Wolf Age, The

by James Enge

  Olleiulu ignored the seat next to his chieftain, sitting on the boards next to the treasure box. He grasped his ears a few times to settle his thoughts, and then began.

  “I get there to the market and he's in the middle of some kind of barking match with Luyukioronu the forger and Snekknafenglu the claw-for-hire. Not the Snekknafenglu who works out of Dogtown, the other one.”

  “I don't know either one.”

  “That's right. I keep forgetting we weren't in business together until a few nights ago.”

  Rokhlenu never forgot it, but he didn't want to say that to Olleiulu; he might take it wrong. “It's a new life since then, and we've been together through most of it.”

  “Right. Anyway. We keep Khretvarrgliu from ripping them up—”

  Rokhlenu had heard a more measured account from Hrutnefdhu, but he made allowances for Olleiulu's admiration for Morlock, and the form that admiration took.

  “—and after we sent off the plepnup—”

  “That plepnup is my friend, Olleiulu.”

  “I keep making that mistake. Sorry, I don't mean anything by it. Anyway, we sent him back to you with the coin and we collected that crazy Hlupnafenglu and walked east right out of town. I think he wants to go back to a lair and sleep the afternoon like people do. But he heads straight past the pl—past Hrutnefdhu's lair and starts wading through the swamp. Hlupnafenglu plops in right after him.”

  “I wouldn't have done that, myself. Gotten in that water, I mean.”

  “Oh, thanks, Chief. I'll treasure that little piece of advice. I jumped as far across as I could, but I still ended in the shallows on the far side. Do you have any idea how bad that muck stinks?”

  “No, thank ghost. Either you're downwind of me or you must have cleaned up.”

  “Cleaned up, but it was a while until I got to that. He starts setting up in one of those creepy caves up on the slope—”

  “Setting up what? I thought all he had was his sword.”

  “That's all he got there with, right. But he starts cutting up brushwood and small trees on the hillside, swinging the sword like an axe.”

  “Weird.”

  “You said that too soon. He's got stacks of wood by now, see, and he takes a bunch of sticks and he builds a kind of basket or something.”

  “A basket.”

  “Except there was no way to carry anything in it. It was round like a ball and there were gaps all around in it, and the branches were weaved—”

  “Woven.”

  “—weaved together in a crazy way that kind of made my eyes hurt. Then he puts his back against the cave wall, and it's like he's gone to sleep or something.”

  “Well, it's a warm day for winter.”

  “It's a warm day for late spring. But I don't think he was really asleep. His sword started to glow and his eyes a little too—I mean you could see it through his eyelids.”

  “Is it too early to say ‘weird' yet?”

  “You tell me. After he's not-sleeping like this for a while, a fuzzy shiny sort of mist starts coming out of the basket and floats away. Eventually he wakes up and lights a fire. He lights a lot of little fires, one at a time. He strikes sparks from a couple of stones, and he catches them with a leaf or a piece of grass or something, one by one you understand, and then he says something to them, talks to them like they're people, and he sets them down in the basket.

  “Which starts to burn.”

  “No. He puts stuff in the basket—grass and junk; I don't know. It burns. But the basket doesn't burn.”

  “All right, I'll call that weird.”

  “But what about when the little flames started talking back? He says something, and they say it back to him in little sparky voices? What do you call that?”

  “Weirder.”

  “Oh, go mate yourself and have knuckly puppies. So, once he's got enough flames—I don't know maybe it was twenty or thirty—he starts making baskets while he talks to them. Real baskets you could carry stuff in. He packed them with earth and grass so the stuff in them didn't fall out.”

  “What stuff did he put in them?”

  “Not him. Us. Hlupnafenglu and me. He wanted sand. Muddy, if it had to be, but the sandier the better. Then he sits back and takes another one of those not-a-naps while we haul sand and the flames argue and snap at each other.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Kreck, no. I couldn't understand them. But that's what it sounded like. We had a pretty big heap of sandy muck by the entrance of the cave when Morlock woke up. He tells us to keep at it and wanders off up the hillside, and he comes back with just a basket of dumb stuff: some yellow stinkstone, and dead beehives, and I don't know what else. Then he takes a bunch of it and mixes it up in a little basket like a dish, like about as wide as your hand. And he puts it inside the big basket, the one with the talking flames, like he's a baker putting some bread in an oven.”

  “Yum.”

  “You liked it.” Olleiulu jerked a thumb toward the treasure box.

  “That's how he made the gold?”

  “Right. He came back after a while and changed baskets, and the one that came out of the big basket, he called it the nexus—the one that came out of the nexus was full of gold. It goes in reeking like yellow stinkstone and it comes out like raw gold. He's just dumping it on the ground in his cave. This goes on for a while.”

  “Busy afternoon.”

  “He takes some sand and he burns it in the nexus. He keeps going over to it and turning it with his bare fingers, folding it over on itself while it was red hot. And he talked a lot to the flames while he was working. It might have been just because they were there, but he didn't talk to us that way.”

  “What did he make the glass into?”

  “He called them ‘mirror gates.' He makes water run uphill with them.”

  “Drop dead.”

  “I almost did. Never seen anything like it. Never seen anything like half the stuff I saw this afternoon, but that was the weirdest. He dug a skinny channel up the hill and another one running down again, and he lined them with wood smeared with beeswax. He put a mirror gate at the top and the bottom of the channels, where they joined. And he took a basket of water—”

  “You want to give me some help with that one?”

  “I'm the one that needs the help. I mean, you could see the water through the weave of the basket.”

  “Did he explain how he did it?”

  “He didn't seem to think it was a secret, but there was stuff he didn't know how to say in Sunspeech or Moonspeech, and I didn't know how to tell him how to say it. I think he was saying that he tricked it—said the water was ‘gullible.' Only a little at a time, though. ‘You can't argue with a lake,' he said. ‘Even a pond can be stubborn.' But I don't know if he really knew what all the words meant.”

  “Or you didn't know what he meant.”

  “And I never will. Anyway, he dumps out the basket into one of the channels, and the murky water runs downhill, like you'd expect, and it hits the mirror gate at the bottom and it runs up hill. The muck mostly didn't want to travel uphill—Morlock says earth is less gullible than water—and after the water had been up and down the hill a couple times it was clear as air, clearer than the air usually is around this swamp. He kept dumping baskets of water in the channels until he had a regular brook running upside and downside. We sponged off with the clean water and drank deep—drank our body weight in water, I think. It was around that time the pl—Hrutnefdhu showed up. He came screaming through the swamp like a chicken on fire, and he ran up and down alongside the channels a couple times, and he wanted to be introduced to each flame personally, and he danced around the gold as if he had invented it personally, and he was pretty excited about the whole business, I guess. Morlock and him talked about stuff for half-forever, it seemed like.”

  Rokhlenu reflected that Olleiulu was more comfortable with Morlock the bloodstained beast slayer than Morlock the work-stained maker and friend of low-status citizens.
>
  “Anyway, the sun was getting pretty low by then. I was going to bring Hlupnafenglu back with me, but he wouldn't leave the flames—just wanted to sit next to them and stare at them. So I came away with the gold.”

  “How'd you get back across the swamp water?”

  “Wickerwork boat,” Olleiulu said glumly. “I—well, I had something to do. He had the boat and some other stuff done when I got back. His hands were moving all the time, all the time.”

  Rokhlenu wondered what Olleiulu had had to do, but it seemed like an unhappy memory, so he didn't press him on it. Instead he changed the topic to the negotiations for the marriage settlement.

  The sun was setting, and they were still deep in consultation when a messenger wolf with human fingers ran up to tell Rokhlenu that Wuinlendhono needed him. There was an embassy from the Sardhluun Pack in First Wolf's Lair: they said they wanted their prisoners back.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  QUARRY

  Once a snake, resting in the cool shadows of a marble quarry, was approached by a werewolf holding a box made of light, glass, and certain heretical opinions.

  The werewolf, still in the day shape, leaped to trap the snake; but the snake, who was Wisdom, transited to the other side of the quarry.

  “Ulugarriu,” the snake said, condescending to speak with its mouth, “you will never trap me that way.”

  “Won't I?” Ulugarriu replied.

  “No. My visualization of totality warned me of your approach. Your war against the gods is worse than folly, maker.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” said Wisdom. “It grieves me that we're enemies—”

  “Does it?”

  “—but I see that the folly has eaten you deeply—”

  “Has it?”

  “Be that way, then, you fur-faced ill-born,” the snake hissed, and summoned ramparts of madness to attend him.

  “I am not wearing my night shape,” Ulugarriu observed, edging closer through the quarry shadows. “If I were, I would sing insults back at you. It would be a relief to my spirit, for I fear you. But why do you insult me? Does a god fear a fur-faced ill-born?”

  But the snake was done with talking. He raised up a rampart of phobia between him and the werewolf.

  Ulugarriu hesitated, and then took from the box a cloak of red-eyed anger. The werewolf donned the cloak and began to force a way through the rampart of phobia.

  Wisdom then realized he did feel a little fear. While Ulugarriu was still entangled in the phobia, he transited to the far end of the quarry.

  He would have transited farther, but he found he could not. His passage through space-time was obstructed somehow.

  Ulugarriu surpassed the rampart of phobia and ran down the quarry toward Wisdom.

  The snake raised up a rampart of delusions to block the werewolf.

  The werewolf drew a two-edged blade, one edge deeply serrated with ugly irregular saw-teeth of evidence. Using this, Ulugarriu patiently began to saw through the delusions.

  “Don't you wish to know why I'm here?” Ulugarriu asked as the saw-tooth blade ground away at Wisdom's defense.

  The snake knew that the werewolf was asking questions to trap him; it was an ancient way to get to wisdom. But it was a game his chosen nature compelled him to play.

  “Yes,” the snake replied. “Tell me, if you will.”

  “I will, indeed. Wisdom, this instrument your people have unleashed against my people—”

  “You brought it on yourselves! You most of all!”

  “Yes, me most of all. And so if I am to defeat this instrument—”

  “You can't. Our united visualizations agree. Wuruyaaria will be destroyed.”

  Ulugarriu laughed strangely. “Wisdom! Wisdom! If only we'd had this conversation a year or two ago! How happy I could have made you with my despair. But now something has changed. Is it some new factor, not present in your visualizations or my mantic spells? Is it something about the nature of your instrument? (I hate that thing so much. How I long to kill it!) Or are your visualizations no longer united? My insight detects some flaw, some sort of disunity. I think you will tell me. I think you must tell me.”

  Wisdom belatedly realized that Ulugarriu had surpassed the rampart of delusion and was dangerously close to him. He summoned up a rampart of delirium to defend himself.

  Ulugarriu patiently reversed the two-edged blade. The other edge was as smooth as the first was rough: this was a glittering razor of rational distinction. The werewolf whittled away at the wall of delirium, and now Wisdom began to feel something like despair. His only hope was to wait until nightfall. Whatever Ulugarriu had used to confine him, the change of sunlight to moonlight would be in his favor.

  “How did you confine me here?” he asked Ulugarriu, hoping to gain time and knowledge.

  The werewolf chuckled. “You're hoping nightfall will save you. No, dear Wisdom: it won't. I wrapped this locus of space-time with a four-dimensional coil, woven of dictates from the Aesir. It was a lot of trouble to collect them, but I knew it would be worth it someday. We are bound here in this stone vagina, gaping in the ground. The sun will not set, nor will you leave, until a certain thing happens. So it is not a matter of time after all. There are powers greater than time.”

  Ulugarriu had surpassed the rampart of delirium.

  Wisdom enmeshed the werewolf in the rampart of mania. The werewolf reversed the cloak of red-eyed anger, and it became a cloak of black-eyed gloom.

  Wisdom, smiling fiercely, resummoned the rampart of mania as the rampart of depression. Ulugarriu, weighed down by the cloak of gloom, labored sluggishly in the dark wall of depression.

  Wisdom was dismayed. Lesser beings would have been instantly crushed by the weight Ulugarriu was enduring.

  “What is it you want from me?” Wisdom asked.

  The werewolf gasped something between a sob and a laugh. “The instrument! The instrument! Stupidity didn't devise it. Mercy had no hand in it. It has the stink of death and cunning on it. I think you and your friend Death made it, and I can find out from you how to break it. If I don't learn that, I will learn other things. I love to learn.”

  Ulugarriu was near, then, very near, moving slowly because of the weight of darkness but still moving. The werewolf reached out with the box made of light and glass and heresy.

  Then behind the werewolf's darkness was a greater darkness. It wore the shape of a woman, except that she had many branching arms and legs.

  Ulugarriu felt the weight of Death's shadow and said frankly, “I don't understand how you passed the barrier of divine intention.”

  “I killed the Aesir,” signified Death, and the werewolf shook with the cold indifferent force of her signs. “Now their intentions are one with their hopes and fears: nothing. As yours shall be, wolf.”

  For answer, the werewolf opened the box. From it came the screams of a goddess: Justice. Wisdom quailed utterly under the assault, and even Death was stunned for a moment. When they recovered, the werewolf maker had escaped.

  “Thanks, Death,” Wisdom signified.

  “We were friends once,” Death observed, and began to demanifest.

  “Wait!” Wisdom signified.

  “For no one,” signified Death. “Not even you.” Then she was no longer manifest.

  Wisdom withdrew his manifestation into the darkness underground and brooded there.

  What the werewolf had said was true. The instrument did have the stink of cunning and death on it. Death had proposed the instrument to the Strange Gods, but now Death was free from the sworn intention of the other gods. If there was cunning here, it was not his. He spent some time unrendering his visualization of the all and rerendering it.

  He did not know and he needed to know. He was no god of wisdom. Also, Death was afraid, and whatever frightened her terrified him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  OFFERS MADE;

  OFFERS REFUSED

  About sunset, Morlock and Hrutnefdhu had just given up their
last attempt to dislodge Hlupnafenglu from his perch beside the choir of flames. They left some dried meat and cheese (which, remarkably, he did not seem to be interested in) and a blanket against the night's chill—assuming there was any chill present in the warm air of this freakish winter. Then they took the wickerwork boat back across the open swamp.

  The sun had long since disappeared behind the slope above, but now the curtain of sunlight withdrew over the edge of the world and the single eye of the second moon, Horseman, glared down on the world from a suddenly dark sky misty with clouds.

  The transition struck Hrutnefdhu midway through their passage, and he writhed, screaming, into his night shape, almost overturning the little boat. Morlock was distracted by the effort to keep the boat upright and didn't note the details of Hrutnefdhu's transformation. But Hrutnefdhu was a wolf before they reached the far side.

  He had been wearing a sort of kilt as his only garment, and now he stood on all fours, staring at it bemusedly. Morlock scooped it up and said he would carry it back to the den.

  Hrutnefdhu sang his thanks and leapt out of the boat. Morlock followed, relieved to be on dry land again: he didn't like boat journeys, even as brief as this one.

  Hrutnefdhu sang as they were approaching the rickety tenement-lair that they were happy to have Khretvarrgliu with them. Hrutnefdhu had worried that he might want to stay in the cave.

  Morlock had considered this, but he didn't say so. The pale mottled werewolf had obviously wanted him to room with him and his mate quite badly. Maybe it gave them status, or maybe there was another reason. Morlock liked him and didn't want to displease him. Rather than say all this, he said, “Eh.”

  Hrutnefdhu laughed snufflingly and sang that Morlock need not be so ghost-bitten wordy; he could hardly keep up with the flow of eloquence.

  “Eh,” said Morlock. Then a practical matter occurred to him, and he reached into a pocket. “What do I owe you both? I have some gold left—”

  Hrutnefdhu turned on him, barking furiously. He would kill-kill-kill Morlock if he said anything more about money. Never-wolves should stick to grunting; it was the only kind of conversation they were good for.