The Wolf Age (7 page)

Time passed. Morlock spent a good deal of it staring at the walls. They looked new: this prison was not more than a few years old. Had it replaced an older one, or had the werewolves found some new need for a prison? For that matter, it seemed in retrospect that the dens he had walked past on his way here were also new; there was a rawness about their edges, a lack of plant growth on or near the doorways. He wondered about all this but came to no conclusions. It was hard to think with the glass spike in his skull: he was deaf to his own insight, could proceed only on reason alone, that feeble reed.

Morlock began to hope that he would be kept in solitary confinement, but that evening, when the window was still reddish gray with sunset, a dozen guards herded a new prisoner up the hallway. The two on station unlocked the door while the others forced the new prisoner into the cell that had been Morlock's sole domain.

The new prisoner was in human form ... approximately. His face was long, but his eyes were set far back, almost by his ears. His brutal jaw came out almost as far as his flat porcine nose; when he bared his teeth, as he often did, they looked like the long gleaming teeth of a carnivore. His legs had a twist in them, like a dog's hind legs. His massive naked body was shaggy with hair, white streaked with red. (His bare skin, where it could be seen, showed the same mottling.) He looked like a werewolf who had changed incompletely back to human-who, perhaps, could not change fully out of beast form.

The new prisoner, as soon as he was released, threw himself at the cell door, but the wary guards had already slammed it shut and locked it fast. The new prisoner pressed his snarling face through the bars and snapped and howled. The guards stood back and passed amused remarks among themselves.

The pale trustee appeared again. This time he had two baskets and a handful of some kind of marker. He passed like a vendor through the crowd of guards (more guards, and more trustees, were filling up the hallway). Morlock couldn't tell exactly what was going one, but he thought the pale mottled trustee was selling bets.

The new prisoner tired of struggling against the unyielding bars. He drew his head back and stood snuffling angrily for a while. Then he stood as straight as his arched spine allowed and turned to look at Morlock, seeming to notice him for the first time.

He howled like a dog, and the crowd outside the cell roared and hooted like the audience at a race. They were an audience, Morlock realized: they had come to see him broken, perhaps killed by the beastlike prisoner.

A square of moonlight was already shining on the cell floor. The new prisoner stepped into it, and his unlovely flesh began to ripple like the surface of boiling water. The prisoner knelt down, raising his arms and screaming in ecstasy or fury as they transformed to wolf legs in the silvery light.

In a moment he had transformed: there was no trace of humanity about him anymore. Even his shadow seemed bestial and hulking as he turned toward Morlock with the light of death in his dark eyes.

Morlock stood, his hands open and empty. He was acutely aware that he had nothing to help him in this fight, not even a seer's intuition. He had no tools, no weapons, no escape, and he faced an enemy he could not kill.

The werewolf leapt from light into shadow. Morlock leapt past him, from shadow into the light.

orlock hit the cell floor rolling and jumped to his feet. The werewolf was skittering to a halt, its claws scrabbling on the stone floor for purchase. It smashed into the cot on the far side of the cell, and Morlock heard the wooden frame crack and splinter under the impact.

The bestial cellmate wheeled around. It started forward, as if to lunge at Morlock again, then paused.

Morlock took stock of his enemy. An ordinary wolf, from nose to tail tip, might be as long as Morlock was tall, or a bit longer. This beast was twice that length, and even broader and taller in proportion. Its red-streaked fur was bristly with winter growth: it would be hard for him to wound the beast without some sort of weapon. Its dead-black eyes were watching him with deadly intelligence, measuring him as he measured it.

It came for him then, diving through the crossed torrents of silvery light from the barred window. He darted toward the cell door, bounced off it, and spun away to the far side of the room, ending by the foot of his splintered bed.

At that point, the beast was just lumbering about in recovery from its leap.

Morlock was surprised. Its leap had been swift, terrifying in its speed. But it could not change direction easily, it seemed. Its muscle mass gave it speed, but not nimbleness.

Nimbleness was a feeble blade to pierce the immortal heart of his enemy. But it was at least one weapon in his armory.

He decided to grab another. He seized two sides of his cot's splintered frame and pulled them apart. He heard the beast's feet scratch the stones as it left the floor in another leap. He swung around, still gripping the cot, and smashed it into the side of the werewolf's head as it leaped toward him.

The werewolf fell in a ball, snarling, and snapped at his legs. Morlock smashed the disintegrating frame down on the werewolf; it yelped, finally fleeing from repeated blows. Morlock shook loose a few fragments and then stood forth triumphantly with a club in each hand.

The werewolf, slinking around the far side of the cell, looked from the uneven clubs in Morlock's hands to the fragments of the cot on the cell floor.

Possibly it was thinking about the disadvantages of wolf form. Morlock tossed one club in the air and flickered his fingers before he caught it again. Nimbleness and clubs: they weren't much, perhaps, against the werewolf's advantages. But maybe the beast didn't know that. He moved slowly, stalkingly, toward the werewolf.

The werewolf backed away slowly, around the edge of the room. Morlock followed it, watching for an opportunity to strike. He was also thinking about the beast, its size, and the energy with which it moved. Whenever it had last eaten, it must be growing hungry. As it grew hungrier, it would grow desperate. But it would also grow weaker. Perhaps his strategy should be a waiting game.

The werewolf was now again by the fragments of the cot. One of them was smoldering slightly; Morlock had been wounded slightly, and the blood, falling on the wood, had set it afire.

The werewolf sniffed the smoldering wood, then looked narrowly at Morlock. It extended its blunt snout and sniffed again. Its teeth bared in a wordless snarl, and it darted forward to attack.

Morlock struck, even more savagely than before, with his makeshift clubs, but this time the beast was not deterred. Still, the blows had some effect: it had been aiming at his throat, but it ended up ripping into his left leg.

Morlock pounded on the narrow snout as steaming fiery blood squirted out from between its teeth. The clubs broke over the beast's head; it whined with pain but did not retreat. Morlock took a sharpish end of one of the broken clubs and stabbed it into the werewolf's right eye. He pushed the wooden stake savagely, with all his strength, hoping to strike into the beast's brain.

It fled, sobbing strangely, with its lips firmly shut, with the wood still dangling from its bleeding eye socket. Then, as it paused by the wooden fragments of Morlock's cot, it spat deliberately on them. The blood it had drawn from Morlock's wound set them aflame. Then it darted across the room and spat the rest of its mouthful of blood on the other cot, which took fire and began to burn-slowly at first, then with increasing strength.

Morlock watched gloomily as his potential armory went up in flames kindled by his own blood. His nimbleness was now very much in doubt, due to the leg wound, and his materials for making new weapons were vanishing as he watched. But the worst thing about all this was the deliberate intelligence the werewolf had shown. He had thought of it as a beast, but it was not merely a beast. In fact, it seemed more like a person now than it had when still in man form.

He sat with his back against the cell wall and watched his enemy. It didn't seem disposed to attack, so Morlock tore strips from his shirt to bandage his leg wound. It was a terrible wound, and if it festered it might kill him ... but only if he lived through this night.

The werewolf itself was hardly in better shape. It shook its head frantically and clawed at its eye, finally dislodging the bloody chunk of sharp wood. Then it crept forward to the middle of the room, toward the wedge of moonlight falling on the cell floor. It kept its one eye warily on Morlock as it moved, but it seemed intent on entering the moonlight.

Morlock didn't understand this, but he did understand that anything the werewolf wanted was bad for him. He stood and brandished his remaining club. He closed one eye deliberately and opened it: a warning to the beast that it could lose its other eye.

The werewolf snarled and continued to inch forward.

Morlock thought the beast had understood his threat and was disregarding it. If so, it was even more important that the werewolf not rest in the moonlight. It had transformed there: did moonlight hasten the beast's power to recuperate and heal? It seemed likely.

Morlock dropped his club and jumped for the window. His left hand caught the bars' iron sill, and with his right he slammed over the wooden shutter. There was a latch on the shutter and he set it. The only light in the cell now came from the smoldering flames set by Morlock's blood. The werewolf howled in fury and disappointment.

Morlock dropped back down to the cell floor, and a wave of pain darkened his vision as the fall jarred his wounded leg. Sound and smell warned him before sight that the werewolf was attacking again. He lashed out desperately with his fists, by luck battering the blunt snout aside before its teeth fixed on his throat.

Its jaws clamped down on his right upper arm. Morlock saw that the wounded eye was already healing: the orb was whole again, if sightlessly white. The healthy eye met his, and the werewolf seemed to grin at him around the blood bubbling out of Morlock's wound. Morlock clutched at the werewolf's eye with his left hand, digging deep into the socket with two fingers. The werewolf gave a muffled shriek, a strangely human sound from the lupine mouth, and fled, one eyeball dangling by a thick gleaming nerve from the empty socket.