But even Arkady had to admit that such an

But even Arkady had to admit that such an

**of Note**

exact figure was surely the result of a simple poetic conceit, rather than anyone bothering to count the interminable array of lights. He also noted that 19,683 was, not coincidentally, three (the number of the Wyrm) raised to a power of nine (the number of the Black Spiral Labyrinth).

And, in the perfect hindsight of an adult perspective on cherished things from childhood, the tale of Iron Peter really amounted to little more than a ghost story with a questionable moral tacked on.

No, everything about this place was wrong.

Even the most disreputable of accounts agreed that the Temple Obscura was a place covered with intricate patterns and designs-story glyphs captured by the Black Spiral Dancers during their raids upon the Garou’s Silver Record Lodges. But Arkady had not seen so much as a single hastily scrawled pictogram.

If the truth were known, it looked as if someone (or -ones) had gone to great pains to scrub the floor to a featureless shine. So much so that Arkady had to conclude that over the ages, several layers of the granite must have been worn away with the effort. It was as if someone had embarked on a systematic effort to eradicate all hint of history or personality from the vast chamber.

Arkady had been traveling for some time before it occurred to him that he really ought to have a better plan of attack in mind. The problem was that his options were miserably limited. There were really only three significant directions here in the underdarkness. One, backward toward the lake of fire-the only visible landmark in the unbroken gloom of the hall. Two, he could repent of his earlier stubbornness and strike out in the direction Illya had gone. That option, he had to admit, was growing on him. Besides tlie obvious attractions that could be marked off in Illya’s personal favor, this path would also give him a much-needed semblance of progress.

Arkady had a natural disinclination toward retreating that bordered on the pathological. He flatly refused to retrace his steps when there was still any other option open to him-even a hopeless one like plunging headlong into a midst of a few dozen armed enemies. Also, there was a good chance that Illya would be returning to her mistress directly to report their encounter, and that might at least lead him somewhere in the direction of Black Spiral Labyrinth. He could not say so much for his current course.

But this option still stuck in his craw. Perhaps it was the thought of being manipulated by the two women, of being led by the nose. But the only other option was, three: to continue to wander around blindly in the dark.

He considered. If he put the burning lake to his back and kept walking in a straight line, directly away from it, sooner or later he was bound to strike a wall. No matter how vast this hall might prove.

And if there were any other point of ingress or egress, besides the rather precipitous way he had come, he was certain to find it if only he followed the wall long enough.

And so, perhaps only out of sheer stubbornness, that is what he did. It seemed he had been running for hours, if not days, when he at last stumbled upon something besides himself in the unbroken darkness. It was impossible to say for sure that he had stuck to a straight line as he had intended. The light of the oily flames was still behind him, although now it had receded to little more than the pinprick of a single star puncturing the vast canopy of the night sky. Of course, the light still seemed to be directly behind him, he thought angrily. Even if he had meandered drunkenly from his original course. There was simply no other point of reference here.

Once it became obvious that he had already covered a distance far greater than could possibly be contained in a single building, he had shrugged into his lupine form. He could not only travel more quickly this way, he could also maintain the ground-eating lope almost indefinitely without tiring.

So it was that, when at last there was a subtle shift in the darkness ahead, he did not discover it by bumbling face first into it, as surely he would have in his human form. Even at a run, his keen lupine senses picked up on the change, like mounting solidity in the dimness ahead. A thunderhead forming on the horizon, billowing, piling higher upon itself.

Arkady checked his speed, slowing to a cautious walk. He circled wide to one side. Meeting the same resistance, he doubled back to circle around the other way. The looming thunderhead was again there before him. It ran in an unbroken line, straight as a plumb line, as far as he could make out. Here then, Arkady thought, was a wall.

Or at least what passed for one in this place.

It was not a conventional wall; there was nothing solid about it. It was not carved from blocks of polished granite like the floor. Arkady inched closer, sniffed at it and snorted. It was difficult to say just what it was made out of. Arkady shifted back to his Homid form to see if perhaps eyes trained from birth to grasp and interact with manmade artifacts could make any more sense of the barrier.

It was a commonly held misapprehension that the human senses were somehow inferior to those of other animals. Arkady, however, understood that just as there were many things invisible to the human senses that were obvious to those of a wolf, the opposite was true as well. There were some experiences that could be taken in only through the filter of human perceptions.

As Arkady shifted, the wall seemed to shift as well, mirroring his every motion as if it were stalking him. Its new form fell upon it with the suddenness of a steel trap snapping shut. Arkady staggered back away from it, reeling to catch his balance.

The wall no longer appeared as the impenetrable bank of a mounting thunderhead-a hazy line marking the outer boundary beyond which a benign Gaia let her darker aspect peek through.

To his wolf senses, the wall had seemed the farthest outpost of the Mother’s sheltering care.

Outside the face of her incomprehensible, unreasoning fury raged-the realm of howling isolation, madness and loss.

It was not only dangerous to move into the barrier, it was nearly unthinkable that any wolf would choose to do so. Only the sick, the gravely wounded or the broken in spirit would willingly leave the community of the pack for the keening loneliness of the outer darkness.

To his human senses, however, the wall wore a different aspect. It was not a presence at all, but rather an absence. It was as if something that should have been there suddenly was not. The feeling was not a pleasant one-a queasy mixture of disorientation and apprehension. It set to work grating directly upon the nerves.

Arkady shook his head angrily to clear it. The idea was ridiculous, of course. How could he perceive an absence? How could he see something that was not there? And yet somehow, that was exactly what he was experiencing.

The wall toyed with his expectations, frustrating them. It reminded him of coming home late at night, fumbling for keys, only to realize that his front door had been kicked in. Arkady stood there gaping at the blank expanse of wall, dreading what he might find within.

The thing that most disturbed him was the feeling of incompleteness about it all. The wall felt to him like a work in progress, unfinished but moving toward some final form that could only be dimly guessed at from the evidence at hand. It went to work on his frazzled nerves like a story or song repeated over and over again, each time with the single glaring omission of its last line.

The wall was not, he realized, something caught in the midst coming into being, but rather, something in the process of going out of it. It was a truth being systematically expunged. A song being unsung. A story being erased, word by word, from the end to its first beginnings. Once upon a...

Arkady’s mind leapt to the pictures and stories he had seen in the Silver Record Lodges of his people. Myths and memories so potent, so vital, that they could not be rendered in any medium more ephemeral than living rock. Stories carved upon the hearts of mountains.

But here, at some more primal level, deeper even than the roots of mountains, the stories were being unwoven. Taken apart at their most basic building blocks and scattered. Split like atoms with results just as calamitous and irreversible.

This was the Elephant’s Graveyard, he realized with sudden clarity. The place where the oldest of stories-the hoary old tales that made up the history, the cosmology, the religion of ?Jthe Garou-came to die. To lie down and be forgotten.

It was only then that Arkady knew the dark purpose to which this Temple Obscura had been built and consecrated. It was a refutation of all the Garou held dear-the counterpart and utter negation of their cherished Silver Record. This was the hole where the stories bled out of the world.

He could not say how long he stood, staring mesmerized at the play of shadows before his eyes as the last living memories of valiant conquests and cowardly betrayaletales that had defined his people and given meaning to their struggles, their sacrifices-passed from the world.

He was their last mute witness, an audience of one. It was as if the entire course of history was no more than a shadow play staged for his private benefit. He could not break away from it. It held him pinned and wriggling. He barely dared to breath or even blink lest he miss something in that fraction of an instant that could never again be recaptured.

He could feel hot tears on his face. He may have cried aloud. But despite his pleas, there was no pause in the damning procession of image and song. It was not his own life, but the lives of countless others, that flickered one last time before his eyes. And then they were gone. Utterly lost.

He threw back his head and howled and from somewhere in the vast darkness behind him, his cry was answered. Not a howl of defiance, as his had been, at a proud and noble tradition that was rapidly slipping through his grasp. The sound that came back to him from the darkness was a mocking echo. A small broken sob. In the voice of a young girl, lost and without hope of finding her way back to the light.

Arkady knew that voice at once and the shock of it managed to break in upon him, to twist his head away from the wall of the Temple Obscura.

“Sarah,” he bellowed. “Sarah, where are you?”

The small voice fell to a whimper and then was silent. Arkady shifted into lupine form again.

The storm front was there before him again and he edged sideways away from its fury. It could break at any moment and it would not do for him to be caught in the downpour.

His keen ears had little trouble picking up the sound of muffled sobbing and he broke away already at a run. Arkady called out to her again, but this time his voice came out as little more than a series of quick barking yips, the crisp efficient signals of a pack spreading out to find a lost cub.

Some distant, human part of his mind winced at the sound, imagining it would only frighten the girl further.

She was still a long way off, but it was difficult to tell if he was racing on all fours toward the girl’s position or merely toward some point where the echoes of her cries rebounded from one of the walls. Arkady could only hope that he was getting closer rather than farther away from her.

Arkady found himself bounding first one way and then another. At times, the distant prick of light that he imagined was the lake of fire (and not just some ghost image playing across his retina) was at his right; at other times it seemed straight ahead, or even off to the left. With a sinking feeling in his stomach he realized that he had no reason at all to assume that there was only one light source here in the Temple Obscura. The lights he glimpsed might actually be from different sources-torches or cooking fires or reflections of distant daylight streaming in from some crack above. Perhaps the temple was so vast that it encompassed not one, but several burning lakes. He thought again of the legends of the temple being lined with twenty thousand balefire lamps and cursed aloud.

The problem, he thought, with taking a story for your guide was not that stories were hardly ever true. It was in what they left out.