The Wolf Age (46 page)

When he had finished and wiped his face on his sleeve, he turned back to Rokhlenu.

"What now?" the werewolf asked.

Morlock had been thinking about that, between convulsions of his belly, and he pointed at the buoyant part of the nearby airship.

"Attack the other airship?" Rokhlenu asked.

"Bag of air," Morlock said.

"What?"

"Not the gondola. The bag of air."

Rokhlenu turned to looked at the nearby airship. It was too dark to see his face, but his shout was pensive as he asked, "You think it's held up by air?"

"Hot air!" Morlock shouted.

A moment passed, and Rokhlenu laughed. "Like ash carried up by a fire! Hot air! Are you sure?"

"No!

"How do they keep it hot?"

"Don't know!"

"This is a great plan!" Rokhlenu howled at him.

"What's yours?"

"Wake up! It's all a dream! Live happy!"

"Never works."

"We'll try yours, then. Back up on the east side of this ship."

Morlock closed his eyes to try to gather the points of the compass, then opened them rapidly to escape the whirling drunken vortex behind his eyelids. "Yes!" he said. He was almost sure the east was the side they had first approached from; the airship itself would screen them from its sister ship.

A hatch opened in the underside of the gondola; werewolves, somehow distorted in form, stood there, holding bows with burning arrows nocked to shoot.

Morlock and Rokhlenu both fell away in power dives. An arrow passed by Morlock's elbow like a red meteor. Morlock bent his flight sharply upward, trying to catch the steady south wind to give him lift. It worked and he flew swiftly past the windows in the gondola, close enough to see a werewolf archer's startled face.

The werewolf wasn't the only one startled. He had at least three eyes, two human and one lupine, in a twisted mouthless face, and the brief glance Morlock had of him was startling indeed.

Morlock flashed past and upward, finally coming to land on the side of the airship. It was covered with a wooden framework, and he grabbed onto the frame with his right hand.

"What took you?" Rokhlenu shouted cheerfully in his ear.

Morlock snarled, "Your mother couldn't make change." His stomach was unhappy, but there was nothing left in it to vomit. Morlock hated the dry heaves, even when he wasn't hanging by one hand a dozen bowshots above the ground.

"... not to bandy words with you when you're drunk," Rokhlenu was saying. He didn't seem to be angry.

Morlock nodded. He unclamped his wooden glove from the wing-grip and hooked it on the airship frame to support himself, at last drawing his sword with his right hand. Rokhlenu did likewise. At more or less the same moment they plunged the blades into the fabric surface of the airship.

Morlock had expected a rush of hot air, perhaps fire. He was disappointed. The rift he was tearing in the surface spilled forth a cool bluish light, but nothing else.

"Guess we were wrong!" Rokhlenu shouted.

Morlock shrugged. That was one possibility. Another was that the bags of hot air were inside. He continued to hack away at the fabric. Rokhlenu did as well, and eventually they had a rip large enough for one of them to slide through, wings and all.

Rokhlenu seemed to want to discuss who should go through first, but Morlock unhooked his wooden glove from the cable and dove through without a word. It wasn't even worth discussing. He was the one who was dying; if he died a little sooner it was no great matter.

In his mind, Morlock had already sketched out several possible designs for the interior of the airship proper. One or two were actually ingenious and he hoped to see them at work. In this he was disappointed, because the interior of the ship was nothing like he had imagined.

The interior was all one great chamber, nearly empty. The only thing in it was a glowing stone near one end of the chamber and an oddly spidery being standing next to it.

Morlock drifted down to the bottom of the chamber, bemused. The stone and the entity by it (the keeper? the steersman? a guard?) were on a wooden platform; the rest of the chamber was an empty cylinder, tapered at both ends.

He heard Rokhlenu land behind him.

The being standing on the platform did something to the glowing stone.

Its light fell on Morlock more intensely. It struck him like an invisible hammer. He felt the fabric of the chamber rippling around him. There was a ghostly murmur in the air. He had no idea what was going on.

"I feel strange," Rokhlenu said thickly.

Bracing himself against the hammer-blows of the light, Morlock turned to face Rokhlenu. He looked strange. The light was causing the werewolf's flesh to ripple and twist, as if he were assuming the night shape. But he was not becoming a wolf. It was more as if a wax image of a man and a wolf were merging, distorting each other, but neither one growing and neither one shrinking. A wolf's head was emerging from Rokhlenu's neck, its eyes dead and empty, its maw toothless. Needle-toothed mouths were opening in the palms of his hands, and twisted canine legs were sprouting from his torso to join his arms and legs, giving him a nightmarishly spidery look-like that thing on the platform.

Morlock drew his sword, repressing a sudden temptation to pass it through his friend a few times and end his misery, and turned instead to slash an opening in the chamber wall.

"You can't stay here!" he shouted at his friend, who was now howling mindlessly from all his mouths. Morlock kicked him through the gap into the night; his howls faded into the storm.

Morlock hoped that his old friend had enough self-command to use the wings and glide to safety-or, if not, that the levity of the phlogistonimbued scales on his wings would cushion his long fall. But the worst thing that could happen to him from the fall was death, and it was not impossible that the light from the strange stone had done worse than this to him already.

The intensity of the light falling on Morlock grew. He dreaded the thought that it would distort him as it had his friend ... but that didn't seem to be happening. It must be something about werewolves that made them vulnerable to the bitter blue light.

Morlock grabbed the grips of his wings and kicked off into flight. He arced upward to land on the platform beside the distorted creature.

It was a werewolf-or had been, Morlock guessed. It had four crooked lupine limbs as naked as a rat's tail, and approximately human arms and legs that were strangely muscled and covered with doglike fur. It had a lifeless wolf head dangling from one human shoulder, a single gigantic human eye peering out from what appeared to be a neck, and on the side of the neck was a gray-lipped human mouth that squealed with terror as Morlock landed beside it.

"Don't do this!" it begged him. "If I obey, he says he can change me back, but if I don't obey, he says he'll leave me like this. Please don't do this. Let me do what they tell me to do."

"How do they tell you?" Morlock demanded. "How does this thing work?"

"I can't tell you. I can't tell you anything. He'll know. They'll hurt me."

The glowing stone was set in a sort of barrel on a spinnable disc, with handles protruding like spokes around the rim's edge. The inner part of the barrel was covered with mirrors, to reflect the light upward and forward. There were lenses mounted atop the barrel and in front. Levers around the lenses made them focus the light more or less intensely. Morlock badly wanted to examine these assemblies; it seemed as if the levers somehow changed the shape of the lenses themselves, which was very interesting. But in more immediate terms, the more intense the light, the greater the force driving the airship. The lens pointing upward kept the ship aloft, could perhaps drive it even further up into the sky. The lens in front steered the ship and drove it forward ... or backward: the wheel seemed to spin in a full circle. Now they were veering away to port-eastward, if Morlock's sense of direction was not totally deranged by dizziness and wine.

That was contrary to the plan emerging in Morlock's mind. He said, "Watch out," and grabbed one of the handles, rotating the barrel so that the light was pointing toward the pointed prow of the great cloth-covered chamber. The steersman (or former steersman, as Morlock had taken his job) hissed and skittered out of the way.

The fabric of the chamber rippled: they were now headed straight into the eye of the wind. There was a brief swirl of vertigo as the direction of the craft spun around. Morlock's stomach had been trying to crawl out of his belly ever since he stood up in his cave, so he found this relatively easy to ignore. He cranked the levers on the vertical lens until the light was more intense, glaring a bright cold blue on the prow.

There was a kind of wailing in his ears that was not quite a sound. It said words that were not quite words. His heart began to pound and his breath grew short, as if he were afraid. He recognized these signs: he had often felt them in graveyards or other places swarming with what some called ghosts, but which those-who-know called ...

"Impulse clouds!" he said to the late steersman of the ship. "This craft is powered by impulse clouds! Maybe you call them ghosts."

"I don't call them anything!" the steersman screamed. "I don't talk to anyone about them, and no one talks to me. Don't tell me anything. I'm trying to do what they say, but you won't let me!"

Morlock ignored him (or her; it was impossible to tell).

Impulse clouds. They were a material part of any living body, but the most tenuous and usually invisible part. Sometimes they could survive the death of the body they had been associated with, in which case they often became a nuisance. Sunlight gathered them up or dispelled them, but moonlight did not. Some said that moonlight actually forced impulse clouds back to earth. That was why ghosts were often reported in moonlight: the moons kept them from rising into the air, then into the sky. Was it possible that the moons, sweeping through bands of impulse clouds raised up from the earth, drove them down again wrapped in moonlight?

If so, this vast fabric chamber was designed to take advantage of the impulse clouds implicit in moonlight. The impulses would reflect off the walls, driving the ship in any desired direction. Speed would vary with intensity.

And the impulse clouds must have something to do with the transformation of werewolves and other werebeasts: that was why the blue light had so distorted Rokhlenu-and the steersman, no doubt, and perhaps others. (He remembered the three-eyed werewolf he had seen.) Never-wolves, like Morlock, must be somehow more resistant to interference with their impulse cloud.

If Rokhlenu's distortion resulted from interference with his impulse cloud, it was possible it could be healed. Perhaps whoever had told the steersman he could be cured had not been lying.

"How do you know where to go?" he asked the steersman. "Do you get signals from the gondola? Is there a port somewhere?"

"Can't tell!" said the steersman. "He'll know! He always knows!"

"I may be able to cure you," Morlock said. "You needn't depend on him anymore. You needn't be afraid. Help me, and I'll help you."

"Liar!" screamed the distorted steersman. "No one can help me! Only him! And he won't now!"

Morlock hated being called a liar. He pushed the distorted creature off the platform; it fell squealing down to the base of the platform and lay there sobbing.

He systematically took in his surroundings. There must be some way for the steersman to see out, or for signals to be sent to him. The craft was too well designed to overlook this nontrivial detail.

At first there seemed to be nothing. Then he realized he was looking in the wrong direction: the steersman had one eye that pointed up....

Morlock craned his neck back. Over his head was a kind of board with black and white shapes playing over it. They seemed meaningless at first, but then he realized what he was seeing. It was as if it were a charcoal drawing of the ship's surroundings from a particular vantage point-on the ship's nose, he expected. And it changed as the ship moved. Somehow those sights were filtered and sent back here. Remarkable.

He tentatively shifted the angle of the ship's flight to starboard; the south wind struck it solidly on the port side of the prow, sending shock waves through the strange craft, forcing its nose further to the west.

At first he fought this, but then he saw something on the view-board that caused him to stop. A clawlike object hanging in the sky not so far from him, a gondola dangling below on cables. The other airship was following, concerned about the state of its sister ship, no doubt.

"Good of them," Morlock remarked to no one. It was time to put his plan into action, clearly. He spun the wheel until the other airship was dead center in the view-board. Then he cranked the levers for the lens on the front of the barrel, until the impulse light striking the prow was as bright as it could be.

"What are you doing?" screamed the steersman.

It didn't seem to be a rhetorical question, so Morlock answered it. "I am going to ram that ship."

There was a dark bird perched in the shredded fabric of the airship. Her name, for that time/place, was Mercy. Near her, in the storm outside, was a dark indistinct cloud: a manifestation of Death.

"Nothing for you to do, on a night like this," Death signified.

"Or everything."

"I visualized that War would be manifest here."

"War enjoys experiencing the losing side of a conflict. He is savoring the outliers' suffering through his most direct manifestation."

"You have visualized this?"

"Yes. Also, he told me that he would."

Morlock's insight was sensitive enough that he felt their presence, though he did not see them or perceive their symbology. Their presence troubled him without his understanding it. But he didn't let it shake his intent.

Unfortunately, the other airship's crew seemed to realize he was intending to attack them. The ship swung around and fled before the wind.

Morlock was the worst sailor in the world. His former wife, who was possibly the best sailor in the world, often used to tease him about this. But even he knew that a stern chase was a long chase.