James Enge: The Wolf Age

Death was there under the surface of the sea. He had known it from the beginning, but now he saw her reaching out for him with long dark fingers, bristling with darkness like a spider's legs.

She embraced him with her many arms, and her bristling fingertips touched his face.

She introduced talic distortions into his fading consciousness, like words.

I am not ready for you to enter my realm, she signified. You have been a good servant to me, but I have more work for you to do in the world.

Without speaking, he rejected her service-rejected all the Strange Gods.

She signified an amusement even colder than the Bitter Water, and his mind went dark.

But it was not the darkness of death. He came to himself later-it must have been hours later, because the western sky was gray with approaching dawn. He was coughing up salty vomit as he crawled across the stony margin of the Bitter Water.

In the same instant he saw two things: his sword, Tyrfing, gleaming in the shallow water and the dim gray light. The other was a crowd of shadows, manlike and wolflike, standing farther up the beach. He looked up and saw men and women with wolvish shadows, wolves with human shadows.

His throat was closed like a fist; he couldn't call Tyrfing to him. He leapt toward it, but the werewolves were on him before he reached it. They didn't use swords or teeth, but clubs and fists. They wanted him alive.

He fought as hard as he could, but they were too many and his strength was failing. Before he lost consciousness he felt them put the shackles on his neck and arms.

Morlock had never been a slave. Until today.

Morlock never remembered much of his first day in captivity. He had been half dragged, half carried all through the hours of sunlight. The band of werewolves who had captured him were about twenty in number, counting humans and wolves together. He was not their only prisoner; they had five others: sorry waterlogged human beasts (like Morlock) that they had recovered from the waves. Morlock was the only one in metal shackles. That was good and bad: bad for his chances to escape but perhaps good for killing one or more of his captors, if he could catch them unaware.

In between bouts of unconsciousness and semiconsciousness, whenever he was aware enough, he tried to keep an eye out for Tyrfing. He guessed one of the werewolves had taken it; it still carried a talic charge he could activate by calling its name. If he picked his moment carefully, he could summon the sword-in ideal circumstances, perhaps fight his way free. But it would have been enough for him to kill some of them.

He never caught sight of Tyrfing, though. Perhaps it was heaped with loot from the raided towns, awaiting a division of the spoils. Perhaps they had left it there in the water, fearing its latent magic. As light left the sky, he began to get desperate. He decided to ascend to the visionary plane and try to locate the sword by its implicit talic burden.

It was a risk; if some of the werewolves were seers, they would sense his action. But he decided to take that risk. As the werewolves settled down for a brief rest around sunset and a snack (one of the waterlogged captives-a lank-haired, hollow-cheeked woman who didn't even scream when they bit into her), Morlock slumped down with the other four survivors and allowed his mind to ascend slightly toward the visionary state. The world of matter and energy receded slightly, faded slightly, and the talic threshold of the spirit world stood forth brightly against the dim background.

A wolvish form turned toward him. Instead of fur, it seemed in his talic vision to have long feathers, and at the tip of each feather was an open, observant human eye. All the eyes were looking at Morlock. The werewolf seer issued an ululating call that Morlock heard with his material senses and his inner ear.

The other werewolves dropped their steaming fragments of human meat and rushed over. One of them, in man form, wore a tool belt and carried a brazen wooden box that the seer-wolf avoided with caution. The seer-wolf barked a curt order. The manlike werewolf set the box down near Morlock and opened it. Within it lay glowing glasslike objects.

Morlock dropped his vision and tried to kick the box over. He didn't know what the things in the box were, but he didn't want them near him, any more than the seer-wolf did. The seer-wolf barked another order, and suddenly Morlock was gripped with many hands and teeth, unable to move, the left side of his face pressed against the ground. The one with the tool belt grabbed tongs from his belt and a hammer. He used the tongs to lift a glowing glass tooth from the brazen box. The seer-wolf moved farther away instinctively, and Morlock would have done the same if he'd been able. The one with the tool belt placed the point of the glowing glass tooth against Morlock's right temple and pounded it in with the hammer.

The pain was the most terrible that Morlock had ever felt in his long life, but that wasn't the worst of it. With each blow of the hammer, he could see and hear and feel less of the world. When it was done, all that he could see and hear and feel were the things that were actually there: his Sight was gone.

His mind was empty of everything but grief and hate for a long time.

When Morlock brought himself to look at the void of matter and energy that was now the only world he could know, they had left the plains and were now in low hills, the sea still in sight on their left. It might have been hours or days later; he neither knew nor cared.

The hills about them were riddled with holes like empty eye sockets: dens of werewolves, he supposed. One of the hills had been cut down to bedrock and walled around; the holes in its sheer sides were smaller: windows, not doors. That was where they were taking him.

And only him. When Morlock looked about incuriously, he saw that the other human captives were gone. Either they had been left somewhere else or they had been eaten on the way. He neither knew nor cared.

To the west, there was another far greater walled edifice, and behind the walls were rising ranks of tableland, each rank thick with toothlike protrusions, each surface notched with dark den-holes. That must be the ill-famed city of werewolves.

Beyond it to the north was a mountain, tall enough to overshadow the highest of the tablelands. From the ragged cone at its peak, it was a volcano, though it seemed to be dormant. Mounted on its higher slopes was a gigantic circular device, gleaming in the light of the minor moons. On its upper rim two silvery globes of unequal size moved at separate rates. In its center were starlike symbols forming an all-too-familiar shape: a wolf. On its lower rim was a third globe-lightless, almost impossible to see, but larger than the other two.

A moon-clock, Morlock deduced, with a faint awakening of interest. He wondered what it was for, who had built it, what powered it. He turned his eyes away resolutely.

Ahead of him lay the walled lair: clearly a prison. From snatches of wolfspeech he understood from the captors, he guessed it was called the Vargulleion. There would be no moon-clocks there. He walked through the tomblike gate of the prison with unfeigned indifference in the midst of his captors, wolvish and manlike. First their shadows were swallowed by the darkness within; then their forms were lost and they made their way down the lightless hallway. A dim red light glowed at the end of the hall: an open door, leading to the prison interior. From it Morlock heard iron slamming on stone and many voices of men and wolves.