The fullness in her heart returned, and she flushed with determination. They were going to live. All of them. They were going to be happy. She-whether she was Kyria or Helen, alive or dead-was going to see to that.

"And Sol-"

"It's not Sol out there," said Alouzon. "It's my fantasies about him: all my hate, all my anger. As a grad student, I put up with his goddam pettiness for months, even though what I really wanted to do was kick his teeth down his throat. And then when we got to Gryylth, I was close to killing him a bunch of times. He was a sadist, an obnoxious kid let loose with swords, spears and armies, someone without any kind of conscience at all ..."

Alouzon's words raised an answering cry from Helen. Yes, she screamed. Solomon was all of that. And he was worse, too. My babies . . .

Kyria bent her head, tears starting from her eyes. I can adopt. I can adopt now. Please let me adopt.

"... someone who actually liked to kill," Alouzon was saying. "He was the Establishment during Vietnam. He was the soldiers at My Lai and the Chicago police in '68. He was the National Guard when they shot my classmates at Kent."

Kyria looked up. Kent State. Alouzon's motivations and reactions were suddenly becoming comprehensible.

"And when I finally understood that there were a few good things about him, it was too late. I'd already made Vaylle, and I'd made it a victim. And I made Broceliande, and a Specter of Solomon Braithwaite to go with it." She laughed nervously, almost a little hysterically. "And you know, dammit, I probably made him omnipotent.''

Kyria shook her head. "He is your fantasy. He is not a God."

' 'You better talk to the Vayllens about that. You saw the statues as well as I did."

Kyria shook her head again. Alouzon was wrong. The Specter was one thing, but that corpse rising up out if its grave was something else. And the Grail . . .

Yes, there was a Specter at the dark heart of Broceliande, but there was something else, too: a Cup that could strengthen, that could counter the horrors with the hopes, that could make Alouzon into something that she did not want to be, but that she nonetheless had to be. And, dimly, with Helen clawing at the soft walls of her psyche and shrieking in her mind's ear, Kyria was beginning to wonder if all the destruction, all the trials, all the deaths-everything, in fact, that had happened since Alouzon had come to Gryylth- were not, after all, necessary. The Grail could not be approached casually, nor could it be gained save by those who had passed through the refining fire.

It would be difficult, and the outcome was still in doubt. Silently, Kyria gripped her staff and summoned power to herself. It was not much of a spell, and even Helen could understand what was needed.

The Dragonmaster was still staring out at the roiling darkness. The runway lights had vanished. Pustules of aqua luminescence pocked the velvet sea, burst, and then subsided. Far away, something cried out, but it did not sound as though it were either human or animal.

"And Marrget's down there," said Alouzon. "We have to save her before ..."

Kyria readied the magic. "You have been pushing yourself too hard, Alouzon."

"I can't sleep-"

But Kyria invoked the power she-had summoned, and, in a moment, Alouzon was enveloped in the spell. She was already asleep when her legs gave way beneath her. Kyria caught her and lowered her gently to the ground.

It was cold at the top of the pass. The sorceress covered yet another of her adopted children with her own cloak, and then she stood watch over them all, wondering at herself.

Broceliande was, by day, a high, arid plateau, its colors dominated by a pall of formlessness that overspread everything. Within its borders, shapes, topography, climate, and scenery were all uncertain; and as Alouzon led her people down the slope and across the border that separated the mundane world of substance from the potentials that lurked in the gray lands, she felt the unclean wraiths of her unconscious rising about her as though she were stepping into a stagnant tide pool.

At first nothing happened, but Alouzon did not find that at all reassuring, for such had been the case when she had entered the Blasted Heath with Dythragor. Broceliande was taking its time: feeling out the weaknesses of those who entered, searching for exactly the right apparitions with which to confront them.

The sky, blue and clear in the mountains, turned milky and disturbed. White mist swirled a dozen feet above their heads, and Alouzon, like Dythragor, kept her eyes fixed on the horizon, unwilling to confront the suggestive and half-formed shapes that were presented to her.

The plain stretched off into the distance, and they trekked slowly across the featureless sand. There was no sign that the Grayfaces had passed this way, but Alouzon recalled the words that Marrget had spoken in the Blasted Heath: I have heard it said that the Heath changes, that two men entering separately will find a different terrain. They might not find each other.

If that was true, then Marrget might be gone forever. Or she might well be within the reach of an arm, and those who sought to rescue her would never know it.

Alouzon shook her head. No. It could not be. If being Guardian counted for anything, if Dragonmaster was more than a mocking, empty title, it was not going to be that way.

She turned to Kyria and noticed that the sand beyond the sorceress was strewn with contorted rock formations. Wary of such sudden changes, she glanced around and found that the rock formations were everywhere. "You're a sorceress," she said with dry lips. "Can you pick up anything?"

Kyria grounded her staff and closed her eyes. A minute later, she opened them. "What do we call it, Alouzon? Bad shit?"

"Yeah."

"Nothing more, I am afraid."

"No sign of Marrget?"

"None."

Alouzon examined the rocks that lay straight ahead. "I'm hoping that they don't know we're after them."

Kyria shrugged. "That could well be."

'.'But that's a problem in itself," said Alouzon. "If they think we're dead, then Marrget isn't useful to them anymore."

Kyria's eyes hardened. "Then let us continue. And quickly." She turned around to address the other members of the party, but she simply stared and said nothing. Alouzon, puzzled, turned to look.

Broceliande was operating as expected. The others were gone.

Alouzon let out a lungful of air in a long, tired sigh. In the distance, from amid a cluster of rocks, something cried out as though in reply. Gelatinous and gritty both, the voice hung in the air like a bad smell, and Alouzon and Kyria cringed instinctively.

The sorceress came to herself quickly, though, brought up her staff, and spoke a word of command. But the wood remained no more than wood, and the initial just above her hand flickered uneasily. Kyria's brow furrowed. She spoke again, and she thumped the staff once on the ground. This time, a violet sheen sprang up about it.

She examined it doubtfully, as though it were an otherwise dependable automobile that had inexplicably turned balky. "I was never schooled," she murmured. "I do not know what to make of this." She faced Alouzon. "What do you wish? Marrget is gone, and now so are the others. And-"

The cry again.

The Dragonsword was in Alouzon's hand. "Looking for them would just cost us time that we don't have," she said. It was a brutal, almost heartless decision, but with Marrget still missing, it was the only one possible. "They've got about as much of an idea where they're going as I do, and we'll just have to hope that the Grail will protect them." She hefted her sword. "But I'll tell you, Kyria: if I were my unconscious, I wouldn't want to mess with any of those people."

The import of her words suddenly struck her. As the Tree and the Circle had been for Dythragor, so the Specter was for her: an archetypal creation of deepest drives and impulses. If it were killed ...

And who would be Guardian then? What would become of Vaylle and Gryylth?

The cries continued. Hands shaking, Alouzon took a sip of water and handed the skin to Kyria. There did not seem to be any way out save through a death that would unmake the world, or through the waters of the Grail. And the latter was as much an unknown as the entity that lay hidden among the rocks, screaming.

Kyria passed the skin back and gestured in the direction of the screams. "I have no wish to have that pursuing us through this waste."

"Me neither," said Alouzon. "Want to tackle it before we move on? "

Kyria glanced uneasily at her staff once again, then nodded. "So be it."

"You go right, I'll go left." Kyria bowed and turned to go, but Alouzon detained her for a moment. "And ... uh ... thanks for the nap."

Kyria smiled. " 'Twas my pleasure."

Alouzon was careful to keep the sorceress in sight as they separated and circled out so as to approach the rock cluster from opposite directions. She had the Dragonsword and Kyria had her staff. She assumed that they were armed about as well as was possible.

The air was clear at ground level, and Kyria's robes were a dark shadow against the misty whiteness of the horizon and the dull gray of the sand and rocks. Boots crunching, sword bright, Alouzon slipped from boulder to boulder, straining her ears for any sounds that might indicate movement ahead. What screamed amid the rocks might be dangerous, or it might be a chance concatenation of stray anxieties. There was no way to know save by looking.

Above her head, the mist swirled, and her thoughts tried to follow suit, threatening at any moment to collapse into a melange of panic. Grimly, she held to her mind as she held to her sword, but faces were peering down at her from the sky, familiar faces, loved faces . . .

. . . dead faces.

Sandy was there. And Jeff. And Allison. And though she had not known Bill at all, he was there too. Impassive and dead, their eyes misted over with the staring whiteness of incipient decay, they gazed down on her.

Those who entered Broceliande, whether they found a trackless forest in Brittany or a gray netherworld on the far side of a galaxy, entered to be tested, to be tried; and when Alouzon approached the stand of contorted rocks and peered through the narrow passage between two boulders, she saw the four inert bodies lying tumbled together in the middle of an asphalt parking lot, their blood mingling in a crimson river that, bright red against the gray waste, streamed across the painted lines and the oil stains and dripped into the storm drain with thick, viscous sounds.

But they were dead. They did not cry out. Something else. Something that moved among them, that took her back to another death, one that she had freely chosen to inflict upon another who, at the time, had not even a voice with which to protest its fate.

She drew back. "No . . . please ..."

How long had she been pregnant when she had had the abortion? Eight weeks? Twelve? The doctor had not told her, but the fetus that lay among the bodies of her classmates was a mangled heap of bird bones and throbbing tissue, and it opened its fragile mouth and uttered a scream that sent Alouzon reeling away from the rocks, her sword arm clutched across her belly, her free hand pressed to her eyes as though it could shut out both vision and memory.

And the screams continued, pursuing her, resolving into words of accusation that decried her sanctimonious pacifism and the cultivated neurasthenia to which she had clung throughout the years following the Kent shootings.

Was she horrified by violence? Here was violence by her own hand, an echo of the blood-stained parking lot, a harbinger of all the swordplay and the slaughter that was to come. Kent had begun it all, but she, hypocrite that she was, had continued it.

She sank to her knees, eyes clenched. The voices of the dead dinned at her: Why didn 't you die ? How come someone else had to take the bullet? Why did you kill me?

Something touched her arm, and she flinched away with a cry, rolling over and over in the sand to escape from the blank, staring fish-eyes of the fetus that had wormed its way toward her through the sand. It came on, mindlessly tracking her, leaving a trail of slime and blood that glistened in the shadowless light.

Terrified, Alouzon scrambled to her feet, raised the Dragonsword, and prepared to strike. Surely the preternatural blade could kill something as soft and helpless as this unborn thing.

But it was not simply the stagnant guilt of the abortion that was writhing its way toward her. It was more. It was her life. Lanced and mutilated on a May morning in Ohio, it was as stillborn as the child she had denied in a clinic in Dallas, and her actions since then had been the predictable manifestations of a spiritual decay as incontrovertible as any physical putrefaction.

She lowered the sword. Solomon Braithwaite had denied everything. But if she ever hoped to win the Grail, to attain its peace and wholeness-not for herself, but for her people- then she could deny nothing.

Shaking with strain and fatigue, half mad with unexpiated guilt, she looked up at the-sky and confronted the swirling faces. "I won't say I won't kill again," she said. "But I'm gonna learn the difference between doing something right and doing it wrong. Even if it ..." She stared the faces down. Her classmates were dead; but if ever a fitting memorial could be built for them, it would be constructed not of marble or granite, but of the lives and actions of those who remembered them. "Even if it kills me," she finished.

Flopping and whimpering, the fetus had reached her feet. Stooping quickly, so as to act before her courage failed her, she scooped the tiny helpless thing into her arms, met its eyes, and laid her cheek against its face. "You were mine," she whispered. "I'm sorry for what happened." Blood was running down her arms, the blood of the unborn, the blood of the preterit. She sobbed, felt her tears mingle with the slime of thwarted birthwaters. "But I've got to tell you this: if I had it to do over, I'd probably do it again. And I'd still be sorry."

The fetus writhed in her arms. The tiny lips parted.

"Mother," it said.

And then it was gone.

She was not sure where she was. She was no longer sure even of her own identity. Her name itself seemed distant, alien, unconnected with this stripped and bleeding woman who had been dragged and force-marched across rocks and through malodorous jungle, who seemed to have no appellation other than cunt or bitch.

Her head still throbbed from the blow it had received when she had first been captured, her arms had been pulled behind her and the forearms lashed together from wrist to elbow, and her shoulders burned with the white-hot pain of imminent dislocation. What few moments of real consciousness she had were bounded by a haze of injury and pain that turned her surroundings to an indistinct blur into which only snatches of sight, sound, and sensation-a masked face, a barked order, a shove of a rifle butt-penetrated.

Dumbly, she stumbled forward, no longer aware of what lay before her: perhaps trees, perhaps rocks, perhaps sand. It did not matter. Her mouth parched, her bare feet raw and blistered, her gravid belly bruised and battered, she made her way blindly in accordance with kicks and curses.

She had no idea where she was being so driven, but a faint cognizance of what was planned for her was beginning to force itself on her unwilling mind, and she had little of either strength or will to protest. In an oblique way, she could even see the justice of it all.

Manda ...your wish has been granted.

Would it do any good, she wondered, to struggle? To protest? It had done Manda no good at all.

Perhaps, she thought, she would no longer be conscious when the time came. Perhaps she would already be dead. That was a good thought. To be dead. The Grayfaces could not hurt her any more if she were dead.

But her native pride intervened, and she dashed off the haze of pain as she might have, had she the strength, ripped the strands of wire that bound her arms and hobbled her feet. She was a warrior. She was Mar- The pride faltered. Marrget was a man. And she, as the Grayfaces constantly reminded her, was a woman.

But I am a warrior.

"Move it, cunt," came the voice behind her. "We're almost home.'' The butt of an M-16 slammed into the small of her back, and she stumbled forward.

Manda . . .

As Kyria rounded the boulders, the screaming stopped as though cut off by an axe, and she was confronted not ,by gray rocks and pale sand, but with a lush, green lawn and a tall marble tower set in the middle of it. White, glittering, its walls unfigured and yet graceful, the tower pointed skyward like the slender hand of a virgin.

She glanced behind her. She saw mist to be sure, but it was moist, billowing, redolent of the sea; and the slope of a hill led down to tidal flats. Beyond was forest. There was no sign of Alouzon, only the white tower and the mist and the trees, and, far off, the sound of waves.

Broceliande again.

But this was a peaceful place, seemingly unconnected with the nascent horror of the land beyond the Cordillera. There was even a sense of the holy about it, a sense that increased as Kyria approached the single door of the tower. She laid her hand against the carved wood, her eyes puzzling out the runes and figures incised upon it, seeing in them her own history, the sins that she could faintly justify but could not deny.

Here was a woman lying in bed as her womb, newly flensed of its offspring, cramped and writhed like a fish in a desert. Here, she crouched in darkness, considering the instructions of her lawyer. Here she was weeping. Here plotting. Here waiting.

And at eye level was the single word: Listinoise.

She leaned against the smooth marble wall, her eyes misting. Transformed though she might be in body and, partly, in mind, her being was still indissolubly linked with that of Helen Addams. The screaming was too loud, the claws too sharp, the anger too unblunted: no, she could not enter. The very sanctity of this place would have told her that even had she not seen the antic carvings.

Strange: as Helen Addams, she had occupied herself obsessively with questions of power. She had made a name for herself through her seminars about its accumulation and its use. And here she had not even the potency to open a single, carved door.

Footsteps were crunching up the path from the shore, and she pulled herself out of her sorrow and memories and slipped behind the tower. Peering cautiously around the edge, she saw an old man approaching. He was dressed in leather armor, like that which Alouzon wore, and his head was bent.

Solomon.

At the top of the trail he stopped and tipped his head back so that he could look at the tower. He was old. Very old. His hair was gray and lank, and his face was deeply furrowed. His withered hands hardly looked capable of drawing the sword at his hip.

He is tired.

And although he was her ex-husband, and although he had hurt her, and although a part of her still harbored for him the most unmitigated and undying hatred, that realization struck her as though a sword had pierced her heart. He was tired.

She could not but pity him for his age and his exhaustion, for the confusion and the pain that etched his face as deeply as his years; and she found within herself an echo of all his afflictions. Though her body was young, she was old, and she was tired, and the burden of life and the mere demands of physical existence seemed suddenly more than she could bear.

And yet she could bear them.

Drawing back, she examined her white hands, touched her smooth, young face, stared in wonder at the staff she held. If indeed the Grail was operating behind the scenes-manipulating, shifting, motivating-then it had bestowed its favors upon her and had brought her to this place and time for ...

For what? Here was Solomon: exhausted, frightened. And here was Kyria, who found herself suddenly possessed by both unutterable hate and unconditional love.

She heard his steps scuff across the grass, heard him approach the door. A moment of silence.