The Wolf Age (35 page)

"It's all right," Morlock said, meeting his eyes. "It's all right. We will follow you over. We'll see you soon. Go with your friend Hrutnefdhu. Go with him. We'll follow."

It was not clear how much the crazy werewolf understood. But Morlock's words or tone seemed to settle him somehow. He followed Hrutnefdhu out of the cave into the afternoon light and they went together, the pale werewolf and the red one, down the wooden stairs to the wickerwork boat.

When they were gone, Rokhlenu turned to Morlock and said, "I want to see your hand."

Morlock considered the matter for a moment, and then he peeled off the glove without saying anything.

The hand was gray and dead looking. The fingers were the worst. And their tips looked not so much dead as ... ghostly. They seemed to be translucent, almost transparent.

"Does it hurt?" Rokhlenu asked.

"Yes," said Morlock. "But most unpleasant is the lack of control. I-I'm not used to that."

Rokhlenu nodded grimly. "Did she do this to you? Liudhleeo? If she did-"

"I don't think so. I think it was from that spike that was in my head. Part of it may still be in there. Or, while it was in me, it did some damage that is killing me by inches."

"You think it will kill you, then?"

"Probably. Liudhleeo calls it `ghost sickness.' She has heard of it but never seen it."

"The Goweiteiuun have the best ghost-sniffers; maybe they can do something."

"So Liudhleeo says."

"And there's the Shadow Market in the low city, just inside the walls. Lots of crazy sorcerers work that place. Half of them are quacks and the rest are crooks, but they might know something useful."

"So Hrutnefdhu says."

Rokhlenu would have cursed the illness, the Sardhluun ghost-sniffers, Liudhleeo, Hrutnefdhu, and all of the sorcerers in the Shadow Market, but it would do no good. So he punched the wall of the cave instead. Morlock said nothing.

The moment passed. Rokhlenu picked up one of the swords from the weapon rack and said, "Can I take this? I prefer a sword to a spear, when it comes to a fight."

Morlock smiled a rare smile. "I made it for you." He took the sword and unwrapped the leather from the grip. Rokhlenu saw dark runes inset into the glass. "There is your name and a few runes of warding and finding. They won't do much for you, I'm afraid. But maybe you'll be able to find your blade when you need it, anyway."

"Thanks."

Morlock shrugged, nodded.

They went down to the wickerwork boat. It was where the two other werewolves had left it, on the far side of the water. Morlock whistled, and the boat swam back toward them on its own. Rokhlenu felt a qualm stepping into the boat, and was relieved when Morlock poled it across the water in the ordinary way.

He grabbed Morlock by the elbow before they went into the lair-tower and said, "Hey."

"Yes?"

"This ghost sickness. It hurts? It makes you angry?"

"Yes."

"You're not alone, though. And you have no reason to be ashamed."

Morlock's pale eyes fixed on him. "I know that. I know it, my friend."

The never-wolf seemed to understand what he was trying to say. So he stopped trying to say it, and they went upstairs to Hrutnefdhu and Liudhleeo's lair.

Hlupnafenglu was sleeping, somewhat twitchily, and he lay on the floor in the day's last light. Rokhlenu was not surprised to see a worried-looking Liudhleeo bending over him, but he was surprised to see his intended, Wuinlendhono, beside her.

They greeted each other warmly while Liudhleeo and Morlock exchanged a look-smoldering on Liudhleeo's part, rather frosty on Morlock's. Rokhlenu supposed Liudhleeo was trying to have sex with him; her appetites were becoming fairly notorious around the settlement, and even in Apetown and Dogtown, or so Rokhlenu had heard.

"Where's Hrutnefdhu?" asked Rokhlenu.

"Oh, he was getting twitchy," Wuinlendhono said irritably, "so I sent him on an errand. There's enough of us here to hold Big Red here down-or put him out of our misery if it comes to that."

"Maybe," Rokhlenu said, looking at the sleeping werewolf. "Just."

"My Hrutnefdhu doesn't like to see people cut up in cold blood," Liudhleeo explained.

"Who does?" muttered Wuinlendhono discontentedly.

Liudhleeo gave her a sidelong look for this. When Rokhlenu realized he was doing the same himself, he stopped. But it seemed like an odd remark for a werewolf to make.

"He's as ready as he'll ever be," Liudhleeo said, gesturing at the red werewolf, "and I'd like to get some sleep this afternoon, if at all possible. Maybe you, Rokhlenu, would hold down his head and you, Wuinlendhono, would hold his head like-well, like last time. That worked out so ghost-bitten well."

Morlock put his left hand on her shoulder and looked into her dark eyes. She dropped her gaze, then shyly raised it again. Her posture was almost flirtatious, and Rokhlenu was going to say something about it when she said in a businesslike tone, "Do you want to cut him open or pull the spike? I think that's a fair division of labor."

"I'll cut," Morlock said, and pulled a glass knife from his belt.

"And you brought your own knife. Very polite. No magical glass tweezers for me, I suppose?"

Morlock produced a long double-toothed probe from a pocket in one sleeve. That, too, was made of clear glass.

"Ask him for some raw beef," Wuinlendhono said, already kneeling by Hlupnafenglu's shaggy golden head. "I'm hungry."

Rokhlenu was in place, too, so Morlock knelt down by Hlupnafenglu's side and deftly incised a cross in the side of his head. He peeled back the flesh, exposing the skull. Under the frighteningly copious blood, there was a network of pulsating light woven through the bone of the skull. It was much like what they had seen in Morlock's skull, the three of them, anyway. Except that there was more of it; it was denser; the light was more golden.

"You knew exactly where it was," Liudhleeo said quaveringly.

"I saw it in a vision," Morlock explained. "He has a faint scar there, also."

"Are you-are you-are you in a vision or whatever you call it now?" She sounded terrified to Rokhlenu. He wondered why.

"No," said Morlock. He got out of her way, and she approached with the two-pronged probe.

Rokhlenu watched her hand narrowly for any sign of trembling, but there was none. Her hand approached the seeping wound confidently, and carefully probed the skull for the central node.

Then she screamed. She leapt to her feet and she was screaming. Smoke was rising from her hand. A drop of blood there was burning through her skin.

Morlock grabbed her hand and, quick as a werewolf, licked the blood from her hand. Then, unlike a werewolf, he grimaced and spat. "Eccch. Healing is an ugly business."

There were tears in Liudhleeo's dark eyes, but she was smiling as she looked on him. "Thanks," she said. "From one ugly healer to another."

"I guess I'd better pull the spike."

"I guess."

"I wonder why it burned you."

"The blood stinks of silver," Wuinlendhono said distantly. "If you people are done licking each other, I wish you would pull that spike or sew him up or both."

Morlock did both. He located the largest pulsating node and applied the pincers of his probe to either side. It took some time to break it free from the skull, which had begun to heal around the spike: it must have been in the red werewolf's head a long time. But, in the end, Morlock held it triumphantly in his hand, and the three (conscious) werewolves looked on it with a mixture of interest and horror.

It was not blood-dark, like the spike from Morlock's brain. It was still luminous as it lay in his hand, a silvery gold sheathed with drying blood.

"It's electrum, I think," the crooked never-wolf said. "An alloy of silver and gold," he explained, when they looked at him bewildered.

"What a disgusting idea!" Wuinlendhono said heatedly.

"Gold will cure a silver wound," Liudhleeo added tentatively. "I read that somewhere, I think. That's how he must have survived."

"It was some sort of experiment?" Rokhlenu asked. "A game-to see what could be done to a werewolf like this without killing him?" He felt rage building in him. "What kind of crazy ghost-sniffer would do that?"

Morlock pocketed the bloody silver-gold tooth. "Ulugarriu, maybe," he said.

The name cast a pall over the room. Morlock sewed up the red werewolf's bleeding head in an awful silence that didn't seem to bother him in the least. Of course, he lived his life swimming in awful silences, Rokhlenu reflected.

Hlupnafenglu lay in the sunlight, strangely still.

"I wonder if we killed him?" Liudhleeo said quietly.

"Better dead than running around with a silver spike in his brain," Wuinlendhono said decisively, standing with her usual fluid grace. "If we are done here, I think I will return to my lair for a sleep. We'll be having a long night, tonight."

"But-" Rokhlenu said, turning toward her. He hadn't been expecting her to accompany them on the foray to the Khuwuleion. It was insane: some of them would likely die. But she was staring at him with eyes carved from black ice, and his objections died unspoken in his throat.

"I'd better do the same," he said. "See you at sunset," he said to Morlock.

"Then."

As Rokhlenu shut the door behind him he glanced back and saw Morlock tending to Liudhleeo's hand as she looked on him with a rather predatory smile on her long narrow face.

ight had fallen. The sky was largely free of clouds and wholly free of moons: it was the first dark call of the month of Jaric- a very dark call, this year, since Horseman had set. They would fight this night in their day shapes-and that increased the chance that some of them would die. Perhaps all of them, if they had miscalculated the forces that would be present to defend the prison.