Capitulum Septimum Decimum

Jolie, like Eric, sat alone in a small room with only one door, but she did not see Giles enter. She had glanced at the door and looked away, and when she looked back, he was there, leaning against the closed door, darkly savage eyes looking out from a feverishly pale face.

Their eyes locked and held. Then Jolie said, "What are you going to do with Eric?"

Giles shrugged. "He is no longer your concern." And Jolie looked away.

There was silence for what must have been several minutes, after which Giles said, "You leave me with an interesting conundrum. What shall I do with you, I wonder?"

Without looking up, Jolie said, "What I wonder is why you haven't killed me yet."

"That is an interesting question," Giles replied. "Is there any reason to kill you?" He slid down the door until he was sitting, his eyes never leaving her. "Elsbietka, perhaps. You should not have killed her. She had such colors in her; the moon never entirely bleached them out. That was deserving of death, perhaps."

She turned her head and looked directly at him. "You know as well as I that if I had not killed her, she would have killed me."

"True enough. In a way, it was my fault, for underestimating the animus between you. She always could hold a grudge; I should have taken that more seriously. Still it is not reason enough to kill you, and what other reason could I possibly have?"

Jolie narrowed her eyes. "I tried to undermine you and have you killed."

Giles shrugged. "I began preparing for that the day I met you, as I did with Aveline, and with Seneca, and with every Wolf who is worth my time. Actually, in some ways I admire the approach. Most Wolves who try to take me on make the mistake of going directly for me; this turns it into a direct battle, and I am the Invincible Wolf: the moon guarantees my victory in any direct battle. To work indirectly was exactly the right strategy, and by doing it you managed to drag it out longer than most do. But in the end it is futile either way. Whether the play is three acts or five, I am the deus ex machina, and can still guarantee one ending. Our lives are governed by a nightmare-logic in which nothing matters but what you know. I know more." He reflected a moment, then said, "I would be interested in knowing what the hurry was. You could have given yourself more time to prepare."

It was Jolie's turn to shrug. "The longer the preparation, the greater the likelihood you would have been able to stop me, no? And I was tired. Tired of sitting on a balcony doing nothing, tired of hunting down and slapping a wayward Wolf back in line here and there, just tired. Particularly when we could do so much more; we could break this little world into pieces, and instead we read books over breakfast, muzzled."

"It is the way things must be."

"Why? Because you say so, because it is your will?"

"Yes!" The word came out with a savage snap. "Because I say so, because it is my will! Because I want order, I want civilization, I want reading over breakfast and sitting on a balcony, I want the muzzling of the Wolf. Because even damnation cannot take away reason, I want all the reason I can get...." He checked himself and closed his eyes for a long moment, and when he opened them again his tone was more calm. "You are too young to remember what it was like, in the days of Lykaios and the warlords. Every Wolf against every Wolf and every Pack against every Pack, with no order but what force and violence could make. You have never had the Will of Lykaios pounding in your brain, driving you into ever greater abysses of savagery. Be more Wolf, it said, be more Wolf, kill, maim, destroy. You do not know. All of your life you have known the Will of Aegidius, a whisper in the back of your head so steady you never notice it, telling you to be more human. The day you kill me, it will begin to vanish all away, and you will find that your allies turn treacherous and your enemies savage, and that all the order you have known will drift away like smoke into a civil war of Wolves. I've no doubt you could handle it; but right now you have no idea. Vsesalevitch and I felt the savagery,and fought it, and after the death of Lykaios began to chain it. Elsbietka came on the scene when we were already more than halfway through, and Aveline can just remember the last days of the last Warlords, and helped us finally kill that slippery devil Oleg." He looked at his hands, then with wry smile shrugged. "It does not matter. There is no point in killing you, because I need Primes who can get things done, and you've always been one of the best at that. And with Elsbietka gone, there will be far more work to do. So instead I give you the choice of joining forces with me again."

He rose and Jolie looked up at him. "How do you know that you can trust me?" she said.

"Seneca will no doubt be keeping one eye on you from here on out. Besides, I have never really trusted anyone for as long as I have been a Wolf," he replied, opening the door, and stood beside it expectantly.

"And what if I refused?"

"The only refusals I accept are my own," he said. "Besides, we both know you will take it because it is the only way you will have a chance to kill me and take over in a couple more centuries."

He looked at her; she looked at him. Then suddenly she threw her hands up with something like a surrender and rose from her chair. She walked out the door, not looking back, and he followed behind her.

Capitulum Sextum Decimum

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.