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.
Mellianne was not yet ready, and even were she, she disliked Jaren. She disliked Elluvian as well, but he expected that; affection of any kind was barely part of her functionality at this point. She was, however, good at what she did, and it did not seem to change her markedly. If she hated or despised people as deeply as she sometimes professed, she could nonethelessdo somethingabout the worst of them. That was the lever that could be pushed: she was no longer helpless.
But her contempt for the helpless was a counterpressure that he had not fully been able to dislodge. Power, and the desire for power, were the province of the living. Even the beasts sought power and supremacy. The balance between feeling powerful and feeling powerless was a gray area. The path from powerless to powerful defined a mortal. Elluvian did not understand the inner workings of most such journeys.
His experience, much of it bitter, had taught him that it was the journey itself that created an Imperial Wolf. Those who stepped on the wrong path, traveled the wrong byway, ended up as a head on the desk of the Lord of Wolves. He had not lied; he found the presence of the head there distasteful. It was, in its entirety, an accusation of failure.
Jaren was older now; younger than Helmat, but older than Mellianne and Rosen. Rosen’s injuries, Rosen’s lack of suitability, were a fact of life. But she had been an excellent Wolf. The life expectancy of the Wolves was short. Her injuries had probably extended hers into the foreseeable future. She would be bound to a desk. Jaren would train her to take on the tasks of organization and reporting, and Jaren would probably return to the hunt.
This, too, was not to Elluvian’s liking. Jaren had once been his hawk. Helmat had been his merlin. Rosen had been his eagle. Hunting birds, all.
And perhaps because that was his personal metaphor, it was natural that they should fly, and natural that one or two, tasting the freedom of the sky and the imperative of that hunt, not return. Perhaps that was why the Emperor had called them Wolves and not birds of prey.
Elluvian could not understand why the name Hawks had been given to the division that was largely investigative; that would not have been his choice of name. Swords, though, he considered apt. It was, however, the tabard of the Hawks he now searched for as he walked through the streets of Elantra.
Ah, he thought. There.
CHAPTER TWO
An’Teela was a legend in the Barrani High Court. As with allsuch legends, gossip and myth had conspired to obscure fact. Elluvian could not transcribe every word he had heard about her unless he had a mortal month or more and an endless supply of both ink and paper. What he believed of what he had heard would be shorter.
He could, however, attest to the truth of one of the more scandalous rumors: An’Teela walked the streets of the mortal city wearing the tabard of the Imperial Hawk. By her side, likewise attired, strode a man Elluvian had little cause to recognize; Tain of Korrin was not a Lord of the High Court.
He had been drawn to investigate An’Teela because he did not understand the game she now played. There had been little bad blood between Elluvian and An’Teela, but not none; it was impossible to be a member of the High Court without giving offense, however subtle, to someone. An’Teela could be extremely subtle. It was not, however, required.
He saw that she did not wieldKariannosin the city streets. She did not, in fact, carry a sword at all. The Barrani who served the Halls of Law had been given the wooden clubs that characterized the Hawks, and she carried that, along with the tabard. It was not a risk that Elluvian had expected her to take. He understood thatKariannoswas not a weapon meant for keeping peace. It had one purpose.
In Barrani terms, she was newly come to the Hawks. In mortal terms, she was not. If her intrusion into the Halls of Law had caused political difficulty—and no doubt it had, for An’Teela—she was nonetheless here, and content, or so it appeared, to abide by the mortal hierarchy that the Eternal Emperor had created.
A game, he thought. Or perhaps she was simply bored. Boredom would carry the day for a time—perhaps a decade. Elluvian himself might have considered it novel to be a Hawk for a small time. He found it vexing to be a Wolf, but he had been part of the Halls of Law for far longer than boredom would otherwise justify.
Boredom, however, remained a problem, and to alleviate it, he often spied on An’Teela. The information—should any useful information arise—would be of value, and he might trade it for information he required in turn.
He had been unprepared for the sight of An’Teela with a mortal child.
The girl was younger than Mellianne had been when he had first caught sight of her and younger than Mellianne was now, but in some fashion, there was a spark of similarity between the two. He might have approached that child in a handful of years, might have offered her what he had offered Mellianne.
But the girl was clearly under An’Teela’s figurative wing, which Elluvian found fascinating in and of itself. While she remained ensconced there, Elluvian would not approach her. He would not dare.
Records in the Halls of Law existed for each Hawk, Sword, and Wolf. Access to the Records of the Wolves was restricted to the Wolves, specifically three of the Wolves. The Emperor, of course, had access to everything should he desire it; to Elluvian’s knowledge, that was never.