Giles was standing pensively beside the window when Aveline entered the office.
"How are things going with the hunt?" he said without turning.
"Marcos seems to be pleased with it. There are still more than a few to track down, though."
"Make sure he doesn't stretch himself too far and get himself killed."
"Of course."
There was silence a moment. Then Aveline said, "Seneca is waiting for you in the basement. They have not changed."
"Of course not." He finally turned and looked at her. "I will be doing some redistributing in the near future; probably temporary, but perhaps not. I will need you to stay for a while so you can help Seneca." She nodded, and then he said, "Tell Seneca I will be down in a moment." And he turned back to the window.
***
It was a long, dim, and slightly damp corridor with steel doors that had . When Giles entered, Seneca, who was leaning against the wall, said, "They are beginning to get restless."
"Good," said Giles. "I will take Eric first."
"Before you go in, tell me how you did it. The door, I mean."
Giles looked at him a long while, then said, "I argued with the moon until I convinced her that the door was weak and easy to open; and her madness overwhelmed the sanity of the world."
"I have no idea what that means."
"So it seems." And he opened one of the steel doors in the corridor and went in.
Eric was chained down, sitting in a chair in the middle of a room with white walls and nothing else but another chair. When Giles entered, he looked up but then looked away.
Giles smiled a cold and enigmatic smile. "That oother of hem is newliche chaunged into a wolf, and howleth whan he wolde wepe," he said.
"What does that mean?"
"It means you have been ravenous for wealth that is not yours," Giles replied, sitting down in the other chair, still wearing the cold smile. He adjusted his tie slightly, which was striped reddish-gold and the only thing of color in the room. It made him seem even more feverishly pale than usual. "How are you, Eric?"
Eric at first merely looked at him sullenly without, however, quite meeting his eyes. But since Giles continued to gaze at him with that savage and unsettling glance and that cold and enigmatic smile, he squirmed, then said, "You will learn nothing from me."
"You have nothing to teach me, Eric. For every day you have been a Wolf I have been one a decade and more. So you can teach me nothing about being a Wolf. Do you think I could have so easily crushed Jolie's little game of rebellion if I had not known every single move she made? And I have Jolie herself. So you can teach me nothing about that. What do you think you could possibly teach me? About yourself, perhaps. No doubt there are things I do not know there; but I can count on one finger all the things in your life I could possibly need to know, and I know it. I do not need to learn anything from you."
"So are you here just to kill me?"
The smile grew slightly broader. "Is there any reason I should not?"
Eric merely shrugged.
"But, in fact, Eric, no, I am not here just to kill you. You have not shown yourself to be colorful enough to be worthy of my personal attention in that regard. If your death were all I wanted, I would throw you to some minor Wolf for practice."
"I helped Jolie rebel against your out-of-date medieval regime."
There was a twitch at the corner of Giles's mouth. "Yes, I suppose in some weak sense you did," he said carelessly. "But I do not kill people for such things, unless I have to do so. Every Wolf rebels; it is the nature of the beast. To crave power forever is to seek it at least sometimes. Whatever you may think, you have never been a threat to me, and killing you would not be a noticeable example for anyone. Had you been the one who killed Bitka, that would be reason, but we both know that Jolie did that, and daring to devour the heart of a Wolf who was your better ten times over was impudent but not a reason for your death."
"If you are not here to kill me, why are you here?"
Giles leaned forward. "What I said was that I am not here just to kill you. You will be dead before I leave this room. But I hope that you can give me something I want."
Eric turned away in contempt. "If you are going to kill me, I have no reason to give you anything."
Giles shrugged. "We are not at an impasse here," he said coolly and quietly. "I can easily supply reasons for you to give me absolutely anything I want. And I assure you, before I leave you will be glad to do so. There are ways of dying. And then there are other ways of dying. How cooperative you are will determine which I select. And what I am asking of you is not very difficult."
"What do you want?"
The Wolf-King rose. "Let us have a conversation a moment, Eric. Let us go back to the beginning; start over, so to speak. When you first met me, you lied to me. I don't really take offense at that. The daring of it is actually almost admirable; and the Spirit of the Wolf likes a bit of daring. The first time I met Lykaios I shoved a crucifix in his face; it amused him. The lie, we can regard it as an amusing jeu d'esprit. But it is in the way of what I want, because I want a confession."
"You will get nothing out of me," said Eric with a shake of his head.
"Come now, Eric," said Giles. "We have already been through this. I already know everything I need to know. I just want your confession. And not even about everything. I have no interest in whatever shenanigans made Jolie decide to give you the Bite. I never realized it was that bad, but her taste has always been a little off. No, all I want is one simple confession. I want you to say what we both know to be true. That you killed Joanne Sommers."
Eric looked at him with a slightly baffled, slightly wary look, but said nothing.
"I will hear you say it. You had already received the Bite. You lost control of yourself. And you killed her. Say it."
Eric said nothing, and Giles looked down at him with dark gaze and cold smile. Finally Giles said, "Tell me, Eric, do you know what torture is? I mean, I assume that even you know the meaning of the word, but do you know what it is to be tortured?"
"You are going to torture and kill me because you think I killed Joanne."
Something about this made Giles pause, and he sat down, although his smile stayed the same. He steepled his index fingers and touched them to his lips and looked at Eric a while. "You were quite right when you said I was medieval," he said finally. "Although we, of course, called ourselves modern; history is just one long succession of modern ages. Even after all this time something sticks. It was a great age. In some ways you would call it savage or primitive, but we did more with less, and if we did not get as far it is because we did not have ourselves to start with. We built a civilization out of wreckage and ruin, often under terrible conditions. Our failings were endless, but we were really and truly human; nothing like you today, all of you bland and limp souls on the edge of damnation, colorless and afraid to die -- no, that would be more human a characterization than you deserve -- afraid even to think about dying. It is pathetic. How many of you are there, and if it weren't for your sheer numbers, you would accomplish hardly anything; the Age of Distraction, a world of ostriches with their heads in the sand. The progress not of the great-minded but of mediocre bits and pieces. And so self-righteous, and what is the foundation of it all but that you've set the bar so low even you can achieve it? I will be glad to see the era end. Then perhaps I will get Wolves worth my time.
"But something of the old days sticks. When I was young it was thought...less than optimal...to punish someone for something to which he did not confess, at least if the punishmen"t were very severe, like death. It happened. But it was felt to be barbaric. There is always some barbarism in being a Wolf, but unless I am forced to do so, I will not put you to death without your confession. And from there it all follows with perfect rationality. Since I know you killed Joanne, with more certainty than you can imagine, and since I will be putting you to death for it, I must have your confession. It follows from this that I must punish you if you do not confess, and do so until you do confess. Tullius tells us that there are eight major kinds of punishment. Death and retaliation will not do here, for different reasons. Prison, exile, and slavery all would take too long. Indemnity would have no effect, and there is no adequate form of public disgrace that would work. So that leaves, by straightforward inductive elimination, stripes. Ordinarily that means flogging, but a Wolf can be far more creative, especially with another Wolf. Claw after claw after claw, furrows so deep that they would kill an ordinary man. And worse. Unlike you I have known what torment is. And the Wolf in me just aches to communicate it to everyone else, and is leaping at the chance to teach you.
"And there is no use in not confessing. It was clear enough from the circumstances, and I have seen it in your dreams, and it is there on the surface of your mind for any Wolf with the mind to see. But it is your choice."
This was all said in such a calm, cold, matter-of-fact manner that I do not know if anyone could have resisted it. Certainly Eric did not. He wavered a moment and broke down.
"Yes, but it wasn't my fault," he said. "I couldn't stop it." His eyes were pleading for mercy.
"I doubt that is really true," Giles replied, "since after the Bite we are as much the Wolf as the man. But fault is really not at issue. If fault were what mattered, how could I lift a finger? De profundis. In the days of Lykaios I murdered entire villages, men, women, and infants. You will die not because you were at fault but because I promised someone that I would kill the Wolf who killed Joanne Sommers. And you are that Wolf."
"Please," said Eric. "I couldn't help it."
"Shh," said the Wolf-King, standing up and walking around to Eric's side. He bent low and whispered in his ear. "You cannot avoid it. But because you have confessed, I give you what mercy my promise allows. You will not even know the moment."
And he pressed his palm against Eric's forehead.
