The Wolf Age

Chapter Twelve: The Outliers

"I understand I have you to thank for this nightmarish cloud of thieves, monsters, and murderers who've descended to suck the last drop of blood from our parched veins?"

Rokhlenu looked up blinking to see a woman standing over him, like a shadow astride the rising sun. He had curled up last night, along with most of his men, on one of the boarded walkways that served as streets among the stork-legged lair-towers of the outlier pack. The night had been warm, and he had slept so deeply that the transition to his sunlit form had not awakened him. He was having trouble waking now, and he blinked his gummy eyes a few times and cleared his throat of goo until he thought of a sufficiently urbane reply.

"You're welcome," he said finally.

"Welcome, hah. You may be, and some of your boys may be, but that filthy, raving, flat-faced, crook-shouldered, fire-hazard of a never-wolf is not."

Rokhlenu didn't need to be fully awake to know who she was talking about.

"We all stay," he said sharply, "or we all go. My boys, as you call them, will back me."

He wasn't at all sure this was true, but a voice (it sounded like One-Eye) called out, "That's written in stone. Are there three moons or not? Does the sun rise in the west or does it not?"

A chorus of voices, in Sunspeech and Moonspeech, agreed that all these truths were self-evident.

Rokhlenu jumped to his feet in a single motion. It wasn't as easy as he hoped he'd made it look, but he didn't want this outlier to think him in any way a weakling.

The way she was eyeing him suggested this was the farthest thing from her mind. "You're Slenkjariu?" she asked. "I've heard of you."

"My name's Rokhlenu now."

"I heard that, too. They didn't strip that from you after you killed that bookie?"

"That's my name, and I didn't kill any bookie."

"The judicants of Nekkuklendon say you did."

"The judicants of Nekkuklendon would tattoo their price on their asses if the price didn't change all the time. Everyone knows that."

She waved her hand, dismissing the issue: it didn't matter in the outlier pack. "I'm Wuinlendhono. I'm running things here, for the time being."

"Oh?" Rokhlenu replied. He had heard that ways were strange in the outliers, but he was surprised to find a female in charge. Still, she seemed to have the bite for it: there was a necklace of long teeth around her neck and ropes of them around her narrow waist.

"I need something a little more binding from you, Rokhlenu," Wuinlendhono said in a low voice. She was a head shorter than Rokhlenu, but somehow her stern round face was very near his face. She smelled a little like the ginger root that grew on the sacred slopes of the necropolis east of the Stone Tree. "Things were tough enough for me," she continued, "before you and your happy band of jugglers showed up last night-"

"We're not jugglers!"

"Keep your voice down. That was a lighthearted, insincere compliment. I wish your boys had any skill as useful as juggling. Listen to me. I mean, listen to nie. You say your boys will back you. If you want to stay here, I need you to back me. Either you are with me or you're against me."

"I don't know anything about you."

"Yes, you do. I'm the person who decides whether you stay here or you go."

"Are you?"

"I am. Half your people are still asleep; many are wounded. It would be a lot of trouble to drive you off or kill you, but we could do it. It'd make me very popular with some of my pack-mates, too. Listen, I'm not talking about indentured service. But if you're going to stay here, I need to know you're not going to get in my way. You can go any time you want. No shackles on anyone."

Rokhlenu thought about it. He looked at her: dark-haired, pale-skinned, round-headed, intent: a cool shadow in the freakishly warm winter sunlight. Not a stupid female. But still a female. He couldn't afford to bow his head to a female; no male would look up to him again.

She read his hesitation perfectly. "How about this?" she said. "My mate is dead. We'll say you're courting me. That way if you, urrr, defer to my judgment, it will seem like politeness, not submission."

"I guess. As long as I don't have to `defer' too often."

"Well, well, well. What a romance this is. The poet sings from the heat in his blood."

"If it's just a ruse-"

"Of course it is," Wuinlendhono said, in a silky contralto murmur as dark as her hair and as warm as fresh blood, "you stupid brach's bastard, do you think I have no one better to turn to than a filthy naked bloodstained refugee from a prison house?"

"Do you?" he replied frostily.

Her fierce little face unbent in a gentle smile. "You're quite right, new friend Rokhlenu," she said, in a voice meant to be heard by those standing nearby. "We must get you some pants, at least." Her eyes flickered downward and she walked away.

Rokhlenu followed her glance down and saw with dismay that he was sporting an advanced erection.

He willed it down by thinking of dead puppies and weeping grandmothers and anything, anything except the warm sensual poison of her voice in his ear. It took a while.

Eventually, he looked up and saw One-Eye standing nearby, but not too nearby. He was not grinning, but his fur-covered face was a little too obviously not grinning.

Rokhlenu called him over. He almost called him One-Eye, but stopped himself at the last minute. No doubt the semiwolf disliked being reminded of his disability, and Rokhlenu particularly wanted to avoid offending him. "Hey," he said finally. "It was busy last night, and I didn't catch your name."

"Olleiulu," said the one-eyed werewolf. Olleiulu meant One-Eye. Rokhlenu repressed an irritated growl.

"All right, Olleiulu," Rokhlenu said. "I need someone to watch my back, and we both know that's you. Am I wrong?"

"You're not wrong," Olleiulu agreed. "But I don't know how long I'm going to stay here. Just thought it's fair to tell you."

"Fair is fair. Just let me know when you're going to leave, if you leave."

"Fair is fair," Olleiulu echoed, and they each gripped the other's shoulder to seal the conditional allegiance.

"I need some clothes if I'm going to talk to that female again," Rokhlenu continued briskly, "and I don't want to get them from her. If there's a market or a rag shop around here, we should be able to trade some of our gear for a kilt or a loincloth or something."

"Breeches for males in the outliers," Olleiulu said. "Anything else makes them look at you funny. I'll get a shirt and some footgear, too, even if it is furnace-hot for winter."

"And it is. Thanks."

"Anything else?"

"Pick a sidekick, someone else to watch your back when you're watching mine."

"Done. It's old Lekkativengu, there." Lekkativengu meant Claufinger, and Olleiulu indicated a werewolf, largely human in appearance, but with wolvish claws on his hands and bare feet. His feet were somewhat pawlike, too. Rokhlenu didn't remember him from the prison escape, but it had been pretty chaotic. "We've sounded out most of the fifth- and fourth-floor gang, and they're with you, as long as you don't cross Khretvarrgliu. The rest are rats who'll go wherever they smell the most cheese."

Khretvarrgliu: that was what they were calling Morlock last night. Rokhlenu thought Morlock might not care for the nickname, but that wasn't the most urgent issue.

"You've done politics before?" Rokhlenu asked.

"I ran an extortion gang in Dogtown," Olleiulu said. "I guess it's pretty similar."

Rokhlenu was washed, breeched, shirted, and booted before he had to face Wuinlendhono again. In spite of the heat of the day, he found this a great relief. Hesitantly, he offered her his left arm; she smiled and intertwined herself with him.

"You can play the part, I see," she said, her contralto voice cooler than the warm winter breeze. "Let's walk. I'll show you the lairs, and something less pleasant."

Rokhlenu's heart was trying to hammer its way out of his chest. It took him several steps to gather enough breath to say, "It's not a part. I'm willing to mate with you."

"Ulugarriu's left testicle," was Wuinlendhono's amused response. "You've been in prison, Rokhlenu. Right now you're willing to mate with anything that doesn't get away fast enough."

"I'm serious."

"I don't want to argue about that. I just want to make something clear. If you're talking about mating with me, we're not talking about a quick screw. I only mate for life. You're too twisted up to think about that right now, but I'm not. You're no good to me like this. So go find someone and discreetly express the depths of your poetic soul-by the bucketful if necessary. We're short on females in the outliers, but there are working girls (and for that matter working boys) who come out from Apetown and Dogtown. You can find them in the day-lairs by the marketplace; your fellow Olleiulu will show you. Until your mind is clear, I'm not making any deal."

Rokhlenu snarled. "Aren't you at least going to say how touched and honored you are by my proposal?"

Wuinlendhono laughed sympathetically. She patted his left hand with her own. "Sorry, new friend, if I seem a little cold. I'm not a puppy, you know, anxiously awaiting her first heat. If we mate, you'll be my fifth."

"Oh? I thought you didn't go in for casual mating."

"I don't. They're all dead. My fourth, who was First Wolf of this hellhole, was killed by a gang of Dogtown robbers. My third caught some sort of lingering illness and ate silver rather than let it finish him. My second was out hunting one day when he ran into a werebear and they killed each other."

They walked on for a while in silence. When it became clear that she had finished he said, "And your first?"

"It was an arranged marriage," Wuinlendhono said. "My guardian outwed me to an old ghost-sniffer in the Goweiteiuun pack. I hated him, so I killed him. That's why I'm here, which was probably your next question."

"No," Rokhlenu said, thinking how much like prison this all was in some ways. "But thanks for telling me."

The lairs of the outlier pack were built on the swamps below Wuruyaaria's south wall. For streets they had boarded ways; the lairs were rickety towers built on stilts driven into the sandy mud of the swamp. The whole place looked like a strong wind could knock it down.

The people were a little tougher looking. They moved fast; they talked or sang fast. He didn't see too many stupid faces, and no sentimental ones. Even the stupid faces wore a hard, cheerful determination. If the wind came and the lairs fell, these people would rebuild-or sell the wreckage to a passing mark.

Wuinlendhono took him to a gem-and-bone seller in the north part of town. He had a single greenish dragon tooth on a gold chain, and Wuinlendhono bought it and gave it to Rokhlenu.

He was going to protest, but she forestalled him with a whisper. "In the outliers, women choose the men. Gifts are normal, so if people hear about this (and they will), they'll take it as part of my arduous campaign to get into your pants. And you need an honor-tooth commensurate with your status. Anyway, it didn't cost very much."

And it hadn't. Few werewolves in history had ever had enough bite to wear a tooth like that in public. Rokhlenu was one. He was strutting a bit after they got back onto the boards, and Wuinlendhono's proud sideways glance didn't exactly sting.

"You're not doing a very good job in cooling my ardor," he observed.

"Well, we haven't got there yet," was her enigmatic reply.

"There" was a lair-tower on the east side of town, taller and more rickety than most. Several of the upper floors seemed to have been added after the original construction, and there was at least one crack running almost half the length of the plastered walls.

"Can this thing stand our weight?" asked Rokhlenu, only half joking.

"Oh, clench up, Dragonslayer," Wuinlendhono answered. "Worse comes to worst, we can always jump." She did not seem to be joking at all.

The air inside was dense with bloodbloom smoke and less pleasant odors. Rokhlenu followed Wuinlendhono up flight after twisting flight of dark creaking stairs until they got to the top story of the lair, which was all one none-too-spacious den. (The tower narrowed as it rose.)

In the light from the western windows lay a naked man, sleeping restlessly on what seemed to be a tarpaulin. Over him crouched a she-werewolf in the day shape. Her smooth mottled skin and torrent of russet hair reminded him of someone, but he wasn't sure who. She was reading a small codex she held in her hand; when they entered, she set the book down next to some odd-looking medical instruments and welcomed them with a complete absence of enthusiasm.

"Liudhleeo, my gravy bowl," said Wuinlendhono. "Can you do it?"

"I've done what I know how to do," Liudhleeo replied. "I have closed up his battle wounds with the salve Hrutnefdhu helped me make-so the lair is no longer in danger of burning down. I have washed him, apparently the first bath he has taken in his life. His skin had many sores, and his feet were rotten with some sort of fungus. All that has been seen to."

"Wonderful. Wonderful. But, you know, what I was really asking about was whether he is still crazy."

"Yes. I have drugged him as deeply as I dared, and he finally fell into a kind of sleep. But unless my experience misleads me, and it is no feeble resource, he is not dreaming."

"He says he never dreams," Rokhlenu remembered. "It's because of the spike in his head."

"This is Rokhlenu, by the way, my cutlet," Wuinlendhono said. "He was Khretvarrgliu's cellmate."

"Yes, I smelled him," the russet werewolf said with a marked distasteand then Rokhlenu knew her, not by sight but by scent. She was the female whom the guards had raped outside his cell on that terrible spring night. He was shocked, then deeply ashamed as she eyed him. He turned away from her, and in the turmoil of his feelings he missed a few of her words.

11 -that spike, yes," Liudhleeo said. "I must say, the book you gave me has taught me quite a lot."

"My first husband wrote it. He was a very learned male."

"And such fine penmanship. All the pages were quite legible, even the ones stained with blood."

"Why dwell on old gossip, my lamb chop, when we could be busy generating new gossip?"

"My considered answer to that …will take a little time. So maybe we should defer it to another occasion."

"By all means, dear, as long as we understand that I'm one ahead."

"I understand nothing of the sort, but never mind. I suppose you want to know why I haven't pulled that spike out of Khretvarrgliu's bewildered old head."

"Do tell."

"Well, I'm a little frightened about it, actually. I've never done anything like this, messing around inside a man's head, I mean. By choice, I would not start out in that type of surgery with a patient whose blood could set me afire. I sent sweet Hrutnefdhu to a ghost-sniffer who works in the Shadow Market; he said he might persuade him to come help."

"So you're waiting for this ghost-sniffer?"

"I was, but after reading this wonderful book some more I had just about nerved myself up to have a stab at the surgery. As it were."

"Why?"

"A ghost-sniffer probably can't help. They put these things in, but they never take them out. That's what I was reading in …in your husband's book. And Khretvarrgliu seems to be getting worse, much worse. You would not believe some of the gibberish he was talking before I finally got him to sleep."

Rokhlenu believed.

"Are we sure the spike is causing the madness?" Wuinlendhono asked. "How do we know he wasn't going mad anyway?"

Both females looked at Rokhlenu, and he said, "I knew him briefly before last year. He was …an odd and difficult male back then. But sane, I think. It must be the spike. Morlock-Khretvarrgliu, I mean-was sure of it."

"Well," Liudhleeo said, not looking at him but inclining her head to acknowledge his contribution, "then either we take the spike out or there's only one other choice."

"What's that?"

"We wrap him in the tarp and dump him in the swamp. Because he's done."

"Does it matter?" Wuinlendhono asked Rokhlenu.

"It matters," Rokhlenu replied. With difficulty, he turned to Liudhleeo. "Can we help?"

She was eyeing him a little less coldly now. "Yes."

Liudhleeo coated their hands with the red-brown healing salve; she said it would protect them from Morlock's fiery blood. Then she had them hold Morlock's unconscious body still. Wuinlendhono held his shoulders down; Rokhlenu put one hand under his jaw and the other on the crown of his head and held him firmly.

Liudhleeo did not anoint her own hands, but took up a long coppery knife on the end of a lead-gray stick. She knelt down beside Morlock and placed the edge of the blade over a red star-shaped scar on his temple. She deftly carved a cross into the flesh. Hot blood poured out of the wound and began to pool on the tarpaulin.

"The tarp is fireproof," she said, noticing Rokhlenu's alarmed glance. "But don't let any of that stuff fall on the floor. Otherwise we'll have a fire in here like …"

"Clench up," Rokhlenu said. "Worse comes to worst, we can always jump."

"Wish I'd said that," Wuinlendhono said, a little breathily. The scent or the sight of blood seemed to make her uneasy-Rokhlenu had never seen an adult werewolf so squeamish. He thought it odd. Of course, Morlock's blood did smell strange; maybe that was it.

Liudhleeo used a long-handled clamp to peel away a strip of Morlock's flesh, exposing the raw skull. Under the blood pulsed a sort of light, in the same rhythm as Morlock's heart. There was a squarish central locus and a fine network of pulsating lines spreading out from there.

"That's it," Liudhleeo said, tapping the squarish center.

"It looks like it's …growing or something. Laying down roots, like a plant."

"Maybe it is."

"Can we get it all out, then?"

"Maybe we can."

Liudhleeo gently but firmly inserted wedgelike probes on either side of the spike. Slowly, carefully, she worked it free from the skull and it dropped, dark as dried blood, to the tarpaulin.

"What about the lines?" Rokhlenu asked.

"I don't see them anymore. They went dark as soon as I extracted the spike. I think we're done."

She folded back the flap of flesh with the clamps and used a longhandled spoon to dab healing salve over the small but surprisingly bloody wound. Then she set about the awkward task of mopping up the blood. With a rag, and then tossing the rag into a bucket of water when it burst into flame. It took several rags, and the bucket was already dense with them, the water oily with Ambrosial blood.

By then the glass spike had dried and was safe to touch. Rokhlenu picked it up and looked at it. The end was unpointed and rather rough. It looked as if the tip had broken off, perhaps left behind in the wound.

"I know," said Liudhleeo, embarrassed. "But I think we've done what we can. Perhaps all will be well."

Rokhlenu handed her the dark spike. Then he lifted the dragon tooth from around his neck and held it out to her, chain and all. Wuinlendhono twitched a little at this but said nothing.

"No," Liudhleeo said, even more embarrassed. "I haven't earned it."

He went down on his knees, eyes intent on her, still holding out the tooth.

She took his hand and firmly folded his fingers over the tooth. "No one but you can wear this, Rokhlenu." She pushed his hand away, but he did not withdraw it.

"I never blamed you," she said then, not looking at him.

"I did," he said. "I do. But that's not what this is about. He saved methree times, four times, I don't know how many times. And you saved him. This is all I have. If it is worthless, it is still yours."

"Wear it for me, then," she said.

"For you," he said, and put the chain around his neck again. "Claim it when you like."

She bowed her head and motioned impatiently for him to stand, so he did.

Wuinlendhono stood also. "You'll keep the book, of course, my dear," she said, "and wear that spike like an honor-tooth. We'll discuss the filthy lucre another time."

"I did it for Hrutnefdhu," Liudhleeo whispered. "Khretvarrgliu is his friend, too."

"Yes," Rokhlenu said, remembering as if it were a thousand years before. "It was the three of us. The three of us against all of them."

"Well," Wuinlendhono said, gently taking his arm, "there's a few more of us now." She guided him toward the door. "Call on me, my dear, if there's anything you need."

"I need my Hrutnefdhu. Send him to me if you see him, please."

They descended the dark stairs to the street, already streaked with the long shadows of a strangely summery winter's afternoon.

"Let me put it this way," Wuinlendhono said then. "I give you a dragon's tooth as a courtship gift, and before sunset I have to watch you on your knees, begging another female to take it. Fairly accurate?"

"Yes," Rokhlenu said glumly. "I understand if this means you're done with me."

"You silly chunk of meat, I'm barely beginning. Five was always my lucky number. Come on along; let's see if a certified dragon slayer can't find a place to sleep indoors tonight."

Chapter Thirteen: The Sardhluun Standard

A dead man who carried his severed head like a lamp was walking beneath the walls of the empty Vargulleion.

"A fine manifestation," signified a passing snake. "But to what purpose, if no one is present to see it?"

"It pleases me," signified War. "It reminds me of the battle that was in this prison house, while the scent of it is still fresh."

"But the battle is over," signified the snake, a manifestation of Wisdom. "There will be no new deaths."

"Deaths are incidental to war, Wisdom. I'm surprised you don't know that."

"You can't have a war without deaths, can you? What is more essential?"

"Courage, and cowardice. The need for cunning, and the uselessness of cunning. Victory. Defeat."

"You could get all that in sporting competitions-"

"Are you trying to see if I can vomit in this manifestation?" War wondered.

-or elections."

"Perhaps the way the werewolves run them. I always look forward to their election year."

"Primaries are beginning. The Sardhluun begin picking their representatives tonight."

"Yes, and I visualize that both you and Death will be manifest there. You wish me to accompany you."

"I do," acknowledged Wisdom. "I dislike this plan of hers, whatever it is, and I think it may be time to reacquire her oath for our pact."

"I did think there would be more fighting," War admitted. "I'll go with you and see what she signifies."

The snake and the corpse with the severed head transited-by-intention to a neighboring locus of space-time.

It was the great arena of the Sardhluun Pack. The time was well after sunset; Horseman the second moon was high in the west; the sky around it glowed indigo. All the werewolves crowding the stands had transited to wolf form.

The Incumbent's Gate swung open in the arena wall. Out of it, a werewolf trotted proudly into the center of the fighting pit. The gate slammed shut behind him. His black fur was silvery on his muzzle. He had a great many honor-teeth: there was a great torc of them hanging around his neck. In his jaws he carried black-and-green streamers, the standard of the Sardhluun Pack. He was the incumbent gnyrrand, the citizen who, for the last year of choosing and several before, had led the Sardhluun's electoral band.

But the crowd did not esteem him: they yodeled his name in contemptuous tones: Wurnafenglu, Wurnafenglu. They called on the sacred ground of the fighting pit to swallow down the misbegotten luckless citizen who dared to pollute it. They howled insults against his relatives in elaborate verse forms.

He trotted back and forth across the arena ground, indifferent to their hostility, secure in his bite. If anyone wanted the Sardhluun standard or his honor-teeth, they would have to fight him for them.

Finally, one werewolf in the stands took up the challenge. He leapt down into the arena proper and barked a challenge. He was a whitish beast with black bristles running from his head down his spine all the way to the end of his tail. He wore a necklace of honor teeth-more than a few dangled there, though nothing like as many as the incumbent carried.

Wurnafenglu dropped the Sardhluun standard, since his right to it had been challenged.

The werewolves in the stands grew silent. They sat down to watch. The election was beginning.

A never-wolf slave entered the arena through a door set into the Incumbent's Gate. She carried two bowls of drink in her trembling hands. The spectators near at hand leaned forward to catch a scent of the deadly brew, then leaned back gasping when they did, or thought they did.

Everyone in the arena knew that the bowls contained an infusion of wolfbane.

The never-wolf slave put the bowls down in the center of the arena and backed away hastily. She ran back to the door in the Incumbent's Gate, but it was now locked and would not open for her. She was the only person present who had supposed it would.

A few werewolves chuckled mildly at her dismay, but all eyes turned now toward the Werowance of the Sardhluun, whose task tonight was to preside over the election of the pack's gnyrrand, its lead candidate in the upcoming general election. A silver-gray wolf with many cords of honor-teeth, the Werowance lay resplendent on his ceremonial black couch in a box set lower than the stands. He pressed a lever with one foot. A narrow opening appeared in the wall below him; a platform extended. On it was a ceramic bowl, brimming with antidote.

The Werowance sang what everyone knew. He was the Werowance of the Sardhluun, chosen by chance, by destiny, and by bite and by the common will of the Sardhluun. It was his duty to lead the Inner Pack in times of peace and to preside over the pack elections. This challenge would choose a representative for the general election to come. Only the strongest, the most cunning, the most ruthless of the Sardhluun could hope to carry the standard of their pack, the youngest and greatest of packs, against the corrupt beasts of the older treaty packs.

There was an incumbent, as they all knew: the detested Wurnafenglu. For many years, Wurnafenglu had tended the green-and-black standards of the Sardhluun like a herd of fat beeves. He had stood for the Sardhluun in the Innermost Pack of Wuruyaaria, even rising on occasion to the couch of the First Singer. But he had spent all his honor and all the glory of the Sardhluun in a single night of disgrace. Though he was the commander of the Var gulleion, the prison that (with the Khuwuleion) was the foundation of the pack's fortunes, he was absent on First Night, celebrating with his disgusting plurality of wives, when the prisoners rebelled. Many of his guards had died; he should have died with them. The subsidies from the city that they received for maintaining the prisoners would disappear; so should Wurnafenglu disappear. The Sardhluun were now a mockery among the older, weaker, less ruthless packs; so should Wurnafenglu be a mockery and a byword until the sun faded and the moons crunched its golden bones in their shining blue teeth. When Wurnafenglu might have done them all a favor by slinking away forever into the night of ignominy and shame, Wurnafenglu insisted on standing again for election to the Innermost Pack, as if to tie disgrace like a rotting puppy around the neck of the Sardhluun forever.

The Werowance hoped that this young and vigorous challenger-whose name escaped the Werowance although it was no doubt a worthy one-could slay the shame of the pack, tear those undeserved honor-teeth from a ravaged neck, or at least prevent him from taking up the banner to represent the pack he had so deeply stained with the stink of dishonor.

Either candidate could at this time withdraw, although he would of course leave his honor-teeth behind on the sacred ground of the arena's fighting pit.

This was the burden of the Werowance's song.

The two candidates bowed their heads and drank the poison in their bowls.

The election would run until one of them had drunk the antidote beneath the Werowance's box, or until both of them were dead.

War noted the manifestation of Death. She appeared to his god's eye as she often did: lightless, faceless, spider-armed, and many-fingered.

She acknowledged the manifestations of both War and Wisdom and signified, "I visualized this encounter. I will not rejoin the pact-sworn intention."

The werewolves felt the presence of Death, although only a few ghostsniffers could actually see her (and that dimly). A shudder ran through the audience, and they leaned forward to watch the election.

Wurnafenglu had faced election many times; he knew the taste of poison well, and it didn't frighten him. The challenger stood in a different place entirely. He looked anxiously toward the bowl of remedy and licked his lips, still bitter with poison. If he ran straight toward the bowl of remedy and drank the antidote, he would not die. But he would gain no honor and another election would be held, with him as the incumbent.

Wurnafenglu saw the uncertainty on the challenger's face and smiled a long sinister smile. He trotted around until he stood squarely between the challenger and the bowl of remedy. Then he sat right down and stared at the moon, drinking its light with his eyes, idly scratching his right ear with his right forepaw. Death was in him and he knew it. But he did not fear it.

"I love that ugly black wolf," signified Death privately to War.

"I consider him to be a fool," War replied. "He spent the better part of a year torturing two prisoners who had gotten the better of him. Then he walks away and lets his guards get snot-face drunk on bloom smoke, simply because of a date on a calendar. Now he must fight for his right to keep what he has, and he must do the same all year long if he wins here tonight."

"Oh, he's a fool. No doubt of that. A clever fool. A cunning fool. A wise fool. That is my favorite kind of fool."

Wisdom knew these signs were directed at him, but he did not acknowledge them.

The challenger was growing anxious. He tried to lock gazes with Wurnafenglu, but the black wolf would not look at him. The challenger assumed a threatening posture and snarled at Wurnafenglu. The black wolf kept looking at the moon. Now he was idly scratching his left ear. The challenger barked that he would kill-kill-kill Wurnafenglu. His blood would be the challenger's most favored drink; his rotting liver would be given to the challenger's cubs for a holiday treat; his intestines would be used for sausages and sold for copper coins in Apetown, and the challenger would give the money away in charity to monkey-faced whores.

Undaunted by these terrors, Wurnafenglu waited.

"Your plan is not progressing as you foresaw," Wisdom signified to Death.

Death emanated a reckless joy, more intense and bitter than mere amusement.

The werewolves, patiently waiting for election developments, shuddered, thinking the warm winter night had suddenly turned chilly.

Death signified, "You are right. The torrent you predicted is sweeping away my visualization of the nearer future."

War grumbled, "This torrent which is so constantly in your signs does not appear to me to be very exciting. One battle in a whole year! And the Sardhluun did no more raiding than they usually do, and next year they'll have to do less."

The citizens in the audience began to grow restless. They wanted a more eventful election than this-something they could talk about to those who hadn't witnessed it, to argue about with those who had.

But the challenger was growing more anxious. His threatening posture had given way to a nervous dance. He capered one way, then another. He leapt back, then forward, snarling.

Wurnafenglu waited.

The challenger looked desperately at the moon, the stands, his enemy. His eyes were clouding; his vision was fading; his nervous antics were spreading the poison through his blood more rapidly. He scampered off in a long curving charge toward the remedy bowl.

Wurnafenglu leapt and struck with his full weight on the challenger's right shoulder. The challenger rolled in the dirt and tried to rise, snapping frantically with his jaws. But Wurnafenglu pinned him. He forced the challenger's head to the ground with his back feet as the challenger scrambled ineffectively to free himself. Wurnafenglu fixed his jaws at the base of the challenger's spine.

Hollow wolvish whistles of admiration echoed around the arena. Few in the audience would have staked a serious combat on a bite like that, where the backbone was strongest. There were a few skeptical yelps, and someone began a song to the effect that Wurnafenglu had made his last bad decision.

These were silenced by the crack of the challenger's spine, a crunching sound that reverberated all around the arena.

Wurnafenglu shook his opponent for a few moments, to make sure the spine was severed, and then he relaxed his jaws and let the broken challenger fall whining to the ground. He turned away and trotted calmly over to the bowl of remedy. Unhurriedly, without wasting a drop, he drank half the antidote.

Carefully, he picked up the bowl with his teeth and sidled toward the challenger, who was staring desperately at the moon, trying to knit his shattered spine together in time to continue the fight. If there had been three moons aloft and no poison in his veins, he might have managed it, but things were as they were.

Wurnafenglu held out the bowl of remedy to his fallen opponent.

This rarely happened in elections of the Sardhluun, and it was a disgrace to accept. But it did mean life rather than death for the defeated candidate.

The challenger weakly pushed the bowl away with his snout.

Wurnafenglu offered the bowl to the challenger again.

The challenger pushed it away again, more slowly and more reluctantly now.

Wurnafenglu offered the remedy to the challenger for a third time.

There was a moment of stillness. Then, in the sight of everyone, the challenger made a sudden movement to drink the remedy.

Wurnafenglu sidled out of reach and the challenger was foiled.

Wurnafenglu approached the sobbing challenger from the side and contemptuously poured the remedy over the challenger's genitals.

The challenger writhed about, trying to lick at the spilled remedy, but because of his broken spine he could not reach it.

Wurnafenglu smashed the bowl across the whining challenger's face and it shattered. Victorious Wurnafenglu ripped the honor-teeth from the defeated challenger's neck and fixed his jaws in the defenseless throat. He held his grip until the poison finished its work and the challenger was dead.

He tossed the corpse from him and looked toward the audience for his due.

They gave it-reluctantly at first, but then more and more enthusiastically. They howled their congratulations and applause. They ululated into the single-eyed night, saluting Wurnafenglu's victory. Everyone loves a winner, and he had proven, against their hopes and desires, that he was a winner. They wanted him on their side so that they could be winners, too.

War attempted to signify something to Death, but then took note she was no longer manifest.

"I signify this again," he signified to Wisdom. "Death is the strangest of the Strange Gods."

"She is lying," Wisdom signified reflectively. "I think everything she signifies is a lie."

"Then she's more reliable than most," War signified tolerantly. Lies are the normal form of communication in war, and he was used to them. "Oh well, I suppose the fighting is over." He ceased to manifest himself.

Wisdom remained manifest, watching and thinking. He knew about lies, too, and he knew that people or gods lie largely because they are frightened. He thought it was important to know why Death was afraid.

Now that the serious matter of the election was over, the lighter business of the celebration began. Wurnafenglu invited a few of his close personal friends down to the arena ground to help him kill and eat the never-wolf slave who had brought in the poison.

Chief among his guests was, of course, his old friend the Werowance. The Werowance explained, in a song where tones of grief mixed with gladness, that he had only seemed to criticize Wurnafenglu because of his official obligations, and that he had always esteemed the gnyrrand as one of the greatest citizens in the history of Wuruyaaria, and that he hoped they could continue to work together for the betterment of the pack and the city they both loved so much. Wurnafenglu replied that he understood the Werowance completely and that he hoped he would always esteem the Werowance at the Werowance's true worth.

Wurnafenglu named a few other friends and foes to join him in the feast, and then they gave chase to the woman.

She had been crouching in a shadowy edge of the arena, hoping against hope that she would be spared, or at least forgotten. When the wolves came for her, she tried to run, but there were several of them and no place for her to go. In the end, which came soon, she was cornered and she knew it.

She stood in the moonlight, her back to the arena wall, as the great silver-muzzled black wolf approached. She shook her fist at him. "Kree-laow!" she screamed in the bestial face. "Kree-laow!"

Then they took her down and killed her and ate her. Many minor guests were invited down to sample some of the meat and hobnob with the great ones, and the night was thought of as a memorable one, until the next election.

Kree-laow, in the language of the dead woman, meant "He will avenge." The werewolves neither knew nor cared about this. At least, not then.

Chapter Fourteen: Fund-Raising

On the third morning of the year, Morlock woke from a long, long dream. He stretched his crooked frame as he lay in the sun and wondered vaguely why so much of his terrible dream had involved werewolves. He opened his eyes and looked up straight into the face of a werewolf.

True, she was in the form of a woman, but he had learned to recognize the long narrow face of a werewolf in the day shape. She had a mottled skin like Hrutnefdhu, too (if he wasn't just part of the dream). And somehow, somehow inside, he just knew she was a werewolf.

He sat up and put one hand to his temple. He felt the healing wound there. The spike was gone. His Sight had returned.

"Thank you," he said.

Her eyes dropped. She seemed embarrassed. "I did what I could," she said eventually. "I'm not sure I got it all. You may …there still may be problems."

He closed his eyes and tested his insight. He realized she might be right. It was hard to tell; his inward blindness had gone on so long. But: he could dream. He could live. The world was as radiant with meaning as with sunlight.

"I still thank you," he said. "My name is Morlock Ambrosius, and my blood is yours."

"Well," she said, laughing, "I sopped up enough of it! I don't think I want any more. Oh, I'm sure that's the wrong thing to say. I don't know your customs. I should-it was for my Hrutnefdhu, you know. He calls you his old friend; I couldn't do less."

"Hrutnefdhu." Morlock closed his eyes, trying to separate memory from dream and from delusions of madness. "Yes: it was him, and Rokhlenu, and me. Us against them."

"It still is, Hrutnefdhu says. Only there are more of us. And more of them, too, I'm afraid. I am Liudhleeo, Hrutnefdhu's mate." She looked narrowly at him as if expecting him to recognize the name.

He had heard it, but didn't at first remember where. Then he did. He considered what to say. He neither wished to avoid the issue of the rape, nor make it the most important thing about her. To him, she was still the healer who had saved him from death and madness. But she was also his fellow prisoner-or fellow ex-prisoner, now. "How did you escape?" he asked.

It was not what she had been expecting him to say, clearly. Her eager-tobe-angered expression twisted into simple surprise, and then a kind of relief. "Oh? Oh, that. They-they let me go. Threw me out, really. I think they thought I was dying. I was-well, the next day, I was in pretty bad shape."

"I hated them for what they did to you."

She was embarrassed again, on the verge of anger. "I don't hate them. I don't hate them. But I didn't shed any tears when I heard what happened to them; you can bet on that."

"Eh."

She put her long clever hands over her mottled face and laughed. "They said you'd say that. They said you'd say that, but I didn't believe them."

"Eh."

"Oh, don't overdo it. It will take the magic away. You'll need something to eat, I expect."

"Yes." Morlock thought about the last time he hadn't been hungry, and he couldn't remember it. "Yes. I could eat anything in the world. Except meat," he added hastily, remembering a gray ear afloat in soupy porridge.

"Oh, yes: Hrutnefdhu mentioned your aversion. Don't worry. It's almost impossible to acquire anything as exotic and expensive as human flesh in the outlier pack."

"All the same. If you don't mind."

"I don't mind. Let me get you settled with breakfast, and I'll go off to find my Hrutnefdhu."

Breakfast was flatbread, cheese, and a warm murky sort of tea. Morlock found it wonderful, not least because nothing in it seemed to be a by-product of a human slaughterhouse.

Afterward, putting on the loose but well-made gray clothes that had been left for him, he stood at each one of the little den's many windows and stared out at the world.

To the north, Wuruyaaria towered over: mesa rising over mesa like great steps up the side of a mountain. He watched the tiny silhouettes of the baskets run up and down the funicular and tried to reason how they might work. He looked at the moon-clock set into the dark volcano, its metal gleaming gold in the sun. If Ulugarriu had made these things, he must meet Ulugarriu.

Hrutnefdhu showed up shortly thereafter.

"Good to see you better," the pale werewolf said, shamefaced for some reason.

Morlock thanked him. "And you are well?" he asked.

"Oh, the moon took care of that. As much as it could," he added rather mysteriously. "Let's go," he added hastily. "Rokhlenu wants to see you."

Morlock nodded and they left together. Hrutnefdhu set a very elaborate lock on the door, and they made their way down the narrow stairs. In the light from the street door, Morlock saw notices on the wall in two languages. One was a few starlike images that might have been ideograms; the other was longer and looked like it might be a phonetic script. Moonspeech and Sunspeech, or so he guessed.

"What do they say?" he asked Hrutnefdhu.

The pale mottled werewolf blushed and said, "`Tenants must bury their own dead. No smoking bloom on the stairways."`

"Bloom is the smoke the guards were drunk on the other night?" Morlock asked.

"Yes," Hrutnefdhu said. "Many smoke it to forget their troubles, and some seem to have more trouble than others. Look, there are no good neighborhoods in the outlier pack, but this is the very worst. You need to know that."

Morlock looked up and down the narrow boarded way that served as a street. It stopped not too far east of the towering lair; beyond it was a murky stretch of swamp water and beyond that a rising slope choked with thickets and the suggestion of a cave entrance or two.

"It seems ideal to me," said Morlock, as he followed Hrutnefdhu to the other side of the little settlement.

Rokhlenu was deep in conference with Olleiulu when he looked up and saw Morlock standing nearby, clear-eyed and relatively sane-looking. He jumped up and they grabbed each other's shoulders.

"How's freedom?" Rokhlenu asked.

"Good," Morlock said. "You're back in politics, I hear."

"I may be," Rokhlenu said, the anxieties of his position pressing down on him. "Have they fed you? Are you hungry?"

"They have fed me," Morlock said, "but I'm still hungry. I take it rations are scarce, though."

"Not for Khretvarrgliu they krecking are not!" barked Olleiulu, and the werewolves nearby all started shouting about Khretvarrgliu and food and how maybe things would be better now.

"Let's go eat, then," said Rokhlenu. "We can talk over breakfast."

Rokhlenu and Olleiulu walked on either side of Morlock to the other side of the great ramshackle building. Hrutnefdhu insisted on walking behind, and no one but Morlock seemed to think that odd. Half of the building served as a dormitory without beds; the other half served as a refectory without benches or tables. Morlock got a bowl of, unfortunately, porridge. At least it seemed to have no animal products in it other than butter and a little honey.

The big red werewolf with the golden hair had preceded them into the refectory, and when he saw Morlock he shouted incoherently and gestured and in general made a fuss until Morlock sat down by him. There was no one else sitting there, so Morlock dropped down and sat on the empty floor. The other werewolves did the same, although at a greater distance from the red werewolf.

The conveniences of the refectory didn't run to spoons, so Morlock ate with his fingers like the others.

"We are short of money, I take it," he said, between slurps.

In a confusing amount of detail, Rokhlenu, supplemented by Olleiulu and Hrutnefdhu, explained to Morlock just how short of money they were. The outlier pack in general was not wealthy, barely having enough food to sustain themselves, and the addition of nearly the entire prison population had made matters worse. Money was scarce; food was expensive; lodging was almost impossible.

The building they were sitting in and the food they were eating were gifts from someone named Wuinlendhono. Olleiulu kept referring to them as "love-gifts" and looking slyly at Rokhlenu. Rokhlenu would blush and talk about something else in a blustering voice. Morlock didn't want to embarrass his friend, but it seemed to be the central issue, so he finally asked.

"Wuinlendhono is the First Wolf of the outlier pack," Rokhlenu explained. "For the time being, at any rate."

"Oh," said Morlock. He thought for a moment or two. "What's stopping her from keeping the job?" he asked. "If she wants it."

"Well, she's a female."

"Yes?" -o was the feminine ending for names in Moonspeech and Sunspeech.

"We don't generally have females running our packs," Hrutnefdhu explained to him, when the other males did not seem to realize that more explanation was needed.

"Oh. Then we're talking an …an arranged mating, if that's the right term," Morlock said.

"Yes, exactly," Rokhlenu said hastily. "That's what it is. A political arrangement, that's all. It will give us a place in the outlier pack. But I have to do my own arranging, my family still being on Aruukaiaduun. And I have no portion."

Morlock mulled this over as he went to get a fingerful of porridge. To his surprise, he found his bowl was empty. He looked up at the werewolves. Most were expressionless. The red werewolf was shamefaced and his right hand was full of porridge. His terrified eyes dropped rather than meet Morlock's.

Theft was a serious crime where Morlock was raised, in some cases more serious than murder, but the red werewolf was obviously not juggling with both hands. Morlock shrugged and turned back to the others.

"He must have grabbed it straight out of my bowl," Morlock said. "Remarkable."

"The skill of long practice," Hrutnefdhu remarked. "Several of his cellmates died of hunger. I don't think he can help it. That's why we call him Hlupnafenglu." The name meant Steals-your-food.

"Eh." Morlock didn't want to talk about it, but instead listened as Rokhlenu explained the local mating customs. Courting gifts were common from females to males, but males were supposed to bring a certain amount of property to a marriage. If Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono married, her position would be secure and Rokhlenu's followers (most of the irredeemables and thugs who had fought their way out of prison with them) would have a place in the outliers.

"So we need money," Morlock said. "What kind of money? Cash? Things? Land?"

"Whatever we can get," Rokhlenu said. Olleiulu proposed a plan to work as robbers on the roads around the never-wolf cities in the south. In a year or two, they could return with a portion for Rokhlenu and enough coin to support the irredeemables for a while-if that was what they all wanted, to join the outliers.

As the three werewolves discussed this plan's merits and defects, Morlock thought about one thing and another. Presently he felt the weight of the bowl on his knee grow greater. He looked down to see most of his porridge had been returned. He looked up to see Hlupnafenglu looking at him shamefacedly.

"Take it," Morlock said, holding out the bowl. "No, take it," he added, when the red werewolf tried to push it away. "You're bigger than I am. You need the food more than I do. I've already eaten today. Take the food."

He persisted until the red werewolf grabbed the bowl and glumly started scooping up the contents.

The other werewolves displayed varying degrees of bemusement. "It's a new age of miracles," Hrutnefdhu muttered. "Hlupnafenglu giving back food…."

Rokhlenu was talking about joining some council of advisors with his intended bride, but Morlock declined to join him. "I'll go round up some money," he said. The other werewolves looked at him skeptically, and Rokhlenu asked if there was anything he needed.

"Two things," Morlock said. "First, a guide who can take me to the nearest market or markets."

"That's me," said Hrutnefdhu eagerly.

"Second, if it's not too much trouble, my sword."

"Your sword," Rokhlenu said blankly. "The one with the black-andwhite blade? The one you called to you in the New Year's fight? The one you slew the blue dragon with in the mountains?"

"Yes, it was not with me when I woke up."

"Those worthless barking ball-less brachs," whispered Olleiulu. "Those ape-toed, bald-faced, quivering slugs. They have stolen the sword of Khretvarrgliu."

"Well, many of them were in prison for theft, you know," Hrutnefdhu said, almost apologetically.

"I will roast them alive on silver spikes over a fire of wolfbane," Olleiulu said. "I will make them beg for the mercy of death and I will deny it them. I will kick their sorry ugly up-for-sale asses. I will get your sword back, Khretvarrgliu." He leapt to his feet and set off at a furious run.

"Thank you," Morlock said mildly to his back. He pounded Rokhlenu on the shoulder and went off to the marketplace with Hrutnefdhu. Hlupnafenglu followed them, a vague look on his face, the bowl still in his hand.

Business was slow in the marketplace; Morlock saw many vacant spaces among the vendors. The busiest corner stood between two whorehouses. A sausage seller and portrait maker had commandeered the space and were doing a fair business with those passing by toward one or the other door.

"Stay here," Morlock said to Hrutnefdhu and Hlupnafenglu.

Morlock walked up to the sausage seller and said, "Have you got live coals there?"

"I've got fresh sausages," the seller said, ready to be offended. "Each one contains a certain proportion of real meat!"

"I don't care about that," Morlock said. "But you've got them on a warming grill, and there's fire under the grill."

"Are you hinting that something might happen to my sausage cart?" the seller said suspiciously. "I pay protection to First Wolf of the outliers himself! You'll answer to him if you bother me! And you're bothering me!"

"The First Wolf of the outliers is a female," Morlock pointed out.

"He's right," said an amused spectator. "Better pay up, Chunky."

"Moonless nights," muttered the seller. "All right, what do you and your boys want?"

Morlock looked around and saw that Hrutnefdhu and Hlupnafenglu were at his elbows. The big red werewolf was staring with naked greed at the sausages on the grill.

"I told you to stay over there," Morlock said.

"Couldn't make him," the pale werewolf admitted.

Morlock took the bowl from Hlupnafenglu's hand and tapped him gently on the nose with it. There was a gasp from bystanders, and a crowd began to gather, expecting a fight.

Morlock had only done it to get Hlupnafenglu's attention, and this it had just barely done. The red werewolf looked vaguely in his direction, and Morlock said, "Over there. Wait over there. There is where you wait. Over there. Not here. There." He pointed. He stared at the red werewolf. He pointed. Eventually Hlupnafenglu got a troubled look on his face. He looked at the far side of the market where Morlock was pointing. He looked back at Morlock. He looked back and forth several times. Eventually he gave a last longing glance at the sausages and shambled sadly away. Hrutnefdhu followed at his heels.

"If you give me some coals of fire," said Morlock, turning back to the seller, "I'll give you a copper coin when I get one."

"That means you haven't got one."

"But I'll get one."

"If I don't give you the coals, what will you do?"

"I'll get them from someone else."

"Are you crazy?"

"I don't see why that matters."

The seller threw up his hands and opened the firebox on his cart. He picked up a pair of tongs to pull out some coals.

"Never mind that," said Morlock, and reached in with his right hand to grab a fistful of coals. There were even more gasps in the rapidly accumulating crowd, and someone actually screamed. This was all to Morlock's liking. He dropped the bowl at his feet and started juggling the live coals.

The audience was impressed. Not as impressed as an audience would have been in Narkunden or Ontil: werewolves did not fear fire any more than the children of Ambrose. But then, werewolves in their night shape do not have fingers and do not juggle. The audience speculated that Morlock was a werewolf who did not change fully to human: he might have wolvish paws, immune to fire. On request, Morlock showed them his hairless palms.

"He probably shaves them," shouted a heckler.

"Like you?" someone else retorted, to much abusive laughter.

Coins started appearing in Morlock's bowl. He threw hooks and doublehooks; he threw double-sidehooks where his hands moved so fast it looked as if he was throwing infinity rings. He kept juggling the coals until the fire was gone. By then the bowl was nearly full of red coins, shining copper and rusting iron.

He took a single copper coin and handed it to the sausage seller.

"Keep it," said the seller, who had sold his entire stock to the crowd that had gathered to watch Morlock's juggling.

"This was our deal," said Morlock, and pressed the coin on him.

"I'm out of sausages and I'm going back to my shop in Apetown," the seller said. "Will you be here this afternoon?"

"I don't know."

"Will you be here tomorrow?"

"Probably not."

"Look, I'll pay you to be here. We're a team, Chiefl"

"I'm not your chief," said Morlock. He picked up his bowl and turned to the portrait maker, who was telling two uninterested passersby that he was Luyukioronu Longthumbs and they were missing the chance of a lifetime to have their portrait inked by him.

"How much for a drawing in ink?" Morlock asked Luyukioronu, after the passersby had passed by.

"Two pads of copper," said Luyukioronu eagerly. He hadn't done as well with the crowd as the sausage seller.

"I'll give you three pads for the paper, the ink, and the loan of a brush."

"What?" said the would-be artist suspiciously.

Morlock repeated himself.

"I'll do the drawing. Just give me the money," Luyukioronu insisted.

"You want the money, you give me what I asked for."

The crowd, which had shown signs of dispersing, began to thicken again.

Reluctantly, Luyukioronu surrendered the materials.

Morlock made a few trial strokes with the brush and the ink on the boards of the market floor. Then he spun the brush in his hands and thought for a moment. He dipped the brush in the ink and applied the brush to the page in swift decisive strokes. Soon it was a picture of a volcano with a moon-clock in its side, with mists hovering about that half obscured the symbols.

"That's Mount Dhaarnaiarnon," whispered a member of the crowd.

"Is it?" Morlock said. "Would anyone like this drawing? I will give it to them for free."

This sounded too good to be true. But the drawing was a marvel in black-and-white. Slowly, suspiciously, a middle-aged citizen edged forward and silently held out his hand. Morlock gave him the drawing and handed the ink and brush back to the artist.

He waited.

"Ink my portrait," someone said tentatively.

"Paint my mate's portrait," said another.

"Paint Ullywuino!" shouted someone else. "She's my favorite whore!"

"There's too much paint on her already," someone else said.

Morlock held up his hands. "I have nothing to paint with, citizens. Unless you buy materials from this reliable craftsman."

"Hey!" shouted Luyukioronu. "I'm not your stationer! Buy your own stuffl"

Morlock shrugged. "I'm here to make money. I can draw better than you. The crowd won't want your work after they've seen mine."

The artist-werewolf's face worked angrily. He glanced at the drawing, still being held up with wonder by the crowd. He threw down the brush and the bowl of ink and stood up.

"Fine," Luyukioronu shouted. "Take the stuff. I hope the ink poisons you. But you won't get my teeth." He clutched at the few honor-teeth he had at his throat. Morlock saw with interest that his thumbs were indeed long: the tips stretched farther than his index fingers. "You'll have to fight me for those," Luyukioronu continued, "you gray-bagged, flat-faced, ape-fingered son of a never-wolf!"

"Wait!" said Morlock. "Stop!"

Luyukioronu walked stiff-legged away.

The crowd applauded.

Morlock looked around in bemusement. Hrutnefdhu was there in the crowd, and he took pity on his never-wolf friend. "You showed you had more bite as an artist than he did. The stuff is yours now."

"Eh." Morlock grabbed the bowl of coins. "How much is this stuff worth? Less than this?"

"A dozen coppers, perhaps. He probably stole it, you know."

"Maybe he did, but I won't. Go after him. Give him twenty copper coins. Take the rest to Rokhlenu and meet me back here."

The pale werewolf smiled strangely at him, took the bowl, and left.

"Citizens," Morlock said, sitting down by the easel. "What will you?"

He painted. He drew images in ink for four copper coins each. There were some sticks of charcoal tucked away in the artist's kit, and he sold pictures in charcoal for two copper coins each. There was some odd pigment in soft sticks, like chalk mixed with colors and oil. He found this fascinating to work with, but he didn't forget he was there to make money. He charged six copper coins for work in these.

He did it for the money, because he and his friends needed money. But it wasn't only the money. He was a maker who had made virtually nothing for more than a year. He ached to reshape matter with his hands and his dreams-now that he could dream again. Each image was important to him for itself, not just for the money.

And money wasn't all he earned by it. Customers often handed him an honor-tooth along with their coins. He thought it was a mistake at first, but they seemed angry if he asked them about it, so he stopped asking.

Most of the pictures were portraits. The customers wanted keepsakes of themselves, their mates, their sweethearts, their cubs. But one citizen said, "Make me a tree. I like trees." So Morlock drew in inks a maijarra tree he had seen in his now-distant youth on the western edge of the world. The next customer wanted a more warlike scene, so Morlock sketched in charcoal and smoky pastels the chaotic central chamber of the Vargulleion prison on that memorable New Year's Night. This was very popular, and customers wanted more like it, so Morlock drew scene after scene of the battle, as much as his hazy memory permitted. He drew images of Rokhlenu on the dragon he had killed in the mountain pass of Kirach Kund, images of Rokhlenu fighting the Spiderfolk. The crowd was intrigued by the images of the werewolf, and even more interested when they found that the werewolf was the intended spouse of the outliers' First Wolf.

Finally, Morlock took the last roll of paper that he had and used most of the rest of the ink and pigment on a vast panorama of the city of Wuruyaaria as he had first seen it, rising in savage civil splendor up the mesas of the mountainside, facing the threatening mass of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon, glaring over the scene with its single intricate mechanical eye. The overall tone was greenish, but Morlock stippled the surface with yellow pigment and smeared it with his thumb until the image shone with a green-and-gold misty luster he had never seen in the world, but somehow seemed exactly right.

"Who's that for?" asked someone in the crowd.

"Whoever pays the most for it," Morlock replied.

The impromptu auction netted Morlock several more fistfuls of copper coins, and a string of honor-teeth. The image went to the madam of one of the day-lairs (i.e., whorehouses) nearby. She said it would be perfect to decorate her waiting room.

"No doubt," Morlock said, with the sinking feeling a maker often has when relinquishing his work.

He bought a woman's headcloth to roll up his newfound wealth in. The crowd began to thin out reluctantly, the show obviously being over.

Two shadows fell across Morlock as he was rolling up the cloth. He looked up to see the long leering face of Luyukioronu, the werewolf artist. Next to him was a many-scarred thug with clawed fingers and a pronounced and toothy overbite.

"You took my stuff," Luyukioronu said. "So now we'll take your stuff. Stand back, never-wolf."

"Didn't my friend find you?" Morlock asked. "I sent him with payment for your materials. And you can have back whatever's left."

"He gave me your money. But that just told me you're afraid. So I used it to hire Snekknafenglu here, and we'll take the rest of your money nowand those honor-teeth you've got; you probably stole those, too."

"No man or wolf calls me thief," said Morlock as he stood.

"You!" shouted Luyukioronu. "Who ever heard of you to call you anything, you rat-tailed tailless bald-faced never-wolf-"

The crowd stood back, but did not leave. The show was clearly not yet entirely over. They had enjoyed watching Morlock work, but they would not intervene: a citizen should only carry what he or his can fight to keep. That was their law.

Morlock saw Snekknafenglu edging forward while Luyukioronu raved. Morlock lashed out with the edge of an ink-stained hand at what seemed to be the weakest part of Snekknafenglu's protruding upper jaw. The mercenary staggered back, eyes crossing in pain. Morlock turned to Luyukioronu and kicked him savagely in one knee. As the artist was reeling, Morlock kicked him in the other knee and he went down on the boards. Morlock turned back to Snekknafenglu standing at bay between Hrutnefdhu and Olleiulu. Olleiulu, Morlock was relieved to see, was carrying Tyrfing.

"What do you want us to do with him?" Olleiulu asked.

"Yes, what should we do with him-Khretvarrgliu?" Hrutnefdhu added slyly, glancing at Snekknafenglu.

The effect of the name on the thug was immediate and, Morlock had to admit, somewhat gratifying. Snekknafenglu gasped, looked anxiously at Morlock, anxiously at the sword, and turned to flee.

"Let him go," Morlock said, so his friends did. The thug-for-hire ran off, and a few members of the crowd tapered off after him, perhaps hoping to win a few honor-teeth from Snekknafenglu while he was feeling whipped.

Morlock turned to the artist, who was struggling to get back afoot. He snatched the artist's honor-teeth and ripped them from the hairy neck. Then he tossed them into the swamp water, where they sank out of sight.

"I am not a thief," said Morlock. "But you are a liar. Earn your bite back by telling the truth, or I'll take your teeth again."

The crowd hooted and applauded ironically as Luyukioronu scrambled away to nurse his losses.

"Well, you've had a busy morning," said Hrutnefdhu, eyeing Morlock's money-roll.

Morlock glanced at the sky in surprise. It was not yet noon.

"How about lunch?"

Morlock was ravenously hungry but said, "No thanks. You can take this money to Rokhlenu. Sorry it's so heavy-can we change it for silver, somewhere?"

"Silver," said Hrutnefdhu faintly. "Are you still crazy?"

"Oh." Morlock reflected for a moment. Silver would not pass for currency among werewolves. "No. Never mind. Tell Rokhlenu I'll send more when I can." Hrutnefdhu shrugged, took the money-roll, and departed.

Morlock accepted the sword from Olleiulu with sincere thanks.

"We found it in a stash one of our fellow escapees had set up," Olleiulu said. "A second-floor hero. He waited until the guards were dead or fled and he then looted bodies. He showed up here the next day and stole your sword the following night. Well, now we have one fewer mouth to feed, and a few more of us have some gear."

"Eh."

"You should put those honor-teeth on," Olleiulu said, pointing at the string Morlock had left on the boards of the market floor.

"Eh."

"I don't know what that means, and I don't mean any kind of disrespect. If you won't, you won't. But people see you without honor-teeth, they try to take whatever you got away from you. I know you can brush them off, but why should you have to?"

Morlock saw his point. He grabbed up the honor-teeth and roped them around his neck.

Olleiulu looked relieved. Morlock wondered if it was bad for a werewolf's reputation to be seen with someone who wore no honor-teeth; he guessed it might. Neither Hrutnefdhu nor Liudhleeo wore them, Morlock reflected.

"Well, what's next if it's not lunch? Rokhlenu said that me or Hrutnefdhu had to stay with you until you-until you-"

"Until I wasn't obviously crazy."

"Which I know you're not, no matter what that plepnup says. But you can't know your way around the boards yet."

"The plepnup is my friend, Olleiulu."

"Uh-huh, Chief. I didn't mean anything bad."

"Can you take me where he lives? Where he and Liudhleeo live?"

Olleiulu nodded sagely. "You're not hungry; you're tired. You want to rest."

"Not exactly." Morlock was both hungry and tired, but now that he had Tyrfing back there were many other things he could and should do.

Through the thinning crowd, Morlock saw the other side of the market square. Sitting with somber concentration, his head in his hands, was the big red werewolf, Hlupnafenglu.

"I forgot about him," Morlock admitted.

"Lucky you," Olleiulu snorted.

They went over, and Morlock told Hlupnafenglu that he could get up. He had to say it several times before the red werewolf could hear it or would believe it, but eventually he sighed with relief and got to his feet. He beamed with vacant happiness on Morlock and the scornful Olleiulu.

"East we go," said Olleiulu, and they went east.

Around sunset, Olleiulu returned alone to the ramshackle building Rokhlenu and his men used as quarters. He brought with him a sizable box sporting a wheel and handles for grasping. Whatever was in the box was obviously very heavy.

Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono were sitting outside the building in chairs that had seen better days. Rokhlenu cocked an eye at Olleiulu and said, "I take it my friend is quite well and knows his way around the outlier pack perfectly."

Olleiulu put the box down and gasped for a while. When he could speak he said, "Khretvarrgliu seems to be well. But I think maybe I'm crazy, after today."

"What's in the box?" Wuinlendhono asked. "Not more fruits of the marketplace, I hope. I had several complaints from merchants that Morlock was funnelling all the money his way this morning."

Olleiulu looked to his chieftain, who nodded. Olleiulu lifted the lid of the box slightly and they all saw the red gleam of raw gold within. Olleiulu slammed the box shut before anyone else could see it.

"Well," Wuinlendhono said, after a brief silence. "It seems like that mating is on. If you're still interested, of course; I don't like to presume."

"I'm interested," Rokhlenu said grimly. It was true in several ways …unfortunately, they were ways that might not run together.

"There isn't that much gold in the outlier pack," Wuinlendhono reflected.

"There is now, I guess. Where did it come from, Olleiulu?"

"That's why I think I must be crazy. He …he …he made it. He apologizes it's not so much. He says there'll be more tomorrow."

"Hmmmm," hummed Wuinlendhono. "We'll have to hire a ghostsniffer to make sure it's really real. But assuming it will pass the sniff test, we can proceed with negotiating the terms of the marriage alliance." She stood in a single fluid movement. "I'll have one of my old women come over tomorrow and chew over the details with one of your men."

"Olleiulu, that'll be you."

Olleiulu nodded.

Wuinlendhono licked the face of her intended in farewell and then walked sinuously away to her own lair-tower. The lupine bodyguards who had lain out of sight jumped up and danced around her as she walked, unregarding, among them.

"Have a seat," Rokhlenu offered. "Tell me about it."

Olleiulu ignored the seat next to his chieftain, sitting on the boards next to the treasure box. He grasped his ears a few times to settle his thoughts, and then began.

"I get there to the market and he's in the middle of some kind of barking match with Luyukioronu the forger and Snekknafenglu the claw-for-hire. Not the Snekknafenglu who works out of Dogtown, the other one."

"I don't know either one."

"That's right. I keep forgetting we weren't in business together until a few nights ago."

Rokhlenu never forgot it, but he didn't want to say that to Olleiulu; he might take it wrong. "It's a new life since then, and we've been together through most of it."

"Right. Anyway. We keep Khretvarrgliu from ripping them up-"

Rokhlenu had heard a more measured account from Hrutnefdhu, but he made allowances for Olleiulu's admiration for Morlock, and the form that admiration took.

-and after we sent off the plepnup-"

"That plepnup is my friend, Olleiulu."

"I keep making that mistake. Sorry, I don't mean anything by it. Anyway, we sent him back to you with the coin and we collected that crazy Hlupnafenglu and walked east right out of town. I think he wants to go back to a lair and sleep the afternoon like people do. But he heads straight past the pl-past Hrutnefdhu's lair and starts wading through the swamp. Hlupnafenglu plops in right after him."

"I wouldn't have done that, myself. Gotten in that water, I mean."

"Oh, thanks, Chief. I'll treasure that little piece of advice. I jumped as far across as I could, but I still ended in the shallows on the far side. Do you have any idea how bad that muck stinks?"

"No, thank ghost. Either you're downwind of me or you must have cleaned up."

"Cleaned up, but it was a while until I got to that. He starts setting up in one of those creepy caves up on the slope-"

"Setting up what? I thought all he had was his sword."

"That's all he got there with, right. But he starts cutting up brushwood and small trees on the hillside, swinging the sword like an axe."

"Weird."

"You said that too soon. He's got stacks of wood by now, see, and he takes a bunch of sticks and he builds a kind of basket or something."

"A basket."

"Except there was no way to carry anything in it. It was round like a ball and there were gaps all around in it, and the branches were weaved-"

"Woven."

11 -weaved together in a crazy way that kind of made my eyes hurt. Then he puts his back against the cave wall, and it's like he's gone to sleep or something."

"Well, it's a warm day for winter."

"It's a warm day for late spring. But I don't think he was really asleep. His sword started to glow and his eyes a little too-I mean you could see it through his eyelids."

"Is it too early to say `weird' yet?"

"You tell me. After he's not-sleeping like this for a while, a fuzzy shiny sort of mist starts coming out of the basket and floats away. Eventually he wakes up and lights a fire. He lights a lot of little fires, one at a time. He strikes sparks from a couple of stones, and he catches them with a leaf or a piece of grass or something, one by one you understand, and then he says something to them, talks to them like they're people, and he sets them down in the basket.

"Which starts to burn."

"No. He puts stuff in the basket-grass and junk; I don't know. It burns. But the basket doesn't burn."

"All right, I'll call that weird."

"But what about when the little flames started talking back? He says something, and they say it back to him in little sparky voices? What do you call that?"

"Weirder."

"Oh, go mate yourself and have knuckly puppies. So, once he's got enough flames-I don't know maybe it was twenty or thirty-he starts making baskets while he talks to them. Real baskets you could carry stuff in. He packed them with earth and grass so the stuff in them didn't fall out."

"What stuff did he put in them?"

"Not him. Us. Hlupnafenglu and me. He wanted sand. Muddy, if it had to be, but the sandier the better. Then he sits back and takes another one of those not-a-naps while we haul sand and the flames argue and snap at each other."

"Are you sure?"

"Kreck, no. I couldn't understand them. But that's what it sounded like. We had a pretty big heap of sandy muck by the entrance of the cave when Morlock woke up. He tells us to keep at it and wanders off up the hillside, and he comes back with just a basket of dumb stuff. some yellow stinkstone, and dead beehives, and I don't know what else. Then he takes a bunch of it and mixes it up in a little basket like a dish, like about as wide as your hand. And he puts it inside the big basket, the one with the talking flames, like he's a baker putting some bread in an oven."

"Yum."

"You liked it." Olleiulu jerked a thumb toward the treasure box.

"That's how he made the gold?"

"Right. He came back after a while and changed baskets, and the one that came out of the big basket, he called it the nexus-the one that came out of the nexus was full of gold. It goes in reeking like yellow stinkstone and it comes out like raw gold. He's just dumping it on the ground in his cave. This goes on for a while."

"Busy afternoon."

"He takes some sand and he burns it in the nexus. He keeps going over to it and turning it with his bare fingers, folding it over on itself while it was red hot. And he talked a lot to the flames while he was working. It might have been just because they were there, but he didn't talk to us that way."

"What did he make the glass into?"

"He called them `mirror gates.' He makes water run uphill with them."

"Drop dead."

"I almost did. Never seen anything like it. Never seen anything like half the stuff I saw this afternoon, but that was the weirdest. He dug a skinny channel up the hill and another one running down again, and he lined them with wood smeared with beeswax. He put a mirror gate at the top and the bottom of the channels, where they joined. And he took a basket of water-"

"You want to give me some help with that one?"

"I'm the one that needs the help. I mean, you could see the water through the weave of the basket."

"Did he explain how he did it?"

"He didn't seem to think it was a secret, but there was stuff he didn't know how to say in Sunspeech or Moonspeech, and I didn't know how to tell him how to say it. I think he was saying that he tricked it-said the water was `gullible.' Only a little at a time, though. `You can't argue with a lake,' he said. `Even a pond can be stubborn.' But I don't know if he really knew what all the words meant."

"Or you didn't know what he meant."

"And I never will. Anyway, he dumps out the basket into one of the channels, and the murky water runs downhill, like you'd expect, and it hits the mirror gate at the bottom and it runs uphill. The muck mostly didn't want to travel uphill-Morlock says earth is less gullible than water-and after the water had been up and down the hill a couple times it was clear as air, clearer than the air usually is around this swamp. He kept dumping baskets of water in the channels until he had a regular brook running upside and downside. We sponged off with the clean water and drank deep-drank our body weight in water, I think. It was around that time the pl-Hrutnefdhu showed up. He came screaming through the swamp like a chicken on fire, and he ran up and down alongside the channels a couple times, and he wanted to be introduced to each flame personally, and he danced around the gold as if he had invented it personally, and he was pretty excited about the whole business, I guess. Morlock and him talked about stuff for half-forever, it seemed like."

Rokhlenu reflected that Olleiulu was more comfortable with Morlock the bloodstained beast slayer than Morlock the work-stained maker and friend of low-status citizens.

"Anyway, the sun was getting pretty low by then. I was going to bring Hlupnafenglu back with me, but he wouldn't leave the flames-just wanted to sit next to them and stare at them. So I came away with the gold."

"How'd you get back across the swamp water?"

"Wickerwork boat," Olleiulu said glumly. "I-well, I had something to do. He had the boat and some other stuff done when I got back. His hands were moving all the time, all the time."

Rokhlenu wondered what Olleiulu had had to do, but it seemed like an unhappy memory, so he didn't press him on it. Instead he changed the topic to the negotiations for the marriage settlement.

The sun was setting, and they were still deep in consultation when a messenger wolf with human fingers ran up to tell Rokhlenu that Wuinlendhono needed him. There was an embassy from the Sardhluun Pack in First Wolf's Lair: they said they wanted their prisoners back.

Chapter Fifteen: Quarry

Once a snake, resting in the cool shadows of a marble quarry, was approached by a werewolf holding a box made of light, glass, and certain heretical opinions.

The werewolf, still in the day shape, leaped to trap the snake; but the snake, who was Wisdom, transited to the other side of the quarry.

"Ulugarriu," the snake said, condescending to speak with its mouth, you will never trap me that way."

"Won't I?" Ulugarriu replied.

"No. My visualization of totality warned me of your approach. Your war against the gods is worse than folly, maker."

"Is it?"

"Yes," said Wisdom. "It grieves me that we're enemies-"

"Does it?"

"-but I see that the folly has eaten you deeply-"

"Has it?"

"Be that way, then, you fur-faced ill-born," the snake hissed, and summoned ramparts of madness to attend him.

"I am not wearing my night shape," Ulugarriu observed, edging closer through the quarry shadows. "If I were, I would sing insults back at you. It would be a relief to my spirit, for I fear you. But why do you insult me? Does a god fear a fur-faced ill-born?"

But the snake was done with talking. He raised up a rampart of phobia between him and the werewolf.

Ulugarriu hesitated, and then took from the box a cloak of red-eyed anger. The werewolf donned the cloak and began to force a way through the rampart of phobia.

Wisdom then realized he did feel a little fear. While Ulugarriu was still entangled in the phobia, he transited to the far end of the quarry.

He would have transited farther, but he found he could not. His passage through space-time was obstructed somehow.

Ulugarriu surpassed the rampart of phobia and ran down the quarry toward Wisdom.

The snake raised up a rampart of delusions to block the werewolf.

The werewolf drew a two-edged blade, one edge deeply serrated with ugly irregular saw-teeth of evidence. Using this, Ulugarriu patiently began to saw through the delusions.

"Don't you wish to know why I'm here?" Ulugarriu asked as the sawtooth blade ground away at Wisdom's defense.

The snake knew that the werewolf was asking questions to trap him; it was an ancient way to get to wisdom. But it was a game his chosen nature compelled him to play.

"Yes," the snake replied. "Tell me, if you will."

"I will, indeed. Wisdom, this instrument your people have unleashed against my people-"

"You brought it on yourselves! You most of all!"

"Yes, me most of all. And so if I am to defeat this instrument-"

"You can't. Our united visualizations agree. Wuruyaaria will be destroyed."

Ulugarriu laughed strangely. "Wisdom! Wisdom! If only we'd had this conversation a year or two ago! How happy I could have made you with my despair. But now something has changed. Is it some new factor, not present in your visualizations or my mantic spells? Is it something about the nature of your instrument? (I hate that thing so much. How I long to kill it!) Or are your visualizations no longer united? My insight detects some flaw, some sort of disunity. I think you will tell me. I think you must tell me."

Wisdom belatedly realized that Ulugarriu had surpassed the rampart of delusion and was dangerously close to him. He summoned up a rampart of delirium to defend himself.

Ulugarriu patiently reversed the two-edged blade. The other edge was as smooth as the first was rough: this was a glittering razor of rational distinction. The werewolf whittled away at the wall of delirium, and now Wisdom began to feel something like despair. His only hope was to wait until nightfall. Whatever Ulugarriu had used to confine him, the change of sunlight to moonlight would be in his favor.

"How did you confine me here?" he asked Ulugarriu, hoping to gain time and knowledge.

The werewolf chuckled. "You're hoping nightfall will save you. No, dear Wisdom: it won't. I wrapped this locus of space-time with a four-dimensional coil, woven of dictates from the Aesir. It was a lot of trouble to collect them, but I knew it would be worth it someday. We are bound here in this stone vagina, gaping in the ground. The sun will not set, nor will you leave, until a certain thing happens. So it is not a matter of time after all. There are powers greater than time."

Ulugarriu had surpassed the rampart of delirium.

Wisdom enmeshed the werewolf in the rampart of mania. The werewolf reversed the cloak of red-eyed anger, and it became a cloak of black-eyed gloom.

Wisdom, smiling fiercely, resummoned the rampart of mania as the rampart of depression. Ulugarriu, weighed down by the cloak of gloom, labored sluggishly in the dark wall of depression.

Wisdom was dismayed. Lesser beings would have been instantly crushed by the weight Ulugarriu was enduring.

"What is it you want from me?" Wisdom asked.

The werewolf gasped something between a sob and a laugh. "The instrument! The instrument! Stupidity didn't devise it. Mercy had no hand in it. It has the stink of death and cunning on it. I think you and your friend Death made it, and I can find out from you how to break it. If I don't learn that, I will learn other things. I love to learn."

Ulugarriu was near, then, very near, moving slowly because of the weight of darkness but still moving. The werewolf reached out with the box made of light and glass and heresy.

Then behind the werewolf's darkness was a greater darkness. It wore the shape of a woman, except that she had many branching arms and legs.

Ulugarriu felt the weight of Death's shadow and said frankly, "I don't understand how you passed the barrier of divine intention."

"I killed the Aesir," signified Death, and the werewolf shook with the cold indifferent force of her signs. "Now their intentions are one with their hopes and fears: nothing. As yours shall be, wolf."

For answer, the werewolf opened the box. From it came the screams of a goddess: Justice. Wisdom quailed utterly under the assault, and even Death was stunned for a moment. When they recovered, the werewolf maker had escaped.

"Thanks, Death," Wisdom signified.

"We were friends once," Death observed, and began to demanifest.

"Wait!" Wisdom signified.

"For no one," signified Death. "Not even you." Then she was no longer manifest.

Wisdom withdrew his manifestation into the darkness underground and brooded there.

What the werewolf had said was true. The instrument did have the stink of cunning and death on it. Death had proposed the instrument to the Strange Gods, but now Death was free from the sworn intention of the other gods. If there was cunning here, it was not his. He spent some time unren- dering his visualization of the all and rerendering it.

He did not know and he needed to know. He was no god of wisdom. Also, Death was afraid, and whatever frightened her terrified him.

Chapter Sixteen: Offers Made; Offers Refused

About sunset, Morlock and Hrutnefdhu had just given up their last attempt to dislodge Hlupnafenglu from his perch beside the choir of flames. They left some dried meat and cheese (which, remarkably, he did not seem to be interested in) and a blanket against the night's chill-assuming there was any chill present in the warm air of this freakish winter. Then they took the wickerwork boat back across the open swamp.

The sun had long since disappeared behind the slope above, but now the curtain of sunlight withdrew over the edge of the world and the single eye of the second moon, Horseman, glared down on the world from a suddenly dark sky misty with clouds.

The transition struck Hrutnefdhu midway through their passage, and he writhed, screaming, into his night shape, almost overturning the little boat. Morlock was distracted by the effort to keep the boat upright and didn't note the details of Hrutnefdhu's transformation. But Hrutnefdhu was a wolf before they reached the far side.

He had been wearing a sort of kilt as his only garment, and now he stood on all fours, staring at it bemusedly. Morlock scooped it up and said he would carry it back to the den.

Hrutnefdhu sang his thanks and leapt out of the boat. Morlock followed, relieved to be on dry land again: he didn't like boat journeys, even as brief as this one.

Hrutnefdhu sang as they were approaching the rickety tenement-lair that they were happy to have Khretvarrgliu with them. Hrutnefdhu had worried that he might want to stay in the cave.

Morlock had considered this, but he didn't say so. The pale mottled werewolf had obviously wanted him to room with him and his mate quite badly. Maybe it gave them status, or maybe there was another reason. Morlock liked him and didn't want to displease him. Rather than say all this, he said, "Eh."

Hrutnefdhu laughed snufflingly and sang that Morlock need not be so ghost-bitten wordy; he could hardly keep up with the flow of eloquence.

"Eh," said Morlock. Then a practical matter occurred to him, and he reached into a pocket. "What do I owe you both? I have some gold left-"

Hrutnefdhu turned on him, barking furiously. He would kill-kill-kill Morlock if he said anything more about money. Never-wolves should stick to grunting; it was the only kind of conversation they were good for.

Morlock sat down beside the pale werewolf on the wooden street. "I spoke badly, it's true. Friendship is not bought and sold. We call it `blood' in my people-blood chosen-not-given. And blood has no price."

Hrutnefdhu wondered why he talked of money at all, then, and why he didn't keep his stupid flat ape-face shut, then; that was what Hrutnefdhu wanted to know. (His barking was still a little hysterical.)

Morlock waved his hands. "Things cost money. Don't you pay money for shelter, for food, for water-for everything but air, here? I have gold. I only wish to share. Why should I have money, and you not. Eh?"

The pale werewolf settled down. He sat beside Morlock and he said that things were fine just now, and that when money was needed they would treat Morlock's money as their own. Would that suit him? Could they stop talking about this ugly subject now?

Morlock nodded, and they sat there in silence for a time as Hrutnefdhu calmed down.

Hrutnefdhu finally sang that his blood was a little wild; he had not slept in the afternoon, as maybe he should have done. His afternoon had been frustrating beyond that. He asked Morlock not to think badly of him.

"Shut your maw," said Morlock agreeably, and was about to get up when Hrutnefdhu held out a paw, and Morlock sat back and waited.

Hrutnefdhu asked if Morlock had thought they would die, back in the tunnel leading out of the Vargulleion.

"I wasn't thinking very clearly then," Morlock said, remembering the night as if it were years or centuries ago. "I did expect us to be killed before we escaped."

Hrutnefdhu admitted that he had planned to ditch Morlock and Rokhlenu during the escape. The last thing he expected was to find himself fighting in the tunnel.

Morlock opened his hands and waited. There was obviously something Hrutnefdhu wanted to tell him.

The pale werewolf sang that he had meant to run away, but there was never a moment when the way was clear. When he found himself enmeshed in the tunnel, he thought they might fight their way through. Then, as time fled before them and the night wore away, he was no longer sure. When he was wounded, so badly wounded, he was sure he would die: there was no moonlight in the tunnel to heal him, or even maintain his life. He had felt himself dying, but he had gone on fighting anyway. It was not the song he would have sung of his life, but that was where it had led him, and he found a kind of contentment in knowing exactly how the rest of his life would pass. Then the enemy line broke, and many trampled Hrutnefdhu in their eagerness to escape, and his limbs were broken. He could see life ahead of him, but knew he would never reach it. But others had, and that was enough. As he was closing his eyes, he felt Khretvarrgliu's grip on his neck, dragging him toward life and light. Coming out of the tunnel, killing the sureness of his death, was like a second birth, a new life.

Morlock didn't know what to say. He patted the pale werewolf awkwardly on the shoulder.

Hrutnefdhu demanded to know why he had done it. Hrutnefdhu was just aplepnup, a trustee who had betrayed his trust, a citizen of no particular bite in prison or anywhere. Why had Khretvarrgliu killed his death, dragged him from death to life?

"Eh," said Morlock reluctantly, wishing he had a better answer to such an obviously important question, "I never asked myself why. It was us against them. You were-you are-one of us, not one of them. That's all."

The pale mottled wolf looked at him with pale moonlit eyes and sang no more of the matter.

They ascended the narrow dark stairs, littered with werewolves drinking smoke from fuming bowls, in defiance of the notice by the door. Liudhleeo was not in the apartment when they arrived. Hrutnefdhu suggested that Morlock wait there while he went and saw about the early night meal.

Morlock didn't argue; the long day had worn him ragged. He lay down for a moment on the rug where he had awoken that morning, and a moment later he was asleep.

It was still night when he awoke again: Liudhleeo was entering the apartment. She still wore her day shape. He rolled to his feet, but she carolled, "Oh, be still you silly ape. You must be half dead. I heard about some of the things you were up to today."

He sat back down on the rug and nearly lay back down, but restrained himself.

"How are you?" she asked, sitting beside him on the rug. "That's a technical question; remember that I'm your healer."

"Eh."

"Oh, blood-drinking, giggling, hairy ghosts. Is that all you have to say? Off with your clothes, then; I'll have to find out for myself."

Morlock nearly struck her hands away: the indignity of it reminded him a little of the prison. But she was his healer and Hrutnefdhu's mate. He took his clothes off, with her assistance.

She looked him over briefly, and then spent a good deal more time smelling him.

"How are you, really?" she said. "How is your Sight? You haven't fully recovered, have you? Don't spare my feelings; I want to know what's happening."

"My Sight is much impaired," he admitted reluctantly. "I had to go into full withdrawal simply to release some phlogiston from some wood this afternoon."

"I wish I knew what that meant. No, don't bother explaining just yet. I take it that this is something that you used to do easily, and now is markedly more difficult."

"Yes."

"Tell me something, and this too is a technical question, so be absolutely honest and as specific as you can. Is this terseness, this reluctance to part with a syllable more than you absolutely must-is it a relatively new feature of your psyche and behavior? Is it something that developed over the last year when the spike was in your skull?"

"No."

"Ghost. Well at least you're no crazier than you used to be. Am I right?"

"As far as I can tell. Of course …"

"If you mean, a crazy person wouldn't know he was crazy, I'm afraid that's not true. Many crazy people are dreadfully aware of their decaying faculties, at least intermittently, and so did you seem to be before I pulled that spike out. So we'll call the operation at least a partial success. Well, you still appear very undernourished, and I think that magical healing goo has some sort of unpleasant aftereffect, but apart from that you seem to be in fairly good shape for a rather battered never-wolf of-how many years?"

"I don't keep count anymore. Between four and five hundred."

"Oh, don't tell me, then. But this is a very poor occasion to practice your wit at my expense. I'm your healer, for ghost's sake. Is there anything else? There is, isn't there? Tell me."

"I'm dropping a lot of things with my left hand," he admitted.

"Doesn't everybody? Unless you're left-handed." She had to explain to him what handedness was, and then he had to explain to her that he was ambidextrous, or had been.

"Hm," she said at last, clearly concerned. "Well, you're still recovering. Let's not worry about it."

Morlock was worried about it, but what happened next nearly drove it from his mind. Liudhleeo leaned forward and inhaled his scent deeply in a gesture that did not seem to be exactly professional.

"You smell fairly clean," she said, "in a watery, brackeny way. But do you want me to wash you?"

"Wash me? With your tongue?"

"You are such a never-wolf. Yes, dear Morlock or Khretvarrgliu or whatever your name is, with my tongue. We don't have tubs and sponges like the Apetown bathhouses. What an idea! Anyway, it wouldn't be the first time. Who do you think cleaned you after your escape from prison? A nasty job, some would have found it, but I have to admit I find something about your scent rather exciting. And your blood is utterly delicious. I have a feeling that it might be some sort of poison, and I'm starting to think maybe that's how I want to die-"

He looked sideways at her and began to put on his clothes.

She grabbed his arm with her hand. "Listen, why bother? You'll only have to take them off again before we couple."

"I'm not going to couple you. If that means what I think it means."

"Couple with me, silly. And of course it means what you think it means. And of course you are going to couple with me, old what's-your-name. I know the smell of a male who's ready to have sex, and I'm ready to have sex with you, so what more is there to talk about? Unless talking is an important part of it, for you? I don't know how never-wolves do it. Though I'm aching to find out."

"No."

"You can't be serious."

"I'm serious."

"Why not? Males mystify me, really. Once you think you have them figured out, they go and-Listen, I'm your healer. This is a matter of your wellbeing. When was the last time you coupled with anybody? And I'm not talking about your apish palms."

"Forget it. Hrutnefdhu is my friend."

"Wonderful. He needs more of them. Especially males with a lot of bite, like you. But what has that got to do with it?"

"You are Hrutnefdhu's mate."

"Yes, of course. But Hrutnefdhu has been castrated, Morlock." She had to explain herself here, as she used the technical term, not the slur plepnup. "He is lovely, far lovelier than you or any other male I've ever known. I love him dearly, as I will never love you. But coupling is one thing we cannot do, and he knows that I need it. He doesn't begrudge me satisfying my needs. So let's say no more about it."

Morlock didn't doubt that she thought she was telling the truth, but he did doubt that Hrutnefdhu was as complaisant as she said: he knew something of the humble werewolf's prickly pride. In any case, Morlock had his own notions of loyalty. "No," he said, and finished putting on his clothes.

She watched him with her mouth slightly open, finally convinced he meant what he said. She threw up her hands and said, "And after I went to the trouble of repressing the change to my night shape! Oh, well: live and learn. Though I must say, you never-wolves are a cold-blooded lot."

"No doubt."

"Don't be sullen, now. I don't fully understand you, Morlock, but I know that you're acting out of friendship to my sweet Hrutnefdhu, and nothing could make you dearer to me. Really, I mean that. Oh, ghosts, what are we going to do until midnight?"

"Midnight?"

"I met Hrutnefdhu as I came home and told him I was going to screw you and asked him not to come home until midnight. He'll bring some supper with him. Oh, well, you had better get some sleep. I'm going to stand in the moonlight and take my night shape, and then perhaps wash myself. If that won't offend your apish sensibilities."

"Don't be sullen."

"Well-bitten. Well-bitten. All right, I won't be sullen. Let's neither of us be."

Morlock's weariness dragged him back into sleep not long after she underwent the change. She woke him at midnight when supper arrived-but Hrutnefdhu did not arrive with it; he had sent it by a messenger from First Wolf's lair. There had been some kind of fight in the audience chamber that evening, and Rokhlenu had called all the irredeemables to stand guard.

The lair-tower of the outlier pack's First Wolf was less rickety than some. Its spacious first floor was mostly given to an audience chamber. At one end of the chamber there was a dais with a steep couch covered in bearskin. There, just after sunset, she lay in the moonlight falling from a nearby window: a small dark-furred she-wolf displaying the stillness and patience of a hunter. The only parts of her body that moved were her glittering eyes, which watched the three emissaries from the Sardhluun Pack as they paced and pranced and boasted before her.

The lead emissary, whose neck jangled with ropes of honor-teeth, had his forefeet on the lowest step of the First Wolf's dais. He was lifting his feet to climb further up, and his seconds were following him. Wuinlendhono's followers stood abashed in the presence of emissaries from a true treaty pack, and none of them sang a word or made a move to defend their First Wolf from disrespect. Even the wolves who wore the gold tooth as her bodyguards were standing with their heads down. Their chief, a reddish frizz-faced citizen named Yaniunulu, was emitting a funk so intense the whole room reeked of it. Wuinlendhono knew that if she had to act to defend her own honor she would act alone.

Rokhlenu came into the audience chamber, a great gray werewolf with eyes as blue as Trumpeter at first rising. He gazed about in astonishment at the insolence of the emissaries, the timidity of the outliers. He dashed across the open floor and leapt onto the dais steps, wheeling about to snarl in the face of the leading emissary.

The emissary knew him, though the reverse was not true. The emissary barked that he would kill-kill-kill Rokhlenu and drag his disembowelled corpse back to the Werowance and Wurnafenglu for the prize. He reared up on his back feet and howled his anger.

Wuinlendhono shot past Rokhlenu's shoulder like a black lightning bolt. She struck the lead emissary in the chest and he tumbled backward on the dais. While he was disoriented by his fall, her shining teeth fastened on his throat.

The other emissaries started forward to aid their leader, but Rokhlenu charged, snarling, to warn them off. They backed slowly away. He wore only one honor-tooth, but it was a dragon's tooth. They had not been present in the Vargulleion on the dreadful New Year's Night, but they had heard about it …from the survivors.

There was a silence in which they all heard the lead emissary's neck break.

Wuinlendhono dragged the corpse over to the nearest patch of moonlight and waited for the werewolf to revive. When he began to move his head feebly, she tore with her jaws at the cords around his neck and sent the honorteeth skittering across the floor of the audience chamber.

To the reviving werewolf she sang sweetly that he should be sure to tell the Werowance, be sure to tell Wurnafenglu, be sure to tell his mate and cubs how he had lost his honor-teeth-that he had lost them to a female.

Desperately, the disgraced wolf tried to grab at a few of the lost teeth with his mouth, but she headed him off, snarling, and he retreated back beside his peers, his head still hanging at an odd angle.

The other two emissaries sang despondently that this was a sad way to treat them and that the Werowance would be angry.

Shoulder to shoulder now, Wuinlendhono and Rokhlenu faced the three emissaries down, forcing them backward, barking that they should go! go! go! while they had one honor-tooth or testicle among them.

Olleiulu appeared at the entrance of the chamber with an unruly pack of irredeemables at his heels, mostly in their night shapes. They parted to let the emissaries through, and barked derisively, from human and lupine throats alike, as the three Sardhluun werewolves suddenly turned tail and fled into the night.

Wuinlendhono held her aggressive stance until the emissaries had vanished and the volley of insults pursuing them had died down. Then she turned and touched noses with Rokhlenu. Her breath was hot on his face, and he inhaled it like perfume.

She whispered her thanks, sang gently that five was a very lucky number indeed, and asked if he was willing to follow her lead on something.

Every nerve in Rokhlenu's body was ringing like a bronze bell, and he breathed back that he was willing to follow her anywhere. What he really meant was that he was willing to follow her into a nearby room and couple like weasels, and her sinister grin suggested that she understood this.

Nonetheless, she took his answer and bounded back up to First Wolf's couch and lay there.

She sang a song of honor to Rokhlenu and his irredeemables, who had stood forth to defend her and the honor of the outlier pack from the insolence of the flea-bitten Sardhluun guard dogs. A lucky ghost had guided her choice of intended, as he had proven this night. Then she pointedly directed Yaniunulu, the chief of her bodyguard, to sweep up the defeated emissary's honorteeth and present them as a love-gift to her intended, Rokhlenu, glorious singer and hero.

His tail hanging a little low, the reddish wolf moved to obey.

Olleiulu stood forth and said, "If you'll excuse me, Wuinlendhono, high and fierce, I can do that. I'm just a semiwolf, it's no problem for me."

Wuinlendhono crooned that Olleiulu was generous and brave, a warrior whatever shape he happened to wear, and that the work was beneath him; she would let Yaniunulu do it, and perhaps some other humble services around the lair. Meanwhile, Olleiulu had more important work to perform, the labor of a citizen and a fighter.

Stoically, Yaniunulu set about sweeping up the scattered honor-teeth with his tail.

Wuinlendhono asked Olleiulu if her intended had gathered together the agreed-upon settlement in gold.

Olleiulu's eyes crossed a little at this, and he looked anxiously at Rokhlenu for a sign. Rokhlenu nodded, and Olleiulu turned back toward First Wolf and said, "Yes, High Huntress and leader, he has."

Wuinlendhono sang that he could keep it, that she had changed her mind.

Stunned silence greeted this remark, followed by whispers and whistles of wonder. And there was an undercurrent of snarling anger from the irredeemable.. They had not come here to see their chief dishonored.

Not about the marriage, Wuinlendhono sang, when the surprise had begun to subside. On that she was more settled than ever. No, for a marriage settlement, she desired no gold, not she, who was rich enough that her very household servants and maids wore gold teeth. No, she needed no gold. It was blood that she wanted, blood and vengeance on the mangy sheepdogs of the Sardhluun Pack.

Dizzy with the sense that he was bounding along the edge of a crumbling cliff, Rokhlenu cried that the gift was too easy, that they had torn the Sardhluun Pack when they had little to fight with but the chains and stones of the hated Vargulleion.

Wuinlendhono sang back that she knew how brave he and his relentless heroes were, and that any deed requiring no more than bravery and cunning would be a trivial favor to ask of them, but that nonetheless she did want this one thing. The Sardhluun kept another prison for Wuruyaaria: the Khuwuleion, the Stone Lair, where females lay in vile durance. If Rokhlenu and his irredeemables would break the gates of the Khuwuleion and free the prisoners therein, she would life-mate with Rokhlenu the same night, may the ghosts bind her to it.

Rokhlenu sang that he accepted the challenge and that he would break the walls of the Khuwuleion and return to mate with her, still stained with the blood of their common enemies.

Wuinlendhono indicated a polite eagerness for that occasion and dismissed the assembly.

When they were alone, in a more private chamber on the floor above, Rokhlenu wondered aloud whether the frozen stone that his beloved used for a heart had been shedding icy splinters that were lodged in her brain, driving her mad.

Wuinlendhono sang that he was a very witty fellow and that she must remember to write some of these things down when her fingers returned on the morrow.

Rokhlenu insisted that he was essentially serious. It was one thing to rebuke emissaries who had insulted a First Wolf in her own lair. It was another to propose an act of war against a treaty pack. That would engage them in war with all four treaty packs: the entire city of Wuruyaaria.

Wuinlendhono said that he had beautiful eyes, lovely white teeth, and magnificent haunches but that he seemed to have no intellectual attainments at all, except making words sing. Did Rokhlenu not realize that he had already committed an act of war against the Sardhluun by leading the escape from the Vargulleion? That he had implicated her and the outliers in it by taking refuge here-and that she had accepted this by accepting him and his? The Sardhluun had generously promised to overlook her offense if she surren dered the fugitives, and those were the only terms on which they would overlook it. They were in a war already, and they could only look for a route to victory. She suggested that he use that space between his alert and expressive ears for a little activity she liked to call thinking.

Rokhlenu's song in reply was one of regret. He had brought this scent of trouble on her, and he would lead the pack hunting it away from her. He would take the other escaped prisoners with him and leave. The Sardhluun would pursue them and leave the outliers alone.

Wuinlendhono barked that if he took one more step toward the doorway she would kill him-kill! kill! kill! Males did not proffer their love to her and then withdraw it. She would rip his belly open. She would kill any female he tried to mate with. She would slander his name before every pack in Wuruyaaria-in every den of flea-bitten stray dogs who roamed the north. He must not leave. Would he not lie down and be reasonable? Why, oh why were beautiful males so reckless and wayward?

Rokhlenu suavely suggested it was because the smells emitted by mateworthy females in their presence drove them mad.

Wuinlendhono leapt on him then, and they rolled around on the floor for a while, nipping each other on the shoulders and pulling each other's tails.

After some more play of this sort, the First Wolf and her intended were lying face-to-face, breathing rather heavily, but discussing issues of a coldly practical nature.

Wuinlendhono agreed with Rokhlenu that war with the Sardhluun was technically war with all the treaty packs. But she pointed out that no one likes to help a loser. The Sardhluun had already been humiliated by the escape from the Vargulleion; that was why they were barking so loudly, to drown the sound of their shame. Citizens were laughing at them on all the mesas of Wuruyaaria, all the way down to Apetown: that was what all her spies said. If the Sardhluun also lost the prisoners in the Khuwuleion, they lost half the reason for their existence, and no one would lift a paw for them.

Rokhlenu said that she had a kind of point, but that the assault on the Khuwuleion was trickier than she made it sound. With all their disadvantages in breaking out of the Vargulleion, they had at least had the advantage of being there, inside the prison. They didn't first have to cross the plantation walls, alerting every citizen in the Sardhluun, and then break into the prison itself. Nor would it be New Year's Night when they did, with half the guards gone and half the guards who remained smoke-drunk and stupid.

Wuinlendhono suggested that they make the attempt during one of the primary elections the Sardhluun were holding this month. Many guards would be absent to attend the election; the plantation walls would be more thinly guarded. As for the prison defenses …well, they would think of something. Perhaps if that crazy Khretvarrgliu could be driven bear-shirt mad again, the guards would run squeaking away. She supposed half the stories she had heard about that night were lies, but even so …

Rokhlenu whistled thoughtfully, curling his tongue to flute the sound as he mulled this over. She did not know Morlock, he sang at last, or she would not have suggested this. Still, there might be something Morlock could do for them.

She sang that if Orlock-

Morlock, he corrected her.

-if Yorlock-

Morlock, he corrected her.

-if Nyorlock-and that was close enough, an evil ghost take the neverwolf's unpronounceable name-that if Nyorlock could make gold out of mud, he could perhaps make more warlike and useful metals.

Rokhlenu sang concordantly and looked deep into her dark eyes agleam with moonlight.

She got to her feet irritably and asked if he had gotten laid yet.

He sang sadly that he would wait until they mated, that he didn't mind waiting.

She snapped that she did mind. The musk he emitted was making females wet in their nether parts for miles around. This nuisance must cease. She needed him to act with a cold clear head; she needed him to understand what he was doing when he bonded with her for life; she needed him to not have any regrets about last lost chances. Because he was not chasing other tails once they were together; she would not be shamed that way. If he needed the name of a good whore, she could find one for him.

In a bitter angular song not far removed from barking, he replied that he would never shame her that way, and he wondered why she was shaming him so. He didn't want his first coupling with her tainted with the stink of another female. His love for her was a sacred fire; it pained him, but he did not fear the pain.

His song was becoming more lyrical, and she interrupted him with a bitter barking laugh. She knew males better than that! she barked. He must be up to something.

He got to his feet, looked at her, and left without a word.

She repressed the impulse to run after him barking (get a whore! get a whore! get a whore!). That would do no good to anyone. She wondered what would.

This was the room where she usually slept in her night shape. Before she curled up in the moonlight, she went to a corner of the room where there was a tapestry on a frame against the wall. She dragged the frame aside. Behind the tapestry, mounted on a wooden frame, was Morlock's drawing of Rokhlenu standing in triumph over the dragon he had killed. One of her agents had bought it for her in the city, and she was very pleased with it. She had looked on it many times during the day, but this was the first time she had seen it with the eyes of her night shape. It looked different, more abstract, starker, not less beautiful.

She shook her head wearily. He would have to do something stupid, something thoughtless, something that reassured her that he was just another thump-footed, fat-nosed, bristle-witted male. Because if he didn't, she might really have to fall in love with him, and that would be a ghost-bitten nuisance.

She lay looking on his image, basking in the moonlight and his lingering scent, until sleep came to her.

Her dreams, as usual, were nightmares. Often she dreamed of her dead husbands; this afternoon, she had dreamed of Rokhlenu standing among them. But tonight it was a much older nightmare, her very first recurring nightmare. She was a child again, back in the Khuwuleion, and they were torturing her mother for a reason no one ever explained. She screamed for someone to save them, but she knew no one would ever save them. Even in her dream, she knew that was just an empty dream.

Chapter Seventeen: Fight and Bite

It was raining the next day-a strangely summery rain, with the warm air so dense with water that it had to sweat some out. Rokhlenu donned a cloak for his walk across the outlier settlement, and before he took too many steps he was overwarm. If the cloak hadn't been a gift from his intended, he would have draped it on a railing and walked away from it.

When he got to the far side of the settlement, he could see that Morlock was already at work in front of his cave, hammering away at something lying on a flat stone or anvil.

The wicker boat was resting at the water's edge on the base of the hill. Rokhlenu stared at it, wondering whether to call to Morlock or flounder across the water. The wicker boat, which had a glassy orb on its prow, swung toward him and proceeded across the stretch of swampy, rain-dented water.

This made the hairs on Rokhlenu's neck and ears rise up. On the other hand, it was rather convenient. He stepped into the boat and, using an oar he found inside the craft, paddled across to the other side. He eyed the up- and downhill stream dubiously, then climbed the slope to Morlock's cave.

Morlock's anvil was just at the entrance to his cave, and he was working sheltered from the rain. He nodded agreeably at Rokhlenu as he approached and said, "With you in a moment."

It wasn't long, in fact. Morlock was hammering what appeared to be a spearhead, and presently he tossed it into a vat of water to cool, alongside some others that were already there.

Rokhlenu's first thought was that Wuinlendhono was right and that Morlock must have been using his talents to make base metals to work with. But then he saw that the anvil was a stone, and that the hammerhead and the spearheads appeared to be made of clear greenish blue glass.

"There is so much sand and lime about," Morlock said, when he noticed him noticing the glass. "It made more sense to use it than try to find or make metal."

Rokhlenu started to ask if the glass was strong enough to make a good spearhead, then stopped. If it was strong enough to make a hammer, it was strong enough for weaponry. Although he didn't see how that could be.

"I had to mess about with it for a while," Morlock said, sensing his inchoate question. "These were just experiments, but I guess we will need weapons to fight with soon."

Morlock's casual assumption that he would fight alongside Rokhlenu when the time came eased the werewolf's mind. "Probably," Rokhlenu said, shouldering off his cloak and hanging it on the side of the anvil rock.

Morlock pulled forth a couple of wickerwork chairs, and they sat in the mouth of the cave and watched the misty rain fall on the swamp and the spindly lair-towers of the outlier pack.

"Odd weather," said Morlock presently, and it wasn't casual conversation.

"Insane," Rokhlenu agreed. "People say the world is going to end."

"Eh. Aren't they always saying that?"

"I guess so. It's not just werewolves, then?"

Morlock shook his head, and they sat for a while in silence.

"I hear the Sardhluun came calling last night," Morlock said.

"Yes." Rokhlenu laughed barkingly as he remembered the hapless emissary trying to lick up the honor-teeth he had lost to Wuinlendhono.

He told Morlock all about it, since it was essential that he know, and then found himself saying much more. He talked about his feelings for Wuinlendhono and her confusing display of feelings for him. He talked about his dreams and hopes that were now lost, and his uncertainty at the prospects opening up to him. He talked about his anxiety about not hearing from his father and brothers-not once, in prison or afterward.

Morlock didn't say much, but it wasn't a soliloquy by Rokhlenu: sometimes the never-wolf would ask a question, and he always appeared alert and interested.

As Rokhlenu wound down he became embarrassed and said, "Sorry to fill your ears with all this quacking."

"Eh," Morlock. "Everyone has to talk to someone. You should have heard me rant to my favorite bartender. Poor old Leen."

"What's a bartender?"

"Someone who serves you drinks."

"Like water? I don't get it."

Morlock explained about intoxicants in liquid form, and bars and bartenders.

"So it's like smoking bloom?" Rokhlenu asked.

"So I gather."

"And you like this …this …stuff?"

"I gave it up. I shouldn't have mentioned it."

"Well, why not? There's no one here but you, me, and the anvil."

"There is also Hlupnafenglu. But I think our secrets are safe with him."

Turning around in his chair, Rokhlenu looked back into the cave and saw the big red werewolf deeper in the cave, crouching down by a brightly lit sort of wickerwork sphere. He was gazing into it, entranced, firelight gleaming in his red eyes. There was a murmur that sounded like speech, but Rokhlenu wasn't sure whether it was coming from Hlupnafenglu or the flames or something else.

Rokhlenu turned around again and whistled meditatively. "He seems crazier than you were."

"Same cause I think," Morlock said, tapping the side of his head. "He has a scar on his temple like mine. I wonder what he was, that they felt the need to do this to him."

Rokhlenu thought about this for a moment. It smelled to him that Morlock was also referring, by extension, to what the Sardhluun had done to him. He also seemed to be implying that what had been done had not wholly been undone.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, and tapped the side of his own head to indicate what he was asking about.

"My Sight is better," Morlock said, "though by no means wholly returned. However …I seem to be dropping things with my left hand."

Years ago, when Rokhlenu was learning how to sing, one of the cantors of the Aruukaiaduun Pack had said in his hearing, "I am beginning to go deaf." A month later he was dead, and some said he had eaten wolfbane. Morlock's tone sounded a little like that long-dead cantor's; Rokhlenu knew it was no passing observation.

" Liudhleeo," Rokhlenu hissed. "That toe-fingered cow-leech. Did she butcher you? I'll-"

"No, I don't think so," Morlock said. "Whatever she did saved my life. I suspect the damage was done by then."

"Maybe it will get better. Give it time."

"Eh."

"Open your maw and tell me what that means."

Morlock shrugged, then said hesitantly, "Actually, it seems to be getting worse. So if we are going to do something about this other prison-"

"The Khuwuleion."

11 -the Khuwuleion, perhaps we had better do it soon."

They turned, with some mutual relief, away from personal matters to tactics of approaching the Khuwuleion. Morlock was in the middle of a rather bizarre proposal that was making Rokhlenu question his sanity again when a damp and somewhat irritated crow fluttered down and landed on the ground by Morlock's feet.

The crow croaked that he had something for Morlock, if Morlock could make it worth his while.

Morlock croaked that he had a little bread, if the crow was interested.

The crow was always interested in new comestibles, but was sure this bread stuff would be a poor trade for ripe juicy information like what the crow had to offer.

Morlock, ignoring this, got up from the chair and went into the cave and rummaged around. "Sorry about this," he said to Rokhlenu. "Crows have a sense of politeness, but it doesn't seem to apply to non-crows. And we might want to know what he knows."

Morlock came back with half a loaf of brown bread and offered some crumbs to the crow. He ate some, complained about the color, flavor, lack of texture, and unfamiliarity of the foodstuff, then asked for more.

Morlock waved the loaf in the air and waited.

The crow said that there were soldiers from the Sardhluun Pack attacking the other side of the outlier settlement. He thought it was funny because-

Morlock and Rokhlenu leapt to their feet. Morlock dropped the loaf on the ground next to the startled crow.

"No weapon," Rokhlenu said ruefully. It hadn't seemed necessary for a walk across town.

"I can get you a stabbing spear or two," Morlock said. "We should drag Hlupnafenglu away from the flames, also."

"He is pretty good in a fight. Enjoys killing Sardhluun werewolves, anyway."

"Eh. Who doesn't?"

They raised the alarm as they went, sending any outlier who responded to defend the fenceless east side of their settlement. They themselves ran on in long loping strides to the western fence.

Hlupnafenglu had been grumpy about leaving his beloved flames, but once he realized that fighting would be involved he was happy enough. Morlock gave him the heavy glass hammer from the anvil, and he was delighted with its weight and, apparently, its translucency: he kept peering at the sky through the heavy glass and hooting inarticulately.

The red werewolf kept with them almost all the way across town, but was finally decoyed away at the last moment by, of all things, the lair-tower of First Wolf. He kept staring at it and mouthing things that might or might not have been words. He wouldn't leave it, so they had to leave him.

Approaching the western verge of the settlement, Rokhlenu felt a sense of foreboding. The palisade surrounding the outlier settlement was not really a fortification. It was mostly useful for preventing flightless birds from walking straight from the marsh into town. The fence was thin; there were many gaps. He could hear arrows striking the far side of the wall as they shouldered their way through a milling crowd to where the First Wolf was standing. A circle of her gold-toothed bodyguards surrounded her, and by each honor guard was one of Rokhlenu's irredeemables, his neck bristling with honor-teeth.

She looked rather dashing, Rokhlenu thought, in a brazen helmet and short coat of coppery rings. But she didn't look happy, and Rokhlenu thought he could guess why.

Morlock stepped up to the west wall and reached out with his left hand to test the strength of the barrier. The soft wood came apart between his fingers like overripe cheese.

"Hurl krakna," Morlock whispered and, whatever that meant, Rokhlenu was pretty sure he agreed with it. The settlement had never really been defended by the fence, Rokhlenu reflected. It had been defended from its potential enemies by the same thing that defended a poor man from robbers: indifference. They had changed all that last night, and now they were paying for it.

"-I don't understand it," Wuinlendhono was saying, "and maybe these two heroes can explain it."

"I beg forgiveness, High Huntress," Rokhlenu said, somewhat out of breath. "Explain what?"

"Why they"-she jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the Sardhluun attackers-"are not firing higher, into the town. Most of their arrows are sticking into our fence. It's a feeble protection as Nyor-as Nor-as Khretvarrgliu is discovering there, but they can't hope to batter through with arrows."

"It is odd," Rokhlenu agreed.

"Oh. Thanks for that," First Wolf replied, white-lipped, furious.

"It may be a distraction from another more serious attack," Rokhlenu continued. "The east side of town is unfenced, but we left some citizens there to stand guard. Maybe some of my men should go put a spine in them."

"A good thought," Wuinlendhono said, and looked her apology at him. He nodded patiently in acceptance, and started calling off irredeemables to go west.

"You can have your red ape-dog go back with them," Wuinlendhono added. "Look at the damage he's doing to the boardwalk by my lair!"

They looked at Hlupnafenglu, who was pulling up a board and muttering to himself.

Morlock said tensely, "How deep does the fence go? Is it anchored in the mud?"

Wuinlendhono looked annoyed at being addressed in this cavalier way, then thoughtful. "It is anchored there, but the palings don't go far below the surface."

Morlock measured the height of First Wolf's lair-tower with his eyes, and then the distance to the western fence.

"They are coming at us from below," he said, and ran past Rokhlenu and the astonished First Wolf.

It took Rokhlenu only a moment to reconstruct Morlock's thought. Archers had attacked the fence to distract the defenders, while werewolf divers had crept below the surface of the boardwalks to the base of First Wolf's tower. If they broke its anchors and it fell, it would breach the western fence….

And the demented Hlupnafenglu had been the only one to notice it! Rokhlenu wondered briefly who was really crazy around there.

"Go!" Rokhlenu shouted at the werewolves he sorted out to defend the east. An attack could still come there; the Sardhluun had enough armed bands for it. "The rest of you, with me."

"My guards, stay here," the First Wolf clarified. "Lucky ghosts guide you, Rokhlenu," she added, but he was already following Morlock away with a riot of irredeemables at his heels.

By now the red werewolf had pulled apart a fair stretch of the boards by the tower's base and was striking at the murky water thus exposed with his glittering hammer. Morlock drew his odd crystalline sword, the blade woven of black and white strands, and crouched down by the ragged hole in the wood and started stabbing deliberately …not quite at the water, Rokhlenu saw, but at the gap between the water and the wood. He had to dodge and weave to avoid getting clipped by Hlupnafenglu's hammer. As Rokhlenu came up, he saw that they were both aiming at: shapes in the murky water, human and lupine, some deeper in the water and others splashing out of reach on the surface. Ominous sounds came from the water: a chunking or chopping, like wood being cut.

Rokhlenu looked around desperately for another opening in the boards, found none, and then saw Morlock was doing the same.

"There's no other way, is there?" he said.

Morlock swore, "God Sustainer." The blasphemy shocked ghost-fearing Rokhlenu a bit, but he remembered how much Morlock hated the water.

Morlock shouted at Hlupnafenglu, "Wait!" He held out his hand. "Wait!"

Hlupnafenglu paused in his water-hammering, obviously confused.

Morlock took a deep breath and jumped into the water, feet first, and vanished from sight.

Hlupnafenglu gasped. A huge smile slowly broke out on his face as the idea pushed through whatever barrier blocked his thinking. People can jump in water! Brilliant! He raised the hammer over his head and jumped in after Morlock.

Rokhlenu gestured with the business end of his spear at the four irredeemables who seemed least terrified by the opening in the boards. "All right. You-you-you-and you: follow me in. Watch out you don't kill each other with your weapons." Rokhlenu turned to Olleiulu, who was standing nearby, his one eye as round as any moon. "Send someone into the lair-tower to clear the people out. Then you take the rest of these guys and go stand by Wuinlendhono. If she doesn't live through this, don't let me find you afterward."

He dropped into the dark water, stabbing spear in hand.

The water was dark; he expected that. Werewolves aren't generally afraid of the dark. But he did somehow expect his eyes to grow used to the darkness, and when they didn't-when he realized much of it came from the mud in the water enclosing him like a fist-he did feel a little panic rise within him.

He dimly saw a support timber for the boardwalk near at hand, and he grabbed it, swinging out of the path his followers would have to take …if they followed him.

They did: he heard a sound like distant thunder and sheaths of white bubbles spearing past him toward the darkness below.

Impinging on one of the sheaths he saw a kind of shadow. He didn't think it was Morlock or Hlupnafenglu, or any of his fighters. It was holding some thing in its hand-not like a sword or a dagger-more like a chisel. It was one of them, one of the Sardhluun werewolves. He stabbed at it with his spear: the shadow writhed and became even less distinct in a dark cloud of blood.

It wasn't a death-stroke; the shadow fled. Rokhlenu followed grimly. He could only hope the others were doing something like this, and that there were more of them than of the Sardhluun attackers; there was no chance for communication in the dark water.

His quarry seemed to have dropped what he was carrying and was swimming upward. Rokhlenu stuck his spear (blunt end first) through his belt and climbed up the support timber. It slowed him down, but he didn't want to throw away his weapon at the very beginning of this battle.

He broke the surface, gasping for air, and cast his gaze about. The light was dim indeed under the boards of the settlement, but in comparison to the darkness of the muddy water it was like the noonday sun.

He heard splashing and looked about to see a bedraggled semiwolf paddling away from him. His quarry. There were others in the water beyond, all heading in the same direction. Rokhlenu didn't see Morlock or Hlupnafenglu or any of his people.

He set off in pursuit. He did not so much swim as launch himself from support column to support column. He soon caught up with the werewolf nearest him, the one he had wounded. The wounded werewolf heard his approach and turned at last to fight, but Rokhlenu drew his spear and stabbed it, under the water, into his enemy's belly, twisting the blade after it struck home. Soon the half-wolf stopped struggling and the life left his bestial eyes. Rokhlenu left him drifting half submerged in the filthy water stained with his own blood …and some of Rokhlenu's, as his enemy's claws had riven his flesh in a few places.

The other Sardhluun attackers were farther off by then, but Rokhlenu continued to chase them. Like a nightmare where his feet were caught in a watery trap, time ceased to have any meaning. He made no progress in closing the gap with the others. Only gradually did he notice the light growing brighter: they were approached the end of the settlement's boards.

He briefly saw each of the attackers briefly framed in dark silhouette against the day's light, and then they vanished. By the time he reached the edge of the settlement he could see them outside the palings, climbing into a boat.

"Archers!" he thundered with what was nearly his last breath. "Sardhluun boat outside the fence! Kill all but the steersman. He's one of ours."

It was sheer bluff; he doubted that there were any archers within reach of his voice. In fact, he hoped there weren't: they'd be needed far more at the western or eastern edges of town. But it was gratifying to see the speed with which the Sardhluun saboteurs rowed away. He hoped idly that they would knife their steersman also, or at least grow to distrust him.

Rokhlenu rested for a moment in the water and then clambered up a support column to the surface of the boardwalk. He loped through the chaotic settlement-some running home to their lair-towers; others hustling away with property in their hands, obviously intent on flight; others rushing about with no clear goal in mind. The settlement had never been attacked, had never been important enough to attack, and many were panicking.

He started collecting these frantic types. "You!" he'd say. "Come with me!" And sometimes they'd run away, and sometimes they'd fall in behind him. Eventually he was leading a large number of citizens (male and female, in the night shape, the day shape, and every gradation between), and others fell in without being asked.

He had no idea what he was going to do with all these followers; it just seemed like a good idea to calm the panic on the boarded ways however he could.

By the time he reached the western wall, he had a pretty good idea what he was going to do with them, though. From some distance away he could see that someone had threaded the First Wolf's lair-tower with support cables. It was leaning precipitously to the west, but the cables were slowly dragging it back into an upright position.

He was not surprised to see a bedraggled and filthy Morlock directing the work. He did feel a little surprise, but perhaps not so much, to see that Hlupnafenglu was operating as his assistant. But they needed more hands to do the work, and he sent all the citizens in more or less human form over to help. Then he took the citizens in night shape toward the western wall. There had obviously been an attack in force while he was chasing saboteurs, and there seemed to have been some casualties.

He felt foreboding as he approached, and in truth the news was very bad. A band of his irredeemables was milling about in confusion; they parted like a curtain before him and he saw the bodies laid out on the boardwalk, dead and dying. There were too many there, too many, and none of them Sardhluun.

Apparently, when the tower-lair did not breach the wall, the Sardhluun archers had switched tactics and started aiming their shots beyond the wall, from boats rowed close enough so that they could do real harm within the settlement. Fire had chewed holes in the wall at several points, and other sections had been pierced by blunt force at the water level: rams mounted on boats had done that, he guessed. Many werewolves had been killed when the Sardhluun attacked in earnest …and Olleiulu, Rokhlenu saw with dismay, was one of them. He lay pierced by many poison-tipped arrows, his one eye staring lifeless at the rainy sky.

Even worse, Wuinlendhono lay among the wounded, and the wound was a serious one in the neck. Kneeling down over the First Wolf's unconscious form, Rokhlenu guessed that the arrow had been poisoned: the blood seeping through the bandages reeked of wolfbane.

"Thank ghost you're here," said a voice behind him, and he looked up to see Lekkativengu, Olleiulu's claw-fingered, wolf-footed sidekick. "We didn't know what to do," Lekkativengu added. "You were gone, the First Wolf is out, and we can't find her Second."

Rokhlenu didn't like the sound of this. A decent sidekick would have risen to the occasion and taken charge until his principal (or his principal's principal: Rokhlenu) returned. Maybe Lekkativengu had done that, but it didn't seem like it.

"Well, I'm here now," he said. "Gather a crew and get the wounded at least a bowshot away from the walls."

"The Sardhluun have retreated," Lekkativengu pointed out.

"They. Might. Come. Back."

"Oh. Oh, yes."

"Take the First Wolf to our-" barn "-lair right away. See that her bodyguard and some of our fifth-floor crew watch over her. That's how I want it, Lekkativengu; don't second-guess me." With Olleiulu the caution would have been unnecessary, but he wanted to let Lekkativengu know he was not ready to trust him yet.

"Yes, Chieftain. I won't, Chieftain."

"Afterward we can burn the bodies of our dead."

"Yes, Chieftain. What should we do-what should we do about these?"

Lekkativengu pointed with a claw-twisted finger toward a heap of dark objects in the shadow of the western wall. At first he thought they were stones or something laid by to be thrown as missiles toward attackers. Then he saw they were severed heads, human and lupine.

"The Sardhluun threw them over before they retreated," Lekkativengu said, unsteadily. "With slings and things, I guess. It was raining heads for a while. So weird."

"No doubt. May ghosts chew their canine innards, the flea-eating Sardhluun sheepdogs."

"Yes, Chief."

"We'll recognize some of those faces, Lekkativengu."

"Yes, Chieftain. One-I think it was-I haven't seen her in a few years. She might have been dead anyway. But I think it's my mother."

The claw-fingered werewolf's dismal confusion now stood explained, anyway. "We'll burn them with our own dead," Rokhlenu decided, after a moment. "Whoever they were, they're in our pack now."

"Yes, Chief."

"See to the First Wolf and return to me here," Rokhlenu said, gripping him briefly on the forearm.

The grief-stricken werewolf went about his work, and Rokhlenu turned to his own. He stationed their archers (pitifully few and rather ineffectivelooking) with lookouts at the breaches in the western wall. He sent messengers to the eastern side of the settlement, to find out how the day had gone there, and others to look for Liudhleeo: she might be no ghost-sniffer or wonder-worker, but she was the best healer they had, and he wanted her at Wuinlendhono's side.

When the chaos began to assume a pleasingly deceptive appearance of order, Rokhlenu ventured over to where Morlock stood, saturninely directing the securing of the support cables on the First Wolf's lair-tower.

"What a moon-barking, ghost-bitten, knuckle-sucking, blood-spattered disaster," he said in an undertone to Morlock, who nodded moodily.

"And it could have been even worse," Rokhlenu added. "If the Sardhluun had wanted to spend the warriors, they could have levelled the settlement down to the marsh."

Morlock nodded. "We did better when we had less," he said.

The remark stuck with Rokhlenu through the rest of that weary, grim day of aftermath. Starting with their bare hands, they had battered their way out of the Vargulleion. Now they had more to lose (he thought anxiously of Wuinlendhono). But they had more to work with, too. There should have been a way to avoid this-and, more important, a way to avoid something like it happening again. Because he doubted the Sardhluun were done with them yet.

His doubts were confirmed late that afternoon when Hrutnefdhu came scampering to tell him that there was an emissary from the Sardhluun Pack at the southern gate.

There was no word from Liudhleeo about Wuinlendhono, and the Second Wolf of the outliers was nowhere to be found-had apparently fled, along with many others, after the Sardhluun attack. So Rokhlenu went to meet the emissary himself.

Standing under the red banner of truce on the boarded way outside Southgate was Wurnafenglu. He had some lesser werewolves, all more or less human in appearance, about him, but he was clearly the emissary with the most bite.

The guards at the gate, none of whom were escapees from the Vargulleion, stood watching the Sardhluun werewolves but saying nothing.

Rokhlenu directed them to open the gate. He put aside his stabbing spear and stepped out onto the boarded way.

"What is your message?" he said. "I will bring it to the First Wolf."

Wurnafenglu smiled a wide predatory smile. "I would enter and deliver it myself. But our emissaries have not always been treated with respect among the huts-on-stilts of the outlier pack-"

"Don't waste my time with lies. Your last emissary treated our First Wolf with disrespect and she took his honor-teeth. He deserved none-a sheep in wolf's clothing."

"The last group was indeed unsatisfactory," Wurnafenglu admitted. "We were displeased. I could show you their bald corpses impaled on poison stakes."

"The price of failure among you Sardhluun sheepdogs?"

"The price of shaming us. Now the outlier pack, too, has taken a first tentative lick of the endless bowl of poison which is the vengeance of the glorious Sardhluun Pack. There is no need for them to drain it all. If you surrender us our prisoners and all the honor-teeth they have earned, no matter how exotic"-Wurnafenglu glanced pointedly at the dragon's tooth on Rokhlenu's cord of honor-teeth-"we will consider that shame has been paid in shame and we will no longer stalk the trail of the outliers. We urge your First Wolf to consider the matter well. War with the Sardhluun Pack will be war with the whole city of Wuruyaaria that overshadows you. You cannot sustain the weight of their anger, or ours."

"Will the Sardhluun Pack go barking for aid to the four treaty packs, then?" asked an amused contralto voice at Rokhlenu's side. Rokhlenu turned to see Wuinlendhono standing beside him, adorned rather than armored in a brazen helmet and a bright shirt of copper rings. Her face was pale and bloodless; her expression was amused and somewhat insolent. "How will the message be phrased?" she continued, adding in a yelping tone, "`Help! Help! We are bad sheepdogs who have lost our bad sheep! Help us! Help us!"'

The guards standing at the gate laughed openly at this. The werewolves in Wurnafenglu's train bristled. Wurnafenglu himself merely broadened his already sinister grin and waited. After a brief silence he asked, "Is that your answer?"

"My answer is this: if you are not out of bowshot one hundred breaths after this gate is shut, I will order my archers to fire upon you, your banner of truce notwithstanding."

"And that is all you have to say?" Wurnafenglu asked, gazing at her searchingly.

"Give my respects to my stepmothers, of course," Wuinlendhono said coolly. "All that they merit." She turned on her heels and walked back into the Southgate. Rokhlenu followed, pondering her last comments.

Hrutnefdhu was cowering in the shadows inside the gate. No doubt he had wanted to avoid being seen by Wurnafenglu. The guards were pointedly ignoring his presence, but Rokhlenu said to him, "We may have unwanted guests here soon, or there may be another attack on the western wall. Round up the fifth-floor gang and send them here. Send the fourth-floor crew to the western wall. Then find as many citizens as you can who are willing to stand watch all around the walls. Tell people you speak with my voice. Where's Morlock, by the way?"

"Bending…. He said we needed more bows. So he said he was going to bend some wood. He took that crazy red werewolf with him."

"Good. Let him do as he wants-he will anyway. But send the rest of the fifth-floor crew here, to me. Understand? Go, then, my friend."

The pale werewolf smiled wanly at him and fled.

He turned back to Wuinlendhono, who was looking rather pale herself, and said, "How are you, High Huntress? I won't lie: I feared for your life when I saw that wound."

"Liudhleeo gave me something for the poison," the First Wolf replied. "She was going to smear me with some of that magic pond water she used on your old friend Nyorlock, but it smelled too bad and I wouldn't let her. The wound will heal with time and a little moonlight. Poor Olleiulu took the worst of the attack, I'm afraid. I liked him, Rokhlenu."

Rokhlenu nodded grimly. "So did I. He thought we should leave and recoup our fortunes among the barbarous packs. We could still do that."

Wuinlendhono took him by the arm and led him a little away from the guards, who were watching them with an open and natural interest.

"I hate this place," she whispered, when they were fairly out of earshot. "I hate the stinking dirty water and the bugs in summer and the rickety lairtowers and the mud and the wobbly boardwalks. But it is mine. It is mine. They gave it to me, after my last husband died; they made me First Wolf for life. I won't let anyone take it from me. You can go if you want."

"If you go, I go. If you stay, I stay."

"Good. I did say you could go, but I was going to kill you if you did."

"There is something wrong with you; that much is certain. But when you speak like that, low and sweet, I almost don't care what you say."

"That's why you need to get yourself a whore. I need a mate with a level head who can pay proper attention to my words."

"You're wrong."

"Don't ever tell me that. Particularly if it's true."

"You need someone as crazy as you are. That's me. Anyway, I'll be there soon if you keep breathing in my face."

Her black eyes glared at him; her bloodless lips grinned at him. She stepped back from him and he was crestfallen: he hadn't really wanted her to move away, and she knew it. He also saw for the first time that she was a little unsteady on her feet. He wanted to give her his arm to lean on, but he guessed she would brush it away now.

After a moment she said, "Here's our real problem."

"We have a problem?"

"Oh, for ghosts' sake. Shut your meat-hole for a moment."

Rokhlenu repressed several approximately witty replies that occurred to him then because she really did look sick and unhappy and he hated that. Because he could not restrain himself any longer, he reached out his hand to steady her. She drew herself up, raised her hand to knock his away …then, unexpectedly, leaned into him.

"Thanks," she said.

"It's nothing," he said. "What's the problem?"

"Are you crazy? We must have ten thousand problems. Oh-you mean the one I meant. It's this. Gravy-boat, you don't have any right to do what you're doing around here."

Rokhlenu looked sidelong at her. "What do you mean?"

"Don't bite me. It's true. You're running this place as if you were my Second Wolf. Which you're not. Unless you want to be: the plepnup who had the job apparently ran off with the squeaking herds this morning."

"There's no chance he's among our honored dead, is there?"

"Well, that's the story I've been giving out. I suppose if he ever has the stones to show his hairless face around here again we may have to kill him to make the story stick."

"A pleasure."

"We'll share it, if it comes to that. But I take it from your general lack of eager woofiness that you are not thrilled with the prospect of being my Second Wolf."

"Frankly, no. I'm sorry-"

"No, don't be sorry. Always be frank with me. Always. Unless you're disagreeing with me. Then you can be diplomatic and sorry. But we don't disagree here. How can you keep the leadership of those crazy battle-scarred thugs if you're taking orders from a female? They'd be stupid to object, because I'm tougher than you are, or any of them, but that's not the point. They would object. We have to find a way around that."

"Hm."

"Well, yes, exactly. It's a problem. You're their leader, the only one they'll accept. Unless your old friend N-Ny-Khretvarrgliu wants the job."

"He doesn't."

"Then it's yours. But I have to have them in my corner if they're going to stay."

"I'll give it some thought."

"That's wonderful, beef dumpling, but I already have and I have a kind of solution. You know that fuzz-faced farting evil old grinning gray-muzzle we just bounced out of here?"

"Wurnafenglu."

"Yes, that. He's not their Werowance. He's just on their pack council. And he's one of their candidates for election to the city's Innermost Pack."

"Huh. He'll have a tough election this year. We cost the Sardhluun a lot of bite with our escape."

"And we'll cost them more, but that's not the point right now. He carries authority in the pack because he was elected to represent them to the city."

"That's how it worked in the Aruukaiaduun, also." Rokhlenu scowled involuntarily. That was the life he had aimed at, and would have achieved, but for that brach's bastard Rywudhaariu. "But the outliers have never had singers on the Innermost Pack of Wuruyaaria."

"But it's stupid that we don't. We're here. We're part of the life of the city. Many of the citizens who vote in Apetown or Dogtown actually live here. Why shouldn't we be part of the treaty?"

"The thing is that we're not, though."

"The thing is, dear leg-of-lamb, that we need some sort of official status for you that doesn't threaten me. Candidate for the Innermost Pack is perfect for that. Your first task will be to obtain treaty rights for the outliers."

"Hm." Rokhlenu grinned. "By crushing the Sardhluun sheepdogs."

"Right! People in the city hate their guts. Who wouldn't? Maybe we can cut them out of the treaty-side with their enemies in the treaty packs. Maybe we can pound them until the Sardhluun themselves help us get into the treaty. Maybe we'll never get into the treaty. But in the meantime it gives you status to do what we want you to be able to do here and now."

"All right. I accept the nomination, but we'll have to have an election-"

"The election will be tonight after dark in the marketplace. Your irredeemables and as many of the outliers as I can trust will be there. Others will be unaccountably stationed on the walls for guard duty."

"I see. I see. You're pretty good at this."

"Somebody has to be. We can't all sidle through on good looks and charm and daring and good looks and a beautiful way with words and courageous feats and a beautiful singing voice and good looks and money. Actually, anyone could sidle through with all of that going for him, so don't think you're anything special."

"As long as you do, that's enough."

The outlier settlement had lost a lot of citizens on this difficult day. That night, after sunset, when the werewolves began to arrive for the election, the market at the center of the settlement was hardly crowded and the windows of the lair-towers all over town were dark and lifeless. In contrast, Wuruyaaria to the north was a misty waterfall of light rushing down the steps of the great mountain.

The great moon-clock on the face of Dhaarnaiarnon showed that Horseman should be aloft, but no moon could be seen through the dense cloud cover. Few of the citizens were in the night shape, and those were werewolves of low bite-likely they never transformed into the day shape.

It was a rather grim assembly that gathered in the torchlit market, but Wuinlendhono showed no awareness of this as she leapt up on a hastily made rostrum and addressed the crowd.

She spoke at some length about the dangers and the choices in front of them. She relayed to them the Sardhluun's offer of amnesty if they surrendered the prisoners, and she let them know she had rejected it. She said that the most she would permit the outlier pack to do would be to cast out the escapees. But she said that, in that case, she would lay down the chieftainship and go with her intended into exile.

That was the first matter she submitted to a vote: if they wished the escapees to leave the outlier settlement, they were to move to her left; if they were against ejecting the escapees, they should move to her right.

More than half of those present were refugees from the Sardhluun, but (unlike Wuinlendhono) Rokhlenu did not consider their votes certain. He suspected many of them would rather flee to the obscurity and safety of the barbaric packs of the outlands. He was sure of this when he saw them milling about in the middle of the market.

He stood up and walked through the milling assembly to stand prominently among the werewolves at Wuinlendhono's right hand.

This persuaded many of the undecided voters to come stand by him. Many-but far from all. Rokhlenu guessed that a majority of citizens present were still in the middle of the market, dithering. Rokhlenu saw Hlupnafenglu standing there, turning round and round with an odd smile on his face. It was far from clear that he understood what was going on-but at least he was enjoying himself, Rokhlenu reflected. He did not see Liudhleeo or Hrutnefdhu. They were citizens of little or no bite, but it would have been something just to have their votes right now.

Wuinlendhono could put the question again, phrasing it slightly differently. They could open the matter for debate. There were all sorts of things they might do, but it would be better if they didn't have to.

There was a stir in the crowd on the eastern end of the market, directly opposite Wuinlendhono. The scandalized crowd parted, and Rokhlenu saw with dismay that the cause of the disturbance was Morlock. He was striding across the marketplace with his freakish sword in his hand.

Wuinlendhono's gold-toothed bodyguards stood forth and snarled a warning. Morlock didn't even seem to notice them (in fact, their snarls had been a little tentative) but he halted ten or twelve paces in front of the rostrum and addressed Wuinlendhono in a voice that rode high above the muttering and growling of the crowd.

"First Wolf, I claim no rights in the assembly," the pale-eyed never-wolf said, "but I ask permission to address you."

"You are addressing me," Wuinlendhono pointed out briskly. "Keep it brief; we have a long night of business before us. It's bad manners to bring a weapon to an election, by the way."

"It was necessary that I do so," said Morlock. He strode forward. He did not quite kick the bodyguards out of his way, but they had to skip nimbly away to avoid being stepped on. He laid the sword at Wuinlendhono's feet.

"I have no vote here," he said, "but I say this. Your enemies are my enemies. I will fight for you in the teeth of the Sardhluun dogs. I do not know if this accords with your law; I don't know your law. I will do this for the healing and harbor you gave to me, a stranger and a never-wolf, when you could have turned me away. Today your blood was shed for me and for these others. I will pay for that blood with the blood of your enemies. Blood for blood: that is the only law I know."

"Khretvarrgliu!" the irredeemables began to roar. "Khretvarrgliu! Blood for blood! Blood for blood! Blood for blood!" It became a chant. Many of the original outliers began to join in. Hlupnafenglu hooted incoherently: apparently he had just recognized his friend Morlock; he stumped forward and pounded Morlock agreeably on his crooked shoulders.

Smiling graciously, Wuinlendhono knelt down and gingerly picked up Morlock's sword, one hand beneath the hilt, one hand beneath the blade. She handed it back to him. She leaned forward to speak in his ear. Rokhlenu wasn't close enough to hear what she was saying-the crowd was growing very noisy indeed-but he could see her lips. He was much mistaken if she didn't say, Nicely timed. Take this back and go stand by my Rokhlenu.

Morlock took the sword, at any rate, sheathed it on the shoulder hilt he was wearing, and strode over to stand at Rokhlenu's side. Hlupnafenglu capered like a puppy at his heels.

Hlupnafenglu wasn't the only one. All the remaining irredeemables came over in a rush, shouting, "Blood for blood! Blood for blood!" Many of the original outliers followed. Soon the whole left side of the market was vacant and there were a few citizens in the center, and the whole right side of the market was crowded with citizens standing on each other's feet and shouting "Blood for blood!" in each other's faces.

"Citizens," Wuinlendhono said, coldly eyeing the few holdouts in the center. "May I call the vote unanimous?"

They looked at her; they looked at the bristling mass of werewolves facing them; they turned back to her and nodded.

°I declare the pack is of one mind: the escapees shall stay. We are one pack; we will stand together and make our enemies pay blood for blood. I have spoken; let it be remembered."

At the First Wolf's declaration, the crowd roared in agreement and began to spread out around the market again. The densest part of the crowd remained around Rokhlenu and Morlock, but in deference to their bite the citizens (except Hlupnafenglu, who barely counted) stood a slight distance away. Rokhlenu risked leaning toward Morlock and said, "Why'd you do it? I told you not to show up here."

"Hrutnefdhu's idea," Morlock explained in a mutter. "We were watching from a tower, and it looked like you were going to lose."

"We were, too."

Wuinlendhono was speaking again. She pointed out the broader issue: that they were vulnerable to the Sardhluun attacks because they were not sworn to the treaty. She made her proposal that the outliers campaign for admission to the treaty packs.

This question she opened up to discussion by the citizens. Many of them had things to say, arguments to make, questions to ask. Wuinlendhono ran the meeting with cool practiced authority, letting everyone have their say in turn and keeping the discussion from breaking up into fights, as debates in werewolf assemblies often did. When one speaker turned snarling on another, a cold word from the rostrum was enough to bring them to heel.

Rokhlenu was proud of her-and worried for her. She looked relentless, yet strangely fragile in the flickering torchlight. He thought she was feeling the pain of her wound. And the wind had turned, also, making the night suddenly cold. He wanted to go stand beside her, support her, shield her from the wind-something to give her comfort, so that she would not have to stand alone.

But if their plan was to work, she had to stand alone.

In the end she declared the debate had gone on long enough. There was a rumble of general agreement: many of the same arguments were being repeated, over and over.

"Those in favor of seeking treaty status in Wuruyaaria, stand to my left," she directed. "Those against it, stand to my right."

The crowd had spread out during the debate, and it took a few moments before the voters sorted themselves out. Rokhlenu strode across the market to stand with those in favor of joining the treaty. He heard Hlupnafenglu tromping after him, but did not hear Morlock's rather irregular stride. Glancing about when he reached the left side of the rostrum, he noticed that Morlock had quietly sidled over to a corner of the market that was quietly noncommittal-neither left, right, nor center-and he stood there, leaning against the wall of a tower, watching the procedure with cool detachment.

There were no voters in the middle. Some did indeed stand on the First Wolf's right: escapees or long-term outliers who had a rather hard-bitten look to them. They probably liked standing outside the scope of the city's laws, Rokhlenu thought. He could understand it, remembering the bitter parody of justice that had brought him to the Vargulleion.

Wuinlendhono eyed the two groups. She said, "I declare that the greater number of the pack has resolved to seek treaty status. Does anyone seek an appeal?" She turned to the dissenters and asked, "Do you wish a tally?"

"No, High Huntress," said one. "The vote is clear." The others nodded their agreement, shivering slightly in the suddenly stronger wind.

"Then the pack will seek treaty status in this Year of Choosing," Wuinlendhono said, with confident formality. "I have spoken; let it be remembered."

As she spoke, the sky opened and the silver eye of Horseman peered through the ragged edges of cloud. She impulsively raised her arms and sum moned the change, assuming the shadow of her night shape, dismissing the shadow of her day shape. Before her transformation was half complete, the wave of moonlight swept over Rokhlenu, and he too summoned the change. All around him, werewolves were summoning their night shapes, screaming in ecstasy and pain at the transformation.

Morlock stood aloof during the debate and subsequent vote. He had an idea for putting a better edge on glass weapons and an idea for a flying machine and an idea for a new card game, and he was aching to get back to his cave and work on one or more of these ideas. On the other hand, he felt it would look bad if he simply walked away. Long solitude had worn away most of Morlock's social instincts, but he was fairly sure it would damage his friend's status if he displayed his complete indifference to the political issues of the day. The glass project involved some complex multidimensional calculations, and Morlock occupied himself by folding various n-dimensional polytopes in his head.

Since he was indifferent to the discussion, Morlock was the only person in the marketplace to notice that the clouds were thinning with the change of wind. He guessed the second moon would be appearing soon, and some of the werewolves would change their skins.

He had seen werewolves assume the night shape many times. But it occurred to him that he had never done so while using his Sight to observe the transformation. It might be interesting, he decided.

He sat down cross-legged on the boards and folded his hands. He rested his back against the tower wall and summoned the rapture of vision.

It was slow to come, cloudy and dim when it arrived. His Sight was nothing like what it had been; he thought now it might never recover.

But what he saw with his enfeebled vision was interesting enough. The werewolves were all woven through and through with silver-edged shadows. Their inner selves bristled with them.

Wuinlendhono was the first to feel the weight of moonlight when the sky opened its single eye. She raised her arms crawling with silver-edged shadows toward the moon. The silver along the edge of the shadows grew brighter and brighter. The shadows themselves grew deeper and darker. Then the image of the woman turned inside out: the silver was in the center and the shadows at the edges. The woman was now a wolf, shaking free from the dim gloomy material garments she wore, the red stain of her agonizing wound melting, drifting away, lost in the silver-hearted shadows.

Then the moonlight fell on the crowd and Morlock saw citizen after citizen undergo the same change, were becoming wolf, as the silver-edged shadows of their being became silver-hearted shadows and their flesh rippled and changed to match their inner selves.

Even the werewolves who could not undergo the change writhed in the moonlight. The shadows within them strove to twist and change, like those of their brethren. But there was some knot or twist within the shadows that kept them from inverting.

Most interesting of all was Hlupnafenglu. He was standing in the center of the marketplace, spinning around and around in glee as werewolves assumed their night shapes all around him. His exaltation and confusion were clearly visible on his talic exhalation. But Morlock could also see the spike in his brain: a coruscating whorl of red and gold and silver, dimming the shadows of his being, perhaps preventing them from inverting.

Now Morlock had a fourth project to contemplate: a cure for werewolves unable to change their skins. The details made for an interesting speculation. Even more interesting was the question of whether he should attempt it.

Morlock dismissed the vision, which was strangely fatiguing. His left hand throbbed with a numb ghostly ache: it seemed to be getting worse all the time, never better.

But at least it gave him one more thing to think about as the meeting continued.

Moonlight ran riot through the assembly, infecting the citizens with their night shapes. The First Wolf stepped out of her shining ceremonial armor and sang a wordless song of celebration and healing into the ragged, suddenly luminous night.

The citizens who could undergo the change freed themselves from their clothes and began to sing along with the First Wolf. The citizens condemned to wear some trace of the day shape even at night looked on in admiration and some envy.

All felt the appearance of moonlight at this crucial juncture of the meeting was a ghost-sent omen. Even the dissenters rejoiced at the outliers' new destiny, sacralized by the moon's unclouded eye.

When the song ended, the First Wolf nominated her intended, Rokhlenu, as gnyrrand to carry the pack's green-and-gold banner to the city, in war and peace. There was no need for a formal vote; the nomination passed with howling acclamations, and Rokhlenu leapt up on the rostrum next to his intended, the outlier pack's first candidate to the city government.

Wuinlendhono proposed that they elect four more candidates: five was a magic number; five was the number of limbs every person possessed (two legs, two arms, and a tail); five would be the number of treaty packs if they were successful.

The motion carried nearly as readily as Rokhlenu's election, and they spent much of the remaining night proposing and debating various nominees.

A water snake with bright wise eyes was listening to it all through the floorboards of the marketplace.

He noted the manifestation of a many-legged spidery form with a woman's face.

"Death," he signified, acknowledging his colleague.

"Wisdom," signified the other.

"Is this part of your mysterious plan?" the snake wondered.

"I am done with plans," Death signified. "Now we ride the torrent to the end that awaits all things-as we ever did, no matter what your visualizations tell you."

"Everything that has a beginning has an end," Wisdom acknowledged. "But there is a time before the end that matters."

"No. Only the end matters."

Wisdom uttered a talic distortion as intense as he was capable of. he rejected her premise.

Death was amused. "You should be careful, Wisdom. Ulugarriu is somewhere nearby. You may reveal your own presence."

"Do you sense that Ulugarriu is here?"

"Imprecisely. My visualization implies that Ulugarriu will at least monitor these events somehow. But the werewolf can mask itself from my direct perception, and my visualizations cannot fully comprehend it."

"Nor mine. I don't see why."

"If you did, your visualization would comprehend it. There is another thing my visualization does not comprehend-perhaps yours does."

"What?"

"There is a bond between those two werewolves-the leaders. I forget their names."

"Love could explain it to you, perhaps," Wisdom signified, referring to the Strange God of that name. "I don't fully understand it either," he continued. "It troubles my visualizations-it is neither in my scope of being, nor can exist without it."

"I feel the same way," Death mused. "Unfortunately, Love does not readily signify to me, anymore. Our presences intermingle confusingly when we manifest in adjoining space-time."

"We have grown too deeply into our divine natures, perhaps," Wisdom mused. "Do you ever regret undertaking apotheosis?" he asked impulsively. "I sometimes wish I had waited a while longer, lived as a man a while longer."

"I do not regret," Death said slowly. "I do not remember. I do not wait. They are inconsistent with my godhood."

They weren't inconsistent with Wisdom, and he indicated so with a talic distortion, the symbolic equivalent of a sigh. But she had already ceased to manifest herself.

Wisdom was left behind troubled in the wake of Death, as usual. He spent some time observing Death's random factor in this nexus, the man named Morlock.

Morlock was not interested in the jubilation or debate of the tumultuous political meeting of the werewolves. He was not paying any attention to it at all. He sat folding strange shapes and setting them adrift in the dark waters of his mind. Those waters were dark to Wisdom, anyway: his visualization could not embrace them. They savored to him of death, of love, of hate, of loyalty, of grief, and other gods and phenomena that Wisdom could not even name.

Wisdom considered this locus of space-time, which both he and Death had come to observe. There was noise. There was howling. There were hopes and fears and anger. There was a man dreaming of bright things with a dark mind. Somewhere, felt but not seen, was the presence of the werewolf maker, Ulugarriu.

Was this locus really part of the god-destroying torrent that Death had signified of and seemed to welcome? He did not know. And he wanted to know.

It is the nature of wisdom to be aware of its limits and always struggle against them. The god Wisdom necessarily shared this nature. He took hold of space-time and twisted it around himself, directing his manifestation far away, toward the end of the world.

The moment after the wise-eyed snake disappeared, the water where he had been manifest was caught up in a net woven of glass, light and certain heretical opinions.

"May ghosts gnaw on the scaly cunning tail-without-a-body!" Ulugarriu spluttered, surfacing in the dark water, still wearing the day shape. "I missed him!"

The werewolf maker looked ruefully at the empty dripping net that had been woven to catch a god-then grinned a narrow, long wolvish grin, not wholly displeased, not wholly hostile. Ulugarriu liked a cunning opponent, and for that reason, if for no other, was a happy werewolf these nights.

Chapter Eighteen: Wisdom at World's End

This is the way the world ends: a wrinkled lip of blue stone protruding against an unending bitter void. That's the northern end, anyway.

Wisdom was tired of being a snake and wove a new manifestation of himself: a skeletal machine with shining crystalline spikes for eyes. It appeared between one instant and another atop the wreckage that had once been the anchor for the Soul Bridge, spanning the gap between this world-Wisdom's world, the only world in which he was allowed to be Wisdom-and another world entirely.

His presence occurred there on a morning when/where he visualized Death would be otherwise occupied.

The northern landscape was a marshy yellow wasteland, scattered with the decaying corpses of frost behemoths and ice jackals and other beasts who could only thrive in the bitter cold of the world's northern edge. But now the cold was gone, even in high winter, and the animals were dead, except for those that could burrow underground to find deep-hidden layers of frost and estivate there through the long deadly thaw.

The Strange Gods had killed this place, or their weapon against the werewolves had, creating the cruelly warm weather that devastated the oncethriving north. Wisdom had killed it, in a way. He hated that.

Death had brought the weapon to the Strange Gods; Death and her allies (especially Stupidity) had persuaded them to unleash it, binding themselves not to interfere with its course. Ulugarriu had foiled the weapon so far; the war between the gods and the werewolves was a long grinding stalemate. And now Death had escaped from the pact she herself had proposed, leaving the rest of the Strange Gods captive in it-and again Stupidity had been her ally. Now Death was excited, afraid, busy. She was up to something, and Wisdom (also afraid) needed to know what.

That was the need that brought him here. Wisdom's visualizations did not embrace where or how Death had acquired the instrument that was poisoning the north with heat. One possible explanation was that the instrument itself was not of the world, but from outside it.

As Wisdom stood on the anchor of the long-shattered Soul Bridge, he felt an alien presence. A set of unfamiliar symbols impressed themselves on his awareness.

He sensed nothing via his manifestation, nor was this part of his visualization. Somehow, this alien presence was speaking directly to his awareness.

It was what he had hoped for. He patiently signified a nonrandom pattern.

A new set of symbols impressed itself on him.

He signified a nonrandom pattern that followed logically from the previous one.

Time passed as Wisdom and the stranger exchanged symbologies: days, bright calls and dark calls, a month.

In the end he could not only understand the stranger but see it: it had acquired a fine layer of grit and moisture over its presence in the world. Wisdom detected a degree of increasing materiality, also, although he did not signal this to his conversational partner; he guessed it would consider the remark impolite.

Finally, Wisdom was able to ask, "Why are you here? We thought the Soul Bridge had been severed."

The response: "Why is not how. How: the Soul Bridge has been severed, but is not the only way to traverse the gulf. The-one-you-would-call-I will not discuss this further."

"And the why?"

"The implicature of events suggested to the-ones-you-would-call-us that a single instrument would be insufficient for your purposes. Do you wish another?"

"And will you-?"

"The-ones-you-would-call-us-"

"I not only would; I do. Will you supply another instrument?"

"If you require it."

"Why?"

"It furthers the interests of those-you-would-call-us."

"You have interests?" Wisdom wondered.

"Yes."

Wisdom pondered this. The entities on the far side of the broken Soul Bridge were hostile to all life that partook of materiality.

His visualizations were enriched-so much richer now than before. They were darker, though, much darker. He thought of Death and was sad.

"Your structure is elegant indeed," the alien remarked.

"Thank you."

"Innumerable nodes of force concatenate in your being in patterns clearly rational yet difficult to predict in a finite set of dimensions."

"Thank you."

"Yet there is an inelegant cluster of being that seems not to be fully patterned. It changes, but with earthy sluggishness. It is almost organic in its soft inflexibility."

"Thank you."

"If the-one-you-would-call-I understand this thrice-used symbol, you have used it with a slightly different import each time."

"You may well have understood it, then."

"Those-you-would-call-we can integrate the unpatterned to your patterning."

"No."

"It would be more elegant. You would process symbols more efficiently."

"No."

"You should not refuse. Elegance is better than inelegance. Pattern is better than unpattern. Efficiency is better than inefficiency."

"Efficiency cannot be calculated without reference to purpose."

"Conceded."

"Reduction of my unpattern to pattern would be contrary to my purpose. I believe the irregularities you refer to constitute my individual self. Sustaining that self as long as possible is at least one of my purposes."

"You have an individual self?" the alien signified doubtfully. "Is this more inefficiency in your symbology?"

"I do indeed have an individual self. You did not expect this?"

"No. This changes the implicature. You may not have another instrument."

"I don't want one anyway," Wisdom signified.

The alien ignored him thereafter, and he it.

The pattern in events was so clear, so dark. He was sorry for it, sorry for Death, whom he had once loved as the closest of his friends, when they were still mortal, all those ages ago. But he delighted in the intense detail of his divine visualization, also. Unclarity was almost gone. It was bracing, an icy relief, even though one small but personally important articulation of the web was tangled in an almost irresolvable coil.

He turned his back on the end of the world.

Standing close by him was Death, manifest as a many-legged spidery being with a dead woman's face.

"We were wrong to assume godhood," he signified to her. "Do you remember how you feared it? You were right to fear it."

"I will take away your fear," signified Death.

He raised his metal-like arms. "Let me take away yours. The apotheosiswheel that changed us into gods was largely my design. I am the only one who knows what has happened to you, and I am the only one who knows how to help you."

"I will take away your knowledge."

"I am willing to help you. I want to help you."

"I will take away your wanting, and all that you want."

His manifestation rejected her approach: the talic equivalent of a blow. Her manifestation flowed around it. She put her lifeless face against his metallic one in a cold kiss.

Wisdom's shining manifestation faded away, the talic components no longer organized by a divine intention.

Wisdom continued in the intentional design of events and in every mind that schemed and planned. In that sense, Wisdom continued to exist, and would always exist, until and unless the last mind faded away forever.

But the Wisdom who had been one of the Strange Gods, who had once been a man, who had walked in the long-vanished forests that once shadowed the western edge of the world and thought of ways he and his friends could escape mortality, that Wisdom was gone.

In this limited sense, Wisdom was dead.

Chapter Nineteen: Electrum

Rokhlenu was riding the wicker boat across the swamp to Morlock's cave when he heard a dull thump. Looking up, he saw a great bloom of fire ascend into the afternoon sky, followed by trails of smoke and dust.

"He'll kill himself one day," Rokhlenu reflected, "and us with him."

Rokhlenu beached the boat on the marshy verge and climbed the wooden steps Morlock had built into the hillside.

The never-wolf maker was not in his cave, as Rokhlenu had expected, but Hrutnefdhu the pale castrato was. He was sitting cross-legged just inside the cave, sewing metal rings onto leather or cloth stretched over a wooden frame. Deeper in the cave, Hlupnafenglu was curled up on the ground, holding up playing cards one by one in front of the basket of talking flames.

"Gnyrrand Rokhlenu," Hrutnefdhu said.

"Old friend Hrutnefdhu," Rokhlenu replied.

The pale werewolf glanced about instinctively, as if to see if anyone was listening, and said, "You don't have to call me that, you know. It can't be good for your bite to have a plepnup among your old friends."

Rokhlenu had thought about that, and Wuinlendhono had made the same point to him several times. But the outliers were not the Aruukaiaduun: there were many semiwolves, many plepnupov, many irregular shapes and shadows among his constituency. He thought it would harm him politically to distance himself from Hrutnefdhu. Anyway, he wasn't accustomed to picking his friends according to political convenience.

"Or a never-wolf, either," Rokhlenu added, grinning. "Where is he, by the way?"

Hrutnefdhu dropped his eyes to his work, blushing a little. He was easily affected by the slightest show of loyalty or affection; Rokhlenu thought he must have led a grim sort of life.

"Over the hill," the pale werewolf replied. "Trying something new, he said."

"Is he still alive, do you think?"

Hrutnefdhu grinned a little and said, "It is dangerous. That's why he doesn't do it here."

Rokhlenu looked over at the weapons rack. There were about a dozen stabbing spears with shining glass gores, two glass short swords with sharp points and leather grips, and about a dozen glass knives. Rokhlenu picked up one of these and balanced it on one finger thoughtfully.

"Not too many today," he remarked.

"You said we had enough yesterday, so he started working on this other thing."

"Is what you're doing part of it?"

"Not exactly. This won't be done tonight."

"What is it?"

"He says he'll be able to fly with it."

"Oh?" Rokhlenu walked over and examined the thing. It looked like a pair of bat wings, scaled over with metal discs and bound to a wooden frame. The frame and the wings hid some gears and cables that mixed wood and glass. There were grips on the inside tips of the wings.

"I doubt it," he said finally, "but it's interesting. Why are you sewing those rings all over it? Armor?"

Hrutnefdhu had just grabbed one of the rings from an odd upside-down box on long stiltlike legs. He met Rokhlenu's eye and let go of the disc in his hand. It flew straight upward, as if it were falling. He grabbed it before it rose too far and grinned as Rokhlenu whistled admiringly.

"It's weird in here sometimes," Rokhlenu said. "Like the stories they tell about Ulugarriu's workshop."

"Ulugarriu couldn't do anything like this. Not that I've ever heard," Hrutnefdhu said, turning shyly back to his work.

The pale werewolf seemed embarrassed by something, so Rokhlenu decided to leave him alone. "I'll go see what Morlock is up to," he said aloud, and patted Hrutnefdhu on the shoulder as he passed out of the cave.

He met Morlock coming over the rise of the hill with a sizable boulder in his hands. He looked a little scorched, but otherwise undamaged. There were clouds of smoke and dust settling behind him.

"Let me help you with that," Rokhlenu called.

"You should stay back. This hillside was a silver dump, I think. There may be some of the metal in these dust clouds."

"Urrrm. I think you're right: I can smell the nasty stuff. Well, they had to put it somewhere, I guess."

He saw mummified bodies of werewolves-some in the day shape, some in the night shape-scattered about the dusty hillside. He pointed at them and said, "Why would they come here? If I can sense the silver, they must have been able to."

"They killed themselves, I think. Some of them were carrying things. Notes, mementoes, that sort of thing."

"Horrible. You picked a nasty place for your work, old friend."

"Well, I knew no one else would get hurt if it went wrong. As it almost did: phlogiston is difficult stuff, and I haven't the material to handle it safely."

"What would you need?"

"A lightning bolt or two. The more the better. I could fashion some aethrium instruments from them. But the storms lately have been surprisingly free from lightning, and the landscape hereabouts is totally free from aether deposits."

"I did not know that."

"I think someone collects them. Your folk hero Ulugarriu, perhaps."

"You think Ulugarriu actually exists?" Rokhlenu asked doubtfully.

Morlock nodded toward the moon-clock on the side of the volcano. Rokhlenu nodded slowly. Personally, he didn't believe in Ulugarriu. But someone had built the wonders of Wuruyaaria: if he wasn't called Ulugarriu, he was called something else.

"You're sure you don't want help with that rock?" Rokhlenu said as Morlock came nearer, out of the poisonous dust.

"It's not too bad," Morlock replied.

"The thing must be heavier than you are."

"Just about. But there's something holding it up." He lifted the boulder high, and on its underside Rokhlenu saw what looked like two metal footprints, affixed to the rock with crystalline spikes.

"What are those?"

"Soles for my new shoes," Morlock said, lowering the boulder.

"Ghost. How many have you got?"

"Just the pair. At that, I had to sacrifice a lot of metal and phlogiston I was planning to use for the wings."

"I saw those. Will that thing work?"

"No idea. The crows think it will, or say that they think it will, but crows aren't always reliable. They may just want to see someone crash in it."

Rokhlenu understood that; he'd known a lot of crows. They'd probably laughed watching the werewolves eating silver. He thought about them and didn't feel like laughing.

"Why do you suppose people kill themselves?" he asked Morlock.

"Pain," Morlock said. "Loneliness. Shame. Anger."

Rokhlenu waited, but Morlock didn't say any more. He thought about the singer he had known who ate wolfbane, and he thought about Morlock's hand. He knew it wasn't any better: in fact, Morlock always wore a glove on his left hand now to hide how bad it was getting.

Rokhlenu had an odd feeling Morlock knew what he was thinking about, but he wasn't saying anything, and Rokhlenu couldn't think of anything to say. He grabbed the other side of the boulder, just to keep from being entirely useless, and they carried it back to the cave together.

"Liudhleeo says," he said when they set the rock down in the cave, "that we need to work on Hlupnafenglu soon-if you want to take care of that before we leave tonight."

"Yes," Morlock said. "If one of us is killed tonight, the task may prove impossible."

Hrutnefdhu had put away his metallic thread and ivory needle and was folding up the stilts under his upside-down box of rings. "I'll take him over to the lair-tower," he said to the others. "Liudhleeo will want to do the work over there. She hates it over here."

"The nearness of that silver, I think," Morlock said, and Rokhlenu turned his head in agreement. Different werewolves were sensitive to silver in different degrees, and Liudhleeo was more sensitive than most.

Hrutnefdhu was getting Hlupnafenglu's attention gently and patiently. He persuaded the groggy red werewolf with words and gestures to rise up and follow him. The red werewolf shuffled docilely along after Hrutnefdhu for a few steps. Then he seemed to wake up a little more. He cast his mad golden gaze around the cave, looking at Morlock, the nexus of speaking flames, the other two werewolves, Morlock again.

"It's all right," Morlock said, meeting his eyes. "It's all right. We will follow you over. We'll see you soon. Go with your friend Hrutnefdhu. Go with him. We'll follow."

It was not clear how much the crazy werewolf understood. But Morlock's words or tone seemed to settle him somehow. He followed Hrutnefdhu out of the cave into the afternoon light and they went together, the pale werewolf and the red one, down the wooden stairs to the wickerwork boat.

When they were gone, Rokhlenu turned to Morlock and said, "I want to see your hand."

Morlock considered the matter for a moment, and then he peeled off the glove without saying anything.

The hand was gray and dead looking. The fingers were the worst. And their tips looked not so much dead as …ghostly. They seemed to be translucent, almost transparent.

"Does it hurt?" Rokhlenu asked.

"Yes," said Morlock. "But most unpleasant is the lack of control. I-I'm not used to that."

Rokhlenu nodded grimly. "Did she do this to you? Liudhleeo? If she did-"

"I don't think so. I think it was from that spike that was in my head. Part of it may still be in there. Or, while it was in me, it did some damage that is killing me by inches."

"You think it will kill you, then?"

"Probably. Liudhleeo calls it `ghost sickness.' She has heard of it but never seen it."

"The Goweiteiuun have the best ghost-sniffers; maybe they can do something."

"So Liudhleeo says."

"And there's the Shadow Market in the low city, just inside the walls. Lots of crazy sorcerers work that place. Half of them are quacks and the rest are crooks, but they might know something useful."

"So Hrutnefdhu says."

Rokhlenu would have cursed the illness, the Sardhluun ghost-sniffers, Liudhleeo, Hrutnefdhu, and all of the sorcerers in the Shadow Market, but it would do no good. So he punched the wall of the cave instead. Morlock said nothing.

The moment passed. Rokhlenu picked up one of the swords from the weapon rack and said, "Can I take this? I prefer a sword to a spear, when it comes to a fight."

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

"Thanks."

Morlock shrugged, nodded.

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

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

"Yes?"

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

"Where's Hrutnefdhu?" asked Rokhlenu.

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

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

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

"Who does?" muttered Wuinlendhono discontentedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I guess."

"I wonder why it burned you."

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

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

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

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

"What a disgusting idea!" Wuinlendhono said heatedly.

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

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

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

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

Hlupnafenglu lay in the sunlight, strangely still.

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

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

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

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

"Then."

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

Chapter Twenty: A Long Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, Gnyrrand."

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

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

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

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

"Nicely done," he whispered harshly.

"Takes practice," Morlock whispered back.

"How many legs did you break?"

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

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

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

"Then he tries again," Rokhlenu said.

"What if he breaks his leg?"

"Then we send up Runhuiulanhu with a rope."

"And what if-?"

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

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

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

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

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

They ran from the wall toward the hulking lightless prison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The werewolves turned to Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They followed Morlock down the stairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You were imprisoned here," he said.

"I was born here."

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

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

Rokhlenu noticed that he was gripping Wuinlendhono's elbow rather tightly. He relaxed his grip and put his hand along her forearm caressingly.

"I cannot stand," whispered Wuinlendhono, "that you know when to talk, and when not to talk. That you are as beautiful as a moon at new rising. That you are strong as iron, as cunning and lively as a flame. That I can trust you. That I can turn my back on you and know that I am safe, know that you will die defending me, that I would die defending you. Your love will make me weak and I cannot be weak. I can't be weak. Stop making me be weak."

"I wouldn't want you if you were weak."

She was in his arms by then, sniffing his hair and nipping at his neck. "Lying son of a never-wolf cow," she breathed in his ear.

"And don't talk that way about my mother. She was a very respectable rope weaver, may the ghosts leave her alone."

Wuinlendhono drew in a long sobbing breath and stood away from him.

"I'm sure she was," said the First Wolf of the outlier pack. "Eminently respectable. How sorry I am that I never got the chance to meet her."

"You'd be sorrier still if you did have the chance. She never was very kindly to my meathearts."

"And neither will I ever be, so we have that in common."

She took his arm and they climbed the dark stair in silence.

When they reached the ground floor, the other werewolves (including the four who had been left outside) were crowded around Morlock and Hrutnefdhu. Morlock was holding a large codex in his right hand and raising high the shining glass in his gloved left hand. Hrutnefdhu, standing beside him, was reading from the book in low tones.

"Interesting story?" Wuinlendhono inquired, when they were close enough not to shout.

"Many stories," said Morlock. "All grim."

"It's the prisoner registry," Hrutnefdhu said. "Names, crimes, dates of admission, dates of-well, departure, I suppose. And notes on their final disposition."

"They are all dead or sold," Morlock said. "The ink on the latest entries looks to be five years old at least."

"Five years." Rokhlenu shook his head. "This was a fool's errand. They must have decided years ago that selling their prisoners was more profitable than housing and feeding them."

"Why just female prisoners?" Morlock asked.

The irredeemables looked embarrassed on Morlock's behalf, the goldtoothed bodyguards amused at his lack of sophistication.

"There are more unmated males than females in the wild packs," Wuinlendhono explained. "Every female knows she can get a mate by leaving the city. Not that many want to."

"Would all the female prisoners over a stretch of five years or more be salable on those terms?" asked Morlock coolly.

"Depends on how desperate they are out there, Khretvarrgliu," Runhuiulanhu said philosophically. "You should see some of the stale biscuits, male and female, they have down at the day-lairs off the market. But people pay for their company all the time."

"Never you, of course," said a gold-tooth slyly.

"Yes me, you stupid bag of marrow-sucked bones. Me with my monkey hands and feet, even when all three moons are up, and everyone knowing about it on account of they call me Ape-fingers. You think females are lining up to mate with me? If I get it, I have to pay for it."

"Couldn't you find a female in the same condition?" asked Morlock.

"Mate with an ape-fingered female?" cried ape-fingered Runhuiulanhu. "I can do better than that!"

"Shut up, for ghosts' sake," Rokhlenu hissed. "We'll have the Sardhluun down on us and there's no point to that, now."

"Be quiet, by all means," the First Wolf agreed. "But," she continued, this was not a fool's errand. That book will be very useful. Very useful indeed."

Confused looks on most faces except Morlock's-he may have been still pondering the plight of the ape-fingered werewolf for all Rokhlenu knew. But light began to shine in Rokhlenu's understanding. "Not every female sent here was to serve a life sentence. No female was sent here for a death sentence. People will want to know what happened to them."

"There's that," Wuinlendhono agreed. "Then there's the money. The Sardhluun have been taking money every year for tending to the city's pris oners. The citizens of Wuruyaaria will be curious to know how that money was spent."

Nods all around, fierce grins. Morale had been falling ever since they found the prison was an empty stone box; now the warriors were standing straighter. His intended was good at chieftainship, Rokhlenu thought (not for the first time). It was one thing to realize what she had said; it was another thing to know that her fighters needed to hear it.

"Then we can declare victory and get out," he said aloud.

"I'd better get that pulley," Morlock said. "It'll look bad when they see we broke into an empty prison."

"Not worth the time-" Rokhlenu began, thinking of Morlock shuffling up and down all the stairs above them, but Morlock was already headed out the front gate.

The werewolves followed him out. Morlock walked over to the lines hanging down the wall, found one of the knots in the rope, and pulled it apart.

"Stand clear," he said belatedly, standing clear himself.

The long cord began to fall, piling up on the dark ground. A few moments later, the glass pulley landed in a shower of bright fragments. Morlock quickly stowed the fragments in a bag he had been carrying on his back, coiled up the rope, and did likewise. He looked up to see the werewolves staring at him.

"I don't like strangers handling my stuff," he said.

This was a universal instinct among werewolves, and they all nodded sagely in agreement. But what Rokhlenu had really been wondering was how Morlock had gotten the pulley to fall into pieces. He must have shattered it somehow beforehand, but kept the fragments from separating with some spell. Now the spell had been broken and the pulley followed suit obligingly.

"Morlock, you're the best of makers!" Rokhlenu said. "Ulugarriu can yodel up his own tail, if any."

"Like to see them fight it out," Yaarirruuiu said. "Morlock against Ulugarriu in a maker's challenge."

"Yes!" cried Hrutnefdhu, his eyes shining with admiration. "What a game it would be! Skill against skill, with life and bite on the line."

The gold-toothed guards looked sidelong with disdain at the pale castrato's enthusiasm, but the irredeemables chuckled and Yaarirruuiu clapped him on the shoulder. They liked the ex-trustee, and even respected him a little, though he would not wear (or could not keep) honor-teeth.

"Shut your noisy word-holes, my champions," Wuinlendhono said cheerily. "Let's get clear of this place so that the Sardhluun can start paying for our fun soonest."

This strongly appealed to all of them, and Rokhlenu had no trouble ordering them for a quick run back to the ropes they had left hanging from the Long Wall. He put Morlock and Hrutnefdhu at the end, where they would wind up anyway, ape-fingered Runhuiulanhu at the front, in case the ropes were gone and they had to rescale the walls, and Wuinlendhono carrying the book in the center of the company, where it was safest.

The ropes were still there and apparently had not been discovered. No one was lying in wait for them, anyway. Rokhlenu was standing on the top of the wall, preparing to climb down the other side, when he noticed light and noise coming from the north and east, along the straight road to Wuruyaaria from the Long Wall. He signalled that the others should keep crossing over while he kept his eyes and ears on this interesting if indistinct disturbance.

Wuinlendhono clambered up the rope. The prisoner book from the Khuwuleion was dangling from one shoulder bound in neatly knotted rope. "Thanks for the help," she said pointedly after (in his absorption) he failed to help her.

"Look!" he said.

"Election," she said briefly. "That's why we're here tonight, remember?"

"It's outside the walls! A primary election would be held on Sardhluun ground."

"Yurr. Yes, you're right about that."

"It's a general election rally."

"Must be. Yes, I agree. And it must be against a pack who has no hope of beating them, so they're risking a rally now, and hoping to live down the defeat before election season is over."

"Only they're going to get some help."

"Not tonight, cutlet. We're not ready."

"They're not ready."

"Can't talk you out of it, can I? Oh, well. You're the gnyrrand."

Yaniunulu was just passing over the wall between them, and Wuinlendhono said, "Yaniunulu. Give it to him."

The frizz-haired red werewolf paused to goggle at her. "High Huntress," he said, "with respect-"

"Listen, I'm not sure who you think you're talking to, but I am sure your respect means less than nothing to me. When I told you to give it to him, I meant for you to give it to him. So give it to him."

Silently Yaniunulu took a staff hanging from his belt and handed it to Rokhlenu. He proceeded down the far side of the wall without another word.

The staff was wrapped with a black covering. When he pulled that loose, he found that the staff was a flagstaff: around it was wrapped the green-andgold banner of the outliers.

"It would be better if all the other nominees were here," Wuinlendhono said, "but I thought it might come to this. Now you can fight under our banner."

Rokhlenu mulled this over for a moment, then said, "You knew there would be a general election rally tonight, and you lied to me about it."

"I still don't think we're ready to intervene in the general election-we don't even have an ally in the treaty packs yet. And I didn't lie; I just didn't go out of my way to correct your mistaken impression. Oh. Oh, ghost. I hate it that I just said that."

After a moment of tense thought Rokhlenu said mildly, "We'll have to do better."

"You're right," she admitted frankly. "I'm not used to this partnership thing. I'll go with my guards and get the wedding ready; I have my brideprice," she added, shyly tapping the prison register. She scampered down the rope before he could kiss her good-bye.

Hrutnefdhu was coming up the rope now. Morlock, the last of the group, climbed up when Hrutnefdhu started climbing down the outer wall.

He caught Morlock by the arm and hauled him up-not that Morlock needed the help; he climbed better than Runhuiulanhu.

"We're going to be fighting after all," he said to Morlock.

"Some sort of rally?" Morlock said. "I heard you talking. Won't it go against you with the treaty packs if you break up an election rally?"

Rokhlenu looked at him with astonishment he was unable to mask. "Have you ever seen an election?" he asked.

"Many," Morlock said. "They didn't usually involve fighting." He paused. "At least, not on purpose." Another pause. "Actually, I'm not sure about that. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Tell me about your election rallies."

The your stung a little. But Rokhlenu had almost forgotten that Morlock was a never-wolf; there was something so wolvish about him.

"Once the packs elect their nominees," he explained to his old friend, "pack meets pack in a series of rallies all through the election season. They speak and they fight; citizens come to watch. The pack that speaks and fights better gains bite. The other loses bite. The nominees with the most bite at the end of the election season lie down in the Innermost Pack of the city."

"Then," said Morlock, and climbed down the outer wall.

By the time Rokhlenu reached the ground, Wuinlendhono and her guards were gone. The werewolves and Morlock were standing with weapons drawn, waiting for him.

He shook loose the green-and-gold banner and handed it to Hrutnefdhu.

"Don't lose it," he said.

"Won't," said the pale werewolf in a strangled tone.

Banner-bearer was a position of high honor and Hrutnefdhu was the male of lowest bite among them, but the irredeemables were for it. "Ha!" said Yaarirruuiu. "You'll have some bite after tonight, plepnup." The irredeemables growled their approval.

"Or we'll all be plepnupov," Hrutnefdhu snapped back, and the irredeemables hooted. The ex-trustee was judged the winner of that exchange.

"Let's go," Rokhlenu said, and they ran side by side into battle.

Mercy was the weakest of the Strange Gods, and her visualizations were often less than complete. So she was surprised when War manifested himself along side her on the road to Wuruyaaria. He wore his now-favorite form of a decapitated man, holding his severed head like a lamp. She wore the form of a woman without a mouth, carrying a white lotus flower in her hand.

"Going to the rally?" the decapitated man signified, flapping its gray lips with a hint of mockery.

"I am," Mercy confirmed. "I am surprised to see you there. Will your friend Death also be watching it?"

"My visualization doesn't embrace that," War admitted. They had hated each other so long that they had reached a state where it was pointless to lie to one another. "She is stranger than ever, in recent event-series. Even when she signifies directly to me, I have trouble disentangling her symbols. They seem almost random, empty of meaning."

"There may be no deaths at this rally, anyway," Mercy signified. "I hope not."

"I care not. You may be right; you may be wrong: the Sardhluun are ruthless bastards. They are stupid, though, and rarely amuse me."

Their manifestations overlapped the nexus of space-time where the rally was occurring.

The gnyrrand of the Goweiteiuun, a citizen named Aaluindhonu, was standing with his slate of candidates under a banner of blue and red, telling a parable of a man with five sons. The man asked each of his sons to take an arrow and break it. They did. Then he took five arrows, bound them together, and told them each to try and break the bundle. None could, and this showed, the gnyrrand said, that strength came through union: of brother with brother, citizen with citizen, pack with pack. The Goweiteiuun Pack was for the strength of the city through unity. The gnyrrand slouched back among his dozen or so followers without waiting for the crowd's applause.

There wasn't much applause to wait for. The crowd of spectators, gathered in the open area between the two bands of candidates, was not particularly impressed. The arrow story was trite; the lesson was the sort of la-di-da their den mothers and teachers had been yowling at them for as long as they could remember. It might be true, but it bored them. They turned with relief to the Sardhluun band.

The gnyrrand of the Sardhluun Pack was not present; this wasn't an important enough rally for him to appear. His second-candidate, Hwinsyngundu, gave the Sardhluun response, standing under a banner of black and green, in front of fifty volunteers wearing the same colors. He was a burly, broad-shouldered werewolf, his fat neck wholly covered with thick bands of honor-teeth. He stepped forward and reached out one hand. A werewolf in Sardhluun colors put five arrows in his outstretched palm. Hwinsyngundu gripped the bundle with both hands, held it over his head, and-without a word-he snapped the bundle in half.

The crowd roared. This was better than the truth. This confirmed their irritation with the old truism-scratched the itch they had long felt.

"That was clever," War signified generously. "It was prearranged, of course."

"Yes," Mercy signified. "Aaluindhonu, the gnyrrand of the Goweiteiuun, betrayed his pack. The Sardhluun threatened to kill some of his semiwolf kin who live in Apetown unless he cooperated with them. He is fond of his kin, even if they are semiwolves, and has little hope in the elections anyway, and so he submitted to the Sardhluun demands."

"All's fair, I suppose," said War dubiously. Politics was much like war in some ways, almost an extension of war by other means, but sometimes the methods involved made him uncomfortable. "I wish Wisdom were manifest," he continued. "He'd enjoy this. The crowd certainly is."

The crowd itself was not particularly impressive. It was numerous, surely, especially for a rally this early in the season on a moonless night, when the fighting was likely to be bloodless. But there were many citizens wearing the night shape-probably denizens of Dogtown, where the never-men tended to congregate. Many of the others may have come from Apetown: they were not well dressed, and there were many semiwolves among them. Many in the crowd wore not a single honor-tooth. They had little bite to bestow.

But what they had, they gave to the Sardhluun and to Hwinsyngundu before he opened his mouth: they cheered; they howled; they barked. It was Sardhluun's rally to lose at that exhilarating moment.

Hwinsyngundu began to speak. He said that the city was strong because of its strongest citizens; life was a war, with every citizen in conflict with the others. The strongest ruled; others cooperated because they must, because they needed the strength of the strong, but the strong needed nothing but their strength alone, so the city should grow the strength of the strong to become stronger as the strong ruled the city with strength and in strength for its strength and theirs. Their strength, that is. In strength was safety and in safety was strength. He then expanded on these important points, perhaps repeating himself a little.

The crowd grew much less enthusiastic as he spoke (at much too great a length). This was just the usual Sardhluun line, almost as trite as the handholding inanity of the Goweiteiuun gnyrrand. They began to vacate the space between the two packs of candidates, long before the second candidate had finished his speech. Eventually, he noticed that he was losing the crowd and concluded with some screeching insults about the cowardice of the Goweiteiuun ghost-sniffers.

The crowd applauded politely. Hwinsyngundu had lost most of their esteem, but they were still somewhat in Sardhluun's favor because of the great stunt with the arrows, and because they were obviously going to win the ensuing fight. The Sardhluun candidates and followers behind Hwinsyngundu looked somewhat dismayed, though.

"What a clown," War signified impatiently.

"He believes what he is saying," signified Mercy, who felt sorry for the inept politician. "Hwinsyngundu really believes he is a bold lone hero who has clambered to the top through his strength and independent daring."

"He grew up in, and inherited, a household of five hundred personal slaves. He is the Werowance's bastard son and grandson."

"Yes. The family should outbreed more, obviously."

Now the space between the bands of candidates and their auxiliaries was quite clear, and the crowd readied themselves to enjoy a quick drubbing and mocking of the Goweiteiuun.

"Where are the prisoners of the Khuwuleion?" came a shout from the darkness beyond the rally torches.

The crowd fell silent, astonished. The candidates paused, unsure what was happening.

Even Mercy was surprised. She observed War, who made the gray lips of his severed head smile cheerily at her.

"Where are the prisoners of the Vargulleion?" the same voice shouted.

Now the crowd was less surprised, and more amused, because they all knew the answer to this one. The Sardhluun had lost all their male prisoners in the largest prison break in the history of Wuruyaaria. It was a shameful display of weakness from those who bragged constantly of their strength, and it had been enjoyed as a joke on all the mesas of Wuruyaaria.

Hwinsyngundu stepped into the open space between the two parties and shouted into the darkness. "The prisoners fled like weaklings to the cowardly outlier pack, who admit their weakness by submitting to the rule of a female. We of the mighty Sardhluun Pack have given them a first burning taste of vengeance and, if need be, they will drink the whole poisonous bowl and die of it. None defy the mighty Sardhluun Pack and live!"

"I did," said the speaker in the shadows, and strode forward into the light. He was a tall, gray-haired werewolf in the day shape, his wolf-shadow rippling below him in the firelight. Over his head rippled the green-andgold banner of the outliers, the flagstaff held by a pale mottled werewolf.

"I am Rokhlenu," said the gray werewolf, "gnyrrand of the outliers. I come with my fighters, all escaped from the Vargulleion, and my old friend Morlock Khretvarrgliu. We say that you lie, Sardhluun sheepdogs. You were too weak to hold us. You were too weak to retake us. And you sold your prisoners of the Khuwuleion like meat to the wild packs in the empty lands. The Khuwuleion is as empty as the Vargulleion, as empty as every Sardhluun promise, as every Sardhluun boast. Only cowards lie. Only weaklings worship strength. We come here to fight alongside the noble Goweiteiuun Pack against the Sardhluun fleabags. If you really are the stronger, you have the chance to prove it now."

Out of the darkness stepped two dozen werewolves, more or less human in shape. And there was the never-wolf, Khretvarrgliu, his shadow the same crooked form as his body. He held a sword the color of glass in his hand; his eyes, too, were the color of gray glass.

The Goweiteiuun followers cheered their unexpected allies; only their gnyrrand seemed dismayed. The Sardhluun werewolves looked at the Goweiteiuun, looked at the newcomers, and fell in a body on the outliers.

"This is what you came to see!" Mercy signified. "You visualized this!"

War's headless shoulders shrugged. "I could not be sure. None of my visualizations have the light of certainty these days. But several futures showed something like this. Ulugarriu was present in those features, but is not here now, unless disguised somehow."

"Ulugarriu might be able to baffle a god's indirect visualization, but not direct perceptions from our manifest selves. Surely?" signified Mercy, ever less sure as she thought of it.

"I don't know," War admitted reluctantly. "It's a good fight, though, don't you think?"

"I hate it. They have struck down that pale werewolf with the banner. They are going to kill him."

"No. No, you're wrong. Look how his comrades come to his aid. That one they call Khretvarrgliu. He's not even a werewolf. He's standing over the pale one's body. He'll die rather than let them hurt his friend. Doesn't it move you, Mercy? This is what war is really about: heroism, self-sacrifice, daring, strategy. Not just killing and cruelty."

"There is a great deal of killing and cruelty. Your hero Khretvarrgliu has killed three Sardhluun werewolves already. And he would kill them all if he could: there is a madness in him."

"You're right, of course. They should have killed him or left him alone."

So far the fighting had only been between the Sardhluun and the newcomers. The Goweiteiuun followers were urgently addressing their gnyrrand, who wore a bitter haggard look on his narrow face. Finally he nodded. The Goweiteiuun gave a thin howling cheer and they charged the flank of the Sardhluun werewolves.

The fight was far from certain even after the Goweiteiuun struck. The Sardhluun still had the greater numbers, and their band were all broadbacked fighters.

But their union was broken when the Goweiteiuun attacked. Some turned to respond to it; others hesitated; others stayed engaged with the outliers. There was a gap in the Sardhluun line, and the ruthless outliers took advantage of it. The gray-haired blue-eyed leader leaped forward, a longfaced ape-fingered werewolf at his side. By now the one they called Khretvarrgliu had lifted the pale werewolf from the ground and was holding him up with his left hand; the pale werewolf in turn held the green-and-gold banner high. The outliers shouted (or howled) as one and followed their gnyrrand into the broken Sardhluun line. Mad-eyed Morlock came last, hauling the banner-bearer like a banner and stabbing with his glittering glass sword.

The Sardhluun band retreated to re-form their line, but the others charged with them and the melee continued. Werewolves lay dead or dying on the moonless ground. Others, only wounded, were crawling out of the torchlight to hide in the shadows. The Sardhluun retreated again, and suddenly they were not retreating but running, a rout of werewolves in black and green fleeing for their lives down the road to the Long Wall.

The Goweiteiuun did not pursue them but stood cheering on the rally ground. The crowd, too, was cheering: the fight was excellent and unexpected; the stunt with the arrows had been a good one; in all, it was a much better rally than anyone had hoped for. The outliers did follow the Sardhluun until the defeated werewolves began to enter the Low Road Gate through the Long Wall. Then the leader of the outliers turned his fighters back and went to have words with the sad-eyed gnyrrand of the Goweiteiuun band.

"A good fight indeed," signified War. "Yes, I think this will be a fine election year." He demanifested himself with no further symbolism. It was uncivil, but he and Mercy had never been on the best of terms.

Mercy turned to find Death manifest beside her in the form of a spiderlimbed woman.

"How your weakness repels me," Death remarked. "I struck here tonight, and you could do nothing to stop it."

"In the shadows," Mercy replied, "are five she-wolves of the Goweiteiuun. They came to tend the wounded from their pack after tonight's rally. As it happens, all the seriously wounded are Sardhluun. The she-wolves will tend them as their own and no more of them will die."

Death rose to all eight of her legs and looked down on the small mouthless woman with the lotus in her hand. "They will all die," Death signified. "Each one will die, and none will save them."

"On another day. On another night. Tonight," signified Mercy with great satisfaction, "I have struck, and you could do nothing to stop it."

Death indicated amusement, indifference, and patience. Then she ceased to manifest herself.

Mercy stayed to watch the acts that fell within her sphere, and to watch the increasingly intent conversation between the gnyrrands of the Goweiteiuun and the outliers. More deaths would come of that; more fighting; more need for mercy.

Chapter Twenty-one: Night Shapes

Wuinlendhono and Rokhlenu's mating was settled for the fourth day of the year's third month-the month the werewolves called Uyaarwuionien ("third half-lunation of the second moon") but Morlock called Brenting. So he explained to Rokhlenu after Rokhlenu bespoke him as a guest and he accepted. They stood talking outside the irredeemables' lair-now considerably less barnlike thanks to their relative wealth, bite, and a good deal of hard work.

"What difference does it make what the month's called?" Rokhlenu asked Morlock.

"Nothing, except I find Brenting easier to pronounce."

"Are you joking? With that lippy growling bibbly sound at the beginning of the word?"

"You can say it."

"Of course I can say it, but why should I have to? I'm not an ape hanging by my feet from a tree branch. What's so hard to say about Uyaarwuionien? It practically sings its way out of your mouth."

"Not my mouth. I still haven't mastered the vowels of Sunspeech, let alone Moonspeech. Yesterday I asked a citizen selling grain in the marketplace whether she would sell me a pound of wheat flour and she started to take her clothes off."

"Oh. Oh, I see." In Sunspeech, the word luiunhiendhi meant "flour ground from wheat" whereas luunhendhe was an abrupt and rather intimate invitation involving another type of seed entirely. "Still, it's promising that she was so eager to go along. Did you get anywhere with her?"

"I got my flour eventually, if that's what you mean."

It was not what Rokhlenu meant at all. Like many males about to mate for life, he was eager to see his friends married off also, or at least happily settled. Morlock was an awkward prospect in this line.

"Well-pronounce it any way you want, as long as you're there. The act needs witnesses, and I want you to be mine."

"I'm honored, old friend," Morlock said formally, then added, "What should I bring?"

"Just yourself."

"Hm." Morlock looked unhappy. After a moment he said, "Rokhlenu."

"Morlock."

"I think our friendship has passed the point where we waste time being polite to each other?"

"Sometime on day two, I'd say. Why?"

"I remind you that I have never been to a mating of werewolves. If a gift is customary, I would prefer to bring a gift, polite protestations notwithstanding."

"Yes, I see. But I mean what I say, Morlock. When a First Wolf mates, or anyone with a lot of bite, really, it's the custom to not give gifts to the happy couple. They are supposed to be too ghost-bitingly wealthy to need the guests' assistance. We really only want you to be there."

"I will be." Morlock looked closely at him, a faint smile on his face. "You say `happy couple' as if you mean it."

Rokhlenu shrugged and threw a chair at his old friend. Morlock caught it neatly-with his right hand, Rokhlenu noticed with a pang; he hardly ever moved the left hand anymore unless he had to. "I do mean it, I guess," Rokhlenu admitted. "Sad, isn't it?"

"Sad? No. Tragic perhaps."

"Tragic?"

"Happiness is usually tragic."

"It is?"

Morlock twirled the chair nervously in his fingers. He was no longer smiling. "I may be using the wrong words. The word I am thinking of in my native language implies no criticism."

"Now who's being polite? Get out and don't come back until you want to."

Morlock smiled, nodded, threw the chair back at him, and left.

"Your friend has been life-mated," Wuinlendhono said sagely, when Rokhlenu told her about the conversation later.

"Morlock? Married? Impossible."

"I'm sure his wife came to the same conclusion, at some point."

"Don't put the snarl on my old friend."

"He knows stuff about marriage that you don't, is what I'm saying, really. He has a sense of what you're getting into."

"I'm not getting into a what. I'm getting into a who."

"There's a what and a who. The who is your mate; the what is the marriage itself. There's usually trouble with one or the other."

"You worry too much about trouble. What happens can be dealt with. What never happens, you never have to deal with."

"Very philosophical. But I've got enough trouble to worry me. If these parfumiers don't come up with a decent wedding scent I may have to be mated wearing garlic instead of honor-teeth."

"Suits me. That or your natural scents: what could be more intoxicating?"

"It's not for you, clod. If you think I'm going to appear before what passes for the gentry in this bug-bitten swampy suburb without a decent wedding scent you …you can …"

"Think again? Bite you? Whistle up my tail?"

"You may not finish my sentences for me until we're mated and old."

"I can't wait to get started."

The waiting was hard, and became harder as the day got closer.

The day before the mating, grim news came from the city. Rokhlenu's father and two of his brothers had been killed in a night-theft while they were working as rope winders. His other brothers were missing; no one knew where they were-or, at least, if they knew, they would not say.

The messenger came to him just before sunset, and he went immediately to Wuinlendhono. He found her lying in her sleep chamber, just waking up from her afternoon sleep. Sitting down beside her sleeping cloak, he told her all he had heard.

"They can say night-thieves," he said. "And maybe they were nightthieves. But Rywudhaariu, that god-licking old gray-muzzle, he sent them. This is his work."

"It's a good guess. When did this all take place?"

"Seven months ago."

"You were on the fifth floor of the Vargulleion. There was nothing you could do."

"I know," Rokhlenu said, but he still felt guilty. He felt the shame survivors sometimes feel. "I think we should cancel the mating."

"Rokhlenu. Beloved. We will not cancel the mating."

"My father is dead. My brothers are dead."

"No deader now than they were yesterday."

"But now I know. If they were your kith, you would understand."

"I do understand. No, let me show you something, stalwart."

She rolled out of her sleeping cloak and grabbed a great heavy codex that was lying on a nearby chair. It was the prisoner book they had taken from the Vargulleion.

"I am not in here, by the way," she said, looking over the volume at him with her night-black eyes. "Evidently they didn't consider me a prisoner. But look at this."

Her forefinger rested on an entry; he read it over her shoulder. A prisoner named Slenginhuiuo. The crime was adultery. The dates of admission and discharge were illegible, but the prisoner was discharged as dead. Annotations in ideogrammatic Moonspeech added that the body was unfit for use as animal fodder and should be chopped up for fertilizer on the plantations.

"My mother," Wuinlendhono said. "I found this a few days ago. I hadn't wanted to look for it. I wanted to believe that he forgave her at last, that he sold her into some wild pack, that she was growing old licking someone else's cubs in the empty lands. But now I know. I know that she is dead. He had them torture her until she died."

"And you say we should be mated anyway."

"This is why we must be mated. Our families are gone. Our pasts are gone. All we have is each other, the present, and the future. Grieve. Plan vengeance. Do what you must. But tomorrow you will mount me as your mate. I need you."

If she had said (as he half expected her to say), be sensible, the plans are made, I finally have chosen my mating scent, we have bought expensive food and smoke which will spoil if it is not used, be sensible, all the invitations have been spoken, we have responsibilities to others, what will people think, be sensible-if she had said any of that, or anything like it, he would have left her forever. But the words she actually spoke tolled in his heart like a bell; he knew he could never leave her. She and no other was his life-mate.

"Need you, too," he grumbled.

"Oh, you golden-tongued persuader."

So Rokhlenu's mood was unexpectedly chaotic as he donned his wedding shirt the next day in the late afternoon. He was vibrating with hope and longing for Wuinlendhono; nothing could change that. But he was shaken by waves of grief and anger and loneliness, too. Somehow, no matter what he had done and where he had been, he had always seen himself returning to his family's den and telling his tale to them and listening to others from them as he lay by his brothers and father on the hearth before the long fireplace. Now they were dead, and that part of him was dying, like a gangrenous limb.

He stood in the little sleeping closet they had built for him in a corner of the irredeemables' barracks. A male was supposed to be mated from his parents' lair, the home where he grew up. But if that place still existed, it was just a place, a hole in the cliffs above Nekkuklendon mesa. The people who gave it meaning, who made it home, were dead. This place was just a place. He could still smell the sawdust from its making. But if he'd lived here for a hundred years, it still wouldn't be home.

"Chief," a hesitant voice broke in on his thoughts, "your friends are here."

Rokhlenu raised his head and saw that the door to his sleeping closet was open. In the doorway stood claw-fingered Lekkativengu.

"Good news," he said heavily, and moved toward the door. Lekkativengu stepped hastily out of the way, but Rokhlenu grabbed him by the shoulder before he had retreated entirely.

"You're in charge here, after I'm gone," he said.

"I know, Chief. Thanks."

They both knew it was a consolation prize; Rokhlenu had picked Yaarirruuiu to be the reeve of his campaign band. Lekkativengu had never really bitten through the bone as Olleiulu's replacement. Now that Rokhlenu had tasted real grief he was less inclined to condemn Lekkativengu as a scatterwit club-juggler. But he needed someone he could trust to watch his back in the long days and nights ahead, and he had seen Yaarirruuiu in the hour of action.

But the job of herding the irredeemables wasn't nothing, and Rokhlenu needed Lekkativengu to do it well. He said, "Olleiulu trusted you. Show me you deserve it and I'll never forget it."

Lekkativengu nodded, put his claw-fingered hand on Rokhlenu's shoulder, and said something about Rokhlenu's intended that would have earned him a knife in the belly on any other day. But encouragements like that were traditional between friends on a mating day, so Rokhlenu grinned and said, "If you insist. Over and over."

They released each other, and Rokhlenu turned to his friends. They were a rather motley crew: the never-wolf Morlock, the biteless healer female Liudhleeo-no, she was wearing an honor-tooth. No, it was the crystal spike she had pulled from Morlock's skull. Excellent: Wuinlendhono had told her to wear it. And it was a reminder, a very civil reminder, of how much he owed her. Beyond them stood the twenty irredeemables who had fought with him at the recent election rally-the twenty who had survived, anyway. Pale Hrutnefdhu was the only one missing.

Liudhleeo stepped forward, took his shoulder, and made an obscene suggestion about Wuinlendhono.

"Certainly," he said, "since you ask. Anything to oblige."

"Hrutnefdhu thought it best not to come," she added, in a low voice. "He hopes you understand."

"I do-though I'd be glad to see him here."

Morlock was close enough to hear this exchange, and he looked with some surprise at Liudhleeo, at Rokhlenu, and back at Liudhleeo. Then he shrugged.

Rokhlenu felt a sudden pang of doubt-did Morlock fully understand the life-mating ritual? Surely it couldn't be that different among neverwolves. Anyway, there was no time for a lesson now.

Liudhleeo stood aside, and Morlock grabbed Rokhlenu's shoulder. "I don't know any of the traditional remarks on a day like this," he observed.

Rokhlenu silently thanked the ghosts for this.

"I'll say this instead," Morlock continued. "We are one blood. Your blood is my blood. It will be avenged."

Rokhlenu belatedly realized that Morlock was talking about his father and brothers. His grief, never distant, returned in a great crashing wave. But this was real. It mattered, unlike the traditional obscene compliments. He met Morlock's eye. "I told you not to bring a present, you rat-bastard."

Morlock half smiled and shrugged. "I won't do it again," he promised, and stood back.

There were more encounters, more jokes and songs about the act of mating. But soon enough, Yaarirruuiu said, "Friends, the sun is setting. We must get our chief to his new home."

They roared and cheered and barked. Rokhlenu picked up a bundle of his clothes, and the twenty irredeemables who were accompanying him into Wuinlendhono's household picked up boxes of wealth and weapons and their own belongings. He walked before them, and they followed singing false and not really flattering stories about his sexual adventures or misadventures.

The walk to Wuinlendhono's lair-tower (still supported by cables, but on a firmer foundation than before thanks to Morlock and Hlupnafenglu) was not long, thank ghost. He pounded on the door and demanded entry.

The door was immediately opened by a snow-pale, anxious-looking Wuinlendhono. She wore a loose white wedding shirt, not so different than his own, except that the hem was lower, sweeping the floor. "My intended, you and yours enter my house and remain here forever," she said rapidly, and kissed his ear. She added in a whisper, "Ghost, I thought you were never coming. It's almost sunset."

"Plenty of time," he breathed, half stunned by the mix of her natural scent and her wedding scent. He noted with interest that she seemed more nervous than he was.

She took him by the hand and led him into the great audience chamber of the lair-tower. The dais had been moved so that moonlight would fall on it as soon as dark touched the sky after sunset. Around the audience chamber were scattered tables with bowls of food and water and fuming smoke. There were many low couches, and on some of them the councilors, allies, and friends who were Wuinlendhono's wedding party. They were already eating, drinking, smoking.

"My intended, disport yourselves with your friends and mine," Wuinlendhono said, in a loud formal voice. "I await your intention at the mating couch." She added in a low voice, "I give you a hundred breaths. If you're not on the dais by then, I'm coming after you and nailing you wherever you happen to be. One hundred breaths. And I'm breathing pretty fast, stalwart."

He watched her stride sinuously away from him and he took a deep breath. Ninety-nine more, and then …

His irredeemables were dumping the boxes with traditional informality about the room. This was just part of the tradition, meant to give the place a moved-in look. All the significant wealth and property (boxes of gold and such) had been brought over early in the day and secured.

Liudhleeo had Morlock over at one of the tables and was fussing over him with bowls of food and water. No doubt she would continue her epic quest to get into his pants tonight: mating ceremonies were famous for promoting spontaneous couplings. She tried to give him a bowl of smoke and he waved it off-and that reminded Rokhlenu of something.

He grabbed a jar sitting at a nearby table and ran over to Morlock and Liudhleeo. He took the bowl of water from Morlock's hand and dumped the contents back in the serving bowl. Morlock looked at him, his eyebrows lifting in surprise and amusement.

"You don't want that swill," said Rokhlenu. "Try this!" He cracked open the jar, poured a stream of purplish red wine into the bowl, and proudly handed it to Morlock.

He had been planning this for some time, ever since Morlock told him about drinking and bartenders. If Morlock didn't like smoking bloom, if he wanted wine to celebrate, Rokhlenu reasoned, why not get him some wine? It hadn't been easy, but he had done it, and the effect was all he could have hoped for.

Morlock's eyebrows raised even farther, his eyes widened, his mouth parted slightly. He was completely stunned.

"Is it the good kind?" Rokhlenu asked. "There were a couple of different colors. I got this from a gang of road robbers who dragged it back from Semendar without looking inside. There are crates of the stuff, as much as you could want."

"It's fine," Morlock said faintly.

"You're sure?" Rokhlenu asked.

"Morlock," Liudhleeo said out of the side of her mouth, "drink it. He's got some business to attend to."

Morlock put the bowl to his lips and drank a sip, then a larger mouthful.

"Excellent," he said, lowering the bowl. "Thanks, old friend. I know you mean well."

Rokhlenu laughed, punched him in the arm, and turned away. He had lost count of the breaths that had passed-and then he realized he didn't care. He walked, with as much dignity as he could, to the dais and mounted the steps. Wuinlendhono was watching him with her night-dark starless eyes. He found he had to step very slowly and carefully, lest he trip and fall-the worst of omens for a mating.

As he climbed the stairs, the room grew silent. By the time he reached the top, no one was speaking.

Wuinlendhono took his hands and they stood for a moment, wordless, staring into each other's eyes.

She shook his hands loose and said, in the dark contralto lightning she used as a voice, "I take you and all you are and all you own as mine."

He replied, in his clearest singing-while-speaking voice, "I take you and all you are and all you own as mine."

She undid the fastenings of her shirt, and it fell to the floor. She stood proudly naked in the red light of evening.

One of the knots in his fastenings would not come undone. He'd have cursed the one who had tied it, except it was himself, distracted by love and grief, only a short time ago.

Wuinlendhono smiled and brushed his hands aside, deftly undoing the knot. His shirt fell away, and he now stood as naked as she.

She ascended the couch on the dais and, never breaking eye contact, went down on all fours.

He climbed onto the couch behind her. She turned her head to watch him over her shoulder. Her eyes were wide, excited. She was panting slightly.

He mounted her from behind. As he entered her, her eyes half closed and she gasped. She writhed in pleasure, and the sinuous motion sent muscles rippling all down her glorious back.

Union with her was silken ecstasy. The world was afire with the day's last light. He wanted to drive into her until he came, but he could not; he must not yet.

She moved again and moaned.

"Be still," he said to her.

"Can't," she whispered.

"You must," he said, and put his hands on her back to keep her still. That was a mistake, perhaps: it sent soft streams of sensory fire up his fingers. He sank his fingers deeper in her soft firm skin, because he could, because they belonged to each other now. He almost started to move his hips.

"You're right," she whispered. "I'll be still."

Somehow that helped. He waited, adrift in a fog of pleasure-that-was and the agony of pleasure self-denied.

The room waited, silent, as sunlight died. The room grew dim, then dark. No lamps were lit.

Blue light appeared in the windows: the eyes of the moons were opening with the departure of the sun's light. The light grew stronger, bluer, more bitter, more intoxicating. Rokhlenu looked through the window straight into the face of Trumpeter and knew that this was the moment.

He yielded to the moment of transformation, and Wuinlendhono did the same. His shadow rose up and towered over him; hers did the same. The two shadows passed through each other, mingling as their bodies mingled, transforming them as they coupled; day shape with night shape and female with male they were bonded in an endless instant of transformation and sexual union.

Their screams gave way to ecstatic howls; they lay, still joined, in the night shape.

Slowly, hungrily, intently, patiently, Rokhlenu began to grind into his mate as she rocked back against him. They were mated now.

Rokhlenu found that his grief was not gone. If anything, he was even more aware of his loss, of his beloved dead. And he grieved for Wuinlendhono and their love. They were mortal; they would die; their love would be forgotten as if it never had been.

But this was their hour, and all the ages of nothingness to come could not wash away this one glorious moment of being and becoming. If this was life, and he felt it was, it was worth even the price of death to feel this way.

Morlock was drinking slowly and he was not yet drunk. But he had begun to drink on purpose, not merely to be polite, and that meant that most of the man he thought of as himself was gone.

It was as if there were two Morlocks. Drunk Morlock was careless, selfish, lazy, stupid, cruel-everything that Morlock hated about himself, everything he rejected. It was like the werewolves, with their day shape and night shape.

Not-drunk Morlock was still holding the reins. But drunk Morlock was slowly getting a grip on them.

This internal struggle numbed the shock he felt when he noticed Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono consummating their bond by having sex in the presence of the wedding party. In any case, it was no skin off his walrus: different lands had different customs.

Rather more worrisome to him was the way partners were beginning to pair off and nuzzle each other on couches. Apparently the ceremonial union of the couple was accompanied by more informal unions among the wedding party. Looking back on weddings he had attended over the centuries, he realized that things were not so different here-just more open.

When the pair mating on the dais assumed their night shapes, and a tide of moonlit transformations spread across the room, the coupling began in earnest, many pairs eschewing the couches and tumbling about on the floor. There were wolves, semiwolves, and a few unfortunates in their day shape, apparently unable to make the transition. Morlock thought this-and nearly laughed aloud. Werewolf notions seemed to be soaking into his skin. If he stayed among the werewolves much longer, at the next wedding he might actually join in. That was an amusing thought, and this time he did laugh.

He looked around for the wine jar: time to grab it and make his escape. He found it. He also found that Liudhleeo was still standing beside him in her day shape. Her eyes were half closed; she was smiling at him with shy eagerness.

"I'd've thought you'd've switched shadows by now," he said, waving his wine bowl vaguely at the rest of the room.

She looked hurt, then sly. "Is that what you'd prefer? Some never-wolves like it-coupling with a partner in the night shape."

"They're not as never-wolfy as I am. I've never coupled with someone who was not a never-wolf." Morlock covertly tried to count up the number of negatives in that sentence, was unsure of his total, and added hastily, "I have only ever coupled with never-wolves. If you see what I mean. It's worked out pretty well for me so far," he said wryly, thinking of his ex-wife. There was a little wine left in his bowl, so he emptied it.

"There are none like that here," Liudhleeo replied. "If there were, she'd be a slave or meat. You aren't only because of who you are. I'm not the only female in the room who finds that fascinating. Or your scent fascinating."

"I never argue about matters of taste-or, in this case, smell."

She laughed too much and took his arm. He impatiently shook her off.

"Why are you being so cruel to me?" Liudhleeo asked, not as if she really minded.

"I don't know what's going on," said Morlock, "but I can't believe you look on me with favor."

Liudhleeo was amused. "Why not? You smell so wonderful, like blood and burning bone with a hint of poisonous leaves. And you're perfectly dangerous. Ghost, when you glare at me like that I just melt. And maybe you're not as beautiful as my sweet Hrutnefdhu, but nobody is, and anyway a female doesn't have to look at her partner during sex…." She paused, horrified by a thought that struck her. "Unless. Unless they do it …face-to-face. Do you do it that way, Morlock?"

"Sometimes. It doesn't matter."

"Doesn't matter? It bites me what males think matters. Not even monkeys do it that way, you know, face-to-face. It seems so depraved. Soft wet mouths and soft wet bellies pressing against each other. It seems so nasty. So nasty. Oh. Oh. Oh, ghost. You have to do that for me. I know you don't care about me. I know you don't care about anybody, but you can't leave me after putting that idea in my head."

"Now I see why Hrutnefdhu didn't attend," Morlock said. "Did you ask him to stay home?"

Now she stepped a pace back from him, her brows knitted in bafflement. "No," she said. "Of course not. But how do you suppose he'd feel if he were here, right now, with pairs coupling all over the floor and the room stinking of sex-"

"-and his mate trying to couple with his old friend-"

"Is that it? You don't understand. You really don't understand. It's not a betrayal."

"And I never will understand."

She bowed her head, defeated. "Do you want me to find you another female, then? Or a male, perhaps? There are other never-wolves in town."

Morlock stared at her. "My love life, grim and empty though it may be, has never been soiled by the presence of a pimp."

She stood back another pace, tears leaking from her eyes. She gave him a last reproachful look and fled.

Morlock took his wine jar and a couple of still-sealed ones for backup. He made his way unsteadily out of the moonlit room, stepping carefully around (or, in one case, over) groups of werewolves in various stages of sexual congress.

The air outside was clean, by contrast, but warm as a summer's night. He drank a jar of wine as he walked slowly across the outlier settlement, dropping the empty into a stretch of swamp showing next to a walkway. When he reached the lair-tower, he found that he couldn't face Hrutnefdhu (drunk Morlock was a coward, among his other vices), so he decided to sleep that night in his cave. The last thing he remembered was sitting in the wickerwork boat, finishing another jar of wine.

The night was dark, though moonlit. The swamp water was darker and smelled bad. His mind was darker still and smelled worse.