This was unusual. Until the Supreme Court stopped the government from administering the drug gado to any lupi it caught, Rule’s people hadn’t dared live together in large numbers. Most clanhomes couldn’t house even half their clan’s members, and clans hadn’t considered it safe to have too many of their members working at the same place.
Nokolai was different because of Isen…and Vochi.
Isen had known for a long time that lupi couldn’t continue to live secretly. The world had changed too much. He’d planned for the day they came out into the open; he’d worked with Wythe clan to make that happen, using the country’s legal system. Even before that, though, he’d been preparing. First he’d created a pretext for gathering forty or fifty clan to him—the fiction that Clanhome housed a religious cult. In addition to the homes here, he’d built dormitory-type housing for “visiting brethren.” After Nokolai went public, he’d added a second dormitory and additional houses.
Nokolai could, at need and with some crowding, house their entire clan.
Even so, and even now, not all Nokolai lived here. Many remained scattered in California, Oregon, and Washington, keeping their ears perked and their eyes open. That was both strategy and necessity. War was expensive. Nokolai was a wealthy clan, but even it couldn’t afford to fully support all of its members for a long stretch. Not when a large chunk of that wealth came from the businesses it owned, where its people worked.
The decision to operate businesses that employed clan had been Isen’s. But he couldn’t have implemented it without Vochi’s help.
Vochi had always been a small clan, suffering even more than most from the limited fertility common to those of the Blood. It had always thrown too many submissives, too few fighters. Add to that a peculiar interest in accumulating wealth, and Vochi could have been the skinny kid in glasses getting picked on by the jocks…or, during times of clan strife, the skinny white guy who got caught on the wrong turf when the Crips and the Bloods were slugging it out.
Vochi knew this. They’d first submitted to Nokolai sixteen hundred years ago. Nokolai had defended Vochi ever since, and Vochi had done much in return for Nokolai. They were the reason Nokolai was the wealthiest clan—their acumen and, more recently, Isen’s understanding that money meant power in the human world. And for better or worse, that was the world lupi lived in.
In, but not of. They had much in common with humans, but they were not human. The clans could not be run the way humans ran their societies.
Human crowds reminded Rule of flocks of birds or children, unable to tolerate stillness for long. He stood beside his father at the center of roughly three hundred mostly still and silent people. Mostly, because there were humans in this crowd, too—female clan, who were as quiet as they could manage. But most were lupi, with a wolf’s instinctive understanding of the value of stillness. Most were Nokolai. Their Rho had called for quiet. They obeyed. Even with that hard pulse stirring them, they could hold quiet and wait…for now. As long as the rhythm didn’t pick up.
But not all here were Nokolai. Laban, Leidolf, and Vochi had each gathered into a knot of their own, surrounded by Nokolai. They would be feeling the tension. They were close enough to smell Isen’s anger. They’d hear the massed heartbeats around them, like a distant ocean. Leidolf would react to this differently than the other two. Rule held their heartbeats to a slow, steady rhythm. They were alert, but calm in their stillness.
Laban and Vochi were still, too—for a wolf’s reason. Fear.
The gathering was not, however, completely silent.
“Your find didn’t work?” Lily said to Cynna, her voice very low.
Cynna shook her head. “Mountains are tricky. I can find through dirt, but even small amounts of quartz will distort things unless I have a really good pattern. Which I don’t. I’ll work up a more complete pattern, but that will take time.”
“Emanuel Korski,” someone called from the rear of the crowd.
“On duty,” Pete said loudly. “Excused.”
“Matt Briggs,” another voice called from up near the front of the crowd. Pete responded with the same two phrases: On duty. Excused.
Lily drummed her fingers on her thigh. “About Laban…they haven’t been subordinate to Nokolai for very long, in lupi terms.”
“Less than thirty years this time,” Cynna whispered back. “But they’ve submitted several times over the years to different clans. This is their third dance with Nokolai.”
“Because they’re combative. They have trouble controlling themselves, so they need a dominant clan to sit on them. Vochi, on the other hand, throws a lot of submissives. They need a dominant clan for protection.”
“Andy Carter!”
“On duty. Excused.”
Six of them stood in the center of the meeting field—Rule and his Rho at the very center, with Pete at Isen’s left. Cullen stood behind them beside a short, angular woman with iron gray hair, thick glasses, and skin that remained luminous in her seventh decade—Isadora Bourque, the chief tender, who answered for those tenders excused from the meeting, just as Pete was for the guards.
Lily and Cynna stood to Rule’s right with their heads together to conduct their soft-voiced conversation. Lily had not run out of questions. No one else would answer them here and now, but Cynna was Rhej. Isen couldn’t command her silence, and by answering Lily’s questions she gave tacit permission for them to continue. Isen was ignoring the whispered conversation. If Cynna had chosen to sit down and paint her toenails, he would have ignored that, too.
But he hadn’t had to permit Lily within the small group in the center of the field. Lily had assumed she would stay with Rule, but Isen didn’t have to allow it. He had. There was a reason—with Isen there was always a reason, often several—but Rule had no idea what it was. Isen hadn’t given him any private word, any guidance at all.
His heart beat steady and slow, out of sync with the rest.
Perhaps no one but he and Isen and Cynna heard Lily’s next question. She kept her voice very low. “But the Vochi Rho himself is a dominant, right? He’d have to be.”
“Right.”
“And Vochi has been subordinate to Nokolai for centuries but has never been…what’s that word? Oh, yeah—subsumed. That’s why Leidolf doesn’t have any subordinate clans. They used to, but they subsumed them.”
“Becka Whitbourne,” a voice at the east side of the crowd called.
“On duty,” Isadora announced in her gravelly voice. “Excused.”
The obvious way to locate a traitor was to see if someone failed to appear. Isen wasn’t calling roll, however; he was calling absences. Or having them called out.
Visitors—both ospi, or clan-friends, and nonresident Nokolai—had been told to report to Pete. There were currently three clan-friends and two nonresident Nokolai at Clanhome, and they were accounted for. Mason and the two adults currently helping him at terra tradis were excused, of course. Adolescents couldn’t be left unsupervised. Nokolai’s guests from the other three clans had been told to assemble up front; Nokolai had been told to gather in the groups they were assigned under the emergency evacuation plan. Evacuation drills were held once a year, so this was a familiar way to assemble. Group leaders had been informed of the fire and the theft and told to pass that information on. Isen hadn’t called for silence until they were all in place, and now the group leaders were announcing any who were absent.
So far, the absences were all excused to other duty.
“That’s right,” Cynna said. “Bad habit of Leidolf’s—or of their mantle.”