The Wolf Age

Chapter Twenty-two: The Shadow Market

From then on, Morlock drank himself to sleep every night. Sometimes he slept in the lair-tower apartment with Hrutnefdhu and Liudhleeo, but he didn't like to. If it was him and Hrutnefdhu alone there, he was conscious of why Liudhleeo was absent. But when he woke up, and looked across the room to see them wrapped around each other, blissfully empty of thought as they slept, joined by something more powerful than sexual union, he felt strange, an intruder. Werewolves had no sense of privacy with those they considered old friends, but Morlock did. Besides, when he drank so much that he grew sick and felt the need to vomit (which was almost nightly now), the cave was more convenient.

He was not yet drinking in the day, though. Morlock had been through this before, and he had a sense of fatalism about it. He knew that drunkenness would come to rule his life entirely and that he would be able to think of nothing else.

Perhaps that wasn't so bad, this time. He was, after all, dying. The ghost sickness had progressed so far that he could pick up nothing with his left fingers: material objects passed through the misty flesh as if it were air. If he was dying, if this was the end of all his days, did it matter if he died a drunk? He would be no more alive if he died sober.

But in the day he did not drink, not yet. He threw himself into projects and worked fiercely. He developed a wooden hand that he could wear over his ghostly hand like a glove. It was no good for fine work, of course, but it could bear weight, and the fingers could clamp shut for a grip, if need be.

For two-handed work, he had Hlupnafenglu. The red werewolf was strikingly improved after the removal of his spike-but he knew nothing about his past. His memory had been almost entirely scrubbed by the madness induced by the electrum spike in his brain. He could speak Sunspeech and Moonspeech, but he didn't even know his real name, so everyone continued to call him Hlupnafenglu.

He was intelligent and strong, though, with extremely deft hands. He fell into the role of Morlock's apprentice. The outliers could use many skills Morlock had, but he clearly would not be around forever to assist them, and he trusted Hlupnafenglu's character as well as his talent.

Together they forged glass weapons and armor for the outlier fighters. They began the challenging task of shoring up the outliers' defenses. Once Wuinlendhono found out what they were doing, she had a crowd of citizens put at their disposal and the work went faster: new watchtowers, armed with catapults and crossbows, soon bristled along the settlement's verge.

The days were hot; the work was hard. In the evenings, when his friends were sometimes smoking bowls of bloom, he would join them in a bowl of wine (which they always had ready, once they knew he would drink it). Sometimes they would play cards. Werewolves love to gamble, and they were all fond of the game he had invented called pookah or, as Hlupnafenglu always mispronounced it, poker. Later, while he could still walk, he would go back to his cave and drink himself unconscious.

He did not look well during the day, but his old friends attributed that to the ghost sickness that they knew was working on him.

One day he woke up, rolled away from the pile of vomit he had emitted in his sleep, fed the flames in the nexus with a chunk or two of coal, and staggered out to rinse his mouth and wash in the uphill stream outside his cave.

Rokhlenu was waiting for him there, sitting cross-legged beside the stream. The gray werewolf was, in contrast to his old cellmate, looking healthy these days. He wore clothes of green and gold, a gold ring with a green stone in it, and a green-and-gold band gathered his long gray queue.

"Gnyrrand Rokhlenu," Morlock said. "You're looking well. Very gnyrrandly, in fact."

"Thanks. Wuinlendhono is knitting some green-and-gold underwear for me, I believe."

"She's treating you well, anyway. Mated life suits you, old friend."

"It does. It does. You, however, look like a sack of moldy kidneys. And not in a good way."

"I was wondering if that was a compliment."

"It's not."

"Well, I won't lie to you. I feel like a bag of moldy kidneys. Or maybe just the mold."

"The ghost sickness is worse?"

"Yes." Morlock might have added, And then there is the drinking, but he didn't want to talk about that.

"Look, I've been talking to Wuinlendhono about this. I want you to stop working on the defenses around the settlement."

"There's more to do."

"There always will be. You told me once you thought this illness would kill you, and it looks to me as if it is killing you. Liudhleeo and Hrutnefdhu both say that someone in the Shadow Market might be able to help. So I think maybe that's what you should be doing from now on."

"Is that a gnyrrandly command?" Morlock asked wryly.

"It's a request from your old friend. You have been helping us so much. Maybe it's time to look out for yourself."

"I can do that pretty well."

"Ghost testicles."

Morlock laughed a little. "Haven't heard that one. I think what I enjoy most about Sunspeech is the rich variety of invective and cursing."

"It's good for that. Moonspeech for singing, Sunspeech for barking: that's the old saying."

Morlock washed his face and mouth and thought. "Would I be allowed in the city? Anyone who smells me or sees my shadow will know I'm a never-wolf."

"There are never-wolves and never-wolves, and then there's Khretvar rgliu. I don't think you'll have any trouble you can't fight your way out of. And the worst they can do is kill you."

"I suppose," said Morlock, looking forward to another night, and night after night, of drunken emptiness, "there are worse things."

In the end, Morlock went with Hrutnefdhu and Hlupnafenglu through the northern gate, up the walkway to the Swamp Road leading to the Swamp Gate of Wuruyaaria.

The gate was wide; twenty werewolves in the day shape could walk through it side by side and still have room to swing their arms. There were a couple of lazy watchers on either side wearing dark armor emblazoned with an ideogram that, Morlock had learned, meant Wuruyaaria in Moonspeech. One of them sniffed the air curiously as Morlock and his friends passed by, but no one stopped them.

The borough just inside the wall was a thicket of tilting towers built on rather marshy ground. Nearly every citizen in sight was wearing the night shape, or some part of it: everyone was a wolf or a semiwolf.

"Dogtown," said Hrutnefdhu. "Those who can't assume the day shape, or at least not completely, often end up here. People say they're more comfortable with their own kind."

"What do you say?" asked Hlupnafenglu, catching an implied reservation. He might have no memories, but there was nothing wrong with his intelligence.

"I say they were kicked out of their dens by shamed parents who didn't want never-men stinking up their lives and reducing their bite."

Morlock wondered, not for the first time, about Hrutnefdhu's family, and who had castrated him, and why. But he seemed to be speaking with some authority here: another outcast, for another reason.

They passed a werewolf nailing up a sign with hammer and nails. His paws had fingers as hairless and gray as a rat's tail. They passed another werewolf who was shuffling a dance on four human feet that grew from crooked canine legs. A chorus of largely lupine werewolves chanted and sang beside him. A small crowd had gathered to watch, and Morlock paused there too, fascinated by the show. But when he realized more eyes were directed toward him than the performers, he tossed a few pads of copper onto the coinspeckled ground between the dancer and the singers and walked off.

Hrutnefdhu and Hlupnafenglu were already standing some distance away, waiting for him.

"That was risky," the pale werewolf said. "If you'd had a few less honorteeth showing, you might have had to fight your way out of there."

"Why?"

"Never-men don't like to be stared at by anyone wearing the day shape. In fact, it's a little risky for us just to be passing through Dogtown in the daytime."

"Why are we, then?"

"Sardhluun werewolves come up the Low Road to Twinegate, and then into the city. There's less chance of meeting them if we take this way."

"Too bad." Morlock was sorry to miss a chance to fight some Sardhluun.

"Yurr. I hate them, too, Morlock, but this might not be the time to take on a band of them."

Morlock opened his right hand and shrugged: it was a matter of opinion.

Hlupnafenglu laughed. Fighting, working, learning, walking-it was all the same to him. Morlock envied the sunniness of his temperament a little.

Presently they came to an open area, and on their left was a gate, obviously Twinegate, not materially different from the Swamp Gate, except that more people were coming and going through it.

The area was dominated by a great stone tower, reaching from the swampy ground to the sky. Morlock kept on staring at it almost from the moment it came into view. There were narrow stairways of metal and wood running up the sides of the tower, and citizens running up and down the stairs. At the top of the tower was a great basket

"It's just the gate-station for the funicular," Hrutnefdhu said. "But I forgot: you've never seen it before."

"Not this close," Morlock said.

Hlupnafenglu was almost as fascinated. "I seem to remember …Do the cars smell like onions?"

"I never noticed that. I suppose it might depend on who or what was riding with you."

"How is it powered?" wondered the red werewolf.

"Slaves. They used to hire citizens to work the big wheels, but when the Sardhluun started flooding the market with slaves, it was cheaper to use them. A lot of citizens went hungry that year."

The three ex-prisoners looked at each other, sharing a single bitter thought about the Sardhluun without the need to speak it.

Morlock said, "The big wheels. I can hear the gears working. I'd like to see them sometime."

"We could ask, I suppose," said Hrutnefdhu nervously.

"It's not important. Another time."

They walked on, across the chaos around the tower's base, northward, into a new tangle of warrens. The land was drier and firmer; the buildings taller and narrower than Dogtown. The twisting streets were dense with werewolves in the day shape.

"Apetown," Hrutnefdhu said in a low voice. "Fairly safe in the daylight, but you don't want to cross here in the night shape, in the day or night."

Morlock nodded, and suddenly the pale werewolf's mottled skin flushed dark. "I forgot-"

"Never mind it, old friend," said Morlock, and Hlupnafenglu tugged playfully on Hrutnefdhu's ear.

Apetown looked busier than Dogtown, anyway. The ground floor of many a tower was given over to workshops of craftsmen: cobblers, smiths, glass blowers, bakers, butchers, launderers.

"Hands," said Morlock aloud. He had been trying to settle in his mind the difference between Dogtown and Apetown, and he realized it all came down to hands.

Hlupnafenglu looked bemused, but Hrutnefdhu instantly understood him. "Yes, you're right. It's a more prosperous place: there's more work people can do. It may not be work that gains anyone great bite, but it's work that other people will pay to have done."

"And when the sun goes down-"

"Yes, the shutters will drop here. Dogtown is livelier then. There's singing and shows. And if you want a thug for hire, you go to Dogtown, day or night."

They walked on through the warm hazy morning.

When they left the rumble of Apetown behind them, they came to a wide-open space between the brooding hulk of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon and the staggered cliff sides of Wuruyaaria. It was paved in stones that alternated black and white in no clear pattern. It was cut off from direct sunlight, and would be until the sun rose considerably higher in the murky sky.

"Here we are," said the pale werewolf. He looked around the Shadow Market, and his face twisted with annoyance. "Not too many vendors, and some of them I know are quacks."

Morlock was looking, too. At a booth near the market entrance, a male with the torso of a young boy and the limbs and face of a young wolf was having his ears pinched by a long-nosed saturnine male with a gray gown and a conical cap adorning his day shape. A mature female, perhaps the boy's mother, was standing over them; she was fully human except for her long lupine jaws and somewhat hairy face. She was asking in Moonspeech how much the fee would be and the vendor was asking in Sunspeech how she proposed to pay.

In the next space over, a wolf-faced young man with immaculately styled hair was listening to a group of young women in the day shape sing a song in Moonspeech. If a wolf face can look dubious, he looked dubious. Morlock was no judge of songs in Moonspeech, but he thought he had heard some broken notes.

Next over was a booth full of red-ribboned scrolls and velvet-bound books. Its vendor was a male with a wolf's body, human hands and feet, and a droopy semihuman face.

"I'll just step over and have a word with Liuunurriu, there," the pale werewolf said. "He doesn't like strangers, and it wouldn't do to look too interested so …"

Morlock nodded, and he and Hlupnafenglu drifted in the other direction.

"I think I remember Apetown," said the red werewolf abstractedly, after a few moments. "I don't remember the looks, but I remember the feel. Always hurry, hurry, hurry and fetch the bones. Fetch the bones; fetch the bones."

Morlock said nothing.

"Fetch the bones," Hlupnafenglu repeated again. "Why would people want bones?"

"For marrow," Morlock suggested. "Or soup."

"Soup!" shouted the red werewolf. "There was a great vat of it in the middle of the hut! And a great fat female who kept telling me, `Fetch the bones, yuh-yuh…. Fetch the bones, yuh-yuh….' And she said my name. Only I don't remember it now."

"You may yet."

"I hated her. I don't remember her name, but I remember the hate. I don't think she was my mother. I hated the bones, too. The stinking stupid bones. That was why. That was why. There was no soup that day. No soup, sir. No soup, ma'am. Take your no-soup and swim in it!"

The more the red werewolf remembered the angrier he seemed to get. Morlock found this interesting, but not so interesting that he failed to notice someone trying to unfasten his money pouch from his belt, craftily reaching under his left arm. He grabbed the pickpocket's extended fingers with his right hand and twisted.

The pickpocket, a strikingly flat-faced young male, screamed and fell sprawling on the ground. He had been standing unbalanced, and he didn't know enough to not draw attention when he was caught. All this marked him as an inept and inexperienced thief-which was in his favor, as far as Morlock was concerned. So Morlock released his fingers without breaking them.

His reward for this was a reproachful glare from the clumsy pickpocket as he lay on the black-and-white pavement. "You broke my fingers," he wailed, rubbing his left hand furiously with his right.

"No," said Morlock. "But I can, if you insist."

"I told you, Snellingu," said a white-haired male standing nearby, wearing dark armor with the Wuruyaaria ideogram. "Pickpocket."

"Snatch-and-grab, snatch-and-grab," irritably replied another watcher (evidently Snellingu) with a long scar on his face that cut across his lips. "You see so stupid he is being. He's being no sort of pickpocket. He's grabbing someone's cash box by now if you didn't have keep staring at him. And you are expecting me paying off the bet."

"Listen, it's my job to keep an eye on the criminal element."

"That's why you keep to be visiting your father's sister on nights-withno-moon. We all are hearing about her criminal element, if you're getting my drift."

"I do not get your drift, and you still owe me breakfast."

"You have be owing me breakfast three half-months straight and bent."

"Minus today's. That's what I'm saying. Hey, don't let him get away, Chief."

"I'm not your chief," Morlock replied. "And he can go where he likes."

The young male, scrambling to his feet, glared suspiciously at Morlock.

"I like that!" said the white-haired watcher. "We come here to defend you from this dangerous criminal and you-"

"Take him and bake him," said Morlock. "But not on my evidence. The young citizen tripped and fell."

"No pickpocket!" said scar-faced Snellingu, catching on suddenly. "The citizen is saying so! And thus I am owing you jack-minus-jack and you owing me breakfast, today, tomorrow, some more days."

"This citizen smells like a never-wolf to me."

"You are smelling like a snake trying to weasel his way out of a dead-dog bet."

"That metaphor stinks worse than this guy does."

"You are stinking worse than-"

"Listen, if I buy you a meatcake will you stop with the similes? I get enough crappy rhetoric from politicians this year if I want it, which I don't."

"Two meatcakes."

"That's two breakfasts, then. I never ate more than one meatcake at a time on your pad."

"You are all the time drinking that rotten milk-drink, which I am never drinking, but I am all the time paying for-"

The squabbling peace officers wandered off across the Shadow Market.

Morlock looked at the young citizen, who had not yet moved away. His face was hollowed out with hunger; rags hung on him as if he were a scare crow made of sticks. Morlock had seen children starved to death, and this child was starving to death.

"You can't steal," Morlock said coolly. "You won't work. I suppose now comes the begging."

The young citizen tore at his hair and spat at Morlock's feet. "I work! I work! I work for three days running messages for Neiuluniu the bookie. He says come back tomorrow; I'll pay you. Come back tomorrow, Lakkasulakku; come back tomorrow, Lakkasulakku. Today I say pay me the three days or I don't run messages. So he has his boys throw me out. You think he pays me? You think he ever pays me?"

It might have been a lie, but Morlock didn't think so. Anyway, it didn't matter. He said to Hlupnafenglu, "Take the young citizen, Lakkasulakku or whatever his name is, to the outliers and get him some work. Better buy him some food on the way-have you got any coin?"

The red werewolf, his good cheer restored, looked wryly at him. "Enough. You'll be all right?"

Morlock opened his right hand and shrugged. Hlupnafenglu punched him farewell and walked off, the suspicious-looking youngster in tow.

Morlock turned and saw a crow sitting in the middle of the Shadow Market, looking at him. Morlock walked over to talk to the bird.

"I don't have any food with me-" Morlock began.

The crow croaked that she remembered him pretty well. At least he wasn't a stone-throwing type. She and the rest of her murder had fed pretty well on a loaf of bread he had thrown at a crow once. She figured she owed him one, if that's what he was asking.

"Is there a vendor here you trust?" Morlock asked. "Not a stone thrower? A man who knows things?"

The crow laughed. She knew a man whose house had no legs but it walked, and he lived around stones but never threw one at crows. She didn't know what he knew, but he gave them grain sometimes, and offal he had no interest in eating, and he asked intelligent questions, not like Morlock.

"Will you take me to him?" Morlock asked.

The crow nodded and took wing. Morlock loped after her through the shadowy crowd.

The crow's dark feathers were briefly outlined in golden light as she lifted above the shadows of the square. She dropped again into darkness, and Morlock almost lost sight of her as she descended just beyond the edge of the market. But she waited for him there until he caught up, and then she flew into the tangle of streets and dark-bricked buildings east of the marketplace. A short flight: she landed at the door of a stone building. Above the door hung a sign with a picture of a rock being weighed on a scale. On the door was written in black letters IACOMES FILIUS SAXIPONDERIS.

"Here is a man I've long wished to meet," Morlock said to the crow. "Stop by my cave sometime. I have some unground grain I'll give you and yours."

The crow assured him he would see her and her murder soon. She flew away.

Morlock knocked on the door. There was no answer, but it wasn't locked, so he pushed it open and entered.

Inside he found a single dim room cluttered with books and stones and papers and dust. In the center of the clutter was a balding man at a desk who was scribbling something on a sheet of paper. He occasionally paused, a faraway look in his dim blue eyes, and gave the end of his pen a thoughtful chew. In his abstraction he sometimes chewed the wrong end of the pen: there were ink stains in his graying beard and on his shirt. He wrote in the light of a window set into the wall. The window did not open on the city outside-there was a wintry scene beyond the frosted glass, pine trees under a dense cover of snow in evening light.

The man didn't seem to notice that anyone else was there, so Morlock rapped on the inside of the door.

The man at the desk jumped, spilling his ink so that it ran dark across the page.

"Go away, won't you?" the man said in Latin. "I'm busy."

"Making more prisons?" Morlock asked in the same language.

"Not today. What day is it?"

"The first of Drums."

"No it's not. What year?"

"The year of the Ship."

"Then I'm in Wuruyaaria."

"Yes. Didn't you expect to be?"

"I expected to be left alone so that I can finish a rather large job I have on hand."

"Another prison?"

"No, no, no, no, no, no. No. Definitely no. Well, it depends on how you look at it, I guess. Listen, if you cared about what I'm doing you obviously would have gone away by now and left me to do it. I'd rather not try to make you go away; you appear to be armed. Is there anything I can do to persuade you to go away?"

"I wanted to meet you, lacomes."

"Pleased to meet you. Really, it's been an honor. Good-bye!"

"But I don't accept your apology."

"I haven't apologized. I'm actually trying to be dismissive and insulting, and it wounds me deeply that you haven't even noticed."

Morlock recited, "'I, lacomes Saxiponderis, made this prison. Sorry about that, prisoner."'

"Oh." lacomes focused his cold blue eyes on Morlock at last. "I see. You were a prisoner at the Vargulleion. Did they let you out? They don't usually do that."

"I escaped."

"Good for you."

"Doesn't it bother you that your prison failed?"

"I'm sure it didn't. You didn't tunnel out, or break the bars, did you? There are silver cores in those iron bars. If you'd sawn into them you'd have had a sad surprise."

"I'm not a werewolf."

"Then what were you doing in the Vargulleion? It's a prison for werewolves, you know."

"They didn't consult me about it."

"Hm. I suppose not. They are pretty arbitrary. Still, I'd bet a nickel that the guards were inattentive. Am I right? You got out of there because the guards were napping or smoke-drunk or something."

Morlock nodded reluctantly, then added, "The locks weren't all that they might be."

The man threw up his hands; the pen flew out of his hand and bounced off the window behind him, leaving an inkblot on the frosted glass. "They didn't hire me to provide locks! They used their own people for the locks and bolts. Blacksmiths! Guys who usually made chains and manacles and stuff like that. I saw one of those locks. Key slots so big you could stick your little finger in them. Cell doors with simple crossbars. I said to them, `What happens when you have a prison riot?' They said, `There will be no riots. We have a way of breaking prisoners.' But broken things or people are pretty damned dangerous. I told them it was a mistake. What is the use of a prison for incorrigibles that has substandard locks? They said, `Perpetual vigilance shall be our lock.' And I said, `Look, in this kind of situation, you wear suspenders and a belt, just to be safe.' But most of them don't even wear pants, so I guess they didn't get it."

"But you took their money."

"Naturally, naturally. What's wrong with that?"

"The Vargulleion was hell before death. And you built it."

"The Vargulleion was, and is, a prison for criminals. I know it may seem odd to you, no doubt being a law-abiding sort of person, but society has to have a place to put its criminals if it's not going to kill them outright. This prison break you staged: anyone come out with you?"

"Practically everyone."

"Well, congratulations. Any idea how many murderers, rapists, extortionists, robbers, and all-around thugs walked out with you? Or were they all innocent? I understand everyone in prison is innocent."

"I was innocent."

"Then you were the victim of an injustice. To the extent I am responsible for that, I apologize. Are you prepared to apologize to all those who've suffered and died because you unleashed a wave of criminals on the world?"

"Eh."

"I'll take that as a no. I'm not laughing off what happened to you: really, I'm not. It bothers me more than I can easily tell you or you'd believe. But I don't think you can have a society without injustice. When people live together-and they have to live together-interests and rights clash and someone always loses."

"And as long as you are paid, you are content with that."

"In a word: no. I hate it. I think everyone should hate it, and I hate it that everyone doesn't hate it. Look, injustice operates in my favor sometimes, against me other times. I guess maybe I'm better off than many. It's one kind of fool who doesn't think there's injustice in his city or his state. It's another kind of fool who sees it and thinks it doesn't matter as long as it doesn't touch him. I'm neither kind of fool."

"What kind of fool are you?"

"I'm the kind of fool who leaves his door unlocked when he doesn't want to be disturbed!"

"That's no answer."

"I haven't got one. Not about society, anyway. I think we have to live in imperfect societies, because there are no perfect ones, and no perfect people. But we have to struggle against their imperfections, and our own. It's a struggle that never ends, but if we carry on with it, things may get better. Not perfect, maybe, but better."

"That's a long war," Morlock said, thinking dark thoughts.

"Right; right. The longest. It'll never be over. Anyway, I'm not temperamentally suited for perfection. If I woke up tomorrow in Utopia City, the first thing I'd do is hit the road and head out of town."

"People get tired of struggling."

"Well, everyone needs a break sometimes. I like to read books, personally. What do you do?"

"Make things."

"Oh?" Iacomes looked him over, noticing the wooden glove on his left hand. "That from a work injury or something? Excuse my mentioning it if it's too painful."

"I seem to be changing into a ghost."

"Really?" lacomes was fully engaged in the conversation for the first time. "Can I see?"

Morlock undid the bolts that fastened the wooden sheath to his arm.

"It looks like those anchors are driven into bone," lacomes observed, watching him. "Didn't that hurt?"

"No. Unfortunately not."

"Unfortunately?"

"It's the illness. First the nerves ache, and then they seem to die and feel nothing, and then the flesh becomes ghostly. Now my arm has no feeling up to the shoulder."

"Hm."

Morlock pulled the sheath off and his hand lay exposed: vaporous, drifting, ghostlike.

"Does it hurt?" lacomes asked. "After it becomes ghostly, I mean."

"There is a kind of pain, but it's not physical. I can't explain."

"Hm. I hope I never understand fully, to tell you the truth. Can you move things with it?"

"Leaves. Feathers. Bits of paper. Nothing much heavier."

"Can you reach through things with it?"

"Not glass, or metal, or stone. If it was alive, or is alive, my fingers seem to be able to sink into it some distance. But there is pain for the other, I believe."

"I'll take your word on that," lacomes said hastily. "Hm," he added more thoughtfully, as Morlock pulled the wooden glove back over his ghostly hand. "This all reminds me of something. But what, exactly?"

"You know something about the ghost illness?" Morlock asked, pausing briefly as he rebolted the wooden glove onto his arm.

"Well, I read something about it once, and that's not the same thing at all. Where is that thing? Hey, Rogerius."

What appeared to be a brass head lifted itself up from among a tumble of gray stones. It was suspended in midair by nothing more obvious than its own intention.

"I asked you not to call me that," the brass head said, looking at lacomes with discontented crystal eyes.

"Did you notice when I ignored you? No? Oh, well. Rogerius, I want you to find something for me."

"I am busy at my visualization. I remind you that if I do not finish my visualization, you will not finish your project."

"I want you to find something for me," lacomes repeated patiently. "I read something once-"

"I sense an indefinite but fairly large number of documents-"

11 -about illness. That should narrow it down."

"Still indefinitely large."

"Oh, come on. I'm not a hypochondriac."

"Do you include emotional disturbances in your definition of illness?"

"Depends. Doesn't it? Everyone who has emotions has them disturbed sometimes. But some people are more disturbed than others."

"The number is still indefinitely large."

"All right. The document I am thinking of described an illness that had something to do with ghosts."

"If we include emotional disorders, the number of relevant documents is still very large. Would you like an estimate or a count?"

"Neither," lacomes said hastily. "How many if emotional disorders are excluded?"

"Is that wise? The intruder-whose name you have not asked but whom I have of course identified-is subject to a number of emotional disorders."

"Who isn't?"

"I am not."

"Assuming that's true (which it's not), so what? Who wants to be a disembodied brass head?"

"I do."

"Very well, I grant your wish: you are a disembodied brass head. Don't say I never did anything for you. Now exclude emotional disorders and give me a count."

"Seven thousand and forty-two."

"Hm. That's a lot."

"Ghosts cause illness. It's a scientific fact."

"Aha. Exclude ghost as cause. What then?"

"There is a much smaller number of relevant documents."

"How many?"

"Five."

"How many are in this room? I seem to remember reading it in here. Or in the third-floor tower. Or in the kitchen. How many are in the house, here?"

"Three."

"Bring them to me, eh?"

The brass head floated about the dim room, gathering dusty pieces of parchment in its teeth. It dropped them on the desk near lacomes and floated back to its nest among the tumble of stones.

"Thanks, Rogerius," said lacomes absently. "Well, this one is no good. It's Vespasian's dying joke-you know, `I think I'm becoming a god.' I can't think why he brought it to me. Though there is some overlap between `god' and `ghost,' I suppose, especially in Latin. And this is just a recipe for giving the morally ill the ability to see ghosts. I have no idea what use that would be, though I suppose in the right hands some use could be made of it. No, it's this that I was thinking of. see?"

He offered the parchment fragment to Morlock, who took it with his right hand. It was a set of instructions for making a mirror out of a unicorn's horn. The page was torn, probably from a scroll, but the mirror clearly had something to do with ghost illness (morbus lemuralis)-whether as cure or cause was not clear. There was a fragmentary notation along one torn edge of the page. It seemed to say lumina umbrosa. He pointed it out to lacomes.

"Yes, I couldn't make anything of that. `Lights full of shadow.' Makes no sense."

"But lumina can also mean `eyes' and an umbra can also be a ghost."

"Hm. `Eyes full of ghosts,' then. `Ghosts-in-the-eyes.' Ulugarriu!"

"Yes." Morlock nodded. "This will be useful to me. What do you want for it?"

"I don't have time to haggle right now. Why don't you just take it, and if I think of any little thing I can use-"

"You will not trick me into accepting an open-ended bargain."

"Well, it was worth a try. What have you got?"

They bargained keenly for a time, and in the end lacomes accepted three gold coins and a glass dagger for the parchment. "Though I don't know what I can do with a glass dagger," he said in the end.

"Take it, leave it, or bargain some more."

"No, I have this big job due and I've wasted too much time here already. We're even. Have a good day, and please don't call again."

"You're the worst salesman in the world, Iacomes," Morlock said, with a grudging admiration.

"Thank you, thank you. Praise from a master is indeed gratifying. Please pull the door completely shut as you go. Thanks. Thanks. Good luck, Morlock.

Morlock was back on the dim street, wending back toward the Shadow Market, before he realized something. He had never given his name to lacomes.

He turned back and tried to find lacomes' shop, but he lost his way in the twisting streets and finally had to give up. Hrutnefdhu met him as he was coming back to the border of the Shadow Market.

"What in ghost's name were you doing in there?" the pale werewolf gasped, who seemed especially pale for some reason.

"That's my business," Morlock replied curtly. He liked Hrutnefdhu, but he didn't like it when anyone tried to limit his movements.

"It's dangerous, that's all," Hrutnefdhu said apologetically. "The streets shift. They say nothing is ever in the same place twice. All sorts of weird entities come and go."

"Hm." There was something in this, but Morlock didn't want to talk about it. He was feeling a little odd, as if he was on the verge of the trembling madness that comes with a long bout of drinking.

"My friend Liuunurriu doesn't know anything about ghost sickness," Hrutnefdhu continued, "but he does know someone who might. He'll be back at twilight."

By now they were in the Shadow Market. The sun was high enough that misty golden light was falling on some of the black-and-white paving blocks. The place was almost empty of vendors: bright light and their shady callings did not mix, it seemed.

"I can come back, then," Hrutnefdhu said, when Morlock didn't answer.

"Thank you," said Morlock, whose body and soul were aching for a drink. "I may not be able to join you."

Chapter Twenty-three: War in the Air

It was another dark night. The sky above was stormy, split sometimes by lightning, but even above the clouds there was no moon tonight. Horseman had set just after sunset, and it would be seven days before Trumpeter rose.

Rokhlenu had grown up hating moonless nights, but now he loved them. It was pleasantly perverse to be entangled with his beloved, both of them wearing the day shape, deep in the darkness of night. Wuinlendhono, too, relished it. The air was warm as summer, despite the storm, and they lay on the day couch without a blanket.

The windows stood open to admit the cool rainy air. Had they turned their heads to look, they would have seen the approach of the airships standing in toward the outlier settlement, the eyes of the gondolas already angry-red with fire. But they were absorbed in a marital conversation and did not notice.

It was the warning calls that roused their attention at last: shouting, howling, horns; all rising from the watchtowers on the settlement's verge. They had been watching the plank roads and the waters for the approach of the enemy. They had been vigilant. But they had not been watching the sky, and so they noticed the airships almost too late.

Wuinlendhono and her mate rolled from the wedding couch and looked out the northern windows. One glance told them both all they needed to know. The Sardhluun had surrendered their long-boasted solitary stance and had allied with the Neyuwuleiuun Pack-the Neyuwuleiuun, who controlled the airships. Now airships were being sent against the outliers as if they were stray never-wolves fleeing bands of raiders.

"I'll go to the watchtowers," Rokhlenu said as they frantically pulled on clothing. "The airships may come within the range of our crossbows and catapults-"

"I'll go to the watchtowers," Wuinlendhono said. "I'm the First Wolf of this settlement, and it's for me to take charge of the defenses. You have to go to that crazy never-wolf friend of yours and see if he's got something to help us. Otherwise, we're done."

Rokhlenu stuttered a moment or two, but then bit down his protestations unspoken. She was right. And what bothered him was the thought of her going into danger, but no place was safe while the airships were attacking.

He seized her, kissed her, ran from her down the winding stairs to ground level.

He ran all the way to Hrutnefdhu and Liudhleeo's den in the rickety slum-tower on the east side of town. There was a new lock on the door of the den; it had a coppery face and glass eyes. It grinned in recognition and let him in as soon as he knocked.

Hrutnefdhu was alone in the den; he was sitting up in the sleeping couch, blinking.

"Where's Morlock?" asked Rokhlenu, and then nearly struck himself. Morlock was absent; Liudhleeo was gone. Wasn't it possible they were coupling at this moment, Hrutnefdhu's mate and his old friend?

If the pale werewolf was thinking anything along those lines, he gave no sign of it. "Morlock's drunk, I expect," Hrutnefdhu said sleepily. "He usually is, by this time of night. What time is it?"

"Where is he?"

"Cave. Wait a moment."

"I don't have a moment. The airships of the Neyuwuleiuun are attacking us.

Hrutnefdhu jumped naked from the couch, grabbed the coverlet, and wrapped it around himself as he ran after Rokhlenu.

The wickerwork boat with the glass eye was waiting on their side of the water-otherwise Rokhlenu would have leapt into the water and floundered across. Both werewolves took oars and drove the boat across the rain-lashed water. Shoulder to shoulder they ran up the long slope to Morlock's cave.

Morlock was sprawled in a pile of blankets by the cave's entrance. A halfempty jar of wine was still in his right hand. Deeper in the cave, Hlupnafenglu was sitting by the nexus of living flames, playing solitaire with Morlock's cards. He looked up in surprise at the entrance of the other two werewolves.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The Neyuwuleiuun are attacking."

"Who are the Neyuwuleiuun?" asked the red werewolf with an oddly unconcerned smile.

Rokhlenu goggled at him for a moment, but then remembered that Hlupnafenglu had lost his memories. "They have airships. We need Morlock. Wasn't he working on wings, or something?"

"Morlock is drunk."

"I see that. Wasn't he working on wings or something?"

"We were all working on them," Hrutnefdhu said. "But I don't know where they are, or if they're done."

Hlupnafenglu's smile became even broader. He pointed at the roof of the cave.

Five sets of wings in various stages of completion were hanging there. Or, more precisely, they were lying against the roof of the cave as if it were the floor.

Three were obviously unready, but the mechanisms of two seemed complete, and the skinlike surfaces of both were covered with the weight-defying metallic rings.

"How do they work?" Rokhlenu asked.

"Not sure," Hlupnafenglu said with his customary, somewhat eerie cheer.

"Morlock was going to show us," Hrutnefdhu added. "But he-well, he never got around to it."

Because he was drunk? Rokhlenu wondered. Looking back, he seemed to remember Morlock had said that wine was not good for him-he forgot exactly what his old friend had said. But why would someone go on drinking if it harmed him? It was beyond Rokhlenu's understanding, and not immediately relevant, so he put it aside.

Rokhlenu said, "Let's pull one down, and you two put it on me. I'll see if I can fly in it. If I don't kill myself, one of you follow me. We have got to do something about those airships or they'll burn our town down to water level."

They dragged one of the wingsets down from the roof and strapped it on the gnyrrand's back. Wearing it, he felt as light as air: his feet barely touched the ground. There were grips inside the wings, and when he used them to flex the wings, he felt his feet leave the ground for a moment.

"Chief, wait," said Hrutnefdhu.

"No waiting. One of you follow me. I'll be headed straight for the airships." He ran out of the cave and took straight to the air.

The southern wind threw him backward, pinning him against the hill above the cave, knocking the wind from his lungs.

"You don't have a weapon!" shouted Hrutnefdhu at the top of his penetrating voice.

"Oh," said Rokhlenu, dashed in multiple senses. "Help me down, citizens."

They hauled him down. There were still many glass weapons about the cave, and a sheath for a short sword was built into the frame of the wings, running across the shoulders. Rokhlenu took a sword, practiced sheathing and unsheathing a couple times, and then said, less dramatically, "Like I said before. I'm going to walk up to the top of the hill and take off from there. One of you do the same. The other try to wake Morlock up. Maybe he can think of something. If you can get him to think."

"Will do, Chief," said Hlupnafenglu.

As he stepped out of the cave into the warm rainy night, he heard the werewolves behind him arguing about who would follow. He struggled up to the top of the hill, the wind threatening to blow him off his feet at any moment. When he reached the crest, he spread his wings and leapt into the air. The wind carried him away, up into the dark fire-torn sky.

The worst thing, as soon as he left the ground, was the sense of placelessness. He was tumbling in the dark; there was no clear sign for him to follow, nothing to give him a sense of where to fly to.

There was, at least, up and down. He drove the wings to carry him higher and higher. Suddenly it occurred to him that the wind was blowing from the south, almost due north, and he must already be past the borders of the outlier settlement.

Steering took a few tries before he began to understand it, but he found he could angle the wings and his body to bank against the wind.

Then he saw them! The airships! They were no blacker than the clouds, but the eyes of the gondolas were still red with fire. Every now and then the sky would flash with lightning, and in the bitter blue light he could see the long clawlike shapes of the airships clearly. Down below was the outlier settlement, also outlined with fire. It was already burning. It might already be too late. Wuinlendhono might already be dead.

He drove his wings toward them. What he could do against them he did not know. But they weren't expecting him, and that was to his advantage.

He closed on the airships faster than he expected. The storm winds added speed to his wings.

And they did, in fact, see him. They were looking out from the windows of the gondola, scanning the dark night. He saw them long before they saw him …but he was armed with a short sword and they had bows. A bolt of lightning thundered shockingly nearby; though he was dazed by it he was close enough to hear a shout from the gondola of the nearer airship: someone had seen him.

With terrible clarity, he saw several archers take their bead on him and ready burning arrows to shoot.

Then a shadow passed between him and their fiery light.

Morlock was having the worst dream ever. Not a nightmare, in the usual sense. A frustration dream, a shame dream. Someone had come to him for help, someone he wanted to help, but he could not help them because he was drunk. Even in his dream Morlock knew it must be a dream, because he had given up drinking ages ago, precisely so that this exact thing would never happen again.

It was very real, though. It was as if he could see Rokhlenu strapping on the wingset he had built. He could hear the words the werewolves spoke. But he knew it was a dream, because he had long ago given up drinking.

He started a little when Hrutnefdhu screamed, You don't have a weapon! That was almost like it was really happening.

He felt something on his hand. He stared at it for a while. It was red, but not like blood. Plus, it did not burn, as his blood did. It was cold, unlike blood. And it didn't smell like blood. It smelled like wine.

He had a bowl of wine in his hand. He had spilled some of it when the pale werewolf shouted.

If he actually had a bowl of wine in his hand, that strongly suggested he had been drinking it.

If he had been drinking it, he was not having a nightmare about being drunk, as he often did. He was simply drunk.

That meant that Rokhlenu did actually need his help.

He'd said something about the Neyuwuleiuun …and their airships.

Morlock set the wine bowl down with elaborate care on the cave floor. He rose to his feet.

Rokhlenu was gone. The pale werewolf and the red one were standing between the other completed wingset and arguing about something.

"Where's Rokhlenu?" Morlock said. "He was just here."

The two werewolves turned to him with blank looks. A pale werewolf with a blank look. Morlock felt there might be a joke in there somewhere if he could think a little more clearly, and if he were the joking type, and if this were a joking situation-none of which was the case, so the hell with it, Morlock decided.

"He's gone, Khretvarrgliu," Hlupnafenglu said eventually. His right hand was gripping the wingset by the torso straps, so that Hrutnefdhu wouldn't escape with it, but his left hand mimicked a bird in flight.

"Buckle that thing on me," Morlock directed.

"Morlock. Old friend," said Hrutnefdhu gently. "You're too drunk to walk."

"I won't be walking. Hlupnafenglu: oblige me."

Hlupnafenglu walked over to Morlock with the wingset and Hrutnefdhu in tow. In the end, the pale werewolf assisted the red one in buckling the second wingset onto its maker.

"Draw down the stirrups and buckle them on my feet," he directed.

"What's a stirrup?" asked Hlupnafenglu.

"Something to put your feet in." Like on a saddle, he almost addedexcept he didn't know the word for saddle in Moonspeech or Sunspeech, and, in fact, he realized belatedly that he had used the Wardspeech word for stirrup. "They're under the base of the wings, attached to cables."

The werewolves found the stirrups and slowly drew them down to Morlock's feet. He stepped into them, and the two werewolves fastened the buckles over his feet.

"Chieftain," Hlupnafenglu admitted, "we didn't do this for Rokhlenu. Is it important?"

"It might be," Morlock said. The cables gave the wing beats extra force. That was the idea, anyway: Morlock had never actually flown one of these things. He'd kept on meaning to make the experiment …but when he came back to the cave in the evening he usually started drinking.

"Morlock, wait a moment," Hrutnefdhu said.

"A sword," Morlock said to Hlupnafenglu, who grinned and handed him a glass sword from the weapon rack. Morlock sheathed it over his shoulder.

"Morlock, wait."

"Spear," he said to Hlupnafenglu. The red werewolf gave him a stabbing spear from the weapon rack, and he placed it in the other shoulder sheath.

"Morlock. Wait!"

"Citizens, good fortune," said Morlock as he strode from the cave.

The cables pulling against his leg muscles had a paradoxically steadying effect. But Morlock was unsure whether he could actually walk uphill under the triple burden of the wingset, the heavy wind, and his drunkenness. He breathed deeply of the air, trying to clear the wine-colored fog from his eyes and mind.

He fixed the fingers of his wooden glove to the grip inside the left wing and clamped them shut. His right hand took the grip of the right wing. It was time to fly or fail-perhaps both.

He judged the direction of the wind, the width of the slope he stood on, and what force his wings could apply at what angles to the wind. The calculation soothed him: drunk or sober he could do a little three-dimensional math. He took a few steps into the darkness and leapt off into the wind, driving the wings hard with his arms and legs.

The shoulder of the hill flashed by at an acceptable distance. Morlock felt his mind, if not his body, come a little more alive.

He pumped his arms and legs to gain height in the darkness. He dreaded the thought of smashing into some tree or unseen ridge.

Like Rokhlenu before him, he felt the empty isolation, the disorientation of night flight. But it did not bother him as much. For one thing, he expected it: he had had flightlike experiences before. Plus, he was an experienced drunk who knew he was drunk: disorientation was an old, familiar enemy.

He banked left, losing the lift under his wings and tumbling end over end a couple of times before he caught the knack of it. But finally he was on a roughly westward course, though still driven northward by the relentless south wind, and climbing as high and fast as he could.

He saw the airships then, hanging like claws over the burning settlement of the outliers. The ships stood there, defying the wind, moored by some power he didn't understand. He wondered at it as he flew toward them, and he found in the wonder an intoxication deeper and more intense than the musty, muddy pleasures of wine. Why had he denied himself this danger and exultation? Why had he denied himself the air and the light and the darkness? This was why he was alive: to make, to do, to drive, not to drown his wits in fermented juice.

As he watched the airships, he saw a shape that occasionally impinged on the fiery light glaring from the gondola ports. Rokhlenu: headed toward a gondola to board it and kill the crew. A plan unlikely of success, but not hopeless with the advantage of surprise.

But there was no surprise. Morlock saw the archers taking aim at Rokhlenu with burning arrows. He expected Rokhlenu to dive, to swerve, to do something to avoid the arrows. But he didn't. Morlock guessed he was willing to risk a wound or two if he could get close enough to board the gondola. Perhaps he was counting on the metal rings to protect him; he might not realize that they would burn like paper, having been deeply imbued with metallic phlogiston.

Morlock drove himself forward and upward; when he was above and somewhat in front of his friend he stalled in midair and kicked him savagely in the right arm. Rokhlenu lost lift and tumbled down, a dark shadow toward the dark earth, the red reflections of fire fading from the scales on his wings. Morlock heard the bows sing discordantly at the same moment, and he drove himself upward in a steep arc.

The fiery arrows passed in midair between Morlock and Rokhlenu. Morlock turned his wings and let himself drop, spinning in the air so that his head was aimed almost directly at the ground. His stomach, full of wine and very little else, disliked this maneuver intensely and told him so noisily, but he did manage to escape the archers' second hasty salvo: he saw the arrows lay red tracks across the sky between his feet.

Looking groundward, Morlock saw that Rokhlenu had succeeded in recovering from the tumble he had kicked him into and was coming back up toward the gondola.

"Meet you on the keel!" he shouted to the startled werewolf as he fell past. He hoped keel was the right word; he had learned it from Hrutnefdhu when they were talking about boats in general (and the wickerwork boat Morlock had made in particular).

He came out of his dive in a sharp curve upward; it strained the wings until they creaked loud enough to be heard over the storm winds, but it saved some of his momentum, helping him to fly upward. He was now headed almost directly toward the underside of the gondola; the archers inside had no clear shot at him. Those in the gondola of the other airship did-but the closer he got to the gondola of their sister ship, the less likely they were to risk it. He got close fast. Soon he was directly under the gondola; he stalled in the air, seized a handhold on the rough planking with his right hand, and dangled there, gasping.

Apparently keel was the right word, or Rokhlenu had known what he meant by it, because a winged shadow hanging from the gondola some distance away started to shout at him in Rokhlenu's voice.

"…you …crazy?" he heard his old friend say.

People were always saying this to Morlock, and he couldn't see the point. If he was, what was the point in asking him?

"-in …now …dead …half of them-" Rokhlenu shouted on, half of his words carried away by the wind. But Morlock guessed he was complaining about the ruin of his attack on the crew of the airship.

"The wings will burn!" Morlock shouted several times. It was possible that he was shouting loud enough for the werewolves to hear him through the planking of the airship's floor. It didn't matter: Rokhlenu had to know this.

"…metal …protect …" Rokhlenu shouted back-anyway, that was all Morlock heard of it.

"The metal will burn!" Morlock roared.

"Metal burns?" Rokhlenu asked. He asked it several times.

"Everything burns!" Morlock replied. It was not strictly accurate. Dephlogistonated objects did not burn. Immaterial objects did not burn. There were other classes of exception, but none of them mattered at the moment.

Rokhlenu said something that might have been a curse.

Morlock released the clamp on his wooden glove by striking the winged arm against his knee. He swung over, handhold by handhold, until he was hanging next to Rokhlenu.

"You need to get your feet in the stirrups," he said.

"What are stirrups?"

Morlock repressed a curse of his own. "Things to put your feet in. They're under the base of the wings."

"Those ghost-bitten things! They kept smacking around, throwing me offl"

"Put. On. Feet."

Rokhlenu bent one foot up. Morlock, hanging from his right hand, used his wooden glove to catch a stirrup from under Rokhlenu's wings and pushed it toward the werewolf's free hand. Using the one hand, Rokhlenu managed to put it on his foot and buckle it. They repeated the process with the other stirrup.

As Morlock struggled to refasten the clamp of his wooden glove to the grip of his left wing, Rokhlenu stretched out his legs and said, "It makes the wings feel different."

That was the point: the pulleys attached to the stirrups helped provide power to the pseudo-musculature of cables and wings that drove the wings. Morlock didn't have the vocabulary to say this, and besides his stomach had finally reached the point of open rebellion. So he just said, "Yes," and turned his head to vomit.

When he had finished and wiped his face on his sleeve, he turned back to Rokhlenu.

"What now?" the werewolf asked.

Morlock had been thinking about that, between convulsions of his belly, and he pointed at the buoyant part of the nearby airship.

"Attack the other airship?" Rokhlenu asked.

"Bag of air," Morlock said.

"What?"

"Not the gondola. The bag of air."

Rokhlenu turned to looked at the nearby airship. It was too dark to see his face, but his shout was pensive as he asked, "You think it's held up by air?"

"Hot air!" Morlock shouted.

A moment passed, and Rokhlenu laughed. "Like ash carried up by a fire! Hot air! Are you sure?"

"No!

"How do they keep it hot?"

"Don't know!"

"This is a great plan!" Rokhlenu howled at him.

"What's yours?"

"Wake up! It's all a dream! Live happy!"

"Never works."

"We'll try yours, then. Back up on the east side of this ship."

Morlock closed his eyes to try to gather the points of the compass, then opened them rapidly to escape the whirling drunken vortex behind his eyelids. "Yes!" he said. He was almost sure the east was the side they had first approached from; the airship itself would screen them from its sister ship.

A hatch opened in the underside of the gondola; werewolves, somehow distorted in form, stood there, holding bows with burning arrows nocked to shoot.

Morlock and Rokhlenu both fell away in power dives. An arrow passed by Morlock's elbow like a red meteor. Morlock bent his flight sharply upward, trying to catch the steady south wind to give him lift. It worked and he flew swiftly past the windows in the gondola, close enough to see a werewolf archer's startled face.

The werewolf wasn't the only one startled. He had at least three eyes, two human and one lupine, in a twisted mouthless face, and the brief glance Morlock had of him was startling indeed.

Morlock flashed past and upward, finally coming to land on the side of the airship. It was covered with a wooden framework, and he grabbed onto the frame with his right hand.

"What took you?" Rokhlenu shouted cheerfully in his ear.

Morlock snarled, "Your mother couldn't make change." His stomach was unhappy, but there was nothing left in it to vomit. Morlock hated the dry heaves, even when he wasn't hanging by one hand a dozen bowshots above the ground.

"…not to bandy words with you when you're drunk," Rokhlenu was saying. He didn't seem to be angry.

Morlock nodded. He unclamped his wooden glove from the wing-grip and hooked it on the airship frame to support himself, at last drawing his sword with his right hand. Rokhlenu did likewise. At more or less the same moment they plunged the blades into the fabric surface of the airship.

Morlock had expected a rush of hot air, perhaps fire. He was disappointed. The rift he was tearing in the surface spilled forth a cool bluish light, but nothing else.

"Guess we were wrong!" Rokhlenu shouted.

Morlock shrugged. That was one possibility. Another was that the bags of hot air were inside. He continued to hack away at the fabric. Rokhlenu did as well, and eventually they had a rip large enough for one of them to slide through, wings and all.

Rokhlenu seemed to want to discuss who should go through first, but Morlock unhooked his wooden glove from the cable and dove through without a word. It wasn't even worth discussing. He was the one who was dying; if he died a little sooner it was no great matter.

In his mind, Morlock had already sketched out several possible designs for the interior of the airship proper. One or two were actually ingenious and he hoped to see them at work. In this he was disappointed, because the interior of the ship was nothing like he had imagined.

The interior was all one great chamber, nearly empty. The only thing in it was a glowing stone near one end of the chamber and an oddly spidery being standing next to it.

Morlock drifted down to the bottom of the chamber, bemused. The stone and the entity by it (the keeper? the steersman? a guard?) were on a wooden platform; the rest of the chamber was an empty cylinder, tapered at both ends.

He heard Rokhlenu land behind him.

The being standing on the platform did something to the glowing stone.

Its light fell on Morlock more intensely. It struck him like an invisible hammer. He felt the fabric of the chamber rippling around him. There was a ghostly murmur in the air. He had no idea what was going on.

"I feel strange," Rokhlenu said thickly.

Bracing himself against the hammer-blows of the light, Morlock turned to face Rokhlenu. He looked strange. The light was causing the werewolf's flesh to ripple and twist, as if he were assuming the night shape. But he was not becoming a wolf. It was more as if a wax image of a man and a wolf were merging, distorting each other, but neither one growing and neither one shrinking. A wolf's head was emerging from Rokhlenu's neck, its eyes dead and empty, its maw toothless. Needle-toothed mouths were opening in the palms of his hands, and twisted canine legs were sprouting from his torso to join his arms and legs, giving him a nightmarishly spidery look-like that thing on the platform.

Morlock drew his sword, repressing a sudden temptation to pass it through his friend a few times and end his misery, and turned instead to slash an opening in the chamber wall.

"You can't stay here!" he shouted at his friend, who was now howling mindlessly from all his mouths. Morlock kicked him through the gap into the night; his howls faded into the storm.

Morlock hoped that his old friend had enough self-command to use the wings and glide to safety-or, if not, that the levity of the phlogistonimbued scales on his wings would cushion his long fall. But the worst thing that could happen to him from the fall was death, and it was not impossible that the light from the strange stone had done worse than this to him already.

The intensity of the light falling on Morlock grew. He dreaded the thought that it would distort him as it had his friend …but that didn't seem to be happening. It must be something about werewolves that made them vulnerable to the bitter blue light.

Morlock grabbed the grips of his wings and kicked off into flight. He arced upward to land on the platform beside the distorted creature.

It was a werewolf-or had been, Morlock guessed. It had four crooked lupine limbs as naked as a rat's tail, and approximately human arms and legs that were strangely muscled and covered with doglike fur. It had a lifeless wolf head dangling from one human shoulder, a single gigantic human eye peering out from what appeared to be a neck, and on the side of the neck was a gray-lipped human mouth that squealed with terror as Morlock landed beside it.

"Don't do this!" it begged him. "If I obey, he says he can change me back, but if I don't obey, he says he'll leave me like this. Please don't do this. Let me do what they tell me to do."

"How do they tell you?" Morlock demanded. "How does this thing work?"

"I can't tell you. I can't tell you anything. He'll know. They'll hurt me."

The glowing stone was set in a sort of barrel on a spinnable disc, with handles protruding like spokes around the rim's edge. The inner part of the barrel was covered with mirrors, to reflect the light upward and forward. There were lenses mounted atop the barrel and in front. Levers around the lenses made them focus the light more or less intensely. Morlock badly wanted to examine these assemblies; it seemed as if the levers somehow changed the shape of the lenses themselves, which was very interesting. But in more immediate terms, the more intense the light, the greater the force driving the airship. The lens pointing upward kept the ship aloft, could perhaps drive it even further up into the sky. The lens in front steered the ship and drove it forward …or backward: the wheel seemed to spin in a full circle. Now they were veering away to port-eastward, if Morlock's sense of direction was not totally deranged by dizziness and wine.

That was contrary to the plan emerging in Morlock's mind. He said, "Watch out," and grabbed one of the handles, rotating the barrel so that the light was pointing toward the pointed prow of the great cloth-covered chamber. The steersman (or former steersman, as Morlock had taken his job) hissed and skittered out of the way.

The fabric of the chamber rippled: they were now headed straight into the eye of the wind. There was a brief swirl of vertigo as the direction of the craft spun around. Morlock's stomach had been trying to crawl out of his belly ever since he stood up in his cave, so he found this relatively easy to ignore. He cranked the levers on the vertical lens until the light was more intense, glaring a bright cold blue on the prow.

There was a kind of wailing in his ears that was not quite a sound. It said words that were not quite words. His heart began to pound and his breath grew short, as if he were afraid. He recognized these signs: he had often felt them in graveyards or other places swarming with what some called ghosts, but which those-who-know called …

"Impulse clouds!" he said to the late steersman of the ship. "This craft is powered by impulse clouds! Maybe you call them ghosts."

"I don't call them anything!" the steersman screamed. "I don't talk to anyone about them, and no one talks to me. Don't tell me anything. I'm trying to do what they say, but you won't let me!"

Morlock ignored him (or her; it was impossible to tell).

Impulse clouds. They were a material part of any living body, but the most tenuous and usually invisible part. Sometimes they could survive the death of the body they had been associated with, in which case they often became a nuisance. Sunlight gathered them up or dispelled them, but moonlight did not. Some said that moonlight actually forced impulse clouds back to earth. That was why ghosts were often reported in moonlight: the moons kept them from rising into the air, then into the sky. Was it possible that the moons, sweeping through bands of impulse clouds raised up from the earth, drove them down again wrapped in moonlight?

If so, this vast fabric chamber was designed to take advantage of the impulse clouds implicit in moonlight. The impulses would reflect off the walls, driving the ship in any desired direction. Speed would vary with intensity.

And the impulse clouds must have something to do with the transformation of werewolves and other werebeasts: that was why the blue light had so distorted Rokhlenu-and the steersman, no doubt, and perhaps others. (He remembered the three-eyed werewolf he had seen.) Never-wolves, like Morlock, must be somehow more resistant to interference with their impulse cloud.

If Rokhlenu's distortion resulted from interference with his impulse cloud, it was possible it could be healed. Perhaps whoever had told the steersman he could be cured had not been lying.

"How do you know where to go?" he asked the steersman. "Do you get signals from the gondola? Is there a port somewhere?"

"Can't tell!" said the steersman. "He'll know! He always knows!"

"I may be able to cure you," Morlock said. "You needn't depend on him anymore. You needn't be afraid. Help me, and I'll help you."

"Liar!" screamed the distorted steersman. "No one can help me! Only him! And he won't now!"

Morlock hated being called a liar. He pushed the distorted creature off the platform; it fell squealing down to the base of the platform and lay there sobbing.

He systematically took in his surroundings. There must be some way for the steersman to see out, or for signals to be sent to him. The craft was too well designed to overlook this nontrivial detail.

At first there seemed to be nothing. Then he realized he was looking in the wrong direction: the steersman had one eye that pointed up….

Morlock craned his neck back. Over his head was a kind of board with black and white shapes playing over it. They seemed meaningless at first, but then he realized what he was seeing. It was as if it were a charcoal drawing of the ship's surroundings from a particular vantage point-on the ship's nose, he expected. And it changed as the ship moved. Somehow those sights were filtered and sent back here. Remarkable.

He tentatively shifted the angle of the ship's flight to starboard; the south wind struck it solidly on the port side of the prow, sending shock waves through the strange craft, forcing its nose further to the west.

At first he fought this, but then he saw something on the view-board that caused him to stop. A clawlike object hanging in the sky not so far from him, a gondola dangling below on cables. The other airship was following, concerned about the state of its sister ship, no doubt.

"Good of them," Morlock remarked to no one. It was time to put his plan into action, clearly. He spun the wheel until the other airship was dead center in the view-board. Then he cranked the levers for the lens on the front of the barrel, until the impulse light striking the prow was as bright as it could be.

"What are you doing?" screamed the steersman.

It didn't seem to be a rhetorical question, so Morlock answered it. "I am going to ram that ship."

There was a dark bird perched in the shredded fabric of the airship. Her name, for that time/place, was Mercy. Near her, in the storm outside, was a dark indistinct cloud: a manifestation of Death.

"Nothing for you to do, on a night like this," Death signified.

"Or everything."

"I visualized that War would be manifest here."

"War enjoys experiencing the losing side of a conflict. He is savoring the outliers' suffering through his most direct manifestation."

"You have visualized this?"

"Yes. Also, he told me that he would."

Morlock's insight was sensitive enough that he felt their presence, though he did not see them or perceive their symbology. Their presence troubled him without his understanding it. But he didn't let it shake his intent.

Unfortunately, the other airship's crew seemed to realize he was intending to attack them. The ship swung around and fled before the wind.

Morlock was the worst sailor in the world. His former wife, who was possibly the best sailor in the world, often used to tease him about this. But even he knew that a stern chase was a long chase.

"God Avenger," swore Morlock.

Death and Mercy symbolically shielded themselves from the name of this alien god.

Morlock felt a brief respite, though he didn't understand why. He held his course, straight on the tail of the fleeing airship. If nothing else, he had broken the air attack on the outlier settlement. And there was still a chance he could ram the other airship. It all depended on what happened when they flew over the city.

The jagged rising outline of Wuruyaaria swelled on his view-board. Morlock's neck was sore from bending back and looking up, but he didn't want to take his eyes off the thing. If the other airship turned port or starboard it would have to strike against the course of the wind and would lose speed. That would be his chance to gain on it.

The other airship flew over the werewolf city without turning. Either its port was further north, or they didn't want to risk losing headway.

Mount Dhaarnaiarnon loomed beyond the mesas and cliffs of Wuruyaaria. The moon-clock did not show on the view-board, presumably because it wasn't relevant to navigation. But the ragged edge of the volcano's crater was unmistakable.

The other airship flew on into the rolling hills north of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. Morlock was sure now that he had them running scared.

War manifested himself as a shadow in the shape of a sword. The other gods greeted him with polite symbology.

Morlock became more uneasy, though he did not know why.

The two airships flew on into the dying north. The storm behind them had faded. Even the gods were silent.

In the quiet, Morlock heard a voice speaking an angry command outside the airship.

The werewolf crew of the gondola were obviously making a bid to regain control of the airship.

Morlock coldly considered his options.

He could use the moonstone to attack the werewolves with impulse light. But he would lose speed that way; the other airship would have a chance to change course and escape. He didn't want that.

He examined the barrel containing the moonstone. He found, as he expected, that there were mirror-bright slats that could be used to cover the lenses.

With the moonstone entirely cocooned in mirrors, its impulse forces would be perfectly balanced. It would no more keep the ship aloft than an ordinary stone would.

Morlock dropped the mirror slats over the lenses. The great chamber of the airship went dark and seemed to deflate.

"No!" screamed the monstrous steersman in the sudden dark. "We'll all be killed!"

Morlock put his right shoulder against the barrel holding the moonstone and pushed. There was a long slow moment when nothing gave-then a splintering crack and the barrel fell off the platform to the floor of the great chamber.

Morlock jumped after it, not using the wings to slow his fall.

At that, his fall was almost too slow. The steersman had floundered around the platform's base and was doing something to the barrel.

Morlock drew his sword and stabbed the steersman several times. It fled, shrieking.

Morlock hooked his wooden glove onto a handhold on the barrel and clamped it tight. Then he stabbed with his sword at the fabric under his feet, sawing away at it.

Soon a jagged tear opened up. He sheathed his sword, pushed the barrel through the opening, and fell with it into the night.

The whole airship was sagging downward in the air; Morlock found himself suspended in midair between the collapsing airship and the gondola below. The cables around him were dense with distorted werewolf shapes, all screaming in anger or panic as they felt their craft failing.

Morlock flipped open one of the lens covers.

The impulse light from the moonstone dragged him, dangling from his wooden glove, away from the falling airship on a wild course into the empty night.

He tried to steady himself by grabbing the other side of the barrel with his right hand. But the radiant impulse light blinded him; he could see nothing in the darkness. One time he almost smashed into the ground, saving himself at the last moment by going into a sickening tumble. By pure chance he came out of it headed upward rather than downward.

He scrabbled desperately at the lens controls to try to diminish his speed, but the barrel was simply not intended to be dirigible by itself; he could not set a course, and every moment he held onto it he risked being smashed against the ground or some obstruction.

He released the clamp from his wooden glove. The barrel spun away, flashing into the darkness.

Morlock scrabbled to get his wooden glove fixed in the grip for his left wing, then gripped the other wing with his right hand. He went into a glide, found the horizon, aimed himself away from the ground, and started pumping his wings with arms and legs.

When he knew he was stable and some distance away from the ground, he looked around to take his bearings.

Not so very far away, he saw the other airship, coming around to the aid of its ruined sister. There was light coming from the ports of its gondola, but he didn't see archers or burning arrows. No doubt they were on the other side, looking out for survivors from the ship Morlock had destroyed. No one seemed to be looking his way.

He was tired, very tired. But he was not dead yet, and this seemed like too good a chance to pass up. He banked into an intercepting course.

The surviving airship was sinking slowly toward the ground. In the dark woodlands Morlock saw glimmers of fire: the ruin of the first ship's gondola, perhaps.

Morlock flew straight on without dropping. By the time he reached the surviving airship, he was just over its motive chamber. He landed atop it. Balancing carefully, he drew his glass sword and drove it deep into the fabric, and again, slashing with the bitter blade until the rift was large enough for him to enter.

This chamber was the twin to the other airship, right down to the distorted steersman on the moonstone platform. The steersman was aware of him, and swung the bright lens about to try and strike him with impulse light. But the carriage of the barrel was not designed to tilt so far. Morlock flew directly to the platform.

"Stand aside," Morlock said. "I won't hurt you if I don't have to. Your light can't hurt me, anyway."

"You've already hurt me!" shouted the steersman. "If he finds out that you learned about impulse clouds from me-"

Morlock turned curiously toward the steersman.

"That was a slip, wasn't it?" said the steersman ruefully, in quite a different sort of voice.

"Yes."

"Two such similar simulacra, facing similar challenges in such a short space of time," the steersman's mouth mused. "I'm not surprised I got confused. But I wonder if that was really it. I've been wanting to talk to you for some time, Morlock."

"Who are you?"

"Krecking ghosts. Do I need to tell you? I'm Ulugarriu."

Morlock bent his head back to look at the view-board, then adjusted his course upward and southward. When the ship was headed straight back toward Wuruyaaria in the teeth of the wind, he levelled off again.

"I heard you didn't talk much," the steersman complained. "But it seems to me you're being petulant."

"I'm in the middle of something."

"You're in the middle of the biggest time-wasting mistake a male can commit. There is more at stake here than a single life, a few lives, a thousand lives, an election, a city. You are in greater danger than you can imagine walking amidst powers that you don't understand."

"I'm in the middle of something," Morlock said, adjusting the height of the airship again and cranking the forward speed to maximum. "Send me a message, if you want to arrange a meeting in person. I will not deal with a simulacrum."

"And I'm supposed to let you within sword's reach of me, so you can split me like beef liver with Tyrfing? Not on your flat greasy ape-nose. We'll talk on my terms, because what I have to say you need to hear."

Morlock grabbed the steersman simulacrum by its elbow and stepped off the platform, dragging the other with him. The simulacrum hit the floor first, since Morlock was held up by the levity of his wings. When he reached the floor, he drew his sword and slashed a hole in the fabric.

"You're making a mistake," the steersman simulacrum repeated in a resigned voice.

Morlock stuffed him through the hole and out into the night. He heard the body strike the gondola on its way to earth.

Satisfied, he sheathed the sword and flew back up to the moonstone platform.

The werewolf crew would come for him presently, but he had a plan to deal with them. If his plan failed he would have to improvise, but he hoped it wouldn't come to that. The crew would remember what had happened to the other airship when the crew attacked, and that would slow them down some. It gave him time, perhaps enough …

In the view-board, the cratered peak of Dhaarnaiarnon lay dead center and growing.

The dark bird who was Mercy signified, "The knowledge that Ulugarriu operates through simulacra has disrupted my visualizations."

The swordlike shadow indicated agreement with Mercy.

The indistinct dark cloud that was Death signified nothing.

"My manifested senses perceived the simulacrum as if it were alive," Mercy persisted.

War agreed.

The indistinct dark cloud that was Death signified nothing.

"If there are multiple entities in or around the city who are, in fact, extensions of Ulugarriu," Mercy persisted, "there is a pattern to events that we do not grasp. It will clash with patterns we do grasp, and the results are beyond prediction."

"There is no pattern to events," Death signified. "Or: only one."

"The inevitability of death?"

"Yes."

War indicated boredom with this oft-repeated pattern of symbology.

"You lesser gods," Death replied, "have the luxury of boredom, change, variety. You hold sway in a mortal's life for an hour, a day, a year, some stretch of time. Then they relinquish you, and you them. But I impinge on a mortal's life once, when they become me and I become them. And then they are not, forever. And I go on, forever."

"Or they escape to a place where we can no longer torture them," signified Mercy, "forever. That's my hope."

"Hope," repeated Death, and signified amusement. She ceased to be manifest.

"Wisdom thinks she is frightened," signified Mercy. She would have preferred to discuss this with Wisdom himself, but her visualizations were growing quite tangled and she could not envision a time/space locus in which they would both be manifest.

War signified that boasting often went hand in hand with fear. Both were part of his sphere, so he was well acquainted with them.

"Why did you accept apotheosis, War?" Mercy asked. "I wanted to do good, and be a part of the good that people do. Maybe I have done some of that. But it has made me more and more aware of the power of evil. Why did you become a god?"

War signified that his answer would play out in events.

The airship was now closing on the peak of Dhaarnaiarnon. Morlock kept a close eye on the view-board. He dropped the level of flight lower, and then still lower. For his purpose, too low was better than not low enough.

The airship shuddered with impact. There was a tearing, grinding sound from below, and forward movement stopped. Morlock braced the wheel with his body to keep the ship on course. Abruptly, the ship was flying free again.

Morlock spun the wheel to aim the ship toward the outlier settlement and cranked down the intensity of the impulse light, diminishing the craft's speed. Then he risked jumping down to the chamber floor and peering through the rift.

He was passing over the smoke lights of Wuruyaaria, and could see clearly that the gondola was gone. A few wooden fragments swung from stray cables, but he seemed to have no passengers. He flew back up to the moonstone platform and steered for his cave, beyond the shoulder of Wuruyaaria.

"I don't understand," Mercy said then. "This is why you became a god?"

War signified that he didn't understand how she could not understand. Two men had pitted their lives against a greater, better-armed force to defend those they loved. They had risked much and lost much. Their skill and daring had won a great victory.

"One man, really," Mercy said.

War disagreed. If it were not for Rokhlenu, Morlock would have slept through the attack in a drunken stupor. He displayed the visualization to her.

Mercy was forced to acknowledge this truth. "But many died for that victory," she pointed out.

War observed that more would have died if the outlier settlement had burned to the ground. Mercy for the airship crews was death for the outliers.

"I know," Mercy replied. It was the sort of paradox which made her the weakest of the Strange Gods and War one of the strongest.

War ceased to manifest himself. Mercy, too, departed for another spacetime locus.

Morlock's heart felt relief at the absence of Strange Gods, although he had not been aware of their presence. He dropped the height of the airship almost to ground level and reduced the impulse light until the airship slowed almost to a walking speed. He drifted past the entrance to his cave to the silver-laden waste fields over the hill's shoulder. He set the airship down there, diminishing the intensity of the lens-foci and completely closing the irises.

The fabric skin of the ship sagged from its skeletal framework. Morlock hauled the barrel containing the moonstone off its disk and threw it down to the ground. He jumped down after it and rolled it downslope until he reached the curtain of fabric at the chamber wall. He slashed through it with the ease of practice, though by now he was very weary, and trundled the moonstone barrel through the opening into the warm humid night air, dragging it all the way back to his cave. There it was as safe as he could make it.

Hlupnafenglu and Hrutnefdhu were not in his cave, which he found disappointing, but also something of a relief. He bent over to pick up the bowl of wine he had set down on the cave floor before he had left. He sat down then, wearily but carefully, so that he would not spill the wine. Then he drank the wine.

Chapter Twenty-four: Shadow and Substance

Hlupnafenglu and Hrutnefdhu, after Morlock flew off, ran down and took the boat over to the settlement. They ran side by side, without any need to talk, to the northeastern edge of the settlement that was under attack by the airships.

But by the time they had gotten there the attack had ceased. The ships were still hovering overhead, but they had retreated higher in the sky, and they were firing arrows at some aerial target, or targets.

Wuinlendhono was directing the firefighting efforts. Since the slime on the Neyuwuleiuun arrows could not be extinguished once it was set afire, they had to isolate every patch of fire through demolition. It was exacting and difficult work requiring many hands; if the Sardhluun had attacked via boats while they were busy with fires, they would have been in a bad way. But they were left alone to carry out the work, and they were winning.

The First Wolf looked up at the approach of the pale werewolf and the red one and said, "What are they doing? What, on your ugly jailbird ghosts, are they doing?"

"They flew away, High Huntress," said Hlupnafenglu simply.

"There wasn't much time to talk," Hrutnefdhu added.

"Something falling from an airship," called a sentry in a watchtower. "Not an arrow. Not a fighter."

"Looks like a bird," sang out another. "It's gliding. No, it's falling. Yes, it's gliding."

"Mark where it lands," called Wuinlendhono. "It'll be one or the other of them," she remarked to the werewolves standing beside her.

"Morlock, I expect," Hrutnefdhu said. "He was drunk, I fear."

Hlupnafenglu looked at him and shrugged. Others could say what they wanted; he would put his money on Khretvarrgliu in any contest, drunk or sober.

"It's down," called the sentry.

"Come here," called Wuinlendhono back.

One of the airships had veered wildly away from the other. The other followed. They were headed south, into the teeth of the wind.

The sentry was standing there, a semiwolf named Rululawianu whose mostly human form was covered with bristling yellowish hair. "I saw the place it landed, High Huntress."

"Then you will guide me there," said Wuinlendhono.

"High Huntress, please think again," said Hrutnefdhu, startled from some distant train of thought by her remark. "There may be enemy fighters in the swamp."

"Then it will be your privilege to die defending me," the First Wolf replied coolly. "Yours too, Big Red."

Hlupnafenglu nodded.

They went to the northern gate, found a fair-sized boat, and rowed away into the great black swamp.

"What's happening now?" the First Wolf asked.

Hlupnafenglu wasn't sure what she meant, and then realized she was looking up at the sky.

One of the airships was headed directly for the other.

"I think he's going to ram it," Hrutnefdhu said grimly.

"He?" asked Wuinlendhono.

"It has to be Morlock or Rokhlenu, doesn't it?"

"Khretvarrgliu," voted Hlupnafenglu. "It's something he would do."

"I can't tell if I want you to be right or wrong," Wuinlendhono replied.

The red werewolf thought he knew what she meant. If her husband was up there, he was in deadly danger, taking terrible risks. If he were not, he had crash-landed in the swamp.

They saw him from a good distance away, floating on his wings in the murky water. They rowed to him and hauled him into the boat.

"This is one of the wingsets that Morlock made," Hrutnefdhu said, after a moment of dreadful silence. "But I can't tell who this is. I can't tell what this is."

Wuinlendhono inhaled deeply, once, twice, again. "He stinks of the mire, and of evil magic," she said then, "but this is Rokhlenu."

"Angry ghosts," whispered Hrutnefdhu. "What have they done to him?"

Wuinlendhono put both her hands on Rokhlenu's distorted chest and said with a frosty calm that Hlupnafenglu found himself admiring, "He's still alive. Hrutnefdhu, are there still empty dens in that death trap you rent on the east side?"

"Yes."

"Take Rokhlenu there. Use the boat: row all the way around town. Then stay there with him. And you: Rululawianu," she said, addressing the yellow semiwolf. "You go with them. I want no one to hear of this. Speak to no one of the gnyrrand's …illness."

"Yes, High Huntress."

By then, the two airships were directly overhead, the one in flight from the other.

"I hope he kills them," Wuinlendhono said, in the same cold tonealthough Hlupnafenglu now realized it was not calm at all. "I hope he kills every one of them. Slowly and terribly. If he does, I'll buy him enough wine to stay drunk every day of his life, even if he lives to be a hundred."

"He'll enjoy that, High Huntress," said Hrutnefdhu soothingly.

Hlupnafenglu doubted that. He didn't think that Morlock actually enjoyed drinking, and had often wondered why he did it. Also, he was pretty sure that Morlock was more than a hundred years old already. But since he, too, hoped that Khretvarrgliu would kill all their enemies and avenge the harm done to their gnyrrand, he decided to say nothing that would sound like disagreement.

They left the First Wolf on the plank road below the North Gate and settled in for the long row around town.

The next day, Hlupnafenglu went with the First Wolf to ask Morlock for help. Rokhlenu had awakened at some point, but either he could not speak or he would not. The First Wolf received a whispered report to this effect at the door of the den, without entering, and then she told Hlupnafenglu to follow her.

The glass eye of the wickerwork boat recognized them, of course, allowing them to board. Hlupnafenglu handled the oars on the way across the water; the First Wolf seemed lost in thought.

Morlock had been drunk, Hlupnafenglu guessed, from the stale winy reek of the cave, but he was not now. He was lying on the cave floor next to an odd object like a black barrel. On the other side lay his sword-his real sword, Tyrfing. The black-and-white blade was alive with bitter life, and a faint red light was showing through the never-wolf's closed eyelids.

"He's working," Hlupnafenglu said decisively to the bemused First Wolf, who had never seen Morlock in this state. "No one can disturb him, in this state. We might as well wait. Do you want to talk to the flames? They say funny things sometimes. Or we could play cards."

Wuinlendhono looked at him with dark-ringed dark eyes and said quietly, "No, thank you. I'll just sit here. If you're sure we can't wake him."

"We can't," Hlupnafenglu confirmed, "because he's not asleep. Working isn't sleeping, though they look the same sometimes."

"I knew an old man once who used to say the same," Wuinlendhono remarked, seating herself gracefully on the cave floor. "I never found out whether he was telling the truth or not."

"Did you kill him?" Hlupnafenglu said, sitting opposite her.

The First Wolf froze, then looked carefully at him. "Yes. How did you know?"

"There is a sound in your voice. I hear it in my own when I talk about the big female who ran the soup hut. I'm pretty sure I killed her, or tried to. She hurt me sometimes, when no one else was around. Did the old man hurt you?"

"No more than some others, perhaps. But he was weaker than they, and paid for their sins. Never be weak, Hlupnafenglu; you may end up paying someone else's debt."

"I'll remember, High Huntress."

She was looking at Morlock's left hand. It was a misty almost shapeless shape all the way past the elbow, and dead-gray like corpse meat above that. The wooden glove Morlock sometimes wore on his left hand had fallen away: the ghost sickness had eaten away his flesh deep into his upper arm. Hlupnafenglu didn't think Morlock would be able to use the glove anymore. But the First Wolf didn't say anything about it, so Hlupnafenglu didn't either.

The light in Morlock's eyes-and in the cursed sword-was fading. He opened his eyes and said, "Wuinlendhono. Hlupnafenglu."

"Khretvarrgliu," replied the First Wolf, and Hlupnafenglu just nodded. "I thank you for your deeds in the air last night."

Morlock raised his right hand, warding off her thanks. "No need. I had my reasons."

Wuinlendhono lowered her head, as if angry or frustrated, but her low voice was calm as she said, "Do you know what happened to my Rokhlenu?"

"I saw it," Morlock said. "And now, yes, I think I know what happened to him. In here"-he rapped the barrel with his right hand-"is the motive energy for one of the airships. It seems to be a piece of a moon, or a stone that acts like a moon. I spent much of the morning in visionary contemplation of its light. Rokhlenu was briefly exposed to it, and the results were-well, I assume you have seen him."

"Yes. I have seen him. Can you help him?"

"I have two ideas. One will not wholly heal him, but will not kill him. The other may kill him, but may heal him."

"What are they?"

"The first: surgery with a silver knife. I could reshape his frame, as either wolf or man. He would be more or less whole, but incapable of transformation; wounds caused by silver seem to leave permanent traces on a werewolf."

"If you are talking like this to horrify me, you don't know who I am. It would take more than you to horrify me."

Morlock looked at her briefly, his eyes wide with surprise, then shook his head. "The other idea is simpler and more dangerous. Rokhlenu's being was infected by something from the moonstone's light. I think I know what it is, and I may be able to blast it clear of him."

"That does sound dangerous. Please do it."

"Rokhlenu will choose."

"He's incapable of choosing. I am his mate and have the right to speak for him; that is our law."

"I live by my own law. Blood for blood, and only blood. Rokhlenu is my blood, harven coruthen."

"I don't know what that means," said Wuinlendhono, and now she did sound angry. "But I am the First Wolf of the outliers. And-"

"How well do you know him, really?" Morlock interrupted.

"I am him. He is me. We were one at the mating and we are one still."

"Then trust him to make the right choice. I will fight with you or with anyone, Wuinlendhono, if there is some point to it. Is there a point to this?"

Wuinlendhono raised her head and looked at him. "No. Is there anything you need?"

"Time. Glass. Sunlight. A pair of able hands."

"I have hands," said Hlupnafenglu eagerly.

"I'll leave you to it, then," Wuinlendhono said. She stood in a single fluid motion, looked at Morlock as if she were going to say something, then walked off without doing so.

The time was time. Hlupnafenglu didn't know where it came from, and he lost track of where it went to. He spent much of it making glass. Morlock wanted enough to make a decent-size corridor of plate glass. He taught Hlupnafenglu how to make it unbreakable by folding it through higher dimensions. That was immensely entertaining to the red werewolf, and he enjoyed doing it. Meanwhile, Morlock often lay working in the sun, the glow of his irises visible through his closed lids even at noon. On the third day, he began to do it with a vat of molten glass beside him. Hlupnafenglu wandered by the vat occasionally. There were odd shapes-outlines and angles gleaming icy-pale through the yellow-orange molten glass. They reminded Hlupnafenglu of the shapes Morlock had taught him for representing fourthand fifth-dimensional polytopes in three-dimensional space. But he found it too hot to bear for long-the sun seemed more intense there, as if something were funnelling sunlight toward the vat.

One afternoon, while Morlock worked in the sunlight, Hlupnafenglu was welding glass plates for the corridor. He enjoyed all the tasks of the current project, but this was his favorite, as it involved interaction with the flames. He enjoyed their ill-tempered self-regarding little personalities, and they spoke mostly in a language Morlock called Wardspeech. Learning the language was an interesting contrast to the tasks of executing fourdimensional designs while limited to three-dimensional senses, although he enjoyed that as well. Hlupnafenglu was enjoying most things these days: his mind was finally awake after a long sleep, and it was fun to see all the things it could do.

Often Hrutnefdhu came by to assist him, but today he was alone, except for the flames. He had just cajoled them to seal up a section of corridor wall when the hill was shaken by a roar like thunder. Hrutnefdhu ran out of the cave and saw a somewhat singed-looking Morlock picking himself up from the ground. The vat was in fragments scattered about the hillside. And where the glass had been was a spiked stonelike object, too bright to look at directly.

"We must establish a zone of Perfect Occlusion around the sunstone," said Morlock matter-of-factly.

It was obvious what the sunstone was, so Hlupnafenglu asked, "How do we establish Perfect Occlusion?"

"I'll show you," Morlock said, and he explained the process carefully to Hlupnafenglu, talking him through it.

"Khretvarrgliu, why are you teaching me so much?" Hlupnafenglu asked when the sunstone was sealed in the Perfect Occlusion.

"I am dying," said Morlock, as matter-of-factly as before. "This way I can pass on some of my skills. Plus, you have natural gifts for making. If you wish to pursue the craft, you should seek out Wyrtheorn of Thrymhaiam. He is a master of making, and was my pupil for many years. He can teach you much."

"Khretvarrgliu, I will."

"We've done enough for today."

That meant that Hlupnafenglu was to leave, because Morlock was going to start drinking. Or at least, that's what it often meant.

But one day, about five days later, Hlupnafenglu returned around dawn to find that Morlock had been working all night. By now they had actually built the glass corridor, setting it into the side of the hill. In the night, Morlock had silvered all the glass, and laid down a second layer of glass, sealing in the deadly metal. It was now safe to be near, although Hlupnafenglu felt dread standing next to it, and he could see that Hrutnefdhu (who had accompanied him that morning) felt it, too.

Morlock's face was gray with weariness, and Hlupnafenglu was alarmed to see that the ghost illness had eaten even more of Morlock's arm during the night. Nonetheless, the crooked man declined to rest.

"There are things we must discuss," Morlock said.

Hlupnafenglu thought he was going to talk about his imminent death, a conversation the red werewolf had been dreading. But instead Morlock started talking about the sun and the moon.

Morlock explained that every living body had three physical parts: a core-self, a shell, and an impulse cloud. This last was so tenuous in being that it was almost nonphysical, but not quite, and it could (under certain circumstances) survive the death of the person or animal whose life had produced it.

"Is that what a ghost is?" Hrutnefdhu asked reverently.

"I don't know what a ghost is," Morlock said. "But this is what an impulse cloud is."

He explained how the sun drew impulse clouds up into the sky, so that the sky was full of them. The moons gathered them together and sent them back to earth, entangled in moonlight.

"That is what powered the airships," Morlock said. "A moonstone imbued with moonlight and impulse clouds. It is the impulse clouds that distorted Rokhlenu's being."

"Is it impulse clouds that make us change from the day shape to the night shape?" Hlupnafenglu asked.

"Yes," Morlock said. "Your natures are permeable, somehow-receptive to the impulse clouds latent in moonlight. Whether you are wolves that can become human or men and women that can become wolves, I don't know. But I suspect that each shapechanger is receptive to impulse clouds from at least one other animal. There may be some who can assimilate and change into many different kinds of animals: I don't know."

The pale werewolf asked, "Then why is Rokhlenu distorted? The moonstone just issued light similar to the moons-"

"But more intense, more concentrated," Morlock said. "There is a miasma in some impulse clouds, the effluvium of the dead soul. If it accumulates in a werewolf's being, he or she becomes distorted, unable to change."

"Like semiwolves," Hlupnafenglu said. "Or …never-wolves?"

"I think so," Morlock agreed.

He waited.

Hrutnefdhu was waiting, too. He expected Morlock to explain himself presently. But Hlupnafenglu knew better: the maker was waiting for someone else to take the next step-to follow in Morlock's trail, as it were.

"You will put the sunstone at one end of the corridor, the moonstone at the other," Hlupnafenglu said. "Thus you will blast the miasma clear."

"And, perhaps," Morlock said, "tear Rokhlenu's impulse cloud to shreds. That will be death."

"You could try it on another first," Hlupnafenglu said, "if-" He paused, then said, "I am a never-wolf."

"Yes," Morlock said.

"Try it on me," Hlupnafenglu said. "If it doesn't work you can think up something else. The gnyrrand is more important than I am."

Morlock shook his head. "Rokhlenu is my old friend, but I say no to that. If you choose to take the risk, I am glad. But not because you matter less than him."

Hlupnafenglu enjoyed risks the way he enjoyed almost everything, so he laughed.

They placed the Occlusion containing the sunstone at one end of the mirrored corridor. Then Hlupnafenglu walked in the open end. He was no longer laughing: being encased in silver was a nightmarish feeling.

Morlock and Hrutnefdhu rolled the black barrel over to the other end of the corridor. Then Morlock established a Perfect Occlusion there, and Hlupnafenglu found himself in absolute darkness.

"I'm going to introduce an aperture and release the light of the sunstone," Morlock's voice said, drifting down the glass corridor through the darkness.

Hlupnafenglu couldn't think of anything to say to that, so he said nothing.

The aperture opened like a golden eye, and the mirror-bright corridor was filled with burning light.

The red werewolf felt a strange pulling sensation, as if the burning eye were drawing him to it. He resisted.

Then a white eye opened at the other end of the corridor. It pushed him as the sunstone pulled him; the light more than redoubled in ferocity; it passed through him like silver swords. Something left him, something that did not belong in him, and he was less and more because of it.

Then the silver eye closed, and he was left gasping in the bitter sunlight. Moments later, the aperture in the Occlusion clenched shut and Hlupnafenglu was left in a grateful darkness. Soon, too soon, the sunstone end of the corridor opened: Morlock had moved the Occlusion so that Hlupnafenglu could exit the corridor.

Tentatively, he walked out into the tame morning light.

It had been a lifetime since he had entered. The world looked very different than it had a few moments before.

"You look all right," Hrutnefdhu said, glancing at him up and down. "How do you feel?"

"Strange," Hlupnafenglu said. "I …I remember who I am. Do you know who I am, Hrutnefdhu?"

"I suspected," the pale werewolf admitted.

Hlupnafenglu turned to Morlock. "Do you know who I am?"

"You are Hlupnafenglu," Morlock replied calmly.

The red werewolf found he had raised his hands in fists, as if to attack Morlock. He lowered them. What if he could kill the crooked man? Morlock was sick, already dying. It was a deed of no particular bite. On the other hand, the crooked man was Khretvarrgliu, the beast slayer. Sick as he was, he might yet defeat any foe. That, too, would win no honor-teeth for the red werewolf. He looked for a few moments at his fists and then unclenched them.

"I am," he said. "I am Hlupnafenglu now. And who I was before …it doesn't matter."

Morlock shrugged and opened his right hand. (The ghostly left one was hidden under his cloak.) Hrutnefdhu said, "Everyone accepts you as Hlupnafenglu. There's no reason for that to change."

The red werewolf nodded. He looked at the sun, the hillside, his two friends.

"I think it worked," he said.

"We'll wait and see," Morlock said. "There will be a moon aloft tonight."

It did work. After sunset, Hlupnafenglu stood in the light of Trumpeter and felt the night shape steal over him like a dream. He shook loose from his human clothing and capered, howling, in the third moon's light, a dark-red wolf with golden eyes. Hrutnefdhu, now also wearing the night shape, knocked him over.

They chased each other along the eastern and southern margins of the swamp, and from there southward into the plains, running deep into the dark land and deep into the night, laughing and singing in Moonspeech.

When Morlock saw the transformation he turned away and went down the hill. He crossed the water and went to the den on the first floor of the lair-tower where Rokhlenu was being kept.

Wuinlendhono was there alone with her husband, but he would neither look at her nor speak to her. He had not spoken, eaten, or drunk since his fall from the airship.

But Morlock spoke to him and to her. It was a long conversation; Morlock said much and Wuinlendhono said more. Rokhlenu said nothing until the hour before dawn, and then he spoke at last.

The yellow semiwolf was cringing before the gray-muzzles of the Sardhluun and Neyuwuleiuun packs. Their gnyrrands were there, with their reeves and fellow-cantors of the campaign, and the werowances of both packs, with their pack councils.

Wurnafenglu, wearing the night shape, sang while the yellow semiwolf cringed. He sang that they should listen to the informant from the mongrel outliers, the honorable traitor Rululawianu (because loyalty to traitors was the only treason, and treason to traitors was the highest honesty). There was hope like rich marrow in his news, if they had the bite to crack the bone.

The Werowance of Neyuwuleiuun sang a song frostier by far than the night's warm air. He pointed out that his pack had suffered dearly from the opportunities Wurnafenglu had brought them. Their airships, the glory of the Neyuwuleiuun, were lost-one ruined, the other stranded in a field of poisonous silver waste, and apparently robbed of its motive element. They could not afford such a loss, nor another such loss.

The Werowance of the Sardhluun sang a sad song in reply, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the honored and honorable Werowance of the Neyuwuleiuun werewolves. How often he had warned Wurnafenglu that he was reckless and his actions were ill judged! All these comments were before trustworthy witnesses who could be produced at need. He had spoken at length about the perils and shame Wurnafenglu had brought to his own pack by his criminally inept stewardship of the Vargulleion, foundation of the Sardhluun pride, now an empty stone box. Still the Neyuwuleiuun could not hold the glorious Sardhluun werewolves culpable for the bad advice of one disfavored and deranged pack member. They must unite for the betterment of both packs against all their enemies-within their respective packs and without. He did not look toward Wurnafenglu as he sang, but many others from both packs did.

Wurnafenglu replied that both werowances had earned their relatively high and not at all unimportant positions by skills that were by no means to be absolutely despised: even the shortest claw can draw blood. And the Werowances knew, he hoped, exactly how much he esteemed them both. And he was willing to surrender his gnyrrandship, his honor-teeth, and his life …to the citizen who could take them from him.

Silence. Wurnafenglu was unpopular in that assembly, but no one cared to accept his offer. He knew it; they knew it; he remained silent, smiling with moon-bright teeth in the singer's circle, until they knew he knew it.

Wurnafenglu took up his song again. He sang that the costly attack on the outliers was not without effect. He sang that there was a wound in the outlier pack that could not be healed, that they could strike them down, along with their allies of the mangy sap-stinking Goweiteiuun dog-lickers. They must listen and learn; listen and learn: that was the refrain.

He stepped back, and motioned with his eyes for Rululawianu to step forward.

The yellow semiwolf crept rather than stepped forward. Absurdly, he was crouching on all fours-a shamefully submissive stance in the day shape. As he quivered in the moonlight falling on the singer's circle, the most powerful werewolves of the Sardhluun and Neyuwuleiuun packs looked down on him from their couches with interest and contempt. They utterly despised him, and Wurnafenglu would have changed that if he could; he wanted them to trust his informant. But they perhaps thought the semiwolf too timid to lie-and, if so, that was good enough.

"Look, I don't know if it matters," Rululawianu began at random. "I mean, I don't know if it's important. But I think Gnyrrand Rokhlenu is dead, or worse than dead. And they say that crazy never-wolf Khretvarrgliu is dying, too."

Wurnafenglu barked that he should tell the tale.

So he told it: how Rokhlenu had fallen distorted from the sky; how Morlock was dying from the ghost sickness; how he had made a corridor lined with silver and claimed it could cure semiwolves and never-wolves, but how, when they had put Rokhlenu in it, something had gone terribly wrong. Morlock was said to be poisoning himself, a slow suicide in self-punishment for the harm he had done his friend.

Wurnafenglu stood behind the semiwolf and watched the story's impact on its audience. He was quite pleased with the effect. The Neyuwuleiuun werewolves drew themselves up and exchanged glances when Rululawianu described Rokhlenu's distortion. They knew something that confirmed this part of the story-some deadly secret about that "motive part" that their werowance had incautiously mentioned.

And the silver corridor had been seen. No werewolf of the Sardhluun or Neyuwuleiuun packs could get near enough to examine it-there were traps and fences, seen and unseen, all around the hill that held Khretvarrgliu's cave. But it was there. It could be seen from miles away on the hot, dry, sun drenched days that were coming with the end of winter-the sort of days that used to come, rarely, in high summer.

The allied pack councils exchanged a few whispered words among themselves. Then they turned and started barking questions at the yellow semiwolf. Most of them asked him to repeat or give more details about something he had already said. Wurnafenglu didn't object to this: he had conducted many interrogations, and he had often seen a liar's story unravel when he gave differing answers to the same question asked twice. The liar wants to be found out; so Wurnafenglu believed. Liars lie from fear, and they want their fear to end, even if the end is death.

But Rululawianu's story did not unravel. It held together, as Wurnafenglu had been sure it would. And one good question was asked, by a familiar friend and enemy.

The Werowance of the Sardhluun wondered why Rululawianu had come to them. He must know that, except for his new friend Wurnafenglu, the noble Sardhluun Pack despised traitors, and a traitor to traitors would get no warm welcome from them. Was it money? Was it meat, now that food was growing scarce? What had brought the yellow semiwolf forward with this tale?

Rululawianu shouted, "They won't use it on me! They won't put me in their magic tunnel! Oh, no! `Silver is too scarce, Rululawianu. The more important wolves must be healed first, Rululawianu. Stop making noise; we don't need whiners like you, Rululawianu.' They could have healed me, made me a real werewolf. But they didn't. They were never going to. Maybe it was all a lie; maybe there is no cure. It doesn't matter. I hate them. I hate them. I don't want anything from you. I wanted it from them, but they wouldn't give it to me. So I'll help you wreck them. That's next best."

The council of allies nodded sagely. Yes, satisfied desire was best, always. But next best was revenge, the bitter drink that quenches frustrated desire, and hate, and love, and every other thing that pains the wolvish heart.

It was all they needed. They were utterly convinced. Wurnafenglu stepped forward, and the yellow semiwolf skittered away.

Wurnafenglu sang to them of a time and day soon to come: midnight on the nineteenth day of the fourth month. The great moon, Chariot, would arise. They, the great alliance of Sardhluun and Neyuwuleiuun werewolves, would challenge the dog-licking Goweiteiuun and their mongrel allies among the outliers to an election rally in the Great Rostra of Nekkuklendon. The challenged would appear and be defeated, for without the great heroes of the Vargulleion escape they were nothing. Or they would not appear, and they would be mocked in word and song on every mesa of Wuruyaaria. It was certain victory. And if it brought the Aruukaiaduun twine-twisters to their alliance (in an inferior position, of course), it would be a final victory in the year of Choosing. They need only settle which of those present now was worthy to be First Singer of the Innermost Pack.

With cold measuring eyes, the Werowance of the Sardhluun watched him all through his song. But the Werowance was the first to give hotthroated assent to Wurnafenglu's plan. The other wolves howled in agreement as the yellow semiwolf shuddered at the edge of the singer's circle.

The challenge was issued openly, in every market square and smoke den of the city, including the squalid settlement of swamp-dwelling outliers. The rumors spread as widely: stories that Rokhlenu was dead or worse, that the never-wolf Khretvarrgliu had killed him and then himself, that the First Wolf of the outliers had sold herself to a wild pack in the outlands.

The chosen night came, not soon enough to suit Wurnafenglu. A crowd began to gather at the Great Rostra of Nekkuklendon just after dark. The Sardhluun-Neyuwuleiuun Alliance had purchased great bales of bloodbloom and crates of cheap clay smoking-bowls for the victory party, and a story had spread that these would be distributed well before moonrise. It was, of course, illegal to give citizens gifts in the hope that they would vote for you. Fines might be levied against the offending pack, perhaps even substantial ones, if they lost the election. On the other hand, a victory party after a rally, to which the general citizenry was invited, was another matter. And if the party began before the victory actually occurred, who could be so smallminded as to object? Certainly not the high-minded public officials who had done the same when they were seeking election.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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