The Wolf Age

by James Enge

  Morlock smiled a rare smile. "I made it for you." He took the sword and unwrapped the leather from the grip. Rokhlenu saw dark runes inset into the glass. "There is your name and a few runes of warding and finding. They won't do much for you, I'm afraid. But maybe you'll be able to find your blade when you need it, anyway."

  "Thanks."

  Morlock shrugged, nodded.

  They went down to the wickerwork boat. It was where the two other werewolves had left it, on the far side of the water. Morlock whistled, and the boat swam back toward them on its own. Rokhlenu felt a qualm stepping into the boat, and was relieved when Morlock poled it across the water in the ordinary way.

  He grabbed Morlock by the elbow before they went into the lair-tower and said, "Hey."

  "Yes?"

  "This ghost sickness. It hurts? It makes you angry?"

  "Yes."

  "You're not alone, though. And you have no reason to be ashamed."

  Morlock's pale eyes fixed on him. "I know that. I know it, my friend."

  The never-wolf seemed to understand what he was trying to say. So he stopped trying to say it, and they went upstairs to Hrutnefdhu and Liudhleeo's lair.

  Hlupnafenglu was sleeping, somewhat twitchily, and he lay on the floor in the day's last light. Rokhlenu was not surprised to see a worried-looking Liudhleeo bending over him, but he was surprised to see his intended, Wuinlendhono, beside her.

  They greeted each other warmly while Liudhleeo and Morlock exchanged a look-smoldering on Liudhleeo's part, rather frosty on Morlock's. Rokhlenu supposed Liudhleeo was trying to have sex with him; her appetites were becoming fairly notorious around the settlement, and even in Apetown and Dogtown, or so Rokhlenu had heard.

  "Where's Hrutnefdhu?" asked Rokhlenu.

  "Oh, he was getting twitchy," Wuinlendhono said irritably, "so I sent him on an errand. There's enough of us here to hold Big Red here down-or put him out of our misery if it comes to that."

  "Maybe," Rokhlenu said, looking at the sleeping werewolf. "Just."

  "My Hrutnefdhu doesn't like to see people cut up in cold blood," Liudhleeo explained.

  "Who does?" muttered Wuinlendhono discontentedly.

  Liudhleeo gave her a sidelong look for this. When Rokhlenu realized he was doing the same himself, he stopped. But it seemed like an odd remark for a werewolf to make.

  "He's as ready as he'll ever be," Liudhleeo said, gesturing at the red werewolf, "and I'd like to get some sleep this afternoon, if at all possible. Maybe you, Rokhlenu, would hold down his head and you, Wuinlendhono, would hold his head like-well, like last time. That worked out so ghost-bitten well."

  Morlock put his left hand on her shoulder and looked into her dark eyes. She dropped her gaze, then shyly raised it again. Her posture was almost flirtatious, and Rokhlenu was going to say something about it when she said in a businesslike tone, "Do you want to cut him open or pull the spike? I think that's a fair division of labor."

  "I'll cut," Morlock said, and pulled a glass knife from his belt.

  "And you brought your own knife. Very polite. No magical glass tweezers for me, I suppose?"

  Morlock produced a long double-toothed probe from a pocket in one sleeve. That, too, was made of clear glass.

  "Ask him for some raw beef," Wuinlendhono said, already kneeling by Hlupnafenglu's shaggy golden head. "I'm hungry."

  Rokhlenu was in place, too, so Morlock knelt down by Hlupnafenglu's side and deftly incised a cross in the side of his head. He peeled back the flesh, exposing the skull. Under the frighteningly copious blood, there was a network of pulsating light woven through the bone of the skull. It was much like what they had seen in Morlock's skull, the three of them, anyway. Except that there was more of it; it was denser; the light was more golden.

  "You knew exactly where it was," Liudhleeo said quaveringly.

  "I saw it in a vision," Morlock explained. "He has a faint scar there, also."

  "Are you-are you-are you in a vision or whatever you call it now?" She sounded terrified to Rokhlenu. He wondered why.

  "No," said Morlock. He got out of her way, and she approached with the two-pronged probe.

  Rokhlenu watched her hand narrowly for any sign of trembling, but there was none. Her hand approached the seeping wound confidently, and carefully probed the skull for the central node.

  Then she screamed. She leapt to her feet and she was screaming. Smoke was rising from her hand. A drop of blood there was burning through her skin.

  Morlock grabbed her hand and, quick as a werewolf, licked the blood from her hand. Then, unlike a werewolf, he grimaced and spat. "Eccch. Healing is an ugly business."

  There were tears in Liudhleeo's dark eyes, but she was smiling as she looked on him. "Thanks," she said. "From one ugly healer to another."

  "I guess I'd better pull the spike."

  "I guess."

  "I wonder why it burned you."

  "The blood stinks of silver," Wuinlendhono said distantly. "If you people are done licking each other, I wish you would pull that spike or sew him up or both."

  Morlock did both. He located the largest pulsating node and applied the pincers of his probe to either side. It took some time to break it free from the skull, which had begun to heal around the spike: it must have been in the red werewolf's head a long time. But, in the end, Morlock held it triumphantly in his hand, and the three (conscious) werewolves looked on it with a mixture of interest and horror.

  It was not blood-dark, like the spike from Morlock's brain. It was still luminous as it lay in his hand, a silvery gold sheathed with drying blood.

  "It's electrum, I think," the crooked never-wolf said. "An alloy of silver and gold," he explained, when they looked at him bewildered.

  "What a disgusting idea!" Wuinlendhono said heatedly.

  "Gold will cure a silver wound," Liudhleeo added tentatively. "I read that somewhere, I think. That's how he must have survived."

  "It was some sort of experiment?" Rokhlenu asked. "A game-to see what could be done to a werewolf like this without killing him?" He felt rage building in him. "What kind of crazy ghost-sniffer would do that?"

  Morlock pocketed the bloody silver-gold tooth. "Ulugarriu, maybe," he said.

  The name cast a pall over the room. Morlock sewed up the red werewolf's bleeding head in an awful silence that didn't seem to bother him in the least. Of course, he lived his life swimming in awful silences, Rokhlenu reflected.

  Hlupnafenglu lay in the sunlight, strangely still.

  "I wonder if we killed him?" Liudhleeo said quietly.

  "Better dead than running around with a silver spike in his brain," Wuinlendhono said decisively, standing with her usual fluid grace. "If we are done here, I think I will return to my lair for a sleep. We'll be having a long night, tonight."

  "But-" Rokhlenu said, turning toward her. He hadn't been expecting her to accompany them on the foray to the Khuwuleion. It was insane: some of them would likely die. But she was staring at him with eyes carved from black ice, and his objections died unspoken in his throat.

  "I'd better do the same," he said. "See you at sunset," he said to Morlock.

  "Then."

  As Rokhlenu shut the door behind him he glanced back and saw Morlock tending to Liudhleeo's hand as she looked on him with a rather predatory smile on her long narrow face.

  ight had fallen. The sky was largely free of clouds and wholly free of moons: it was the first dark call of the month of Jaric- a very dark call, this year, since Horseman had set. They would fight this night in their day shapes-and that increased the chance that some of them would die. Perhaps all of them, if they had miscalculated the forces that would be present to defend the prison.

  Rokhlenu assembled his strike force on the marshy verge west of town. Besides him, the First Wolf, and Hrutnefdhu, there were twenty irredeemables and five gold-toothed bodyguards led by the frizz-haired Yaniunulu. The senior bodyguard was hardly more prepossessing in his day shape than his night shape, but he had
insisted on his right to accompany the First Wolf into danger and she had smilingly assured him she would do her very best to protect him.

  They were waiting on Morlock; and Rokhlenu, getting jittery, sent Hrutnefdhu to round him up.

  He was not surprised when he saw the pale werewolf returning alone, poling a boat from the southern gate of the outlier settlement.

  "He says not to wait for him," Hrutnefdhu gasped as soon as he was within talking distance. "He'll catch up to us."

  Rokhlenu shook his head grimly. "That crazy never-wolf."

  "Yes, Gnyrrand."

  They set off at a loping run down the path that led to the long walls of the Sardhluun Pack. They kept their glittering weapons sheathed; what armor they wore was covered by dark surcoats. They were hoping to surprise the enemy. They had no other hope, really.

  They came to the long walls at a place far from any gate. There was no guard atop the wall that anyone could see or smell. Ape-fingered Runhuiulanhu climbed the wall with pitons and rope, like a cliff face, and the rest of them went up the rope one by one after him and down by rope on the opposite side.

  They'd chosen their spot well: hardly three hundred loping paces off lay the squat bulk of the Khuwuleion, a dark shape etched against the western stars.

  Rokhlenu was just catching his breath and his beloved on the far side of the Long Wall when a human shape vaulted clear over the wall and landed rolling in the dark field nearby.

  "Nicely done," he whispered harshly.

  "Takes practice," Morlock whispered back.

  "How many legs did you break?"

  Morlock climbed carefully to his feet. His expression was invisible in the dark, but he was clearly turned toward the wall, waiting. When all the werewolves had climbed down the inner wall he said, "Then," and leapt into the sky.

  Rokhlenu lost sight of him at first, then saw a series of stars being briefly occulted: that was where Morlock must be. A dark shape landed in the fields halfway between the wall and the Khuwuleion and lifted off again.

  "What if he misses the roof?" wondered Yaniunulu.

  "Then he tries again," Rokhlenu said.

  "What if he breaks his leg?"

  "Then we send up Runhuiulanhu with a rope."

  "And what if-?"

  "Then we trade you and your gold-toothers to the Sardhluun for the female prisoners," said Yaarirruuiu, one of the irredeemables. "A bad trade for them, but we'll tell them you clean up nice."

  A few snarling chuckles at this. The irredeemables had no time for the First Wolf's bodyguard at the best of times, and they didn't like frizz-faced Yaniunulu casting aspersions on Khretvarrgliu.

  "I think he landed on the roof," Hrutnefdhu said quietly.

  Rokhlenu couldn't tell, himself, but he trusted the pale werewolf.

  "Forward, then," he said. "Run silent. Don't draw a weapon until the First Wolf or I command it."

  They ran from the wall toward the hulking lightless prison.

  It was too lightless, Rokhlenu thought as they approached. There seemed to be no lamplight or torchlight shining through the infrequent dark windows of the stone lair. It gave him a bad feeling, but they had set their plans and this was no reason to change them.

  By the time they arrived at the Khuwuleion wall, two knotted lines had dropped from the distant roof. Except that they were both one line: they were connected at the low end and up above, where Morlock had installed a pulley. That was how the plan went, anyway.

  "I suppose you'll want to be first or last," Wuinlendhono murmured in his ear.

  "Last," he said. He'd thought about it: the ground was the point of greatest danger, if a patrol of Sardhluun guards happened by.

  "Then I'm first," she said. Stepping over to the lines, she gripped one firmly and gave it a yank, letting Morlock know that a passenger was coming. Then four others took hold of the other line and started hauling it down. As it came down, the First Wolf went up, walking along the rough gray walls of the Khuwuleion.

  Twenty-two others followed her up. In the end, there were four others and Rokhlenu.

  "Remember," he whispered to the last four, who included Hrutnefdhu and the ape-fingered Runhuiulanhu, "run rather than fight. If need be, run all the way back to the outliers and have Lekkativengu come rescue us."

  The irredeemables stood silent, but Hrutnefdhu's light voice whispered, "Yes, Gnyrrand."

  Rokhlenu went to the rope, gripped it firmly, and pulled.

  The other four started hauling at the ropes. Rokhlenu found himself fly walking up the side of the building. He found he didn't like it much and, as the ground got farther and farther away, he liked it less and less. But there was a moment when he seemed to be struggling absolutely alone, halfway between the dark ground and the star-filled sky. He didn't like it. But he knew he would never forget it.

  He came up the lip of the roof, where the glass pulley was straining under his weight. In fact, Rokhlenu was dismayed to see a network of cracks running all through the pulley's transparent frame: it wouldn't bear his (or anyone's) weight much longer, he guessed.

  Hands reached over the edge to pull him up. He grabbed them gratefully, and when they had him firmly, he let the rope go and climbed onto the roof.

  He looked at the others and they looked at him. Most of them were grinning, teeth pale and sinister in starlight. There was no need to say anything: whatever he had experienced, they had experienced.

  Morlock was standing with his long-leaping boots in his hand, looking at them intently. They had discussed this, too: it would be a mistake to leave them anchored to the roof, where the Sardhluun could find them and make use of them. They were impossible to fight in. But Rokhlenu had some sense of how difficult their making had been, and what an oddly intense feeling Morlock had for the things he made. Still, there was no help for it. Morlock opened his fingers, and the boots flew up into the sky and were lost.

  The shadow with Yaarirruuiu's profile gestured toward part of the roof, where there was a hatch permitting entrance to the top floor of the prisonif it would open.

  Morlock's crooked shape moved toward it. He gripped the bar atop the hatch with both hands (one gloved, one ungloved) and pulled it open.

  It swung open fairly easily. At least there was no lock on it. But it screamed like a ghost hungry for blood, and a cloud of gray murk rose from it that had the tang of iron in Rokhlenu's nostrils: rust.

  They waited without moving or speaking. Any guard within hearing would have to come investigate the sound.

  No one came. The dark feeling in Rokhlenu grew darker. It was not a feeling of danger. It was worse than that somehow.

  Morlock drew the sword strapped over his shoulder: it was a short one with a glass blade, not his own Tyrfing. He stepped through the hatch and dropped down to the floor below.

  The werewolves turned to Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono.

  "Go down first," said Rokhlenu. "Then draw." He didn't want anyone impaling himself on his weapon. Except Yaniunulu, perhaps.

  One by one they dropped through the hatch. Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono went last, side by side.

  Morlock had a piece of glass in his hand that was shedding a cool bluish light. Rokhlenu would have cautioned him about making a light until they were sure it was safe, except for two things. One was that Morlock seemed not to be in the mood for caution: his eyes were starting to get that staring crazy look again; he was less Morlock and more Khretvarrgliu by the moment. Second, Rokhlenu's ears and eyes and nose were all telling him what perhaps Morlock had already guessed: this place was abandoned. The cell doors lay half open; there was a fur of humid dust on the very bars of the cells.

  "If there is a single rat in this entire building," said one of the irredeemables, "I'll eat it."

  "I thought I was the only one who was hungry," said Wuinlendhono in a hard, clear, amused tone.

  The werewolves snickered. They liked the toughness of their First Wolf. If they noticed, as Rokhlenu noticed, the wet staring look in her eyesalmost
as crazy as Morlock's-they gave no sign of it.

  Morlock took another piece of glass from a pocket in his sleeve and tapped it against the first. Now both were lit. He tossed the glass toward Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono without looking at them; Rokhlenu snatched it out of the air and tried to look as if he weren't startled.

  Morlock plunged down a nearby stairwell. The irredeemables started to follow him. The gold-toothed bodyguards looked toward Wuinlendhono for instructions. Yaarirruuiu noticed this, looked annoyed, and stood in front of the stairwell, blocking the way.

  "Gnyrrand?" he said, meeting Rokhlenu's eye. (Translation: I'll be gnawed by ghosts if these semi-cows are going to show more respect to their chief than we show to ours.)

  "Follow him," Rokhlenu said, "but be careful. This place may have traps, even if there is no one in it."

  They followed Morlock down the stairs.

  They were careful. There were no traps. There were no people. The building was empty of life, down to the torture chambers on the underground levels.

  Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono investigated those alone while the others stood guard in the central chamber on the first floor.

  Rokhlenu walked behind and held the shining fragment of glass high as Wuinlendhono peered carefully into bloodstained room-the holding cells, the torture chambers, the spiked closets, everything large enough to conceal a body. It was as if she was expecting to find someone in particular. But there was no one there, alive or dead.

  Finally she gave up and they started to climb the stairs back to the ground floor.

  "It hasn't changed that much since I was a girl," she remarked. "I wonder when they stopped using it."

  He grabbed her by the arm, and she turned to look at him. Her dark eyes were empty as if she didn't see him.

  "You were imprisoned here," he said.

  "I was born here."

  "Ghost." Rokhlenu thought furiously. "That thing. Wurnafenglu. He is your father."

  "No, I don't think so. I hope not. He didn't think so. My mother was one of his wives, but she became pregnant by another male. So he insisted, anyway. He had her thrown in prison and tortured her for the name, but she never told. Or maybe she did, and it didn't matter; they kept on torturing her, anyway. I grew up here. When I was a few years short of my first heat, Wurnafenglu bartered me to a rich old pervert of the Goweiteiuun Pack. He was an eminent ghost-sniffer, and smock-sniffer, too. I learned so much from him. My first, extremely late husband."