The Wolf Age

by James Enge

  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.

  Morlock stood with his back to the wall beneath the window and wearily tore more strips from his shirt for bandages. He did so with a sense of futility. In every encounter where the werewolf hurt him, it came closer to killing him. He could hurt it, but he could never kill it. The absence of moonlight might slow its healing, but would not stop it. And now it didn't even need to attack; it could sit and wait for him to pass out from blood loss or weariness.

  If only he could kill it. But he had no silver and no wolfbane. How else could you kill a werewolf.?

  The wounded beast sidled through the red smoky shadows of the cell. It issued a harsh, rasping sound like a cough.

  Morlock thoughtfully twisted the bandage in his hands. He let the blood fall unregarded to the stone floor. A thought was forming in his mind.

  Everything that lived, everything that had physical life, had to breathe. That was why the werewolf was coughing from the smoke.

  Keeping one eye on the lurking beast, Morlock stooped down and pulled the leather laces from his shoes. When he had made them he had leeched the phlogiston from them so that they wouldn't burn; he tested their strength now with his fingers, and he liked what he felt. He patiently spliced the laces together. It took a little time to do properly and his time was running out, but there was no point in trying this without doing it right. When the laces were one, he grabbed a stray length of nonburning wood from the floor and, being careful not to drip blood on it, broke it in half. He knotted one end of each lace to a piece of wood, and presently he had a serviceable garrote.

  Now to make a chance to use it. The beast was wounded in both eyes, but it could still smell and hear; he would have to distract it somehow so that he could attack it from behind.

  Morlock carefully placed the garrote on the floor far away from any fires. Then he loitered casually toward one of the burning cots-it was the other one, the one Morlock had not broken up. By now the fire had spread over the length of the thing and it was burning merrily.

  The werewolf was on the far side of the cell, distractedly and somewhat dismayedly swinging its loose eyeball on its nerve.

  Morlock picked up the burning cot and threw it at the wall above the werewolf. As soon as the cot struck the wall, he dodged across the cell to seize his garrote and then jumped upon the werewolf's back as it emerged snarling from the curtain of hot gleeds and bloody smoke. He wrapped the cord around the half-blind beast's neck and began to twist.

  Of course, it fought. But there was very little it could do: Morlock was out of reach of its teeth and claws. It strove to tear at the strangling cords with the claws of its back feet. Morlock waited until both back legs were fully extended, then stomped on the joints where the long bones of the leg joined together-the knees, for a man or a woman. He felt a certain savage satisfaction in hearing the knee joints crunch under his unlaced shoes.

  The werewolf yelped, or tried to: Morlock felt the surge in its chest and neck. But its throat was closed; not a sound emerged. Morlock twisted the handles of the garrote again and again, cutting deeply into the beast's flesh. Presently it stopped moving.

  He held on for a long time after that, counting th
e moments by his own pulses long after the werewolf's heart stopped. When he had counted a thousand heartbeats since the beast's last movement he relaxed the hold of the strangling cord slightly. The werewolf remained motionless. He relaxed it a little more.

  The wolvish chest expanded slightly. There was a slight tremor in its veins: a returning heartbeat.

  Morlock snarled and twisted the cord tight again, strangling off the werewolf's returning life.

  Frustration threatened to swamp his reason. He could keep the beast from living, but he could not actually kill it. He could hope that the return of the sun would change the beast back into the bestial man it had been ... but he couldn't be sure even of that: some werewolves could obviously maintain the beast form through the day.

  He took the frustration out by twisting the cord even tighter. It dug even more deeply into the wolvish neck. That was what gave him the idea.

  Maintaining his grip on the unliving but not-yet-dead beast, he dragged the body nearer some fragments of burning wood. Some of the wood was sharp and ragged. He took a chunk of that and started hacking away at the great muscles of the wolvish neck. Blood started to flow, a great deal of cold blood, black in the fiery light. But that was just as well: it extinguished the flames in the splintering wood and made it last longer. When one chunk became useless, he grabbed another. He twisted the unliving head back and forth periodically; it was growing looser and looser on the spine, as Morlock had hoped it would.

  Eventually his crude wooden weapons pierced the werewolf's airway. Air began to whistle through the slashed openings-slow at first, then faster and faster. The werewolf's dangling eyeball dilated with awareness, and the claws began to scrabble on the stone floor.

  Morlock had destroyed so much of the werewolf's neck that the strangling cord was no longer an effective means of restraint. Morlock let it go and clamped the werewolf's jaws shut with his hands. Planting his feet on the werewolf's front legs, he began to twist the werewolf's head on the fleshless neck. The beast struggled to open its jaws, to savage Morlock with its back claws, but soon its legs stopped moving: he had severed the corridor for nerve impulses to reach the body. The head came loose from the spine on the next twist.

  The beast's body fell lifeless to the ground ... but, horribly, the beast itself was not dead. Its dangling eye still glared at him with baleful intelligence, and the jaws strove feebly to open. He muzzled them shut with the strangling cord as a temporary solution.

  He sat with his back against a wall and tried to think what he might do next. He wondered dimly if the head could find a way to reunite with the dead body and live again, or perhaps grow a whole new body from its neck. He didn't know. He didn't know what a werewolf could do.

  The head could live without the body, but not the body without the head, that was clear. It made his next move clear, too.

  Morlock jumped up and unlatched the shutter on the window, letting blue bars of moonlight fall into the red fuming cell again. He grabbed the wolf head by a loose end of cord and then jumped up to grab the iron sill of the window with his free hand. He tossed the wolf head up onto the sill and tried to push it through the bars. But the openings were too narrow for the wolvish skull to pass through. It made odd sounds as it lay there in the moonlight; it began to rock back and forth as if gaining new strength.

  He grabbed the bars with both hands and slowly lifted himself up to the window, aided slightly by his feet scrabbling on the coarse stone wall of the cell. He kicked the wolf head with one foot, wedging its narrow maw between the iron bars. He kept on kicking it, first with one foot, then with another, finally with both. It was agony to his wounded leg and arm, but he kept at it until the bones of the skull were broken and the sacklike wolf head squished through the bars and fell, grunting with terror or some other emotion, out of sight into the moonlit world beyond.

  Morlock extended his arms as much as possible and slid down the wall, finally dangling from his unwounded arm, to reduce the shock when he fell. It worked, to the extent that he didn't pass out from pain when he hit the cell floor.

  He turned and surveyed the smoking, firelit cell. The werewolf body lay motionless, apparently dead (even if its head was still alive somewhere). He was sick with horror at what he had done, at what he had had to do. But he supposed he could call this a victory.

  Looking beyond the cell bars, he saw with shock that the corridor was still full of watchers. He had forgotten about them. They stood there, man and wolf, staring at him with eyes full of wonder and horror, silent and motionless as stones. The pale trustee had dropped his baskets and was watching him through outspread fingers, like a child who is at once afraid to look at something and afraid to not look at it.

  Morlock read their shock, and slowly (his mind was going dark) he understood it. This had not been about killing him. They could have done that at any time after his capture. They could have put archers at the cell door and filled him full of arrows. They could still do that. But they had planned to break him, send in the bestial man-wolf and break him and then, perhaps, kill him. Or perhaps make him into a new trustee-a safe fellow to run errands around the prison.

  Lit within by sudden fury, Morlock staggered forward and, straining greatly but trying not to show it, seized the dead body of the beast from the cell floor. He threw it with all of his fading strength at the bars of the cell. He would have screamed at them, too, but he didn't have the breath for it.

  They jumped back, tripping over each other to retreat. He stared at them for a moment longer, then turned away and limped over to a corner of the cell with relatively few fires. He lay down with his face against the wall, his back toward the cell door. It was his only way to show his contempt, since he had no words to speak that they could understand and no breath to speak them with.

  The corridor was still silent when darkness descended on him and he escaped from the bloodstained, red-smoked, blue-lit cell for a time.

  ain and cold woke Morlock from a sleep more dreamless than death. He turned his head and saw that the open window was gray with predawn light. The smoke in the room had cleared away, the fires extinguished.

  Morlock fought his way to a sitting position, his back against the bitterly cold damp wall. The werewolf body and the burning fragments were gone from the cell. Dark bloodstains still spread across the stones of the floor, especially by the barred door.

  There was a bowl of food and a bowl of water there, and something else lay beside them on the stones.

  Beyond the bars the guards stood watching him: two in wolf form, two in man form. They didn't speak to each other or to him.

  He got to his feet and lumbered over to the food and water.

  The thing beside them on the cell floor was a long tooth-a wolf's tooth possibly. A narrow hole had been bored in it, and it was strung on a piece of cord.

  He looked up at the guards. Each of them had a cord of teeth around his neck or (in one of the men's case) wrapped around his forearm. It was some badge of acceptance or honor-or status. The savage man-wolf he had fought last night had worn no such symbol. But somehow he had earned this by defeating it.

  He didn't like the idea of a cord around his neck, particularly if he got into another fight. He wrapped the cord around his wrist and turned his attention to breakfast.

  The bowl of food was mush again, this time garnished with a human ear and two fingers, gray and bloodless as the predawn light. He set them aside and ate the mush: he could not afford to be squeamish. The water did not entirely wash away the taste. He took the ear and put it up on the sill of the open window and tossed the two fingers in a corner.

  He went and sat in the opposite corner and stayed there, eyeing each one of his guards in turn. The faces of the men were clean shaven; their light armor and weapons well crafted and well kept. Yet they were somehow wolflike, with long narrow faces and somewhat crooked legs. The wolves, in turn, were strangely human, with cool observant eyes and deliberate gestures.

  Someone had left this t
ooth for him, and they had not objected. He didn't understand, and he felt ill equipped to try to understand it. With the glass spike in his head, he was deaf to everything except what he heard with his ears. He was blind to everything except what he could see with his eyes. He grieved for his lost Sight.

  Presently the trustee came along the hallway, with two archers following him, and exchanged a few words with the guards. The archers each hocked an arrow and pointed it through the bars at Morlock. A guard unbarred the cell door as the others stood ready to strike if Morlock rushed the door. There was obviously no point in doing this, so Morlock merely watched and waited.

  The trustee entered the cell, and the door slammed shut behind him. The trustee wheeled and whined something at the guards through the bars; one of the wolves snarled a response. Reluctantly, the trustee turned back toward Morlock.

  The trustee held something out in his pale mottled hands and made noises that were clearly words. The object in his hands was an open jar, and in it a brownish red goo, the color of cold blood. It smelt of bitter herbs: some kind of medicine, Morlock guessed; they would hardly take the trouble to poison him when they could kill him in so many more direct ways. Of course, what was a healing salve for a werewolf might still be poisonous for him, but Morlock was inclined to take the risk. He slowly extended one arm and opened his hand. The trustee darted forward to put the jar in his hand and then skittered away.

  The guards in the corridor snickered. Morlock ignored them and the trustee; sitting down on the cell floor, he unbound his wounds (breaking their tenuous scabs, unfortunately) and smeared the salve densely over the ragged tears in his flesh.

  The effect was not immediate, but it was quick enough to make him suspect there was magic involved in the salve. Plus, it seemed to have been leeched of phlogiston: it did not bubble or flame on contact with his blood.

  A maker of some considerable attainments had crafted this salve, Morlock reflected, and had likely done it for Morlock personally (unless they had more prisoners with fiery Ambrosial blood). That was worth remembering.