He went forward alone, the wolves watching him from the valley lip. Feileg kept to the same side of the gorge on which Vali was sleeping, slinking low but fast towards his target. The horses were past the sleeping man, and Feileg felt there was a chance he could take them without waking him. It was too big a risk, however. Who knew who was riding to meet the sleeper? Who knew if he was an experienced tracker or even a sorcerer? He would have to die. To Feileg’s keen senses threat oozed from the sleeping man. It hummed like a nest of bees in a cave mouth, seeped into his consciousness like fire on the breeze. There was only one way to make it go away.
The quickest way to kill someone in their sleep depends on how they are lying. If he is on his front then it’s relatively easy to break his neck with an arm around the head and a knee in the back. Feileg had done this two or three times and found that even if the neck didn’t break he still had an effective stranglehold on his prey and could finish him very quickly. If the man was on his side or back then he might stamp him to death. Other times, when silence was necessary, he had power enough in his fingers to crush his throat.
Feileg — perhaps it is better to call him the wolfman because the hormonal surge he felt within him at the prospect of killing made his humanity seem a weak and withered thing — didn’t make a sound as he reached the brush that concealed the sleeping man. The man was on his back and the wolfman decided to creep up on his victim and twist his neck.
There was a growl, low and guttural. The wolfman glanced around to see where it had come from. He hadn’t made the noise himself. It was like nothing natural, and he felt a chill creep down his spine. Every pore seemed open and sweating, his body signalling danger with every sense. The growl came again, even lower, like rock on rock.
Feileg flattened himself to the ground. A third growl, this time like something coming from the lower earth, and a word: ‘Adisla.’ Feileg looked up. The noise was coming from the sleeping man. He was snoring. Feileg’s mind went back to the hut of the berserks where he had been raised. His memories of that time were now just impressions: the dark of the hut, the smell of his mother’s skirts, a glimpse of himself being chased in a game by the girls he considered his sisters. Only one incident stuck out. The man he had called father had snored like thunder, especially when drunk. The children had put feathers on his lips and hooted as he puffed them away. He remembered one of the girls putting one next to her father’s behind to see if that moved when he farted. It had moved and Feileg had thought he would never stop laughing. Looking down at the sleeping Vali, he heard another strange noise, like the babble of a stream. It was, he realised, coming from himself. He was chuckling. He hadn’t done that in a long time.
As he laughed, a glimpse of the meaning of human interaction returned to him, or rather a fleeting delight in inanities, and he felt a sort of fellowship with the snoring man, almost the desire to wake him and tell him how loud, how funny, he sounded. But Feileg had to kill him. The focus — those who didn’t know wolfmen called it rage — that made this easier though had been carried away by his laughter. He looked hard at Vali. Feileg hadn’t seen his own face since he was six and then only rarely. His image of himself had been mainly formed by looking into the shiny surfaces of the sword blades he had taken so he wasn’t immediately struck by his resemblance to the man before him, but something within him made it difficult to murder him outright.
Feileg sat for a while at the man’s feet. He studied him closely. He had — by ritual, the consumption of strange mushrooms, privation and lack of practice — lost the habit of thinking in words. So it was a shapeless, sliding thought that came to him as he looked at Vali’s combed and clipped hair, the fine sword that lay at his side, the rich colour of his woollen coat. He could not have articulated what he felt but this made the sense no less powerful. There was himself, as he could have been, had the fates weaved him a different skein. The man had said a word: Adisla. Feileg instinctively recognised it for what it was — a girl’s name. He did not feel unhappy, or at least he could not identify his emotion as unhappiness, but he did begin to feel uncomfortable about the path that the fates had chosen for him.
He breathed in, smelling something sweet and something rancid. He saw Vali’s pack and felt his saliva rise. He opened it and, without pausing to examine what he found, began to eat. He ate the honey and the stale bread and the cheese. He ate the berserker mushrooms and the long root. He couldn’t abide even the smell of the wolfsbane but the sleeping mixture was sweet and palatable so he sucked it down and pushed his tongue into the pot to get the last drops. Then he ate the mint and drained Vali’s wineskin. He began to feel peaceful, warm and relaxed.
From up the valley the wolves began to howl, but he could not hear them to reply. Disa’s white night potion had made the world soft. Feileg lay down on the grass and slept.
15
Vali really did think he was dreaming. He came to himself with that strange sensation that you sometimes get when waking in unfamiliar surroundings, when reality makes a sudden lurch and you don’t know where you are or how you got there.
At his feet, sleeping face down, was a powerfully built man dressed in little but a wolf pelt. The ruins of the pack were next to him, all food gone, and his wineskin lay flat as a blanket at his side. At first he thought it was dark but then he realised it was the shadow of the horses. They had pressed in as close as they could to him. No wonder. From down the valley he heard the call of a wolf.
Vali grabbed for his sword and drew it, pointing it at the sleeping figure. This had to be a wolfman. Vali didn’t know what to do. He knew it would be far more impressive to take the bandit alive and — more than that — it would be proof he had a wolfman and not some dressed-up slave. But the man — no older than he was — was impressively muscled. Even the thralls who did most of the heavy labour on the farms were not made so powerfully. If he awoke while Vali was tying him up then the prince didn’t fancy his chances in a wrestling competition.
Vali looked around him. The pack was completely empty, everything in it gone. There were the little cloth bags in which he’d carried Disa’s herbs all torn; there was the empty honey pot and the one containing the sleeping draught.
He smiled to himself when he realised what had happened. Carefully, he pushed the tip of his sword into the wolfman’s back, drawing a little blood. That was a relief, knowing that ordinary weapons could hurt him. The wolfman didn’t even stir.
Vali took the cord from the saddle at his side. He had never actually needed to tie anyone up before and didn’t quite know how to do it, so he erred on the side of caution, binding the man’s hands behind his back, then his legs, then his hands again and his legs again.
He had never thought of himself as religious or superstitious but he was almost afraid to touch the wolfman and certainly didn’t want to move the wolf pelt he wore over his head. It was a magical item, capable of transforming the man into a snarling half wolf. Even the merchant Veles Libor had taken those stories seriously.
Vali thought of the remedies for magic that he knew — not many, he’d had no reason or opportunity to learn them. However, he knew that magicians were supposed to be able to enchant you with their gaze and a way to negate this power was to blindfold them. He had nothing that would do for a blindfold; he did, however, have the bag that he had taken the rope from. But as he lifted the wolfman to slide the bag over his head, he caught a glimpse of something extraordinary.
The man was strikingly similar to Vali himself. His face was far more weatherbeaten and lean, and his hair was wild, but his beard was sparse and thin, like Vali’s, his features virtually identical. Vali shivered. This was truly a shape-shifter.