The Wolf Age

by James Enge

  Morlock shrugged. That was one possibility. Another was that the bags of hot air were inside. He continued to hack away at the fabric. Rokhlenu did as well, and eventually they had a rip large enough for one of them to slide through, wings and all.

  Rokhlenu seemed to want to discuss who should go through first, but Morlock unhooked his wooden glove from the cable and dove through without a word. It wasn't even worth discussing. He was the one who was dying; if he died a little sooner it was no great matter.

  In his mind, Morlock had already sketched out several possible designs for the interior of the airship proper. One or two were actually ingenious and he hoped to see them at work. In this he was disappointed, because the interior of the ship was nothing like he had imagined.

  The interior was all one great chamber, nearly empty. The only thing in it was a glowing stone near one end of the chamber and an oddly spidery being standing next to it.

  Morlock drifted down to the bottom of the chamber, bemused. The stone and the entity by it (the keeper? the steersman? a guard?) were on a wooden platform; the rest of the chamber was an empty cylinder, tapered at both ends.

  He heard Rokhlenu land behind him.

  The being standing on the platform did something to the glowing stone.

  Its light fell on Morlock more intensely. It struck him like an invisible hammer. He felt the fabric of the chamber rippling around him. There was a ghostly murmur in the air. He had no idea what was going on.

  "I feel strange," Rokhlenu said thickly.

  Bracing himself against the hammer-blows of the light, Morlock turned to face Rokhlenu. He looked strange. The light was causing the werewolf's flesh to ripple and twist, as if he were assuming the night shape. But he was not becoming a wolf. It was more as if a wax image of a man and a wolf were merging, distorting each other, but neither one growing and neither one shrinking. A wolf's head was emerging from Rokhlenu's neck, its eyes dead and empty, its maw toothless. Needle-toothed mouths were opening in the palms of his hands, and twisted canine legs were sprouting from his torso to join his arms and legs, giving him a nightmarishly spidery look-like that thing on the platform.

  Morlock drew his sword, repressing a sudden temptation to pass it through his friend a few times and end his misery, and turned instead to slash an opening in the chamber wall.

  "You can't stay here!" he shouted at his friend, who was now howling mindlessly from all his mouths. Morlock kicked him through the gap into the night; his howls faded into the storm.

  Morlock hoped that his old friend had enough self-command to use the wings and glide to safety-or, if not, that the levity of the phlogistonimbued scales on his wings would cushion his long fall. But the worst thing that could happen to him from the fall was death, and it was not impossible that the light from the strange stone had done worse than this to him already.

  The intensity of the light falling on Morlock grew. He dreaded the thought that it would distort him as it had his friend ... but that didn't seem to be happening. It must be something about werewolves that made them vulnerable to the bitter blue light.

  Morlock grabbed the grips of his wings and kicked off into flight. He arced upward to land on the platform beside the distorted creature.

  It was a werewolf-or had been, Morlock guessed. It had four crooked lupine limbs as naked as a rat's tail, and approximately human arms and legs that were strangely muscled and covered with doglike fur. It had a lifeless wolf head dangling from one human shoulder, a single gigantic human eye peering out from what appeared to be a neck, and on the side of the neck was a gray-lipped human mouth that squealed with terror as Morlock landed beside it.

  "Don't do this!" it begged him. "If I obey, he says he can change me back, but if I don't obey, he says he'll leave me like this. Please don't do this. Let me do what they tell me to do."

  "How do they tell you?" Morlock demanded. "How does this thing work?"

  "I can't tell you. I can't tell you anything. He'll know. They'll hurt me."

  The glowing stone was set in a sort of barrel on a spinnable disc, with handles protruding like spokes around the rim's edge. The inner part of the barrel was covered with mirrors, to reflect the light upward and forward. There were lenses mounted atop the barrel and in front. Levers around the lenses made them focus the light more or less intensely. Morlock badly wanted to examine these assemblies; it seemed as if the levers somehow changed the shape of the lenses themselves, which was very interesting. But in more immediate terms, the more intense the light, the greater the force driving the airship. The lens pointing upward kept the ship aloft, could perhaps drive it even further up into the sky. The lens in front steered the ship and drove it forward ... or backward: the wheel seemed to spin in a full circle. Now they were veering away to port-eastward, if Morlock's sense of direction was not totally deranged by dizziness and wine.

  That was contrary to the plan emerging in Morlock's mind. He said, "Watch out," and grabbed one of the handles, rotating the barrel so that the light was pointing toward the pointed prow of the great cloth-covered chamber. The steersman (or former steersman, as Morlock had taken his job) hissed and skittered out of the way.

  The fabric of the chamber rippled: they were now headed straight into the eye of the wind. There was a brief swirl of vertigo as the direction of the craft spun around. Morlock's stomach had been trying to crawl out of his belly ever since he stood up in his cave, so he found this relatively easy to ignore. He cranked the levers on the vertical lens until the light was more intense, glaring a bright cold blue on the prow.

  There was a kind of wailing in his ears that was not quite a sound. It said words that were not quite words. His heart began to pound and his breath grew short, as if he were afraid. He recognized these signs: he had often felt them in graveyards or other places swarming with what some called ghosts, but which those-who-know called ...

  "Impulse clouds!" he said to the late steersman of the ship. "This craft is powered by impulse clouds! Maybe you call them ghosts."

  "I don't call them anything!" the steersman screamed. "I don't talk to anyone about them, and no one talks to me. Don't tell me anything. I'm trying to do what they say, but you won't let me!"

  Morlock ignored him (or her; it was impossible to tell).

  Impulse clouds. They were a material part of any living body, but the most tenuous and usually invisible part. Sometimes they could survive the death of the body they had been associated with, in which case they often became a nuisance. Sunlight gathered them up or dispelled them, but moonlight did not. Some said that moonlight actually forced impulse clouds back to earth. That was why ghosts were often reported in moonlight: the moons kept them from rising into the air, then into the sky. Was it possible that the moons, sweeping through bands of impulse clouds raised up from the earth, drove them down again wrapped in moonlight?

  If so, this vast fabric chamber was designed to take advantage of the impulse clouds implicit in moonlight. The impulses would reflect off the walls, driving the ship in any desired direction. Speed would vary with intensity.

  And the impulse clouds must have something to do with the transformation of werewolves and other werebeasts: that was why the blue light had so distorted Rokhlenu-and the steersman, no doubt, and perhaps others. (He remembered the three-eyed werewolf he had seen.) Never-wolves, like Morlock, must be somehow more resistant to interference with their impulse cloud.

  If Rokhlenu's distortion resulted from interference with his impulse cloud, it was possible it could be healed. Perhaps whoever had told the steersman he could be cured had not been lying.

  "How do you know where to go?" he asked the steersman. "Do you get signals from the gondola? Is there a port somewhere?"

  "Can't tell!" said the steersman. "He'll know! He always knows!"

  "I may be able to cure you," Morlock said. "You needn't depend on him anymore. You needn't be afraid. Help me, and I'll help you."

  "Liar!" screamed the distorted steersman. "No one can
help me! Only him! And he won't now!"

  Morlock hated being called a liar. He pushed the distorted creature off the platform; it fell squealing down to the base of the platform and lay there sobbing.

  He systematically took in his surroundings. There must be some way for the steersman to see out, or for signals to be sent to him. The craft was too well designed to overlook this nontrivial detail.

  At first there seemed to be nothing. Then he realized he was looking in the wrong direction: the steersman had one eye that pointed up....

  Morlock craned his neck back. Over his head was a kind of board with black and white shapes playing over it. They seemed meaningless at first, but then he realized what he was seeing. It was as if it were a charcoal drawing of the ship's surroundings from a particular vantage point-on the ship's nose, he expected. And it changed as the ship moved. Somehow those sights were filtered and sent back here. Remarkable.

  He tentatively shifted the angle of the ship's flight to starboard; the south wind struck it solidly on the port side of the prow, sending shock waves through the strange craft, forcing its nose further to the west.

  At first he fought this, but then he saw something on the view-board that caused him to stop. A clawlike object hanging in the sky not so far from him, a gondola dangling below on cables. The other airship was following, concerned about the state of its sister ship, no doubt.

  "Good of them," Morlock remarked to no one. It was time to put his plan into action, clearly. He spun the wheel until the other airship was dead center in the view-board. Then he cranked the levers for the lens on the front of the barrel, until the impulse light striking the prow was as bright as it could be.

  "What are you doing?" screamed the steersman.

  It didn't seem to be a rhetorical question, so Morlock answered it. "I am going to ram that ship."

  There was a dark bird perched in the shredded fabric of the airship. Her name, for that time/place, was Mercy. Near her, in the storm outside, was a dark indistinct cloud: a manifestation of Death.

  "Nothing for you to do, on a night like this," Death signified.

  "Or everything."

  "I visualized that War would be manifest here."

  "War enjoys experiencing the losing side of a conflict. He is savoring the outliers' suffering through his most direct manifestation."

  "You have visualized this?"

  "Yes. Also, he told me that he would."

  Morlock's insight was sensitive enough that he felt their presence, though he did not see them or perceive their symbology. Their presence troubled him without his understanding it. But he didn't let it shake his intent.

  Unfortunately, the other airship's crew seemed to realize he was intending to attack them. The ship swung around and fled before the wind.

  Morlock was the worst sailor in the world. His former wife, who was possibly the best sailor in the world, often used to tease him about this. But even he knew that a stern chase was a long chase.

  "God Avenger," swore Morlock.

  Death and Mercy symbolically shielded themselves from the name of this alien god.

  Morlock felt a brief respite, though he didn't understand why. He held his course, straight on the tail of the fleeing airship. If nothing else, he had broken the air attack on the outlier settlement. And there was still a chance he could ram the other airship. It all depended on what happened when they flew over the city.

  The jagged rising outline of Wuruyaaria swelled on his view-board. Morlock's neck was sore from bending back and looking up, but he didn't want to take his eyes off the thing. If the other airship turned port or starboard it would have to strike against the course of the wind and would lose speed. That would be his chance to gain on it.

  The other airship flew over the werewolf city without turning. Either its port was further north, or they didn't want to risk losing headway.

  Mount Dhaarnaiarnon loomed beyond the mesas and cliffs of Wuruyaaria. The moon-clock did not show on the view-board, presumably because it wasn't relevant to navigation. But the ragged edge of the volcano's crater was unmistakable.

  The other airship flew on into the rolling hills north of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. Morlock was sure now that he had them running scared.

  War manifested himself as a shadow in the shape of a sword. The other gods greeted him with polite symbology.

  Morlock became more uneasy, though he did not know why.

  The two airships flew on into the dying north. The storm behind them had faded. Even the gods were silent.

  In the quiet, Morlock heard a voice speaking an angry command outside the airship.

  The werewolf crew of the gondola were obviously making a bid to regain control of the airship.

  Morlock coldly considered his options.

  He could use the moonstone to attack the werewolves with impulse light. But he would lose speed that way; the other airship would have a chance to change course and escape. He didn't want that.

  He examined the barrel containing the moonstone. He found, as he expected, that there were mirror-bright slats that could be used to cover the lenses.

  With the moonstone entirely cocooned in mirrors, its impulse forces would be perfectly balanced. It would no more keep the ship aloft than an ordinary stone would.

  Morlock dropped the mirror slats over the lenses. The great chamber of the airship went dark and seemed to deflate.

  "No!" screamed the monstrous steersman in the sudden dark. "We'll all be killed!"

  Morlock put his right shoulder against the barrel holding the moonstone and pushed. There was a long slow moment when nothing gave-then a splintering crack and the barrel fell off the platform to the floor of the great chamber.

  Morlock jumped after it, not using the wings to slow his fall.

  At that, his fall was almost too slow. The steersman had floundered around the platform's base and was doing something to the barrel.

  Morlock drew his sword and stabbed the steersman several times. It fled, shrieking.

  Morlock hooked his wooden glove onto a handhold on the barrel and clamped it tight. Then he stabbed with his sword at the fabric under his feet, sawing away at it.

  Soon a jagged tear opened up. He sheathed his sword, pushed the barrel through the opening, and fell with it into the night.

  The whole airship was sagging downward in the air; Morlock found himself suspended in midair between the collapsing airship and the gondola below. The cables around him were dense with distorted werewolf shapes, all screaming in anger or panic as they felt their craft failing.

  Morlock flipped open one of the lens covers.

  The impulse light from the moonstone dragged him, dangling from his wooden glove, away from the falling airship on a wild course into the empty night.

  He tried to steady himself by grabbing the other side of the barrel with his right hand. But the radiant impulse light blinded him; he could see nothing in the darkness. One time he almost smashed into the ground, saving himself at the last moment by going into a sickening tumble. By pure chance he came out of it headed upward rather than downward.

  He scrabbled desperately at the lens controls to try to diminish his speed, but the barrel was simply not intended to be dirigible by itself; he could not set a course, and every moment he held onto it he risked being smashed against the ground or some obstruction.

  He released the clamp from his wooden glove. The barrel spun away, flashing into the darkness.

  Morlock scrabbled to get his wooden glove fixed in the grip for his left wing, then gripped the other wing with his right hand. He went into a glide, found the horizon, aimed himself away from the ground, and started pumping his wings with arms and legs.

  When he knew he was stable and some distance away from the ground, he looked around to take his bearings.

  Not so very far away, he saw the other airship, coming around to the aid of its ruined sister. There was light coming from the ports of its gondola, but he didn't see archers or burning arrows. No do
ubt they were on the other side, looking out for survivors from the ship Morlock had destroyed. No one seemed to be looking his way.

  He was tired, very tired. But he was not dead yet, and this seemed like too good a chance to pass up. He banked into an intercepting course.

  The surviving airship was sinking slowly toward the ground. In the dark woodlands Morlock saw glimmers of fire: the ruin of the first ship's gondola, perhaps.

  Morlock flew straight on without dropping. By the time he reached the surviving airship, he was just over its motive chamber. He landed atop it. Balancing carefully, he drew his glass sword and drove it deep into the fabric, and again, slashing with the bitter blade until the rift was large enough for him to enter.

  This chamber was the twin to the other airship, right down to the distorted steersman on the moonstone platform. The steersman was aware of him, and swung the bright lens about to try and strike him with impulse light. But the carriage of the barrel was not designed to tilt so far. Morlock flew directly to the platform.

  "Stand aside," Morlock said. "I won't hurt you if I don't have to. Your light can't hurt me, anyway."

  "You've already hurt me!" shouted the steersman. "If he finds out that you learned about impulse clouds from me-"

  Morlock turned curiously toward the steersman.

  "That was a slip, wasn't it?" said the steersman ruefully, in quite a different sort of voice.

  "Yes."

  "Two such similar simulacra, facing similar challenges in such a short space of time," the steersman's mouth mused. "I'm not surprised I got confused. But I wonder if that was really it. I've been wanting to talk to you for some time, Morlock."

  "Who are you?"

  "Krecking ghosts. Do I need to tell you? I'm Ulugarriu."

  Morlock bent his head back to look at the view-board, then adjusted his course upward and southward. When the ship was headed straight back toward Wuruyaaria in the teeth of the wind, he levelled off again.

  "I heard you didn't talk much," the steersman complained. "But it seems to me you're being petulant."

  "I'm in the middle of something."

  "You're in the middle of the biggest time-wasting mistake a male can commit. There is more at stake here than a single life, a few lives, a thousand lives, an election, a city. You are in greater danger than you can imagine walking amidst powers that you don't understand."