By early afternoon, he’d become aware of the wolves. Ghosting between the trees at the edge of eyesight, they made no more noise than a shadow falling upon a rock. It had taken him most of an hour to gather sufficient peripheral glimpses to create a composite identification. There was no way to get anything like an accurate count, but he thought at least three. For now, he ignored them. Later, closer to darkness, he’d have to do something. What that might be eluded him, but it was easier to put such things off than to think about them.
He was still traveling more or less southeast, still without trace of open country. Didn’t really matter all that much, he decided. They were gone, and where the hell did he think he was going anyway?
* * *
“Do golems, in your experience, Corporal, commonly loot bodies?” The old mage’s voice was acerbic.
The corporal shrugged helplessly. “I wouldn’t know, Belius. I’ve already told you I hadn’t any idea what it might ha’ been, and wouldn’t know a golem did one bite me on the arse. Sergeant Beltran told me it were a golem, so I considered it a golem.”
“Yes, well,” Belius paced slowly around the clearing. “I can tell you with certainty that it wasn’t a golem.”
“Then what was it?”
Belius turned and straightened. “It was a man, you dolt!” He went back to poking with the butt of his staff at the bloodied clumps of grass the golem had apparently used to clean itself of the blood of its victims.
“A man? It couldn’t ha’ been!”
“Look here then,” Belius was at the edge of the wood, poking at something on the ground with his staff. “Take a close look. Does a golem void its bowels? And bury the scat?”
“That’s a soldier’s trick, right enough,” the corporal allowed. “A man? It was so fast!”
“Well trained, perhaps?” the mage’s tone was wry. He’d no great respect for these glorified guardsmen. They weren’t like the real soldiers he’d dealt with in the king’s wars of expansion. These, while trained well enough, were little more than city guard with saddle sores.
“Well trained? Perhaps,” the corporal allowed, “but forget you not, I’ve seen the best of the knights in action at the games in the royal city. This ragged scarecrow could best its choice of the cream of Elion at its leisure.”
Belius had trouble believing that, but kept his council. The corporal wasn’t a bad sort, all things considered, and didn’t play an awful game of bones for a bucolic. Few enough of these could hold a decent conversation, let alone strategize. No, he wasn’t ready to alienate this one just yet. Too, he was looking at the lance shaft protruding from the sergeant’s breastplate.
Walking over to the other two bodies, he stood where the mystery man must have, and paced to where the other end of the broken lance was still buried in the dirt. Looking back, he was forced to alter his lowly opinion of the corporal’s courage just a bit. That was an awfully long way to throw a lance with enough force to transfix both breast and backplate.
“You there,” he pointed to one of the troopers standing nervously near the horses. “Bring me my bag.” Turning to the corporal, he nodded. “We’ll have a look at your golem, then, shall we?” Kindle me a fire, good corporal, and fetch me a bit of the scat.”
A shallow and elaborately decorated bowl was placed upon the freshly kindled fire, and various mysteries from the mage’s bag placed within. Smokes, foul-smelling and colorful, began to waft up from the mixture. At the last, Belius took the proffered knife and flipped the bit of excrement into the bubbling mess, passing his hands before him and muttering words that made every hair in the clearing stand on end.
The smoke billowed full, swirling and coalescing, altering its color. Ignoring the breezes of the prairie, it formed itself into the semblance of the creature the soldiers knew as the golem.
“You see?” the mage swept a hand at the smokey, three dimensional image. “Naught but a man.”
The corporal gazed unbelievingly at the apparition. It looked real enough to snatch a weapon and kill, but it didn’t look all that much like the golem.
“Oh, aye, Belius, t’looks sorter like the thing in a general sense. The size is about right, and there’s parts of it could be the same. But look you at the face,” he gestured with the blade of his returned knife.
“Here,” he waved at the right side, “‘t’was steel, like the blade of a sword, and the eye was a fiery light rather than this peaceful-looking thing you’ve created.”
“I created nothing,” Belius insisted. “I’ve only shown what the essence of the creature tells. The scat knows naught of scars or wounds, nothing of missing teeth or broken noses. It tells only what the man has grown naturally. Perhaps the steel is a mask, the eye a trick or spell.
Then old wizard sighed. “In any case, corporal, it makes no difference. Man or monster, you can’t have the king’s guardsmen slaughtered without recompense. We’ll have to follow, and he’s gone back into the wood.
“You, Sergeant Hansul of Bela,” he called to Bela’s leader. “Half of your number will remain here with the horses. He may think to return once he feels enough time has passed, and as he seems to have the late sergeant’s horse, he’s much more likely to want the open sky above than the canopy of the faerie wood.”
He nudged the bowl free of the fire and overturned it upon the grass. A few muttered words and a pass with outstretched fingers, and it was clean and cool to the touch. He returned it to the velvet bag in which it commonly traveled, and the bag to the larger leather bag slung over one shoulder.
Turning his back on the smokey figure of the enemy and the soldiers staring at it in rapt horror, he traversed half the distance to the nearest trees before glancing back to realize he was alone. Vexed, he turned back to the knot of troopers huddled around the fire. “Be of brave heart young maidens,” he chided, “old Belius will protect you from the big bad scary man! Now get your lazy asses into that wood before I turn the lot of you into grasshoppers!”
* * *
The horse snorted in alarm, twisting abruptly and yanking the reins from the soldier’s hand. He stifled a lunge meant to recapture them as he saw what the horse had seen, drawing pistol and sword instead.
He’d taken it for a moldering stump when he’d passed not two seconds agone. Hard to believe, looking at it now. It stood easily six feet at the shoulder, going half again that from the tip of its tufted tail to the business ends of some nasty looking tusks. Black as a supply sergeant’s heart, covered in leaves and crud, it was the largest boar he’d ever seen in his life. Its stench was absolutely foul.
The horse, trained for war, was confronting the beast, ready to rear or kick as opportunity allowed, but hampered by the trailing reins. Even without that hindrance, it wouldn’t have been a contest but for the man.
* * *
The boar took a slow pace forward, swinging its stinking, ugly head back and forth, gauging with its tiny eyes and slobbering nose which was the most dangerous of the creatures confronting it, and hence, the first to be charged. It thought the man, but in Bayel’s Wood one could never be quite certain. Then its nostrils flared. Magic! The man, then.
* * *
The soldier edged away from the horse with a last, longing look at the lance lashed to the saddle. He’d no great faith in the ability of either the pistol or the sword to stop the tusker. Still, he wanted distance between him and the horse. He needed that horse alive, which it wouldn’t be after first contact with the ton or so of unchained death they now faced. He trailed the tip of the sword through the duff as he moved, swishing it back and forth to draw the pig eyes to him.
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There was a way. Suicidally risky with the weapons he carried, but a way. If he could slip the first charge, he might get a side-on shot. The front of the creature’s skull would stop a cannon ball like a duraloy bulkhead stopped spitwads, but the sides were less protected. If only he could—
The boar charged! Head down, the cloven hooves tearing great rents in the forest floor, it went from a dead stop to full out run in a single leap. The man feinted left and launched himself into a wild rolling leap to the right, coming up to his knees, sword out, pistol up.
It hadn’t worked. The boar hadn’t shifted far enough out of line, and it wasn’t going to—
A flash of grey and a wolf leapt clear and away, a tuft of porcine hide dangling from laughing lips. The boar’s head flipped toward the unexpected pain, and the man had his instant. CRACK! The pistol coughed out an enormous cloud of sulfurous brown smoke, and the boar stumbled, blood gouting from its ear. A darker flash of grey and another wolf was at its throat, the first dancing back in to harry the hind legs. A third, smaller and nearly white, dashed in to attempt the hamstringing of a foreleg while a fourth leapt atop the giant pig’s back.
Throat torn out, brain so much pulp, the boar convulsed, throwing the dark wolf clear, twisting to disembowel the smaller animal hanging from its leg, and dislodging the wolf from its back in the same motion.
Recognizing its peril too late, the small wolf twisted almost in half, fighting to stay clear of the jagged killing tusks. The boar’s head bore down, and the wolf wasn’t going to make it. Then the man was there, sword before him, driving the blade in through the bullet wound with all the weight of his body and momentum, crying out with the effort.
The sword blade transfixed the monstrous head, exploding out of the far side of the skull in a cloud of crystalized blood, bone, and brain. The man’s weight overbalanced them both, sending the whole tangle crashing down. The sword blade bit into the duff, breaking off short as the weight of the boar pinned it to the earth. The man, still gripping the hilt, somersaulted over the collapsing hulk, landing with a thump half atop the scrabbling white wolf, eliciting a fresh yelp of pain.
Silence settled upon the forest, save for the panting of the wolves and the soft groaning of the man. Of the horse, there was no sign.
The soldier rolled over, coming to his knees, knowing he was in no less trouble than he had been. The broken sword was still wedged in the skull of the dead boar, and the pistol was empty. That left him with his combat knife and a long dagger against four of the biggest damned wolves he’d ever seen.
The dark grey, who was a male, stood across the carcass from him, ears up, tail at half mast. Okay, not a particularly aggressive stance. The pale amber eyes, now... they were troublesome. There was away and gone too much intelligence behind those eyes.
Glancing left, he saw that the lighter grey wolf –another male, but younger– was sitting quietly, regarding him with lolling tongue. The one that had been thrown from the boar’s back lay panting where he’d —no, she’d— fallen, shaken but not obviously injured.
A whine sounded behind him and he shifted minutely to bring the white into view. It was another bitch, not very old. She lay near the boar’s head, licking a wound on her hind leg. He found himself hoping it wasn’t a tusk slash which would certainly be grossly septic and guaranteed fatal.
A quick glance only for the white bitch, and his eyes returned to the big male, knife held low and steady. For its part, the wolf regarded him right back for a long moment, paying undue attention, it seemed, to his boots. Then it ambled over to the reclining bitch, nosing her wound and all but ignoring him. After a moment, it raised its head and issued a short yip in the direction of the younger male.
The younger male surged to his feet and trotted off toward the northwest. He’d made only a dozen or so paces, though, before he stopped and turned, looking directly into the soldier’s eyes. A couple more paces and another look. Finally, he trotted back and sat directly opposite the carcass, head tilted, waiting.
It was too obvious. The soldier struggled to his feet, at which point the young male trotted off again. This time when the wolf looked back and saw him following, it continued on.
They found the horse fully four kilometers from the scene of the contest, skittish as hell. Apparently fighting a boar was one thing, a pack of wolves entirely another.
The young male turned on his heel at first sight of the horse, trotting back the way he’d come, leaving the man to spend the next hour calming and reclaiming his mount.
* * *
“Sylvans!”
The cry was followed by the thunderous POOM! of a matchlock and the sharp double twang of a pair of bows. By the time the rest of the party had brought their weapons to bear, the forest around them was empty. The only evidence that anything had happened, a cloud of powder smoke in the air and a pair of egret-fletched arrows buried in the throats of the Bela troop corporal and one of his troopers.
Even Belius was shaken. The sylvans were few these days — a dying people on the losing end of a war few men bothered even to learn the details of. The odds of running into a pair of them here, following this trail were astronomical.
The lancers were scattering out now, looking for traces of the assailants. They would find none. That was the way it was with the forest people — they hit sharply and vanished. You never got two shots in a row at them, and even his magics couldn’t find them once they’d gone to ground and the wood itself acted to hide them. He called the troopers in and put them back on the trail, pausing only long enough to allow them to arrange the bodies alongside the trail and relieve them of weapons, powder, and supplies. There’d be no burial here within the faerie wood. The ground wouldn’t accept it. They would try to retrieve the corpses when they returned. If they returned. Or the wood would see to them in its own way.
Belius pressed on, ignoring the mutterings behind him. The sooner they found the mysterious stranger and got the hells out of this wood, the happier they’d all be.
* * *
“How dare they!” Swallow was fuming as she allowed Thrush Dancing to apply a poultice to the ugly burn along her thigh. “Bringing thunderers right into the wood! We should call a council and drive them back out into the grass with the rest of the grazers!”
“That would mean outright war,” Thrush Dancing told her somberly. “And we haven’t the warriors to do it any longer. Even had we time to gather them before those ones caught up to their deaths.”
“What do you mean?” Swallow winced as the bandage was tightened.
“They were tracking the other.”
An evil smile grew on Swallow’s lips. “Good. Then their souls as well as their lives are forfeit.”
“Don’t say that!” Thrush Dancing spat with surprising vehemence.
Taken aback, Swallow turned to face her sister fully. “What’s wrong, sister? Isn’t that what the others did? Stole their victim’s souls?”
“Of course it was, you... you...” her voice trailed into sobbing.
“Sister?” Swallow’s voice went from angry to frightened in a single beat. Thrush was the rational twin, and these sudden swings of temper were dismaying. “Why do you weep? We weren’t with him long enough to worry about that.”
“Weren’t we?”
* * *
The wolves were still gathered around the carcass when the soldier returned with the horse. Nor had they eaten any of it. He was kind of surprised at that. He tied the reins to one of the more substantial limbs of a fallen oak and approached slowly. “Thank you,” he addressed the big male in Hopi, feeling foolish. That thing would have killed me for certain.”
After a single start of surprise, quickly brought under control, the big male regarded him from cold eyes, ears forward, tongue lolling.
“I have something,” he told it. “I found some herbs out there.” Still nothing. “If that slash is from a tusk,” he chucked his chin at the white bitch laying on her side, leg held out stiffly, “they may help keep the rot away.”
The old male turned his attention away from the man and regarded the white female for a long moment. Then he got to his feet and moved away from her. He regarded the man again, calmly.
Taking a deep breath, the man edged toward the bitch. This was the craziest thing he’d done so far, and he hoped he was reading the situation correctly. Even given that these weren’t ordinary wolves, he still didn’t have the vaguest idea of their motives. But they’d saved his life, whatever their aim, and he owed them.
Kneeling before the white wolf, he set out a slab of bark he’d acquired and began to crush the herbs against it with the pommel of his combat knife. Adding some water from the canteen, he made a thick poultice. Now for the really dangerous part.
Looking over his shoulder at the big male, he called softly. “This is going to sting pretty bad when I put it on, but she can’t — shouldn’t chew it off. It has to stay on the wound for at least twelve hours... uh, half a day, or it won’t do the job.” The wolf continued to regard him without apparent change. Shrugging, he turned back to the bitch. “This is going to hurt. Please don’t bite my hand off or we’ll both regret it.”
She let out a yip when the poultice made contact, and her jaws closed around his wrist. But she didn’t bite down — holding her teeth against him for only an instant before releasing him with a whine. Cursing under his breath, heart pounding, the soldier finished applying the poultice and wrapped the wound in leaves, tying the whole mess in place with strips of the inner bark he’d peeled from an aspen-like tree he’d seen nearer where they’d found the horse. Only when he was finished did he look at his wrist and see the reddened dimples left by the wolf’s teeth.
Taking a long swallow from the canteen and wishing it was something high in distilled sugars, he sat back and regarded the old male again. There’d been no sign of recognition beyond the initial, which could have been caused by no more than his voice. But he knew that the old grey understood every word he said. “That bandage should be changed tomorrow and a new batch put on, but I guess you’ll have to settle for taking it off. But not until tomorrow. At least she’ll have a fighting chance.”
There followed an exchange between the animals, after which the greys and the older bitch got up and faded into the rapidly falling darkness. The white bitch lay where she’d been.
“I see.”
She looked up at him with clear eyes and sniffed. He had no way of knowing whether she was asking a question, taking a breath, or remarking on his hygiene.
“Well, if you’re coming, let’s go,” he told her, climbing to his feet and moving to the horse. “I suspect that there’s another waypoint not too far ahead, and I think I’d feel safer there, even with your friends out here.”