Wolf Age, The

by James Enge

  Other voices joined the cry, and wolfsongs soon drowned the men's words, but Rokhlenu chuckled as he recognized the first voice: Morlock—moon simple to the last, though Rokhlenu began to hope this wasn't the last.

  He called on his archers to shoot.

  Many of them were trained—it was one way for a werewolf stuck in the day shape to be useful—but the worst of them could not miss. They fired into the densely crowded backs of men and wolves, and soon the wounded began to run. The only way they had to run was toward the bowmen, but it was also toward the moonlight, where the wolves could seek healing. The men could hope for no healing there, but it was the only way of escape.

  The more ran, the more did run. Presently the guards' line broke, and roaring, the escapees charged forward, trampling any guard, man or wolf, who did not flee.

  Morlock emerged almost last, surrounded by the survivors from the irredeemables, leaned on by the gorilla-like red werewolf and dragging Hrutnefdhu by the scruff of his neck. All three were terribly wounded; Morlock was trailing fire like a burning snail.

  Some of Rokhlenu's thugs gently peeled the half-dead red werewolf from Morlock's shoulder. The pale mottled wolf raised his eyes to the moon, drank deep of light and air, and stood on his own feet, his strength renewed.

  Morlock absently patted his white head like a dog's and staggered forward, blinking. He saw Rokhlenu standing there, and he remarked, as if they were in the middle of a long conversation back in the cell, “For a while I thought I didn't see the dead wolf anymore, but now I think I see him everywhere. I tried killing him by killing him and I killed and I killed but he kept being dead, so I think…I think I need to kill him by not killing him. If you know what I mean.”

  Rokhlenu sang that this seemed a very sound plan, and that life was like that sometimes.

  Hrutnefdhu agreed, and said they would go now to the outlier pack, a fine place where all the werewolves were completely alive, and dead ones banned by law.

  “Eh,” said the crooked man, “dead wolves don't always obey the law.”

  A few more philosophical gleams like these lightened their long moonlit road to the outlier pack. But not too many, as Morlock was very tired, for which Rokhlenu thanked the moons and stars and even the Strange Gods, because he had heard as much as he could stand of crazy talk.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE OUTLIERS

  “Iunderstand I have you to thank for this nightmarish cloud of thieves, monsters, and murderers who've descended to suck the last drop of blood from our parched veins?”

  Rokhlenu looked up blinking to see a woman standing over him, like a shadow astride the rising sun. He had curled up last night, along with most of his men, on one of the boarded walkways that served as streets among the stork-legged lair-towers of the outlier pack. The night had been warm, and he had slept so deeply that the transition to his sunlit form had not awakened him. He was having trouble waking now, and he blinked his gummy eyes a few times and cleared his throat of goo until he thought of a sufficiently urbane reply.

  “You're welcome,” he said finally.

  “Welcome, hah. You may be, and some of your boys may be, but that filthy, raving, flat-faced, crook-shouldered, fire-hazard of a never-wolf is not.”

  Rokhlenu didn't need to be fully awake to know who she was talking about.

  “We all stay,” he said sharply, “or we all go. My boys, as you call them, will back me.”

  He wasn't at all sure this was true, but a voice (it sounded like One-Eye) called out, “That's written in stone. Are there three moons or not? Does the sun rise in the west or does it not?”

  A chorus of voices, in Sunspeech and Moonspeech, agreed that all these truths were self-evident.

  Rokhlenu jumped to his feet in a single motion. It wasn't as easy as he hoped he'd made it look, but he didn't want this outlier to think him in any way a weakling.

  The way she was eyeing him suggested this was the farthest thing from her mind. “You're Slenkjariu?” she asked. “I've heard of you.”

  “My name's Rokhlenu now.”

  “I heard that, too. They didn't strip that from you after you killed that bookie?”

  “That's my name, and I didn't kill any bookie.”

  “The judicants of Nekkuklendon say you did.”

  “The judicants of Nekkuklendon would tattoo their price on their asses if the price didn't change all the time. Everyone knows that.”

  She waved her hand, dismissing the issue: it didn't matter in the outlier pack. “I'm Wuinlendhono. I'm running things here, for the time being.”

  “Oh?” Rokhlenu replied. He had heard that ways were strange in the outliers, but he was surprised to find a female in charge. Still, she seemed to have the bite for it: there was a necklace of long teeth around her neck and ropes of them around her narrow waist.

  “I need something a little more binding from you, Rokhlenu,” Wuinlendhono said in a low voice. She was a head shorter than Rokhlenu, but somehow her stern round face was very near his face. She smelled a little like the ginger root that grew on the sacred slopes of the necropolis east of the Stone Tree. “Things were tough enough for me,” she continued, “before you and your happy band of jugglers showed up last night—”

  “We're not jugglers!”

  “Keep your voice down. That was a lighthearted, insincere compliment. I wish your boys had any skill as useful as juggling. Listen to me. I mean, listen to me. You say your boys will back you. If you want to stay here, I need you to back me. Either you are with me or you're against me.”

  “I don't know anything about you.”

  “Yes, you do. I'm the person who decides whether you stay here or you go.”

  “Are you?”

  “I am. Half your people are still asleep; many are wounded. It would be a lot of trouble to drive you off or kill you, but we could do it. It'd make me very popular with some of my pack-mates, too. Listen, I'm not talking about indentured service. But if you're going to stay here, I need to know you're not going to get in my way. You can go any time you want. No shackles on anyone.”

  Rokhlenu thought about it. He looked at her: dark-haired, pale-skinned, round-headed, intent: a cool shadow in the freakishly warm winter sunlight. Not a stupid female. But still a female. He couldn't afford to bow his head to a female; no male would look up to him again.

  She read his hesitation perfectly. “How about this?” she said. “My mate is dead. We'll say you're courting me. That way if you, urrr, defer to my judgment, it will seem like politeness, not submission.”

  “I guess. As long as I don't have to ‘defer' too often.”

  “Well, well, well. What a romance this is. The poet sings from the heat in his blood.”

  “If it's just a ruse—”

  “Of course it is,” Wuinlendhono said, in a silky contralto murmur as dark as her hair and as warm as fresh blood, “you stupid brach's bastard, do you think I have no one better to turn to than a filthy naked bloodstained refugee from a prison house?”

  “Do you?” he replied frostily.

  Her fierce little face unbent in a gentle smile. “You're quite right, new friend Rokhlenu,” she said, in a voice meant to be heard by those standing nearby. “We must get you some pants, at least.” Her eyes flickered downward and she walked away.

  Rokhlenu followed her glance down and saw with dismay that he was sporting an advanced erection.

  He willed it down by thinking of dead puppies and weeping grandmothers and anything, anything except the warm sensual poison of her voice in his ear. It took a while.

  Eventually, he looked up and saw One-Eye standing nearby, but not too nearby. He was not grinning, but his fur-covered face was a little too obviously not grinning.

  Rokhlenu called him over. He almost called him One-Eye, but stopped himself at the last minute. No doubt the semiwolf disliked being reminded of his disability, and Rokhlenu particularly wanted to avoid offending him. “Hey,” he said finally. “It was busy last night, and I
didn't catch your name.”

  “Olleiulu,” said the one-eyed werewolf. Olleiulu meant One-Eye. Rokhlenu repressed an irritated growl.

  “All right, Olleiulu,” Rokhlenu said. “I need someone to watch my back, and we both know that's you. Am I wrong?”

  “You're not wrong,” Olleiulu agreed. “But I don't know how long I'm going to stay here. Just thought it's fair to tell you.”

  “Fair is fair. Just let me know when you're going to leave, if you leave.”

  “Fair is fair,” Olleiulu echoed, and they each gripped the other's shoulder to seal the conditional allegiance.

  “I need some clothes if I'm going to talk to that female again,” Rokhlenu continued briskly, “and I don't want to get them from her. If there's a market or a rag shop around here, we should be able to trade some of our gear for a kilt or a loincloth or something.”

  “Breeches for males in the outliers,” Olleiulu said. “Anything else makes them look at you funny. I'll get a shirt and some footgear, too, even if it is furnace-hot for winter.”

  “And it is. Thanks.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Pick a sidekick, someone else to watch your back when you're watching mine.”

  “Done. It's old Lekkativengu, there.” Lekkativengu meant Clawfinger, and Olleiulu indicated a werewolf, largely human in appearance, but with wolvish claws on his hands and bare feet. His feet were somewhat pawlike, too. Rokhlenu didn't remember him from the prison escape, but it had been pretty chaotic. “We've sounded out most of the fifth-and fourth-floor gang, and they're with you, as long as you don't cross Khretvarrgliu. The rest are rats who'll go wherever they smell the most cheese.”

  Khretvarrgliu: that was what they were calling Morlock last night. Rokhlenu thought Morlock might not care for the nickname, but that wasn't the most urgent issue.

  “You've done politics before?” Rokhlenu asked.

  “I ran an extortion gang in Dogtown,” Olleiulu said. “I guess it's pretty similar.”

  Rokhlenu was washed, breeched, shirted, and booted before he had to face Wuinlendhono again. In spite of the heat of the day, he found this a great relief. Hesitantly, he offered her his left arm; she smiled and intertwined herself with him.

  “You can play the part, I see,” she said, her contralto voice cooler than the warm winter breeze. “Let's walk. I'll show you the lairs, and something less pleasant.”

  Rokhlenu's heart was trying to hammer its way out of his chest. It took him several steps to gather enough breath to say, “It's not a part. I'm willing to mate with you.”

  “Ulugarriu's left testicle,” was Wuinlendhono's amused response. “You've been in prison, Rokhlenu. Right now you're willing to mate with anything that doesn't get away fast enough.”

  “I'm serious.”

  “I don't want to argue about that. I just want to make something clear. If you're talking about mating with me, we're not talking about a quick screw. I only mate for life. You're too twisted up to think about that right now, but I'm not. You're no good to me like this. So go find someone and discreetly express the depths of your poetic soul—by the bucketful if necessary. We're short on females in the outliers, but there are working girls (and for that matter working boys) who come out from Apetown and Dogtown. You can find them in the day-lairs by the marketplace; your fellow Olleiulu will show you. Until your mind is clear, I'm not making any deal.”

  Rokhlenu snarled. “Aren't you at least going to say how touched and honored you are by my proposal?”

  Wuinlendhono laughed sympathetically. She patted his left hand with her own. “Sorry, new friend, if I seem a little cold. I'm not a puppy, you know, anxiously awaiting her first heat. If we mate, you'll be my fifth.”

  “Oh? I thought you didn't go in for casual mating.”

  “I don't. They're all dead. My fourth, who was First Wolf of this hellhole, was killed by a gang of Dogtown robbers. My third caught some sort of lingering illness and ate silver rather than let it finish him. My second was out hunting one day when he ran into a werebear and they killed each other.”

  They walked on for a while in silence. When it became clear that she had finished he said, “And your first?”

  “It was an arranged marriage,” Wuinlendhono said. “My guardian out-wed me to an old ghost-sniffer in the Goweiteiuun pack. I hated him, so I killed him. That's why I'm here, which was probably your next question.”

  “No,” Rokhlenu said, thinking how much like prison this all was in some ways. “But thanks for telling me.”

  The lairs of the outlier pack were built on the swamps below Wuruyaaria's south wall. For streets they had boarded ways; the lairs were rickety towers built on stilts driven into the sandy mud of the swamp. The whole place looked like a strong wind could knock it down.

  The people were a little tougher looking. They moved fast; they talked or sang fast. He didn't see too many stupid faces, and no sentimental ones. Even the stupid faces wore a hard, cheerful determination. If the wind came and the lairs fell, these people would rebuild—or sell the wreckage to a passing mark.

  Wuinlendhono took him to a gem-and-bone seller in the north part of town. He had a single greenish dragon tooth on a gold chain, and Wuinlendhono bought it and gave it to Rokhlenu.

  He was going to protest, but she forestalled him with a whisper. “In the outliers, women choose the men. Gifts are normal, so if people hear about this (and they will), they'll take it as part of my arduous campaign to get into your pants. And you need an honor-tooth commensurate with your status. Anyway, it didn't cost very much.”

  And it hadn't. Few werewolves in history had ever had enough bite to wear a tooth like that in public. Rokhlenu was one. He was strutting a bit after they got back onto the boards, and Wuinlendhono's proud sideways glance didn't exactly sting.

  “You're not doing a very good job in cooling my ardor,” he observed.

  “Well, we haven't got there yet,” was her enigmatic reply.

  “There” was a lair-tower on the east side of town, taller and more rickety than most. Several of the upper floors seemed to have been added after the original construction, and there was at least one crack running almost half the length of the plastered walls.

  “Can this thing stand our weight?” asked Rokhlenu, only half joking.

  “Oh, clench up, Dragonslayer,” Wuinlendhono answered. “Worse comes to worst, we can always jump.” She did not seem to be joking at all.

  The air inside was dense with bloodbloom smoke and less pleasant odors. Rokhlenu followed Wuinlendhono up flight after twisting flight of dark creaking stairs until they got to the top story of the lair, which was all one none-too-spacious den. (The tower narrowed as it rose.)

  In the light from the western windows lay a naked man, sleeping restlessly on what seemed to be a tarpaulin. Over him crouched a she-werewolf in the day shape. Her smooth mottled skin and torrent of russet hair reminded him of someone, but he wasn't sure who. She was reading a small codex she held in her hand; when they entered, she set the book down next to some odd-looking medical instruments and welcomed them with a complete absence of enthusiasm.

  “Liudhleeo, my gravy bowl,” said Wuinlendhono. “Can you do it?”

  “I've done what I know how to do,” Liudhleeo replied. “I have closed up his battle wounds with the salve Hrutnefdhu helped me make—so the lair is no longer in danger of burning down. I have washed him, apparently the first bath he has taken in his life. His skin had many sores, and his feet were rotten with some sort of fungus. All that has been seen to.”

  “Wonderful. Wonderful. But, you know, what I was really asking about was whether he is still crazy.”

  “Yes. I have drugged him as deeply as I dared, and he finally fell into a kind of sleep. But unless my experience misleads me, and it is no feeble resource, he is not dreaming.”

  “He says he never dreams,” Rokhlenu remembered. “It's because of the spike in his head.”

  “This is Rokhlenu, by the way, my cutl
et,” Wuinlendhono said. “He was Khretvarrgliu's cellmate.”

  “Yes, I smelled him,” the russet werewolf said with a marked distaste—and then Rokhlenu knew her, not by sight but by scent. She was the female whom the guards had raped outside his cell on that terrible spring night. He was shocked, then deeply ashamed as she eyed him. He turned away from her, and in the turmoil of his feelings he missed a few of her words.

  “—that spike, yes,” Liudhleeo said. “I must say, the book you gave me has taught me quite a lot.”

  “My first husband wrote it. He was a very learned male.”

  “And such fine penmanship. All the pages were quite legible, even the ones stained with blood.”

  “Why dwell on old gossip, my lamb chop, when we could be busy generating new gossip?”

  “My considered answer to that…will take a little time. So maybe we should defer it to another occasion.”

  “By all means, dear, as long as we understand that I'm one ahead.”

  “I understand nothing of the sort, but never mind. I suppose you want to know why I haven't pulled that spike out of Khretvarrgliu's bewildered old head.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Well, I'm a little frightened about it, actually. I've never done anything like this, messing around inside a man's head, I mean. By choice, I would not start out in that type of surgery with a patient whose blood could set me afire. I sent sweet Hrutnefdhu to a ghost-sniffer who works in the Shadow Market; he said he might persuade him to come help.”

  “So you're waiting for this ghost-sniffer?”

  “I was, but after reading this wonderful book some more I had just about nerved myself up to have a stab at the surgery. As it were.”

  “Why?”

  “A ghost-sniffer probably can't help. They put these things in, but they never take them out. That's what I was reading in…in your husband's book. And Khretvarrgliu seems to be getting worse, much worse. You would not believe some of the gibberish he was talking before I finally got him to sleep.”