Wolf Age, The

by James Enge

  He went and sat in the opposite corner and stayed there, eyeing each one of his guards in turn. The faces of the men were clean shaven; their light armor and weapons well crafted and well kept. Yet they were somehow wolflike, with long narrow faces and somewhat crooked legs. The wolves, in turn, were strangely human, with cool observant eyes and deliberate gestures.

  Someone had left this tooth for him, and they had not objected. He didn't understand, and he felt ill equipped to try to understand it. With the glass spike in his head, he was deaf to everything except what he heard with his ears. He was blind to everything except what he could see with his eyes. He grieved for his lost Sight.

  Presently the trustee came along the hallway, with two archers following him, and exchanged a few words with the guards. The archers each nocked an arrow and pointed it through the bars at Morlock. A guard unbarred the cell door as the others stood ready to strike if Morlock rushed the door. There was obviously no point in doing this, so Morlock merely watched and waited.

  The trustee entered the cell, and the door slammed shut behind him. The trustee wheeled and whined something at the guards through the bars; one of the wolves snarled a response. Reluctantly, the trustee turned back toward Morlock.

  The trustee held something out in his pale mottled hands and made noises that were clearly words. The object in his hands was an open jar, and in it a brownish red goo, the color of cold blood. It smelt of bitter herbs: some kind of medicine, Morlock guessed; they would hardly take the trouble to poison him when they could kill him in so many more direct ways. Of course, what was a healing salve for a werewolf might still be poisonous for him, but Morlock was inclined to take the risk. He slowly extended one arm and opened his hand. The trustee darted forward to put the jar in his hand and then skittered away.

  The guards in the corridor snickered. Morlock ignored them and the trustee; sitting down on the cell floor, he unbound his wounds (breaking their tenuous scabs, unfortunately) and smeared the salve densely over the ragged tears in his flesh.

  The effect was not immediate, but it was quick enough to make him suspect there was magic involved in the salve. Plus, it seemed to have been leeched of phlogiston: it did not bubble or flame on contact with his blood.

  A maker of some considerable attainments had crafted this salve, Morlock reflected, and had likely done it for Morlock personally (unless they had more prisoners with fiery Ambrosial blood). That was worth remembering.

  Morlock rebound the stiff bandages over the no-longer-bleeding wounds and held the jar of salve out toward the trustee, still cowering at the far side of the cell. The trustee made no move toward Morlock; all his limbs were quivering and his pale eyes were twitching about as if looking for escape. One of the guards prodded the trustee with the blunt end of a pike, but he still made no move toward Morlock.

  Finally Morlock tossed the jar toward the trustee. The pale mottled limbs spasmed with terror, and the hands just barely managed to catch the jar. The pale werewolf shrieked at the guards and they laughed. The archers took aim at Morlock again, and the other guards stood ready as one guard went to unbar the door again and let the panicky trustee out.

  Morlock covertly watched for any lapse in vigilance. Unfortunately, he saw none. Unlike the trustee, they did not fear him. But they would never trust him. That was good for them, bad for Morlock.

  The day outside grew brighter; the stones of the cell stubbornly began to yield up their nighttime chill and grow a little warmer. Morlock didn't move much. He kept an eye on the open window and waited.

  Eventually the light in the window was darkened by the presence of a crow, drawn by the attractive smell of decaying flesh. She squawked with disgust when she found only a gristly old ear.

  Morlock croaked a greeting.

  The crow reacted with surprise and alarm. She wondered if he was one of those crow-eating people she had heard so much of recently.

  Morlock said he wasn't hungry and he hoped the crow was enjoying the ear.

  The crow wondered if that was supposed to be some kind of joke. She pointed out, as a general comment, that ears hardly have enough meat to fill a chick's belly, and the flavor was never very good, no matter how well rotted the flesh.

  Morlock expressed ignorance. He rarely ate human meat, never by preference.

  The crow saw his point. Human meat was rarely worth the trouble. Just as soon as it was getting ripe enough to eat, someone was likely to come along and bury it. The practice seemed mean-spirited to the crow, and she had some harsh words to say about that.

  Morlock heard her out, and then said he was sorry about the ear and wondered if the crow would be interested in a couple of fingers.

  The crow observed that Morlock still seemed to be using his, and she laughed a while at her witticism.

  Morlock said that the fingers were lying around the cell somewhere; they had come with his breakfast and he didn't want them. The crow could have them.

  The crow wondered if he thought she had been hatched yesterday. On the contrary, she was forty-two thousand years old and a personal friend of Morlock Ambrosius, if he knew who that was. She had more sense than to be trapped in a cell with a ravenous crow-eating werewolf who was just waiting for a chance to eat some more crow, but not this crow, not this clever crow, no. He could forget that. Besides, she could smell the fingers and she didn't think they were ripe yet.

  Morlock said that he thought the fingers might have been cooked, like the ear.

  The crow squawked in outrage. Had the great feathered gods laid the clutch of eggs that hatched into the universes just so that monkeys with their freakishly long and horribly soft and flexible claws could rip meat apart and stink it up with fire?

  Morlock said that he had no opinion on the theological issue, but he thought the fingers were soft enough to eat and that, since the crow was a personal friend of Morlock Ambrosius, he was willing to put the fingers up on the cell so that the crow could get at them safely.

  The crow bluntly wondered what the catch was.

  Morlock said that he had no use for the meat, but he could do something with the finger bones. He wondered if the crow would leave them behind on the sill.

  The crow thought for a moment, and grudgingly agreed.

  Morlock gathered up the fingers and reached up to put them on the iron sill. Then he stood well away, to make it clear to the crow he intended no harm.

  The crow kept an eye carefully on him. When satisfied he was safely distant, she took up one of the fingers in her claws, then the other, as if judging which was ripest.

  An arrow struck her in the chest and she fell from sight with no sound other than a brief scrape of her claws on stone. The fingers fell with her off the far side of the sill.

  Morlock turned toward the guards. The guard with the bow nocked another arrow and held it ready, watching him. The others watched him, too.

  He realized they probably understood crow speech. No doubt wolves would find it handy. He could speak to them, then: insult them, threaten them, bribe them, plead with them, acknowledge them as people.

  He chose not to. He took the tooth off his wrist and threw it at them: he was not one of them; he would never be one of them; he rejected them. He couldn't tell if they understood. They said or did nothing. But they watched him.

  He sat down in the corner of the room and waited.

  The day passed noon and headed toward evening. The guards were changed several times during the day, but each set proved as vigilant as the last. They spoke to each other very little and to Morlock never.

  In the late afternoon there was a scuffle in the corridor and the tramp of booted feet. Armed guards dragged into Morlock's sight another prisoner: in man form, but clearly a werewolf, from his wedgelike face and crooked legs. His hair was brownish red, and he hadn't shaved for a few days, but he didn't have the full beard of a long-term prisoner.

  He took one look at Morlock, at the bloodstained floor, at the laughing faces of the guards, and he began to
shriek. Morlock understood no word, but the whole intent. The prisoner was begging not to be put in the cage with that monster. He was sorry; he was very, very sorry; he would never do it again; just please would they put him somewhere else, anywhere else.

  There was a long conversation between the prisoner and one of the guards in wolf form. The werewolf seemed to be in charge; he had a great torc of honor-teeth that hung over his chest. Eventually they took the prisoner away without even opening the cell door.

  The guards all expressed amusement, and some counters changed hands; apparently they had been betting on how long it would take the prisoner to break.

  When the cell began to cool off, Morlock jumped up and slammed the shutter across the window. Then he wrapped himself into as tight a knot as he could in a corner and waited for sleep to come.

  He was not one of them. He would not be one of them. But they could still use him, the way they had used the bestial wolfman they had unleashed on Morlock. He was their new beast, their new terror to break prisoners with. There was nothing he could do about that and no way he could think to use it to his advantage.

  The darkness, when it came to cover his awareness, was no darker than his mood.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DRAGONKILLER

  The trustee returned with the healing salve again the next morning. The guards were as vigilant as ever, but the pale trustee seemed less terrified. He entered the cell without being forced and even approached Morlock within arm's reach to hand him the jar of salve.

  The trustee seemed disposed to talk, but Morlock took the jar and turned away. He was used to saying nothing for many days at a time; he had often travelled alone in his long life. Further, his last conversation had been with the crow, and that hadn't ended well for the crow. Finally, if the jailors found the pale werewolf trustworthy, then Morlock had to assume the contrary.

  His wounds were nearly healed. He examined the jar for some sort of maker's mark: a magical salve would almost certainly require its own unique vessel, and he knew that most adepts were as vain as spoiled children. But there was nothing that Morlock could see—with his eyes, anyway. Again, he felt the loss of his Sight like the loss of a limb.

  He looked up to see the trustee's pale eyes on him. He handed back the jar and, as he did so, the pale werewolf said something to him. It was the first time he had heard the pale trustee speak without a background of banter or barking from the other jailors, and Morlock found the werewolf's voice to be oddly resonant and high-pitched—not a male voice or a female voice exactly. Morlock met the other's eye and shook his head to indicate he hadn't understood.

  The werewolf spoke again, speaking more slowly. Morlock still understood only one word, or thought he did. It was rokhlan. In the shared language of dragons and dwarves, the language Morlock had grown up speaking, rokhlan meant “dragonkiller”—a title of honor among dwarves that Morlock had earned several times. Did the trustee know him? Did someone here know him? Had he misheard?

  He shrugged and turned away. He still didn't trust the trustee. The pale werewolf waited for a few moments, apparently expecting Morlock to engage him again. Morlock began to pace the width of his cell, from stone wall to stone wall, ignoring the other. Eventually, the trustee left. Morlock continued his pacing.

  After a month, the wounds were completely healed; even the scars had vanished. Over the month, which must have been the month of Jaric, since the nights were often moonless, the little drama of a prisoner being dragged up to Morlock's cell was several times replayed. Never was it necessary for the jailors to actually throw the prisoners into the cell; they were weeping and babbling as soon as they saw the fearsome beast that awaited them: Morlock. This did not please him, but there was nothing he could do about it. Several times he found the tooth on a cord next to his food and water; every time he tossed it contemptuously into the corridor, and eventually it stopped reappearing.

  When he wasn't being used as a threat to terrify werewolves, he paced his cell. As he walked, through the long days when there was nothing else to do, he eyed the confines of his cell, hoping to find some signs of weakness he could exploit. Sadly, there seemed to be none. The building was newish; Morlock guessed it was less than ten years old. The mortar was much stained from moss and filth, but time had not worked its crumbling magic on it. The stones were well shaped and uniform; they seemed to have no flaws he could exploit. His greatest hope was in the ceiling or the floor; those stones could not be as massive as the load-bearing ones in the walls, even if the building was timbered with maijarra wood.

  Of course, to exploit any weakness he would need time, tools, and freedom from observation. Time was every prisoner's constant friend and enemy. Tools he could make or acquire somehow. But every time he turned in his pacing he met the eyes of his jailors, staring at him, watching and waiting. As long as they kept that up, he could not escape.

  He got to know the walls of the cell quite well, even the individual stones. Some of them displayed strips of texture in the upper right corner; others did not. Some had been scratched at by prisoners; others had not. Most of the prisoners' scratchings he couldn't read, but many of them were obviously tallies of days, calls, months, years. Morlock speculated on what the other symbols meant. And he walked.

  One day, he realized that the strips of texture on the corners of some stones were also writing, graven deep into the stone and covered later by moss and mold and other matter. It was long before he could bring himself to stop pacing and scrape away at the filth to see if he could read the words. For one thing, it would let his captors know he was interested in the stones of the wall. For another, it broke the tedious pattern of his pacing, and his idea was to be as boring as possible for his guards so that they would lose interest in watching him. But in the end his curiosity overcame him. He halted by one of the walls and rubbed away at one of the corners.

  He found, to his surprise, that he could read it. Moreover, he guessed few others in the world could. It was a piece of Latin, one of his mother's languages.

  EGO • IACOMES • FILIVS • SAXIPONDERIS • HAS • CARCERES • FECI • ME • PAENITET • CAPTE

  It took him some time to work it out. Latin was one of the languages that his long-dead harven father had made him learn, out of respect for his ruthen parents, but he rarely had use for it. Eventually he decided that this inscription said something like, “I, Iacomes, Stoneweight's son, made this prison. Sorry about that, prisoner.”

  Stoneweight. What kind of name was that? Morlock wondered. And why had the maker signed his repellent work in Latin? It was mysterious, and he thought he might have some words for this Iacomes character if he ever met him. Still, the inscription lifted his mood strangely. This prison had been made. What one maker makes, another can unmake. So Morlock believed, and he spent the rest of the day thinking about it: of solvents to break down mortar, of methods to stun or drug or distract guards, of opportunities that time and patience might bring him.

  What time brought him that day was another prisoner in late afternoon. This one—another werewolf in man form—was tall and much scarred; his hair and beard were iron gray, but it didn't appear to be the gray of age. His appearance was nearly as threatening as the subhuman they had sent in to face Morlock on his first night here. But there was an intelligence in this werewolf's eyes that worried Morlock. He might be a more dangerous antagonist, and nightfall was imminent.

  Many guards came along with the new prisoner into the narrow corridor. He wore no clothes, but he walked like a captive king among an honor guard of spears. He ignored them all and looked straight at Morlock through the bars of the cell. Morlock leaned his left shoulder against a cell wall and looked back indifferently.

  The cell door was unbarred and swung open. The new prisoner stepped in, and the door crashed shut behind him.

  The new guards remained in the corridor outside. The wolves and men bantered and bartered; the pale trustee again appeared and seemed to be taking bets (although he looked a
little glum to Morlock). It was all very familiar.

  The new prisoner went to a corner of the cell and sat down. His action seemed deliberately…not hostile. It could be he was only waiting for nightfall.

  Morlock's best chance was to kill him before he turned into a wolf. As a man, he was as mortal as Morlock, and perhaps less used to defending his life. Morlock struggled with the idea of attacking first. It seemed reasonable, the only reasonable alternative. But he remembered the second prisoner who had been brought in, the one who panicked at the sight of Morlock, who broke down at the prospect of being locked in a cell with him. They used him as their beast to train rebellious prisoners. And he would not be used that way. He was caged; he was not a beast. He'd let this man live so that the man Morlock was could go on living.

  They waited. The cell grew dark. They waited still. The chatter in the corridor outside grew impatient: some bets had already been lost. Blue squares of moonlight began to glow on the floor of the cell as the sun's light finally faded away. It was now early in the month of Brenting, by Morlock's calculation, and both the minor moons would be aloft.

  The new prisoner rose to his feet. He stepped into the larger square of moonlight and raised his hands toward the window.

  The silver-blue moonlight struck the prisoner like a hammer strikes red-hot metal: bending him, reshaping him, twisting him. His back curved; his ears and jaws stretched; his teeth flickered like white flames in his mouth; he fell on his hands, and by the time they struck stone they were paws. A dense forest of coarse, dark fur sprouted on his crooked limbs and arched body.

  His voice was unheard throughout. Morlock remembered how the other one had screamed in transformation, and he wondered if this werewolf was mute. But he suspected not. The werewolf's luminous blue eyes never lost their cool intelligence. He could master the pain or terror that accompanied his transformation and not be mastered by it. That was bad for Morlock, of course. But Morlock, too, was the master of his pain and fear. He waited for the werewolf's attack.