The Wolf Age

by James Enge

  But now he was near-hardly three lines of struggling werewolves lay between him and his sword. He shifted the blade he was holding to his left hand, stabbed a werewolf with it, raised his right hand, and shouted as loudly and clearly as he could, "Tyrfing!"

  The blade left the hand of the astonished werewolf who held it and flew through the smoky air to rest in Morlock's right hand.

  Morlock's satisfaction was intense. They had taken everything from him, everything. Now, bit by bit, he was taking it back. Perhaps they would kill him tonight. They would never forget the price they paid to do it.

  Now he carried two swords, and he wielded them both with deadly efficiency. At first he was tentative about striking with Tyrfing for a death blow, until he realized that his blindness on the tal-realm protected him from suffering when he used Tyrfing as a weapon. Perhaps it still harmed him, but he could not feel it. He laughed at the thought of it, and killed werewolves thereafter whenever he could.

  He thought he heard Rokhlenu shouting at him-in Sunspeech, strangely, because Morlock remembered he had changed skins after sunset. Rokhlenu was shouting something about the tunnel.

  Morlock turned toward the tunnel. The guards were retreating toward it, and the entrance bristled with their weapons and teeth.

  Rokhlenu was right. That was the way out, if they sought escape, and there were many enemies there, if they sought vengeance. Plus, he had a feeling that Khretnurrliu was hiding there, cowering among the ranks with his severed head held low. Morlock turned and began to cut his way through the battle toward the tunnel entrance.

  Rokhlenu's jaw dropped when he saw the dark blade fly through the air when Morlock called it. With his mouth still open, he turned to look at Hrutnefdhu.

  The pale werewolf sang that Morlock was a maker, great among makers, perhaps the greatest of all.

  "He's still crazy," Rokhlenu said. They were standing together at one of the rope ladders leading to the balcony. It was the obvious escape route, but most of the escapees had missed it-including Morlock, apparently. "I'm going to run up this ladder and see if there's a way out over the rampart outside. You thugs stand watch here."

  His thugs disliked that-not the name, but the idea of being left behind. But they accepted it, perhaps because Rokhlenu was one of the few people in the room not drunk on blood or smoke.

  He was halfway up the ladder when he looked around to see if there were any archers in the chamber or on the balcony. The balcony seemed to be empty, and no one on the floor seemed to be troubling himself with a bow: all the combat was close quarters.

  Rokhlenu saw Morlock and his incorrigibles drifting aimlessly on the tide of battle. They were perilously near the tunnel entrance, where all the guards were falling back. If Morlock and his following got trapped in there, the guards could tear them to bits.

  "Morlock!" he shouted. "Stay clear of the tunnel! Stay clear of the tunnel!"

  Morlock glanced about and turned toward the tunnel.

  "Year without a moon," swore Rokhlenu in a whisper, and dropped down to the foot of the ladder. "Hrutnefdhu," he said, "lead these wolves to Mor lock and stand by him. I'll take the men over the ramparts and attack the guards on the far side."

  The pale werewolf's eyes grew as large as fists when he heard this order. But he nodded, and with a few high-pitched barks rallied the wolvish thugs and led them in a wedge into the chaos of the battle-torn smoky chamber.

  Rokhlenu hoped they wouldn't all be absolutely killed, but there was only one thing he could do and he did it. He turned his back on them and swarmed up the rope ladder. The day-shape thugs followed him up.

  If Morlock had been able to dream anymore, he would have thought it was a nightmare. The tunnel was darkish, lit only by a few torches. There was a mass of guards there, in wolf form and man form. The men were armed, and even some of the wolves were armored. The air was dense with smoke and heat and the stink of shed blood.

  Morlock and his irredeemables killed their way into the tunnel. But there came a time when they could not advance farther. The press of bodies among the guards kept the dead guards standing in place three deep. The men at least were dead, and the wolves lifeless: there was no moonlight in the dark tunnel to feed their renewal. Morlock and those with him on the front line could not reach past the dead to get at the living. Nor could they retreat: there was a flood of escapees behind them also, forcing them forward.

  The layers of dead surged back and forth between the competing sides, like the border of an uncertain empire.

  It was strangely, dreadfully quiet in the dark tunnel. The only sounds were the labored breathing of the opposing mobs and the scratch of booted or clawed feet on the tunnel pavement.

  From time to time some armorless werewolves would try to creep forward among the thicket of dead legs and snap at the knees of Morlock and his irredeemables. But their own wolves stood ready to counterattack: Morlock saw with surprise that one of those at his own side was Hrutnefdhu.

  Morlock wanted to call back down the line for a spear or a bow and arrow or some kind of distance weapon. But he hadn't the words for this, in Moon speech or Sunspeech: weaponry had rarely come up in his discussions with Rokhlenu and Hrutnefdhu. Besides, he was tired, desperately tired, and it was almost impossible to breathe in the stinking smoke-laden tunnel.

  If he lost his footing and tumbled backward, it would begin an avalanche that would end with a victory of the hated guards. He remembered hating the guards without actually hating them so much: the whole world was growing as dark and hazy as the evil tunnel's air. But he clung to the memory of hate like a faith; he braced his feet against the tunnel pavement and pushed back against the dead body in front of him.

  He didn't think he could sustain the counterweight of the enemy line much longer.

  He reached out with his right hand and stabbed experimentally with Tyrfing. If he could crack the enemy line somehow, cause one guard to give way, maybe the avalanche of bodies would fall the other way and the guards would flee or fall.

  He couldn't reach anyone.

  There was a wound on his arm, and it seeped blood onto the wolvish corpse in front of him. The corpse began to smolder, adding a reek of burning hair to the poisonous fog in the tunnel.

  Morlock reflected faintly that if he bled enough, the corpse would burn away entirely. Then he would be that much nearer the enemy, near enough to strike a blow.

  An idea occurred to him. Keeping the tension on the corpse in front of him, he slashed down at the corpse in front of that, hacking away at it until part of it fell away to the ground and the rest was crushed between the two battle lines. He was too startled when the moment came to press forward, but the enemy line lurched nearer to him. He tried reaching over it and stabbing at the werewolf on the far side.

  The wolf first cowered low, losing the precarious purchase his shoulders had on the corpse in front of him. Then he leapt back to escape being crushed.

  There was a tiny breach in the line of battle. Morlock let the corpses fall and leapt over them. Wielding Tyrfing with both hands, he cut a brief swathe of death, piling corpses all around him.

  He turned to fund the gorilla-like red werewolf grinning beside him. He had imitated Morlock's tactic, with equal success.

  "We do it again," he said to the other, hoping he would understand. "Again and again, until we break the line."

  The red grinning shadow beside him made a wordlike sound, and they both turned to the task.

  More of their comrades followed into the wedge they were digging into the guards' line; it grew wider, flatter, as more of them attacked enemies who had suddenly come into reach.

  Morlock was wearier than ever, but when he looked up now his heart was gladdened by the sight of moonlit ground. This was bad in a way: the wolvish guards would take strength from the moonlight. But it was the way out, and they were nearer now.

  Then he saw shapes he had been dreading step out of the light: werewolves in the day shape with bows, their arrows nocked
and ready to shoot. They could devastate the irredeemables from a distance, and there was nowhere to turn, no way to protect themselves.

  Morlock nearly groaned. But if he was to have only one more utterance, he didn't want it to be a sound of despair.

  "Khai gradara!" he shouted, greeting the moonlight that had recently given him such hope. "Khai gradara! Khai, khai!"

  The werewolves with human faces took up his cry behind him. The irredeemables wearing the night shape sang their own bitter triumphant song. The smoky air of the tunnel rang with it as the shadowy archers took deadly aim and shot.

  Rokhlenu didn't know what he was expecting on the balcony, but he was disgusted with what he found. The balcony had been thick with soldiery when the prison break began, but no guards were there now. If they had held their post and fired a few arrows at escaping prisoners, the escape might have ended in utter failure. But because it was New Year's Night, they were smoke-drunk on duty when the alarm came; they had panicked and fled their post, leaving their weapons behind them. So Rokhlenu read the chaos of broken smoke-bowls, of quivers heavy with unshot arrows lying alongside unstrung bows.

  "Everyone grab a bow," he said, "and a quiver-two if you can carry them."

  He followed his own order and then ran along the balcony until he reached a portal to the outer rampart. He rushed out onto the rampart, hoping it would be as empty as the balcony.

  It was, and he was delighted to discover the cowardly guards' escape route: a ladder of hooked-together guard harnesses, dangling over the edge of the rampart halfway down the wall.

  "They must have loved their families," remarked the thug who first followed him out onto the rampart. He was a fur-faced, one-eyed son-of-a-brach, and he didn't seem to think much of families.

  Rokhlenu waited until all his thugs were present and then explained his plan.

  "All right, Dragon Slayer," said the one-eyed semiwolf "You go first. Watch out your hands don't slip on that armor: I guess they moistened it some while they were still wearing it."

  Rokhlenu climbed down the makeshift ladder as far as it went and then dropped the rest of the way; arrows clattered out of his quivers as he struck the ground. He was stooping to pick them up when he discovered that not all the guards had abandoned their post in the crisis. There were a dozen of them, men and wolves, grinning at him from the shadows of a recess in the prison wall.

  He grasped at his sword ... and realized he had left it on the ground when he was gathering his bow and arrows. He seized the bow and started wielding it like a club. He had little hope his thugs would follow him: they would hear the fight and take a more advantageous escape route.

  But they surprised him. He was kicking a wolf who had attached himself to his right knee when the wolf was abruptly cut in two by a broadbladed axe. He looked up to see it was wielded by the one-eyed semiwolf His other thugs were dropping down like hail from the rampart.

  The guards weren't cowards, but they were taken by surprise and were pinned against the wall. In the end, they were dead, and Rokhlenu and his thugs limped away the victors.

  "Sorry about the delay," the one-eyed semiwolf said. "We all left our swords and things behind and had to go back for them."

  "Can't think of everything," Rokhlenu gasped.

  "Say, Chief," One-Eye said, "you should take the night shape. We won't be mad; you've got a lot of wounds there."

  They might have been mad, because they were most likely incapable of the full change themselves. A few had crooked legs, or hairy faces, but no doubt if they could have changed completely they would have done so at nightfall, before their cell doors swung open. But they all seemed to be looking at him with genuine concern and, when he looked down, he did see several wounds gushing black blood in Horseman's blue light.

  He almost said, "Wait for me," but that would have implied a chance that they would not, and he didn't want to suggest that to them. He dropped his weapons and his loincloth and stood, naked and bleeding in Horseman's light. He drank the moonlight deep until it slew the sunlit thoughts in his brain.

  His wolf's shadow rose up from the ground and wrapped itself around him; his human form fell away and lay, a mere shadow on the ground. His flesh and bones rippled like running water, and that was an agony. But it was also a delight, a tearing free from who he had been, an escape into new being, an ascent into harmony with the night. That was why he sang; that was why he screamed. That, and the pain.

  The change took longer the less moonlight was in the air, and still longer because the silver light had to fill up his wounds and make them whole. Appreciable time had passed before he raised his lupine head to properly salute the moon with song.

  He dropped his eyes to the ground and saw his ragged band of semiwolves still waiting for him.

  He sang that they should bring their flying teeth and the corded branches that hurled them, and they should match their paces to his until they found the great mouth in the prison's ugly face.

  The thugs seized their bows and arrows (not forgetting their swords and clubs this time) and followed him to the tunnel entrance of the prison.

  Standing in the clear light of the moon, Rokhlenu looked into the swel tering, smoky, torchlit tunnel, and he didn't like what he saw or heard or smelled. Clearly, neither side had won a clear victory yet. He did not see or hear Morlock, but he thought he smelled the crooked man's fiery blood.

  With a whispered song or two he deployed his men in two ranks to shoot at the backs of the slowly retreating guards.

  "Khai gradara!" came a ragged shout, echoing down the tunnel. "Khai gradara! Khai, khai!"

  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.

  -BYRON, LARA

  understand I have you to thank for this nigh
tmarish 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."