Diplomacy of Wolves: Book 1 of the Secret Texts Read online

  Kait held her breath, then released it slowly. “You need to know what I am, Uncle.”

  “I’ve figured it out—at least I think I’ve figured out some of the difference in you. Sooner or later, perhaps a few others of the Family will need to know. But you need not think your differences make you anything but an asset to us. You’re a gift, Kait. You’re beautiful, you’re intelligent, you’re charming, you’re educated . . . and your special talents allow you to do things other people can’t.” He patted her arm. “You were a marvelous child—never afraid of anything. You’re becoming a magnificent young woman. But more than that, you can become a weapon for the Galweighs unparalleled by anything the other Families can bring to bear against us.”

  Kait raised her eyebrows, thinking of the Sabir Karnee. If Dùghall didn’t know he existed, he didn’t realize exactly what the Galweighs were up against. “That’s all I want. It’s all I have ever wanted—to serve my Family. I want to do anything I can to protect them from their enemies. To repay them for protecting me, and giving me the chance to take a place among them.” She paused and looked beseechingly at Dùghall. “But maybe I don’t have the right to risk Maman and Papan by staying with the service,” she said. “Maybe I don’t have the right to serve, because more people than I will pay the price if I fail.”

  “Sit.” Dùghall pointed to the high-backed carved chair nestled into the corner beneath one of the library’s leaded glass windows. He settled himself into its twin, and only when Kait was seated said, “You serve the Family; that is duty. You do so without endangering the lives of your family; that is both obligation and act of love. But the needs of the Family must come first, Kait-cha. I have lived by this dictum, as you must: ‘You are born to greatness, but greatness must be re-earned in every generation. Your life—’”

  Kait cut him off. “‘—is an extension of the lives of my ancestors, and a bridge to the future, and as such my life can never be wholly my own, for my every action reaps yesterday’s fruit and sows tomorrow’s seeds.’” She quoted Habath solemnly. “I know my duty.”

  “Then no more uncertainty about whether you do right to serve. You have been chosen; you must serve.”

  “My comment is that I was not chosen by those who knew the truth about me; I question that I would have been asked to serve if the truth were known.”

  “And that you reached adulthood alive so that you could be chosen, what of that? I do not question too closely the value of miracles—the gods guide our feet down mysterious paths; I chose you, but I think now that my choice was better than I had previously thought, rather than worse. No matter what anyone else might think. I’ll keep your secret to myself for now; I don’t trust everyone in the Family to know a boon when one is given.”

  Kait laughed at that. “I don’t trust anyone in the Family to keep me from the horses in the square, to tell you the truth. Except my family and you.”

  “Nor should you. Remain circumspect, and I’ll make sure that you receive assignments suited to your peculiar talents.” He leaned back and laced his fingers together. “And speaking of your talents . . . what are they, exactly? I’ve already figured out that your hearing is better than mine, and I know that you can climb sheer walls that I would have thought impossible to breach without hammers and pitons. But why can you do these things?”

  Kait said, “I’m Karnee.”

  Dùghall looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and let out a slow breath. “I thought that might be it. For that reason I warned you of the boy they executed today—I’d heard . . . rumors . . . before we left the embassy that such a creature had run wild last night and had been apprehended in the early hours. I doubt the boy was the cause of those deaths in the alley.” He arched a thoughtful eyebrow in her direction. “So the Family curse has not yet abated.”

  “I would seem to be proof that it hasn’t.”

  “To what degree are you affected? Improved hearing, improved sight, increased lust and vigor, added strength?”

  Kait’s laugh this time had no humor in it. “All of those benign things, and all of the foul ones as well. I’m fully Karnee, like the child who died in the street today. I Shift when I’m angry or overcome by other emotion, or when I’ve gone too long without Shifting; I’m both woman and monster in one body, and the part of me that knows joy and pleasure without regret is not the woman, but the monster. When I’m Karnee, my blood sings out for other blood, and for the hunt, and for rutting, and I’m without mercy, and without remorse.”

  “There are times, child, when both mercy and remorse are curses, too.”

  Kait frowned. “Maybe so. But the human part of me carries the remorse for both parts—and seems to carry it in double measure.”

  Dùghall nodded and leaned back in the chair, and templed his fingers in front of him. “‘In order to live with ourselves, we accommodate who we are with who we wish to be. If we are to know happiness in this short life, we do it without lying to ourselves, and we remember to be kind.’ Vincalis again. I really must find you a copy of To Serve Honorably when we get back to the House. It and the Secret Texts will be essential to you. Simply essential.”

  Kait said, “I’ll read both if they’ll help me serve the Family better.”

  “They’ll help. Of course if you really want to serve the Family, find the Mirror of Souls for us.” He laughed when he said it.

  Kait didn’t get the joke. “The Mirror of Souls? What’s that?”

  “A myth, I think,” Dùghall told her. “We’ve found several references to it now in the oldest books we have, and of course the Secret Texts speak of it.” He sighed. “Supposedly, it’s the greatest artifact of the Ancients. From the best translations we’ve obtained, it seems to have been a device that called the dead back from the grave and returned them to the world of the living. Imagine being able to bring back to life all of our dead relatives.” He shook his head, bemusement clear on his face. “We could overrun the Sabirs and Dokteeraks and Masschankas and Kairns in days and take control of Ibera. And that would be the end of the wars and the slaughter and the struggle.”

  “You sound like you think such a device might exist.”

  “Do I? Forgive an old man’s wistfulness. I wish such a device existed—if the Galweighs alone could obtain it, of course. But in spite of the several references to it in the ancient literature, I believe that, had it ever existed, it has long since vanished from the face of the earth. And I number myself among the cynics, for I don’t believe it ever existed. Such magic would be . . .”

  He sat forward and smiled. “Forget my musings, Kait. How childish of me to fill your head with the fancies of the Ancients. You don’t need any such silliness. Concentrate on keeping Tippa out of trouble, and make sure she doesn’t suspect the Dokteeraks’ treachery, or she’ll give us all away. She’s a sweet child, but far too naive.”

  “I’ll make sure she thinks everything is still fine. How long will I have to keep up the pretense?”

  Dùghall’s grin was predatory. “You and I and Tippa will be leaving for Calimekka by airible four days from now, at predawn.”

  “That’s the day of the wedding.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about everyone else?”

  “Most of them will be gone by tomorrow. The last few will leave the day after.”

  Kait winced. “The Dokteeraks will notice.”

  Dùghall laughed. “That’s the beauty of this. The airibles have been bringing in a steady stream of “wedding guests” since we got word home yesterday . . . but they aren’t truly wedding guests, of course. They’re soldiers in wedding dress, many of them disguised as women to make up for the few swordswomen and female archers we have. And the embassy staff has been traveling back in the supposedly empty airibles, disguised as ballast. The three of us can’t leave until the last minute because Tippa and that rodent Calmet have the sunset purification ritual the night before the wedding, and I have to stand witness, and you’re to chaperone again. But we’ll ha
ve an airible waiting for us when we return to the embassy, and veiled soldiers will attend the wedding in your stead, and my replacement shall wear a hood.”

  Kait smiled, and for the first time that day the smile felt genuine. “Then the wedding won’t be what the Dokteeraks are expecting.”

  “Far from it. When it’s over, the Galweighs will be the only ones celebrating.”

  Chapter 10

  His horse—well, even in the most liberal terms he couldn’t truly call it his horse, but it was the horse he had stolen—stood in the makeshift paddock with the Gyrus’ other beasts, contentedly munching on hay. He recognized both the animal’s speckled hide and the curving brand on its right flank . . . and he thought, too, that he recognized the vindictive gleam in its eye. Hasmal saw the animal when his guard took him down to the stream to wash himself; the Gyrus kept the horses both downhill and downstream, by which they showed more concern for sanitation than the designers of the city he’d lived in. He didn’t give any sign to the guard that he recognized the beast; reticence seemed the best course of action to him. But inwardly, he was elated. If the Gyrus had found his horse, perhaps his belongings were somewhere in the camp, too. Perhaps he could find a way to recover them.

  The Gyru camp covered the north slope of the low hill it occupied, from the long crest down to the stream that meandered through the trees in the valley. Hasmal guessed more than a hundred of the Gyru wagons sat there, though he couldn’t be sure, because the forest was thick enough that as he got a clear view of some of the wagons, others disappeared, and the wagons themselves, beautifully painted with scenes of forests and meadows, had the unnerving tendency to blend in with their surroundings. Still, he had a rough count, which was good enough to tell him that the Gyrus outnumbered him by at barest minimum fifty adults—so he could give up any plans of overpowering guards and fleeing.

  Too, he knew his strengths, and he knew his weaknesses, and he considered himself intelligent enough not to mistake one for the other. Born a city boy, raised in civilization—where water came to his home via the aqueduct and where people cooked food indoors in fine brick ovens, and where they washed in public baths instead of a river—he did not think for an instant that he would be able to escape through the forest, eluding his pursuers and surviving the dangers of the wild. The wilderness was not his strength.

  Guile and caution were, though, and with guile and caution, he would get himself out of this mess.

  His guard didn’t seem impatient with the time Hasmal was taking with his bath. He sat on a fallen tree and grinned, his crossbow steady on Hasmal’s chest. The crossbow made Hasmal nervous; nevertheless, the guard had treated Hasmal well, made sure he got plenty of food, and let him walk around the thorny underbrush instead of pushing him through it. Since Hasmal still didn’t have any clothes, that last consideration meant a great deal to him.

  “Kind of you not to mind my taking the time to get clean,” Hasmal said in Iberan. He and the guard were playing out an elaborate game, in which the guard pretended not to understand a word of Iberan, and he pretended he’d never run into Shombe. They pantomimed when they wished to communicate, and spoke into the air in asides to the gods at other times, each attempting to get the other to be the first to reveal secrets.

  Hasmal scrubbed with the soap the guard had given him, appreciating the lather on his skin as much as he appreciated the feel of running water on all those places yesterday’s horseback ordeal had left aching. “Those bastards who grabbed me yesterday dragged me through every patch of filth and thicket they could find between the road and the place where they met you folks.”

  The guard kept grinning; he made no sign that he understood a word that Hasmal said.

  Hasmal relaxed into the water. It wasn’t as clear as aqueduct water, and it was colder, but at the moment it felt good enough. “I don’t imagine you have any idea what it feels like to be sold,” Hasmal continued. “To be a free man running away from omens that spell your death, and to be captured by thieves, and to have them decide to hang you because you don’t have anything to steal, and to have them decide, when the rope is already around your neck, to sell you into slavery instead so they can make some profit off of you.” He shook his head, ducked completely under the surface of the water long enough to thoroughly wet his hair, and came up to begin lathering. “The bastards stole my clothes and left me naked, too. Didn’t even throw me a few rags so I could cover myself. Still . . . being a naked slave is better than being a dead freeman.” He finished lathering, rinsed, and stood.

  His guard, still grinning, threw him a towel so coarse and crude that in the bathhouses of Halles, it would have been used for nothing more lofty than knocking the dirt off shoes. Hasmal wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to dry himself off with it or wrap it round his waist, and decided, since his guard offered neither suggestion nor pantomime, to do both. The women in the camp had gotten a few giggles out of his nakedness when he’d paraded by them on his way down to the stream; if he could skip a repeat of that experience on the way back, he thought he would.

  “I’d give anything to get my things back and get out of here,” Hasmal said. The guard pointed up the hill. Hasmal started walking. The rough forest floor hurt his feet, but he felt almost cheerful after the bath and with the towel to keep him from being completely naked. “You’d probably want me gone, too, if you knew the sort of trouble I’m likely to become. I’m under a curse—a doom tied to some Galweigh woman. I want to put as much distance as I can between the two of us, before something terrible happens. It’s sure to happen to me, but the oracle didn’t say there wouldn’t be trouble for anyone around me.”

  The guard led him back to the tent where he’d been kept. He left the towel—something good—and didn’t put Hasmal’s hands back into the stocks in which he’d had to sleep. Something else good. He did still put the metal ring around his neck, and he did attach it to the chain that attached to the stone ball that rested in the center of the tent. Hasmal didn’t fight this indignity any more than he had fought any other. He let happen what was going to happen, and then he settled in to wait. He was good at waiting.

  The sun followed more than half its path across the sky, and the noises in camp changed in character and volume. Hasmal heard shouting and the stamping of horses and creak of wagons, and he wished he could see what was going on. Finally someone came back into the tent, but she wasn’t his guard. She was a woman of, he guessed, middle years, though she had aged extraordinarily well. She dressed in loose leather pants and a gaudy silk shirt, the costume favored by Gyru women, and she wore a heavy gold torque around her neck and rows of gold beads in her braided hair. In her youth she had been, he had no doubt, a stunning beauty, and even though time had added lines to her face, and streaks of gray to her fiery hair, it had not been able to erase her loveliness. All it had done was add character—something he always found lacking in the faces of women his own age. He smiled at her out of reflex. She was the sort of woman who would have caught his eye in any circumstances, and these difficult times made no exception.

  She studied him, thoughtful. He continued to wait, sensing in her presence the shifting of his fate. Finally, she said, “You’re a strange sort of slave. You haven’t begged for your freedom, yet you claim to be a freeman; you have not threatened us with doom if we do not release you, yet you claim to be under a curse. You haven’t tried to reclaim your horse or your belongings, yet Ffaunaban says you saw your horse tethered among ours.”

  “So Ffaunaban does speak Iberan.”

  “As well as you speak Shombe, unless I miss my guess. We told him to find out what he could about you. You were most obliging. And, I might add, most unlike our usual slaves.”

  Hasmal smiled but said nothing. Politeness, gratitude for kindnesses done, and a bit of information dropped in the right ears at the right time never failed to yield action. He could only hope that it was the right sort of action.

  The woman waited, too, as if expecting him to say mo
re—perhaps to protest his status as slave, or to ask if he could have his belongings back. When he remained silent, she rewarded him with a brilliant smile of her own and arched an eyebrow.

  “Excellent,” she said. “You honor yourself with your silence.” Then she said something that shocked him to his core. “Katarre kaithe gombrey; hai allu neesh?”

  They were the words of greeting used among the Falcons; words from a language mostly lost in the destroying tempest of time, but kept alive by the brethren sworn to uphold the secrets of the past and to work toward the prophecies that would better all of humankind’s lot. His father had taught him that they meant “The falcon offers its wings; will you fly?”

  He responded as his father had taught him. “Alla menches, na gombrey ambi kaitha chamm. I accept, and for the falcon’s wings I offer my heart.”

  “Well met, brother,” she said. She leaned over him and unlocked the ring that bound him to the stone. Her heavy braids brushed against his naked shoulders, and her sweet, faintly musky scent filled his nostrils, and he was suddenly more grateful than words could express for the coarse towel still wrapped around his waist. “We have things we must discuss. Please come with me.”

  As quickly as that, he found himself a guest of the Gyru-nalles instead of a slave. She led him out of the tent, and he saw that the wagons were lined up, and that people were tying spare horses to the backs of the wagons, and that outriders already moved along the enormous train, shouting orders.