The Wolf Age

by James Enge

  Morlock shrugged. "I'm here to make money. I can draw better than you. The crowd won't want your work after they've seen mine."

  The artist-werewolf's face worked angrily. He glanced at the drawing, still being held up with wonder by the crowd. He threw down the brush and the bowl of ink and stood up.

  "Fine," Luyukioronu shouted. "Take the stuff. I hope the ink poisons you. But you won't get my teeth." He clutched at the few honor-teeth he had at his throat. Morlock saw with interest that his thumbs were indeed long: the tips stretched farther than his index fingers. "You'll have to fight me for those," Luyukioronu continued, "you gray-bagged, flat-faced, ape-fingered son of a never-wolf!"

  "Wait!" said Morlock. "Stop!"

  Luyukioronu walked stiff-legged away.

  The crowd applauded.

  Morlock looked around in bemusement. Hrutnefdhu was there in the crowd, and he took pity on his never-wolf friend. "You showed you had more bite as an artist than he did. The stuff is yours now."

  "Eh." Morlock grabbed the bowl of coins. "How much is this stuff worth? Less than this?"

  "A dozen coppers, perhaps. He probably stole it, you know."

  "Maybe he did, but I won't. Go after him. Give him twenty copper coins. Take the rest to Rokhlenu and meet me back here."

  The pale werewolf smiled strangely at him, took the bowl, and left.

  "Citizens," Morlock said, sitting down by the easel. "What will you?"

  He painted. He drew images in ink for four copper coins each. There were some sticks of charcoal tucked away in the artist's kit, and he sold pictures in charcoal for two copper coins each. There was some odd pigment in soft sticks, like chalk mixed with colors and oil. He found this fascinating to work with, but he didn't forget he was there to make money. He charged six copper coins for work in these.

  He did it for the money, because he and his friends needed money. But it wasn't only the money. He was a maker who had made virtually nothing for more than a year. He ached to reshape matter with his hands and his dreams-now that he could dream again. Each image was important to him for itself, not just for the money.

  And money wasn't all he earned by it. Customers often handed him an honor-tooth along with their coins. He thought it was a mistake at first, but they seemed angry if he asked them about it, so he stopped asking.

  Most of the pictures were portraits. The customers wanted keepsakes of themselves, their mates, their sweethearts, their cubs. But one citizen said, "Make me a tree. I like trees." So Morlock drew in inks a maijarra tree he had seen in his now-distant youth on the western edge of the world. The next customer wanted a more warlike scene, so Morlock sketched in charcoal and smoky pastels the chaotic central chamber of the Vargulleion prison on that memorable New Year's Night. This was very popular, and customers wanted more like it, so Morlock drew scene after scene of the battle, as much as his hazy memory permitted. He drew images of Rokhlenu on the dragon he had killed in the mountain pass of Kirach Kund, images of Rokhlenu fighting the Spiderfolk. The crowd was intrigued by the images of the werewolf, and even more interested when they found that the werewolf was the intended spouse of the outliers' First Wolf.

  Finally, Morlock took the last roll of paper that he had and used most of the rest of the ink and pigment on a vast panorama of the city of Wuruyaaria as he had first seen it, rising in savage civil splendor up the mesas of the mountainside, facing the threatening mass of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon, glaring over the scene with its single intricate mechanical eye. The overall tone was greenish, but Morlock stippled the surface with yellow pigment and smeared it with his thumb until the image shone with a green-and-gold misty luster he had never seen in the world, but somehow seemed exactly right.

  "Who's that for?" asked someone in the crowd.

  "Whoever pays the most for it," Morlock replied.

  The impromptu auction netted Morlock several more fistfuls of copper coins, and a string of honor-teeth. The image went to the madam of one of the day-lairs (i.e., whorehouses) nearby. She said it would be perfect to decorate her waiting room.

  "No doubt," Morlock said, with the sinking feeling a maker often has when relinquishing his work.

  He bought a woman's headcloth to roll up his newfound wealth in. The crowd began to thin out reluctantly, the show obviously being over.

  Two shadows fell across Morlock as he was rolling up the cloth. He looked up to see the long leering face of Luyukioronu, the werewolf artist. Next to him was a many-scarred thug with clawed fingers and a pronounced and toothy overbite.

  "You took my stuff," Luyukioronu said. "So now we'll take your stuff. Stand back, never-wolf."

  "Didn't my friend find you?" Morlock asked. "I sent him with payment for your materials. And you can have back whatever's left."

  "He gave me your money. But that just told me you're afraid. So I used it to hire Snekknafenglu here, and we'll take the rest of your money nowand those honor-teeth you've got; you probably stole those, too."

  "No man or wolf calls me thief," said Morlock as he stood.

  "You!" shouted Luyukioronu. "Who ever heard of you to call you anything, you rat-tailed tailless bald-faced never-wolf-"

  The crowd stood back, but did not leave. The show was clearly not yet entirely over. They had enjoyed watching Morlock work, but they would not intervene: a citizen should only carry what he or his can fight to keep. That was their law.

  Morlock saw Snekknafenglu edging forward while Luyukioronu raved. Morlock lashed out with the edge of an ink-stained hand at what seemed to be the weakest part of Snekknafenglu's protruding upper jaw. The mercenary staggered back, eyes crossing in pain. Morlock turned to Luyukioronu and kicked him savagely in one knee. As the artist was reeling, Morlock kicked him in the other knee and he went down on the boards. Morlock turned back to Snekknafenglu standing at bay between Hrutnefdhu and Olleiulu. Olleiulu, Morlock was relieved to see, was carrying Tyrfing.

  "What do you want us to do with him?" Olleiulu asked.

  "Yes, what should we do with him-Khretvarrgliu?" Hrutnefdhu added slyly, glancing at Snekknafenglu.

  The effect of the name on the thug was immediate and, Morlock had to admit, somewhat gratifying. Snekknafenglu gasped, looked anxiously at Morlock, anxiously at the sword, and turned to flee.

  "Let him go," Morlock said, so his friends did. The thug-for-hire ran off, and a few members of the crowd tapered off after him, perhaps hoping to win a few honor-teeth from Snekknafenglu while he was feeling whipped.

  Morlock turned to the artist, who was struggling to get back afoot. He snatched the artist's honor-teeth and ripped them from the hairy neck. Then he tossed them into the swamp water, where they sank out of sight.

  "I am not a thief," said Morlock. "But you are a liar. Earn your bite back by telling the truth, or I'll take your teeth again."

  The crowd hooted and applauded ironically as Luyukioronu scrambled away to nurse his losses.

  "Well, you've had a busy morning," said Hrutnefdhu, eyeing Morlock's money-roll.

  Morlock glanced at the sky in surprise. It was not yet noon.

  "How about lunch?"

  Morlock was ravenously hungry but said, "No thanks. You can take this money to Rokhlenu. Sorry it's so heavy-can we change it for silver, somewhere?"

  "Silver," said Hrutnefdhu faintly. "Are you still crazy?"

  "Oh." Morlock reflected for a moment. Silver would not pass for currency among werewolves. "No. Never mind. Tell Rokhlenu I'll send more when I can." Hrutnefdhu shrugged, took the money-roll, and departed.

  Morlock accepted the sword from Olleiulu with sincere thanks.

  "We found it in a stash one of our fellow escapees had set up," Olleiulu said. "A second-floor hero. He waited until the guards were dead or fled and he then looted bodies. He showed up here the next day and stole your sword the following night. Well, now we have one fewer mouth to feed, and a few more of us have some gear."

  "Eh."

  "You should put those honor-teeth on," Olleiulu said, po
inting at the string Morlock had left on the boards of the market floor.

  "Eh."

  "I don't know what that means, and I don't mean any kind of disrespect. If you won't, you won't. But people see you without honor-teeth, they try to take whatever you got away from you. I know you can brush them off, but why should you have to?"

  Morlock saw his point. He grabbed up the honor-teeth and roped them around his neck.

  Olleiulu looked relieved. Morlock wondered if it was bad for a werewolf's reputation to be seen with someone who wore no honor-teeth; he guessed it might. Neither Hrutnefdhu nor Liudhleeo wore them, Morlock reflected.

  "Well, what's next if it's not lunch? Rokhlenu said that me or Hrutnefdhu had to stay with you until you-until you-"

  "Until I wasn't obviously crazy."

  "Which I know you're not, no matter what that plepnup says. But you can't know your way around the boards yet."

  "The plepnup is my friend, Olleiulu."

  "Uh-huh, Chief. I didn't mean anything bad."

  "Can you take me where he lives? Where he and Liudhleeo live?"

  Olleiulu nodded sagely. "You're not hungry; you're tired. You want to rest."

  "Not exactly." Morlock was both hungry and tired, but now that he had Tyrfing back there were many other things he could and should do.

  Through the thinning crowd, Morlock saw the other side of the market square. Sitting with somber concentration, his head in his hands, was the big red werewolf, Hlupnafenglu.

  "I forgot about him," Morlock admitted.

  "Lucky you," Olleiulu snorted.

  They went over, and Morlock told Hlupnafenglu that he could get up. He had to say it several times before the red werewolf could hear it or would believe it, but eventually he sighed with relief and got to his feet. He beamed with vacant happiness on Morlock and the scornful Olleiulu.

  "East we go," said Olleiulu, and they went east.

  Around sunset, Olleiulu returned alone to the ramshackle building Rokhlenu and his men used as quarters. He brought with him a sizable box sporting a wheel and handles for grasping. Whatever was in the box was obviously very heavy.

  Rokhlenu and Wuinlendhono were sitting outside the building in chairs that had seen better days. Rokhlenu cocked an eye at Olleiulu and said, "I take it my friend is quite well and knows his way around the outlier pack perfectly."

  Olleiulu put the box down and gasped for a while. When he could speak he said, "Khretvarrgliu seems to be well. But I think maybe I'm crazy, after today."

  "What's in the box?" Wuinlendhono asked. "Not more fruits of the marketplace, I hope. I had several complaints from merchants that Morlock was funnelling all the money his way this morning."

  Olleiulu looked to his chieftain, who nodded. Olleiulu lifted the lid of the box slightly and they all saw the red gleam of raw gold within. Olleiulu slammed the box shut before anyone else could see it.

  "Well," Wuinlendhono said, after a brief silence. "It seems like that mating is on. If you're still interested, of course; I don't like to presume."

  "I'm interested," Rokhlenu said grimly. It was true in several ways ... unfortunately, they were ways that might not run together.

  "There isn't that much gold in the outlier pack," Wuinlendhono reflected.

  "There is now, I guess. Where did it come from, Olleiulu?"

  "That's why I think I must be crazy. He ... he ... he made it. He apologizes it's not so much. He says there'll be more tomorrow."

  "Hmmmm," hummed Wuinlendhono. "We'll have to hire a ghostsniffer to make sure it's really real. But assuming it will pass the sniff test, we can proceed with negotiating the terms of the marriage alliance." She stood in a single fluid movement. "I'll have one of my old women come over tomorrow and chew over the details with one of your men."

  "Olleiulu, that'll be you."

  Olleiulu nodded.

  Wuinlendhono licked the face of her intended in farewell and then walked sinuously away to her own lair-tower. The lupine bodyguards who had lain out of sight jumped up and danced around her as she walked, unregarding, among them.

  "Have a seat," Rokhlenu offered. "Tell me about it."

  Olleiulu ignored the seat next to his chieftain, sitting on the boards next to the treasure box. He grasped his ears a few times to settle his thoughts, and then began.

  "I get there to the market and he's in the middle of some kind of barking match with Luyukioronu the forger and Snekknafenglu the claw-for-hire. Not the Snekknafenglu who works out of Dogtown, the other one."

  "I don't know either one."

  "That's right. I keep forgetting we weren't in business together until a few nights ago."

  Rokhlenu never forgot it, but he didn't want to say that to Olleiulu; he might take it wrong. "It's a new life since then, and we've been together through most of it."

  "Right. Anyway. We keep Khretvarrgliu from ripping them up-"

  Rokhlenu had heard a more measured account from Hrutnefdhu, but he made allowances for Olleiulu's admiration for Morlock, and the form that admiration took.

  -and after we sent off the plepnup-"

  "That plepnup is my friend, Olleiulu."

  "I keep making that mistake. Sorry, I don't mean anything by it. Anyway, we sent him back to you with the coin and we collected that crazy Hlupnafenglu and walked east right out of town. I think he wants to go back to a lair and sleep the afternoon like people do. But he heads straight past the pl-past Hrutnefdhu's lair and starts wading through the swamp. Hlupnafenglu plops in right after him."

  "I wouldn't have done that, myself. Gotten in that water, I mean."

  "Oh, thanks, Chief. I'll treasure that little piece of advice. I jumped as far across as I could, but I still ended in the shallows on the far side. Do you have any idea how bad that muck stinks?"

  "No, thank ghost. Either you're downwind of me or you must have cleaned up."

  "Cleaned up, but it was a while until I got to that. He starts setting up in one of those creepy caves up on the slope-"

  "Setting up what? I thought all he had was his sword."

  "That's all he got there with, right. But he starts cutting up brushwood and small trees on the hillside, swinging the sword like an axe."

  "Weird."

  "You said that too soon. He's got stacks of wood by now, see, and he takes a bunch of sticks and he builds a kind of basket or something."

  "A basket."

  "Except there was no way to carry anything in it. It was round like a ball and there were gaps all around in it, and the branches were weaved-"

  "Woven."

  11 -weaved together in a crazy way that kind of made my eyes hurt. Then he puts his back against the cave wall, and it's like he's gone to sleep or something."

  "Well, it's a warm day for winter."

  "It's a warm day for late spring. But I don't think he was really asleep. His sword started to glow and his eyes a little too-I mean you could see it through his eyelids."

  "Is it too early to say `weird' yet?"

  "You tell me. After he's not-sleeping like this for a while, a fuzzy shiny sort of mist starts coming out of the basket and floats away. Eventually he wakes up and lights a fire. He lights a lot of little fires, one at a time. He strikes sparks from a couple of stones, and he catches them with a leaf or a piece of grass or something, one by one you understand, and then he says something to them, talks to them like they're people, and he sets them down in the basket.

  "Which starts to burn."

  "No. He puts stuff in the basket-grass and junk; I don't know. It burns. But the basket doesn't burn."

  "All right, I'll call that weird."

  "But what about when the little flames started talking back? He says something, and they say it back to him in little sparky voices? What do you call that?"

  "Weirder."

  "Oh, go mate yourself and have knuckly puppies. So, once he's got enough flames-I don't know maybe it was twenty or thirty-he starts making baskets while he talks to them. Real baskets you co
uld carry stuff in. He packed them with earth and grass so the stuff in them didn't fall out."

  "What stuff did he put in them?"

  "Not him. Us. Hlupnafenglu and me. He wanted sand. Muddy, if it had to be, but the sandier the better. Then he sits back and takes another one of those not-a-naps while we haul sand and the flames argue and snap at each other."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Kreck, no. I couldn't understand them. But that's what it sounded like. We had a pretty big heap of sandy muck by the entrance of the cave when Morlock woke up. He tells us to keep at it and wanders off up the hillside, and he comes back with just a basket of dumb stuff. some yellow stinkstone, and dead beehives, and I don't know what else. Then he takes a bunch of it and mixes it up in a little basket like a dish, like about as wide as your hand. And he puts it inside the big basket, the one with the talking flames, like he's a baker putting some bread in an oven."

  "Yum."

  "You liked it." Olleiulu jerked a thumb toward the treasure box.

  "That's how he made the gold?"

  "Right. He came back after a while and changed baskets, and the one that came out of the big basket, he called it the nexus-the one that came out of the nexus was full of gold. It goes in reeking like yellow stinkstone and it comes out like raw gold. He's just dumping it on the ground in his cave. This goes on for a while."

  "Busy afternoon."

  "He takes some sand and he burns it in the nexus. He keeps going over to it and turning it with his bare fingers, folding it over on itself while it was red hot. And he talked a lot to the flames while he was working. It might have been just because they were there, but he didn't talk to us that way."

  "What did he make the glass into?"

  "He called them `mirror gates.' He makes water run uphill with them."

  "Drop dead."

  "I almost did. Never seen anything like it. Never seen anything like half the stuff I saw this afternoon, but that was the weirdest. He dug a skinny channel up the hill and another one running down again, and he lined them with wood smeared with beeswax. He put a mirror gate at the top and the bottom of the channels, where they joined. And he took a basket of water-"

  "You want to give me some help with that one?"