The Wolf Age (10 page)

The trustee seemed disposed to talk, but Morlock took the jar and turned away. He was used to saying nothing for many days at a time; he had often travelled alone in his long life. Further, his last conversation had been with the crow, and that hadn't ended well for the crow. Finally, if the jailors found the pale werewolf trustworthy, then Morlock had to assume the contrary.

His wounds were nearly healed. He examined the jar for some sort of maker's mark: a magical salve would almost certainly require its own unique vessel, and he knew that most adepts were as vain as spoiled children. But there was nothing that Morlock could see-with his eyes, anyway. Again, he felt the loss of his Sight like the loss of a limb.

He looked up to see the trustee's pale eyes on him. He handed back the jar and, as he did so, the pale werewolf said something to him. It was the first time he had heard the pale trustee speak without a background of banter or barking from the other jailors, and Morlock found the werewolf's voice to be oddly resonant and high-pitched-not a male voice or a female voice exactly. Morlock met the other's eye and shook his head to indicate he hadn't understood.

The werewolf spoke again, speaking more slowly. Morlock still understood only one word, or thought he did. It was rokhlan. In the shared language of dragons and dwarves, the language Morlock had grown up speaking, rokhlan meant "dragonkiller"-a title of honor among dwarves that Morlock had earned several times. Did the trustee know him? Did someone here know him? Had he misheard?

He shrugged and turned away. He still didn't trust the trustee. The pale werewolf waited for a few moments, apparently expecting Morlock to engage him again. Morlock began to pace the width of his cell, from stone wall to stone wall, ignoring the other. Eventually, the trustee left. Morlock continued his pacing.

After a month, the wounds were completely healed; even the scars had vanished. Over the month, which must have been the month of Jaric, since the nights were often moonless, the little drama of a prisoner being dragged up to Morlock's cell was several times replayed. Never was it necessary for the jailors to actually throw the prisoners into the cell; they were weeping and babbling as soon as they saw the fearsome beast that awaited them: Morlock. This did not please him, but there was nothing he could do about it. Several times he found the tooth on a cord next to his food and water; every time he tossed it contemptuously into the corridor, and eventually it stopped reappearing.

When he wasn't being used as a threat to terrify werewolves, he paced his cell. As he walked, through the long days when there was nothing else to do, he eyed the confines of his cell, hoping to find some signs of weakness he could exploit. Sadly, there seemed to be none. The building was newish; Morlock guessed it was less than ten years old. The mortar was much stained from moss and filth, but time had not worked its crumbling magic on it. The stones were well shaped and uniform; they seemed to have no flaws he could exploit. His greatest hope was in the ceiling or the floor; those stones could not be as massive as the load-bearing ones in the walls, even if the building was timbered with maijarra wood.

Of course, to exploit any weakness he would need time, tools, and freedom from observation. Time was every prisoner's constant friend and enemy. Tools he could make or acquire somehow. But every time he turned in his pacing he met the eyes of his jailors, staring at him, watching and waiting. As long as they kept that up, he could not escape.

He got to know the walls of the cell quite well, even the individual stones. Some of them displayed strips of texture in the upper right corner; others did not. Some had been scratched at by prisoners; others had not. Most of the prisoners' scratchings he couldn't read, but many of them were obviously tallies of days, calls, months, years. Morlock speculated on what the other symbols meant. And he walked.

One day, he realized that the strips of texture on the corners of some stones were also writing, graven deep into the stone and covered later by moss and mold and other matter. It was long before he could bring himself to stop pacing and scrape away at the filth to see if he could read the words. For one thing, it would let his captors know he was interested in the stones of the wall. For another, it broke the tedious pattern of his pacing, and his idea was to be as boring as possible for his guards so that they would lose interest in watching him. But in the end his curiosity overcame him. He halted by one of the walls and rubbed away at one of the corners.

He found, to his surprise, that he could read it. Moreover, he guessed few others in the world could. It was a piece of Latin, one of his mother's languages.

EGO • IACOMES • FILIVS • SAXIPONDERIS • HAS • CARCERES • FECI • ME • PAENITET • CAPTE

It took him some time to work it out. Latin was one of the languages that his long-dead harven father had made him learn, out of respect for his ruthen parents, but he rarely had use for it. Eventually he decided that this inscription said something like, 1, lacomes, Stoneweight's son, made this prison. Sorry about that, prisoner."

Stoneweight. What kind of name was that? Morlock wondered. And why had the maker signed his repellent work in Latin? It was mysterious, and he thought he might have some words for this lacomes character if he ever met him. Still, the inscription lifted his mood strangely. This prison had been made. What one maker makes, another can unmake. So Morlock believed, and he spent the rest of the day thinking about it: of solvents to break down mortar, of methods to stun or drug or distract guards, of opportunities that time and patience might bring him.

What time brought him that day was another prisoner in late afternoon. This one-another werewolf in man form-was tall and much scarred; his hair and beard were iron gray, but it didn't appear to be the gray of age. His appearance was nearly as threatening as the subhuman they had sent in to face Morlock on his first night here. But there was an intelligence in this werewolf's eyes that worried Morlock. He might be a more dangerous antagonist, and nightfall was imminent.

Many guards came along with the new prisoner into the narrow corridor. He wore no clothes, but he walked like a captive king among an honor guard of spears. He ignored them all and looked straight at Morlock through the bars of the cell. Morlock leaned his left shoulder against a cell wall and looked back indifferently.

The cell door was unbarred and swung open. The new prisoner stepped in, and the door crashed shut behind him.

The new guards remained in the corridor outside. The wolves and men bantered and bartered; the pale trustee again appeared and seemed to be taking bets (although he looked a little glum to Morlock). It was all very familiar.

The new prisoner went to a corner of the cell and sat down. His action seemed deliberately ... not hostile. It could be he was only waiting for nightfall.

Morlock's best chance was to kill him before he turned into a wolf. As a man, he was as mortal as Morlock, and perhaps less used to defending his life. Morlock struggled with the idea of attacking first. It seemed reasonable, the only reasonable alternative. But he remembered the second prisoner who had been brought in, the one who panicked at the sight of Morlock, who broke down at the prospect of being locked in a cell with him. They used him as their beast to train rebellious prisoners. And he would not be used that way. He was caged; he was not a beast. He'd let this man live so that the man Morlock was could go on living.

They waited. The cell grew dark. They waited still. The chatter in the corridor outside grew impatient: some bets had already been lost. Blue squares of moonlight began to glow on the floor of the cell as the sun's light finally faded away. It was now early in the month of Brenting, by Morlock's calculation, and both the minor moons would be aloft.

The new prisoner rose to his feet. He stepped into the larger square of moonlight and raised his hands toward the window.

The silver-blue moonlight struck the prisoner like a hammer strikes redhot metal: bending him, reshaping him, twisting him. His back curved; his ears and jaws stretched; his teeth flickered like white flames in his mouth; he fell on his hands, and by the time they struck stone they were paws. A dense forest of coarse, dark fur sprouted on his crooked limbs and arched body.

His voice was unheard throughout. Morlock remembered how the other one had screamed in transformation, and he wondered if this werewolf was mute. But he suspected not. The werewolf's luminous blue eyes never lost their cool intelligence. He could master the pain or terror that accompanied his transformation and not be mastered by it. That was bad for Morlock, of course. But Morlock, too, was the master of his pain and fear. He waited for the werewolf's attack.

The werewolf turned toward Morlock and fixed his frosty blue gaze on him. Morlock still waited for the werewolf's attack. He did not move, but kept his hands open. If the beast jumped, he would try to meet it in midair and break its neck.

There were mutters of anticipation from the guards, human and lupine, in the corridor.

The werewolf stepped out of the square of moonlight: a deliberate step backward, away from Morlock. He stood there in the shadows, waiting.

A storm of shouts and barking arose in the corridor outside.

Morlock wondered if this meant what he thought it meant. The gesture the werewolf had made was oddly familiar. He himself couldn't take a step backward, since he was against the wall, but he spread the fingers of his hands and waited.

The werewolf took another step back, a blue-eyed gray shadow among other shadows. He deliberately dropped his gaze.

Then Morlock remembered when he had seen this gesture before. In the Giving Field of the Khroic horde, Valona's, where he had killed a dragon and saved a werewolf's life.

The werewolf uttered a few wordlike barks. It paused, and repeated them.

One of the words sounded like rokhlan. Though, as the werewolf repeated it for the second time, Morlock decided it was really more like rokhlenu. But he thought it was the same word, borrowed into the werewolf speech.

The werewolf repeated his statement a third time.

Morlock thought the werewolf was saying that he himself was the dragonkiller. Then Morlock remembered that the werewolf who had been taken with him and the others by Valona's horde was a dragonkiller. Anyway, he had claimed it, and Math Valone had believed it.

Morlock didn't think he could say what he wanted to say in wolfspeech-and, now that he thought of it, he had never heard werewolves in human form speak like wolves. It might be insulting or unclear; that was the last thing Morlock wanted at the moment.

He made a corvine croak of recognition (I know you) and added the werewolf's own word: rokhlenu.

The werewolf nodded, satisfied, and turned away. He trotted over to a corner of the cell and curled up to sleep.

The jailors in the corridor were furious. They threw bits of trash and shouted obvious insults, and they barked like chained dogs yearning at the end of a leash, and they grumbled, more or less all at once. They wanted to see a fight, at least see someone humiliated. There would be none of that tonight.

Morlock crossed his arms and watched them, allowing a crooked smile to show on his face. As the jailors in the hallway noticed it they began to grow quiet. He met the eye of anyone who looked at him and smiled. He was trying to tell them something: tonight they were the entertainment and he was the audience, and he had been richly amused.

They began to slink away. The message had been received, or they were tired of complaining. Last to go (apart from the guards who were left on station) was the pale trustee. He met Morlock's eye, gave a brief answering smile, and fled.