love from of dwelling upon a haunting fdilure or

love from & of dwelling upon a haunting fdilure or

stories. Stories of more reflective passions. Of a doomed love from & of dwelling upon a haunting fdilure or glory from the past; of the cherishing of family and kinfolk, even to one’s own undoing.

The lore of the Fianna was filled with tales of lawcases and dreamquests, of poets and devils, of card games and pillow talk, of mission bells and bloody idols, of men with wits lighter than air and children strapped to the lodestone of having to grow a second tongue. of princes and exiles; warriors and holy hermits; and of exiled-warrior-princes-cum-holy-hermits.

And yes, even of the proud, sea-coursing raiders who pressed Stuart so sorely on every side this very night, reminding him of the labyrinthine passions of his own people.

“What is called for here is clear thinking.” The Jarlsdottir’s voice broke in upon his introspection.

“Did this delegation offer any proof that they came from Lord Arkady? There is often a chasm between what a Spiral says and what is, in fact, truth.”

Jorn considered a moment. “No,” he admitted. “Although the spokesman did claim to be a kinsman of Lord Arkady. He said his name was Knife-between-Bones.”

A short way down Stuart’s table, Victor Svorenko surged to his feet, his hands slamming down upon the board hard enough to rattle the crockery. “I will not have my House slandered in my presence. I came here in good faith, to speak the truth as I have witnessed it. Those of you who last night heard me tell of the fall of Arne Wyrmsbane know that I am not one to shirk the truth-even if this truth would seem damning to one of my kinsmen. House Crescent Moon is the truest of all the Silver Fang noble lines.

This point is uncontested and excruciatingly documented. To assert that Lord Arkady is kinsman to such-it is unthinkable. Retract your claim, or defend it with the strength of your arm!”

Jorn bowed slightly in the direction of the incensed Silver Fang. “You mistake me, cousin. I was only reporting the words of the Spiral as I was ordered. I do not myself press this accusation. And it may please you to learn that the Warder has already avenged you this insult.”

The bared neck seemed to mollify Victor more than the carefully chosen words. “I accept your retraction. But have a care to tell us only the exact words of this Knife-between-Bones that we can avoid such confusions.”

“I will give them to you as nearly as I can remember them,” Jom replied and proceeded to give a fairly accurate rendering of the peculiar conversation.

When he got to the part about Arkady being “detained,” the clamor rose up again, drowning him out. ‘This is a foul business,” Victor called out.

“Arkady has obviously fallen into the clutches of the Spirals. Why else would he not be here by now?“ “Because he is &id to face us!”

“Who says such?” Victor challenged, reddening.

“We must mount a party to track these Wyrm-spawn back to their lair. If Arkady has been taken captive.. .”

Karin again brought her silver hammer down. “I am sure the Warder already has our best trackers out on the trail,” she said. As she scanned the room, however, she saw that Thijs and the other hunters were still among them. The Warder had not been at all himself these last weeks, she reflected. The shadow of death rode him mercilessly, goading him on with the lash of vengeance.

Before anyone else could remark on this oversight, she pressed on. “If Arkady fails to present himself, however, we will be forced to pronounce judgment in his absence. We have heard the testimony of Victor Svorenko-Arkady’s own kinsman-telling how Arkady commanded the Knockerwyrm and it obeyed him as its master.

We have heard the tale of the Silver Crown and how Arkady conspired with the servitors of the Wyrm to capture the throne of the Silver Fangs for himself. We know that he was forced to flee the States under suspicious circumstances and that the cloud of suspicions followed him all the way home to Russia. And thus far, not one voice-from any of the twelve tribes-has come forward to speak in his defense.’’ There was a long silence in the hall. Stuart gazed around at the sea of downcast faces. No one so much as looked toward the Jgrlsdottir, much less rose to meet her challenge. Had the proud Silver Fang lord fallen so low that there was no one among this vast company who would speak up for him?

The silence stretched and Stuart could feel anger and indignation rising up within him. This was Arkudy they were talking about. The hero who had been proclaimed the best hope of the Garou Nation. The king who would unite the fractious tribes under a single banner and carry the battle into the very teeth of the Wyrm!

Before he even realtzed he had moved, Stuart was on~~t.Aseyestumedtowardhim,heself-consciouly smoothed at the front ofhis rumpled suit. It was too late to back down now The golden wolf-headed torc at his throat seemed suddenly too tight, as if it were cholung him, s&ng its teeth into his neck.

He cleared his throat loudly and began to speak.

His voice was not loud, but his words carried to the far comers of the hall and beyond. They streamed like firelight out through the cracks beneath windows and doors. They spilled out among the tipsy revelers staggering across the Aeld Baile. They slipped like shadows through the tree line and skidded out over the ice floe. The slight, but unmistakable Appalachian drawl sounded alien, almost exotic, here in the domain of the north wind.

“Not one of you, eh? Not a one. Well, it’s not hard to tell which way the wind blows through this room. I came a long way hoping to find some answers, but I see nobody here’s even asking the questions. Still, I can’t very well sit by and see a man condemned without a word spoken to his credit. My given name’s Stuart; they call me Stalks-the-Truth.

“Now, I don’t personally even know Arkady, but I do know the stories. I know what’s in them and I know what’s not. And when I hear about Arkady quelling the Knockerwyrm with only his voice, I am put in mind of an old saying, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ You don’t cast out devils by the power of the Devil and you don’t subdue the minions of the Wyrm by the power of the Wyrm. That’s in a book somewhere, or near enough. And if I remember the story right, Arkady was not banished after the affair of the Silver Crown. In fact, if he were already under formal censure for his part in that tale, there would be no need for us to sit around passing judgment on him now. No, if Albrecht had had it in mind to judge Arkady, he would have done so. There, on the spot. All in all, a few stories is pretty thin evidence on which to convict a man without even giving him his say.”

There was a silence in the hall, broken only by the scrape of the Jarlsdottir’s silver hammer as she rose to her feet. The note ofsadnes and disappointment in her voice was plain. These were her people. And they had failed her far more than hey had w e d Stuart, with their hard hearts, their blood prices. “Our stories are our past, Stum Stalks-the-Tmth. As a lawqxaker, I put my trust in the songs and stories of our people. As Arkady has not premted lunx#, he will be judged by what is said and sung of him-not only by us, but by all who come after. His reputation and hts renown must be his defense. It does you d i t that you are willing to speak up fmhm, astranger to you. I can only wish that thexr were more voices r a d in his praise and fewer in lus condemnation.”

There were mutters of agreement from around the room. Karin cleared her throat and pitched her voice to carry the length of the hall. “I speak for the Fenrir. It is the judgment of the tribe that Lord Arkady of the House of the Crescent Moon has willingly consorted with the Wyrm and is further complicit in the death of our shield-brother Arne Wyrmsbane. He is from this night declared outcast. No longer shall our halls be open to him, nor shall any of our kinsmen give him aid or succor. His blood is declared already fallen; there shall be no question of wergild or any other repercussion against one who is found to have harmed, maimed, or even killed him. We mourn our cousin, fallen in private battle with the Wyrm. Sergiy Dawntreader, how say the Children of Gaia?"

Stuart did not have the heart to hear the rest.

Silently, he slipped from the hall. He had had about as much as he could stomach of Fenrir justice. Outside, in the crisp night air, beneath the ice-sharp stars, hulking silhouett-ach towering over nine feet tall, bristling with fur and knotted sinew-vied to throw one another to the frozen earth.

He picked his way carefully through the combatants. It was not the object of their games that eluded him, it was their purpose. At the end of their desperate grapplings, one contender lies flat upon the earth; one raises a clawed fist heavenwards. But what is gained, what is lost? At the end of a game of chess, the vanquished overturns his king, capitulating. The toppled monarch lies stretched out insensate upon an unadorned square of white snow or black ice. But what dynasty falls with him? What kingdom is despoiled? What army, relieved of its head, is broken and scattered?

Somewhere behind him, within the riot of the Hall of the Spearsreach, in the wake of the elaborate and raucous game of intertribal justice, a king-that-mighthave-been had just been toppled. The duc b e h m that they had been promised had been taken from them.

And without a single blow being struck.

Who could say what doleful price would yet be exacted for this presumption? And who, of all of them, would be left to pay it?

Upon Dierdre‘s return, she found FatherdSepmts still hunched over the hearth as she had left him. He was smring intently into the dance of flames as if trying to wrest from it some secret His shadow swayed hypnotically intime tothe flickeringofthe flames. I f h e h a d s d at all since early morning, however, he gave no sign of it.

She took some smug satisfaction in that. If she had managed to keep him from his usual mischief, even for the space of a single morning, the world would be a better place for her trouble.

Hearing her footfalls creaking on the uncarpeted wooden stair, he turned toward her, smiling broadly.

Lord, she hated that smik. “There’s a clever girl,” he purred, extending one blackened claw toward her.

For a moment, a wave of cold panic swept over her, fear that he intended to take her by the hand, to draw her close to him. She stiffened and involuntarily retreated a half step, before she caught herself, forced herself to hold her ground before him. There were some adversaries you did not turn your back upon.

His smile didn’t waver.

Then, flustered, she realized his true intent. Embarrassed, she thrust the skein of yam-the fruit of her morning’s shearing and carding and spinninginto his outstretched hand. This had the desired effect.

That terrible appendage withdrew.

He teased loose one end of the skein and played out a handsbreadth of ebon yam. He rolled it between thumb and forefinger appraisingly. It was finer than human hair and strong as a rope.

“It’s beautiful work,” he said at last. “Your talents are wasted here, among the dirt farmers-a golden lamp hidden under a bushel basket. If you can do this with mere lamb‘s wool, imagine what you might do with the finest silk of all between your fingers, the dream-fine thread of human misery. Perhaps when your year and a day is up, I might entice you to-”

Wo, thank you,” she said curtly.

“I would reward you in queenly fashion for your trouble,” he pressed. “And it would be so little trouble for a clever girl such as yourself. Here, I will make you a gift. As both a token of my affection and as a pledge to seal the bargain.. .”

Her hesitation could not have amounted to even a fraction of a second, but it was enough. He knew he had her. And after so long and intimate an association, perhaps it was no longer even a fair contest. He knew exactly where the chinks in her armor lay.

“I said I want nothing more to do with you or your presents,” she said.

“But you do not even know what it is yet,” he coaxed.

“How can you say you want nodung to do with it?“ She started to retort and broke off abruptly as he turned his free hand palm up. The motion revealed two long, gleaming knitting needles. Delicate scrollwork, or perhaps a flowing script, coiled lovingly about them, covering their entire SuIface. The firelight did not so much reflect off them as become trapped in the flowing engraving, following its curves like water following a channel.

“Spinnerets of purest silver,” he said. “And there’s not another set to match them in all the breadth of the earth. With such needles as these in your hands, your efforts would be nothing less than the stuff of legend. Why, one might even weave the ethereal threads of dream and nightmare, desire and fear, hope and-”

“Put them away,” she said, unable to take her eyes from them.

He watched their reflection glittering deep within her eyes. “But they are yours,” he said. “For the asking.”

“I said, put them away.” Her voice had a note of desperation to it now. And still she could not wrest her eyes away.

He rose from his chair, but she was aware only of the dazzling needles. They drew closer, almost within reach, ‘Very well,” he said. “Tell me where you would like them, and I will put them away for you.” He surveyed the room a moment and then reached up toward the mantle. “Here, perhaps?“ She felt their moving away like a hole opening up within her. She yearned toward them. ‘No,” she said, shaking her head stubbornly. “Take them away. Far away. Before I cannot.. .” From somewhere within, she seemed to draw on a hidden reserve of strength, of steel and firelight. Her tone became hard and sure. “Before I am forced to take you up on your unwise offer and tell you, with most unladylike exactitude, where I should like you to keep your needles.”

A look of anger settled low on his brow like a storm CloudItpassedjust~~~~evaporatingbeforeshecould even be sure that she had really seen it. But that infunating smile vanished, and that was a victory in itself.

Even if it that disappearing act was followed a moment later by the peerless needles. Gone.

“As you wish,” he said, shrugging with feigned indifference. Then, without so much as looking at her, he cast the skein of ebon yam-her entire day’s labor-directly into the heart of the flames.

A cry of protest escaped her lips as she lunged forward. She brushed roughly past him, trying to ignore the way her skin seemed to creep beneath the caress of thousands of skittering legs at the contact. Seizing the poker, she caught at the smoldering ball of yam and, with a deft twisting motion, she snared it. But when she drew it forth from the flames, she found she had hooked, not a ball of yam, but a finely woven shawl.

She turned, a look of incomprehension on her face. And he laughed then, genuine laughter. Not just that stupid, maddening grin. And he drew her close to him and she could not resist him.

He took her by the hand and led her back out through the door of the farmhouse. She could not so much as manage to draw the door closed behind her, although she knew she would not return. She thou& of dl the lovely thmgs within that she had accumulated these fifty years. And of going away, just leaving the front door gaping wide. Where anyone might walk in.

And that Father-of-Serpents marched her right back up the lane to the gate. And that too she could only leave standing open behind them, swinging lazily in the wind. Then, with a flourish, he wrapped her in the long black shawl, encompassing her above and below. And lifting her up, he set her adrift upon the night wind. The coming storm caught at the hem of the shawl and billowed it out like a sail.

The sound of footsteps crunching through the thin crust of snow brought Stuart around sharply. His own feet had carried him, as if of their own accord, far from the press of reveling Garou-down to the silence and serenity of the Hammerfell. The river, choked with ice, creaked and groaned like a ship.

Straining toward the open sea. Anxious to be free.

A solitary figure was picking its way toward him from the direction of the Aeld Baile. After a moment, its features resolved themselves into the face of Victor Svorenko.

“I hope I do not intrude,” Victor called, hesitating a dozen yards away. “I.. . I would thank you before I go. For what you have done for my kinsman.”

Stuart scowled. “I have done nothing,” he said.

“I am sorry.”

Sorry I could not have done more. Sorry my words carried no conviction. Sorry they fell only upon deaf ears.

He turned back toward the river.

After a moment, the footfalls drew closer. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Stuart Stalks-the-Truth.

You spoke up for my kinsman, and at a time when I could not. FOT that I am in your debt.”

“Forget it,” Stuart said. “I meant I was sorry about what they did. To Arkady. To you and your kin. To all of us for that matter. I really thought he might be the one.. . . Forget it. You don’t owe me anything.”

Victor was beside him now. He spoke in a choked whisper. “All of these proud warriors,” he said, gesturing disdainfully back toward the House of the Spearsreach, “they are cowards. All of them!

They judge my kinsman without having the courage to face him. Without one of them having even the strength to speak in his defense! Better that I should never have spoken. Better that I should have let the things I have seen fester within me, turning like the Wyrm in my belly. Better that I should have cut out my own tongue than I should have brought this indignity upon my house.”

“It’s not your fault,” Stuart said. But Victor was having none of these platitudes. He scoffed and shook his head, pretending to study the complex patterns of moonlight on the frozen river.

Stuart could sense that the Fang had taken the first steps of a solitary path that only spiraled down into disillusionment and despair. He could not follow Victor along that path, but he could accompany him in spirit, by pouring a steady flow of bolstering words, like strong drink, into him.

“Look, if you had not spoken out,” Stuart persisted, “that doubt would have gnawed away at you. Chewed you up from the inside until it found your heart. All it takes is a tiny opening, even a well-intentioned one, and the Wyrm has you. I’ve seen it happen. A lie to save a kinsman and the Wyrm slips in. It wraps its coils around the deception, encysts it. Soon you’re scrambling to conceal not only your kinsman’s failing but your own part in the cover-up. Then the Wyrm takes its tail in its mouth and draws the noose tighter. Something leaks out, you don’t know how, and now it’s blackmail. A stranger contacts you with a simple request, a favor. And who would it hurt, really?

Before long your kinsman’s stumble has dragged you down with him. Another champion lost to us. This is the way the Wyrm works.”

“This is the way the world ends,” Victor replied flatly, his eyes fixed on some distant point amidst the ice-sharp stars. Stuart could feel the Fang fosterling slipping away from him.

“Let me tell you something about the way the world ends,” Stuart said hastily. “YOU know what 1 thmk! Sometimes I think the Apocalypse is not some Final Battle waiting for us at the end of time. Where the assembled champions of Gaia all line up on one side and the minions of the Wyrm all line up on the other. And then Luna, knowing what must surely come, opens her throat in a banshee wail for her lost children. And the armies take that keening note as the eagerly awaited signal and set upon one another in earnest. And they kill and kill and kill again until that wailing stops. Until they have drowned it in a sea of spilling lifeblood and the moon’s face vanishes under a film of blood.”

“Gaia forfend! Do not speak of such things,”

Victor made a sign against the Eye of the Wyrm.

“By giving voice to such misfortune you only invite it upon yourself. It is better not to think of such things at all.”

“But I do not think that this is the end that we are speeding toward,” Stuart said. “If I did, I do not know how I would find the strength to rise and face another day. No, I think the Apocalypse is something quite different.”

He leaned closer, confiding a secret. “I think the Apocalypse is already upon us. I do. I think that we are the children of the Apocalypse. It’s the battle we all fight, every day. It’s a battle, not against doing ‘evil,’ but against doing what is convenient, what is comfortable, what is expected. Let’s face it, the Wyrm doesn’t have to put on some great martial display to carry the field. He only has to keep whispering and churning.

Telling us that we are doing all that can be done. That we are already fighting the good fight. Telling us there’s no harm in taking little ‘shortcuts’ for the greater good.

A silence, a complacency, a deception-that’s all it takes. Good men, strong warriors, fall in this battle each and every day. And we go on as before, listening to the whispers in the dark, pretending the Final Battle is still years off. Pretending that all is well.”

Victor was silent a long while. At last, he turned to Stuart and met his eyes. ‘‘I have grown tired of pretendings,” Victor said. “I have no further time for childish things-for the posturings of our cousins, for their playing at the games of justice and of conquest. I must go and find my kinsman. Even if he has fallen into the clutches of the Black Spirals, I must go to him. I was a fool to have ever left his side. I saw him command the Wyrm-spawn and I was afraid. No, do not interrupt. I was afraid; I will not put a more flattering face upon it. Arkady may have been in the midst of his greatest need, of his own Final Battle with the Wyrm, and I turned my back upon him. Out of fear.” ‘You are no coward, Victor Svorenko,” Stuart said.

“Few would have the courage to do what you have done. To speak out when silence was in your best interest. It could not have been an easy decision.”

“It was the only decision. But did I speak from courage or from fear? I would not be so fast to judge. I was afraid, Stuart Stalks-the-Truth. Afraid of what Arkady had become. And afraid because, if the Wyrm could do that to Lord Arkady, to that one who was the best and purest of us all, then the Wyrm could do that to any of us. To you. To me. No, it was not bravery that drove me, but desperation. Despair.”

“You had hoped that the concolation would prove you wrong,’) Stuart said. “That the elders would vindicate your kinsman.”

“I had hoped that they would drag him here.

In chains, if need be,” Victor answered with sudden vehemence. “I wanted them to make him answer. To prove to me, with his own acts and his own deeds that I was wrong. That what I had seen, with my own eyes, was a lie. A trick of the Wyrm, nothing more.

“I wanted him to show them-to show them all!-that he was better they were. Larger than life, more than merely Garou. That he could crush a thunderwyrm with a mere word. I wanted him to make them follow him. To love him,” he trailed off weakly.

Victor’s anger seemed to drain from him. “I wanted him to make me follow him. To believe in him again.

As if nothing had. . .”

Victor broke off and turned away. There were tears at the corners of his eyes.

Stuart left him to his private thoughts and recriminations. But he stood beside him, withi easy reach. If Victor should find himself overmatched in his own Final Battle, he would at least know that someone was there. He would not fall alone and unmourned.

The moon settled gingerly toward the horizon, as if reluctant to dip her toe into the icy waters.

At last Victor stirred, stepping from the field of battle back onto the icy shores of the Hammerfell. As he became aware of his surroundings once more, he cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably, obviously embarrassed.

“You have been too indulgent of a very foolish man this night, Stuart Stalks-the-Truth. And now the moon is already low in the sky and I have little chance of catching up with the hunters and picking up the trail of the Black Spirals.

I only wanted to thank you.”

Stuart shook his head. ‘You are welcome, Victor. I am glad we had the chance to speak. And it helped me as well, gave me a chance to get some stuff straight in my head. Now I find myself wondering if I can ask you a favor.”

“Ah, and then a stranger asks you for a favor.”

Smiling, Victor parroted back Stuart’s earlier words.

Stuart, in turn, laughed aloud. “No, nothing like that. Your secrets are safe with me. But it occurs to me that I would very much like to find Lord Arkady myself. To ask some questions. To find some answers. I know it is a great imposition, but do you think you could take me to the place where you last saw him-the site of the battle with the Knockerwyrm at the tin mine? I would consider it a personal favor.”

“I am in your debt,” Victor said, waving aside Stuart’s protests to the contrary. “I would be honored if you would join me in the search for my kinsman. I should be glad for your assistance and your company”

He clasped Stuart by the forearm. Stuart returned the gesture, sealing the bargain. “You are a good man, Stuart Stalks-the-Truth,” Victor said.

“And a brave one. We will meet again tomorrow night and travel back to the Sept of the Dawn. But tonight I must learn what I can from these Fenrir hunters. Good night.”

Stuart nodded and let Victor take all of three steps along the ice floe. Then, silently, he fell into step beside the Silver Fang.

Victor turned to him with a look of puzzlement and slight annoyance.

“If the hunters have turned up anything,”

Stuart explained, “I don’t want you rushing off into some nest of Black Spirals without me.” He slapped Victor on the back and the two set their steps toward the perimeter.

In three shakes of a serpent’s tail, that wind washed Dierdre ashore upon a high mountaintop half a world away. It was a desolate place, a blackened stump jutting up out of a range of forbidding crags.

A crooked finger pointed accusingly heavenward.

The retreating winds tugged at Dierdre’s skirts as if repenting their cruelty in depositing her here in such a place. She could almost hear them whispering one to the other, “Enough. Not here. Come away now.”

But she held her ground. Thts was the place. She could feel it in the pulse of the mountain reaching up for her, rising through the layered granite, piercing the soles of her feet. Rooting her to the spot.

She breathed deeply, eyes half closed, savoring the night air, attuning herself to the slow, steady pulse of the mountain. Yes, there was something buried here, a story, a word of power graven upon the very heart of the mountain. The low, patient murmuring through the rock whispered of its existence, even as it shielded the story itself from prying eyes.

Peering down into the hollow, Dierdre could see that its floor was split with a gaping crack, the remains of an abandoned mineshaft. In some decade past, a conscientious soul had gone to great trouble to board up the fissure, although Dierdre could not imagine that there had ever been much danger of any passersby who might take a tragic misstep in the dark. Surely visitors to this remote and unwholesome spot were few and far between-an impression that was only strengthened by the state of disrepair into which the site had fallen. The boards that had not rotted away altogether had splintered as if someone had rolled a great boulder down upon the orifice.

It now gaped like a maw full of broken teeth.

But even as this thought crossed her mind, she became aware that the site had not been altogether abandoned. There were figures below, tiny man-like figures, scurrying around that crack. No, upon further scrutiny she became convinced that it was not the mineshaft itself that was the object of their attentions, but something at the very brink of the precipice. Themoonlight glinted off some. thing there. A pool of water, perhaps a spring.

It was no matter. She would shoo them away soon enough.

She lingered there upon the summit a while longer before setting about her appointed task. She took her time, drinking in each and every one of the mountain’s scents and sounds.

And beneath her touch, the landscape began to take on recognizable form. The mountainside spread out below her like a well-loved patchwork quilt. With an artist’s scrutiny, she began to tease out the name of each wrinkle in the rockface. Soon a pattern began to emerge, as clear to her as if she had stitched it into the mountainface with her own hands. Each irregular square of fabric, a promontory; each stitch, a looping path.

The seam of the highest lane was dotted with a flock of scraggly mountain goats that kept twisting free like frayed threads. Each bounding dirty white flank was a living fiber in the tapestry she wove.

And once she had done, once she was certain that she knew that mountain’s name and that it was now her place, she began to unpack her things. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

She took her black shawl-the one that Fatherof-Serpents had wrapped around her shoulders with his own hands-and she spread it out below her until it covered the entire mountainside. It settled in like a dark and low-lying fog. It seeped down into each and every crevasse of the ascent. Where it touched the tiny man-beasts below, it clouded their thoughts and cast them into a shifting labyrinth of fog. They wandered aimlessly, ranting, not recognizing their fellows even when they came upon them suddenly in the mists. The shawl also softened and blurred the boundaries between worlds until it was hard to tell where one reality ended and the next began.

And Dierdre saw that this was good. And again she reached into her apron and drew out her carding combs and cast them down the mountainside, where they took root and burst with new life. Each tine of the combs sprang up into a forest of thorns, blocking all hope of progress up or down the slope. Cutting off the hollow from the outside world. Walling out even the moonlight from the rocky path.

And she saw that that too was good. Finally, she knelt down and carefully unfolded her kerchief, spreading it before her on the ground. Inside its folds was a single midnight-black seed. It shone like polished onyx in the moonlight.

Leaning far out over the abyss, she let the seed fall. It dropped straight down to the floor of the hollow, straight into the gaping maw of the old mineshaft and straight down to the very heart of the mountain.

She craned forward, straining to catch the sound of the distant impact. She wished the writhing manthings below would be still, if only for a moment. There.

The distant echo swelled to the roar of a freight train and then something dark and terrible erupted from the gaping mineshaft, gleaming like a tower of onyx and writhing like the old Wyrm itself.

Yes, she thought, gazing down with satisfaction.

She would have this place feeling like home in no time.

“Well, the good news is that you don’t have a nest of Spirals in your backyard,” Stuart said.

The old troll smiled his saw-toothed grin. “That much I know,” he said. “But you can do better. Now, attend.” He rapped his gnarled stick sharply atop the nearest marker stone.

The Hill of Lamentations was quieter tonight.

The moon was but newly risen and the Rite-master had not yet called the first of the moonbridges which had so dominated the night sky above the sept yesterday evening.

“You crossed over last night,” the old troll accused. “My eyes are rheumy but they are not blind.

The remembrance of the spirit world still clings to you like the morning dew.”

“We meant neither slight nor deception, Grandfather,” Victor said. “We were following the trail of the Black Spiral delegation. We managed to track them all the way back into the mountains to the north-no mean feat-to the spot where they stepped across. We had to follow.’’ The Rite-master nodded, mollified. ‘‘And what did you find? I am many years your senior and have never known a man to step across from this caern without bringing back some sign for the defenders of the sept. The land here has grown accustomed to our touch. It whispers to us-to those who have ears to hear-mumbling warnings, portents, omens.”

“They came through at the source of the Hammerfell,” Victor said. “Not the physical source, the icy spring high in the mountains your kinsmen call the Fist, but at the Umbral source.”

“I know the place,” the old man replied. “And you are right, it is warrior-work to win through to it.

Even in more charitable weather.”

“Which brings us to the bad news,” Stuart said.

“There’s a contagion marking the spot where they came through. But it’s dug in deep, under the surface of the frozen river. We could see it throbbing down there, seeping, gangrenous. But we couldn’t break through to it. Someone’s got to root it out before the thaw, or you’re going to have a serious problem when that water starts flowing again.”

“I knew you would not disappint me,” the old troll said, slapping his hands together sharply. “In every coming and going there is a new learning. You should stay here among us for a time. There are strong backs and willing hands enough here; you could lead a party to the river’s source. Carve out this corruption. The Fenrir would drink to your courage and feast in your honod’ “I think we’ve had our fill of the hospitality of the Fenrir warband for the present,” Stuart said, his words sounding jarring and bitter even to his own ear. He quickly continued to cover up the discordant note. “And besides, we have an appointment to keep with one of Victor Svorenko’s kinsmen. I only hope we are not already too late.”

“I think you are perhaps a bit uncharitable to my kinsmen. But you may yet have the opportunity to make amends. And if your appointment is with the Lord Arkady,” the Rite-master said shrewdly, ‘(then I think you are not yet too late for that either.”

“You havemews of my kinsman?’ Victor demanded, pressing closer. “What have you seen, old man?“ The Rite-master planted the end of his stick firmly in Victor’s sternum, bringing him up sharply.

“It’s not what I’ve seen, young lordling. It is what I have not seen. If the great Arkady had fallen in battle, do you think we would not yet have seen his flayed pelt-as blazing white as First-snow, they say-paraded before us? The Wyrm would not waste such an opportunity to crush our spirit.”

Still, somehow Victor did not seem reassured.

Perhaps he was thinkmg of the grisly battle standard of Knife-between-Bones and his delegation. “And if he has fallen in another kind of battle?” Victor asked.

“A more personal, private conflict?“ The old man lowered his stick and leaned closer until a mere fingersbreadth separated his eyes from Victor’s. “Then, child, we would have heard from Arkady himself. Standing atop the ruins of some despoiled caern. Spitting defiance in the face of the Twelve Tribes. Ebllying the forces of the enemy about him fur the Final Battle.”

Victor looked away. “We must go.”

Stuart cleared his throat. “Can you open a path for us, Gatekeeper? We have to get to the Sept of the Dawn, back to the last place we know Arkady was seen. Maybe we can pick up his trail from that end.”

“No great feat, that,” he replied, smiling. “But let us give Luna a chance to climb out of bed at least, before we start making demands of her.”

“Something is not right here,” Victor’s voice was taut. He raised muzzle to the wind, a distinctly lupine gesture that looked slightly ridiculous in his human form. Stuart did not call this fact to Victor’s attention.

“It is something on the wind. Do you scent it?“ the Fang asked.

The steep rocky trail was little more than a hint of footpath at this point, a way more suited for the scraggly mountain goats that haunted this desolate height than for either man or wolf. Stuart had shifted form experimentally several times, but each time returned in frustration to his accustomed human proportions.

They were already well within the fog-riddled Carpathians. Overhead the moon was bright, gibbous.

And that was some small comfon. But Luna’s gaze did not so much illuminate their way as infuse the low-lying mists with an eerie phosphorescence. W i i y serpents coiled intimately around their calves. Stuart felt as if he were wading ankle-deep through chill water.

It also meant that he could only intermittently see his feet, much less his footing. Now, Stuart was no stranger to a mountainside at midnight. He had spent the better part of his growing-up clambering over and through the Appalachians and the Blue Ridge. But even he had already given up on trying to avoid a misstep in the dark tonight, stumbling about one step in every dozen. Resigned to proceeding at a snail’s pace, he tested each step gingerly before he put his weight down upon it. A twisted or sprained ankle he could ignore, block out the pain and press on. A broken o n m r an incautious step out over the edge of a precipice-would be another story.

Victor seemed to be bearing up pretty well for his part. The physical rigors of the climb didn’t seem to faze him so much. He had fallen flat several times already without so much as a curse or a grumble. But this blind groping through the luminous fog was starting to work on him in other ways. He had grown silent, absorbed in his own thoughts. Perhaps he was retracing some treacherous trail of memory and regret from his previous fateful visit to this desalate height, when he had walked beside Lord Arkady. Already he was jumping at shadows.

“I don’t smell anything,” Stuart replied. ‘‘Just pine.

And mud, of course. And.. .rotting wood? And the damned goat droppings.”

“Shh,” Victor cut him off with a sharp wave of his hand. “We must be close. We should be able to hear it by now. I fear something has gone terribly wrong.”

Stuart drew to a halt, letting the currents of mist drift languidly past him. He didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. “Hear what? You said we’re looking for a mineshaft. What’s there to hear, an echo?”

Victor waved at him angrily to keep silent. At last he gave up listening in frustration. “Maybe we have gone past it in the dark. It should be right here somewhere. Off to the right of the path.”

“I haven’t seen any turnings since you pointed out that old signpost about a half mile back. What am I supposed to be listening for?”

“Gaia’s Tears,” Victor replied.

“I don’t think I’m following you,” Stuart said distractedly. “But I’m pretty sure I can make out something just ahead. There, do you see it?” He slapped his companion’s arm and pointed off to the left of the trail.

Victor squinted. There was something there. A vague shape, as tall as a man, just standing there.

Waiting, watching, sizing them up.

“Hello!” Victor called. ‘We’re from the Sept of the Dawn. Can you take us to Speaks-Thunder?’ ‘Who’s Speaks-Thunder?” Stuart asked in a whisper and again Victor gestured him to silence. Stuart thought that this habit was getting old very quickly “We’ve brought supplies,” Victor called again. He began moving forward slowly, his arms spread wide to show that he bore no weapons.

Still no answer. Stuart didn’t like the look of this.

If the watcher were a friend, why didn’t he answer?

Slowly, Stuart began to circle around wide to one side.

If thls were a trap, it wouldn’t do for both of them to waltz straight into it.

Victor cursed. Stuart instantly pitched his senses into full lupine alertness and dropped into a fighting crouch. His companion’s hulking form seemed to deflate. Victor scuffed angrily with one foot, sending a scree of loose rocks clattering down the treacherous mountainside. Stuart was not too pleased to discover the sheer drop mere paces from where he stood.

Victor turned his back upon the shadowy stranger and plopped himself down onto a rock that barely jutted up above the ever-present layer of fog.

“It’s that damned signpost again,” he said. “We’ve been wandering around in circles.”

Stuart let out a long breath. “You sure?’ He warily approached the shadowy figure until it resolved itself into the half-rotted wooden signpost. He swiped another notch out of the upright, just to vent his frustration. “Well, at least we know where we are now,” he offered.

Victor didn’t reply.

“Look,” Stuart said, “it’s obvious we’re not going to make any further progress tonight. Why don’t we just settle in for the night? The fog is likely to be even worse first thing in the morning, but given a few hours to work at it, the sunlight will bum away even the worst of fogs. And this climb has got to be easier in the daylight.”

“You’re probably righ;,” Victor admitted grudgingly. ‘With the moon this bright, I didn’t expect we’d have any trouble. I’ve come this way twice before, but it wasn’t like this either time. This damned fog.. .”

“Not your fault,” Stuart said. “Don’t worry about it. I’d venture that this tin mine of yours will still be there in the morning.”

Victor grunted. “I hope you can say the same for us. I’ll take the first watch, just to be sure. Just give me a chance to gather some wood for a fire.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea? A fire, I mean.”

“If it helps keep this fog off, it’s a good idea,”

Victor said.

Stuart shrugged. “I guess anything else that might be abroad tonight is going to be more surprised at fiiding us then we’ll be at meeting it. But stay within hollering distance. I’d hate to think of you falling off the mountain without me.”

Victor gave him a curious look as if trying (not for the first time) to determine exactly how serious Stuart was being. “Don’t worry,” he said at last, “It is my intention that we should go down the mountain together.”

He struck off through the mists and within moments was lost to sight. Stuart busied himself with clearing a place for the fire. Every few minutes, he would sing out, “Victor, you fallen off this mountain yet?“ And Victor would yell back, “Not yet. Be patient.”

Soon the Fang returned, grinning. His dark mood seemed to have lifted with having accomplished something-even if that something was as simple as gathering firewood. Stuart’s own jokes and good-natured ribbing didn’t hurt either. Victor was dragging what seemed to be the upper reaches of a fallen pme tree behind him.

“It’s all soaked through,” he said, depositing his burden. “It will be a minor miracle if we ever get it alight. Damned fog.”

“Fortunately, I just happen to know that particular miracle,” Stuart confided. And before long they had a roaring blaze going. One that kept the worst of the fog at bay.

Victor nodded approvingly. “It may be that the others will see the light of the fire, even through this fog. If we cannot win through to the mountaintop, perhaps the mountaintop will come to us.”

The dance of flames made Stuart drowsy. He stifled a yawn and tried to concentrate on what Victor was saying. “What others? That’s the second time tonight you’ve mentioned others. I haven’t seen sign of anyone else since we left the Sept of the Dawn.” ‘That is one of the things that has been bothering me,” Victor admitted. “Surely we should have seen some sign of them by now. The path to the old mine cannot be more than a half a mile from this crossroads. Even if no one had sighted us for the fog, still they should have heard us. Someone should have come to investigate.”

Now Stuart was really lost, and he was tired and starting to get annoyed. “Okay, I give. What the hell are you talking about? Who should have heard us?

And what were we listening for back there?”

“Gaia’s Tears,” Victor repeated stubbornly. Then realization dawned upon him. “Ah, now I see. I am sorry, my friend. I thought that you understood. That you had heard the tale at the concolation-the story of what happened when we returned to the tin mine.

They all wanted to see for themselves, of course. I could hardly deny them. That is how I came to be leading Sergiy Dawntreader and the others back to the place where Arkady had commanded the.. .where we had fought the Knockerwyrm,” he finished awkwardly.

Stuart found his eyes straying away from the welcome glow of the fire to where he thought the trail ahead must lie. He was suddenly aware that there were certain glaring holes in his knowledge.

Certain questions that had gone unasked. And that wasn’t like him.

What, for example, had become of the wyrm after Arkady had quelled it? Victor had never mentioned anyone actuallydtspatchtngthe beast Ford he knew, Arkady mght simply have left it there, brooding in its dark hole.

Suddenly the prospect of spending the rught on the exposed mountaitlside seemed even less appealmg.

“You told me that you returned home with the body of Arne Wyrmsbane,” Stuart accused. “You didn’t mention anything more about what had become of Arkady. Or, say, this towering Wyrrn-beast, for that matter. And what the hell has any of this got to do with Gaia’s Tears, whatever they are?“ Victor nodded, which only served to irritate Stuart hrther. What he wanted was some answers. But Victor only poked at the coals with a snapped pine bough.

“There is more you should know,” he said. <‘I should say there is,” Stuart said. His thoughts were still clouded with fatigue, but his journalistic instincts were kicking in now and, given their head, they could cany him on autopilot for hours-even through an appalling haze of alcohol or even stronger brain-damping substances. “We should have had this talk last night.”

“Last night we were out hunting S p d all night,”

Victor said. “Which may explain why you can’t seem to keep your eyes open.”

“All right, you’ve got my attentionnow How about you start me out slow.” Step by step, Stuart painted the scene, dung Victor back across the intervening span of time to revisit the battle at the mineshaft. “ M y The wyrm, You’re carrying the broken body of your fiiend, Arne, in your arms. And you just walk away. You turn your back on your kinsman. You just leave him there, alone with that thing. Why? ‘The battle was over,” Victor said, perhaps too abruptly. “The wyrm, it could no longer harm Arkady.

Perhaps it never could have hurt him. That was how it seemed to me, at least.”

“You never found out what happened. You were afraid,” Stuart accused. “You ran.”

“No! I was not afraid. I would not be afraid were it three wyrms bearing down on me. I.. .”

“No, not of the wyrm,” Stuart interrupted. He leaned closer, purposefully crowding Victor, trying to rattle him. ‘Of your kinsman. Of Arkady. Or rather, of what he had become.”

“My battle was not with Arkady. And if you had been there, if you had stood beside him when he commanded the Wyrm-spawn, then you would not be so quick to judge others.”

“All right,” Stuart said. “SO you weren’t afraid.

You just freaked out. You took off with Arne’s body.

But you never stopped to wonder, just once, what happened? To Arkady ? To the Wyrm? Hell, for all we know they could still be up there. Waiting for us to come stumbling along.”

“Of course I wondered! Do you think me without feeling? But my duty was to my fallen friend. My kinsman, well, he could obviously fend for himself.

Oh yes, he had demonstrated that.”

“So that’s it. You never even looked back? Just closed the book on him. And then this concolation thing comes up and you go all the way to freaking Norway to give evidence against your kinsman.

Damn, Victor! I hope you’ll forgive me saying so, but you are a hard man. I hope I never do anything to freak you out.”

“Ah, now I see,” Victor said. “You are having a joke at my expense. I am not such a hard man as you suppose, Stuart, called Stalks-the-Truth. As soon as I had fulfilled my duty toward my fallen friend, as soon as he was safely back at the Sept of the Dawn, then the questions began to nag at me. And then the doubts. Had I really seen what I remembered? Was Arkady all right? I had seen him command the Knockerwyrm with little more than his voice and his stare, but I did not know whether or not he could break that contact without the wyrm rising up and turning upon him. Perhaps he was trapped there, held in thrall as surely as he himself held the wyrm.”

“So you went back?” Stuart prompted.

“Of course. I had to go back. How else could I be sure? I convinced Dawntreader himself to accompany me. He must have thought me half mad with grief. And others came as well, I could not have kept them away-Speaks-Thunder and his pack among them.”

“And that is the second time tonight I have heard you mention that name-speaks-Thunder.”

“He was always kind to me. From the time when I first came here from my home, it must be more than three years now. Speaks-Thunder treated me like a man and not like a frightened cub. Even when the evidence would have tended to suggest the contrary.

Especially those times, when my temper got the best of me, or the frustration of having to relearn everything I thought I knew already, or stigma of being different from everyone else.”

Stuart nodded. “I understand. So you take this Speaks-Thunder and Dawntreader and a handful of others back here. Back to the scene of the crime. But when you get here.. .”

“When we got here,” Victor said, “we could find no sign of either Arkady or the wyrm. Oh, the signs of the battle were clear enough, but the combatants were gone.”

“Of course you searched the area?” Stuart prompted. ‘‘Certainly. And when we could find no proof of what had become of them, Dawntreader set about the Cleansing.”

Stuart shot him a questioning look over the intervening fire.

“To clear the site of the Wyrm-taint,” Victor explained. “For three days and three nights, Dawntreader sat there, unmoving, perched upon the very brink of the mineshaft. We could not prevail upon him either to sleep or take a bite of food. Not a word would he speak to us, nor even acknowledge our presence. I began to fear for his safety. On the third day I took to pressing a rag soaked in creek water to his mouth, thinking that if I could not get him to dnnk, I might at least force‘a trickle of life past his lips. The water only streamed from the corners of his mouth, but I told myself that his lips and tongue did not look as parched and cracked as they once had. What else could I have done? We waited. We kept vigil.”

Caught up in Victor’s peculiar tale, Stuart could only gesture for him to continue.

“I did not sleep at all that night. I stood watch over Dawntreader. He was too weak, I could see it in his face. He wore each of the three nights he had spent upon the brink as if it had been a full year. I tried to coax him back to us. I pleaded with him.”

Victor paused, as if unwilling to tell more. At last, he steeled his resolve and pressed on. “In the end-and I admit it freely-I resolved to drag him bodily back from the edge. I am not proud of it, but I had already lost a kinsman here. I was not about to lose my liege as well. ”But when I took him beneath the arms, he weighed no more than an armful of dried autumn leaves. I feared to move him lest he crumble in my hands. If-the spirits had come for him then, they would have taken him easily. He could not have resisted them. They could have swept him up bodily into the heavens, or buffeted him over the edge of the precipice.

“As the moon set, we heard a great rumbling from deep within the earth, from the heart of the abandoned mineshaft. An oily black cloud belched forth from the depths and spread across the heavens, blotting out the light of the stars. Where the vapors touched the skin, flesh blistered and peeled away We fell back before it, smarting, howling with rage and indignation at the foe we could bring neither claw nor fang to bear against.

“Only Dawntreader and I held our ground at the edge of the pit-he because his eyes no longer focused upon things of this world; I because I refused to abandon him there. Choking, I tried a second time to drag him back from the brink, but my arms passed right through him as if he were of less substance than the viscous fumes that clung to my seared flesh.

“I think I may have cried out then, for I knew that he was lost to us, and that he had been the best of us. And that for the second time, this hellish abyss had robbed me of my lord, and of my best remaining hope.

“I do not know for how long I held that moumful howl. It was as if something had broken inside me. I could not make it stop. Others, brothers and sisters that I was aware of only as raw nerves at the periphery of my pain, took up the cry. The sound swelled to brim-fill the mountaintop, to ring out over the foothills and the plateau, to drown the valleys and to swallow the night sky. Time itself had ceased to have any meaning for me. I was adrift, devoid of any point of reference. Deprived of the stately ageold procession of sun, moon and stars, we had only the cadence of that song, the rising and falling of the howl, to mark out time. Our grief remade the passing of time in its own image.

“And then it happened. Another voice, a voice I had longed to hear these three nights, joined in our communion, our desperate plea. Dawntreader stirred, threw back his head, and opened his throat to the unseen stars.

“His voice was strong and true, but he sang not with the breath of his life-for if the truth were known, there was barely a whisper of life left within him-but with his very lifesblood. A fine red mist funneled out before him, spiraling out into the night, seeping into the impersonal void between the distant stars-a darkness more silent and ravenous than any mineshaft.

“Where that fine red mist met the inky blackness, the darkness gave way before it. Soon it had streaked the eastern sky and puddled into a ruddy pool at the horizon. With infinite patience, the spilling life resolved itself into the radiant face of Brother Sun, cresting the rim of the world.

“The first hint of dawn broke the morbid paralysis that had crept into my heart and I rushed to Dawntreader’s side. He was slumped forward precariously over the brink. His breath came only in shallow, rasping sobs-the effect of breathing deeply of the vitriolic cloud. The exposed flesh of his face and arms had all but blistered away. A steady trickle of blood ran down his forearms, over the hump of his wrists, and trailed between his fingers to fall down into the murky abyss below.

“For a third and final time, I set to pull him back from the edge. And this time he did not resist me. Even as I began to lift him, however, to carry him to safety, the inexplicable happened. The miraculous. Even now, I hesitate to tell of it, as if my very words, leaden and impure, might somehow pollute the memory of it. But there was no denying what I saw.

“From the very spot where Dawntreader’s blood had run into the pit, water bubbled up. Clear, sparkling water. The earth cracked asunder, revealing a natural basin that had lain hidden there, a still pool, a font. Speaks-Thunder said that it was Gaia Herself who wept for Dawntreader’s pain.”

Victor fell silent, overwhelmed at the memory.

“Gaia’s Tears,”

Stuart put in gently. “The gurgling of a spring. That’s what we should be hearing.”

Victor only nodded. “I do not know if you have ever been present when a lost caern is reclaimed from the enemy, Stuart Stalks-the-Truth. It is the most.. .consuming elation 1 had ever hoped to experience. I.. .” Victor’s eyes glazed over with tears.

“It must have been glorious,” Stuart whispered.

Victor angrily wiped at his eyes with the back of one hand. ‘‘I have seen the miracle of Gaia consecrating a new caem to Her glory. Words are messengers too clumsy to carry the gift I am trying to place before you. I have seen the Great Mother Herself stretch out Her hand! Watched as She moved a finger through time, and eternity danced like a flame on Her fingertip.

“In that instant I knew-knew with searing clarity-that even our worst fears were for naught. Even the Old Wyrm itself could not hope to stand before the majesty of that simple gesture. It is no wonder to me that it must go about on its belly before Her, scratching in the dirt all the days of its torment. Trying to bury itself from the very sight of Her.”

“You have been blessed beyond the lot of man or wolf, Victor Svorenko,” Stuart said. “I envy you your certainties.”

They sat in silence for a long while, neither one aware of the fact that the fire had grown dim and that the mists had crept closer as if craning to overhear them.

“Your words make me all the more anxious to reach our destination,” Stuart said at last. ‘Yes, but you should rest now. I will watch,” Victor said. “I will wake you at first light.”

“Many have tried, but few have lived to tell the tale,” Stuart said ominously. But his eyes were full of laughter. “In any event, we can’t go anywhere until the sun has burned off the worst of this fog. Good night, Victor. See you in the morning.

In the late morning.”

After a long night of wandering around in circles, Stuart was more than ready for sleep. He curled up before the fire, pulled the blanket of his wolf-form over him, and was soon sound asleep.

He awoke some time later to the sound of muffled cries. The moon had long set, but the sun had not yet put in its appearance. With the fire having burned down to a dim glow of coals, the only real illumination seemed to come from the creeping tendrils of fog. Emboldened by the dying of the fire, the wisps of mist had stolen closer and coiled all about his sleeping form. For a moment, Stuart had the distinct and unsettling impression that he was drowning. He flailed wildly and lurched to an upright position. Not upright enough-stuart realized that he was wearing his lupine form. The fog still pooled about his chest, his muzzle barely staying above the damp caress.

He shifted. In human form, he found himself soaked to the skin, his clothing clinging wetly to his body. ‘Victor!” he cried out, choking and sputtering.

The only answer was a moan from the far side of the ring of stones circumscribing the dying fire. He could barely pick out his companion’s form, slumped, back against a tree. Victor seemed to be struggling with something. Some unseen assailant? Stuart lurched toward him, stumbled over a stone, and barely managed to avoid plunging to his knees amidst the coals. The stone he had tripped over shot into the fire, sending up a shower of sparks. In the brief flare of light, Stuart could see that Victor was totally entangled in thick coils of mist, the Fang struggling fiercely, but to no avail. The coils were slowly crushing the life from his body.

With a cry, Stuart leapt forward. Angrily he slashed down at the thick tendrils binding Victor’s arms. He aimed his blow carefully, hoping to avoid biting into the flesh beneath. But his claws passed through the coils without meeting any resistance. Victor stiffened as the swipe drew blood, but he remained as securely bound as before. Sheathing his claws, Stuart grabbed at the tendrils trying to tear them free with only the strength of his arms. The bonds did not so much as budge. Then Stuart felt a sharp tug at his ankle and he went down, falling face first to the rocky path. The fog closed over him.

The ground grated against the flesh of his stomach, face and forearms. He was being dragged rapidly backwards, away from his companion. It was not enough to strangle him on the spot, it seemed.

The mists needed to separate the two of them, to ensure that he could not help free Victor. As if they wanted to rob him of even any shred of hope of either rescue or release.

And with most victims, this strategy would have worked superbly. But Stuart was nobody’s victim. Most men, faced with his predicament, would have brought their arms up to shield their faces, would have waited out the ungentle ride across the rocky path, would have bided their time until the motion of the ground had stopped and that threat had passed. Not Stuart.

Realizing that he was being dragged backwards by his feet, he immediately threw his arms out wide, opening himself up to the worst ravages of the rough terrain. His extended left arm found its target, dragging directly through the heart of the smoldering fire.

Stuart screamed and thrust his fist in deeper.

Stirring the coals, freeing the flame.

As the fire surged to life, he could feel the misty tendrils shrrnking back from it. He felt the grip on his ankle loosen, unravel. And then he was at rest.

He wasted no time. Cradling his burned hand to his chest, he rolled toward the fire, curling around it.

He rose to his knees, feeling the bite of the stones at the fire’s edge. His good hand groped blindly until it found the discarded pine bough that Victor had used to poke at the fire earlier. Stuart churned the coals with it, and fed the slumbering flames.

The mists shrank back from him. As the circle of firelight expanded and the domain of the mists receded, more fuel came within his reach and all of it went immediately into the blaze. Soon he had a roaring bonfire burning and a clear path to where Victor still struggled in the grip of the deadly fog.

The enemy might have braced itself for the slash of claw, the tug of grappling hands. It was surely not prepared for what Stuart did next. With a great heave, he rolled the rigid form of Victor Svorenko closer to the fire.

The entwining mists twisted and writhed. Stuart rolled his friend another turn closer. Then another.

The mists broke and scattered before the assault of their most ancient enemy. Victor’s chest heaved, free at last of the constricting pressure, and he sucked ragged gasps of the mountain air. Stuart pounded him on the back until Victor coughed up the last tenacious strands of watery death that had crept down his throat and into his lungs.

“Thank you, my friend. I don’t know how I could ever.. .” Victor managed to force the words past another fit of coughing.

“Save your breath. You can thank me, at length, later. Assuming there is a later. Right now we’ve got to concentrate on keeping that fire lit until morning.”

As Victor got his breath back, he was quick to grasp their dilemma. The only fuel they had to feed their fire was whatever wood currently lay within the circle of firelight. As the night wore on and fire burned lower, the area from which they might gather more wood rapidly dwindled. It was a losing proposition.

At the outskirts of their protective circle, the mists seemed to gather, piling higher upon themselves. Soon the encircling wall had risen to the height of a wolf. It would not be long before it stood taller than a man. As unsettling as it was watching the fog pile higher-swallowing the rocks, the undergrowth, the signpost, the treesStuart was suddenly struck by an even more disturbing thought. If things continued at this pace, it would not be long (certainly not so far removed as morning) before the walls would be high enough that the mists would close over them and their little fire. Blotting out even the stars and walling them up in a sealed tomb of shifting vapors.

“If you’ve got any ideas,” Stuart said, a bit louder than was necessary, “this would be the time to get them off your chest.”

“Don’t know about you,” Victor said, “but I’m all for making a break for it. You can’t fight what you can’t hit. And you can’t throttle what you can’t get a grip on. And if this fire goes out again-rryl when this fire goes out again-we’re both dead. Just plain old dead. And I’m not ready to be dead yet. Not here.

And not like this. I was always taught to pick my fights better.”

“I’m with you so far’” Stuart said. “What do you have in mind?“ “Stepping sideways. Even the uncertainties of the spirit realm have got to be better than what’s awaiting us here. Worst comes to worst, we could just sit tight there until about noon when most of this thrice-damned mist has burned away. Or if that’s not good enough for you, we could even try to flag down a passing-”

“Normallyl I’d say that’s a great plan,” Stuart interrupted. “Except for one thing. There isn’t any ‘elsewhere’ here. No other side. There hasn’t been all evening, ever since we set foot in this fogbank.”

“That can’t be,” Victor said stubbornly. He tried unsuccessfully to reach out across the barrier into the spirit realm. Nothing. confusion .gave way to anger.

“There has got to be an elsewhere. Everywhere’s got a damned elsewhere. Otherwise it would be.. .” ‘Nowhere?“ Stuart asked. ‘That’s all a bit metaphysical for me. But I do know there’s nowhere to step across to here. It’s as if we were already there.”

“Damn it, I’m not dying here.”

There was a flickering of light overhead. It took Stuart a moment to realize what it was-the stars, one by one, being swallowed by the canopy of fog.

“We’ll make a break for it,” Victor said. “We’ll each take a brand from the fire. We’ll strike out until we find more wood or until the torches start to bum down. Then we’ll just come back here.. .”

“We’ll never find it again,” Stuart said. “Take a look at that wall of fog. It’s solid. As soon as we’re out of the circle of firelight, the mists will tighten around us again, walling everything else out. We could be within ten feet of the fire and never see it again. And meanwhile, the vapors would crowd around us even more closely, held back by only the thickness of a torch flame instead of that of a campfire.”

“Well, we’ve got to do something.” Victor lurched to his feet and, snatching up a burning branch from the fire, launched himself at the nearest section of wall. He shredded it with brutal swipes of his torch, rending and tearing it until he was short of breath. All around him, his victims piled higher, wriggling serpentine strips of fog carved drizzling from the smooth, unbroken wall. They flopped and squirmed at his feet, coiled about his ankles, vying for his attention.

Watching from the fireside, Stuart had the unsettling impression that the wisps of fog were actually a clutch of serpents, each as black as onyx. A moment later, Victor swiped angrily downward with his torch, shattering the image and burning away the last of the mist clinging about his feet.

But in the end, his efforts were to no avail. Despite his struggles, the wall stood as smooth and towering as before. Exhausted, Victor fell back toward his place by the fire.

“No good,” he panted. “Can’t make any headway.”

“We’ve just got to hold out here a while longer,”

Stuart said. ‘‘Until sunup. The dawn might not be enough to bum away the mists entirely, but surely they can’t maintain fortifications of this scope in the face of the new day.”

“I hope you are right,” Victor agreed. “How long until daybreak?“ “I don’t know,” Stuart said. The stars were completely hidden now, offering no help. And even at his most responsible, Stuart had never managed to brhg himself to wear a watch. “But it can’t be long now.”

So they sat and they talked and theywaited, until the circle of firelight had shrunk to little more than the thickness of their own bodies, and their voices fell to hushed whispers.

“I am sorry to have brought you here, Stuart Stalks-&e-Truth. It is bad enough 1 go to my death without a foe to sink my claws into and drag with me.

But I fear that I have brought your death down upon you as well. And I had accounted you my friend.’’ “It’s not your fault,” Stuart said. “I chose to come.

To find my own answers.” He chuckled quietly. “It’s just this damned waiting! I’m afraid I’m much better at seeking than hiding. Here, let’s try something.

What do you say to me taking a shot at that wall and you sitting back for a moment and telling me what you see? All right? Good.”

Stooping, Stuart retrieved a makeshift torch from the fire and hurled himself at the nearest fog bank. Frayed wisps of fog fell all about him as he wielded his brand two-handed, like an axe.

I? think you are making progress,” Victor called encouragingly. But Stuart knew better.

“But what is that there?” Victor wondered aloud. “Watch out! By your foot.” He was on his feet, and rushing to Stuart’s side. Glancing down, Stuart again had the impression of a writhing black serpent rearing to strike. Then Victor’s claws came down and slashed it in two.

Out of breath, Stuart fell back toward the fire.

“What did you see?” he demanded, not bothering to thank Victor.

The Fang took the omission in stride. “1 don’t know. It seemed like a twist of rope at first, darker than the fog around it. Black like pitch. Then it rose up and I thought it must be some Wyrmling coming at you through the fog. Just because we cannot see a thing in this blasted haze does not mean that others are similarly handicapped.”

Stuart smiled and clapped Victor on the shoulder. “Excellent. One more time, then. I’ll try the wall again. But this time, if you see your Wyrmling, you don’t cut it, you grab it. Follow me?“ Puzzlement was clear on Victor’s face, but he nodded. He would do what was needful.

Stuart grabbed an additional torch from the fire and laid into the wall two-handed. The fog seemed to fall back a pace before the intensity of his onslaught. He advanced, wading through the writhing bodies of his victims. Another step. A third. Through the shredding layers of fog, Stuart saw a dark silhouette looming up ahead of him-the bole of the tree against which Victor had fallen asleep at his post earlier that evening.

“There!” Victor shouted and lunged. His hand shot out toward a mere wisp of fog fallen in Stuart’s wake, but one that looked somehow darker, more solid than its fellows. He grabbed for it and howled triumph as he felt the thing twist in his grasp. Something solid at last. ‘Now, don’t let it go, whatever you do!” Stuart called. “Have you got a good grip on it? With both hands, then, pull!”

Victor set his shoulders and heaved. It was a proud effort, one that might have uprooted a young tree.

Victor stumbled under an unexpected give, braced himself anew, and pulled again.

Even Stuart could see it now. The thing in Victor’s grasp looked like a length of strong black cord, no more than the length of his arm. But it twisted like a living thing in his hands and it was all Victor could do to maintain his grip.

Throwing down both torches at their feet, Stuart latched onto the rope. “On three,” he called.

“One.. . two.. .”

On three the fog bank surrendered another length of the living ebon rope and the battle was joined in earnest. Within ten minutes both Garou were bathed in sweat. But they had won a good ten feet of the slippery shifting “cord” to show for their efforts. And they had tugged and fought their way back to the fireside.

“This is no Wyrmling!” Victor gasped, fighting for breath. “What is this thing?”

“Don’t know,” Stuart replied with some effort.

“But whatever it is, it seem to be unraveling. We seem to have worked loose a frayed end.”

“Yes, but what will we find at the other end? This one’s not so bad, if you can keep it from coiling about your legs and tripping you up. But the other.. .”

“Better tie it off then,” Stuart said, casting about.

“We could try to fight our way back to that tree. You could loop the end around that.”

This time it seemed to take only half as long to recross the distance. “Progress,” Stuart said, and Victor wrapped the twitching end around the bole of the tree three times before lashing it off.

“The knot will hold,” he said appraisingly, examining his own handiwork. “If the rope does not break.. .”

“If this thing is alive somehow,” Stuart said, “it’s not going to pull so hard it tears itself to pieces.

I’ll hold on here for a minute. I want you to get some sticks from the fire and give us a little working space here. I want to try something.”

Victor hesitated only a moment to see what Stuart was about. Then, nodding his approval, he went to fetch fire.

Stuart held the rope at arms length in front of him with both hands, and began slowly, methodically, circling the tree. The rope began to wind about it as if it were a spindle.

“I think the fog is lifting a bit,” Victor said, returning. “I could see your outline even from the fire. The dawn must be close.” He began arranging several smaller fires in a circle about the tree, where they would not interfere with Stuart’s circuit.

Lmking up, Stuart noted that he could again see the dim twinkle of starlight above them. He almost cried aloud. “Not the dawn, look! It’s still well dark, but the fog is definitely thinning.”

Soon Victor took his place beside Stuart and the work began to gain momentum. “It is as if the fog itself were unraveling,” Victor said after a long while. ‘‘I can see the ground now, and the way upslope.”

Stuart looked in the direction the Fang had indicated with his nod, and he could make out the telltale path of the winding black thread, zigzagging upwards toward the summit. It was as clear as any blazed trail. ‘“lie it off again, I’ll brace it,” Stuart said with a crow of triumph. “I think we might yet make some progress tonight.”

“Can‘t be far now,” Stuart said. The sun was a clumsy red smudge on the horizon, a child’s fingerpainting. The fog would be unraveling on its own soon, retreating to wait out the heat of the day.

Stuart felt better already. He took a deep breath of the clear mountain air and then quickly abandoned the effort, a sour look on his face. “You smell like a wet sheep,” he accused.

Victor sniffed himself and grunted. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “As do you, I’m afraid. Wet wool. But that will also pass, as the sun climbs.”

“You’d think they’d be able to see us now. From the summit, I mean,” Stuart said. “Shouldn’t there be watchers, at this spring? If it is truly a site of power, Dawntreader would not leave it undefended.”

“That also worries me,” Victor admitted grudgingly. “I called once when we started our ascent, and again when we saw the first hint of the sun. I haven’t heard any response, nor seen any sign of another abroad this morning. But you are right, we must be close now, we should try again.” So saying, he threw back his head and howled. The thinning mist seemed to drink down the sound almost before it escaped his throat, just as it leached the heat from their bodies.

“I hear nothing,” Victor said after a patient interval. Resignedly, he started upwards again. Stuart fell into step behind him.

“Perhaps they’ve got a good reason to keep silent,” Stuart said. “If they’re not expecting visitors fiom the Sept of the Dawn, they may be wary of leading other uninvited guests to the site. If there are Spirals in this region-”

Victor hushed him sharply. “Do not speak such things aloud!’’ he said, makmg the sign against the Eye of the Wyrm. “And even if the Fallen Ones are nearby, there are even darker things in these mountains. Ancient evils that sleep only fitfully, with one eye open.”

“What kind of ‘ancient evils’?“ Stuart asked. But just then Victor stumbled again and fell heavily to the ground. There was a cascade of loose scree and then a muffled cry of alarm.

“You okay?” Stuart called, pressing forward through the hail of small stones to give him a hand.

Then he too stopped abruptly. He cursed quietly as he saw what it was that Victor had stumbled over.

The hump of rock swathed in the remains of the low-lying fog resolved itself into the unmistakable outline of a body.

Victor knelt over it, batting impatiently at the tendrils of mist which obscured the dead boy’s features. The bcdy had been arranged precisely, formally.

It lay on its back, legs together, arms tucked close in at its sides. Someone had gone to the effort of aligning the corpse along the axis mud-its feet pointing due east, its head west.

As the mist scattered before Victor’s flailings, it revealed an almost serene face, uncontorted by rage or pain or suffering. The cub looked as if he had just lain down to rest and died peacefully in his sleep. There was even a slight smile on his lips. Then the misty veil drew aside fully and Stuart drew a sharp breath.

There was a gaping wound in the boy’s forehead.

It looked as if he had been struck a piercing blow in the exact center of the brow. The force of that blow had crumpled the brow ridge like an eggshell, leaving a jagged hole like a single red eye.

This was certainly not the work of fang and claw.

Stuart’s imaginings, already primed perhaps by storybook notions about abandoned mines, leapt to the thought of a pickaxe.

“It is Gennady,” Victor said, his voice choked with emotion. “The cub was one of Speaks-Thunder’s pack.

Speaks-Thunder was the first to give voice to the miracle that Gaia had worked here; Dawntreader had entrusted him with the warding of this site.”

Stuart hesitatingly laid a hand upon the youth’s throat. He shook his head sadly. “His flesh has grown cold,” he said, “and there is no pool of blood here that I would expect from such a wound. He’s been here a day and a night at least. How., .how many others?“ Victor looked up sharply, as if realizing for the first time what they must find here. This was no murder; it was the prelude to a massacre.

They left the boy’s body where it lay, staring with its single unblinking red eye toward the west of west.

Toward the place where even the sun must soon stumble and sink beneath the benighted waters.

A dark forboding settled upon them and they knew speed might well be of the essence. Turning his back upon the treacherous ascent, Victor picked his way to the right of the path, following the point of the corpse’s feet. With such a clear signpost, there was no mistaking the mouth of a narrow dirt track winding away toward a hollow.

Thick undergrowth encroached upon the path from either side, but the signs were plain: Something heavy had been dragged this way recently. Stuart found his steps quickening, hurrying toward an engagement he was already dreading. As the pair rounded the corner of the trail, the reek of decay rushed up to meet them. The way forward was choked off by an impenetrable canopy of thorns. The wall of vegetation towered above them, as thick as a jungle, as bristly as a phalanx.

They had no choice but to try to force their way through. Donning the thick pelt of his warrior form like a shield, Stuart forged ahead, laying waste to all before him with great swipes of his claws.

The thorns could not stand before him. They tore at him and clung to his fur. They batted mercilessly at his face and eyes. They turned him aside from the true path time and time again, leading him into deadends and deadfalls. But they could not gainsay him.

Covered head to toe in angry red weals, choking on the stifling air that hung heavy beneath the low ceiling of nettles, Stuart plunged forward and down, oblivious to all opposition.

Victor crashed along in his wake, his passing made easier by the Garou-sized rent Stuart left in his wake.

“Would you like me to take the lead for a while?“ he called up to Stuart. “I’m certainly not-”

He stopped cold, staring in alarm and disgust at something in the undergrowth just off to his right.

“You’re not what?” Stuart growled, turning back toward his companion. “Jeez! What the hell is that?“ There, draped languidly over a thorny bough, was a grisly spectacle-the dry, cracked skin of a man. The branch seemed to droop slightly beneath its burden. The paper-thin deathmask stared back at them, unblinking, its features a distorted mirror of their own horror.

Victor took an unsteady step toward it, reaching out a shaky hand. He brushed against the skin and then jerked his hand back as if stung, his own skin crawling from the unsettling texture of the sun-baked flesh. “What could do something like this?“ he voice rang with disbelief and indignation. ‘“To skin a man whole and then to hang his skin upon a tree? It is inhuman! It is-”

“It is not something we want to run into,” Stuart interrupted, his voice pitched low. He gestured for Victor to follow his example. “I don’t like this any better than you do, but there’s no sense in calling attention to ourselves. At least not until we figure out what we’re up against here.”

Victor dropped his voice to a whisper, but it rang with menace. “Whoever has done this,” he raged quietly, “will pay dearly.”

“Oh, we’ll get him, all right,” Stuart assured his companion, backing away slowly. ‘‘No fear of that.

But you’ve got to keep your eyes open. I can’t see six inches in front of my face when I’m carving through that curtain of nettles.”

“My turn. You keep watch,” Victor growled.

Stuart did not argue the point.

After the discovery of the third such desiccated corpse, Stuart simply stopped pointing them out to Victor. The exercise no longer served any purpose except to eat away at his companion’s thin veneer of self-control.

Soon it seemed to Stuart that everywhere his eye traveled, it was met by the same macabre sight. His head swam and he had to keep blinking against the heat and dripping sweat to force his vision to focus.

He could not seem to wrest his gaze free from the steady procession of the dead, from the unbroken line of morbid scarecrows, From these victims who had shed their skins.

In vain, he found himself wondering what fate could have befallen them, forced them to trade their familiar bones for new frameworks of briar.

He could almost hear the sap trickling through channels that had once carried the noble blood of the warriors of Gaia.

After a while, Stuart simply stopped counting. He couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around the sheer magnitude of this atrocity. It must be over a dozen deathmasks now, adorning the thicket. Stuart could no longer bring himself to meet the ragged, gaping stares.

Unspoken reproaches assailed him from every side.

It is a blessing of youth to fail to find familiar faces among the dead. Perhaps Victor was fortunate to catch sight of only one, but that one nearly undid him entirely. Upon finding the remains of his fnend Speaks-Thunder hung upon a tree, Victor’s resolve left him and he sank to his knees. Speaks-Thunder’s skin was stretched taut and rustled like dry leaves.

His limbs swayed gently in the breeze. Victor threw his arms around the shattered husk that had once been his hend, and embraced him tightly. There was no resistance. The skin parted like old parchment and slumped to the ground all around him.

Victor knelt there, his fists knotted in the tattered shreds for a long while and Stuart left him to his private mourning. He watched as Victor’s visage slowly hardened. Until that moment Stuart might have fooled himself into believing that their quest might yet end simply by winning their way through to the tin mine. Now something essential had changed.

Victor’s features took on a hard, fixed expression that was mirrored back to him from the deathmasks hung from every thicket. Blood called to blood.

Victor,” Stuart said gently, laying a hand upon the young Fang’s shoulder, “your friend is no longer here.

He is safe now. His spirit has departed this empty husk.”

“I know,” Victor said, without looking up. “We must go on.” He peered up through the twisted brambles as if he had caught some hint of the dark tower rising beyond the thorns.

Stuart took the lead. It was growing hard upon midday, and the stifling heat under the low canopy of thorns seemed to squeeze life and will from his body.

Exhausted, he fell back from the wall of brambles and shrugged off the thick pelt of his warrior form.

“My turn now,” Victor said, pushing past him, but Stuart waved him back.

“Can’t even lift my feet at this point,” he panted.

“Let’s just rest a bit. Catch my breath.”

Victor frowned. The thought of stopping, or even slowing, clearly rankled. He was focused solely on finding whoever was responsible for this atrocity-for this garden of shed skins-and then crushing the life out of him with his bare hands.

But, seeing the weariness on his companion’s face, Victor relented. The Fang was clearly beyond caring for his own well-being at thii point, but this did not give him the right to push his friend beyond his limits.

“Rest,” he said. ‘When the sun has passed its apex, then we continue.”

Stuart sank onto a nearby stump and tried not to watch Victor’s restless pacing. It was as he turned away that he caught his first glimpse of the thing that had been trailing them since they had entered the thorns, At first Stuart thought it was a reflection of the sunlight piercing the canopy overhead. His mind leapt immediately to thoughts of water-perhaps a small pool!-concealed within the undergrowth. But just as he opened his mouth to call this discovery to Victor’s attention, the reflection glittered once and vanished. A moment later, it winked again, a short way off.

Stuart listened for the sound of running water, although he knew he would surely have noticed such a welcome sound before now. Nothing.

But there was definitely movement through the heart of the thicket. He could pick out the rustle of its slow shifting. Something large, slipping through the clinging nettles.

Stuart cleared his throat to call this presence to Victor’s attention, but the words died on his tongue.

It was then that Stuart saw the face.

Stuart had already seen a dozen agonized faces hanging in the thicket. He had almost convinced himself that he had grown numb to them. This face, however, shattered his conviction. It broke in upon him and shook him to the core. This was no familiar visage left as a parched monument to an old friend.

This was the death mask‘s complement-not the fleshy outer wrappings, but the face beneath, the true face. A face that had shed its skin.

What unholy transformation must have taken place to birth such a monstrosity, Stuart did not know, nor did he ever hope to learn. The thing’s features were porcelain smooth and pink all over.

Every line of bone was clearly visible on the hairless head. Its eyes protruded in a most horrifying manner and moist flaps of membrane over its nostrils fluttered at each hideous breath.

For this thing drew breath. It was alive, as surely as Stuart himself was. Only it was as if someone had painstakingly peeled back its skin and cast it aside, perhaps leaving it draped over a branch to dry in the sun.

The image hung before his eyes only an instant, but in later years, Stuart would see that face again, in the dark of night, peering back at him from the insides of his own eyelids. Reproachful. Loathing.

Then the creature twisted away and was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Stuart listened for the rustle of its withdrawal. Skinned one! its body hissed accusingly as it dragged itself, pink and vulnerable, through the cruel briars. The thorns bit and sank deep into the vulnerable exposed tissues. At the creature’s slightest motion, the jagged spikes tore away long bloody strips of it. And still it struggled on, dragging itself along on its belly.

Stuart silently prayed that Victor had been spared the sight of it. Or that at least, if he had seen it, he had failed to recognize in its features those of his friend, Speaks-Thunder. Hairless, yes. Skinless, yes. But recognizable even to one who had never seen the man in life, knowing him only by the dry and shrtveled husk hung high in a tree.

Knowing only the mask, never the m n , Stuart thought.

The wretched creature was gone as quickly as it had come. Stuart was more than half surprised that he had not cried aloud. He realized this only distantly, feeling a strange dislocation. It was as if he were somehow outside himself, looking down with mild curiosity upon the bedraggled and travel-worn journalist whose curiosity had again gotten the better of him. Who had again been caught peering into places he was never meant to.

How strange, he thought, that the other Stuart there did not even scream. Didn’t really even flinch. He just sat there stupidly, peering into the heart of the thicket, while that angry red streak broke from the undergrowth and rushed-with great loathing and single-mindedness of purpose-toward the young Silver Fang.

The realization broke through the haze of shock that had settled like a layer of thick dark wool over his mind.

“Victor!” The word broke from Stuart’s lips as he lurched to his feet.

Victor spun, his warrior-senses instantly alert.

Quicker than thought, he took in the import of both Stuart’s cry and the crashing through the undergrowth behind him. His body instinctively triangulated and his claws split the difference.

The vicious upward slash would have &mboweled any man foolish enough to stand before it. But the oncoming assailant was not standing upright before itit came low, on its belly. And its charge slipped cleanly below the flashing claws and crashed into Victor‘s legs.

There was a sharp crack and a cry of pain and then, suddenly, Victor’s feet were cartwheeli above him. He landed heavily, his wind knocked from him.

Fortunately, for all the creature’s speed, it was slow in bringing itself back around. The turns exacted a heavy price from his expaed underside, as cruel thorns dug mercilessly into skinless flesh. Yet come around it did. It took its bearing and charged again, oblivious to the shiny red trail it left in its wake.

Stuart launched himself toward the beast, trying to throw himself between his fallen comrade and the doom descending upon him. But already he could see that he would be too late. In desperation, he shouted, “Speaks-Thunder, no!”

Stuart winced before he words had escaped his lips. The shout did little to slow the approach of the creature, but it had a remarkable effect on young Victor. Stuart saw the Fang’s lips mouth the name as his guard dropped.

Then the beast crashed over him.

Smart might have cried out. The damning certainty of what he had just done hit him like hammer.

One thought kept racing through his head, over and over again: He had just killed his friend. Killed him as surely as if he had stabbed Victor in his sleep.

In desperation, Stuart grabbed the only thing ready to hand. Not surprisingly, it was a length of vine covered in wickedly sharp thorns. He wrapped it tightly around both his hands, ignoring the sharp pain as the briars pierced his flesh. He deserved no better.

The fish is incidental here, he thought, dsposdk.

Stuart saw the skinless monstrosity-slick with not only its own blood but with that of Victor as well-wheel toward him. It held his eyes for a moment and then lowered its head and charged.

Stuart could only watch it come. He had killed his friend. He counted off his few remaining moments as the distance between the two antagonists shrank rapidly, trying to gauge exactly how long he had. The timing surely was important. But he could not seem to concentrate.

The time actually passed much more quickly than he had feared. The reek of spilled blood and decaying flesh crashed over him first, but the full weight of the creature could only be a moment behind. With a cry of abandon, Stuart leapt to one side. The creature barreled past, barely clipping him. It knocked his feet cleanly out from under him, but that no longer mattered. He had snared the foul creature as it rushed past, wrapping the lacerating vine tightly around what had once been its throat.

Stuart clung desperately as he too was dragged through the thorns in the beast’s wake. He bore down more tightly, feeling his knuckles slip between the fatty layers at the back of the creature’s neck. He saw the plnk sheath part as the bramble vine cut clean through to the spine.

Stuart gave a great wrench. With a crack, the creature’s head bent backward at an improbable angle, staring into Stuart’s eyes as the light behind its own went dim, lost focus, glazed over.

Stuart lay there on top of it, panting, until his arms stopped shaking. Then he set about the grisly business of extracting his shredded hands from the makeshift double-edged garrote. The work was slow, messy, and excruciatingly painful. His eyes and thoughts repeatedly strayed to the broken body of his friend. He had to go to him, to help him. But he forced himself to focus on the task at hand. Until he had exmcated himself, he could not hope to help Victor.

At last, he managed to tear free the last barbed strip of vine. He slid from the creature’s back and lurched to his feet. Staggering half-blind across the clearing, he at last reached the spot where the body of his friend lay.

A sobbing gasp revealed what he had not dared to hope. Victor was alive! As Stuart crouched over his fallen comrade, however, he knew that ‘alive’ was all he could hope for. Victor’s wounds were deep, severe.

And very probably mortal. Broken in body and spirit, it was unlikely that Victor would ever move again.

His chest was crumpled in an alarming manner.

Blood poured from the wounds where the creature’s jaws had tom at his face and throat. His hair was a matted mess from where his head had impacted the ground.

And already the thorns were growing up around him-through him!-barbed tongues testing the air, lapping eagerly at the spilling lifesblood.

Stuart slashed angrily at the tangle of nettles, but for every shoot he tore away, three more crept up to replace it. Soon Victor was covered in a thick carpet of creeping life.

All around him, Stuart could hear them, closing in, the rustlings of new life craning toward the wreckage of the old. He knew they came for him and that their caress meant certain death. But he was beyond caring for anything but freeing Victor‘s body. For any thing except carrying it back to his kin.

Perhaps it was better this way, he thought. Just to let the thorns take them both. Better, by fir, than the grisly a l t e m a t i v d t they should end up like Speaks-Thunder, skinned alive and cursed with a monstrous half-life.

Stuart was only vaguely aware of the thorny coilas thick around as a strong man’s am~-~urling lovingly, almost protectively, around IS waist. Then he felt the suddensharpflamingrushofairfromhrslungs.Andth~ the cool cares of darkness, of welcome oblivion.

Stuart awoke with a curse on his lips, so he knew he could not be in Heaven. But he wasn’t sure he liked the alternative. He lay on his back staring up at a gibbous moon rising above a retreating canopy of thorns. The pearl on black velvet seemed to swim closer for a moment, stooping over him. Then, with a flicker of disapproval, it resumed its distance.

The throbbing behind his eyes and the piercing pain in his chest vied for Stuart’s attention. He did not want to think about either of them, but as he pressed the awareness of these two greater pains from his mind, a slew of lesser affronts rushed in to fill their place.

Stuart groaned aloud before he had the chance to think better of it. If he were still alive, it was a glaring oversight. And one which he was in no hurry to bring to the attention of those who might be around him, still lurking nearby, watching him from the cover of the thicket.

His breath came in whistling gasps, struggling its way up past what were certainly cracked ribs. His chest ached as if he’d been holding his breath for a few days.

Over the hammering of his heart, Stuart could hear something moving through the thorns nearby. He could see the thick vines, even now, snaking away from his prone form. He tried to lever one cheek up from the crushed undergrowth and look about him. After a long pause, a second attempt proved more successful.

As his surroundings swam into focus, he managed to pinpoint the movement nearby. That streaked red and white patch that lay a short distance away was certainly the body of his fnend Victor Svorenko.

It wasn’t moving. The figure that crouched over him, however, was. It batted distractedly at the last creepers still clinging to the fallen Fang. All the vines in the immediate vicinity-including, it seemed, the ones that had bound Stuart-seemed to trip over themselves in their hurry to withdraw.

That can’t be good, Stuart thought. He tried to silence his lungs’ ragged gasping as the figure took Victor’s body by the ankles and began to drag it away through the thorns. At this latest indignity, Stuart felt the first stirrings of rage within him. It jerked him stumbling to his feet and sent him shambling off in the pair’s wake.

Fortunately, the trail was none too difficult to follow. Victor’s new assailant was making good time as the thorn seemed to shrink back before the two of them. Stuart found that, by dropping into his lupine form, he could keep pace while still keeping out of sight. This proved important as the brambles seemed to regroup quickly at the pair’s passing, choking off the tenuous trail once more.

Before long, Stuart became aware of a reek of decay and corruption that soon grew to overwhelming proportions. The smell seemed to originate from ahead. Downslope, he realized.

He was startled to find the pervasive canopy of thorns giving way suddenly before him. The transition was as sudden as the throwing of a light switch.

One moment, he was dragging himself through the towering wall of thorns; the next, he was gazing down into a hollow.

There was no mistaking his whereabouts. His eye followed the slope of the ground down to where it disappeared into a foreboding darkness-the first hint of the funnel of an abandoned mineshaft.

In the moonlight, Stuart had the vague impression of a squat structure at the very brink of the abyss.

An abandoned shack, perhaps a toolshed that had once served some function in the operation of the old mine.

His head swam with the noxious scent of decay that reached up for him from the depths. But Stuart knew he had to press forward. He couldn’t afford to lose his prey now. No longer caring if his movements were observed, he strode boldly out of the cover of the canopy of thorns.

So fur, so good, he thought. There was no sign of Victor, or of the ghoulish figure that had taken such an interest in his dead body. Stuart picked his way forward across the broken ground. Ahead, he could make out the lip of a natural basin. It was no farther across than he was tall. The jagged stones thrusting skyward all around its rim gave the impression that the earth itself had been rent asunder here, revealing some hidden wonder that had lain long buried within.

A gift from the heart of Gaia Herself.

Gaia’s Tears, he realized. Victor had spoken of the pure mountain spring-a sign of the Mother’s perpetual sorrow, of Her compassion for Her children and all they must endure in Her name. But there was no aspect of the pure crystal spring about the benighted tam that met Stuart’s gaze. It was the puddle of a darker mystery, filled not with tears but with a miserable trickle of far less savory secretions.

A monstrous appendage lay mired in the muck, half-buried. Even in the dark, Stuart’s eye could pick out the oily body segments of the great wyrm, each chitinous arc bristling with coarse tendrils like spears.

The wyrm was almost too vast to take in with a single glance. Stuart found himself involuntarily craning backwards to try to take the full measure of the beast.

He could not tell with certainty whether the appendage mired in the tam was the beast’s head or its tail or some other abortive stump of its massive bulk.

With growing apprehension, Stuart traced the ebon line of glistening body segments back toward the wreckage of the mineshaft. He immediately realized that what he had first taken for a building at the edge of the abyss was only a single coiling of the blasphemous creature. The beast rose like a great tower of onyx straight from the bowels of the earth.

Stuart approached warily. He could clearly see the feeler tendrils along the roll of its nearest side twitch in the slight breeze. But otherwise, the atrocity did not stir.

Pkase let it be dead. Lt it be dead. Stuart whispered a silent prayer to whatever spirits might still be tenaciously clinging to the desecrated shrine. He found himself wondering if this was the thing that Victor, Arne and Arkady had fought. The Knockerwyrm.

But no, Victor had told him of returning to the mine with Dawntreader. There was never any mention of anything like this. And it would be difficult to overlook.

A slight sound, a soft plish of water, wrenched Stuart out of his musings. It came from the direction of the befouled tam. With growing horror, Stuart watched the ripples spreading out across the murky water. His keen eye followed the concentric circles back to their center, to the source of the disturbance.

The viscous appendage of the Wyrm-beast twitched, once, twice, straining against the pull of the mud.

Stuart leapt. Four powerful legs pushed off the earth as he bounded-a high, powerful arc that carried him threequarters of the way up the wyrmb flank.

Claws scrabbled frantically for purchase, chewing up great rents in the shining onyx armor and the mealy white flesh beneath. Then Stuart was atop the great beast, sighting along its length to its very tip. Any moment now, the questing tendril would tear itself free of the sucking mud and lash out.

But the monstrous appendage did not pull free.

Instead it seemed to sigh and collapse in an exhalation of fetid vapors. Stuart found himself choking, even as he crept closer along the slick body segments.

In vain he squinted through the miasma, but it seemed in no hurry to disperse.

By the time his sight cleared, the wyrm lay still once more. But there was another movement from below.

Where the wyrm’s body spilled over the edge of the defiled pool, a sphincter-like opening gaped. The dark hole, ringed with dripping cilia, was certainly the source of the stench of decay.

It was not the opening, however, that captured Stuart’s attention but the tiny figure that emerged from it. A slip of a girl, radiant in the half-light of dusk, both darker and brighter than everything around her. All moonlight and midnight. She had taken a half dozen brisk strides away from him before Stuart remembered to breathe. There was a terrible beauty about her. Stuart felt it like a weight upon his chest.

In the girl’s arms she carried a woven basket. It must have been brimming full, for it took all the strength of both her arms just to keep it upright. She found a level patch of ground within a stone’s throw of the old mineshafi and set her burden down with a thump.

Fascinated, Stuart peered closer. The girl unwrapped a shawl from her shoulders and spread it out before her on the ground. The act itself was not so unusual as the fact that Stuart could have sworn she had not been wearing a shawl a moment before. He held the mental image of his first glance of her still. It was seared upon his mind’s eye, like the burning afterimage from staring overlong at the sun. No shawl.

He would have sworn to it.

But it was there before her now, a square of midnight-black wool, woven finer than any silk. Even from this distance, however, Stuart could see that the piece was worn, frayed about its edge. One trailing onyx thread had worked its way loose and writhed in the slight breeze.

Stuart found himself suddenly put in mind of another trailing end of black thread, from their struggle in the fog. At least the damned fog seemed to have lifted tonight. Or perhaps it never reached quite reached this summit. At any rate, he took its absence as a blessing.

The girl set about unpacking her hamper, her hands quick and clever. As she worked, however, her eye lit upon the place where Stuart crouched, high on the back of the wyrm. He had unconsciously slipped back into his accustomed human form as he clung there, the curve of the wyrm’s flank concealing all but his head and shoulders from view.

“Well the worst of the work‘s over,” she called, brushing a wayward strand of ebon hair back from her eyes. “I’ve managed to retrieve the body from the thorns. I’d say you’re probably safe to come down now.”

Stuart scrambled to his feet uncertainly on the slick scales. He couldn’t say anything. He could hardly breathe. He tried, in vain, to remember the last time he’d found himself at a loss for words. The giji of gab, his mother had always said. You get ehat from your father‘s s& of the family.

If Stuart hadn’t been aware of it before, he knew now. He was lost. Completely and utterly lost.

He knew something was very wrong here. Hadn’t he just seen this girl actually emerge from the gullet of the Wynn-beast? But before he could properly form the thought, he was already sliding down toward her. Feet first, then backside, and finally elbows.

With a splash, he landed shin-deep in the murky secretions of the tam. He hardly noticed them.

She shook her head and smiled at him then, and he felt a hole open up within him. A hole the exact shape of that smile. It was an emptiness that he knew would start aching just as soon as that smile turned away from him. He had the presence of mind to smile sheepishly back, a crooked, idiot grin.

“I suppose they gave you a name,” she prompted, replacing something in her hamper and closing the lid upon it. “Parents are funny that way.”

“Stuart,” he said. ‘That’s my given name. But my people call me Stalks-the-Tmth. That’s my found name.”

She accepted this odd pronouncement without question. What could this girl know of the Garou ways? he wondered. And what was she doing in such a dangerous and desolate place?

“All right, Stuart Stalks-the-Truth. From your accent, I’m guessing that your people aren’t from anywhere around here. But this mountain has let you make your way this close to its heart, so it would seem that it’s taken a fondness to you. Couldn’t say why from looking at you. But you’re no stranger to mountaintops and mountainways, so perhaps that’s something. All I know is that the mountain is not resisting you in earnest. And that’s a problem.”

“Not resisting?!” Stuart sputtered. “This place has tried to strangle me in my sleep. It’s med to tear me into pieces with thorns. It even tied to crush me in its coils. I really don’t see what more resistance, it could.. .”

The girl raised an eyebrow and glanced sideways toward where her delicate black shawl lay spread out upon the ground as if awaiting a picnic. Stuart followed her gaze and then started, his blood going cold.

There was now unmistakably something beneath the woven black shroud-a something that bore a startling resemblance to the body of a large, well-built man.

“Victor ?” Stuart muttered, uncomprehendingly “But how did.. .” He moved toward the body, but she laid a restraining hand on his arm.

“Easy now,” she said. “He’s beyond harm, and soon we’ll properly speed him on his journey. Now, if had been you that the mountain resisted in earnest. . .”

Stuart shook his head as if trying to clear it. “All right, point taken,” he muttered. “But you’re not trying to tell me that the mountain is somehow responsible for all this? For what happened to Victor and to Speaks-Thunder and all the others? A mountain doesn’t skin people alive. A mountain doesn’t hit people in the forehead with a pickaxe.. .”

Her nose wrinkled. “A pickaxe? Oh, I see. You have a colorful imagination. That will get you into trouble. Look, Stuart. I’ve been entrusted with protecting this mountain, with seeing that no one comes nosing about. This is a dangerous place. Why, the last time a bunch of folks came traipsing up here, it led to no end of trouble.”

“Tell me about it,” he said, thinking of Arne Wyrmsbane and Victor and Arkady-all three victims of t h i s d e s o l a t e p ~ ~ d o f t h e ~ ~ t ~ n ~ in co~lsequence of that first, ill-conceived expedition.

“SO it’s important that we make sure that no one else gets hurt,” she said pointedly. “Do you understand?“ He nodded and offered no resistance as she took him by the elbow and led him to Victor’s side. Stuart sank down on his haunches and reached out a tentative hand to lift the comer of the winding sheet, to peer once more at the face beneath. Distractedly, he noted a frayed back thread trailing from it. He angrily jerked it free.

The girl came to ground beside him gently amidst a cascade of skirts and smoothed his hand away “1’11 tell you what, Stuart. I have a bargain for you,” she said, regarding him over the body of his fallen friend. “You’re mountain-born and bred, there’s no concealing that, so you know the value of protecting your own and of keeping your word. Now, I can see to it that you get back down this mountain without further mishap. You take the body of your friend and you see that he gets a proper burial. That’s the right thing to do.”

“That’s very kind,” Stuart said. “And I intend to do just that as soon as I’ve found the answers to a few questions. But that hardly sounds like a ‘bargain.’ There is some way I can be of service to you in return?“ “You can warn the others. So no one else comes bumbling up here and gets himself killed. I would take it as a personal favor. I’d do it myself, but those folk down there don’t know me from Adam-or rather, from Eve-and they’ve no earthly reason to heed my words. But you could make them understand the danger. I know you could. Will you do that for me, Stuart?”

Stuart looked into her eyes and knew he could deny her nothing. “I will do as you ask,” he said quietly, “if only you would tell me that I might come to you again. Tell me that and I will gladly do battle with mountains to return to you.”

“That remains to be seen,” she replied, neatly sidestepping his entreaty. “But go now, and quickly.

Before the moon sets.”

“You doubt me?” Stuart exclaimed. “Why I “I offer you a chance to prove your devotion,” she corrected gently, “with actions rather than pretty words.

Now then, I have lulled the mountain into a fitful slumber so that we might speak. But it will awaken soon and shrug off this stony complacency. You must be away would-” before then. You are strong enough now to face the return trip, if only you go quickly. But do not forget your promise to me, Stuart Stalks-the-Truth.”

She raised a hand in parting, already knowing she had won. He would carry the fanciful story she had sown to the people down-mountain. The story of a vengeful mountain spirit who frowned upon trespassers in his domain. And who marked them all with a single, unblinking red eye and took from them their skins. Yes, guarding the secret graven on the mountain’s heart would be easier once word spread and she no longer had to take such a direct role in removing uninvited guests.

She smiled at him, her most devastating smile.

And that was her only mistake. He could not, of his own will, turn his back on that smile. He shuffled his feet; he cleared his throat. He opened his mouth and said the first thing that came to mind, just to prolong the dalliance a few moments longer.

“We came here, my friend and I, looking for one of his kinsmen,” he said. “Perhaps you know of him or have seen him. His name is Arkady and he is a noble Silver.. .I mean, he is a great lord among our people. And they say his coat gleams like moonlight on new-fallen snow.”

“His coat?“ she replied, perhaps a bit testily. “That’s the best you have to say for him, that people talk about his coat? You must admit it’s not much of a description.”

“They will talk about your shawl, my lady,” Stuart replied evenly. At that, she looked a bit flustered.

“Well, I’ve not seen any foppish lords in fashionable coats trooping up this mountain,” she retorted.

“And I hope you can find something more flattering to say of me than ‘she had a black shawl!”’ “Brighter than the faces of stars,” Stuart murmured admiringly, holding those peerless eyes, “And darker than the unguessed voids behind them.”

She crossed her arms and turned away from him, but he could see that she was not displeased.

“They say he fought a great battle with a Knockerwyrm here,” Stuart blurted, again taking up the thread of the only topic that seemed to keep looping through his thoughts. He gestured to the monstrous onyx wyrm. “A big one. Something like that, I imagine. And they say he quelled it with nothing more than his voice. Victor and I, that’s my friend, we came back here. What else could we do? It was the last place anybody had seen Arkady alive.”

“Yes, yes. An interesting tale. But I’m afi-aid we’ve no time for that right now. I can feel the mountain stirring. If it finds you here, it will kill you. Take your friend and go. Now.” She took him by the arm to raise him to his feet.

As much as it cost him to break that contact, he disengaged his arm. “But I cannot depart leaving you with your conviction that I am some idle layabout.

You have been kind to me. You will at least let me help you with your basket-” ‘There is no time for that,” she said firmly. “He comes, even now. You must be away before.. .”

It was too late. As soon as Stuart took hold of the hamper, his eye lit upon a still-fresh droplet of blood clinging to its lid. With growing apprehension, he flipped it open. The basket was filled with grisly tools whose purpose there was no mistaking. Stuart saw the array of wicked flaying knives, jars of preserving balms and even less savory substances. And, jutting defiantly from the tangle of ceramic and cutlery, a gleaming stainless-steel awl and blood-stained wooden mallet.

Dierdre saw him stiffen and backed away slowly.

One pace. Two.

A great howl rose up within him. Rage and betrayal echoed out of the hollow and rang out over the mountainside. Even miles away, at the Sept of the Dawn, a patrolling Garou along the bawn cocked his head at the sound of a distant thunderhead cresting the mountains.

Then, emptied of all but his hurt and a promise of vengeance to his dead comrade, a most startling change came over Stuart. His face screwed up in hideous rage.

One eye squinted closed and it seemed to be swallowed up in his head. The other bulged out and hung loosely.

The scowl on his mouth split his visage clear around to the back of his head and his skull flapped open and closed with the sound of gnashing teeth. All of his hair stood on end, each strand as straight and sharp as a dagger. A warrior’s halo rose black and gold above him.

Blood welled up and oozed from the pores of his face and his whole frame shook with a wrath that threatened to rend sinew from bone. He let out a bellow that shook loose stones from the walls. He beat his breast.

He stamped his feet. The hollow trembled beneath him. His warrior strength was full upon him, and he was a temfying sight to behold.

And standing directly in the path of this ravening tower of contorting fur and sinew was Dierdre. She looked very small indeed, but she showed no fear in the face of Stuart’s warrior rage.

As his claws drew back and loomed over her like a thunderhead, she simply seemed to flow out from beneath the blow. Stuart’s claws struck sparks from the rocky ground. He ripped his hand free and howled in frustration.

The blood forcing its way out through his every pore was now a steady flow. Catching the slightest hint of movement in the moonlight, he quickly pivoted and launched himself at her a second time, his entire frame shaking as if it would tear itself into pieces.

And again he came up empty-handed. His eyes filmed over with rage. The trickle of blood was now a torrent and it seemed he must surely fall. One wouldn’t think that there was that much blood was in a body. But a third time he came at her, and a third time she eluded him, seeming to coil around the path of the oncoming blow, neatly avoiding even a scratch.

Stuart spun, pawing the blood-streaked fur out of his eyes with the back of one mammoth claw. But just as he caught sight of her again, he stopped short.

Dierdre’s entire form seemed to tremble under the force of the dark thing that was forcing its way up through her. It scooped her up and shook her out sharply like a laundry sheet. Then it pulled and prodded her out to a length of about ten feet and set about rolling her-none too gently-between its palms.

It was her Serpent’s Casting-the dark and hardwon gift of Father-of-Serpents. The shedding of her human skin. When she had completed her unholy transformation, no trace of human form clung about her. The tremendous serpentine form reared backhigher than a tall man’s reach-and crashed like a wave over the battle-mad warrior.

He took the brunt of the blow on his upraised forearm, feeling flesh part and bone splinter beneath the force of her strike. Stuart sank to one knee, howling agony and defiance into the teeth of the storm.

The next attack fell on him with all the speed and subtlety of a lightning strike. He only narrowly tolled out of the path of the lethal fangs. The impact churned up the ground behind him, hurling him into the befouled tarn. He pushed himself up to his hands and knees in the muck and saw the third and final blow already descending.

Stuart knew this third attack must surely finish him. So he did the only thing he could do: He leapt straight into the jaws of the great serpent.

The couple crashed together with force enough that the mountain itself trembled. They fell heavily to the ground, rolling, grappling desperately like young lovers. Stuart felt lithe arms coil around the back of his neck and passionately draw him closer. He drove against her and bore her gently over backwards. Her back arched at his touch. She drew in a breath sharply as his hand traced a delicate line along her breast.

Their coupling was brief but passionate, as intense as the last fleeting moment of life. He penetrated her like fire; she collapsed gasping for breath against him. There was a slight trickle of blood that turned quickly into wave after wave of oceanic warmth. And finally the blissful cradling caress of oblivion.

In the grips of the Little Death, the witch resumed her human form. She lay heavily against him, his arm around her. The slight telltale hint of claw could be seen protruding, ever so timidly, from her peerless breast.

With excruciating care, Stuart drew his clawed fist back from where it had lodged within her and lowered her tenderly to the ground again. Then he surrendered to the fit of wracking contortions as he shuddered back into his true form.

Numb and alone, Stuart stared down the gullet of the wyrm. The sphincter-like opening from which the girl had emerged was ringed with jagged tooth-like shards and wriggling cilia. But if she could navigate the way, emerging from the belly of the beast, then he could retrace her path. And if there were any answers to be found here, this was the path that would lead to them.

Muttering a silent entreaty to whatever saint might be within earshot, Stuart ducked low and placed his head within the maw of the wyrm.

He tensed, but the anticipated blow did not fall.

Tentatively, he tested the ground before him with one foot. It squelched in a most unsettling manner. The weight of his footstep set up an reverberation that rippled along the corridor of soft tissue ahead of him.

Satisfied that the mucousy secretions lining the tunnel were not actively devouring the soles of his shoes, Stuart took a deep breath and stepped forward with the other foot. Totally committing himself.

His first impression was of the weight of the air in the conftned space. It hung heavily upon him, warm and moist. The reek was nearly overpowering-a smell of rotting flesh and something more. Something acidic, vaguely vinegary. Stuart had a moment to be grateful that he was not wearing his lupine form with its heightened senses. There were some environs in which the prison of the limited human senses was a blessing. Still, he found his eyes watering and his throat stinging in the pungent, humid air.

He had to bend nearly double to advance, brushing past questing cilia that dangled like Spanish moss.

Their touch left angry weals upon his shirt, staining it a gangrenous green-black that seemed slightlyphosphorescent. It was difficult to keep his footing on the soft, yielding tissues. Stuart did not relish the thought of losing his balance and finding himself sprawled out face-down in the fetid muck and secretions that trickled past underfoot.

The tunnel seemed to constrict as he pressed his way forward. Twice he went rigidly still, anxious about a reverberation conducted along the fleshy wall of the passage. Peering ahead, he could not see anything else in the darkness, nor identify the source of the thrumming.

After what seemed an eternity, the channel began to slope noticeably downward. Stuart’s first thought was that he must be making some progress.

This momentary sense of victory was quickly replaced by the realization that the footing had suddenly become even more treacherous. After a few wild flailing tumbles, Stuart had to resign himself to the fact that he would not make any more forward progress on two legs.

He shifted to his lupine form, hoping that four legs might prove surefooted where two had failed him, but he immediately regretted it. His keen lupine senses screamed danger and abhorrence. There was something fundamentally unnatural about traversing the gullet of another beast. His senses howled wrongness at him, tugged his body around, fought for the freedom of the outside air. Stuart shook his head sharply to clear it, fearing he might have blacked out for a moment. He found himself desperately scrambling back up the passage, reversing what progress he had made.

Resignedly, he shifted back to his clumsier human form. Surefooted as his wolf-skin was, still he could not force his lupine senses and instincts to make any sense of these surroundings.

After fighting to regain the ground he had lost, Stuart found himself forced to submit to the indignity of having to scoot forward on his backside, feet before him to slow his slipping descent. Every once in a while, his heels found some more substantive purchase, some cartilaginous ridge, perhaps, a buried strut of the wyrm’s pseudo-spine.

These outcroppings allowed Stuart to catch a small rest. To wipe the acidic slime from raw hands onto his already ruined pants legs.

It was on the third such pause that Stuart noticed the change. It was in the soft flesh underfoot, or rather in the ridge against which he had come abruptly and jarringly to a halt. The hard rib-like strut had been laid bare of all concealing flesh. It jutted up defiantly, piercing the floor of the tunnel.

Stuart ran his hands over the smooth surface. It seemed the flesh here had been purposefully carved away. Judging from the camage, it looked as if the work had been done with a heavy chopping blade. A machete, or perhaps an axe.

Stuart shivered. Although he knew intellectually that he was not the first to traverse this unholy tunnel-had he not seen the girl emerge from this very passage?-still, there was an intimacy to the moist, dark confines of this passage. An intimacy that made him believe that its trial and indignities were his alone. An intimacy that balked at the proof that others had come here before him.

There were some sort of markings carved into the exposed rib, again with a blade, but Stuart could not make out their significance. Were these trail signs, meant to mark the path deeper within the beast?

Stuart could hardly credit the hypothesis. If what Victor had told him had been correct, the body of the wyrm could not have been here for longer than a few nights at most. Surely there would not have been either opportunity or reason to blaze such a trail in so short period of time. Perhaps with months of comings and goings along this blasphemous route.. .

Stuart pressed on, but soon the tenor of the path changed again. The way grew continually more steep, the exposed ribs more frequent and more pronounced. Some of them now seemed to have been excavated entirely. More than once Stuart found himself with a wrist or ankle painfully lodged beneath such an outcropping of bone.

The sloping descent was soon a climb, clambering hand over hand down a rough ladder of notched and carved ribs. And then even these handholds were gone. The descent suddenly transformed into a slide and then, perhaps inevitably, an unchecked fall.

When Stuart at last came to rest, he did so rather abruptly and with bone-jarring force. He seemed to have found the “floor” of the tower. There was no sign of cushioning fleshy membranes here. He was in a natural cavern, deep within the heart of the mountain. There was some slight illumination that he was reasonably sure did not come from the flashfires of pain inside his skull.

At least he had managed to keep his feet pointing downward for most of his slipping, sliding plunge. He had come down heavily on one ankle.

It hurt like hell, but didn’t seem to be broken. The momentum had sent the rest of him sprawling out across the hard floor, but a little blood was not going to deter him at this point. He had come for some answers. Legendary obstacles had lain between him and his quarry. He damned well wasn’t about to turn back now-even if he could figure out how to accomplish that trick.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that the cave bore signs of recent habitation. And not just by the blind white Wyrmlings that gnawed away at the tower of flesh from its insides. There was a banked cookfire in the center of the cavern with a large copper pot hung over it by means of a four-legged construct. On closer examination, perhaps the term “four-legged” was a bit too literally true for Stuart’s tastes. Each of the four supports seemed to be a long, gnawed femur bone, lashed together at the apex with a fine woolen thread.

There were other signs of grisly goings-on here as well. Against one wall was a kind of s h e where the decomposing head of a white wolf had been propped up on a natural outcropping of stone. The creature's bones had been carefully arranged in complex patterns around the base of the pedestal, as if someone had been enacting some rite or perhaps reading omens in the fall of the bones. A pair of long, blackened iron boarspears were crossed behind the trophy, but there was no sign of the rest of the beast's body or pelt.

The girl's personal effects were few, and functional rather than decorative. There was a silver looking glass and an antique steamer trunk in one comer, wedged between the wall and a foul tangle of more bones, brambles, pine boughs and unwound bolts of fabric. He gave the whole area a wide berth. It gave him the unsettling impression of being some sort of nest and he was none too eager to probe the secrets of that dark bower.

Instead he tumed his attention to the source of the dim illumination. The sickly py-green light originated from a recess in the farthest wall of the cave.

Some phosphorescent lichen or fungus, Stuart thought. The unwholesome light certainly did not look in any way natural.

What Stuart found there was surely not the work of nature. As he turned the comer, he could see clearly that the light arose from three mes carved into the wall of the cave. Each of the sigils simmered with the leprous glow of balefire.

Stuart whistled low and took out his notebook from back pocket. He wiped away the worst of the slime from its cover, more than halfsurptrsed he hadn't lost the book during his descent. The pencil had not weathered the trip as well and was broken in no fewer than three pieces.

He turned to the wall at his left hand and ran the knuckle-length pencil stub rapidly back and forth, giving it some semblance of a point. He was careful to avoid any contact with the wall on which the blasphemous runes were etched.

Satisfied with his efforts, he set to work slowly and carefully, copying down the complex sigils. He saw immediately that two of the three symbols had been defaced. They bore the sign of vicious gouging, claw marks that rent deep furrows into the rock itself.

The sickly balefire had run from the patterns, dripping down the wall's surface and scoring it with ugly burned streaks.

Stuart felt the outrage of that act of vandalism like a hole in the pit of his stomach. These runes might have been lost lore captured by the Black Spirals on one of their all-too-frequent raids upon the lorekeepers' lodges. Now there was no use even trying to reconstruct the stories that had once been contained here-perhaps the last surviving record of some ancient legend now lost to the Garou.

But the third rune was still intact, and it was here that Stuart concentrated his attentions. The pattern was not one that was familiar to him. Although he was no lorekeeper, all of his tribe had a soft spot for the old stories. Even a cub among them had more than a passing familiarity with the legends of Garou contained in the rune symbols of the Silver Record.

But this story he did not know. He was not sure he even understood it in its entirety. He recognized some of the familiar twistings of the complex pattern glyph. That powerful downstroke was the surely the mark of an ancient hero-and a Silver Fang, if Stuart read the supporting flourishes correctly They certainly were meant to elaborate on the hero's lineage, but Stuart did not have the genealogical background to put a name to the signatory marking.

He recognized the telltale curve of the Eater-ofSouls in the story, one of the three mightiest incarnations of the Wyrm. But he could not identify the pattern of the Myrm-spawn that arose tiom itthe antagonist pitted against the ancient Fang hero.

Its sign seemed to arc sharply back upon itself, devouring its own tail, erasing all sign of its passage.

There had been a great battle, that much was obvious, one from which the Fang hero had emerged victorious, but at a great cost. The serifs on the sign of mumph trailed like spilled lifesblood. Stuart could read a great sacrifice in those strokes, but the details of the cataclysmic battle and its consequences he could not unravel.

This did not dishearten him. There were others among his people who would succeed where his own clumsy efforts had fallen short of the mark, kinsmen trained since birth in the deciphering and the keeping of the Record. If this was a lost tale that had fallen into the hands of the enemy, the lorekeepers would know.

And they would also honor the one who succeeded in recovering such a treasure for them-a story written on the heart of a mountain.

The silence under the mountain was broken only by the agonized scratchings of the pencil stub. When Stuart was through, he went over the entire pattern again to make sure he had it exactly With a smile he flipped the notebook shut and replaced it in his pocket.

The scratchings did not stop.

Unsettled, Stuart strained to catch the slight, telltale sound. There it was again. It seemed to be coming from just beyond the wall. He cast about, but could not see any sign of an opening or any way to reach the space beyond. He needed to get a better vantage point. Using the story rune as an anchor, he stepped sideways into the spirit realm.

There was no longer any barrier of fog to impede his crossing. Stuart found himself in another cavern, nearly a twin to the first. But he did not have much time for detailed comparisons. He was not alone.

The scratching sound stopped suddenly as Stuart stepped through. There was a figure here, seated crosslegged on the cave floor, his back to Stuart. The stranger half turned at the sound of Stuart’s entrance and regarded him curiously Despite the uncertain light, Stuart could make out the other’s features clearly. The stranger seemed to radiate his own light. His pelt was the gleaming white of moonlight on new-fallen snow. Stuart could name a half-dozen Silver Fang nobles that would give a dozen years off their lives for such a coat as thatthe crown of a proud and refined lineage. Stuart had never seen its equal. Already he had a pretty good idea that his search had not been in vain.

Even crouched forward, the Fang’s bearing was regal. There was a certain unconsidered nobility to his simplest gesture, a curious but aloof cock of his head as he sized up the newcomer, the unconscious straightening of his shoulders as he swallowed a sigh of disappointment.

Stuart spread his hands to show that he was unarmed, his claws sheathed. The Silver Fang studied Stuart for a moment, staring in a manner that would have been considered rude in a more formal setting. Stuart returned his stare levelly, but held his ground. He made no move to advance that might be interpreted as threat or challenge. He had not come this far only to leave his questions unanswered in some rash challenge, in some senseless catharsis of blood.

It was sometlung about the Silver Fang‘s stare that brought Stuart up short, h e l d h thm There was a look o f t i o n t h i b a vast and slow-moving sadness Stuart thought he could recognize the first tentative touch of Harano, the deep and all-consuming river o f m w It was an ancient foe and one that had claimed the lives of countless proud Garou warrim. It was an adversary against which all the weaponsofthe WyrmpaledbycompQtison.

Then, as if reaching a decision, the Fang gave a slight shrug and turned away again. The meaning behind the gesture was plain-stuart not only posed no threat, but did not measure up. He recoiled as if struck. The Fang was making it painfully clear that he considered Stuart to be of no account whatsoever.

He barely registered on this stranger’s consciousness.

Maddeningly, the scratching sound resumed.

Now the sound grated directly on Stuart’s nerves.

He fought to keep his rising anger and indignation in check. When he was sure he had mastered himself, he cleared his throat and stepped forward.

“I am sorry to intrude,” he said. “But I have come an awfully long way-and at no small personal risk.. .”

Stuart started to add “my Lord Arkady,” but choked back the honorific. He realized that, although he had his anger well under control, there was still a lingering resentment there. He would be damned if he was going to pay deference to someone who had so casually insulted him. He hurried on to cover the lapse.

“And, to be frank, I’m none too eager to tackle the return trip just now, So, if it’s all the same to you, I hoped I might speak with you.”

There was an uncomfortable pause. Stuart thought the Fang would just ignore him entirely and he felt hot words boiling up within him. Just as he opened him mouth to hurl them, however, the scratching noise again fell silent. Without looking up, Arkady raised his right hand to where Stuart could see it. Clutched in his fist was a long, thin bone, its tip sharpened and fire-blackened. Impatiently, he gestured with his macabre pointer to a place not far from his own on the cave floor.

Stuart did not hesitate, although inside he was not at all certain he wanted to place himself within striking range of the fallen Silver Fang lord. By all accounts, Arkady was a formidable opponent, a legendary warrior. But Stuart had more than a passing familiarity with the tales of Arkady’s exploits. He was well aware that whenever the Galliards sang of the noble Fang’s martial discipline, it was only a matter of time before he would hear of some tragic lapse of temperance that put the entire undertaking at risk.

And whenever they told of Arkady’s cunning, it was inevitably the prelude to a tale of some undermining lapse of judgment.

But prudence was not Stuart’s long suit Knowing he mght well regret it, he walked straight up to ArMy and made a point of s e d i in r&t beside the fallen lor& A place much closer than that Arkady had indicated.

If the noble Fang noted this discrepancy, he chose not to draw attention to it.

Silently, Stuart let out a long breath. He was aware that he had passed the first critical juncture in what was already proving to be a much more delicate situation than he had foreseen. What had he expected? For Arkady to be grateful for his arrival? WeU, yes, he realized. Stuart had pictured Arkady as a prisoner of the Black Spirals. And he still hadn’t seen anything to dislodge that first conviction.

But if Arkady was a prisoner, where were the iron bars of his cage? Where were the silvered fetters? After a moment’s consideration, even Stuart had to admit that Arkady did not bear himself like a condemned man. There was no sign of the ravages of long interment upon him-the slouch of the head and shoulders, as if from personally bearing up the vast weight of stone above him. The gaunt skeletal tickling of hunger about the ribs. The slow aimless shuffle of feet, unsure of how to measure out their progress now that they could no longer distinguish the procession of days.

Arkady was unbowed.

Stuart studied his companion, but the reality refused to fall into place with what Stuart had envisioned for this encounter. Arkady was still as proud, aloof as any Garou Stuart had ever seen.

He showed no sign of being broken by torture or long confinement.

Distracted? Yes, he was that. Arkady scratched obsessively at the cave floor before him with the fireblackened shard of bone. Its tip left angry black weals across the uneven surface.

Consumed by some gnawing doubt? Almost certainly. Stuart could see the slight tic of the muscles of the Fang’s powerful arms, thighs, jaw. He was going through an elaborate kata of slash, parry, counterstrike.

But he couldn’t quite keep the inner battle contained.

Little hints of the conflict kept slipping past his guard, making themselves known.

Contemplating something desperate?

Distractedly, Stuart realized that this comer of the cave corresponded exactly with the location of the foul nest in that other cavern he had so recently quit. It was not a comforting thought.

“If you’ve come to gloat,” Arkady said without looking up, “you should do it quickly. I’ve killed the last six of you who came trooping down here. And none of them was so foolish as to come alone.”

His tone was matter-of-fact, almost emotionless.

There was no hint of malice or bravado in his voice.

If anything, he sounded very weary.

“Thanks for the warning,” Stuart said. “But I haven’t come to gloat. Really. My name’s Stuart.

They call me Stalks-the-Truth. And I just wanted to talk to you.”

At this announcement, one comer of Arkady’s mouth curled up in a slight mocking smile. “Stalksthe-Truth,” he mused aloud. “Not Finds-the-Truth?

A shame. It seems, then, that your tale is fated to be a sad one. A tragedy. All right, Stuart Stalks-theTruth, if you wish to talk then you should do so quickly.

Although 1 think gloating would be a more satisfying way to spend your final moments.”

Stuart frowned. “Look, I’ve come a long way. And I want to hear your side of the story. At the concolation, when no one else had a single word to say in your defense-”

“Ah, that’s better. Now we get to the gloating.”

“What? I‘m not gloating. If you’d just listen for a minute, I’m just trying to tell you-”

“I said you could talk,” Arkady said. “I did not say that I would listen. It was a mistake, I think, to let those first few go. Knife-between-Bones and his companions. If I had killed those first few, the rest of you would not be so bold and I would have some peace in which to contemplate what I must do.

But I was so anxious for news then, to hear what the People were saying about me. Perhaps it was a conceit. But it is one I have repented of. I will not make the same mistake again.”

“Knife-between-Bones ?“ Stuart latched on to the name. It was not that he was trying to be brave, to dismiss Arkady’s threat. It was more that his personal danger was not nearly so immediate as the sound of pieces falling into place. Stuart did not even have opportunity to reflect that this was not the first time his reporter’s instincts for unraveling the tantalizing loose end of a story had put him in grave peril.

Yes, the name was familiar. He had heard it recently, at the concolation.. .. Of course! He could see the image of the Warder storming into the House of the Spearsreach carrying his grisly pennon-the bloody white wolf pelt hung from a cast-iron spear.

His packmatewhat was his name?-had given his report to the Jarlsdottir, telling of a party of Black Spiral Dancers who had come under this “flag of truce.” The leader of that party, this Knife-betweenBones, had claimed to be a kinsman to Lord Arkady.

“You know him?“ Arkady asked casually. “I’m really not surprised. Perhaps I should let you live after all. Perhaps if I left one of you clinging to some shred of life and sent you crawling back home it might convince the others that intruding upon my privacy is simply not worth it.”

His train of thought derailed, Stuart looked up irritably. “Look, for the last time, I’m not here to gloat. I’m starting to realize why everyone says you’re some kind of.. .”

For the first time, Arkady looked up and met Stuart’s eyes. “What is it that they say about me?“ Stuart felt the challenge in that stare and he tried to hold their eyes locked. But after only a moment, he was forced to look away. It was the intensity of the need in those ice-blue eyes. You would think that someone with a reputation as infamous as Lord Arkady’s would just stop caring what others thought of him. Or at least that he would come to affect indifference, if only as a kind of shield against the raw hunger that Stuart saw in those eyes.

Arkady didn’t just want to force Stuart to finish his ill-considered insult-which in itself would have been affront enough to justify the spilling of blood that Arkady kept hinting toward. Nor was he simply curious for news-to find out who might even now be on his trail for wrongs real or imagined. No, he honestly, desperately, needed to know what others were saying of him. What they were thinking of him. It was a craving-a desire as palpable as that for food or sex or battle.

Poor, unlucky, bastard, Stuart thought, shaking his head in mute sympathy. This Silver Fang really cared what everyone was whispering about him. He needed to wake up each morning and see the admiration mirrored in the eyes of his warriors as they stood on review. He needed to hear the murmur of adoration in the voices of his people as he passed them at their work.

Only vaguely did Stuart begin to get the sense of what thii exile, this captivity, must be costing Arkady. ‘‘What do they say?” Stuart repeated. He steeled h i courage and gave it to him straight. ‘They say you’re Wyrm-tainted. That you commanded the Knockerwyrm and that it bowed before you. They say that you are to blame for the death of the Fenrir fosterling and all the trouble between the Get and the G a i a . They say you have conspired and connived to seize the Silver Crown, that you trafficked with the Black Spirals to do so. That Albrecht himself told you that you were not to show your face again in that part of the world. And that was all before the concolation. Now they say that you’re an exile, an excommunicant, that you’re already dead. Fallen in some private inner battle against the Wyrm”

Arkady closed his eyes and inhaled slowly. The gesture was not one of shame and defeat, but rather of drinking deeply, unashamedly, of the echo of his name on other people’s lips. For the moment, it almost seemed that it did not matter to him that those whisperings were all words of scorn and condemnation. But then again, Stuart thought, Arkady was a starving man, languishing in a prison of isolation.

After a long pause, Arkady spoke again, without ever opening his eyes. Perhaps he was bracing himself for the answer to his quiet question.

“And what do you think, Stuart Stalks-theTruth?”

If Stuart were half so concerned with self-preservation as he was with puzzling out what was hidden from him, he would have taken his time and chosen his next words very carefully.

If a man wants to be right in his words or in his deeds, there are only really two ways he can set about it. The first is to assiduously avoid error.

Stuart had met these cautious men, those for whom avoiding error had become the holy grail in itself.

They acted seldom, fearing misstep, and spoke even less. Better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to open one’s mouth and prove it. And technically they were precisely correct, these smiling silent guardians of the truth-for the man who has never spoken has never spoken falsely.

But Stuart was cut from the opposite cloth. For him, to be right was to tirelessly pursue the truth. It was an active, boisterous thing. Better to aspire to reach the right answer and fail, than to be content with the not-knowing. Grasping for the truth and coming up short was not falsehood, and certainly not so dishonest as to conceal ignorance behind closed doors and closed lips.

“I will tell you what I told them,” Stuart said. “A house divided against itself cannot stand. And a man does not cast out devils by the power of the devil. I say that if you have truly found a way to quell the greater wyrms, I can only wish we had a dozen more warriors just like you. Lord knows we have sore need of such skills.”

At this Arkady smiled. Not the sideways mocking smile he had shown earlier. But a genuine, unconsidered, prehmy smile.

Stuart felt his mouth go dry and he began, with excruciating slowness, to edge away sideways. To get out of the reach of those bone-rending canines.

At these close quarters, Arkady surely could smell Stuart’s sudden fear. A strangled, choking sound tore free of Arkady’s throat. Stuart knew that there was no time for scrambling to his feet. He immediately shifted to a fleeter four-footed form that would stand some small chance of evading the hunter’s first lethal spring.

Long out of practice, Arkady’s vocal chords struggled to shape themselves around the sound welling up from within him. The pitch changed and the rasping noise resolved itself into a series of short sharp barks and then, finally, rang out clear and pure.

Laughter.

At the sight of Stuart hastily grabbing for his wolfs-skin and scrambling backward submissively, the laughter redoubled in strength.

Stuart got his feet under him at last and bristled. He growled low in the throat and shifted his weight back over his haunches. The opening prelude to a pounce.

Arkady did not miss the motion or its import.

He visibly struggled for control and momentarily managed to force a serious look upon his face before the whole effort collapsed back into riotous laughter.

He held up one hand, begging a moment to compose himself. He still clung to his makeshift stylus. “I am sorry,” he managed at last, snatching words and quick breaths where he could. “For a moment there, I had the overwhelming urge to throw you the bone. It was an unworthy thought.

You have my sincere.. .”

But by this time, Stuart was laughing as well and struggling back into his more accustomed human form. He waved aside the apology.

“No, you don’t need to apologize. You just rattled my pride a little, that’s all. But I guess I didn’t deserve much better, not after that dose of medicine I handed you. I’m more than willing to cede the field. If you’ll just tell me what I came to hearyour side of the story, why you didn’t show up at the trial, what you’re doing here.. .”

“Well spoken,” Arkady said, at last mastering himself. “I will agree to tell you what you came to learn. If in return you will first help me with a small problem of my own. I have come to a bit of an impasse. I can neither advance, nor gracefully withdraw.”

He gestured hopelessly at the tangle of angry black markings scratched into the cave floor. “But perhaps you can provide some insight that I have overlooked.”

“I can try,” Stuart replied, unconsciously shifting closer to get a better look at the weird symbols that spread out before Arkady. Already his mind was off and racing after this new mystery.

“But what does all this mean?“ Stuart asked, shaking his head and pushing himself back upright. He lay on his stomach, peering closely at the mad scrawl of runes on the cave floor. His right arm was asleep from where his entire weight had been resting upon it. “It looks like some kind of a map.”

“Not a map exactly,” Arkady replied. “A battle plan. Although admittedly not much of a battle plan at this point. I keep going round in circles here. I can’t see any avenue of penetrating the fortress’s defenses single-handedly” He snorted and cast down his crude stylus in an uncharacteristic moment of unguarded frustration. It clattered and skidded out into the center of the diagram. “I’d do just as well presenting myself at the main gate and trusting their tender mercies.”

“Whose tender mercies?” Stuart asked, retrieving the blackened shaft of bone. ‘What is this place?” With the tip of the macabre pointer, he traced the outline of Arkady’s meandering runic symbols. If he squinted, Stuart could almost imagine that this wavering coil here was a ring of imposing battlements. That twin charcoal smudges along one side might be a pair of fortified gatehouses. And these angry slashes piled up tightly behind could be construed as a wall of unscalable mountain peaks. Stuart shook his head. The image dissolved back into an unintelligible tangle.

“It is Malfeas,” Arkady said simply. “Some have called it the Gates of Hell; others, Sheol, the Bottomless Pit; others still, the Lake of Fire.

It has many names. It is the Prison of the Wyrm.” ‘That’s the Prison of the Wyrm?” Stuart exclaimed incredulously. “Somehow I always pictured it being, I don’t know, bigger. More cosmic.”

“It’s not to scale,” Arkady said. Stuart looked up, but could find no hint of amusement in the Fang’s eyes.

“Actually,” Arkady continued, his tone formal once more, “this is merely the approach to the realm of Malfeas. Or at least, one approach. The one I have managed to isolate. And that is what is relevant to our current quandary. 1 have reason to believe my efforts to pass through this portal might be.. .resisted.”

“Why the hell would you want to enter Malfeas?!

Are you deranged? Quick reality check here: People don’t just go off on little sightseeing excursions to the underworld. And they certainly don’t come back from them. Do you really think-”

“As I said,” Arkady continued, “I anticipated some resistance.”

“Oh, I haven’t even gotten started resisting yet,” Stuart retorted. “This has got to be about the worst plan-no, I take it back. This is definitely the worse plan I’ve ever heard. You are‘ going to Malfeas. You are voluntarily going to Malfeas. You are voluntarily going to launch a direct assault on the front gate of Malfeas. Am I grasping the finer points of this plan here?”

“We don’t know it’s the front gate,” Arkady pointed out. “It’s one gate. That is sufficient for our purposes.’’ “It doesn’t matter which gate it is! We’re talking about suicide here.. . H he visibly struggled for control. ‘Zook, why don’t we try another tack. Why would you want to go anywhere near Malfeas?“ In his own ears, his question sounded quite reasonable.

Arkady gave Stuart a look he usually reserved for idiots and cubs. “I am going to walk the Black Spiral,” he said. As if that explained everything.

The only sound in the cavern was the sharp snap of the blackened bone breaking neatly in two against the floor. Stuart still clung to the other half of the splintered pointer, But his eyes were fixed on Arkady.

“Madness!” Stuart h d , making a sign against evil.

Arkady stood and straightened regally. He brushed at the dust and dirt that still clung to him.

“Madness or no, that is what I must do. It is the only thing I can do now. The only way to redeem my people.”

“You know what happens to folks that attempt to walk the Spiral,” Stuart accused. He rose quickly, as if afraid Arkady would start off straightaway. That he would just walk away and leave him here. “You’ve seen what they become. The Black Spiral twists them, breaks them, corrupts them. It turns them into something less than human, less than beast. It makes them into-”

Arkady’s eyes flashed fire and he wheeled on Stuart. “Do you think to lecture me? On the history of my own people?” He brandished a fist. Stuart watched in apprehension as gleaming claws emerged from that fit.

But something was wrong. Three of Arkady’s claws, he saw, were broken off sharply. The stubs that remained were charred, burned black as coal. As Stuart stared, he could see now that Arkady’s entire left hand was badly singed.

“You’re hurt,” Stuart muttered, pressing closer despite the obvious threat. “Here, let me. And I wasn’t talking about your people. I was talking about the White Howlers. The Fallen Tribe. The ones who became the Black Spiral Dancers.”

Arkady snorted disdainfully. He did not allow Stuart to take hold of his wounded hand, much less to bandage it as was obviously his intent. He gestured angrily back the way Stuart had come. “Do you try to tell me that you did not see the stories carved under the mountain? The condemnations etched into the very heart of the living rock, written in blazing green balefire ?”

“No. I just saw the one story rune, and that one I didn’t understand. I.. .” He broke off, slow realization dawning. There had been three runes, he thought.

But two had been destroyed. By the gouges of angry claw marks. “The other two stories,” Stuart said with growing certainty. ‘Stories of your kinsmen, of the Silver Fangs. You destroyed them.”

“Yes! Kinsmen of mine.” Arkady sheathed his broken claws and turned away. “It is not only the White Howlers who have fallen to the Spiral over the centuries. There are those among my tribe, as well. Some of my direct ancestors, may they now rest peacefully, now that, at long last, the final record of their failures has been destroyed. Yes, we have a name for such as these. They are called the Silver Spirals, the noble Silver Fangs who have fallen victim to the Black Spiral. Those who have been turned by the power of the enemy.”

“And you would follow in this tradition?”

Stuart asked quietly.

He could see Arkady’s shoulders hunch in outrage, but the Fang did not turn to face him. “No,”

Arkady said, his tone clipped. “I would succeed where they have failed. I will walk the Spiral and I will master it. And only then will my forebears be redeemed. They will rest in the knowledge that, although they themselves fell short of the prize in the direct attempt, by their seed the Spiral was mastered and unmade.” ‘%‘hat the hell are you talking about?“ Stuart exclaimed. “What makes you think the Spiral won’t just swallow you too? From what they tell, your family tree is almost bent double beneath the weight of legendary Garou warriors. Are you trying to tell me that you think you’re better than all of them? Better than your father, better than your grandfather?“ “I am the purest of the blood in twenty generations,” Arkady said simply, meeting Stuart’s eye.

“There will not be another twenty. You know that as well as I do. Look within your heart, Stalks-the-Tmth, and tell me if I speak falsely. I doubt there will be another two. No, this thing must be done now if at all. And now, at last, I am ready.”

“Um, I’ve seen your plan,” Stuart said. “You’re not ready.”

Arkady pointedly ignored him. “I have reached the point where there is nothing for me to go back to now. You have said as much yourself. That all doors are closed to me. That I am dead to my people. That even my name has been.. .” he broke off. His eyes dropped. He appeared to study the back of his fBt.

Stuart could see the l i e of broken claws, barely peeking from their fleshly prison. And he knew, as surely as he had ever known anything, what was in Arkady’s thoughts. The noble Fang, who had been the last and best hope of his people, the pride of his generation and the last-and he certainly realized this now-the very last of his peerless bloodline. Arkady was seeing only those others now, those who had gone before him into the very depths of hell. The ancestors whose names he had himself expunged.

Freeing them.

Stuart looked up at Arkady, but already his companion was too big for the eyes to take in all at once.

A deep surging strength rose up through him, a strength of mountains. All the strength of his forebears, all their pride, all their hope. The tons of rock above him, the prison of granite, could no longer hold him. Arkady was already stepping over the low stile of the mountain range, vaulting effortlessly over the familiar gate, setting his steps on the familiar path.

But from somewhere far below, Stuart’s tiny voice reached him, called him back.

“There might be a way,” Stuart said. “Yes, there might just be a way”

The pair of Garou that sat hunched forward on the cold cave floor were about as different as day and night. The first was proud, regal of bearing. He was a legendary wamor, a cunning strategist, a man prophesied to rally the Garou Nation to the Final Battle.

The other was a no-account of humble beginnings.

A drifter who couldn’t manage to hold down a freelance job. A self-confessed and unrepentant layabout.

“Again,” Stuart said, sounding more than a little like a frustrated schoolmaster. “The Spiral. There’s got to be something we’re missing.”

Obediently, Arkady wiped the cave floor of its complex diagrams and elaborate plottings. Slowly, he started over again at square one. With a single motion, without ever lifting the blackened tip of the bone stylus from the uneven surface, he drew a perfect, continuous spiral. Nine times the figure looped back in upon itself before vanishing in a final singularity.

A crude, coal-black smudge.

“There must be a way,” Arkady repeated as if trying to convince himself of the fact. “A way of walking the Spiral without being corrupted. Of striding into the heart of the labyrinth and emerging victorious on the far side. It is prophesied. It must be possible.” He struck the cave floor soundly with the flat of his fist.

“Unless, of course, the prophets were just engaging in a little wishful thinking,” Stuart said. “Or later scholars were just trying to find a way to explain away the fact that Lord So-and-so had just flipped out and gone over to the other side.”

“That’s not funny,” Arkady said. “I’ve lost too many kinsmen to that promise for me to start questioning it now.’’ “Seems to me like an ideal time to start questioning it,” Stuart said. “And I can’t read a damned thing you’re writing anymore. The whole floor here is smeared black and I think my eyes are starting to cross. How about we just call it a night?“ “You said you would help. You said that there might just be a way.’’ “There might be. But we’ve been over this a dozen times and I’m damned if I can find it. Maybe in the morning things will be a bit clearer. The late morning,” he added hastily.

“Sleep then. I will keep watch,” Arkady answered testily. He rose to his feet and began pacing out the interior of the cave. His steps instinctively carried him in an ever-narrowing gyre.

Stuart lay stretched out full-length on the floor, his chin propped up on the back of his hands. “It’s no good. Even if you can win through to the Spiral-a doubtful proposition at bestthere’s still nothing you can do when you get there except repeat the same mistakes made by all those who have gone before you. Once you set foot on that Black Spiral, you are lost. Period. There’s no turning back, no turning aside, no escape. It’s got you and it’s just going to work away at you until you crack.”

The winding path of Arkady’s pacing brought him back around to Stuart again. This time he brushed past him on the inside and continued his circuit.