Wolf Age, The

by James Enge

  Dim misty bars of sunlight fell from the sky, breaking the darkness. The eclipse was ending. Another cascade of transitions spread through the crowd, howls becoming screams as their human shadows fell on them and forced them to resume their day shapes.

  The monuments of the necropolis also seemed to be changing shape, moving up the long slope. Morlock stared at them, bemused, until he understood what he was seeing. It wasn't the monuments. It was an army of werewolves who had been hiding among them, waiting for this moment of confusion to strike their enemies.

  They came in every shape: men and women trailed by wolvish shadows, wolves paired with crouching human shadows, and every grade of semiwolf in-between. But they had clearly resisted both transitions, hiding from the sky among the mausoleums, and they came with clear minds, bared teeth, and drawn blades. They wore the red and blue of the Goweiteiuun and the green and gold of the outliers, and they fell on their enemies of the Alliance.

  Rokhlenu, wearing the day shape, ran in the vanguard. Beside him, bearing a green-and-gold banner in one hand and a glass sword in the other, was Wuinlendhono.

  Morlock charged down the stairs of the scaffold, kicking and stabbing at stray werewolves as he went. Shouted chants were rising on the edge of the crowd toward the funicular station—perhaps a rally of the Alliance. He could do the most good (or the most harm, depending on how one looked at it) if he joined with the outliers.

  The green-and-gold wave was sweeping toward him also, Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono at its crest. They met, laughing, by the Well of Shadows.

  “You are in good time, my friends,” Morlock said.

  Rokhlenu stared at him with haunted blue eyes. “We couldn't attack before,” he began to explain. “The—”

  “I meant what I said,” Morlock said firmly. “No banter.”

  “Ghost no,” gasped Wuinlendhono. “No banter. I hate banter.”

  They turned and led the Union werewolves in a charge straight through the chaotic clusters of the Alliance volunteers. Many died; many fled; the spectators to the rally had long since run off to a safe distance.

  Long before they reached the funicular, they heard chanting. It was in neither Moonspeech nor Sunspeech nor any language that they spoke, but Morlock at least recognized it: “Kree-laow! Kree-laow! Kree-laow!” The slaves of the funicular station had risen in rebellion. They were attacking the spectators and Alliance werewolves from behind with their chains as weapons. Many of the slaves had already died, their bodies scattered about the plain of Wuruklendon, but others were still streaming out of their subterranean tower, eager to take up the fight.

  “Rokhlenu!” shouted Morlock, when he saw this through the dust and blood of the election rally. “I need to take the funicular slaves out of here. Will that hurt your Union?”

  “Take them,” Rokhlenu said instantly. “Get as many as you can clear. We'll meet you back in Outlier Town.”

  “We may meet there,” said Morlock. He was thinking about Mount Dhaarnaiarnon, and were-rats, and Ulugarriu.

  “Oh?” said Rokhlenu, obviously surprised, but there was no time to talk the matter over. “In any case, good luck to you, my friend.”

  “And to you, and all of yours,” said Morlock, and they parted there in the midst of battle, much as they had met.

  Morlock ran straight at the ragged line of slaves and shouted in Sunspeech, “Do you understand me? Do you know me?”

  “Kree-laow!” they shouted, saluting him with their bloody chains. “Kree-laow!”

  “Do you understand me?”

  “We understand you, Khretvarrgliu,” said one in Sunspeech. “This is the hour of vengeance and atonement. Where do you wish us to die?”

  “This is the hour of escape. We will make our way down the face of the city and free as many of our people as we can. If we die, we die, but if we escape we may live—for a little while,” he added, thinking of his own illness.

  “That may not be, Khretvarrgliu, for armed werewolves guard the downward ways.”

  “Let me through!”

  They parted and Morlock dashed to the edge of Wuruklendon.

  A band of dark-coated City Watchers stood blocking the stairways down to Iuiunioklendon.

  “Citizens,” said Morlock, “give way or die. I will not tell you twice.”

  Some of the watchers did in fact flee down the stairs at his approach. But others stayed, led by a white-haired werewolf and one with a scarred face.

  Morlock beat the spear blade of the scar-faced guard aside and passed Tyrfing through his heart. The death-shock was grievous, causing Morlock's knees to buckle, and the white-haired guard cried out with rage and made as if to stab him. But then the guard went down before a tide of chain-swinging slaves; his cries of anger changed to fear and then fell silent forever.

  Morlock straightened himself and looked about. The guards who had not fled were dead or dying.

  “We go down and out,” he said, as clearly as he could. “Mesa by mesa, tower by tower. We rescue our people as we go. If we get separated, fight your way out and flee south; all will head that way who can.”

  “But what of atonement, Khretvarrgliu?” said one.

  Morlock had no idea what they were talking about, but he didn't want to admit it, lest he lose authority in their eyes. “Dying is easy,” he said. “It is over in a moment. Atone by living. Live as well as you can, for all who have died. It is all you can do.”

  This seemed to satisfy them. They armed themselves from the fallen guards and began to move down the winding stone stairways, the first stones of an avalanche that would sweep the city clear of slaves.

  Morlock went with them. But first he paused to cover the hands of two dead guards: one with white hair, the other with a scarred face. If it was important to atone, and if death was an atonement, they had atoned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ELECTION RESULTS

  Rokhlenu watched Morlock go, then turned back to the rally, where the fighting had broken up into a chaos of separate combats, clouds of dust dimming the colors and scents of the factions.

  “We'll never find the Alliance leaders in this mess,” Rokhlenu remarked to Wuinlendhono.

  “You want my advice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don't bother with the leaders. Better that they survive today, hated and toothless. Who'll vote for them now?”

  “Right. I'd rather kill the volunteers, anyway.”

  His wife looked at him in some surprise.

  “I want them to know,” Rokhlenu said grimly, “that if they march to an election as if it were a war, a war is exactly what they'll get. The Aruukaiaduun would never have put my family's heads on poles if they hadn't known a private army was marching with them. It won't be so easy for them to recruit one, next time.”

  “Yurr. Well, if nothing else, it thins out the voters committed to the other side.”

  In fact, there was not much more fighting and no more killing. The Alliance leaders had quietly absconded down the necropolis slope once the Union charge had passed by, and when the Alliance werewolves realized this they began fleeing themselves, or tearing off their colors and surrendering themselves.

  They let the Alliance citizens keep their weapons and collect their dead. They sent the Union dead and wounded back to the outlier settlement by the necropolis road: Rokhlenu didn't want to make a display of their losses, which were not nothing.

  But he did want to make a display of their victory. Both packs of Union werewolves raised their banners high and ran together in good order down the winding stairs to Iuiunioklendon market square.

  There the Goweiteiuun citizens parted company: most of them had dens on Iuiunioklendon. “And it would be a long walk back up, thanks to your friend,” said Aaluindhonu, the Goweiteiuun gnyrrand, as they parted company. He gestured up at the motionless funicular and laughed.

  “We should call for an election soonest,” Wuinlendhono said. “I think we have the bite for it.”

  “Tomorrow after
sunset, I suggest,” Aaluindhonu replied, looking at both Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono to see if they approved. When they nodded, he said, “I'll send a message to the First Singer when I get back to my den. He'll have plenty of time to send heralds to sing the news tonight, and shout it tomorrow.”

  They said good-bye, and the outliers continued onward and downward.

  Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono didn't talk much as they walked; they were both tired, and the head of a crowd was no place for a conversation of consequence. But once he asked her, as they passed the abandoned funicular tower on Iuiunioklendon, “Do you think I was wrong to tell Morlock to take the slaves out?”

  “No,” said Wuinlendhono. “For one thing, he'd have done it anyway. But I think the political harm will go to the Aruukaiaduun. They played a rough game and lost. Everyone knows it. They will have to hire workmen to open the funicular ways again, but no one will thank them for it; everyone knows they would rather have slaves.”

  But it was clear, long before they reached Twinegate, that at least one of the ways would not be reopening soon. The anchor-gate in Twinegate Plaza was bright with flames and dark with smoke in the afternoon shadows. Someone had set the wooden mechanisms inside the tower on fire.

  They stood on the verge of Runaiaklendon mesa and watched the tower burn for a while.

  “Morlock has written ‘I was here' on the face of the city in letters of fire,” Rokhlenu said. “People will be reading it there for a long time.”

  “No doubt,” said Wuinlendhono. “That tower isn't going to stand much longer. Let's go home through the Dogtown Gate. We don't want to be punctuated by falling periods.”

  Hours later, Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono were alone at last, settling down for a brief nap before sunset, when she asked, “You don't think you'll see him again, do you?”

  “I wouldn't bet either way,” said Rokhlenu. “Not on him. But I don't think he expects it. He's old; he's sick. If he can get the never-wolves to safety, it may be the last thing he can do. His future is closed in, and he's out of tomorrows. I'd loan him some of ours, if I could.”

  “Over my day-barking body you would,” Wuinlendhono replied, and bit him somewhere he'd notice.

  Morlock was not, in fact, shepherding the never-wolves to safety. He had sent them away south to fend for themselves, and he was, at sunset, rounding the edge of the city's necropolis and headed for the slopes of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon.

  He had felt bad about parting company with the ex-slaves, but most of them had not seemed to expect his help. They were natives of the northern plains and knew the region better than he did. Also, some of them kept referring to atonement and some sin by their ancestors in the distant past, and he found it hard to stay patient with this. He had done things since noon that he felt some guilt for; if the never-wolves weren't committing their own misdeeds by now, it was long past time that they start.

  As for him, he had to untie the knot of mystery surrounding the murder of his friends and find vengeance for them. He did not honestly think that he would succeed, but if he were even to try, he would have to confront Ulugarriu. Morlock was wondering if he might be a were-rat, or perhaps a colony of were-rats, passing the name Ulugarriu down generation after generation to create the legend of an immortal maker. But if he was not a were-rat, or among the were-rats, the were-rats certainly knew him and were working with him.

  Morlock walked around the marsh south of the outlier settlement and came at his cave through the silver-tainted hills to the east.

  He was surprised and pleased to see a sallow-faced Lakkasulakku hard at work over the forge, folding and refolding glass for weapons.

  “Good evening, apprentice,” he said, when the young citizen leaped up at his approach.

  “Khretvarrgliu!” shouted Lakkasulakku. “They said they were going to execute you!”

  “They tried. They won't again, I think.”

  “Then the Union won the rally?”

  “I think so, though I left before it was done. I am here only to collect a few things and leave again.”

  “I hope—I hope you don't mind…. They needed weapons for the rally, and I thought—”

  “I don't mind. Everything in the cave is yours as much as mine, save Tyrfing alone, because of the burden that goes with it.”

  “Chieftain,” Lakkasulakku said, bowing his head.

  Morlock pounded him on the shoulder. Together they gathered a cloak, some cold-lights and provisions, and a few other things Morlock thought might be handy. Before the sun disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill, he was off again, waving farewell to Lakkasulakku, who stood disconsolate before the mouth of the cave. Morlock never expected to see him again and, as a matter of fact, he never did.

  Sunset found him on the lower slopes of the volcano. He was tempted to drive onward, but he knew too much about mountains to try ascending one in the dark. Also, he was deathly tired. He wrapped himself in the cloak, although the air was still hot, and lay down. He was awake for a long time, looking at a strange fiery light burning on the undersides on the incoming clouds. It was odd, as if the city were on fire and the clouds were reflecting it. But the city was not on fire.

  The next morning, he ate some bread and drank some water, because he knew he must, and began the long climb to the mountain's summit. It took him most of the day, and throughout it he kept alert for the sound and sight—even the smell—of the were-rats.

  Evening's red light found him lurking under the lip of the crater, above the great moon-clock in the mountain's face. He kept hearing fugitive sounds he thought were were-rats' voices. But whatever way he turned, he seemed to get no closer to them, and they often roamed farther away.

  He wondered if they might have nests inside the crater. The idea took him up to the edge of the crater.

  The sun disappeared beyond the eastern rim of the world. Two moons stood out abruptly in the night sky: Chariot was burning darkly on the red rim of the western horizon: it would set soon, and summer would begin. Trumpeter stood somber above: in a few days, it would set, too, and the night skies would be dark until Horseman returned. Morlock watched, his quest for were-rats forgotten, as Chariot slid down beyond the eastern edge of the world and its light was lost.

  “Khul gradara!” Morlock said, when Chariot was gone. “Good-bye, moon.”

  He turned back to the vast echoing pit of the volcano crater. He thought he heard some sort of sound coming from it. He kept his eyes fixed on the darkness in the crater, hoping he might see something as his eyes grew used to the dark.

  Something pushed him, hard, on the back of both legs and he tumbled helplessly into the crater. He heard were-rats chitter in triumph behind him, but he still could not see them. He slid down the surface of the crater and, before he could recover, fell into the open pit at the bottom.

  He was falling straight into the mountain. Shadows spun around him as he fell.

  At about the time Morlock was briefly encountering the were-rats, Rokhlenu was acclaimed First Singer of Wuruyaaria.

  Heralds had been crying the election up and down the mesas of the city all night and day, and by sunset the surviving candidates and all citizens interested in voting were gathered on the great plain west of the city. The crowd was gathering around a dais built near the Bitter Road. On the dais were five couches, and in front of the couches stood five citizens, their necks a-bristle with honor-teeth: the incumbents of the Innermost Pack.

  Rokhlenu and Aaluindhonu, with their reeves and cantors and supporters, stood on the south side of the road. The gnyrrands for the Alliance and their fellow candidates and supporters stood on the north side of the road. The candidates wore no colors or scents, but their supporters carried the pack banners high. As citizens arrived at the assembly, they joined one side or the other. They also had the option of standing aloof, but tonight few were availing themselves of this.

  In fact, few stood by the Alliance candidates. Long before the sun set, it was clear that the election was a landslide for the Un
ion. An election in Wuruyaaria could be a drawn-out business, with voters changing sides through the night as bite, or the perception of bite (which was the same thing, really, in the hour of choice), shifted from one pack to another. It could be complicated by the fact that one citizen's bite, and consequently his vote, might be greater than another's.

  But tonight there was no question: the citizens were almost uniformly rejecting the Alliance. To be brutal, criminal, and reckless was one thing. To fail was another, and Wuruyaaria's citizens had no mercy on it. The only citizens standing with the Alliance were the candidates' closest relatives, ones who could not vote with the opposition (or stay away) without shaming their blood.

  The sun set.

  All citizens turned eastward. The moonlit tide of transformations swept over them, and they cried out in voices human and lupine, bidding Chariot farewell and summer welcome.

  When the major moon had set, when the citizens had recovered from their transformations, Aaluindhonu gave Rokhlenu a wolvish grin and trotted over to the dais, where the retiring singers of the Innermost Pack were leaping down from the dais.

  He congratulated the retiring First Singer, an old acquaintance of his from the Neyuwuleiuun named Skuiulaalu.

  Skuiulaalu thanked him loudly, then more privately wished him good luck: he would not have chosen to take the high couch at this strange and dreadful time. Citizens said the world was ending, and Skuiulaalu half believed them.

  Aaluindhonu laughed, skipped past the old singers, and leapt up to the dais. He prepared to mount the high couch of the First Singer.

  There was a storm of protests from the crowd. It broke forth without warning, and it was intense, furious. It raged on both sides of the road. Neither the Alliance nor the Union voters would accept Aaluindhonu as First Singer. The Alliance disliked him, and neither side respected him.

  Instead, the voters chanted or howled the name of Rokhlenu.