I reckoned they sensed the same thing I

“I reckoned they sensed the same thing I

awareness of what lies outside, and then I discovered that even after the change, the Banes hadn’t gone away. They still felt a need to keep Garou away until they could find a way to break into the caem and destroy it. They even possessed and deformed certain fish, so they could approach the stones more easily.”

Big Sis said, “Some people don’t know when to quit.”

“I wasn’t surprised they remained,” the spirit said.

“I reckoned they sensed the same thing I did, the reason, perhaps, I was fated to linger here: whatever they may have believed, the sept hadn’t truly sealed the caem merely to deny their foes the pleasure of its desecration. Someday, one last Garou would seek the pile on a matter of the greatest urgency.”

“Cries Havoc,” said North Wind’s Son, the fetish spear dangling casually in his bloodstained hand.

“Evidently,” the spirit replied.

“To consult the ancient glyphs,” Julia said. “You might have said so plainly when I asked. As a matter of fact, you might have asked me to help.”

“They were written by Galliards for Galliards.”

“Indeed.” Julia didn’t sound convinced, but she let it go.

“NOW at last the caem will perish,” the old man said, “and I will take the path that has awaited me all these centuries. But if the site is to fulfill its purpose, you must take the place of its former servants and preserve it a little longer.”

Big Sis cocked her head. “Say what?”

“You broke the seal,” said Julia. “I’m not criticizing. It was necessary. But unfortunately, that was what kept all the corrupt spirits at bay.”

“Unless I’m mistaken,” the spirit said, “the Banes will try to break in right here where you entered. I need you to hold them back. I will be elsewhere, fighting in my own way. Let us hope that together, we can balk them long enough for your packmate to find his answer.”

North Wind’s Son looked around the stone chamber. Big Sis knew just what he was thinking: at least in the previous fight, they’d had room to maneuver. “Round two,” he sighed.

“By the time Cries Havoc fixes himself,” said Big Sis, “we’re probably going to be up to our asses in Banes. Where’s the back door out of here?“ “Your comrade seeks the way to a particular part of the Penumbra where he may heal himself. If he succeeds, you will presumably walk the path alongside him.”

Presumably, thought Big Sis. Great, nothingpsyches a girl up like ’presumably.’ “We will not fail you,” Storm-Eye said. Wow that we have heard your tale, now that we know we were fated to come here since the morning of the world, we see the importance of our quest even more clearly than before.”

Well, that was true enough. Big Sis did see it.

She took a deep, steadying breath and told herself that maybe they were even fated to win. It could have been an inspiring mini-pep talk, if only she believed in fate.

“How long have we got till the party starts?” she asked.

The old man pointed. Water was seeping in between two of the stones.

The Bane soared on its black, vulturine wings and contemplatedthe other corrupt spirits below. They were a sorry lot, and not just because they were of a cruder, stupider nature than their critic’s quasi-avian breed. They were inept.

The flyer considered that, in contrast, it had proved itself remarkably deft. Back at the resort, it had worried that the Silver River werewolves would spot it as it pursued them through the mountains, but as it turned out, that had been a needless concern. By slipping sideways back and forth between the worlds and taking advantage of every bit of cover, the Bane had not only remained unobserved, it had occasionally managed to sneak close enough to extrude a spectral length of itself and take another nibble from one of the Garou’s memories.

Indeed, when the white shining led them squarely into a veritable army of corrupt spirits, the winged Bane had almost regretted it. No more slow, subtle torture and no more snacks. But it had assumed the clash was actually for the best. The lesser Wyrm-spawn would put Cries Havoc and his pack out of the war in Serbia once and for all, and Jo’cllath‘mattric’s will would be done.

Unbelievably, the werewolves had cut their way through their foes. The flyer was fearless when fighting in the company of its own ferocious flock, more cautious otherwise, but it had risked discovery by swooping close and tearing a big bite out of StormEye’s mind, a wound that had frozen her in place and forced her comrades to stand fast around her. And stiU the guardians of the lake couldn’t kill them.

Indeed, the winged Bane could only say one good thing about them. At least they were giving chase.

Three and four at a time, the spirits who had quite possibly infested this wood for millennia were jumping into the lake and doing their best to swim out to the center, joining the long, eel-like creatures who were already darting and circling out there. Some of the forest Banes managed to shapeshift into piscine forms.

Many, cloaked in matter here in the physical world and so vulnerable to certain of its perils, tried to breathe while submerged, failed and drowned, but the deaths of their physical shells did nothing to deter any of the rest.

Happily, the vulturous Bane had no need to breathe, and its black-feathered wings would pull it through water almost as easily as air. That meant it could tag along with this motley force and catch up with its charge once more. As bound by Jo’cllath‘mattric’s command as the lesser spirits were by their own imperative, the flyer soared high in the moonlight, then dived. The water was cold, but not cold enough to bother it.

North Wind’s Son was seventeen. Usually, he felt older. He’d been through a lot since his First Change, and he thought it had made him grow up. The rest of the pack seemed to see something in him that made them think so, too. They never treated him like a PUP.

At the moment, however, he did feel young, with a boy’s uncertainty about what was to come. The Garou had beaten the Banes once. Now they had to fight them again, before they were completely healed and rested, and pinned down in this box of a room on top of it? To say it seemed unfair was like saying the Pacific seemed moist.

He didn’t even understand how the coming battle was supposed to work. If the Banes broke through the stone wall, the water would pour in, and that would pretty much be the end of the Garou, wouldn’t it?

Fretting, he’d fallen prey to a restless urge to prowl around. In contrast, Julia was sitting cross-legged, pecking and clicking away at her computer. Big Sis looked down at her and said, “I hope you’re doing something witchy that’ll kick the shit out of the Wyrm things.”

“I’m afraid not,” the Glass Walker said. “For the most part, I was simply wondering how a Galliard bereft of his Gifts can possibly be expected to decipher unfamiliar glyphs in only an hour or so.”

“GO ahead,” said Big Sis, “cheer me up.”

Julia laughed. “Very funny. I like that. I trust you know I like you, too. All of you. I-” ?.r “No farewells!” Storm-Eye snarled. “We defeated the Banes before and we will do it again. Cries Havoc will find his path. All will be well.”

The English Garou inclined her head. “Yes, of course.”

Suddenly water trickled from two new leaks between the rocks. North Wind’s Son’s fur bristled, stirred by a noxious electricity in the air. “They’re here!” he shouted.

Contrary to his expectations, the wall didn’t burst inward. Rather, three Banes simply materialized in the chamber and lunged.

The werewolves sprang to meet them. North Wind’s Son rammed his spear through a pike-thing, which was crawling and rearing in a fair imitation of a snake. The corrupted fish thrashed in its death throes, and another Wym~ spirit, this one a pig-faced horror mincing on two dainty cloven hooves, appeared to take its place. The abomination lifted his machete for an overhand cut, and North Wind’s Son yanked on the haft of his fetish to free it. As if with conscious spite, the expiring pike-creature somehow clenched around the lance and held it fast.

The Wendigo’s first impulse was to pull again, but he realized the pig spirit would nail him with the machete if he tried. Instead, jostling Julia in the process, he sprang back and came on guard with the weapons Gaia had given him.

As he did so, water spattered atop his head and gurgled on all sides. He risked a fast glance about. A dozen more chinks in the walls and ceiling were leaking.

The pig-man danced forward, swinging his blade back and forth. North Wind’s Son retreated a little farther-that was all he had in these tight quartersmeanwhile timing the cuts. The machete whizzed past one more time, and then, before the Bane could reverse it for a backhand cut, the werewolf stepped inside his reach, grabbed him, jerked him up off the floor and bit down on his head, piercing the rottentasting flesh and the rock-hard skull beneath.

Dropping his kill, North Wind’s Son looked about. So far, his packmates were winning. Four more Banes lay mangled and inert on the floor. Storm-Eye disemboweled another, and that was the last of the first wave.

As if someone had turned a tap, some of the leaks stopped altogether, while others slowed the flow of water considerably. North Wind’s Son had witnessed a good many marvels during his brief time as a Garou, but somehow, this current development so flouted common sense that he thought it the oddest thing he’d ever seen.

Julia spat out a mouthful of no-doubt vile Bane flesh and greenish pus. “Well,” she said, “at least we now know the rules of the game.”

“I feel so much better,” Big Sis said.

North Wind’s Son yanked his spear from the aquatic Bane’s carcass, then felt the same unpleasant prickling in the air. An instant later, a second contingent of Wyrm-spawn popped into the artificial cave.

As the battle continued, the Wendigo verified that he and his packmates did indeed understand the parameters. Though the process occurred invisibly, somehow the presence of living abominations within the sacred caem created and exacerbated leaks. While the spirits were active, the water poured in. Once they were dead, it ebbed somewhat until the next bunch of enemies ghosted their way inside.

Unfortunately, understanding that didn’t provide much in the way of practical help. It was like the caem spirit’s story. The Banes died and died, but they were like water themselves, racing floodwater scouring away soil. The Silver River Pack couldn’t slaughter them fast enough to stop more and more leaks from opening.

Indeed, as the minutes passed, each kill seemed more difficult than the last, even for an Ahroun, a warrior born. Water was falling everywhere and always seemed to splash in North Wind’s Son’s eyes at the most dangerous possible moment. Yet despite what ought to have been the torrent’s cleansing properties, he was choking on the concentrated stink of the Banes. They were blinking in so fast that at any given moment, a dozen or more gibbered and shrieked within the chamber, filling the space with a pounding, echoing cacophony, jamming it so tightly that for the werewolves, dodging and displacing targets became virtually impossible. All they could do was stand in a line and lash out at whatever rushed in at them.

So that was what North Wind’s Son did. In such close quarters, the length of his spear often made it impossible to bring the flint point to bear, in which case he let go of the haft to shred the foe with his claws. His exertions opened his half-healed wounds, and the Banes’ talons and knives cut new ones, not mortal or crippling yet, but soon, he suspected, soon.

His heart hammered, and the arteries in his neck throbbed. A bone-deep exhaustion numbed and weighted his limbs. He knew his packmates had to be in equally bad shape. It made sense to him that StormEye was still clawing and snapping away-he figured the alpha would be the last to fall-but he was in awe of what must be the sheer iron determination that kept the pair the Red Talon called city wolves doing the same.

A Bane flung himself forward with pale, withered arms outstretched. Insanely, in the midst of all the streaming water, his hands crackled with halos of yellow flame. The fire gave off a stink like tires burning.

North Wind’s Son thrust. With inhuman agility, the abomination stopped a fraction of an inch from the spear point, then backpedaled.

The Ahroun didn’t like the look of the fire. He wanted to kill this particular Bane now, before it managed to grab and bum one of the werewolves. He knew he also had to hold the line-he didn’t dare let any of the Wyrm-spawn get behind it-but for this instant, the assault had slackened. It looked like he could spring forward, spear the abomination with the torchlike hands and jump back before the Banes could take advantage of his being out of position.

If he weren’t so tired, he might not have made the same decision. Might not have caught his foot on an obstruction that felt like the mangled carcass of a Bane someone had already killed. Might not have flailed desperately and failed to recover his balance.

As it was, he fell headlong and splashed down in the water on the floor. The liquid was cloudy with the gore and excretions of the Banes, and while he was focused on other things, had risen to at least a foot high.

Caught by surprise, he inhaled a choking mouthful of the putrid liquid and tried to scramble back up before he took in any more. Some clawed, some skeletal and some supple as a snake, some possessed of tcm few fingers and some too many, a score of hands gripped him and held him down.

North Wind’s Son felt that he should be able to lift his face up out of the water anyway. He was a mighty protector of Gaia, wasn’t he? But somehow, he couldn’t achieve the necessary leverage. Around him, the nasty soup churned as other Banes scrambled forward to exploit the new gap in the pack’s defenses.

That meant all the werewolves were going to die within the next few seconds. They hadn’t held out nearly as long as the original sept. Strangling on the contaminated water, North Wind’s Son guessed it wasn’t all the fault of his crappy judgment, but it sure felt that way.

Then other racing feet splashed around him.

Some of the hands pressing him down jerked away.

With the last of his strength, he heaved himself up, tumbling other Banes off his back. A couple clung to him, scrabbling, pummeling, groping for a choke hold, until he flung them into the ranks of their fellows.

Coughing and retching, he looked around. StormEye, Julia and Big Sis encircled him, slashing at Banes.

Evidently, when he’d fallen, his packmates had charged forward and slaughtered some of the Banes who were trying to drown him, enough so that he could shake off the remainder.

Bo They must have fought like the heroes of myth, like old Laughs-at-Pine-Cones himself, to reach him, and horribly, it wasn’t going to matter. With the battle line dissolved, the Banes were scuttling and slithering along the walls of the cave, maneuvering to surround the werewolves. When they got that done, they wouldn’t have much more trouble killing the Garou, and North Wind‘s Son could see no way to stop them.

Other abominations were pressing him and his friends too hard.

Soaked in blood and water, Storm-Eye stood straight and tall. She still had her fangs bared, but she folded her arms and, turning her lupine head, raked the Banes with a stare of infinite contempt. A temfying scarlet light seemed to bum in her good eye, while something even worse seethed in the ruined one.

In the cramped chamber, none of the abominations could miss her demeanor and expression. Over the course of a second or two, they ceased their hideous roaring and screeching, uncovering silence and the hiss of streaming water.

The Banes shrank back. Four new ones popped into view, and they too fell under the spell.

“Reform the line,” Storm-Eye murmured. ‘‘I do not think the fear will hold them very long.”

“Since when can you do this?” asked Big Sis, scurrying to her side. “I mean the spirits teach that to some of us Philodox, sure, but only to the big wig lawgivers. Way outta my league and, I thought, yours.”

“I have never done it,” the Red Talon replied.

“And, you are right, I should not be able to do it now.

It is reserved for those wiser than me. Still, the thought came into my head to try.”

“You’re channeling the power of the caem,” Julia said. “There was probably a wolf spirit who called this place home long ago. They can grant that Gift.”

“Perhaps,” Storm-Eye replied. “But not for much longer, so everyone get in line!”

The werewolves obeyed, and none too soon. Over the next few seconds, most of the Banes shook off their funk and charged.

North Wind’s Son leveled his spear and summoned back the energizing Garou fury. It came, but it was a shadow of what it had been earlier in the fight, a brittle thing, nearly shattered by a surge of pain and fatigue. Come on, Cries Huvoc, the Wendigo thought as he traded attacks with the next Bane, and the one after that, read the damn thing!

Cries Havoc had just about decided he was never going to figure out the glyphs. He tried to tell himself his doubts were merely a manifestation of the despair festering in his ruined spirit, but he was having trouble believing it, because the situation was fraught with plausible reasons for him to fail.

Somehow, the Bane back in Bosnia had swallowed his most precious ability, telling tales. And with it, the sensitivity needed to decipher these glyphs seemed to have vanished. Once, he could simply have glanced at the lines of chiseled glyphs and they would have all but burst into song for him, conveying the greater part of their significance in an instant. And if he’d needed to ferret out some more abstruse implication, he could have entered a trance where nothing existed but the subtle layers and interconnections of meaning in the symbols.

Now the inscription mocked him with its incomprehensibility. He examined a line, and his mind seemed to glance off it like a flat stone skipping across a pond. For an instant, he might glean a fragment of meaning from two or three of the glyphs, but then it evaporated out of his brain and left not a garbled word behind.

Unable to make any progress in his normal state of consciousness, he struggled and struggled until it became obvious that he was also now incapable of slipping into a lorekeeper’s meditation. He lacked even the focus that a human scholar might have achieved. Time and again, his mind drifted from the task before it, and he caught himself brooding over how damaged and useless he was, or how impossible was his current problem, instead of actually working on it. Then he grimly resumed his concentration.

He became even more distracted when the water started coming in. No matter how he shifted around, he couldn’t keep it from plopping or streaming onto his head, and even if he could, he still would have had the lower part of his body immersed in the icy flow. He doubted that even with all his faculties he could have deciphered the message under such miserable conditions.

The snarls and shrieks echoing down the tunnels were equally disruptive. He clenched and winced out at every particularly jarring cry or sudden swell in the volume. He told himself, That’s your pack out there, fighting, maybe dying, to give you your chnce, but that didn’t help. It was just more unproductive thought to stick in his brain and lure him away from his chore.

Cries Havoc grappled with another line, or rather, with the first line, for what might be the hundredth time. For one bright, startling moment, it made sense to him, and then he realized the glyphs couldn’t possibly say what he’d imagined. Not unless some ancient seer had anticipated a lyric from a Taj Mahal song the Child of Gaia had heard on the radio on the drive down from New York.

Perhaps the caern spirit was right. Perhaps Cries Havoc still did possess emotions, for right now, he had a sort of taut, hollow sensation in his head that made him wonder if he was going mad.

He did what seemed the o d y thing left to do. He contemplated the first symbol in the top line and that symbol alone, as youngsters did when first grappling with the alphabet. Maybe his crippled mind was at least capable of teasing the meaning out of one character at a time.

The glyphs beside and below the first one tugged at the edges of the storyteller’s field of vision, trying to draw and fragment his attention. Wading through the water on the floor, he rose, walked to the inscription and covered the signs he wished to ignore with his hands and forearms.

Framed among his long, furry fingers, nicked and raw from the battle beside the lake, the remaining glyph looked like an arrowhead pointing upward. If that was what it was really supposed to be, it could mean weapon, war, danger, anger or simply indicate a direction. On the other hand, the glyph also resembled a stylized pine or fir. If that was what the carver had intended, it could signify tree, forest or strength.

If Cries Havoc’s mind had been working properly, he would have known immediately and effortlessly which correspondence and meaning the ancient Galliard had intended. As it was, the Child of Gaia stared and stared until his eyes ached and blurred, and still he couldn’t tell.

In the desolated heart of him, a jagged, unrecognizable shard, of muted panic or desperation, perhaps, twisted, snagged and gouged, insisting that he was doing everything wrong. He had to go back to looking at the entire inscription, for the first glyph, or any of them, would only define itself in the context of the whole.

Teeth bared, he shoved that traitor idea to the back of his mind with all the other babbling irrelevancies. He’d already tried examining the entire only hope.

He stared some more, striving by the sheer intensity of his regard to make the meaning of the arrowhead/tree flip one way or the other. It didn’t.

After a time, water spilled from the rocks above the inscription and cascaded over it in a shimmering, whispering sheet. Startled, Cries Havoc gasped. For one lunatic moment, he was certain the liquid was going to wash away the carvings.

Still suspecting himself demented, he sniffed the glyph. The only smells were stone and lake water. He touched the carving, probing it, running his fingertip around the edges. Then his eyes widened.

A triangular notch indented one side of the vertical line comprising the foot of the glyph. Like a human suffering from a brain lesion, up until now, he hadn’t been able to see the tiny detail, but he could feel it.

It told him the symbol represented a tree with a wound chopped in its trunk, and smining mightily, his mind declared that, altered thusly, the sign denoted weakness or sickness, the antithesis of strength.

If so, he had the first sign figured out. He wondered if he’d forget what he’d learned as soon as he switched to the second. Maybe, but he had to risk it, because the glyphs were no use unless he deciphered them all. He said, “Weakness, weakness, weakness,” trying to fix the idea in his mind, then shifted the viewing frame he’d made of his hands.

The new sign was a spread pair of wings. It could signify bird, flight.. .or the spirit. Surely it was the latter.

Now, did he still remember the first glyph? Yes.

Weakness. And did it make sense married to the second one? Again, yes, mending a wounded spirit was supposedly the point of the inscription. Somewhat encouraged, he moved on to the next sign.

It was slow going, but as he studied them with eyes and fingers alike, the glyphs grudgingly spoke to him. Sometimes the ideas occurred in what, to a human, might have seemed an incoherent, illogical sequence, but Cries Havoc understood Garou conventions of thought and discourse, and that was one thing the winged Bane hadn’t ripped out of his brain.

As the caern keeper had promised, the inscription described a rite to carry a werewolf to a realm of dreams and memory where, if he wished, he could step back inside the early verses of his own story, his own past.

Fortunately, the ceremony shouldn’t be difficult to perform. It was mainly just a matter of saying a prayer.

That is, if Cries Havoc had translated every single glyph correctly, but really, how likely was that with his mind and talents in tatters?

He gave his head a shake. It was worse than useless to think like that. It was how the Wyrm wanted him to think. He wouldn’t even worry about whether the rite would work or not. He would simply perform it as perfectly as he was able, as he would any such invocation, and see what happened.

Splashing up water, he danced through the ritual postures. Spoke the words. When the rite was done, nothing seemed to happen, and he thought he had indeed bungled it. Then something blasted through his body, staggering him. Had his soul been intact, he might have felt a flash of ecstasy. As it was, the blaze was simply a sensation, neither pleasant nor painful, but it charged him with a sort of vibrant power and the knowledge that the force could take him where he needed to go.

He howled to tell his packmates he was ready, then loped out of the chamber to find them. Elsewhere in the caem, something banged like a loud, sharp clap of thunder. The luminescence in the rock walls dimmed and died, smothering the passageway in darkness.

A Bane with horns made of rusty steel cable lowered his head and charged like a bull. Unable to dodge without opening a hole in the defensive line, Storm-Eye braced herself and caught hold of the spirit’s “naturaI” weapons. Metal slivers pierced and abraded the insides of her hands, but she stopped the abomination dead in his tracks. She wrenched the horns in a half circle that broke their possessor’s neck, and dropped him in the cold, filthy, ever-deepening water on the floor.

Then a howl reverberated up the passage at her back. Like any Garou, she could hear the sense in it, and despite her utter weariness, knew a thrill of satisfaction. Julia had been too pessimistic. Cries Havoc had deciphered the glyphs, and now he called for his packmates to join him.

The problem was that Storm-Eye couldn’t really see any way to do that. The Banes were pressing too hard. If the werewolves turned to run, the spirits would pull them down in a heartbeat.

So spent was the Red Talon that, had she been alone, she might well have howled back to tell Cries Havoc to escape without her. But an alpha couldn’t give up, not while she had a pack to look after, and so she shouted, “Backward! One step at a time! Keep the line!”

The werewolves started their retreat. The attempt enraged the Banes, and they attacked even more furiously. Then something crashed.

Storm-Eye looked toward the noise. Behind the Banes, several stones of the leaking wall had burst inward, making a sizable hole. Water roared in.

The torrent knocked down everyone, werewolf and spirit Bane. Perhaps because they weren’t ready for it, even the pike-things tumbled about.

With a crunching roar, more of the breached wall collapsed. Meanwhile, the current shoved Storm-Eye along. She tried to get her feet under her, resist the pushing and stand, and a scabrous Bane slammed into her, robbing her of any semblance of balance and sending her splashing back down. She thought the creature had collided with her inadvertently as the cold, roaring water carried him, but he made the most of his opportunity. He skittered up her body with spiderish ability, clinging, mauling, biting with needlepointed fangs.

Storm-Eye was glad she’d reflexively sucked in a breath as she fell. She didn’t like having her face submerged-to say the least-but she knew she couldn’t labor to lift it into the air and fight the Bane at the same time, and those murderous teeth had to take priority.

With some effort, she managed to hook her claws in the skinny, wriggling thing and thought, Good, I’m in concrol, I’m coping with this.

Then blackness swallowed her. The concentrated foulness of the Banes had finally smothered the benevolent power that for countless generations had shone from the sacred stones.

For a second, her mind tottered on the brink of an emotion she had never known: pure, mad panic.

It was ludicrous, really. No Garou feared the dark, but she’d nearly reached the end of her strength and courage, and with water clogging her nose and ears, the gloom seemed to blind her nearly as thoroughly as it would a human.

Once again, it was the thought of the pack that drew her back from the edge. She would not fail it.

She finished ripping the thrashing Bane apart, then floundered toward the air. The moment seemed to stretch out endlessly while all she touched was water. Perhaps she and the Bane had rolled about in the dark and she was swimming down or sideways instead of up. Or maybe the water pouring in had already filled the passage, and there wasn’t anyHer head broke the surface. As she gasped in a breath, and the current pushed her along, she sensed that her second conjecture was wrong, but not by all that much. She could feel the ceiling not too far above her head. The lake would finish drowning the tunnel, the caem and everyone still trapped in it soon enough.

She fumbled hold of a couple of the rocks comprising the passage wall. She didn’t really know if it was the right thing to do, but her instincts prompted her to anchor herself somehow in the midst of streaming chaos.

Something else bumped against her. She slashed with one hand, tore flesh and winced when she realized that here amid the blackness, the body could just as easily be a packmate as a Bane. She groped for it as the current whisked it by, then slumped with relief. The thing whose flesh she had just tom didn’t have fur.

Where were the other Garou, then? She heard Cries Havoc still howling somewhere deeper in the caem, his voice breaking as he strove to out-shout the endless clamor of the water. It was a good idea, and Storm-Eye did the same, letting out a somewhat gurgling howl.

“Here!” Big Sis called, coughing, from farther down the tunnel.

Storm-Eye didn’t want to let go of the wall. But Big Sis and Cries Havoc were both downstream, and the alpha couldn’t very well expect them to fight the current and come to her. She snarled the shameful trepidation out of her heart and pushed off, dumping herself back in the center of the flow.

At least this time she could paddle along with her head above water. She sensed another Bane splashing in with no extraordinary grace on her flank.

She wrenched herself around, grabbed the thing, shoved it under the surface and wrung its neck until it stopped moving.

“Carlita!” she cried, then caught the Bone Gnawer’s scent and North Wind’s Son’s as well. Her friends were just ahead and to the left. She reached out, and, groping, the Ahroun grasped her arm and pulled her to another perch on the wall.

“Are you all right?” Storm-Eye asked.

“Well, as all right as we were just before the dam broke,” rasped North Wind’s Son, just a shadow of humor manifest in his pain-ridden, dead-tired voice.

“A couple Banes pulled me under,” babbled Big Sis. The same hysteria that Storm-Eye had barely quashed was obviously cutting through the younger Bone Gnawer’s bravado. “I almost drowned before John got them off me. But now we don’t know how to find Julia or Cries Havoc. I mean, he’s howling-”

“Enough!” Storm-Eye snapped. “You are no coward, so calm yourself. We will find our packmates by scent and sound, and we will look after one another while we do it. Tell me you understand.”

“Yeah,” said Big Sis, her voice now only a little shaky. “Got it.”

Suddenly the Garou smelled Banes all around them. The werewolves fought as best they could, blind, with water drumming maddeningly on their heads and likewise trying to slosh into their mouths and separate them. Eventually, the packmates tore their foes apart, but not before Storm-Eye acquired two new gashes, one on her forearm and one on her belly. They burned like fire for a few moments, then the frigid stream numbed them.

“Now we swim with the current,” she said, “deeper into the caern.”

Big Sis asked, “What if Julia’s behind us?”

“We must stay together,” Storm-Eye said, “and the only thing we know for certain is that Cries Havoc is calling us from somewhere up ahead.”

“That sucks.” The Bone Gnawer paused. “But, yeah, you’re right.”

“Then come.” The werewolves let go of the wall.

As they swam on, they found other places where the water was gushing in. At one point, rocks dropped from the ceiling and missed the swimmers by a matter of inches. The entire caem was disintegrating.

The Banes found the werewolves periodically, if not quite as often as Storm-Eye had expected. She wondered if some of them had perished as a result of their own victory. It was paradoxical, considering that the Wyrm-spawn had survived their plunge to the bottom of the lake, but she had a hunch that some had drowned or been dashed against the stones when the water poured in.

Still, plenty remained, and the Garou perforce learned to fight them while floating along in the blackness and the surging, treacherous current that periodically sought to dash them against a wall. StormEye got the impression that some of her attackers could see perfectly well in the dark, but the ones she had the most trouble with were the pike-things and the others adapted for existence in the water.

She was just finishing off another such threat, a creature like a festering mermaid with a head that was nothing but prehensile jaws, when Big Sis croaked, “My leg! Damn it!”

“What?” shouted North Wind’s Son.

“I killed the thing that was after me,” the Bone Gnawer said, “but it smashed my leg against the wall first. It’s broken. A piece is sticking out of my skin.”

“Can you still float?” Storm-Eye asked.

“Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, I guess. I’ll try.”

“You’ll be all right,” the alpha said. “We’ll carry you if you need it. You just have to hang on.”

“Sure,” Big Sis gritted. “No problem.”

The ordeal ground on until Storm-Eye felt she understood the human notion of hell. They didn’t find Julia, although it was entirely possible that they’d obliviously paddled past her submerged corpse in the dark. At least Cries Havoc’s howling kept leading them past the branching passages that might otherwise have taken them astray.

Until, abruptly, the calling stopped.

“This isn’t happening,” said Big Sis, sounding half-delirious with pain. “I didn’t go through all this shit just so Cries Havoc could get croaked at the end.”

“No, you did not,” said Storm-Eye. “I do not know why the howling stopped, but the lorekeeper is still ahead somewhere, and we will find him.”

After another moment, the Red Talon smelled a length of wet stone looming at the level of her head.

She stretched out a hand and caught hold to keep herself from banging into it, then considered what it meant. At this point, the passage dipped, and for that reason the next section was already completely full of water.

“Maybe the water closing this space is what cut off the howling,” said North Wind’s Son.

“Perhaps,” said Storm-Eye. “In any case, we must go on.”

“Yeah,” said Big Sis, “and hope we’ve got someplace to come up for air on the other side.”

They dived without hesitation, Storm-Eye included, though she wished Carlita had kept that last remark to herself.

She kicked and stroked forward, then faltered in dismay. Though she could see nothing, she could feel and hear the water flowing on through two conduits.

The passage branched, and she had no idea which fork to take.

A hand, Big Sis’s by the size of it, tugged her toward the left. She passed the signal on to North Wind’s Son, then took hold of the city wolf and somewhat clumsily helped her along in the direction she’d indicated.

They swam for a time, and then Big Sis pulled on her again, this time indicating they should ascend. It was fine with Storm-Eye. Her lungs were nearly empty.

Perhaps air waited above her head, perhaps it didn’t, but either way, she could kick and drag herself no farther.

She and the Bone Gnawer headed upward.

Sensing their change in direction, North Wind’s Son followed. Their heads broke the surface a few seconds later. They heard the constant gushing of incoming water and the splashing of falling stones, but no howling.

“It’s the wrong way,” groaned the warrior when he managed to catch his breath. “We have to go back.”

“No!” said Big Sis. “Tampa street-kid, remember?

Bone Gnawer judge in the making? I knows my way around in alleys.”

“You’re hurt,” said John North Wind’s Son, “and these tunnels aren’t alleys.”

“Close enough,” Big Sis said.

“We trust you,” said Storm-Eye. ‘Onward!”

“They swam forward, killed two more Banes, and then Cries Havoc began calling again.

“Told you, Juanita”

“Sorry,” answered North Wind’s Son.

Storm-Eye realized the passage was rising when her feet brushed the bottom. She gratefully wulked on while the howling grew ever louder, and the stream sank to waist deep. Then she caught Cries Havoc’s scent and saw a silvery glimmering. It was soft as moonlight, but after her immersion in total darkness, it made her squint.

Another turn and she discerned the source of the light was Cries Havoc himself. The body glowed as if his flesh were translucent and his bones phosphorescent. He had found a sort of ledge to perch on, and he bore fresh punctures and cuts attesting to the fact that somehow, some of the Banes had made their way around to where he had been waiting. The wounds shone more brightly than the rest of him.

“Sure,” said Big Sis, catching hold of the stones beneath the shelf, “we fight our way through the whole stinking caem, and you sit your ass down and take it easy.”

“I tried to get back to you,” said Cries Havoc. “I knew the way the old man led me in, but I couldn’t use it. At one point, the stones from the ceiling were falling like hail. They would have killed me for sure.

After that, I thought that instead of all of us just blundering around in the dark, maybe I should call you, and I didn’t know if I could swim, kill Banes, and howl at the same time. Where’s Julia?”

The question wiped the grin off Big Sis’s face.

“We don’t know. We lost her.”

“No, you didn’t,” the Glass Walker said. StormEye tumed to see the Glass Walker hurrying up behind them.

“Thank God,” said North Wind’s Son.

I? was behind you the whole way,” Julia said. “But whenever I got a chance to call out, you didn’t hear me. It is quite noisy.”

“How did you get through all the Banes by yourself?” Big Sis asked. ‘Theurge techniques,” said Julia. “Flickering back and forth between the worlds at the right moment and more than my share of luck, in other words. Cries Havoc, I surmise from the glow that you’re ready to move on?“ “Yeah.”

“Then get down in the water,” Big Sis said, “I don’t exactly feel like climbing up to you.”

“Right.” The storyteller jumped in. “Everybody, grab hold of me.”

Storm-Eye moved to obey him, and then a pikething many times larger than the others they’d seen erupted from the water and opened its jaws to swallow her down. Bellowing, North Wind’s Son rammed his spear into the spirit’s misshapen head. Up until now, in the blackness and the confusion, the alpha hadn’t realized that the Wendigo had managed to hold on to the fetish.

As the Wyrm-spawn thrashed and sank, North Wind’s Son pulled the lance out of it. “Let’s do it,” he said.

They took hold of Cries Havoc, or he got hold of them, and then he shifted them across the Gauntlet.

Abruptly, the frigid, relentlessly pushing water was gone, and they had solidity beneath their feet. They hastily shifted to gain their balance. Big Sis gasped and fell when her broken leg took her weight, but Storm-Eye and Julia caught her before she hit the ground.

Then the alpha looked around. Luna and the Red Star, harbinger of the Apocalypse, shone down on a memory, for in the spirit world, the caern retained the same form it had possessed in ancient times. It was a pile of stones on dry land, occupying the center of a forest glade, and around it were the marks of a thriving Garou community, black, sunken places littered with ash and scraps of charred wood, tents, lean-tos, whittled poles lashed into racks for the scraping and drying of pelts, and smaller collections of glyph-carved stone on which one seer or another had recorded his discoveries, artifacts that in the material world had merged with the pile when it transformed. The carvings seemed strangely blurred, and Storm-Eye doubted the Banes had ever been able to make them out.

Now, however, time was catching up with the Penumbra’s analogue of the sacred site. Individual stones shattered with sharp reports, and the central caern was crumbling. Stinking Banes swarmed everywhere, shrieking and gibbering in triumph, coming on guard when they noticed the werewolves, and more abominations were appearing by the moment, evidently pursuing the pack across the Gauntlet.

Storm-Eye felt like the victim of a cruel prank.

Did Cries Havoc’s newfound secret amount to nothing more than step sideways? Any Garou already knew how to accomplish that, and in this case, it wasn’t enough to extricate the pack from the foes who were inexorably picking them apart. The Red Talon looked for a clear path out of the middle of them and wasn’t at all surprised to find that none existed.

Then Big Sis said, “Check it out.”

Storm-Eye turned. Still glowing, Cries Havoc held his arms raised in invocation. In response, a pathway, seemingly made of pearly light, appeared in the sky. It appeared to be a moon bridge, the same sort of magical trail certain Garou could create to link two caems. The near end of it descended to the ground like a ramp.

“Come on!” said Cries Havoc. He and North Wind’s Son scrambled onto the bridge. Still carrying Big Sis, Julia and Storm-Eye followed. Only a few feet behind charged the next wave of raging Wyrm-spawn.

The first time Storm-Eye had seen an arch of curdled light, she had wondered if it would be as smooth and thus slippery as it looked. Familiarity had taught her otherwise. Though not even the sharpest eye could see the grain, the surface of such a span felt rough enough that a Garou could even dash along it without danger of losing his footing.

The one Cries Havoc had conjured was no exception, but though it was no threat to her balance, her first stride upon it made the world stretch and blur in a disorienting fashion. Suddenly the babble of the pack‘s pursuers sounded faint and far away.

Curious, Storm-Eye glanced around and discovered that a single step had carried her and her friends far along the path and thus high above the disintegrating caem. Banes were racing up the bridge, but the span declined to help them along, and they were covering distance no more quickly than their legs alone could carry them.

“It’s as if we’re wearing seven-league boots,” said Julia, making yet another reference Storm-Eye didn’t recognize, “and if I’m not mistaken, the moon bridge has still another trick to play. Watch.”

The first several yards of bridge abruptly vanished.

Storm-Eye instinctively tensed, as if now that the span no longer rested its foot on the ground, it would topple.

It didn’t. It didn’t inconvenience the Garou in any way. But their pursuers, who had still been traversing that initial stretch, plummeted when the support evaporated from beneath them.

Big Sis laughed. “Sweet.”

“We should keep moving,” said Cries Havoc. “I don’t completely understand what I did. I don’t know if the bridge will keep dissolving one length at a time or how long it might be before it disappears altogether.”

“Very well,” said Storm-Eye. “Forward.”

They pressed on, each step eating up distance, smearing the world beyond the edges of the path in the same uncanny way. When she paused for a second and glanced down, the alpha sometimes saw what resembled an empty world. Many of the works of man-houses, freeways, factories, even whole citiescast their shadows in the Penumbra, but rare was the actual human being who could do the same.

But of course that momentary impression was a lie. In reality, the Umbra teemed with life in the form of countless spirits, and between strides, she caught glimpses of a good many. The Weaver’s spiders crawling in the Pattern Web. A magnificent buck, the essence of Deer, looking up at the moon bridge from the edge of a cliff. Glass elementals, manlike figures composed of glittering shards, picking pieces from one another’s bodies to create a vast mosaic for some purpose that, of all the werewolves, only Julia might possibly understand. And far too many Banes, but to the lawgiver’s relief, none who seemed capable of molesting the travelers on their mystic and elevated path.

Eventually Storm-Eye discerned that the bridge was bending downward. After a few more paces, it deposited the pack in a quiet field, seemingly untenanted save for grass and brush. A stream that smelled of iron ran through the center of it, and a thick wood lay beyond.

The luminous path through the sky disappeared.

Julia helped Storm-Eye set Big Sis gently on the ground. Then, as if someone had thrown a switch, exhaustion crashed down on her, and she collapsed as much as sat down beside the Bone Gnawer.

Cries Havoc and North Wind’s Son did the same.

Storm-Eye managed to stay on her feet for one more moment, peering and sniffing in all directions, making sure the field really was safe, before she flopped down and sprawled on her back.

For a while, no one spoke. They just waited for their breathing and heartbeats to slow and savored the joy of remaining still. Gradually, as a bit of her strength trickled back, Julia realized how horribly thirsty she was. Evidently suffering from the same condition, Storm-Eye bestirred herself, limped to the creek, stooped and drank noisily.

When she returned, she gave her gashed, battered body a shake, flinging droplets of the lake water that still soaked her in all directions. “I have made what Julia calls an executive decision,” she said, her voice hoarse. “No more swimming unless absolutely necessary.”

The others stared for a moment. Then Julia said, “Did you just make a joke?”

“Of course,” said the alpha. “Why are you so surprised?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Julia said, trying to hide a smile. She dragged herself to her feet and trudged for the stream. It hurt. She’d already stiffened up considerably. She’d never experienced that before, not in Crinos form.

“I can’t believe we all made it out of there,” said North Wind’s Son, feebly rubbing the gory point of his spear with a handful of grass. “It’s amazing. When I can find the strength, I’m going to be really proud of us. Unless I bleed to death first.” ‘You will not,” said Storm-Eye, sitting back down.

“Nor will any of the rest of us. We each bear many wounds, but none grave enough to slay a Garou.”

“We did kick ass,” said Big Sis, “and it’s a good thing. Cause as far as I could see, the old man didn’t do shit to help us.”

Cupping her hands and lifting them to her muzzle, Julia drank from the stream. To someone who’d lived her life in the city, the icy iron water tasted harsh and unpleasant, but that didn’t stop her from gulping her fill.

Then she said, “Actually, that’s unjust. The guardian spirit did help. The caern would have disintegrated far more quickly if he hadn’t tried to hold it together. Even at the end, it didn’t fall apart in a natural sort of way. If it had, we would have drowned long before we all found one another.”

“Hm,” Big Sis said. “Okay, I take it back. Do you think the guy made it out?”

“I believe so,” the Glass Walker said. “I doubt the Banes could have done anything to stop him from embarking on that road he mentioned. Now, I’ll fetch you some water, and when you’ve drunk your fill, we’ll see about lining up the two ends of that broken tibia.’’ The lanky werewolf sighed. ‘(1 can’t wait.”

“What happens next?” asked North Wind’s Son, turning to Cries Havoc. “Are you okay now?”

“No,” said the storyteller, and indeed, Julia could still see the raw hollowness inside him. The only difference between now and earlier was that his bloody body no longer glowed. “But maybe I can be. The moon bridge brought us to the right place.”

Cries Havoc crawled to the stream, slurped some water, then heaved himself to his feet. He swayed for a moment, and the Glass Walker lifted her hands to catch him, but then he found his balance.

“If I can be cured,” he said, “the medicine’s in those woods.” He turned toward them.

“Rest,” said Storm-Eye. “You have time. Recover your strength.”

The lorekeeper glanced back. ‘‘I’ve got the strength for this. The rite gave it to me.”

“Good,” Big Sis said, “but wait a minute until my leg’s fixed, and we’ll all go with you.”

Cries Havoc said, ‘Thanks. But I have to do the last part by myself, and I think I should get on with it.” He walked on.

Julia knew he was right, but she also understood exactly how the Bone Gnawer felt. After all the pack had been through together, it seemed strange to let its most sorely damaged member, the one the rest had fought so hard to help, go on alone.

Perhaps Storm-Eye and North Wind’s Son felt the same, for everyone watched in silence when Cries Havoc entered the trees. Then Big Sis said, “Yo, Princess Di, how about that drink?”

For a few paces, the wood seemed merely that, a stand of elm and maple. Here as in the material world, it was early spring, the air chilly and the trees showing only the subtlest signs of awakening life. Patches of rotten mulch, the remains of last autumn’s fallen leaves, littered the ground.

Then everything changed. Cries Havoc had expected something to happen, but even so, the shift was so sudden and disorienting that it took him a second to sort out his impressions.

He rode clutched in a pair of powerful, hrry arms, feeling the rhythm of a long, swift stride. A gibbous moon, his birth moon, hung overhead in air warmer than it had been a moment ago. He could smell his mother’s scent, the milk in her breasts, and the Rocky Mountains spreading out all around him.

This isn’t right, Cries Havoc thought. I never remembered being a baby in my mother’s arms. I didn’t remember my mother ut all. But apparently that wasn’t true. Somewhere deep inside him, he had remembered, until the Bane tore the knowledge out of him.

He also knew what night this was and what was happening. His elders had told him the story, insofar as they knew it. By mating with another werewolf and producing a freakish metis pup, his mother had broken sacred Garou law. Her pack would cherish and raise the baby, for that was the way of the Children of Gaia.

But she would go into exile as soon as she recovered her strength.

Mother, however, refused to relinquish her son.

She stole him and fled, and clasped in her embrace, he was fearless and content. Indeed, returned to this moment, Cries Havoc rediscovered a pure, astonishing bliss. It lasted until he noticed the white, four-legged beast silently pacing his mother as she raced down the mountainside.

The creature was beautiful, and Cries Havoc somehow knew it meant him no harm. The sight of it should have made the night even more wonderful.

But he sensed the entity was a harbinger of change.

Of loss. He tried to avoid its lustrous golden eye but met it anyway. The creature spoke without words, and he understood. W h y not? Even the first time, as a baby and nothing more, he’d somehow understood.

Young Garou, this is not your path. You have a duty, a destiny, and this trail will not take you there. Still, I will not intervene unless you give me leave.

What newborn could possibly give a spirit such permission? And yet Cries Havoc knew he’d done it.

Perhaps some buried wisdom from a past life had prompted him, or perhaps the entity’s shining grace and majesty had awed him into acquiescence. In any case, his tiny heart already breaking for a reason he didn’t quite yet comprehend, he’d answered, Yes.

Come. Do it.

He sensed that he needed to do the same thing now to keep the tale of his life unfolding as it ought.

If he diverted the dream into wishes, lies and mighthave-beens, it couldn’t cure him. Still, it was amazingly hard to give the invitation. Before, he had been dead inside. Now, he knew joy. How could he renounce it? The cure might fail. He might return to the same crippled, usetess condition.

Yet he had to try. Otherwise, he would break faith with the friends who had risked all to find this place.

So he forced the voiceless message out: Yes. Come.

Do it.

Defining a silver arc that reminded Cries Havoc fleetingly of the moon bridge, the unicorn leaped into the fugitive mother’s path. Unicorn, totem spirit of the Children of Gaia, embodied peace and harmony, but her emissary held her black, whorled horn poised in an unmistakably threatening manner.

Mother cried out and tried to dodge around the beast. With an effortless bound, the spirit blocked her, then lunged forward. The point of the slender horn stopped an inch in front of the werewolfs throat.

Her eyes wide, Mother floundered a step or two backward. With a dip of her head, the unicorn signaled that the werewolf should lay Cries Havoc on the ground.

Mother refused and continued to refuse through several more futile attempts at escape, until, with another sudden thrust, the unicorn proved her willingness to maim and likely even kill. The Garou stumbled, and the scent of her blood filled the air.

Weeping, she looked at Cries Havoc. Kissed him.

Embraced him. He screamed, No, no, I didn’t uhswmd! I take it buck! The unicorn ignored him.

Mother set him down gently and limped away, leaving a trail of bloody drops behind her, and then, impossibly, she was gone. After a moment, the unicorn departed as well, perhaps to shadow her and make sure she didn’t double back.

The adult Cries Havoc thought, Unicorn chose me fi-om the beginning, and I never knew. But the realization didn’t comfort him. The feelings of his infant self were far more compelling, and he found himself overwhelmed by grief, guilt, loneliness, hunger and the cold. He shrieked and sobbed until daybreak, when the pack found him.

“Strong set of lungs in this one,” a scarred old Ahroun said.

Beating its black-feathered wings, the Bane followed Cries Havoc into the wood. The very essence of forgetfulness, it found this dream-realm of memory utterly unpleasant, save for the fact that he seemed able to mask his presence. What was it, after all, other than the absence of memory? And so it remained invisible and immaterial, following the Galliard into the woods. Once it got far enough from its victim’s comrades, then it would make itself known. Then it would attack.

The business with the caern had been a fiasco from start to finish. The local Banes were obviously even punier, stupider and in general more degenerate even than their European counterpart had first imagined. How else could a mere five Garou survive the worst the wretches could throw at them?

The winged Bane had done its best to help its fellows but, amid the chaos, hadn’t been able to nip a piece out of any Garou’s mind. Though the spirit had gotten lucky with Storm-Eye on the hillside above the lake, that stealthy attack actually worked better when the target hadn’t already assumed a defensive attitude.

Fortunately, the vulturelike spirit had managed to follow the Garou over the moon bridge, and now that Cries Havoc had separated from his packmates, it would rend him as it had before, and this time finish the job. It had to. Now that the Child of Gaia had, against all probability, fought his way this close to his remedy, the time for wary sniping and nibbling had past.

The Bane reckoned that his prey had walked far enough. It put on solidity above the Garou’s head, opened its fanged jaws and dived.

The world blurred in front of it. The spirit didn’t connect with any tangible target and had to flap its wings frantically to keep itself from slamming ignominiously into the ground.

It soared higher, looked down and found everything altered. Day had given way to night. The terrain, which had been relatively level, now tilted in the form of another mountainside, this one somehow different from all the ones the Bane had traversed on the trek into the heart of the Appalachians. Certainly the trees were different, with a sudden preponderance of fragrant conifers.

A female Garou in Crinos form was running down the slope with a homed, furry baby-Cries Havoc, obviously-in her arms. Intermittently obscured by trees and brush, a unicorn bounded along beside her a few yards to her left. Evidently she hadn’t noticed the spirit yet.

The winged spirit dived twice more, enough to demonstrate conclusively that it couldn’t touch the baby, mother or horned messenger, and they could neither touch nor see it.

The Bane felt a sickening surge of rage and panic.

It had waited a moment too long, and Cries Havoc had passed beyond its reach into conjured memory.

Jo’cllath’mattric’s wrath would be as terrible as it was inescapable.

But no. The spirit refused to believe its mission would end this way. Surely it would find a final opportunity to keep Cries Havoc and his pack from further meddling in its master’s affairs. It just had to wait for the proper moment. It perched on a limb and stared fixedly down at the little drama playing out below, like a true vulture waiting for something to die.

“...and so Crookedclaw paid the price of the Spirit of the Valley and won a bountiful new home for his people. Their long years of wandering had reached an end.”

The tale had likewise come to its conclusion, and the eleven-year-old Cries Havoc looked hopefully at his teacher. Seated atop a chuck of log the Garou used for a bench, slender, blue eyed, and sun bronzed in human form, dressed in an old plaid shirt with rolled sleeves, Song-of-the-Waterfall visibly recognized his desperation and sought to offer encouragement. “That wasn’t bad at all,” she said.

The boy’s shoulders slumped. “That just means it wasn’t good enough.” Actually, now that he’d had a moment to think, he knew it wasn’t. He’d enjoyed telling the story, had gotten caught up in it, but certainly hadn’t felt any miraculous powers stirring within him.

Her agate pendant flashing in the sun, the pretty blonde Galliard rose and hugged him. With her in human shape and him in Crinos, the adult and boy were about the same height.

Songof-the-Waterfall had been so kind. Cries Havoc had had a huge crush on her and struggled mightily to conceal it. Now, reliving this hour, his adult perspective dominating for a moment, he suspected that she’d known perfectly well.

“You’ll get it,” she said. Elsewhere among the lodges, an ax thunked into the wood it was chopping.

The aroma of elk stew cooking over a fire tinged the air.

“Was it my diction?” Cries Havoc asked. “My cadence? My tone? My acting?“ Song-of-the-Waterfall had taught him all those things and more, and he’d done his best to apply them in his performance.

“In and of themselves, they were all good,” she said. “I guess the pieces just haven’t quite fallen into place yet.”

“What if they never do?”

“That’s a silly thing to say. How can they not?

You were born under the storyteller’s moon.”

“Yeah, but I was born a metis.” He could almost feel the weight of the grotesque horns on his brow.

“What if I’m a freak on the inside, too? What if the spirits won’t teach me any Gifts?”

Song-of-the.Waterfal1 frowned. “Did someone put that idea in your head? I’ll smack him the length of this camp and back again!”

“No,” said Cries Havoc, “everyone treats me okay.

But I know what I am. Maybe I’m wasting my time.

Your time. Maybe I should just work on my hunting, fighting and fishing. I’m halfway good at those.”

The teacher sighed. “I hate hearing you say that.

But I can’t choose your path for you. I certainly can’t turn anyone into a bard if he doesn’t want to work to become one.”

Once again, the older Cries Havoc, his awareness fading in and out from one moment to the next, felt that what she’d said was true. It defied rationality, but in some sense, he could choose a different path within the dream and avoid the years of frustration and humiliation that still lay before him, and though it would be a mad, self-destructive thing to do, he felt the temptation nonetheless, perhaps even more keenly than the first time.

“I don’t’ know,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t like learning stories and the ancient secrets. I do. I just don’t know if there’s any point to it, not for me.”

“I can only tell you these things,” Song-of-theWaterfall said. “First, in all our people’s lore, I have never found mention of a Garou to whom the spirits didn’t see fit to give of themselves.

“Second, the Children of Gaia are the teachers and peacemakers of the Garou. When walking the human world, we try to guide that teeming race to a better understanding of the world we share, so they’ll break off their unwitting alliance with corruption.

Among our own kind, we try to allay strife among the tribes and unite our people for the final snuggle against the Wyrm. Such being the case, who needs eloquence more than we? It would be sad indeed if you have it in you to become a great orator, a fountainhead of inspiration for all fortunate enough to hear you, and never develop the capacity.

“Finally, I promise I’ll never, ever stop trying to teach you.”

Cries Havoc snorted. “Even when I’m old, lame and toothless?”

“Even then, it will be a glorious day when the stories finally speak to you.”

He cocked his head. “They do speak to me. I mean, I understand them. They teach me things.”

“Which means you understand them in the same way that any listener does. But I’ve taught you that stories are literally living spirits, the Garou’s partners and benefactors. They suffer us to bind them into graven glyphs, words lovingly composed and committed to memory, pantomimes, games and dances so we may know and disseminate truth. Without them, I suspect, we could not live at all. Certainly we would lack any culture or capacity to defend Gaia against the Wyrm.”

“Yeah,” said the boy, “I remember,”

“But what you don’t truly understand, and what’s difficult to explain, is that one day, you’ll start telling a story and directly perceive it for the spirit it is. The two of you will enter into a communion. He’ll guide you in your telling, infusing your reflection of his essence with power. You’ll fascinate your audience, and you’ll see that the spirits have already gifted you plentifully.”

“I.. .I wish I was as sure as you.”

Song-of-the-Waterfall took hold of his chin and turned his head to look him in the eye. “My friend, nothing is certain in this life. All we can do is choose, strive and hope. What do you choose?”

Perhaps it was once again the thought of his friends, or maybe this time, it was the bond that he and his teacher had shared, but somehow he mustered the strength to commit for a second time to the long work ahead. “I’ll stick to it,” he said. “I’ll keep trying.”

U B Something tapped Cries Havoc on his pointed ear. Startled, he turned his eye, and a second missile, a loop of braided leather, hit him on the nose.

Troutcatcher, Hears-the-Quiet and Wally, who opted to use his human name even among his fellow Garou, laughed.

“It’s called ring-toss,” said Troutcatcher. He had a square head and wide, rounded shoulders, with a flabbiness around his middle that even life in the wild hadn’t yet managed to trim away.

Cries Havoc belatedly understood that the other three teenagers had been trying to throw the leather rings over his horns, as if he were a toy for their amusement. The realization filled him with mingled shame and rage. He sprang to his feet. In Crinos guise, he towered over the other pups, who, homid breed, generally wore the shapes of their births while in camp.

But the other boys weren’t intimidated. He hadn’t really expected them to be, not when they could shift form in an instant and outnumbered him three to one.

“Hey, Freaky, it’s just a game,” said Troutcatcher, all mock innocence. “We thought maybe you’d want to play.”

“Well, I don’t,’’ said Cries Havoc. “Leave me alone.” ‘‘No problem,” said Troutcatcher, “as soon as we get done.” He tossed another ring, trying to snag one of the horns that was now a yard above his head.

Cries Havoc swatted the leather out of the air. “I told you to quit!”

“How are you gonna make us?” Troutcatcher replied. “Run crying to Song-of-the-Waterfall?”

“I bet he’s going to fight all three of us,” said Wally, fair and freckled, his skin perpetually pink and peeling because most of the time he chose not to shield it with fur. Troutcatcher was always the instigator, but once he started harassing Cries Havoc, the other two invariably joined in soon enough. “And get his ass beat. That’s the retarded thing to do, isn’t it, retard?”

Maybe it is, Cries Havoc thought, ht I guess I’m going to try it anyway. What choice do I have?

An answer came. Perhaps it had been trying to emerge from the back of his mind for a long time. I could just turn around and leave, leave the mountains, leave everything Gmou. Why not? Could the human wmld be any worse?

It was hard to remember that he’d actually been glad when their parents brought Troutcatcher, Hearsthe-Quiet and Wally to the camp. The boys had just passed through their First Changes and so revealed their werewolf natures, and he’d thought it would be fun to have septmates his own age. And for a little while, it was. Since the newcomers were ignorant of nearly every aspect of Garou life, he’d taught them all he could, and they’d seemed to appreciate it.

Gradually, though, their attitude changed. Once they underwent a Rue of Passage and gained the Gifts from the spirits, becoming full cliath, the differences became all too clear: after years at the sept, Cries Havoc was still a cub, and they blamed that on his metis nature. The Children of Gaia believed they should accord a werewolf with tainted blood the same rights as any other, but simply by proclaiming such a tradition they likewise underscored the fact that a metis was a mistake, a creature of dubious worth in need of special dispensation.

The newcomers had surely assimilated the sad truth of Cries Havoc’s condition, but he still wasn’t sure why that had prompted them to turn on him so completely. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that prior to the trio’s discovery, the sept hadn’t located any new offspring for a number of years and so was inclined to spoil them. Maybe Troutcatcher, Hears-the-Quiet and Wally carried their own inner stain, one acquired from the Wycm-infected madness of human civilization. Or possibly groups of young males simply had a natural urge to appoint a pariah to bully.

Whatever the reason, in time, the newcomers came to torment Cries Havoc relentlessly, and unfortunately, he didn’t feel he could complain to the elders, not even Songcof-the-Waterfall. Especially coming from the malformed spiritual cripple, a plea for intercession would seem a weak, cowardly, unGarou act. But he didn’t know what else to do, nor how much more abuse he could take.

But I do know what to do, the adult Cries Havoc thought. What I did. The notion takes hold of me, and I just cut loose.

Under the circumstances, it should have been easy, but it wasn’t. The young part of him didn’t know what would happen. It feared looking foolish and giving the other youths further cause for scorn, and indeed, though it was probably crazy, the old part shared that dread. After all, he’d entered these memories because he was a broken vestige of his former self. Why, then, should he assume that he could do what he’d done before?

But ultimately, he knew he had to try. He’d promised John North Wind’s Son he wouldn’t jump off the damn bridge, and giving up would amount to pretty much the same thing.

It was hard, but he stretched his lips into a grin, the one Song-of-the-Waterfall had taught him to wear for reciting a satire or playing a game of insults. His tormentors’ eyes widened. He’d surprised them.

“Maybe I am a retard,” Cries Havoc said. ‘‘I’m definitely a freak. But at least I’m not a fat pig with a fat gut hanging off me, and at least my bowels don’t give me any trouble.”

Troutcatcher scowled. “What are you talking about?”

“You know. Two nights ago, you snatched way more than your share of the duck meat, like usual.

But this time, you paid for it. Everybody heard you trying to shit.”

“You’re crazy,” said Troutcatcher, but Hears-theQuiet and Wally smiled a little despite themselves.

Because everyone had heard.

“It went on for hours,” Cries Havoc said. He let out an imitative groan, and then it was as if he’d opened another pair of eyes to a gorgeous radiance, or lightning had flashed inside his skull and illuminated every shadowy comer of his mind.

This mockery he was about to attempt was a story of a sort, and suddenly he perceived the tale spirit at the heart of it as plainly as he saw the three youths standing before him. The bodiless but vibrant entity was his partner, his brother, ready to guide him in the telling and charge his every word and gesture with a captivating power.

Cries Havoc had always assumed that if the mantle of Galliard ever descended on him at all, it would happen as he related one of the great sagas or laments of his people. He had no idea why a vulgar impersonation of a septmate’s constipation should at long last invest him with his birthright, nor would he ever understand. But he didn’t care. Here at the beginning of his new life, all he wanted to do was express his newly exalted nature. He barely even cared about striking back at Troutcatcher anymore.

But he would, because that was the essence of the story that he and the tale spirit had to tell. He screwed up his face into an expression that, despite the handicap of his lupine features, was both suggestive of Troutcatcher’s human ones and a mask of cramping anguish. Squatting, clenching, shifting back and forth, he commenced a series of anguished moans mixed with desperate, humiliating prayers for relief addressed to any Umbral being that might be listening.

Mesmerized by this first profligate expression of Cries Havoc’s storytelling arts, Troutcatcher’s companions had no choice but to find the demonstration hilarious. Smaller and younger-looking than his friends, a KA-BAR knife clipped to his belt, Hears-the-Quiet laughed so hard that tears streaked his grubby face.

Troutcatcher wasn’t amused, but the magic in the storyteller’s voice and gestures froze him in place, while more of the pack wandered up to watch the performance. Cries Havoc finished with the subject of obstructed intestines and moved on to the shrieking, pissing terror the stocky boy had experienced the first time he found himself in proximity to a grizzly.

Finally Troutcatcher shook off his paralysis. He shifted to wolfinan form, snarled and lunged, but Cries Havoc in his moment of glory was invincible. He knocked his attacker cold with a single, almost casual sweep of his arm.

The horned werewolf stared at Hears-the-Quiet and Wally until they dropped their eyes, showing submission and silently giving a pledge to tease him no more. Then he went to find Song-of-the-Waterfall and tell her of his transformation. Full to bursting with his long-awaited role, feeling as if he were discovering and declaiming each story and verse for the first time, he kept on reciting as he marched through the camp.

So potent was the telling that everyone who’d listened to his ridicule of Troutcatcher trailed along behind him, and other Garou hurried out of the lodges.

He was finally ready for his Rite of Passage. Finally able to be a full, adult Garou.

Clad in wolf form, with only his horns to mark him as anything more, Cries Havoc stalked along the narrow ledge and drank in the night. This far from human habitation, the stars shone brightly, although Garou tradition maintained that before the human invention of electricity, they had blazed more brilliantly still, even in the remotest reaches of the wild. That, the storyteller supposed, was a glory he’d never see.

Still, the night was more than lovely enough to satisfy a Child of the End Time. Miles to the south, coyotes ripped, making their music. The breeze was cool and bracing and carried the appetizing scent of bighorn sheep. Had Cries Havoc not just come from a sumptuous feast, he might have gone hunting them, but with a full belly, it was more pleasant simply to laze about the heights and admire the view across the mountains.

Then he caught a different scent, and it stopped being pleasant at all.

His sept had invited three others from across the Rockies to a moot, a weeklong council and celebration. Like the rest of the Galliards, Cries Havoc had provided entertainment. It was his first time offering a story to strangers, and he was nervous, but the telling went splendidly.

Afterwards he was too excited to sleep and too preoccupied with his success to pay much heed to the rest of the festivities. He’d drifted away from camp to savor his triumph and clear his head.

And now he smelled the foul reek of Wyrmspawn. Unless he was mistaken, of many Wyrm-spawn.

He peered down over the drop-off. His eyes widened in shock. A column, a veritable army of Wyrm-spawn, was skulking along at the base of the mountain, marching on the moot with a silence that could be the product only of some rite or Gift of the Wyrm. He didn’t have the skill or the experience to tell which abomination was a fomor, a Black Spiral Dancer or a materialized Bane, but he was sure there were plenty of all three.

To say the least, the Garou gathering was unprepared to receive them. Some of the werewolves were drowsing from a surfeit of food and drink. Others were busy singing, dancing, playing games, courting or deliberating. No one expected to fight a battle tonight.

Cries Havoc had to warn them. He drew a deep breath, then hesitated.

If he revealed his presence, he would have to try to get down from his perch and away, because the enemy could scarcely fail to catch him if he stayed put. But unfortunately, the descent was difficult, dangerous even for a werewolf if he tried to take it quickly. He would have to try, however, because for much of its height, the mountain offered only a couple trails. Everywhere else was impassable. Which meant the twisted creatures would have a good chance of intercepting him even if he descended slowly, and a sure thing if he took his time.

The lorekeeper thought, The a m p has sentries.

They’ll give the akrt.

Yes, but they’d be giving it minutes before the abominations attacked. If he dared, Cries Havoc could warn everyone an hour in advance, and the extra time could make all the difference.

He forced himself to throw back his head and howled out a shappitched warning to the entire sept.

The Wyrm-spawn heard and recognized the call for what it was. Some of them started up the scree at the foot of the mountain.

Knowing he was racing for his life, Cries Havoc spun and dashed back along the precarious shelf. Soil crumbled beneath his paws, and the grit fell over the edge. *** Cries Havoc drank another plastic cup of water. It almost tasted like a different substance with all the chemicals the humans put in it, but he knew that wasn’t the reason why, a minute Iater, his mouth was dry again. ?“Nrvous?“ asked Song-of-the-Waterfall, who had a drearier name in this world of highways and highrises. The paper oval stuck to her jacket lapel proclaimed it.

“Yes,” he said, resisting an urge to tug his necktie looser. “Maybe I’m not ready. Maybe you should handle this.”

A plump, frazzled-looking member of the League of Women Voters floundered through the curtain, perhaps to make sure the debaters hadn’t ducked out, as Cries Havoc rather wished he could. She saw the two werewolves in Homid guise and the Wal-Mart spokesman, smiled, and said, “We’re almost ready.”

Then she flailed back through the layers of heavy, hanging cloth.

“Relax,” Songof-the-Waterfall murmured, her voice pitched low enough that no dull-eared human would overhear. “You’ll be fine. You’re a storyteller and this is just another audience. If anything, they’ll be less rancorous than the sept.”

“That won’t matter if my opponent completely discredits me. What if the business people figured out I’m not a real biology professor?”

“They have no reason to doubt you, and even if they checked, Malcolm built you a paper life that will stand up to almost any scrutiny. They fabricated everything from your birth certificate to your last credit-card purchase.”

Malcolm was Kinfolk, a human relation of the Children of Gaia. The change had never come over him, or any of his cousins that generation, but he made his own contribution to the struggle to save the world.

Dealing with the bureaucracy of human life was his specialty; the sept had realized long ago that when dealing with humans, few words were as terrifying as “tax attorney.”

“If you say so,” Cries Havoc said.

“Brighten up! You can do this. You were born to it, and it may be the most important thing any Garou can do to oppose the Wyrm. Listen, Mr. Caulder is announcing you.”

The younger werewolf turned, and his horned shadow glided along the curtain. He froze, abruptly, crazily certain that if he stepped through, all the people in the rows of tightly packed, weirdly identical seats would see the deformity, too.

He realized it was nonsense. Hears-the-Quiet, who’d matured into a Theurge to be reckoned with, had called on a moth spirit to veil the horns from human sight.

Or had he? He loved to play pranks on Cries Havoc, didn’t he? What if he’d arranged for the mask to fall at the worst possible moment?

The storyteller shook his head. He was just apprehensive about addressing his first human audience, about all the sept depending on his eloquence, and it was making him fret over nonexistent concerns. He’d mended his quarrel with Hears-the-Quiet long ago, and even if he hadn’t, his septmate wouldn’t dare sabotage a mission of genuine importance. The evening would go all right. Cries Havoc remembered it going all right.

The moderator finished listing the storyteller’s bogus credentials. The corporate spokesman, who smelled of coffee and whose chestnut hair looked like a single sculpted piece of leather, gave the metis a surprisingly friendly smile. Then the two of them walked out onto the stage of the high school auditorium, where they would argue the wisdom of cutting down a stand of ancient trees to erect something called a warehouse store. *** “It’s an honor to be chosen,” said Song-of-the- “I know.” Cries Havoc didn’t sound convinced.

“It is. It means the pack elders think you’re the most sensible of all our youths, the one most likely to reflect credit on us.”

“I appreciate it. I just wonder what they think about metis at the Sept of the Dawn.” And if 1’11 ever see you again, OT anyone else from our sept.

Waterfall.

“Dawntreader’s people are Children of Gaia no less than we. They will treat you like one of their own.”

“I guess, but I’ve barely been outside of Colorado.

This is the Ukraine we’re talking about.”

She sighed. “I truly believe this plan of fostering the young between septs and even tribes is important.

It will unite us all to stand against the Wyrm. But no one will force you to go if you can’t stand the thought of it.”

She’d offered a reprieve, and he wanted to take it. The young half of him feared the future. The old half knew that at times, life would be hard at the Sept of the Dawn, and harder still when he moved on to the Sept of the Anvil-Klaiven and had to fight for an honorable place among the harsh Get of Fenris.

He did his best to swallow his reluctance. “No, it’s all right. I’ll go. Maybe I’ll pick up some new stories.” *** And so it went. Cries Havoc relived one incident after the next. Most involved a choice he’d made, and no matter how vehemently he insisted to himself that it would be madness to deviate from the path he’d walked before, still, every fear, doubt and pain whispered to him, enticing him to take an easier way.

Somehow he resisted.

Hunkered in its tree, talons clutching the limb beneath it and tail wrapped around another, the vulture-thing watched its victim’s life replaying. The highlights, anyway.

The winged Bane was glad the dream was proceeding so rapidly. In another minute or two, the parade of memories would reach its conclusion and then presumably restore Cries Havoc to the same frame of reference as his nemesis. At that moment, it wouldn’t matter if the bard had healed or not, because the spirit would strike him down immediately.

Or so the Bane thought, until it heard rustling in the foliage and the she-wolf Storm-Eye’s blunt, commanding voice. Startled, the vulture-thing wrenched itself around on its perch to see how the rest of the Silver River Pack had crept so close without it noticing.

Then the Bane felt a pang of annoyance at its own confusion. Storm-Eye and the others hadn’t actually entered the wood. Instead, commencing a new phase, Cries Havoc’s dream had created phantoms in their images.

The shadow show had cast up another apparition as well. When the vulture saw it, it discerned exactly what was about to transpire. The realization inspired a clever notion, a ploy to help the stalker take its prey by complete surprise.

The last choice was the most difficult of all.

Knowing what was coming, Cries Havoc could run away from it. Or he could stand and endure indescribable agony.

The Silver River Pack had journeyed deep into the Wyrm’s territory when the Child of Gaia caught sight of a strange sort of Bane. It had no real body connecting its two black-feathered wings, just a pair of fearsome jaws, with long fangs that made them resemble a giant staple-remover, clawed raptor feet and a lashing whip of a tail. Though Cries Havoc had never encountered such an abomination before, he knew a little about its breed from his studies. He started to share the information with his comrades.

Then suddenly, somehow, the abomination was right on top of him. It caught the werewolf in its fangs and savaged him. He could feel the spikelike teeth tearing away pieces of his flesh and soul. The pain was unbearable, and he blacked out. When he came to, the Bane was diving for a second attack.

Cries Havoc had resolved to live the dream as he had lived his life, to accept every adversity he had known before. He stood still and waited for the Lore Bane-he knew its name again-to seize him.

Then he noticed that, even though they certainly hadn’t deserted him the first time around, his packmates had disappeared. The landscape no longer looked like a blighted Serbian city, but rather the Umbral wood where his visions had commenced.

Moreover, a newly recovered memory told him that during their first encounter, the vulture-thing had flown at him only once.

This, then, was no longer a dream. It was really happening, and the spirit was nearly upon him.

Cries Havoc frantically flung himself down and to the side. The talons barely missed him. The flexible bludgeon of a tail clipped him, but not squarely enough to do much damage.

The Lore Bane hurtled past and soared upward, no doubt gaining altitude for another pass. Meanwhile, Cries Havoc took stock of himself. Was he healed?

He couldn’t tell. Before, he had been empty. Now, he was full but felt an ambiguity, as if his ordeal might not have stuffed all his spiritual bones and viscera back in the right places. Certainly his Gifts still seemed out of reach. He snarled in frustration.

The vulture-thing plunged down at him, this time with a cunning zigzag in its trajectory that made its prey dodge in the wrong direction. Cries Havoc corrected, but not quickly enough, for now that he’d returned to conventional reality, his injuries from the previous battles slowed him. A talon opened a gash in his shoulder. He lashed out with a riposte, which didn’t land. The abomination climbed.

Cries Havoc realized that if he couldn’t employ the full range of his Garou abilities, he was unquestionably going to die. He thought of calling to his packmates for succor, but his instincts forbade it.

For good or ill, this was his fight.

He did use his voice, though, in one last attempt to unlock his powers. He tried to tell the story that John North Wind’s Son had shared atop the bridge.

“In the sweet morning of the world, when Luna’s face was as clear as a sheet of freshly fallen snow, and malice, rare as a fish in a desert.. .”

The vulture-thing dived. Somehow Cries Havoc evaded without the effort throwing off his tone or rhythm.

“Bright of eye, sharp of tooth and fleet of foot, Laughs-at -Pines-Cones walked.. . ”

And the Child’s powers roared up inside him like a geyser. His bardic talents. Gifts from spirits gained during his years in the Rockies and in the Ukraine.

The rage, a fire to burn soreness and fatigue away.

Everything was there.

Certainly his passions were. In other circumstances, he would likely have collapsed weeping with joy at his restoration. But he had a Lore Bane to kill. Fortunately, that too would bring him pleasure.

The Lore Bane dived. Exalted by a fury that, paradoxically, did nothing to diminish his clarity of thought, Cries Havoc filled his lungs and shouted.

His bellow seemed percussive as a thunderclap and ended with a sharp snarl. I um your end, the call said to the Lore Bane in a way no human speech could.

The vulture-thing lurched and flailed its wings spastically. It looked like it would fall out of the air, and the storyteller grinned. Then his foe snapped its black-feathered appendages, regained the proper attitude for controlled flight and hurtled at him.

The ploy caught Cries Havoc by surprise, but the rage made him strong and quick as he had ever been in his life, and he still managed to spin out of the Lore Bane’s path, meanwhile swinging his arm in a horizontal arc. His hand slammed into the abomination’s tail, and his claws plunged into its rubbery flesh.

He tried to hold on, but with a frantic jerk of the member, the Lore Bane pulled free and fell on the ground before him. He lunged, and the Wyrm-spawn pivoted. One of its wings slapped him in the face.

Though it didn’t injure him, it startled and balked him for the instant the creature needed to heave itself back into the air.

Drops of steaming black ichor fell from the punctured tail. Cries Havoc laughed, partially to goad the Bane into doing something stupid but with honest pleasure as well.

Not as easy, is it, he thought, when I’mfuUr myself, and you haven’t &.en me by surprise.

He beckoned to his adversary, then spread his arms wide, exposing his torso in invitation. More important, he uttered a series of yips and yelps that, even if a listener were ignorant of the Garou tongue, conveyed a scathing, maddening derision.

The Lore Bane dived. If Cries Havoc had succeeded in driving it crazy with anger, it should be coming in hard and straight, without any tricks or deceptive maneuvering. The werewolf stood in place until the spirit was almost upon him. At the last possible moment, he sidestepped and grabbed one of the wings.

The Wyrm-spawn’s momentum nearly yanked him over, but throwing his weight against it, he managed to keep his feet. This time, the Core Bane crashed down hard.

Cries Havoc tore and twisted the spirit’s pinion.

He hoped that if he disabled it and kept the Bane on the ground, he could finish it.

Feathers flew, flesh tore and dark, scalding ichor splashed. He was sure the bones in the wing were starting to give way. Then the tip of the Lore Bane’s tail lashed at his knee.

He sensed the attack corning and jerked his leg back out of harm’s way. The frantic evasion must have loosened his grip, however, because the Lore Bane wrenched free, leaving handfuls of its meat and gore behind.

Cries Havoc dropped them and grabbed for a new hold. The tail whipped at him, this time cracking him painfully across the knuckles of his right hand. Wings beating, the Bane hopped around and bit at him.

The Galliard twisted aside and seemingly escaped grievous injury. The point of one of the abomination’s lower fangs merely grazed his thigh. He struck, clawed away a gob of flesh at the top of the Lore Bane’s mouth and started to follow up.

Pain broke through his energizing rage and locked up his muscles. The fang had barely cut him, but it was a fresh wound to his spirit as well as his body, and it hurt! Shadow drowned the wood as he started to pass out, the same as he had the first time. He roared, seeking the fury once more, and it surged up and masked the agony.

Believing him incapacitated, the Lore Bane had spread its jaws wide to gulp him in. He deterred it with a slash of his claws, inflicting another wound above the mouth. Alas, he hadn’t quite recovered his balance from the spasm, and before he could strike another blow, the Wyrm-spawn took to the air with a frantic flailing.

Cries Havoc was a little disappointed that it could still fly, albeit now in a floundering, lurching, unbalanced kind of way. Hoping it wouldn’t use its wings to flee the battle, he resumed taunting it.

Please come back doewr. 1 have m e tricks to show you.

Somewhere among the trees, a Garou roared. The sound was sudden and preternaturally frightening.

Startled, Julia nearly dropped her handheld computer.

“Was that Cries Havoc?” asked North Wind’s Son.

“The cry had power in it,” the English werewolf said. “It may well have been the voice of a Galliard.”

“Does that mean he’s okay?” asked Big Sis, her fang dagger, still spattered brown with dried gore, lying beside her on the grass.

Be quiet, Storm-Eye yipped in wolf-tongue. Keep listening.

When they did, they heard thumping, lashing and scraping noises that sounded like a duel or battle. The breeze carried them the scent of fresh werewolf blood and a hot stink that might be the life essence of a Bane. An abrasive yetping commenced.

“Cries Havoc’s in a fight.” John North Wind’s Son’s icicle pendant glinted in the Umbral light as he assumed his towering Crinos form. “DO we go help him ?”

Julia closed her computer case. “He said he needed to complete his cure unassisted-”

“Who cares what he said?” snapped Big Sis. “He’s like, brain damaged, right? That’s why we’re here.”

“Let me finish!” Julia took a moment to suppress a sudden urge to lash out at the infuriating Bone Gnawer. “1 was attempting to say that while he wanted to be alone, this doesn’t feel like a healing rite or a vision quest to me. I sense a genuine combat. I think we shuld find him.”

“Then we will,” said Storm-Eye, now using the Garou tongue. “Carlita, how is your leg?“ “Much better.” Big Sis, who had stayed in wolfwoman form, pointed down at her leg, which had a nasty scar but seemed otherwise to be healed. Gaia’s gift of healing was a great one indeed. “Think this’ll score me a special place in Cries-for-Mama’s stories?”

Storm-Eye didn’t bother answering. “Come, then.”

From its vantage point flying above the trees, the Lore Bane abruptly spotted the other four werewolves loping through the wood. This was it, then. The creature knew it couldn’t fight them all. If it couldn’t kill Cries Havoc within the next minute or so, it would never kill him at all.

Unfortunately, at the moment, the storyteller was winning the fight. The vulture-thing was grievously wounded. Its strength was failing, and it was grueling labor simply to stay aloft. The mangled wing throbbed with every beat. And here in this Umbral subrealm, this werewolf could actually destroy it outright rather than simply shattering a physical shell.

Even more debilitating than the pain was the sound of Cries Havoc’s voice. The taunting jabbed inside the spirit’s mind and made it too angry to think.

It struggled to ignore the yelping. It had to come up with a plan quickly, a way to slaughter the Child of Gaia even at the cost of its own existence. It feared its lord too profoundly to contemplate any other course, for surely Jo’cllath‘mattric could find and punish it anywhere in any world, in any condition of life or death.

No matter how it tried, the Lore Bane could think only of one stratagem. It was less than delighted with the idea, because it would further dilute its already ebbing might, and because it had only a remote chance of success. It was tremendously difficult to damage a werewolf‘s spirit with a ghostly tendril when the beastman was already on his guard. Yet the Lore Bane had to try something, and so it frayed the outer surfaces CA@r %t?fl&-S/Q0 of its body into long, invisible, insubstantial threads.

Then it dived at its foe.

As before, Cries Havoc didn’t shift into any sort of obvious fighting stance. He just stood casually, looking incapable of protecting himself against a swift attack.

The Lore Bane had learned just how misleading that appearance was. This time, however, it reckoned it had outsmarted the Garou. No matter what trick Cries Havoc had in mind, he couldn’t hurt the Wyrm spirit if it didn’t swoop down low enough for him to reach, and it had no intention of doing so. Not yet.

The winged Bane started to arrange its spectral tentacles for a sweep along the ground. Cries Havoc left off yipping, swung his arm back, then lashed it forward.

It seemed a pointless action until the Lore Bane noticed the stone hurtling through the air, and then it was astounded. The werewolf‘s hands had been empty. The vulture-thing had perceived the fact clearly. Where, then, had the rock come from? Damn the nature spirits who taught these beastmen their Gifts!

The Lore Bane tried to dodge, but it had spotted the missile too late. Impelled by a Garou’s strength, the stone hit harder than the spirit would have believed possible. The shock paralyzed it, and it plummeted.

On the way down, however, the Bane had one piece of extraordinary luck. It felt the end of one of its flailing, intangible arms tear into Cries Havoc’s soul like a fishhook.

Then the Lore Bane crashed into the ground. The universe seemed to skip somehow, and it realized it had passed out and roused. Its body was crumpled and shattered. It would never fly again nor, most likely, survive the next few minutes.

Casting about with its eyeless senses, it discerned Cries Havoc lying motionless save for the rise and fall of his chest. The Bane had to reach him before his packmates arrived on the scene.

Every move a torture, the Lore Bane dragged itself across the ground to its prey. It clambered on top of him, pinning his limbs with its broken legs and tail.

They were still good for that much, anyway. Then it opened its jaws to plunge its fangs into his head, The werewolfs eyes flew open. Just a second too late, the Wyrm spirit gloated. You’re helpless now.

Cries Havoc dipped his head and brought it up.

The Lore Bane’s jaws snapped shut over his head, but caught on his hard ram horns. Unable, or unwilling, to release its surprisingly hard-shelled prey, the Bane was momentarily paralyzed.

Cries Havoc plunged his clawed hand into the thing with all his might.

Cries Havoc sensed that he had struck a mortal blow, but he wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

The Lore Bane exploded.

He flinched from the blast, but nothing struck him. Nothing tangible, anyway. At the moment of dissolution, the abomination’s substance changed.

One portion, a foulness, simply dissolved. The rest turned into tale spirits.

Exulting, the ghostly entities swooped and darted about. Several flashed into Cries Havoc’s head. His own stories and memories returned to him in their entirety, while new tales revealed themselves in a silent, ecstatic cacophony. Many, their living embodiments proclaimed, had not been heard for generations.

Then it was over. The spirits vanished from his ken until such time as he would tell their stories.

The revelations left him feeling blissfully dazed.

He shook his head and looked around.

His packmates were standing just a few yards away.

They looked drunk, too. He realized there’d been too many tale spirits flying around for anyone, even a Galliard, to encounter all at once. The extra ones had struck sparks in the minds of his friends.

“Mother Eldridge and the rest of ’em back in Tampa ain’t ever gonna believe some of these stories!”

Grinning wildly, Carlita walked toward Cries Havoc.

“You gonna make me look like prime alpha material back home, umigo.”

Walking just behind the Bone Gnawer, Julia sighed. “Thank goodness you grasp the greater implications.”

Big Sis blinked. “Was that a slam?”

Storm-Eye said, “Cries Havoc. You have recovered yourself?”

“Yes,” the storyteller said, “thanks to my pack.

Laughs-at-Pine-Cones had the river, the earth and the forest to heal him, and I had you.”

“You’re welcome,” said North Wind’s Son. “Now, what just happened? Was that the same Bane that tore you up in Serbia?“ “Yes. It followed us all this way, apparently to make sure I’d never get better.”

The Wendigo winced. “I’m supposed to be the Ahroun, the warrior, the sentry, and I never spotted it.” ‘‘I’m the Theurge,” said Julia, “the expert on spirits, and I never did either. It was attacking us in some subtle way, wasn’t it, stealing one bit of memory at a time? That’s why our minds kept freezing and glitching.”

Cries Havoc nodded. “I wasn’t contagious after all.”

“No one ever thought you were,” said Storm-Eye.

“What happened when the Bane died? My stolen memories came back to me, but I have new things in my head as well, legends no Galliard ever taught me.”

“The vulture-thing was a Lore Bane.” The fresh slice in Cries Havoc’s shoulder gave him a twinge, and he shrugged the pain away. “I’d heard of them, heard they consumed stories somehow, but I didn’t know just how literally true it was. I still don’t entirely understand how it works, but the abomination had tale spirits trapped inside it. Maybe it was leeching strength from them. When I killed it, I set them free, and they shared themselves with us.”

John North Wind‘s Son narrowed his eyes. “We Garou have lost a lot of secrets, things we need to beat the Wyrm. And there are more Lore Banes.”

“With who knows what information pent up inside them,” Julia said. “It may be possible to recover every piece of data, every weapon we’ve forgotten.”

“This is big,” said Big Sis.

Julia smiled. “To say the least.” ‘Then is this it?” Big Sis asked. “The reason Antonine said there had to be a third pack, the white light led us into the mountains, and the old caern was waiting for us?Have we done what we’re supposed to do? After we tell the other Garou what we found out, can we kick back?”

Storm-Eye smiled one of her infrequent smiles.

“The war is not over, and my instinct tells me the Silver River Pack has only begun its work.”

Cries Havoc looked as his companions and felt all the love he had been unable to find on his long trek toward redemption. “That’s all right with me.”

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White Wolf Publishing 735 Park North Boulevard, Suite 128 Clarkston, GA 30021 -.white-wolf.com/fiction A very special thanks to Eric Griffin, who provided not only much guidance and encouragement, but also the idea for the finale. Thanks also to Ethan Skemp, John H. Steele, Carl Bowen and, of course, Stewart Wieck, for the opportunity to once more put forth my words before an unwary public.