"Please," she whispered. ''Please.''

The sky was blue, the sea calm, the breeze from the east almost uncannily fresh. If Vaylle possessed sorcery, Cvinthil thought, then surely it was making a poor showing of it by not opposing in the slightest the progress of the men and weapons coming to attack it.

He wondered what Vorya would have thought of all this. In the s.p.a.ce of a little over three months, an army had been raised, trained, and provisioned-and now it was en route to battle. Cvinthil took no pride in the achievement, for it seemed to him to be no more than the proper response of any king of Gryylth. But he still hoped that the old man, were he still alive, would have nodded his white head gravely and uttered a soft well done.

Though Vaylle was the enemy, it was Vorya, perhaps, with whom Cvinthil actually competed. For ten years, the late king had guided his country through a mora.s.s of war. To be sure, he, like everyone else, had been wrong about the Corrinians, and there had been breaks and cracks in the honor of both sides that eventually led to the transformation of the First Wartroop and the slaughter of an entire generation of young men, but Vorya had maintained through it all, and even in his last days he had lost nothing of the stature of a king.

And have I myself done the right thing ?

Vaylle was appearing, rising up out of the water and taking on detail as the flotilla approached. With any luck at all, Gryylth's unexpected resolution and quick reprisal would catch that evil land off guard. But though most of the warriors and soldiers were looking ahead, Darham, silent and thoughtful even after a day and a half on the ocean, was staring back towards Gryylth. He seemed to be pondering, examining the distant fading land as though he hoped at this remove to pierce the veils of distance and semblance and so see, beneath the surface, something that would confirm or banish the suspicions that still gnawed at him.

Oh, we are but little kings, thought Cvinthil. Tarwach and Vorya were giants, Darham and I but children in comparison.

And what place had children in the business of war?

Cvinthil shrugged wearily. Child or not, he had to act, and he hoped that he acted rightly. Still, though, he wondered as he always wondered: What would Vorya have done? How would he have done it?

"Brother king," said Darham with his farmer's courtesy.

Cvinthil looked up dully. Vorya would have done just this, in just this way. He made himself believe that. "Aye?"

"Look behind."

At first Cvinthil saw nothing save blue water, blue sky, and a smear of green haze that indicated the distant coastline. But in another moment he had detected the obscurity that was shimmering into existence, dimming the sunlight about Gryylth.

"Clouds?"

"There are no clouds," said Darham. "The sky is clear."

Darkness grew in the distance. The wind died. The ocean turned gla.s.sy. Sails, deprived of the breeze, rattled uselessly, and the air turned leaden.

An attack from the Tree had numbed Vorya's arm, but the old king had dismissed the wound with disdain. Cvinthil's shoulder suddenly ached, and he wondered whether he could do the same. "Vaylle?" he said uneasily.

"Attacking Gryylth and Corrin in our absence?" Darham pa.s.sed a hand over his beard. "Why would they wait so long? If they meant to attack, they might have killed us all while we lay at the docks of Quay."

Cvinthil shook his head. "They might not have been ready. And, in any case, Vaylle seems to thrive on cruelty. But we will give them a fight." Cupping his hands about his mouth, he shouted to the other boats. "Put about!"

The darkness turned to gray, then black. Darham shook his head. "A field half reaped is a field wasted. We are closer to Vaylle than to Gryylth, and if, as Helwych says, each attack weakens the Vayllen sorcerers, then they are now open for conquest."

Cvinthil was incredulous. "You would leave your people to die?"

There was a touch of amus.e.m.e.nt in Darham's blue eyes. "A day and a half ago you were all but accusing me of being faint-hearted," he said. "Now you think me unfeeling."

His voice fell flat in the sullen air, but then his words were swept away by a rising wind. A gale arose from the east, filling the sails to bursting; and though the steersmen fought with their oars and the pilots barked orders, their efforts were useless, for the wind drove the boats towards Vaylle like a child sweeping rushes with a broom.

Cvinthil lost his footing and would have toppled overboard but for Darham, who grabbed the Gryylthan and pulled him down below the level of the gunwale. "Kings cannot command the winds," he shouted over the storm. "Best to let the sailors do their tasks without our meddling."

The ship bucked and tossed like a frightened horse. The wind continued to rage, and the very substance of the sea and the ships seemed to quiver in its blast. As though a curtain had fallen over it, Gryylth was now hidden in a shroud of darkness, and Cvinthil thought of Seena and his children, wondered what might be happening to them behind that veil. He wanted to scream, he wanted to weep, but he could not allow himself that luxury.

He held to Darham. What would Vorya have done? This very thing, he hoped. But Vorya, confronted with the loss of his homeland, would do something else, too. And so would his successor. "I swear to you, brother Darham," he said, though his words were all but blown away, "Vaylle may well bring us to its sh.o.r.es for sport, but it will find its pleasure turned to pain when we arrive."

Solomon's office was much as Alouzon remembered it: severe and cluttered both, the battered mahogany desk shoved into the corner beside the packed bookshelves, and the old man's reading gla.s.ses perched atop a stack of papers. But one wall opened out onto a dark seash.o.r.e, and that she did not remember. The water was gray, troubled, unlit by the overhead fluorescents; and breakers foamed up the shingle and crept almost all the way to the inst.i.tutional linoleum that covered the floor. The sky was black, and no stars relieved its sable darkness.

Alouzon sat at the dead man's desk, leafing through old photo alb.u.ms and indices of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh names. The names-Sandde, Cynwyl, Morgan-told her little more than she already knew, for Gryylth was, after all, a study in recreation, an old scholar's frantic fantasies touched with history and then brought to life in a tangle of wish-fulfillment, repressed hope, and unadmitted fear.

The photos-some faded and yellow with age, some sharp and clear with the exacting precision of quality Polaroids and expensive SLRs-were of her own life and origins: her grandfather marching with the Wobblies at the Lawrence textile strike, her parents taking their daughter to picnics and political rallies, prom dresses and tuxedos, high school graduation . . .

. . . and then-blurry with half-tone reproduction, endless handling, and tears-there were the pictures of Kent State.

Alouzon leafed through them all slowly, noting as she did that the pages vanished after she turned them, the images they carried dissolving into mist. And when she was done, even the alb.u.m faded. She was left in an office lapped at by turbulent waters and filled with the sounds and smells of a dark, endless sea.

She waited. She was supposed to wait.

Finally, floating above the water with a steadiness that disdained the surging of the waves beneath it, came a shrouded, golden thing. It approached in a haze of light, pa.s.sed soundlessly up the sh.o.r.e and into the office. It hung before Alouzon Dragonmaster, a beating, pulsing glory that seemed not so much precious metal as living flesh and blood, and beneath its veil she sensed an upwelling of eternal waters, waters that invisibly, cascaded to the floor and inundated the universe.

Take what you need.

She understood and reached out her hands to the flow. She could not lift this cup yet: it was too early. But the Grail nurtured those in need, and Alouzon washed her face in what seemed to be pure life, the endless fatigue falling from her, the breaks and splits and fissures that had marred her existence beginning to fill and heal.

Face dripping with something that was like immortality, she gazed at the wondrous thing before her. "Please," she said softly. "Can you help my friends?"

The glory wavered and then was gone. Alouzon understood: without doubt, the Grail would help her friends. It could, by its very nature, do nothing else. But by having to question it, Alouzon had shown her ignorance, and therefore her unworthiness to attain it as of yet.

When the questions are all done, then you will be ready.

"When they're done?" she murmured into the roar of the sea, "or when they all just don't matter anymore?"

But out on the ocean, tossing on the waves, there was more movement. Bobbing and rocking, a boat with sere, torn sails floated to the sh.o.r.e and ground to a halt on the gravel. For a moment, it lay as though untenanted, but then a pale hand gripped the gunwale, and a withered head rose into view.

Slimy with decay, his long-dead fingers stiff with rigor mortis, his bloodless face pale with embalming fluids and seamed with the slippage of mortician's wax and make-up, Solomon Braithwaite crawled out of the boat and dragged himself up through the lap of waves. He made his way almost blindly, as though drawn by the Grail, but he stopped at Alouzon's feet and lay down beside her boots.

"I'm here," he said.

Alouzon was shaking. "Why?"

The corpse lifted a dripping, mottled head. "I'm here to confess."

Solomon's eyes were glazed with rot, and Alouzon tried not to meet them; but the plea that thrust itself out of their yellow ruin was such that she could not turn away. "Confess?" she managed. "Confess what?"

And then Solomon started. Bit by bit, the acc.u.mulated horrors and atrocities of his life pa.s.sed the lips of his corpse. His anger, his cruelty, his willingness to inflict both upon others dribbled out like a flow of impure blood, and the tale of Helen's forced abortions racked his decaying body as the stainless steel instruments ravaged her womb.

His hands fumbled and clutched at the linoleum as he supplied one d.a.m.ning detail after another, and his polished oxford shoes scuffed helplessly, doll-like. It was all, really, a kind of a war. A war upon the innocent. A war upon all the quiet, little people who had stayed at home while the battles raged through the falling snows of Korea. And overlaying it all, tinting it with the hues of blood and envy, was the frantic ambition of a soldier chained to a desk and a pile of reconnaissance photographs.

Alouzon listened, and she thought of Vaylle. How much of Solomon's feelings had she unconsciously shared? How much anger had been hidden by the wall of despair and guilt that she had erected in the days following the shootings at Kent State? And upon whom had she vented it?

Frightened by the correspondence, she recoiled from the decaying thing at her feet. "Why . . . why do you have to tell me this?" she said.

Solomon fixed her once more with his rotting eyes. "I want to be clean," he said. "I have to be clean. I turned away from the Grail. I'll never find it now. But I'm not clean, and so I can't rest." His hands clutched at her boots and left a film of slime on their smooth brown leather.

Alouzon swallowed her fear. "How am I supposed to help you to be clean?"

"You're the G.o.ddess."

The t.i.tle smacked her in the face. "I'm just a dumb s.h.i.t girl!"

The corpse almost smirked. "No. Maybe once. But not any more."

"I didn't want this."

"You got it anyway." Solomon rested his head on the linoleum, panting with the exertions of a dead thing that clings stubbornly to a semblance of life. "Once I thought that it was Silbakor that chose you to be Guardian. Now I know that it was much bigger than that. It was the Grail. It's always been the Grail."

"But Silbakor-"

"Don't listen to Silbakor," the corpse snapped. "Silbakor doesn't understand anything except Gryylth. Listen to me." He cackled: the dry sound of a file on metal. "I'm dead. I'm supposed to know a few things."

The darkness that bore down upon the ocean suddenly wavered, shifted. In the night, a deeper night appeared, flickered, subsided.

Solomon lifted his head as though sniffing the air. "Helwych."

My boy, Helwych, the Specter had called him in the temple of Broceliande. And Cvinthil and an army were bearing down on Vaylle. And her friends . . .

The deeper darkness gnawed at the edges of dream and distance. Alouzon stood, reached for her sword. "What's he done?"

The corpse shook his head. "Maybe ended the world. Maybe saved it. It's hard to tell sometimes, even when you're dead." He started back for the waves, but paused at the sh.o.r.e. "I didn't make it, but you might. You've got the stuff."

There was a roar, the night split, and darkness surged forward in a rushing wall, foaming towards the sh.o.r.e in a wave of nothingness.

The corpse turned to meet it. "I'll be there if you need me. Remember that."

* CHAPTER 6 *

Though they were burned by phosphor, cut by shrapnel and stone splinters, and had gone without sleep or even rest for several days, the surviving members of Alouzon's reconnaissance party pushed on through ravines and stagnant pools and stands of elephant gra.s.s that razored their already-lacerated skin. The peaks and cliffs of the Cordillera were high and jagged, the jungles fetid and hot, and the way down the slopes was no easier than the way up; but Cvinthil and an army were on their way to Vaylle.

Night came, then morning. The sun rose out of the shroud that hung over distant Gryylth, flickering with lightning and pulsing like a black heart. That it was a barrier of some kind was obvious, but Kyria-probing with her art while her body grunted and sweated down the mountainside-sensed something more about it, something that smacked of s.p.a.ce, of distance, and of worlds.

What, she wondered, had the Specter done? What had Helwych done? Certainly not anything completely expected. By anyone. Including, possibly, the Specter itself. "

The summer sun was at the zenith when they reached the slopes below the jungle, and the warm breeze from the flatlands smelled of crops and of the distant sea. Santhe took the point as the party wound down a narrow defile that followed the contours of the mountain- side, but the way ended suddenly in a broad slope of bare stone. It was wide and even, but its angle and the debris that covered it would make any descent treacherous.

Santhe's arms and legs were cut and bleeding, and the leech bites that studded his skin still ran with trickles of blood. He stared Wearily at the slab. "Did we really climb that?"

Marrha-Marrget no longer-forced a tired smile. "Did you fly, councilor?"

Her voice made him brighten, and a shred of humor forced its way through his exhaustion. "Indeed, dear friend, we often wished that we could at the time. But in looking at this I think we must have done so in truth."

Marrha nodded. "Then I must double and triple my thanks to all." She offered a hand to Manda, and the maid took it.

Santhe examined the slopes above and below. "I believe this is the way we came."

Dindrane was leaning heavily against the wall of the defile. She nodded. " Tis true."

Reluctantly, still puzzled by the barrier surrounding Gryylth, Kyria turned her powers to her immediate surroundings. "There was a landslide," she said after a moment. "Much has happened in the three months that has pa.s.sed in the world."

Out on the horizon, the darkness roiled and billowed. Somewhere on the ocean were Cvinthil and a flotilla of ships. Three months. Indeed, much had happened.

Santhe shrugged. "We must descend somehow, and quickly. Is there another way, priestess?"

Dindrane shook her head. ' 'Not for some distance.'' She sat down heavily and buried her face in grimy hands. Manda made her drink what was left of her ration of water.

Wykla looked up at Kyria. Her face was worn. "I dislike this place, lady Kyria. It makes me think of more than landslides. And we have seen traps before."

"Thank you, child. Haven't we, though ..." Kyria frowned, pondering. Wykla was right. There was more to the slab ahead than the fresh scars of abused rock, and when she reached out with her mind, feeling it as though with great, invisible hands, she discovered, just beyond the far edge, a deep pit filled with upright, pointed stakes and, yes, another trip wire.

With an inward nod, she returned to herself and told the others to retreat back up the trail. When they had, she sighed and shoved a large rock down the slope. It slid across the smooth slab, teetered on the far edge, and finally fell in a clatter of sand and gravel. Kyria threw herself flat in a tangle of ragged robes and black hair, and the air was suddenly filled with detonations as concealed claymore mines sent waves of buckshot across the surface of the slab in a crossfire sufficient to disintegrate a human body.

The explosions died away. Kyria rose, shaking. "You think your kind supreme in the world," she said when she found her voice, "but while I am here you shall not triumph."

She cast her arms to left and right. With Helen gone, she was in full possession of her powers, and without effort she lifted her thoughts to the bright sun and called down a torrent of yellow flame that enveloped her in a swirling maelstrom of incandescence.

It burned, but it cleansed, too; and for a moment she allowed it to play on her body and sear away what it could of Broceliande. After a minute, though, she roused herself, cupped her hands, and by double hand-Ms scattered the solar fire out onto the stone slope. The rock sizzled and ran like water.

And then the flame was gone. The slope had been carved into steps that would provide a sure footing, and the pit on the far side had been filled.

Kyria bowed, thanked the sun, then bent and touched the first step. The fused rock was gla.s.sy, but cool. "I suppose, given time, I might become fairly good at this," she murmured. She turned to the others with an encouraging smile. "Come. To Lachrae."

But her companions stayed cl.u.s.tered protectively around Dindrane, who was sitting on the bare rock beside a twisted pillar of basalt. The priestess had been maintaining her composure admirably in the face of the losses and revelations she had encountered, but the shock of the explosion had finally pushed her endurance past its limits. Arms wrapped about herself, she wept softly, swaying back and forth like a lonely, frightened child.

" 'Tis all gone," she sobbed. "Everything is gone."

Her sorrow was genuine and bitter, and it wrenched at Kyria's heart. She sent the others on ahead, and when she was alone with Dindrane, she knelt beside her. "It is not all gone," she said gently.

Dindrane would not look at her. "I judged you all. I thought you murderers, and I hated you. I thought you barbarians, and I despised you." She finally lifted her head, and her eyes, as blue as the sea, held the desolation of arctic waters. "And you have more n.o.bility in the fingers of your hands than I have in my entire being."

Karthin was helping Marrha over the edge of the slab, his expression tender and anxious, his hands strong and loving. He touched his wife as though she were a queen. Dindrane watched them for a moment, then bent her head and sobbed again.

Time was pa.s.sing. Cvinthil was on the way. But Kyria's voice was soft and gentle. "Give yourself the grace you now extend to others, sister. Regardless of your judgments on them, those people are your friends, and they love you."

The phosphor burn was a dark blotch on Dindrane's pale cheek, and her long blond hair was matted with dirt. The golden torque about her neck seemed not so much a symbol of rank as a cynical incongruity. "Everything . . . everything is gone. My husband is dead. And my land, eighteen months old and the creation of a woman like myself, is being destroyed from within and without.''

Gentleness was accomplishing nothing. Clenching her teeth at the brutality of her action, Kyria grabbed the priestess by the front of her tunic and pulled her up until they were nose-to-nose. "I cannot undo what has been done, sister of mine," she whispered. "Baares gave his life for another. And Vaylle is as it is. And Alouzon is its G.o.ddess. If you think us n.o.ble, then be grateful that you also have such n.o.bility in your deity and your land."

Dindrane's eyes turned bleaker. "Eighteen months."

Kyria nodded. "Yes, and a little over a decade for Gryylth."

"And we are so wrong. Wrong about everything." Dindrane looked down at her boy's clothes as though they told the entire story of the error.