“But these wolves—Orhvan, are you in agreement?”
Orhvan had risen, white-faced.
“I think that I am, Dakan. We’ll thank you, and leave.”
Dakan’s countenance grew very ugly.
“Please do. And remember, if you reach Xarabiss, the terms of this contract. I trust your wolves avoid you.”
They passed through the foyer into the cold black night.
A hand brushed Raldnor’s arm.
“Why go with them?” Orklos hissed from the doorway. “You endeavor to act as one of these Lowland serfs on whom the Vis spit, but you—you have the way of a Vis and a face I have seen on the statues of Rarnammon. What do they offer you, these people? Stagnant ruins, filth, poverty. My master can be generous, I assure you, to my friends.”
Raldnor shrugged off the hand.
“I’m not your friend, Ommos.”
The door thudded shut behind him.
At first they traveled the dark streets in silence, the small lamp Orhvan carried casting an erratic pallid light.
Raldnor, walking a little to the rear, stared at the girl’s silver fountain of hair. The Ommos wine and his victory had made him slightly drunk.
“Perhaps you were too brisk with them, Raldnor,” Ras said eventually, not looking back. “It’s not good to fall foul of Yr Dakan.”
“You’d have preferred to stay then, and have your girlfriend taken into the slug’s bed.”
Ras turned and glanced at him: a look turbulent with unreadable yet disconcerting emotion.
At that moment a wolf howled not twenty yards away. It was a peculiarly resonant sound, too big for the silence of the night.
They froze like a tableau.
“That’s the white one. I know his voice,” Orhvan said softly. “He came last winter and killed five men in the streets.”
Raldnor’s hand slid to the hunter’s knife and pulled it free of his belt. He felt a corrosive scorn for the three in front of him, passive with inevitable despair. He went past them and was in front as the white shape ran suddenly out between two crumbling walls, and paused, its eyes intent on him.
It was hunting alone, then. He was arrested by its unexpected beauty and its colossal size, for this one was two wolves made into one. He had heard hunters’ tales of similar monsters, mutations of strength, but never seen one before. Its massive head would reach as high as his ribs. But such grace it had. He caught the dull calculating flash of its eyes, and its open mouth looked full already of blood.
And then it seemed he toppled into its black primeval brain. Dark, ancient, elemental, a dank forest full of merciless things, steaming swamps and torpid rivers, where sudden sparkling drives and lusts darted and flamed.
It leapt at him, but he had seen the diamond firework of its thought. His hand moved even as its glorious body slammed against him and its stench and insolence choked his throat. He buried the knife to the hilt in the eye of a demon which went immediately out.
He lay then very still beneath the coverlet of the wolf, racked with an abrupt impossible sorrow. Buried by its magnificence, he could only mourn. It was presentiment. There was a sound of distant voices shouting in his head. He opened his eyes and saw the girl Anici kneeling by him on the street, her face a rigid mask of fear for him. He smiled at her and, thrusting aside the corpse of the wolf, sat up and took her hand. “You care for me, then, do you?” he thought, and she hung her head, for there was no longer a bolted door between them and her mind was open for him to invade all the fragile private dusts and dreams inside it. He felt as though he walked on a splintering crystal, entering her mind, and a protective tenderness surged through him.
He got to his feet and, still holding her hand, drew her up also. Then he lifted the dead wolf in his arms and glanced at Orhvan and at Ras.
“Something else to sell in Xarabiss. This pelt should fetch a good price.”
Ras’s face was blank; Orhvan looked at him, wearily nodding. They sensed how he had usurped them.
6
To begin with he had turned his back on Xarabiss. Now there was a craving in him to cross the border into Vis lands, to find towns seething with life, and dark-haired women resembling his lost mother. It came on him suddenly, he was not certain why, the day after he had killed the wolf and skinned it of its beauty.
Orhvan took two days hiring a wagon and two zeebas from the lower alleys of the city. Ras and Raldnor fetched the many-colored weaving from Anici’s house, the wreck of a palace haunted by the girl’s grandmother. They left Mauh here also, sniffing after rats among the fallen columns.
The old lady seemed suspicious of Raldnor. She snatched Ras’s sleeve and whispered at him, and Raldnor’s face burned with anger. He followed Anici into the ruinous garden and caught her hand.
“Come with us to Xarabiss.”
“No. I couldn’t leave her alone here.”
“Surely there’s someone else who could look after her, and Mauh would be protection enough.”
She hesitated, her eyes lowered. He sensed a malleable quality and said: “I want very much for you to be with me.”
She looked into his face, and her loveliness and innocence brought his heart into his throat. She was very precious to him; his ability to enter her open mind, the look of love in her eyes, were salves for his bitterness. She was his link with his people. He did not want to lose her even for a month.
“There is a woman in the third house,” she said tentatively.
Later, as Ras and he walked back across the streets, Ras broke his silence to say: “We’ve spoken hard to each other, you and I. I saw the way she looked at you, and I was envious. My fault, Raldnor. I ask for peace between us now, and wish you both happiness.”
Unexpected warmth moved Raldnor. He made his own verbal reparations, after which they were friendly enough, though Ras’s friendship was subdued and reserved, in the manner of the Lowlanders.
They traveled under blowing dark roofs of skies, and at night ringed the wagon with fires. Once they saw tirr crossing a plateau beneath, and Raldnor felt old implacable hatred rise up in him, thinking of the dead Xarabian woman and that lost finger he surmised they might have bitten off.
They drove most of the day, taking this task in turns, huddling at dusk to eat by the fires. In the dark of the night he would lie awake and listen to Anici’s breathing behind the curtain she stretched midway across the wagon. They were all too close for him to go to her. He wished there had been more sexual complicity between them, for then it might have been managed. The Vis sex in him was hungry for her, the hunger made more greedy by every day spent in her presence, seeing the look of shy loving in her eyes. Even the sounds of her soft breathing inflamed and curdled in his loins. And yet he had had nothing from her except those gentle and unsatisfying kisses, for she was very timid and nervous—a delicate, difficult pupil of his desire.
On a day of harsh silver light they crossed the border and reached Sar, that small Xarabian town so near to which the Hamos man had found the dead woman and her child.
Their permit was shown at the gate, yet the sentries seemed indifferent, and there were many yellow-haired people moving about the streets. At the town’s center a terrace climbed to a small shrine dedicated to the wind gods who beat about the hill, and near this place they found cheap lodgings.
Raldnor lay on his back in the male dormitory he, Orhvan and Ras had settled for, while two or three prostitutes plied their trade from pallet to pallet. The bestial grunts and mutterings of the Vis about him both sickened and excited him. At last, seeing his companions asleep, he got up and slipped out of the long room, following the narrow corridor to the tiny cell where Anici had been housed.