At the mention of the wartroop, a shadow crossed Timbrin's face. "Please, Relys." Shock had erased her defiance and temper, and in women's garb she looked soft and vulnerable: a girl, no more, recovering from an illness. "Not yet."

Relys examined her for a moment, searching. Timbrin dropped her eyes. "Aye," said Relys softly. "Not yet. There will be time enough for that later." She touched Timbrin's face tenderly, as a mother might caress a child. "Much later."

* CHAPTER 12 *

The autumn dusk fell early over Los Angeles, the sun setting in a haze of smog out to the west and turning the ocean the color of blood; but darkness brought no relief from the heat. The Santa Ana winds continued to blow, the city continued to parch and swelter, and the twilight sky held a sense of oppressive weight as Alouzon Dragonmaster drove out towards MacArthur Park through the tail end of rush hour traffic.

The story in the Los Angeles Times had been simple and blunt, the lack of evidence and the horror of the murders precluding any journalistic sensationalism. The two men who had been found by an early morning police patrol had been unrecognizable, their bodies scattered over a wide area; and what was left of them- where the flesh had not been gnawed from the bones- had been partially dissolved by corrosives that the forensic specialists were still trying to identify. The police had theories that ranged from a drug deal gone bad to Satanism, but Alouzon knew otherwise.

Wilshire Boulevard split MacArthur Park into two halves, the north gra.s.sy and open and dotted with picnic tables and playgrounds, the south occupied for the most part by a lake. Alouzon pulled into a parking s.p.a.ce near Alvarado Street and climbed out, her new jeans stiff and sweaty both. The hot wind stirred her bronze hair as she shoved a coin into the meter, and she leaned on the wall and examined the park to the south.

She remembered the lake. She had fallen out of nothingness and onto the gra.s.s near the lake. But the men had been killed in the same area, and if there was any logic left in the universe, the two facts had to be connected.

She entered the park at the corner gate and made her way south. The fast-food stand was doing a brisk, last minute business in soft drinks and hot dogs. Over her left shoulder, the Westlake Theater sign came on in neon red, and she could see, just over the roof of the Botica del Pueblo, another sign hanging from a rickety scaffolding of criss-crossed girders and beams like an ancient G.o.d crucified upon the indifference of civilization: Olympic.

But here, on this broad swath of gra.s.s that extended from Alvarado to the lake, were tokens of the violence. Despite the efforts of the park service, patches were still greasy and brown from phosphor, and Alouzon's warrior eyes detected the trail of the men who had seen, and then had fled, and then had died without even vaguely comprehending the nature or purpose of the beasts that had slain them.

Night was coming on, but there were still a few sightseers about, come for the trees and gra.s.s or to examine the scene of the killings. Alouzon pa.s.sed on, crossed Alvarado, and spent the next two hours in Langer's Delicatessen, lingering over a pastrami on rye and a soda while she watched the park clear and the artificial lights come on.

Light was not desirable, for she wanted to examine the park leisurely, without worrying about junkies or the police. But she had to put up with it, and when darkness had fallen as much as the city would allow, she sloshed her way north through the pools of mercury vapor light until she reached her VW. She fumbled in the back seat, withdrew the Dragonsword and wrapped it in a big beach towel, then climbed over the low wall into the park.

A fountain hissed in the distance. Waves lapped softly on the sh.o.r.e. Discarded hamburger wrappings rustled in the dry wind. Styrofoam cups rolled along the bare dirt and rattled to a stop at the base of date palms and flame trees.

For the next two hours, Alouzon prowled through the park, searching, feeling, her sword ready beneath its terrycloth wrappings. She had fallen into Los Angeles on Sat.u.r.day morning. In the course of the day, crowds had visited the park-picnicking, plashing in the paddle boats, playing frisbee or volleyball-and no one had noticed anything amiss. But that night, one or more hounds had made their way into Los Angeles, and they had killed.

And then what? Evaporated?

Standing on the northwest sh.o.r.e, Alouzon shrugged. Maybe. Cut off from the source of their being and stranded in a strange world, the hounds might well have killed, eaten, and then simply vanished ... as was appropriate for impossible beasts and, perhaps, Dragonmasters too.

Something flickered across the water.

Headlights? Her eyes narrowed. It was late, and traffic was intermittent on Alvarado. At present there were no cars to cast reflections on the water. But something had glimmered-was still glimmering-out on the lawn between the lake and the street: a hazy curtain of shifting light and mist.

Silently, undetected by the vagrants and the drug dealers, she slipped around the lake sh.o.r.e and skirted the edge of the white fence that surrounded the fast-food stand. The glimmering grew more distinct: a wavering door of light.

Door. The word came to her unbidden, but she knew it to be appropriate. She quickened her steps, feeling a sensation of otherworldliness growing about her, one that reminded her of Solomon's grave, Helen's house, and the indefinable and invisible aura about the office at UCLA.

A clump of heavy paws-and a deep-throated howl suddenly rang through the night, echoing off the water and the line of shops across Alvarado Street.

She ran. Ahead, figures were moving on the lawn. One was that of a man, his clothes tattered, his skin lined. Three others, though, were four-footed, the size of lions. They glowed, their eyes like lamps, their mouths dripping with phosphor.

Alouzon pulled the Dragonsword free of the towel and approached at a run, her sneakers silent on the gra.s.s. The beasts were intent on other prey, though, prey that was defenseless, slow, weak . . . and much, much closer.

Cut off from the street and the lights, the old man stumbled out towards the lake, screaming at the sight of the waking nightmares that pursued him. He slammed into the benches that lined the walkway about the lake, spun to the side, and nearly fell; but an eager yelp from the beasts pulled him to his feet again, and he staggered onto a small tongue of land that projected into the water near the island reserved for the ducks that nested in the park.

The hounds closed on him. Alouzon closed on the hounds.

The Dragonsword slid out of its sheath and sent one of the beasts writhing to the pavement, cut nearly in two. Phosphor spilled and smoked, boiling like molten sodium where it touched the water. The ducks erupted into startled flight. Alouzon pulled her blade free of the carca.s.s, but one hound was already dragging down the old man while the other came at her.

She skipped to the side, evading the needle teeth that smacked together inches from her leg, and vaulted one of the park benches. The hound followed, bounding over the obstacle with ease. It was a clear opening, but before Alouzon could swing, she was struck from behind. She fell, narrowly missing the pool of corro- sives that was already gathering. The two hounds rushed at her.

"Not on your life, guy." She caught the nearest beneath the chin with the sheath of her sword and planted a kick between the eyes of the second. The hounds tumbled, but they rose again.

She was now between them, with only the Dragon-sword and her instincts to defend her. Backing, she put herself at the end of the narrow tongue of land, confining the beasts to an approach only twenty feet wide. It was not much, but it was better than being directly in the middle.

They came at her simultaneously, mouths gaping, needle teeth dripping, eyes glowing like blue lamps. While she managed to open the side of the one on her right, she could not avoid the other, and it struck her in the stomach and pitched her into the lake.

She floundered, the hounds thrashed, phosphor steamed and frothed in the water. The wounded hound staggered to the side, still snapping; but its fellow, unhurt, waded towards her and sprang just as her feet, betrayed by the algae-slick lake-bed, went out from under her. The hound pa.s.sed over her head, and she sat down in two feet of stinking water, arms flailing, expecting at any moment to feel iron jaws snap closed on her.

But, distantly, she heard a voice. An impossibly familiar voice: "Gryylth!"

The morning after Relys arrived at Paia's house, word came down from Kingsbury that the villages and steadings were to be cleared, their inhabitants moved into Kingsbury and the other major towns. When pressed, the guards who brought the orders merely said that it had to do with adequate defensive measures, that the order applied to villages and steadings all across the country. Paia protested, but the men were big, gruff, and armed; and by way of a reply they asked her whether she wanted to be left to the mercy of the hounds and Grayfaces.

Paia looked at her steading-neat and trim, its vegetable garden showing the promise of a good harvest. She wore the agonized expression of a woman about to be sent away from everything familiar and secure, but the toddlers clutching at her skirts could not but make up her mind for her.

"I will go," she said at last.

The soldiers gestured towards Kingsbury Hall. "Immediately."

Paia flared. "I will go," she snapped. "That is all I will say. Now take your evil news to the other farmers and leave me alone."

She turned on her heel and stalked back to the house, her children following behind her. After slamming the door, she sent the children up to the loft, sat down at the table before the big fireplace, put her face in her hands, and sobbed.

Relys, moving slowly, rose from her pallet. "It was bound to happen," she said. "We heard the rumors a week ago."

Paia was not comforted. "Why? It is the action of a fool! Helwych takes the people off the land . . . and who will feed the people then? Or can he make feasts and banquets for us out of straw and weeds?''

"Nay, I do not think he can," Relys admitted.

The housewife was crying weakly, tears running down her plump cheeks. "I would defy the orders," she said. "But my children ..."

"Courage, my friend," said Relys, putting her good arm about the midwife's shoulders. "The king will return. And perhaps Alouzon too. All will be well."

Paia lifted her eyes. "Do you believe that, sister?"

Relys dropped her eyes. "I . . . know not what to believe."

The housewife's eyes were sad. "You and Timbrin will have to leave immediately. I am sorry.''

"Peace," said Relys. "We would have left in a week in any case. That we must leave early is of no concern."

Paia only looked at Relys's hand. It was trembling from weakness.

Relys and Timbrin departed before dawn the next day, starting off when there was just enough light in the sky to find the road. It was a doubtful journey to be sure: neither woman could wield a weapon, and they would be skirting the edge of the night battles that lit the horizon to the north of Kingsbury. But Relys doubted that any sword or armor would be of use against weapons that illuminated half the sky, and therefore their strategy-if simple necessity could be dignified with that term-would be to travel to Quay quietly and un.o.btrusively.

They took back ways and farmer's roads northward, making the most of the cover of forests and foothills. Paia had given them the cart, supplies, and a dependable horse, so their way was slow, but not arduous.

Timbrin, still locked in h.e.l.lish timidity, sat in the back of the cart, clutching a shawl about her thin shoulders, trying not to cower. She wore a gown given her by one of Paia's daughters, and, clad as she was like a child, she looked almost absurdly young. Her large brown eyes scanned the pa.s.sing landscape with a mixture of fear and curiosity.

Relys drove, and though her hard black eyes watched the leagues unfold before her-the roads and tracks glowing white under the summer sun, the breeze whipping up dust devils and clouds from the abandoned fields-she saw also the barracks, and the faces of the men who had raped her, and her hand bared of flesh and muscle . . .

The wound throbbed, and she clutched her hand within its bandages, stifling the cry of pain that surged up in her throat. She would never wield a sword again. Never. What, then, was she? Just a woman?

The words stung like bile in her throat. Just a woman. She had seen and felt what women were: she would never utter those words again.

Three days, and they were still traveling; but the land changed. Out on the broad plains east of the foothills, large expanses of once fertile fields were brown and dead, and even Relys and Timbrin, who had no skill or knowledge of fanning, knew instinctively that the blight was not natural.

Further north, craters pocked the fields and forests in strings of house-sized depressions that stretched for the better part of a league. Full-sized oaks had been felled, their trunks splintered like sticks blown in a hurricane; and long black scars cut through hill, field, and abandoned village alike, as though the landscape had been furrowed by a t.i.tanic piece of charcoal.

"No wonder that Helwych is bringing the people into the garrisoned towns," Relys murmured.

Timbrin looked up.

Relys gestured with her mangled hand at devastation that appeared to cover hundreds of leagues. "Whatever he is fighting demands room in which to fight. Helwych is considerate enough to remove the innocent from the path of the destruction."

"But. . ." Timbrin peered over the side of the cart. "But what about the crops? We might starve this winter."

"Might?" Relys snorted. "Dear friend, we probably will."

That afternoon, they saw the Grayfaces.

Timbrin spotted them first, and her quick intake of breath alerted Relys. But even before her words confirmed the presence of intruders, the captain had already turned the cart off into a stand of trees. Together, the two women hid the vehicle behind thick bushes and crouched behind a screen of ferns to watch.

Five hundred yards away, a group of twenty Gray-faces was crossing a green field. In the hot son, the men labored through the crops as though wading through deep mud, and they repeatedly lifted their strange, glistening faces as though they saw enemies everywhere.

"Helwych turned some of these to his own use," Timbrin whispered. "Do you think they are ours . . . or theirs?"

Relys shook her head. "Ours? Theirs? What is ours or theirs anymore?''

Whatever their allegiance, the Grayfaces had enemies, for the women heard a sudden, dull thump from a low rise to the north, and a minute later, the field in front of the men erupted in a detonation that sent dirt and rock flying and left three of their company lying lifeless and shattered in the sunlit field.

A second detonation was not far behind, but the soldiers were already moving, spattering into the cover of a clump of tumbled boulders below the position occupied by the women. In a minute, voices crackled through the silence left by the explosions, strange voices speaking stranger words: "Victor Six, we have you located. Roger your request for dustoff and air strike. Suggest you mark hostile position with smoke. Repeat, mark hostile position with smoke. "

Relys glanced at Timbrin. The lieutenant looked terrified, and when two more detonations rocked the Grayface position, she clung to Relys, her eyes clenched against the incredible blasts. Relys stroked her hair, trying to remain calm herself.

Two thuds from below, dull, yet potent enough that Relys felt them in her chest as much as she heard them. She peered through the ferns in time to see one of the men drop something into a short, angled tube and turn away with his hands pressed to his ears. Another thud and concussion.

A minute went by. The rise to the north of the fields was suddenly cratered by the Grayface weapons, and seconds later three m.u.f.fled booms drifted across the open ground.

Cracks, rippings, smoke. Now the Grayfaces had turned their hand weapons on the ridge. Sparkles of light replied, and projectiles spattered off the rocks about the men, tore up the foliage, splintered the trees.

"We must flee," said Relys. "On foot."

Timbrin looked at her, owl-eyed. "How far can you walk, Relys?"

"As far as I must."

A screaming came across the sky. Three flying things streaked out of the north, lined up on the rise. They pa.s.sed over and left in their wake a trail of blasts and craters, and it seemed for a moment that the Gray-faces' troubles were over, but just then three more came up out of the east. Traces of light streaked from beneath their wings, and one of the first group was suddenly falling in flames.

And then more came. And more. Ungainly things hovered in the air like spiders in their webs, bringing more Grayfaces and more weapons, but Relys and Timbrin had already turned away from the battle. Leaving the cart, setting free the cart, they climbed- slowly, painfully-up through the wooded slope. They found their way through heather and bracken and dense stands of oak and beech, moving ever toward deeper forest and higher ground.

Towards evening, they reached the crest of a ridge, and there they rested and ate a meager dinner of bread and smoked meat. A stream allowed them to drink and wash, and Timbrin helped Relys change the dressings on her hand.

Night fell, and still the battle raged in the fields east of the foothills. Unnatural thunders cracked across the miles, and the air screamed with things that flew like birds and killed like men. But come morning, silence had fallen, and from the song of lark and magpies and the buzz of honeybees and dragonflies, one might never have guessed that yet another piece of Gryylth had been transformed into a sterile waste.

The women started off again. Now their progress was slower, and another two days had pa.s.sed before they sighted the ruins of Bandon, smeared out across the flood plain of the river like a child's sooty fingerprint.

"Not too much farther, Timbrin," said Relys. "Beyond Bandon is the pa.s.s across the mountains, and my guess is that we will find no Gray faces there."

At this alt.i.tude, the breeze was cold. Timbrin clutched her shawl about her shoulders. "Why so, Relys?"

"Because Helwych is in Kingsbury," Relys replied softly, "and he is both the cause and the object of this war."

Within a week after Santhe's plan was implemented, the number of hound attacks on the Vayllen settlements and cities fell off sharply. No longer confronted by pacifist Vayllens who made no attempt to defend themselves, the roving packs were met instead by efficient warriors and thoroughly enchanted steel.

As quickly as they were killed, though, the ranks of the hounds were replenished. A seemingly endless supply of the preternatural beasts was trickling over the Cordillera, and so the job continued.

Wykla and Manda had been riding for many days now, leading a phalanx of Corrinian pikemen in a long, sweeping patrol that stretched from the Waelow Hills that lay to the south of Lachrae all the way out to the Cordillera. But as Wykla rode across the greening miles, her thoughts returned often to the look with which Marrha had bidden her farewell at the gates of Lachrae: the expression of one who was watching a portion of her life ride away amid a glitter of weapons.

A woman's life ...

. . . yes, was one of changes, and as Marrget the captain had turned into Marrha the councilor, so her new duties kept her in Lachrae and forced her to watch wartroops and phalanxes depart into the west without her. But with much the same expression-tearful and prideful both-had Wykla once ridden away from Burnwood, from a family that had rejected her; and the sight of Marrha's face had freed that particular memory from the thin bonds that held it, dragged it up before her mind's eye like a tormented prisoner, and forced her, in her thoughts, to live again the old pain.

I will never call you daughter, her father had said on that terrible day. I have no daughter. And her mother, terrified, had stayed by the cooking fire, hunched over, occupying herself with the preparation of a dinner that would in all likelihood go uneaten.

I will never call you daughter.

Again Wykla saw her father, arms folded, glowering like some dark G.o.d at the door of his house, his jaw set with anger. Begone. I have no daughter.

But she saw also another man, this one tall and proud, his beard as golden as a sunrise, his eyes blue and kind. Should you need someone to call father, call me.

She spoke of it upon occasion with Manda, blurting out her feelings to the woman who had awakened her emotions and her s.e.xuality. Manda held her, made love to her, comforted her as she could; but not even a lover could fill the aching void left by the rejection of her family, or settle the confusion into which Darham's offer had plunged her.

"Darham is a good man, my love," Manda said as they lay together one still night when the sentries had been posted and the camp lay asleep.

Wykla gazed at the dark line of the Cordillera. They were camped near Mullaen, having driven a large pack of hounds before them for several leagues before darkness had intervened. "But my father lives," she said. "How can I have two fathers?"

Manda touched her cheek. ' 'Your father turned you away. Why should you not accept Darham's offer?"

"It is not the same, Manda."

Manda nodded understandingly. "I know, beloved."

Across a mile of withered fields, Mullaen bulked like a heap of black rocks. Manda and Wykla had warned the men to stay out of the blasted areas, and so they had made camp on a patch of untouched greenery that bordered the lake sh.o.r.e.

Something about the place, though, was vaguely disquieting, and Wykla's sleep that night was broken and light. Several times she awakened in the darkness to find that she was on her feet, staring out towards the lake sh.o.r.e, but she could not guess the reason why until, near midnight, something flickered near the water like a piece of gilt cloth . . . and grew.

Then she remembered. She waved to the sentries to let them know that she had seen, then turned and woke up Manda. The maid rubbed her eyes and regarded the apparition. It soared up, lambent, shimmering. "As before," she said.