Capitulum Tertium: Contra Se Divisum

The verandah behind Giles Scott's mansion, I am told, is covered with black and white tile, swirling around in a kind of whirlwind. On days that are sunny but not hot, they set out a table and chairs there for a late breakfast and afterward simply take in the view at leisure, or read, or talk.

Such a table was set out this day with four chairs, three of which were occupied, by Giles, Seneca, and a beautiful young woman wearing sunglasses. It was apparently not a day for talking; Giles was reading with a large leatherbound book on his lap, and Seneca mostly stared out at the garden, while the young woman, who seemed hungover, still had not finished her meal. The silence was broken by Giles saying, without looking up from his book, "It seems that the puppy is up and about." Seneca glanced over at him, then back to the garden; the young woman showed no indication of even having heard. It was several minutes later that Eric walked out and joined them. He looked much healthier than he had the day before, in an All-American-but-recovering-from-a-light-flu sort of way. His sandy hair was carefully combed.

"How are you feeling today?" Seneca asked him as he pulled up the remaining chair.

"Much better," Eric said. "But everything still seems too vivid."

"Your senses are bringing in much more information than your brain is used to interpreting," said Seneca. "But you seem to be recovering quickly. When I received the Bite I was in a delirium that lasted for days."

Giles finally looked up from his book and thoughtfully contemplated Eric, a forefinger lightly tapping his bottom lip. Finally he said, indicating the young woman but not taking his eyes off Eric, "You have not met Jolie yet."

Jolie took time enough from pushing the food around her plate to look at him without a sign of interest.

"Good to meet you," said Eric.

"Hmmm," she replied, and turned her attention back to her plate. Giles turned his eyes back to the book, but seemed to be lost in thought.

"You'll have to forgive her," said Seneca. "She has spent a day and a night tracking the Wolf that gave you the Bite."

"Any luck?" Eric asked, looking at Jolie again. She did not return the look.

"No," said Seneca."He seems a slippery one."

"Yes," said Giles in a neutral tone. "Remarkably so. One would have expected more result." Jolie glanced sharply at him, but he was still reading his book.

Seneca glanced over both of them with a peculiar look, then said to Eric, "The vividness comes from preternatural senses. You catch more of the world."

"It is taking some getting used to," said Eric. "Do I turn into a wolf every full moon? Could I turn into a wolf at will?"

Giles looked up again, the thoughtful look still on his face, but he said nothing. Seneca said, "Don't try it; in your state it will be weeks before we manage to get you back. But yes, if you have the strength you can take the form of a wolf, or anything intermediate between human and wolf form. It is like being in a dream, where you can take control of it, and shape yourself as you will, if you have the presence of mind."

"But it has to do with the moon, right?"

"The strength of your abilities wax and wane with the moon, and are stronger at night than during the day, but they never go away."

"The moon that matters is inside you," said Giles.

"What does that mean?" asked Eric. But Giles had returned to his book.

"He likes talking in riddles," said Seneca drily. ""There are many stories, but the one that I think makes the most sense of everything as long as you don't try to understand what really lies behind it is one I heard many years ago. Originally the moon was brighter than it is now, pure and splendid, full of infinite and formless possibility. But when the human race began to look up at it, it was too much, too bright, too formless, and it drove them mad. So the face of the moon was marred, and a veil was put over it, and the strength of its light was linked to the sun and earth.

"But before that happened, the story goes, some of the pure light of that primal moon escaped, and wherever it enters, men go insane, because the human mind cannot grasp infinite possibility of form, and they die, because its primal splendor burns them away from the inside. But the wolf is more a creature of the moon than man is,and can bear it more easily, and at some point the moonlight became entangled with the wolfishness of the wolf. The spirit of the wolf filters it, restrains it, takes its infinite possibilities and confines it to a range of forms, and therefore makes it more manageable to the human mind. You, and I, and Jolie, and Giles, and all other Wolves -- we were infected with the madness of the moon, which is too bright to bear, but it is cloaked in the spirit of the wolf, which the human mind, if it is strong enough, can master. This is why we are not natural wolves, but preternatural ones: it is the dream-wolf, the moon-wolf, that possesses us."

"There has to be a scientific explanation of it all."

"Of course there is," said Giles with sarcasm, "and when you are dealing with werewolves the scientific explanation is that they have been infected by the madness of the moon, and that that insanity is so powerful that it can express itself in real form. When you find you can turn into a wolf and do other things no ordinary human being can do, it is a little arbitrary to claim that insanity is an unlikely explanation."

Seneca laughed softly. Eric flushed angrily, but said nothing, merely making himself a plate. Giles looked thoughtful again, then shook himself and continued; but he still seemed distracted by his thoughts.

"You are factus maniacus per lunam maniacam. You do not feel it yet, but both the light and the wolfishness are powers man was not made to bear, one too high and one too low; when they are inside us they are moral toxins, stirring up intense desires and cravings of extraordinary kinds, bestiales propter perniciosam naturam, things no human being was ever meant to feel. Desires to rule, to dominate, to hunt, to destroy: lupus rapax mane comedet praedam et vespere dividet spolia. Reason can tame the wolf, as it can tame the man; but the wolf has the power of the moon on its side."

"It is Giles who keeps order," said Seneca. "Once every Wolf was either alone or under the tyranny of some warlord. He changed that centuries ago, which is why you are here chatting over breakfast with him rather than enslaved or running mad across the fields until someone figured out how to kill you."

Eric jumped on one word: "Centuries? I'm immortal now?"

"Nothing on this earth is immortal. But the moonlight inside you makes you largely invulnerable; you can recover from wounds that would be fatal to ordinary men, and your body resists aging. But only largely; you are more vulnerable at new moon, and just as the moon gives you power, what has affinity to the moon can potentially kill you. But it is not possible to define any exact limit: how far you can go, how much you can endure, what you can actually do, depends entirely on the strength of the madness within you and the strength of your will to control it."

"So not everyone has it to the same degree?"

"No. Some things, like the power of the Wolf that gave the Bite, can make a difference."

Eric looked at Giles. "And how powerful was the Wolf that bit you?"

Both Jolie and Seneca looked first at Eric, then at Giles, but Giles simply finished whatever he had been reading and looked up slowly to meet Eric's gaze calmly. It was Eric who looked away first.

"It is no secret," said Giles quietly but coldly. "I did not receive the Bite from some anonymous renegade. I am the Scion of Lykaios, a warlord and the Destroyer of Man and Wolf. For uncounted centuries he ravaged northern Asia, and Scandinavia, and into northern Germany. I received the Bite from him. I killed for him. I attained Primacy under him. And for all that he was rumored to be invincible, I killed him nearly seven centuries ago, and under circumstances that everyone before that day had thought impossible. And I am the only Scion of Lykaios, the only one who still survives, because I killed the others, one by one. Make no mistake, little puppy; others have assumed from my appearance that I was half-sick and weak, and none of them have survived, either. It is a very unlucky thing to think."

There was an awkward silence, during which Giles simply continued gazing at Eric, while Eric attempted to meet the gaze again and found he could not. Then Jolie turned to Eric and said, "You must not take Gilles too seriously," she said. Although she had no noticeable accent in general, her pronunciation of the name was clearly different from Seneca's, as if it were a French name. "He gets very intense about his ancient history." She turned from the sandy-haired man to the black-haired one. Giles slowly turned toward her and smiled, although he seemed not to be smiling at her but in her direction.

"Some kinds of history seem to call for it." He leaned back and looked at the sky, and said, "I have a number of meetings this afternoon, Eric, but I should be able to push forward with something to help us gather more information that may help us track down this renegade Wolf that killed Joanne." He suddenly brought his gaze down, disconcertingly. "We're having a party tonight; nothing to do with Wolves, just a small affair for the Aegidian Corporation. I hope you will attend? We can talk, perhaps, a bit then."

"Certainly."

"Excellent. We have no idea what this renegade Wolf is doing, and until we do, you are safest here. I insist on your staying with us for a while until we get this worked out. You are free to use any facilities, and I will have Marcos put out appropriate clothes for the party." He smiled. It was polite, the tone was pleasant, but the meaning was clear: Eric was to remain at the house and was dismissed from the table. Slowly, reluctantly, Eric obeyed and took his leave.

As he walked into the house and the door closed behind him, Seneca said, "Do you think he will try to make trouble?"

Giles returned to his book. "It doesn't matter whether he does or not."

"I find something unsettling about him," Seneca said thoughtfully.

"I think he shows some promise," said Jolie.

"Yes," said Giles acidly, "the volchionok cuts a figure as a very pretty puppy. The Wolf that gave him the Bite must have been unusually mad."

Jolie looked at him sharply, but did not respond.

Capitulum Secundum: Sermo Celat

It is one of my failures that I have never been able to get entirely clear on how you died, Joanne. There was a story told about it, although, unfortunately, I know that some of it is false and the rest unreliable. But it is the only full story I have.

It goes something like this. It was a bad-tempered September evening when Eric Masters received the Bite. When he had chosen the weekend for camping with his girlfriend Joanne it had seemed auspicious enough. The weather reports had all been excellent, promising sun and slight cloud, nothing worse. And those promises were fulfilled up to about noon on Friday, after which it grew cloudier and cloudier as evening approached until Masters began to prepare for a wet night. Since Joanne had pitched the tent and Eric could never quite bring himself to trust her on such matters, he double-checked that it was pitched correctly and, for good measure, used a tarp to put up a make-shift extra roof to prevent rain from beating directly down on the tent fabric. It did not take long, but it was wasted effort; it never rained that night and, if it had, I suppose it would no longer have been a matter of concern to him.

By this point it was getting dark quickly. He crawled into the tent, where Joanne sat beside a lantern and said to her, "Well, that's about as secure as we're going to get it."

Joanne, who had no illusions about Eric's real purpose in making one last check, said, "Aren't you lucky to have a girlfriend who can pitch a perfect tent?" They both heard a low rumble outside, like thunder in the distance.

"Absolutely," said Eric, kissing her with a feigned sincerity that fooled no one. Joanne laughed. It was a high-pitched laugh, but at the same time somewhat more like a donkey's bray than a human laugh should be. People hated Joanne's laugh. I have no doubt that Eric did, too. Unfortunately, she was a cheerful person and her laughter came freely and easily. Eric had simply had to get used to the perpetual donkey bray. And aside from that she had much to recommend her; she was somewhat pretty, very good-tempered, and liked the outdoors; and while Eric himself grew bored with them if exposed to them for long periods, he was, it must be said, quite taken with the general idea of a woman who liked the outdoors. The thunder rumbled again.

Eric leaned over to say something to Joanne but was interrupted with an intense thump against the side of the tent that made them both jump.

"It's the tarp," said Eric; "it must have come untied."

Joanne laughed. "Would you like me to go out and tie it right?"

"No," Eric said testily, moving to the tent door. "I'll fix it."

Outside it was dark, but still not pitch black: the kind of liminal darkness to which the eyes can barely adjust but which still allows you to see, in which everything is shades of black and gray. He went over to the flapping corner of the tarp and grabbed it, peering as best as he could at the cord that had held it and had been thumping against the tent. Something was less than right about it.

"Joanne!" he shouted. "Light!"

She crawled out of the tent with the lantern and went over to stand by him.

"As I thought," he said to himself. Then to her: "Look at this. It's almost as if someone had cut it."

"If you tie something so that it rubs against something sharp in the wind, it will do that," she said drily.

"I did no such thing," he said coldly. "And this wind isn't that strong. Besides...."

The thunder sounded again, but outside the muffling walls of the tent, it was clear enough that it was no thunder. It had enough rumble to it, a low tone, deep and powerful, that seemed to pass through the air and resound inside one's head, but it was not the thunder. The sky itself was quiet; this sound seemed to come horizontally, or even through the ground, not from above. And while the volume of it was like distant thunder, its source was clearly very close. There was a rustling in the bushes off to their side.

"Give me the lantern and go back to the tent," he ordered. Joanne opened her mouth to say something, but then simply shut it and obeyed. Eric edged forward toward the bushes, but had hardly taken two steps when Joanne shrieked behind him. He turned and froze.

At the edge of the lantern-light, not far from where Joanne herself, frozen with fear, was some kind of great, hulking animal. It was difficult to make out in detail; mostly what one saw, or perhaps what one remembered seeing, were the eyes, glinting reddish gold in the light, great, inhuman eyes, bestially cruel but cunningly intelligent. But one also remembered the teeth, a row of sharp teeth, gleaming white, and snapping. If you suddenly saw a great dog, or any other fierce animal snapping out you, you would see the snapping almost before you saw the animal, and it is that which would stick in your mind. So it was here; it seemed to be almost nothing but glinting eyes and snapping teeth. The beast had a human-ish form, but its movements were too quick to make out anything with precision, and it stayed out of direct light, snapping in the barely enlightened darkness around Joanne without actually snapping at her. Or so it was for the first few seconds; it soon lunged directly at Joanne, who tripped and fell backward. It threw itself on her.

The speed at which this all happened was almost too fast for the mind to take in, and without any thought at all, Eric dropped the lantern and rushed at the beast and Joanne. It was too late, however; the beast in a great leap sprang over Eric's head in one smooth motion, and as Eric reached Joanne he saw in the light of the lantern that she was covered with blood. He crouched and cradled her head in his hands as she drew a last few gasping breaths, and as the living eye of Joanne took on the unseeing stare of the dead. When he pulled his hands away, they were wet with blood.

But things were still moving too quickly. Behind him there was a cracking sound and the lantern went out. Eric, again with no time to think, only to react, fled. In the ever-increasing dark he stumbled; but each time he rose and fled again. But it was futile, for he would hear the rustling and twig-cracking of the beast behind him, then ahead of him, then off to his right, then off to his left, as if it were somehow everywhere at once, or as if it were moving so swiftly that it was running circles around him as he ran. Now and again the rustling would transform into the snapping beast itself, and Eric would flee blindly in the opposite direction. All of this had taken just a few minutes, but it felt to Eric as if he had been running for hours when the beast tired of the sport, and suddenly appearing in front of him, threw him to the ground and bit him hard on the shoulder right at the base of the neck. He screamed. The world went red, then it went black. The last he remembered before he actually blacked out was the beast letting go and the shouts of human voices.

He drifted in and out of consciousness for some time, sometimes seeing faces or vague forms but mostly just dreaming strange dreams. The dreams were mostly feverish nightmares of rumbling man-beasts, or of Joanne's face with the staring, dead eyes, or of his hands covered with blood. But one recurring dream, although the simplest, was the worst of all. In it he saw the moon, shining so brightly that it seemed to pierce not just cloud but rock and earth. It simply radiated brilliance, shining and shining and shining until he felt that he would go mad looking at it.

At the end of about a day and a half, he woke as from a restless sleep and found himself in a beautifully furnished room he had never seen before, with gauzy curtains blowing in a pleasant breeze and the sun pouring through the window. Everything in the room seemed to stand out in feverish colors. There were birds raucously arguing somewhere outside the window, and the breeze carried in a deep scent of flowers. The sun was too bright. The walls were too straight. The flapping of the curtains in the breeze was too noisy. Everything seemed relentlessly distinct from everything else, as if it were shouting to be noticed.

The door opened and a man walked into the room. He was small and wiry, and his light sweater vest and bowtie, both apparently quite expensive, were brightly colored, standing out cheerfully against his dark skin. "I thought you might be awake," he said. his voice, though quiet, was strong and clear.

"Where am I?" Eric asked.

"You are in one of the guest rooms in the house of Giles Scott," replied the man. We found you suffering from the Bite and Giles had you brought here to recover."

Eric tried to clear his head, but everything was still pushing at him. "You are not Giles Scott?"

"No," the man said. "My name is Seneca Lewis. I am what you might call an associate of Mr. Scott." The man looked intently at Eric for a few moments. "It looks like you need more rest. Just relax. We will send for you this afternoon when you are more fully recovered, and we will talk through what happened." He left and Eric sank back into the pillows and tried to close his eyes against the pushiness of the room.

He woke with a start several hours later and found Seneca Lewis standing by the door as if he had just walked in. "Come along," he said. "Mr. Scott and I would like to talk with you."

They walked down a long hallway with paintings on the wall, both right and left, and many doors, then down a small stairway at the end, then down another long hallway to something like a waiting room, which they walked through. Seneca pushed through a large mahogany door into a large office or study, different from the one I had seen. Old leatherbound books lined the wall; there was a plant in one corner and some statuary in another; and at one end of the room there was a desk, around which were gathered three chairs on one side and one chair on the far side. That chair was occupied by a man.

He was not an imposing figure, although there was something striking about him. He had black hair, slightly curly, and large, startlingly dark eyes with long lashes, and he was thin. He was dressed immaculately in a suit that probably would have cost most people half a year's salary or more. What was most noticeable about him, however, was his pallor. He was pale, so pale he seemed almost ill, especially given his thinness. He had no ravaged look about him, and indeed had a sort of youthful boyishness in his face, but he seemed too pale for health.

"Mr. Masters," he said, gesturing to the chair immediately in front of the desk, "please sit down." His voice was pleasant and precisely enunciated.

Eric did so, and Seneca Lewis took the chair to his right.

"You are Giles Scott?" Eric asked.

"I am."

"Why did you bring me here instead of taking me to a hospital?"

Giles seemed drily amused. "They would hardly have known what to do with you. Tell me, what happened last night?"

Eric found himself describing what had happened as best as he could; however, he was much less coherent in telling it than I was above. At several points during the telling Giles and Seneca exchanged glances. And when he was done Giles leaned back in his chair and gazed somewhat disquietingly at Eric for some moments.

"Do you have any inkling of what has happened to you?" he asked abruptly.

Eric was immediately angry. "I was bitten by an animal that killed my girlfriend. Yes, I am completely aware of what happened to me."

"Perhaps you should start at the beginning," Giles said. And then Eric told the story told above.

When he was done, Giles simply gazed at him for a few minutes, while Eric shifted in his seat and tried to think of something to say.

It was Giles, however, who spoke first. "That is what really happened, Eric?"

"Yes."

Giles gazed at him some more. Then he looked at Seneca.

Seneca cleared his throat. "That was no animal, Eric," he said. "You were bitten by a werewolf."

"A werewolf," Eric repeated dully.

"Yes."

"A werewolf," Eric repeated again.

"Yes. You have received the Bite."

"The Bite?"

Giles broke in. "I quickly get annoyed with people who only repeat what other people say to them," he said. "Let us try to keep up, shall we?"

He looked at Seneca again, and Seneca continued. "Do you know what happens to people who receive the Bite of the Wolf, Eric?"

Eric still continued to look at him dully.

"You have become a werewolf yourself, Eric."

"And what are you? Werewolf hunters?" Eric said incredulously.

"No," said Seneca, "we are werewolves, too."

"You were the one who just told us you were bitten by a man-shaped beast-thing with sharp teeth," said Giles drily; "are you really trying to argue the point? And do you not feel it? Doesn't everything seem a little more real than it should, like it has a little too much in its muchness?" He smiled darkly. "Like a fever, or insanity."

Eric put his hand to his forehead. "I do feel strange. Is it some kind of virus?"

Giles made a face and contemptuously dismissed the suggestion with a flick of his fingers. "Viruses cannot do what has been done to you. You are infected not with a virus but with the spirit of the Wolf and the power of the lunatic Moon."

Eric remembered the nightmare about the moon and shuddered. He closed his eyes. "Why was I bitten?" He became angry again. "And why was Joanne killed?"

"Interesting questions," said Seneca. "It is not supposed to happen. There is some renegade running around behind our backs, and we are not pleased. It will be necessary to track him down and destroy him."

"Do you know who it is?" asked Eric looking up suddenly.

Seneca looked to Giles. Giles simply gazed unreadably at Eric, the dark, cold, hostile eyes looking and looking. Then he said, "I will put it simply. We know nothing. But there are things happening that give us some threads to follow. There are a number of Packs of Wolves throughout the world; many of them are unaligned, but for the most part they tend to fall within three major alliances, one of which I lead. The leaders of these three alliances form a triarchy whose formal and informal agreements keep everyone else in line. Lately, however, the Siberian alliance has been somewhat restless, and we have found an increasing number of its spies about."

"Then that must be it," said Eric. "These Russian spies killed Joanne. Didn't they?"

The other man shrugged. "It is a matter that needs to be investigated."

"I want to help."

"Eventually."

"Now."

In response Giles simply picked up a large paperweight from the desk and threw it with extraordinary force and speed at Eric's head. Eric reflexively caught it, but barely.

"Good," said Giles, "but not good enough; had I miscalculated and thrown it just a little harder you would now have a dent in your head. Seneca, I think, was a little too optimistic about how quickly you had recovered. There will be plenty of time for helping us when you have revived enough not to be a liability."

Eric put his hand to his head, which did ache somewhat, and at some invisible signal the door behind him opened.

"Marcos here will take you back to your room," Giles said. "If you require anything, simply ask the staff."

After Eric had left, Seneca turned to Giles and said, "Do you really think the Russians are behind it?"

Giles gave him a sarcastic look. "Siberian spies playing messy cat-and-mouse games with idiot campers in the middle of nowhere like in some bad horror movie, clever enough to give us the slip but stupid enough to leave someone with the Bite, which I can eventually trace? You know better than that, Sen." He looked up at the ceiling. "No, there is something else going on here. Our new Wolf is a liar through and through; a bad liar, but I cannot see into him as well as I should be able. Something is missing. And what is she up to?"

"She?" said Seneca, startled.

Giles dismissed it. "With all these Siberians about, giving young Eric truth-after-a-fashion is the best route: truth will look after its own consistency better than any lie will, until we know better how to proceed. Make sure the cub doesn't slip out in the night."

Seneca seemed about to say something else, but instead nodded and left the room. Giles Scott looked out the window a very long time afterward.

Capitulum Primum: Lupus in Fabula

I suppose I should address this to you, Joanne, for all that you cannot read it; I do not care if anyone else does, and you were the reason for it all. Yet I would do it again.

I was certainly thinking of you when I drove up. The mansion of Giles Scott is not a showy building, although there are a few noticeable flourishes. The first flourish one meets is the gate, which bears the silver A on a black shield that also serves as the logo of the Aegidian Corporation, of which he is chief executive officer. Passing through the gates takes you along a meandering lane over manicured grounds until you reach the front of the house itself, large but unremarkable in appearance. It is not made to impress, either by its beauty or its ugliness, and one gets the impression that even its size is mostly utilitarian. There are gardens, it is said, in the back, beautiful gardens, but I have never seen them, and know of them only by the testimony of another. I am sure that they are there, though; he would know.

It indicates my state of mind that I had left the car and made it almost to the door when I had to run back and grab the thick manila envelope I had left on the seat. When I had returned the door, I had barely knocked when a young man of haughty Iberian looks answered the door. He wore black slacks, a loose silk shirt and a bright yellow flower in a buttonhole.

"What is your business?" he asked. His voice was chillingly cool.

I worked up my courage. "I have an appointment with Giles Scott. It was made through the office of Mr. Lewis."

He looked at me impassively for a moment, then said, "Very well, then. Come inside."

The mansion was much more lovely inside than outside. The floor was marble tile and the wood on the walls was dark and expensive-looking. Along the hallways there were display cases with some breathtaking displays of endless exotic items. I would have died to have the chance to curate some of them. He brought me to an office.

"Mr. Scott should be along shortly," he said. "If he is delayed and you require anything, my name is Marcos." Then he left.

I looked around. It was a cheerful office, apparently designed precisely for receiving guests. 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. In one corner of the room was a large standing globe, but of the moon rather than the earth. 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. "He seems quite the collector, Giles Scott," I said to myself.

"Opal," a low, quiet voice right behind me suddenly said, causing me to jump and twist around. "'It seems to blush and turn pale as if it had a soul.'"

It was Giles Scott himself, of course. He looked surprisingly young, although in that way in which it is difficult to tell how old some people are. His face was pale in the way that you expect someone on the edge of death to be pale, giving a suggestion of gauntness to a face that was not really gaunt at all. His hair was black and slightly curly, and his dark eyes were startlingly hostile. His pallor made both his hair and his eyes seem darker than any hair and eyes should be. He wore a custom-tailored suit with an expensively red silk tie and diamond tie pin and a black vest.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't hear you come in."

He did not smile, but 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 did smile at this, with a smile that was marvelously 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 an unsettling gaze. 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?"

"Marginal religious practices in Greater Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."

"'Marginal religious practices,'" he said. "That is academic-speak for 'crazy superstitions'. In late medieval Greater German, 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, trembling inside. "Well, yes and no."

His gaze became even more unsettling and hostile, if possible. "I was told that you had information of material concern to me about the recent murder 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 once every other year or so, 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 all thought of 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. Sometimes she would send a special request to me, although usually about other places and times; I saw no pattern in the requests until much later.

"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. "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. She had always had sense. I didn't know what to make of it, but 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 incommunicado 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 one known as the Invincible Wolf, sometimes called Lykaios, sometimes called 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."

His smile quirked into something that might have been pity if the eyes had not been so fierce and cold. "Not all."

"You admit it?"

"I am a great reader of people, my friend," he replied. "If I denied it, you would simply continue nosing around; and you clearly know enough it would be useless to pretend otherwise, in any case. 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. You cannot hide the slight shaking in your body or the slight tremor in your voice; the scent of an animal afraid to die is pouring off of you. You are expecting to die today, and yet you came here, anyway. 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. I just want to know that justice is done before I die."

His eyes locked mine, and he rose suddenly. He still was somewhat boyish in appearance, and still sickly-pale, but somehow he was also seemed tall, majestic, terrible, as if the room warped around him. Slight shadows in the room became deep and black. 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. Etiam in damnatis."

He looked down at me again; but his gaze, while as unsettling and cold 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 moment you stepped into this room was, as you thought, the beginning of your death. 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."

I fled, running into a startled black man in an expensive suit and tie who was entering as I was leaving. He was like a wall, and I fell to the ground and had to scramble to get back up and keep running. Looking back at it, it was embarrassingly undignified. But all that I could think at the time was that I needed to get out.

As I left, although I did not hear it at the time, Giles Scott said, "Come on in, Seneca" and walked over to the globe of the moon, looking down at it reflectively.

The man I had run into walked into the office. "That seemed dramatic," he said.

"I was expecting you 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 some significant news. She is in your study."

"I will meet her there.

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.

He studied it more closely. "And it is touched by the Moon. 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.' Apparently you no longer have the acquaintance in Krasnoyarsk."

"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 invented 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, "Bitka, 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."

Capitulum Vicesimum Primum, et Fortasse Capitulum Ultimum

It had been months since I had last seen Giles Scott. Every so often I would catch a glimpse of some stranger a little too often, revealing that I was still watched, but other than that it all went quietly. I continued to gather information from whatever source I could find, using every dark art of journalism and history that I knew. I had so many notes, but so little that was coherent! Hints of stories, not the true history. And through it all I could not find the thing I most wanted to know.

I had just made a scotch-and-water when a knock came at the door. When I opened it, I heard the familiar voice of the Wolf-King.

"I have kept my promise," it said.

I saw nothing outside. It was dark except under the street lamp on the corner. The moon was just a bare sliver of crescent.

Baffled, I closed the door and went back to the den. There, sitting in my overstuffed chair, was Giles Scott.

"I apologize for taking so long," he said, "if that is the sort of thing for which one should apologize. I have had to tie up many loose ends recently, and you were the least important. But I have kept my promise. The Wolf who killed Joanne was Eric; he is no longer a matter of any concern to anyone. Justice, or at least some semblance of it, has been achieved. So...." He spread his hands.

I looked at the floor. "Is there no other way?"

He advanced on me and I, shame to say, shrank against the wall.

He frowned, a slight furrow at the brow. "The art of living well is learning how to die well," he said. "You should have been using the time to prepare yourself."

"Can't you do something else, like make me a Wolf."

The frown became dark and fierce. "I have lived centuries with the trace of Lykaios in me; for most practical purposes I am Lykaios. There is only one thing Lykaios did that I have never done, only one thing that distinguishes him from me, only one thing that marks off the life of Aegidius from the life of Lykaios. I will not become Lykaios merely because you are unable to look death in the face like a rational man."

So spoke the man who had lived eight centuries. But I took I deep breath. "Then at least grant me a favor," I replied. "I have been writing a book about you."

The frown deepened. "No such book could ever be published."

"I don't care if it's ever published," I said. "I just need to write it. Afterward you can destroy it, if you want. But I need to finish it."

He considered this, and as he did the frown vanished. He sat down on the suttee and, leaning back slightly, looked at the ceiling.

"There is a story I have told very few people," he said slowly, still looking at the ceiling, as if the events were replaying in his mind. "Not long after I had been turned by Lykaios, I escaped and fled. I must have run for hundreds and hundreds of miles. We were in pagan territory somewhere around the Baltic, but I had fled so far that I came across a Christian shrine hidden away. It was hardly more than a hovel, a few sticks. I fell down before a crude wooden statue of the Holy Virgin and fell asleep.

"In my sleep I had a dream. We Wolves have very few of them, in the ordinary sense; most of our 'dreams' are as real as waking to us, because the Moon crosses the border between dream and waking. But this was really a dream, elusive, intangible, strangely removed. In the dream I was lying down in the same little chapel, at the feet of the Holy Virgin. But the Lady was real. She stood tall above me, majestic. She wore stars for a crown and the Moon was beneath her feet. My head was near it, and, for the first time ever, I heard it singing. She looked down at me and said, 'Agnoscisne me? quid taces? pudore an stupore siluisti?'

"But I was indeed stupidly astonished, and could say nothing.

"Then she sternly asked, 'Hominemne te esse meministi?'

"Then I, who knew my Boethius as if it were a catechism, replied, 'Quidni, inquam, meminerem?'

"And she returned the next question: 'Quid igitur homo sit poterisne proferre?'

"And the words came from as they did from Boethius: 'Hocine interrogas, an esse me sciam rationale animal atque mortale? Scio, et id me esse confiteor.'

"'Scis, et id te esse confiteris!' she repeated as if she were dismissing my answer as an absurdity. 'Scio morbi tui aliam vel maximam causam; quid ipse sis nosse desisti. Quoniam tui oblivione confunderis. Nubibus atris condita nullum fundere possunt sidera lumen.'

"And at this I did seem overwhelmed with forgetfulness, because I did not know what to say in response. Darkness was all around me, and against its background I could hear, and (it almost seemed) see, the singing of the Moon. Had I been able to speak, I would have begged her to speak, but she was silent for what seemed like centuries.

"Then there was a voice, and perhaps it was hers, but but it seemed like a thundering chorus cascading down on top of me: 'Ad spes animum sublevate, preces in excelsa porrigite! (O felix hominum genus, si vestros animos amor quo caelum registur regat!) Magna necessitas indicta probitatis, cum ante oculos agitis iudicis cuncta cernentis.'

"And I awoke. It was very strange. During the dream I was both distressed and dumbfounded, but it is the most beautiful dream I have ever had. It felt like it meant something. But it was just a dream, fragments of Boethius spinning around in my head."

He looked at me with those fierce dark eyes against his feverishly pale face. The look was cool to the point of being indifferent, but indifferent in a way that seemed menacing and perilous. "Of course," he said calmly, "Lykaios and his henchmen caught up to me shortly afterward, dragging me back the way we had come. As punishment Lykaios beat me and threw me into a pit, and the next several days they threw stones at me and jabbed me with sharp sticks until the savagery inside was uncontrollable. Then Lykaios turned me loose on a village. I killed every man, woman, and infant there. And that was when I first understood that, however things may seem, I was no longer a living man, but a damned soul."

"Because you could do such a thing."

"No," he said impatiently, as one might speak to a child who was fooling around rather than learning his lessons. "Because I couldn't regret it. Damnation is formally the lack of contrition and materially the punishment that comes with being no longer able to regret your wrongdoing. They used to teach people these things." He made it sound as if it were my fault that medieval theology was no longer taught in schools. Then he waved it away. "I suppose you are not alone; it is a common defect. But it is the whole point. The difference between a man and a monster is that the man can repent. And the difference between a monster who is not yet wholly insane and a monster seized by inescapable madness is that the rational monster, unable to repent, still at least knows that he should. I have seen endless numbers of Wolves slide from rationality to savage madness."

He put his hand to his mouth and stroked his chin a moment. "The wolf in me is howling for your blood. You will not live to see the dawn. But I will let you finish your book."

And so here I am, finishing the book, the Wolf of Wolves sitting like the Angel of Death a few feet away. He has given me information I would not otherwise have, and corrected a few mistakes. Some part of me holds out the hope that he will for some reason, somehow, change his mind, but that is the part of me that hopes regardless of what reason says. A less foolish side of me hopes that he will not destroy this book, that it will last and one day be read by someone. But that, too, is perhaps foolish; it is all the future. I cannot see what will happen beyond the dawn.

But I did what was required to bring your killer to justice, Joanne.

Capitulum Vicesimum

A small hut, little more than a hovel, stood on a snowy hillside in the midst of the woods. The woods, I think, may have been in Tver Oblast. A man came out from behind the little hovel with an axe. He was a large man, perhaps in his late twenties, with a beard of reddish-brown, and he wore robes like that of a monk or hermit. As he began to chop wood from a woodpile, another man, pale with black, curly hair, dressed in an expensive knee-length coat of modern cut, came walking up the path. The man in the robes stopped chopping and simply watched until the other man came up and spoke.

"So," said Giles in English.

"So," replied the other man in the same language.

"This is it," Giles said, looking around at the hovel, the woodpile, the trees.

"This is it," said the other man.

Something like a smile flickered at Giles's mouth. He continued to look around.

"I had a dream the other night. A dream, not the living nightmare under the Moon."

"And what was it about?"

"I dreamed that I was on my knees in prayer when suddenly the ground opened up beneath me to reveal the flames of hell. I simply stayed there, suspended, though. I looked to my left and I saw the devil. In his hands was the scroll, or rather one end of it, because the other end stretched away so far that it could not be seen. The tale of my sins, of course, the charges against me. But then I looked on my right and I saw the Virgin with her hand raised above of her head and a scepter or rod in her hand. And they were contending for my soul."

There was a long pause, and the other man said, "And that was it?"

"That was it," said Giles, who had begun to pace a little. "I woke before the decision had been made."

"What do you think it means?"

Giles continued to pace slowly. "Who knows?" he said at last. "Dreams are not like nightmares; they have no governing logic. Some residual de profoundis, perhaps, some memory of a long-forgotten miserere."

"Perhaps a part of you thinks you are still human."

"Perhaps," said Giles. "But I think it was just a flicker of a memory from a time when I was too inexperienced to know that I had already been weighed and found wanting." He took up a log and upended it, then sat on it. The other man did the same.

"How are you finding Russia this trip?" the other man said.

"It is much the same as it was. The last time I was here the major question was which Party official to bribe. It was usually quite clear. Now, however, one has to guess which businessman to bribe, and they are much more expensive. I suppose that is progress." They were quiet for a while.

"Bitka is dead," Giles said suddenly in Russian.

"Unfortunate," replied the other man, also in Russian. Then, after a moment: "Was it Jolie or Aveline?"

"Ava has many strengths, but she could never have outmaneuvered Bitka. Jolie cornered her in a warehouse. Quite brutal."

The other man shook his head. "Unfortunate," he said again.

"Yes," said Giles simply. "She was almost exactly right. Just a little too much Wolf and a little too much ice. And the centuries made her wilder and colder." There was silence for a while, then he shrugged. "Infima summis, summa infimis. She tried to kill me, too."

The other man looked at him shrewdly. "Am I to assume from your standing here that Jolie is dead, too?"

A brief smile. "The last pennies in the purse are suddenly precious. It just seemed...wasteful. Perhaps I am getting weak. Too much 'celibacy of fang', to use the phrase Jolie uses when she feels like insulting me."

"But you are right that there are not many."

"Not many at all." Giles sighed. "They all seem to break so easily, Usiaslau. And sometimes I wonder if we lost our opportunity, because every new Wolf seems worse. Weak of will, weak of character, fools who could never skin a rabbit but think they could be the fiercest wolf in the forest. There was a time when every single one was a possibility; now they come to us already useless."

"No discipline."

"Worse than that. We were all made to be creatures of reason and grace. You and I understand that. We were born to it, raised in it, taught it from the beginning. And we know that if one is gone forever the other has to be held at any cost. But how can you explain that to people who have never felt in the marrow of bones what either reason or grace are?"

"They do not know what has been lost," said the other, nodding slowly. "So they cannot understand what must be kept. Perhaps that is it. "

Giles nodded in turn, and they were again silent for a while. It was the other man who broke the silence first this time.

"How did you find me?"

He was answered with a small spread of hands. "Do you even have to ask? You hid well, but it was clear enough that Vsesalevich was not dead. The Moon kept singing about you. So I hunted, and soon enough found a Wolf in hermit's pelt."

"I assume Ivan is dead," Vsesalevich replied.

"You assume rightly; about three weeks now. He was one of Dmitry's. How did he slip past you -- us? He should have been killed three hundred years ago."

"I never met him in person."

"Lax."

"Tired of dealing with idiots," returned Vsesalevich.

"That I understand," said Giles. "But it is no excuse. You have had your little vacation. Now it is back to work, and with effort this time."

"And if I refuse?"

Giles looked at him sarcastically. "You know as well as I that the only 'No' I accept is my own."

"I could fight."

"You could. You probably need the exercise."

"You could just kill me."

"Your memory is going in your old age; we were just talking about how there are too few of the possibles. I didn't kill you the first time you were pretending to be dead because you were the first Wolf I had met who already understood what needed to be done and yet was able to do something about it. That's why I made dead Vseslav rise as new Vsesalevich. Why would I kill you now, after centuries have shown that you are still the only one to measure up to the task? You could kill me."

Vsesalevich was silent a moment. Then he sighed and said in English, "I could not rule them all. I can hear the Moon sing, but I cannot talk to her; I could establish nothing like the Will of Aegidius."

"Then we are stuck with each other, Charodey. Without me, the magic ceases; without you to share the task, the madness destroys. Our task is not done: Numquam purpuream nemus lecturus violas petas cum saevis Aquilonibus stridens campus inhorruit -- Aquilo trembles on the heath, my friend, and we have winter things to do."

There was silence again, both lost in thoughts, memories of endless centuries, perhaps, of people dead or of evils committed and endured. Then Giles rose.

"Come along," he said. "I have been lax myself, taking my time hunting you rather than destroying the remnants of Ivan's power base. There are Wolves who do not understand the importance of the Will of Aegidius. It will be like old times."

Vsesalevich stood looking at him a long while. Finally he sighed. "Very well. Where shall we start? There's bound to be a few in Novobirsk who need to be reminded."

"Novobirsk it is, then. The last time I was there I think there was a symphony hall or opera house or something, newly built, that I never managed to visit."

Capitulum Nonum Decimum

Snow drifted down upon a small cabin. It seemed a quiet and an unexceptional place, but the appearance was misleading. Beneath the surface appearance there were terrible things. Wolves in human form patrolled the woods around it with AK-74 assault rifles. Observation posts, themselves equipped with Pechenegs, were cleverly located so that they could see and not be seen. For miles not a rabbit, not a bird, not a mouse stirred without notice.

The uproar, consternation, and panic was therefore all the greater when a knock came at the door and, when opened, it revealed Giles Scott himself standing as patiently as if he were a neighbor in need of a cup of sugar. Not a single alarm had been raised, not the slightest sign of him seen.

"Dobry den," he said with a sort of quiet cheerfulness. "I wish to see Ivan."

He was seized, dragged into the cabin, and put in a cage which had, no doubt, been prepared for him when it had been assumed that he would arrive under different conditions. There was only one room in the cabin, and it was sparsely furnished. The cage was in the center of the room and contained only a chair; outside the cage there was nothing but a bare desk and another chair. Giles simply looked around with mild curiosity and waited.

It was not long before a large man with a black beard entered and scowled at him. Several others entered after him, so that the room was quite crowded.

"You seem somewhat familiar," Giles said in Russian, "although I have not met you before. Somewhere I've known the Wolf who gave you the Bite."

The bearded man sat down behind the desk. "You have courage, I'll grant you that," he said. "Even I would not have expected you to walk right up to the front door."

Giles shrugged. "It is full moon." A cold smile played around his mouth. "And as it happens, my dear Ivan, I am the only Wolf here who knows how to kill a Prime Wolf at full moon."

"Full moon becomes new moon soon enough."

"Where I am, the moon is always full."

"You are outnumbered."

Giles shrugged again. "Your numbers are insignificant. You would all be dead by now, but I am in a less savage mood than usual, and constrained by a mild curiosity. I have an offer for you all. If any Wolf surrenders now, I will spare his life."

Ivan laughed, although it was a humorless laugh. He swept his hand at the room. "You are in a cage and we can wait you out."

"Any Wolf who does not surrender now will be dead by sunset tomorrow."

"I would like to see you try," Ivan said in English.

"You will not live to see me try," replied Giles in the same language. Then he smiled coldly and continued in Russian. "I think I know the lineage now. You were given the Bite by Dmitry."

"Yes," said Ivan. "And he by Lykaios. I, too, am a Scion of Lykaios."

"Dmitry was a fool."

"He evaded you long enough."

"True," said Giles. "He was the last of the old court of Lykaios we destroyed. He had an extraordinary talent for running away. The most slippery coward I have ever met. He begged for his life at the end, but Aveline tore him apart with hardly a fight."

"You lie."

"Lykaios kept him around for amusement, nothing more. No one could lick a Wolf's paws better than Dmitry. The perfect court jester."

Ivan rose suddenly. "You will have no food and no water. And you will die as soon as the moon wanes. I will tear your heart out myself and devour it as they say you did with Lykaios."

Giles merely smiled. Ivan walked out, with a string of Wolves in train, leaving only a few guards.

Nothing happened until late that night. Ivan came into the room and began looking for something in the drawers of the desk. Giles watched him, coldly smiling, the dark eyes more unfathomable than ever.

"You have made a mistake," he said finally. Ivan ignored him, but he continued to talk. "It is a mistake most people make. It has destroyed more impressive Wolves than you. Everyone thinks that a Wolf is part animal, but this is not true. A Wolf is madness. A Wolf is nightmare. A Wolf is where reality ends and becomes something else. An intimation of death, an intimation of Hell, a touch of that terrible thing in your worst dreams, the thing you cannot bear to look at but cannot ignore. The difference between a would-be Wolf-King like you and a true Wolf-King like me is that I understand this and you do not. We are not playing the game you think we are. How did I find you? How did I get here without you knowing it beforehand? Why would I walk right into a Pack of enemy Wolves without the slightest worry? Why am I certain you will be dead by morning? You have made a fatal assumption."

Finally Ivan said, angrily, but almost as if the words were drawn out of him. "And what is this fatal assumption? Merely capturing you?"

The cold smile grew wider and colder, and the dark eyes above began almost to glitter. "That goes without saying. No, I mean an assumption you are making right now, the one that will lead to your death. It is the assumption that is fatal whenever you deal with a nightmare monster. You think you are awake."

The last sentence seemed to come from everywhere at once, making Ivan jump suddenly and look around him. When he looked back at the cage, it was empty.

"Dreams are strange things," said Giles. He was leaning against the wall. "Anything can become real in dreams. And if you are a Wolf who understands what it is to be a Wolf, anything in dreams can become real."

Ivan became Wolf, a big, fierce, black beast, leaping at Giles. But Giles was no longer there.

"You should be more calm," said Giles mockingly from the other side of the room. "This is all in your head. You are just dreaming. What harm can come from a dream?"

Ivan leaped again, but Giles caught him by the throat and threw him against the wall. Ivan yelped in pain.

"It seems real enough, though." The room, which had before seemed lit by electric light, began to take on a different color and tone, black and white, like moonlight pouring into a dark room. Giles was no longer visible, but his voice could be heard.

"Once Lykaios knew that he could not beat me, he fled, the first time he had ever fled another Wolf. He was a savage and ferocious creature. But he too did not understand that a Wolf's life is just madness and that you cannot flee an enemy who knows how to hunt you in your nightmares. I chased him over fields lit by an impossible Moon, through forests where dark things are, through marshes where nothing but despair can live, out upon an infinite plain of uncaring snow and ice, and there he turned to fight again. But my madness was stronger than his madness. My nightmare, in which I was the most terrible monster, overpowered and overwhelmed his nightmare. Since it was my dream, I stripped him of his Wolfishness, he who had been Wolf so long he could not even remember being human, and beneath the full moon I tore out his heart and devoured it. It was all just a nightmare he had one night." The voice took on a sharper, colder edge. "But it was a nightmare so dark that he was dead in the morning with his heart torn out of his chest, and I was the new Lykaios.

"You have been very foolish, Ivan, going about your business as if you were some man with special powers. You are as stupid as Dmitry. You do not know what you are. But I do. You are Death in the shape of a Wolf. A cold, silver Hell burns inside you. You are damned, and part of the punishment of your damnation is that you will continue to deserve it. Damnation never ends, but tonight is your last night of being damned in the form of a Wolf."

Ivan searched around in the shadows for his enemy, but found himself thrown against the wall again by an unseen hand. At that he fled, breaking through the door and rushing out into the snow.

It was a dark night, and yet the Moon was shining with impossible brightness, rising too swiftly and too vastly above the horizon, charging the snow with a glow somewhere between brilliantly silver and sickly pale. It hit the eye with a million diamond-like sparks, but it hit the stomach with something like nausea. The entire world seemed too vivid, too real, like something that you could only see in a fever. Ivan, still in Wolf form, sped out of the cabin, fleeing through the snow like a beast gone mad, scattering diamond powder with every leap. His speed would have suggested that he would soon reach the trees, but instead they never seemed to get any closer, as if the snow stretched out as swiftly as he raced through it.

The wind began to blow -- it formed into words -- all the world blinked -- and in mid-leap Ivan was no longer Wolf but man, sprawling face-down into the snow. As he struggled up, he glanced back. Framed against the impossibly large moon was Aegidius -- 'Giles' seems here too small a name -- the features of his pale face even at this distance somehow sharp and crystal-clear. There was something very wrong about him, though, and it was in the eyes, which were no longer dark but shining with silver light like that of the Moon. He gestured -- the world blinked again -- down Ivan went again. He felt himself seized by some irresistible force and dragged backwards. He could see nothing except moonlight-bright snow and dark furrows where his fingers were digging into the ground. The furrows grew longer and longer.

The Moon continued to rise, growing more and more vast until it filled the entire sky. In a silver voice and a strange language it began to sing.

Two weeks later some hikers stumbled across a pair of dead bodies in the snow. Upon investigating, the police found dozens more, and came upon a quiet cabin. Inside they found an empty cage and a man dead from severe trauma to the chest, his heart missing. In the door and across the floor were grooves, such as might be made by a human hand, yet impossibly deep. The gruesome murder was attributed to internecine conflict between two rival factions of the Russian mafia.

Capitulum Octavum Decimum

The next day Seneca came into Giles's office and found a large manila envelope with his name on it. There were legal documents of various kinds, related to the operations of the Aegidian Corporation, and a note: 'Off to Krasnoyarsky Krai.'

The events of the next several weeks are impossible to trace with any exactness, but I believe that, having made his way somehow to Moscow, Giles boarded a train at Moscow's Yaroslavsky Station for a relatively leaisurely trip of at least two days to Krasnoyarsk; but as this leaves gaps, he may well have stopped at other places along the way. But at the Krasnoyark station a curious event makes it possible again to say something of his actions.

Giles had hardly stepped off the train when he was met by Ivan's thugs, two large and brutish-looking men, or, rather, Wolves, wearing rather nicer suits than almost everyone around them. A short discussion in Russian followed. It was simple and to the point: he was told that he would be coming with them, and he cheerfully agreed.

As they began to escort him through the station, however, Giles brushed past someone else, a businesswoman coming back from Novobirsk on a business trip, perhaps. She was, in any case, dressed in a stylish, albeit not very expensive, suit, and she was with a group of others, both male and female, also dressed in good but understated suits. It is difficult to say much about them because there was nothing extraordinary about them. They went their way and Giles and his escort went theirs, and that might have been the end of it.

A few seconds later, however, the entire station was startled by a blood-curdling scream rising high above the ordinary passenger noise. It was the woman Giles had brushed past; she was brushing at her suit and screaming about paukí. Her startled companions attempted to calm her down, but could not; she continued to scream about spiders. Then it began to spread, as those who had touched her also began to be in the grip of terror. With each person it was something different, but each one began to scream as well. Some began to run. Whoever touched them, whomever they touched, also began to experience the madness.

Soon, however, the commotion was spreading by other means than touch. Sanity is no security against panic. It was a very early hour, so the station was not as busy as it might have been, but there were plenty of people who were departing or arriving, greeting or bidding goodbye. As the screaming spread, most of these wholly sane people began to panic, convinced, as we all would be, that something terrible was happening. They began to push and to shove and ultimately to stampede out of the station.

In all the chaos, Giles had vanished away. There were injuries, mostly from the stampede, but no deaths, and the Russian government blamed events on terrorists from some obscure border area; hallucinatory gas was as specific as they would get -- hallucinatory gas, no lasting ill effects. But several of those who had been there and who were able to give more coherent reports claimed that in their hallucination had were herded this way and that by a terrible monster with shining eyes and the form of a wolf, and thus you and I know better.

The thugs, having lost their prey, made their way to a shady restaurant near the station. Virtually all of the restaurants near the railway station in Krasnoyarsk are shady; businessmen of illegitimate trades haunt them, usually concerned one way or another with various kinds of trade in drugs and weapons, although sometimes concerned with even less decent ways of making money from another's misery. This restaurant was no different from any of the others; if anything, the criminal clientele was much higher class than is often found in such places: high enough not to have to dirty their own hands, although low enough that they still must meet in person those who do. It was a clean place, run well, and would no doubt have made a decent standing in a more respectable criminal neighborhood, as a place for politicians to have lunch.

In the back of this restaurant was a little room for special guests, and the thugs went directly for this room. It was not a large room, only big enough for one large table and a small bar, and there was only one person in it: a great, fat, white-faced man with dark circles under his eyes and a fearsome jawline. On the table in front of him was a stack of folders and papers, as well as a teacup, a little china pot of somewhat tacky design, marked kipitok in Cyrillic letters, and one of those fifty-gram shot glasses that are ubiquitous in Russia. The cup was full of tea but the glass was empty. The room was rather dark; the only source of light was a window, through which the early morning light was beginning to filter; but it was covered with light curtains.

"You are alone," the man at the table said.

"He escaped," one of the thugs said. "I do not know how."

"Unimportant," the man at the table said. "I am not the one Ivan will kill for it."

The thugs fidgeted.

The man at the table carefully lifted his teacup and looked into it reflectively for what could only have been a deliberately long moment. Then, taking the most delicate of sips, he said, "Ivan expected that it would not be easy to capture Him. Do you think the Wolf King the sort of Wolf who could be outmaneuvered by two idiots? You have played the role that was intended for you, by serving as an alarm. We now know that Aegidius has come to the Krai, and surely not alone. What is more, we know that He wishes us to know that He is here; otherwise we can very well expect that He would have made a more subtle entrance. You see that the Wolf King warns us. All of this," he said with a wave of the hand, "expected, all of it. Now you must let Ivan know, and quickly. A car is waiting for you. And if the Wolf King gets there before you do, you may count yourself among the dead."

So it was that the thugs set out north; and so it was that someone with keen hearing, who had been outside the window, set out north as well.