The Wolf Age

Chapter One: Council of the Gods

Listen, lacomes. This is what I see.

The Strange Gods were gathering by the Stone Tree, but Death and her sister justice had not yet appeared. Justice, they knew, would not, but they expected Death to be there before them and War was angry.

"I swear by myself," War signified, indicating by a talic distortion that the oath was not sincere or binding, "Death is the strangest of the Strange Gods. She pervades the mortal world, but she can't manifest herself anywhere within a pact-sworn juncture of space-time!"

"I am here," Death signified.

Now that they noticed her presence among them, the Strange Gods realized she had been implicit in a fold of local space-time all along, and simply had not chosen to reveal her presence to them. The other gods signified nontrivial displeasure with her.

Death indicated indifference and readiness to begin the pact-sworn discussion.

The Strange Gods did not submit to a ruler. In their discussions, it was common for the weakest of them to preside. So Mercy manifested herself more intensely than she would normally have done, and reminded them of their mission to destroy the werewolf city Wuruyaaria and how it was currently imperiled.

"It is Ghosts-in-the-eyes," signified Wisdom. "They are a powerful maker and necromancer-a master of all the arts we hate. Our instrument will destroy the city"-Wisdom indicated a pattern in events they all under- stood-"but now unless we find a way to bring down the walls of Wuruyaaria more swiftly, our instrument may also destroy great swathes among our worshippers. This goes against our nature and cannot be accepted."

Other gods indicated agreement.

Death indicated chilly amusement: a laugh. "The werewolves will die," she signified. "Their city will die. Our worshippers will die. Our instrument will die. Everything that lives must die. When the last soul is severed, this world will collapse into its component elements and drift away in pieces, flotsam on the Sea of Worlds. All this will happen in time: let events take whatever course they will, this is their destination. If this goes against our nature, our nature is doomed."

Each of the other gods emanated anger that would have killed a material being. It was uncivil of Death to prate about these matters that were well known to every god. If Death felt any discomfort from their emanations, she didn't show it. Her next comment was more immediately helpful, though.

"I have a kind of solution to propose," Death signified. "I would have effected it already, but the consequences will affect our pact-sworn efforts to destroy Wuruyaaria."

Mercy signified a need for more details; other gods echoed her.

Death indicated a trivial detail in the pattern of events: the death of a man named Morlock.

The gods expressed indifference.

Death changed the detail's position in time-space.

The gods meditated on the new potential patterns of events, a flowering of dark futures springing from this one seed.

Most of the gods expressed surprise. Cruelty chuckled a bit, slowly shaking his heavy, many-toothed head.

Death again changed the detail's position in time-space. The manifold patterns of things-to-be changed even more radically.

"How can this be?" signified War. "Men and women die every day and their deaths do not matter." Mercy signified some restlessness at this, but the Strange Gods were used to ignoring the endless quarrel between War and Mercy.

"The progress of our plan in the as-things-are moves very slowly," Death signified. "There is a tension of powers: our instrument; the pact binding our powers in this nexus of events; that damned sorcerer, Ghosts-in-the-Eyes; the natural forces we do not control; and so on. If we disrupt that tension, unbalanced powers will unleash events like a torrent."

Wisdom emanated concern, a need to wait. They did wait as he juggled futures in various shapes, pondering the uncertain effects of varying causal chains. "I cannot chart the path of this torrent," he signified finally to Death and to his peers. "It may benefit our pact-sworn intention or harm it."

"We must guide the torrent," signified War with obvious eagerness.

"We can't," Wisdom signified bluntly. "If we break our sworn intention we will be adrift in the torrent, effecting local changes within it but unable to determine its course. Each change will create new and interacting series of causation. There is certainty in our pact of sworn intention. In this other there is only chaos."

The Strange Gods, as one, made a symbol of protection against the name of this alien god. It had shocked them, as Wisdom intended, lending an unusual force to his signs.

"Certainty only of failure," Cruelty signified. "I was against the proposed instrument from the beginning. It is clear now that I was right and others were wrong. Why should the pact be sacred? Only our wills are sacred, or we are not gods."

"The pact is our will," signified Loyalty. "It is our will united to act as the Strange Gods. To break that is to blaspheme against ourselves." He continued for some time and stopped only when he visualized that the assembly was against him.

Everything he signified was true, but they would not accept failure. On the other hand, Wisdom had frightened them with his tomorrow-juggling and his metaphorical torrents.

"I propose a compromise," signified Stupidity. "Death alone will be freed from the pact-oath. The rest of us will abide by it. That should reduce the chaos in events." The Strange Gods impatiently made again the symbol of protection against the name of Chaos. Stupidity's use of Wisdom's trope emanated contempt and mockery, as was his intent. The gods were annoyed with Stupidity, but he did succeed in making them think less of Wisdom. Suddenly, Wisdom's fears seemed less wise, more fearful.

"That hardly matters," Wisdom signified warningly, but the gods were not prepared to listen. They wanted to do something, and this compromise allowed them the illusion of keeping to their plan even as they adopted a new one.

The compromise, in the end, was assented to by all the Strange Gods (except justice), and Death alone was released from the pact.

"I go," signified Death, and ceased to manifest herself.

The rest of the Strange Gods stood conferring worriedly under the Stone Tree until the sun rose in the west and they fled like ghosts to hide with the darkness underground.

Chapter Two: Death By Water

Morlock Ambrosius shuffled the deck and dealt again. He was sitting by the side of an empty field on the great northern plain, using the surface of a broad stump as a card table.

He threw a set of cards in a spiral pattern, crossed each card with another drawn from the pack, and then sat back to contemplate them. He again saw the drowned sailor, crossed by the Death card, the Lady of the Rocks. There were some variations: the one-eyed merchant bore the blank card of Mystery, the Wheel was crossed by the man with three wands looking out to sea. This was the third time he had thrown the cards, and each time they had prophesied the same fate: death by water.

He had invented the cards as a way to gather signs from the future without using his Sight. That was dangerous for him now: he knew that Merlin had broken loose from his earthy prison and might be exerting his own powers of Sight to track or trap Morlock. He had left his horse with a friend and let his choir of flames run wild in an open seam of coal. He had walked away from everyone and everything he knew so that when the final battle came between him and Merlin, as few people as possible would be destroyed. (In fact, he didn't much care if he himself survived the battle, but he hated the thought of losing to his old embittered ruthen father.) And now, instead of telling him anything about the conflict he knew was coming, the cards kept predicting his death by drowning.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders and gathered up the cards. It was the nature of any type of mantia to reveal things that were useless until one met them in the context of a living Now. He slipped a band on the deck and tucked the cards into a pocket in his sleeve. Then he stood and walked northward up the road to the next town.

Morlock Ambrosius knew the town would be empty before he got there. He had seen enough of them on the northern plains to read the clues by now: the lack of smoke, even from the local smithy, was the clearest sign. What he didn't know was why the town was dead. It had not been for long. There was meat fresh enough to eat in the pantry of the town's sole cookhouse. Morlock cooked and ate it, along with some slightly stale bread and withered mushrooms he had also found there. He left the deck of cards on the counter in payment, even though he had a feeling the owners of the place would never return to claim it.

The place bothered him, so he didn't sleep there. He hopped a wall and walked due north across the brown stubbly fields, averting his eyes from the sun setting in the east. That was how he saw the raiding party approaching from the west.

Morlock was so old he didn't bother to keep count of the years anymore and had seen things like this before. The mystery of the empty towns stood explained: they had fled the raiders who were now returning toward the northern road after having caught at least some of the townspeople. The only question now was how Morlock could avoid being swept up by the raiders.

He knew a few invisibility spells, but they would all make his presence felt to a seer, if they had any in their party. Mundane concealment would be better than any spell, but there were no buildings near enough to be of any use. He settled for sitting down with his back to a wall facing east and waiting for them to pass.

It almost worked. The raiders had some trouble with their prisoners at the wall, which they were crossing somewhat north of Morlock. A few children made a break, running away northward, and a few raiders had to round them up while the others supervised the prisoners' crossing of the wall. They had much to trouble them without looking about for stray travelers.

Morlock, on the other hand, had a chance to observe the raiders and their prisoners quite closely. The raiders were rather odd looking, with long hatchet-narrow faces and necklaces strung with varying numbers of long sharp teeth. They had with them several doglike creatures who were not, in fact, dogs. Some of them took orders and obeyed them with more-thancanine shrewdness. Others seemed to be barking orders that the men (or manlike raiders) would obey.

Morlock watched their shadows to confirm his guess. They were long, distorted by the low angle of the setting sun. But where they fell upon the wall it was clear: the dogs or wolves cast shadows like a man crouching on all fours, while the men cast shadows like wolves standing on their hind feet.

It was a raiding party from the werewolf city somewhere to the north. Morlock forgot the name, if he had ever known it. His sisters could have told him, if she were here.

The prisoners were mostly older folk and children. The healthy adults had obviously been able to escape from the raiding party. A rational choice, Morlock supposed: one must bury one's parents eventually, and one can always have more children. He eyed the few mature adults among the prisoners with some interest. Merely slow-footed?

Morlock felt a twinge of pity for the children. There was nothing in store for them but life as slaves at best, or death as prey at worst. Or maybe it was the other way round: Morlock had never been a slave and he wasn't eager to make the experiment. He kept quiet and still and waited for the raiders to pass.

It almost worked. The prisoners had all crossed the wall; the runaways had been rounded up. The rearguard of the raiding party crossed the wall and began to follow the main group eastward. Perhaps Morlock released an incautiously energetic breath of relief. Perhaps his luck was just out. In any case, one of the wolves in the rearguard lifted his nose and then turned to look directly at Morlock, slumped against the wall. He barked a quiet word to his manlike comrades.

Two of the raiders armed with pikes looked over at Morlock and moved toward him, shouting in a language Morlock did not understand. Since all hope of concealment was over, Morlock stood and drew his sword Tyrfing, holding it at an angle meant to warn rather than threaten.

The two pikemen stopped moving toward him and stared at the dark crystal of the blade, woven with veins of paler crystal, glittering in the red light of the eastering sun.

The wolf who had spotted him first yowled a warning to the whole raiding group. All the raiders stopped and looked at him. Things were going from bad to worse.

Morlock backed away one deliberate step, paused, then took another step back. He growled slightly. From what he knew of wolves, he thought this might show that he was not prepared to attack, but would fight if he must.

The two pikemen and the wolf who commanded them took two steps forward, the pikemen shouting something and the wolf barking furiously. Oddly, he understood the wolf better than the pikemen. The wolf seemed to be saying that Morlock should hide his teeth or he would be bacon by morning.

Morlock suggested, in the same snarling language, the werewolf perform an act made possible by lupine agility. It was one of the few insults he knew for a wolf, and it was gratifyingly effective. The two wolf-shadowed pikemen were rocked back on their heels; the man-shadowed wolf charged forth with fiery eyes, silent now, eager to kill.

Morlock waited. When the wolf poised himself to leap, Morlock dodged forward and brought Tyrfing down on the werewolf's shoulder, shattering the bone.

Tyrfing was a focus of power as well as a weapon; to kill with it was an act of grim consequence, tantamount to enduring death itself. But the werewolf, of course, was not dead, merely wounded, and Morlock found he could shake off the shock of its suffering relatively quickly. He hoped the wolf would not heal soon; he had other trouble at hand.

The two pikemen were bearing down on him. Their weapons were excellent for keeping a party of unarmed prisoners in line, less effective against a skilled swordsman. Morlock ran to meet them and was past the range of their pikeheads before they could stab at him. He wounded the nearer pikeman on the arm with Tyrfing, and reached past him with his free hand to break the neck of the one beyond. The dying one fell like a stone, gasping his last breaths out uselessly; the other staggered backward, yammering, and strove to stab at Morlock with his pike.

Morlock spun aside and rolled over the nearby wall. He made as if to back away; the wounded pikeman lunged at him recklessly. Morlock evaded the pike's hooked blade, waited until the pikeman was fully extended, and then struck down with Tyrfing. The glittering edge hit the pikeman's arm lying across the surface of the wall and severed it at the elbow like a butcher's cleaver cutting through a joint of meat. The pikeman shrieked words of fear and hate, staggered backward, and fell out of sight groaning behind the low wall.

Morlock shook off the horror of the pikeman's suffering. A werewolf he might be, but he was as mortal in human form as Morlock was, and it was unlikely he would survive two such terrible wounds. But Morlock had many deaths on his conscience already; adding the death of a slave-taker or two did not bother him much.

The others were coming for him now. Since there was nothing he could do to stop it, he encouraged it. He made clucking noises he hoped they would find insulting. He croaked out some abuse he had learned from crows. He tapped the edge of his sword on the bloodstained surface of the wall and waggled his free hand at them. Soon many of the raiders, manlike and lupine, were running toward him. At the moment he judged right, he turned and ran south along the stone wall.

He heard some of the raiders scrambling or leaping over the wall. Others were running along the eastern side of the wall. That was all right with him: his enemies had effectively halved their own forces.

His bad leg was troubling him, but he kept running as fast as he could until he heard the grating gasp of a wolf's breathing just behind him. He spun and braced his feet in a fighter's crouch, his sword at full extension. The wolf at his heels was impaled on the blade before he knew what was happening; the frightened howl had an unpleasantly human quality. Morlock repressed the horror of the other's suffering and shook him off his sword. He kicked the moaning wolf out of his way and lunged at the next one leaping at him. This one didn't howl; Tyrfing had passed through her throat, nearly severing her neck. She, too, was out of the fight until she healed. Morlock leaped past to meet the next raider.

Neither men nor wolves run all at the same rate. A disciplined military force learns to move as a group, applying a maximum of power at the expense of moving a little more slowly. These raiders weren't that disciplined, and Morlock planned to take advantage of it. During his sprint his pursuers had strung behind him in a long line, and what had been an unwinnable battle of one against many was now just a string of single combats in which Morlock had, at least briefly, the advantage of surprise.

His next opponent was a wide-eyed man armed only with a long pole. He was already skittering to a halt as Morlock came up to him. While he was still off balance, Morlock struck off his weapon-bearing hand with Tyrfing and punched him in the throat. The man fell gagging to his knees. Morlock kicked him in the face as he passed, and the man went down to the ground.

By then Morlock was facing another antagonist: a lean woman with roancolored hair and a long pointed sword. Morlock fenced with her for a few grim moments, then struck home with a thrust through her upper right chest. He wrenched the sword from her grip with his free hand and she fell, spouting blood from her lips, into the dust of the stubbly field.

The woman's sword was rusty, bent, unbalanced, notched along both edges-inferior to Tyrfing in every way but one: he could use it to kill with impunity. He ran on to fight his next antagonist.

After a few more single combats, Morlock looked about to see wolves and men gathering in a group to attack him. He turned and, leaping back over the wall, ran southward. His would-be attackers followed. Glancing back, he saw that their pursuit had broken up into smaller groups again, some on each side of the wall. He leaped back to the west side and ran north to attack again.

He was running out of breath by now, but he strove not to show it: they would be more likely to break off the battle if they thought him tireless. And, in a strange way, the grim prophecies of the cards buoyed him up: if he was doomed to die by drowning, he needn't worry about being ripped open by werewolves in an empty field.

He had struck down a few more men and wolves, and was thinking of a new retreat when horns and wolf calls sounded to the north. His antagonists fled northward to answer them. When he was sure they were leaving, he slumped gasping against the wall and watched them run.

There was some sort of fight going on back at the main body of the raiding party. In the failing light it wasn't at first clear to Morlock what was happening. Then he realized: encouraged by the absence of so many raiders, the captives had seized the opportunity to fight back.

Their chances didn't look good.

Morlock, of course, could improve them.

He shook his head, wearily. It was not his fight; he was already tired. This was his chance to flee south and escape the raiders.

On the other hand, the field was dry. Absent a sudden downpour, he was unlikely to drown.

He stood pondering alternatives and getting his wind back. He saw a raider lift the struggling body of a child, impaled on a spear point. As the raider brandished the spear, shouting in triumph or threat, the body grew slack.

Morlock found himself running forward then in long irregular strides. The slave-takers, intent on their rebellious captives, didn't notice his approach until he was almost upon them. Then he lashed out with both swords, torn by the sudden rage from within and the talic shocks from Tyrfing. He struck and struck. He was bleeding now, and his fire-laden blood lit smoldering fires in the stubbly fields. The werewolves, manlike and wolfformed, seemed more dismayed by this than anything. Now many of the former captives had seized weapons from raiders that had been killed or wounded. The raiders still had greater numbers, but seemed to lack stomach for fighting. Soon they fled, north and east, away from the bitter low wall and the bodies of the slain and wounded and the harsh vengeful cries of their former captives.

Morlock stepped aside and sat down on the low wall, ripping strips from his cloak to bandage his wounds. He kept an eye on the former captives as he did so. It was possible they would resent him as much as the werewolves. He knew nothing of these people, not even a word of their language.

He saw one woman with iron gray hair struggling with a long spear gripped in the hands of a dead raider. She was sobbing quietly. He kept a cautious eye on her; it was possible that some of the captives were quislings or traitors, and perhaps she was one. Otherwise why weep over the dead raider? Then he saw what was on the end of the spear: the child's body he had seen raised up as a rebuke or a threat to the captives. She was struggling to remove the spear point from the body without doing it further damage.

He got up from the wall and walked over to her. He brushed her hands away from the shaft of the spear, and she let him. The blade of the spear was barbed and had caught in the child's body. The child was dead, of course; it had been a girl, perhaps ten years old. Morlock put one foot on the corpse and tore the spear loose from the body.

The old woman screamed and struck at his face with weak fists. He ignored it. He broke the spear shaft with his hands and cast the pieces aside. Then he opened his hands and looked her in the eye.

She stopped hitting him. She stood back, still sobbing from exhaustion, fear, grief-or all three. The sobbing slowed to a halt.

Silence surrounded them.

"Kree-laow," said one of the former captives, pointing at Morlock.

"Venbe Land kree-laow," said another.

An argument broke forth. One of the issues seemed to be whether Morlock was or was not kree-laow-whatever or whoever that might be.

Many of the captives lay dead on the field. If they had been Morlock's kith he would have felt the impulse to bury them. But circumstances were obviously unsuitable for a funeral, no matter how hasty. The sun had now set, and the blue eyes of the minor moons, Horseman and Trumpeter, were opening in the gray sky of gloaming. In the shadows along the low bitter wall, darker shadows were lurking, wounded werewolves licking their wounds audibly, healing probably, readying for a new attack almost certainly.

Morlock knelt down by the dead girl. The old woman jumped at him, croaking angry words. He held up his hand. Then he tore another strip from his ragged cloak and bound up the dead girl's left hand.

"My people," he said to the old woman, without any hope she would understand, "the people who raised me: they taught me to do this for those I would honor, but could not bury." He tore another strip of cloth and bound the girl's other hand.

The old woman knelt down by the dead girl on the other side. She tore a strip from her own ragged clothing and put it across the dead girl's face. She met his eye and nodded grimly. They both stood.

"Kree-laow!" said one of the former captives decisively, and this time no one argued. The survivors set about hastily honoring their fallen dead. Morlock patrolled back and forth as they did so, watching the wolf-eyed shadows that were gathering in the dark.

Then the others were done. Some of them tugged at Morlock's arm and shoulder; they said words he didn't understand. Their expressions were hard to read in the ice-pale moonlight, but they seemed to want him to come with them. They kept pointing north: perhaps they had a refuge there, or simply planned to join another band of refugees.

He considered it. On the one hand, not too far to the north lay the Bitter Water, an inlet from the western ocean. If he were truly destined to die by drowning, that would be a likely scene for it. On the other hand, if he walked southward alone, the werewolves would likely follow him. He knew from experience how relentless werewolves could be in the pursuit of a single prey, even one who had given them less cause to be angry than Morlock now had. And he had no silver nor wolfbane in his nearly empty pack.

He touched his chest and pointed north. "I'll go with you," he said.

They understood; their faces creased with relief and a kind of happiness. He thought it odd.

They went northward as quickly as they could, stumbling through the empty fields in the moonlit shadows. Eyes followed them in the dark-never too near, nor ever very far away.

It was the last bright call* of Cymbals, the first month of winter. The air on the northern plains should have been pitilessly cold, the land covered with many layers of snow. The wind that rose at their backs was chilly and many of the refugees shivered as they walked, but it was more like early autumn than the beginning of winter. Morlock had never known weather like this, but it was true that he didn't know the northern plains as well as other parts of Laent. He'd have liked to ask the refugees (the other refugees, he supposed he should call them: he was one of them now) about the weather, but he couldn't understand a word they said, and none of them could understand any of the languages he spoke to them.

About the middle of the night, they began to hear the sound of surf, and the air came alive with salty wet scents. The refugees were increasingly excited, but Morlock was feeling rather gloomy: it was as if he could feel Death gripping him more tightly.

They came in sight of the shoreline, and there were other refugees there, and the coarse cheerful sounds of wood being worked. Morlock's companions picked up their feet and ran down to the shore, laughing and crying and greeting the others there. Morlock followed more slowly. He noted that the woodworking sounds were coming from a small flotilla of boats that the refugees were making with lumber salvaged from demolished buildings. There were some foundations, gaping open at the cold sky, not far away from the shore.

Many explanations had already been made before Morlock arrived at the rocky beach of the Bitter Water. Some of Morlock's companions were standing around an older man wearing a ceremonial headband. Morlock heard the by now familiar kree-laow several times.

The old man, some sort of leader or priest, looked up as Morlock approached. His lined face had been frozen in a skeptical expression, but that melted as he took in Morlock's limping crooked form. He said several things directly to Morlock, who opened his hands and looked expectantly, waiting for the old man to understand that he didn't understand.

The old man was annoyed that Morlock didn't understand him. He waved off some explanations from some of the other refugees and spoke over his shoulder to a boy who wore a version of the same headband. The boy ran off, returning a few moments later with a small codex book. He handed it to the old man, who leafed through it for a few moments and then turned to hand it to Morlock.

Morlock took the book reluctantly. It seemed to be some book of ceremonies or prophecies, and he had found that participating in someone else's religion could become abruptly dangerous, even when he understood what they were saying. He was even more dismayed when he saw what the old man wanted him to see: through the middle of the text strode a crook-shouldered man, a torch in one hand and a black-and-white sword in the other. Around him was a ring of wolves with human shadows.

"Kree-laow!" shouted the old man, as if he could make Morlock understand that way.

"Possibly," said Morlock, handing back the book. "I hope not, though." If he disliked being entangled in someone else's religion, being entangled in their destiny seemed almost unsanitary.

Three children ran up, one of them bleeding. They were talking excitedly and gesturing southward. They may have been posted as lookouts; obviously, they had met a werewolf. More than one: one of the boys kept on flashing all his fingers, which Morlock guessed meant the numbers of the enemies: ten and ten and ten….

The old man said something; other men and women wearing headbands repeated it, and the men, women, and children all rushed to the boats, pushing them out from the rocky beach into the water.

Morlock was in two minds about whether to join them. He hated the water and would almost rather die on land than be saved on the sea. But he thought about the boy's hand signals: ten and ten and ten…. Too many tens.

Morlock waded into the cold shallows of the Bitter Water. Many cold moonlit faces turned eagerly toward him from the boats; they spoke to him. Everyone seemed eager to have the kree-laow (if that's what he was) on their boat.

He climbed on one at random. It did not, thank God Avenger, have the old man with the ceremonial headband; Morlock had taken a dislike to him in the few seconds he had known him. A younger man wearing a headband appeared to be the priest-captain of the boat. He took Morlock by the hand and welcomed him, then took him to one side of the boat where there was a bench and an oar for rowing.

"I understand," said Morlock. He threw his backpack and his two swords under the bench, sat down, and took hold of the oar. Some of the crew were already frantically splashing the blades of their oars in the water. He waited until the sides had established a rhythm, along with a chant led by the head band-wearer (who sat at the stern at the steering oar). When the other oars were swinging in rhythm he extended his own and started to push the water with the blade.

On the bench in front of him was an old woman. He wasn't sure if it was the same one whom he had met among the captives. There were no passengers in the middle of the boat, and many of the benches were empty: the refugees had been expecting more people than actually arrived.

That was unfortunate; they could have used the arms. And Morlock wished he had arrived early enough to give them some advice on boat building. (He was no sailor, but he knew something about shipmaking.) The boats were all flatbed rafts-none of them seemed to have keels. They would fare badly on the rough waves of the Bitter Water.

It was bad at first, but no worse than Morlock expected. The flat bottom of the boat hit each wave on the rough gray waters like a broadhead hammer. Morlock's mouth filled with a greasy fluid. He was near vomiting, but struggled against it. He didn't know how soon he would eat again, and he couldn't afford to lose a scrap of food to the cold dark sea.

The waves kept pushing the flatboats backward even as they struggled forward-and the boats slid sideways as often as they made any progress. When they had been paddling for more than an hour, Morlock looked backward. The shore was still in sight, terribly near for all their efforts. In the chill light of the minor moons, he saw that the smooth beach bristled with the forms of men and wolves.

He turned back to plying his oar. He met the eye of the old woman rowing in front of him: she too had been looking back.

"There's no going back," he said.

She grunted and said something he didn't understand. They bent themselves to their rowing. The night was still strangely warm for winter, but a cold wind came off the gray gleaming water; no one was sweating much.

Presently it grew still worse. There was a shout from one of the other boats, and everyone turned their eyes to the east. Morlock followed their gaze, but at first he wasn't sure what he was seeing. He had never seen anything like this before.

Emerging from the blue broken clouds, high above the moonslit eastern edge of the Bitter Water, were gray shapes like teardrops, riding through the sky like ships. Their prows were pointed; their sterns were wide and rounded. Under each midsection hung chains suspending a long black craft, snakelike in form.

"What are they?" he wondered. "Are they alive?"

No one answered. No one understood him. But the townsfolk knew something about them. Some turned back to their oars with renewed panicky energy; others put their hands over their faces, resigning themselves to their fate.

Morlock was not the resigned type. He struck out at the water savagely with his oar, but turned often to watch the approach of the airships. At first they were headed toward the center of the Bitter Water, but then they turned their prows slightly to intercept the flatboats. The sharp ends of the airships tilted slightly forward, and the snakelike gondolas slid forward on their chains.

The old woman in front of him said something and he turned to look at her. She said it again. He shrugged and opened his free hand.

She grunted and gestured impatiently back toward the shore. Then Morlock did understand: the airships had something to do with the werewolves.

Morlock was impressed. He also felt a savage covetous longing to know how the things were made, how they worked. But the main thing at the moment was to survive, and that looked increasingly unlikely.

The airships were clearly coming in to attack the flatboats. They were close enough now that he could see the windows lining the snakelike gondolas. And in many of the windows a warm, welcoming red light shone.

"We're done," he remarked grimly, and turned back to his oar. He still wasn't the resigned type.

Soon the airships were nearly overhead, and he could see the bowmen in the windows, their arrows alive with red light.

"Ware fire!" he shouted, though he knew no one could understand him.

The bowmen shot, and burning arrows struck all around them, in the water and on the decks. Few seemed to have been wounded, a fact that struck Morlock as ominous. The arrows largely fell in the center of the boats, on open planking.

Morlock reached under his bench for his nearly empty backpack. He swung it over the rail and passed it through the water. Then he ran with it, still soaking, to the nearest arrow burning on the deck and tried to douse the flame. But he managed to do nothing except set the soaked backpack alight: the burning arrows were treated with some agent that burned even in water. And it burned fast and fierce: he tossed the backpack off the boat, but it was already half consumed, and the fires were chewing deep holes in the flatboats. As he watched bemusedly, boiling water began to bubble upward amidst the spreading flame. This boat was sinking, and a glance around showed him that the other flatboats were as well. People were abandoning them on every side.

Now was the time for the crews of the airships to attack again, if they were seeking to kill the refugees. But they didn't. In fact, Morlock saw that they were lowering something from the airship gondolas on long chains. Nets. They were nets. As they hit the water, people already adrift on the waves started to crawl into them.

Morlock could not imagine what use the werewolves could have for humans except as meat animals or slaves. He expected his fiery blood would keep him off the menu card, so he wasn't concerned about that. But he had never been a slave. He had no interest in trying the profession.

He turned back to his bench and grabbed Tyrfing from its sheath. He struck with the dark glittering blade, severing the bench from the deck. He tossed the bench into the water and jumped in after it, sword still in hand.

He flipped the bench on its back and lay Tyrfing across its underside. The bench seemed buoyant enough to carry him and his sword, at least until it absorbed some water. Looking back, he saw the old woman who had been rowing in front of him. She was sinking under the silver surface of the Bitter Water. He reached out with one hand to rescue her, but she scornfully struck it aside and let herself sink. Soon she passed from sight: a gray shape lost in the gray moonslit water.

Morlock looked up. One net full of dripping refugees was already being drawn up toward the gondola of an airship. The others were still gathering willing victims.

Maybe they were right, Morlock realized. It was a warm night for winter, but it was still a winter night on the Bitter Water. Death was there, in the chill of the water if nothing else. He might live longer if he resigned himself to his fate, as they were doing.

But he wasn't the resigned type. And he had never been a slave. "Eh," he said, and paddled grimly away into the night.

His plan was to swim westward and then turn south toward the shoreline, hopefully landing at a place not thick with angry werewolves.

He hadn't much hope. The weather was warm, perhaps, by the frosty standards of the north, but the Bitter Water was cold-far colder than his blood. There was a fire in him, but he knew that water quenches fire. Still, he would not surrender. Death was in the water. He knew it; he felt it. But he would fend it off as long as possible.

A current, even colder than the other water, caught him and dragged him off the course he thought he was taking. Soon he couldn't even remember where he had thought land was. If he could hold out until dawn…

He did not hold out. The cold sank deep teeth into his aching limbs. His mind began to fog. He forgot to raise his head occasionally to look for signs of land. He found himself drifting occasionally, his feet motionless in the killing water, loosely grasping the bench, his eyes closed. Every time it happened it was harder to kick his feet into motion. And eventually the time came when he found himself adrift half submerged in the water, the wooden waterlogged bench lost on the dark sea. He kept his limbs moving as long as he could, but eventually the darkness in the cold water entered his mind and he sank, already dying, into the killing water.

Death was there under the surface of the sea. He had known it from the beginning, but now he saw her reaching out for him with long dark fingers, bristling with darkness like a spider's legs.

She embraced him with her many arms, and her bristling fingertips touched his face.

She introduced talic distortions into his fading consciousness, like words.

I am not ready for you to enter my realm, she signified. You have been a good servant to me, but I have more work for you to do in the world.

Without speaking, he rejected her service-rejected all the Strange Gods.

She signified an amusement even colder than the Bitter Water, and his mind went dark.

But it was not the darkness of death. He came to himself later-it must have been hours later, because the western sky was gray with approaching dawn. He was coughing up salty vomit as he crawled across the stony margin of the Bitter Water.

In the same instant he saw two things: his sword, Tyrfing, gleaming in the shallow water and the dim gray light. The other was a crowd of shadows, manlike and wolflike, standing farther up the beach. He looked up and saw men and women with wolvish shadows, wolves with human shadows.

His throat was closed like a fist; he couldn't call Tyrfing to him. He leapt toward it, but the werewolves were on him before he reached it. They didn't use swords or teeth, but clubs and fists. They wanted him alive.

He fought as hard as he could, but they were too many and his strength was failing. Before he lost consciousness he felt them put the shackles on his neck and arms.

Morlock had never been a slave. Until today.

Chapter Three: The Vargulleion

Morlock never remembered much of his first day in captivity. He had been half dragged, half carried all through the hours of sunlight. The band of werewolves who had captured him were about twenty in number, counting humans and wolves together. He was not their only prisoner; they had five others: sorry waterlogged human beasts (like Morlock) that they had recovered from the waves. Morlock was the only one in metal shackles. That was good and bad: bad for his chances to escape but perhaps good for killing one or more of his captors, if he could catch them unaware.

In between bouts of unconsciousness and semiconsciousness, whenever he was aware enough, he tried to keep an eye out for Tyrfing. He guessed one of the werewolves had taken it; it still carried a talic charge he could activate by calling its name. If he picked his moment carefully, he could summon the sword-in ideal circumstances, perhaps fight his way free. But it would have been enough for him to kill some of them.

He never caught sight of Tyrfing, though. Perhaps it was heaped with loot from the raided towns, awaiting a division of the spoils. Perhaps they had left it there in the water, fearing its latent magic. As light left the sky, he began to get desperate. He decided to ascend to the visionary plane and try to locate the sword by its implicit talic burden.

It was a risk; if some of the werewolves were seers, they would sense his action. But he decided to take that risk. As the werewolves settled down for a brief rest around sunset and a snack (one of the waterlogged captives-a lank-haired, hollow-cheeked woman who didn't even scream when they bit into her), Morlock slumped down with the other four survivors and allowed his mind to ascend slightly toward the visionary state. The world of matter and energy receded slightly, faded slightly, and the talic threshold of the spirit world stood forth brightly against the dim background.

A wolvish form turned toward him. Instead of fur, it seemed in his talic vision to have long feathers, and at the tip of each feather was an open, observant human eye. All the eyes were looking at Morlock. The werewolf seer issued an ululating call that Morlock heard with his material senses and his inner ear.

The other werewolves dropped their steaming fragments of human meat and rushed over. One of them, in man form, wore a tool belt and carried a brazen wooden box that the seer-wolf avoided with caution. The seer-wolf barked a curt order. The manlike werewolf set the box down near Morlock and opened it. Within it lay glowing glasslike objects.

Morlock dropped his vision and tried to kick the box over. He didn't know what the things in the box were, but he didn't want them near him, any more than the seer-wolf did. The seer-wolf barked another order, and suddenly Morlock was gripped with many hands and teeth, unable to move, the left side of his face pressed against the ground. The one with the tool belt grabbed tongs from his belt and a hammer. He used the tongs to lift a glowing glass tooth from the brazen box. The seer-wolf moved farther away instinctively, and Morlock would have done the same if he'd been able. The one with the tool belt placed the point of the glowing glass tooth against Morlock's right temple and pounded it in with the hammer.

The pain was the most terrible that Morlock had ever felt in his long life, but that wasn't the worst of it. With each blow of the hammer, he could see and hear and feel less of the world. When it was done, all that he could see and hear and feel were the things that were actually there: his Sight was gone.

His mind was empty of everything but grief and hate for a long time.

When Morlock brought himself to look at the void of matter and energy that was now the only world he could know, they had left the plains and were now in low hills, the sea still in sight on their left. It might have been hours or days later; he neither knew nor cared.

The hills about them were riddled with holes like empty eye sockets: dens of werewolves, he supposed. One of the hills had been cut down to bedrock and walled around; the holes in its sheer sides were smaller: windows, not doors. That was where they were taking him.

And only him. When Morlock looked about incuriously, he saw that the other human captives were gone. Either they had been left somewhere else or they had been eaten on the way. He neither knew nor cared.

To the west, there was another far greater walled edifice, and behind the walls were rising ranks of tableland, each rank thick with toothlike protrusions, each surface notched with dark den-holes. That must be the ill-famed city of werewolves.

Beyond it to the north was a mountain, tall enough to overshadow the highest of the tablelands. From the ragged cone at its peak, it was a volcano, though it seemed to be dormant. Mounted on its higher slopes was a gigantic circular device, gleaming in the light of the minor moons. On its upper rim two silvery globes of unequal size moved at separate rates. In its center were starlike symbols forming an all-too-familiar shape: a wolf. On its lower rim was a third globe-lightless, almost impossible to see, but larger than the other two.

A moon-clock, Morlock deduced, with a faint awakening of interest. He wondered what it was for, who had built it, what powered it. He turned his eyes away resolutely.

Ahead of him lay the walled lair: clearly a prison. From snatches of wolfspeech he understood from the captors, he guessed it was called the Vargulleion. There would be no moon-clocks there. He walked through the tomblike gate of the prison with unfeigned indifference in the midst of his captors, wolvish and manlike. First their shadows were swallowed by the darkness within; then their forms were lost and they made their way down the lightless hallway. A dim red light glowed at the end of the hall: an open door, leading to the prison interior. From it Morlock heard iron slamming on stone and many voices of men and wolves.

They took him to a cell on the highest floor of the Vargulleion and locked him in. The lock itself was a simple crossbar. But there was a guard station opposite the cell door, with a manlike and a wolvish guardian posted, watching him with cold interested eyes. He hoped they wouldn't always be as alert as they were now.

The cell had two cots. There was a window, high in the wall, and the light of the minor moons poured through it, painting the filthy surfaces with silver. (The window had a wooden shutter, but it was propped open.) He saw a narrow dark hole in the floor: the commode. Impossible to escape that way, but it might represent some structural weakness in the cell he could exploit.

Morlock lay down on one of the cots and slept. He never knew how long. When he awoke there was sunlight glaring in the window and he found a bowl of food and a bowl of water on the floor by his cot. The food was a mash of peas or beans or something-no meat, thank God Avenger. The water was even more welcome. He wasted none of it on washing, of course.

When he was done he examined the bowls carefully. They seemed to be tin of some type-perhaps brittle enough that he might break off a few fragments.

A man's voice shouted words at him. He looked up to see a guard standing at the bars of his cell. The guard rattled the bars and motioned with his hand: he wanted Morlock to bring the bowls to him.

The guard's hands were resting between the cell bars; Morlock thought about leaping forward to trap the guard. Now, perhaps, was not the timethere was still another guard, in wolf form, standing ready-but he noted the guard's recklessness. That, too, was a weakness that might be exploited.

As he stood and walked deliberately toward the cell door, the guard stood back. He used hand motions to direct Morlock to pass the bowls through the bars and drop them on the ground. Morlock did so and stood back. Presently a man-formed werewolf came by to collect them in a basket.

This werewolf was not a guard, clearly. He had no armor and very little clothing, only a sort of loincloth. His skin, hair, and eyes were all the same mottled pale color, and he was beardless (like the guards, but unlike Morlock himself; it was long since he'd shaved). Morlock guessed he was a prisoner, too: a trustee of some kind. The guards spoke to him, their voices friendly and contemptuous. The trustee said a few things to Morlock, but Morlock made no move to respond. Eventually the trustee went away, his basket of bowls clanking as he wrestled it down the corridor.

Time passed. Morlock spent a good deal of it staring at the walls. They looked new: this prison was not more than a few years old. Had it replaced an older one, or had the werewolves found some new need for a prison? For that matter, it seemed in retrospect that the dens he had walked past on his way here were also new; there was a rawness about their edges, a lack of plant growth on or near the doorways. He wondered about all this but came to no conclusions. It was hard to think with the glass spike in his skull: he was deaf to his own insight, could proceed only on reason alone, that feeble reed.

Morlock began to hope that he would be kept in solitary confinement, but that evening, when the window was still reddish gray with sunset, a dozen guards herded a new prisoner up the hallway. The two on station unlocked the door while the others forced the new prisoner into the cell that had been Morlock's sole domain.

The new prisoner was in human form …approximately. His face was long, but his eyes were set far back, almost by his ears. His brutal jaw came out almost as far as his flat porcine nose; when he bared his teeth, as he often did, they looked like the long gleaming teeth of a carnivore. His legs had a twist in them, like a dog's hind legs. His massive naked body was shaggy with hair, white streaked with red. (His bare skin, where it could be seen, showed the same mottling.) He looked like a werewolf who had changed incompletely back to human-who, perhaps, could not change fully out of beast form.

The new prisoner, as soon as he was released, threw himself at the cell door, but the wary guards had already slammed it shut and locked it fast. The new prisoner pressed his snarling face through the bars and snapped and howled. The guards stood back and passed amused remarks among themselves.

The pale trustee appeared again. This time he had two baskets and a handful of some kind of marker. He passed like a vendor through the crowd of guards (more guards, and more trustees, were filling up the hallway). Morlock couldn't tell exactly what was going one, but he thought the pale mottled trustee was selling bets.

The new prisoner tired of struggling against the unyielding bars. He drew his head back and stood snuffling angrily for a while. Then he stood as straight as his arched spine allowed and turned to look at Morlock, seeming to notice him for the first time.

He howled like a dog, and the crowd outside the cell roared and hooted like the audience at a race. They were an audience, Morlock realized: they had come to see him broken, perhaps killed by the beastlike prisoner.

A square of moonlight was already shining on the cell floor. The new prisoner stepped into it, and his unlovely flesh began to ripple like the surface of boiling water. The prisoner knelt down, raising his arms and screaming in ecstasy or fury as they transformed to wolf legs in the silvery light.

In a moment he had transformed: there was no trace of humanity about him anymore. Even his shadow seemed bestial and hulking as he turned toward Morlock with the light of death in his dark eyes.

Morlock stood, his hands open and empty. He was acutely aware that he had nothing to help him in this fight, not even a seer's intuition. He had no tools, no weapons, no escape, and he faced an enemy he could not kill.

The werewolf leapt from light into shadow. Morlock leapt past him, from shadow into the light.

Chapter Four: Undying

Morlock hit the cell floor rolling and jumped to his feet. The werewolf was skittering to a halt, its claws scrabbling on the stone floor for purchase. It smashed into the cot on the far side of the cell, and Morlock heard the wooden frame crack and splinter under the impact.

The bestial cellmate wheeled around. It started forward, as if to lunge at Morlock again, then paused.

Morlock took stock of his enemy. An ordinary wolf, from nose to tail tip, might be as long as Morlock was tall, or a bit longer. This beast was twice that length, and even broader and taller in proportion. Its red-streaked fur was bristly with winter growth: it would be hard for him to wound the beast without some sort of weapon. Its dead-black eyes were watching him with deadly intelligence, measuring him as he measured it.

It came for him then, diving through the crossed torrents of silvery light from the barred window. He darted toward the cell door, bounced off it, and spun away to the far side of the room, ending by the foot of his splintered bed.

At that point, the beast was just lumbering about in recovery from its leap.

Morlock was surprised. Its leap had been swift, terrifying in its speed. But it could not change direction easily, it seemed. Its muscle mass gave it speed, but not nimbleness.

Nimbleness was a feeble blade to pierce the immortal heart of his enemy. But it was at least one weapon in his armory.

He decided to grab another. He seized two sides of his cot's splintered frame and pulled them apart. He heard the beast's feet scratch the stones as it left the floor in another leap. He swung around, still gripping the cot, and smashed it into the side of the werewolf's head as it leaped toward him.

The werewolf fell in a ball, snarling, and snapped at his legs. Morlock smashed the disintegrating frame down on the werewolf; it yelped, finally fleeing from repeated blows. Morlock shook loose a few fragments and then stood forth triumphantly with a club in each hand.

The werewolf, slinking around the far side of the cell, looked from the uneven clubs in Morlock's hands to the fragments of the cot on the cell floor.

Possibly it was thinking about the disadvantages of wolf form. Morlock tossed one club in the air and flickered his fingers before he caught it again. Nimbleness and clubs: they weren't much, perhaps, against the werewolf's advantages. But maybe the beast didn't know that. He moved slowly, stalkingly, toward the werewolf.

The werewolf backed away slowly, around the edge of the room. Morlock followed it, watching for an opportunity to strike. He was also thinking about the beast, its size, and the energy with which it moved. Whenever it had last eaten, it must be growing hungry. As it grew hungrier, it would grow desperate. But it would also grow weaker. Perhaps his strategy should be a waiting game.

The werewolf was now again by the fragments of the cot. One of them was smoldering slightly; Morlock had been wounded slightly, and the blood, falling on the wood, had set it afire.

The werewolf sniffed the smoldering wood, then looked narrowly at Morlock. It extended its blunt snout and sniffed again. Its teeth bared in a wordless snarl, and it darted forward to attack.

Morlock struck, even more savagely than before, with his makeshift clubs, but this time the beast was not deterred. Still, the blows had some effect: it had been aiming at his throat, but it ended up ripping into his left leg.

Morlock pounded on the narrow snout as steaming fiery blood squirted out from between its teeth. The clubs broke over the beast's head; it whined with pain but did not retreat. Morlock took a sharpish end of one of the broken clubs and stabbed it into the werewolf's right eye. He pushed the wooden stake savagely, with all his strength, hoping to strike into the beast's brain.

It fled, sobbing strangely, with its lips firmly shut, with the wood still dangling from its bleeding eye socket. Then, as it paused by the wooden fragments of Morlock's cot, it spat deliberately on them. The blood it had drawn from Morlock's wound set them aflame. Then it darted across the room and spat the rest of its mouthful of blood on the other cot, which took fire and began to burn-slowly at first, then with increasing strength.

Morlock watched gloomily as his potential armory went up in flames kindled by his own blood. His nimbleness was now very much in doubt, due to the leg wound, and his materials for making new weapons were vanishing as he watched. But the worst thing about all this was the deliberate intelligence the werewolf had shown. He had thought of it as a beast, but it was not merely a beast. In fact, it seemed more like a person now than it had when still in man form.

He sat with his back against the cell wall and watched his enemy. It didn't seem disposed to attack, so Morlock tore strips from his shirt to bandage his leg wound. It was a terrible wound, and if it festered it might kill him …but only if he lived through this night.

The werewolf itself was hardly in better shape. It shook its head frantically and clawed at its eye, finally dislodging the bloody chunk of sharp wood. Then it crept forward to the middle of the room, toward the wedge of moonlight falling on the cell floor. It kept its one eye warily on Morlock as it moved, but it seemed intent on entering the moonlight.

Morlock didn't understand this, but he did understand that anything the werewolf wanted was bad for him. He stood and brandished his remaining club. He closed one eye deliberately and opened it: a warning to the beast that it could lose its other eye.

The werewolf snarled and continued to inch forward.

Morlock thought the beast had understood his threat and was disregarding it. If so, it was even more important that the werewolf not rest in the moonlight. It had transformed there: did moonlight hasten the beast's power to recuperate and heal? It seemed likely.

Morlock dropped his club and jumped for the window. His left hand caught the bars' iron sill, and with his right he slammed over the wooden shutter. There was a latch on the shutter and he set it. The only light in the cell now came from the smoldering flames set by Morlock's blood. The werewolf howled in fury and disappointment.

Morlock dropped back down to the cell floor, and a wave of pain darkened his vision as the fall jarred his wounded leg. Sound and smell warned him before sight that the werewolf was attacking again. He lashed out desperately with his fists, by luck battering the blunt snout aside before its teeth fixed on his throat.

Its jaws clamped down on his right upper arm. Morlock saw that the wounded eye was already healing: the orb was whole again, if sightlessly white. The healthy eye met his, and the werewolf seemed to grin at him around the blood bubbling out of Morlock's wound. Morlock clutched at the werewolf's eye with his left hand, digging deep into the socket with two fingers. The werewolf gave a muffled shriek, a strangely human sound from the lupine mouth, and fled, one eyeball dangling by a thick gleaming nerve from the empty socket.

Morlock stood with his back to the wall beneath the window and wearily tore more strips from his shirt for bandages. He did so with a sense of futility. In every encounter where the werewolf hurt him, it came closer to killing him. He could hurt it, but he could never kill it. The absence of moonlight might slow its healing, but would not stop it. And now it didn't even need to attack; it could sit and wait for him to pass out from blood loss or weariness.

If only he could kill it. But he had no silver and no wolfbane. How else could you kill a werewolf.?

The wounded beast sidled through the red smoky shadows of the cell. It issued a harsh, rasping sound like a cough.

Morlock thoughtfully twisted the bandage in his hands. He let the blood fall unregarded to the stone floor. A thought was forming in his mind.

Everything that lived, everything that had physical life, had to breathe. That was why the werewolf was coughing from the smoke.

Keeping one eye on the lurking beast, Morlock stooped down and pulled the leather laces from his shoes. When he had made them he had leeched the phlogiston from them so that they wouldn't burn; he tested their strength now with his fingers, and he liked what he felt. He patiently spliced the laces together. It took a little time to do properly and his time was running out, but there was no point in trying this without doing it right. When the laces were one, he grabbed a stray length of nonburning wood from the floor and, being careful not to drip blood on it, broke it in half. He knotted one end of each lace to a piece of wood, and presently he had a serviceable garrote.

Now to make a chance to use it. The beast was wounded in both eyes, but it could still smell and hear; he would have to distract it somehow so that he could attack it from behind.

Morlock carefully placed the garrote on the floor far away from any fires. Then he loitered casually toward one of the burning cots-it was the other one, the one Morlock had not broken up. By now the fire had spread over the length of the thing and it was burning merrily.

The werewolf was on the far side of the cell, distractedly and somewhat dismayedly swinging its loose eyeball on its nerve.

Morlock picked up the burning cot and threw it at the wall above the werewolf. As soon as the cot struck the wall, he dodged across the cell to seize his garrote and then jumped upon the werewolf's back as it emerged snarling from the curtain of hot gleeds and bloody smoke. He wrapped the cord around the half-blind beast's neck and began to twist.

Of course, it fought. But there was very little it could do: Morlock was out of reach of its teeth and claws. It strove to tear at the strangling cords with the claws of its back feet. Morlock waited until both back legs were fully extended, then stomped on the joints where the long bones of the leg joined together-the knees, for a man or a woman. He felt a certain savage satisfaction in hearing the knee joints crunch under his unlaced shoes.

The werewolf yelped, or tried to: Morlock felt the surge in its chest and neck. But its throat was closed; not a sound emerged. Morlock twisted the handles of the garrote again and again, cutting deeply into the beast's flesh. Presently it stopped moving.

He held on for a long time after that, counting the moments by his own pulses long after the werewolf's heart stopped. When he had counted a thousand heartbeats since the beast's last movement he relaxed the hold of the strangling cord slightly. The werewolf remained motionless. He relaxed it a little more.

The wolvish chest expanded slightly. There was a slight tremor in its veins: a returning heartbeat.

Morlock snarled and twisted the cord tight again, strangling off the werewolf's returning life.

Frustration threatened to swamp his reason. He could keep the beast from living, but he could not actually kill it. He could hope that the return of the sun would change the beast back into the bestial man it had been …but he couldn't be sure even of that: some werewolves could obviously maintain the beast form through the day.

He took the frustration out by twisting the cord even tighter. It dug even more deeply into the wolvish neck. That was what gave him the idea.

Maintaining his grip on the unliving but not-yet-dead beast, he dragged the body nearer some fragments of burning wood. Some of the wood was sharp and ragged. He took a chunk of that and started hacking away at the great muscles of the wolvish neck. Blood started to flow, a great deal of cold blood, black in the fiery light. But that was just as well: it extinguished the flames in the splintering wood and made it last longer. When one chunk became useless, he grabbed another. He twisted the unliving head back and forth periodically; it was growing looser and looser on the spine, as Morlock had hoped it would.

Eventually his crude wooden weapons pierced the werewolf's airway. Air began to whistle through the slashed openings-slow at first, then faster and faster. The werewolf's dangling eyeball dilated with awareness, and the claws began to scrabble on the stone floor.

Morlock had destroyed so much of the werewolf's neck that the strangling cord was no longer an effective means of restraint. Morlock let it go and clamped the werewolf's jaws shut with his hands. Planting his feet on the werewolf's front legs, he began to twist the werewolf's head on the fleshless neck. The beast struggled to open its jaws, to savage Morlock with its back claws, but soon its legs stopped moving: he had severed the corridor for nerve impulses to reach the body. The head came loose from the spine on the next twist.

The beast's body fell lifeless to the ground …but, horribly, the beast itself was not dead. Its dangling eye still glared at him with baleful intelligence, and the jaws strove feebly to open. He muzzled them shut with the strangling cord as a temporary solution.

He sat with his back against a wall and tried to think what he might do next. He wondered dimly if the head could find a way to reunite with the dead body and live again, or perhaps grow a whole new body from its neck. He didn't know. He didn't know what a werewolf could do.

The head could live without the body, but not the body without the head, that was clear. It made his next move clear, too.

Morlock jumped up and unlatched the shutter on the window, letting blue bars of moonlight fall into the red fuming cell again. He grabbed the wolf head by a loose end of cord and then jumped up to grab the iron sill of the window with his free hand. He tossed the wolf head up onto the sill and tried to push it through the bars. But the openings were too narrow for the wolvish skull to pass through. It made odd sounds as it lay there in the moonlight; it began to rock back and forth as if gaining new strength.

He grabbed the bars with both hands and slowly lifted himself up to the window, aided slightly by his feet scrabbling on the coarse stone wall of the cell. He kicked the wolf head with one foot, wedging its narrow maw between the iron bars. He kept on kicking it, first with one foot, then with another, finally with both. It was agony to his wounded leg and arm, but he kept at it until the bones of the skull were broken and the sacklike wolf head squished through the bars and fell, grunting with terror or some other emotion, out of sight into the moonlit world beyond.

Morlock extended his arms as much as possible and slid down the wall, finally dangling from his unwounded arm, to reduce the shock when he fell. It worked, to the extent that he didn't pass out from pain when he hit the cell floor.

He turned and surveyed the smoking, firelit cell. The werewolf body lay motionless, apparently dead (even if its head was still alive somewhere). He was sick with horror at what he had done, at what he had had to do. But he supposed he could call this a victory.

Looking beyond the cell bars, he saw with shock that the corridor was still full of watchers. He had forgotten about them. They stood there, man and wolf, staring at him with eyes full of wonder and horror, silent and motionless as stones. The pale trustee had dropped his baskets and was watching him through outspread fingers, like a child who is at once afraid to look at something and afraid to not look at it.

Morlock read their shock, and slowly (his mind was going dark) he understood it. This had not been about killing him. They could have done that at any time after his capture. They could have put archers at the cell door and filled him full of arrows. They could still do that. But they had planned to break him, send in the bestial man-wolf and break him and then, perhaps, kill him. Or perhaps make him into a new trustee-a safe fellow to run errands around the prison.

Lit within by sudden fury, Morlock staggered forward and, straining greatly but trying not to show it, seized the dead body of the beast from the cell floor. He threw it with all of his fading strength at the bars of the cell. He would have screamed at them, too, but he didn't have the breath for it.

They jumped back, tripping over each other to retreat. He stared at them for a moment longer, then turned away and limped over to a corner of the cell with relatively few fires. He lay down with his face against the wall, his back toward the cell door. It was his only way to show his contempt, since he had no words to speak that they could understand and no breath to speak them with.

The corridor was still silent when darkness descended on him and he escaped from the bloodstained, red-smoked, blue-lit cell for a time.

Chapter Five: Visitors

Pain and cold woke Morlock from a sleep more dreamless than death. He turned his head and saw that the open window was gray with predawn light. The smoke in the room had cleared away, the fires extinguished.

Morlock fought his way to a sitting position, his back against the bitterly cold damp wall. The werewolf body and the burning fragments were gone from the cell. Dark bloodstains still spread across the stones of the floor, especially by the barred door.

There was a bowl of food and a bowl of water there, and something else lay beside them on the stones.

Beyond the bars the guards stood watching him: two in wolf form, two in man form. They didn't speak to each other or to him.

He got to his feet and lumbered over to the food and water.

The thing beside them on the cell floor was a long tooth-a wolf's tooth possibly. A narrow hole had been bored in it, and it was strung on a piece of cord.

He looked up at the guards. Each of them had a cord of teeth around his neck or (in one of the men's case) wrapped around his forearm. It was some badge of acceptance or honor-or status. The savage man-wolf he had fought last night had worn no such symbol. But somehow he had earned this by defeating it.

He didn't like the idea of a cord around his neck, particularly if he got into another fight. He wrapped the cord around his wrist and turned his attention to breakfast.

The bowl of food was mush again, this time garnished with a human ear and two fingers, gray and bloodless as the predawn light. He set them aside and ate the mush: he could not afford to be squeamish. The water did not entirely wash away the taste. He took the ear and put it up on the sill of the open window and tossed the two fingers in a corner.

He went and sat in the opposite corner and stayed there, eyeing each one of his guards in turn. The faces of the men were clean shaven; their light armor and weapons well crafted and well kept. Yet they were somehow wolflike, with long narrow faces and somewhat crooked legs. The wolves, in turn, were strangely human, with cool observant eyes and deliberate gestures.

Someone had left this tooth for him, and they had not objected. He didn't understand, and he felt ill equipped to try to understand it. With the glass spike in his head, he was deaf to everything except what he heard with his ears. He was blind to everything except what he could see with his eyes. He grieved for his lost Sight.

Presently the trustee came along the hallway, with two archers following him, and exchanged a few words with the guards. The archers each hocked an arrow and pointed it through the bars at Morlock. A guard unbarred the cell door as the others stood ready to strike if Morlock rushed the door. There was obviously no point in doing this, so Morlock merely watched and waited.

The trustee entered the cell, and the door slammed shut behind him. The trustee wheeled and whined something at the guards through the bars; one of the wolves snarled a response. Reluctantly, the trustee turned back toward Morlock.

The trustee held something out in his pale mottled hands and made noises that were clearly words. The object in his hands was an open jar, and in it a brownish red goo, the color of cold blood. It smelt of bitter herbs: some kind of medicine, Morlock guessed; they would hardly take the trouble to poison him when they could kill him in so many more direct ways. Of course, what was a healing salve for a werewolf might still be poisonous for him, but Morlock was inclined to take the risk. He slowly extended one arm and opened his hand. The trustee darted forward to put the jar in his hand and then skittered away.

The guards in the corridor snickered. Morlock ignored them and the trustee; sitting down on the cell floor, he unbound his wounds (breaking their tenuous scabs, unfortunately) and smeared the salve densely over the ragged tears in his flesh.

The effect was not immediate, but it was quick enough to make him suspect there was magic involved in the salve. Plus, it seemed to have been leeched of phlogiston: it did not bubble or flame on contact with his blood.

A maker of some considerable attainments had crafted this salve, Morlock reflected, and had likely done it for Morlock personally (unless they had more prisoners with fiery Ambrosial blood). That was worth remembering.

Morlock rebound the stiff bandages over the no-longer-bleeding wounds and held the jar of salve out toward the trustee, still cowering at the far side of the cell. The trustee made no move toward Morlock; all his limbs were quivering and his pale eyes were twitching about as if looking for escape. One of the guards prodded the trustee with the blunt end of a pike, but he still made no move toward Morlock.

Finally Morlock tossed the jar toward the trustee. The pale mottled limbs spasmed with terror, and the hands just barely managed to catch the jar. The pale werewolf shrieked at the guards and they laughed. The archers took aim at Morlock again, and the other guards stood ready as one guard went to unbar the door again and let the panicky trustee out.

Morlock covertly watched for any lapse in vigilance. Unfortunately, he saw none. Unlike the trustee, they did not fear him. But they would never trust him. That was good for them, bad for Morlock.

The day outside grew brighter; the stones of the cell stubbornly began to yield up their nighttime chill and grow a little warmer. Morlock didn't move much. He kept an eye on the open window and waited.

Eventually the light in the window was darkened by the presence of a crow, drawn by the attractive smell of decaying flesh. She squawked with disgust when she found only a gristly old ear.

Morlock croaked a greeting.

The crow reacted with surprise and alarm. She wondered if he was one of those crow-eating people she had heard so much of recently.

Morlock said he wasn't hungry and he hoped the crow was enjoying the ear.

The crow wondered if that was supposed to be some kind of joke. She pointed out, as a general comment, that ears hardly have enough meat to fill a chick's belly, and the flavor was never very good, no matter how well rotted the flesh.

Morlock expressed ignorance. He rarely ate human meat, never by preference.

The crow saw his point. Human meat was rarely worth the trouble. Just as soon as it was getting ripe enough to eat, someone was likely to come along and bury it. The practice seemed mean-spirited to the crow, and she had some harsh words to say about that.

Morlock heard her out, and then said he was sorry about the ear and wondered if the crow would be interested in a couple of fingers.

The crow observed that Morlock still seemed to be using his, and she laughed a while at her witticism.

Morlock said that the fingers were lying around the cell somewhere; they had come with his breakfast and he didn't want them. The crow could have them.

The crow wondered if he thought she had been hatched yesterday. On the contrary, she was forty-two thousand years old and a personal friend of Morlock Ambrosius, if he knew who that was. She had more sense than to be trapped in a cell with a ravenous crow-eating werewolf who was just waiting for a chance to eat some more crow, but not this crow, not this clever crow, no. He could forget that. Besides, she could smell the fingers and she didn't think they were ripe yet.

Morlock said that he thought the fingers might have been cooked, like the ear.

The crow squawked in outrage. Had the great feathered gods laid the clutch of eggs that hatched into the universes just so that monkeys with their freakishly long and horribly soft and flexible claws could rip meat apart and stink it up with fire?

Morlock said that he had no opinion on the theological issue, but he thought the fingers were soft enough to eat and that, since the crow was a personal friend of Morlock Ambrosius, he was willing to put the fingers up on the cell so that the crow could get at them safely.

The crow bluntly wondered what the catch was.

Morlock said that he had no use for the meat, but he could do something with the finger bones. He wondered if the crow would leave them behind on the sill.

The crow thought for a moment, and grudgingly agreed.

Morlock gathered up the fingers and reached up to put them on the iron sill. Then he stood well away, to make it clear to the crow he intended no harm.

The crow kept an eye carefully on him. When satisfied he was safely distant, she took up one of the fingers in her claws, then the other, as if judging which was ripest.

An arrow struck her in the chest and she fell from sight with no sound other than a brief scrape of her claws on stone. The fingers fell with her off the far side of the sill.

Morlock turned toward the guards. The guard with the bow nocked another arrow and held it ready, watching him. The others watched him, too.

He realized they probably understood crow speech. No doubt wolves would find it handy. He could speak to them, then: insult them, threaten them, bribe them, plead with them, acknowledge them as people.

He chose not to. He took the tooth off his wrist and threw it at them: he was not one of them; he would never be one of them; he rejected them. He couldn't tell if they understood. They said or did nothing. But they watched him.

He sat down in the corner of the room and waited.

The day passed noon and headed toward evening. The guards were changed several times during the day, but each set proved as vigilant as the last. They spoke to each other very little and to Morlock never.

In the late afternoon there was a scuffle in the corridor and the tramp of booted feet. Armed guards dragged into Morlock's sight another prisoner: in man form, but clearly a werewolf, from his wedgelike face and crooked legs. His hair was brownish red, and he hadn't shaved for a few days, but he didn't have the full beard of a long-term prisoner.

He took one look at Morlock, at the bloodstained floor, at the laughing faces of the guards, and he began to shriek. Morlock understood no word, but the whole intent. The prisoner was begging not to be put in the cage with that monster. He was sorry; he was very, very sorry; he would never do it again; just please would they put him somewhere else, anywhere else.

There was a long conversation between the prisoner and one of the guards in wolf form. The werewolf seemed to be in charge; he had a great tore of honor-teeth that hung over his chest. Eventually they took the prisoner away without even opening the cell door.

The guards all expressed amusement, and some counters changed hands; apparently they had been betting on how long it would take the prisoner to break.

When the cell began to cool off, Morlock jumped up and slammed the shutter across the window. Then he wrapped himself into as tight a knot as he could in a corner and waited for sleep to come.

He was not one of them. He would not be one of them. But they could still use him, the way they had used the bestial wolfman they had unleashed on Morlock. He was their new beast, their new terror to break prisoners with. There was nothing he could do about that and no way he could think to use it to his advantage.

The darkness, when it came to cover his awareness, was no darker than his mood.

Chapter Six: Dragonkiller

The trustee returned with the healing salve again the next morning. The guards were as vigilant as ever, but the pale trustee seemed less terrified. He entered the cell without being forced and even approached Morlock within arm's reach to hand him the jar of salve.

The trustee seemed disposed to talk, but Morlock took the jar and turned away. He was used to saying nothing for many days at a time; he had often travelled alone in his long life. Further, his last conversation had been with the crow, and that hadn't ended well for the crow. Finally, if the jailors found the pale werewolf trustworthy, then Morlock had to assume the contrary.

His wounds were nearly healed. He examined the jar for some sort of maker's mark: a magical salve would almost certainly require its own unique vessel, and he knew that most adepts were as vain as spoiled children. But there was nothing that Morlock could see-with his eyes, anyway. Again, he felt the loss of his Sight like the loss of a limb.

He looked up to see the trustee's pale eyes on him. He handed back the jar and, as he did so, the pale werewolf said something to him. It was the first time he had heard the pale trustee speak without a background of banter or barking from the other jailors, and Morlock found the werewolf's voice to be oddly resonant and high-pitched-not a male voice or a female voice exactly. Morlock met the other's eye and shook his head to indicate he hadn't understood.

The werewolf spoke again, speaking more slowly. Morlock still understood only one word, or thought he did. It was rokhlan. In the shared language of dragons and dwarves, the language Morlock had grown up speaking, rokhlan meant "dragonkiller"-a title of honor among dwarves that Morlock had earned several times. Did the trustee know him? Did someone here know him? Had he misheard?

He shrugged and turned away. He still didn't trust the trustee. The pale werewolf waited for a few moments, apparently expecting Morlock to engage him again. Morlock began to pace the width of his cell, from stone wall to stone wall, ignoring the other. Eventually, the trustee left. Morlock continued his pacing.

After a month, the wounds were completely healed; even the scars had vanished. Over the month, which must have been the month of Jaric, since the nights were often moonless, the little drama of a prisoner being dragged up to Morlock's cell was several times replayed. Never was it necessary for the jailors to actually throw the prisoners into the cell; they were weeping and babbling as soon as they saw the fearsome beast that awaited them: Morlock. This did not please him, but there was nothing he could do about it. Several times he found the tooth on a cord next to his food and water; every time he tossed it contemptuously into the corridor, and eventually it stopped reappearing.

When he wasn't being used as a threat to terrify werewolves, he paced his cell. As he walked, through the long days when there was nothing else to do, he eyed the confines of his cell, hoping to find some signs of weakness he could exploit. Sadly, there seemed to be none. The building was newish; Morlock guessed it was less than ten years old. The mortar was much stained from moss and filth, but time had not worked its crumbling magic on it. The stones were well shaped and uniform; they seemed to have no flaws he could exploit. His greatest hope was in the ceiling or the floor; those stones could not be as massive as the load-bearing ones in the walls, even if the building was timbered with maijarra wood.

Of course, to exploit any weakness he would need time, tools, and freedom from observation. Time was every prisoner's constant friend and enemy. Tools he could make or acquire somehow. But every time he turned in his pacing he met the eyes of his jailors, staring at him, watching and waiting. As long as they kept that up, he could not escape.

He got to know the walls of the cell quite well, even the individual stones. Some of them displayed strips of texture in the upper right corner; others did not. Some had been scratched at by prisoners; others had not. Most of the prisoners' scratchings he couldn't read, but many of them were obviously tallies of days, calls, months, years. Morlock speculated on what the other symbols meant. And he walked.

One day, he realized that the strips of texture on the corners of some stones were also writing, graven deep into the stone and covered later by moss and mold and other matter. It was long before he could bring himself to stop pacing and scrape away at the filth to see if he could read the words. For one thing, it would let his captors know he was interested in the stones of the wall. For another, it broke the tedious pattern of his pacing, and his idea was to be as boring as possible for his guards so that they would lose interest in watching him. But in the end his curiosity overcame him. He halted by one of the walls and rubbed away at one of the corners.

He found, to his surprise, that he could read it. Moreover, he guessed few others in the world could. It was a piece of Latin, one of his mother's languages.

EGO • IACOMES • FILIVS • SAXIPONDERIS • HAS • CARCERES • FECI • ME • PAENITET • CAPTE

It took him some time to work it out. Latin was one of the languages that his long-dead harven father had made him learn, out of respect for his ruthen parents, but he rarely had use for it. Eventually he decided that this inscription said something like, 1, lacomes, Stoneweight's son, made this prison. Sorry about that, prisoner."

Stoneweight. What kind of name was that? Morlock wondered. And why had the maker signed his repellent work in Latin? It was mysterious, and he thought he might have some words for this lacomes character if he ever met him. Still, the inscription lifted his mood strangely. This prison had been made. What one maker makes, another can unmake. So Morlock believed, and he spent the rest of the day thinking about it: of solvents to break down mortar, of methods to stun or drug or distract guards, of opportunities that time and patience might bring him.

What time brought him that day was another prisoner in late afternoon. This one-another werewolf in man form-was tall and much scarred; his hair and beard were iron gray, but it didn't appear to be the gray of age. His appearance was nearly as threatening as the subhuman they had sent in to face Morlock on his first night here. But there was an intelligence in this werewolf's eyes that worried Morlock. He might be a more dangerous antagonist, and nightfall was imminent.

Many guards came along with the new prisoner into the narrow corridor. He wore no clothes, but he walked like a captive king among an honor guard of spears. He ignored them all and looked straight at Morlock through the bars of the cell. Morlock leaned his left shoulder against a cell wall and looked back indifferently.

The cell door was unbarred and swung open. The new prisoner stepped in, and the door crashed shut behind him.

The new guards remained in the corridor outside. The wolves and men bantered and bartered; the pale trustee again appeared and seemed to be taking bets (although he looked a little glum to Morlock). It was all very familiar.

The new prisoner went to a corner of the cell and sat down. His action seemed deliberately …not hostile. It could be he was only waiting for nightfall.

Morlock's best chance was to kill him before he turned into a wolf. As a man, he was as mortal as Morlock, and perhaps less used to defending his life. Morlock struggled with the idea of attacking first. It seemed reasonable, the only reasonable alternative. But he remembered the second prisoner who had been brought in, the one who panicked at the sight of Morlock, who broke down at the prospect of being locked in a cell with him. They used him as their beast to train rebellious prisoners. And he would not be used that way. He was caged; he was not a beast. He'd let this man live so that the man Morlock was could go on living.

They waited. The cell grew dark. They waited still. The chatter in the corridor outside grew impatient: some bets had already been lost. Blue squares of moonlight began to glow on the floor of the cell as the sun's light finally faded away. It was now early in the month of Brenting, by Morlock's calculation, and both the minor moons would be aloft.

The new prisoner rose to his feet. He stepped into the larger square of moonlight and raised his hands toward the window.

The silver-blue moonlight struck the prisoner like a hammer strikes redhot metal: bending him, reshaping him, twisting him. His back curved; his ears and jaws stretched; his teeth flickered like white flames in his mouth; he fell on his hands, and by the time they struck stone they were paws. A dense forest of coarse, dark fur sprouted on his crooked limbs and arched body.

His voice was unheard throughout. Morlock remembered how the other one had screamed in transformation, and he wondered if this werewolf was mute. But he suspected not. The werewolf's luminous blue eyes never lost their cool intelligence. He could master the pain or terror that accompanied his transformation and not be mastered by it. That was bad for Morlock, of course. But Morlock, too, was the master of his pain and fear. He waited for the werewolf's attack.

The werewolf turned toward Morlock and fixed his frosty blue gaze on him. Morlock still waited for the werewolf's attack. He did not move, but kept his hands open. If the beast jumped, he would try to meet it in midair and break its neck.

There were mutters of anticipation from the guards, human and lupine, in the corridor.

The werewolf stepped out of the square of moonlight: a deliberate step backward, away from Morlock. He stood there in the shadows, waiting.

A storm of shouts and barking arose in the corridor outside.

Morlock wondered if this meant what he thought it meant. The gesture the werewolf had made was oddly familiar. He himself couldn't take a step backward, since he was against the wall, but he spread the fingers of his hands and waited.

The werewolf took another step back, a blue-eyed gray shadow among other shadows. He deliberately dropped his gaze.

Then Morlock remembered when he had seen this gesture before. In the Giving Field of the Khroic horde, Valona's, where he had killed a dragon and saved a werewolf's life.

The werewolf uttered a few wordlike barks. It paused, and repeated them.

One of the words sounded like rokhlan. Though, as the werewolf repeated it for the second time, Morlock decided it was really more like rokhlenu. But he thought it was the same word, borrowed into the werewolf speech.

The werewolf repeated his statement a third time.

Morlock thought the werewolf was saying that he himself was the dragonkiller. Then Morlock remembered that the werewolf who had been taken with him and the others by Valona's horde was a dragonkiller. Anyway, he had claimed it, and Math Valone had believed it.

Morlock didn't think he could say what he wanted to say in wolfspeech-and, now that he thought of it, he had never heard werewolves in human form speak like wolves. It might be insulting or unclear; that was the last thing Morlock wanted at the moment.

He made a corvine croak of recognition (I know you) and added the werewolf's own word: rokhlenu.

The werewolf nodded, satisfied, and turned away. He trotted over to a corner of the cell and curled up to sleep.

The jailors in the corridor were furious. They threw bits of trash and shouted obvious insults, and they barked like chained dogs yearning at the end of a leash, and they grumbled, more or less all at once. They wanted to see a fight, at least see someone humiliated. There would be none of that tonight.

Morlock crossed his arms and watched them, allowing a crooked smile to show on his face. As the jailors in the hallway noticed it they began to grow quiet. He met the eye of anyone who looked at him and smiled. He was trying to tell them something: tonight they were the entertainment and he was the audience, and he had been richly amused.

They began to slink away. The message had been received, or they were tired of complaining. Last to go (apart from the guards who were left on station) was the pale trustee. He met Morlock's eye, gave a brief answering smile, and fled.

Chapter Seven: Words

Every day, for many days that followed, the jailors tried to provoke a fight between Morlock and the werewolf Rokhlenu. The jailors would give them one dish of food and one dish of water and wait for them to fight over it. It maddened them to see the prisoners divide up the food and share the water, passing the dish back and forth. The jailors gave the prisoners scant water and no food for ten days, then again tried offering the prisoners a single dish of food. Their fury at seeing the prisoners again share their food was extremely amusing to Rokhlenu and Morlock.

The guards with bows started using one or the other of the prisoners for target practice. When they did this they would shout or bark words at him. Morlock guessed these were encouragements to attack the other prisoner. He ignored the arrows, as did Rokhlenu. What the werewolf thought about it Morlock didn't know-their conversations hadn't gotten to the point of discussing abstractions. But from Morlock's point of view, the issue was clear. Either the guards would kill him, or they would not. If they would not, their threats were empty. If they did kill him, it was one way to escape the prison. He was willing to buy their failure with his own death.

The guards began to enter the cell in force. They beat Rokhlenu until the prisoner was crippled with pain and injuries. Then they left him to be killed in his weakness by Morlock. Morlock left him alone, letting him be healed by time and moonlight, so the next time the guards entered they crippled Morlock and left him for Rokhlenu. Rokhlenu left Morlock alone to heal, also (although this took longer).

The guards tried this gambit many times. The beatings were often overseen by the same senior guard-sometimes in wolf form, sometimes in human form, but always addressed as Wurnafenglu by the other guards, and recognizable from his great torc of honor-teeth. He would speak at length, cajolingly or insultingly, to the prisoners. Rokhlenu ignored it; Morlock didn't understand it.

Wurnafenglu finally resorted to riskier gambits, like having the jailors introduce weapons to the cell. One day they left a single knife with the food and water. Morlock and Rokhlenu tossed it back and forth to each other across the cell until the disgusted guards sent the pale trembling trustee in to recover it.

Their last attempt was directed specifically at Morlock. One night, after Rokhlenu had undergone his transition to wolfhood, a dozen archers took their places outside the cell and aimed nocked arrows at Morlock. Then the pale trustee appeared, holding a rough metal spike in a pair of long wooden tongs. He tossed the spike into the cell and backed away, looking apologetically at the prisoners.

Rokhlenu backed instinctively away from the spike. Morlock approached it. The archers shifted their aim to follow him.

The spike was made of silver. Morlock was intrigued. How had they acquired it? Why had they acquired it? What did they expect him to do?

He picked up the spike and looked at the guards outside the cell. No word or sign was given, but the implication seemed clear: kill him or we'll kill you.

Morlock hefted the spike in his hand. It was a powerful weapon in this stretch of the world, but it was no good to him in this cell. He tossed it through the open window into the moonslit world outside. Then he turned to face the archers.

Wurnafenglu, standing in wolf form in the hallway, gave a curt bark. The archers stood down and marched away. Only the usual four guards were left on station. Wurnafenglu looked wearily at Morlock and then looked away.

It was the jailors' last attempt to get Morlock and Rokhlenu to fight.

In the meantime, Morlock had been learning the werewolves' languages from Rokhlenu. He had been right that the werewolves were repelled by humans making wolf sounds (and the reverse): each form had its own language. In wolf form ("the night shape" Rokhlenu called it) they used Moonspeech, and in human form ("the day shape") they used Sunspeech.

At first, Morlock learned Moonspeech faster: he already knew a few words, and there were apparently not many to know. But Moonspeech was more difficult than Sunspeech in some ways. With fewer words and less grammar to communicate the same universe of meanings, much of the sense depended on shifting contexts and metaphorical leaps that Morlock found hard to follow. If he'd still had his Sight it might have been easier.

Sunspeech, in contrast, had a multitude of vocabularies and inflections with very precise distinctions. There was a difference between "volcanic rock unworked by a maker and unweathered by the elements" (wilk), "volcanic rock worked but not weathered" (wlik), "volcanic rock weathered but not worked" (welk), "volcanic rock worked and weathered" (welik), and it was a solecism to use one when you meant the other, or a vaguer word like the undifferentiated "rock" (lafun) when you really meant something more specific. Morlock committed this solecism so often that Rokhlenu seemed to grow used to it. Anyway, he stopped laughing at it.

Rokhlenu was a patient teacher, Morlock was a patient student, and they had as much time as they needed: they worked on languages whenever they were awake and the jailors weren't trying to provoke a fight between them.

Not infrequently the pale trustee would come and speak with them through the bars-mostly with Rokhlenu at first, but more and more with Morlock as he could speak and comprehend Sunspeech better. The trustee's name, it turned out, was Hrutnefdhu ("Skin-maker").

Morlock had thought long about the social differences he could see among the werewolves. All the guards, for instance, were clean shaven. All of the prisoners wore beards, except for Hrutnefdhu. Of the prisoners he had seen, all were naked, except for Hrutnefdhu …and himself.

After learning enough words, he finally managed to put a question to Rokhlenu one day: "Why are all the prisoners naked? Or are they?"

Rokhlenu's answer hinged on many words that Morlock didn't know, and he missed almost all of it. He got a sense that there was a status system involved, and that the less clothes you had the lower your status.

"Then," Morlock asked, "a loincloth like Hrutnefdhu's would be better than no clothes at all?"

"Yes," Rokhlenu agreed, with unusual curtness.

Morlock nodded. He took off what remained of his shirt and began to tear it into wide strips, knotting them together as he went. Rokhlenu said something to him that he didn't understand. He ignored it and finished the job. Then he held the cloth out to Rokhlenu. "Here. It's not much."

Rokhlenu struck the edge of one hand into the palm of another, a gesture of refusal. "No! I can change into a wolf at night. It may be a warm winter, but it's still winter. You need it more than I do."

Morlock continued to hold the cloth out.

Rokhlenu struck the edge of one hand into the palm of another and said again, "No. I thank you. No."

Morlock had to state an abstraction, and his language skills weren't ready for it. He said slowly, "There is you and me. There is them. They don't want this. So: here. Take it."

Rokhlenu looked at Morlock. He looked at the guards outside, who were watching keenly. He took the makeshift loincloth. "Thanks," he said, and wrapped it around himself with the ease of long practice.

Morlock then asked another question that had long been on his mind, "Why doesn't Hrutnefdhu have hair on his face?"

"He does," Rokhlenu replied, startled.

Some of the guards laughed. Morlock mulled it over, and then mimed shaving. That was what he was really concerned about. If there was some way for a prisoner to get the privilege of shaving, then he might acquire a razor and keep it. A straight edge of steel could be useful in so many ways.

The guards laughed again. Rokhlenu seemed surprised and a little embarrassed when he understood Morlock's question. He laboriously explained that Morlock's words implied that Hrutnefdhu had no fur on his face in the night shape, which was apparently an embarrassing blemish for werewolves and which Rokhlenu knew was not the case with Hrutnefdhu. He taught Morlock the vocabulary of shaving (khlut: razor, srend: oil, khlunv: shave) and then said, "But Hrutnefdhu doesn't shave. Someone shaved him good, long years ago."

The guards laughed again, even more uproariously.

There was some joke here that Morlock did not understand. He opened his hands and looked at Rokhlenu expectantly, hoping an explanation was coming.

Rokhlenu turned his head to one side: he understood that Morlock didn't understand. He mimed an action with his hands: a razor lopping something off. He said, "Hrutnefdhu is plepnup." He mimed again and repeated, "Plepnup." Morlock guessed that plepnup meant castrated. He turned his head to one side.

When Hrutnefdhu next appeared, Morlock's guess was confirmed. The guards had been much amused by his conversation with Rokhlenu, and they made Hrutnefdhu take his loincloth off and show his mutilated genitals to Morlock. The pale werewolf was deeply humiliated; his mottled face grew red with shame and powerless rage. Not just his testicles had been removed; his penis too had been savagely mutilated. He glared at Morlock as he stood naked at the barred cell door.

Morlock, for his part, was furious at the guards for humiliating the weak and timid trustee. He was sorry that something he'd said was the cause. He would have been hard pressed to explain that in one of his native languages, though. As the jailors finally allowed Hrutnefdhu to turn away, Morlock blurted, "There is them. There is you and me."

Rokhlenu looked at Morlock in surprise. He turned to Hrutnefdhu and said, "He's right. There is them. There is you and him and me."

"Plepnupov," hissed Hrutnefdhu. "Eh? You, me, him? All plepnupov. Eh?"

"If they had their way," said Rokhlenu. "So the Stone Tree can have them."

Hrutnefdhu turned and ran naked down the echoing hallway.

"That was bad," Rokhlenu said, turning away from the laughing guards, taking Morlock by the arm as he did so. "It was also good. You have a strange shame, Morlock."

"Oh?"

"Yes. To have no bite does not shame you. To get bite from the jailors, that shames you. To have no shirt does not shame you. To have a shirt while your friend is naked, that shames you. To stand with a plepnup and say youand-me does not shame you. To let aplepnup stand ashamed before you, that shames you."

"I suppose so."

"Yurr. You don't say much, do you? Are you more talkative when you know more words?"

"Not really."

"Now there is you and me and him against them."

"Against," Morlock said. (It was a new word.) "If that means what I think it means, it is a good word."

"Isn't it, my friend?" laughed Rokhlenu. "I thought you would like it. Us against them. I almost feel sorry for them, don't you?"

Morlock thought the matter over for a moment and then said, "No."

Chapter Eight: Eyeless Night

There came a night without a moon, an eyeless night, in the wolvish phrase. It must have been early in the month of Drums. Rokhlenu did not transform into a wolf but stayed in human form, shivering in the dark cell with Morlock.

"How do you stand it without fur?" Rokhlenu asked him finally.

"I don't sleep much," Morlock admitted. "A few hours a night. There's no point in it anyway."

"Isn't there? I like to sleep when I can. Dreams might be the only way I ever get out of this place."

"I don't dream."

"Everybody dreams, Morlock. Are you sure what the word means?"

"I don't dream since they put the spike in my head."

"What?" Rokhlenu asked.

So, with a little prompting and vocabulary assistance from Rokhlenu, Morlock told the tale of how he had been captured. He didn't mention why he had been using his Sight: that wasn't something he wanted the guards to hear, if they were listening, and ever since Hrutnefdhu's humiliation he tried to stay aware that they were always listening. But he said that he had used his Sight and narrated what happened after, as far as he could remember it.

"A ghost-sniffer," Rokhlenu said, when Morlock described the wolf who had detected his Sight. "They travel with the raiders, in case they run afoul of any magic-users, like you used to be, I guess. I understand they get their powers from sleeping with pigs during the dark of the moons. Of course, all the Sardhluun try that sometimes."

This was mere slander, for the ears of the ever-listening guards, who twitched angrily but did not intervene.

"How did you end up so deep in the north, though?" Rokhlenu asked. "And what happened to those people who were travelling with you? I remember that young man. Thund?"

"Thend."

"Thend. Not the dullest tool in the drawer, but he had more nerve than brains at that. I remember how he crept down into the Vale of the Mother, leaving a trail as dark as ink through the tall grass! But his family was down there, and he wasn't going to let fear or common sense stop him from getting killed with them. It's a miracle he wasn't."

"You played a part in that miracle."

"A small matter. It added nothing to my bite when I told the story back home, believe me. Anyway, how are they?"

"Well, or so I hope. I left them so they'd have a better chance at that."

"Oh? Anything I should know about?"

Morlock glumly pondered how much he could or should tell Rokhlenu about Merlin. "I have a powerful enemy. When he attacks me …those around me may be harmed."

"Yurr. Well, we'll meet him together, if it comes to that. But you haven't asked me what I'm doing here."

"Bad manners."

"In a prison? I guess you're right. I've never been in one before. Have you?"

"A few times. Nothing like this." Morlock tapped the side of his head and shrugged.

"Well, since you can't ask, I'll just tell you. I was born, poor but honest-"

"Poor in imagination, anyway."

"To the Stone Tree with you, you ill-tempered, ape-footed son of a walrus-fondling pimp."

"That's a little better," Morlock conceded.

"I was horn, anyway: you won't quibble with me about that?"

Morlock almost did, just for something to do, but there was a limit anyone could stand to this abrasive humor, and they had no escape from each other's company. So he shrugged and opened one hand.

"Three shadows by sunlight," Rokhlenu swore. "Do you talk any more when you know the language better?"

The joke was already overfamiliar. "No," Morlock said curtly. "You were born?"

"Yes, although they didn't throw me in prison right away because of that. Actually, I was lying like a were-weasel earlier: my family had a lot of bite when I was growing up in the Aruukaiaduun pack-"

"What's `bite'?" Morlock asked.

"You can't be serious. Don't you know what bite is?"

"I thought I did," Morlock said. He pointed at a ragged scar on his arm. "That's from a bite. Or am I using the wrong word?"

"No," Rokhlenu said, "but it means more than just one thing. Bite is …You know, they gave you that honor-tooth after you ripped old Khretnurrliu's head off."

"Khretnurrliu." The name meant man-killer if Morlock understood it right. "That was his name?"

"Yes, but so what? It's not like you'll be seeing him again."

Morlock didn't tell him how wrong he was but said, "I remember the tooth. And the guards wear teeth. They show …" He wanted to say status, but he didn't know the word for it.

"They show bite: the more teeth the greater the individual's bite. The more bite you have, the more important you are. That's why Hrutnefdhu keeps trying to give the tooth back to you."

Hrutnefdhu, the pale trustee, had brought the tooth back to Morlock several times. But Morlock would not accept status from the beasts who had stolen his freedom, a point he did not have the abstract vocabulary to make to Hrutnefdhu, so he just kept refusing it.

"It is theirs," Morlock said now to Rokhlenu. "If it is theirs, it is not mine."

"Most people would have taken the tooth. If you acquired enough bite, they might let you out of here."

"Just let me go?"

"No. They'd probably send you to work in the fields. The Sardhluun have many fields and pastures, most of them slave-worked." Rokhlenu seemed about to go on, but he didn't.

Morlock could guess what he had been going to say. It would be easier to escape from there than from here. No doubt that was true. Morlock doubted he could bend himself to the performance, though. And it was clear that the only way he could earn a second tooth, more "bite" in the eyes of his captors, would be to kill Rokhlenu. Even if he could do that, he would not.

"Eh," Morlock said.

"Right," Rokhlenu agreed. "So, anyway, my people had bite. My father was a master rope maker on the funicular in Wuruyaaria-"

"Wuruyaaria is the city of werewolves?"

"Yes. For someone who doesn't talk much, you're interrupting me a lot."

"What's a funicular?"

"It's just a bunch of big ropes, really. One end is at the city walls (by Twinegate, naturally) and the other is on the city's highest mesa, Wuruklendon. Baskets can ride the ropes up and down."

"Baskets?"

"Yes." Rokhlenu explained what a basket was. "Of course, it's really the people and things in the baskets that are important."

"Of course," Morlock agreed, but he didn't mean it. It was the rope system itself that impressed him. "An impressive feat of making."

"The funicular? I guess so. People say Ulugarriu made it, like the moonclock in the volcano's side and everything else that impresses people."

"Ulugarriu." The name meant Ghosts-in-the-eyes, unless Morlock misunderstood it. "I would like to meet him." (The name's -u ending meant that it was masculine gender.) "He must be a great maker."

"Eh. Oh, maggots, now you've got me doing it. Forget about meeting Ulugarriu, Morlock. He walks unseen. Nobody ever meets him."

"Then how do you know he exists?"

"I never said he did. Anyway, I exist and I was born, not-so-poor-and slightly-dishonest in the shadow of the great Fang Tower of Nekkuk- lendon-which, before you ask, is the third of the great mesas of Wuruyaaria. Shall I tell you about my childhood, my youth, my musical education, my many battles, my steady-yet-rapid accumulation of bite, my first sexual adventures?"

"God Avenger, no.,,

"Well, it's your loss, but I'll skip on a bit, then. My problem was that, like most young werewolves of spirit, I wanted political office."

"Eh."

"I did say werewolves. I don't pretend to know what life is like for you people, but we are pack animals. We're not ashamed of it."

"It's not much different for us, I guess. Except for the shame, maybe. Go on."

"My father ranked high in the Aruukaiaduun pack, but I wanted to rank still higher. I could have, too: I was favored to win nomination to the Innermost Pack."

"How many packs are there?"

"Four, of course-and the outliers, who don't count yet. Each pack has an Inner Pack, who have the most bite in the pack, and millennia ago, when the city was founded, they set up an Innermost Pack with members drawn from all three of the treaty packs."

"Three? You said there were four."

"There were three, then. The Sardhluun weren't part of the treaty until later. They bought their way in, essentially. They had slaves, and prison houses, and meat, and as these are three things that no civilized society can do without-"

"Eh."

11 -that our society can't do without, the Sardhluun were given places on the Innermost Pack and accepted into the treaty. What would you have done?"

Morlock gave it some thought and said, "I would gut every member of the Sardhluun Pack with a silver knife."

This caused a rustle among the ever-watchful guards. Even Rokhlenu jumped a little, but then he said, "Right! And I'll hold them down for you. Anyway. The different packs can nominate members to the innermost Pack, but the nominees have to earn their place in competition with each other."

"How does it work?"

"Fight and bite. Bite and fight. You can get bite by fighting, or talking, or singing, or making, or doing. You can buy it: people who make money always have lots of bite. I got a lot of bite from a song I composed."

"Oh? What's it about?"

"The way a she-wolf's genitals smelled when Chariot was aloft in midwinter."

"That's impossible, though," Morlock pointed out, after some vocabulary was explained to him. "Chariot doesn't rise until the first day of spring."

"You have to make things up for a good song sometimes, Morlock."

Morlock shrugged dubiously at the necessity of fantasy and said, "So your political career led to the prison house."

"As it often does-maybe not often enough. I was popular; my family was rich; I was a well-respected singer; people knew I could fight. They knew it so much that I never had to."

"Wasn't that good?"

"Yes and no. I'd have liked to get in a few more fights to raise my reputation. But if you run around starting fights with people, it can actually decrease your bite."

Morlock nodded. "So: the dragon."

"Exactly. I took many a long run down south to the mountains, hoping to get into trouble I'd have to fight my way out of. Not too many werewolves actually go into the Kirach Kund, though. I had to wait a long time before I found a dragon that was vulnerable, but it was worth it."

"Go on." Morlock had a professional interest in the killing of dragons.

"I came upon one that had been drugged by the Spiderfolk. They had just taken its dragonrider prisoner and they were hauling him away. They could not approach the dragon-they're very susceptible to fire. You remember."

"Yes."

"So I waited till they were gone and I sneaked up on the dragon and killed it. And-"

"How?"

"I crept into its mouth and gnawed through the palate into its brain."

"Oh."

"I can't say that I enjoyed the dragon brain much. But the palate, and dragon meat generally, is very pleasant: a firm white meat, somewhat like rattlesnake or chicken. Have you ever-?"

"No. Not dragon, at any rate."

"Well, everyone has to draw the line somewhere. I've never eaten another werewolf, no matter how hungry I've been. Not knowingly, anyway. So, after I left you in the Vale of the Mother, I went back and stripped the dragon's skull and brought it back to my father's house for a prize."

"It must have earned you a lot of bite."

"It did! It did! My father hired the best ghost-sniffers from the Goweiteiuun Pack to confirm my story in an affidavit, and the pack voted me a new name. They liked the story of how we were taken by the Khroi and the odd Dwarvish word the Khroi used for dragonkiller, so they voted me that for my new name."

"Oh? What was your name before?"

"Slenkjariu," Rokhlenu said reluctantly. "After my mother's grandfather. None of my mother's people amounted to much, and with names like that you can see why."

Morlock didn't exactly see why, but his friend actually seemed embarrassed and he didn't want to make it any worse. "I still sense a long road from there to here."

"A short one. There was, and is, a gray-muzzle in the Aruukaiaduun Inner Pack, name of Rywudhaariu; he had a list of nominees for the next citywide election, and I wasn't on it and he didn't want me on it. So he had a few of his boys rob and murder a bookie and then frame me for it."

Morlock needed some words explained ("bookie" and "frame" particularly). Then he remarked, "Was there a trial? Didn't your heroic bite help you there?"

"Not against Rywudhaariu, who'd been collecting teeth up and down the mesa for more than forty years. Anyway, he bribed the jury-used the proceeds of the robbery to fund the bribes. You have to admit that shows vifna."

"Do I?" Morlock didn't know what vifna was, but he didn't think he liked it. "Wasn't this all illegal? I don't understand your system."

"It was illegal, and everyone knew about it, and if things made sense maybe it wouldn't have worked. But Rywudhaariu was probably better off after my trial than before it. Somehow, if it's your job to make or enforce the laws and you break them with impunity, you can get a certain kind of bite from that. I don't understand it myself well enough to explain it, but that's how it seems to work. Maybe it's different in never-wolf cities."

"I don't know," Morlock said slowly, thinking of the late and unlamented Protector Urdhven and the men who had followed him. "Maybe not that different."

"Rywudhaariu's guards dragged me to the Sardhluun's plantation," Rokhlenu went on. "I was hoping they would have me working the fields, herding cattle or something. Escape would be easy. That's why they didn't do that, I guess. I started out on the ground floor and then worked my way up here." When he saw that Morlock didn't understand him, he explained, "The top floor is where they keep the real irredeemables. Like you and Khretnurrliu."

Morlock bowed his head to accept the compliment.

"I was hoping my father and brothers could bribe the Sardhluun to let me go, or at least give me a chance at escape," Rokhlenu said reflectively, "but I suppose Rywudhaariu is giving them their own trouble now."

"`It's a fool who kills the father and lets the son live,"' Morlock said, quoting the proverb.

"`Bare is the back with no brother,"' said Rokhlenu, quoting another.

"Your back is bare," Morlock pointed out.

"The god it is," Rokhlenu said, yawning. "I'm going to try to sleep now, Morlock. I don't know how you can stand this."

Sleeping on a cold stone floor in human form, Morlock guessed he meant. But the truth was that Morlock didn't have to stand it, for he slept very little, and that little didn't do him much good. His body rested, but never his mind.

Just now, for instance, he saw a fifth werewolf outside the cell. There were two guards in the day shape and two in the night shape, as always. One of the humans seemed to be in charge: he wore a neckband and chest-tort that bristled with accumulated teeth. Morlock thought this was Wurnafenglu. Morlock was fairly sure it was the same werewolf, and he was sure that he hated him. The others were just guards; Morlock might have seen them before, but he didn't recognize them.

It was the fifth werewolf that really had Morlock's attention, although he never looked directly at him. He could not: every time Morlock tried, the werewolf seemed to sidle over to the edge of Morlock's vision. But Morlock knew him: it was Khretnurrliu, the werewolf he had decapitated. The body was in the day shape, carrying its severed head before it like a lamp. It did not speak, nor make any noise. The guards passed a remark to each other occasionally, but never to Khretnurrliu. But Morlock saw him. He could not stop seeing him.

A pale shadow appeared at the bars: Hrutnefdhu, in the night shape. He coughed shyly, wondering if Morlock wished to talk.

Morlock moved forward to sit by the cell door. The archers raised their arrows reflexively to threaten him, but he ignored them and presently they relaxed.

"I'd rather sleep than talk," Morlock admitted, "but I can't sleep."

Hrutnefdhu expressed sympathy.

Morlock opened his hands: there was nothing to be done. "Can you change into wolf form without moonlight?" he wondered. "Can those?" he asked, gesturing at the guards.

Hrutnefdhu sang that he had assumed the hairy cloak of wolfhood last night, with Trumpeter's last light, and resisted the man-shaping rays of the sun all day. He added in a whisper that the wolf-formed guards were unfortunates unblessed by the gift of a second skin.

Morlock was interested. He'd heard there were werewolves who couldn't change fully from were to wolf or back again; indeed, Khretnurrliu with his twisted legs and hatchet face seemed to be one such. Apparently it was considered a blemish, even a matter of shame. He wondered if there was some way to use this to his advantage-to divide the guards somehow.

"Are there …? Sometimes I see werewolves in the day shape by moonlight," he said, trying to explain the question he could not ask.

Hrutnefdhu understood. He said that many guards lacked the gift of a second form, walking under the moons as if they were suns, making a lack of gift into a gift.

"Hm," Morlock said, trying not to sound too dubious. One of the night shape guards had a single tooth around his neck; the other had none. Clearly, they had little bite, even among other guards …who, Morlock reflected, might not have much bite as a class, outside the prison house.

Hrutnefdhu sang a single note of query.

Morlock nodded.

Hrutnefdhu wondered why Morlock had never answered Rokhlenu's question. He too wished to know what had brought so powerful a maker and a seer as Morlock so far into the north.

Morlock shrugged. "I have no home. I go from one place to another. How did you know I was a maker?"

Hrutnefdhu sang that he had heard of heroes who walked into the north ages ago, broke the Soul Bridge, and banished the Sunkillers from the world. One of them was a man with crooked shoulders, and they called him Morlock. He was a maker and a son of makers.

"That was a different man than me," Morlock said, standing. "A very different man." He turned away and rolled himself up in a corner of the cell. He didn't sleep, then or for a long time, but at least no one expected him to talk.

It had been a better night than most since Morlock's imprisonment began. Now he knew that Rokhlenu was a rope maker, or had been. Under the circumstances, that was a very useful skill.

Chapter Nine: Madness

The days grew warmer, and Morlock gradually became convinced that he was going mad. He rather reluctantly raised the topic with Rokhlenu, who laughed it off at first.

"You'll have to convince me you were ever sane," the werewolf said, one blisteringly hot noonday in midspring. "Then I'll worry about you going crazy."

But Morlock convinced him in the end. He told him about Khretnurrliu, how he always saw the mutilated werewolf outside the cell. He wore the day shape in the night, carrying his head in one hand; he wore the night shape in the day, sitting with his head at his feet. He never spoke and rarely moved, except to shift away from Morlock's sight when Morlock tried to look straight at him. But he was always there.

"There's no one there but the guards, Morlock," Rokhlenu said, sounding a little worried now, though.

"You say so," Morlock agreed, "and I'm almost sure you're right. But I see him. I know he's there, even when I'm not looking. Listen to me, Rokhlenu. It's you this matters to."

"I don't know what I can do about it," the werewolf said.

"There's nothing to be done," Morlock agreed. "But you need to know. If I seem to be acting insanely, it's probably not an act. Protect yourself. Maybe you can get one of those field jobs."

Rokhlenu looked blank for a moment; then he realized Morlock was suggesting he might have to kill him. "Shut your meat-hole," he snarled.

"No. But I'll do what I can do to keep it from coming to that."

"All right. What can you do?"

Morlock shrugged. There was nothing, really.

That night, when they thought Morlock was sleeping, Rokhlenu had a low-voiced conversation with Hrutnefdhu.

Rokhlenu sang of Morlock's strength of will, how he had slain the beast Khretnurrliu, how he had faced the torments of the guards with patience, even with humor. He said he could not believe that madness was stronger than Morlock's will.

Hrutnefdhu conceded much of what Rokhlenu sang. He himself had seen that battle in the cell; he was still in awe that a man, a mere human, had done what Morlock had done. But he apologetically sang about the dangers of a powerful will turning inward, about obsessions that ate away at the strongest minds, feeding on that strength itself. He pointed out that Morlock was a Seer who had lost his magical Sight, and that madness might be the rot from that inward death.

Rokhlenu wondered if there was anything that could be done-if the spike could be drawn and Morlock's mind healed.

Hrutnefdhu sang of the storied wisdom of his mate, Liudhleeo, She-whoremembers-best. She waited for him among the long-legged lairs of the outlier pack, in the swamps south of Wuruyaaria. Liudhleeo might know.

Rokhlenu sang a brief comparison of the distance between the prison and the outlier pack and the distance between the prison and the paths of the moons. Since neither were accessible, they were equally far away.

Hrutnefdhu's song was apologetic, guilt-ridden. There were ghostsniffers among the Sardhluun, but they would not heal Morlock or allow him to be healed. They had felt his power when he was first captured and they feared it. An insane Morlock would suit them better than a sane one.

Rokhlenu sang a questioning note.

Hrutnefdhu gently pointed out that Morlock and Rokhlenu had broken the Sardhluun's system: they used prisoners to terrorize each other. A mad Morlock might be useful as a terror. A sensible Morlock who did exercises and memorized verb-tones was no good for the Sardhluun.

Rokhlenu speculated on things that might be good for the Sardhluun, such as venom-drenched, spiked silver hooks inserted under the tail.

Hrutnefdhu turned and walked away, his nails clattering on the stone floor. The guards were listening, and he could not afford to have a conversation of this sort under their ears.

Morlock found it interesting that Hrutnefdhu hadn't argued with Rokhlenu, even for show. The pale werewolf was a trustee in the prison, but Morlock was beginning to think that they could trust him …if they could think of a task to use him for. That was the trouble: they could do nothing unless they could escape from the cell, and the guards' unending vigilance made that unlikely.

It was increasingly difficult for Morlock to think coherently at all. He had begun to worry that Khretnurrliu was edging closer to the cell door. The fact that the cell gate was never opened was a matter of some comfort to Morlock. He began to wonder what would happen if he did have the chance to get into the corridor. If Khretnurrliu were there …Morlock had already killed him once. (His eyes were rotted away, and his nose and other soft tissues were visibly decaying. Empty eye sockets ringed with bare bone were what watched Morlock night and day from the corner of his eye.) How could he kill him again? Would he have to go on killing-killing-killing him forever? Wouldn't it be safer to stay in the cell where Khretnurrliu couldn't get at him? So Morlock reasoned to himself as his reason continued to unravel.

But in fact it was Rokhlenu who went mad first.

It happened one night late in the last full month of spring. The days were unbelievably, damnably hot, even in the shadows of the stone cell, and the nights brought very little relief to the still blistering air. But Rokhlenu did not refrain from the nocturnal change to wolfhood: apparently there was a special exultation to the transformation when all three moons were in the sky.

Rokhlenu had just undergone the change; the hallway was echoing with the howls of those doing the same.

Morlock looked up and saw, of course, Khretnurrliu, holding his severed head like a lantern in one hand. Next to him, in the center of Morlock's vision, was Wurnafenglu, that one gray-muzzled prison guard who seemed to have significant bite. He was looking directly at Morlock, dark lips parted in a wolvish grin that was all-too-human. He was expecting a good show.

"Rokhlenu," Morlock said, "they're about to try something. Be wary."

But Rokhlenu didn't listen. He was distracted by something happening in the hallway. Morlock heard the noise, but Rokhlenu was reacting to a scent. His nostrils dilated and he slunk toward the cell bars as if he were being dragged by the nose.

Several guards dragged a she-wolf into view. It was the first female werewolf that Morlock had seen in the prison: there had been females among the raiders, but none among the guards. This one was collared, her back feet bound to a metal bar that kept them spread-eagled. She was whimpering; blood was dripping from her mouth; she had been beaten, perhaps many times. She was evidently in heat.

The guards, laughing and making obscene gestures, showed her to Rokhlenu.

Rokhlenu seemed to struggle with himself for a moment. Finally he threw himself against the bars in a desperate attempt to reach the female.

The guards laughed and mocked him. In a chorus, man and wolf, they sang an obscene song at him; Morlock wondered if it was a version (or inversion) of one of Rokhlenu's songs; there was some mention of three moons aloft.

Rokhlenu was breaking his teeth trying to gnaw through the bars.

The guards raped the female werewolf, one by one. The senior guard, Wurnafenglu, the one with the grizzled fur and the multitude of honor-teeth, went first; the guards wearing the day shape went last. Even headless Khretnurrliu held his severed head high, as if to see better, and gruntingly thrust against the empty air with his decaying phallus.

In the end the she-wolf lay without moving on the stone corridor. Morlock wondered if she was dead. Two of the man-form guards dragged her away. The others turned and started barking insults and mockery at Rokhlenu again. They said they could bring in a she-wolf again every night, if Rokhlenu had enjoyed the show. They said that he probably couldn't have done much if he had made it through the bars-as they themselves would have done, in his place. They described the visceral pleasures of forcing the she-wolf in grunted songs that, again, seemed to be parodies of love poetry. They said a great many things that Morlock did not understand and made no effort to understand.

Rokhlenu kept battering himself against the bars. Whatever reason he had, it was not at his command.

Morlock hated to see it. He hated to see the guards laughing at his friend, mocking him in his moment of weakness. So he jumped forward and strangled him. He wrapped his right arm around Rokhlenu's neck as tightly as he could, and ignored the wolf's savage claws tearing at his flesh, scattering fuming fire-bearing blood on the stones of the cell and the corridor outside.

The guards roared with excitement. This was the game they had long waited to see. They called down the hallway to the other guards. They demanded that Hrutnefdhu bring his bag of betting slips-where the ghost was Hrutnefdhu whenever they needed him?

Morlock clamped down on Rokhlenu's windpipe as hard as he dared and held until the werewolf stopped scrabbling and clawing to get free.

He stood straight up, holding the motionless werewolf's body aloft by his neck. From the grinding sensation under his fingers, at least one bone was broken.

The guards in the hallway applauded him. They called him the beastkiller. They said he had earned much bite, and could earn much more.

Morlock threw the dead werewolf into the square of moonlight on the cell floor.

He turned toward the cell bars. He found the senior guard and fixed him with his gaze. He snarled at him in Moonspeech. He could see by their faces that this shocked the guards; even Khretnurrliu seemed dismayed, to the extent that Morlock could see expression on the severed head's face.

Morlock snarled that, if they wanted bloodshed, one of them should come into the cell. In the day shape or the night shape. With weapons and armor, or naked as the bald-faced bastards of ape-legged brachs that they were. He jumped up to the cell gate and shook the bars with his bleeding hands; the guards all instinctively recoiled. He laughed and turned his back on them.

Rokhlenu was reviving in the white-hot pool of moonlight. He rolled groggily to his feet. His eyes found Morlock, dripping blood and fire near at hand, and shied away from the sight. He didn't look at the hallway, still crowded with eager guards. He slunk over to a lightless corner of the cell and curled up on the floor.

Morlock went to the opposite corner and sat down with his back against the wall. He didn't expect to sleep, but he must have, eventually. After a dreamless interval he woke up and saw that it was past dawn. His wounds had mostly dried up, but one on the wrist was still dripping persistently.

Rokhlenu, now wearing the day shape, was sitting crouched in his corner, his hands across his face. He had not yet put on his loincloth, which was normally the first thing he did after transition.

Morlock rose and limped over to the loincloth. He picked it up with his left (unbleeding) hand and held it out to Rokhlenu. "Here."

"Get away from me," Rokhlenu said, not moving.

"Here," Morlock said, more insistently.

Rokhlenu struck the filthy cloth away from him. "Don't you understand?" he screamed. "The bond is broken. There never was a bond. I'm not one of you. I'm one of therm. I know it now. They know it. Why don't you know it?"

Morlock stooped and picked up the loincloth and held it out. "There is you and me," he said patiently. "There is them. You and me against them. No bond is broken. I say so."

Rokhlenu silently took the loincloth and wrapped it around himself. As Morlock turned away, the werewolf reached out his hand and grabbed Morlock by one shoulder. "You and me," Rokhlenu said, "against them. I'll remember this, Morlock."

Morlock nodded and went back to the other side of the cell, where he was less likely to bleed on his friend.

Chapter Ten: Method

Morlock didn't bother binding his wounds; he guessed the Sardhluun would be reluctant to let their beast killer die until they had wholly given up on finding ways to use him.

He was right. Presently Hrutnefdhu came slinking down the corridor in man form, the jar of healing salve in one hand, a roll of bandages in the other. He stood in the corridor, not looking at the guards as one opened the gate while the others nocked arrows and aimed them at the prisoners. Hrutnefdhu stepped into the cell. He didn't look at Rokhlenu, either, but went straight to Morlock with the salve.

"Thanks," Morlock said, slathering on the ill-smelling goo.

"I'll bind them," Hrutnefdhu said, unrolling a stretch of cloth and tearing it with his sharp white teeth.

Morlock thought this unwise, as his blood would likely cause the bandage to burn. But then he realized that Hrutnefdhu knew about this, and said nothing as the werewolf deftly bound up his wounds. The cloth absorbed the salve and Morlock's blood and did not burn.

"This salve and the cloth have been dephlogistonated," he said to Hrutnefdhu.

"I don't know what that means," the werewolf said.

"A powerful maker made them," Morlock said. "Who was it?"

"I don't know-the Goweiteiuun practice magic. Or maybe Ulugarriu made them."

"Ulugarriu?" Morlock asked. "I thought nobody saw him?"

"Nobody does," Hrutnefdhu said. "I didn't mean it. If any great wonder has been worked, they say that Ulugarriu did it. It's stupid. Never mind."

"Do you know what happened to the she-wolf?" Morlock asked.

Every muscle in the mottled werewolf's flexible body seemed to freeze. "What do you mean?" he asked finally.

"Did she die? Will she recover? They hurt her very badly."

"Yes." Hrutnefdhu swallowed painfully. "She is not dead. She is not well, but will recover. She is my mate, Liudhleeo."

His mate. Morlock did not understand how a castrato could have a mate, but that was not the most important thing, perhaps. "I am sorry," he said quietly. "I hated them for what they did. I hate them more now. I know that doesn't help."

Hrutnefdhu closed his eyes, opened them. "It's not nothing. There is you and me. There is them."

"There is Rokhlenu, also."

"I suppose there is."

"Will you bind his wounds also?" Morlock asked.

Hrutnefdhu's pale eyes focused on Morlock for a moment. Then he nodded impassively.

Rokhlenu had no visible wounds. But the smeared ointment would look like dried blood. And Morlock hoped that a rope maker's son could unobtrusively fashion the bandages themselves into respectable strangling cords.

The months passed and the deadly heat lessened slightly. It was autumn, presently, and from then on the nights were moonslit: great Chariot, the major moon, would be aloft until the last day of the year. But Rokhlenu often practiced the discipline of not changing into a wolf at night. When he did assume the night shape, he usually avoided the transformation into the day shape on the next morning.

It was a sort of self-discipline, he explained to Morlock. To wear the day shape by night or the night shape by day was, as Morlock had been told, an act of low status-largely because many could not make the full transition into or out of wolfhood. But for someone who could make the transition, it was a challenge to maintain the wolf-form by daylight: the wolf-self drew sustenance from the silver shadows in moonlight. And to resist the change by moonlight took yet another skill-the skill to decline power and the call of the beast in one's own blood. Rokhlenu wanted to know that he, not the Sardhluun, was the master of his spirit and his will.

Morlock was facing similar challenges, but not voluntarily. He was trying to retain a thread of his sanity untainted by the rising tide of madness in his mind. For long stretches of the day and night he could not see or hear anything that made sense. He would sit with his back against the wall amid a cloudy chaos of nothingness that masked the world. There was pain also: a steady knifelike pain radiating from the spike in his head, and cascades of dull aches in his joints that came and went.

If he had been himself in the midst of these distortions, it might not have been so bad. But, increasingly, he was not. Day after day he became more concerned that his fingers were growing backward into his hands, his hands withdrawing into his arms. He spent hour after hour measuring his hands against the bricks in the cell walls. He always seemed to get different results-sometimes encouraging, sometimes not.

There were times he knew his obsessions were just that: the madness working its way into his mind. But, in a way, that made it worse. There was nothing he could do to stop the madness. If he ever made it free from the cell, he would still be a prisoner of the madness.

He wondered, too, if he had the courage to leave the cell anymore. Khretnurrliu was outside all the time, now, very close to the bars. Often he held his severed head through the bars, and the rotting lips whispered silent threats and unspeakable curses against the man who had killed him. The only way Morlock could escape was to not be that man somehow. The madness, the cell, became his refuge. He feared the ghosts and the freedom that lay without.

Hate could help him with this, and sometimes he drank deep of it, trem bling with the desire to kill his tormentors as he had killed Khretnurrliu. But this, too, had its dangers. Like any strong drink, like any drug, the rage left behind it a cold absence, a weakness that only the return of rage itself could heal.

In the arena of his mind, in the chaos of his heart, he fought thousands of battles every day. Sometimes, through the dim distorting vision of the world-as-it-was, he saw Rokhlenu peering at him with deep concern. He would have allayed his friend's concern if he'd known how.

Fortunately, Morlock's obsessions, his endless internal war, the fog he lived in day and night-all these things made him a very boring prisoner. Occasionally he engaged in low-voiced conversations with Rokhlenu, but apart from that he sat by the cell bars day and night, rocking back and forth and flexing his muscles to keep from cramping. The guards kept close watch on him at first, but eventually they grew used to seeing him there and they relaxed their vigil.

It was necessary to sit by the doorway for a simple reason. Khretnurrliu was always just to the left or right of his field of vision. If he stayed by the door and refrained from looking into the cell, Khretnurrliu could not enter. It was a simple and reasonable solution to keep the ghost from entering and destroying them. Rokhlenu, when Morlock explained the matter to him, eventually agreed, although they didn't have many conversations after that. More often, Morlock saw him in low-voiced converse with Hrutnefdhu on the other side of the cell door.

Morlock had long ago twisted his old bandages into a strangling cord, wrapping it around his wrist as if it were a bracelet. He didn't doubt he could use it effectively against the guards, or at least one of them, if he could somehow get into the corridor. Rokhlenu could take care of another. If they were quick enough, each might use a fallen guard's weapon on another guard. All that was possible, if they could get into the corridor.

But what could they do against Khretnurrliu? That was the real question, and Morlock gnawed at it alone through the lonely days and hours, as Rokhlenu didn't seem interested in discussing it. Morlock knew little about trapping or combating ghosts, and what little he knew involved the Sight that was now lost to him.

He had once seen the execution of a criminal in the Anhikh Komos. After expulsion from the city communion, the malefactor was beheaded and his limbs bound with a light thread to keep the ghost from roaming about, malefacting even after death. Morlock had pointed out to a local that the thread wasn't much of a bond, and the local had told him it wasn't meant to bind the dead body but the ghost. Perhaps that was what he could do about Khretnurrliu: bind the ghost with a rope of light thread.

Morlock thought he could probably make a thread from his own hair, which was getting pretty long. He chose the grayer hairs on the grounds that they were more likely to baffle the grayish rotting ghost: like is always frustrated by like. He knotted a great length of the grayish hairs together over a number of days, working with his hands behind his back or under his legs so that the guards and Khretnurrliu could not see.

He tested his first attempt and it broke on the first tug. That annoyed him, and it also raised the latent maker in his madness. He could make a better thread than that-and did, though it took many days and many wild hairs. In the end he had a long thin string of grayish twine that was fairly strong. He himself could break it, but he didn't think Khretnurrliu could, not with his muscles hanging off his bones in greenish strands.

It was a trivial accomplishment, in a way, but it gave him a fierce satisfaction. He would have boasted about it to Rokhlenu, but of course that would give everything away. Anyway, Rokhlenu wasn't very communicative lately. He was very kind and very patient, reminding Morlock to eat and drink when he forgot (as he invariably did), but Morlock did not want kindness or patience in response to this heroic deed. He wanted awe or nothing. If he could explain to Rokhlenu how important the problem was, maybe he could spring the twine on him as a solution and get an appropriate response. But it would require distraction on the guards' part if he were to escape their attention, and he thought this unlikely. He looked up and glanced at them.

He saw, with some surprise, that there were only two: one in the day shape, one in the night shape. The day-shape guard was not an archer-anyway, he didn't have a bow. They were both werewolves of very little bite; the wolf had only one tooth on a cord around his neck; and the man had only a cord with no teeth. The man was looking idly down the corridor; the wolf was asleep.

Morlock was astonished, and more than a little offended. Didn't they know how dangerous he was? Didn't they have any sense of responsibility? He looked at Khretnurrliu, who was wearing the rotting body of a decapitated wolf today, and somehow he knew his enemy was as offended as he. Morlock was minded to complain about it, although he didn't know who would listen.

Then his attention was speared by something else. The grayish iron of the bar securing the cell gate was almost exactly the same color as the silvery twine he had labored so long to make. He wondered if the twine was strong enough to sustain the weight of the metal bar. He thought it was. If he could manage to loop the twine around the bar unobserved, there was a good chance he could ease it out of its slot and throw the cell door open.

He wished there were some way he could warn Rokhlenu of his plan, but there wasn't. Rokhlenu was very difficult to talk to lately; Morlock wondered if his cellmate might be going mad. The thought of insanity bothered Morlock very much; he hated the thought of losing his selfhood that way. He was glad he wasn't going insane. But if Rokhlenu was, there was little he could do but kill him before Morlock caught his illness: it was the reasonable thing to do.

Or was it? There was some reason why Morlock should not kill Rokhlenu; he was sure of it. Only he couldn't remember what it was. It would certainly be good to have someone fighting alongside him in the corridor.

Neither of the guards was looking. The one was still asleep. Morlock unobtrusively tossed a loop of twine for the end of the lock-bar …and missed.

Morlock was shocked. He could not remember the last time he had thrown anything at anything and missed. On the other hand, he couldn't remember much at all. His time in prison might have lasted only a few days or weeks, but everything before it seemed faint and unreal. Perhaps he really wasn't much good at throwing things.

He tried it again, and this time the twine loop fell across the top of the lock-bar on its far end. Morlock jostled the loop gently, and it fell across the end of the lock-bar. He was ready.

He looked up and saw that Khretnurrliu was staring at him. The dead wolf's severed head had opened its mouth in anticipation; the headless body was leaning forward, like a dog straining at an invisible leash. The dead werewolf was waiting for him.

He let one end of the twine go and drew it unobtrusively back into the cell. Khretnurrliu's dead body sat back and the severed head tilted; it seemed disappointed in Morlock. So was Morlock. But he just couldn't face the dead wolf. He had already killed it once. How long was he supposed to go on killing it? Maybe it was Rokhlenu's turn.

He sidled over to Rokhlenu and said, "Hey."

"Hey," Rokhlenu replied wearily. "Long time no smell."

"Rokhlenu."

"Morlock."

"Rokhlenu."

"Morlock."

"Rokhlenu."

"Stop saying that. There's no one else here. You can just say what you have to say."

"What would you do if you got out of here?"

Rokhlenu seemed surprised and pleased. "You sound a little more like yourself today. And, it's funny: I was just thinking about that-the minor moons know why; I don't. But I'd probably go to the outlier pack, south of Wuruyaaria. I can send word to my father and brothers-" He continued for a while in this vein.

Morlock twitched impatiently. This was too long term, too strategic. Morlock was asking about the immediate, the tactical situation. But he didn't know the words for this.

"I mean here and now," he said finally, interrupting Rokhlenu's daydream. "What would you do here and now if you got out of here?"

Rokhlenu caught his meaning. His breath grew short. "I suppose …take out the one on the left with the thing." The thing was what they usually said when referring to the strangling cords, when they had still been talking about them.

"What about Khretnurrliu?" Morlock whispered. "What could you do about Khretnurrliu?"

Rokhlenu slumped a little. The hope went out of his face. He looked directly into Morlock's worried eyes and said, "Nothing. I would do nothing about Khretnurrliu. I'm sick of hearing about him. He's dead, Morlock. Dead."

Morlock was troubled. He'd had a fairly sophisticated argument planned, given his still-primitive vocabulary of Sunspeech, all of it leading toward the proposition that Morlock would tackle the two living guards, if Rokhlenu confronted the dead wolf. He was going to explain about ghost binding and the twine and everything. But now it seemed there would be no point.

Morlock went back to his corner by the door and thought. He rocked back and forth; he clenched and unclenched his muscles and he thought. The guards didn't look at him. Rokhlenu had climbed up to the window and was staring out into the hot afternoon air. Even Khretnurrliu seemed to be looking away scornfully.

Morlock sat wrestling with the dread of the dead wolf the rest of that afternoon, all through the night, all through the next day until dark. In the end he came to the conclusion that it was safer to stay in the cell and not try to get out. This was his life now. He could endure it, if he could not love it.

Except that was not quite the end. Because …it wasn't just that he didn't love this life. He hated it. He hated the raiders who had inflicted it on him. He hated the ghost-sniffers who had driven the spike into his head, blinding him to the world of dreams. He hated the guards and their stupid tortures and rapes. Most of all he hated his hate: he hated the stink of it in his mind, the filth of it in his eyes and bones. What hell could the dead wolf inflict on him that was worse than this? And he was inflicting it on himself. He could make it end now, one way or the other.

He, of course, didn't have the courage, but he had known a man once who would never have given up, would never have inflicted this on himself if he had the chance to escape it, even by certain death, who never resigned himself to fate. That man had drowned …in the Bitter Water, he thought; he couldn't remember his name, unless …unless it was Morlock.

Bells began to ring, as if in answer to this appalling conjecture. Morlock looked up. Khretnurrliu stood in man form in the corridor, tossing his severed head from hand to skeletal hand as if it were a ball. The guards were staring down the corridor, a faint silver light shining on their faces. The one in the day shape raised his hands and underwent the transition to wolfhood, screaming in ecstasy and pain. Rokhlenu was at the cell window, reaching out his left hand for a single thread of moonlight as he gripped the sill with his right. He transformed abruptly to wolf, howling as he fell down into the cell's darkness.

Other werewolves were howling, up and down the corridor. And bells were ringing. Echoing faintly in through the windows, louder in the corridor, mixed with the despairing howls of prisoners, the joyous or merely drunken howls of guards.

It was the first night of the year, the night of Cymbals they called it in Morlock's distant home. Trumpeter and Chariot were setting, and Horseman was rising. A bright year, they would be calling it back home, since the first call would not be moonless. In dark years, all three moons set together and the night sky was dark and starlit until Trumpeter rose again.

Back home, the celebration would go on all night.

A long, joyous, noisy time.

Would these moon-worshipping werewolves celebrate less or more?

In any case, they were celebrating now. Loudly. Joyously.

God Avenger, thought Morlock, the thin fraying thread that was still Morlock in his madness, this is my hour. I will celebrate the New Year in a way the Sardhluun will never forget.

From where he sat he tossed the twine over the end of the lock-bar and caught it. He stood, hefting the lock-bar from its place. It fell ringing to the floor, one more bell welcoming in the new year. Morlock threw the gate open and strode across the threshold of the cell. The wolf-guards, startled, turned to meet him. But for them it was already too late: they had seen their last moonrise.

Chapter Eleven: New Year's Night

Morlock was achingly conscious that he was turning his back toward the dead man who had haunted him all these weary months, but that was the choice he made: not to be bound by his fear.

He stooped down to seize the iron lock-bar from the corridor floor. One of the guard-wolves was already leaping toward him; the other, the one who had just undergone transition, was struggling in the harness of his human armor.

Morlock swung the iron bar with all the unpent fury of his madness.

The guard-wolf's head shattered like a piece of ripe fruit. The body rolled to the floor and lay still. Morlock turned to silence the other guard, who had begun to yammer for help in Moonspeech, but he had only taken one step when a gray shadow streaked past him and fixed long white teeth in the guard-wolf's throat.

Morlock seized the guard's abandoned sword and severed its head from its body as Roklenu jumped nimbly out of the blade's path.

Rokhlenu gave Morlock an agreeable but bloody smile. He wished Morlock a happy New Year in singing Moonspeech.

" Khule gradara!" Morlock replied. "That's what we say back home: goodbye moons!"

The other guards were crowded by the window at the far end of the hallway, peering out at the last moonlight they would see for some time. Those who could change had already changed to the night shape. Those few in the day shape held out their hands wistfully, or drank smoke from great stone bowls, or just stared at the free air as if they hated the prison as much as Morlock did.

Rokhlenu looked slyly at the severed head and back at Morlock's free hand.

Morlock grinned in answer. He picked up the severed wolf head and hurled it down the hallway to land in the mournful celebration of guards. It struck one guard on the elbow while he was inhaling some smoke. The coalladen jar shook, spilling some fiery matter. The jostled guard turned and struck the wolf nearest him across the snout. It yowled a curse at him and bit him on the knee. The jar dropped and smashed on the ground, scattering smoke and fire. The fire burned many feet, and a cacophonous chorus of rage sprang up against the background of bells and wolfsong floating in on the evening air. The guards were embroiled in a general fight before Morlock and Rokhlenu reached them, the severed wolf head being kicked here and there by heedless feet in smoky chaos.

It took them a few moments after Morlock and Rokhlenu reached them to realize the fight had taken a more serious turn. Soon other severed heads were being jostled about on the floor, and the guards in day shape had all been hamstrung by surgical strokes of Rokhlenu's bright teeth. He then returned to sever their neck veins with equal precision.

The surviving guards, all in the night shape, fled down to the other end of the hallway.

Rokhlenu sang that they must not let the rats escape the trap; there would be no chance, otherwise.

Morlock did not understand what he meant about chances. He simply intended to kill his enemies until they killed him. But he was more than willing to start with the fleeing guards.

Side by side, the former cellmates ran back up the corridor. The prisoners in the cells all began to chant their names: Khretvarrgliu and Rokhlenu; the Beast Slayer and the Dragon Slayer.

The fleeing guards, some of them still trailing human war gear, tangled up at the narrow entrance to the stairway, blocking each other from escaping.

None escaped.

Morlock leaned against the outside of the cell that had once been his, among uncounted dead enemies. He wished vaguely there had been more.

One more werewolf appeared in the shadows of the stairway entrance: a pale mottled muzzle and a pair of shocked pale eyes. It was Hrutnefdhu, the trustee.

Rokhlenu sang that they were celebrating the New Year by escaping. He wondered if Hrutnefdhu wished to leave the prison alive or in pieces.

Morlock turned away and walked down the corridor again. If Hrutnefdhu would not join them, he must be killed. Morlock's throat was too choked with hate to use persuasive words; he hoped Rokhlenu's song could lure the pale castrato to abandon his trust. Otherwise Morlock would have to kill him.

He occupied himself by tossing back the lock-bars and swinging the gates of the cells wide. Some of the cells had mechanical locks; these Morlock forced with a sword or his fingers. The prisoners swarmed into the hall, praising his name, Rokhlenu's name, the moonset, the New Year's Night, the carnage of the hated guards.

Most wore night shapes, but there were a few who did not or would not undergo the change, including one red-skinned gold-haired monster with the build of a gorilla, the hands of a juggler, and the intelligence of a vacant room. The wolves were varicolored: red, black, gray, and white. They were battered, scarred with wounds that showed even through their wiry fur. Their eyes were cold and bitter as the lost light of the moons. They were the irredeemables, and they knew he would lead them into death among the swords and teeth of the guards. They shouted for it. They howled for it.

When Morlock returned to the stairway, Rokhlenu was singing of plans, of forethought, of deliberation, of safety.

"We don't need safety," Morlock said. "That's what keeps us safe."

He plunged into the dark stairwell. Cheering and howling, the irredeemables followed him.

Wide-eyed, the pale mottled trustee watched the ragged pack of irredeemables cascade down the dark stairs.

Rokhlenu snarled. First he had thought Morlock mad; then he thought him sane; now he was sure the never-wolf was mad. If Rokhlenu himself were not mad, he would take advantage of the chaos Morlock was causing to escape the prison. It would be so easy!

But he couldn't. When Rokhlenu had gone mad, Morlock had watched out for him, had not let the guards' cruelty destroy him. He had risked his life. Rokhlenu would do the same for him if it killed him, as Rokhlenu was glumly sure it would.

He forced himself to think sunlit thoughts, dreaming of a gold the world would not see for hours, that he might never live to see. The agony of transition swept over him, without the exultant shout of light to remake his heart. He had to remake it himself. It seemed to take forever, and it hurt like chewing a leg off. But at the end of it he stood like a man and began to arm and armor himself from the bloody torn equipage scattered around the floor.

"Stay by me," he said to the yet-more-astonished-if-possible Hrutnefdhu. "Morlock has run mad. If we stick together, maybe we can live through this thing."

Hrutnefdhu's pale face looked as dubious as Rokhlenu's heart felt. But they did go together down the dark stairway.

The fourth floor of the prison was larger than the fifth; there were several aisles among the freestanding cages and more prisoners in each cage. Rokhlenu remembered there being more guards there, too. Whether that had been the case or not Rokhlenu never knew; by the time he and Hrutnefdhu arrived the guards were bloody rubble in various corners, slain by Morlock and his irredeemables. Morlock was forcing locks with a long knife and freeing the prisoners; other irredeemables were smashing at locks with stolen swords …or, in a few cool-headed cases, using keys they had looted from dead guards.

Rokhlenu said to Hrutnefdhu, "Get the ones using keys. Have them come to me. Round up anyone who isn't moon simple."

Hrutnefdhu wondered if he were moon simple; he didn't understand.

"There are guard stations in the stairways below; we'll need to divide in two bands," Rokhlenu began.

Hrutnefdhu barked a curt acknowledgment and ran off to do Rokhlenu's bidding. Rokhlenu himself grabbed a few wolves who seemed to be able to pay attention. When Hrutnefdhu returned with a dozen men and wolves, Morlock and his irredeemables were already streaming toward one of the stairwells.

"We take the other," Rokhlenu said. "Ware guards. Kill the men and maim the wolves as severely as you can; behead them by choice."

They nodded and snarled in acknowledgment. These were not blooddrunk ex-prisoners intent on vengeance. They were hardened criminals engaged in escape. Rokhlenu knew he could trust them as long as it looked like he might succeed.

They ran down the stairs to the guard station. The guards there were waiting for them: three smoke-drunk men with rusty swords in their trembling hands. Rokhlenu's wolves took them down and left them sleeping off their drunk in death.

The third floor was even larger than the fourth; some guards were still resisting when Rokhlenu and his band arrived. Worst of all, one was at a window blowing a horn-call. Rokhlenu ran over and stabbed him through the rib cage, killing him instantly, but the damage was done. The sound of bells and songs from below had diminished greatly: what guards remained in the prison now knew of the escape. Rokhlenu hoped it was a skeleton crew; if so, they'd soon crack it to the marrow.

Many of the prisoners on the third floor were terrified and refused to leave their cells. Still, the numbers of escapees swelled, and many began to stream down the stairwells.

If Rokhlenu had been in charge, they would have skipped the second floor and gone down to confront the guards on the first floor while they were still relatively unprepared. But no one was in charge. Many of the more panicky escapees did indeed run from the second floor to the stairwells leading down to the ground floor, but Morlock and his irredeemables cleared the second floor of its few guards and broke the locks on all the cages. On this level, more prisoners were day shaped than night shaped, and almost none refused to leave their cages. The number of the escapees, as they finally charged the stairwells, was very large, but the men were very poorly armed and armored.

Rokhlenu and Hrutnefdhu followed Morlock down the stairwell. Rokhlenu thought there was some chance that the guards below (they could hear the sounds of fighting echoing up the stone ways) might rally and come up other stairways to attack Morlock's group from behind. His criminals would serve as a rearguard, then. If not, Morlock and his irredeemables would be their shock troops.

Just before Rokhlenu made it down to the ground floor, he heard Morlock laughing.

When he came out into the high-vaulted central chamber on the first floor, he saw why.

Morlock had not seen the dead rotting ghost of Khretnurrliu since he had rushed into the corridor, and a feeling of exultation was growing in him. It was separate from the poisonous glee of satisfied revenge (which, however, he also felt). The dead beast was dead, but it still fled from him. Perhaps it feared binding. Morlock had lost his twine somewhere, but Khretnurrliu might not know that.

Morlock kept looking about for Rokhlenu, but whenever he turned his view was blocked by the great gorilla-like red werewolf, who grinned at him with gray teeth through his golden beard. He had no weapon but fought only with his huge gold-clawed fists. Morlock did not understand a word he said, if the sounds he made were words, but he seemed intent on guarding Morlock's back.

Long before he reached the ground floor, Morlock met a backwash of escaped prisoners running back up toward the second floor. Morlock attacked them with the same cold empty rage he had unleashed on the guards: they were in his way. He killed a man, dismembered a crawling wolf, and drove the rest screaming before him down the stairs again.

They were pinned between Morlock and a knot of armed guards at the outlet of the stairwell. Of the two, they feared Morlock the more and threw themselves at the guards with panicky fervor. Morlock came up behind them and started stabbing through the bodies to cripple the guards. They broke and fled, and Morlock and his irredeemables ran into the central chamber of the prison's first floor.

There were no cages or cells here. This was the marshalling point of the guards, the sorting place for incoming prisoners. A sort of balcony ran around just under the ceiling of the high-vaulted chamber; beyond it were entrances to the upper wall outside. Morlock wondered if that might be a way to escape. The only way up to the balcony was a few rope ladders, though, so the wolves could not go that way. And when Morlock had last seen Rokhlenu, he was in the night shape. He turned away from them and contemplated the scene in the chamber itself.

Its chaos mirrored the disorder in his own soul, and he found it pleasing. Very few of the guards were in day shape; most had changed their skins to celebrate the bright New Year. The chamber was full of werewolves snarling and biting each other, with more pouring through the stairways every moment. The air was filled with smoke, from torches and from the aromatic bowls of smoke the werewolves seemed to love inhaling. The walls glittered with mounted weapons, mostly useless to the night-shape guards. The few guards in day shape-and some of the freed prisoners-were running up and grabbing these.

Morlock watched as one guard seized a very familiar scabbard and drew from it a glittering crystalline sword, the blade interwoven white and black.

Morlock laughed. The gorilla-like red werewolf was standing beside him now that they were free from the narrow stairway; Morlock slapped him on the shoulder and shouted ("There!"), pointing at the guard who bemusedly held Tyrfing.

The red werewolf grunted something and followed as Morlock began to fight his way across the chaos of the great chamber. The irredeemables followed at their heels.

The guard holding Tyrfing slipped in and out of Morlock's sight through the battle in the center of the chamber. At first he seemed inclined to put aside the deadly blade as a mere showpiece, but then a prisoner in a stolen guard's harness leaped at him and he struck out with the blade, shattering the attacker's weapon and armor, the blade sinking deep into his body.

Then the tide of battle blocked Morlock's sight. He grimly fought toward the place where he had last seen the guard holding Tyrfing.

Soon he was rewarded with another glimpse: the guard was cutting his way with the dark crystalline blade toward a group of guards blocking a sort of tunnel.

Morlock knew that tunnel. He remembered being dragged through it on his first night in the Vargulleion.

He wondered if he dared call out to Tyrfing. It had been long, so long, since he had implanted the talic impulse in its crystalline lattice, and he was worried that it might have dissipated. Blinded as he was on the talic realm, his inner self could hear no whisper of life from the blade-or from any other entity.

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.