Wolf Hunting (7 page)

By the fourth day, Firekeeper felt certain they had the correct wall and joined Powerful Tenderness in clearing away dirt. The huge maimalodalu did most of the actual digging, but Firekeeper shoveled dirt and stone onto the sledge that Rascal, and now Blind Seer hauled. It had been hard to convince the blue-eyed wolf to take his turn in the traces, but Firekeeper shamed him into the work, showing him her own bruised and blistered hands.

“We are a pack, are we not?” she said, and although Blind Seer did not stop complaining about the indignity, he let Plik harness him up and hauled.

On the fifth day, the soft dirt on the edge of their trench crumpled inward. Had Powerful Tenderness not been so tall, he would have been completely covered. As it was, he was buried right to his chin. Firekeeper uncovered him with all the haste care would permit. After that accident, some of the Wise Wingéd Folk brought heavy sailcloth that could be used along with cut saplings to hold back the dirt. By the sixth day they were ready to continue.

On the seventh day, they found the door, and by that evening, with renewed enthusiasm, they had cleared its surface to the threshold. The door was sheathed in dark metal, unadorned but for some writing stamped into its surface. There was no knob, latch, or keyhole—nothing at all to indicate how it should be opened.

After the door was cleared, Plik very carefully made his way out onto the packed dirt and stone that still filled the bulk of the cellar. Pebbles and dry soil trickled into the trench.

“Careful,” Firekeeper warned.

“I am being careful,” Plik answered, proving this by very cautiously lowering his bulk so that his weight would be dispersed more evenly. “I want to see what’s written on the door. It’s the same old script I’ve been finding on the blocks. Now that I have the dictionaries, I think I can translate it.”

“Good,” Firekeeper said, mollified. “Can you see the writing clearly enough? The sun is setting.”

“I inherited excellent night vision from both my parents,” Plik said. “I can manage well enough to make a copy.”

Firekeeper found herself wondering who among the assorted beast-souled were Plik’s parents—or if they were even alive, for Plik was clearly a mature creature. As no one of the maimalodalum looked unduly like any of the others, she couldn’t even guess.

Plik had brought a well-scraped piece of hide with him, and now he copied the inscription with a bit of charcoal. The scratching sound made Firekeeper’s back prickle—at least that’s what she told herself, refusing to admit her growing apprehension.

“‘Silver,’” Plik murmured. “That word is unchanged from what we use today. So is ‘magic.’ ‘Light’ is an older form, but I’m sure that’s what it means. There’s something here about a cascade, but I can’t figure out how that fits.”

“‘Cascade,’ as in a waterfall, you mean?” asked Powerful Tenderness. He stood beside Firekeeper in the trench, inspecting the door but apparently having no better luck in discovering how to open it.

“Something like that,” Plik agreed, “but there seems to be something about ‘detritus,’ too. It doesn’t help that the text is written in one of those archaic verse forms where it seems the author thought it was in bad taste to use verbs. I was never very good at those.”

Firekeeper listened, letting the words flow through the edges of her awareness. It occurred to her that, in nature, patterns in the dappling on the fawn’s coat or the spots on a moth’s wings often served to distract the eye from what was really there. She set her fingers to inspecting the surface of the door, looking for any irregularities that might not be visible to the naked eye. She traced every letter, seeing if it hid more than mere meaning, but found nothing.

When she drew her hands back, she noticed that the pads of her fingers were blackened. When she licked one, the blackening didn’t rinse clean, only smudged a bit. Powerful Tenderness noticed what she was doing and frowned.

“Why are you licking yourself, Firekeeper?”

“My fingers,” she said, holding them to show him. The black marks were clear even in the fading light. “The door made them filthy, but the marks do not come away easily.” She spat. “Licking wasn’t a good idea. My mouth tastes like metal.”

“Go drink some water,” Powerful Tenderness said, but his attention was elsewhere. As Firekeeper climbed from the trench, she saw he had taken a bit of cloth from a pouch that hung at his waist and was using it to rub the metal.

Water made most of the taste go away, and Firekeeper chased away the remainder with a few withered, lateseason blackberries before returning. Powerful Tenderness was still rubbing the door, and even in the failing light Firekeeper could see that a section was lighter than the surrounding area.

“The door is made from silver,” Powerful Tenderness said in response to her query. “Something Plik said made me think it might be. What came off on your fingers was tarnish, not dirt.”

Firekeeper nodded. “Does this matter?”

“It might,” Powerful Tenderness replied. He seemed to notice the gathering darkness for the first time. “But this is not the time to worry about it. Plik, let me come up before you move again. If you spill a little dirt in after, it won’t hit me.”

The raccoon-man didn’t look up from his copying, but nodded. Firekeeper turned away, knowing work was done for the day, and looking forward to whatever Blind Seer and Rascal might have hunted up for her dinner. She was tired of rabbit. Maybe they would have taken a deer.

“MAGIC.” “LIGHT.” Those words hadn’t changed too much over time. One verb gave Plik a great deal of trouble. It turned out to be an archaic form of “reflect,” little in use these days.

The minimalist verse style had been popular over a hundred years before Divine Retribution had sent the Old World rulers to whatever judgment the deities had ordained. Rather than making Plik’s task easier, it made it less so, for even when Plik felt fairly certain he had all the words correctly translated, meaning still escaped him.

Plik finished his translation that night when meals had been eaten and even the three wolves were settled near the fire—though all three sat with their backs to the flame lest their night vision be spoiled. Truth had no such qualms. The jaguar cuddled so close that the occasional spark guttered out in her fur.

“So,” Firekeeper said after a long silence, “what do you have?”

“Have?” Plik replied blankly.

“You haven’t been writing for some time, but your eyes go up and down over the page. What do you have there that is so fascinating?”

Plik chuckled. He. felt a ridiculous urge to toss the paper in the fire rather than subject his efforts to that coolly assessing mind, but he knew he was being foolish.

“I think I know what it says,” he replied, “or rather, I have meanings for all the words, but I’m not sure in the least what it means.”

“Read it,” Firekeeper said, her tone midway between a suggestion and an order.

Plik couldn’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t, so he complied.

Magic Light
Silver Shine
Reflect
Back, then back, then back, then back
Cascading concourse
Bright shower
Foaming tumult
Carrying detritus
Open way

“Magic light?” Firekeeper said. “Reflecting? If reflecting magic light is what we need, then we must find some other way through. I wonder if we can cut silver?”

“It depends on how thick it is,” Powerful Tenderness said automatically, “and how pure. Pure silver is fairly soft as metals go. But it doesn’t follow that we don’t have magic light. Some of the light panels in the tower on Center Island still work. I suppose that is magic light.”

“But would those panels work if taken from the tower?” Plik objected. “Our experiments have shown otherwise. I don’t think that could be the answer.”

“Why didn’t whoever wrote that just say what needed to be done?” whined Rascal.

“Why bury a door underground?” Blind Seer retorted. “There are times I think you might as well be Cousin-kind for all you use your mind. Whoever wrote those words didn’t want them to be easy to understand, just as they didn’t want that door to be easy to find. I know little of human buildings, but I recall certain things Firekeeper and I saw in New Kelvin. I am sure that even when the building here was standing—before it was flattened to the ground—this door was hidden.”

Plik nodded vigorously. “That idea goes well with what little I have been able to understand from the fragments of writing on the building stone. Many of the words seem to be warnings or cautions. This was not a place where the common resident would have been welcome.”

“So,” Powerful Tenderness said, and Plik worried that the huge creature was angry that his idea had been so quickly dismissed. “If ‘magic light’ is not to be found in the panels at the towers, where do we find it?”

“Or how do we cut the silver?” Firekeeper muttered, her words probably inaudible to any but Blind Seer, next to whom she sat, and to Plik, whose hearing was unexpectedly good given that his ears were rather small and furry.

Plik ignored the wolf-woman—after all, she hadn’t been addressing him. “I’ve been thinking about the original word used for ‘magic.’ I translated it as an adjective modifying ‘light.’ There seemed to be justification in a parallel to the next line.”

He heard a faint growl that he was fairly certain came from Firekeeper and hastened on.

“The language is archaic. Forms have changed. What if instead of it being ‘magic light,’ it is ‘Magic’s light’?”

The two foreigners looked as baffled as ever, but Rascal yelped happily, “Moonlight! The Moon is Magic’s body, and so moonlight would be magic’s light.”

Firekeeper nodded. “I remember your people’s old tales. That makes sense. So this begins to work. Moonlight, reflected, will open the way.”

“Not so fast,” Blind Seer said. “How then do you explain all of this about reflecting back and back?”

Firekeeper shrugged, but Powerful Tenderness answered.

“If the door is silver, then it would reflect back light cast upon it. However, somehow the light must be handled so that it reflects repeatedly. I can see doing that with sunlight, but with something as weak as moonlight?”

They sat in silence, contemplating.

“There will be a full moon in a few days,” Firekeeper said at last. “The moonlight will be strongest then. We should at least try.”

Plik stared up at the waxing moon. “I wonder how the ones who built this door managed to get moonlight into a cellar?”

“Maybe that’s why the inscription hints at using mirrors,” Powerful Tenderness said. “There could have been a window into the cellar.”

“It’s all very strange,” Plik said. “I know we came here to let Truth out, but what is this door? Why was it built here? How did Truth—or some part of Truth—come to be on the other side?”

Rascal cut in, repeating his earlier question. “And why make it so hard to understand the inscription? I know what Blind Seer said—that it was meant to be hard to understand, just like the door was meant to be hard to find—but why?”

Firekeeper shifted uneasily. “Rabbits and foxes alike hide the entrances to their dens so that they will always be able to escape, but this does not seem to be of the same order. This seems like a door that is not meant to be opened except with great difficulty.”

Plik knew that Firekeeper had been raised by Royal Wolves, and that the Royal Beasts had as great an aversion to magic as did their northern human counterparts—an amusing parallel, since in all other things the Royal Beasts viewed themselves as in opposition to the humans. Still, Firekeeper surely had heard stories from the old days when magic was still common—and was used by those who ruled humans and annihilated Beasts with equal cruelty.

The maimalodalum had a different relationship with Magic, but more than did the yarimaimalom or the humans who lived on the mainland, their tales included cautionary ones. After all, the beast-souled themselves had been created from an abuse of magic. Plik wondered if Firekeeper’s thoughts paralleled his own, but she said nothing aloud, so he spoke.

“I wonder if something is locked away there,” Plik said, “something powerful, perhaps, or merely dangerous, but something so valuable that the ones who built this place did not want to destroy it.”

“Do we leave it locked away then?” Firekeeper asked, and Plik was fairly certain she would be happy to do so. “If we do, it means abandoning Truth to her madness—or hoping she finds her way back by some other road.”

Powerful Tenderness looked at the jaguar who had been his charge for over a year now. “Truth has grown worse, not better since we have come to this place. She is like one in whom fever has split the body and soul. I fear that even if we took her from here she would not recover.”

“I agree,” Plik said. “Whatever is happening to her is not active magic applied against her. I would ‘hear’ that, I am sure. I think her talent for divination is splitting her mind from her body, as once it revealed omens for her contemplation.”

“So,” Firekeeper said, “you do not think Truth will find her way back from this madness.”

“No,” Plik replied for both himself and Powerful Tenderness.

Firekeeper stretched, rising with the motion. Blind Seer rose beside her.

“Very well,” the wolf-woman said. “Then we have two choices. We can do our best to open this door to which Truth has led us and hope she is the only thing that comes out, or we can give up.”

“Wolves,” Blind Seer added, “find it difficult to give up on a pack member. Truth may not be a wolf, but she has been if not a friend, at least an ally.”

“So you wish to proceed?” Plik said.

“We do,” Firekeeper said. “I could not sleep well knowing I left Truth trapped.”

“Besides,” Blind Seer said pragmatically, “we do not know if we can open this door. If we do open the door, we do not have to remove anything from the space behind but Truth.”

Plik wished he was as certain they would have the choice. He only had to look at his own reflection to be reminded that even well-laid plans did not end as those who made them might wish.