The Wolf Age

Chapter Twenty-five: Friends and Foes

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

"How does it work?" Wuinlendhono asked.

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

He offered the bucket to Rokhlenu.

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, Chieftain."

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

"Yes, Chieftain."

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

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

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

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

"Warm weather for spring," Morlock remarked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wuinlendhono nodded, still not convinced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, I saw that."

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

"How did they get it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes. It really does."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it, Hlupnafenglu?" he asked.

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

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

"I am now. Do you know who I was?"

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

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

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

"I was the Red Shadow."

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

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

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

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

The red werewolf bowed his head. "I'm done with all that. Can't I be Khretvarrgliu's apprentice, Hlupnafenglu? Does it matter that I was the Red Shadow?"

"Not to me," said Rokhlenu. "We were in the Vargulleion together, and we fought our way out together. That matters more to me than the crimes of someone I never heard of until just now."

"But this is a Year of Choosing," Wuinlendhono said gently. "It might matter to the citizens of Wuruyaaria."

The red werewolf nodded, not looking at either of them. "If you say, I will go."

Rokhlenu would have liked to turn him down then and there. No; stay; you're one of us now. But it wasn't that easy.

"Let's think about it," he said. "I have a meeting to go to now"-ghosts, that sounded like something a politician would say, but he was a politician these days-"so let's talk it over later on, perhaps tomorrow. If you can stay, we want you to stay: not as the Red Shadow, but as yourself, as Hlupnafenglu."

"Chieftain, my real name is-"

"Your real name is Hlupnafenglu, unless you choose otherwise. Think on it."

The red werewolf looked at him with his golden eyes, turned, and walked away.

"I handled that badly," he said to his spouse, after Hlupnafenglu had gone.

"No," she said. "Not if you weren't lying to him. If you really want to keep him around. Because now he probably won't leave unless we send him away."

"I wasn't lying."

"Then go meet with the Aruukaiaduun band. Them you can lie to. They'll be disappointed if you don't."

"Them I live to disappoint."

The Aruukaiaduun band were awaiting him in the old barracks of the irredeemables. Lekkativengu, claw-fingered no longer and wearing perhaps the first pair of shoes he had ever owned, was entertaining them with polite conversation. The subject at hand was the last rally fought between the Sardhluun-Neyuwuleiuun Alliance and the Goweiteiuun with their outlier partisans.

The Aruukaiaduun gnyrrand was a smooth-faced, brown-eyed, shinytoothed emptiness named Norianduiu; Rokhlenu knew a little bit about him from the old days (as he thought of his life before the Vargulleion), and had not expected much trouble with him. He knew the Aruukaiaduun cantors, as well; they were just inferior versions of Norianduiu.

No, the only person who counted in this embassy was the oldest and ugliest member, a werewolf with no official position in the Aruukaiaduun Pack, the old gray-muzzle Rywudhaariu.

He was nearly a semiwolf. He could assume the night shape, but in the day shape his nose and lower jaw were strangely prominent, almost meeting, and the end of his nose had a strange spongy look, almost like a wolf's nose. His arms were somewhat crooked and leglike, too; he always wore clothes with long sleeves to disguise this.

He was too impaired to run for office; no one liked him enough to vote for him without pressure. But his neck was almost hidden by ropes of honorteeth he had acquired or extorted over the years. He had been running things on Nekkuklendon, with claws into business on every other mesa, for generations. And he controlled the representatives of the Aruukaiaduun to the Innermost Pack of the city, always through some face-without-a-personality like Norianduiu.

It had kept members of the Aruukaiaduun on the Innermost Pack for as long as anyone could remember. Citizens were more than willing to enlist the famous cunning of Rywudhaariu in the service of the city. But no Aruukaiaduun werewolf had ever been First Singer of the Innermost Pack. That was a job for a puppet master, not a puppet.

This was why Rokhlenu had decided to meet the Aruukaiaduun werewolves alone. The risk was that he would look like a gnyrrand with no followers. The message, though, was that there was only one citizen in the Aruukaiaduun embassy worth talking to. He saw the chagrined looks among the Aruukaiaduun cantors as he approached, and decided that the message had been received. They had been hoping at least to meet his notorious mate, the First Wolf of the outliers. Instead, they would be shuffled off to an underling while the grown-ups talked-as usual.

"Lekkativengu, show the gnyrrand and the cantors around town a bit," Rokhlenu said as he approached. "Citizens, I leave you in good hands"-he winked slightly at Lekkativengu, who grinned and proudly flexed his fingers"and perhaps we'll talk later. But I must consult with your leader now."

The gnyrrand and the cantors looked at Rywudhaariu, who nodded, and they glumly rose from their couches and shuffled after Lekkativengu into the searingly hot spring sunlight.

Rokhlenu sat down on a couch opposite and tried to look his old enemy in the eye. It was difficult, as old Rywudhaariu was somewhat wall-eyed and he enjoyed making interlocutors uncomfortable by turning his face toward them and his eyes away.

"That was rather high-handed," said the old werewolf, not as if he disapproved. His voice was reedy, not good for singing or speaking.

"Not so high-handed as when your clowns sent me to the Vargulleion."

"That was the biggest mistake I ever made. But you wouldn't be led, old sport, and I'm not ready to lie down and be barked at yet."

"That's to be seen. If you had my people killed, you may find it an even greater mistake."

"I had nothing to do with that."

"That's to be seen, too. But I'm here to talk with you, not as a citizen with a private grudge, but as the gnyrrand of my new pack and the consort of my First Wolf. We have a common interest against this new political alliance of the Sardhluun and the Neyuwuleiuun."

"That's to be seen, in the words of your own refrain. You need us; that's clear. And the Alliance does not need us; that's clear. But it may be in our interest to stand apart, as neutrals, rather than join in a losing side."

"We're not the losing side. We're the winning side. Don't take my word for it. Look what's happened every time the Alliance has tangled with us."

"I have been looking, and I am impressed. But your victories have been very costly for Wuruyaaria, you know. Those airships of the Neyuwuleiuun brought in a lot of slaves and meat-animals. This is going to be a hungry year, and the next one hungrier yet. We'll miss them. And citizens will blame you."

"Slaves do the work once done by citizens. The fewer slaves in the city, the better."

"The better for citizens of very little bite. The worse for citizens of very large bite."

"That may even out."

"You need it to be better than even, in your favor, and I'm not sure that's the way it is."

"You can help with that."

"Maybe I can. What's in it, for me and mine?"

"I can make you First Singer of the Innermost Pack."

Rywudhaariu almost spoke, then paused. He was genuinely surprised. "Would you?" he said at last. "If you could. They are separate issues, I suppose."

"I might: if you give me evidence that you were not involved in the murder of my kin. I'll waive my personal grievance against you. You need not be elected to the Innermost Pack to be First Singer; the Innermost normally choose the First Singer from among themselves, but not always. If a union of the Aruukaiaduun, the Goweiteiuun, and the outliers win the election, the first act must be the admission of the outliers to the treaty. Then I and the gnyrrand of the Goweiteiuun will support you for First Singer. If you can persuade your own unruly band to support you, your election is certain."

"Certain only in the wake of many uncertainties. Still: what an offer! Well, I must think on this."

"Not for too long, though."

"Naturally not. This is a lively election year. A pity if it is really the last."

"The last?"

Rywudhaariu was laboriously extricating himself from the comforts of his couch, but when both his feet were on the floor he said, "Hadn't you heard? The world is ending. That's what all this strange weather means. The gods or somebody-"

"Keep it clean, Rywudhaariu."

"This is how the story goes; I'm not saying I believe it. The gods or somebody have decided that the world has gone on long enough, and now they are burning it alive."

Rokhlenu walked silently beside the old politician for a while and then said, "Yurr. The world changes, but never ends. I can't believe it."

"Oh, I don't believe it, either. Still, if the world changes enough, we may not be able to live in it. I'll leave you here, Rokhlenu," he said at the door of the barracks. "I don't want to inflict the heat outside on you, not if we're going to be friends after all. That sunlight is too much for anyone with red blood still running in their veins. Personally, I rather enjoy it, of course, but I seem to be mostly ice water and mush as I get older."

"Well, see that your ice water doesn't boil over," said Rokhlenu, perfectly willing to stay behind in the shade.

Outside, the rest of the Aruukaiaduun band were waiting, looking bedraggled and unhappy in the fierce light. Not even the harsh sunshine could dim Lekkativengu's spirits, though, and he gladly offered to accompany the Aruukaiaduun werewolves to the southern gate.

Rokhlenu waited till they were out of sight and then braved the bitter light to cross over to the First Wolf's lair-tower and talk with his mate. She was waiting for him in the singing room on the second floor, and they discussed the whole meeting.

"I don't see how we can win," he said, "if the Aruukaiaduun join the Alliance. But I sort of hope Rywudhaariu carries out his threat of staying neutral through the election. I'd hate to give him a chance to bite us on the back of our neck."

"On the back of our anything," Wuinlendhono agreed.

Rywudhaariu had another meeting later that afternoon in the deserted Shadow Market. By then he had dismissed the Aruukaiaduun electoral band and was accompanied by a pack of mute mercenary thugs from Dogtown.

The citizen he came to meet stood alone in the empty marketplace. Wurnafenglu might be a gray-muzzle, but he was proud of the fact that he needed no bodyguards to defend his person or his honor-teeth.

"And so?" he said, as soon as the two werewolves were in conversation range.

"He won't go for it," Rywudhaariu replied. "He's not stupid, just inexperienced, and he's getting more experience every day. I tell you what, if I could gather proof that I wasn't involved in his family's murder-"

"Oh, was that the deal breaker?"

"It was, and he knows it. But if it wasn't, I would toss your Alliance over and join their Union."

"What did he offer you?"

"The chance to be First Singer."

"Yurr. Yes, that was shrewd. If you could have jumped at it, you would have, and the fact that you didn't sang him a whole epic."

"Nonsense. I don't jump at anything without looking it over. I wish you were as bright as our enemy is, Wurnafenglu."

"I have other merits," Wurnafenglu said smugly.

"You must list them for me sometime. That would be useful knowledge indeed. In the meantime, I think we must retreat to our secondary line of attack and rattle the young fellow somehow-get him to do something rash. What do your spies among the outliers tell you? What is their strength and what is their weakness, and how do we use the one to strike at the other? If we can answer those questions, I may be able to offer you the station Rokhlenu offered me."

Chapter Twenty-six: Death of a Citizen

It was already hot the next morning at dawn. Morlock awoke with an empty wine bowl in his hand and a female's screams in his ears.

He dropped the bowl and rolled from his sleeping cloak to his feet. He was not ready for a fight, but tried to look as if he was.

Liudhleeo was on her knees, wailing over Hrutnefdhu's body. His obviously dead body. It still wore the night shape, though the air was filled with sunlight. And the head was missing. Someone had crept into the den while Morlock was drunk, killed his friend, decapitated him, and escaped-not just unharmed, but unchallenged.

He sat down on the other side of the body, her screams and sobs vibrating in his wine-wounded mind. He could not speak to her, could not bring himself to comfort her. He was too ashamed. His friend had been murdered, in his presence, while he lay there drunk. What right did he have to speak to the dead wolf's grieving mate? He was stunned beyond speech, beyond action, by the enormity.

Eventually, Liudhleeo's screams subsided to sobbing, and the enormous glacier of Morlock's shame split through with anger and pain.

There were jars of wine scattered around the den. Morlock got up and threw the nearest one out the window. When he heard it smash on the plank road outside and someone shout in alarm and annoyance, he felt a fierce satisfaction begin to burn within him. He grabbed another jar and tossed it out the window, and another.

Presently feet came drumming up the stairs. He was picking up another wine jar as an astonished Rokhlenu entered through the open door, with Hlupnafenglu following close behind.

"Morlock, what are you-?" Rokhlenu began, but broke off as he saw Hrutnefdhu's decapitated corpse.

"Ghost of all ghosts," Rokhlenu whispered. "What happened here?"

"Our friend was murdered last night," Morlock said, and threw the jar he was holding out the window.

"I was," Liudhleeo said, through her tears, "I was-out. And Morlock was-Morlock was-"

"I was drunk," said Morlock grimly, seizing another jar. "Dead drunk." He tossed the jar out the window.

"Morlock," said Rokhlenu. "Old friend. I think I know how you feel."

"Old friend, I hope you don't. I hope you never do."

"But you could at least toss the jars out the other window. They'd fall in the swamp that way, not into the street."

Morlock considered the question seriously and replied reasonably, "They might not break." He tossed another jar into the street. He continued until there were no more and he was left glancing about in frustration. After a brief internal struggle, he decided not to continue hurling every available thing in the den out the window.

He turned to Liudhleeo, who was bending over Hrutnefdhu's corpse, her eyes wet, though she was no longer sobbing. Hlupnafenglu was standing behind her, staring with a strange, hungry expression at the meaty end of the pale severed neck.

"I'm sorry," he said to her. "You both deserved better from me."

"We both failed him. I should have been here. Oh, I should have been here."

Morlock closed his eyes, imagined waking in the fierce noontime to the prospect of two stinking corpses that had once been his friends, repressed the urge to vomit, and opened his eyes again. "No," he said. "Better that you weren't."

He crouched down across the body from her. She looked at him for the first time.

"I don't know what your burial customs are," he said. "How can I help?"

"That's females' work," Rokhlenu said hastily.

Morlock didn't look at him. "I don't care if it is," he said to Liudhleeo. It was in his mind that she seemed to have few friends, male or female. "How can I help?"

"There is a female-she runs a smoking lair off the market. Name is Ruiulanhro. She has-she has-she can help."

Rokhlenu said, "I know her. I'll send her word."

"Then I will do what I must do," Morlock said.

She bowed her head, breaking their locked gaze.

"Morlock," said Rokhlenu. "Come talk with me a moment."

Morlock stood and walked after his old friend through the door and down the stairs. He felt as if iron spikes were being pounded past his eyes, and every movement threatened to make his gorge rise up through his throat.

Rokhlenu came to a halt underneath a notice near the bottom of the stairs. Morlock had passed it many times, and now, after a fashion, he could even read it. In Sunspeech and Moonspeech it said, Tenants must bury their own dead. No smoking bloom on the stairways.

"There is a thing or two I must tell you," Rokhlenu began.

"This is about politics, I guess."

Rokhlenu was silent for a moment, looked past Morlock's shoulder, met Morlock's eye, and said, "Yes, in a way. How did you know?"

"I don't understand it and I don't understand your politics."

"All right. I think this murder was aimed at me-an attempt to make me do something irrational."

"You can leave that to me."

"That's what I'm worried about. The election is in balance just now, Morlock. If the Aruukaiaduun stay neutral, or at least separate from the Alliance, our Union has a fair chance of winning most of the couches on the Innermost Pack."

Morlock looked at him and waited; he could not see why this mattered.

"Most of the City Watchers are members of the Aruukaiaduun," Rokhlenu explained, when he saw that an explanation was necessary. "If we go into the city, asking questions, getting in fights, maybe killing someone, it could push the Aruukaiaduun into opposition. That may be the motive for this murder."

"Rokhlenu-" Morlock began, and found he could not go on.

"It's dangerous to be too predictable, Morlock," Rokhlenu said. "You're too good a fighter to not know this."

"Rokhlenu, I will have blood for my friend's blood. For our friend's blood."

"Is this what Hrutnefdhu would want?"

"I don't know. It doesn't matter, anyway. I am myself, not him."

Rokhlenu looked away. "I don't want them to get away with it, either. I miss him already."

"Then."

"If-" He glanced up the stairway. There were doors open, citizens gathering on the turns of the stair. He looked back at Morlock. "I have an idea. You drunken, drooling, farting spongebag of a never-wolfs brach."

Morlock was confused, then amused. He thought he saw what Rokhlenu was aiming at. "Your mother shaved her nose every morning," he shouted back, red echoes of pain bouncing around his head. "She could juggle at midnight!"

"Don't talk about my mother, you cow fondling, milk-drinking, ape-toed refugee from a freak show!"

"I never fondled your mother-" Morlock began, and Rokhlenu howled, "Thats it!" and seized him by the shoulders. They struggled for a bit, snarling theatrically for the benefit of the audience.

"Have to take it outside," Rokhlenu muttered. "Need more eyes on this." He released Morlock's shoulders and flew away down the stairs as if he'd been struck.

Even if he weren't hungover Morlock wouldn't have been up to similar acrobatics; the ghost sickness was throwing off the balance of his entire body. But he thundered down the steps as fast as he could, and they broke together through the door leading into the street.

The plank road was littered with broken jars, stained with wine like purple blood. The reek of it nearly did make Morlock furious, and he never remembered afterward the insults he hurled at Rokhlenu in the street. He remembered the awed looks on the citizens standing around, though. The crowd had begun to gather-drawn by screams and hurled wine jars, no doubt-before they took their ostensible quarrel out into the sunlight, and it only thickened as they stood there screaming and shoving each other in the hot morning light.

"Good enough," Rokhlenu muttered eventually. "Have to end it somehow."

Morlock threw back his head and shouted, "Tyrfing!"

The sword, its black-and-white blade glittering like crystal in the day's fierce light, flew from the window of the topmost den and landed in Morlock's outstretched hand.

Rokhlenu spat at his feet. "Go ahead and use it, coward!"

"Get out," Morlock snarled. "Come back with a weapon and we'll finish this."

"I'll come back in my night shape and rip your belly open."

"Dogs bark. Citizens act. This is over."

"It's not over!" shouted Rokhlenu, and stormed away through the crowd.

Morlock turned back to the dark doorway and stepped out of the sun and the gaze of the crowd. There were still citizens goggling on the stairway, but they skittered away like mice when they saw him returning, sword in hand. He mounted the stairs back to the topmost den, his thoughts grim.

If Rokhlenu thought, as he obviously did, that this stagy break between the two friends would help him politically, Morlock was willing to oblige him. But he didn't relish the thought of investigating a political assassination in the largely unknown werewolf city. If Hrutnefdhu could help himbut, of course, it was Hrutnefdhu who had been assassinated. There was Hlupnafenglu, of course. But, if he was not mistaken, Rokhlenu had been trying to warn him about Hlupnafenglu for some reason.

As he approached the still-open door to the den, a thought occurred to him. How had the assassin entered the den? He pulled the door half closed and examined the lock. The glass eye was missing, and the coppery sinews of the lock mechanism had been severed somehow. Not by a blade, he thought: something hot enough to melt copper. Yet it had not set fire to the wooden door. Interesting, and revealing.

Ulugarriu had a hand, or a paw, in this, Morlock decided. At least, he had supplied the means.

Morlock's feelings lightened a little bit. Political assassination was as beyond him as was most politics. But murderous sorcerers were a more familiar matter.

He reentered the den. Liudhleeo was now flanked by two females Morlock didn't recognize, one a semiwolf with a hairless canine face and the other a bitter crone who was staring at Hlupnafenglu with naked hatred. When Morlock entered, she alternated her glare of hatred between the two males.

Morlock got the sheath for Tyrfing, threw it over his shoulders, and sheathed the blade. He tossed a cloak over his ghostly arm and grabbed a bag of money, tying it with his right hand to his belt. Then he stepped over to the red werewolf and said to him quietly, "What did you see in Hrutnefdhu's wound?"

"I don't want to say," the red werewolf admitted. "Maybe I'm wrong. Look yourself."

Morlock did, and then he motioned Hlupnafenglu to join him on the stairwell.

"They can hear us just as well out here," the red werewolf said. "Except that evil old never-wolf, maybe, may her eyes fall out."

Morlock sensed an evasiveness in Hlupnafenglu, a sort of slyness, that was new to him. But not new to Hlupnafenglu, he guessed. Perhaps it had come back to him with his memories.

"The neck was severed below the level of the shoulders," Morlock said. "It would have been easier to sever it higher. But the cutting was done by a practiced hand with a clean sharp blade-a surgeon rather than a butcher. Why?"

"I don't know, Chieftain. But it seemed odd to me."

"How can it be odd? Have you seen many werewolves with their heads cut off?"

"One haunted the prison where we lived, the Vargulleion. I often saw it there."

Morlock was silent a moment under the shadow of the dread memory. Then he said, "You are not answering me. I find that troubling."

"Didn't the gnyrrand tell you about me, Chieftain? I saw him looking at me."

"You will answer my question."

The red werewolf shrugged despairingly and said, "Yes, I have seen many decapitated werewolves. I have cut the heads off many myself. It is the best way to kill a citizen in the night shape. Before I was sent to the Vargulleion I was an assassin. They called me the Red Shadow."

"Oh." Morlock was vaguely aware that werewolves distinguished sharply between assassination and other more open forms of murder. Morlock himself did not, though. "That may be a useful set of skills for us. Rokhlenu thinks this was a politically motivated killing."

The red werewolf was staring at him. "You are not …you still wish me to help you? You are still willing to teach me?"

"Yes."

Hlupnafenglu closed his golden eyes, then opened them. "Thank you," he said. "Hrutnefdhu was my friend, too. I would be sorry to miss the hunt."

The stairwell below them was suddenly flooded with females. Looking down, Morlock saw Wuinlendhono at their head.

"All males not dead, get out!" she shouted.

"We were just going, High Huntress," said Hlupnafenglu humbly.

"See that you do," she said briskly, and swept past.

Morlock and Hlupnafenglu edged past the river of female citizens rushing up the stairs. Soon they were standing outside on the stinking winestained street in the searing spring sunlight. Some citizens were still standing around, but when they saw Morlock they turned and fled.

"You call it an odd murder, then," Morlock said.

"Yes, Chieftain," said Hlupnafenglu. "It is one thing to sever the head. That makes sense, for a night murder. But why not hurl it out the nearest window? Why carry it dripping away with you?"

"How do you know they did?"

"I smelled it in the stairway."

Morlock nodded slowly. "Then we can trail them-" And then he broke off, staring distractedly at the wine staining the boards. "God Avenger. What have I done?"

The red werewolf punched him gently in his good arm. "Don't gnaw on yourself, Chieftain. We'll walk on the streets nearby a bit, and I'm sure we'll pick up on their scent."

That was what they did, and soon the red werewolf said he had found it.

"Are you sure that's the scent?" Morlock asked, feeling somewhat foolish.

"Fairly sure," Hlupnafenglu replied. "A citizen's blood is a distinctive smell, and Hrutnefdhu's has a tang to it I've never noticed in anyone else's. I'd be surer in my night shape. The wolf's nose is sharper. Hrutnefdhu taught me that when I-when we-when you made me whole. Sometimes I wish you hadn't done that, Chieftain."

"You did seem happier before."

"Maybe happiness is overrated."

Morlock had always hoped so, but said instead, "Should we wait for nightfall? There will be a moon aloft tonight."

"I think the scent might be gone then. Best while it's fresh."

The trail was clear enough. Even Morlock saw a few blood drippings at times. The scent led them to the northern gate, where a few irredeemables were standing guard. Two seemed to be coming on duty, two others going off, and they were standing around talking.

"Khretvarrgliu!" called one of the off-duty guards, and Morlock saw that it was ape-fingered Runhuiulanhu. "What's this rotten froth I hear about you and the gnyrrand fighting?"

Morlock opened his hands and said, "We had words. It's nothing serious."

"Politics?" Runhuiulanhu guessed.

"Sort of."

"I don't know much about politics."

"Neither do I."

"But I know what side I'm on."

"Rokhlenu and I will always be on the same side." Morlock lowered his voice. "But it may not look that way for a while."

"Oh. Oh! I get you! Some kind of strategy?"

"Sort of."

"I know crap-all about strategy either," said Runhuiulanhu, with a certain satisfaction.

"Eh."

"Can I buy you guys breakfast? I just got paid, and my mate bought some sausages. They're guaranteed to contain a certain proportion of real meat. And if they don't, I'll rip the sausage off the walking mouth who sold them to her."

"Thanks, but we're going into town," Morlock said. He didn't like to think of the meat that might be in a sausage made in the werewolf city. "Are you mated?" he asked. "Last time we met you were still …"

"Paying for it? I guess so. I thought about what you said that night. Two ape-fingered werewolves ought to be able to get along, shouldn't they?"

Marriage was not among the few topics where Morlock felt he could give useful advice. He hummed and shrugged as noncommittally as possible, and was horrified when Runhuiulanhu said, "Yes, yes, I know what you mean, there."

Hlupnafenglu intervened. "Runhuiulanhu, were you on duty all night?"

"Just since midnight. Why?"

"Did anyone pass by last night carrying a bloody bag or something like that?"

"A bloody bag. What is that, some kind of joke?"

"Can't you smell the blood? I can."

Runhuiulanhu sniffed the air tentatively and he said, "No, I-wait a lope. Wait a lope. Hey, Iuiolliniu," he called to his watch-partner, who was turning away. "Did someone come through here last night with a bloody bag?"

"No one came through all night. Nobody at all. Not that I remember."

"Of course they did. There were those whores walking home from Dogtown; and the guy who kept dropping his lamp and we thought he was trying to burn the plank road, only he was just smoke-drunk; and old Lekkativengu and his bookie friend."

"Oh. Right. But except for them, nobody."

"Yurr." Runhuiulanhu turned back to Hlupnafenglu and Morlock. "Were they going in or out?"

"Out," Morlock said.

"Bloody bag. Bloody bag. You'd think I'd remember that. And yes. Yes, I do remember it. Three of them, right?"

"You tell us."

"Three of them. There was that fuzz-faced goldtooth guard of Her Supreme Wolfiness. Yaniunulu. Which I think she just keeps him around to make fun of him, and why not. And the guy with the bag. He looked kind of familiar to me, but I didn't know his name. All his fingers were the same length. His thumbs, too, I mean."

"Luyukioronu," Morlock said. "They call him Longthumbs."

"Right. You're right! The watchers had us both in lockup before I got sent to the Vargulleion. I guess he got out. Forgery, that's what he was in for."

"Who was the third citizen?"

"That fuzz-face guard. Yaniunulu. That's three."

"That's two."

"Yurr. This shouldn't be so hard. There was Luyukioronu. And fuzz-face, Yaniunulu. And the guy with the bag. That's three."

"I thought Luyukioronu had the bag."

"He did."

"Then that's two."

"All right. Let's see. There was the guy with the bag. And Fuzz-face. And Longthumbs."

"And he had the bag."

"Right." Runhuiulanhu began to look frightened.

"Can you describe him? The third one," Morlock said.

It turned out that he was neither tall nor short, nor of any clear coloration, nor was his scent distinctive, nor was he clearly in the day shape nor the night shape. In fact, Runhuiulanhu could not describe him, or even be sure that it was a male citizen rather than a female citizen. Runhuiulanhu's fear was then more open.

"Don't worry yourself," said Morlock. "I think you've met Ulugarriu."

The ape-fingered werewolf's fear vanished. "Really? You think so? I wish I could remember him!"

"Maybe next time."

They said good-bye, and Morlock and Hlupnafenglu went through the gate out to the plank road.

"The trail is clear," Hlupnafenglu said after a while. "But we'll lose it if it goes into the city."

"Maybe," Morlock said.

"You're full of maybes today, Khretvarrgliu."

"Here's another. The maker who created the moon-clock in Mount Dhaarnaiarnon, and the funicular way, and the other miracles that are credited to Ulugarriu. That maker."

"Yes?"

"Maybe he could make a bag that wouldn't leak."

"Oh, well …Well. Yurr. You think he wanted us to come this way? Maybe. Maybe you're right. Then why are we following this trail?"

"The trail is what we have."

The sunlight dimmed as if a heavy curtain had been pulled across the sky. Looking up, Morlock saw this was true: a dense, turbulent, lightningscarred layer of clouds was spreading over the world, cutting off the light of the sun.

Together Morlock and Hlupnafenglu began to run. If it began to rain, the water would wash away the blood trail. And it was going to rain: the air to the east and south was already blurred with falling water, and the cruelly hot morning air was already retreating before the cool moist air of the storm.

They reached the city's southern gate at the same time as the storm front. But at first it wasn't rain that fell, but hail: great chunks of it, some as large as a child's fist, drumming on the roads and the stone walls and the heads of the travelers, particularly Morlock and Hlupnafenglu. They fled into the open gate and stood there, with the guards and some other passersby taking refuge from the storm.

For a long time, they gazed in unanimous silent wonder at the shallow drifts of melting ice forming in the streets. Eventually, Morlock caught Hlupnafenglu's eye, nodded toward one of the gate watchers, and glanced at his own right thumb. Hlupnafenglu looked baffled, then amused. He nodded.

The big red werewolf sidled up to the gate watcher and said, "Seen Luyukioronu Longthumbs today? I heard he was through here."

The watcher looked sharply at him and said, "You a friend of his?"

There was no mistaking the gate watcher's hostility. Morlock met the red werewolf's eye over the watcher's shoulder and reached out one hand insistently, as if demanding payment.

"He owes me money," Hlupnafenglu said, taking the hint. "The half-rat nipple-biter was running a game off of the outlier market, but he couldn't cover the bets. He said he'd pay me the next time he saw me, only he never sees me anymore."

Hlupnafenglu's newfound facility with lying impressed Morlock, not altogether favorably.

"All right," the watcher said. "I get you. Only it's not my problem, is it?"

Morlock jingled the bag of money tied to his belt.

The gate watcher turned around to look at him. The watcher was a semiwolf with white fur over a rather vulpine face, but his eyes were human, and they looked searchingly at Morlock. "It's like that? You're with him?"

"Yes."

"All right. Three pads of copper, I tell you where he went. One more, I won't tell him you guys were asking about him."

Morlock reached into the wallet and extracted six copper coins. He dropped them in the watcher's outstretched and rather hairy palm.

"For you and your partner," Morlock said. "We don't care what you tell Longthumbs."

Soon they were out in the hail again, headed for a day-lair run by a nightwalker called Iolildhio. Hlupnafenglu knew about it, from his extensive criminal career, but he would not be welcome there. They waited in the shelter of an overhanging wall opposite the dark open door of Iolildhio's joint.

Morlock had decided to watch and wait. Assuming the guard was telling the truth and Luyukioronu, at least, had reached the day-lair and was within, he would not stay there all day. He would satisfy his needs (food, smoke, and sex were what the day-lairs normally provided) and leave. If he was not there, it was possible that Ulugarriu would try to contact them or attack them.

He did not discuss this with Hlupnafenglu, who seemed content to follow his lead. The only thing the red werewolf said while they were waiting was, "I can smell the bloom from here."

Morlock could, too, and he didn't have a werewolf's nose. He nodded.

They waited.

The hail turned to sheets of rain. It filled the already swampy street and ran in through the door of the day-lair. Soon, smoke-choking, half-dressed citizens in varying degrees of wolfhood came stumbling out into the street. The day-lair was flooding. Hlupnafenglu met Morlock's eye and stretched his mouth in a long sinister smile. They would see something soon.

Luyukioronu and Yaniunulu came together out of the dark door, peering up at the sky and holding their hands over their heads in a futile attempt to shield themselves from the savage downpour.

Hlupnafenglu started forward, dashing across the muddy street toward their quarry.

Morlock was taken off guard. He had planned to follow one or the other of the two murderers for a while and see what they were up to, who they contacted. This was especially important in the case of Yaniunulu, who had betrayed his trust: it was important to know who had corrupted him. But he had not discussed this with Hlupnafenglu, who obviously preferred a more direct approach. No longer a red shadow, he was a juggernaut charging through a crowd of citizens bemused by the heavy rain and slipping across shining beds of ice.

Morlock dashed after him.

Luyukioronu dropped his eyes from the sky and saw Hlupnafenglu charging toward him, with Morlock trailing behind. He gaped, screamed, and ran.

Yaniunulu stared bemusedly after him, looked around, saw what Luyukioronu had seen, and ran the opposite way down the street.

Morlock caught up with Hlupnafenglu, pounded on his shoulder to get his attention, shouted, "Get the goldtooth!" and turned, skittering on an icelined puddle, to follow Luyukioronu.

The long-thumbed werewolf was already almost out of sight in the torrential rain. Had he plunged into the twisting paths of Dogtown he might easily have left Morlock bewildered, but instead he took a straight route parallel to the city wall, headed for Twinegate.

The rain began to thin out. The clouds were breaking in the east, torn to bits by the winds. Shafts of sunlight illumined the last misty rain. It was already getting warmer again, but Morlock didn't find that unwelcome: he had been battered by the hail, soaked through by the rain. His cloak was heavy with water, but he didn't throw it off: he wanted it to cover the empti ness of his left arm. But the weight was slowing him down; Luyukioronu, though still in sight, was opening up a considerable lead.

Entering the great plaza before Twinegate, Luyukioronu looked over his shoulder to see if he was still being followed. As he did so, his feet hit an icy patch and he rolled in the mud. Morlock drove himself forward; by the time the werewolf had scrambled back to his feet, Morlock was almost on top of him.

He darted into the crowds around the base of the funicular tower. Morlock thought the werewolf was going to circle around it, but instead he charged up one of the stairways, pushing and shoving citizens out of his way.

Morlock followed. He drew his sword as he ran. He disliked shoving people, and he'd found in the past that people were likelier to get out of his way if they saw him approaching with a longsword. So it proved on this occasion, and Morlock again began to gain on Luyukioronu. Eventually, the werewolf heard him approaching and turned, drawing a short sword and a dagger, his dark eyes blazing with panic.

"What do you want from me now?" screamed the werewolf, slashing madly with both blades. "My honor-teeth? You took them before! My money? I spent it all. My female? I spent the money on females; you can hire any of them by the half hour. What do you want? What do you want? What do you want?"

Morlock was at a severe disadvantage. Luyukioronu was no master of the sword, but he had two edged weapons and Morlock had to fight one-handed. He had two advantages: he knew how to use his weapon, and it was longer. He retreated a step or two to take advantage of this.

Luyukioronu followed him down, still swinging knife and sword frantically. One of his feet hit an icy patch on the stairs, and he slipped. He reached out his right hand, the hand with the knife, to steady himself on the well of a deep unglazed window set into the wall.

While Luyukioronu was still off balance, Morlock jumped forward and slashed with Tyrfing at the werewolf's right hand. Luyukioronu screamed and, recoiling, dropped the knife and several of his fingers as he retreated back up the stairway.

"Stop!" Morlock said, following him. "Tell me who sent you to kill Hrutnefdhu. If you do, I may let you live."

"I never killed anyone!" Luyukioronu shrieked wildly. "People kill me, they killed me a thousand times, but I never killed. It was a lie what they said about me. An accident. I'm a skilled operator; you should see me."

"I have seen you," Morlock said. "Remember? I gave you twenty copper pads. I sent them by my friend Hrutnefdhu. Remember?"

Luyukioronu seemed to be calming a bit; he considered this question with an inward, remembering gaze. Then he looked up, saw that Morlock had edged closer, and he started away. His back hit the fragile handrail behind him; it gave way beneath his weight.

"No!" shouted Morlock. He did not give a fragmented damn about Luyukioronu's life, but he wanted to know whatever the long-thumbed werewolf could tell him about the murder of Hrutnefdhu. Morlock dropped his sword and let it slither away down the stone stairs, rattling as it went. He leapt forward, reaching out with both hands.

Luyukioronu felt himself beginning to fall, and he reached out with his right hand to grasp at Morlock's left.

But Luyukioronu's mutilated right hand had no fingers, apart from one long thumb, and Morlock's left hand was a patch of mist, the ghostly idea of a hand. Luyukioronu's mutilated hand passed through it; his features convulsed with pain; he fell screaming all the way down the tower until the stones of the plaza ended his fall, his scream, and his life.

"God Avenger!" muttered Morlock (causing Death, who was manifest nearby, to signify hastily against the name of this alien god). He hoped that Hlupnafenglu had caught the treacherous Yaniunulu, or this day was looking bleak indeed.

"Hey!" someone shouted at him. "What are you? Crazy?"

"Maybe," Morlock admitted. He turned to see two armed watchers in city livery coming up the stairs. One had a mace in his hand, the other a drawn sword. The sword was Tyrfing. Morlock remembered he hadn't replenished the talic charge in the sword's crystalline lattice after he had summoned it this morning. If he had, he could have summoned it to himself now.

"Duelling on the anchor stairs is illegal, citizen!" said the watcher in the lead, a citizen with white hair. "Didn't you know that?"

"No."

"Well, it is, and the penalty's a pretty heavy fine. Pretty heavy. You'll find it inconvenient to go to court, and if you can't pay you might even end up in the Vargulleion. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

"No."

"On the other hand, you could just pay us at a bargain rate and save the time, too."

Morlock untied the wallet from his belt and shook it.

"That's the idea," said the watcher approvingly. "Now let's say-ghost bite me, partner, he's a never-wolf."" He pointed at Morlock's human shadow falling in the summer-hot sunlight against the gray stone of the anchor tower.

Morlock didn't deny it, since there was no point, but waited to see what the guards would do.

"I've never heard of anything like this!" the white-haired watcher said to his partner. "A never-wolf running around the city killing citizens, a string of honor-teeth around his neck like he's some kind of chieftain."

"Okhurokratu, you are being the stupidest of city watchers I am ever hearing of," his scar-faced partner remarked bitterly. "We've been seeing this guy before, that time when in the Shadow Market you keeping to try ratwriggling out of the meatcakes."

"I've never been in a meatcake in my life. But I guess I remember what you're talking about: when the young crook tried to pick his pocket."

"He was never him picking his pocket that! The citizen is was saying so!"

"He's not a citizen. He was a never-wolf then and he's a never-wolf now, and if you want meatcakes we can make some out of his liver."

"Stupid, stupid. The citizen is being the one they are calling Khretvarrgliu."

"The-Don't try and slap that turd in my hand. There's no Khretvarrgliu. The Sardhluun made him up to justify that prison break."

Scarface-Morlock remembered the citizen, but not his name-lifted the sword in his hand. "This is being the sword of Khretvarrgliu. My cousin, who is been trying to join with the Sardhluun since forever, he was been always telling me about it. He keeps making it fly through the air to him."

The first guard turned to Morlock. "That true? Can you show me?"

Morlock considered his answer carefully. "If I do, I will have to kill someone with it. There is a curse on the blade." It was a lie, but he owed the City Watchers no truths; they were no blood of his.

"Hm," said white-haired Okhurokratu thoughtfully. "I guess there's been too much fighting on the stairs today as it is. Yoy, partner?"

"Oh, for ghosts' sake," muttered the other watcher, and handed Tyrfing past his partner to Morlock. Morlock gave the bag of money to the surprised and delighted Okhurokratu and received Tyrfing from Scarface, and sheathed it.

"That should cover the fine," said white-hair, weighing the bag in his hand. "I won't say come back again, because I hate the stink of a live neverwolf. But if you come back, remember to bring plenty of this."

"He is being a rat-licker," Scarface said apologetically, "because he can't not be being."

Morlock nodded and walked past them down the long stairway.

It turned out, when he dragged his weary damp carcass back to the outlier settlement, that Hlupnafenglu had failed to catch up with Yaniunulu, and the day became bleak indeed.

The funeral for Hrutnefdhu took place at sunset. They burned the body around sunset (so that it would not end up on some hungry citizen's dinner table in these hard times) and sang songs in Moonspeech to keep the evil ghosts away. Then, when the sun set and they assumed the night shape in the moonlight, they sang songs in Sunspeech to guide Hrutnefdhu's ghost to the place beyond the stars where the good ghosts dwell.

That was how the other werewolves explained it to Morlock afterward, anyway. Then they sat around outside Morlock's cave and reminisced about their dead friend until one by one they went asleep.

Morlock was the last one to drop off. His body was screaming for a drink, and he knew he had a jar or two of wine hidden around the cave. But he sat there in the hot blue moonlight, hating the wine and the thirst for it and the flesh that thirsted, until sleep drew him down into itself.

Another never-wolf was having trouble sleeping that night. His name had been Plackling when he was born, and then they called him Brumerlem when he was weaned, and plain, proud Brum at his man-crowning. Now he was Daytime Twenty-seven, a slave in the anchor-tower of the funicular way, pulling the spoke on the gears during the day that Nighttime Twenty-seven pulled during the night.

Brum, as he still rebelliously thought of himself, lay in the slave barracks not far from the anchor tower and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about it.

Brum had seen him, though-the avenger. He had talked about it with the others on the meal break before the sleep time. Many of them had seen the avenger. They had seen the sword. Some didn't know about the avenger, and others did or thought they did. It was something to talk about, which wasn't nothing. Often they had nothing to talk about and ate their disgusting fodder as solemn and as wordless as cows.

But long after the others had stopped talking, Brum couldn't stop thinking about it. The pain had ended for many of their people on that terrible day and night of the raids. For some it had ended later. But for the people, it was not ended yet. It had not ended for Brum or the others. As long as they were alive, the pain went on. The vengeance was incomplete.

When Brum had been young, he had not believed in the vengeance, not really. But that was before the raids, before the destruction of his people, before he had seen the avenger with his own eyes. Now he was a grown man, nearly fourteen years old, and he knew that the vengeance was real, was needed, and he had seen today that the avenger was still nearby.

Brum silently prayed to his gods in the dark, the Strange Gods. It was the Coranians who had first spread their worship through the north. Brum's people in the old time had persecuted and tortured and robbed and murdered the Coranian prophets. But the Coranians worked certain miracles that impressed the people deeply and led them to believe in the Strange Gods, even as they continued to rob and murder Coranians. When the last Coranian was dead or fled, a shame came upon the people and they began to feel that they had done a great wrong that would be paid for in the fullness of the gods' slow anger. But they also began to believe prophecies of an avenger, who would come in the time of their pain to avenge their destruction.

This meant, as Brum understood the prophecy, that he and his fellow slaves would soon die. And this happy thought kept him awake deep into the watches of the night. It would be over soon. It would all be over soon.

Chapter Twenty-seven: Long Shots

The next day, and for many a day, Morlock went alone into the city to look for Yaniunulu. Hlupnafenglu protested at first, arguing that he should come along, but Morlock pointed out that the outliers needed a maker. Hlupnafenglu, or rather the Red Shadow, was also inconveniently infamous in the more dangerous quarters of Wuruyaaria. Even more important, Morlock needed to be alone. He wanted none of his friends around to watch in pity and amazement as he scratched at nonexistent insects, twitched and shook, and suffered diarrhea or the other panoply of indignities that came when he came off a binge.

He did not bother to swear that he would never put himself in this position again, as he usually did when he quit drinking. He was reasonably sure he would not live long enough to go through this again. The ghost sickness had reached his upper arm by now, and he had a sense that when the deadness that preceded dissolution through his flesh reached his heart, he would die.

The fierce heat of the lengthening days was broken infrequently with savage outbreaks of storm. Whether it was raining or not, Morlock wore a light cloak to cover his ghostly arm.

No one wanted to talk to him at first. Citizens wearing the day shape were not generally welcome in Dogtown, unless they were some kind of semiwolf, and genuine never-wolves (without even a wolf's shadow) were utterly unheard-of. Morlock had to draw his sword any number of times, and fight repeatedly. He took to leaving Tyrfing behind in the cave or Liudhleeo's den. Killing with Tyrfing was always a grim shock, and he dreaded the thought of what it might do to him in his weakened state.

But the nightwalkers of Dogtown grew used to seeing him and smelling him. They respected his ability and, even more, his ruthless willingness to fight. And he always had money to spend, and no one could take it from him or trick it from him; they respected that most of all.

As the days passed and his body slowly recovered, he found out a few things about Yaniunulu. The fuzz-faced semiwolf had money out at loan all over Dogtown-or he used to have it, anyway. For the past month he had been cashing out with all the moneylenders he'd been working with. He was placing the money with bookies, betting on the outcome of the election: betting against the Goweiteiuun-outlier Union.

This struck Morlock as characteristic of a werewolf's sense of revenge: to defeat someone, and profit from it, too. What bothered him was that Yaniunulu had, apparently, put all his money into these bets, so much that it began to change the odds, make them less favorable. (The best odds any bookie would now give was 7-to-1 against the Union; before Yaniunulu had shifted his money, it was only 3-to-1.) He thought it was a sure thing. He had no doubts at all.

That made it all the more imperative that Morlock find him and get him to talk a little about his habits in betting and political assassination. Unfortunately, he seemed to be nowhere at all. He could hardly have gone to ground in Apetown or the mesas of the city: a semiwolf was supposedly an unwelcome visitor at best there. But if he was hiding in Dogtown, he succeeded in eluding Morlock's best attempts to find him.

On the eighteenth day in the sixth month in the year (which Morlock's people called "Marrying" but which the werewolves of Wuruyaaria called, rather unimaginatively, "Sixth-semilunation-of-the-second-moon"), Morlock spent long fruitless hours trying to locate Yaniunulu, and then finally gave up. But before he left town, he went around to every bookie that Yaniunulu had placed bets with, and he made a correspondingly large bet in favor of the Union.

Most of the bookies were unimpressed-they were in the business of lapping up any money that flowed their way-but at least one, a wolf-headed young citizen named Orlioiulu, was quite excited.

"Do you think the Union really have a chance, Khretvarrgliu?" Orlioiulu asked, his pawlike hands trembling slightly as they swept Morlock's coins off his counting board into his cashbox. "I thought you and Rokhlenu were on the outs?"

"Eh," Morlock replied. "He may be sort of a bastard. But that's not always a bad thing in an election." He hoped bastard implied what he thought it did in Sunspeech; the word certainly caused Orlioiulu's eyes to gape wide.

When he returned to the outlier settlement through the south gate in midafternoon, he was glad to see Lekkativengu conferring with the guards. Most of the old irredeemable crew had guessed that the quarrel between Morlock and Rokhlenu was a political fiction, but Lekkativengu knew it for a fact and had often served as a go-between for the two friends.

The no-longer-claw-fingered citizen tried to look sternly at Morlock, but ended up grinning broadly. Morlock couldn't help smiling a little in response. But his voice was harsh as he held the wooden betting tickets out to the werewolf and said, "Hey, citizen. Give these to your chief. Tell him I expect them to pay off."

Lekkativengu took the tickets, gaped, nodded, grinned again, and capered off.

Morlock waved at the gate guards, who did not appear equally glad to see him, and trudged back to the east-side den that he now shared with Liudhleeo alone.

The outlier settlement had changed a good deal since he had first seen it. There was a respectable wooden wall running all the way around it, for one thing-much of the wood dephlogistonated, so that it could not catch fire under any circumstances. There was even a gate with guards and a watchtower on the eastern margin, just in case enemies braved the silver-infected hills and tried a sally that way. Morlock's cave was not within the palings: he had several surprises planned for his Sardhluun acquaintances, if they ever came to visit him. Also, it helped maintain the fiction that he was at odds with Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono.

Liudhleeo was sleeping when he entered, curled up in her day shape in a pool of bitterly hot sunlight. He tried to avoid waking her, but she leapt up with a gasp when he eased himself down on the floor across the room from her.

"Who is it?" she shouted.

"Me," Morlock said. "Sorry to wake you."

Unselfconsciously, she rolled across the floor and looked in his face. "Are you all right?" she asked. "Are you hungry? Are you thirsty?"

Morlock only ate and drank at intervals because he knew he must; he was never hungry or thirsty anymore. He considered this a bad sign, but did not want to discuss it with Liudhleeo, who had a habit of worrying too much.

"No to all that," he said. "You should take care of yourself, not me."

"Yurr. Don't be a bore like everyone else. `Take it easy, Liudhleeo. Don't worry about it, Liudhleeo. We'll take care of it, Liudhleeo.' Hrutnefdhu, may he sing beyond the stars, is dead, but I feel like I'm the one wrapped up in linen for a funeral."

"Stop barking at me."

"Oh, that's more like the Khretvarrgliu I know and unrequitedly love."

"Stop that, too. Or I'll be polite to you again."

"Anything but that." She stood and looked down at him, smiling a long predatory smile. Her face went blank; she turned her head sideways and said, "Someone is on the stairs. Rokhlenu, I think."

It was Rokhlenu, his hands full of wooden betting tickets. "Every now and then," he said without preliminary remark as he entered, "I start to believe that you will stop doing weird things. And then something like this happens." He waved the tickets in his hands.

"I'd have written you a note," Morlock said, "but I still can't write Sunspeech very well. And I can't write Moonspeech at all."

"Well, well. Illiteracy in a citizen of your eminence is a shame, but no crime. I take it you wanted to talk to me about something and that you don't actually intend me to make good these bets."

"You can keep them. They are bets on the Union's final victory in the elections, at odds of seven to one."

"Seven to one against our victory?"

"Yes."

"That seems a little high."

"Yes."

Rokhlenu sat and listened while Morlock told him what he had found about Yaniunulu's finances.

"He must know something," Rokhlenu reflected. "Or thinks he knows something. He thinks that there is no chance we'll win."

"Yes. I don't know what it is."

"I think I do. I expect that the Aruukaiaduun will side with the Sardhluun-Neyuwuleiuun Alliance. Bastards."

"Hm." Morlock reflected and asked, "If I called you a bastard, would it be an insult?"

Rokhlenu was amused. "Naturally. Why? Wait: have you been calling me a bastard around Dogtown?"

Morlock repeated his conversation with the bookie and added, "What I meant was that you were tough and relentless, even though I was angry at you. Insults like that can carry this meaning in other languages."

Rokhlenu shook his head, and looked sourly at Liudhleeo, who was holding her hands over her face and shaking with silent laughter. "I suppose it can," he conceded grudgingly. "It's pretty poisonous language, though."

"Sorry. "

"No, no. You were right. Just the thing to keep up the illusion that we're against each other. But I have to admit this odds thing bothers me a little."

"Beyond Yaniunulu, you mean?"

"Yes. It's the bookies who are setting the odds, and other people will know about it, even if they never place a bet. It makes us look like losers, and that's always bad. No one likes a loser."

"Eh."

"Long shots, then, if you don't like losers."

"It doesn't matter to me; I was just going to say something."

"I'm sorry; I'm not used to that sort of wild behavior from you. What were you going to say?"

"We could send citizens into town to place bets with bookies. Lots of bets."

"Yes, but we couldn't do it on credit; we'd have to use money-but I was forgetting. You can make the stuff."

"So can Hlupnafenglu. I taught him how to make gold and copper, anyway. I take it weights of the metals will pass as currency; I wouldn't want to counterfeit coin."

"No, of course not. That would be wrong. They might send you to the Vargulleion."

Morlock smiled wryly and opened his hand.

"Yurr," Rokhlenu said, after some silent thought. "I like this. I like this betting idea a lot. It's a new way to get the ears of the citizenry. If the odds start sliding our way, everyone will start talking about it. Let's get started on it tomorrow."

Morlock looked at him, looked out at the sunlight, and looked back at Rokhlenu.

"I know there's daylight left," Rokhlenu said, "and that many a bookie does business after dark. But there's a rally tonight on the Goweiteiuun's home mesa, up on Iuiunioklendon. I need to get some sleep now, and-given what you've told me-send a message or two to the Goweiteiuun gnyrrand and his band of happy warriors."

"I forgot," Morlock admitted.

"Well, I guess if we ever saw each other these days I might have mentioned it." He looked dubiously at Morlock for a moment, and Morlock thought he was going to say something about his health or appearance. But what he actually said was, "This farce about us being enemies may have run its course. I'll talk it over with the First Wolf; her instincts on these things are better than mine. But you had certainly better not join us tonight."

Morlock hadn't planned to, but he felt a pang when Rokhlenu said this. He thought it might be more a reflection of his illness than electoral politics …and, probably, it was justified under both headings.

"What about me?" said Liudhleeo, briskly, looking from one old friend to the other.

"The rally will be all-wolf. It will be a two-eyed night," Rokhlenu said, meaning that two moons would be aloft, "and all our fighters will be in their night shapes. So I don't think we'll need your services as healer, tonight, Liudhleeo; I hope not."

She nodded, and said, "I hope not, too. Send for me if you need me."

Rokhlenu said he would and, after some more talk about this and that, he left.

It was a solemn, if not a silent, crowd assembling in the amphitheater on Iuiunioklendon that evening just before sunset. Most of those present were native to the mesa, and most of them belonged to the Goweiteiuun Pack. The election didn't seem to be going well for them; their reckless union with the lawless outliers had brought other packs into alliance against them-and everyone had at least heard a rumor that the Aruukaiaduun Pack would join the Alliance.

There were claques of citizens favoring the Sardhluun and the Neyuwuleiuun. They made noise occasionally, barking their slogans about unity in solitary strength. But no one was quite sure what they meant, and they didn't catch on with the crowd at large. And the barkers didn't sound very happy or confident: this was a make-or-break rally for the Alliance, and both packs had lost a great deal in this election already. Even if they ultimately won, the cost might prove too high to be borne.

Plus, almost everyone was hungry to some extent. Food was scarce and expensive, and growing more expensive daily. The weather was so bad that people expected the rest of the year and next year to be even worse. And if it got much worse, many citizens would simply starve to death. Concerns like these tended to blunt the edge of slogans that were not about food.

One enterprising merchant from Apetown made a great deal of money in a short time by offering for sale a completely novel form of food: fish sausages. Each sausage was guaranteed to contain a certain proportion of real fish, caught on the shores of the Bitter Water and rushed for sale in the great city of Wuruyaaria before it could spoil by magical means the seller was unfortunately unable to disclose, interesting though they were. His audience was skeptical, but in this grim year they could not afford to be scornful. The merchant sold all his fish sausages at a remarkable profit. If he had thought to provide himself with a couple of guards, he might even have taken the money away with him. Still, he lived, and both he and his customers and those watching had learned something interesting and useful: werewolves would eat fish, if sufficiently hungry, and would pay well for the privilege.

The sun set, and presently the major moon, Chariot, peered out in somber brilliance through the bloody stain the sun had left on the eastern sky. Every citizen who could do so assumed the night shape. Then, as one, they turned to the west to look at the minor moon, Trumpeter-smallest of the three moons, but standing fiercely bright in the western sky.

It was time for the rally. The Goweiteiuun gnyrrand, Aaluindhonu, was the first candidate to appear, followed by his bold cantors and their brave band of volunteers. So Aaluindhonu described them in his opening song, but it would probably not have occurred to anyone else to do so. One of the cantors was actually trailing his tail on the ground, like a puppy who had been shouted at.

But Aaluindhonu sang well and fervently. There were rumors about him, and the crowd whispered them to each other as he sang. They whispered that he once had semiwolf kin in Dogtown, and the Sardhluun had killed them. Others said, no: the semiwolves were held hostage by the infamous First Wolf of the outliers, and others told other stories. But everyone had felt doubts about the gnyrrand's dedication to victory earlier in the Year of Choosing, and no one doubted it now.

In his song he hit the Neyuwuleiuun very hard, pointing out that the airships had never before been used against werewolves, and that if they could be used against the outliers then why not against the citizens of Dogtown? Of Apetown? Of Iuiunioklendon? Not only had the Neyuwuleiuun Pack committed a crime, they had failed: their vaunted airships had been struck from the sky by the daring and skill of the outliers. Bad enough to elect criminals to lead them-but failed criminals?

Which brought him to the Sardhluun. For years they had taken money and resources from the city to house prisoners in the Vargulleion and the Khuwuleion. Some they had killed, for meat or mere cruelty. Some they had sold like cattle to the wild packs. When a brave remnant had broken free from their sluggish hold and brought the truth to Wuruyaaria, the Sardhluun dogs had been powerless to stop it, just as they were powerless to answer that dreaded question. Where were the prisoners of the Khuwuleion? Where were the prisoners of the Khuwuleion? Where were the prisoners of the Khuwuleion?

The refrain infected the crowd, most of whom were anti-Sardhluun anyway. As they sang, the outliers raced into the amphitheater, green-and-gold streamers tied to the cords of honor-teeth around their necks. Their appearance raised the first genuine cheer of the night. When that subsided, the great gray werewolf who led them, the dragon-killer Rokhlenu, began to sing.

He sang that the outliers and their Goweiteiuun partners had founded a colony on the shores of the Bitter Water. He said that even if the harvest of the land failed and all the cattle died, the harvest of the sea would go on forever, fresh with life in the cool blue water. This, in essence, was the contrast between the Sardhluun-Neyuwuleiuun Alliance and the Goweiteiuun-outlier Union. The Alliance were dishonest jailors and failed sky-pirates. The Union dared to think in new ways to save the lives of citizens in these troubled times. Did citizens want the vicious past of the Alliance or the shining future of the Union? The choice was theirs.

His song was brief, convincing, eloquent, and had several direct references to food. The audience howled their approval at the two-eyed starspangled sky.

Suddenly there were new bands charging into the fighting ground of the amphitheater. The gnyrrands of the Sardhluun and the Neyuwuleiuun, grimly silent, running side by side with their bands of cantors and a stunningly large crowd of volunteers in their wake. The Alliance werewolves ran silent circles around the werewolves of the Union, and the crowd fell silent too. The Alliance was waiting for something, and the crowd waited also.

It happened. Five standard-bearers appeared at the amphitheater gates. But instead of flags, on the standards were the heads of citizens. Most were rotting, almost skeletal. But one was freshly killed: his blood was still dripping, his eyes still shining with tears in the moonlight.

Between the standard-bearers came the Aruukaiaduun band and their volunteers, teeth bared, snarling, ready to fight and kill. They charged straight at the Union werewolves, and as they did so the Alliance werewolves broke their circle formation and charged inward.

Few in the amphitheater recognized the heads on the standards, but Rokhlenu thought that he knew them. They were the heads of his father and brothers. The shock of seeing them was great, so great that he didn't even feel it as grief. He had long mourned them as dead. It maddened him a little to think that his youngest brother, one of the two who had disappeared around the time the others were murdered, had been alive until moments ago. It was his head that was still dripping on its pole. They had killed him just now to torment Rokhlenu, make him lose control.

He would not give them that.

He snarled a directive at his reeve, Yaarirruuiu, and at Aaluindhonu. They'd suspected they would be outnumbered, although not this badly, and had planned a retreat. He sang they should execute that plan now-but added they should kill the standard-bearers if they could.

The Union wolves struck as a body against the Aruukaiaduun band rushing down on them and sent the newcomers into confusion. Soon the Aruukaiaduun were entangled in the advancing lines of the Alliance werewolves.

The Union werewolves made their escape in the confusion, killing several of the standard-bearers as they went.

Rokhlenu sang one last line to the audience as he stood in the amphitheater gate, the last to leave as his enemies bore down on him. He sang that this was the meat and drink the Alliance would serve Wuruyaaria: their own flesh and blood.

Then he turned and vanished into the night.

Now, at last, the Alliance gnyrrands sang their songs. They welcomed the Aruukaiaduun werewolves to their band, and the Aruukaiaduun gnyrrand acknowledged his pack's worth and the new Alliance's glory. They talked a good deal about sternness, lonely strength, the need for order, and they boasted time and time over of their victory.

The crowd, apart from the Alliance claques, was mostly silent. It was true the Alliance had won the rally, but they had won in the ugliest possible way. It was not against the rules to overwhelm your opponents with the number of your volunteers, as the Alliance had done, because very little was against the rules in the Year of Choosing. But it was a very low-status way to earn a victory. Many remembered and repeated Rokhlenu's last words. And everyone noted that the Alliance werewolves said nothing at all about food or famine.

Morlock spent part of the afternoon teaching Hlupnafenglu a new set of multidimensional polytopes, and the red werewolf reciprocated by teaching Morlock how to read. Written Sunspeech he could understand, after a bit of effort, but he was deeply ignorant of the ideograms used in Moonspeech. He did not think he would live long enough to make much of this knowledge, but he had to have something to do at night besides drink, and he thought reading might be worth a try.

The last part of the afternoon they spent playing cards. Hlupnafenglu was unlike most werewolves in his disinterest in gambling, but he loved the deck of paper images and often used them in the mantic spells Morlock had taught him.

Before sunset, the red werewolf returned to the old refectory of the irredeemables to eat. It was thought the Sardhluun might try some sort of night attack after the rally, however it went-and, anyway, Hlupnafenglu wanted to wait for the rally results with his fellow irredeemables.

Morlock returned to the den he shared with Liudhleeo and spent some time reading a scroll that Hlupnafenglu had given him, written in Sunspeech ideograms. The exercise of recognizing ideograms was fairly interesting, the story less so. It was some minor epic about two immature werewolves in the night shape and their human slave, Spilloiu. It was possible that the lines had some sort of poetic force that Morlock was not sophisticated enough to recognize. They seemed mostly to be exhortations that one child shouted at the other to look at Spilloiu as he ran or did not run. Morlock finished the scroll and, irritated by the inefficient format, sliced the pages apart with a razor and sewed the pages together to a cloth binding to make a passable codex book. He was wondering what to use for a cover when Liudhleeo came home, her hands full of covered dishes.

"I brought dinner," she said.

"Not supper?" he said. He had just learned the ideogram for that word. (See Spilloiu! See Spilloiu fetch supper!)

"Don't be more ridiculous than you can help. Supper is a meal eaten by sophisticated citizens after a night howling about the town. Dinner is eaten by working-class citizens around sundown."

"Dinner, then."

"That's what I said."

She set the dishes down on the floor next to him and gracefully sat down across from him. "You'll never guess what it is."

"Not meat, I hope."

"Not for you." She uncovered one dish, plucked out a steaming fragment, and popped it in his mouth before he could protest.

"Hm." He chewed the oily, leathery stuff for a moment. "Smoked fish of some kind."

"Yes!" She was absurdly delighted. "The First Wolf gave it to me. It's from the new colony on the Bitter Water. I had my friend Ruiulanhro cook it up. She runs a hot-pot as well as a smoking lair and a poison shop, you know."

Morlock hadn't known. In fact, he wasn't sure what a hot-pot was: some sort of restaurant or refectory, it seemed. "It's good," he said.

"Do you really like it?"

He did. He was never hungry or thirsty, but his illness seemed to be intensifying all his sensations. He didn't feel the need to eat, but the act of eating was intensely pleasing.

"I have red meat, of a sort, for myself," Liudhleeo added. "You may partake if you like. It's guaranteed not to come from a never-wolf. In fact, it looks to be some kind of bird."

A seagull, Morlock guessed, looking in the dish. This had not been smoked, and was somewhat gamy by his never-wolvish standards. Also, it had not really been cooked so much as warmed, and the innards did not seem to have been removed at all. "No thanks," he said. "I'll stick to the fish."

"Knew you would. Coward."

Morlock shrugged, picked up a piece of fish, and ate it.

"Have you been practicing your ideograms? Oh my ghost, what have you done to Hlupnafenglu's little reader?"

"Made it into a proper book." He lacked the terminology for codex books since, apparently, he had just introduced them to Wuruyaaria.

She licked her fingers fastidiously and flipped through the primer. "I suppose it's easier to handle," she said.

"The pages won't crumble as it gets older," he pointed out.

"Nice stitching. You sew better with one hand than most people do with two."

He nodded to acknowledge the compliment. She gave him an amused glance and held the gaze too long for Morlock's comfort, so he glared at her a little. She dropped her eyes then, but not her smile.

They ate and talked desultorily until about sunset, and then they walked down through the hot humid air of evening to the marketplace to wait for election news with the other outliers. Liudhleeo walked on his left side and casually put her arms around him when the crowd threatened to push them apart. A little too casually: as he looked sideways at her profile, he thought she was enjoying the experience of being Khretvarrgliu's escort. Not improbably, that was why she had resisted the change to the night shape.

There was a carnival atmosphere in the market: torches and lamps lit the place almost as brightly as day. The citizens swarmed in the night shape, the day shape, and every gradation of semiwolf in-between. The air was dense with smoke from cooking fish and other seafood-a pleasant smell, in a town that had come very near to famine. Another noticeable smell was bloodbloom, one of the few crops hardy enough to thrive in the nightmarish weather of the past couple years, and more in demand than ever.

One female citizen was wandering the crowd, selling bowls of bloom to all and sundry. She was a semiwolf who wore the day shape except for bristling doglike fur that covered her from head to toe, and hence she had dispensed with the apish vulgarity of clothing.

Liudhleeo saw her, and was no longer interested in having people see her. She turned her head against Morlock's shoulder and seemed to shrink into herself.

But the smoke-selling semiwolf saw her and cried out, "Liudhleeo! How are you, you slinky bastard's brach?"

"Putting the bite on things, Ruiulanhro," Liudhleeo replied politely, but said nothing more to promote conversation.

Ruiulanhro, however, needed no encouragement. She looked Morlock up and down and said, "So you must be the never-wolf she's trying to regrow her hymen for?"

"Eh," Morlock said. "Thousands have."

"When I-What was that? What was that? Never mind. I don't really want to know if you're joking or not. I guess there's more to you than meets the eye, anyway. Have a bowl of bloom."

"No, thanks."

"On me!" she protested.

"I don't smoke."

"Oh, I don't think you two are going to get along. Have a bowl on me, gravy," she said to Liudhleeo. "For old times' sake. We miss you round the old den. We'll still be there when this one is off hunting fresher hymens."

"Thanks, Ruiulanhro," Liudhleeo said. "But not bloodbloom. Spiceweed, if you've got it."

"Some. I was expecting more children to be here." She blew a spark onto one of the bowls of herb on her tray and then offered it to Liudhleeo. She took it, saluted Ruiulanhro with it, and inhaled deeply of the smoke. Some of it reached Morlock; it smelled of cinnamon and cloves.

"Farewell, my meatpies," the vendor said. "I was young once." She moved on through the crowd, hawking her smoky wares.

After a moment of silence, Liudhleeo said reflectively, "So this is what it is like to long for death. I've often wondered."

"Don't gnaw yourself."

She looked at him gratefully. She offered him the fuming bowl and said, "It doesn't make you drunk, exactly. It's mostly for scent and flavor."

"I'm getting plenty," he said.

Her eyes widened in alarm. He gripped her shoulder briefly to tell her nothing was wrong. She smiled waveringly. Inhaling smoke deeply, she nestled into his side.

The news came soon, and it was worse than anyone expected. There was much resentment at the reports of how many volunteers the Alliance had brought to do their fighting, and the reports of severed heads as standards raised howls of rage from every quarter of the crowd. Morlock had seen werewolves do worse, even to other werewolves, but apparently the fact that this happened in the city, in an election rally, was genuinely shocking to the citizenry. About politics he knew very little, but he wondered if the Alliance might have gone too far.

Around midnight, Rokhlenu and his cantors made an appearance in the market square. The outliers gave them a loud welcome, howling and shouting. There was a great deal of singing and speaking going on, most of which Morlock didn't understand; werewolves could follow many songs at once, with a skill he had not yet learned to match. But he did see, or thought he saw, that Rokhlenu was ill-at-ease, never standing in one place for long, his eyes scanning the crowd of citizens.

This would be the first rally the outliers could be said to have lost, at least as far as Morlock knew, and perhaps that was all that was bothering his old friend. But Morlock added some things together: the number of severed heads the Aruukaiaduun had displayed, the number of Rokhlenu's brothers (plus his father), the fact that at least one of the heads was a fresh kill, according to reports, and that two of Rokhlenu's brothers had been reported missing when the others were killed.

No wonder Rokhlenu was distressed: the Aruukaiaduun had been boasting openly that they had killed his family, and he had been compelled to flee from the rally. Morlock knew his old cellmate fairly well, and guessed that shame and grief would be eating away at him now.

Rokhlenu stopped scanning the crowd; he was now looking directly at Morlock.

Morlock met his eye, across the surging tide of citizens. He pointed deliberately at Rokhlenu, then at himself. He pointed at himself, then Rokhlenu. What he meant was, You and me against them. Although he didn't think his friend knew it, he added the Dwarvish signal blood-for-blood. his hand clenched twice in front of his chest.

Rokhlenu grinned a long wolvish grin. He threw back his head and laughed. Either he had understood what Morlock had signalled, or understood something else that put his mind at ease.

"You don't say much," Liudhleeo said wryly at his side, "but you sure seem to make it count."

"Eh."

"Except when you say that."

Rokhlenu's laugh had surprised most of the audience, and they fell quiet, watching him. Into the semi-silence he sang a clear, concise song. It was true they had been defeated, and the taste of defeat was bitter. But one rally was not the election, and they would force that bitterness down their enemies' throats until they learned to love it. They would pay blood for blood. He thanked the citizens for coming and suggested, in brief, that they go home and begin working for the defeat of the criminal Alliance.

The crowd roared. The word criminal struck at the heart of their anger. Were they dogs or cattle, for the rope-twisting Aruukaiaduun to kill for their entertainment? They were citizens of Wuruyaaria, and there would be a reckoning. So they said to each other. Rokhlenu and his cantors were gone from the rostra, and the meeting was breaking up.

Morlock and Liudhleeo were at the edge of the market and found it easy to slip away on a side street. They were soon away from any crowd, but Liudhleeo kept her arm around him and he did not push her away. They walked home in silence and climbed the dark narrow stairs to the den.

She didn't say anything, so neither did he. He planned a long day tomorrow, making copper and gold so that they could flood the bookies with bets on a Union victory. The night was hot, as the nights always were these days, so he stripped to his shirt and lay in the shadows against the wall under an open window.

He had almost fallen asleep when he felt her press up against his back.

He turned to face her, holding himself up from the floor by his right hand.

Her red eyes were black in the blue moonlight. She whispered to him, "I don't need you to say anything. I don't need you to feel anything for me. I don't even want that. I know you don't care. I don't care that you don't care. But please. Please. Please."

He did care, but he didn't tell her that. He felt death in him and near him all the time, and she was alive, was life. Her lean naked body was strangely beautiful. Her mouth was hot and wet and smelled of cloves. She pressed it against his as she frantically tore the buttons from his shirt and they at last met, skin to conscious skin.

He worked for two straight days making copper and gold. He invested a third day in helping his old apprentice to teach his new apprentice the making of copper and gold. He thought of his new apprentice as the apprentice of his old apprentice, Hlupnafenglu, but no one else seemed to. His new apprentice was the clumsy thief who had tried to pick his pocket in the Shadow Market, a young citizen who was named Lakkasulakku.

Now that he had two apprentices, he never taught the same thing to both. His idea was that they could pool the skills he taught them after his death. They both looked disturbed when he told them this, but he could not understand why: he could feel the dead area preceding dissolution creeping up his neck and through his chest. His shoulder was beginning to fade. They could cherish illusions if it suited them; he didn't have the time.

In the evening and the night, there was Liudhleeo. He learned more about her in a few days than he had in the previous six months. She was intent on sharing everything with him: the details of her day, healing the semiwolves and never-wolves of the city; her brutal childhood in a fosterden on Iuiunioklendon; how she had escaped to live in the necropolis of Wuruyaaria, the long eastern slope of the mountain that bristled with the tombs of the city's eminent dead; how she had met Wuinlendhono there and how they had come together to the outlier pack; how Wuinlendhono had risen and risen while Liudhleeo fell further and further until …well…

She poured her words into him as if they were coins and he was a strongbox to protect them. Sometimes he wanted to tell her to stop, to save her secrets for someone who would be alive to share them with. But, of course, it was the imminence of his death that made him safe to talk to. He was like one of the eminent dead she knew so well from the necropolis, a grave and mostly silent counsellor.

Her physical hunger for him was as intense: a dark longing in which pleasure had very little place. He understood the horror and repulsion that drew her to him, and he pitied her for them. But he never said this to her, because he felt it would drive her away. And he wanted her at least as much as she wanted him.

She was alive. She was life. And he was dying.

He had not forgotten his debt to avenge Hrutnefdhu, her mate whom he could follow but never replace. He went several times into Dogtown to place long-shot bets for the outliers, and the bookies grew to know and trust him well. He became quite adept at reading the notes on betting slips, a mishmash of Sunspeech and Moonspeech. And he believed that some of the bookies, at least, would pass the word to him if they saw Yaniunulu again. No one seemed to esteem him much: an odd-smelling mutt with a habit of sneering at people; more bark than he had bite.

One day he was in the cave, teaching Lakkasulakku how to fold molten glass, when Hlupnafenglu came in, a small strip of wood in his big red hands.

"A runner from the city brought this, Khretvarrgliu," he said. "It's from that bookie in Dogtown, Orlioiulu."

Morlock looked at it. It was scraped on the same sort of wax-covered wood that they used for betting tickets. The ideograms told him that Yaniunulu ("the dog-faced betrayer") had been seen, and that Morlock ("Khretvarrgliu") should come see Orlioiulu ("friendly purveyor of chance and mystery") soonest.

Morlock's reading had progressed fairly well, but it was as a maker that the note interested him.

"Elegantly carved ideograms, wouldn't you say?" he asked, showing the note to the werewolves.

"Yes, Khretvarrgliu."

"Sure," said Lakkasulakku. "What's it say?"

"A lie," Morlock said. "Have you ever seen Orlioiulu?"

Hlupnafenglu nodded, and then gave a slow smile. "He has paws for hands. He could not have drawn these figures."

"Not with these angles of incision," Morlock said, who had examined the note very closely indeed.

A shadow fell across Hlupnafenglu's face. Looking up, they saw that Liudhleeo had entered the cave.

It turned out she, too, had received a note. Written by the same hand, but not signed Orlioiulu, it said that if she wanted news of her mate's murder, she should consult her new mate.

"This looks very much like a trap," said the red werewolf with great satisfaction. "Let me go, Khretvarrgliu. I missed him once; let me bring him home this time."

"No," Morlock said. "I'll go. From you they would merely hide. Also, you may be recognized-not as yourself, but as who you were."

"Morlock," Liudhleeo said evenly, "I am frightened."

"I'll be careful."

"For myself, you selfish pig. They meant this note to divide me from you. I'm worried they may be coming for me."

"Hm. Not impossibly. Another reason for you to stay, Hlupnafenglu. You can defend her with the resources of the cave. I'll leave Tyrfing, also. Kill with it only if you must, but in that case kill without mercy."

Hlupnafenglu, who had been the Red Shadow, bowed his golden head. "Khretvarrgliu, I will. I will spend my life for hers, if need be."

"You can't do this," whispered Liudhleeo. "You cannot do this. You stupid ape-faced-you've only got one hand!"

"I'll have three," Morlock said. "Lakkasulakku will come with me."

"Right, Chiefl"

Now Liudhleeo was weeping silently as Morlock armed himself and his apprentice from the gear in the cave. He turned to her at last. "I'll see you tonight," he said.

"Tonight you'll be dead. I'll never see you again."

"If not tonight, then soon. Good-bye, Liudhleeo," he said, and kissed her shocked weeping face. He turned away and walked down the hill in the bitterly bright sunshine. Lakkasulakku followed him, whistling noisily as he rattled down the wooden steps.

Orlioiulu's betting booth was closed, much to the annoyance of some semiwolvish patrons who wanted to lay bets on the weather. A prominent citizen was claiming the sunlight would soon be hot enough to boil water at noon, and the locals wanted to get some action going on it. Orlioiulu would give odds on anything, but he wasn't here to give odds on anything and his loyal customers were upset.

"Poor old Orlioiulu," Morlock remarked to young Lakkasulakku.

"Think he's dead?"

"Yes. Our correspondent will have killed him."

"Bastard."

"Yes. They will show us some bait, soon. I'll follow it. You wait a hundred breaths or so and follow me from a distance. Get me?"

"I get you, Chief."

Before long, they saw their bait: fuzz-faced Yaniunulu lurking at the mouth of an alleyway, craning his neck to peer toward Orlioiulu's betting booth. He was even wearing the gold tooth he had earned as a member of Wuinlendhono's guard, just so that no one could miss who he was.

"Pretty raw," whispered Lakkasulakku. "He must be desperate."

Morlock was also. He nodded, turned away, and sauntered openly toward the alleyway.

Yaniunulu affected not to see him until he had crossed half the distance to the alley. Then the fuzz-faced semiwolf started, and turned back to run up the alley.

Morlock loped after him, not too swiftly. He was fairly sure Yaniunulu wasn't really trying to escape him, and he wanted to have a look at whatever trap he was headed into before it closed on him.

By the time Morlock reached the alley, Yaniunulu was at an open doorway, looking over his shoulder. When his eyes met Morlock's, he fled through the doorway.

"Too obvious," said Morlock aloud, and drew one of the stabbing spears sheathed over his shoulder. He followed Yaniunulu through the open door out of the cruel sunlight.

He waited for his eyes to accustom themselves to the shadows before he moved.

What he saw, presently, was a dim corridor with Yaniunulu standing (somewhat twitchily) at the far end. The corridor floor had a dark seam down the middle, and it looked like the edges did not fully meet the walls on either side.

"Eh," Morlock said. The trap was so obvious he had to be concerned it was simply the mask for another more subtle one. But before him was one of the citizens involved in his friend's murder. If he could not get him to talk, he would not let him get away.

He threw the spear in his hand.

He was ten paces away from Yaniunulu, and he was ill and feeling weak. But he was still Morlock Beast Slayer: the spear passed through the werewolf and pinned him to the wall behind. Yaniunulu screamed and struggled to free himself.

Morlock crouched down and pounded on the corridor floor with his fist. The two sides of the floor folded apart as he had expected. They were set on axles, it seemed, about a handsbreadth away from the walls; the space between the wall base and the floor had been left to allow the floorboards to swing freely when the trap was sprung. Below was a filthy stretch of water that looked like a sewer-and smelled like one, too.

Morlock tested the strength of the axle holding one of the swinging floorboards; it seemed strong enough to hold his weight. Balancing with his right hand against the wall, he stepped onto the upright edge of the floorboard and walked across to where Yaniunulu was still vainly struggling against the spear that pinned him to the wall.

The wound was grave, straight through the middle of the werewolf's body. But it hardly bled at all.

"What are you, citizen?" Morlock asked. Yaniunulu's dark eyes, void of expression, met his, but there was no other answer.

"Not what you appear, at any rate," Morlock observed. He drew his other spear and, striking vertically, slashed Yaniunulu from the base of his neck to his belly.

The werewolf's loose brown garment fell away, and great folds of his furred skin parted like curtains. Through the gaps Morlock saw several small creatures, hardly larger than his fists. They had pink-and-brown mottled skins, void of hair, and long gray tails. Their faces were strangely human, but for the long ratlike snouts. He had wounded one of the rat-things, and evidently killed another, but the rest chittered angrily. One issued a high screeching sound like a command, and the ratlike beasts began to abandon the Yaniunulu simulacrum they had been operating.

They held long glittering razors liked swords in their hands, and they moved toward him menacingly.

He decapitated one with his spear when it approached him incautiously and kicked another into the slime of the open trap. He made a great sweeping feint with the spear, and the rough line of ratlike beasts broke. They fled, a dozen or so, across the edge of the floor trap and away into the harsh sunlight at the corridor mouth.

Morlock examined the now-motionless simulacrum of Yaniunulu. It was a fascinating piece of work. The skin and fur and bone seemed to be real and alive, but it was all just a shell, with levers and pulleys to be operated by the tiny crew of rats. It was marked nowhere MADE BY ULUGARRIU, but it hardly needed to be.

The corridor was a dead end that gave no clear entrance into the rest of the building. Morlock turned and followed the rats across the trap and into the cruel sunlight outside.

The rats had long since fled, but he saw a familiar figure lying on the ground at the head of the alley: Lakkasulakku. Several citizens were bending over him, not obviously with kind intent. Morlock ran over, brandishing the spear still in his hand, and they retreated.

Lakkasulakku was bleeding copiously from wounds in his foot and thigh. A swelling bulged on his forehead; he had been struck there. Morlock thought bitterly of the razorlike blades of the ratlike beasts. Had he followed them straight out, they might not have had the opportunity to do this.

He sewed up the greater wounds with thread and needle he had with him in a stray pocket and bound up the wounds with strips torn from his clothing. Then he tossed the young citizen over his shoulder and loped off down the street.

Lakkasulakku's face was pale, and oily with sweat; his breathing was irregular; he had been unconscious since Morlock had found him. But Morlock thought he could be saved by a healer as skillful as Liudhleeo. He made his way back to the outliers as swiftly as he could.

The sunlight was growing gray for Morlock by the time he reached the southern gate. He was glad to see one of the old irredeemables on duty at the gate, although he could not remember the werewolf's name. He was about to ask that the guard help him haul Lakkasulakku to Liudhleeo's when the guard said to him, "The gnyrrand wants to see you, Khretvarrgliu."

"Later," Morlock said. "I have to get this young citizen to a healer."

"She-" the irredeemable began, then paused. "There was a thing that happened at your cave. That's what I heard."

The day got grayer still for Morlock, though the sun was as fierce as ever. "Can you take care of my friend?"

The irredeemable bowed his grizzled head. "An honor, Khretvarrgliu. The gnyrrand and-and-and the others are at the First Wolf's lair."

Morlock, relieved of the burden of Lakkasulakku, ran as fast as his weary legs would carry him to the First Wolf's tower. The goldtooth on duty at the entrance saw him coming and simply stepped aside.

The bodies were laid out on biers in the main audience hall on the ground floor. Hlupnafenglu was staring at the ceiling with what Morlock would have called an expression of mild interest, were it not for the raw red hole in his unmoving chest. The other body was headless and already wrapped in linen, but Morlock recognized it as Liudhleeo's from its outline.

Wuinlendhono was bent over Liudhleeo's body, sobbing. She had one of the dead linen-wrapped hands gripped in both of hers. Rokhlenu stood beside her, his hands on her shoulders, his face clenched with grief and worry.

Wuinlendhono looked up with red eyes as Morlock approached. She dropped the dead hand, shook off Rokhlenu, and stood between Morlock and the corpse as if to protect it from him.

"If she," she said. "If this. If you. If. If this. If this was because of you. If this happened because of you. I'll kill you myself. You sheep-stinking, apefaced, never-wolf, plepnup bastard. I will kill you."

Morlock stepped around her. The neck was severed in the same way as Hrutnefdhu's had been. Hlupnafenglu's neck was untouched. Of course, it was possible that the killer had planned to remove Hlupnafenglu's head in the same way, but had been interrupted. He would ask about how the bodies had been discovered, if he had a chance, and if he could get someone to talk to him instead of screaming at him. But, even if that were the case, the killer (or killers) must have killed them both and then proceeded to decapitate Liudhleeo's corpse first. This had been done for a reason.

The linen wrappings were falling loose from the hand Wuinlendhono had been weeping over. Morlock looked at the hand, then picked it up and further unwrapped the linen to get a better look at it.

"Leave her alone," Wuinlendhono shrieked, and began to pummel him. "Leave her alone!"

He turned and held the dead hand up in front of her face. "Do you recognize this hand?"

The unexpected question shocked her into stillness. Presently she said, "I recognize it. I first saw it ten years ago. I was fleeing from the Goweiteiuun after killing my husband. I ran into the necropolis. I stole food from the funeral gifts; that was how I stayed alive. Once I saw a hand reaching for the same piece of rotten meat that I wanted, and I bit it. See the scar? See the scar there, on her hand? That was where I bit it. We fought, Liudhleeo and I, and she-we fought. She didn't kill me, though I guess maybe she could have; I was near starving, weaker than a chicken. She was running away, too. She said we should go to the outliers. I. She. I went with her. Came here with her. I don't know what I would have done. Without her. And now. Now I'll have to."

"This is not Liudhleeo's hand."

"Liar. That won't save you."

"She was smoking spiceweed every day for the last month-bowl after bowl of the stuff. It stained her hands and her fingers. Do you see any stains here? Use your dog's nose. Do you smell the spiceweed?"

Wuinlendhono's dark eyes widened with anger and wonder. Then she closed them tight, and her face wore a remembering look. "I saw her only twice the last month. That was your fault: this stupid game you and Rokhlenu are playing. But she was smoking. She was smoking spiceweed both times. It does stain your fingers, and your teeth. That's why I never." She opened her eyes. "What is it you are saying?"

"Liudhleeo may be dead," Morlock said. "But this is not her body."

Wuinlendhono took a step back, straight into Rokhlenu's arms. He wrapped them about her, and she let herself rest upon them, closing her eyes, her face growing calm.

"How can that be?" she asked at last, not opening her eyes.

Morlock had an idea or two about this. He had been thinking of that strange flesh-machine the ratlike beasts had been using, the simulacrum of Yaniunulu. Perhaps this corpse was something like that. Perhaps there was some other explanation. But there was no reason to say all that when one word would do as well.

"Ulugarriu," he said.

Wuinlendhono screamed. Her body arched with the force of it. She screamed until all the air had left her lungs and the scream sank to a croaking, gurgling snarl.

Rokhlenu held her patiently through all of this.

She lay in his arms for a time, neither speaking nor moving.

Then she opened her eyes and stood. She looked at Morlock and said, "You will find the truth of this. You will go and find the truth of this. We will hold a funeral over these things as if they were our friends. Is that Hlupnafenglu's body, do you think?"

Morlock nodded. "Probably."

"Well, we will pretend this thing is her body and burn it with Hlupnafenglu's. It's a kind of blasphemy, but we've all done worse, I guess. And you will find the truth of this."

Morlock said nothing. Nothing needed to be said.

She turned to Rokhlenu and said, "Beloved. Thank you. I needed you, and I will need you, but now I need to be alone. Please don't follow me away." She walked off and disappeared into a stairway.

Rokhlenu waited until she was gone, and then turned to Morlock with something like relief in his face. "What is Ulugarriu after, do you suppose?"

Morlock shrugged.

"He seems to have been interested in the cave. He ransacked it before he left."

Morlock nodded, almost pleased. This confirmed that the killer had not failed to behead Hlupnafenglu for lack of time.

"It looks like Hlupnafenglu left her, came back to find her dead, and then stabbed himself with a glass dagger. That's how we found him."

"That's how it was meant to look."

"I'm afraid he took your sword," Rokhlenu added. "Unless you hid it somewhere."

"No," said Morlock. "I left Tyrfing with Hlupnafenglu. And it is gone?"

"Yes."

Morlock laughed. It was the best news he had heard on this evil strange day.

Rokhlenu was looking at him with open amazement.

"I'll explain," Morlock said.

But first he turned to his dead friend. The red werewolf's body had been washed, but not yet bound with linen. Morlock took some lying ready nearby the bier and wrapped up the red cold hands in the cloth. Then he put his hand on Hlupnafenglu's eyes and whispered a prayer that Those Who Watch would welcome this apprentice through the gate in the west.

"Good-bye, my friend," he said at last. "I hope you have all the breakfast you need or want, wherever you are now."

Then he turned away and walked from the audience hall with Rokhlenu beside him. Someone else would have to stand the vigil over the corpses: there was much to do.

The next morning found Morlock walking through Twinegate in full daylight with a lit lamp.

"Sun's up," said one of the watchers. "Don't know if you noticed."

"I'm looking for a citizen," Morlock said.

"Good luck. There might be one or two in the city somewhere, if you're not choosy."

"I'm choosy," said Morlock, and walked on into the sunlight with his lamp.

Morlock's plan was a simple one. The killer (Ulugarriu or his agent) had taken Tyrfing. That might even have been the motive for the attack on the cave, a possibility that gnawed at Morlock a little: if he had taken Tyrfing with him to the city earlier, Hlupnafenglu might be alive now. But never mind that: the killer had taken Tyrfing, and nothing else it seemed, because Ulugarriu had wanted it. So the sword was with the killer, or Ulugarriu (if there was a difference) now.

And Morlock could find Tyrfing. He had implanted a talic impulse in the crystalline lattice of the sword, so that he might summon it to him at need. That meant he was still in talic stranj with the blade. If he had been in full possession of his Sight, he would simply have summoned a light trance and walked until he reached the blade and the killer. But the ghost sickness, or whatever was causing it, had weakened his talent so that even going into a light vision kept him from taking volitional action in the world of matter.

Still, the matter was easy enough. Morlock lit a lamp, went into a trance, and went into talic stranj with the flame. When he descended to normal awareness, the flame was still linked to his magical blade: the flame burned brighter in its direction.

The lamp had led him here. It would lead him to Tyrfing. And then he and Ulugarriu would have a long-overdue conversation.

The bright edge of the flame guided him through Twinegate Plaza into Apetown. He came at last to a sort of shop, but the sign outside the shop was blank and there was no name or symbol on the door.

He kicked the door open and entered.

The shop within was dim: all the windows were shuttered. The brightest lights in the room entered with Morlock: the fierce sunlight of the spring morning and the lamp he held in his hand.

By their light he saw in the room's shadows an old citizen in the day shape sitting in front of a shop counter. Behind him, on the counter, glittered Tyrfing.

"Are you Ulugarriu?" he asked the old citizen.

The old citizen's lower jaw swung open like a gate. Through the grayish lips peered a mottled pink-and-brown face, almost human but for the long ratlike snout.

It screeched. Morlock heard someone behind him and reached out his hand to summon Tyrfing, but a blow fell on the back of his head and he lost consciousness before he could speak.

Chapter Twenty-eight: The Stone Tree

Morlock awoke to the weary certainty that he was imprisoned again. The dank stone floor was familiar; the stench of unwashed bodies and the crash of iron doors was familiar. There was no cord of honor-teeth around his neck. For a moment, before he opened his eyes, he was afraid that the desperate New Year's escape and all that followed had been a delusion of his madness and he was still in the Vargulleion.

But as soon as he looked around him, he knew the fear was groundless. This was not the Vargulleion. The cell had no window; the walls seemed to be baked brick; and the cell doors had proper locks on them. Nothing he couldn't handle with the slightest excuse for a lockpick and a little time, though. They had taken his cloak, and all the useful and useless items he had tucked away in its pockets. But he had a long stiff wire or two sewn into the seams of his breeches; they might do the trick, if he could get a few moments unobserved.

There was only one guard outside his cell door, a solemn-faced semiwolf with a long face and hairy ears, wearing the dark regalia of the City Watchers.

"Why don't you shave those ears?" Morlock asked him, adding other insults that occurred to him, or that he remembered werewolves using to each other over the months he had been in or near Wuruyaaria.

But the watcher didn't even seem to be aware he was being insulted. He just looked at Morlock solemnly and with a little awe.

Presently a tall citizen with grizzled hair and a great tort of honor-teeth on his chest appeared, strolling up the corridor.

"I'll sit the watch for a while," he said.

The watcher stood slowly. "I think he was trying to get me to fight, Chieftain."

"You were too smart for that, I hope."

"Me, fight Khretvarrgliu?" The watcher seemed genuinely appalled. "Never."

"That's right," the grizzled citizen said agreeably.

The watcher wandered off, and the werewolf with the tort said to Morlock, "But we've already had our fight, haven't we, me and you? We've fought, and I've won."

"Your name is Wurnafenglu," Morlock said.

"It is," the werewolf said, quite pleased. "You were not in a condition to converse when last we saw each other. I'm glad things have changed."

"We have not fought. You are wise to keep this door between us. I'll kill you if I get the chance."

"But I won't give you the chance!" Wurnafenglu said triumphantly. "No, indeed. That's why I win, Khretvarrgliu. I'll keep you on the other side of this door as long as it suits me."

"That's what you thought before."

"I'll keep you on the other side of this door as long as it suits me," Wurnafenglu repeated, raising his voice. "On a day soon to come, I will have you chained and dragged forth. I will take you to the highest mesa of the city, and I will execute you there between the Stone Tree and the Well of Shadows, as the climax of our final rally against those mongrels who now call themselves the Union."

"Why wait?"

"A good rally takes preparation. Plus, our astronomers say there will be an eclipse of the sun on that day. That will impress the rabble."

"Your fellow citizens, you mean to say?"

"That's what I did say. The important people are already with us."

Wurnafenglu spent some time talking about his plan of independent strength through partial unity. Morlock didn't listen, but spent the time thinking about things he had seen and people he had known.

Presently he saw a decapitated man holding his severed head like a lamp. The man was standing next to Wurnafenglu, as he had stood beside him so many times in the Vargulleion. Wurnafenglu had never seen him then and didn't see him now. But Morlock did. He wondered if his madness was returning-if, perhaps, the ghost sickness was driving him insane.

"No," said the severed head in Wardspeech, one of the languages Morlock had grown up speaking. "I felt an impulse to manifest to you. I am War. "

Morlock mulled this over for a bit, and said in the same language, "You are one of the Strange Gods?"

"I am."

Wurnafenglu asked him what the ghost he was babbling about, but Morlock had no trouble ignoring him. "Do you know Death?" he asked.

"She is one of our company. I don't count her as a friend, but we often work together, of course."

"Why have you chosen to show yourself to me?"

War dismissed the question with a wave of his free hand. "I do what I choose, and I don't explain myself even to myself. I should thank you, though. This has been the most entertaining Year of Choosing that I remember."

"I have nothing to do with that."

"Never lie to a god. What's the point? I was manifest when you and your friends escaped the Vargulleion. I was manifest when you fought the Sardhluun on the ground and the Neyuwuleiuun in the sky. I watched the battles your friend has been fighting."

"They call them rallies, I think."

"Never bandy words with a god. He may take offense."

Morlock shrugged and opened his right hand.

"You are indifferent, I see. But in a way, we are old friends. And I often visited you in the Vargulleion."

Morlock nodded. "Do you know Death?" he asked.

"No one really knows her; she is the strangest of the Strange Gods."

"I think I met her, once."

"`Met' is improper usage. She may have allowed you to perceive her manifestation. Yes, I visualize that. I don't understand it, though. Perhaps you can ask her about it when you see her."

"You visualize my imminent death?"

"Not visualize, no. All things are in flux, and visualizations of the future are near valueless. Still, if I were a gambling god, I would not bet on your living to the next moonset."

Morlock turned his face away and sensed without seeing War demanifest himself. When he looked back at the corridor, both War and Wurnafenglu were gone and the semiwolf watcher had returned and was staring at him, the long doglike jaw somewhat askew.

Morlock wondered why he was so impressed. Clearly he had heard stories of Khretvarrgliu. But it was not impossible he somehow felt without understanding the manifestation of the Strange God. He had few honorteeth: one of those Wurnafenglu called the rabble.

"I am not angry at you," he said to the guard in Sunspeech. "I am rarely angry. But when I am angry, I will blot out the sun. Do you understand me? I will blot out the sun."

The watcher gaped at him, but did not respond. Morlock decided he would try again with the next shift.

Days passed. Eventually the day for his execution came. The corridor filled with watchers, most of whom stared at him in open terror: he had spent each shift working on their minds. His heart fell, though, when two watchers actually entered the cell. They weren't jailhouse guards. In fact, they were the pair he had met before, patrolling the Shadow Market and again on the stairs of the funicular tower: white-haired Okhurokratu and his scar-faced partner-Snellingu, Morlock remembered. Okhurokratu had chains in his hand; Snellingu a drawn sword.

"Be coming along, Khretvarrgliu," said Snellingu.

Morlock rose to his feet, prepared to fight if there was a chance.

But there was no chance. Other guards with clubs entered, and they struck Morlock about the head and shoulders until he lost consciousness.

When he awoke, he was being carried up the long stairs of the funicular tower by the white-haired werewolf and the scar-faced one.

"Are you being awake?" grunted Snellingu. "Why don't you get walking, then?"

"Eh," said Morlock. "Why not?"

He thought there might be more chance for escape while on his own feet, although it turned out he was wrong about that. His right hand was chained to his leg; his legs were chained to each other: there was barely enough slack for him to climb a step at a time. His left hand was free, of course, but there was little it could do. His cloak had been taken, and his ghostly arm was bare to the shoulder, looking strangely insubstantial in the fierce morning sun. They were already halfway up the long tower stairway: there was no chance of his getting away-unless he took the quick route, over the rail. He thought about it coldly, then decided against it. He wasn't the resigned type. He would put them to the trouble of killing him, if there was no other way he could inconvenience them.

He turned his eyes back up the stairwell and met the gaze of the whitehaired guard who was leading the way upward. "That's right!" Okhurokratu said, in a relieved tone. "No point getting us into trouble."

"Don't be trying to be talking him into it," called Snellingu from below.

Morlock said nothing. He thought he heard someone saying, Kree-laow.! Kree-laou ' He looked into an unglazed window as they passed it on the stairwell but could see nothing within: the light difference was like a black curtain.

As they climbed, Morlock kept his eyes on the funicular ways. He would have liked to see the gears within the tower, but he thought he understood how the ropeways worked. There was one upward way and one downward way that were in constant motion. At regular intervals, crews atop the towers attached the rope-woven cars to the upward way and detached them from the downward way.

They finally reached the top. Morlock looked with interest at the crews hitching and unhitching the basketlike cars. When a car came down the way, the crew fixed it to the tower with an anchor like a great hook. The passengers got out and trudged away via the down staircase on the far side of the tower. Then the crew unhooked the car from the ropes and carried it over to the near side of the tower. They anchored it, hooked it to the upward rope, but did not fasten the hitch, so that the funicular ropes ran through the hooks without carrying the car away. They motioned the waiting passengers to embark. The waiting passengers were Morlock and his two guards: the way had apparently been cleared before them.

The crews were looking very unhappy in the fierce light and humid air, but they didn't appear to be slaves.

The guards sat down at some distance from him: white-haired Okhurokratu at the left-hand window, opposite to Morlock, scar-faced Snellingu with his back against the wicker-screened window in the front of the car. They had probably been warned against coming within reach of his ghostly hand. This was wise, as Morlock would certainly use it against them if he could. It had occurred to him that if he could distract one of them with it long enough to get a spear, he might kill them both, in which case matters would be very different indeed. He could not hope for real escape, but he did plan on causing harm to those who would kill him.

Morlock covertly tested the wicker screen on his right by pressing his elbow against it. It didn't give much. Probably it would be difficult to kick one of the guards out without being speared by the other. If he was going to try anything on the funicular, it would be best if he freed his hand first. He thought about the difficult task of teasing forth the wire from the seam while the guards were watching him, and wondered if he could get them to distract each other.

The crew cast off the anchor of the car and simultaneously did something to the hitches, fixing them to the cable leading upward. The car jerked into motion and carried them out over the city.

Morlock asked the watchers, "Are they all free citizens on the roof crews?"

"Yes," Okhurokratu said. "They tried slaves a few times, but it never worked. Not lively enough when it counts. It used to be free workers on every spoke down to the ground, and things worked better then."

Snellingu made a rude whistling sound with his wounded lips.

"My old gray-muzzle used to work the gears," Okhurokratu said. "Since they went to using slaves, he hasn't had an honest day's work and I've got to support him. A free citizen, supporting his gray-muzzled dad and half his brothers. Can you feature that?"

"The funiculars are working the same way they have been always doing, and you are just being angry about your sloppy-lazy family, which is boring to me."

"Ah. You don't know what it's like."

"I am knowing; you are all the time telling me. I am not caring."

"Ah. You-"

"So, Khretvarrgliu," said Snellingu. "You are being impressed by our funicular ways? Is it not being impressive? Don't be listening to my partner; he cannot be being happy unless he is being unhappy."

This turned the conversation back to Morlock, which was awkward, as he had the tip of the wire between his thumb and index finger. "Could be improved," he said. "It's a long walk up."

Both the watchers laughed. "Of course it's a long walk," Okhurokratu said. "What would you do about that? The funicular has to be high so it can clear the mesas."

"The same sort of gears that power the funicular could work ropes running up and down the tower. Put platforms on the ropes; people can ride up." He was hindered by the lack of a technical vocabulary in Sunspeech-and, anyway, he really only wanted to distract them.

The watchers fell silent, distracted by the image in their minds of elevators rising and falling. "Too much work for the tower-slaves," Okhurokratu said eventually. "They're only flesh and blood."

"Get other crews. The gears could be worked from the ground, or from the top of the tower. Adding another level there might be the best thing."

The two watchers looked at each other. Morlock deftly palmed the wire now freed from the seam.

"They would never be going for it," said scar-face doubtfully. "The big-teeth."

Morlock shrugged. He looked at a hand crank on the ceiling of the car. Nodding toward it, he said, "That's for-" He paused. He didn't know the Sunspeech word for emergency, though he had been in many and caused more than a few. "If the ropes stop," he concluded finally.

"Yes," grumbled Okhurokratu. "Happened to me, once-on the up way, which is the worst. Had to crank for half the afternoon just to get to the next tower. That never happened when they used free workers."

Snellingu rolled his eyes. "How would you be knowing? You have been saying you were only a pup when they were had starting to use slaves."

"My gray-muzzle told me."

Both watchers turned their gaze directly at Morlock, now-not especially interested in him, but efficiently minding him. There was nothing he could do while they were watching him, so he looked out the window.

They were riding high above the city. Morlock felt strangely inspired, almost the way he had felt when he was flying. The city had a kind of beauty, seen from here: it was full of trees, bristling with lair-towers. There were running streams, silvery in the bitter sunlight, and open pools that glared back at him. He saw the citizens going about their business in their day shapes in the cruel summery light. None of them looked up to see him pass on toward his death. They would go on doing the same thing tomorrow when he was dead. In that moment, they almost mattered more to him than he did to himself, even though they looked smaller than …than those ratlike things with the human faces.

"Were you two there when I was arrested?" he asked the guards.

They looked uncomfortable. "We were only doing our jobs," Okhurokratu said defensively.

"Yes," agreed Snellingu.

Morlock wondered why they said that-why they thought it would make a difference to him. But since they clearly had been there, he asked the question he really wanted an answer to. "Did you see that thing inside the old citizen-the thing running him like a puppet?"

"Were-rats," White-hair said, and scowled. "I hate those guys."

"Why are you hating them?"

"They smell bad, and I can't understand what they say, and they make me feel creepy. And that meat-puppet they had really bothered me."

"The old citizen," Morlock prompted him, when it seemed like he would say no more.

"Citizen my third testicle. That thing-didn't it bother you?" he asked his partner explosively. "Now I have nightmares that half the people I run into are just meat-puppets run by were-rats. It would explain a lot of what's wrong with this town. But you're not bothered; I can tell by the smug expression on your face."

"Not me. I would be knowing."

"How?"

"They are smelling bad. You are saying so."

"Where do the were-rats come from?" Morlock asked. "Do they have a borough, like Dogtown or Apetown?"

"The were-rats are living on Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. Everyone is knowing that."

"I'm not from around here."

"I am almost forgetting. Even though you are smelling like a never-wolf."

By now they had reached Runaiaklendon Tower. Morlock was hoping for a moment or two of distraction as they disembarked and reembarked on the funicular car-but they didn't disembark at all; the guards kept their seat and the tower crew hustled the car and its passengers from the Twine- Runaiaklendon line to the Runaiaklendon-Nekkuklendon line.

By now Morlock's cupped right hand was resting lightly on the manacle binding his thigh. If he could open that lock, it would effectively free his hand …and give him a weapon, as the leg manacle swung on the end of a short chain might do a lot of damage in the right hand (that is, Morlock's).

Unfortunately, it was no good. The wire rasped audibly against the metal of the manacle. Morlock could hear it, and he knew the two werewolf watchers heard something, too: their ears seemed to twitch. He moved his hand away from the manacle in a way he hoped did not look furtive. He would have to wait until there was more noise and less alertness.

The noise came at every changeover, but unfortunately the guards' alertness increased then also. When they were riding up the final line, from Iuiunioklendon to Wuruklendon, Morlock had to admit to himself that he would not be able to free himself before he arrived at his place of execution.

The funicular anchor on Wuruklendon was the lowest of all-not even a tower, really, just a raised platform. The door of the car was opened from the outside, and white-haired Okhurokratu, all friendliness dropped, stood and gestured with his spear at the door.

Morlock stood and walked out the door into the late-morning sun.

On the platform the crew was standing well clear of him, fearful looks on their faces. Around the anchor-station on the ground was a small army of campaign volunteers, divided into companies of the Sardhluun (black-andgreen tunics), the Neyuwuleiuun (red-and-green tunics) and the Aruukaiaduun (resplendent in blue and gold). They were armed, also, and their weapons were in their hands.

Wurnafenglu stood at the head of the Sardhluun volunteers. "Come down, Khretvarrgliu, come down!" he cried. "We have an errand at the Stone Tree!"

The Sardhluun werewolves cheered him enthusiastically, the others of the Alliance less so.

"That's our next First Wolf, partner," Okhurokratu remarked quietly to Snellingu behind Morlock. "And I hate that guy."

"I am not liking this," the scar-faced partner replied. "I am being glad the Sardhluun dogs will be doing the actual kill."

"What's to like? It's a job, partner. Citizens don't have to like their jobs; they just have to do them."

Morlock walked down the wooden steps, trying to conceal the wire in his hands without seeming to conceal anything.

This station was different from the others. Most of the gears were underground, but one set was exposed to the outer air, just below the platform. He gazed hungrily at it, and couldn't help speculating on how their efficiency might be increased.

The slaves working the wheels on the upper level looked up from their work and saw him as he descended. He recognized none of them, but they seemed to recognize him; some seemed to be muttering kree-laow. He nodded at them and turned away toward his enemies.

The line of weapons bristled as the volunteers lifted them threateningly against him. He looked at them, rattled his chain, and smiled. Some of the ones nearby turned their eyes away and seemed embarrassed. But no one lowered a weapon.

The volunteers surrounded Morlock like an honor guard, the nearest ones a spear's-length distance from him on every side. He walked among them and tried to see past them.

Wuruklendon was strangely like a wilderness. If anyone had ever lived there, it was so long ago as to leave no traces. There was underbrush and small trees-and rising over all a great gray branching structure that stood against the misty blue sky: the Stone Tree. It did look like a leafless tree, but Morlock guessed it had been built, rather than grown. The ends of the branches seemed to trace out three-dimensional representations of higherspace polytopes. He would have been interested to know if the branches changed position over time, but he doubted that anyone within hearing distance would answer his question.

Not far from the trunklike base of the Stone Tree was a dark hole in the ground, bordered by a crumbling stone wall. The Well of Shadows, no doubt.

Beyond the well, the ground fell steeply away and the eastern slope was littered with the shapes of tombs, mausoleums, and monuments all the way down to the hilly plain at the base of Wuruyaaria's mountain. This was the necropolis of the city, where wealthy and wellborn citizens honored their dead.

Between the well and the tree was a wooden platform with three levels.

The volunteers parted, and Morlock was prodded with spears to step forward and climb the scaffold to the highest platform, where there were leg manacles on chains that were nailed to the wood.

Once there he turned and looked out at the crowd gathering for the rally, and the execution.

A volunteer in the green-and-black tunic of the Sardhluun had followed Morlock up the stairs. With a grim look on his face, he knelt down and fastened the manacles to Morlock's ankles. Then he stood and looked Morlock in the eye.

"So much for you, Khretvarrgliu," he said. "My brother died in the Vargulleion on New Year's Night."

"I hope I killed him," Morlock said.

The Sardhluun volunteer's long face worked, as if he were trying to spit, but could not quite manage it.

"If your mouth is dry," Morlock said, "perhaps Wurnafenglu can moisten it for you."

It was a version of an insult he had heard Lakkasulakku shout at Hlupnafenglu on one high-spirited afternoon recently. He had no clear idea what it meant. But the Sardhluun volunteer obviously did. He staggered backward; one foot missed a stair, and he tumbled down the long wooden scaffold to the bottom.

A small, ugly victory on the way to an even uglier defeat. Wurnafenglu looked at the fallen Sardhluun volunteer, who was carried away unmoving, looked up at Morlock, and smiled, exposing all of his white sharp teeth. He pointed at the sky and turned away, still smiling. Morlock spent some time wondering what he had meant. Enjoy your last noon. Your time is short. The eclipse is coming. Something like that, perhaps.

The three gnyrrands of the Alliance had gathered on the third platform, along with their reeves and cantors. Citizens without colors or weapons were gathering to watch the rally, but they were still outnumbered by the sea of armed and uniformed volunteers. The Alliance had found so much success with their last rally that they were taking no chances at all with this one. If the outliers and the Goweiteiuun showed up, the gnyrrands and cantors would be killed, with as many of their volunteers as seemed necessary. The election would end today. So ran the rumor of the crowd as it reached Morlock, standing alone on the high scaffold. His hand rested naturally on the manacle binding his thigh.

Wurnafenglu was forcefully asserting his right to speak for the entire Alliance before the execution. The other two gnyrrands of the Alliance seemed unhappy about this, but the one in Aruukaiaduun colors was a nonentity, not even addressed with respect by his own cantors, and the Neyuwuleiuun gnyrrand lacked Wurnafenglu's fierce hunger for the crowd. Also, they were constrained by the time, if they were really trying to orchestrate Morlock's execution with an eclipse-and time was certainly an issue: one of the reeves had mounted a sundial on the corner of the platform, and was constantly consulting it.

Presently, Wurnafenglu mounted to the second platform and began to speak. His speech was about the grief and the glory of being a solitary citizen of Wuruyaaria. From solitude came strength and courage; from unity, weakness and fear. But when the strong united with the strong bravely to oppose the cowering weak, were they not creating a kind of disunity that led to greater strength? But if some would weave the city into a disharmonious unity, weakening its strength, then the city must defend itself by cutting that part of itself out, like a gangrenous limb. So Wurnafenglu reasoned with his audience, taking both speaking parts.

The reeve watching the sundial made a significant gesture.

Two other reeves opened a long box: in it lay a long spear, painted black and green. Beside it glittered Tyrfing, unsheathed and unbound in any way that Morlock could see.

Someone in the crowd shouted that the sun was disappearing. Everyone looked up, including Morlock. Cries of wonder and fear swept the crowd, and Morlock was not immune from the same feelings. He wished, at some time in his long life, he had spent some time understanding the mysteries of eclipses, the subtle gestures of the stars, all the open secrets the sky unveiled every night.

Wurnafenglu shouted in a commanding voice, "And so the sun itself demands the death of the never-wolf who poisoned the city!" This drew the eyes of most, if not all, of the crowd back to him. One of the reeves, the one wearing Neyuwuleiuun colors, handed Wurnafenglu the spear dark with Sardhluun black and green.

Morlock pulled the unlocked manacle free from his leg. He reached out his still-manacled hand and called loudly, "Tyrfing!"

In the faded light of the vanishing sun, the monochrome blade flew glittering through the air to Morlock's outstretched hand.

Wurnafenglu gaped for a moment, then realized what had happened. He charged up the stairway to the execution scaffold.

Morlock shattered the shackles on his right ankle and then Wurnafenglu was upon him. Morlock swiftly brought Tyrfing up to parry Wurnafenglu's spear.

Tyrfing's edge sheared away a strip of black-and-green pigment from the spear's shaft. Underneath, the spear gleamed like glass.

"Your own work," Wurnafenglu whispered. "Think of that when I stab you through the heart with it."

Morlock didn't answer. With their weapons bound together, Wurnafenglu was clawing at his face. Morlock reached out with his ghostly hand and inserted empty fingers into Wurnafenglu's right eye socket.

The gnyrrand screamed and the day went dark. The disc of the sun had completely disappeared, and the three moons stood forth in the suddenly dark sky like unequal glaring eyes.

Werewolves rippled and howled in the cascade of sudden moonlight, assuming the cloak of their animal forms.

Wurnafenglu did not have the discipline to resist the night shape. His wolf's shadow rose over him and recast him in its image.

In the moment of transition, Morlock's ghostly hand tore a deep furrow through Wurnafenglu's being, doing fearful damage to both his shadows.

Wurnafenglu fell heavily on the stairs. His head was half wolf, half man; his legs were crooked and lupine; he lifted clawed but human hands at the uncaring sky.

In horror at himself, at what he had become, Wurnafenglu lay aghast in the brief night.

Morlock shattered the manacle on his left ankle. He stepped forward and struck down with Tyrfing as if it were an executioner's sword.

Wurnafenglu's monstrous head fell from his bristling severed neck.

To inflict death with Tyrfing was always nightmarish, but Wurnafenglu's death in the terror of his distortion was a kind of damnation. It nearly carried Morlock's spirit with it into the darkness, and Morlock fought for long moments to keep his life in his ailing body.

In this trancelike state he seemed to see the Strange Gods gathering in the sudden night by the Well of Shadows. They got on their hands and knees and drank from it like dogs.

Then the moment passed and he was wholly himself again, Wurnafenglu's death dismissed, the Strange Gods no longer visible.

He unbent himself and looked out at the crowd.

The Alliance had planned his execution to coincide with the eclipse, so that the terror and ecstasy of transition would be yoked in the minds of the citizens with the Alliance's victory. The result had been somewhat different.

Morlock held his bloody sword toward the sky and shouted, "Citizens of Wuruyaaria! I await your next champion."

The gnyrrands, reeves, and cantors still on the scaffold scampered or rolled down the stairs to the ground, hampered by their clothing in their night shapes.

Dim misty bars of sunlight fell from the sky, breaking the darkness. The eclipse was ending. Another cascade of transitions spread through the crowd, howls becoming screams as their human shadows fell on them and forced them to resume their day shapes.

The monuments of the necropolis also seemed to be changing shape, moving up the long slope. Morlock stared at them, bemused, until he understood what he was seeing. It wasn't the monuments. It was an army of werewolves who had been hiding among them, waiting for this moment of confusion to strike their enemies.

They came in every shape: men and women trailed by wolvish shadows, wolves paired with crouching human shadows, and every grade of semiwolf in-between. But they had clearly resisted both transitions, hiding from the sky among the mausoleums, and they came with clear minds, bared teeth, and drawn blades. They wore the red and blue of the Goweiteiuun and the green and gold of the outliers, and they fell on their enemies of the Alliance.

Rokhlenu, wearing the day shape, ran in the vanguard. Beside him, bearing a green-and-gold banner in one hand and a glass sword in the other, was Wuinlendhono.

Morlock charged down the stairs of the scaffold, kicking and stabbing at stray werewolves as he went. Shouted chants were rising on the edge of the crowd toward the funicular station-perhaps a rally of the Alliance. He could do the most good (or the most harm, depending on how one looked at it) if he joined with the outliers.

The green-and-gold wave was sweeping toward him also, Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono at its crest. They met, laughing, by the Well of Shadows.

"You are in good time, my friends," Morlock said.

Rokhlenu stared at him with haunted blue eyes. "We couldn't attack before," he began to explain. "The-"

"I meant what I said," Morlock said firmly. "No banter."

"Ghost no," gasped Wuinlendhono. "No banter. I hate banter."

They turned and led the Union werewolves in a charge straight through the chaotic clusters of the Alliance volunteers. Many died; many fled; the spectators to the rally had long since run off to a safe distance.

Long before they reached the funicular, they heard chanting. It was in neither Moonspeech nor Sunspeech nor any language that they spoke, but Morlock at least recognized it: "Kree-laow! Kree-laow! Kree-laow!" The slaves of the funicular station had risen in rebellion. They were attacking the spectators and Alliance werewolves from behind with their chains as weapons. Many of the slaves had already died, their bodies scattered about the plain of Wuruklendon, but others were still streaming out of their subterranean tower, eager to take up the fight.

"Rokhlenu!" shouted Morlock, when he saw this through the dust and blood of the election rally. "I need to take the funicular slaves out of here. Will that hurt your Union?"

"Take them," Rokhlenu said instantly. "Get as many as you can clear. We'll meet you back in Outlier Town."

"We may meet there," said Morlock. He was thinking about Mount Dhaarnaiarnon, and were-rats, and Ulugarriu.

"Oh?" said Rokhlenu, obviously surprised, but there was no time to talk the matter over. "In any case, good luck to you, my friend."

"And to you, and all of yours," said Morlock, and they parted there in the midst of battle, much as they had met.

Morlock ran straight at the ragged line of slaves and shouted in Sunspeech, "Do you understand me? Do you know me?"

"Kree-laow!" they shouted, saluting him with their bloody chains. "Kreelaow!"

"Do you understand me?"

"We understand you, Khretvarrgliu," said one in Sunspeech. "This is the hour of vengeance and atonement. Where do you wish us to die?"

"This is the hour of escape. We will make our way down the face of the city and free as many of our people as we can. If we die, we die, but if we escape we may live-for a little while," he added, thinking of his own illness.

"That may not be, Khretvarrgliu, for armed werewolves guard the downward ways."

"Let me through!"

They parted and Morlock dashed to the edge of Wuruklendon.

A band of dark-coated City Watchers stood blocking the stairways down to Iuiunioklendon.

"Citizens," said Morlock, "give way or die. I will not tell you twice."

Some of the watchers did in fact flee down the stairs at his approach. But others stayed, led by a white-haired werewolf and one with a scarred face.

Morlock beat the spear blade of the scar-faced guard aside and passed Tyrfing through his heart. The death-shock was grievous, causing Morlock's knees to buckle, and the white-haired guard cried out with rage and made as if to stab him. But then the guard went down before a tide of chain-swinging slaves; his cries of anger changed to fear and then fell silent forever.

Morlock straightened himself and looked about. The guards who had not fled were dead or dying.

"We go down and out," he said, as clearly as he could. "Mesa by mesa, tower by tower. We rescue our people as we go. If we get separated, fight your way out and flee south; all will head that way who can."

"But what of atonement, Khretvarrgliu?" said one.

Morlock had no idea what they were talking about, but he didn't want to admit it, lest he lose authority in their eyes. "Dying is easy," he said. "It is over in a moment. Atone by living. Live as well as you can, for all who have died. It is all you can do."

This seemed to satisfy them. They armed themselves from the fallen guards and began to move down the winding stone stairways, the first stones of an avalanche that would sweep the city clear of slaves.

Morlock went with them. But first he paused to cover the hands of two dead guards: one with white hair, the other with a scarred face. If it was important to atone, and if death was an atonement, they had atoned.

Chapter Twenty-nine: Election Results

Rokhlenu watched Morlock go, then turned back to the rally, where the fighting had broken up into a chaos of separate combats, clouds of dust dimming the colors and scents of the factions.

"We'll never find the Alliance leaders in this mess," Rokhlenu remarked to Wuinlendhono.

"You want my advice?"

"Yes."

"Don't bother with the leaders. Better that they survive today, hated and toothless. Who'll vote for them now?"

"Right. I'd rather kill the volunteers, anyway."

His wife looked at him in some surprise.

"I want them to know," Rokhlenu said grimly, "that if they march to an election as if it were a war, a war is exactly what they'll get. The Aruukaiaduun would never have put my family's heads on poles if they hadn't known a private army was marching with them. It won't be so easy for them to recruit one, next time."

"Yurr. Well, if nothing else, it thins out the voters committed to the other side."

In fact, there was not much more fighting and no more killing. The Alliance leaders had quietly absconded down the necropolis slope once the Union charge had passed by, and when the Alliance werewolves realized this they began fleeing themselves, or tearing off their colors and surrendering themselves.

They let the Alliance citizens keep their weapons and collect their dead. They sent the Union dead and wounded back to the outlier settlement by the necropolis road: Rokhlenu didn't want to make a display of their losses, which were not nothing.

But he did want to make a display of their victory. Both packs of Union werewolves raised their banners high and ran together in good order down the winding stairs to Iuiunioklendon market square.

There the Goweiteiuun citizens parted company: most of them had dens on Iuiunioklendon. "And it would be a long walk back up, thanks to your friend," said Aaluindhonu, the Goweiteiuun gnyrrand, as they parted company. He gestured up at the motionless funicular and laughed.

"We should call for an election soonest," Wuinlendhono said. "I think we have the bite for it."

"Tomorrow after sunset, I suggest," Aaluindhonu replied, looking at both Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono to see if they approved. When they nodded, he said, "I'll send a message to the First Singer when I get back to my den. He'll have plenty of time to send heralds to sing the news tonight, and shout it tomorrow."

They said good-bye, and the outliers continued onward and downward.

Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono didn't talk much as they walked; they were both tired, and the head of a crowd was no place for a conversation of consequence. But once he asked her, as they passed the abandoned funicular tower on Iuiunioklendon, "Do you think I was wrong to tell Morlock to take the slaves out?"

"No," said Wuinlendhono. "For one thing, he'd have done it anyway. But I think the political harm will go to the Aruukaiaduun. They played a rough game and lost. Everyone knows it. They will have to hire workmen to open the funicular ways again, but no one will thank them for it; everyone knows they would rather have slaves."

But it was clear, long before they reached Twinegate, that at least one of the ways would not be reopening soon. The anchor-gate in Twinegate Plaza was bright with flames and dark with smoke in the afternoon shadows. Someone had set the wooden mechanisms inside the tower on fire.

They stood on the verge of Runaiaklendon mesa and watched the tower burn for a while.

"Morlock has written `I was here' on the face of the city in letters of fire," Rokhlenu said. "People will be reading it there for a long time."

"No doubt," said Wuinlendhono. "That tower isn't going to stand much longer. Let's go home through the Dogtown Gate. We don't want to be punctuated by falling periods."

Hours later, Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono were alone at last, settling down for a brief nap before sunset, when she asked, "You don't think you'll see him again, do you?"

"I wouldn't bet either way," said Rokhlenu. "Not on him. But I don't think he expects it. He's old; he's sick. If he can get the never-wolves to safety, it may be the last thing he can do. His future is closed in, and he's out of tomorrows. I'd loan him some of ours, if I could."

"Over my day-barking body you would," Wuinlendhono replied, and bit him somewhere he'd notice.

Morlock was not, in fact, shepherding the never-wolves to safety. He had sent them away south to fend for themselves, and he was, at sunset, rounding the edge of the city's necropolis and headed for the slopes of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon.

He had felt bad about parting company with the ex-slaves, but most of them had not seemed to expect his help. They were natives of the northern plains and knew the region better than he did. Also, some of them kept referring to atonement and some sin by their ancestors in the distant past, and he found it hard to stay patient with this. He had done things since noon that he felt some guilt for; if the never-wolves weren't committing their own misdeeds by now, it was long past time that they start.

As for him, he had to untie the knot of mystery surrounding the murder of his friends and find vengeance for them. He did not honestly think that he would succeed, but if he were even to try, he would have to confront Ulugarriu. Morlock was wondering if he might be a were-rat, or perhaps a colony of were-rats, passing the name Ulugarriu down generation after generation to create the legend of an immortal maker. But if he was not a were-rat, or among the were-rats, the were-rats certainly knew him and were working with him.

Morlock walked around the marsh south of the outlier settlement and came at his cave through the silver-tainted hills to the east.

He was surprised and pleased to see a sallow-faced Lakkasulakku hard at work over the forge, folding and refolding glass for weapons.

"Good evening, apprentice," he said, when the young citizen leaped up at his approach.

"Khretvarrgliu!" shouted Lakkasulakku. "They said they were going to execute you!"

"They tried. They won't again, I think."

"Then the Union won the rally?"

"I think so, though I left before it was done. I am here only to collect a few things and leave again."

"I hope-I hope you don't mind…. They needed weapons for the rally, and I thought-"

"I don't mind. Everything in the cave is yours as much as mine, save Tyrfing alone, because of the burden that goes with it."

"Chieftain," Lakkasulakku said, bowing his head.

Morlock pounded him on the shoulder. Together they gathered a cloak, some cold-lights and provisions, and a few other things Morlock thought might be handy. Before the sun disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill, he was off again, waving farewell to Lakkasulakku, who stood disconsolate before the mouth of the cave. Morlock never expected to see him again and, as a matter of fact, he never did.

Sunset found him on the lower slopes of the volcano. He was tempted to drive onward, but he knew too much about mountains to try ascending one in the dark. Also, he was deathly tired. He wrapped himself in the cloak, although the air was still hot, and lay down. He was awake for a long time, looking at a strange fiery light burning on the undersides on the incoming clouds. It was odd, as if the city were on fire and the clouds were reflecting it. But the city was not on fire.

The next morning, he ate some bread and drank some water, because he knew he must, and began the long climb to the mountain's summit. It took him most of the day, and throughout it he kept alert for the sound and sight-even the smell-of the were-rats.

Evening's red light found him lurking under the lip of the crater, above the great moon-clock in the mountain's face. He kept hearing fugitive sounds he thought were were-rats' voices. But whatever way he turned, he seemed to get no closer to them, and they often roamed farther away.

He wondered if they might have nests inside the crater. The idea took him up to the edge of the crater.

The sun disappeared beyond the eastern rim of the world. Two moons stood out abruptly in the night sky: Chariot was burning darkly on the red rim of the western horizon: it would set soon, and summer would begin. Trumpeter stood somber above: in a few days, it would set, too, and the night skies would be dark until Horseman returned. Morlock watched, his quest for were-rats forgotten, as Chariot slid down beyond the eastern edge of the world and its light was lost.

"Khul gradara!" Morlock said, when Chariot was gone. "Good-bye, moon."

He turned back to the vast echoing pit of the volcano crater. He thought he heard some sort of sound coming from it. He kept his eyes fixed on the darkness in the crater, hoping he might see something as his eyes grew used to the dark.

Something pushed him, hard, on the back of both legs and he tumbled helplessly into the crater. He heard were-rats chitter in triumph behind him, but he still could not see them. He slid down the surface of the crater and, before he could recover, fell into the open pit at the bottom.

He was falling straight into the mountain. Shadows spun around him as he fell.

At about the time Morlock was briefly encountering the were-rats, Rokhlenu was acclaimed First Singer of Wuruyaaria.

Heralds had been crying the election up and down the mesas of the city all night and day, and by sunset the surviving candidates and all citizens interested in voting were gathered on the great plain west of the city. The crowd was gathering around a dais built near the Bitter Road. On the dais were five couches, and in front of the couches stood five citizens, their necks a-bristle with honor-teeth: the incumbents of the Innermost Pack.

Rokhlenu and Aaluindhonu, with their reeves and cantors and supporters, stood on the south side of the road. The gnyrrands for the Alliance and their fellow candidates and supporters stood on the north side of the road. The candidates wore no colors or scents, but their supporters carried the pack banners high. As citizens arrived at the assembly, they joined one side or the other. They also had the option of standing aloof, but tonight few were availing themselves of this.

In fact, few stood by the Alliance candidates. Long before the sun set, it was clear that the election was a landslide for the Union. An election in Wuruyaaria could be a drawn-out business, with voters changing sides through the night as bite, or the perception of bite (which was the same thing, really, in the hour of choice), shifted from one pack to another. It could be complicated by the fact that one citizen's bite, and consequently his vote, might be greater than another's.

But tonight there was no question: the citizens were almost uniformly rejecting the Alliance. To be brutal, criminal, and reckless was one thing. To fail was another, and Wuruyaaria's citizens had no mercy on it. The only citizens standing with the Alliance were the candidates' closest relatives, ones who could not vote with the opposition (or stay away) without shaming their blood.

The sun set.

All citizens turned eastward. The moonlit tide of transformations swept over them, and they cried out in voices human and lupine, bidding Chariot farewell and summer welcome.

When the major moon had set, when the citizens had recovered from their transformations, Aaluindhonu gave Rokhlenu a wolvish grin and trotted over to the dais, where the retiring singers of the Innermost Pack were leaping down from the dais.

He congratulated the retiring First Singer, an old acquaintance of his from the Neyuwuleiuun named Skuiulaalu.

Skuiulaalu thanked him loudly, then more privately wished him good luck: he would not have chosen to take the high couch at this strange and dreadful time. Citizens said the world was ending, and Skuiulaalu half believed them.

Aaluindhonu laughed, skipped past the old singers, and leapt up to the dais. He prepared to mount the high couch of the First Singer.

There was a storm of protests from the crowd. It broke forth without warning, and it was intense, furious. It raged on both sides of the road. Neither the Alliance nor the Union voters would accept Aaluindhonu as First Singer. The Alliance disliked him, and neither side respected him.

Instead, the voters chanted or howled the name of Rokhlenu.

This was not as the gnyrrands had arranged it between themselves and their fellow candidates. But the electorate was a fickle master, not under anyone's control. Strictly speaking, they had no say in the matter, but it was a foolish politician or a brave one who defied the unanimous wish of his constituents.

Rokhlenu met Aaluindhonu's angry eye and tilted his head sideways: an inquiry. Aaluindhonu hesitated, then lowered his gaze: a submission.

Rokhlenu leapt forward, bounded up to the dais, jumped atop the high couch, and stood there, looking out at the crowd.

The electors howled their approval. Even the Alliance voters seemed caught up in the moment. It was a triumph to make songs of, a tale that would be told for a thousand years. Half a year ago, Rokhlenu had been a prisoner in the Vargulleion. Tonight he was the First Singer of Wuruyaaria.

Least moved, of everyone there, was probably Rokhlenu himself. It would have meant more if his father and brothers had been there. Ghost, it would have meant more if Morlock had been there. His beloved was there, proudly waving a green-and-gold banner, and that meant a great deal. It meant more than the rest of the crowd rolled together in a carpet. Meeting her, mating her: that was his true triumph in this half year, the triumph of his life. That was what he would make songs of, when he had time.

When the crowd's shouting began to subside, Rokhlenu summoned the candidates they had agreed on to the Innermost Pack: two from the Goweiteiuun cantors and his own reeve, Yaarirruuiu. The Goweiteiuun were to have a majority of singers on the Innermost Pack, in return for their welcoming the outliers into the treaty. That seemed to be a settled question when the voters saluted him as First Singer, but he was determined to keep his deal with Aaluindhonu.

Rokhlenu's first song as First Singer was brief. He promised two things, though. First, there would be a new source of food in the outliers' colony on the Bitter Water; they could not control the weather, but they would not sit idle while it killed them. That was the behavior of a dumb beast, not a werewolf. Second, there would be justice for every citizen. He repeated that: justice for every citizen, no matter what his bite.

"Where are the prisoners of the Khuwuleion?" shouted someone-a semiwolf still wearing the day shape. Others took up the cry, in Moonspeech and Sunspeech.

Rokhlenu silenced them with a commanding howl. The question, he sang, had been asked, and asked again. It would never be forgotten. Soon it would be answered. There would be justice for every citizen.

Then he dismissed them to their celebrations. The first night of summer had come; the Choosing had ended.

Wuinlendhono and her mate spent the night going to other citizens' celebrations. They finally got back to her lair-tower just before dawn.

While they were grooming each other before lying down, she met his eye and whispered a question: Was he unhappy? They had succeeded, against very long odds. He was due a little triumph. Was anything wrong?

Rokhlenu had been singing the role of a magnanimous victor all night, and it was a relief to tell what he really felt. But he sang, in the end, he was glad: no one could take the outliers away from her now, not after what she had achieved-

-what they had achieved, she snapped.

-what she had achieved. And they would be together now, forever. That was the greatest victory of all.

She told him to prove it, and their minds turned to other matters.

The next morning he had not slept much, but his mind was clear as ice (which he wondered if he would ever see again: it was another murky glaring day). He and Yaarirruuiu woke early so that they could climb the long stone stairs up to Iuiunioklendon, where the first meeting of the Innermost Pack traditionally took place. Aaluindhonu had commandeered the audience hall of the Goweiteiuun's Inner Pack for the occasion.

The first issue they tackled was the admission of the outliers under the name of the Ekhaiasuteiuun ("the border-runners"), as chosen by a majority of the outlier citizens. A copy of the treaty was sent down to the outlier settlement for the First Wolf to sign.

As the other singers began to rise from their couches, Rokhlenu said, "And now for the main business. I want the Aruukaiaduun gnyrrand and the Werowance of the Sardhluun arrested."

This quelled anyone's interest in leaving. Three of the singers were standing with their mouths open, but no song or speech came from them.

Aaluindhonu smiled wisely, as if he had been expecting something like this from the hotheaded young First Singer and said, "Understandable, but quite impossible."

"Essential," Rokhlenu disagreed.

"What charges will you prefer?"

There was a smiling ambiguity in Aaluindhonu's question that Rokhlenu disliked intensely. He said bluntly, "The Werowance, as the representative of the Sardhluun Pack, is guilty of theft from the city. They took money every month for the feeding and housing of prisoners they had sold as slaves or butchered for meat. That's a crime against the city, against every citizen."

"Subject to a certain interpretation-"

"That is nonsense, my friend, and you know it. The disbursements were marked in the city accounts `For the maintenance of prisoners.' The dead do not require maintenance."

"Yurr. I see what you mean. You have actually read the city accounts?"

"Skuiulaalu sent them to my residence last night, of course. I read the relevant parts as I walked up here this morning. Yaarirruuiu has them, at least a portion of them."

"You have hit the ground running, I see. It bites me to admit this, but I think our fellow citizens made the right choice. But what is it you have against the gnyrrand of the Aruukaiaduun? What is his name again?"

It turned out no one there could remember his name. But Yaarirruuiu had some notes from the campaign with him, tucked into the city account books (he had held them while Rokhlenu read them), and after consulting them he could tell his fellow singers that the gnyrrand of the Aruukaiaduun was named Norianduiu.

"All right," Aaluindhonu continued smilingly, "what have you got against poor Norianduiu?"

"Murder. The Aruukaiaduun under his leadership secretly murdered my family. Their display of the severed heads as campaign banners at that damned rally was an open admission. My youngest brother had been dead less than an hour. You saw the head, Aaluindhonu: what do you think?"

The old politician's smile was finally gone. "Yes," he said finally. "Yes, you've got something there. But won't it look like you're using your position for private vengeance?"

"No. Because if I were, I'd go after Rywudhaariu. Everyone knows that he pulls the strings in the Aruukaiaduun Pack. But Norianduiu was legally responsible for the campaign, so he will be charged. I'm putting this to a vote. I want unanimous support. If I don't get it, I'm going to resign my office and kill those rat-bastards with my own teeth and claws. Because if the secret murder of citizens is not a crime, if theft from the city is not a crime, if treating female citizens like meat for export is not a crime, then nothing is a crime because there is no law. And if there is no law, there is no city. Say your say; do it now."

They all agreed to the arrests. But Aaluindhonu added hesitantly (no longer smiling, thank ghost), "But, Rokhlenu, a suggestion."

"Yes?"

"You should not direct the arrests or prosecution yourself. Let me do it. I can get justice without appearing vindictive. It will be better all around that way."

Rokhlenu had never found himself able to trust Aaluindhonu; they had been thrown together by circumstance rather than choice. But he did trust Yaarirruuiu, and he saw his former reeve approved the plan, so he nodded. "Good. I'll leave it to you, then."

"There's something else we could do to diminish the appearance of a grudge," one of the other Goweiteiuun singers said-a citizen named Naaleiyaleiu. He was unremarkable, except for his overuse of the pungently piney pack-scent of the Goweiteiuun. "The Neyuwuleiuun are fending off some attack on their northern colony-the place that served as a hunting ground and a station for their airships. If you take some fighters and defend the Neyuwuleiuun, it will show this is not about the election."

Yaarirruuiu was nodding at this, but asked, "What kind of attack? We don't want to lose our First Singer on his first day on the job."

They all smiled at that. Some laughed.

"Werebears, I'll bet," the other Goweiteiuun singer said. (Dhuskudheiu was his name.) "There have been lots of them roaming around the fringes of the city."

The smiles faded. Werebears were nothing to laugh about.

"I'll go and reconnoiter," Rokhlenu said thoughtfully. "If it looks too risky, we'll get out and come back with a stronger force."

They all agreed, and on that note the Innermost Pack ended its first meeting. Rokhlenu and Yaarirruuiu left, hauling the city account books, deep in conversation. llhuskudheiu departed on some mission of his ownpossibly lunch. Aaluindhonu started to go, paused by Naaleiyaleiu's couch a moment as if he would speak, twitched his nose, then hurried on.

Naaleiyaleiu was left alone in the chamber, chittering to himself. Eventually, his jaw swung open like a gate, exposing the long-nosed pink wererat within. Naaleiyaleiu's hand reached into a pocket and grabbed a jar of scented oil. Naaleiyaleiu's hand doused the were-rat in Naaleiyaleiu's head generously with the scent, and then did the same for the were-rats controlling the other parts of the body.

Naaleiyaleiu had a more difficult job than most of the meat-puppets scattered through the city. But it was nearly over, thank Ulugarriu: so, at least, Naaleiyaleiu's crew chittered hopefully to each other.

Rokhlenu left later that afternoon. He picked a crew of nine irredeemables to go with him, and Yaarirruuiu was not among them, much to the latter's annoyance.

"Look," Rokhlenu said, when he had heard his fellow singer's fifteenth reason why he should come along. "I need you around town to keep an eye or two on that slippery Aaluindhonu." And that convinced him.

But he did take Lekkativengu and eight other survivors from the fifth and fourth floors of the Vargulleion. And, on reflection, he stopped by Morlock's cave before he left and had Morlock's remaining apprentice, a reedy little citizen with a big nose, get him two of those nightmarish glass spears with a silver core in the head.

He disliked even the feeling of being around them, and when he rejoined his fighters he knew that they felt the same way; their faces fell and they started to twitch. So he explained to them about the spears. His thinking was: werebears don't like wounds from silver any better than werewolves do. His fighters agreed, but they still weren't enthusiastic.

To placate his fighters, Rokhlenu stopped by Ruiulanhro's poison shop and picked up some spearheads imbued with wolfbane. That cheered them up a little: citizens didn't get to use poison weapons very often, but in their former lives as criminals many irredeemables had been fond of them.

It was well after dark before they got anywhere near the Neyuwuleiuun's northern colony, and that was intentional on Rokhlenu's part. He wanted half his crew to wear the night shape, the better to sense danger, half of them to retain the day shape, so that they could use weapons. But as it turned out, only Rokhlenu himself and ape-fingered Runhuiulanhu had practiced the discipline of resisting the call of the night shape. Rokhlenu wasn't happy about it, but it was his own fault: he had picked the crew. He and Runhuiulanhu divided the weapons between them, abandoning what they could not carry.

They ran onward, past the western shoulder of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. The great moon-clock in its face seemed almost to be watching them, but Rokhlenu dismissed the idea impatiently as it occurred to him.

It looked almost as if the plains north of Dhaarnaiarnon's foothills were on fire. There was a sullen brooding redness there that shifted and shiftednot quickly enough for fire, not steady enough.

Rokhlenu almost turned back, then. There was something odd about this. The air around them was furnace hot. No one would have reported this as an attack of werebears. It was beginning to look like a trap. Certainly he wanted to go back and have a long conversation with his fellow member of the Innermost Pack, the scent-addicted Naaleiyaleiu.

In the end he decided to go onward. This, whatever it was, might have something to do with the freakish weather bedeviling the city. It might be a cause of the weather; it might be an effect. But this near to the city, it certainly represented a danger. He was now the First Singer of Wuruyaaria. He led his fighters on.

Rather than head straight onto the plain where the red shifting mystery lay, he climbed the last foothill to the north to reconnoiter. His fighters followed him up.

From the ridge at the top of the hill he looked down on the plain and the monstrous thing it contained.

It was like a bug, he decided-a helgrammite or many-legger, grown to incredible length. It sprawled from east to west without any obvious ending. It was coal black in color, but around the edges of its carapace it glowed with sullen red light.

Perhaps it was more like a plant than an insect. It seemed to be sinking roots deep into the ground, all along its length that he could see. And it had more than one branch.

"Chieftain," said Runhuiulanhu urgently, gesturing behind them. "Look!"

Rokhlenu looked and disliked what he saw. Two branches of the thing, whatever it was, were closing around the hill they stood on.

"Who's fastest?" he snapped. "Lekkativengu and who else?"

"Taakhyteiu," said Runhuiulanhu, and there was general agreement.

"Lekkativengu. Taakhyteiu. As soon as I'm done talking, you get out of here. Get back and tell Wuinlendhono and Yaarirruuiu what you saw hereand no one else. Go."

The two werewolves fled down the southern slope toward the closing gap.

"You three: go with Runhuiulanhu. You three: come with me. Runhuiulanhu: each of us will take one branch. If it's a beast, we can fight it. If we can't kill it, we can at least keep it from killing our messengers. If we survive, so much the better. Get me?"

"Got you, Chief." Runhuiulanhu and his crew ran down to attack the branch curling around the hill from the west. Rokhlenu and his crew took the eastern branch.

Two of Rokhlenu's werewolves jumped straight at the nearest point of the eastern branch with reckless courage, one at a rootlike leg, the other at a lateral plate. They didn't seem to slow its progress at all, but they hung on for a moment or two, screaming. Then Trumpeter's dim moonlight could not heal them anymore and they burst into flame and died.

"God bite this damned thing!" Rokhlenu swore. He could hardly bear to close with it, the heat was so fierce; the boiling glass in Morlock's cave was nothing compared to it. He seized a poison-tipped spear and darted in close, slashing at one of the rootlike legs. A blue glowing mist emerged: what the beast used for blood, he supposed. Immediately rootlike tendrils reached out toward the blue glowing scar: to heal it, he guessed. He darted back in to widen the wound. The spear shattered in his hands, scattering red shards of molten metal. He jumped back, burned and cut by the hot metal, poisoned by its venom. He could feel it spreading in his veins from the wound.

He glanced over to see his last remaining comrade had been pierced through the eye by a metal fragment. He was as dead as if he had been stabbed with silver.

Silver. Rokhlenu remembered the dreadful weapon he carried. He drew it from the shoulder sling and stabbed the beast with it in the side, stabbing fiercely but without hope. He hated the thing, and he hated silver, and he wanted to use one hate to hurt the other.

And it did. The silver-cored glass spear shattered from the heat of the beast, but his slashing desperate cut opened up a long blue wound in the beast's side.

Nor was that all. Again, rootlike tendrils reached toward the wound. But so did several legs. They sank deep into the beast's own side. It was not trying to heal itself. Somehow, it was feeding on itself-struggling to consume the blue glowing fog that lay within itself. And he had slowed its progress, as it turned on itself.

Turned on itself. That was it. He could not defeat the thing, but it could and would defeat itself, if it could be wounded deeply enough.

He wondered if the messengers had gotten away. He looked up to see Lekkativengu standing alone and indecisive in the red-tinged moonlightbut beyond the closing ring of the beast's branches.

"Get out!" he screamed. "Get back! Runhuiulanhu, use the silver spear! Then get away!"

He did not see Runhuiulanhu, and wasn't even sure he was still alive. But Rokhlenu realized that he himself was already dead. If he could give his fighters a chance to get away, he owed them that.

He raised his hands toward dim uncaring Trumpeter and summoned the night shape upon himself.

When he arose as a wolf, shaking off his harness and tunic, time had passed. The narrow blue wound he had opened in the beast was nearly blocked by the beast's own hungry tentacles.

Rokhlenu leapt at the furnace-hot blast of the beast …and found the blue fog seeping from the beast was strangely cool. He planted his teeth on one of the ragged edges of the wound and pulled with all his strength. If he could kill it, or lure it into killing itself, his death might not be for nothing. It might save his beloved from dying the same way.

That was his last thought. There were no others. In a way, there never had been, none that mattered.

Chapter Thirty: Makers Meet

Morlock fell into the pit, and shadows spun around him as he fell. He thought at first they were birds, but when one passed without pain through his ghostly hand he realized they were impulse clouds.

Conditions were hostile in the extreme, and he had, perhaps, moments before his fall killed him. But he forced his mind into the discipline of vision. The world of matter fell away, and he was surrounded by clouds of intention and desire, bereft of any will to wield them.

Morlock wielded them. He wrapped the impulse clouds around him like a cloak, slowing his fall.

Time and the perception of time are altered in the experience of visionary rapture. Morlock had no idea how long he fell. He simply became aware, at some point, that he had struck the ground with some force. Not enough to kill him, he guessed, since his awareness was still anchored by his body.

With his Sight in its current decrepit state, it was even harder for him to dismiss a vision than to summon one. Slowly, deliberately, he rewove the ragged threads of his conscious awareness. As he became more and more aware of physical pain, he knew he was getting closer to escape from the vision that had saved his life.

He finally opened his eyes. The world was coal black, edged with burning red. Even without being in rapture, he could feel the swarms of impulse clouds surrounding him. If they had been water, he would have been drowning in them.

He sat up slowly. His body ached a bit, but all the parts that were still there still worked. Tyrfing was still strapped to his shoulder. If someone had tried to kill him, they had failed. He took his time about getting to his feet: there was no hurry, since no one seemed to be trying to kill him at the moment.

The light was dim and bloodred, coming from a distant source that (Morlock thought) was toward the east. Morlock had spent much of his life underground, and he thought he knew what the light was from. He reached into a pocket of his cloak and drew out a cold-light, tapping one end gently on the pommel of his sword to activate it. By its cold moonlike rays, Morlock picked his way through the field of boulders he found himself among, trending westward-at any rate, away from the fiery light.

He spent a long time stumbling about in the great chamber he found himself in at the base of the volcano. He did not find any vents or air currents that suggested to him a way out. He did form the tentative conclusion that the floor of the cavern, despite its unfinished appearance, was artificial, perhaps the roof to a cavern still further below. And he definitely discovered that it was littered with corpses. Some were relatively fresh; some skeletal; some mummified; several had turned to stone.

This was all very bad, Morlock thought. If he was going to a dangerous confrontation, he preferred to have a line of retreat ready. Still, there was at least one other possibility open.

Light footfalls approached him, over and among the boulders and littered corpses. He felt an incongruous lightness of spirit hearing these sounds: it had been centuries since he had heard their like. But they did indicate the presence of danger, so he hid the cold-light under his cloak.

The footfalls fell silent. Then Morlock heard them again: moving away this time, hesitantly at first, then with more confidence and speed. Morlock didn't try to keep up, knowing that was impossible, but did struggle to keep within earshot.

Presently they came closer to the source of the red light, and Morlock caught glimpses of his quarry against it. It was a tall beast, with shoulders about as high as Morlock's, with goatlike legs and body. It was most dangerous, of course, because of the long tapered horn that sprouted from its forehead.

The source of the fiery light was a river of molten stone. They were fairly close to it now, enough so that Morlock felt uncomfortably warm.

The unicorn began to wander aimlessly up and down the banks of the burning river. Morlock peered out from behind a boulder. There was a bridge, glittering white in its own light, that passed over the river. The unicorn was pacing up and down in front of the bridge, guarding it. The beast was bloodred, but for its black wisping beard and black-slotted eyes, but apart from that it resembled the Swift People Morlock had known (mostly from a distance) in the mountains of his youth.

It was Ulugarriu's doorkeeper, Morlock guessed, to keep out any unwanted visitor who made his way down here.

The unicorn stepped lightly over to the bank of the river and lowered its head to drink from the molten stone.

Morlock thought this a good time to try the bridge. He left his boulder behind and stealthily made his way toward the bridgehead.

Not stealthily enough, though. The unicorn lifted its head and swung about on guard. Fire dripped from its black beard; the black slots in its red-onred eyes fixed on Morlock; its red spiraling horn was aimed directly at his chest.

It did not charge. When Morlock moved to one side, it moved to keep its horn pointed at Morlock. When he took a step forward, it took a step forward. When he stepped back, it did nothing.

Morlock was puzzled. Before, when he was so far distant from the bridge that he couldn't see it, the unicorn had seen him or sensed him and moved to attack. Now that he was actually near the bridge the unicorn guarded, its behavior was merely defensive. It would not let him pass, but it did not attack.

Then he realized: it was the cold-light, of course. He pulled it out from under his cloak-and was nearly stabbed through the heart by the unicorn, bearing down on him, glaring with silent rage. Morlock swiftly hid the light again. The unicorn stopped in its tracks. Its equine nostrils trembled with frustration or fury. It backed away slowly, staring at Morlock, waiting to see what he would do.

Morlock waited until it had backed up to the bridgehead and stopped. He stared off idly into space for a time. Then he spun about, snatched the cold-light from his cloak, and threw it as far as he could away from the river.

The red unicorn charged past him, furiously intent on the inimical light.

Morlock ran like a thief to the bridgehead, then up on the arching white bridge. The cool glowing light protected him from the killing heat of the river, as he had hoped.

Beyond the red river were dark grassy fields scattered with pale flowers like asphodels. Morlock moved cautiously here; the light was dim, and there were shapes moving about.

When he was well into the dark fields, he approached one of the people wandering there. It was a citizen wearing the day shape; his face was oddly familiar, but Morlock was not sure in that dim light if he knew him.

The citizen did not seem to see him at all. He turned and walked off, his indifferent face dimly lit by the distant bridge and river.

Morlock walked on. The shadowy figures paid attention neither to him nor to each other. At times they bent down on their hands and knees and grazed like cattle on the faintly glowing asphodels. Morlock detoured around one of these. Glancing down as he passed, he recognized the pale mottled face. It was Hrutnefdhu.

"Old friend," Morlock whispered. "You are alive. You are alive after all."

But he could not believe it as he said it. Hrutnefdhu's empty eyes looked at nothing in particular as he chewed his cud of flowers.

Morlock turned away. But now he had a reason to look at every passing shadowy face.

He found her by the banks of a narrow stream, near the end of the asphodel fields. Her cupped hands were full of water, and she was lapping delicately at it with her tongue.

He knelt on one knee and touched her russet hair with his right hand. "Liudhleeo," he whispered. The name meant She-who-remembers-best in the werewolf languages. He asked her desperately, "Liudhleeo. Liudhleeo. Don't you remember me? Don't you remember the city, the world above-the sun, the moons, the stars?"

Liudhleeo continued to drink as if he were not there. When the water was gone, she opened her hands and stood. She walked away, her lips wet and motionless, without ever having looked at him.

He stayed kneeling there beside the stream for a long time, his head bowed. Finally he said to himself, "If this is life, it seems worse than death."

He stood and stepped forward into the stream. About midway across, he began to feel that he should really go back-that he must, in fact, go back. The water was up to his knees by then. He ignored the impulse and strode forward; the odd feeling faded, disappeared entirely as he stepped out of the water on the other side.

He squelched over the shoulder of the hill that faced him on the other side.

Beyond the hill was a sort of house. The walls were like slabs of brownish ivory bone; there were no doors, exactly, but there were gaps in between the bones. The roof was a kind of canopy of glowing moss.

He walked up to the house and hesitated before it. A voice called out to him from one of the gaps, "Well, you made it this far, damn you. You might as well come in."

The voice was oddly pitched, not exactly a male's or a female's.

Morlock stepped through the gap and found himself in the familiar confines of a maker's workshop. The making was different than any art he normally practiced, but he could not mistake the lighting, the long tables, the racks of tools, the posture of the citizen who was bending over some sort of bowl, incising its broad rim with Sunspeech ideograms.

"Give me a moment, old friend," called Ulugarriu. "The image in this bowl of dreams simply won't come clear, and it will be rather important to our conversation. That is, if you don't intend to simply strike me dead."

Morlock walked closer. He eyed the long lean build of the maker, as much as could be seen in the folds of the long silk gown. He examined the russet hair, the pale mottled features, the dark eyes. Ulugarriu was conscious of his inspection and seemed to enjoy it. The werewolf maker finished the task at hand, gave a satisfied look into the bowl of dreams, and turned to face Morlock.

"I can't tell," Morlock admitted at last. "Which one are you? Are you Hrutnefdhu, or Liudhleeo?"

"I'm both, of course, and others besides."

"God Avenger."

"Please don't talk in that filthy way. I know you don't mean any offense, but still. Foul language upsets me a little."

Morlock shook his head, dismissing the issue. "Both is neither," he said.

"I don't see why. I was really there, you know-all the time."

"Through your meat-puppets. Is that what those things on the field are?"

"In a manner of speaking. The real meat-puppets, as you call them so gracelessly, are the things I make for the were-rats."

"Good of you."

"Were-rats are people, too, and they are often helpful for my purposes, which is more than I can say for some. But the bodies on the asphodel fields I grew from seeds of my own flesh. I let them wander the asphodel fields when I'm not using them, because it's better for them; meat-puppets I keep in vats sealed with gel until they're needed. They're not me. But the simulacra really are me, extensions of myself, and I can direct my intentions through them. And that is how I usually operate: the way we spoke on the airships. It's been ages since my body here has felt the light of the moon or the sun."

"Meat-puppets."

"Shh. You don't really understand yet, Morlock. I was afraid to appear before you through a mere simulacrum-I was afraid your Sight would sense my absence and the game would be over. I don't have much in the way of Sight myself, and I don't fully understand it. In extreme cases, I can have my skull and heart transferred to a simulacrum, and that is how you knew me, as both Liudhleeo and Hrutnefdhu. That was the reason for Liudhleeo's latenight excursions and Hrutnefdhu's habit of early rising-so that I would not have to operate one simulacrum by remote while inhabiting the other. I was afraid your Sight would catch me at it. But if one or both were sleeping, you would not expect them to be fully present."

Morlock closed his eyes, remembering. How often had he seen his two friends together, and awake? Not often, if ever. "God Sustainer. How blind I was."

"Please: I asked you already about the language. And it's not your fault about not seeing. One of my best magics is a kind of indirection, and I deploy it constantly when I'm, you know, up there. It has been very useful in my conflict with, well, certain enemies I shall tell you of."

"You mean the Strange Gods, I suppose."

Ulugarriu's dark eyes glared at him. "God. God damn it. Do you already know every God-bitten thing I was going to tell you? If I'm not a God's brach-bastard of a bastard's brach! God! God! God!"

Morlock disliked to see Ulugarriu upset, probably because he was reminded so much of his two lost friends. He reached out and put his hand on the hysterical werewolf's shoulder.

This calmed Ulugarriu down. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I just had a series of surprises planned, leading to a conversational coup of some importance, and you've screwed my plans already. Well, what else is new? May I ask how you know about the Strange Gods? Have you seen them?"

"At least two. I saw Death in the Bitter Water early last year, and War in the Jail in Wuruyaaria on the day of my execution."

"Oh yes. You killed Wurnafenglu, didn't you? Wish I'd seen that with my own eyes. I hated that evil son-of-a-brach-and-her-bastard."

"Who didn't?"

"He didn't, but he was about it. War and Death, you say? Not Wisdom?"

"Just War and Death. Why?"

"I'm working on a theory about Wisdom, that's all. He ceased appearing in my visualizations some time ago. I think Death may have killed him, which would be very interesting indeed. Do you know anything about their plans for the city?"

"They both said something, but I didn't pay any attention."

"Now that was a mistake, my friend. War is a liar, it's true, and proud of it, which is worse, but on the rare occasions Death speaks it's wise to listen. Even her lies can be revealing, because she's so bad at it."

"I didn't pay any attention because I don't care. If Wuruyaaria is wiped off the map it's nothing to me."

"But …but …your friends live there!"

Morlock met the other maker's eyes. "Not so many as before. And the others can live somewhere else, if need be."

"I knew I should have killed you. I should have outright killed you when I had the chance. You don't care about anyone but yourself. Oh, shut up, Ulugarriu, shut up."

The werewolf maker looked away from Morlock for a time. Eventually Ulugarriu said in a subdued voice, "I know that's not true. I should know. On that night, on New Year's Night, I really thought I was going to die in that stupid corridor. After all my long life, and all the things I'd done, and all the things I still might do, to die that stupid way, because I couldn't nerve myself to run away in front of you and poor Rokhlenu. And you saved me. And I …I …I loved you for that. For other things, too. But to you. To you it was like nothing. It was just a thing that you did, like eating or breathing or cutting your fingernails. On the rare occasions you bother to groom yourself, you ragged bastard."

Morlock found that the enemy he had come to kill was embracing him and sobbing. Ulugarriu's head was pressed against his head as if listening to his heart. Liudhleeo had sometimes done the same. He stood there and waited for the other maker to calm down.

"You really don't know what's going on, do you?" Ulugarriu asked. "Or is it that you don't care? Why don't you ask? Why don't you ask? Don't you care? I know you don't care."

"Ask what?"

"Whether I am male or female."

"Then. Are you male or female?"

"Neither." Ulugarriu looked up into his face and hissed the words. "That's what you'd say. Because both is neither."

"Eh."

Ulugarriu leapt back and laughed bitterly. "Oh, I was wondering where we'd hear that one! Concise, but meaningless, the inarticulate maker's allpurpose reply! Stock up now, folks, supplies are limited! Brilliant! Brilliant!"

He looked at Ulugarriu and shrugged.

"Oh, god. Oh, ghost. Never mind. Yes, my old friend, I was born with both male and female genitalia. But don't worry. My parents followed the traditional practice of giving me before puberty to the ghost-sniffer, who applied the traditional remedy of castrating me with a silver knife and searing the wound with poison. This will normally kill the child, solving the problem for everyone, don't you see, but I was always an inconsiderate brach and I lived. I was afterward some use to the ghost-sniffer, as acolyte and as sexual object, but only when he was too smoke-drunk not to find me disgusting."

Ulugarriu was silent for a time and then said, "I killed them all, of course, in time. My parents, the ghost-sniffer, the females who held me down while he cut me, everyone who watched and laughed and gave helpful advice. They are all dead, and the only reason I regret it is because I can't kill them again and again."

Morlock nodded grimly.

"Oh," said Ulugarriu, "you don't really mean that. What you want to say is-

"I say what I want to say," Morlock interrupted. "What I do not say, I don't want anyone to say for me, particularly when they will blame me for it. You say you are my friends, Hrutnefdhu and Liudhleeo. Would they oblige me in this?"

"Liudhleeo would oblige you in any way at all," said Ulugarriu, "as you know. I am sorry, though. This is how I live, you see: through many masks and under many names. I have not spoken to someone openly, as myself, in oh so long. Except for the Strange Gods, and only then when I couldn't avoid it."

Ulugarriu put a long pale hand over a red mouth and laughed silently. "But it's so funny. You still don't know whether to kiss me or kill me, whether to call me he or she. There's no word for what I am, because all of you pretend I don't exist, that people like me don't exist."

"I would refer to you as `they,' if I were talking to someone else about you."

"What? Why?"

"That's what we do in the Wardlands when someone has more than one sex."

Ulugarriu looked at him through narrowed eyes. "Yurr. They. They. I think I like that." Ulugarriu pressed their hands on their temples. "There are so many people in here. And, oh honey, they cause me a lot of trouble sometimes. Excuse me."

Ulugarriu fled up the long room and out a side doorway, leaving Morlock alone in the workshop. When they did not soon return, Morlock found a stool and sat down on it. Soon he was laying his head down on a nearby table, and very soon he was asleep.

He woke on a couch that smelled intensely of cloves and faintly of more intimate scents. He had no clear memory of how he had gotten there, or of the recent past. "Liudhleeo," he said sleepily.

"I am here," Ulugarriu said.

Memory stabbed through him. He sat up, propping himself on his good arm.

Ulugarriu was sitting next to him on the couch (clearly, their own couch). They held a wooden bowl out to him. "I don't suppose you've eaten much, lately."

"I'm never hungry," Morlock admitted. "I eat because I know it's time."

"And down here you never know what time it is. That's one reason I like it. It's also one reason I hate it." Morlock sat straight up, and they handed him the bowl.

"I thought about killing you while you slept," Ulugarriu said. "It would solve a lot of problems."

"I'll be dead soon anyway. That should solve those problems."

"And you don't care."

"Everyone has to die sometime."

"I don't. I mean, apparently, I don't."

Morlock ate the porridge and waited for them to go on.

"I think I'm about six thousand years old," Ulugarriu said. "I'm not sure, because every so often I go to sleep. And I sleep for a long time, and when I get up I'm a little younger than when I lay down. I age very slowly, so it seems to average out."

Morlock nodded. "Then the city is your child."

Ulugarriu winced. "Yes. Yes, I suppose so. I was never able to have children, thank you so much for reminding me. And, oh I don't know. After everyone I had ever known had died, I got sort of bored and I started trying different things. It was interesting. When I wasn't working on the crafts of lifemaking, I sort of did things with the city as a hobby. And the two pursuits merged, until the city became my greatest act of making."

"You didn't make the mechanisms-the moon-clock, and the funicular, and so on."

"No-nor the excellent sewer system. Different citizens came up with these ideas over the years, and I filed them away and eventually arranged for them to be implemented."

"What happened to the citizens who came up with the ideas?"

"They would be dead by now anyway, Khretvarrgliu. I couldn't have people just randomly setting up lyceums of machine making and other ugly crafts. The city is mine, my long life's work. Do you understand?"

"Yes. But I don't agree. A city belongs to those who live there. And they belong to themselves."

"Do it for them, then. Not for me, but for them."

"Do what?"

"Help me fight the Strange Gods. Oh, they're not invulnerable; don't let them fool you. They hate Wuruyaaria because they need the Well of Shadows, and the city feeds on it."

"Feeds on it? How?"

"Why do you think there are so many werewolves around here? They've been imbued with, what is it you call them, impulse clouds from the Well of Shadows. The Stone Tree was created to gather them and concentrate them in the Well. But since the growth of the city, well, there has been less to go around."

"And the gods need them."

"The Strange Gods do. They were once men and women, like you and your people. Long ago, they found a way to ascend to godhood, identifying their selves with abstract elements of human nature. Each one sacrificed himself-or herself-on the Apotheosis Wheel to a specific deity. And they became that deity. They have the powers that go with their spheres: Love or Cruelty or War or Death. But they need to be refreshed by shadows-by impulse clouds, as you say-to sustain the identification. Without that, their powers fade. They may even die. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"

Morlock was dying himself, and did not feel any measure of the other's enthusiasm. He shrugged and handed them the bowl. "Thanks for the porridge."

"And now you'll be going?" Ulugarriu scowled at him. "You came here to kill me because I killed your friends. That robbed you of your purpose. I can give you another purpose. Will you hear me out?"

"I've been hearing you. I am done with purposes. I am nearly done with everything, I think."

"Listen. Just listen. If you're dying, what's your hurry? You might as well die here with me. I doubt anyone in the world loves you as well as I do, and I'll feel that way even if I have to put the knife in you myself."

"Eh."

"Please, please don't say that. I never know what you mean by it. Never mind. Come and look at something with me."

Ulugarriu stood, and he followed them out of the dimly lit sleeping chamber back into the bright workroom.

At one end of the room was a kind of bottle, about the size of a woman or a man. Both ends were twisted together. To Morlock's practiced eye the bottle looked as if it was made with glass interwoven with sunlight. He sensed a talic pressure also, even without summoning the rapture of vision.

Inside the bottle was a figure, misty and indefinite in form. Sometimes it looked like a woman, sometimes like a sword, sometimes like nothing Morlock could recognize.

"You see," Ulugarriu said proudly. "I captured one. The one they call justice. The power of justice is anywhere that people behave justly-which is why this is one of the weaker gods, I guess. But the Strange God named justice has to manifest herself in a particular locus of space-time. They can be trapped by a crafty hunter with the right materials."

"What is this made of?"

"Light. Glass. And heretical opinions: the Strange Gods are entities of the human domain, so human action can influence them."

Morlock looked at justice writhing, trapped behind glass.

He reached for his sword, but it was not on his back, of course. No matter: he could feel its nearness. He called out, "Tyrfing!" and held up his right hand. The sword flew glittering to his hand.

"Are you going to kill her?" Ulugarriu cried, surprised and delighted. "Khretvarrgliu, my stalwart. I knew you-Do it. Kill her. I've learned as much as I can from her. Then we can fight the rest of them together. Eh? Oh, say `Eh' to me for once in your life."

Morlock, ignoring them, summoned the lowest level of vision. In the talic world, uniting spirit with matter, he was a pillar of black-and-white flames, and Tyrfing his focus of power showed the same talic pattern. Ulugarriu, in contrast, was a cloud of chaotic lights. Justice in her prison became more vivid and terrible, displaying the colors of a dying god. Her chains were the exact color of a thousand screaming voices.

Morlock swung the blade; it shattered the chains and the prison of glass and light.

Justice rose towering over them. One of her hands was gray, lacking talic force. Tyrfing had passed through it, and it seemed to have affected her somehow for the worse.

Morlock expressed regret: he had not meant to harm her.

Without answering, she moved to exact justice from her jailor.

Morlock stepped between the alien god and his enemy. He raised his sword, willing to do damage if Ulugarriu was harmed.

Justice, baffled, ceased to manifest herself. When Morlock was sure of this, he lowered his sword and dismissed his vision.

-ghost-bitten god-licking brach-up of a bastard!" Ulugarriu was shrieking.

Morlock leaned on his sword like a staff. The effort had cost him much, too much. He felt his tunic settling from his left shoulder down to his side. His shoulder had become too insubstantial to hold the fabric up. And the area around his heart was numb, set for dissolution. In another day he would be dead, or a living ghost.

He snarled wordlessly at Ulugarriu, who seemed taken aback.

"At times I forget you're not a werewolf," they said. "But that's because you're so much like a werewolf."

He turned to leave.

"Wait!" Ulugarriu said. "Look at the visualization I've been simmering in my bowl of dreams. This will matter to you. I promise you it will."

They led him down the long workroom to the broad-rimmed bowl of dreams, in its own wooden stand near the door where Morlock had first entered.

"Look! "

Morlock looked. He saw the insectlike instrument of the Strange Gods, sprawling across the northern plain. It was black lined with red fire. The land beyond it was brown and dead.

"What does it do?" Morlock asked.

"Ah! You are interested! I call it the Ice-Binder. It seems to eat cold."

"Eh."

"Oh, ghost. Not that again."

"Cold is merely the absence of heat."

"That's what I used to think, and I still think it. But apparently, heat can also be treated as the absence of cold."

"Hm."

"How I shall miss your lively conversation when you're gone!"

Morlock knew that two contradictory scholia might sometimes be used to explain and account for the same phenomena, and he even knew some math to describe such situations, but he was not interested in augmenting Ulugarriu's already considerable powers, so he said nothing.

"So this thing will gradually make this area unlivable, is that it?"

"Yes, except for the gradually part. I've been holding it off for yearsusing various dodges. It acts like it's alive, but it doesn't really seem to be. It certainly doesn't think. So I've used phantom cold waves and other tricks to slow its progress. But now it's about to sweep over the city."

"How are we seeing this? This is not a vision."

"You don't tell, but you ask, ask, ask. All right; I don't mind. The Strange Gods don't have anything like your Sight, either, but they do have what they call visualization. They gather information throughout their sphere and use it to create understanding of things as they are, or were, or will be. Their minds are not limited by physical constraints; they can use the whole world to think in, or remember. I can't, but I found that I can gather information through mantic spells to create images of things-as-they-may-be."

"May be? Sounds uncertain."

"That's what you get when you look at anything, youngster: something that may be there."

Morlock tapped the rim of the bowl of dreams, sending ripples through the visualization. "This, itself, is interesting. But I still don't care what happens to Wuruyaaria."

"No? Look there! A band of warriors, led by the new First Singer, has come north to investigate the Ice-Binder. They're trapped on the hill there. They're fighting so that some of them can get out."

Morlock didn't even glance at the image. "They will die, or live. It makes no difference to me."

"No?" Ulugarriu's russet eyebrows lifted in wonder. "Well, I made a promise to you earlier. I'm not withdrawing it-what was that?"

"You tell me."

"They made some sort of hole in the Ice-Binder. Not enough to do any lasting harm, and now they're dead, as you say, but it's more than I've been able to do. If we could find out what they used-"

"I am dying, Ulugarriu. Even if I wanted to help you, I would be of no help to you."

"Yes, but you need not die. I could-we could. That would be the first matter of business, you see. I would take your word you would help me. Then I, of course, could help you."

"You can cure the ghost sickness."

"Well. In a word. Yes."

"Because you caused it."

"Well, I. May have. Unintentionally."

"What were your intentions?"

"To make you more pliable, of course. That was the whole purpose in getting you into the Vargulleion. That fathead Wurnafenglu said he could break anybody. But you wouldn't be broken. You wouldn't cooperate in any way. I admired you for that, still do, but it was inconvenient. The Strange Gods had sent you north on some mission that was disrupting all visualizations-even they were complaining about it, if you can believe it, selfcentered brachs. I thought if I could get you working for me, you know, things might be fine after all."

"You planted that spike in my head. And it was meant to do this. To do this to me." He waved his ghostly hand in Ulugarriu's alarmed face.

"No! Really, I mean that. The spike was just a precautionary measure. I had no idea it would be in that long, or that it would make you suffer so. I was glad to take it out, so glad. But I couldn't have you-have you. Sort of running around with your full Sight, seeing through things and me and things. I just couldn't. So after I took the spike out I. Well, I did something else, didn't I? I let you have some of your Sight, and you weren't insane anymore, though you will never be what I would consider wholly sane either. The ghost. The ghost illness. Well, that wasn't meant to happen. I think I know why it's happening, and I can stop it. If you'll promise to help me."

"Would Hlupnafenglu have gone the same way?"

"No. He had another problem. He couldn't stand his memories of being the Red Shadow. When I met him in Apetown he was going to kill himself. I experimented on him with the electrum spike. It did make him pliable and freed him from the burden of memories."

"And made him an idiot."

"A cheerful idiot is not to be despised, not by creatures like us, my friend. It was you who gave him his memories back. Without those, he might have been happy."

"Did you kill him?"

"He killed himself."

"That was how you made it look. You killed him."

"I'll swear to you on binding oaths, I did not kill him. As Liudhleeo, I persuaded him to leave me alone for a time, and then I planted the headless Liudhleeo-simulacrum, stole Tyrfing, and fled. He must have killed himself after he found the body. He bore a heavy burden of guilt, you know."

"No," Morlock said bitterly. "No, I didn't know."

He turned away.

Ulugarriu sighed. "Wait," they said to his back. "Ambrosius, listen. The way down to the underworld is easy. The dark door lies open night and day. But to retrace your steps and escape again to the upper air-for that you'll work. For that you'll suffer."

"Drop dead."

"You're nearer that than I am, old friend."

Morlock did not answer. His cloak and other gear were on the stool where he had first sat down to rest. He donned them, sheathed his sword, and walked out of Ulugarriu's house.

He passed swiftly through the asphodel fields, lest Ulugarriu try to talk to him through any of those masks, and was nearly running by the time he reached the shining bridge over the river of fire.

On the far side, the red unicorn had resumed its place at the bridgehead. Now it was pawing at something on the ground. Morlock could hardly see it in the glare from the bridge's light, but as he came closer he thought it was the dark splintered remains of the cold-light he had thrown away earlier.

He felt through the pockets in his cloak and shirt to see how many coldlights he had left. The unicorn looked up and saw him on the bridge. It casually moved aside to let him pass: apparently it only guarded against people trying to enter-if, in fact, that was what it had been doing before. Perhaps it had only wanted to destroy the hated light, and now it had.

Morlock sidled past the uninterested unicorn. He had a thought on how to get that horn.

Morlock found an upright stone a little under his height. He draped his cloak over the stone. Standing behind the stone and resting his head atop it, he inched his arm under the cloak and pulled a cold-light from one of its pockets. Holding it behind the cloak, he tapped it lightly against the stone to activate it.

At the sound, faint even to Morlock, the red unicorn became completely alert. It stared straight at Morlock with its slotted red eyes.

Morlock shifted his stance a little and pushed the light out from beyond the cloak.

The unicorn lowered its horn and charged, in a single silken motion. Through each odd writhing gallop, neither like a horse nor a goat, the long spiraling horn was aimed straight at the same point; it never wavered.

The impact of the unicorn shook the stone. The horn was buried deep in the rock, about where Morlock's heart would be, if the stone had been his torso.

And it was stuck. The unicorn planted its delicate cloven hooves and pushed against the rocky ground, but it could get very little purchase.

Morlock pocketed the cold-light as the unicorn watched him with frenzied gaping red eyes. He drew Tyrfing from the baldric over his decaying shoulder.

"I'm sorry, Swift One," Morlock said. "Need drives me." He struck at the base of the horn and cut it cleanly through, about a thumb's width above the brow.

The docked unicorn leapt back and stared bemusedly at Morlock. It looked at the stump of its horn sticking out of the stone and stepped back farther.

"I hope it will grow back," said Morlock, not supposing the unicorn understood him, or would care if it could. Resting Tyrfing against the stone's side, he drew the cold-light and tossed it as far and as fast as he could.

The unhorned unicorn followed the arc of the light with delighted angry eyes and immediately ran after it. Morlock had actually thrown it harder than he intended: the cold-light landed in the river of molten stone. The unicorn dove in after it and disappeared from sight. Presently it appeared again, spraying fire from its nose and mouth. When Morlock turned away, it was still diving about like a porpoise in the fiery river.

Morlock picked up Tyrfing and began to hew away at the top of the stone. If he could have used two hands, he would have. But eventually he had split the top of the stone and was holding the red horn of the unicorn in his hand. He tucked it away in his cloak and walked away from the river of fire.

He came to the place where he felt the impulse clouds swirling through the air like leaves in autumn. He lay down among the stones and the corpses and, holding tightly to Tyrfing as his focus, summoned the rapture of vision.

It did not come easily, but he was in no hurry this time. He focused and unfocused. He thought and he dreamed. He unwove his consciousness and in its place spun a vision as deep as his wounded powers could permit.

When he was deep in rapture, he began to draw impulse clouds to him. They flocked to him like birds to scattered grain, eager to be directed by a living will. When he was densely cocooned with the shadowy clouds, he directed them to lift him upward.

As he rose through the cone of the dead volcano, he saw much with his inward eye that had been hidden before. He saw a network of underground channels like dark rivers, leeching impulse clouds from the Well of Shadows. He saw the unlife of the fiery beast to the north and the thousand winters it carried in its cold veins. He saw the colonies of were-rats up and down the slopes of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. More were dead than alive: the cruel weather had been deadly for them, too.

The impulse clouds lifted him above the lip of the crater. It was night, and they began to disappear in the open air; they could not carry him much farther. He unbound them from his will and let them dissipate in the faint misty starlight.

He knew, rather than felt, that his body slid down the side of the volcano for a while until it came up against a tumble of stones. Carefully, as deliberately as he could, he rewove his conscious connection with his dying flesh. It took a long time, and he didn't have much time, but he was strangely unconcerned.

He had come looking for knowledge and for vengeance. He was leaving with knowledge and guilt-and a unicorn's horn. That added up to something very like hope.

Chapter Thirty-one: Plans and Devices

Morlock made his way back to his cave past the necropolis covering the eastern face of the city. No moon was aloft, but there were faint lights moving among the tombs, no doubt from citizens who had taken refuge in the graveyard, or were robbing the graves for meat. The slopes of the city were outlined in fire. Morlock wondered if the city was on fire. But he was not especially concerned: his friends would be safe enough in the outlier settlement. As he climbed the ridge above the silver-waste fields, he saw that at least two mesas of the city were stained with fire-Iuiunioklendon and Nekkuklendon. The outlier settlement, in contrast, was unusually dark and quiet-there were usually some citizens abroad during the night, but tonight it seemed almost funereal. Perhaps they were helping fight fires in the city.

He was deeply weary when he reached his cave, but he set immediately to his task. He could not afford to rest; he might wake up dead, or unable to work. The fragmentary page he had purchased from Iacomes described a mirror made from a unicorn's horn, but not how to use it. He was fairly sure he could make the mirror, anyway.

He broke up the unicorn horn with Tyrfing and ground the shards to powder with a diamond mortar and pestle. The powder had a gritty sandlike quality, and he hoped to melt it like sand to make glass for the mirror. He eventually succeeded in doing so, though it took his entire choir of young flames working for hours in a reflective furnace. He poured the bloodred molten glass into a shallow mold, cooled it, polished it, and cut it into an octagon, to match the form sketched on his fragment.

He had intended to treat the back with quicksilver or some other reflective agent. But the glass, though thin, was opaque. Its redly opalescent surface was not especially reflective, even when polished.

He picked it up with his right hand and looked intently at the faint image of himself he saw on the surface. It seemed faint and ghostly.

On impulse, he tried to pick up the mirror with his left hand. The drifting mist that were the fingers of his left hand, unable to move anything more substantial than a leaf, closed on the red glass and easily hefted it in the palm of his left hand.

Fairly easily. It felt heavy-heavier than it should-heavier than a dead body. But he could hold it.

And the image of himself on the red surface suddenly became much clearer. It was indeed ghostly, a drifting mist in Morlock's image. But the gray eyes were luminously clear, even through the red glass, and his mirrorleft hand and arm looked hale, unharmed.

The mirror-Morlock met his eye and said, "So it's come to this. I have to save you."

It occurred to Morlock that his reflection was drunk. His heart sank. He would have spoken, but he found he could not.

After brooding a while, the mirror-Morlock said resentfully, "You'd never do it, you know. If our positions were reversed. You hate me. You'd rather die than be yoked to me forever. Well, I hate you more. But I'm not an idealist, like you are. The only way I can go on living is if you do. So buy me a drink, sometime; we'll call it even."

The mirror-Morlock reached through the mirror with his misty rightreversed hand and past Morlock's eye, pushing the misty fingers deep into his skull. Morlock would have backed away or protected himself somehow, but he could not move: his free will seemed to have been wholly seized by the mirror-Morlock.

The mist-fingers moving through his brain were searing agony. But eventually he felt them close on something, an alien presence, like a splinter of glass or metal lodged in his mind. The fingers drew it forth. This, too, was agony, but also a relief, like a weapon being drawn from a wound. At last, healing could begin.

He briefly saw the dark splinter in the mirror-Morlock's misty hand before he passed out.

When he awoke, it was still night. Or perhaps, it was night again. His head was pounding like a drum; his throat was as an old shoe buried in the desert; he was hungry enough to eat a live stoat and too weak to chase one even if it were right in front of him.

But he didn't care about any of that. Because the wound in his spirit was gone; his arm and hand were whole again, and even without summoning the rapture of vision, he knew his Sight had been healed as well.

The red mirror lay shattered in his hand. He thought about what the mirror-Morlock had said. He wondered if this flaw, this division of himself into drunk and sober Morlocks, had been the entering point for Ulugarriu's hostile magic. It was worth considering.

He found some flatbread and a bottle of water in a breadlocker and ate and drank, exulting in the freedom to use his left hand. When his thirst was finally satiated, he grabbed the fragments of the red mirror and started to juggle them. When that no longer amused him, he threw glass daggers, lefthanded only, at marks on the cave wall. He spent an hour or two writing in the palindromic script of ancient Ontil, which requires the left hand and the right hand to write simultaneously. In short, he engaged in a bacchanalia of sinister chirality.

He was still exulting in his regained hand and the hope for life that had returned with it when he looked up and saw that the sun had risen. He felt briefly ashamed that he had been wasting time so childishly.

"No, to hell with that," he said aloud, changing his mind. If self-hatred was the secret door by which this illness had entered him, he was going to lock that door-mortar it shut, if possible. "Look," he said, addressing his despised drunken self. "I'm not going to buy you a drink. But there must be something else I can do to amuse you. Let me know."

There was no response, but Morlock didn't really expect one; he was aware he was talking to himself, that there had never been more than one Morlock.

He packed a knapsack with flatbread, cheese, and bottles of water; he took a few glass knives and a glass sword from the weapon rack. He noticed someone had taken two of the silver-core glass spears. He wondered what they had been used for: Rokhlenu had been so set against them. Perhaps someone else had been less squeamish.

Everything else in the cave he left for Lakkasulakku. The young citizen was not much of a maker yet, but he was intelligent and quick-fingered and he knew some useful skills. Morlock thought he would do well.

Morlock had decided to leave Wuruyaaria. It was no place for him, if gods were clashing with immortal werewolves there and both had plans for him. It was no place for his friends, either: he was going to recommend to Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono that they flee to the shores of the Bitter Water and wait for the Strange Gods' vendetta against the city to play out. That would be their choice; he had made his, and it was a great weight off his crooked shoulders.

He ran down the wooden steps to the wicker boat and poled himself across to the eastern gate of the outlier settlement. The gate was unguarded, which struck him as odd at first, but then he realized that the election must have passed and with it the time for open warfare between the packs.

He had not gone far into the settlement before he realized that something was wrong, though. There were no sounds of city life at all in the hot still air: not a single voice, or any footfall beyond his own. The settlement had been abandoned.

It was the same through the market and all the way to the First Wolf's lairtower. Not only was the tower empty, it had been cleared of its contents. There was no destruction; it had not been looted. The tenant had decided to vacate.

As he was looking about the second floor, he did notice some citizens around the old headquarters of the irredeemables. He descended to the street and went over to investigate.

That, too, was almost empty. But Wuinlendhono was there, wearing dark clothes that must have been uncomfortable in the hot heavy air. There were a half dozen irredeemables present also; Wuinlendhono seemed to be giving them some sort of instructions when Morlock entered, and she, seeing him, broke off.

She was looking oddly at him. They all were, except Lekkativengu, who had turned his eyes away, his face dark with shame.

"Khretvarrgliu," Wuinlendhono said, "have you come for the funeral? It is over, I'm afraid."

Morlock assessed the mourning quality of her face and clothes, the sullen anger in Yaarirruuiu's face, the shame in Lekkativengu's. He knew then that his friend Rokhlenu was dead.

"I didn't know," he said. "I've been-" to the underworld and back; baiting unicorns; talking to myself "-away."

The anger in Yaarirruuiu's face faded. "Your hand is better, Khretvarrgliu."

"Yes."

"I'm so glad," said Wuinlendhono's voice. Her face said, What do I care? And Morlock completely understood this.

"How did he die?" he asked. Wuinlendhono winced, and he added hastily, "I'm sorry. I will ask someone else."

"Lekkativengu can tell you," Wuinlendhono said, in tones that were almost too even. "He was there."

Now it was Lekkativengu's turn to wince. But under the First Wolf's cold dark eye and with a minimum of prompting, he told the story of Rokhlenu's last fight and death.

Morlock listened with bowed head. He was thinking of those images he had briefly seen in Ulugarriu's bowl of dreams before turning his face away. The images of Rokhlenu fighting desperately, the images of his friend dying alone. He wished, now, that he had taken the time to look at them. But that was done, and he wrapped Lekkativengu's words around what he had seen, and he thought he had learned something important.

Lekkativengu had finished speaking, and an embarrassed silence reigned. Morlock looked up to see that the citizens were all eyeing him, waiting for him to speak.

"I'm glad you, at least, returned, my friend," he said to Lekkativengu.

He could tell the werewolves thought this was in very poor taste. Even Lekkativengu seemed to be offended.

"Should have died with his chieftain," Yaarirruuiu muttered.

"His chieftain didn't think so," Morlock replied. "And neither do I. It was a tale worth hearing."

They all bowed their heads as if he had said some sacred word. "Yes," said Wuinlendhono eventually. "And it will be a song worth singing, in time."

She shook her head and lifted it. She calmly wiped away the tears that were leaking from her eyes and said, "Khretvarrgliu, we are leaving for our colony on the Bitter Water. We would welcome you, if you wish to join us. In my stalwart's name, for my stalwart's sake, you will always be welcome in any dwelling of mine."

"No, thank you," Morlock said, thinking that the coils of the gods were difficult to escape. "I am glad you are going, and taking the outliers with you. I will go and see if I can kill the beast that killed Rokhlenu. Blood for blood."

"Blood for blood!" the werewolves cried.

"Let us help you, Khretvarrgliu," Yaarirruuiu said eagerly. "We'll fight alongside you to avenge our chief."

"The First Wolf needs you," Morlock pointed out. "Besides, my weapon will be made of silver, like Rokhlenu's. Only a never-wolf could wield it."

"Of course! Of course!" cried a new voice from the doorway. "They had to have some way to slay the beast themselves. But they didn't want us to be able to do the same. Brilliant, really. I wonder who thought of it: most of those gods don't strike me as being terribly bright."

"Is it-oh ghost," whispered Wuinlendhono. "Is it you, Liudhleeo? Have you-have you come back?"

"Not exactly, sweetling," said the newcomer gently. "You knew me as Liudhleeo, and as Hrutnefdhu, and as others still whose names may someday occur to you. But my true name is Ulugarriu."

The werewolves bowed their head in reverence and fear at the great name.

Morlock, of course, did not. He looked coldly on the werewolf maker and said to them, "You visualized this moment."

"It appeared faintly in my bowl of dreams," Ulugarriu acknowledged. "But I could not be certain of it. Events I myself may take part in do not visu alize clearly for me. And by then I had already decided to come help you, if it came to this."

"Then you don't know if we will slay the Ice-Binder or not?"

"No-not 'know' exactly. In fact, if I were a bookie, I wouldn't give good odds on us. But it's a fight I wouldn't miss, my friend."

The citizens left before noon. Ulugarriu and Wuinlendhono spent some time talking urgently together in the arch of Southgate, while Morlock and the others stood apart. In the end, Ulugarriu tried to put their hand on Wuinlendhono's face and she recoiled, her face a mask of fury. Ulugarriu looked mildly on her, bid her farewell, and walked away without looking back.

Wuinlendhono stared after Ulugarriu in frustrated rage. Her eyes caught Morlock's, and her expression changed as if she had been stabbed. He had reminded her of her dead husband, he guessed. She raised her left hand in farewell; he did the same. The irredeemables, shouting their good-byes to him, surrounded her in a guard formation and they ran off together in long loping strides down the plank road to the marsh's edge.

Morlock left Ulugarriu to their own devices in the empty town. He returned to his cave to forge the weapon that had come into his mind when he had heard Lekkativengu's story. For it, he would need silver, a great deal of silver. Collecting it from the silver-wastes would probably be quicker than transmuting it out of swamp mud, so he spent much of the first day doing that.

A crow flew into the cave that night after dark. After remarking that it was as hot as a bonfire outside and as hot as fifty bonfires in the cave, she asked if he was coming home for supper anytime soon. His den-mate wanted to know.

Morlock said he was surprised that there were any crows left around Wuruyaaria and suggested that she and anyone she cared about should get out.

The crow absentmindedly agreed and wondered if he had any of that bread stuff around?

Morlock gave her some crumbled flatbread and then observed that he had used the rest to stoke his smelting furnace. This was a lie, strictly speaking, but he didn't want crows hanging around Wuruyaaria hoping for more handouts from Morlock. Whether they defeated the Ice-Binder or not, the region was likely to be unhealthy for some time.

He set the molten silver to cycle through a fifth-dimensional pattern of mirrorglass pipes and went down the hill, across the marshy water, through the empty gate, and up the lair-tower to the den he had shared with Liudhleeo and Hrutnefdhu-or, as it turned out, Ulugarriu.

Ulugarriu had set a low table on the floor; there were several covered dishes on it and bowls of clean water. There were two couches set on opposite sides of the room, and Ulugarriu was spreading a sheet on one as Morlock entered. They watched him as he took in the scene, and then they said stiffly, "We needn't both sleep here if you dislike it. The den below this is vacant. In fact, nearly every building in town is vacant. But …anyway, I promise not to touch you. I'm well aware that you find me disgusting."

"No," Morlock said, "but we should sleep in separate couches at least. I haven't decided whether I'm going to kill you yet."

"Haven't you, my stalwart?" Ulugarriu turned to finish their work on the couch, then turned to face him again. "That seems unusually indecisive."

"I don't believe your story about Hlupnafenglu's death, but it may be true. If it isn't-"

"It is true!"

"If it is true, you, at least, can't swear to it. According to you, Hlupnafenglu committed suicide in your absence."

"Oh. I guess you're right."

Confident assertions beyond the evidence were one symptom of lying; Morlock had noticed others in Ulugarriu's account, but did not choose to say so.

"Aren't you being incautious in telling me of this, Morlock?" Ulugarriu continued. "I might kill you to protect myself."

"No. You need me to do your fighting for you."

"Oh! That's true, I suppose. When I caught you in my intention, you also caught me. Life is odd sometimes, isn't it?"

"Yes. What's for supper?"

"Nothing remarkable. Some dried fish, cheese, peas, a bit of smoked seal (I think). I didn't bother to heat it up, because …"

"It's hot enough already, yes. Thanks for gathering it."

"It was no trouble, dear." They sat and began to eat without ceremony.

"Your appetite certainly has returned," Ulugarriu remarked approvingly.

Morlock nodded. "Not dying agrees with me."

"Well, I agree with it. Can I ask you a personal question?"

Morlock shrugged.

"Taking that as a yes-aren't you reluctant to share a meal with someone you may later have to kill?"

"Not if I've warned them. Then there's no deceit."

"So you were being polite. In your rather brutal way. How strange you are."

Morlock shrugged again.

"Tell me what you did today or I'll say something disturbingly personal."

"I collected silver ore discarded in the waste hills and smelted it. I left it cycling through a five-space web of mirrorglass tubes."

"I didn't get that last part-but never mind. Once you have the metal, isn't that enough? Can't you make your weapon?"

"No, I don't want to use regular silver. As metals go, it's too soft to make a good weapon. Also it melts too easily."

"You're going to change it somehow?"

"Yes. You know that quicksilver is a form of the metal even softer and more malleable than regular silver."

"Of course. Though some people say it's a different metal entirely."

Morlock waved aside this superstition without bothering to discuss it. "There is a form of silver opposite to quicksilver: harder, more brittle, with a much higher melting point."

"I see. Sort of a deadsilver."

"Yes. Once I extract its phlogiston, it should be suitable for the weapon I have in mind."

"What is that, exactly?"

Morlock sketched it on the surface of the table with the point of a knife.

"I see," said Ulugarriu at last. "How can I help? I can't work the silver with you, obviously."

"We'll need a lot of cable for this plan to work-strong and lightweight."

"Yes-yes I can provide that. But it will burn, I'm afraid."

"We'll dephlogistonate it."

"Of course. I'm looking forward to learning that technique from you; it will be so useful."

In fact, Morlock believed that Ulugarriu already knew how to remove phlogiston from matter. He wasn't sure why they were lying to him about this-mere habit, perhaps. But it was a useful reminder that Ulugarriu could not really be trusted.

The meal was done, and Morlock said, "You brought the food, so I'll clear UP.

"Oh, ghost," said Ulugarriu, and tossed an empty dish out the window. "Let the swamp have it. We'll be here a few days, but I can always scavenge clean dishes when we need them."

They threw the dishes out the window, laughing a little, and turned in on their separate couches.

The next day, Morlock left the silver to unquicken in its five-web and built a ballista out of lumber from abandoned buildings in the outlier settlement and rope that he borrowed from Ulugarriu's cable-making project, which they had set up in the empty marketplace. Ulugarriu had rapidly built a rope-winding machine out of wood, and by the time they were done, citizens were already bringing in fiber to feed into it.

"Are they extensions of yourself?" Morlock asked Ulugarriu, when several of these blank-eyed citizens dropped off loads of hemp fiber and left.

"No," Ulugarriu said uneasily. "Just citizens who owe me favors. Well, most of them are were-rats running meat-puppets, all right?"

"It's all right with me," Morlock said. He took his rope and left.

Death and justice, manifest as sisters (which they once had been), were walking arm in arm under the Stone Tree. Justice had swords for hands and Death had reaping knives, but apart from that they made a charming pair, for those who were there to see them.

"And so the werewolf city is dying at last?" Justice signified.

"The instrument threatens it more every day. There were riots and murders through the election season, and then more rioting after the new First Wolf was treacherously sent to his death. Yes, I think it is dying, if not yet dead."

Justice shook her monochrome head. "I saw so little of this. My visualizations were disrupted by my manifestation's captivity."

"Not just yours," Death replied. "Everyone's visualizations have been uncertain, lately. But all that is soon to end."

"Yes. It will be relief to have the plan fulfilled."

"It will be a relief. A great relief."

"Why are the others not manifest, yet? Were we not to meet at this space-time locus?"

"They are here, Justice, but you cannot see them." Death unfolded a piece of space-time and said, "Look."

The Strange Gods were all present. Even Wisdom was there, or at least the shell of Wisdom. Justice knew from his manifestation that he was dead, had long been dead.

Each of the gods, except Death, was bound in a web of otherness that Justice saw, but did not understand.

"What is this, Death?" she asked.

"This is the plan," said Death. "I have labored over it for thousands of years. Each of you is trapped (yes, you, too, justice) in a talic web of my weaving. Each thread of the web is woven to a cluster of human lives. And if you move to break that thread, the lives will be affected in a way inimical to your nature. See poor War there, I caught him first, while he was enjoying the riots after Rokhlenu's death. If he tries to free himself in time, the Anhikh Komos will make peace with the Ontilian Empire. If he tries to free himself in space, the Mupuvlokhu tribes in northern Qajqapca will lay down their arms and unite. If he tries to take effective action without freeing himself, other things inimical to his nature will happen."

"Why? Why are you doing this?"

"So that I can kill you. If gods take action inimical to their nature, their manifestation becomes more loosely associated with their nature. If that separation becomes permanent, death will occur."

"I know that. I know that. I am asking you why."

"So that death will occur. I act according to my nature, and my nature is Death. You are mortal, and my task has been to reap your lives. You have been cunning. You have used power and magic and skill and patience. You have evaded me for long ages, but you could not escape me. I am Death."

"You weren't always Death. We were sisters once."

"We were once, but we are not now. All your symbols, all your dreams and hopes, all that you were and were not and wished to be, all this is nothing to me. Stop your signifying, justice. I am Death, and I always have the last word. "

Chapter Thirty-two: Last Words

On the second night of the ninth month, the month Morlock called Tohrt, he took the nexus holding his choir of flames and carried it to the bone-dry grassy slope to the east. He set the nexus down and broke it open.

"Run free," he said. "Live and die as flames do, my friends. You need not leave the nexus, but I may not return to feed you anymore."

They were young, as flame-choirs go, and eager to escape and explore the world outside. Long branches of flame were already spreading across the dead dry hillside as he walked away. He did not look back; he'd said harder goodbyes than this, lately.

Horseman was a bright white eye in the western sky. Ulugarriu was impatiently waiting in their wingset by the door of his cave. It was time to go avenge Rokhlenu or die as well as he had.

The ballista Morlock had built was a relatively light weapon, if a powerful one, to start with. After Morlock had leached forth its phlogiston and covered it with weight-defying scales harvested from the unfinished wingsets, it was approximately as heavy as a happy thought.

For Ulugarriu, the thought was a rather grim one at the moment, though: resting on the firing slot were two hooked and flanged spears made from deadsilver.

"I can come back for these," Morlock said, noting the look of dread that Ulugarriu was giving the spears.

"No," said Ulugarriu. "We'd best do this all at once."

The werewolf maker took a long look at the rising moon, took a long breath, and knotted the lift ropes to the harness of their wingset. Morlock had been doing the same, and he met their eye. "Ready?" he asked, and they nodded.

The two makers gripped their wings and launched from the earth. The ballista came after them, dragged by the ropes.

They had practiced this a number of times, but it was different nowbecause of the silver spears, weighing down the ballista-and because this wasn't practice.

They flew straight up at first, into the hot blue night. When they were well above the level of the city and Mount Dhaarnaiarnon, Morlock called out, "Now!" and they levelled off, heading north.

Ulugarriu could already see the thing. At least there was a smoky red line of fire there that became clearer and clearer as they approached.

There were citizens abroad on the mesas of Wuruyaaria, but not as many as you would expect on a moonlit night. Ulugarriu wished they were down there, wearing the night shape, singing and causing trouble.

They felt an awkward tug on the load-bearing ropes. It almost pulled them off course. Looking around for the answer, Ulugarriu saw that Morlock was veering to the right, toward the high mesa of Wuruklendon.

"What are you doing?" Ulugarriu screamed.

He called back something about something and the Stone Tree.

"Don't care!" they screamed back. "North!"

He got the eh expression on his face: they just bet he was muttering it to himself. But he bent his course northward until there was a little slack on the load-ropes.

The dark shoulder of the volcano was below them now, with the moonclock and its one luminous eye rivaling the rising moon to their left.

Then the beast was below them, a red-black border burning from west to east.

It was a stupid sluggish burning worm that was poisoning Ulugarriu's world, and they hated it. They wished they knew how it worked.

The turbulent wind carried them up, upward, up-an intense updraft caused by the heat of the Ice-Binder. The air was pretty hot, but not hot enough to ignite the phlogiston-imbued metal scales-that was Ulugarriu's deepest dread about this business.

Then they were past the updraft and trending downward.

"There!" Morlock shouted.

Ulugarriu saw it: a small hill just north of the Ice-Binder. It was dark and lifeless as everything the Ice-Binder left in its wake.

They turned, in fairly good order, and glided down to perch on the hilltop; the ballista dropped down on the hillside below them.

They unhitched their load ropes and fetched the ballista. They set it up on the slope, about two hundred paces from the undulating red-black side of the Ice-Binder.

Morlock bound one of the lightweight coils of rope to one end of one of the deadsilver spears. He pushed the spear (harpoon, really) into the firing slot from the front, and then dropped the coil on the ground where it could run free.

"What if you miss?" Ulugarriu said stupidly. "We should have brought more than two shots."

Any other male Ulugarriu had ever known would have said, I never miss, or something equally fatuous. Morlock simply tapped the rope bound to the end of the spear. Of course: they could simply drag the spear back and try again.

It was only then that Ulugarriu realized how terrified they were of this. They definitely weren't thinking clearly.

Morlock cranked up the ballista, took several sightings, adjusted the height and position of the ballista, and said, "Watch out."

Ulugarriu was already well away, so Morlock released the firing bolt; the ballista kicked like an angry donkey and the deadsilver spear was gone, trailing the rope after it into the night. After a moment, though, the rope stopped. Ulugarriu looked up and saw a faint blue light around the side of the Ice-Binder. Soon this was obscured by dark tendrils rising from the IceBinder itself.

"Clean hit," Morlock said. "I think the hook is in place."

"It works," Ulugarriu said wonderingly. "It feeds on itself."

"It doesn't feed," Morlock disagreed.

With deliberate speed, he performed the same set of actions for the second deadsilver spear, firing a little further east this time, so that the ropes wouldn't get tangled.

"West or east?" Morlock asked.

"West," Ulugarriu said, with dry lips. They went and bound the rope from the first harpoon to the harness of their wingset.

Morlock was doing the same with the rope for the other spear.

"Morlock," said Ulugarriu, "what if this doesn't work?"

"Then we'll think of something else."

"What if it does work?"

"Then get away as fast as you can."

Ulugarriu knew what he meant. This thing had millennia of perpetual winter locked in its guts, all the cold of the world's far north. They were hoping it would be released more or less at once. If so, this would be no place to linger.

"Then," Morlock said, and took to the air.

Ulugarriu had a speech planned, witty yet tender, designed to make Morlock less inclined to kill them, should the occasion ever arise. They gaped after the winged back of the disappearing never-wolf. "Gaaaah!" they shouted, and took to the air flying westward.

Due west and fairly low, at first. They didn't want to pull the harpoon loose, but drag it through the side of the Ice-Binder, doing as much damage as possible.

Soon the cord on their harness jerked, holding them back as they strained with their wings to fly forward.

That was good. It meant that the hook had set.

Now came the hard part. Ulugarriu pumped, with their arms and legs, as hard as they could. At first, it seemed as if they were trying to fly through stone. Then something gave a little; then something more. Soon they were plowing forward slowly-not as if the air were stone, but perhaps a thick unpleasant sludge. Which it sort of smelled like.

They looked back over their left wing and saw a gratifyingly long scar of blue light opening in the Ice-Binder's side. It wriggled at the edges, as the Ice-Binder's legs turned to feed on itself.

Ulugarriu was repelled, but also pleased, and they turned with a fierce grin to drive themselves a little farther west, to drag that hook through the Ice-Binder's side a little longer.

It was a lot longer. Ulugarriu lost track of time, but a good deal of it had surely passed when they felt a shadow pass between them and the moon.

Ulugarriu looked up curiously, and saw something high in the sky, like a tower. A falling tower. And on top of the tower was a kind of mouth ringed with dark flashing teeth.

It was the Ice-Binder-the end of the Ice Binder. Ulugarriu's first thought was that it was coming to attack whatever was hurting it, that is, Ulugarriu themself. They thought furiously, then regretfully loosed the rope tied to the wingset's harness. They had done as much harm to the Ice-Binder as they could; now it was time to save themself.

Except it was already too late, it seemed. As Ulugarriu flew free from the rope, the many-toothed worm head swerved to follow. Ulugarriu twisted in the air, veering left, and the worm head followed again.

Ulugarriu hoped fiercely that they had at least killed the thing that was about to kill them when a winged silhouette impinged on the sky between them and the falling worm. Morlock. That crazy brach's bastard.

"What are you doing?" Ulugarriu shrieked. "You were going to kill me anyway! "

Morlock arced high, drawing the attention of whatever the worm used for eyes. It followed him, bending upward again.

Morlock vaulted straight in the air, spun in the sky, and began to fall.

He had released both his wing grips, Ulugarriu saw. He was holding that sword of his, Tyrfing, in both hands. He fell past the questing worm mouth and scored a shining blue wound down the side of the worm. The worm mouth turned its teeth on its own wound and began to tear at it. Morlock fell past, dropping his sword, clutching at his wing grips.

But the close passage with the blazing hot surface of the Ice-Binder had kindled the phlogiston-imbued scales on his wings. Morlock was burning, and burning he fell to the ground and lay there.

Ulugarriu stooped like a hawk, driving themself to the point where Morlock had crashed to earth. They pulled up at the last minute and stalled in the air, dropping down beside the fallen maker.

The fall had actually extinguished most of the fires on Morlock's wings. He had rolled in the dusty ground. Morlock was starting to move.

"Be still!" Ulugarriu shrieked, and heaped dust on his wings until the flames were dead.

"You hurt anything?" said Ulugarriu. "Idiot. You were supposed to be pulling the hook in the other direction."

"Rope broke."

"My ropes don't break! You must have done something wrong! You're always doing everything wrong! You should have let it kill me, you idiot, don't you see? Now you'll have to kill me or I'll have to kill you."

"Ulugarriu," said Morlock, "it's snowing."

"It-" It was snowing. Ulugarriu stared mutely at the white flakes falling like a benediction around them in the moonlight. Towering over their heads, stretching eastward past Dhaarnaiarnon, the Ice-Binder was busy ripping itself to shreds, releasing deep winter into the humid air of midsummer. "It's snowing!"

"Yes."

"We have to get out of here!"

"Yes."

Ulugarriu found they wanted to rage some more at Morlock about something, anything, but now was not the time, obviously. "Where away? The volcano? It's still our best bet, I think."

"Yes."

"Will your wings carry you? You lost a lot of scales."

Morlock stretched his wings testingly. He nodded. "Yes."

"Say something else!" Ulugarriu shrieked in his face. "Say something else! Say anything else! Say eh, or something!"

Morlock shouted, "Tyrfing!" The deadly blade flew from the ground by the self-eating Ice-Binder into Morlock's outstretched right hand. He sheathed the blade over his crooked shoulders and then gestured politely at the sky.

After you, Ulugarriu interpreted the gesture. They leapt into the air and flew westward, giving the Ice-Binder a wide berth, then taking a long steep turn eastward, running alongside the dying monster through the sudden moonlit snowstorm.

Ulugarriu marvelled at the ferocity of the thing's self-attack, as pitiless toward itself as if it were alien to its own being. Morlock was right, they realized. This thing was not really alive. It was a mechanism, not an organism. But it was a mechanism designed to look like an organism-a parody of life, made by something that hated life. Ulugarriu wondered who had made it. It seemed beyond the scope of the Strange Gods.

When they were over the dark shoulder of Dhaarnaiarnon, Ulugarriu looked back to see how far Morlock was behind. They assumed he would be flying more slowly, because of the lost scales.

Morlock was not behind them at all.

Ulugarriu felt the bite of panic and shook it off. They circled slowly in the air, scanning the snow-scattered sky.

They caught sight of a winged man flying slightly to the south, toward Wuruklendon atop Wuruyaaria.

Morlock. He had been hollering something about the Stone Tree earlier. But didn't he realize they had to get somewhere safe?

Ulugarriu hesitated, then followed. It was barely possible he knew what he was

doing.

Morlock wearily relaxed his arms and let himself fall the last few feet to the ground of Wuruklendon.

The scaffold of his execution had been dismantled. No one else was present. To all appearances, he stood alone in the moonlit snowstorm under the Stone Tree.

But he could feel something happening. He knew something was happening. He remembered his brief vision of the Strange Gods drinking from the Well of Shadows. And he remembered this feeling from the time he had died in the Bitter Water.

"Death!" he shouted. "I feel your presence! Show yourself! I have something to say to you."

Death manifested herself not far from him, in the form of a spider with a woman's face.

"If you wish," the woman's face said. "It is a foolish wish, but I owe you this at least for the service you have done me."

"I reject your service. I will not serve you. I will not serve."

"You have already served me. I give you the gift of everything you have, which I will take back whenever it suits me. Go now. I'm working." She disappeared. But Morlock felt that she was still present somehow.

Morlock drew Tyrfing and summoned the rapture of vision.

The scene transformed itself as he entered the talic realm. All around the Well of Shadows he saw the Strange Gods in their various manifestations, bound with strange dark webs of talic force. The webs all ran to and through Death, still spiderlike, her manifestation perched on a branch of the Stone Tree.

Death was hard at work. If Morlock had his way, she would work still harder yet.

Morlock slashed with Tyrfing at the talic webs running from the Strange Gods. Without looking, he knew several of them were free. Death signified a statement that nearly struck him dead; he was saved only because he didn't fully understand the symbolism. But he kept on slashing, and soon the other Strange Gods were signifying back at Death, and the time-space locus was full of clashing symbols.

The Strange Gods all were unbound now; even hollow Wisdom was free to fall to the earth and stare with empty eyes at the snowthick sky.

The Strange Gods assumed their most terrifying aspects. They rose to gigantic heights. They turned all their power together against Death.

And it was nothing to her. Morlock saw that immediately. What were all the powers of human life to Death, that surrounds and defines all life? Nothing.

But he saw something else. There was Death, a Strange God among others, and there was death, the uncaring essence that ends all entity. They were different, somehow, though joined.

Morlock kicked off from the ground. Sustained by the wounded levity of his wings, he rose to the branch where Death was perched. In the instant that they occupied adjoining loci time-space, the living maker and the manifestation of Death, he struck at the spidery presence with his cursed sword, severing the woman's head from the spider's body.

The manifestation of Death became disorganized and ceased to represent an individual identity.

Even in long ages, Death cannot die. Death continued to stand at the end of every road, the darkness framing the light of everything that lived until it lived no longer.

But the Death who had been one of the Strange Gods, who had once been a woman, who had walked arm in arm with her sister justice on the western edge of the world and talked of the way things were and the way things should be, that Death was gone.

In this limited sense, Death was dead.

The death of the greatest of the Strange Gods shook the world. The surviving Strange Gods, dismayed, fled into widely separate loci of space-time.

Morlock, struck from his vision, from awareness, and nearly from the world, fell from the Stone Tree and lay motionless on the snow-covered ground of Wuruklendon.

He was not, however, alone.

Ulugarriu followed Morlock to the high mesa. They heard him shout his insane challenge to the Strange God of Death. They saw, with perfectly reasonable terror, the manifestation of Death. After the manifestation disappeared, they were bemused to see Morlock draw his sword, luminous blackand-white in the storm's shadows, leap up on his fire-scarred wings, and strike at the empty air above the branch of the Stone Tree.

The death of Death shocked Ulugarriu-but Ulugarriu walked freer from death's shadow than some, and they soon recovered.

When they raised their head and looked at the sky, Ulugarriu saw a storm, blue with continuous lightning, striding high above Mount Dhaarnaiarnon, a wave of blue light brighter than the moon in the one-eyed sky, a wave as tall as the world, deadlier than the god Morlock had just killed.

The Ice-Binder had destroyed itself; the millennia of winters were loosed on the world, and the storm was heading this way. It was already too late to reach the crater of the volcano.

Only one bolt hole remained, and Ulugarriu used it.

They ran over to where Morlock lay under the Stone Tree and dragged his unconscious form to the Well of Shadows. They tried to pry his sword loose from his fingers, but the unconscious maker clutched tight to the grip and would not let go.

"Be that way then!" Ulugarriu shouted at him, and pushed him into the Well. They jumped in afterward.

The fall was long, so long. But Ulugarriu hoped the wings would keep them, both of them, from being crushed by the fall.

The storm fell howling across the mountain, shaking it like a blue earthquake. Ulugarriu dreaded the thought of a direct lightning strike down the well, but none came. Eventually they struck the ground in a tangle of wings and bodies; the storm front passed. There was silence and darkness for a long time.

Ulugarriu seemed to awaken. Between Morlock and Ulugarriu, who lay at the stony base of the Well of Shadows, stood a young woman with no mouth, holding a faintly glowing lotus flower in her hand. Ulugarriu knew she was the manifestation of the Strange God called Mercy.

"All right," Ulugarriu said grumpily. "I suppose you gods always win in the end. Just be quick about it."

Mercy signified her dissent from this in symbols that were too intense to be clear to Ulugarriu's baffled mind.

"Talk to me, can't you?" they shouted. "Or go away! You make my head hurt with your signifying."

A red-lipped mouth formed in the lotus flower. Mercy spoke through it in Moonspeech.

"I am not interested in killing you, poor Ulugarriu," Mercy's flower said. "I opposed the plan of the other Strange Gods, and worked to overcome it in the end. It was in my nature to do so, and it would be against my nature to slay you now. Besides, you saved my agent Morlock, and I'm grateful to you for that. Blood for blood, as he would say, poor man."

Mercy reached down and caressed Morlock's scarred sleeping face with her flower.

Ulugarriu watched this with interest, thinking furiously all the while. "I thought it was Death who appeared to Morlock in the Bitter Water. That's what he told me, anyway."

"She did, and she thought she was acting for herself when she saved him from drowning. But it was I who prompted her to act against her own nature, separating her manifestation from the phenomenon that sustained it. It took time for that seed to blossom, but now it has, and she is finally at peace."

Ulugarriu lowered their head and thought about this for a long time. Finally they said quietly, "Are you telling me that that was what this whole thing was about? Everything that happened was so that you could bring death to Death?"

"I was sorry for her suffering, which was more terrible than you or I can imagine, and I wanted it to end. That was my purpose, and it was very simple. Other entities had other purposes (you among them, Ulugarriu), and so the pattern of events became very complex."

Ulugarriu raised their head and saw in the light of Mercy's lotus that Morlock was gone.

"What have you done with my stalwart?" they blurted.

"Hardly yours, poor Ulugarriu. I hid your presence from him, and he has gone his way through the dark roads under the earth. Don't be afraid for him; he has lived much of his life underground, poor man."

"We didn't have a chance to say good-bye."

"I can't see very deeply into his mind, Ulugarriu. It is almost as strange to me as yours is. But I do know that he might have felt obliged to kill you for what you did to his friend, and I felt obliged to prevent that."

"I did not kill Hlupnafenglu!"

"I know. I was referring to Rokhlenu."

"Oh." Ulugarriu thought it over and decided it was fruitless to make a denial. "Everything would have been fine if Aaluindhonu or someone like that had been elected to lead the Innermost Pack. I couldn't have Rokhlenu as First Singer, don't you see? The city's social pattern is a delicate thing, and too-rapid change will create chaos. Don't you see?"

"No," said Mercy, making a protective sign against the name of the alien god Chaos, "but it's not necessary that I do. Do you think Morlock would see?"

"I guess not. Thanks."

"He would have been sorry if he found out afterward you were pregnant."

Ulugarriu was silent for a time, and then said feebly, "I'm not pregnant."

"Your simulacrum Liudhleeo is. Or is my visualization in error?"

"No," Ulugarriu admitted finally. "You're right. It is pregnant. I haven't been sure what to do about that. What does your visualization say?"

"I see no unclarities. The child will lie in Liudhleeo's womb for two years. He will be born with a full set of teeth and a full head of hair. Not even you will consider him handsome, but he will have very long, strong, clever hands. You will call him Fenrir Ambrosius."

"I bet I'll think he's handsome."

The red mouth on Mercy's flower smiled gently. "What will you bet, poor Ulugarriu?"

Morlock walked many long twisting ways under the ground, seeking a way out of the warm ghost-thick darkness and into the cold light of life.

He finally followed a breath of bitter air to a shallow snow-filled flaw in the earth. Cutting his way through with Tyrfing, he emerged in a trench filled with snow, and the gray light of a daytime blizzard.

The dirt of the trench smelled and tasted like silver ore to him. If he was not very much mistaken, he had emerged close to his cave on the verge of the outlier settlement.

He thought of taking refuge there from the cold, but shook the thought off. He had shed that skin.

The framework of his wings had broken in his several falls; as wings, they were unusable. But the scales that still remained on them kept him light on his feet, and he could wrap the wings around him like a coat, until he found (or made) better.

Not far off, he was interested to see a steaming pit in the snow, about three hands wide. He slogged closer and peered over the edge.

At the bottom of the pit was the flame nexus. Three shivering flames, the last of his choir, were quarrelling over the last bit of wet smoky fuel.

"Friends," he said, "I'm headed south. Care to come with me?"

They accepted his offer with dignified, if sparky, restraint. He reached down and lifted the nexus out of the pit.

He fed them scales off his broken wings, and they assured him that metallic phlogiston was the best thing ever, even better than coal, unless he actually had any coal. Since he didn't, they gladly continued to consume the burning metal. This, in turn, warmed Morlock.

Sheltering the three flames under his wings from the midsummer blizzard, the crooked man took the long road south.

This, lacomes, is the extent of my visualization. May I return now, to rest among my stones?