“To live as a Wolf, you must be true to the principles you have chosen to uphold. Those principles cannot be rocked or shaken by anger, by grief; they cannot be ignored when convenient. The act you commit, you commit for a reason, and that certainty is what holds you above the abyss. The abyss,” he added quietly, “that you will live on the edge of while you serve. Helmat?”
The Wolflord nodded. “It is easy, in the end, for all who serve the Imperial Law to feel, viscerally, that what they see, what they make their life’s work, is all there is to see. The Hawks deal with petty criminals on a daily basis. Some of those Hawks have come to believe that all citizens are petty criminals; that only petty criminals exist. The Swords deal with frightened or angry crowds—and on occasion, with the mobs those crowds become. It is natural for the Swords to believe that people should not—should never—be allowed to congregate; that people in congregations naturally evolve into something more deadly. In both cases, their fear is based on their experiences—both Hawks and Swords have died in the line of duty, and they wish to prevent future deaths of their comrades.
“It is work to fight against the growth of those beliefs, when all of your experience screams the opposite. The consequence of a Hawk or a Sword falling slowly into that bleak, gray cynicism is not large, although it should be guarded against. Imagine the consequence of a Wolf who does so. En is Barrani; he believes we are all irrelevant. He does not prize the lords of the mortal caste courts over the beggars in the streets; to En, we are practically one and the same.
“I am not En. I am mortal, as you are. I have had my fights, my difficulties, my rivalries, and my outrages. I bear the scars of some of them; I have emerged from the gauntlet of that life to lead this one. My experiences on the battlefield, on the city streets, and within the closed ranks of my household, form the foundations of my position as Lord of Wolves. But there is a reason that I no longer hunt. Even when I did, I never stood in the shadows. I am aware of my limitations. And it is my job, Severn—perhaps my most important job—to find those who can do the necessary work without being swallowed whole by the shadows themselves.” He stood, pushing his seat back from his desk.
“What is the difference between your hunts?”
“Wolves attempt to retrieve escaped criminals to bring them to trial. Shadow Wolves carry a writ of execution. They are expected to kill those the Emperor has deemed guilty.” Helmat was silent for a beat, studying the detritus that adorned his desk. “If you were to be given a job, a task, a duty, and you could choose it for yourself, what would you choose?”
Severn said nothing.
Helmat, however, expected an answer to this particular question. He folded his arms across his desktop, leaning into them, his gaze intent and almost unblinking.
“Do I have to be good at it?” The young man finally asked.
The question surprised Elluvian. It did not, however, appear to surprise Helmat. And this, of course, was the interesting thing about mortals. They gained wisdom at an astonishing rate, and the insight that accrued from that wisdom was unpredictable. They did not view the world the way Elluvian did, although, in theory, the world itself was the same. He had taught Helmat much of what the Lord of Wolves now knew.
But in the interstices of concrete lessons, Helmat had developed some strands of intuition that Elluvian did not possess. His understanding of Lord Marlin, however, made it clear that the boy’s question had been, on some level, the right question.
“No. I should not have asked; it is a question meant for daydreams and yearning, no more.” Helmat rose like the movement of mountains. “When I was young—younger than you are now—I did not dream of becoming a Wolf. I did not dream of serving the Emperor and protecting the Emperor’s Law. I do not remember what I dreamed of then. But I remember when dreams did, finally, arrive. They were not the dreams of a happy child. They might more accurately be called nightmares—but they came to me as daydreams do. Or perhaps I threw myself into them. Bitter as they were, they offered—” He paused then, and turned to Elluvian. “This story will no doubt bore you. You may wait outside.”
Elluvian raised a raven brow. “I am not entirely certain I’ve heard this one,” was his mild reply.
“En.”
The urge to argue surprised Elluvian. To Severn, he said, “You are free to leave. Remember that. You are not our captive; you are not our debtor; if you have broken laws—and I assume you must have, some laws are so lamentably trivial—we are unaware of them. Lord Marlin may intimidate, but he will not break the law we serve.”
The young man nodded.
CHAPTER FOUR
Elluvian stepped outside, which took him into a hallway. It was designed for, and by, mortals of the human variety; the ceilings were not high, and the halls themselves were not wide; one might walk three abreast in them, but two was more comfortable. They were currently empty. Although the hall had not, in theory, been designed to intimidate, it usually had that effect on those summoned into Lord Marlin’s presence; there were no doors on either wall, nothing to break its length. When one approached the Wolflord, one did so in isolation; there was no hope of escape.
Helmat had had the door repaired; the wall was sound now, but required paint. Structural integrity was more important than appearance to Helmat.
He wondered what Helmat was telling Severn. But more, he wondered why. Elluvian had seen some potential in the boy but in truth, some of that he derived from the fact that Severn had been tailing An’Teela and her two companions and he had been neither caught nor apparently noted. Helmat, clearly, saw something more.
If Helmat had begun the interview with some reservations, they were gone; his reluctant agreement had, with a few words from an otherwise suspicious young man, become genuine approval. Perhaps he saw something of himself in the young man. If he did, Elluvian had not seen it—and he had known Helmat for all of the Wolf’s career in the Halls of Law.
He left the hallway like an incarcerated man leaving his cell; he disliked mortal architecture’s suffocating density, and oft felt like a rat trapped in a maze, albeit a familiar one. Beyond the narrow hall, the office opened up, although the ceilings did not. Here there were desks, and those desks occupied a much larger room than the Lord of Wolves did. At the front of that room was a desk that was meant as a choke point.
“En.” The single syllable traveled the length of a room that was not entirely empty, as the woman at the desk rose and turned.
“Rosen.” He offered her a shallow bow. She was the oldest of the Wolves present, which did not make her old in mortal terms. Injury—her left hand was missing two fingers, and her left leg was not stable without a brace—had sidelined her permanently. Even given those injuries, she could be intimidating. None of the force-of-nature elements of her personality had left her. She disliked her name, and he thought it amusing that she was willing to use Helmat’s diminutive when addressing him. Only the very drunk or the very foolish attempted to call her Rose.