The Wolf Age Read Online Free Page B

He tossed the bench into the water and jumped in after it, sword still in hand.
    He flipped the bench on its back and lay Tyrfing across its underside. The bench seemed buoyant enough to carry him and his sword, at least until it absorbed some water. Looking back, he saw the old woman who had been rowing in front of him. She was sinking under the silver surface of the Bitter Water. He reached out with one hand to rescue her, but she scornfully struck it aside and let herself sink. Soon she passed from sight: a gray shape lost in the gray moonslit water.
    Morlock looked up. One net full of dripping refugees was already being drawn up toward the gondola of an airship. The others were still gathering willing victims.
    Maybe they were right, Morlock realized. It was a warm night for winter, but it was still a winter night on the Bitter Water. Death was there, in the chill of the water if nothing else. He might live longer if he resigned himself to his fate, as they were doing.
    But he wasn't the resigned type. And he had never been a slave. "Eh," he said, and paddled grimly away into the night.

    His plan was to swim westward and then turn south toward the shoreline, hopefully landing at a place not thick with angry werewolves.
    He hadn't much hope. The weather was warm, perhaps, by the frosty standards of the north, but the Bitter Water was cold-far colder than his blood. There was a fire in him, but he knew that water quenches fire. Still, he would not surrender. Death was in the water. He knew it; he felt it. But he would fend it off as long as possible.
    A current, even colder than the other water, caught him and dragged him off the course he thought he was taking. Soon he couldn't even remember where he had thought land was. If he could hold out until dawn...
    He did not hold out. The cold sank deep teeth into his aching limbs. His mind began to fog. He forgot to raise his head occasionally to look for signs of land. He found himself drifting occasionally, his feet motionless in the killing water, loosely grasping the bench, his eyes closed. Every time it happened it was harder to kick his feet into motion. And eventually the time came when he found himself adrift half submerged in the water, the wooden waterlogged bench lost on the dark sea. He kept his limbs moving as long as he could, but eventually the darkness in the cold water entered his mind and he sank, already dying, into the killing water.
    Death was there under the surface of the sea. He had known it from the beginning, but now he saw her reaching out for him with long dark fingers, bristling with darkness like a spider's legs.
    She embraced him with her many arms, and her bristling fingertips touched his face.
    She introduced talic distortions into his fading consciousness, like words.
    I am not ready for you to enter my realm, she signified. You have been a good servant to me, but I have more work for you to do in the world.
    Without speaking, he rejected her service-rejected all the Strange Gods.
    She signified an amusement even colder than the Bitter Water, and his mind went dark.
    But it was not the darkness of death. He came to himself later-it must have been hours later, because the western sky was gray with approaching dawn. He was coughing up salty vomit as he crawled across the stony margin of the Bitter Water.
    In the same instant he saw two things: his sword, Tyrfing, gleaming in the shallow water and the dim gray light. The other was a crowd of shadows, manlike and wolflike, standing farther up the beach. He looked up and saw men and women with wolvish shadows, wolves with human shadows.
    His throat was closed like a fist; he couldn't call Tyrfing to him. He leapt toward it, but the werewolves were on him before he reached it. They didn't use swords or teeth, but clubs and fists. They wanted him alive.
    He fought as hard as he could, but they were too many and his strength was failing. Before he lost consciousness he felt them put the shackles on his