The Wolf Age (72 page)

Morlock wearily relaxed his arms and let himself fall the last few feet to the ground of Wuruklendon.

The scaffold of his execution had been dismantled. No one else was present. To all appearances, he stood alone in the moonlit snowstorm under the Stone Tree.

But he could feel something happening. He knew something was happening. He remembered his brief vision of the Strange Gods drinking from the Well of Shadows. And he remembered this feeling from the time he had died in the Bitter Water.

"Death!" he shouted. "I feel your presence! Show yourself! I have something to say to you."

Death manifested herself not far from him, in the form of a spider with a woman's face.

"If you wish," the woman's face said. "It is a foolish wish, but I owe you this at least for the service you have done me."

"I reject your service. I will not serve you. I will not serve."

"You have already served me. I give you the gift of everything you have, which I will take back whenever it suits me. Go now. I'm working." She disappeared. But Morlock felt that she was still present somehow.

Morlock drew Tyrfing and summoned the rapture of vision.

The scene transformed itself as he entered the talic realm. All around the Well of Shadows he saw the Strange Gods in their various manifestations, bound with strange dark webs of talic force. The webs all ran to and through Death, still spiderlike, her manifestation perched on a branch of the Stone Tree.

Death was hard at work. If Morlock had his way, she would work still harder yet.

Morlock slashed with Tyrfing at the talic webs running from the Strange Gods. Without looking, he knew several of them were free. Death signified a statement that nearly struck him dead; he was saved only because he didn't fully understand the symbolism. But he kept on slashing, and soon the other Strange Gods were signifying back at Death, and the time-space locus was full of clashing symbols.

The Strange Gods all were unbound now; even hollow Wisdom was free to fall to the earth and stare with empty eyes at the snowthick sky.

The Strange Gods assumed their most terrifying aspects. They rose to gigantic heights. They turned all their power together against Death.

And it was nothing to her. Morlock saw that immediately. What were all the powers of human life to Death, that surrounds and defines all life? Nothing.

But he saw something else. There was Death, a Strange God among others, and there was death, the uncaring essence that ends all entity. They were different, somehow, though joined.

Morlock kicked off from the ground. Sustained by the wounded levity of his wings, he rose to the branch where Death was perched. In the instant that they occupied adjoining loci time-space, the living maker and the manifestation of Death, he struck at the spidery presence with his cursed sword, severing the woman's head from the spider's body.

The manifestation of Death became disorganized and ceased to represent an individual identity.

Even in long ages, Death cannot die. Death continued to stand at the end of every road, the darkness framing the light of everything that lived until it lived no longer.

But the Death who had been one of the Strange Gods, who had once been a woman, who had walked arm in arm with her sister justice on the western edge of the world and talked of the way things were and the way things should be, that Death was gone.

In this limited sense, Death was dead.

The death of the greatest of the Strange Gods shook the world. The surviving Strange Gods, dismayed, fled into widely separate loci of space-time.

Morlock, struck from his vision, from awareness, and nearly from the world, fell from the Stone Tree and lay motionless on the snow-covered ground of Wuruklendon.

He was not, however, alone.

Ulugarriu followed Morlock to the high mesa. They heard him shout his insane challenge to the Strange God of Death. They saw, with perfectly reasonable terror, the manifestation of Death. After the manifestation disappeared, they were bemused to see Morlock draw his sword, luminous blackand-white in the storm's shadows, leap up on his fire-scarred wings, and strike at the empty air above the branch of the Stone Tree.

The death of Death shocked Ulugarriu-but Ulugarriu walked freer from death's shadow than some, and they soon recovered.

When they raised their head and looked at the sky, Ulugarriu saw a storm, blue with continuous lightning, striding high above Mount Dhaarnaiarnon, a wave of blue light brighter than the moon in the one-eyed sky, a wave as tall as the world, deadlier than the god Morlock had just killed.

The Ice-Binder had destroyed itself; the millennia of winters were loosed on the world, and the storm was heading this way. It was already too late to reach the crater of the volcano.

Only one bolt hole remained, and Ulugarriu used it.

They ran over to where Morlock lay under the Stone Tree and dragged his unconscious form to the Well of Shadows. They tried to pry his sword loose from his fingers, but the unconscious maker clutched tight to the grip and would not let go.

"Be that way then!" Ulugarriu shouted at him, and pushed him into the Well. They jumped in afterward.

The fall was long, so long. But Ulugarriu hoped the wings would keep them, both of them, from being crushed by the fall.

The storm fell howling across the mountain, shaking it like a blue earthquake. Ulugarriu dreaded the thought of a direct lightning strike down the well, but none came. Eventually they struck the ground in a tangle of wings and bodies; the storm front passed. There was silence and darkness for a long time.

Ulugarriu seemed to awaken. Between Morlock and Ulugarriu, who lay at the stony base of the Well of Shadows, stood a young woman with no mouth, holding a faintly glowing lotus flower in her hand. Ulugarriu knew she was the manifestation of the Strange God called Mercy.

"All right," Ulugarriu said grumpily. "I suppose you gods always win in the end. Just be quick about it."

Mercy signified her dissent from this in symbols that were too intense to be clear to Ulugarriu's baffled mind.

"Talk to me, can't you?" they shouted. "Or go away! You make my head hurt with your signifying."

A red-lipped mouth formed in the lotus flower. Mercy spoke through it in Moonspeech.

"I am not interested in killing you, poor Ulugarriu," Mercy's flower said. "I opposed the plan of the other Strange Gods, and worked to overcome it in the end. It was in my nature to do so, and it would be against my nature to slay you now. Besides, you saved my agent Morlock, and I'm grateful to you for that. Blood for blood, as he would say, poor man."

Mercy reached down and caressed Morlock's scarred sleeping face with her flower.

Ulugarriu watched this with interest, thinking furiously all the while. "I thought it was Death who appeared to Morlock in the Bitter Water. That's what he told me, anyway."

"She did, and she thought she was acting for herself when she saved him from drowning. But it was I who prompted her to act against her own nature, separating her manifestation from the phenomenon that sustained it. It took time for that seed to blossom, but now it has, and she is finally at peace."

Ulugarriu lowered their head and thought about this for a long time. Finally they said quietly, "Are you telling me that that was what this whole thing was about? Everything that happened was so that you could bring death to Death?"

"I was sorry for her suffering, which was more terrible than you or I can imagine, and I wanted it to end. That was my purpose, and it was very simple. Other entities had other purposes (you among them, Ulugarriu), and so the pattern of events became very complex."

Ulugarriu raised their head and saw in the light of Mercy's lotus that Morlock was gone.

"What have you done with my stalwart?" they blurted.

"Hardly yours, poor Ulugarriu. I hid your presence from him, and he has gone his way through the dark roads under the earth. Don't be afraid for him; he has lived much of his life underground, poor man."

"We didn't have a chance to say good-bye."

"I can't see very deeply into his mind, Ulugarriu. It is almost as strange to me as yours is. But I do know that he might have felt obliged to kill you for what you did to his friend, and I felt obliged to prevent that."

"I did not kill Hlupnafenglu!"

"I know. I was referring to Rokhlenu."

"Oh." Ulugarriu thought it over and decided it was fruitless to make a denial. "Everything would have been fine if Aaluindhonu or someone like that had been elected to lead the Innermost Pack. I couldn't have Rokhlenu as First Singer, don't you see? The city's social pattern is a delicate thing, and too-rapid change will create chaos. Don't you see?"

"No," said Mercy, making a protective sign against the name of the alien god Chaos, "but it's not necessary that I do. Do you think Morlock would see?"

"I guess not. Thanks."

"He would have been sorry if he found out afterward you were pregnant."

Ulugarriu was silent for a time, and then said feebly, "I'm not pregnant."

"Your simulacrum Liudhleeo is. Or is my visualization in error?"

"No," Ulugarriu admitted finally. "You're right. It is pregnant. I haven't been sure what to do about that. What does your visualization say?"

"I see no unclarities. The child will lie in Liudhleeo's womb for two years. He will be born with a full set of teeth and a full head of hair. Not even you will consider him handsome, but he will have very long, strong, clever hands. You will call him Fenrir Ambrosius."

"I bet I'll think he's handsome."

The red mouth on Mercy's flower smiled gently. "What will you bet, poor Ulugarriu?"

Morlock walked many long twisting ways under the ground, seeking a way out of the warm ghost-thick darkness and into the cold light of life.

He finally followed a breath of bitter air to a shallow snow-filled flaw in the earth. Cutting his way through with Tyrfing, he emerged in a trench filled with snow, and the gray light of a daytime blizzard.

The dirt of the trench smelled and tasted like silver ore to him. If he was not very much mistaken, he had emerged close to his cave on the verge of the outlier settlement.

He thought of taking refuge there from the cold, but shook the thought off. He had shed that skin.

The framework of his wings had broken in his several falls; as wings, they were unusable. But the scales that still remained on them kept him light on his feet, and he could wrap the wings around him like a coat, until he found (or made) better.

Not far off, he was interested to see a steaming pit in the snow, about three hands wide. He slogged closer and peered over the edge.

At the bottom of the pit was the flame nexus. Three shivering flames, the last of his choir, were quarrelling over the last bit of wet smoky fuel.

"Friends," he said, "I'm headed south. Care to come with me?"

They accepted his offer with dignified, if sparky, restraint. He reached down and lifted the nexus out of the pit.

He fed them scales off his broken wings, and they assured him that metallic phlogiston was the best thing ever, even better than coal, unless he actually had any coal. Since he didn't, they gladly continued to consume the burning metal. This, in turn, warmed Morlock.