Wolfking The Omnibus: Books 1-4 Read online

  WOLFKING THE OMNIBUS

  Books 1-4

  Sarah Rayne

  © Sarah Rayne 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994

  Sarah Rayne has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 1991-1994 by Headline under the pseudonym Bridget Wood.

  This edition published by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd in 2016.

  Table of Contents

  Wolfking

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  The Lost Prince

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Rebel Angel

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Sorceress

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Epilogue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Wolfking

  CHAPTER ONE

  Before the apocalypse Joanna would not have had to draw water from the well and carry it in pails to the kitchen. There would have been levers that you turned, and there the water would have been. Some of the legends even said you could have the water hot if you wanted, but this was not generally thought correct. Joanna’s father said if all the stories about the Letheans were true, they ought to have been able to fight the Apocalypse and destroy it before it destroyed them. They certainly ought to have been able to stop it from stalking the world and laying waste and burning up cities wholesale. It was only a pity, said Joanna’s father, that a bit more of the Letheans’ fabled learning had not survived, and then Joanna would not have to pull up pailfuls of water, and her mother would not have to wrestle with the cauldron of clothes on wash days, and he himself could have travelled to every corner of the farm in a machine that drove itself, like the Letheans were said to have done.

  The Letheans. The Forgotten Ones. Named after the River of the Underworld — the Lethe — whose waters made the souls of the dead forget their lives on earth. And, what was so terrible to Joanna, they had been given the name because so little of them had survived that no one now knew for sure what they had been called.

  “Ah, it’s a grand old name for them,” said Flynn O’Connor. “And aren’t they truly the forgotten ones, anyway? In some lands they call them the Quondam!”

  Joanna asked what that meant.

  “That which once was, but is no longer.”

  You could not altogether trust Flynn’s information, because like most Irishmen he could spin a good tale if he thought he could get away with it, but you could not entirely dismiss it either. The O’Connors were honoured in Tugaim. “Old Stock,” said Joanna’s Aunt Briony reverently, but then Aunt Briony’s information could not really be trusted either, because she had once been betrothed to be conjoined to Flynn’s great-uncle Diarmid, and was apt to be sentimental about the family. Joanna’s father said that Diarmid O’Connor had deliberately disappeared one night, rather than face conjoining with Aunt Briony, but Joanna did not believe this either.

  Aun
t Briony was inclined to promote a conjoining between Joanna and Flynn because it was a tradition, and a linking of two great Irish families. “The land marches along — well, we know that. And Joanna would like marrying Flynn. He has books,” said Aunt Briony reverently, “from before the Apocalypse. Not the thin, rubbishy stuff your father reads, my dear, but real books. Paper like satin and printing so clear you wouldn’t believe it. Remarkable things.” She had read one once, she said. “All the way through, and not one word in ten did I understand, which just shows you. A great city it was, with desperate criminals and horses drawing the finest contraptions to carry folk about. And a man who wore an odd hat solving the crimes, and a doctor helping him. A fine old tale it was, but it was nothing like we have in the world today.”

  There was not very much crime in Tugaim of course, unless it might be Seamus Flaherty carrying off Fingal O’Dulihan’s pigs, and swearing it was a wild bull got them.

  You were not really supposed to possess anything from before the Apocalypse, although of course people did. But if you had anything that your ancestors had salvaged, you were supposed to take it along to the People’s Museum in Dublin, so that everyone could see how the Letheans had lived. Everyone thought that was a fine idea, but nobody ever donated much, because, as Joanna’s mother said, hadn’t they all sufficient to do all day without digging up the fields to see if the Letheans had buried anything there before Devastation? Joanna knew all about Flynn’s books and the maps and the copper pans and the pewter jugs, and she did not see why Flynn’s family should not keep these things for themselves if they wanted to.

  But nobody really owned very much from the Letheans’ time. Except land, of course, and anyone could have land. There was so much of it. But it was usually a problem to find land where crops would grow properly, and land that did not glow in the dark.

  “Never,” said Joanna’s mother, “never ever live on land that does that, acushla!”

  “Why not?”

  But Joanna’s mother did not know. It was one of the legends, an old wives’ tale, some kind of ancient warning handed down from the survivors of the Letheans’ Great Battle. It was sometimes extremely irksome, because it meant that acres of good flat land could not be built on. But no one had ever risked going against the warning, and so no one had ever really found out why the Glowing Lands were unsafe. One day Joanna was going to coax Flynn to take her to Tara’s Hill, where a soft incandescent light sometimes showed, and picnic there by moonlight and find out what happened. She thought she would do it quite soon, but she thought she would have to be feeling extra brave, because she had once seen the great ruined city of Cork glowing like a massive furnace against the night sky, though it was generations since the Apocalypse had stalked Ireland and everywhere else in the world. Had it come to Ireland first? Or last?

  “No one knows,” said Flynn, lying down on the hillside, his hair tossed into wild disarray, his eyes bright blue and his thin cheeks whipped to colour against the sky. “Oh, it was a shocking thing, Joanna. The Last Battle … the world in flames. But they say that the Letheans were so weakened by their dissolute way of life, and so flabby from generations of soft living and greed and arrogance, that they hadn’t the backbone to put up a fight.”

  “I don’t see them as greedy and arrogant,” Joanna picked out an apple from their lunch basket and prepared for a good argument. “I see them as sad. Misguided. Hadn’t they missed the point of life somewhere — the stories all tell that over and over. Weren’t they so taken up with their machines and their fine cities that they forgot about the important things? They were children,” said Joanna, her grey eyes black-fringed and enormous in her little pointed face. “Children with huge machines they failed to master.”

  “They were heedless children,” said Flynn, his eyes sparkling, for Joanna, the darling girl, always gave a man a great old argument. “They deserved to be punished.” He rolled over on to his back. “But if the Apocalypse came back today, wouldn’t he find a different story! Oh wouldn’t he just! We’d give the creature a fight for his impudence, Joanna! We’d skin the ruffian and tweak his tail and send him to the rightabout!”

  Flynn visualized the Apocalypse as something between a mischievous boy and an enraged pig, but Joanna knew that the Apocalypse had been something so huge and so incredibly powerful that your mind would never grasp it. An immense evil, a vasty spirit conjured up from another world. It had destroyed the Letheans and their marvellous world so completely that only the thinnest of memories of them were left.

  The Letheans. The Lethe. The Forgotten Ones.

  It was achingly sad to Joanna that a race, a culture, a whole world, could have so cruelly and so comprehensively disappeared.

  “We have nothing of them,” she said.

  “We have a little,” said Flynn.

  But it was so little that all it did was tantalise you.

  “If,” said Joanna, lying back on the springy turf at Flynn’s side, “if I could work magic, I believe I should go back to their time.”

  “And meet up with the Beast? Girl dear, he’d huff his scorchy breath on to you and you’d be frizzled up in a minute! He’d have you for breakfast and spit out the bones. Much better to stay here.”

  “It’d be before the Apocalypse came,” Joanna replied, suddenly warm inside at Flynn’s soft cajolery, “when the Letheans lived in their great glittering cities, and had machines to take them everywhere, and got water from levers and fire from pressing buttons. They could fly — did you know that? Oh wouldn’t that have been grand. Flynn, you’re not listening.”

  Flynn said, “But there was once a much better time, acushla.” And Joanna shivered and delight ran all over her, because when Flynn looked at her like that and called her acushla, which was a very privileged word indeed, it sent rivulets of pleasure trickling down beneath her ribs. It would not do to admit it of course. Conjoining was meant to be strictly practical. It was a weighty undertaking. Her father often said so. The Kin Book had to be consulted, so that people did not conjoin with near relations — which might bright forth idiots; the joining up of land had to be considered, so that Glowing Lands were not farmed or built on — which might bring forth anything at all.

  “A business arrangement,” said Joanna’s mother, explaining it to Joanna. “And all very sensible.”

  The Letheans had conjoined freely and wherever they chose.

  “Too freely,” said Joanna’s mother. “They were like animals.”

  “And look where it got them,” said Joanna’s father. And taking her quietly aside, he explained that there was nothing particularly wonderful about conjoining, as so many of the young people seemed to think. “A simple physical process. Something to be done to bring children into the world. Be guided by me.”

  Even so, Joanna thought her mother sometimes looked a bit wistful, almost as if she was thinking: is this all there is? And what about the soft look on Aunt Briony’s face when she talked about Diarmid O’Connor. And what about her own delight when Flynn smiled at her and called her acushla, which was such a very old and very precious word? She thought she could easily be envious of the Letheans who had known about conjoining with whoever you wanted; who had known, as well, about indulging their every appetite. “Overindulging it,” said Joanna’s father. “That’s where they went wrong. We shall do better.”

  The Letheans had done disastrously, of course, everyone knew that, but even so, they had married whom they liked and conjoined where they pleased, and had not had to bother about Kin Books and land registrations.

  But, since you were not supposed to care about such things, Joanna did her best to conform. Even, said her mind, even when Flynn lies beside you on the hillside, and even when you ache with wishing he would just reach out and touch your face, your neck, your breasts …

  Even then. It did not do to be different. And even these days, even with the Great Devastation so far behind them, nonconformity was still looked at askance. The coming of the Apocalypse had prod
uced so many odd things, that to begin with, there had been laws about certain people being let to conjoin at all. There had been a word: mutation. Joanna had never seen a mutation. “Of course not,” said Aunt Briony. “They had died out by the time you were born.”

  “Had they?” said Joanna’s mother, and sent a wary look through the window to where the great grim bulk of the Gealtacht, the terrible House of Mutants, stood on its hill overlooking Tugaim. Everyone tried to pretend that the Gealtacht was empty these days, and that it had been empty for years, but everyone knew that lights still showed there sometimes, and that dreadful screams could be heard if you went near to the hill. Hardly anyone ever did go near to the hill of course, because it was sinister and repellent, and because the very thought of being out there alone on the cold hillside in the dark was enough to send most people scurrying to the safety and the comfort of their firesides. Some of the older people occasionally hinted at terrible things; monsters, deformities, all shut away inside the House, but no one really believed this. And no one Joanna knew had ever actually seen a Mutant.

  Even so, the idea of something not quite as other people had remained like a tender spot on a good many consciences. You had to be absolutely the same as everyone else, otherwise you might find you were crossed from the Kin Book altogether, and not allowed to own land, except the Glowing Lands, which nobody wanted anyway.

  And so, although Joanna often lay awake and imagined how Flynn’s hands would feel caressing her body, and how his mouth would taste, she could not let anyone know. When Flynn said, “There was once a much better time,” and smiled, she moved back a little and said, “Tell me about the better time,” and tried not to know that he smelt of masculine skin and clean hair, and the wild strawberries they had been eating for their lunch. His mouth would taste of the strawberries, sweet, tender and quite beautiful and you could drown in the delight of it …

  Flynn smiled at Joanna, and thought: what would she do if I reached for her now? Dare I? Would she go running off to Grady the Landgrabber, shrieking “rape”? Oh, but her mouth would be soft and sinless, and I could lay her down on the hillside and take her innocence, my sweet lovely girl, because for sure she’ll be innocent …

  He would not do it. He would abide by the unwritten laws that permitted of no conjoining before marriage, and he would slake his hungers on the women of Peg Flanagan’s, whose business that sort of thing was. But none of it stopped him lying wakeful and alone in the yellow and white bedroom beneath the eaves, and none of it stopped him aching with longing, because he would never really want anyone other than Joanna.