Wolf Wing Read online

  WOLF WING

  Tanith Lee

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Bookmarks

  The Clockwork Wedding

  The Grove of Masks

  At Home

  Lion Night

  Spilling the Beans

  To the South?

  The House in the Lake

  Us

  Rough Crossing

  Old Mother Shark

  The Shining Shore

  Through the Wall

  As Sun is to the Candleflame

  Summer

  Water and Air

  Earth and Fire

  The Masked Palace

  Ours

  Wolf Wing

  Website

  Also by Tanith Lee

  Tower Family Trees

  About the Author

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  After finishing Queen of the Wolves I soon saw I couldn’t leave Claidi’s adventures even now, as Claidi had other ideas. Couldn’t I see, Claidi seemed to be saying, that some huge questions were still unanswered? Of course I could. All the books had produced gigantic surprises for them, and this one would produce them most of all. It also took me longer to write than the other three. There was a lot to be said.

  But is even this book the last? I wonder.

  Youth is not wasted on the young.

  Fact

  BOOKMARKS

  It isn’t that we’re unhappy.

  We are happy. We’re together.

  Only nothing is ever straightforward, is it. Do you find that? There’s always some complication, some extra something.

  And what seems about to be just a happy golden flight through the bluest air—

  Well, it’s as if a cloud keeps covering up the sun.

  I suppose it’s habit now, turning back to my ‘diary-journal’ – this book. Will I always do this, make these wiggly black marks over the whitish paper, these marks which are letters and words – but which are really feelings, thoughts, confessions—

  Maybe I always will.

  We’d been standing at one of Yinyay’s windows, Argul and I, as we travelled through the air, always southwards, towards Peshamba.

  I said, ‘You do know Yinyay can almost certainly locate the Hulta? She found them before. Do you think—?’

  And Argul didn’t say anything.

  Then he said what he’d said before, ‘A leader can’t really go back to being a leader, Claidi. I’m not sure he can even go back. I might not be welcome.’

  ‘Oh but Argul – they’re your family—’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know that.’

  ‘Perhaps if you just tried? I mean, Blurn—’

  ‘Blurn took over from me when I left, and is now leader. Despite anything he might have said, Claidi, despite being a good mate, he’ll have changed. You do, if you’re leader. You have to.’ He went on staring down Yinyay’s whirling-along length. She wasn’t really whirling then, but just going fast and smooth. The landscape below seemed to be grasslands, or else a green desert. The sky was morning-bright. ‘Yeah,’ Argul said, softly.

  And after that nothing else.

  So I left it.

  He had given it all up, his leadership, the Hulta-family, and his life-long friends, in order to find and rescue me, in order to make sure I survived the plots of the Wolf Tower and the Raven Tower.

  Of course, I thought, he must miss the Hulta. Even I did, and I hadn’t been with them that long. Argul was born Hulta. For nineteen years he’d lived with them, almost four of those as their king.

  I couldn’t help thinking, although it wasn’t my fault, exactly, it was because of me he’d lost all that, and apparently really lost it all, for good. He seemed to think he was exiled.

  That evening Yinyay landed and parked on a hilltop.

  Argul and I flew out of a top window and dived and played about in the sky. We watched the sun set over some hills, then flew up even higher to watch it sink again.

  I say flew, but naturally we weren’t flying as such, as you know, but more walking or running in the sky.

  It is wonderful, doing this. Exhilarating – and the tingle of amazement never quite goes, or at least not for me.

  I veer and swerve up to the lowest clouds, touch their fleecy smoke, rush down again to the richer more breathable air, gasping and laughing. I think over and over, How am I DOING this? Even though I know I’m doing it because of the diamond Power ring that was Ustareth’s. Just as Argul can ‘fly’ because of the sapphire on the charm-which-isn’t round his neck.

  After the flight, we landed in a valley, and for exercise walked on the ground back up to Yinyay’s white Tower, gleaming in the afterglow.

  ‘I miss Sirree,’ I said, not thinking. ‘She was the best horse. I miss riding.’

  ‘Right. I do.’

  ‘And the dogs and monkeys—’

  He didn’t speak, like before.

  I thought, Am I going to have to be careful now, never say anything that makes him think of the Hulta? He had seemed almost unnaturally at home with all the science-magic. With Yinyay, all of it. Now I wondered if it had been unnatural – that is, if he’d been pretending, to me, or to himself.

  I said,’ I didn’t mean to remind you,’ and Argul said, flatly, ‘I’m reminded all the time, Claidi. I don’t want to forget the Hulta, do I.’

  Later, after dinner had laid itself on a silvery table high up in the all-window room near Yinyay’s top, Argul casually remarked, ‘What a lazy life. It’s too easy, all this.’

  I pictured how the Hulta would have made camp, and the one big camp-fire, and the little fires all about. The lighting of the lamps, cooking of food. I thought of the Hulta gathering round the fires, and the king and his men having a meeting – Argul, Blurn, Mehm, Ro – shining in the firelight. The horses moving lightly at their pickets, the dogs walking about, glossy and calm. Bits of music, laughter, jingling of horse bells and earrings. Evening stars overhead, and open sky. And things to do in the morning.

  Argul
and I talked about something else while we ate the dinner, which was delicious as usual in Yinyay’s Tower.

  Soon I forgot about the strange feeling that had come over and between us. It was gone.

  Until of course, it came back.

  Missing things …

  Stupidly perhaps, I missed talking to Yinyay herself. I’d had quite a few chats with her on Ustareth’s Star-ship, when I first came back from the Rise. Yin had been a dolly-snake then, elegantly balanced on her tail, gently handing me cups of tea held by the tendrils of her hair.

  Now she was the huge Tower. When outside, you saw her turn her face, storeys up, far above, looking mildly round, a beautiful watcher, guarding us, perhaps scanning the weather or the stars. If you called up to her, the face would look down. She would smile her quiet angelic smile. She was and is a machine, but had been also a companion. Now she’s all round us, she’s much further away.

  Yinyay had become – well, like a god. Sort of. Powerful, kind, just about to be seen in the distance, unreachable?

  Oh, I don’t mean she doesn’t do everything for us we ask. She does. But – it’s the gadgets and mechanisms of her Tower itself which do these things.

  Though we named the Tower ‘Yinyay’, it’s a bit hard to remember it’s actually her.

  Anyway, journeying in Yinyay all the long way from the north to the south, not always going very fast, and often parking in some pleasant spot for a while, took us one whole month, or ‘moonth’ (as Chylomba had called them).

  We were going to be married at Peshamba.

  I had then no intention of writing in this book anything about that. I was superstitious, because look what had happened the first time we’d been meant to get married!!! (And, come to that, the second.)

  This was going to be so different too.

  It wouldn’t be a Hulta wedding.

  No one we knew would be there.

  The customs wouldn’t be the same, either.

  And I had sold my wedding dress. A goat had got married in it instead.

  I remembered Peshamba so vividly. The fields of flowers as you got near, the turquoise lake, and the glamorous town with its jewellery towers and windows.

  This was where I had first really seen Argul – that astonishing night of the festival, the dance, the peacock in the moonlit garden – magical Peshamba.

  But when we came to Peshamba, it wasn’t as I remembered at all.

  The north had been all snow. Well, the place was actually called Winter, wasn’t it. But there was a kind of winter now, in Peshamba.

  I recalled how last time, it had been snow here which interrupted Argul and me in the peacock garden, before we could get anything said or properly sorted out. (After which Nemian had appeared and really ruined our chances.)

  Snow in Peshamba, however, had been pretty. The town had still looked like a charming toy.

  I thought it must have snowed recently now. Then the snow had gone. But it had taken all the flowers, and the leaves off the trees. And the colour from the sky and lake. And somehow from a lot of the buildings.

  A bleak hard glassy sky hung high overhead. And even from the distant place where Yin had landed, you could see the smoke-fumes rising from Peshamba’s chimneys, and curdling there blackly in the still, white air, so the whole town was under a cloud.

  Argul had suggested we didn’t go bowling up in Yinyay. It could cause a commotion and might set off Peshamba’s defences, which were mechanical and quite famously dangerous.

  So after Yinyay had brought us to earth well clear of the town, she reduced herself for the first time since we met her again in the north.

  The original plan was that she might stay doll-size, as Peshamba’s used to (average size) mechanical dolls. But when Yinyay had done this, she herself said if we didn’t need her just then, she would prefer to make herself very tiny. In this way, she explained, she could ‘be at one’ with all her own mechanisms and new abilities to do with becoming a flying Tower. (She seemed to find this prospect exciting.)

  Neither Argul nor I objected. (Was he perhaps glad? The lazy life – gone.)

  Yinyay then shrank in a sudden alarming rush that made me blink. One moment she was there, about my height, and then she had sort of snapped away.

  ‘Where – is she?’ I gawped.

  ‘I have her,’ said Argul. And he showed me the shrunk Yinyay, who must have darted somehow into his hand, a little teeny pearly speck, like a pin’s head, lying there on his dark palm. I couldn’t now see any of her features, even her tail.

  It seemed she’d previously given Argul a carrying pouch for this situation. He put her into it and said did I want to carry the pouch, or should he.

  I felt totally bemused. ‘Oh, you have her—’ I vaguely muttered. Because it had seemed suddenly untrusting to say Give her to me.

  Of course, we can call her back to any size any time we want to. I felt tempted to try it at once. Somehow her going like that left me with the feeling of a huge hole in everything where she’d been.

  So anyway, we went on foot through the cold-scorched grasses, and came to the cold pale lake, and walked over the bridge into Peshamba, through an apparently unguarded gate, under high windows reflecting the blank sky.

  THE CLOCKWORK WEDDING

  We didn’t stay at the Travellers’ Rest, where we did before, with the Hulta. Instead we took a big room in a house that rented big rooms. The building had rose-red walls that the Peshamban winter had faded to a dull, rusty pink. There was a large garden outside, with grapevines that had gone black and lots of bare trees and flowerbeds with headless flower-stalks standing up in them.

  ‘It must have been a bad snow,’ I said to the woman who showed us to the room.

  ‘Not a snow. Leaves and blooms survive under snow,’ she said. ‘A cruel frost.’

  That evening the frost resettled, as apparently it had been doing for ages. The air sparked with chill and the stars flashed wildly like insane bright eyes. In the morning, all the roofs would again be thick with white frost-scales.

  Downstairs, where we had dinner at the house table with the house-family in their coloured silks, and several other travellers, the weather was discussed.

  ‘I say it’s been upset,’ said a man who wore his fur cloak to the table.

  ‘Yes, it’s certainly not right.’

  ‘Twenty solid nights of frost. Never happened here in living memory.’

  This was all from the visitors (they seemed to know more about Peshamba than the Peshambans, who just sat there politely, neither arguing nor agreeing).

  Fur Cloak’s girlfriend, who had on a fur coat, chipped in, ‘Well, I say it’s witchcraft. I say someone’s cast a jealous eye on Peshamba.’ There was a real silence at this. Everyone, I think, put down their knives or forks and looked at her. Not put out, the FCG tossed her straw-yellow hair and added, ‘Everyone knows Peshamba is a prize no one can take, it’s too well-defended by its machines and fighter-dolls. So someone’s taken a spite against it.’

  Fur Cloak cleared his throat. The FCG shrugged and drank her tea.

  Then the fat, goodlooking visitor, who said he sold elephants (he’d tried to sell us one), announced, ‘I heard someone’s tugged all the warm weather off somewhere else, storing it for private personal use. So all the rest of us get the leftover bad weather non-stop.’

  ‘Disgusting,’ said a woman who had come to Peshamba with her three daughters.

  ‘Disgusting,’ echoed Daughters Number One and Two.

  Number Three, the youngest, said flirtatiously to Argul, ‘Umm … would you pass the bread, please?’

  ‘Perhaps my wife can,’ said Argul graciously, ‘as she’s nearer.’

  So I passed the youngest daughter the bread, which she accepted with quite a glare.

  Despite everything, I was startled when Argul called me his wife. Although by then I was.

  We’d got married that afternoon. And as Argul said afterwards, when we came out of the wedding-building, ‘Did so
mething happen in there?’ Because the wedding had been – well actually AWFUL. Which was another reason why, right then, I didn’t write about it. But now I’m writing this again, I might as well.

  Argul had said that marriages took place at Peshamba under the CLOCK-which-is-a-god. But it turns out that’s only for Peshambans, or people who have lived in the town at least a year. I suppose it’s quite fair really. But very disappointing. What I’d remembered about Peshamba most, aside from its jewel-colours, was its generosity to outsiders.

  The first time we’d tried to get married I had been kidnapped by the Wolf Tower and then re-kidnapped by Ironel’s men, and the WT told Argul I’d left him to go off with that creep Nemian, which luckily Argul didn’t believe. The second time we had been meant to get married was in the Raven Tower at Chylomba, where Twilight Star wanted to see us swiftly hitched and then bred like two pedigree wolves. Yuk. We had escaped that one.

  The third marriage should have been special, to make up for the mess before.

  It wasn’t special. It was mostly just quick.

  First we were sent to a building with a red dome, where we had to sign a paper which said we wished to marry. There was no one in the room as we did this. Then a doll came in.

  I’d got used to the life-size moving dolls at the Rise, actually one doll, Jotto, who was remarkably unmechanical and human. Then there had been that other doll on the way to Chylomba – whose only virtue had been its total believable reality.

  Ustareth and Twilight Star could/can make dolls of that type. Now Peshamba’s dolls, which had seemed so astounding the first time I’d seen them, looked very stiff and machine-ish.

  This one wore a long, tubular robe of metallic silk and had a silver mask-face, and a high round hat like a sort of halo, made of some kind of black wood.

  I often speak to dolls and machines as if they’re people, but this one I didn’t. I just stood there, and the doll in the black halo-hat glided up to us.

  ‘Do you have witnesses or friends?’ it asked.