The Wolf Age (34 page)

"You have an individual self?" the alien signified doubtfully. "Is this more inefficiency in your symbology?"

"I do indeed have an individual self. You did not expect this?"

"No. This changes the implicature. You may not have another instrument."

"I don't want one anyway," Wisdom signified.

The alien ignored him thereafter, and he it.

The pattern in events was so clear, so dark. He was sorry for it, sorry for Death, whom he had once loved as the closest of his friends, when they were still mortal, all those ages ago. But he delighted in the intense detail of his divine visualization, also. Unclarity was almost gone. It was bracing, an icy relief, even though one small but personally important articulation of the web was tangled in an almost irresolvable coil.

He turned his back on the end of the world.

Standing close by him was Death, manifest as a many-legged spidery being with a dead woman's face.

"We were wrong to assume godhood," he signified to her. "Do you remember how you feared it? You were right to fear it."

"I will take away your fear," signified Death.

He raised his metal-like arms. "Let me take away yours. The apotheosiswheel that changed us into gods was largely my design. I am the only one who knows what has happened to you, and I am the only one who knows how to help you."

"I will take away your knowledge."

"I am willing to help you. I want to help you."

"I will take away your wanting, and all that you want."

His manifestation rejected her approach: the talic equivalent of a blow. Her manifestation flowed around it. She put her lifeless face against his metallic one in a cold kiss.

Wisdom's shining manifestation faded away, the talic components no longer organized by a divine intention.

Wisdom continued in the intentional design of events and in every mind that schemed and planned. In that sense, Wisdom continued to exist, and would always exist, until and unless the last mind faded away forever.

But the Wisdom who had been one of the Strange Gods, who had once been a man, who had walked in the long-vanished forests that once shadowed the western edge of the world and thought of ways he and his friends could escape mortality, that Wisdom was gone.

In this limited sense, Wisdom was dead.

okhlenu was riding the wicker boat across the swamp to Morlock's cave when he heard a dull thump. Looking up, he saw a great bloom of fire ascend into the afternoon sky, followed by trails of smoke and dust.

"He'll kill himself one day," Rokhlenu reflected, "and us with him."

Rokhlenu beached the boat on the marshy verge and climbed the wooden steps Morlock had built into the hillside.

The never-wolf maker was not in his cave, as Rokhlenu had expected, but Hrutnefdhu the pale castrato was. He was sitting cross-legged just inside the cave, sewing metal rings onto leather or cloth stretched over a wooden frame. Deeper in the cave, Hlupnafenglu was curled up on the ground, holding up playing cards one by one in front of the basket of talking flames.

"Gnyrrand Rokhlenu," Hrutnefdhu said.

"Old friend Hrutnefdhu," Rokhlenu replied.

The pale werewolf glanced about instinctively, as if to see if anyone was listening, and said, "You don't have to call me that, you know. It can't be good for your bite to have a plepnup among your old friends."

Rokhlenu had thought about that, and Wuinlendhono had made the same point to him several times. But the outliers were not the Aruukaiaduun: there were many semiwolves, many plepnupov, many irregular shapes and shadows among his constituency. He thought it would harm him politically to distance himself from Hrutnefdhu. Anyway, he wasn't accustomed to picking his friends according to political convenience.

"Or a never-wolf, either," Rokhlenu added, grinning. "Where is he, by the way?"

Hrutnefdhu dropped his eyes to his work, blushing a little. He was easily affected by the slightest show of loyalty or affection; Rokhlenu thought he must have led a grim sort of life.

"Over the hill," the pale werewolf replied. "Trying something new, he said."

"Is he still alive, do you think?"

Hrutnefdhu grinned a little and said, "It is dangerous. That's why he doesn't do it here."

Rokhlenu looked over at the weapons rack. There were about a dozen stabbing spears with shining glass gores, two glass short swords with sharp points and leather grips, and about a dozen glass knives. Rokhlenu picked up one of these and balanced it on one finger thoughtfully.

"Not too many today," he remarked.

"You said we had enough yesterday, so he started working on this other thing."

"Is what you're doing part of it?"

"Not exactly. This won't be done tonight."

"What is it?"

"He says he'll be able to fly with it."

"Oh?" Rokhlenu walked over and examined the thing. It looked like a pair of bat wings, scaled over with metal discs and bound to a wooden frame. The frame and the wings hid some gears and cables that mixed wood and glass. There were grips on the inside tips of the wings.

"I doubt it," he said finally, "but it's interesting. Why are you sewing those rings all over it? Armor?"

Hrutnefdhu had just grabbed one of the rings from an odd upside-down box on long stiltlike legs. He met Rokhlenu's eye and let go of the disc in his hand. It flew straight upward, as if it were falling. He grabbed it before it rose too far and grinned as Rokhlenu whistled admiringly.

"It's weird in here sometimes," Rokhlenu said. "Like the stories they tell about Ulugarriu's workshop."

"Ulugarriu couldn't do anything like this. Not that I've ever heard," Hrutnefdhu said, turning shyly back to his work.

The pale werewolf seemed embarrassed by something, so Rokhlenu decided to leave him alone. "I'll go see what Morlock is up to," he said aloud, and patted Hrutnefdhu on the shoulder as he passed out of the cave.

He met Morlock coming over the rise of the hill with a sizable boulder in his hands. He looked a little scorched, but otherwise undamaged. There were clouds of smoke and dust settling behind him.

"Let me help you with that," Rokhlenu called.

"You should stay back. This hillside was a silver dump, I think. There may be some of the metal in these dust clouds."

"Urrrm. I think you're right: I can smell the nasty stuff. Well, they had to put it somewhere, I guess."

He saw mummified bodies of werewolves-some in the day shape, some in the night shape-scattered about the dusty hillside. He pointed at them and said, "Why would they come here? If I can sense the silver, they must have been able to."

"They killed themselves, I think. Some of them were carrying things. Notes, mementoes, that sort of thing."

"Horrible. You picked a nasty place for your work, old friend."

"Well, I knew no one else would get hurt if it went wrong. As it almost did: phlogiston is difficult stuff, and I haven't the material to handle it safely."

"What would you need?"

"A lightning bolt or two. The more the better. I could fashion some aethrium instruments from them. But the storms lately have been surprisingly free from lightning, and the landscape hereabouts is totally free from aether deposits."

"I did not know that."

"I think someone collects them. Your folk hero Ulugarriu, perhaps."

"You think Ulugarriu actually exists?" Rokhlenu asked doubtfully.

Morlock nodded toward the moon-clock on the side of the volcano. Rokhlenu nodded slowly. Personally, he didn't believe in Ulugarriu. But someone had built the wonders of Wuruyaaria: if he wasn't called Ulugarriu, he was called something else.

"You're sure you don't want help with that rock?" Rokhlenu said as Morlock came nearer, out of the poisonous dust.

"It's not too bad," Morlock replied.

"The thing must be heavier than you are."

"Just about. But there's something holding it up." He lifted the boulder high, and on its underside Rokhlenu saw what looked like two metal footprints, affixed to the rock with crystalline spikes.

"What are those?"

"Soles for my new shoes," Morlock said, lowering the boulder.

"Ghost. How many have you got?"

"Just the pair. At that, I had to sacrifice a lot of metal and phlogiston I was planning to use for the wings."

"I saw those. Will that thing work?"

"No idea. The crows think it will, or say that they think it will, but crows aren't always reliable. They may just want to see someone crash in it."

Rokhlenu understood that; he'd known a lot of crows. They'd probably laughed watching the werewolves eating silver. He thought about them and didn't feel like laughing.

"Why do you suppose people kill themselves?" he asked Morlock.

"Pain," Morlock said. "Loneliness. Shame. Anger."

Rokhlenu waited, but Morlock didn't say any more. He thought about the singer he had known who ate wolfbane, and he thought about Morlock's hand. He knew it wasn't any better: in fact, Morlock always wore a glove on his left hand now to hide how bad it was getting.

Rokhlenu had an odd feeling Morlock knew what he was thinking about, but he wasn't saying anything, and Rokhlenu couldn't think of anything to say. He grabbed the other side of the boulder, just to keep from being entirely useless, and they carried it back to the cave together.

"Liudhleeo says," he said when they set the rock down in the cave, "that we need to work on Hlupnafenglu soon-if you want to take care of that before we leave tonight."

"Yes," Morlock said. "If one of us is killed tonight, the task may prove impossible."

Hrutnefdhu had put away his metallic thread and ivory needle and was folding up the stilts under his upside-down box of rings. "I'll take him over to the lair-tower," he said to the others. "Liudhleeo will want to do the work over there. She hates it over here."

"The nearness of that silver, I think," Morlock said, and Rokhlenu turned his head in agreement. Different werewolves were sensitive to silver in different degrees, and Liudhleeo was more sensitive than most.

Hrutnefdhu was getting Hlupnafenglu's attention gently and patiently. He persuaded the groggy red werewolf with words and gestures to rise up and follow him. The red werewolf shuffled docilely along after Hrutnefdhu for a few steps. Then he seemed to wake up a little more. He cast his mad golden gaze around the cave, looking at Morlock, the nexus of speaking flames, the other two werewolves, Morlock again.