The Wolf Age

by James Enge

  In fact, a little bloom was being smoked well before midnight when the gnyrrands of the Sardhluun-Neyuwuleiuun Alliance showed up, with their reeves and their cantors in train behind them, and a cascade of campaign volunteers in loose clothes of black and green and short capes of red and green (the Neyuwuleiuun colors). They ran in close order down the stairs into the singers' pitch sunk into the center of the rostrum and ran all the way around the pitch, receiving the hopeful cheers of the audience. Some bloom was good; more bloom was better-and if the Alliance won, much bloom would be smoked.

  This was a more important rally than the last one, which the Sardhluun had lost so ignominiously. If for nothing else (and there was much else) because of the location. The most common pack affiliation on Nekkuklendon was Aruukaiaduun. Many important members of their Inner Pack had come here to watch the rally and judge the prospects of the new Alliance. If they were impressed, they might see fit to join, virtually assuring victory for the Alliance.

  The betting ran seven to one against the Goweiteiuun even showing up tonight. The Alliance was so confident, they started their speeches before the Goweiteiuun appeared, and the crowd shouted their approval. The sooner the talking began, the sooner it would end.

  The speeches were not noted, then or later, for their impressiveness. The Neyuwuleiuun gnyrrand congratulated the Sardhluun Pack for its association, almost as younger brothers, with one of the original treaty packs, and congratulated his own pack for inventing the pack, the city, and civilization itself. Wurnafenglu, speaking for the Sardhluun, made a remark about the potency of youth that was either pointless or obscene, but not particularly witty either way, and went on to explain that this alliance with the Neyuwuleiuun was a natural extension of the Sardhluun's longstanding policy of solitary strength. The strong and the solitary had the strength to recognize when a greater strength could be gained by alliance, thus actually preserving the solitary strength of the strong allied partners. They stood together because they stood alone. He said this several times, and his cantors cheered louder every time, but members of the crowd seemed to be trying to figure out what it meant.

  Wurnafenglu was saved by moonrise. As his speech thundered to a vigorous but not-altogether-coherent close, a bitter blue light grew in the sky, drowning the feeble lamps and torches: Chariot rising in the west.

  All the citizens turned to the west and raised their hands-even the never-wolves and semiwolves who could not hope for a metamorphosis. They did it because others did it, and because they wished they could hope, even though they were hopeless.

  Citizen after citizen fell under their own shadow, their day shape lost to the night shape; screaming men and women became howling wolves in the hot blue night. Winter was over. Spring had begun. They rejoiced and they were afraid.

  As the howling of the crowd began to die down, everyone heard a band of wolves singing somewhere in the city. It was a song about a battle in the air-a song about the night the new Alliance had tried and failed to destroy the outliers, and lost its boasted airships in the bargain. Everyone in the city remembered that night-how they had watched and wondered at the battle in the air.

  It dawned on the assembly that the Goweiteiuun were indeed coming to the assembly, and that they were bringing their outlier allies with them.

  The crowd by the stairs parted to admit the newcomers. There were wolves and, shockingly, never-wolves in their company. The never-wolves wore strange glass armor that glittered in the moonlight, and some bore banners on staves: blue and red for the Goweiteiuun and green and gold for the outliers.

  At their head was a great gray wolf with blue eyes; he wore cord upon cord of honor-teeth, and among them was the long curving fang of a dragon.

  "Rokhlenu!" shouted the crowd. "Rokhlenu!"

  Many of them were Aruukaiaduun, and he was born to their pack. They had lost him to the machinations of the old gray-muzzle Rywudhaariu, but they were still proud of him, still ashamed they had let themselves lose him. They chanted his name as if it would let them reclaim him, as if he could still be their hero, their native son.

  Wurnafenglu turned to lock eyes with the yellow semiwolf, the coward, the traitor-to-traitors, Rululawianu.

  The semiwolf was not cowering. He was laughing. He threw back his head and shouted, "Where are the prisoners of the Khuwuleion? Where are the prisoners of the Khuwuleion? Where are the prisoners of the Khuwuleion?"

  It was the question the Sardhluun didn't want asked, the question they could not answer. It was the nature of the city's legal system that justice didn't enter into it: only the powerless went to prison. But there had been many of them, and they had left many kin and friends behind them, and perhaps in those numbers was a kind of power. Also, the city had paid the Sardhluun to tend those prisoners, not to sell them or butcher them. The next government would also ask: where were the prisoners of the Khuwuleion?

  Now the band of newcomers began to chant the deadly question. The crowd took up the cry. The Sardhluun were baffled, the Neyuwuleiuun embarrassed.

  Wurnafenglu was not baffled. He saw just exactly how he had been fooled. He leapt on the laughing semiwolf and tore his furry throat out. Then the gnyrrand swung about and, jaws still dripping with Rululawianu's blood, he charged the outliers, his cantors at his heels.

  The watching citizens sang their approval. This was the way to run an election: surprises, bloom smoke, one side turning on itself, and a maximum of fighting with a minimum of talking.

  The crowd was barking with excitement by now. They were not aware of it, but their barking fell into the rhythm of War's delighted laughter. He was manifest, though not visible to most of the citizens there, and he was enjoying the rally immensely. It was a good fight, and promised to get better. He visualized that the Alliance would lose, but that many of the never-wolves and semiwolves fighting for the outliers would die, and he was interested to see how well the results accorded with his foresight.

  He wished Mercy were there. He would have showed her some events worth seeing.

  But Mercy was manifest elsewhere and elsewhere. As a dark bird with no feet, she was hovering over the hills west of the outlier settlement. A pale werewolf was half supporting, half dragging a crook-shouldered man with a gray corpselike face who was stumbling out of a cave.

  "Come on, you old fool," the pale werewolf was saying. "You can be drunk in our den as well as in this stupid cave. You may be dying, but you don't have to die alone. Come on, old Khretvarrgliu. Just a little further along here. Careful on the steps."

  Half cajoling, half abusing, in the manner of werewolves, the pale werewolf took the crooked man down the steps, across the water, and up the rickety stairway to the den at the top.

  The man said nothing. But Mercy saw a little into his heart: how he feared death not at all, but disliked the need for parting with friends like this. The werewolf's heart, too, was full of hopeless, helpless affection he could not express, much of it confused with thoughts of his mate Liudhleeo.

  Mercy witnessed them for a while, but demanifested herself before too much time passed. She knew that, whatever they felt now, they would change. She had been a god for long ages now, and she knew that Death was right about mortals: they were filled with one divinity, and then another, and then they changed and changed and changed. She preferred to be absent before they were lost to her entirely.

  -ROBERT HUNTER, "DIRE WOLF"

  t was a blisteringly hot morning in early spring. The First Wolf of the outliers and their gnyrrand were looking at a bucket of muddy water that Hlupnafenglu had just drawn from the swamp.

  "How does it work?" Wuinlendhono asked.

  "Like this," Hlupnafenglu said, and dumped the contents of the bucket into an open tube with a downward slope. The muddy water poured down the slope, through a glassy mirrored gate at the base of the slope, then up another slope on the other side. Except the water ran on alone; the mud remained at the bottom of the slope in a sludgy pool. There was a second mirrored gate atop the secon
d slope, and another downward sloping tube beyond. Beneath this tube was another bucket. The water ran into the bucket, and when it was done, the red werewolf picked up the bucket and drank from it.

  He offered the bucket to Rokhlenu.

  Rokhlenu took it, tasted it, drank a mouthful, and said, "It smells a little odd."

  "You can run it through more than once to get it cleaner," Hlupnafenglu said eagerly, and then his face fell. "Chieftain," he said, and bowed his head.

  The others turned and saw Morlock standing near, with pale Hrutnefdhu beside him. The day was cruelly hot, but the crooked man wore his usual dark cloak over his ghostly left hand. He didn't seem to feel the heat: his pale grayish skin was dry as bone. He looked at the wooden tubes, at the suddenly abashed Hlupnafenglu and said, "So that was your project? A water cleaner?"

  "Yes, Chieftain. I didn't want to bother you with it."

  "Not bad. But I think you need more than one turn to get the water really clean. A coil of three or four might do."

  "Yes, Chieftain."

  "Sketch a design or two and we'll discuss them later."

  "Yes, Chieftain."

  "This will be important to us," Rokhlenu said, in case the red wolf was disheartened. "Especially if this dry weather continues."

  Hlupnafenglu bowed his head, but did not call Rokhlenu chieftain.

  "Let's step out of this sun," Wuinlendhono said. "Ghost! It's not even noon yet."

  They went back into the First Wolf's lair-tower. The red werewolf remained behind to take apart his apparatus.

  "Warm weather for spring," Morlock remarked.

  "It's like hell," Wuinlendhono said. "Do your people believe in hell? I never did, but now I think I'm going to live through it."

  There was a ragged edge to her voice, and Rokhlenu wanted to comfort her somehow, but he didn't know what to say. The weather was odd, very odd, frighteningly odd.

  "I don't suppose you have a magic trick that will make food for us, Khretvarrgliu," the First Wolf said wryly. "We've been living on stores for almost a year, and by next fall they'll all be empty, I guess."

  "No," said Morlock, "but if I were you, I would set up a colony on the coast of the Bitter Water. Even the swamp will not last forever, if there are no streams to run into it, and the mirror gates will rinse water clean of salt. Plus the drought will not affect sea creatures much."

  There was a silence, and Wuinlendhono said with amusement, "Are you proposing that we eat fish?"

  "Citizens will be eating worse by winter," Morlock replied. "At least if you are correct about the stores running out."

  Wuinlendhono nodded, still not convinced.

  "Besides," Morlock continued, "there are red-blooded animals in the sea and around it. Whales, wave-horses, merkine, seabirds."

  "Really? I had no idea! What do they taste like?"

  "Seabirds are just birds. I can't say about the rest."

  "Yurr. Interesting. Of course, it's a few days' run to the coast. They'd have to smoke the meat on the coast to transport it back here."

  The males were silent as the First Wolf thought it through. "And if the drought goes on, we can all just move there," she said at last. "Wuruyaaria will be done, anyway." She put a hand on Rokhlenu's arm. "Beloved, I'm going to do something about this. Do you want me with you when you meet the band from the Aruukaiaduun wolves?"

  He did, but he stroked her hand and said, "Want, yes. Need, no. Go save our lives, why don't you?"

  She gave a long carnivore's grin to them all and hurried away, her goldtoothed guardians scurrying in her wake.

  "Morlock," said Rokhlenu to his old friend, "you don't look well."

  "I'm dying," the crooked man said matter-of-factly. The pale werewolf looked at him with alarm.

  "You look like you're already dead," Rokhlenu said. "Isn't there anything we can do?"

  "Not unless you know where to find a unicorn," Morlock replied.

  He used the Latin word, not knowing the term in Sunspeech, and when he explained what he meant, Rokhlenu said dubiously, "There are stories about things like that. Children's stories. What's told of them makes them sound like pets. Imaginary pets."

  "I don't know anything about your local kinds," Morlock said. "They lived in the mountains where I was raised. I suppose they still live there."

  "Then we'll take you there. Or we'll send there for a horn."

  Morlock shook his head. "No. I'll be dead soon. The ghost illness will reach my heart and I'll be done." Again, Hrutnefdhu was looking at him with a stricken expression, but Morlock didn't seem to notice. "I'll teach Hlupnafenglu what I can before I die. I'll do what I can for you before I die. It's not what I would have chosen, but it will have to be enough."

  "What about Ulugarriu?" broke in Hrutnefdhu. "Maybe-maybe he could do something."

  Morlock opened his right hand, closed it. That seemed to be a dismissal of the subject. He turned to Rokhlenu and said, "I tore down the mirror corridor."

  "Yes, I saw that."

  "The moonstone failed after I healed Lekkativengu. I can't recharge it with moonlight; it's designed differently than my sunstone. In fact, I don't think it was made at all; it may be a piece of a moon."

  "How did they get it?"

  Morlock shrugged. He continued, "When I was breaking up the silvered glass I had an idea."

  He drew a short stabbing spear from a sheath under his cloak. The spear head was glass, woven through with threadlike cracks. And in the center was a silvery wedge.

  "In the haft, there's a rune-slate bonded in state to the glass spearhead," Morlock explained coolly. "You stab someone with the spear, break the runeslate, the glass shatters, and the silver point remains in the wound."

  Rokhlenu finally understood the feeling of dread gripping him since Morlock had appeared. "Put it away, please," he said, as mildly as possible.

  "I think they'll work," said Morlock, "though I haven't tested one yet. I have enough silver and glass from the mirror corridor to make many of these."

  "I'm sure they'll work; everything you make works. But we can't use them."

  "They're safe enough for the user. The-"

  "Politically impossible. You need to take my word for this, Morlock. I cannot use silver weapons against other werewolves. Every citizen in Wuruyaaria would march against us."

  Morlock shrugged, nodded, and sheathed the spear. "Well, maybe I can use the stuff for something else. This really bothers you, does it?" he added, tapping the sheath.

  "Yes. It really does."

  "I'll get rid of it. You'd better stay here," he said to Hrutnefdhu. "Some silver might be lying around the cavern yet."

  The pale werewolf nodded and said, "Either Liudhleeo or I will bring you lunch. You'll eat it or find another den."

  Morlock smiled, gripped him by the forearm, punched Rokhlenu lightly in farewell, and left.

  "Is he drunk?" Rokhlenu asked Hrutnefdhu. "He smelled like that stuff he drinks. The wine."

  "He never drinks during the day," the pale werewolf replied. "But he is drunk every night."

  "I wish I'd never given him the stuff. I thought he'd like it."

  "I can't tell if he does. It seems to be hurting him somehow. But what does it matter, if he's dying anyway?" The pale castrato's voice was shrill with despair.

  They entered the great audience chamber of the First Wolf. She wasn't there. In fact, no one was there. They sat down on couches and talked in low voices about one thing and another: the election, and Morlock, and Ulugarriu, and the deadly weather. They reached no conclusions, but that, Rokhlenu thought to himself, isn't what talking was usually for.

  Wuinlendhono appeared presently. She dismissed her guards and began to talk about her plans for the seacoast colony. They were getting more people in the outlier settlement because of their successes in the elections-more than they could really feed, as it was turning out. This was a chance to give some of the newcomers a chance to earn some bite, if nothing else.

  Hrutnefdhu left
them during this conversation. Rokhlenu waved him an offhanded farewell, involved in discussing the new plans and their political impact with his beloved.

  Presently he looked up to see that the red werewolf Hlupnafenglu was standing nearby, patiently waiting for them to notice him.

  "What is it, Hlupnafenglu?" he asked.

  "Do you know who I am?" the red werewolf asked in turn.

  "Yurr." Was the big red werewolf going crazy again? "Aren't you Hlupnafenglu?"

  "I am now. Do you know who I was?"

  "Oh. Before the Vargulleion? No. Is it important?"

  "I don't know if it is." The red werewolf looked keenly at the First Wolf. "Do you know who I was, High Huntress?"

  She seemed reluctant to reply. Finally she said, "Well. I thought you might be the Red Shadow. I saw him a few times in Apetown. From a distance, mind you. But he didn't look like anyone else I've ever seen, except you."

  "I was the Red Shadow."

  "All right," Rokhlenu said. "Someone has to explain this to me."

  Wuinlendhono turned to him and said, "The Red Shadow was an assassin. You wouldn't have heard about him; you were a respectable person before they framed you. But for five or six years, if you wanted someone killed in Apetown or Dogtown, and you didn't care how much it cost you, you hired the Red Shadow. He never failed. A few years ago, he disappeared. Some people said he was killed by one of his targets, and some people said he had retired to live among the wild packs. But apparently he was in the Vargulleion. Eh, `Hlupnafenglu'?"

  "Yes. I don't know how I got there or what they did to me. I don't remember a lot. But I do remember the murders. Many, many murders."

  "Oh," said Rokhlenu. Killing in fights was an accepted part of life in the werewolf city, but secret murder was another thing entirely. "Maybe that does make a difference."