The Wolf Age (22 page)

Death signified, "You are right. The torrent you predicted is sweeping away my visualization of the nearer future."

War grumbled, "This torrent which is so constantly in your signs does not appear to me to be very exciting. One battle in a whole year! And the Sardhluun did no more raiding than they usually do, and next year they'll have to do less."

The citizens in the audience began to grow restless. They wanted a more eventful election than this-something they could talk about to those who hadn't witnessed it, to argue about with those who had.

But the challenger was growing more anxious. His threatening posture had given way to a nervous dance. He capered one way, then another. He leapt back, then forward, snarling.

Wurnafenglu waited.

The challenger looked desperately at the moon, the stands, his enemy. His eyes were clouding; his vision was fading; his nervous antics were spreading the poison through his blood more rapidly. He scampered off in a long curving charge toward the remedy bowl.

Wurnafenglu leapt and struck with his full weight on the challenger's right shoulder. The challenger rolled in the dirt and tried to rise, snapping frantically with his jaws. But Wurnafenglu pinned him. He forced the challenger's head to the ground with his back feet as the challenger scrambled ineffectively to free himself. Wurnafenglu fixed his jaws at the base of the challenger's spine.

Hollow wolvish whistles of admiration echoed around the arena. Few in the audience would have staked a serious combat on a bite like that, where the backbone was strongest. There were a few skeptical yelps, and someone began a song to the effect that Wurnafenglu had made his last bad decision.

These were silenced by the crack of the challenger's spine, a crunching sound that reverberated all around the arena.

Wurnafenglu shook his opponent for a few moments, to make sure the spine was severed, and then he relaxed his jaws and let the broken challenger fall whining to the ground. He turned away and trotted calmly over to the bowl of remedy. Unhurriedly, without wasting a drop, he drank half the antidote.

Carefully, he picked up the bowl with his teeth and sidled toward the challenger, who was staring desperately at the moon, trying to knit his shattered spine together in time to continue the fight. If there had been three moons aloft and no poison in his veins, he might have managed it, but things were as they were.

Wurnafenglu held out the bowl of remedy to his fallen opponent.

This rarely happened in elections of the Sardhluun, and it was a disgrace to accept. But it did mean life rather than death for the defeated candidate.

The challenger weakly pushed the bowl away with his snout.

Wurnafenglu offered the bowl to the challenger again.

The challenger pushed it away again, more slowly and more reluctantly now.

Wurnafenglu offered the remedy to the challenger for a third time.

There was a moment of stillness. Then, in the sight of everyone, the challenger made a sudden movement to drink the remedy.

Wurnafenglu sidled out of reach and the challenger was foiled.

Wurnafenglu approached the sobbing challenger from the side and contemptuously poured the remedy over the challenger's genitals.

The challenger writhed about, trying to lick at the spilled remedy, but because of his broken spine he could not reach it.

Wurnafenglu smashed the bowl across the whining challenger's face and it shattered. Victorious Wurnafenglu ripped the honor-teeth from the defeated challenger's neck and fixed his jaws in the defenseless throat. He held his grip until the poison finished its work and the challenger was dead.

He tossed the corpse from him and looked toward the audience for his due.

They gave it-reluctantly at first, but then more and more enthusiastically. They howled their congratulations and applause. They ululated into the single-eyed night, saluting Wurnafenglu's victory. Everyone loves a winner, and he had proven, against their hopes and desires, that he was a winner. They wanted him on their side so that they could be winners, too.

War attempted to signify something to Death, but then took note she was no longer manifest.

"I signify this again," he signified to Wisdom. "Death is the strangest of the Strange Gods."

"She is lying," Wisdom signified reflectively. "I think everything she signifies is a lie."

"Then she's more reliable than most," War signified tolerantly. Lies are the normal form of communication in war, and he was used to them. "Oh well, I suppose the fighting is over." He ceased to manifest himself.

Wisdom remained manifest, watching and thinking. He knew about lies, too, and he knew that people or gods lie largely because they are frightened. He thought it was important to know why Death was afraid.

Now that the serious matter of the election was over, the lighter business of the celebration began. Wurnafenglu invited a few of his close personal friends down to the arena ground to help him kill and eat the never-wolf slave who had brought in the poison.

Chief among his guests was, of course, his old friend the Werowance. The Werowance explained, in a song where tones of grief mixed with gladness, that he had only seemed to criticize Wurnafenglu because of his official obligations, and that he had always esteemed the gnyrrand as one of the greatest citizens in the history of Wuruyaaria, and that he hoped they could continue to work together for the betterment of the pack and the city they both loved so much. Wurnafenglu replied that he understood the Werowance completely and that he hoped he would always esteem the Werowance at the Werowance's true worth.

Wurnafenglu named a few other friends and foes to join him in the feast, and then they gave chase to the woman.

She had been crouching in a shadowy edge of the arena, hoping against hope that she would be spared, or at least forgotten. When the wolves came for her, she tried to run, but there were several of them and no place for her to go. In the end, which came soon, she was cornered and she knew it.

She stood in the moonlight, her back to the arena wall, as the great silver-muzzled black wolf approached. She shook her fist at him. "Kree-laow!" she screamed in the bestial face. "Kree-laow!"

Then they took her down and killed her and ate her. Many minor guests were invited down to sample some of the meat and hobnob with the great ones, and the night was thought of as a memorable one, until the next election.

Kree-laow, in the language of the dead woman, meant "He will avenge." The werewolves neither knew nor cared about this. At least, not then.

n the third morning of the year, Morlock woke from a long, long dream. He stretched his crooked frame as he lay in the sun and wondered vaguely why so much of his terrible dream had involved werewolves. He opened his eyes and looked up straight into the face of a werewolf.

True, she was in the form of a woman, but he had learned to recognize the long narrow face of a werewolf in the day shape. She had a mottled skin like Hrutnefdhu, too (if he wasn't just part of the dream). And somehow, somehow inside, he just knew she was a werewolf.

He sat up and put one hand to his temple. He felt the healing wound there. The spike was gone. His Sight had returned.

"Thank you," he said.

Her eyes dropped. She seemed embarrassed. "I did what I could," she said eventually. "I'm not sure I got it all. You may ... there still may be problems."

He closed his eyes and tested his insight. He realized she might be right. It was hard to tell; his inward blindness had gone on so long. But: he could dream. He could live. The world was as radiant with meaning as with sunlight.

"I still thank you," he said. "My name is Morlock Ambrosius, and my blood is yours."

"Well," she said, laughing, "I sopped up enough of it! I don't think I want any more. Oh, I'm sure that's the wrong thing to say. I don't know your customs. I should-it was for my Hrutnefdhu, you know. He calls you his old friend; I couldn't do less."

"Hrutnefdhu." Morlock closed his eyes, trying to separate memory from dream and from delusions of madness. "Yes: it was him, and Rokhlenu, and me. Us against them."

"It still is, Hrutnefdhu says. Only there are more of us. And more of them, too, I'm afraid. I am Liudhleeo, Hrutnefdhu's mate." She looked narrowly at him as if expecting him to recognize the name.

He had heard it, but didn't at first remember where. Then he did. He considered what to say. He neither wished to avoid the issue of the rape, nor make it the most important thing about her. To him, she was still the healer who had saved him from death and madness. But she was also his fellow prisoner-or fellow ex-prisoner, now. "How did you escape?" he asked.

It was not what she had been expecting him to say, clearly. Her eager-tobe-angered expression twisted into simple surprise, and then a kind of relief. "Oh? Oh, that. They-they let me go. Threw me out, really. I think they thought I was dying. I was-well, the next day, I was in pretty bad shape."

"I hated them for what they did to you."

She was embarrassed again, on the verge of anger. "I don't hate them. I don't hate them. But I didn't shed any tears when I heard what happened to them; you can bet on that."

"Eh."

She put her long clever hands over her mottled face and laughed. "They said you'd say that. They said you'd say that, but I didn't believe them."

"Eh."

"Oh, don't overdo it. It will take the magic away. You'll need something to eat, I expect."

"Yes." Morlock thought about the last time he hadn't been hungry, and he couldn't remember it. "Yes. I could eat anything in the world. Except meat," he added hastily, remembering a gray ear afloat in soupy porridge.

"Oh, yes: Hrutnefdhu mentioned your aversion. Don't worry. It's almost impossible to acquire anything as exotic and expensive as human flesh in the outlier pack."

"All the same. If you don't mind."

"I don't mind. Let me get you settled with breakfast, and I'll go off to find my Hrutnefdhu."