"Not for me to say. Not for you to say, not for the captain to say. It's up to the old Wizard.

He might be watching you now, he might be advising the governor in Mountain Home. One thing is for sure, no one who meets him comes away the same as he was before."

Back at the cabin, like a demon invoked by mention of his name, word from the Lifeweaver waited in the form of a small printed list. The cabin was empty save for Seth and Sailor Tom, both napping in front of the Franklin stove.

"Amu's called an Invocation," Big Seth explained from his modified bunk. Reinforced wooden wings accommodated his six-foot-six-inch frame and supported an elongated mattress of his own making. "Starting Sat.u.r.day and running for a week. One hundred fifteen fresh Wolves in this batch, thank G.o.d."

"Nice to see the roster growing this year. Many's the sum-mer we had less than the year before. Let's see the list," Pankow said, reaching for the typed sheet of paper.

"Marquez made it. Bad news, Valentine," he said, watching Valentine's face fall. "You made it, Valentine. In fact, you're last on the list."

Valentine felt ambivalent at Pankow's joke, but a little pride still crept into his voice. "At least I made it, even if I'm dead last."

"Don't take it that way, son," Big Seth interjected. "It isn't good or bad, being last. Just means they may want to take more time."

"Doing what? Tattoos, a Vulcan mind-meld, what?"

Pankow laughed. "h.e.l.l, Valentine, where did you come up with that? Little before your time, and they haven't done reruns in over forty years."

"My dad liked to read science fiction. The man who brought me up after he died taught me to read my dad's books. But what is this transformation you all keep hinting about?"

Big Seth and Pankow exchanged a look. Pankow shook Valentine's hand.

"You'll just have to meet Father Wolf and see for yourself. Magic, son, is a little hard to explain."

The week dragged on, and Valentine made it pa.s.s more quickly by devouring the few books in the cabin. A heavy snowstorm came, and the Wolves relaxed the tough schedule shared by the two Aspirants. Valentine gratefully retreated to his bunk. Pankow gave him a pamphlet written by his foster mother. Printed in heavy, slightly smeared type and c.u.mber-somely t.i.tled Fallen G.o.ds: The History, Theory, and Practice of the Kurian Order, it was fifty pages relating the history of the Lifeweavers, their schism over the use of vital auras to attain immortality, and the Kurian takeover of Earth.

The Kurians failed in their first effort to take Earth because it was chaotic, badly planned, and they had not even consolidated their victory on Kur itself, where knots of Lifeweaver resistance slowed them. Humanity owes these brave lost souls a four-thousand-year debt of grat.i.tude. Mankind in its primitive, isolated state was less vulnerable to the spread of the Ravies plague and quicker to accept the word and help of the Lifeweavers.

We hunted the horrors that came over from Kur, closed the doors, and having eradicated the threat promptly forgot about it two hundred years before Stonehenge was built.

Vampires became rumor, then legend, and the Caste of the Bear trickled down into human legend as the berserkers of the Norse sagas.

Certainly a Kurian or two remained on Earth, lurking in untraveled corners of the globe.

And Kurian-de-signed sp.a.w.n, now known generically as Grogs and individually through slang and names out of mythology, no doubt survived to trouble humanity now and again as it pushed back the borders of the unknown.

But though the Gates of the Interworld Tree were closed, the Kurians in their red-clouded underground world learned in the long years of their exile how to open new ones. When and where the first of the new portals were opened is a matter of some dispute. Even the Lifeweavers are unable to say. It could have been as early as the Dark Ages in the Balkans, or as late as the eighteenth century. Opening the portals requires enormous sacrifices of vital auras to achieve, but after the first Kur came through the new Gate or Gates, humanity aided the Kurians in this all too frequently.

Humanity took the first step toward its own overthrow. Over the years, the Kurians recruited human allies, perhaps by striking Faustian bargains. The Kurian moles gained positions of trust and authority in society.

With the new millennium, the dragon's teeth sown in the last hundred or so years of man's history were ready to grow. In the first week of June 2022, they sprang the trapdoor on the vital auras of Earth's seven billion inhabitants.

The door to the cool room opened noisily, and Gavineau entered the cabin. He walked over to the hearth, apparently not seeing Valentine, and took the jug of busthead down from its place on the shelf. Gavineau collapsed in the leather-webbed camp chair by the empty fireplace, took a long pull, and stared at the cold ashes. Sailor Tom took advantage of the warm lap, and Gavineau scratched the cat between the ears without looking at it. Valentine considered greeting him, but didn't wish to be given something to do. He returned to his booklet.

THE OVERTHROW The world was already a miserable place in the spring of that cursed year. The New Depression was at its height. Stocks fell, jobs were lost, and consumer consumption fell in a corporate death spiral as the aging technoczars were revealed to have feet of clay. Financial inst.i.tutions underreacted, the government overreacted, and a society living on borrowed time paid for with borrowed dollars failed. Hard times and hunger came to the Western world, which was all the more of a shock because the generation that survived the last financial collapse had virtually died out.

Ancient hatreds smoldered and burst into flame. Europe saw its first real war in generations over food tariffs; China used America's preoccupation with its economy to overrun Taiwan.

Russia and j.a.pan, both backing different factions in Europe and the Pacific Rim, started a naval war that the United States, in its last great overseas commitment, stopped by cordoning off the two powers.Civil unrest over the use of American wealth and resources abroad with so many suffering at home erupted into violence. Paramilitary groups took a hodgepodge of economic, political, and even racial grievances to the ultimate court of violence. A few polarizing and charismatic leaders further unraveled the tattered American social fabric.

The Earth itself added its cataclysmic voice to the dissonant chorus of human suffering. A worldwide string of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions leveled cities and made ash-covered wastelands of regions near the volcanoes. Particles in the atmosphere changed the climate more to the Kurians' liking. As if the tectonic damage was not enough, a plague added to the chaos. People called it rabies, but its twenty-four-to seventy-two-hour incubation cycle and mind-altering effects made the cure seem more like a job for exorcists than doctors. Wild mobs tore through the cities in a biting and clawing frenzy that shattered civic order.

Not even suspected at the time was that both events were long planned. Kurian technology allowed the fallen Lifeweavers to use the Earth itself as a weapon, and the disease, which we know today as Raving Mad-ness, had appeared on Earth in the first Kurian invasion. The pale, robed Reapers began to walk the night.

The Reapers strode into the maelstrom, alternately cowing and killing. They commanded legions of Grogs, genetically altered creatures designed to break up opposition. As fearless in battle as army ants, but far more cunning, the Grogs come in many shapes and sizes. The most common form is a large rhino-hided ape, with hands and brains capable of using weaponry from a.s.sault rifles to armored personnel carriers.

The military and civil forces of the United States, already unable to deal with the plague and widespread destruction, succ.u.mbed as spare parts, ammunition, and especially morale ran out. A few Kurian agents and collaborators in the command structure helped orchestrate defeat on a grand scale. In the final extreme, a scorched-earth policy destroyed military bases and their equipment to keep them out of the hands of the Kurians. A few nuclear and chemical weapons were used in the last gasp of the war, but this added to the suffering rather than slowing the Kurian takeover. The end came with a bang and a whimper. The president shot himself when he learned his family had caught the Raving Madness virus at a riot in Quantico, and the vice president fled with a few leading members of congress to Mount Omega after she read the president's final executive order. In it, the despairing president declared, like the captain of a sinking ship, that the situation was "every man for himself."

The United States, and as far as we can tell the rest of the world, belonged to the Kurians within a year.

Valentine could understand why Kostos ended her life a hard-drinking woman. The facts of life of the New World Order came more easily to Valentine, who had been born well after the Kurian takeover. No memories of the vanished security and a.s.sorted technological delights of the past haunted him, just a wistful curiosity. He sometimes felt a schism between himself and Pankow's generation, including even the Padre. They cherished and fought for the past, a flag with stars and stripes, a way of living that would probably never return. Valentine wanted to win back his future.

A creaking from the sitting part of the room and a disgruntled miaow from Sailor Tom made Valentine glance up from the old red pamphlet and look at Gavineau. The Wolf set the jug on the floor and shuffled over to his bed, a sad and sick look visiting his face with every intention of staying the night.

"You okay, Don?"

"Hey, Val," he slurred. "Didn't see you there. Pankow giving you some slack?"

"He rode up the Happy Trail today," Valentine explained. The Happy Trail Getaway was a saloon where the bartender was friendly to the Wolves and the girls were even friendlier, if the words were kind and the price was right, the price being anything from a new pair of shoes to an old song, depending on the charm of the man. "I think he's letting up on me with the Invocation a day away. All I had to do was draw him a hot bath and put an edge on the razor. He told me I couldn't eat anything, and just to take it easy. Wouldn't tell me why I couldn't eat, though."

"Valentine, Marquez is dead. Can't think of any other way to say it."

The Aspirant's thoughts about-faced and came to attention in a hurry. "What?"

Gavineau sat on his bed, a bunk away from Valentine's. A sheet of laundry hung between them.

"It just happens sometimes, boy," said Gavineau.

"He made it through the Invocation fine. It's not like you run an Indian gantlet or something," slurred Gavineau. "He got out of the cave and just lost it. It can affect you funny. I remember I got out of mine and all I could smell was wood smoke on everything.

He looked around like he didn't know where he was and took off at a run. Jumped right off the d.a.m.n cliff. I remember two years ago one kid quit eating after it. Wouldn't touch any food, always saying it was diseased or filthy or something. He starved himself to death, just threw up when we force-fed him. Usually the guys who come over funny are just jumpy for a couple of days, then they come round. Bad business with Marquez. A couple others volunteered to go down and get the body. I only saw it from three hundred feet up."

"My G.o.d, what made-?"

"Hey, David, don't let it get to you," he said. "He just wasn't wired right, and sometimes not even the Wizard can spot that. You'll be fine."

Gavineau's drunken prediction was something Valentine reminded himself of again and again as he climbed the mountainside with ten other Aspirants, the last set supposed to meet with the Lifeweaver known variously as Amu, the Wizard, and Father Wolf.

Named Winterhome Mountain, the 2,200-foot cap of rock and snow looked like a shark's tooth from some angles and a sagging tepee from others. The cave was a little more than halfway up, set back from Marquez's fatal cliff by a sloping meadow. Five goats grazed there, some stripping bark from the stunted mountain pine and others pawing at the lingering snow fo expose dead bracken underneath.

Two totem poles flanked the crescent-shaped entrance to the cave. Carved wolf heads, ears erect and eyes alert, crowned the poles. Carved names covered the rest of the pole, some with dates written afterwards. Valentine decided these must be the tollpoles, mobile gravestones for Wolves who died in battle. Not so bad, Valentine thought, a few hundred names for twenty years of fighting.

Just inside the cave eleven more poles, filled with tightly packed names, formed an arch the recruits filed under like a wedding party pa.s.sing under crossed swords. Valentine paused and ran a finger over the carved names on one of the poles. Would his name join the long list?

The tunnel widened into a teardrop-shaped cave with a curtain at one end. What might have been a tapestry decorated the curtain; Valentine couldn't make out much in the dim light trickling in from the entrance even after his eyes adjusted. The two Wolves guiding them motioned for them to sit.

"Just keep quiet, and let him work you one at a time," one of them warned. "After the ceremony, they'll be kinda twitchy, so keep still and quiet when they come out."

The curtain moved as a wet black nose appeared. A canine head the size of a champion pumpkin lifted the curtain, revealing blazing blue eyes that reminded Valentine of a husky from the Boundary Waters. A wolf that could be mistaken for a pony by its size strode into the ring of Aspirants sitting around the edges of a cave. It had striking white fur, with black tips visible only up close. It sniffed each man, stepping sideways on paws" the size of horseshoes.

"Thank you all for earning your places in this cave," a rich, cultivated voice came from the wolf's mouth, which did not seem to be forming any words. The wolf quivered and blurred, to be replaced by a smiling old man. "Forgive the dramatic entrance; it's an illusion that impressed your ancestors. I continue it out of love of tradition. Ahem. I hope you all know who I am."

"Amu," said some of those present. "The Wizard," said a few others. Valentine just nodded.

There was something n.o.ble and strong about the man, Valentine thought, but with just a hint of tired lunacy in his frosty blue eyes. Valentine for some reason thought of Cervantes's Don Quixote.

"My name is not as important as who I am, a matter entirely different from a simple name.

For I am going to be your Father. You all have a biological father who started your life, and most of you believe in a spiritual father who will take you unto him after death. I am here to be a third Father. I will give you rebirth."

Eleven separate faces digested this.

"Yes, I am speaking in riddles. Riddles are simple, usually after you hear the answer. But I am a busy man and would prefer to deal with each of you individually. Michael Jeremy Wohlers," the Wizard said, standing in front of a husky, curly-haired youth. "I'll see you first."

The prospective Wolf shot to his feet, narrowly missing crashing his head against the ceiling.

"How did-?"

"I didn't," interrupted the Wizard, opening the curtain and gracefully pointing with his chin to the inner cavefti. "You did."

Valentine spent four increasingly sore hours waiting his turn. Hungry, anxious, cold, and confused seemed a strange way to go through this invocation ceremony. He watched each of the ten other recruits emerge one at a time from behind the tapestry and stare about at those remaining as if they had never seen them before. Pete, the Viking giant who came down from northern Minnesota with Valentine, looked around at the remaining Aspirants suspiciously, as if fifteen minutes ago he had not been shifting from one aching b.u.t.tock to the other with the rest of them.

"Pete, how'd it go?" Valentine asked. The blond jumped away from Valentine like a horse startled by a firecracker. His head connected with the cavern roof with the audible thump of a dropped melon, and he crashed to the ground, unconscious.

"Told you to keep quiet. If he ain't up by the time you're done, you're carrying him out,"

one of the Wolves said.

Pete began to groan and rolled onto all fours. He retched, vomiting clear liquid across the floor of the cave.

"Oh, that's just fine," the second Wolf said. "Now the other three are sure to puke." Pete staggered to his feet and lurched out of the cave, rubbing the back of his head.

And puke they did. As the last two returned to the cave, they each added their own puddles of bile to the floor of the cave before fleeing to the open air outside. Valentine wondered if this was the reason for the orders not to eat anything.

"You're up, kid," one said.

"Through the looking gla.s.s you go, Alice," added the other.

He pulled the tapestry aside and stepped through. Behind him, he heard one Wolf say to the other, "Glad this happens only twice a year."

The tunnel wound downward, illuminated by nearly guttered candles set into the irregular sides of the cave. Valentine counted twenty paces before a second heavy piece of cloth blocked his progress. He didn't know whether to just open it, say his name, or tap on the material. He cleared his throat.

"Come in, come in, Valentine the Younger."

He entered, bending beneath the low rock arch.

The cave was warm and well lit, with a clean, inviting smell, which Valentine identified as balsam. The warmth and light came from an apple-size glowing ball that floated a few inches below the cave's eight-foot ceiling. It was bright but somehow did not pain Valentine's eyes, even when he looked directly at it. The room reminded Valentine of the inside of an igloo, were the igloo constructed out of grayish ice.

Father Wolf sat cross-legged in the center of the room on a woven rug. The floor of the cave was a ma.s.s of pine needles and small branches, with more patterned rugs thrown over the boughs. Five four-legged wolves snored in a companionable heap near the door.

"My bodyguard, you might say," said Amu. "Long ago, in another part of your world, I traveled with twenty of them. It made more of an impression on those simple folk: they lived in fear of wolves. I have grown rather fond of them, and should our enemies discover me here, I would remask myself and slip out with them. Sit down, please."

Valentine sat, grateful for the cushioning needles and rug after the hard floor of the outer cave.

"What do you want me to do?" Valentine asked.

"The question would be better put as what do you want to do. Why did you leave Minnesota? You did not come south just for a change of geography."

"I want to do my part."

The Wizard smiled at this. "Simply put. I hear something a little different from each young man or woman. They want to defend hearth and home, liberate their enslaved fellow men, and kick the invaders back into their kennels.

"What is needed from you, and what you can give me if you are true to yourself, is an outlet for your hatred. Hatred makes for good killers. The word is anathema; your religions rightly discourage it because it makes poor mortar for a society. But, young Valentine, your race is being eaten. You should be consumed by hate; your every breath should be drawn to curse your enemies. It gives you energy and a purpose and a determination that only love matches. The more you love your fellow men, the more you should be aflame with hatred for your foe. Your culture is so full of the image of the reluctant warrior that it is an archetype. The man who kills regretfully, who goes into battle terrified but gets the job done and then shows mercy to his enemy afterwards. That kind of man will keep the Free Territory upright for a while. But he will not win the war. Not against this enemy.

"There is a beast in you that I'm going to help you release. If you agree, that is. I give fair warning, though. It means a vicious life and perhaps a hard end. You will live only to kill our enemies until you yourself are slain. Few of my warriors retire to marry as your father did.

So if you want a role inside the human family, I'm giving you a chance to walk out of this cave and down the hill with your humanity intact. You can serve with honor in the Guards, living up to the image of n.o.ble crusader, or go back into hiding. There are many ways to do the right thing. Stay with us, though, and you will become the thing the enemy fears in the night. The prey will become the predator."

Valentine wondered how many refused the offer. How many men wanted to be killers? He had expected physical or mental tests, not a moral one. He thought of his father but could not make the connection between the Wizard's animalistic killers and the quiet man who was shot to death in his own backyard.

"Why don't the Lifeweavers fight? I would think that with your technology, magic I've heard it called, you'd be able to beat the Kurians."

The Wizard seemed a little surprised. "Usually I ask the questions, but I will do my best to answer yours: We are not any good at it. It would be like you defecating in your pants. You could do it if you put your mind to it, but you would not enjoy the experience, and until you had a chance to clean yourself, you would probably be preoccupied. We toilet-trained ourselves far too long ago, we are not numerous, and my ability to change into a wolf does not mean I could bite like one.

"You h.o.m.o sapiens, on the other hand, are almost perfect killing machines. You are flexible, aggressive, intelligent, and inventive. We examined life-forms on twelve worlds, and you half-savages revert to your terrible earlier selves with greater alacrity than any other. So we help you fight your battles, and in doing so you fight our war for us. Or am I speaking in riddles again?"

"No, I understand. It's your method I question. Instead of arming us with some kind of advanced technology, you turn us feral. That seems a strange way to help us win a war."

The Wizard abruptly disappeared, only to emerge from the dome-shaped cave's other exit, carrying what looked like a small mirror on a stand. "I am sorry," he said to the startled young man. "I had to get this, and I didn't want to interrupt, so I left you talking to an image. You said you understood, David. It is clear that you do not. I'm giving you the most powerful weapon on the planet: yourself at your full potential."

"I thought I was supposed to make up my mind."

"You did, David, you did," he said, sitting again opposite the young man. "The moment you thought of your father, and his death, and wondered if he was the kind of man I want you to become. You may not have felt it, but to me your fury was white hot. You can hide your rage from yourself, but not from me. It is so big, I wonder where you put it so you can sleep at night."

The item the Wizard placed between them looked like a plate-sized round mirror. It hovered at face level between them, held up by the same mysterious force that kept the light globe near the ceiling. Valentine saw in it only his own reflection, but fuzzy and out of focus, conforming to his general outline.

"What is this?" he asked. Amu's face appeared in the mirror. The Lifeweaver's visage melted and shifted as though his skin were made of clouds boiling in the wind. "You could say it's the surgeon's scalpel, David. I will use it to operate on you. There is a cup in front of you. Drink up."

Valentine looked at the woven rug. A wooden cup, round like a hollowed-out coconut, sat before him. Had it been sitting there all the time? Valentine sniffed at it suspiciously.

"Just a little something to facilitate the ceremony. It is tasteless."

Valentine drank. Just before consciousness faded, he looked into the mirror-thing. First he saw his face, then the Wizard's, then a wolf's. The images flickered together: Wizard-Wolf- Self-Wizard-Wolf-Self-Wizard-Wolf-Self. Only the eyes were all the same. But they were not his. Not Amu's. The Wolf's. Valentine found himself fixing on the eyes of the three faces as they morphed from one manifestation to the next, all sharing the same ice-blue stare.

The young Wolf awoke to an overwhelming farrago of sounds and smells. The pine needles, musty rugs, dried lichen on the walls, and living wolves all vied to overthrow his brain. He could hear their heartbeats as with a stethoscope. Their breathing sounded like a gale. Too much! Too much! his brain shrieked at him. He leaped up and hurled himself away from the sleeping pack as if flung by a catapult, bruising himself with the force of the impact against the wall.

David, stay calm. Your senses are just sharpened up a little, that is all, Amu's voice in his head whispered in a soothing monotone. I will help you through your first days; then you will learn on your own. You must learn to switch your senses between two levels, "hard"