Despite the Mercury's faded exterior, its engine was in excellent shape. Acceleration shoved Alouzon back in her seat as the car roared out into the left lane.

"Jia would be jealous," she murmured to herself.

The driver blinked at her with dark eyes. "Jia?"

Lights were pa.s.sing: street lights, traffic signals, the neon glow of bars and storefronts. Alouzon regarded them with a clenched throat. "Uh ... a friend of mine."

"Don't I know you?"

She nearly laughed, but she stifled it: she was afraid she would start crying. "No. You don't."

The big Mercury cruised out towards Western. "Sure I do. Lessee. Uh . . . waitaminute. I remember: you're a waitress. I seen you up at the . . . uh . . . Tropicana. Yeah, that's it. I go there all the time. You do that mud wrestling. You girls got some muscles, I'll tell you. And you're built like G.o.ddesses." He grinned at her. "I got me a celebrity."

Despite her efforts in the park rest room, Alouzon decided that she probably made the mud wrestling girls look clean by comparison. "Sorry. You're out of luck."

The driver was unfazed. "You comin' back from a party?''

She snorted softly. ' 'I wish.''

The city went by. Western Avenue and the green porcelain of the Wiltern Theater, then Wilton Place. Early morning, pre-dawn: traffic was light, and the Mercury purred and grumbled along Wilshire as though it were a jungle cat marking its kingdom.

"What'cha do for a living?"

Trainee G.o.d came to mind. Alouzon shrugged. "I get by."

"You interested in earning a little extra cash?"

She read his meaning. It would have been easy to become angry, but she had other things on her mind. "Sorry. Not interested "Come on, I'm not a cop. Fifty?"

"No. Give it up." Just get me to Bel Air, d.i.c.k-head. I've got things to do.

He frowned petulantly. Face set, he glowered over the wheel, took the turning onto Highland, and cruised up the street at ten miles an hour over the speed limit.

"This isn't going to get us to Bel Air any time soon," said Alouzon.

"I know what I'm doing."

"Suit yourself." She settled back, tried to decide what she should do after she had picked up her car. Go home? What was home? "By the way: what day is it?"

He grinned. "You don't know? It's Sat.u.r.day. Musta' been some party."

"Yeah," she said. "Quite a party." 3.5-inch rockets, and Skyhawks, and hounds whose blood melted flesh like hot lye. And then the Specter.

The Mercury pa.s.sed beneath the Hollywood Freeway, but, caught up in her thoughts, Alouzon did not notice for a minute. When she did, she chewed it over hi her mind for a moment, then: "All right, dude. Where are you taking me?"

He did not look at her. "I got some friends that want to meet you, girl."

"Not interested."

He pulled up at a stop sign. "Sorry, dude," said Alouzon. She reached for the door handle. It had been removed. The Mercury pulled out again, tires screeching. "Say, guy, what the f.u.c.k is going-"

She broke off. He had drawn a knife and was holding it a few inches from her linen tunic. "Just sit still, babe, and you won't get hurt," he said. "You got a cute body and you had your chance to make a few bucks with it. But you turned it down. Now it's all gonna be for free."

The Mercury picked up speed. Alouzon examined the knife. Sharp, but thin and cheap, it was, she decided, suitable only for abducting properly socialized females. "Cute," she said, biting back her anger. "Does it come in an adult size?"

He drove on. The car was traveling too fast for her to make a move. As Gryylth, Corrin, and Vaylle hung balanced in precarious existence, she bided her time.

The man turned into the maze of streets that wound through the hills east of Hollywood Lake. Houses here were dark and set back behind overgrown gardens and unkempt lawns. Trees that had not seen a pruning in twenty years straggled and drooped over roofs and power lines.

The Mercury slowed because of the twists in the road. The shoulders of the road were unpaved, and a vacant lot appeared ahead, overgrown with gra.s.s and weeds.

The lot was on the right now, pa.s.sing swiftly. Alouzon moved. Grabbing the hand that held the knife, she bent it back until she heard the wrist snap. The sound was as gratifying as the harsh, sucking intake of breath that came from the man's lips.

The Mercury wavered. Backhanding the driver with a fist, Alouzon grabbed the wheel and ran the car over the unpaved shoulder and into the tall gra.s.s of the vacant lot. With a free hand, she grabbed the ignition key and pulled it out, but when the car continued running she cursed aloud and pushed down on the brake pedal with her hand until the engine lugged and stalled.

Wary of another knife, she shoved herself away from the man, but he was looking at a right hand bent back at a crazy angle. Pieces of bone stuck out of his wrist, and blood was oozing from the rents they had left.

Pain finally cut through his shock, and he started to scream. "You . . . you ..."

Cities had been razed. Dindrane's people had been decimated. And Cvinthil and an army bent on revenge were making for Vaylle. There was too much death in the past and future for Alouzon to be bothered by the whining of one bully.

She reached to her boot and extracted her own dagger. It was small, but its leaf-shaped blade was broad, sharp, and built for fighting. It made the man's stiletto seem a child's toy. "You're playing with the big girls now, s.h.i.t-for-brains," she whispered, laying the point against his throat.

His screams cut off. He started to whine frantically, and he made a lunge for the door handle, but she caught him by the shirt.

"You're not going anywhere," she said. "And shut the f.u.c.k up. I've seen men with wounds a lot worse than yours holding their own against three." Alouzon gave him a shake. "You G.o.ddam wimp."

She kicked out the pa.s.senger side window, opened the door from the outside, and sprinted around the car. Jerking open the driver's door before he had time to move, she shoved him to the far side of the car and slid in behind the wheel. "Don't even think about trying anything," she said.

Terrified, holding the ruin of his wrist, he stared at her as she restarted the car, backed out of the lot, and drove down to Highland. Taking the turning onto Sunset, she made her way westward, faintly astonished that she could operate anything more technologically complex than a horse. But the Mercury purred along under her guidance as her would-be abductor cowered in the corner.

She glanced at him. His eyes were glazed with pain, his wrist was b.l.o.o.d.y, swollen, and discoloring with ma.s.sive bruises. But her pity evaporated when she thought of what he had intended to do to her-what he would have done to another woman with less experience in fighting.

The man groaned and shut his eyes, obviously expecting no more mercy than he himself had been prepared to give. But Alouzon shook her head and turned onto Helen's street, still wondering at the anomaly of her strong brown hands on a welded chain-link steering wheel. Just around a bend from the house, she made a U-turn, stopped, and pulled on the parking brake. "OK, buddy. It's your turn again."

He stared, unbelieving, but after dumping her armor and sword onto the asphalt, Alouzon got out, grabbed him by the shirt, and dragged him over behind the wheel. Her knife was in her hand again.

"Now," she said, holding the blade to his throat, "you drive. And you drive real good. The UCLA Medical Center is at Le Conte and Tiverton, right by the campus. They've got an emergency room there: they can fix your wrist." She started to close the door, but a thought struck her and she stopped and leaned towards him. "And don't ever think you're gonna use a knife to grab a little piece of a.s.s again, 'cause I'll fix you good if you do."

She slammed the door and picked up her armor. The man dithered at the wheel, groped for the parking brake and the shift with his good hand.

She kicked the side of the car. "Move. "

Shakily, weaving back and forth, he drove off down the street. The sound of the Mercury's engine faded into the distance.

But its rumble was replaced by another, and when Alouzon turned towards the bend in the road, she saw the trees and shrubs lit by the reflection of flashing lights: red, blue, yellow, white. A helicopter was circling above, its searchlight stabbing down into the darkness, the roar of its engine blending with the distinctive sound of idling fire and rescue trucks.

She suddenly remembered the attack on Helen's house. Weeks had pa.s.sed in Gryylth. Los Angeles had known only a few hours.

Lugging her armor and sword, she turned the corner and found that the house was a ruin of gla.s.s, brick, steel, and wood. As though a great weight had fallen upon it, it had been demolished so thoroughly that the two-story structure now rose no higher than the head of a tall man. Police cars were parked in the street and on the lawn, and officers and firefighters were examining the wreckage cautiously.

Radios crackled with unintelligible orders. The odor of smoke and diesel exhaust hung in the damp air beneath the trees. Alouzon hesitated, then forced herself forward, trying to walk casually. She was just here to pick up her car. Clenching her teeth at the alien sights and sounds, she took the spare key from beneath the VW's b.u.mper, unlocked the door, and put her armor and sword inside.

But for a moment before she got in and drove away, she turned around to the lights and the wreckage. Helen's house was as ruined as Bandon. All that was missing was the stench of napalm and the charred bodies of the dead.

And then she saw that the paramedics were wheeling two gurneys out to the waiting ambulance. A still form occupied each cart, and white cotton blankets were pulled up over the faces.

* CHAPTER 5 *

At times now, Helwych wondered if he could see everything, for the world at times had come to resemble a great, open map, like one of those in Tireas's old texts that depicted other worlds and distant countries spread out before his curious eyes.

He was indoors, and the shutters were closed. Physically, he could see no further than the walls, floor, and ceiling; but, in his mind's eye, Gryylth was a particolored daubing of life and activity, its people minute, antic dancers. He saw Cvinthil aboard ship with Dar-ham. He saw the months-old ruins of Bandon sprouting with gra.s.s and weeds. He saw Seena caring for her children with the same obsessive single-mindedness that had driven her husband from her side. He saw Relys pacing nervously in her house. He saw Timbrin standing on the other side of his shuttered window.

Toys, all of them. Little toys that would soon be his.

Deep within his mind, blue-black eyes suddenly blinked curiously, and he hastened to re-direct his thoughts. Ours, he thought. They will soon be ours.

But in the few corners of his mind that remained his own, he had formulated other plans. There, the possessive remained mine.

The Specter had given him much: wizardry that made the potencies of Tireas and Mernyl seem mere dabblings, a will that could wrap itself about the thoughts and feelings of others and manipulate them as a child might play with a doll, a sense of subtlety.

But for the Specter, all those gifts were as spears that wounded the hand, for in sending him to Gryylth and turning its attention to whatever end it had planned for Alouzon and her company, it had given Helwych a certain freedom, a certain breadth of thought; and, empowered as he was with borrowed magics and skills, he had surrept.i.tiously turned along his own road, one that would lead first to Gryylth, and then to Corrin itself.

Daydreaming, savoring the success of his plans, he had allowed his eyes to close, but now he opened them. He was sitting in his working chair to the east of the circle he had inscribed on the floor of the house Cvinthil had given him. Triangles, squares, and multi-pointed stars-mnemonic emblems of the powers he commanded-filled the floor within the circle, and at the very center, floating a hand's breadth from the ground like a lifted scepter, was his staff. To others it had seemed a crutch, but that was as much the stuff of illusion as the injuries he had been feigning for the last three and a half months.

That the staff was floating was a good sign: it meant that the potencies he had summoned the evening before were building towards their climax. Even as he watched, the outlines of the circle were taking on a nimbus of red and violet, and when he reached a hand towards the edge of the working s.p.a.ce, he felt his flesh tingle.

Good. Very good indeed. The Specter had wanted only a curtain wall that would bar the return of the flotilla, but it was about to receive much more than that.

He paused and looked beyond the walls of his house. Timbrin was still at the window, keeping watch. The flotilla had sailed halfway across the White Sea. The potencies he had summoned were at their peak. It was time.

He rose from his chair, not with a tottering lurch, but with the spring of a young man, and he removed his shabby outer robe to reveal an inner garment of white samite. A wave of his hand opened a door in the circle through which he entered. Another wave closed it behind him. Here, in the heart of the raised potencies, magic crackled across his skin in hot waves that lifted his lank hair away from his scalp and sent coruscations of crimson fire through the expanding field of his inner vision.

Now he could see Timbrin as though he stood behind her. Silly, meddling woman. She would learn her place. As would Relys.

Helwych took up his staff with a quiet smile. He had a wall to create, but there would be a sizable backlash of energy. It would be a simple matter to direct a handful of it at Timbrin. She might die; she might not. In any case, Helwych was not worried. Gryylth and its queen would be his, and his four wartroops would be without opposition in the land.

He was not shielding his intentions. He had no need to. In minutes, not only would Cvinthil, Darham, and all their warriors be barred from Gryylth, but also the Specter itself.

But as he began the working, a thought came to him unbidden: Corrin was his homeland. Darham had always treated him decently, and had, as though to make up for Tireas's neglect, even encouraged his studies. And Alouzon and her friends might have smirked at him, but on the road to Bandon they had fought against the hounds in order to save his life.

Why did he want to bring destruction and pain to such as these?

He steeled himself, recentered his thoughts, and went on. The energy mounted. Physical reality seemed to part before him, revealing the intricate workings of the universe-wheels within wheels, living light, planes of reified causality-and he stretched out his staff and stirred the matrix of existence as though it were one of the countless bowls of gruel he had eaten and despised since he had arrived in Gryylth.

With a roar as of an angry ocean, worlds shifted, blurred, flowed. In another minute, he would lift his arms and send the result of his workings into the physical and non-physical world. It would become not magic, not desire, but reality.

The blue-black eyes within him suddenly opened wide. Too busy to gloat, Helwych only marked their astonishment. But he noticed that the eyes were, for a moment, not fixed on him at all. They were turned elsewhere, towards something that-incredibly-terrified them.

He had little time to wonder. The energies were building fast. Seconds now. Heartbeats. Then all would be done.

A blinding scream slashed through his mind, loosening his hold on the spell, and only the energies that had solidified about him kept him from staggering to the side. Reeling nonetheless in the suddenly chaotic flow of power, he saw that the eyes were gone, banished by ...

Banished by what? Nothing could drive those eyes away. And yet ...

But now even the scream was eclipsed by the thunder of energies in Helwych's ears. Released from his careful manipulation, the spell was now out of control, the energies whipping into raging turbulence as Helwych struggled desperately for balance. Gripping his staff with sweat-slick hands, he grabbed for the strands of the working and stuffed them back into their carefully-wrought channels.

Shakily, the barrier formed, and a blackness rose up in the White Sea, gusting mightily and wrapping itself around the coastline of Gryylth and Corrin like a sable curtain. But the world was quivering. All the Worlds, in fact, were quivering. Rents were forming. Fissures. Unintended gaps ...

A flash of daylight. Timbrin, aroused by the tumult within the house, had battered through the shuttered windows. She stared at Helwych for a moment.

Now the backlash was coming, falling like mountains. The entire spell was lashing out at Helwych; and with a last, panicked effort, he swung his staff over his head and managed to deflect the brunt of the catastrophe onto Timbrin. Caught full in the face by the energies, the small warrior was smashed away from the window.

But the tail end of the magics, sharp as a scorpion's sting, drove into Helwych: he fell heavily onto the flagstone floor, dimly aware not only of the wall he had formed, but also of eyes. Blue-black eyes. Eyes of void and darkness. Stupid little Dremord fool, they said. But it really didn't make any difference now, did it?

Alouzon drove home to the apartment of a stranger.

Her armor and sword rattled incongruously on the pa.s.senger seat of the VW, and her hands looked distant and tentative on the black plastic steering wheel. As the morning grew over Los Angeles, the sun glinting alike on high rise windows and her steel wrist cuffs, she peered out through the front window of the automobile like a child grappling with a fearful dream: wondering and yet afraid, defiant and yet impotent.

Suzanne h.e.l.ling was dead.

The police had not identified the body yet, nor would they soon, for Suzanne's purse and its contents had been charred and smeared with corrosives beyond all recognition or retrieval. But Alouzon, knew whose bodies were now traveling to the coroner's office, and she admitted that it made a kind of warped sense. In bringing down the Circle, Dythragor had died, crushed by his impact and incinerated in the resultant blast of energy. And yet Solomon Braithwaite's body had been waiting for Suzanne when she returned to the archaeology offices at UCLA.

Alouzon maneuvered the VW into the streets to the west of the campus. Suzanne had been dead since the attack on Helen's house. But where did that leave Alouzon Dragonmaster? And what about Kyria?

Shaking, she parked and shut off the engine. For a moment she was almost afraid to get out of the car for fear that whatever life and existence she possessed would suddenly prove to be illusion. But she pulled herself away from the thought, held her hands up before her face, and stared at them as though she would burn their images into her retinas. No: she was alive, and she was Alouzon. And this was Los Angeles.

Her boots made hollow sounds on the asphalt as, carrying the tackle and weapons of a warrior, she got out of the car and walked across the street to the apartment building. In spite of the heat and morning glare, the sunlight had an ephemeral, watery look to it; but it was not the sunlight that was wrong, it was Alouzon. She did not belong here. This was Suzanne's world.

And Suzanne was- For a moment, she stood in the courtyard, staring up at the second-floor apartment that held as much of home as Suzanne h.e.l.ling had known for the last three years. There she had lived, studied, made oatmeal and granola cookies, raged at the childish actions of her lover and the imperious methods of her professor. She had huddled in its bed, terrified of her past, and then- as Guardian of Gryylth-of her present and her future. She had dreamed of Mis, tear gas, and bullets . . . and of a campus slaughter that had pursued her throughout the years with a vicious memory that had eaten away at her life.

She was Alouzon now. It was all gone.

She found the spare key that Suzanne had hidden in the rock garden, and she climbed the stairs to the apartment and let herself in. She had never been here, and yet here were things she remembered: twenty pages of a first-draft dissertation hammered out on a Smith Corona portable, a blow drier propped up on the shelf beside the bathroom sink, barrettes and clips that had held hair much longer and straighter than her own bronze mane, a notebook rilled with scribbled memos and outlines in a hand that was perhaps not dissimilar to that which Alouzon herself would produce had she taken up a pen.

Alouzon set her bundle on the sofa, sat down on the floor where someone else had once done her morning yoga, and put her face in her hands. Her friends were in danger ... or dead. She did not belong here. And she could do nothing about any of it.

"Please," she murmured to the Grail. "Don't do this to me. I can't take it. Just help me save my friends. That's all I want."

Fatigue fell on her then, and she nearly toppled: the adrenalin rush that had been sustaining her had exhausted itself. She realized fuzzily that she had not slept for several days.

But I can't sleep now. My friends . . .

There was a golden light in the room, though, a light that grew out of the corners and shadows and softened even the harsh glare of the Los Angeles sun that was pouring in through the windows. It lifted her as a mother might lift a weary child, put her on her feet, and guided her to the bedroom. It made her hands draw the blinds and turn on the air conditioning, and it laid her gently down.

Her eyes were closing. "I can't," she said softly. "I can't."

But the golden light was insistent, and she drifted off, clutching to herself like a beloved doll the memory of the words she had heard long ago: Yeah, kid. It's gonna be all right.