The Wolf Age (42 page)

Rokhlenu was waiting for him there, sitting cross-legged beside the stream. The gray werewolf was, in contrast to his old cellmate, looking healthy these days. He wore clothes of green and gold, a gold ring with a green stone in it, and a green-and-gold band gathered his long gray queue.

"Gnyrrand Rokhlenu," Morlock said. "You're looking well. Very gnyrrandly, in fact."

"Thanks. Wuinlendhono is knitting some green-and-gold underwear for me, I believe."

"She's treating you well, anyway. Mated life suits you, old friend."

"It does. It does. You, however, look like a sack of moldy kidneys. And not in a good way."

"I was wondering if that was a compliment."

"It's not."

"Well, I won't lie to you. I feel like a bag of moldy kidneys. Or maybe just the mold."

"The ghost sickness is worse?"

"Yes." Morlock might have added, And then there is the drinking, but he didn't want to talk about that.

"Look, I've been talking to Wuinlendhono about this. I want you to stop working on the defenses around the settlement."

"There's more to do."

"There always will be. You told me once you thought this illness would kill you, and it looks to me as if it is killing you. Liudhleeo and Hrutnefdhu both say that someone in the Shadow Market might be able to help. So I think maybe that's what you should be doing from now on."

"Is that a gnyrrandly command?" Morlock asked wryly.

"It's a request from your old friend. You have been helping us so much. Maybe it's time to look out for yourself."

"I can do that pretty well."

"Ghost testicles."

Morlock laughed a little. "Haven't heard that one. I think what I enjoy most about Sunspeech is the rich variety of invective and cursing."

"It's good for that. Moonspeech for singing, Sunspeech for barking: that's the old saying."

Morlock washed his face and mouth and thought. "Would I be allowed in the city? Anyone who smells me or sees my shadow will know I'm a never-wolf."

"There are never-wolves and never-wolves, and then there's Khretvar rgliu. I don't think you'll have any trouble you can't fight your way out of. And the worst they can do is kill you."

"I suppose," said Morlock, looking forward to another night, and night after night, of drunken emptiness, "there are worse things."

In the end, Morlock went with Hrutnefdhu and Hlupnafenglu through the northern gate, up the walkway to the Swamp Road leading to the Swamp Gate of Wuruyaaria.

The gate was wide; twenty werewolves in the day shape could walk through it side by side and still have room to swing their arms. There were a couple of lazy watchers on either side wearing dark armor emblazoned with an ideogram that, Morlock had learned, meant Wuruyaaria in Moonspeech. One of them sniffed the air curiously as Morlock and his friends passed by, but no one stopped them.

The borough just inside the wall was a thicket of tilting towers built on rather marshy ground. Nearly every citizen in sight was wearing the night shape, or some part of it: everyone was a wolf or a semiwolf.

"Dogtown," said Hrutnefdhu. "Those who can't assume the day shape, or at least not completely, often end up here. People say they're more comfortable with their own kind."

"What do you say?" asked Hlupnafenglu, catching an implied reservation. He might have no memories, but there was nothing wrong with his intelligence.

"I say they were kicked out of their dens by shamed parents who didn't want never-men stinking up their lives and reducing their bite."

Morlock wondered, not for the first time, about Hrutnefdhu's family, and who had castrated him, and why. But he seemed to be speaking with some authority here: another outcast, for another reason.

They passed a werewolf nailing up a sign with hammer and nails. His paws had fingers as hairless and gray as a rat's tail. They passed another werewolf who was shuffling a dance on four human feet that grew from crooked canine legs. A chorus of largely lupine werewolves chanted and sang beside him. A small crowd had gathered to watch, and Morlock paused there too, fascinated by the show. But when he realized more eyes were directed toward him than the performers, he tossed a few pads of copper onto the coinspeckled ground between the dancer and the singers and walked off.

Hrutnefdhu and Hlupnafenglu were already standing some distance away, waiting for him.

"That was risky," the pale werewolf said. "If you'd had a few less honorteeth showing, you might have had to fight your way out of there."

"Why?"

"Never-men don't like to be stared at by anyone wearing the day shape. In fact, it's a little risky for us just to be passing through Dogtown in the daytime."

"Why are we, then?"

"Sardhluun werewolves come up the Low Road to Twinegate, and then into the city. There's less chance of meeting them if we take this way."

"Too bad." Morlock was sorry to miss a chance to fight some Sardhluun.

"Yurr. I hate them, too, Morlock, but this might not be the time to take on a band of them."

Morlock opened his right hand and shrugged: it was a matter of opinion.

Hlupnafenglu laughed. Fighting, working, learning, walking-it was all the same to him. Morlock envied the sunniness of his temperament a little.

Presently they came to an open area, and on their left was a gate, obviously Twinegate, not materially different from the Swamp Gate, except that more people were coming and going through it.

The area was dominated by a great stone tower, reaching from the swampy ground to the sky. Morlock kept on staring at it almost from the moment it came into view. There were narrow stairways of metal and wood running up the sides of the tower, and citizens running up and down the stairs. At the top of the tower was a great basket

"It's just the gate-station for the funicular," Hrutnefdhu said. "But I forgot: you've never seen it before."

"Not this close," Morlock said.

Hlupnafenglu was almost as fascinated. "I seem to remember ... Do the cars smell like onions?"

"I never noticed that. I suppose it might depend on who or what was riding with you."

"How is it powered?" wondered the red werewolf.

"Slaves. They used to hire citizens to work the big wheels, but when the Sardhluun started flooding the market with slaves, it was cheaper to use them. A lot of citizens went hungry that year."

The three ex-prisoners looked at each other, sharing a single bitter thought about the Sardhluun without the need to speak it.

Morlock said, "The big wheels. I can hear the gears working. I'd like to see them sometime."

"We could ask, I suppose," said Hrutnefdhu nervously.

"It's not important. Another time."

They walked on, across the chaos around the tower's base, northward, into a new tangle of warrens. The land was drier and firmer; the buildings taller and narrower than Dogtown. The twisting streets were dense with werewolves in the day shape.

"Apetown," Hrutnefdhu said in a low voice. "Fairly safe in the daylight, but you don't want to cross here in the night shape, in the day or night."

Morlock nodded, and suddenly the pale werewolf's mottled skin flushed dark. "I forgot-"

"Never mind it, old friend," said Morlock, and Hlupnafenglu tugged playfully on Hrutnefdhu's ear.

Apetown looked busier than Dogtown, anyway. The ground floor of many a tower was given over to workshops of craftsmen: cobblers, smiths, glass blowers, bakers, butchers, launderers.

"Hands," said Morlock aloud. He had been trying to settle in his mind the difference between Dogtown and Apetown, and he realized it all came down to hands.

Hlupnafenglu looked bemused, but Hrutnefdhu instantly understood him. "Yes, you're right. It's a more prosperous place: there's more work people can do. It may not be work that gains anyone great bite, but it's work that other people will pay to have done."

"And when the sun goes down-"

"Yes, the shutters will drop here. Dogtown is livelier then. There's singing and shows. And if you want a thug for hire, you go to Dogtown, day or night."

They walked on through the warm hazy morning.

When they left the rumble of Apetown behind them, they came to a wide-open space between the brooding hulk of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon and the staggered cliff sides of Wuruyaaria. It was paved in stones that alternated black and white in no clear pattern. It was cut off from direct sunlight, and would be until the sun rose considerably higher in the murky sky.

"Here we are," said the pale werewolf. He looked around the Shadow Market, and his face twisted with annoyance. "Not too many vendors, and some of them I know are quacks."

Morlock was looking, too. At a booth near the market entrance, a male with the torso of a young boy and the limbs and face of a young wolf was having his ears pinched by a long-nosed saturnine male with a gray gown and a conical cap adorning his day shape. A mature female, perhaps the boy's mother, was standing over them; she was fully human except for her long lupine jaws and somewhat hairy face. She was asking in Moonspeech how much the fee would be and the vendor was asking in Sunspeech how she proposed to pay.

In the next space over, a wolf-faced young man with immaculately styled hair was listening to a group of young women in the day shape sing a song in Moonspeech. If a wolf face can look dubious, he looked dubious. Morlock was no judge of songs in Moonspeech, but he thought he had heard some broken notes.

Next over was a booth full of red-ribboned scrolls and velvet-bound books. Its vendor was a male with a wolf's body, human hands and feet, and a droopy semihuman face.

"I'll just step over and have a word with Liuunurriu, there," the pale werewolf said. "He doesn't like strangers, and it wouldn't do to look too interested so ..."

Morlock nodded, and he and Hlupnafenglu drifted in the other direction.

"I think I remember Apetown," said the red werewolf abstractedly, after a few moments. "I don't remember the looks, but I remember the feel. Always hurry, hurry, hurry and fetch the bones. Fetch the bones; fetch the bones."

Morlock said nothing.

"Fetch the bones," Hlupnafenglu repeated again. "Why would people want bones?"

"For marrow," Morlock suggested. "Or soup."

"Soup!" shouted the red werewolf. "There was a great vat of it in the middle of the hut! And a great fat female who kept telling me, `Fetch the bones, yuh-yuh.... Fetch the bones, yuh-yuh....' And she said my name. Only I don't remember it now."

"You may yet."

"I hated her. I don't remember her name, but I remember the hate. I don't think she was my mother. I hated the bones, too. The stinking stupid bones. That was why. That was why. There was no soup that day. No soup, sir. No soup, ma'am. Take your no-soup and swim in it!"

The more the red werewolf remembered the angrier he seemed to get. Morlock found this interesting, but not so interesting that he failed to notice someone trying to unfasten his money pouch from his belt, craftily reaching under his left arm. He grabbed the pickpocket's extended fingers with his right hand and twisted.

The pickpocket, a strikingly flat-faced young male, screamed and fell sprawling on the ground. He had been standing unbalanced, and he didn't know enough to not draw attention when he was caught. All this marked him as an inept and inexperienced thief-which was in his favor, as far as Morlock was concerned. So Morlock released his fingers without breaking them.

His reward for this was a reproachful glare from the clumsy pickpocket as he lay on the black-and-white pavement. "You broke my fingers," he wailed, rubbing his left hand furiously with his right.

"No," said Morlock. "But I can, if you insist."

"I told you, Snellingu," said a white-haired male standing nearby, wearing dark armor with the Wuruyaaria ideogram. "Pickpocket."

"Snatch-and-grab, snatch-and-grab," irritably replied another watcher (evidently Snellingu) with a long scar on his face that cut across his lips. "You see so stupid he is being. He's being no sort of pickpocket. He's grabbing someone's cash box by now if you didn't have keep staring at him. And you are expecting me paying off the bet."

"Listen, it's my job to keep an eye on the criminal element."

"That's why you keep to be visiting your father's sister on nights-withno-moon. We all are hearing about her criminal element, if you're getting my drift."

"I do not get your drift, and you still owe me breakfast."

"You have be owing me breakfast three half-months straight and bent."

"Minus today's. That's what I'm saying. Hey, don't let him get away, Chief."

"I'm not your chief," Morlock replied. "And he can go where he likes."

The young male, scrambling to his feet, glared suspiciously at Morlock.

"I like that!" said the white-haired watcher. "We come here to defend you from this dangerous criminal and you-"

"Take him and bake him," said Morlock. "But not on my evidence. The young citizen tripped and fell."

"No pickpocket!" said scar-faced Snellingu, catching on suddenly. "The citizen is saying so! And thus I am owing you jack-minus-jack and you owing me breakfast, today, tomorrow, some more days."