The Wolf Age (30 page)

"-I don't understand it," Wuinlendhono was saying, "and maybe these two heroes can explain it."

"I beg forgiveness, High Huntress," Rokhlenu said, somewhat out of breath. "Explain what?"

"Why they"-she jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the Sardhluun attackers-"are not firing higher, into the town. Most of their arrows are sticking into our fence. It's a feeble protection as Nyor-as Nor-as Khretvarrgliu is discovering there, but they can't hope to batter through with arrows."

"It is odd," Rokhlenu agreed.

"Oh. Thanks for that," First Wolf replied, white-lipped, furious.

"It may be a distraction from another more serious attack," Rokhlenu continued. "The east side of town is unfenced, but we left some citizens there to stand guard. Maybe some of my men should go put a spine in them."

"A good thought," Wuinlendhono said, and looked her apology at him. He nodded patiently in acceptance, and started calling off irredeemables to go west.

"You can have your red ape-dog go back with them," Wuinlendhono added. "Look at the damage he's doing to the boardwalk by my lair!"

They looked at Hlupnafenglu, who was pulling up a board and muttering to himself.

Morlock said tensely, "How deep does the fence go? Is it anchored in the mud?"

Wuinlendhono looked annoyed at being addressed in this cavalier way, then thoughtful. "It is anchored there, but the palings don't go far below the surface."

Morlock measured the height of First Wolf's lair-tower with his eyes, and then the distance to the western fence.

"They are coming at us from below," he said, and ran past Rokhlenu and the astonished First Wolf.

It took Rokhlenu only a moment to reconstruct Morlock's thought. Archers had attacked the fence to distract the defenders, while werewolf divers had crept below the surface of the boardwalks to the base of First Wolf's tower. If they broke its anchors and it fell, it would breach the western fence....

And the demented Hlupnafenglu had been the only one to notice it! Rokhlenu wondered briefly who was really crazy around there.

"Go!" Rokhlenu shouted at the werewolves he sorted out to defend the east. An attack could still come there; the Sardhluun had enough armed bands for it. "The rest of you, with me."

"My guards, stay here," the First Wolf clarified. "Lucky ghosts guide you, Rokhlenu," she added, but he was already following Morlock away with a riot of irredeemables at his heels.

By now the red werewolf had pulled apart a fair stretch of the boards by the tower's base and was striking at the murky water thus exposed with his glittering hammer. Morlock drew his odd crystalline sword, the blade woven of black and white strands, and crouched down by the ragged hole in the wood and started stabbing deliberately ... not quite at the water, Rokhlenu saw, but at the gap between the water and the wood. He had to dodge and weave to avoid getting clipped by Hlupnafenglu's hammer. As Rokhlenu came up, he saw that they were both aiming at: shapes in the murky water, human and lupine, some deeper in the water and others splashing out of reach on the surface. Ominous sounds came from the water: a chunking or chopping, like wood being cut.

Rokhlenu looked around desperately for another opening in the boards, found none, and then saw Morlock was doing the same.

"There's no other way, is there?" he said.

Morlock swore, "God Sustainer." The blasphemy shocked ghost-fearing Rokhlenu a bit, but he remembered how much Morlock hated the water.

Morlock shouted at Hlupnafenglu, "Wait!" He held out his hand. "Wait!"

Hlupnafenglu paused in his water-hammering, obviously confused.

Morlock took a deep breath and jumped into the water, feet first, and vanished from sight.

Hlupnafenglu gasped. A huge smile slowly broke out on his face as the idea pushed through whatever barrier blocked his thinking. People can jump in water! Brilliant! He raised the hammer over his head and jumped in after Morlock.

Rokhlenu gestured with the business end of his spear at the four irredeemables who seemed least terrified by the opening in the boards. "All right. You-you-you-and you: follow me in. Watch out you don't kill each other with your weapons." Rokhlenu turned to Olleiulu, who was standing nearby, his one eye as round as any moon. "Send someone into the lair-tower to clear the people out. Then you take the rest of these guys and go stand by Wuinlendhono. If she doesn't live through this, don't let me find you afterward."

He dropped into the dark water, stabbing spear in hand.

The water was dark; he expected that. Werewolves aren't generally afraid of the dark. But he did somehow expect his eyes to grow used to the darkness, and when they didn't-when he realized much of it came from the mud in the water enclosing him like a fist-he did feel a little panic rise within him.

He dimly saw a support timber for the boardwalk near at hand, and he grabbed it, swinging out of the path his followers would have to take ... if they followed him.

They did: he heard a sound like distant thunder and sheaths of white bubbles spearing past him toward the darkness below.

Impinging on one of the sheaths he saw a kind of shadow. He didn't think it was Morlock or Hlupnafenglu, or any of his fighters. It was holding some thing in its hand-not like a sword or a dagger-more like a chisel. It was one of them, one of the Sardhluun werewolves. He stabbed at it with his spear: the shadow writhed and became even less distinct in a dark cloud of blood.

It wasn't a death-stroke; the shadow fled. Rokhlenu followed grimly. He could only hope the others were doing something like this, and that there were more of them than of the Sardhluun attackers; there was no chance for communication in the dark water.

His quarry seemed to have dropped what he was carrying and was swimming upward. Rokhlenu stuck his spear (blunt end first) through his belt and climbed up the support timber. It slowed him down, but he didn't want to throw away his weapon at the very beginning of this battle.

He broke the surface, gasping for air, and cast his gaze about. The light was dim indeed under the boards of the settlement, but in comparison to the darkness of the muddy water it was like the noonday sun.

He heard splashing and looked about to see a bedraggled semiwolf paddling away from him. His quarry. There were others in the water beyond, all heading in the same direction. Rokhlenu didn't see Morlock or Hlupnafenglu or any of his people.

He set off in pursuit. He did not so much swim as launch himself from support column to support column. He soon caught up with the werewolf nearest him, the one he had wounded. The wounded werewolf heard his approach and turned at last to fight, but Rokhlenu drew his spear and stabbed it, under the water, into his enemy's belly, twisting the blade after it struck home. Soon the half-wolf stopped struggling and the life left his bestial eyes. Rokhlenu left him drifting half submerged in the filthy water stained with his own blood ... and some of Rokhlenu's, as his enemy's claws had riven his flesh in a few places.

The other Sardhluun attackers were farther off by then, but Rokhlenu continued to chase them. Like a nightmare where his feet were caught in a watery trap, time ceased to have any meaning. He made no progress in closing the gap with the others. Only gradually did he notice the light growing brighter: they were approached the end of the settlement's boards.

He briefly saw each of the attackers briefly framed in dark silhouette against the day's light, and then they vanished. By the time he reached the edge of the settlement he could see them outside the palings, climbing into a boat.

"Archers!" he thundered with what was nearly his last breath. "Sardhluun boat outside the fence! Kill all but the steersman. He's one of ours."

It was sheer bluff; he doubted that there were any archers within reach of his voice. In fact, he hoped there weren't: they'd be needed far more at the western or eastern edges of town. But it was gratifying to see the speed with which the Sardhluun saboteurs rowed away. He hoped idly that they would knife their steersman also, or at least grow to distrust him.

Rokhlenu rested for a moment in the water and then clambered up a support column to the surface of the boardwalk. He loped through the chaotic settlement-some running home to their lair-towers; others hustling away with property in their hands, obviously intent on flight; others rushing about with no clear goal in mind. The settlement had never been attacked, had never been important enough to attack, and many were panicking.

He started collecting these frantic types. "You!" he'd say. "Come with me!" And sometimes they'd run away, and sometimes they'd fall in behind him. Eventually he was leading a large number of citizens (male and female, in the night shape, the day shape, and every gradation between), and others fell in without being asked.

He had no idea what he was going to do with all these followers; it just seemed like a good idea to calm the panic on the boarded ways however he could.

By the time he reached the western wall, he had a pretty good idea what he was going to do with them, though. From some distance away he could see that someone had threaded the First Wolf's lair-tower with support cables. It was leaning precipitously to the west, but the cables were slowly dragging it back into an upright position.

He was not surprised to see a bedraggled and filthy Morlock directing the work. He did feel a little surprise, but perhaps not so much, to see that Hlupnafenglu was operating as his assistant. But they needed more hands to do the work, and he sent all the citizens in more or less human form over to help. Then he took the citizens in night shape toward the western wall. There had obviously been an attack in force while he was chasing saboteurs, and there seemed to have been some casualties.

He felt foreboding as he approached, and in truth the news was very bad. A band of his irredeemables was milling about in confusion; they parted like a curtain before him and he saw the bodies laid out on the boardwalk, dead and dying. There were too many there, too many, and none of them Sardhluun.

Apparently, when the tower-lair did not breach the wall, the Sardhluun archers had switched tactics and started aiming their shots beyond the wall, from boats rowed close enough so that they could do real harm within the settlement. Fire had chewed holes in the wall at several points, and other sections had been pierced by blunt force at the water level: rams mounted on boats had done that, he guessed. Many werewolves had been killed when the Sardhluun attacked in earnest ... and Olleiulu, Rokhlenu saw with dismay, was one of them. He lay pierced by many poison-tipped arrows, his one eye staring lifeless at the rainy sky.

Even worse, Wuinlendhono lay among the wounded, and the wound was a serious one in the neck. Kneeling down over the First Wolf's unconscious form, Rokhlenu guessed that the arrow had been poisoned: the blood seeping through the bandages reeked of wolfbane.

"Thank ghost you're here," said a voice behind him, and he looked up to see Lekkativengu, Olleiulu's claw-fingered, wolf-footed sidekick. "We didn't know what to do," Lekkativengu added. "You were gone, the First Wolf is out, and we can't find her Second."

Rokhlenu didn't like the sound of this. A decent sidekick would have risen to the occasion and taken charge until his principal (or his principal's principal: Rokhlenu) returned. Maybe Lekkativengu had done that, but it didn't seem like it.

"Well, I'm here now," he said. "Gather a crew and get the wounded at least a bowshot away from the walls."

"The Sardhluun have retreated," Lekkativengu pointed out.

"They. Might. Come. Back."

"Oh. Oh, yes."

"Take the First Wolf to our-" barn "-lair right away. See that her bodyguard and some of our fifth-floor crew watch over her. That's how I want it, Lekkativengu; don't second-guess me." With Olleiulu the caution would have been unnecessary, but he wanted to let Lekkativengu know he was not ready to trust him yet.

"Yes, Chieftain. I won't, Chieftain."

"Afterward we can burn the bodies of our dead."

"Yes, Chieftain. What should we do-what should we do about these?"

Lekkativengu pointed with a claw-twisted finger toward a heap of dark objects in the shadow of the western wall. At first he thought they were stones or something laid by to be thrown as missiles toward attackers. Then he saw they were severed heads, human and lupine.

"The Sardhluun threw them over before they retreated," Lekkativengu said, unsteadily. "With slings and things, I guess. It was raining heads for a while. So weird."

"No doubt. May ghosts chew their canine innards, the flea-eating Sardhluun sheepdogs."

"Yes, Chief."

"We'll recognize some of those faces, Lekkativengu."

"Yes, Chieftain. One-I think it was-I haven't seen her in a few years. She might have been dead anyway. But I think it's my mother."

The claw-fingered werewolf's dismal confusion now stood explained, anyway. "We'll burn them with our own dead," Rokhlenu decided, after a moment. "Whoever they were, they're in our pack now."

"Yes, Chief."

"See to the First Wolf and return to me here," Rokhlenu said, gripping him briefly on the forearm.

The grief-stricken werewolf went about his work, and Rokhlenu turned to his own. He stationed their archers (pitifully few and rather ineffectivelooking) with lookouts at the breaches in the western wall. He sent messengers to the eastern side of the settlement, to find out how the day had gone there, and others to look for Liudhleeo: she might be no ghost-sniffer or wonder-worker, but she was the best healer they had, and he wanted her at Wuinlendhono's side.

When the chaos began to assume a pleasingly deceptive appearance of order, Rokhlenu ventured over to where Morlock stood, saturninely directing the securing of the support cables on the First Wolf's lair-tower.

"What a moon-barking, ghost-bitten, knuckle-sucking, blood-spattered disaster," he said in an undertone to Morlock, who nodded moodily.

"And it could have been even worse," Rokhlenu added. "If the Sardhluun had wanted to spend the warriors, they could have levelled the settlement down to the marsh."