A Brief Introduction to

by

Robert V.S. Redick

Please Note: while the text below seeks to minimize spoilers,
it does contain them, and they grow more dolorous and frequent as you near the end. Those who prefer an untainted experience may wish to read only a paragraph or two of what follows – or better yet, none at all. Rest assured that everything in this summary is explained more fully, naturally and elegantly in the book itself.

The Red Wolf Conspiracy is the first book in The Chathrand Voyage trilogy. It is the story of a magical journey and a great ship’s disappearance at sea. It is also the story of a few brave souls who must stop a war before it starts, in defiance of their own emperor and his murderous servants aboard.

Two naval powers dominate the world of Alifros: the Empire of Arqual and its bitter enemy the Mzithrin. Century after bloody century, these two have gone to war, but today they are preparing to end the carnage at last: in three months’ time the old foes will sign a peace treaty on the Isle of Simja, in neutral territory between the empires.

For Arqual it is a moment of incomparable joy—except in the heart of Thasha Isiq. A clever if rather hardheaded admiral’s daughter, Thasha has no sooner escaped from her repressive boarding school than she finds that the Emperor himself has chosen her to play a part in the Great Peace: a part that requires her to spend the rest of her life among the Mzithrin, 5000 miles away to the west. Thasha’s own wishes, and those of her ailing father, count for nothing. But her father’s beautiful young consort, Syrarys, can barely hide her delight at the prospect of Thasha’s removal.

In keeping with the grandeur of the event, Thasha and her family are to make the voyage to Simja aboard the I.M.S. Chathrand: the mightiest sailing ship every built, and the pride of the Arquali fleet. Six centuries old, crewed by 700 men, the Chathrand is the last of her kind. Built for war, she has passed generations in the hands of a secretive merchant guild with close ties to the Imperial family. The truth of the great ship’s history has long been forgotten, but rumours of spells and curses surround her.

Thasha isn’t the only new arrival. Just transferred aboard the Chathrand under mysterious circumstances is Pazel Pathkendle, a quick-witted servant boy (or ‘tarboy’) who has the misfortune to come from a small country seized five years ago by Arqual. Once bookish and sheltered, Pazel has become a scrappy survivor, working the ships of the very empire that destroyed his family and burned his city to the ground. But five years of humiliation come to a head when he meets Thasha, daughter of the very admiral who led the invasion.

Their first meeting ends in a fistfight, which Pazel loses. Nonetheless the two are strangely drawn to one another. As resentment gives way to trust, Pazel decides to share his greatest secret: on the eve of the invasion of his country, his mother (an amateur witch) cast a spell on him. Mighty but flawed, the spell sometimes allows him to understand any language of Alifros—and at other times fills his head with maddening gibberish.

The two also share a deepening suspicion about the voyage itself. Why has the Chathrand taken on enough food for a year at sea, when the voyage to Simja requires no more than three months? Why are the passengers so nervous and secretive? What compelled the Emperor to name Captain Nilus Rose, a man infamous for his cruelty and deceit, as the head of the most important diplomatic mission in history? Finally, what did the strange foreigner, slain by arrows in Thasha’s garden on the eve of the Chathrand’s launch, mean by croaking ‘the red wolf, the red wolf!’ with his dying breath?

These suspicions grow sharper when the Chathrand lands well after midnight (for dubious “repairs”) at the Emperor’s notorious prison isle. Lying awake in their hammocks, the ship’s boys hear someone being brought aboard in chains.

Thasha and Pazel begin to investigate. They are not alone: Thasha’s tutor, the warrior Hercól of Tholjassa, has long surmised that something about the supposed mission of peace was not as it seemed. And a few crewmembers and passengers share in the unease. But the odds are stacked against the new friends: Thasha’s every move is watched by her family’s honour guard (who seem to have a far larger agenda than protecting the Isiqs), and Pazel faces attacks from older boys and contempt from officers because of his race. Captain Rose is especially hostile – and also quite possibly insane, convinced as he is of his own persecution by a shipboard cat.

The more Pazel and Thasha dig, the more enemies they discover: brutal imperial commandos, sinister mages, greed-crazed merchants, assassins in disguise. As large as the Chathrand is, the friends feel all but smothered by the ill-will surrounding them.

But stranger things than humans reside on the Chathrand: ghosts trapped in ancient timbers, rats blessed (or cursed?) with human intelligence—and a race of tiny stowaways, the ixchel, hated and feared as ship-sinkers, and usually killed on sight by humans. Not everyone is an adversary: the ixchel queen, Diadrelu; and the disturbed yet noble rat, Felthrup; become their particular allies. But for every new friend it seems that three or four new enemies  arise, and each faction has its own end in mind for the Chathrand. Some will kill for these ends; others, like Pazel and Thasha, must find the courage to trust, and the wisdom to choose who is trustworthy.

For as the ship moves west, the friends and their new allies begin to perceive the ghastly shape of a conspiracy. Rather than peace, their own empire is bent on pushing the rival Mzithrin into a devastating civil war, leaving it weak and ripe for the conquering. Thasha’s wedding and the peace treaty are but gears in a hidden machine, the purpose of which is nothing short of global conquest.

But those who set gears in motion can also get caught in them. While the war-plot is terrible, Pazel and Thasha soon learn of something even worse: hidden forces aboard the Chathrand are working to turn Arqual’s conspiracy against Arqual itself, using an ancient magic that the plotters may be about to unleash, albeit unwittingly. These sub-conspirators, if they prevail, will bring about the ruin of both empires, in a conflagration so vast it will make all previous wars seem like minor quarrels.

A handful of allies, then, against the lethal intentions of the most powerful and ruthless interests in all the world. These are the stakes of The Red Wolf Conspiracy. But the scope of the voyage, the lands and creatures and magics discovered, the transformations worked in the lives of Pazel, Thasha and a host of others, the final doom of the great ship – all these are more than one book can relate. Book II of The Chathrand Voyage, entitled The Rats and the Ruling Sea (appearing early 2009), tells of the crossing of the mammoth southern ocean, the rediscovery of lost lands, and the deepening magical war over the fate of the world called Alifros. The concluding volume follows the enemies of war in their most desperate days, through the sundering of ancient spells, the breaking of nations, and the starkest of contests between love and fear, valour and hate.