"I almost did. Never seen anything like it. Never seen anything like half the stuff I saw this afternoon, but that was the weirdest. He dug a skinny channel up the hill and another one running down again, and he lined them with wood smeared with beeswax. He put a mirror gate at the top and the bottom of the channels, where they joined. And he took a basket of water-"
"You want to give me some help with that one?"
"I'm the one that needs the help. I mean, you could see the water through the weave of the basket."
"Did he explain how he did it?"
"He didn't seem to think it was a secret, but there was stuff he didn't know how to say in Sunspeech or Moonspeech, and I didn't know how to tell him how to say it. I think he was saying that he tricked it-said the water was `gullible.' Only a little at a time, though. `You can't argue with a lake,' he said. `Even a pond can be stubborn.' But I don't know if he really knew what all the words meant."
"Or you didn't know what he meant."
"And I never will. Anyway, he dumps out the basket into one of the channels, and the murky water runs downhill, like you'd expect, and it hits the mirror gate at the bottom and it runs uphill. The muck mostly didn't want to travel uphill-Morlock says earth is less gullible than water-and after the water had been up and down the hill a couple times it was clear as air, clearer than the air usually is around this swamp. He kept dumping baskets of water in the channels until he had a regular brook running upside and downside. We sponged off with the clean water and drank deep-drank our body weight in water, I think. It was around that time the pl-Hrutnefdhu showed up. He came screaming through the swamp like a chicken on fire, and he ran up and down alongside the channels a couple times, and he wanted to be introduced to each flame personally, and he danced around the gold as if he had invented it personally, and he was pretty excited about the whole business, I guess. Morlock and him talked about stuff for half-forever, it seemed like."
Rokhlenu reflected that Olleiulu was more comfortable with Morlock the bloodstained beast slayer than Morlock the work-stained maker and friend of low-status citizens.
"Anyway, the sun was getting pretty low by then. I was going to bring Hlupnafenglu back with me, but he wouldn't leave the flames-just wanted to sit next to them and stare at them. So I came away with the gold."
"How'd you get back across the swamp water?"
"Wickerwork boat," Olleiulu said glumly. "I-well, I had something to do. He had the boat and some other stuff done when I got back. His hands were moving all the time, all the time."
Rokhlenu wondered what Olleiulu had had to do, but it seemed like an unhappy memory, so he didn't press him on it. Instead he changed the topic to the negotiations for the marriage settlement.
The sun was setting, and they were still deep in consultation when a messenger wolf with human fingers ran up to tell Rokhlenu that Wuinlendhono needed him. There was an embassy from the Sardhluun Pack in First Wolf's Lair: they said they wanted their prisoners back.
Chapter Fifteen: Quarry
Once a snake, resting in the cool shadows of a marble quarry, was approached by a werewolf holding a box made of light, glass, and certain heretical opinions.
The werewolf, still in the day shape, leaped to trap the snake; but the snake, who was Wisdom, transited to the other side of the quarry.
"Ulugarriu," the snake said, condescending to speak with its mouth, you will never trap me that way."
"Won't I?" Ulugarriu replied.
"No. My visualization of totality warned me of your approach. Your war against the gods is worse than folly, maker."
"Is it?"
"Yes," said Wisdom. "It grieves me that we're enemies-"
"Does it?"
"-but I see that the folly has eaten you deeply-"
"Has it?"
"Be that way, then, you fur-faced ill-born," the snake hissed, and summoned ramparts of madness to attend him.
"I am not wearing my night shape," Ulugarriu observed, edging closer through the quarry shadows. "If I were, I would sing insults back at you. It would be a relief to my spirit, for I fear you. But why do you insult me? Does a god fear a fur-faced ill-born?"
But the snake was done with talking. He raised up a rampart of phobia between him and the werewolf.
Ulugarriu hesitated, and then took from the box a cloak of red-eyed anger. The werewolf donned the cloak and began to force a way through the rampart of phobia.
Wisdom then realized he did feel a little fear. While Ulugarriu was still entangled in the phobia, he transited to the far end of the quarry.
He would have transited farther, but he found he could not. His passage through space-time was obstructed somehow.
Ulugarriu surpassed the rampart of phobia and ran down the quarry toward Wisdom.
The snake raised up a rampart of delusions to block the werewolf.
The werewolf drew a two-edged blade, one edge deeply serrated with ugly irregular saw-teeth of evidence. Using this, Ulugarriu patiently began to saw through the delusions.
"Don't you wish to know why I'm here?" Ulugarriu asked as the sawtooth blade ground away at Wisdom's defense.
The snake knew that the werewolf was asking questions to trap him; it was an ancient way to get to wisdom. But it was a game his chosen nature compelled him to play.
"Yes," the snake replied. "Tell me, if you will."
"I will, indeed. Wisdom, this instrument your people have unleashed against my people-"
"You brought it on yourselves! You most of all!"
"Yes, me most of all. And so if I am to defeat this instrument-"
"You can't. Our united visualizations agree. Wuruyaaria will be destroyed."
Ulugarriu laughed strangely. "Wisdom! Wisdom! If only we'd had this conversation a year or two ago! How happy I could have made you with my despair. But now something has changed. Is it some new factor, not present in your visualizations or my mantic spells? Is it something about the nature of your instrument? (I hate that thing so much. How I long to kill it!) Or are your visualizations no longer united? My insight detects some flaw, some sort of disunity. I think you will tell me. I think you must tell me."
Wisdom belatedly realized that Ulugarriu had surpassed the rampart of delusion and was dangerously close to him. He summoned up a rampart of delirium to defend himself.
Ulugarriu patiently reversed the two-edged blade. The other edge was as smooth as the first was rough: this was a glittering razor of rational distinction. The werewolf whittled away at the wall of delirium, and now Wisdom began to feel something like despair. His only hope was to wait until nightfall. Whatever Ulugarriu had used to confine him, the change of sunlight to moonlight would be in his favor.
"How did you confine me here?" he asked Ulugarriu, hoping to gain time and knowledge.
The werewolf chuckled. "You're hoping nightfall will save you. No, dear Wisdom: it won't. I wrapped this locus of space-time with a four-dimensional coil, woven of dictates from the Aesir. It was a lot of trouble to collect them, but I knew it would be worth it someday. We are bound here in this stone vagina, gaping in the ground. The sun will not set, nor will you leave, until a certain thing happens. So it is not a matter of time after all. There are powers greater than time."
Ulugarriu had surpassed the rampart of delirium.
Wisdom enmeshed the werewolf in the rampart of mania. The werewolf reversed the cloak of red-eyed anger, and it became a cloak of black-eyed gloom.
Wisdom, smiling fiercely, resummoned the rampart of mania as the rampart of depression. Ulugarriu, weighed down by the cloak of gloom, labored sluggishly in the dark wall of depression.
Wisdom was dismayed. Lesser beings would have been instantly crushed by the weight Ulugarriu was enduring.
"What is it you want from me?" Wisdom asked.
The werewolf gasped something between a sob and a laugh. "The instrument! The instrument! Stupidity didn't devise it. Mercy had no hand in it. It has the stink of death and cunning on it. I think you and your friend Death made it, and I can find out from you how to break it. If I don't learn that, I will learn other things. I love to learn."