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."