The Wolf Age (8 page)

Morlock stood with his back to the wall beneath the window and wearily tore more strips from his shirt for bandages. He did so with a sense of futility. In every encounter where the werewolf hurt him, it came closer to killing him. He could hurt it, but he could never kill it. The absence of moonlight might slow its healing, but would not stop it. And now it didn't even need to attack; it could sit and wait for him to pass out from blood loss or weariness.

If only he could kill it. But he had no silver and no wolfbane. How else could you kill a werewolf.?

The wounded beast sidled through the red smoky shadows of the cell. It issued a harsh, rasping sound like a cough.

Morlock thoughtfully twisted the bandage in his hands. He let the blood fall unregarded to the stone floor. A thought was forming in his mind.

Everything that lived, everything that had physical life, had to breathe. That was why the werewolf was coughing from the smoke.

Keeping one eye on the lurking beast, Morlock stooped down and pulled the leather laces from his shoes. When he had made them he had leeched the phlogiston from them so that they wouldn't burn; he tested their strength now with his fingers, and he liked what he felt. He patiently spliced the laces together. It took a little time to do properly and his time was running out, but there was no point in trying this without doing it right. When the laces were one, he grabbed a stray length of nonburning wood from the floor and, being careful not to drip blood on it, broke it in half. He knotted one end of each lace to a piece of wood, and presently he had a serviceable garrote.

Now to make a chance to use it. The beast was wounded in both eyes, but it could still smell and hear; he would have to distract it somehow so that he could attack it from behind.

Morlock carefully placed the garrote on the floor far away from any fires. Then he loitered casually toward one of the burning cots-it was the other one, the one Morlock had not broken up. By now the fire had spread over the length of the thing and it was burning merrily.

The werewolf was on the far side of the cell, distractedly and somewhat dismayedly swinging its loose eyeball on its nerve.

Morlock picked up the burning cot and threw it at the wall above the werewolf. As soon as the cot struck the wall, he dodged across the cell to seize his garrote and then jumped upon the werewolf's back as it emerged snarling from the curtain of hot gleeds and bloody smoke. He wrapped the cord around the half-blind beast's neck and began to twist.

Of course, it fought. But there was very little it could do: Morlock was out of reach of its teeth and claws. It strove to tear at the strangling cords with the claws of its back feet. Morlock waited until both back legs were fully extended, then stomped on the joints where the long bones of the leg joined together-the knees, for a man or a woman. He felt a certain savage satisfaction in hearing the knee joints crunch under his unlaced shoes.

The werewolf yelped, or tried to: Morlock felt the surge in its chest and neck. But its throat was closed; not a sound emerged. Morlock twisted the handles of the garrote again and again, cutting deeply into the beast's flesh. Presently it stopped moving.

He held on for a long time after that, counting the moments by his own pulses long after the werewolf's heart stopped. When he had counted a thousand heartbeats since the beast's last movement he relaxed the hold of the strangling cord slightly. The werewolf remained motionless. He relaxed it a little more.

The wolvish chest expanded slightly. There was a slight tremor in its veins: a returning heartbeat.

Morlock snarled and twisted the cord tight again, strangling off the werewolf's returning life.

Frustration threatened to swamp his reason. He could keep the beast from living, but he could not actually kill it. He could hope that the return of the sun would change the beast back into the bestial man it had been ... but he couldn't be sure even of that: some werewolves could obviously maintain the beast form through the day.

He took the frustration out by twisting the cord even tighter. It dug even more deeply into the wolvish neck. That was what gave him the idea.

Maintaining his grip on the unliving but not-yet-dead beast, he dragged the body nearer some fragments of burning wood. Some of the wood was sharp and ragged. He took a chunk of that and started hacking away at the great muscles of the wolvish neck. Blood started to flow, a great deal of cold blood, black in the fiery light. But that was just as well: it extinguished the flames in the splintering wood and made it last longer. When one chunk became useless, he grabbed another. He twisted the unliving head back and forth periodically; it was growing looser and looser on the spine, as Morlock had hoped it would.

Eventually his crude wooden weapons pierced the werewolf's airway. Air began to whistle through the slashed openings-slow at first, then faster and faster. The werewolf's dangling eyeball dilated with awareness, and the claws began to scrabble on the stone floor.

Morlock had destroyed so much of the werewolf's neck that the strangling cord was no longer an effective means of restraint. Morlock let it go and clamped the werewolf's jaws shut with his hands. Planting his feet on the werewolf's front legs, he began to twist the werewolf's head on the fleshless neck. The beast struggled to open its jaws, to savage Morlock with its back claws, but soon its legs stopped moving: he had severed the corridor for nerve impulses to reach the body. The head came loose from the spine on the next twist.

The beast's body fell lifeless to the ground ... but, horribly, the beast itself was not dead. Its dangling eye still glared at him with baleful intelligence, and the jaws strove feebly to open. He muzzled them shut with the strangling cord as a temporary solution.

He sat with his back against a wall and tried to think what he might do next. He wondered dimly if the head could find a way to reunite with the dead body and live again, or perhaps grow a whole new body from its neck. He didn't know. He didn't know what a werewolf could do.

The head could live without the body, but not the body without the head, that was clear. It made his next move clear, too.

Morlock jumped up and unlatched the shutter on the window, letting blue bars of moonlight fall into the red fuming cell again. He grabbed the wolf head by a loose end of cord and then jumped up to grab the iron sill of the window with his free hand. He tossed the wolf head up onto the sill and tried to push it through the bars. But the openings were too narrow for the wolvish skull to pass through. It made odd sounds as it lay there in the moonlight; it began to rock back and forth as if gaining new strength.

He grabbed the bars with both hands and slowly lifted himself up to the window, aided slightly by his feet scrabbling on the coarse stone wall of the cell. He kicked the wolf head with one foot, wedging its narrow maw between the iron bars. He kept on kicking it, first with one foot, then with another, finally with both. It was agony to his wounded leg and arm, but he kept at it until the bones of the skull were broken and the sacklike wolf head squished through the bars and fell, grunting with terror or some other emotion, out of sight into the moonlit world beyond.

Morlock extended his arms as much as possible and slid down the wall, finally dangling from his unwounded arm, to reduce the shock when he fell. It worked, to the extent that he didn't pass out from pain when he hit the cell floor.

He turned and surveyed the smoking, firelit cell. The werewolf body lay motionless, apparently dead (even if its head was still alive somewhere). He was sick with horror at what he had done, at what he had had to do. But he supposed he could call this a victory.

Looking beyond the cell bars, he saw with shock that the corridor was still full of watchers. He had forgotten about them. They stood there, man and wolf, staring at him with eyes full of wonder and horror, silent and motionless as stones. The pale trustee had dropped his baskets and was watching him through outspread fingers, like a child who is at once afraid to look at something and afraid to not look at it.

Morlock read their shock, and slowly (his mind was going dark) he understood it. This had not been about killing him. They could have done that at any time after his capture. They could have put archers at the cell door and filled him full of arrows. They could still do that. But they had planned to break him, send in the bestial man-wolf and break him and then, perhaps, kill him. Or perhaps make him into a new trustee-a safe fellow to run errands around the prison.

Lit within by sudden fury, Morlock staggered forward and, straining greatly but trying not to show it, seized the dead body of the beast from the cell floor. He threw it with all of his fading strength at the bars of the cell. He would have screamed at them, too, but he didn't have the breath for it.

They jumped back, tripping over each other to retreat. He stared at them for a moment longer, then turned away and limped over to a corner of the cell with relatively few fires. He lay down with his face against the wall, his back toward the cell door. It was his only way to show his contempt, since he had no words to speak that they could understand and no breath to speak them with.

The corridor was still silent when darkness descended on him and he escaped from the bloodstained, red-smoked, blue-lit cell for a time.

ain and cold woke Morlock from a sleep more dreamless than death. He turned his head and saw that the open window was gray with predawn light. The smoke in the room had cleared away, the fires extinguished.

Morlock fought his way to a sitting position, his back against the bitterly cold damp wall. The werewolf body and the burning fragments were gone from the cell. Dark bloodstains still spread across the stones of the floor, especially by the barred door.

There was a bowl of food and a bowl of water there, and something else lay beside them on the stones.

Beyond the bars the guards stood watching him: two in wolf form, two in man form. They didn't speak to each other or to him.

He got to his feet and lumbered over to the food and water.

The thing beside them on the cell floor was a long tooth-a wolf's tooth possibly. A narrow hole had been bored in it, and it was strung on a piece of cord.