Wolf Age, The

by James Enge

  “Duelling on the anchor stairs is illegal, citizen!” said the watcher in the lead, a citizen with white hair. “Didn't you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it is, and the penalty's a pretty heavy fine. Pretty heavy. You'll find it inconvenient to go to court, and if you can't pay you might even end up in the Vargulleion. You wouldn't like that, would you?”

  “No.”

  “On the other hand, you could just pay us at a bargain rate and save the time, too.”

  Morlock untied the wallet from his belt and shook it.

  “That's the idea,” said the watcher approvingly. “Now let's say—ghost bite me, partner, he's a never-wolf!” He pointed at Morlock's human shadow falling in the summer-hot sunlight against the gray stone of the anchor tower.

  Morlock didn't deny it, since there was no point, but waited to see what the guards would do.

  “I've never heard of anything like this!” the white-haired watcher said to his partner. “A never-wolf running around the city killing citizens, a string of honor-teeth around his neck like he's some kind of chieftain.”

  “Okhurokratu, you are being the stupidest of city watchers I am ever hearing of,” his scar-faced partner remarked bitterly. “We've been seeing this guy before, that time when in the Shadow Market you keeping to try rat-wriggling out of the meatcakes.”

  “I've never been in a meatcake in my life. But I guess I remember what you're talking about: when the young crook tried to pick his pocket.”

  “He was never him picking his pocket that! The citizen is was saying so!”

  “He's not a citizen. He was a never-wolf then and he's a never-wolf now, and if you want meatcakes we can make some out of his liver.”

  “Stupid, stupid. The citizen is being the one they are calling Khretvarrgliu.”

  “The—Don't try and slap that turd in my hand. There's no Khretvarrgliu. The Sardhluun made him up to justify that prison break.”

  Scarface—Morlock remembered the citizen, but not his name—lifted the sword in his hand. “This is being the sword of Khretvarrgliu. My cousin, who is been trying to join with the Sardhluun since forever, he was been always telling me about it. He keeps making it fly through the air to him.”

  The first guard turned to Morlock. “That true? Can you show me?”

  Morlock considered his answer carefully. “If I do, I will have to kill someone with it. There is a curse on the blade.” It was a lie, but he owed the City Watchers no truths; they were no blood of his.

  “Hm,” said white-haired Okhurokratu thoughtfully. “I guess there's been too much fighting on the stairs today as it is. Yoy, partner?”

  “Oh, for ghosts' sake,” muttered the other watcher, and handed Tyrfing past his partner to Morlock. Morlock gave the bag of money to the surprised and delighted Okhurokratu and received Tyrfing from Scarface, and sheathed it.

  “That should cover the fine,” said white-hair, weighing the bag in his hand. “I won't say come back again, because I hate the stink of a live never-wolf. But if you come back, remember to bring plenty of this.”

  “He is being a rat-licker,” Scarface said apologetically, “because he can't not be being.”

  Morlock nodded and walked past them down the long stairway.

  It turned out, when he dragged his weary damp carcass back to the outlier settlement, that Hlupnafenglu had failed to catch up with Yaniunulu, and the day became bleak indeed.

  The funeral for Hrutnefdhu took place at sunset. They burned the body around sunset (so that it would not end up on some hungry citizen's dinner table in these hard times) and sang songs in Moonspeech to keep the evil ghosts away. Then, when the sun set and they assumed the night shape in the moonlight, they sang songs in Sunspeech to guide Hrutnefdhu's ghost to the place beyond the stars where the good ghosts dwell.

  That was how the other werewolves explained it to Morlock afterward, anyway. Then they sat around outside Morlock's cave and reminisced about their dead friend until one by one they went asleep.

  Morlock was the last one to drop off. His body was screaming for a drink, and he knew he had a jar or two of wine hidden around the cave. But he sat there in the hot blue moonlight, hating the wine and the thirst for it and the flesh that thirsted, until sleep drew him down into itself.

  Another never-wolf was having trouble sleeping that night. His name had been Plackling when he was born, and then they called him Brumerlem when he was weaned, and plain, proud Brum at his man-crowning. Now he was Daytime Twenty-seven, a slave in the anchor-tower of the funicular way, pulling the spoke on the gears during the day that Nighttime Twenty-seven pulled during the night.

  Brum, as he still rebelliously thought of himself, lay in the slave barracks not far from the anchor tower and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about it.

  Brum had seen him, though—the avenger. He had talked about it with the others on the meal break before the sleep time. Many of them had seen the avenger. They had seen the sword. Some didn't know about the avenger, and others did or thought they did. It was something to talk about, which wasn't nothing. Often they had nothing to talk about and ate their disgusting fodder as solemn and as wordless as cows.

  But long after the others had stopped talking, Brum couldn't stop thinking about it. The pain had ended for many of their people on that terrible day and night of the raids. For some it had ended later. But for the people, it was not ended yet. It had not ended for Brum or the others. As long as they were alive, the pain went on. The vengeance was incomplete.

  When Brum had been young, he had not believed in the vengeance, not really. But that was before the raids, before the destruction of his people, before he had seen the avenger with his own eyes. Now he was a grown man, nearly fourteen years old, and he knew that the vengeance was real, was needed, and he had seen today that the avenger was still nearby.

  Brum silently prayed to his gods in the dark, the Strange Gods. It was the Coranians who had first spread their worship through the north. Brum's people in the old time had persecuted and tortured and robbed and murdered the Coranian prophets. But the Coranians worked certain miracles that impressed the people deeply and led them to believe in the Strange Gods, even as they continued to rob and murder Coranians. When the last Coranian was dead or fled, a shame came upon the people and they began to feel that they had done a great wrong that would be paid for in the fullness of the gods' slow anger. But they also began to believe prophecies of an avenger, who would come in the time of their pain to avenge their destruction.

  This meant, as Brum understood the prophecy, that he and his fellow slaves would soon die. And this happy thought kept him awake deep into the watches of the night. It would be over soon. It would all be over soon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  LONG SHOTS

  The next day, and for many a day, Morlock went alone into the city to look for Yaniunulu. Hlupnafenglu protested at first, arguing that he should come along, but Morlock pointed out that the outliers needed a maker. Hlupnafenglu, or rather the Red Shadow, was also inconveniently infamous in the more dangerous quarters of Wuruyaaria. Even more important, Morlock needed to be alone. He wanted none of his friends around to watch in pity and amazement as he scratched at nonexistent insects, twitched and shook, and suffered diarrhea or the other panoply of indignities that came when he came off a binge.

  He did not bother to swear that he would never put himself in this position again, as he usually did when he quit drinking. He was reasonably sure he would not live long enough to go through this again. The ghost sickness had reached his upper arm by now, and he had a sense that when the deadness that preceded dissolution through his flesh reached his heart, he would die.

  The fierce heat of the lengthening days was broken infrequently with savage outbreaks of storm. Whether it was raining or not, Morlock wore a light cloak to cover his ghostly arm.

  No one wanted to talk to him at first. Citizens wearing the day shape were not generally welcome in
Dogtown, unless they were some kind of semiwolf, and genuine never-wolves (without even a wolf's shadow) were utterly unheard-of. Morlock had to draw his sword any number of times, and fight repeatedly. He took to leaving Tyrfing behind in the cave or Liudhleeo's den. Killing with Tyrfing was always a grim shock, and he dreaded the thought of what it might do to him in his weakened state.

  But the nightwalkers of Dogtown grew used to seeing him and smelling him. They respected his ability and, even more, his ruthless willingness to fight. And he always had money to spend, and no one could take it from him or trick it from him; they respected that most of all.

  As the days passed and his body slowly recovered, he found out a few things about Yaniunulu. The fuzz-faced semiwolf had money out at loan all over Dogtown—or he used to have it, anyway. For the past month he had been cashing out with all the moneylenders he'd been working with. He was placing the money with bookies, betting on the outcome of the election: betting against the Goweiteiuun-outlier Union.

  This struck Morlock as characteristic of a werewolf's sense of revenge: to defeat someone, and profit from it, too. What bothered him was that Yaniunulu had, apparently, put all his money into these bets, so much that it began to change the odds, make them less favorable. (The best odds any bookie would now give was 7-to-1 against the Union; before Yaniunulu had shifted his money, it was only 3-to-1.) He thought it was a sure thing. He had no doubts at all.

  That made it all the more imperative that Morlock find him and get him to talk a little about his habits in betting and political assassination. Unfortunately, he seemed to be nowhere at all. He could hardly have gone to ground in Apetown or the mesas of the city: a semiwolf was supposedly an unwelcome visitor at best there. But if he was hiding in Dogtown, he succeeded in eluding Morlock's best attempts to find him.

  On the eighteenth day in the sixth month in the year (which Morlock's people called “Marrying” but which the werewolves of Wuruyaaria called, rather unimaginatively, “Sixth-semilunation-of-the-second-moon”), Morlock spent long fruitless hours trying to locate Yaniunulu, and then finally gave up. But before he left town, he went around to every bookie that Yaniunulu had placed bets with, and he made a correspondingly large bet in favor of the Union.

  Most of the bookies were unimpressed—they were in the business of lapping up any money that flowed their way—but at least one, a wolf-headed young citizen named Orlioiulu, was quite excited.

  “Do you think the Union really have a chance, Khretvarrgliu?” Orlioiulu asked, his pawlike hands trembling slightly as they swept Morlock's coins off his counting board into his cashbox. “I thought you and Rokhlenu were on the outs?”

  “Eh,” Morlock replied. “He may be sort of a bastard. But that's not always a bad thing in an election.” He hoped bastard implied what he thought it did in Sunspeech; the word certainly caused Orlioiulu's eyes to gape wide.

  When he returned to the outlier settlement through the south gate in midafternoon, he was glad to see Lekkativengu conferring with the guards. Most of the old irredeemable crew had guessed that the quarrel between Morlock and Rokhlenu was a political fiction, but Lekkativengu knew it for a fact and had often served as a go-between for the two friends.

  The no-longer-claw-fingered citizen tried to look sternly at Morlock, but ended up grinning broadly. Morlock couldn't help smiling a little in response. But his voice was harsh as he held the wooden betting tickets out to the werewolf and said, “Hey, citizen. Give these to your chief. Tell him I expect them to pay off.”

  Lekkativengu took the tickets, gaped, nodded, grinned again, and capered off.

  Morlock waved at the gate guards, who did not appear equally glad to see him, and trudged back to the east-side den that he now shared with Liudhleeo alone.

  The outlier settlement had changed a good deal since he had first seen it. There was a respectable wooden wall running all the way around it, for one thing—much of the wood dephlogistonated, so that it could not catch fire under any circumstances. There was even a gate with guards and a watchtower on the eastern margin, just in case enemies braved the silver-infected hills and tried a sally that way. Morlock's cave was not within the palings: he had several surprises planned for his Sardhluun acquaintances, if they ever came to visit him. Also, it helped maintain the fiction that he was at odds with Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono.

  Liudhleeo was sleeping when he entered, curled up in her day shape in a pool of bitterly hot sunlight. He tried to avoid waking her, but she leapt up with a gasp when he eased himself down on the floor across the room from her.

  “Who is it?” she shouted.

  “Me,” Morlock said. “Sorry to wake you.”

  Unselfconsciously, she rolled across the floor and looked in his face. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Are you hungry? Are you thirsty?”

  Morlock only ate and drank at intervals because he knew he must; he was never hungry or thirsty anymore. He considered this a bad sign, but did not want to discuss it with Liudhleeo, who had a habit of worrying too much.

  “No to all that,” he said. “You should take care of yourself, not me.”

  “Yurr. Don't be a bore like everyone else. ‘Take it easy, Liudhleeo. Don't worry about it, Liudhleeo. We'll take care of it, Liudhleeo.' Hrutnefdhu, may he sing beyond the stars, is dead, but I feel like I'm the one wrapped up in linen for a funeral.”

  “Stop barking at me.”

  “Oh, that's more like the Khretvarrgliu I know and unrequitedly love.”

  “Stop that, too. Or I'll be polite to you again.”

  “Anything but that.” She stood and looked down at him, smiling a long predatory smile. Her face went blank; she turned her head sideways and said, “Someone is on the stairs. Rokhlenu, I think.”

  It was Rokhlenu, his hands full of wooden betting tickets. “Every now and then,” he said without preliminary remark as he entered, “I start to believe that you will stop doing weird things. And then something like this happens.” He waved the tickets in his hands.

  “I'd have written you a note,” Morlock said, “but I still can't write Sunspeech very well. And I can't write Moonspeech at all.”

  “Well, well. Illiteracy in a citizen of your eminence is a shame, but no crime. I take it you wanted to talk to me about something and that you don't actually intend me to make good these bets.”

  “You can keep them. They are bets on the Union's final victory in the elections, at odds of seven to one.”

  “Seven to one against our victory?”

  “Yes.”

  “That seems a little high.”

  “Yes.”

  Rokhlenu sat and listened while Morlock told him what he had found about Yaniunulu's finances.

  “He must know something,” Rokhlenu reflected. “Or thinks he knows something. He thinks that there is no chance we'll win.”

  “Yes. I don't know what it is.”

  “I think I do. I expect that the Aruukaiaduun will side with the Sardhluun-Neyuwuleiuun Alliance. Bastards.”

  “Hm.” Morlock reflected and asked, “If I called you a bastard, would it be an insult?”

  Rokhlenu was amused. “Naturally. Why? Wait: have you been calling me a bastard around Dogtown?”

  Morlock repeated his conversation with the bookie and added, “What I meant was that you were tough and relentless, even though I was angry at you. Insults like that can carry this meaning in other languages.”

  Rokhlenu shook his head, and looked sourly at Liudhleeo, who was holding her hands over her face and shaking with silent laughter. “I suppose it can,” he conceded grudgingly. “It's pretty poisonous language, though.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, no. You were right. Just the thing to keep up the illusion that we're against each other. But I have to admit this odds thing bothers me a little.”

  “Beyond Yaniunulu, you mean?”

  “Yes. It's the bookies who are setting the odds, and other people will know about it, even if they never place a bet. It makes us
look like losers, and that's always bad. No one likes a loser.”

  “Eh.”

  “Long shots, then, if you don't like losers.”

  “It doesn't matter to me; I was just going to say something.”

  “I'm sorry; I'm not used to that sort of wild behavior from you. What were you going to say?”

  “We could send citizens into town to place bets with bookies. Lots of bets.”

  “Yes, but we couldn't do it on credit; we'd have to use money—but I was forgetting. You can make the stuff.”

  “So can Hlupnafenglu. I taught him how to make gold and copper, anyway. I take it weights of the metals will pass as currency; I wouldn't want to counterfeit coin.”

  “No, of course not. That would be wrong. They might send you to the Vargulleion.”

  Morlock smiled wryly and opened his hand.

  “Yurr,” Rokhlenu said, after some silent thought. “I like this. I like this betting idea a lot. It's a new way to get the ears of the citizenry. If the odds start sliding our way, everyone will start talking about it. Let's get started on it tomorrow.”

  Morlock looked at him, looked out at the sunlight, and looked back at Rokhlenu.

  “I know there's daylight left,” Rokhlenu said, “and that many a bookie does business after dark. But there's a rally tonight on the Goweiteiuun's home mesa, up on Iuiunioklendon. I need to get some sleep now, and—given what you've told me—send a message or two to the Goweiteiuun gnyrrand and his band of happy warriors.”

  “I forgot,” Morlock admitted.

  “Well, I guess if we ever saw each other these days I might have mentioned it.” He looked dubiously at Morlock for a moment, and Morlock thought he was going to say something about his health or appearance. But what he actually said was, “This farce about us being enemies may have run its course. I'll talk it over with the First Wolf; her instincts on these things are better than mine. But you had certainly better not join us tonight.”