"Where's Hrutnefdhu?" asked Rokhlenu.
"Oh, he was getting twitchy," Wuinlendhono said irritably, "so I sent him on an errand. There's enough of us here to hold Big Red here down-or put him out of our misery if it comes to that."
"Maybe," Rokhlenu said, looking at the sleeping werewolf. "Just."
"My Hrutnefdhu doesn't like to see people cut up in cold blood," Liudhleeo explained.
"Who does?" muttered Wuinlendhono discontentedly.
Liudhleeo gave her a sidelong look for this. When Rokhlenu realized he was doing the same himself, he stopped. But it seemed like an odd remark for a werewolf to make.
"He's as ready as he'll ever be," Liudhleeo said, gesturing at the red werewolf, "and I'd like to get some sleep this afternoon, if at all possible. Maybe you, Rokhlenu, would hold down his head and you, Wuinlendhono, would hold his head like-well, like last time. That worked out so ghost-bitten well."
Morlock put his left hand on her shoulder and looked into her dark eyes. She dropped her gaze, then shyly raised it again. Her posture was almost flirtatious, and Rokhlenu was going to say something about it when she said in a businesslike tone, "Do you want to cut him open or pull the spike? I think that's a fair division of labor."
"I'll cut," Morlock said, and pulled a glass knife from his belt.
"And you brought your own knife. Very polite. No magical glass tweezers for me, I suppose?"
Morlock produced a long double-toothed probe from a pocket in one sleeve. That, too, was made of clear glass.
"Ask him for some raw beef," Wuinlendhono said, already kneeling by Hlupnafenglu's shaggy golden head. "I'm hungry."
Rokhlenu was in place, too, so Morlock knelt down by Hlupnafenglu's side and deftly incised a cross in the side of his head. He peeled back the flesh, exposing the skull. Under the frighteningly copious blood, there was a network of pulsating light woven through the bone of the skull. It was much like what they had seen in Morlock's skull, the three of them, anyway. Except that there was more of it; it was denser; the light was more golden.
"You knew exactly where it was," Liudhleeo said quaveringly.
"I saw it in a vision," Morlock explained. "He has a faint scar there, also."
"Are you-are you-are you in a vision or whatever you call it now?" She sounded terrified to Rokhlenu. He wondered why.
"No," said Morlock. He got out of her way, and she approached with the two-pronged probe.
Rokhlenu watched her hand narrowly for any sign of trembling, but there was none. Her hand approached the seeping wound confidently, and carefully probed the skull for the central node.
Then she screamed. She leapt to her feet and she was screaming. Smoke was rising from her hand. A drop of blood there was burning through her skin.
Morlock grabbed her hand and, quick as a werewolf, licked the blood from her hand. Then, unlike a werewolf, he grimaced and spat. "Eccch. Healing is an ugly business."
There were tears in Liudhleeo's dark eyes, but she was smiling as she looked on him. "Thanks," she said. "From one ugly healer to another."
"I guess I'd better pull the spike."
"I guess."
"I wonder why it burned you."
"The blood stinks of silver," Wuinlendhono said distantly. "If you people are done licking each other, I wish you would pull that spike or sew him up or both."
Morlock did both. He located the largest pulsating node and applied the pincers of his probe to either side. It took some time to break it free from the skull, which had begun to heal around the spike: it must have been in the red werewolf's head a long time. But, in the end, Morlock held it triumphantly in his hand, and the three (conscious) werewolves looked on it with a mixture of interest and horror.
It was not blood-dark, like the spike from Morlock's brain. It was still luminous as it lay in his hand, a silvery gold sheathed with drying blood.
"It's electrum, I think," the crooked never-wolf said. "An alloy of silver and gold," he explained, when they looked at him bewildered.
"What a disgusting idea!" Wuinlendhono said heatedly.
"Gold will cure a silver wound," Liudhleeo added tentatively. "I read that somewhere, I think. That's how he must have survived."
"It was some sort of experiment?" Rokhlenu asked. "A game-to see what could be done to a werewolf like this without killing him?" He felt rage building in him. "What kind of crazy ghost-sniffer would do that?"
Morlock pocketed the bloody silver-gold tooth. "Ulugarriu, maybe," he said.
The name cast a pall over the room. Morlock sewed up the red werewolf's bleeding head in an awful silence that didn't seem to bother him in the least. Of course, he lived his life swimming in awful silences, Rokhlenu reflected.
Hlupnafenglu lay in the sunlight, strangely still.
"I wonder if we killed him?" Liudhleeo said quietly.
"Better dead than running around with a silver spike in his brain," Wuinlendhono said decisively, standing with her usual fluid grace. "If we are done here, I think I will return to my lair for a sleep. We'll be having a long night, tonight."
"But-" Rokhlenu said, turning toward her. He hadn't been expecting her to accompany them on the foray to the Khuwuleion. It was insane: some of them would likely die. But she was staring at him with eyes carved from black ice, and his objections died unspoken in his throat.
"I'd better do the same," he said. "See you at sunset," he said to Morlock.
"Then."
As Rokhlenu shut the door behind him he glanced back and saw Morlock tending to Liudhleeo's hand as she looked on him with a rather predatory smile on her long narrow face.
Chapter Twenty: A Long Night
Night had fallen. The sky was largely free of clouds and wholly free of moons: it was the first dark call of the month of Jaric- a very dark call, this year, since Horseman had set. They would fight this night in their day shapes-and that increased the chance that some of them would die. Perhaps all of them, if they had miscalculated the forces that would be present to defend the prison.
Rokhlenu assembled his strike force on the marshy verge west of town. Besides him, the First Wolf, and Hrutnefdhu, there were twenty irredeemables and five gold-toothed bodyguards led by the frizz-haired Yaniunulu. The senior bodyguard was hardly more prepossessing in his day shape than his night shape, but he had insisted on his right to accompany the First Wolf into danger and she had smilingly assured him she would do her very best to protect him.
They were waiting on Morlock; and Rokhlenu, getting jittery, sent Hrutnefdhu to round him up.
He was not surprised when he saw the pale werewolf returning alone, poling a boat from the southern gate of the outlier settlement.
"He says not to wait for him," Hrutnefdhu gasped as soon as he was within talking distance. "He'll catch up to us."
Rokhlenu shook his head grimly. "That crazy never-wolf."
"Yes, Gnyrrand."
They set off at a loping run down the path that led to the long walls of the Sardhluun Pack. They kept their glittering weapons sheathed; what armor they wore was covered by dark surcoats. They were hoping to surprise the enemy. They had no other hope, really.
They came to the long walls at a place far from any gate. There was no guard atop the wall that anyone could see or smell. Ape-fingered Runhuiulanhu climbed the wall with pitons and rope, like a cliff face, and the rest of them went up the rope one by one after him and down by rope on the opposite side.
They'd chosen their spot welclass="underline" hardly three hundred loping paces off lay the squat bulk of the Khuwuleion, a dark shape etched against the western stars.
Rokhlenu was just catching his breath and his beloved on the far side of the Long Wall when a human shape vaulted clear over the wall and landed rolling in the dark field nearby.
"Nicely done," he whispered harshly.