The Red Wolf Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page A

shook his head and frowned.
    “Arquali words. I've heard enough of them for a lifetime.”
    The woman made no answer. She listened to the boy above them shout, “Captain Nestef! Captain, sir!” until at last his voice broke into sobs. Homelessness. How could anyone who had known it feel no pity?
    Sixty feet away there came a flash of light: the old fisherman was cooking his breakfast of shrimp heads and gruel on the deck of his lunket , a kind of patchwork boat made of hides stretched over a wooden frame. Lunket: that was Arquali, too. So was her favorite word in any tongue: idrolos , the courage to see. Her own language had no such word. And without a word to hook it, how the thought wriggles away! That old man knew idrolos: he had dared to see the good in her people, who mended his threadbare sails and fixed leaks in his vessel by night. And that seeing had given him a further courage: to carry them here, four clans across four fishing nights, pretending not to hear them in his hold or to notice them leaping from the stern as they docked in Sorrophran. They had never spoken, for to transport ixchel was a crime punishable by death, and only the fisherman and Diadrelu knew how she had woken him once, standing on his night-table, holding out a blue pearl larger than her own head and worth more than he would make in two years dragging nets along the coast.
    “Finish your meal,” she told the clan, without turning. “Dawn is come.”
    Her command silenced them all. They ate. Diadrelu was glad of their appetites: who knew how hungry the months ahead would prove? Good as well to find an order Taliktrum could obey without grumbling. He was insolent, her nephew. Already sniffing out the power he assumed would come to him. As it would, no doubt. When her group joined that of her brother Talag, the two of them would share command, and Taliktrum would be his father's first lieutenant.
    She remembered the boy's birth in Ixphir Hall, twenty years ago. A hard birth, an agony for her sister-in-law, who had screamed so loudly that the Upper Watch sent a runner to warn that the mastiffs on the old admiral's porch (directly over Ixphir House) were cocking their heads. Then out he came, open-eyed like all ixchel newborns, but also gripping his umbilicus: an omen of great valor, or madness, depending on the legend you preferred. Little Taliktrum— Triku , they'd called him, although he soon forbade even his mother to use the nickname. Would he still obey her in his father's presence? Yes, by Rin, he would .
    She stepped up to the watchboy, held out her hand for his spear.
    “The last trawler's coming in now, m'lady,” he said. “We've got a path.”
    She nodded. “Go and eat, Nytikyn.”
    “There's a crab, m'lady.”
    Diadrelu nodded, then detained him with a hand on his arm. “Just Dri,” she said. Then she turned to face them all.
    “You newcomers don't believe me,” she said. “And I know that customs differ in East Arqual, where some of you were raised. But I meant what I told you last night. From here forward we are a clan of ixchel—just so. And until our next Fifthmoon Banquet or wedding, my name is Dri—just so. Or if you insist, Diadrelu. Such was always my preference in Etherhorde, in Ixphir House, and I don't mean to change it now. Discipline is one thing, servility another. Turn and look at that monster behind you. Go on.”
    Unwillingly, they leaned out over the water. It was a sapphire crab, wider than a human's dinner plate, clinging to the moss with its fish-egg eyes trained on them and one huge serrated claw flexed open. Such a claw, they well knew, could cut any of them in two at the midsection.
    “Crabs don't say m'lady . Nor will that assassin, that Red River cat, if the hag Oggosk brings her aboard. Nor will the necklace-fanciers.”
    At the word necklace they shuddered, then dropped their eyes with shame.
    “There will be one or two,” she said. “You know this. So tell me: can I hide from them behind