The Wolves' Road

Opening

The light went with them, and only the light.

It hung off Telno's wrist in a bracelet of white-shot platinum, and for perhaps sixty feet in every direction it held the valley at arm's length — the packed black road showing itself, the nearest pines standing in something close to their true colors. Past that ring the fog came up out of the ground in a wall, unnatural and patient, climbing into the treetops and standing there like glass, and beyond the wall the world was only grey. Even inside the ring nothing was truly colored. The valley leaked the color out of everything it touched, and the fog only made the greyness greyer, and where the two met the world went nearly to black and white.

Above them the sky was a single unbroken sheet of pewter. No sun stood in it. Not a thinning, not a bright patch where a sun ought to be behind cloud — only that even, sourceless light that threw no shadow and told them nothing about the hour. Zuktind put a word to it before anyone asked him to. Not night, not day. Eternal twilight — a country caught forever between the two.

They had walked out of a fortune-teller's tent expecting Neverwinter. This was what they had instead.

The Land That Lies

The road bent east around the pines, and the fog flowed east ahead of it, and that was the first thing that was wrong.

Yeltsu had been the one to notice it, and Yeltsu was the one who kept pulling at the threads all through the grey hours that followed — reading the valley the way another man reads a book he doesn't trust. Fog was not supposed to go anywhere. It sat, or it drifted where the wind pushed it. This fog moved with intent, all of it the same way, eastward, even where the ground rose against it and fog had no business climbing. Rathenfall watched it long enough to be sure of the same thing, and said as little as his failing voice would let him.

Zuktind reached for the arcane grain of the place and Telno reached past the Mirror's steady warmth toward the divine, and the answers they brought back did not comfort anyone. This was unhallowed ground, Telno said — claimed against the gods, in some sacred sense simply wrong. Whether Bahamut could hear a prayer spoken here at all, she could not tell. Only that they were standing in someone else's temple, and the temple was the whole land.

Lissandra went further, and what she found was worse for being so simple. There was nothing here to dispel. She felt for the seams of an enchantment laid over the valley and found no seam, because nothing had been done to this place — the place itself was the working. The land was the spell. The distances refused to add up; the road returned them to landmarks they were nearly certain they had already passed, and were nearly as certain were not the same landmarks. History gave the thing its name at last: a demiplane. They were not on the Sword Coast anymore. They were not, in any ordinary sense, anywhere.

And when Yeltsu crouched and read the ground for what lived in it, the last lie came apart. A forest this old should have been loud — birds, insects, the sign of deer at the very least. There was nothing. No scat, no tracks but their own boots stamped behind them in the black dirt. No song, no crickets, no wingbeats. A stage dressed to look like wilderness, with all its animals somewhere the party could not see, and possibly watching.

He tried, once, to reach the fog directly — sent Zuktind to the wall with the Mace of Disruption held out ahead of him, its light bright at twenty feet and dim for twenty more. The light spilled into the grey and the grey did not so much as stir. It did not penetrate the fog. It did not disturb it. Zuktind lowered the mace and walked back, and that settled it: the Mirror on Telno's wrist was the only thing in the valley that the fog would answer to.

Through all of it Mira Ashveil walked and drew, the way she had done since the mists first took them — pencil ticking against paper in short, confident strokes that kept stopping. She held the book at arm's length, turned it, frowned at the road, frowned at the page, muttered low that she had passed that already, that she had drawn something here. Then she stopped walking. The knee-high fog gathered around her boots as she slowed, curling in as if to hold her there, and for a moment she only stared at the bend in the road like a woman waiting for something. She snapped the sketchbook shut.

"Do you understand what I do for a living?" she asked them. And when Yeltsu offered — you make maps — she looked at him as though he had missed the whole point of it. "I make maps," she agreed. "This place is lying to my pencil. It doesn't agree to be described. I draw things on the paper and they are not there — the next time I look, it's different." She had drawn a landmark not a minute ago, she said, and she was certain it had already changed its place on the page.

Yeltsu told her he did not envy her the work, and meant it. Even Avernus, he said, had kept some sense of its own logic. This place kept none.

The Crossroads Gallows

The road turned around the pines, and a gallows stood at the junction.

It was weathered wood, grey as everything else — but the rope was new. The body turning slowly at the end of it was dressed like a traveler, and for a moment, as the slow rotation brought the face around, it was familiar. Then it was more than familiar. It was Rathenfall's face, the dark mane unmistakable, the dead eyes open and turned toward them.

Yeltsu's hand went out on instinct — not to the hanged thing, but to the Rathenfall walking beside him. He pressed his fingers into the fur of the one who was still there, needing to feel that he was warm and solid and no ghost. You're you, right? You're not dead? Rathenfall told him, flatly, that of course he was here. And when Yeltsu looked back at the gallows the body had changed. It was a stranger now, dead for days, no one any of them had ever known. It had always been a stranger. Its pockets, when it came to that, held nothing but a plain button — a plain button and nothing else, meaning nothing to anyone.

A raven dropped onto the crossbeam and folded its wings and watched them.

The Raven

It did not leave.

It kept twenty, thirty, forty feet ahead of them down the road, tree to tree, waiting when they slowed, doing the one thing no wild bird does — keeping their pace. When it settled it looked at them, and Lissandra, watching it look, grew quietly troubled. Ravens watched hands, she said. Ravens watched bright things — and there was bright enough here, the jewelry at her own throat, the Mirror burning on Telno's wrist. This one watched none of it. This one watched their eyes.

She turned her senses on it and found nothing to find: no enchantment, no conjuration's signature, no leash running back to some caster somewhere out in the grey. The creature was only itself. And yet it was more intelligent than a raven had any right to be, and ravens were already clever. Not a summoned spy, then. Not a druid's borrowed shape. Something that wore this shape because the shape was its own — a shapechanger, she decided, deliberate and unbothered and native to those feathers.

Yeltsu spoke to it, half-expecting an answer, and got none. It only regarded him — the way Mirela had regarded them across her cards, a lifetime and a fog wall ago — and then lifted off and flew ahead and settled again to wait, as though whatever it had been waiting for had finally come to pass. It went where they were going. It never once led them wrong.

The Caravan That Stayed

Somewhere in the grey a wolf howled, far off, and much nearer another answered — so near it walked the goosebumps up their spines head to toe, louder than any wolf they had ever heard. The howling was closing on them, and they knew it. They pulled Mira into the middle of them, a loose ring of scale and mane and drawn steel around a woman who carried a pencil and nothing sharper, and they picked up the pace.

Around the next bend the fog gave up two wagons.

They were wrong-stopped — tongues down in the mud, no oxen anywhere, cargo spilled and left to the weather. Whatever had happened here had happened weeks ago and had taken only minutes. On the driver's bench a pipe still sat waiting in its rail-notch for an owner who was never climbing back up. Yeltsu crouched over the marks scored into the wagon boards while Zuktind, distracted by something in the grey, saw nothing at all — claw-rake in parallel fours, hip-height off the ground, too high for a wolf, too wide for a man's hand. Not a bear. Not a wolf, not even a dire wolf. Nothing that belonged to any forest's food chain had left that mark. A bipedal thing, canid, that struck at a man's height or higher, fast and large, and gone in minutes.

In a good case among the spilled cargo he found twenty-four bolts tipped with silver. He weighed sharing them — Zuktind carried a crossbow, a musket — and chose instead to keep them close and hoard them, because everyone who had ever heard a story knew what silver was for, and the thing that had gutted these wagons was still out there somewhere ahead of them. A jar of lamp oil went into a pack. A child's doll lay in the wreckage, and no one would touch it, and it stayed where it lay.

From the caravan, for the first time, the trees opened enough to show them the far side of the valley — and on a hill above the treeline to the south stood a house. Tall, gabled, grey. One window on the upper floor, and, count it and count it again, one window only, lit warm and yellow.

The House on the Hill

Nobody expected anything of it. The last house in this valley had answered them through a barred door and given them nothing but a name. But Lissandra allowed there was no harm in a look, and Zuktind hoped aloud that whoever lived here might be a shade braver than the last, and so they turned off the road and took the overgrown cart-track up the hill.

Up close the house stood alone the way a tooth stands alone in a jaw — three storeys, steep gables, grey timber gone silver with age, forgotten on its forgotten hill in its forgotten valley. That single lit window held the only warm light they had seen since the fog took them. As they watched, something small moved behind the glass. A child's height. A small hand pressed itself flat against the pane and stayed there.

Yeltsu turned to say something to the others, and behind him a voice he had not heard arrive said, You are not allowed.

At the top of the entrance stairs, where a heartbeat ago there had been no one, two children stood holding hands — a girl of perhaps ten, a boy of perhaps seven, in nightclothes forty years out of fashion. The landing window showed clean through both of them. The girl looked at the party's scales and mane and serpent's eyes, pulled her brother back a step, and put herself in front of him. You are not allowed, she said again, steady in the way of a child who has decided not to cry. Mother says no one is allowed downstairs.

We weren't aiming to enter, Yeltsu said — it seemed only courteous — and Good, she said.

Telno drew close to him and spoke very softly. "Why are you talking to it?"

Zuktind heard the word and did not like it. "Why do you keep calling them it, sister? I see two scared children."

"Don't you see?" she said. And she raised the wrist that wore the Mirror, and let its light fall on the two small figures at the top of the stairs.

The light went through them the way it went through fog. Where the children had been there was for an instant a rotten body, and they flinched from the brightness with a sound like something hurt, something frightened — and then the light simply washed over them and they came apart into mist and were gone.

Yeltsu had seen only two frightened children trying to keep strangers off their steps; the Mirror had shown Telno what was truly there. "Thank you, sister," Zuktind said. "We almost made a grave mistake." Not by declining to enter, he explained when Yeltsu asked — by standing there talking to them at all.

Whether the twins were destroyed or only turned aside for a while, none of them could say for certain. There was a mother spoken of, another presence somewhere in the house, and a warm light in an upstairs window that Lissandra distrusted precisely because it was warm. "Perhaps the light is there to intrigue you," she said. They weighed the house — the promise of something useful behind those silvered walls against everything the valley had taught them in a single grey day — and Rathenfall, his voice come briefly back to him, said he did not think it was worth it. So they left it. They turned back down the cart-track toward the road, the lit window at their backs, and did not look to see whether the small hand was still against the glass.

Turning Point — The Toll

Grey shapes moved in the woods below the hill as they came down, circling, keeping pace with them through the trees. They did not answer the shapes. They kept to the road and tried to open distance, and the howling started up again from the treeline — one call, an answer close beside it, another from the far side of the hill. They were surrounded, and knew it, and kept walking. Mira asked them, small and afraid, to move fast; she had heard wolves before, even close, but something about these sounded different, and she could not say how. Yeltsu understood her better than he wanted to. He had seen how different one raven could be.

They closed the ring around her — six of them and a hound besides — and pressed on down the road as far and as fast as they could go, on high alert, watching the trees, watching the road behind. And then the howling stopped. All of it. Everywhere, at once.

The silence had weight, as if the whole valley had drawn one long breath and held it. Into it, without hurry, a shape stepped onto the road ahead of them.

It stood nine or ten feet tall, grey-black pelt over a frame that was wrong for a wolf and wrong for a man and fully committed to being both. Its eyes were a mirror yellow, and they held — this was the terrible part — consideration. It was not deciding whether to attack. It was deciding what they were.

"The Mists feed the strong to the valley," it said, in a voice like gravel taught grammar. It drew a breath of the air between them. "You smell of somewhere else. Somewhere bright." Behind it the pack poured out of the treeline, silent now, spreading wide across the road. "Bright things last the least time in here. Run if you like. It's better when the toll runs."

"You won't find such pleasure from us," Zuktind said. And then, quieter, to Telno: Sister. Try the mirror.

She closed her fist, and raised her wrist, and turned the Mirror's face toward the treeline and the things standing in front of it. Clean white light rolled out across the road. The dire wolves flinched and slunk back from it, ears flat, the way any animal shies from a torch thrust at its eyes. But the light kept going, and where it washed over the shapes at the back the shapes did not quite hold. A shoulder stood too high. A joint bent the wrong way. A muzzle flattened toward a face for half a heartbeat before the shadow took it back — and the party understood, all at once, that not everything in that pack was a wolf.

And the biggest of them did not flinch at all. The tall one, the one that had spoken, stood in the full white light and looked into it with plain interest — and then, as the brightness held on it, it growled, low and clearly angry, a creature that had just been provoked with the one thing it could not abide.

Closing

The valley had been inhaling all this while. Now it let the breath go.

They stood on the crooked black road with Mira at their center and the Mirror burning on Telno's wrist, silver bolts hoarded against exactly this, and the thing that had emptied a caravan in minutes considering them from ten feet away with its pack fanned wide behind it. There would be no more walking past. The toll had been called, and it meant to be paid.

What the road would take from them, it had not yet taken. That reckoning waited on the far side of the silence — for the next time the mists closed, and the initiative was rolled, and the wolves of Barovia finally came.