The Red Wolf Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF

my rank? Then I won't let you hide from me behind formalities. Or from your duty to think. When all are counted we shall be four hundred and eighty. The giants will outnumber us three to one, and if we don't out-think them at every turn from here to Sanctuary-Beyond-the-Sea we shall all be murdered. Warriors, children, your old parents waiting in Etherhorde. By Rin, people! I'm not smart enough to do this alone! No one is. The thought you'd spare me out of meekness could be the one that saves our lives. Who doubts what I say?”
    Silence. Low slap of water on wood. Far off in the village, temple bells, ringing the dawn.
    “Let us board our ship, then,” she said.
    “Dri!” they cried, soft but earnest. All save Taliktrum. He liked ranks and titles, and would be Lord Taliktrum soon enough, when his father declared him a man.
    They stood and stretched, buttoned their shirts of eelskin and sailcloth, washed their faces in a pool of rain. Then, with Diadrelu in the lead, they ran.
    To see an ixchel clan set its heart on being somewhere is like watching a thought race quicksilver toward its goal. This clan of nine swarmed up the wooden piling as though mounting stairs, dashed along an upper beam that shook with the boots of fishermen inches overhead, reached a knot-hole in the boards, made a ladder of their bodies and, in a heartbeat, pulled one another up and onto the pier.
    No giants saw them. A great ravenous gull did, and hopped straight for Dri, but four needle-sharp arrows met its breast in an instant and it blundered shrieking away. This was the worst now: the open run, the wide gaps and jagged splinters in the boards, and any variety of deaths along the way. Ixchel run in formation, a fluid diamond or arrowhead, and Dri was pleased with the tight cohesion of a clan that had not existed four days ago.
    It started well. The fishermen obligingly kept their toes to the harbor. A wharf-rat froze at the sight of them, hair on end and a slashed-off stump of tail twitching alarm, but it proved a wise creature and let them pass unchallenged. It even hissed a greeting: “Fatten up, cousins!” —which in rat terms is high courtesy.
    Best of all, the wind slept. Two weeks before, Dri had lost a boy on this very dock when a sudden gust knocked him sidelong into the waves.
    Mother Sky, we might not lose a soul today! thought Dri.
    But halfway to land a sailor, flat on his back and reeking of pumpkin ale, came to sudden life and groped for Ensyl, the youngest of their company. Had he used his boot he might have killed her, drunk as he was. His hand, however, was bare, and Ensyl turned like a seasoned battle-dancer, her sword a blur, and cut off his forefinger at the second knuckle. The man howled, waving his mutilated hand.
    “Crawlies! Muckin' sewer-sippin' whorespawned grubs! I'll kill ye!”
    The evil word swept past them like fire. Crawlies! Crawlies! Boots shook the pier ahead and behind. A crowd of giants, two or three of them sober, pounded straight at them from the village. Others rushed to the rails of the nearest ships with lamps, squinting into the half-light. A bottle shattered, spraying them with grog.
    “The barge!” cried Dri, and without hesitation flung herself from the dock. As she fell toward the water, the flaps of the swallow-suit billowed like twin sails. Diadrelu stretched out her arms, found the gauntlets sewn into the hem. The swallow's wingbones, heirlooms of her family, were fused to these gloves, and when her hands slipped inside them she became the swallow, a flying being, a woman with wings.
    She barely pulled out of the fall: her feet grazed a wave. Then with four aching beats of her arms, she rose and shot to the deck of the barge, thirty feet from the pier where her people stood at bay. The barge was long and dark, and by the stillness of the lamps at the far end, she guessed its people had not yet heard the shout of “Crawlies!” That would change, though: in minutes every boat in Sorrophran