But several had gone to the Tree, had chewed through the ropes, and were attempting to topple it from the wagon. The Tree was swaying, the wagon creaking. It started to fall.

"No!"

Tireas was conjuring, but there was no time. Flebas ran to the wagon, lifted his hands, caught the Tree as it overbalanced on him.

His arms did not penetrate the Tree. Instead, the Tree entered him, flowed into his bones, stung its way through his limbs. Flebas watched as his arms turned wooden, then watery. The flesh reformed in new shapes, inhuman shapes.

And the change continued. He felt the magic pour into his chest, down his legs, rise up to shroud his face in a twisting gyre of transformation. He screamed, but it was a mewling, whining sound that spewed from his altered throat.

Sand was beneath him. Sand. Hands did not touch him. The feathered things were gone.

Dimly, he saw that Tireas was leaning over him.

"G.o.ds," someone said. "Look at his face."

34.He tried to speak, but he felt blood in his throat. No, not blood. Something else.

Calrach turned away from him. Tireas shook his head. "We cannot bring him with us."

"We cannot leave him."

"We cannot but leave him."

And then they were gone. Flebas felt sand beneath him, saw a faint sun creep across the sky. With limbs that were no longer his own, he began to crawl. He did not know where he was going. He simply crawled, whimpering softly, leaving a wake of pale sand stained with the b.l.o.o.d.y sweat that oozed slowly, constantly, from what had once been his body.

Whatever it was doing, the Dragon took its time.

The paperweight remained empty during Solomon's short walk to the department, and when-after he nodded to Suzanne, who was waiting by the front desk-he set it down on the bookshelf in his office, it was still no more than a transparent gla.s.s sphere, uninhabited.

It was unusual for Silbakor to vanish with such a brief explanation. There had been an urgency in its last words that had made Solomon's hand itch for the Dragonsword, but without the Dragon, he was stranded in the mundane world of books and offices and ex-radical research a.s.sistants.

Suzanne knocked briefly. He had forgotten that she was waiting.

"You should have come in sooner," he muttered, but he noticed the tight lines in her forehead that meant that she was having another headache. She groped her way to the chair beside his desk and sat down.

The bookshelf was behind Solomon, and he transferred the paperweight to the desk as he drew up a chair. If the Dragon came back, he wanted to know immediately. "Did you get the materials from England?"

She winced as if antic.i.p.ating a beating. "No. They wouldn't release them to me. You have to sign for them yourself.''

"d.a.m.ned idiots." He saw that Suzanne was eyeing .

35.him suspiciously. Suzanne. Guardian of Gryylth. Laughable. "You could have shown some gumption and pushed them. They might have given in."

"I did. They didn't."

"Hmmm." He picked up the phone, dialed the library, asked for Special Collections. "This is Dr. Braithwaite in Archaeology. I Ve some materials that came in on in-terlibrary loan." He listened as the student tried to explain, cut him short. "Yes, I know she did. You should have given them to her. I want those things sent up to my office right now."

Suzanne's eyes were clenched as though his words were directed at her.

"Do it," he said. "Now. Or I'll have you fired." He threw the handset back into its cradle. "There. That wasn't so bad, was it?"

"He was just doing his job."

He snorted. "And I'm just doing mine. Do you know, that sort of individual is exactly the kind that made Rome lose Britain? It's true. Little budding bureaucrats looking out for number one. No sense of the daring. And the Brits themselves picked up all of that. Of course, the Saxons weren't much of an alternative. They didn't care about anything except loot. But the little Roman-style bureaucrats couldn't do anything when they broke out of their territory and started to rip up the towns."

Suzanne nodded curtly, seemed to realize that she was being impolite, and made a visible effort to control herself. "Sorry, Doctor. Headache. I'll be OK."

"Sure you don't want to go home?"

She looked at him curiously, defied him and the migraine both. "What were you saying about the Saxons?"

He was testing her, and she was rising to the bait. "They were your archetypal barbarians, Suzanne. You know that: you've seen the sources. They had no conception of higher culture, and what they didn't understand, they tried to destroy. And they would have destroyed everything, too, if Arthur and Ambrosius hadn't held them off."

Suzanne shook her head. "I thought Layc.o.c.k's re- 36.search had torpedoed that theory. There's no evidence of widespread disruption during that period."

"Gildas recounted the destruction," said Solomon. "He had no good reason to lie. That's why I want to look at the original of the De excidio. There might have been a misreading of some key words that would remove all the ambiguity."

"And the Layc.o.c.k stuff?"

"He was too wrapped up in his theories. I think he ignored evidence. I want to see for myself."

Suzanne clung to her point. ' 'If the Saxons had burned everything, there'd be evidence. Boudicca left evidence, and she certainly wasn't as widespread as the Saxons."

Leave it to Suzanne, he thought, to use a woman for an example.

"Besides," she went on, "if they had been that bad, they wouldn't have settled down so readily and put their energies into building a country.''

The radicals had settled down, too. Nice little jobs. Nice little families. They had raised h.e.l.l and then they had been swallowed up by the very thing they had fought. "Nice little bureaucrats," he said.

The headache was sharpening her tongue. "Whose side are you on, Braithwaite?"

Whose side, he wondered, was she herself on? "I'm a professor at a university," he said. "I'm on the side of civilization. I always have been." His voice was flat. "I hope you understand that."

She put her hands to her temples, and nodded. But as Solomon sat back, trying to find some savor in his words, a flash of yellow from the paperweight caught his eye.

The Dragon had returned.

"Maybe you ought to call it a day, Suzanne," he said quickly. "Why don't you go home and go to bed?"

She had followed his gaze. "I didn't know you had a paperweight like that." Her voice was dull with habitual pain. "Whatever made you choose a horned toad?"

Silbakor was unmoving. Only Solomon knew that it was alive. Only Solomon could read the tension in every line of its iron-colored body. "It's not a horned toad,"

37.he found himself saying as he tried to think of a way to bring the appointment to an end. "It's a dragon. It's too thin, you see, to be a horned toad. You can see the wings, too. Now-"

"Yeah." h.e.l.ling was leaning forward as if fascinated by the unblinking eyes. With a sense of rising panic, Solomon recalled how he himself had paused in the antique shop, almost hypnotized, when he had first found the Dragon.

Silbakor, vjhat the h.e.l.l are you doing?

Solomon suddenly realized that he could not hear the air conditioning in the office. The lack of the humming produced a silence like a well. Outside, the corridor had grown absolutely still.

Suzanne roused herself suddenly. "All right, Doctor. My headache's better.'' Her soft voice sounded over-loud.

"I think we should break for a while."

"Why? I feel fine."

The Dragon moved. "Enough. It is urgent. You must come. Gryylth is endangered."

"Silbakor! No!" Solomon rose quickly from the desk and seized Suzanne's arm. She was staring, wide-eyed and pale. The gla.s.s of the paperweight began to dissolve. "You've got to go, Suzanne." He put his hand on the doork.n.o.b and pulled, but the door did not yield.

The gla.s.s was gone now, and the Dragon was growing. Solomon was raging inwardly. It was not supposed to happen like this. Silbakor had always given warning before.

The office walls faded out of existence, and there was nothing beyond them but darkness. The office itself grew dim and obscure as the Dragon expanded, rearing its black head high and unfolding its bat wings in preparation for flight. Suzanne was on her feet now, looking for a place to flee. She found nothing but darkness and the Dragon.

The bright yellow eyes burned down. "Mount."

"You want to tell me what's going on, Braithwaite?" said Suzanne. There was fear in her voice, but mixed in 38.with it was anger. She had, he recalled, faced fear before, and death. She was stronger than she appeared.

The Dragon did not move. "Mount," it said. "Su-zanne h.e.l.ling also."

Her fists were clenched, but she did not flinch. She looked up at the Dragon as though staring down the muzzle of a gun.

It bent its colossal head down to her level. "You need not fear, Suzanne h.e.l.ling." Its voice was almost gentle. "I will not harm you. Please. Climb onto my back. Above my wings." It extended a black talon for her use as a step, and she climbed as if in a trance. "Braith-waite," said the Dragon, "you are needed."

"Will you tell me the meaning of this, Silbakor?" He was shouting.

"Mount."

Feeling as if a decision had been made without his partic.i.p.ation or consent, Solomon stepped up and took his place on the iron neck in front of his student. Without another word, the Dragon spread its wings, and they were lifted.

* CHAPTER 3.

Since that dream in which he had seen land and ocean end in an abyss that faded into the stars, Mernyl had consulted his books and his scrolls and had cast the old Ogham and the new Runes. But nothing that he read gave him the slightest clue as to the meaning of that implacable termination. In fact, the silence of texts and oracles only gave him added questions to ask. Why was there no mention? Surely, sorcerers before him had dared the edges of the world. Surely someone had written it all down. His books had come from near lands and far. Why then-?

But those questions led to others. Near lands and far. What far lands were there if the world ended a few leagues off the sh.o.r.e of Gryylth? Where had his books come from?

Why, from his master, and from his master before him. Try as he would, though, Mernyl could not remember the name of the man who had taught him, could not, in fact, recall being taught. And while he remembered making some of his books himself-the one bound in soft calfskin, for example, he had finished just two summers ago, on the day he had heard that big Helkyying had died in battle-others, written in his own hand, he knew nothing about. They might have appeared out of the air.

Lands that dropped off into nothingness, books that had no origins, a past he did not remember . . . When he heard the sound of horse hooves in the distance, he was standing in his garden, ostensibly to harvest herbs, 39.40.but actually he was peering at the leaves and flowers to ascertain if they were as thin and unreal as he now felt the whole world to be.

He held his hand up to the sun, examined the color of the glowing flesh. The cup had looked like that. The cup seemed now to be the only solid, real thing in a world full of indefiniteness and enigma. And it had been a vision. What did that say about Gryylth?

The hoofbeats drew nearer, approaching at a gallop. Merayl looked up, clutched at his staff. He recognized the rider. Had Vorya or Dythragor finally decided to rid themselves of their annoying magician?

But the man who approached, his blond hair wild with the speed of his journey, was not particularly terrifying. If Mernyl had not known that he came from Vorya's court, he might even have found his appearance rea.s.suring. Slender, blue-eyed, his mouth set in what was almost a perpetual smile, he waved and whooped like a boy when he saw Mernyl, and the sorcerer heard him laugh out loud.

"Greetings, master sorcerer," he said, reining in at the edge of the garden. "And how is it in the realms of magic?''

"It is well, Santhe," said Mernyl, resolved to keep his knowledge to himself for the time. He noticed that Santhe had another mount with him, saddled, but without a rider. "What is the news from Kingsbury?"

Santhe looked as though he had ridden all day without a stop. His face was grimy with the dust of the road. "The news, Mernyl, is not good." His laughing eyes were shadowed for a moment. "I have seen something . . ." He pressed his lips together, shook his head. "Evil times, these," he muttered.

He was tired, Mernyl realized. Tired and spent. He must have ridden all the way from Kingsbury in the s.p.a.ce of a dayy changing horses at Bandon and Alysby. "Come," he said. "Come into my house. I do not mind playing the woman. You need food."

Santhe nodded slowly. "And ale if you have any, ma- .

41.gician." His humor returned for a moment. "Preferably some that will not turn me into a toad."

Mernyl helped Santhe lead the horses to the stable, and then he provided fodder for the warrior himself. Santhe slumped in the high-backed chair of the main room, smiling gratefully when the sorcerer set out bread and meat and a large bowl of ale. Mernyl could feel his fatigue from across the room, but he did not press Santhe for the reason he had come. Not only did courtesy dictate that he let the man eat, but he also found that he was not anxious to know.

"My thanks, Mernyl," said Santhe when he had finished. "I wish I could now find a corner by the fire and doze off, but I am afraid that my tasks include another ride today. With you."

Memyl felt an eyebrow lift. "Oh?"

"I spoke of evil things. The Dremords have been active. Two days ago, during a skirmish at the Great Dike, a band in the company of Tireas and a captain named Calrach broke out and moved northward. They had a wain with them, and we should have been able to trace them, but I think that Tireas did not want to be found. And sorcerers-so I have been told-have their ways."

Santhe was teasing. Mernyl smiled in return. "I, too, have heard such rumors."

But Santhe's face clouded. "They apparently entered the Blasted Heath, and they came out again, bearing something. Scouts to the north found a man . . ." He broke off, shuddered.

Mernyl pulled a chair up to the rough table, sat down, and leaned forward.

"At least," Santhe continued, "it seems to be a man, though the wretch is mutilated beyond belief. I saw him at Alysby on the way here. King Vorya had sent me to fetch you in response to the activity of Tireas, but when I saw the man, I pushed on with all the speed I could."

"Tell me."

"I ... I think he is a Dremord, Memyl," said Santhe. "I think he is human. I cannot be sure. He whines and shrieks like a beast, and yet his eyes . . ." He looked 42out the unshuttered window as if the sight of trees and flowers would dilute the memory. "I have seen battle," he said softly. "Battle was nothing in comparison."

"Where is he now?"

"He was sent on to Kingsbury."

Mernyl had shoved his chair back and was already gathering his things together, bundling them into an old pack. "I can leave as soon as you wish," he said. "But will Vorya welcome me? Dythragor Dragonmaster, as you well know, bears me little love."

"Dythragor is not here. We do not know where he is. The king sent for you." Santhe held up a ring with Vorya's token on it. "Here. If you need proof."

Mernyl glanced cursorily at the ring, but given Santhe's tale of the Dremord, he would have gone even if Vorya had been outright hostile.

As he fastened the iron buckles of the pack, Mernyl found himself staring at them. When had he bought this pack? He could not remember. And now strange workings of magic in the land, and Tireas was active. He had to go to Kingsbury. Still . . .