His voice was unheard throughout. Morlock remembered how the other one had screamed in transformation, and he wondered if this werewolf was mute. But he suspected not. The werewolf's luminous blue eyes never lost their cool intelligence. He could master the pain or terror that accompanied his transformation and not be mastered by it. That was bad for Morlock, of course. But Morlock, too, was the master of his pain and fear. He waited for the werewolf's attack.
The werewolf turned toward Morlock and fixed his frosty blue gaze on him. Morlock still waited for the werewolf's attack. He did not move, but kept his hands open. If the beast jumped, he would try to meet it in midair and break its neck.
There were mutters of anticipation from the guards, human and lupine, in the corridor.
The werewolf stepped out of the square of moonlight: a deliberate step backward, away from Morlock. He stood there in the shadows, waiting.
A storm of shouts and barking arose in the corridor outside.
Morlock wondered if this meant what he thought it meant. The gesture the werewolf had made was oddly familiar. He himself couldn't take a step backward, since he was against the wall, but he spread the fingers of his hands and waited.
The werewolf took another step back, a blue-eyed gray shadow among other shadows. He deliberately dropped his gaze.
Then Morlock remembered when he had seen this gesture before. In the Giving Field of the Khroic horde, Valona's, where he had killed a dragon and saved a werewolf's life.
The werewolf uttered a few wordlike barks. It paused, and repeated them.
One of the words sounded like rokhlan. Though, as the werewolf repeated it for the second time, Morlock decided it was really more like rokhlenu. But he thought it was the same word, borrowed into the werewolf speech.
The werewolf repeated his statement a third time.
Morlock thought the werewolf was saying that he himself was the dragonkiller. Then Morlock remembered that the werewolf who had been taken with him and the others by Valona's horde was a dragonkiller. Anyway, he had claimed it, and Math Valone had believed it.
Morlock didn't think he could say what he wanted to say in wolfspeech-and, now that he thought of it, he had never heard werewolves in human form speak like wolves. It might be insulting or unclear; that was the last thing Morlock wanted at the moment.
He made a corvine croak of recognition (I know you) and added the werewolf's own word: rokhlenu.
The werewolf nodded, satisfied, and turned away. He trotted over to a corner of the cell and curled up to sleep.
The jailors in the corridor were furious. They threw bits of trash and shouted obvious insults, and they barked like chained dogs yearning at the end of a leash, and they grumbled, more or less all at once. They wanted to see a fight, at least see someone humiliated. There would be none of that tonight.
Morlock crossed his arms and watched them, allowing a crooked smile to show on his face. As the jailors in the hallway noticed it they began to grow quiet. He met the eye of anyone who looked at him and smiled. He was trying to tell them something: tonight they were the entertainment and he was the audience, and he had been richly amused.
They began to slink away. The message had been received, or they were tired of complaining. Last to go (apart from the guards who were left on station) was the pale trustee. He met Morlock's eye, gave a brief answering smile, and fled.
Chapter Seven: Words
Every day, for many days that followed, the jailors tried to provoke a fight between Morlock and the werewolf Rokhlenu. The jailors would give them one dish of food and one dish of water and wait for them to fight over it. It maddened them to see the prisoners divide up the food and share the water, passing the dish back and forth. The jailors gave the prisoners scant water and no food for ten days, then again tried offering the prisoners a single dish of food. Their fury at seeing the prisoners again share their food was extremely amusing to Rokhlenu and Morlock.
The guards with bows started using one or the other of the prisoners for target practice. When they did this they would shout or bark words at him. Morlock guessed these were encouragements to attack the other prisoner. He ignored the arrows, as did Rokhlenu. What the werewolf thought about it Morlock didn't know-their conversations hadn't gotten to the point of discussing abstractions. But from Morlock's point of view, the issue was clear. Either the guards would kill him, or they would not. If they would not, their threats were empty. If they did kill him, it was one way to escape the prison. He was willing to buy their failure with his own death.
The guards began to enter the cell in force. They beat Rokhlenu until the prisoner was crippled with pain and injuries. Then they left him to be killed in his weakness by Morlock. Morlock left him alone, letting him be healed by time and moonlight, so the next time the guards entered they crippled Morlock and left him for Rokhlenu. Rokhlenu left Morlock alone to heal, also (although this took longer).
The guards tried this gambit many times. The beatings were often overseen by the same senior guard-sometimes in wolf form, sometimes in human form, but always addressed as Wurnafenglu by the other guards, and recognizable from his great torc of honor-teeth. He would speak at length, cajolingly or insultingly, to the prisoners. Rokhlenu ignored it; Morlock didn't understand it.
Wurnafenglu finally resorted to riskier gambits, like having the jailors introduce weapons to the cell. One day they left a single knife with the food and water. Morlock and Rokhlenu tossed it back and forth to each other across the cell until the disgusted guards sent the pale trembling trustee in to recover it.
Their last attempt was directed specifically at Morlock. One night, after Rokhlenu had undergone his transition to wolfhood, a dozen archers took their places outside the cell and aimed nocked arrows at Morlock. Then the pale trustee appeared, holding a rough metal spike in a pair of long wooden tongs. He tossed the spike into the cell and backed away, looking apologetically at the prisoners.
Rokhlenu backed instinctively away from the spike. Morlock approached it. The archers shifted their aim to follow him.
The spike was made of silver. Morlock was intrigued. How had they acquired it? Why had they acquired it? What did they expect him to do?
He picked up the spike and looked at the guards outside the cell. No word or sign was given, but the implication seemed clear: kill him or we'll kill you.
Morlock hefted the spike in his hand. It was a powerful weapon in this stretch of the world, but it was no good to him in this cell. He tossed it through the open window into the moonslit world outside. Then he turned to face the archers.
Wurnafenglu, standing in wolf form in the hallway, gave a curt bark. The archers stood down and marched away. Only the usual four guards were left on station. Wurnafenglu looked wearily at Morlock and then looked away.
It was the jailors' last attempt to get Morlock and Rokhlenu to fight.
In the meantime, Morlock had been learning the werewolves' languages from Rokhlenu. He had been right that the werewolves were repelled by humans making wolf sounds (and the reverse): each form had its own language. In wolf form ("the night shape" Rokhlenu called it) they used Moonspeech, and in human form ("the day shape") they used Sunspeech.
At first, Morlock learned Moonspeech faster: he already knew a few words, and there were apparently not many to know. But Moonspeech was more difficult than Sunspeech in some ways. With fewer words and less grammar to communicate the same universe of meanings, much of the sense depended on shifting contexts and metaphorical leaps that Morlock found hard to follow. If he'd still had his Sight it might have been easier.
Sunspeech, in contrast, had a multitude of vocabularies and inflections with very precise distinctions. There was a difference between "volcanic rock unworked by a maker and unweathered by the elements" (wilk), "volcanic rock worked but not weathered" (wlik), "volcanic rock weathered but not worked" (welk), "volcanic rock worked and weathered" (welik), and it was a solecism to use one when you meant the other, or a vaguer word like the undifferentiated "rock" (lafun) when you really meant something more specific. Morlock committed this solecism so often that Rokhlenu seemed to grow used to it. Anyway, he stopped laughing at it.