The Wolf Age

by James Enge

  "The judicants of Nekkuklendon say you did."

  "The judicants of Nekkuklendon would tattoo their price on their asses if the price didn't change all the time. Everyone knows that."

  She waved her hand, dismissing the issue: it didn't matter in the outlier pack. "I'm Wuinlendhono. I'm running things here, for the time being."

  "Oh?" Rokhlenu replied. He had heard that ways were strange in the outliers, but he was surprised to find a female in charge. Still, she seemed to have the bite for it: there was a necklace of long teeth around her neck and ropes of them around her narrow waist.

  "I need something a little more binding from you, Rokhlenu," Wuinlendhono said in a low voice. She was a head shorter than Rokhlenu, but somehow her stern round face was very near his face. She smelled a little like the ginger root that grew on the sacred slopes of the necropolis east of the Stone Tree. "Things were tough enough for me," she continued, "before you and your happy band of jugglers showed up last night-"

  "We're not jugglers!"

  "Keep your voice down. That was a lighthearted, insincere compliment. I wish your boys had any skill as useful as juggling. Listen to me. I mean, listen to nie. You say your boys will back you. If you want to stay here, I need you to back me. Either you are with me or you're against me."

  "I don't know anything about you."

  "Yes, you do. I'm the person who decides whether you stay here or you go."

  "Are you?"

  "I am. Half your people are still asleep; many are wounded. It would be a lot of trouble to drive you off or kill you, but we could do it. It'd make me very popular with some of my pack-mates, too. Listen, I'm not talking about indentured service. But if you're going to stay here, I need to know you're not going to get in my way. You can go any time you want. No shackles on anyone."

  Rokhlenu thought about it. He looked at her: dark-haired, pale-skinned, round-headed, intent: a cool shadow in the freakishly warm winter sunlight. Not a stupid female. But still a female. He couldn't afford to bow his head to a female; no male would look up to him again.

  She read his hesitation perfectly. "How about this?" she said. "My mate is dead. We'll say you're courting me. That way if you, urrr, defer to my judgment, it will seem like politeness, not submission."

  "I guess. As long as I don't have to `defer' too often."

  "Well, well, well. What a romance this is. The poet sings from the heat in his blood."

  "If it's just a ruse-"

  "Of course it is," Wuinlendhono said, in a silky contralto murmur as dark as her hair and as warm as fresh blood, "you stupid brach's bastard, do you think I have no one better to turn to than a filthy naked bloodstained refugee from a prison house?"

  "Do you?" he replied frostily.

  Her fierce little face unbent in a gentle smile. "You're quite right, new friend Rokhlenu," she said, in a voice meant to be heard by those standing nearby. "We must get you some pants, at least." Her eyes flickered downward and she walked away.

  Rokhlenu followed her glance down and saw with dismay that he was sporting an advanced erection.

  He willed it down by thinking of dead puppies and weeping grandmothers and anything, anything except the warm sensual poison of her voice in his ear. It took a while.

  Eventually, he looked up and saw One-Eye standing nearby, but not too nearby. He was not grinning, but his fur-covered face was a little too obviously not grinning.

  Rokhlenu called him over. He almost called him One-Eye, but stopped himself at the last minute. No doubt the semiwolf disliked being reminded of his disability, and Rokhlenu particularly wanted to avoid offending him. "Hey," he said finally. "It was busy last night, and I didn't catch your name."

  "Olleiulu," said the one-eyed werewolf. Olleiulu meant One-Eye. Rokhlenu repressed an irritated growl.

  "All right, Olleiulu," Rokhlenu said. "I need someone to watch my back, and we both know that's you. Am I wrong?"

  "You're not wrong," Olleiulu agreed. "But I don't know how long I'm going to stay here. Just thought it's fair to tell you."

  "Fair is fair. Just let me know when you're going to leave, if you leave."

  "Fair is fair," Olleiulu echoed, and they each gripped the other's shoulder to seal the conditional allegiance.

  "I need some clothes if I'm going to talk to that female again," Rokhlenu continued briskly, "and I don't want to get them from her. If there's a market or a rag shop around here, we should be able to trade some of our gear for a kilt or a loincloth or something."

  "Breeches for males in the outliers," Olleiulu said. "Anything else makes them look at you funny. I'll get a shirt and some footgear, too, even if it is furnace-hot for winter."

  "And it is. Thanks."

  "Anything else?"

  "Pick a sidekick, someone else to watch your back when you're watching mine."

  "Done. It's old Lekkativengu, there." Lekkativengu meant Claufinger, and Olleiulu indicated a werewolf, largely human in appearance, but with wolvish claws on his hands and bare feet. His feet were somewhat pawlike, too. Rokhlenu didn't remember him from the prison escape, but it had been pretty chaotic. "We've sounded out most of the fifth- and fourth-floor gang, and they're with you, as long as you don't cross Khretvarrgliu. The rest are rats who'll go wherever they smell the most cheese."

  Khretvarrgliu: that was what they were calling Morlock last night. Rokhlenu thought Morlock might not care for the nickname, but that wasn't the most urgent issue.

  "You've done politics before?" Rokhlenu asked.

  "I ran an extortion gang in Dogtown," Olleiulu said. "I guess it's pretty similar."

  Rokhlenu was washed, breeched, shirted, and booted before he had to face Wuinlendhono again. In spite of the heat of the day, he found this a great relief. Hesitantly, he offered her his left arm; she smiled and intertwined herself with him.

  "You can play the part, I see," she said, her contralto voice cooler than the warm winter breeze. "Let's walk. I'll show you the lairs, and something less pleasant."

  Rokhlenu's heart was trying to hammer its way out of his chest. It took him several steps to gather enough breath to say, "It's not a part. I'm willing to mate with you."

  "Ulugarriu's left testicle," was Wuinlendhono's amused response. "You've been in prison, Rokhlenu. Right now you're willing to mate with anything that doesn't get away fast enough."

  "I'm serious."

  "I don't want to argue about that. I just want to make something clear. If you're talking about mating with me, we're not talking about a quick screw. I only mate for life. You're too twisted up to think about that right now, but I'm not. You're no good to me like this. So go find someone and discreetly express the depths of your poetic soul-by the bucketful if necessary. We're short on females in the outliers, but there are working girls (and for that matter working boys) who come out from Apetown and Dogtown. You can find them in the day-lairs by the marketplace; your fellow Olleiulu will show you. Until your mind is clear, I'm not making any deal."

  Rokhlenu snarled. "Aren't you at least going to say how touched and honored you are by my proposal?"

  Wuinlendhono laughed sympathetically. She patted his left hand with her own. "Sorry, new friend, if I seem a little cold. I'm not a puppy, you know, anxiously awaiting her first heat. If we mate, you'll be my fifth."

  "Oh? I thought you didn't go in for casual mating."

  "I don't. They're all dead. My fourth, who was First Wolf of this hellhole, was killed by a gang of Dogtown robbers. My third caught some sort of lingering illness and ate silver rather than let it finish him. My second was out hunting one day when he ran into a werebear and they killed each other."

  They walked on for a while in silence. When it became clear that she had finished he said, "And your first?"

  "It was an arranged marriage," Wuinlendhono said. "My guardian outwed me to an old ghost-sniffer in the Goweiteiuun pack. I hated him, so I killed him. That's why I'm here, which was probably your next question."

  "No," Rokhlenu
said, thinking how much like prison this all was in some ways. "But thanks for telling me."

  The lairs of the outlier pack were built on the swamps below Wuruyaaria's south wall. For streets they had boarded ways; the lairs were rickety towers built on stilts driven into the sandy mud of the swamp. The whole place looked like a strong wind could knock it down.

  The people were a little tougher looking. They moved fast; they talked or sang fast. He didn't see too many stupid faces, and no sentimental ones. Even the stupid faces wore a hard, cheerful determination. If the wind came and the lairs fell, these people would rebuild-or sell the wreckage to a passing mark.

  Wuinlendhono took him to a gem-and-bone seller in the north part of town. He had a single greenish dragon tooth on a gold chain, and Wuinlendhono bought it and gave it to Rokhlenu.

  He was going to protest, but she forestalled him with a whisper. "In the outliers, women choose the men. Gifts are normal, so if people hear about this (and they will), they'll take it as part of my arduous campaign to get into your pants. And you need an honor-tooth commensurate with your status. Anyway, it didn't cost very much."

  And it hadn't. Few werewolves in history had ever had enough bite to wear a tooth like that in public. Rokhlenu was one. He was strutting a bit after they got back onto the boards, and Wuinlendhono's proud sideways glance didn't exactly sting.

  "You're not doing a very good job in cooling my ardor," he observed.

  "Well, we haven't got there yet," was her enigmatic reply.

  "There" was a lair-tower on the east side of town, taller and more rickety than most. Several of the upper floors seemed to have been added after the original construction, and there was at least one crack running almost half the length of the plastered walls.

  "Can this thing stand our weight?" asked Rokhlenu, only half joking.

  "Oh, clench up, Dragonslayer," Wuinlendhono answered. "Worse comes to worst, we can always jump." She did not seem to be joking at all.

  The air inside was dense with bloodbloom smoke and less pleasant odors. Rokhlenu followed Wuinlendhono up flight after twisting flight of dark creaking stairs until they got to the top story of the lair, which was all one none-too-spacious den. (The tower narrowed as it rose.)

  In the light from the western windows lay a naked man, sleeping restlessly on what seemed to be a tarpaulin. Over him crouched a she-werewolf in the day shape. Her smooth mottled skin and torrent of russet hair reminded him of someone, but he wasn't sure who. She was reading a small codex she held in her hand; when they entered, she set the book down next to some odd-looking medical instruments and welcomed them with a complete absence of enthusiasm.

  "Liudhleeo, my gravy bowl," said Wuinlendhono. "Can you do it?"

  "I've done what I know how to do," Liudhleeo replied. "I have closed up his battle wounds with the salve Hrutnefdhu helped me make-so the lair is no longer in danger of burning down. I have washed him, apparently the first bath he has taken in his life. His skin had many sores, and his feet were rotten with some sort of fungus. All that has been seen to."

  "Wonderful. Wonderful. But, you know, what I was really asking about was whether he is still crazy."

  "Yes. I have drugged him as deeply as I dared, and he finally fell into a kind of sleep. But unless my experience misleads me, and it is no feeble resource, he is not dreaming."

  "He says he never dreams," Rokhlenu remembered. "It's because of the spike in his head."

  "This is Rokhlenu, by the way, my cutlet," Wuinlendhono said. "He was Khretvarrgliu's cellmate."

  "Yes, I smelled him," the russet werewolf said with a marked distasteand then Rokhlenu knew her, not by sight but by scent. She was the female whom the guards had raped outside his cell on that terrible spring night. He was shocked, then deeply ashamed as she eyed him. He turned away from her, and in the turmoil of his feelings he missed a few of her words.

  11 -that spike, yes," Liudhleeo said. "I must say, the book you gave me has taught me quite a lot."

  "My first husband wrote it. He was a very learned male."

  "And such fine penmanship. All the pages were quite legible, even the ones stained with blood."

  "Why dwell on old gossip, my lamb chop, when we could be busy generating new gossip?"

  "My considered answer to that ... will take a little time. So maybe we should defer it to another occasion."

  "By all means, dear, as long as we understand that I'm one ahead."

  "I understand nothing of the sort, but never mind. I suppose you want to know why I haven't pulled that spike out of Khretvarrgliu's bewildered old head."

  "Do tell."

  "Well, I'm a little frightened about it, actually. I've never done anything like this, messing around inside a man's head, I mean. By choice, I would not start out in that type of surgery with a patient whose blood could set me afire. I sent sweet Hrutnefdhu to a ghost-sniffer who works in the Shadow Market; he said he might persuade him to come help."

  "So you're waiting for this ghost-sniffer?"

  "I was, but after reading this wonderful book some more I had just about nerved myself up to have a stab at the surgery. As it were."

  "Why?"

  "A ghost-sniffer probably can't help. They put these things in, but they never take them out. That's what I was reading in ... in your husband's book. And Khretvarrgliu seems to be getting worse, much worse. You would not believe some of the gibberish he was talking before I finally got him to sleep."

  Rokhlenu believed.

  "Are we sure the spike is causing the madness?" Wuinlendhono asked. "How do we know he wasn't going mad anyway?"

  Both females looked at Rokhlenu, and he said, "I knew him briefly before last year. He was ... an odd and difficult male back then. But sane, I think. It must be the spike. Morlock-Khretvarrgliu, I mean-was sure of it."

  "Well," Liudhleeo said, not looking at him but inclining her head to acknowledge his contribution, "then either we take the spike out or there's only one other choice."

  "What's that?"

  "We wrap him in the tarp and dump him in the swamp. Because he's done."

  "Does it matter?" Wuinlendhono asked Rokhlenu.

  "It matters," Rokhlenu replied. With difficulty, he turned to Liudhleeo. "Can we help?"

  She was eyeing him a little less coldly now. "Yes."

  Liudhleeo coated their hands with the red-brown healing salve; she said it would protect them from Morlock's fiery blood. Then she had them hold Morlock's unconscious body still. Wuinlendhono held his shoulders down; Rokhlenu put one hand under his jaw and the other on the crown of his head and held him firmly.

  Liudhleeo did not anoint her own hands, but took up a long coppery knife on the end of a lead-gray stick. She knelt down beside Morlock and placed the edge of the blade over a red star-shaped scar on his temple. She deftly carved a cross into the flesh. Hot blood poured out of the wound and began to pool on the tarpaulin.

  "The tarp is fireproof," she said, noticing Rokhlenu's alarmed glance. "But don't let any of that stuff fall on the floor. Otherwise we'll have a fire in here like ..."

  "Clench up," Rokhlenu said. "Worse comes to worst, we can always jump."

  "Wish I'd said that," Wuinlendhono said, a little breathily. The scent or the sight of blood seemed to make her uneasy-Rokhlenu had never seen an adult werewolf so squeamish. He thought it odd. Of course, Morlock's blood did smell strange; maybe that was it.

  Liudhleeo used a long-handled clamp to peel away a strip of Morlock's flesh, exposing the raw skull. Under the blood pulsed a sort of light, in the same rhythm as Morlock's heart. There was a squarish central locus and a fine network of pulsating lines spreading out from there.

  "That's it," Liudhleeo said, tapping the squarish center.

  "It looks like it's ... growing or something. Laying down roots, like a plant."

  "Maybe it is."

  "Can we get it all out, then?"

  "Maybe we can."

  Liudhleeo gently but firmly inserted wedgelike probes
on either side of the spike. Slowly, carefully, she worked it free from the skull and it dropped, dark as dried blood, to the tarpaulin.

  "What about the lines?" Rokhlenu asked.

  "I don't see them anymore. They went dark as soon as I extracted the spike. I think we're done."

  She folded back the flap of flesh with the clamps and used a longhandled spoon to dab healing salve over the small but surprisingly bloody wound. Then she set about the awkward task of mopping up the blood. With a rag, and then tossing the rag into a bucket of water when it burst into flame. It took several rags, and the bucket was already dense with them, the water oily with Ambrosial blood.

  By then the glass spike had dried and was safe to touch. Rokhlenu picked it up and looked at it. The end was unpointed and rather rough. It looked as if the tip had broken off, perhaps left behind in the wound.

  "I know," said Liudhleeo, embarrassed. "But I think we've done what we can. Perhaps all will be well."

  Rokhlenu handed her the dark spike. Then he lifted the dragon tooth from around his neck and held it out to her, chain and all. Wuinlendhono twitched a little at this but said nothing.

  "No," Liudhleeo said, even more embarrassed. "I haven't earned it."

  He went down on his knees, eyes intent on her, still holding out the tooth.

  She took his hand and firmly folded his fingers over the tooth. "No one but you can wear this, Rokhlenu." She pushed his hand away, but he did not withdraw it.

  "I never blamed you," she said then, not looking at him.

  "I did," he said. "I do. But that's not what this is about. He saved methree times, four times, I don't know how many times. And you saved him. This is all I have. If it is worthless, it is still yours."

  "Wear it for me, then," she said.

  "For you," he said, and put the chain around his neck again. "Claim it when you like."

  She bowed her head and motioned impatiently for him to stand, so he did.

  Wuinlendhono stood also. "You'll keep the book, of course, my dear," she said, "and wear that spike like an honor-tooth. We'll discuss the filthy lucre another time."

  "I did it for Hrutnefdhu," Liudhleeo whispered. "Khretvarrgliu is his friend, too."