“I assume Renzo was attempting to ensure that things went the other way.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“The door?”
“Was closed.” Closed, in the Wolflord’s office, had a different weight, a different meaning.
“Was he on the inside or the outside of that closed door?”
“Inside. En—is this necessary?”
“He was my student, just as you were. It pains me to see his head used as a paperweight.”
“Does it?”
Elluvian smiled. It was a Barrani expression; sharp, cold. “What do you think?”
“I think one day you’ll tell me why you ever agreed to serve the Eternal Emperor. How is Rosen?”
“I do not believe she will be engaged in ground hunts in the near—or far—future.”
Helmat did not curse; he seldom did when Elluvian’s appraisal matched his own. “We’re down a Wolf.” Renzo was clearly no longer considered a Wolf.
They were down two, but Elluvian did not correct Helmat. In his current mood it would be highly unprofitable.
“Who do you have for me?”
Elluvian had, three times in the past centuries, attempted to change the recruitment procedures of the Wolves. He had failed each of those times. Elluvian did not technically or legally command the Wolves, but he found them. Scouted them. Often trained them. Helmat Marlin, current Lord of Wolves, had final say; not all of those Elluvian brought into the office had been accepted into the pack.
But all of them had had, in Elluvian’s opinion, the raw ability to become Wolves and to survive it.
“One possible candidate.”
“Bring them in.”
* * *
This was, of course, easier said than done. Helmat was a Wolf of several decades; he understood what possible meant in this context.
Elluvian did not generally seek Wolves from the comfortable strata of human society. There were always exceptions; the current Wolflord had come from an older—for mortals—family, and his father was what passed for nobility. Had Elluvian been aware of his family and parentage when he had first approached the younger Helmat, he would never have offered him the job. And that would have been a mistake. He could see that clearly now—but decades had passed, and he had seen Helmat’s full measure in the interim.
The Emperor wanted soldiers.
The Wolves, however, were not soldiers. The Emperor’s nomenclature preference aside, the Wolves in general were considered assassins by much of the populace.
In the view of the Barrani, the differences between the two, soldier and assassin, were slight and would be considered negligible. One killed on command. The other also killed on command. The difference would be in the small details: the soldiers congregated; the assassins did not. Where an army might be met with the forces of another army, the assassin was free to come and go as competence and strategic planning allowed.
Mortals seldom considered the two to be the same. Helmat, in spite of his experience and knowledge, did not. But Helmat appeared to understand what the Emperor desired of the Wolves—an understanding that continued to elude Elluvian.
The bare bones of it, however, were clear.
Find someone who might be molded into a soldier who could—and did—kill on command. Ah, no, not soldier—executioner. The Eternal Emperor had those: men who saw that death sentences were carried out, both cleanly and quickly. The Emperor did not call the Wolves his assassins; he called them his executioners. His mobile executioners.
There was no shortage of mortals who could, and did, kill. No shortage of Barrani who could, and did, either. But the Emperor had decided, for reasons that made sense to none of the Immortals of Elluvian’s acquaintance, that the general formation of the power structure that Immortals understood was not allowed to occur within his Empire naturally.
In the Emperor’s Empire, power was not to be the sole measure of worth. There was right, there was wrong, and laws laid out which action belonged in which category. They seemed arbitrary to Elluvian, an echo of the systems around which the Dragons and the Barrani built their societies. Right and wrong simply meant: angers the Emperor or does not anger the Emperor—the person in power.
The Emperor, however, denied that this was the intent.
* * *
Elluvian was angry. He had felt low-level irritation—a mixture of resignation and anger—since he had entered the Imperial presence; it had grown steadily as he had reached the offices the Wolves occupied in the Halls of Law.
To see the head of Renzo displayed on the desk of the Wolflord had been something of a surprise, and not a pleasant one. Displaying the dead was not something the Barrani themselves were above—but in general, the display was more tasteful, less immediately raw. There were better ways to make a point.
Renzo’s failure was not unexpected. If Helmat was Wolflord, he was not an open book; he could be both jovial and deadly as the occasion demanded, and his ability to deal with emotional fragility was almost nonexistent. No, what frustrated Elluvian was Renzo’s decision. Observed pragmatically, Renzo had nothing at all to gain by Helmat’s death. He would not become Wolflord.
Those who served as Wolves required two things: loyalty to the Emperor and his Wolves, and a complete lack of attachments outside of that. No children, no family. Where secondary attachments existed, blackmail and extortion also existed. Some men and women could accept threats to family as the consequence of their duty. Most, however, could not. In the end, if forced to endure it by that sense of duty, something in them broke.
Elluvian wondered what had broken Renzo—assuming that anything had.
He was dead. No answers would, therefore, be forthcoming, which was the second reason that Elluvian was angry. He could not gather that information in any efficient way; he must investigate as if he were a Hawk, which did not suit him in any fashion. Helmat was unlikely to seek the Hawks or their aid; the death was an internal matter.
Rosen’s injuries had all but ensured she would never hunt at the Emperor’s pleasure again; she was willing to work in the office and willing to train those who could. That left the ranks all but unmanned. Mellianne was, in Elluvian’s opinion, skilled but not yet fully come into the wisdom that might allow her to survive particularly difficult encounters. Jaren was the only functional Wolf because Helmat did not hunt.
The Wolflord never did.
This had not always been the case, but trial and error had made clear to Elluvian that the presence of the Wolflord in the office was a necessity. Hunts were, by their very nature, long and often complex affairs; it was not simply a matter of assigning a death and a “reasonable” completion time.