arm had a glamor that drew the eye, as if something alive were caught inside them.

  “Oh, piss.” Kasad vomited onto the street.

  Tyras pulled his feet away from the body. “Oh the hells!”

  Gil set a foot up on the carriage and stuck his head into the interior, probing around with a hand. “How did he get himself killed on the inside of a locked door? There’s blood greasing the floor. Ah! It’s on the forward-facing seat as well. It looks as if he was killed and then fell forward and knocked the handle askew. But the door was locked. He can’t have locked it after he was dead, so who did and where is the key?”

  Tyras peered into the dark interior. “A strange turn of events, truly.”

  Gil grabbed a coin pouch from the damp floor of the carriage and shook it, then opened the strings and peered inside. “Whoever killed him didn’t steal his coin.”

  Kasad stumbled up to them, leaning against the carriage. Rain sluiced down his body. Water streamed past his boots as it ran along the stonework paving of the street. “What are we going to do now, Gil?”

  Tyras glanced at the brothel. No one had come out to investigate. He shivered as rain slammed into the pavement. “We’ll walk until we find another conveyance. Then go to my house and send out a servant to alert the constabulary.”

  Gil shook his head. “We’re not walking anywhere at night, in this weather, with a prince in tow. Anyway, where’s your sense of fun? Ty, you grab his feet and we’ll heave him back inside. I think we should sell his bracelets.”

  “You’re already in trouble with your family,” objected Tyras.

  “How much more trouble can I get into? I’m the only male in the house who has balls. They have to keep me for stud service. Anyway, I desperately need coin.”

  Kasad stared at the dead man. He looked ready to retch again. “No one will redeem his bracelets. Ri Amarah silver is cursed.”

  “You’re right. The bracelets are nothing without the man. So we’ll sell his corpse, too.”

  “Sell his corpse?” echoed Tyras, gaping like a fish.

  “How can you get coin for a dead man?” Kasad asked.

  The idea unfurled in his head with lightning swiftness. He grinned, and as if his smile was a threat, his friends took a step away from him. He didn’t blame them. They knew what he was capable of when these stormy moods overtook him. He tucked fingers under one edge of the cloth and pulled it away from the man’s head.

  “Gil!” cried Tyras in a shocked tone.

  “Haven’t you always wondered if they really have horns?”

  The dead man’s hair was as black as their own. That wasn’t what made them fall silent just as the rain and wind slackened.

  “I’ll be cursed to all the hells,” murmured Gil, eyes wide. “It’s true.”

  Peeping through the thick curls were two horns each no longer than a woman’s thumb.

  “Enne preserve us,” mumbled Kasad. “Now we are cursed for seeing what is forbidden.”

  “Are you asking to be arrested and condemned to a work gang, Gil?” demanded Tyras. “I want no part of this.”

  “You two have the nerves of old men.” Gil tugged the silk roughly back into place, concealing the horns. “Help me! I’ll bet we can find someone in the night market who’ll pay good coin to see what we just saw. I heard people pay a bounty for dead Silvers. Maybe they grind up the horns for medicinal potions or maybe they just hate them because they’re rich and foreigners.”

  “Like our grandfathers?” asked Tyras with an unusual snap in his tone.

  “Our grandfathers were soldiers who saved the Hundred from a terrible war. That’s the difference, isn’t it?”

  He and Tyras swung the dead man back into the carriage and laid him on the blood-soaked rear seat with his head lolling forward and his knees bent and legs twisted to brace him so he wouldn’t slide off.

  “Get in, Kas,” said Gil cheerfully, warming to his plan.

  “I can’t,” said Kasad. “If my mother finds out I’ve touched a Silver’s corpse and seen such an impious thing…”

  “Then you’re on your own.”

  Being on his own was always the situation Kasad avoided. With a groan, he climbed in to huddle on the forward seat.

  “I’ll drive,” said Gil.

  “The hells you will,” said Tyras, who had already anticipated this suggestion and gotten hold of the reins. “We can leave Kas to keep company with our dead friend here, but I’ll drive and you’ll tell me where we’re going.”

  “I don’t want to stay in here alone!” shouted Kasad. “Their corpses give off noxious fumes that choke any but their own kind.”

  Gil laughed. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. What I wonder is why this fellow was stuck driving people around the city instead of making his fortune in trade like the rest of them. Maybe the Silvers have poor as well as rich folk, just as the rest of us do. Let’s get out of here before whoever killed him comes back looking for us.”

  He slammed the door and clambered up onto the driver’s seat.

  Tyras flicked the coachman’s discarded whip over the horse’s back. The nag was eager to get moving.

  “Where are we going?” Tyras asked once they had negotiated the first corner and rumbled down a deserted avenue lined by compounds shut up for the night.

  “Like I said. Wolf Quarter.”

  “I don’t know, Gil. You’re in so much trouble with your destitute family they don’t even let you carry an eating knife when you go out. Why should I just do what you tell me?”

  “Go home to your mother, Lord Tyras. Have a posset of sweet tea and some bean-curd cakes so you won’t crack your teeth on anything hard.”

  Tyras stiffened, then shook out the reins as the horse faltered at a corner. “May your balls wither and fall off, Gil. You’ll kill us all someday.” He grinned, angling the coach to the right. “Let’s go.”

  By the time they reached Canal Street and Four Quarters Bridge, the clouds were clearing off. Four Quarters Bridge was a lovely span, built up on pilings with a bridge from each quarter meeting over the wide intersection of the two canals. At night the entrances onto the bridge were closed by gates.

  They pulled up beside the Bell Quarter guardhouse. Although it was no longer raining, they looked drowned, clothes bunched in wet ripples down their bodies. Tyras’s curls were utterly gone; hair twined down his neck like tendrils of water
weed trying to choke him. Two guards strolled out, irritated at having to come out from under a roof. One carried a truncheon and the other a whip.

  “We’ll get arrested,” muttered Tyras. “Then I can say I told you so.”

  “Let me do the talking.”

  The guard with the truncheon halted at the horse’s head, looking over the nag with an expression of almost comical disbelief. “Your names?”

  “I am Lord Gilaras of Clan Herelia. This is a man I’ve hired to drive, no one important. And a cursed poor driver, too, if you take my meaning.”

  Tyras groaned under his breath, hands tightening on the reins.

  “Where may you be off to, my lord? At this untimely late hour when most folk obey the curfew?” The guard had a firm grip on his truncheon and no patience for youthful nonsense.

  Gil smiled. “Wolf Quarter, ver. Where else?”

  The man snorted. “You’ll lose all your money.”

  “Haven’t got any to lose,” replied Gil cheerfully.

  The guard with the whip saluted him with a mocking flourish a hair away from insult. “This is a Silver’s coach. How’d you come by it?”

  Tyras stiffened.

  Gil almost laughed aloud at this predictable interrogation. “A friend of ours gave us the name of a coaching establishment. We spent all our coin renting the coach, on a dare.”

  “Did you now, my lord?” said Whip. The lamps burning at the guardhouse porch and hanging over the gate gave plenty of light with which to observe the meaningful glance the man shared with his comrade.

  Truncheon hefted the truncheon. His bare arms looked strong. “I never heard those cursed suspicious Silvers rented out their livelihoods to honest Hundred folk like us. But maybe they can’t refuse a lord.”

  “Very true.” Gil looked the man straight in the eye, holding the gaze. “My grandfather was General Sengel. People just don’t like to say no to me.”

  Truncheon tapped the other guard on the arm. “No sense getting a foot in the antics of palace lads.” He turned back to Gil. “You may proceed, my lord.”

  The guards retreated to the guardhouse. Bells tinkled along the length of the bridge as the Bell Quarter gate swung open. Tyras drove across toward the Wolf Quarter gate. From high on the span they had a clear view of Law Rock, the massive promontory that rose above the city.

  “Do you believe the story about how Law Rock came to be?” asked Gil.

  “What story?” Tyras kept his eyes on the bridge.

  “Back in ancient days, so long ago that the seven gods had not yet come into being, the Four Mothers shaped the land. Being so different, they went to war. When the Water Mother sent her watery dragons against her sister Earth, the Earth Mother flung a spear of stone at the beasts. The Fire Mother intervened with bolts of lightning and broke the stone shaft into pieces. One fragment pierced the body of the larger dragon and pinned it to the earth. The dragon’s watery essence transformed into the River Istri. And the fragment of the huge spear became Law Rock. The thousand stairs by which we ascend to the top were carved in later.”

  “Where do you hear those ridiculous tales?” Tyras said with a snort.

  “My grandmother sang them all to me, Ty. You want to make fun of her?”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  As they passed the Wolf Quarter gate and rattled away along a lantern-lit street, Kasad began retching noisily.

  “No worries, Kas, I got through the gates without a mention of your name,” Gil called back. “No one will know you were with me.”

  “The scent in here is sickening.” Kasad’s muffled voice broke off into a string of gargling coughs. “… just not got anything left to heave.”

  “No need for details.” Tyras shuddered. He nudged Gil hard with a boot. “Now where?”

  “The night market at the docks.”

  Tyras gave him a wild look but fortunately did not argue.

  Most of the compounds in Wolf Quarter were closed up tight against the night, and the only lights burning were watch-lights mandated for each neighborhood. Things got livelier down along the dockside streets, where everyone knew the king had agents skimming off the top of the unregulated markets that flourished at night despite the tax reapers and toll agents. Groups of loitering men watched the coach pass. Slurs and curses drifted their way, but no one molested them.

  Gil directed them to an open gate flanked by a pair of wood statues, dragonling guardians with sinuous bodies and weeping eyes. A sign swayed in the wind, marked by a snake with a head at either end. The place had once been a temple dedicated to the Lady of Beasts but now was a tavern.

  “The hells,” exclaimed Tyras. “We could get arrested for going into a place like this. Isn’t this a nest of poisonous agitators who call for the overthrow of the king? Are you insane, Gil? Do you want to get your balls cut off like your brothers did?”

  “My brothers were children when that happened, not traitors. Anyway, we can’t get arrested. We’re too highborn. Haven’t you figured out yet that our rank protects us no matter what we do? Why do you think I went after my cousin? The law was never going to touch him for what he did to that flower girl.”

  Men armed with cudgels allowed them to pass. Gil wasn’t sure what part of the sprawling building had been part of the temple compound back in his grandparents’ time. The tavern now was a series of roofs supported by stone pillars and wood posts. The place was crowded with people drinking, men and women mixing together in the way common to the Hundred but which was never allowed in the palace.

  At the sight of a Ri Amarah carriage come to a halt, all the talk ceased.

  Gil was genuinely startled when every person in sight rose in silence and stared.

  An elderly woman limped out, leaning on a cane. She looked so old she might have once worshipped at this temple before it was shuttered.

  “What is this, my lords?” she asked without blinking an eye. “I am surprised to see palace youths at my humble establishment.”

  Tyras shifted uncomfortably. From inside Kasad said, “Where are we?”

  Gil swung down from the driver’s bench and made a polite curl of the hand for greeting in the sign language once known by everyone in the Hundred.

  The old woman’s eyebrows lifted. “I’m surprised a palace lad like you knows the hand-talk, since there are folk who live their whole lives in the upper palace without ever learning a single word of the Hundred-speech we Hundred folk have spoken for generations down here.”

  “I learned the hand-talk from my grandmother. Her ancestors have been in the Hundred as long as yours, I daresay, verea. Her people just happened to be so wealthy and well connected that one of King Anjihosh’s Qin soldiers married her.” He grinned his sweetest grin. “You can’t blame me for that.”

  Her stare did not soften. “What do you want?”

  “I hear there are folk who will pay a bounty for dead Silvers,” he said in a low voice.

  “Is that what you hear?”

  “Why would I say so if it were not?”

  “Hard up for coin, are you? Or just bored and looking for a fight you’ll never be brought before the law for starting, while our lads will be arrested and sent out on work gangs if they throw even one punch at a lord like you?”

  “I really have a dead Silver in the coach,” he retorted, annoyed at her shrewdness. “Give me the bounty, and you can have the corpse.”

  “If you killed him I suppose you’ve a need to pass off the crime onto someone else. Onto people like us.”

  “We didn’t kill him! We hired him for the night to drive us about on our diversions. He was killed while he was waiting on the street. We saw nothing, only found him afterward with his head smashed in.”

  “If one of my grandsons were to tell that story to the constabulary, what do you suppose the constabulary would say?”

  He glanced around to see that men had taken up stations all around the courtyard. “What were we to do? I hear people say Silvers are bootlicking flatterers
who keep the king happy with monthly infusions of coin. People have little enough love for them and their closed doors and their hidden women and their heaps and heaps of coin. We couldn’t help that unknown and unseen criminals decided to murder the man. But I’ve heard rumors of bounties for their silver bracelets, for I hear there’s a magic laid on them that people covet. I’ve heard owning even one bracelet can turn a clan rich if they burnish themselves with spell-wrapped silver. I’ve heard other things about them, too. Things I don’t want to speak out loud. So. What’s it to be? How much?”

  “How much?” She offered a rude two-finger salute. “How much time will I give you to get the hells out of my respectable establishment? As much time as it takes you to turn around and drive right back out of here.”

  Gil knew better than to confront an old woman with that look in her eye and tens of thugs awaiting her order to bash his head in.

  He swung back up. “Let’s get out of here, Ty.”

  Tyras was clearly rattled as a snared bird, for he made a terrible mess of getting the coach around and finally out the gate while every gaze there watched them with a hostility so thick, Gil felt it as waves of hate on the air.

  “I told you we should have left the dead man,” Tyras muttered.

  They hadn’t gotten a block down the dark street when six men stepped into the street, forcing Tyras to drag the poor exhausted horse to a stop. Armed with staves, the toughs slouched forward. One of their number took hold of the horse’s harness. Another stepped right up beside the driver’s bench and grasped hold of Gil’s sandaled foot, offering him a gap-toothed smile.

  “Heard you palace boys had a bit of trouble. We’d be glad to take the stink of that dead Silver off your hands.”

  Tyras sucked in a sharp breath.

  “How much?” said Gil coolly.

  “We won’t beat the shit out of you.” The gap-toothed smile vanished into a gaze as emotionless as a slab of stone.

  “Gil…” Tyras muttered.

  Gil shook his head. “Not enough. I’ll accept a gold cheyt for the coach and the dead man and his bracelets. That would be a bargain for you.”

  The man’s grip tightened on Gil’s ankle. “A bargain for you would be going home instead of lying on the street with your head stove in.”