The Wolf Age (41 page)

-SHELLEY, THE MASK OF ANARCHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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