The Wolves Of War Read online

  After waking from that dark dream earlier he had known that this had to be his top priority. He was a morph. He had to know he was safe. And the crier was his best source of information.

  It would be best he thought if the crier did not have a lot of announcements to make. Sometimes he didn't, but that wasn't the norm. Even though he seldom appeared in public or heard his people's petitions in person, the king liked for his people to be informed about what was happening. The arrival of royal visitors for instance. Or changes in taxes and laws. Arrangements for the upcoming celebrations of the Temple of the Great Sage. His plans for city improvements. Or an update on the building of the new railway – something that was destined to begin in a few years, once the funds were available.

  A railway would be a good thing to have Briagh thought. To have some of the steam wagons off the street as people instead rode the steam train between the cities of the realm. The accursed wagons were noisy and smelly and left soot everywhere. And now that some of the nobles had their own smaller, personal steamers for travelling around the city, the problem was becoming worse. But Briagh wasn't interested in that just then.

  It would have been easier to listen to the man if the snow had stopped falling. If his legs weren’t near frozen owing to the knee deep snow he had walked through to get here. What was wrong with winter this year? This was Second Thaw. First Thaw had already passed, and he had a horrible feeling that Late Bloom would be ended before the warmth finally returned to the land. If it ever did. Winter just didn't seem to be relinquishing its grip on the land even though it was now officially spring. Obviously the seasons couldn't read the calendar. Or else Celes' head wasn't burning as brightly this year. Not that he truly believed in the sun god. How could someone's head burn after all? Even a god's?

  “The king is in fine health and proclaims this fourth day of Second Thaw a proud day to live in the grand city of Abysynth and the realm of Abylon!”

  The crier managed to get his opening proclamation out, before suddenly bending over almost double and sneezing. When he straightened up Briagh could see the pink and blue in his cheeks and the rheumy eyes that told of a sick man. He shouldn't be out this night. He should be at home in bed by a roaring fire. But he had no choice. There were only a dozen criers left in the city, the rest having given up their posts one way or another, and no one had volunteered to replace them. So there was no one left to replace those who were sick. Those who remained therefore had to work until they dropped – something Briagh suspected would not be far away in this man's case. Not when he suspected the man already had frostbite.

  Briagh could see that the man was freezing to death in front of him, and pitied his plight. He himself was cold, and he was bundled up in the heaviest clothes he could find. Standing out in the snow in a girl's yellow summer dress would have been unbearable. But the man had to do it. King Harold the Good had decreed it. The king really was quite mad.

  Most of the time, his madness was mitigated by the Court which ran the day to day affairs of the kingdom. It did a reasonable job of things as they kept everything running smoothly while simultaneously keeping the king more or less on task. Everyone knew that that was their main job. Keeping the king sane enough to rule until his son Prince Myrim finally took over. But there was nothing they could do when the king went a little misty minded and made a decree. And a year and a half before he had decreed that all the criers should wear bright, yellow summer dresses of the sort his sister had worn when she was a girl. He'd apparently even provided a painting of his sister in the dress to explain exactly what he meant. In the warmer months that had simply proved an excuse for the people to laugh at the unfortunate criers – all of them men and most of them of larger girth than looked good in a thin cotton dress. But when the snow was falling it became less amusing.

  Still, Briagh thought, it did lighten the mood a little. The king was right in that. And really, the criers had mostly been an arrogant lot up until then. After all, they had been getting paid handsomely simply to walk around the streets in their bright red uniforms with the polished brass buttons and call out a few pronouncements and the odd bit of news. Everyone had envied them. Not anymore though.

  “All is well in the realm –.” The man doubled over and sneezed again. This time it took him longer to straighten back up.

  “Crimes are few and the cases of blister plague less …” The man carried on, rushing his words as he desperately tried to get through his proclamations so he could head back into the waiting wagon and cover himself in furs before he had to start again in another hour.

  But that was a good thing Briagh thought. The sooner the man was finished, the sooner Briagh could get out of the snow and head for the Schooner's Deck further up Windford Street where he would find a mug of hot honeyed mead and a warm meal. After that he would return home to his fire. Praise the gods he didn't have to go out in this weather and work like everyone else! There had to be some advantages to being a thief after all.

  Still, he had to keep stamping his feet as he waited for the man to get to the interesting parts. The others standing around listening to the news were much the same, though he doubted they were interested in the same news items as him.

  “Wildred have been sighted in the Dunlee Wastes, but have not dared approach Henton.” There was a small gasp from the crowd when the crier said that.

  Briagh gasped too, surprised by the admission. Everyone knew that the wildred could be found in the various wastelands, but no one in authority ever admitted it. The wild magic men – if men they were – were the stuff of nightmares, and no one wanted to frighten the people with the mention of them. Briagh feared them too. He had heard the stories. Creatures with deadly magic that walked as men but which were not. They lived in the forests and wastelands. But whether they were real or simply the tall tales of the bards he didn't know. What he did know was that the criers had never spoken of them before.

  So why now? Was there trouble in Henton? Was the eastern city in a panic? One so great that it could no longer be ignored? If there was the crier did not say. But perhaps that was the purpose in his mentioning them? Not to say that the wildred were about, but rather that they had been driven back and the people were safe from them. Maybe the real message was that the King was doing a good job of keeping them safe.

  Or maybe – and Briagh accepted it was perhaps an unworthy thought – the king was preparing them for a royal purchase of Fenton bloom coated weapons and the tax rise that would be needed to pay for them? Fenton bloom, otherwise known as witch bane, was expensive. A tiny amount of the dust from the herb breathed in could render a magic user unable to cast for hours or days. Too much could kill them. When coated on a weapon that cut into the magic user's flesh it was even more effective. It made the weapons perfect for use against the wildred or any other casters. But the cost of outfitting the Imperial Guard with the weapons would be horrendous as the herb couldn't be cultivated and only grew in a very few specific places in the southern islands.

  “A reward is offered for any information leading to the apprehension of the criminal who calls herself the wolf mother.”

  Finally the crier got to the stuff Briagh wanted to hear about and he was immediately attentive. But then the man once again started coughing and sneezing, and much of what he was meant to say was lost in the attack. Briagh cursed his luck. But he consoled himself that he had heard enough as the man continued to splutter and choked out his news to know that the wolf mother had stolen something from the Arcanium, and that there didn't seem to be anything in the proclamation about a morph being seen.

  Briagh wasn't sure why his presence hadn't been mentioned, but he was grateful for it. Morphs were rare as were most who had magic – but not in the tales of the bards which routinely spoke of morphs prowling the streets of small towns at night, searching for people to eat. Morphs in fact were almost as often the villains of their tales as necromancers and demons summoning dark wizards. Of course the wolf mother was the most comm
on monster in their tales.

  Still, the crier hadn't mentioned a morph and that surprised him. Other morphs had been named in his official proclamations before when they were linked to crimes. Shrines to the Mother of the morphs, Morphia were also mentioned when they were discovered and burnt. Burning them and driving the priests out was the law of the land. It had been for the past ten years. Sometimes he suspected the Goddess' priests were also killed. He wasn't sure of that, but there was talk.

  He wasn't sure why the priests of Morphia were hated. The reasons for it were lost in history. As were the reasons why the bards and minstrels could sing some of the songs and read some of the epic poetry of Racha – the Goddess' personal balladeer – with impunity. But none of them were morphs like him he supposed dourly. Creatures to be feared at least according to the bards. It was strange that they could sing Morphia's songs and yet decry her children and her followers both.

  All that was said of the faith though was that the Goddess and her followers were dark and in opposition to the faiths that were allowed in the realm. Mostly that meant the Temple of the Great Sage – the official faith of Abylon and giver of their laws. By contrast the Goddess Morphia was opposed to any form of law. She was the Goddess of Freedom after all. But because the priests themselves were simple humans and not cursed like her children, they were not supposed to be harmed. Only driven out. Not like the Goddess' children who were slaughtered with impunity.

  But then morphs were seen as monsters, and so killing them was about self-protection. Of course it wasn't officially the law and so people rarely spoke about their deeds. Not when it might technically be a crime. So if another morph had been found and killed for what had happened the previous night, he wouldn't hear about it from the crier. Briagh just hoped that it hadn't happened.

  By then however, Briagh wasn't hearing a lot from the crier at all save more coughing and sneezing. It was time he decided to leave, and not a moment too soon as by now his feet starting to hurt from the cold. And so he tossed a copper at the crier, pitying the man a little for his fate, and then turned and headed up the street for the alehouse. And to celebrate the fact that no one was hunting him – as far as he knew.

  But maybe it was too soon? No one had followed him the previous night. He'd heard gunshots somewhere behind him in the distance as he'd left. He'd heard the sound of a lot of feet running which he assumed belonged to the city or imperial guards. But no one had given him chase. Maybe they'd chased the wolf mother instead? But if they had, he knew the guards hadn't caught her. She'd been running wild through the city at night, murdering almost at will for years. The chances were that the guards hadn’t caught her either. If they had the crier would have announced it first. The snow had been falling, covering both his tracks and those of the wolves, making any trail all but invisible in the darkness. But Briagh had made doubly sure they wouldn’t follow him home and had travelled a lot of the way via the rooftops. By the time they'd presumably finished the battle with the wolf mother, there would have been no tracks at all for them to follow.

  That didn't mean though that people hadn't been told of his presence in the city. That there wouldn't be discrete enquiries made. Sooner or later someone would put together the facts that there had been a string of nearly impossible burglaries in the city over the previous few years and the fact that a morph lived in the city. After that, someone might start asking those people who sold stolen merchandise who they'd got it from.

  Perhaps it was time to consider leaving the city? When he'd first come to Abysynth Briagh had been looking for a place where he could find some easy coin. The smaller towns and villages generally had far less worth stealing. And they knew who the strangers in town were. It was why he had kept on moving. The cities were better sources of coin, and the capital had seemed like the best of them. It was where the Court was after all.

  But there were other cities in Abylon. Bigger cities. The half-moon kingdom as it was also known, was huge, stretching some two hundred leagues from the east to the west across the shores of the great Southern Ocean and extending inland a hundred and thirty more. There was a full score of large cities in it. Abysynth might be the capital, but it certainly wasn't the grandest city in the realm. And really, he hadn't planned on staying in Abysynth as long as he had. Just long enough to gather together some useful coin.

  But then he'd quickly pulled enough silver together to buy his shack in Leeward Street, moved in and become comfortable. Too comfortable perhaps. Maybe that was what the dream had been trying to tell him? That it was time to leave. But in fairness he'd never owned his own home before.

  Maybe now though he had enough gold to be comfortable somewhere else? Enough at least to buy himself a small holding somewhere in one of the surrounding towns and make himself comfortable. He was twenty-seven. Old enough he thought to have a proper home rather than his somewhat ramshackle cottage on the bank overlooking the harbour. A place with a roof that didn't leak and floors that were solid. With proper glass windows and not wooden slats. And maybe for those warm summer days, he could sit out on a porch and enjoy the sun. That was his dream. He supposed it wasn't much of one, but it was his.

  Once when he'd been very young, he'd lived in a house like that. At least his earliest memories were of a home like that. But that was before his curse had made itself known and the family had had to start running. He now no longer had a family to return to– not in the living world anyway. But maybe he thought, he could return to that sort of home? And now he was no longer a young child. He knew to hide the curse. No one need ever find out what he was.

  The Schooner's Deck was full when he arrived. That didn't come as much of a surprise. Everywhere that had a fire was full these days. People, even those who didn't have the coin to pay for food or a meal, wanted to be warm. Especially if they couldn't afford firewood for their own homes. And everyone was running low since the damned winter hadn't ended as it should.

  Still, he didn't mind it being crowded. He liked having people to talk to and he knew many of the patrons. They knew him too, though not what he did to earn his coin. Most of them thought he was just a casual labourer like so many others. The alehouse was the closest one to his home and his usual haunt. Situated as it was on the docks, most of the patrons were dock workers. Either that or people like him who lived nearby. They earned their living from the ships that came and went from the harbour.

  The Schooner's Deck was patronised by a lot of labourers, hired daily to load and unload ships. Store men too who ran the various warehouses where the goods were kept. There were of course plenty of ship hands present, most of them busy getting drunk on the cheap ale. Similarly, there was no shortage of shopkeepers who bought and sold what arrived in the city. A few caravan traders too who bought what he sold as well. Looking around he could see even a few followers of Elm Tibesh, the six fingered Lord of Thieves, though of course they never acknowledged one another if they recognised them.

  Those you wouldn't find in the Schooner's Deck or the docks were the nobles and the merchants – at least the heads of the various trading concerns. They mostly had grand houses in the Imperial Quarter. You didn't find a lot of the poor either. No beggars or tramps. No street performers. Those who couldn't work couldn't afford a place here – or a meal in an alehouse. They mostly had places somewhere in the Escarpment. And the alehouses there weren't half so pleasant. Often they weren't clean either.

  Women, save for the serving wenches, were also missing from the alehouse. But then this was Abysynth and you wouldn’t expect it any other way. In same lands, he understood – even in some alehouses in the various cities of Abylon – women were welcome in them. But not in Abysynth. He'd never understood why. In most of the towns there would be as many women as men in them. But here in Abysynth the men ate and drank in the inns, beer gardens and alehouses while the women stayed in the homes.

  Briagh managed to find a seat at one of the tables and soon attracted the attention of a serving wench. Shortly after
that he was digging into a bowl of hot stew and bread, and drinking warm mead. It was the sort of meal he would have had at home he thought, if he'd had a wife. But that was never to be his fate. Not when he would have to share the secret of his nature with her. And especially not when any children he had would presumably be cursed like him.

  Hiding his nature had been difficult as a child, and his parents had had to move constantly because of it. It wasn't a crime to be a morph. But every crime and misfortune that happened would quickly be laid at the feet of one. Briagh didn't know if he had the strength to raise a child like himself. Especially when that responsibility had ultimately led to his parents death and left him alone in the world at a young age.

  Maybe he should head into one of the mystic realms? To Wynde Par to the north east of Abylon or Vellary Fell to the north west. One where people with his blood were more welcome. But he didn't know the tongue in those lands. Erthane – the language of the trees as it supposedly was – was as foreign to him as the moon maiden. He didn't know if he would be welcome there as a human – the merchants who visited those realms always had odd stories about them to recount. He didn't even know if his coin would be accepted. And ultimately he was human. Not fae. He wanted to be with his own kind.

  The fae were odd people. They accepted some science and technology, but much preferred magic. Mostly it was said they regarded humans as primitives not much more advanced than trolls. And their lands were said to be filled with dangerous creatures not seen in Abylon. Magical, dangerous creatures including the cockatrice which ironically was the emblem of the kingdom of Abylon. Ironic because there were none of the creatures in Abylon itself. He'd always wondered though whether the fighting birds were truly as they were painted on the gates of the city. But he would probably never find out.