The Wolf Age (67 page)

"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.