It was later that day that I met Giles Scott for the first time. I was shown by Marcos into a small office. It was not Giles's usual office, but a more cheerful one, apparently for guests, and I was the only one there for several minutes. There was a wooden desk in front of a large window, and also some chairs, and two walls were lined with books, some very old, but not so old as the books that lined his main office. In one corner of the room was a large standing globe; but the globe was not of the earth but of the moon. The wall that had neither books nor window was lined with cabinets and tables of matching mahogany, mostly filled with stones and curious knick-knacks from all over the world.
I bent down and looked at one of the stones on the table nearest to me. It was a pinkish stone, as big as large hen's egg. I say 'pinkish', but in fact it seemed to shift somewhat in hue depending on how exactly you looked at it.
"Opal," a quiet voice right next to me suddenly said, causing me to jump. "'It seems to blush and turn pale as if it had a soul.'"
It was Giles himself, of course, his dark eyes looking at me from his feverishly pale face with a disconcerting stare. His pallor somehow made both his slightly curly hair and his eyes seem darker than any hair and eyes should be. He wore a custom-tailored suit with a silver-striped tie and a black vest.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't hear you come in."
He seemed amused. "People rarely do. Won't you have a seat?"
As I sat down in the chair he indicated, he said, "Would you like something to drink?"
"No, thank you," I said. "I don't drink."
"I rarely drink myself," he said, sitting in the chair across the desk from me. "In general, I only drink to calm myself when I am in a state of excitement; and things excite me very rarely. Do you smoke?" He pulled a cigar case out of a drawer.
"No, sorry."
"No apology needed. I only keep them around for others, since I am not a smoker myself. No drinking, no smoking, no gambling." He smiled a smile that was marvellously ambiguous between pleasantness and sarcasm. "I am a man of very few vices."
He leaned back in his chair and regarded me for a moment with one of his unsettling gazes. Then he said, "You are a journalist?"
I hesitated. "In the strict sense, no. I am a historian."
"A much more respectable trade. In what do you specialize?"
"Superstitious practices in Greater Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."
"That must be a very large field of study."
I do not know what I had expected him to say, but it was not that. "Well, yes," I replied lamely.
"But I take it that it is not in your role as a historian that you are here today?"
I hesitated again. "Well, yes and no."
"The envelope suggested you had information on the recent murder of that girl out in the park."
"I do."
He waited patiently. At least, I suppose it was patience; his eyes seemed to bore into me.
"Perhaps I had better begin at the beginning," I felt myself blurt out.
"That is often the best way to begin," Giles agreed, with a slow nod of the head that managed again to achieve that remarkable borderline between affability and sarcasm.
"I first met Joanne in college; she was a journalism student and I, of course, was a history student. We became fast friends, and throughout our undergraduate years we were largely inseparable. After college, however, we went separate ways. We did keep in touch, with occasional correspondence, and we saw each other about once every other year, but that's about it.
"A few years back, however, Joanne came to me saying that she had uncovered something extraordinary, but that it needed to be investigated carefully before she did anything with it. She couldn't trust it with anyone else, she said, so she had come to me. Also, it had some relationship to my field of study. She had discovered, she said, a secret Wolf-cult with roots going back to medieval Germany. The members of this cult thought of themselves as werewolves." I paused here and waited for him to respond, but he said nothing, simply looking at me with the same patient but disconcerting look.
"How she came across it originally, I do not know. I also didn't make much of it at the time. But what she had was interesting from a historian's perspective: symbols, old names, fragments of stories. I promised to look into them and get back to her. And I did. Some of them I couldn't trace, some of them I could. But it was always very sketchy. I sent what I could find to her, and largely set it aside, except that part of me kept a look-out for anything in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Germany that might indicate an interest in wolves. Whenever I did, I would mark it in case she would happen to need it, and when I had a fair stack of such things, I sent them to her. It didn't happen often.
"Then a little over a year ago she came to me in great agitation, saying she had stumbled on something even larger than she had thought. She brought me copies of everything she had gathered, which by this point was a quite considerable stack. She also had video footage that was somewhat startling: people vanishing suddenly into shadows, and the like. I didn't know what to make of it, but she said she did: there was indeed a cult of the Wolf, and its members did not merely think they were werewolves, but actually were."
I stopped and reflected. "If it had been anyone else," I said, "I would have laughed at it. But Joanne was no flighty individual, nor was she gullible. She had sense. I promised at least that I would look over what she had brought me and do some research on my own. She said that she had some leads that needed to be followed, and that she would be incommunicando for some time. I got two small packages from her after that, with additional materials; they had no return address, and the postmark was different in each case. That was all until I read the news report about her death, mauled by an animal 'while camping alone in the park'. In the meantime, though, I kept my promise. I went through everything she had gathered and did further research on my own. And I became convinced that she was right, at least in general. There were werewolves among them. And chief among them was Aegidius, sometimes Gide, sometimes Egidio, sometimes Gilles, sometimes Giles, called the Scot. You are he. But more than this, the day after she died I received a last package from her, with a full letter. I know about Eric, I know it all."
He smiled. "Oh, not all, I think. But you are right, I am Aegidius, and master of the Wolves."
"You admit it all?"
"Of course. Why wouldn't I? Seeing the mind of a mere human is not as easy for me as seeing the mind of a Wolf; it is full of shadows, not lit by the moon. But I have moonlight enough in me for the both of us. And it is enough for me to see that nothing I could say could convince you otherwise, and that you know enough that there is no use pretending. But still I would pretend, and still I would deny, were it not for one thing: you knew quite well that coming here would be the death of you. I would inevitably find out eventually, but you would have had more time; instead you willingly ran toward the end. Why was that?"
"I came here to ask a favor from you."
He smiled. It was cold, having nothing of the affability of his previous smile, but it still was sarcastic. "The prey asking the predator for a promise? And what would this be?"
"That you not kill me before you give Joanne the justice she deserves. That Eric, or whoever it was that killed her, die in turn."
His eyes locked mine, and he rose something. He still was somewhat boyish in appearance, and still sickly-pale, but somehow he was also a thing of majesty and terror. I had a sense of vertigo. It seemed as if I saw spread before me an extraordinarily vast panorama of centuries of night, filled with wars and destruction; with plagues and famines; with great Gothic churches, and monks in choir, and friars preaching crusade; with uprisings and revolts and revolutions; with great sailing ships and conquistador armies; with the rising and falling of civilizations. It all seemed too real, too sharp, too clear; for it was lit with the light of a vast and unwaning moon. He stepped around the desk and looked down at me as I, unable to break the gaze, began to tremble, knowing that this was an angel of death come for me.
But after holding me gaze for so long it seemed unbearable, he looked away, gazing as if at something very far off. "Non potest," he said softly to someone or something that was not me. "Non potest ab homine tolli quod sit rationalis, non totaliter; etiam in damnatis manet conscientia."
He looked down at me again; but his gaze, while as unsettling as ever, was no longer terrible. "You do not know," he said. "You do not know what it is to bear this quasi-morbus animorum, this second languor of nature. The moon-wolf in me recognizes you as a threat, and his strength is mingled with the madness of the moon. I cannot outlast him, and no matter how much I tried to prevent it, there would one day come a day in which my strength would give out, and you would die. But I promise you this: you will not die before I have killed the Wolf who killed Joanne." He looked away again. "Go now, before I waver in the decision."
And so I walked out. As I did, Seneca passed me, and he found Giles in a contemplative pose, looking down on the globe of the moon. "I was expecting for the interview, Sen," Giles said abstractedly, reaching out his hand to set the globe spinning.
"I apologize," said Seneca. "But it is Elsbietka. She has something important to tell you. She is in your study."
Giles nodded and Seneca left.
It was about ten minutes later when Giles entered his study to find Seneca sitting beside an agitated Elsbietka. She was holding an already opened envelope.
"Well," said Giles, "What is it?"
She said nothing, merely handing him the envelope. He pulled out a piece of paper and looked at it briefly. "This is written in blood," he said.
"Yes," Elsbietka said.
"And there is moonlight in it. One of yours?"
She nodded. "An acquaintance in Krasnoyarsk."
"The acquaintance in Krasnoyarsk?"
She nodded again. He turned back to the letter.
"'As one Scion of Lykaios to another, I felt obliged to inform you that something of yours was unfortunately destroyed. Ivan.'"
"You do know what this means?" said Seneca. "If he can convince others that he is a Scion of Lykaios -- well, you know what the legends say about the Scions of Lykaios."
Giles cast a sarcastic glance at him. "Yes, I know what the legends say; I made up half of them."
"Could it be true?"
"That he is a Scion of Lykaios?" Giles looked thoughtful. "It is impossible to rule out. Vsesalevich and I hunted down all the ones that were known, but Lykaios was ancient. How remarkable it would be to find out after all this time that I am still not the only one! But it is unlikely."
"Regardless, if he can get enough people to believe him -- and who in the age of Aegidius would dare claim it if he did not think he could get people to believe it?--it will be a problem."
"In fact," said Giles, handing the paper and envelope back to Elsbietka, "it changes nothing essential. But it does give some questions to ask." He looked at them both a moment, then said, "Elsbietka, please do me the honor of staying the night here" -- despite the 'please' it was not a request -- and we will talk more over breakfast tomorrow. In the meantime, I think I will take a walk alone in the garden."
