The Wolf Age (19 page)

-BYRON, LARA

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

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

"You're welcome," he said finally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My name's Rokhlenu now."

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

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

"The judicants of Nekkuklendon say you did."

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

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

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

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

"We're not jugglers!"

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

"I don't know anything about you."

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

"Are you?"

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

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

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

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

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

"If it's just a ruse-"

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

"Do you?" he replied frostily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And it is. Thanks."

"Anything else?"

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

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

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

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

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