The Wolf Age (65 page)

"Skuiulaalu sent them to my residence last night, of course. I read the relevant parts as I walked up here this morning. Yaarirruuiu has them, at least a portion of them."

"You have hit the ground running, I see. It bites me to admit this, but I think our fellow citizens made the right choice. But what is it you have against the gnyrrand of the Aruukaiaduun? What is his name again?"

It turned out no one there could remember his name. But Yaarirruuiu had some notes from the campaign with him, tucked into the city account books (he had held them while Rokhlenu read them), and after consulting them he could tell his fellow singers that the gnyrrand of the Aruukaiaduun was named Norianduiu.

"All right," Aaluindhonu continued smilingly, "what have you got against poor Norianduiu?"

"Murder. The Aruukaiaduun under his leadership secretly murdered my family. Their display of the severed heads as campaign banners at that damned rally was an open admission. My youngest brother had been dead less than an hour. You saw the head, Aaluindhonu: what do you think?"

The old politician's smile was finally gone. "Yes," he said finally. "Yes, you've got something there. But won't it look like you're using your position for private vengeance?"

"No. Because if I were, I'd go after Rywudhaariu. Everyone knows that he pulls the strings in the Aruukaiaduun Pack. But Norianduiu was legally responsible for the campaign, so he will be charged. I'm putting this to a vote. I want unanimous support. If I don't get it, I'm going to resign my office and kill those rat-bastards with my own teeth and claws. Because if the secret murder of citizens is not a crime, if theft from the city is not a crime, if treating female citizens like meat for export is not a crime, then nothing is a crime because there is no law. And if there is no law, there is no city. Say your say; do it now."

They all agreed to the arrests. But Aaluindhonu added hesitantly (no longer smiling, thank ghost), "But, Rokhlenu, a suggestion."

"Yes?"

"You should not direct the arrests or prosecution yourself. Let me do it. I can get justice without appearing vindictive. It will be better all around that way."

Rokhlenu had never found himself able to trust Aaluindhonu; they had been thrown together by circumstance rather than choice. But he did trust Yaarirruuiu, and he saw his former reeve approved the plan, so he nodded. "Good. I'll leave it to you, then."

"There's something else we could do to diminish the appearance of a grudge," one of the other Goweiteiuun singers said-a citizen named Naaleiyaleiu. He was unremarkable, except for his overuse of the pungently piney pack-scent of the Goweiteiuun. "The Neyuwuleiuun are fending off some attack on their northern colony-the place that served as a hunting ground and a station for their airships. If you take some fighters and defend the Neyuwuleiuun, it will show this is not about the election."

Yaarirruuiu was nodding at this, but asked, "What kind of attack? We don't want to lose our First Singer on his first day on the job."

They all smiled at that. Some laughed.

"Werebears, I'll bet," the other Goweiteiuun singer said. (Dhuskudheiu was his name.) "There have been lots of them roaming around the fringes of the city."

The smiles faded. Werebears were nothing to laugh about.

"I'll go and reconnoiter," Rokhlenu said thoughtfully. "If it looks too risky, we'll get out and come back with a stronger force."

They all agreed, and on that note the Innermost Pack ended its first meeting. Rokhlenu and Yaarirruuiu left, hauling the city account books, deep in conversation. llhuskudheiu departed on some mission of his ownpossibly lunch. Aaluindhonu started to go, paused by Naaleiyaleiu's couch a moment as if he would speak, twitched his nose, then hurried on.

Naaleiyaleiu was left alone in the chamber, chittering to himself. Eventually, his jaw swung open like a gate, exposing the long-nosed pink wererat within. Naaleiyaleiu's hand reached into a pocket and grabbed a jar of scented oil. Naaleiyaleiu's hand doused the were-rat in Naaleiyaleiu's head generously with the scent, and then did the same for the were-rats controlling the other parts of the body.

Naaleiyaleiu had a more difficult job than most of the meat-puppets scattered through the city. But it was nearly over, thank Ulugarriu: so, at least, Naaleiyaleiu's crew chittered hopefully to each other.

Rokhlenu left later that afternoon. He picked a crew of nine irredeemables to go with him, and Yaarirruuiu was not among them, much to the latter's annoyance.

"Look," Rokhlenu said, when he had heard his fellow singer's fifteenth reason why he should come along. "I need you around town to keep an eye or two on that slippery Aaluindhonu." And that convinced him.

But he did take Lekkativengu and eight other survivors from the fifth and fourth floors of the Vargulleion. And, on reflection, he stopped by Morlock's cave before he left and had Morlock's remaining apprentice, a reedy little citizen with a big nose, get him two of those nightmarish glass spears with a silver core in the head.

He disliked even the feeling of being around them, and when he rejoined his fighters he knew that they felt the same way; their faces fell and they started to twitch. So he explained to them about the spears. His thinking was: werebears don't like wounds from silver any better than werewolves do. His fighters agreed, but they still weren't enthusiastic.

To placate his fighters, Rokhlenu stopped by Ruiulanhro's poison shop and picked up some spearheads imbued with wolfbane. That cheered them up a little: citizens didn't get to use poison weapons very often, but in their former lives as criminals many irredeemables had been fond of them.

It was well after dark before they got anywhere near the Neyuwuleiuun's northern colony, and that was intentional on Rokhlenu's part. He wanted half his crew to wear the night shape, the better to sense danger, half of them to retain the day shape, so that they could use weapons. But as it turned out, only Rokhlenu himself and ape-fingered Runhuiulanhu had practiced the discipline of resisting the call of the night shape. Rokhlenu wasn't happy about it, but it was his own fault: he had picked the crew. He and Runhuiulanhu divided the weapons between them, abandoning what they could not carry.

They ran onward, past the western shoulder of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. The great moon-clock in its face seemed almost to be watching them, but Rokhlenu dismissed the idea impatiently as it occurred to him.

It looked almost as if the plains north of Dhaarnaiarnon's foothills were on fire. There was a sullen brooding redness there that shifted and shiftednot quickly enough for fire, not steady enough.

Rokhlenu almost turned back, then. There was something odd about this. The air around them was furnace hot. No one would have reported this as an attack of werebears. It was beginning to look like a trap. Certainly he wanted to go back and have a long conversation with his fellow member of the Innermost Pack, the scent-addicted Naaleiyaleiu.

In the end he decided to go onward. This, whatever it was, might have something to do with the freakish weather bedeviling the city. It might be a cause of the weather; it might be an effect. But this near to the city, it certainly represented a danger. He was now the First Singer of Wuruyaaria. He led his fighters on.

Rather than head straight onto the plain where the red shifting mystery lay, he climbed the last foothill to the north to reconnoiter. His fighters followed him up.

From the ridge at the top of the hill he looked down on the plain and the monstrous thing it contained.

It was like a bug, he decided-a helgrammite or many-legger, grown to incredible length. It sprawled from east to west without any obvious ending. It was coal black in color, but around the edges of its carapace it glowed with sullen red light.

Perhaps it was more like a plant than an insect. It seemed to be sinking roots deep into the ground, all along its length that he could see. And it had more than one branch.

"Chieftain," said Runhuiulanhu urgently, gesturing behind them. "Look!"

Rokhlenu looked and disliked what he saw. Two branches of the thing, whatever it was, were closing around the hill they stood on.

"Who's fastest?" he snapped. "Lekkativengu and who else?"

"Taakhyteiu," said Runhuiulanhu, and there was general agreement.

"Lekkativengu. Taakhyteiu. As soon as I'm done talking, you get out of here. Get back and tell Wuinlendhono and Yaarirruuiu what you saw hereand no one else. Go."

The two werewolves fled down the southern slope toward the closing gap.

"You three: go with Runhuiulanhu. You three: come with me. Runhuiulanhu: each of us will take one branch. If it's a beast, we can fight it. If we can't kill it, we can at least keep it from killing our messengers. If we survive, so much the better. Get me?"

"Got you, Chief." Runhuiulanhu and his crew ran down to attack the branch curling around the hill from the west. Rokhlenu and his crew took the eastern branch.

Two of Rokhlenu's werewolves jumped straight at the nearest point of the eastern branch with reckless courage, one at a rootlike leg, the other at a lateral plate. They didn't seem to slow its progress at all, but they hung on for a moment or two, screaming. Then Trumpeter's dim moonlight could not heal them anymore and they burst into flame and died.

"God bite this damned thing!" Rokhlenu swore. He could hardly bear to close with it, the heat was so fierce; the boiling glass in Morlock's cave was nothing compared to it. He seized a poison-tipped spear and darted in close, slashing at one of the rootlike legs. A blue glowing mist emerged: what the beast used for blood, he supposed. Immediately rootlike tendrils reached out toward the blue glowing scar: to heal it, he guessed. He darted back in to widen the wound. The spear shattered in his hands, scattering red shards of molten metal. He jumped back, burned and cut by the hot metal, poisoned by its venom. He could feel it spreading in his veins from the wound.

He glanced over to see his last remaining comrade had been pierced through the eye by a metal fragment. He was as dead as if he had been stabbed with silver.

Silver. Rokhlenu remembered the dreadful weapon he carried. He drew it from the shoulder sling and stabbed the beast with it in the side, stabbing fiercely but without hope. He hated the thing, and he hated silver, and he wanted to use one hate to hurt the other.

And it did. The silver-cored glass spear shattered from the heat of the beast, but his slashing desperate cut opened up a long blue wound in the beast's side.

Nor was that all. Again, rootlike tendrils reached toward the wound. But so did several legs. They sank deep into the beast's own side. It was not trying to heal itself. Somehow, it was feeding on itself-struggling to consume the blue glowing fog that lay within itself. And he had slowed its progress, as it turned on itself.

Turned on itself. That was it. He could not defeat the thing, but it could and would defeat itself, if it could be wounded deeply enough.

He wondered if the messengers had gotten away. He looked up to see Lekkativengu standing alone and indecisive in the red-tinged moonlightbut beyond the closing ring of the beast's branches.

"Get out!" he screamed. "Get back! Runhuiulanhu, use the silver spear! Then get away!"

He did not see Runhuiulanhu, and wasn't even sure he was still alive. But Rokhlenu realized that he himself was already dead. If he could give his fighters a chance to get away, he owed them that.

He raised his hands toward dim uncaring Trumpeter and summoned the night shape upon himself.

When he arose as a wolf, shaking off his harness and tunic, time had passed. The narrow blue wound he had opened in the beast was nearly blocked by the beast's own hungry tentacles.

Rokhlenu leapt at the furnace-hot blast of the beast ... and found the blue fog seeping from the beast was strangely cool. He planted his teeth on one of the ragged edges of the wound and pulled with all his strength. If he could kill it, or lure it into killing itself, his death might not be for nothing. It might save his beloved from dying the same way.

That was his last thought. There were no others. In a way, there never had been, none that mattered.