With a wrench that made his mind spin, his spirit rolled off the couch he had been given in Hall Kings-bury, and he scrambled amid the astral currents, keeping his eyes firmly away from the inert heap of flesh and blood that he normally inhabited.

Cautiously, he moved through the Hall. About him, ignorant of his presence, guards watched and slept, spoke in low mutters. The sorcerer overheard a familiar name and drew near to two.

"...and so what does Darham do but send us a woman." The speaker was hardly older than Helwych, but he bore a black eye and a cut on his cheek as though he had been brawling. "I am tired of woman games."

"I cannot blame you," said his companion with a smile. "Woman games seem to have done your face no good."

The first man flinched as though struck. "Damn you, Dryyim. If I could once get that girl alone for the space it takes to tell a hundred-"

"Most likely she would thrash you soundly, Kerlsen. She can take care of herself. And you are drunk."

Kerlsen snorted sullenly. "And now Darham has sent us another."

"The Corrinian maid looks able enough."

A laugh. "She would look better out of that armor and in my bed."

If Helwych's spirit had possessed blood, he would have colored. Manda's tart words had more than once driven him to consider a suitable fate for her. That proud head should be bent now and again for its own good. He was not sure that he agreed completely with Kerlsen's methodology, but the lad had the right idea.

Helwych fumbled his way into the street. Nothing moved. With a sense of confidence, he brought to his mind an image of a black-eyed woman whose hair fell to her waist in a torrent of jet. His vision blurred, and then he was standing in the king's house, beside Kyria's bed.

The sorceress lay, eyes closed in sleep, and Helwych regarded her almost fearfully. Was there anything mat she could teach him? Probably much. Would she, though? A difficult question. He had, he admitted, already erred several times in his dealings with her; had, in fact, thoroughly antagonized her. He would have to move carefully about Kyria, and he had resolved to take a few minutes this night to learn how best he might win her approval.

On the other side of the fire, the Dragonmaster stirred, rolled over, and murmured to herself. She was not asleep, but that did not matter. A simple warrior would never detect the delicate workings of sorcery.

Settling himself on the rush-covered flagstones, Helwych rested his staff across his knees as Tireas had taught him. In a moment he was mentally feeling out toward the sorceress, seeking to read as much of her inner thoughts as his inadequate training would allow.

But as he groped his way toward her unconscious, he found his own thoughts seized suddenly, and he was pulled away into a realm in which ebony skies weighed down on a floor of jet. Before him, Kyria was locked in battle with a wiry, gray-haired harpy who quite obviously wanted to kill her.

Kyria, though, held the taloned hands away from her throat and spoke gently to her opponent. She did not even raise her voice. "You have to give it up sometime, Helen. You cannot live like this,"

The hag snarled, incapable of words. Her teeth snapped at Kyria's face.

Kyria seemed unperturbed. "Please, Helen. Try to love. It is better that way. You know that." But her opponent got a hand loose and struck her. Kyria fell to the floor.

In an instant, Helen was on her, shaking her as a dog might shake a rat. Kyria's face remained calm, but though she fought to regain her feet, she seemed reluctant to strike a blow.

The sides involved in the conflict seemed obvious, and Helwych was delighted that he could be of service to the sorceress. Striding forward, he swung his staff at the hag, and she went down with a snarl. But she was up again almost immediately, her hands reaching for Helwych's robe.

Kyria had regained her feet, and she seized his arm and put him behind her. "Fly," she said softly. "You have no power here."

The words might have stung, but her voice was such that he had to accept fact as fact. "Remember that I tried to help."

As Helen closed in, Kyria smiled sadly, as though she had a long night ahead of her. "I will," she said. "Peace to you. May the Goddess protect you."

He goggled, but she thrust him away and turned to meet Helen with arms open as though to embrace her. Helwych fell back, felt the floor give way beneath him, and then was sprawled on the floor of the king's house, astral mouth choked with astral rushes, staff turned slippery as snail slime.

Spitting out rushes, but unsure of what he had seen, Helwych wandered out through the closed door, passed the ever-vigilant guards, and made his way up the street toward the Hall. He was too disoriented to think himself back to his body, but once he found it, he knew, it was a simple matter to re-enter it. Tireas had taken the time to teach him that. So nice of the old bastard.

He had found out nothing that was of any help, and he had been thoroughly shaken by visions that he could neither control nor understand. Who was the woman that Kyria fought? And how was it that Kyria-normally so vicious and harsh-could be the embodiment of such well-nigh divine gentleness?

The realms of spirit were disturbed, confused. Buildings warped and twisted in his sight, and eyes gleamed out of the shadows. He was within sight of the Hall when he looked into a dark place to find his gaze met by something that glowed with corpse-light, that opened its mouth to reveal a maw of phosphorescence set about with glistening fangs.

With a faint scream, he turned and ran, feeling the beast rise and follow. He had only gone a few steps when he was knocked flat and rolled face up to stare up the muzzle of a massive, grinning parody of a hound. The jaws opened, the teeth flashed, and his sight was suddenly blanketed by the roiling incandescence of a spectral throat.

When he came to himself, he was back in his chamber, his ears ringing with the sounds of shouts and alarms. Men called to one another, and he heard the clank of weapons. Eyes unclosed, he lay in the darkness for a moment, feeling drained and empty, as though the life had been sucked out of his body, leaving only a hollow shell.

Marrget was dreaming.

She dreamed of war, of a young Corrinian girl who had been stripped and raped amid a pile of dirty laundry by the shore of the Long River. The sky was clear, the water went by like oil. The girl's face was pained, her blue eyes outraged, but even as she was violated, she had stared her rapist in the face as though to impress on her memory every nuance of his being. She would find him someday, and she would kill him.

Marrget started awake to find herself in her own bed, beside Karthin, her head pillowed on his shoulder and a warmth in her belly that even a nightmare had been unable to extinguish.

"Oh . . . Gods ..." She sat up, covered her face.

Karthin stirred. "Martha?"

He called her that frequently, though he was ignorant of the associations mat the name had for her. It was, apparently, a Corrinian diminutive, and she had not thought to complain. "Here, Karthin."

He touched her arm. "Are you troubled?"

"A dream. No more."

"About . . . before?"

She had never told him of the rape. She would not tell him now. "Aye."

He sat up beside her, put his hands to her smooth shoulders, and kneaded out the knots of tension. "And have I brought confusion to your already difficult life, beloved?"

"If it was brought," she said, "we brought it together: each holding one side of the bucket." She reached back, touched his face. "But I cannot say that I mind."

Under his hands, the stiffness left her, though the memory of the dream remained. Someday, she decided, she would find that girl and make reparation. She was not sure what she could do that might help, but when, inwardly, she had made the vow, swearing it before the Gods whose names she did not know, she felt better. Curling up in Karthin's arms, she rested her head on his shoulder while he stroked her.

"Do you want to sleep again?" he said.

For the girl left bleeding and bruised by the river, there had been no love, only violence, and Marrget burrowed further into Karthin's embrace as though to fide from her thoughts. "I would sooner remain like this."

The room was cold. Karthin gathered up the furs and covered them both. "I noticed that you did not stay to speak with the Dragonmaster at the Hall. I know you are friends. I hope that I have not ..." Marrget felt him shrug.

"You did nothing, O man. I have changed since Alouzon was last in Gryylth, and now I hardly know how to present myself to her. If I spoke with her, I would have to tell her of myself and of my life. I ... do not know if I am ready to do that.''

"Santhe has guessed, I think."

She laughed softly. A woman's laugh, she realized. "Santhe guesses everything. We know one another too well for me to care. Alouzon, though ..." She squirmed uncomfortably. "Alouzon is like a God. I am not certain how I might be judged. I am not certain how to judge myself.''

He hugged her closely, nuzzled at the hollow of her shoulder. "Strange customs indeed you have in Gryylth. Is it unlawful for a woman to take a man to her bed?"

She made a small, impatient sound. "I was not always a woman."

"You are now." He ran a hand down her spine, and she stiffened, eyes shut, mouth half open. She wanted. . .

She found her voice. "It is easy to say that. It is difficult to live it."

His hand stayed at the small of her back. "You were once my enemy. You broke my ribs. But I love you, and I will help. In any way possible."

The fire was burning in her again, and she had learned at last that she had no reason to deny it. She turned and pushed him gently back onto the bed. "You do help, my love. You have helped me greatly." She pressed herself against him, sought his lips. "Help me now."

Suzanne Helling had grown up in the shadow of Vietnam, and her earliest memories were of slick magazine pages emblazoned with four-color icons of death. Beneath her chubby, pre-adolescent fingers and her wondering eyes, the images in Life and Time and Newsweek had revealed themselves, a burned village that smoked in the tropical sun changing with the brush of a hand into a child who screamed as she ran down a dusty road with legs tattered by shrapnel, her place taken then (another wave of the hand, another startled glance) by a man, disheveled and sullen, who grimaced with one eye half shut as the shock wave of an impacting bullet swept through his skull.

War seemed to be everywhere, bringing with it its cartloads of bodies and its morning-edition casualty statistics; and when Suzanne, filled with the horror of a too-early acquaintance with death, had taken her sentiments to the streets, shouting and screaming that something had to be done to stop the endless slaughter, she had found war waiting for her there, too, brought to life in the concrete verities of tear gas, nightsticks, and, yes, high-velocity bullets.

If an uneasy and distrustful truce could be called an end, then Vietnam had ended. But Suzanne knew- and Alouzon had come to know even better-that wars had no end, not really. To be sure, pieces of paper had been signed, hands had been shaken, and perhaps even a few backs had been slapped. But in America and Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, there were graves, vacant chairs at countless dinner tables, fading photographs on a million walls. There were lives as empty as an amputee's sleeve, as shattered as the stump left by a claymore mine.

And, elsewhere, there were other artifacts.

Alouzon asked to see Gelyya after the evening meal. The Gryylthans were confronted by unknowns; but the Dragonmaster and Kyria knew what questions to ask, and Gelyya's answers, guileless and direct, did nothing but bolster their theory that Bandon had been destroyed by modern weapons.

The apprentice midwife told her tale, and Alouzon, staring into the fire, saw again the magazine photographs of death: ruined village, screaming child, dying man. Snuffling and howling, the war that had soiled her childhood had tracked her across the universe to another world, for she recognized now that Vaylle was as much a remnant of Vietnam as the wasted and defoliated ridges of the Annamese Cordillera.

"That bastard," Kyria said after Cvinthil and his family had retired upstairs.

"Sol?"

"Yes. He couldn't hack this place, so now he's going to blow it up."

It would have been convenient to blame Solomon for Bandon and for such diseased creations as the White Worm and the leprous hound, but Alouzon knew that the responsibility lay with her own unconscious. "He died trying to save the land, Kyria. Why should he try to destroy it?"

"Because he couldn't have his fun anymore." Kyria's voice was an edged blade that cut with the accents of Helen Addams. "Sol was like that. You didn't know him."

"I knew him well enough."

"Sure. Come on, honey. He made this place to prove his manhood, but it got the better of him. Ever hear how an enraged husband kills both his wife and his wife's lover? He can't give it to her with his penis anymore, so he does it with a bullet. Same damn thing."

"I don't ..." Alouzon could not admit the truth. "I don't think it's Sol."

' 'Well then, who the hell is it? Or do you get napalm storms out here like the Midwest gets tornadoes?"

Alouzon was silent.

Kyria cursed under her breath and rolled herself in her furs. "I'm going to sleep. Wake me if the world ends, and I'll try to do something about it." She hefted her staff and tucked it under her arm.

Alouzon lay back on her couch, listening to the muffled crackles and snaps of the banked fire, feeling her tacit lie chew slowly at her heart. Kyria wanted to find Solomon so that she could kill him. Cvinthil wanted vengeance on Vaylle. But neither Solomon nor Vaylle was the problem.

The fire crackled, and an ember glowed momentarily, illuminating the stone walls of the room, the timbered ceiling, the shutters closed tightly against the cold. Ayya's toy-sized broom leaned against the doorframe, and Vill's infant playthings were scattered in the rushes near the hearth. Outside, the men who stood watch at the king's door spoke in low voices and stamped their feet to keep warm. A few feet away, Kyria whimpered softly, the prisoner of some evil dream.

The Grail. She had to find the Grail. Somehow, a woman who had dragged herself through the blood and pain of two worlds had to grasp something that fled from the slightest taint of impurity, and she had to survive the experience so as to bring healing not only to herself, but to the land and the people she loved.

I'll do it. Oh, you Gods of Gryylth, somehow, I'll do it.

Kyria whimpered again, louder. Alouzon recalled her first night in Gryylth, and her second and third, and her fourth. Unless Kyria also had some intimation of the Grail's ineffable and nurturing presence, her dreams must be dark indeed.

The sorceress writhed for a moment, drew her knees up to her chin, cried out softly. Her hands felt her strange, new face. Alouzon slipped out of her blankets and went to her.

"Kyria."

"Who am I?"

"Wake up, Kyria. It's just a dream."

Kyria shuddered, jerked, sat upright. Her long hair was twined in her fists. "Oh God ... no ..."

"It was a dream."

The sorceress broke into tears. "No ... no it's not. I'm not me. He took that, too. Who the hell am I? I want my home ... I want... I want my babies ..."

"Easy." Alouzon held her, felt the cool brush of Kyria's staff against her shoulder. "Easy. It's going to be all right." She tried to find words, failed, and contented herself with holding the weeping woman. Much as she disliked Kyria, she could not bear to allow her to suffer. There was enough horror in Gryylth these days, and probably more in Vaylle. She would not add to it.

Kyria was pulling herself out of her sleepy hysteria. "It's not right," she said. "How can you say it's right? We don't have our own bodies, towns are getting blown up, women are getting raped, and those kids ..." She buried her face in her hands for a moment. "How old is Wykla? Manda?"

"I don't know. Eighteen, maybe nineteen."

"They're just kids. They're just goddam kids. They should be off having fun or something. How come they're carting swords around?"

Alouzon shrugged helplessly. "That's the way it is here."

That's the way it is here. Later, when Kyria had fallen back into an uneasy sleep, Alouzon was thinking, planning, wondering how she could give the lie to those words.

Guardian of Gryylth. What kind of a Guardian was she? Dythragor, for all his crotch-hitch and swagger, had at least kept the warfare comprehensible. It was Alouzon who had created weapons against which her people had no defense. What was next? Nuclear bombs?

The thought drove her out of bed and into her clothes. Wrapping a warm cloak about herself, she opened the door and greeted the guards. "Cold, huh?"

"Bitterly, Dragonmaster," said one whom she recognized as a veteran of the Circle. "But it is often this way before the season warms toward spring. Next week will bring fine weather.''

"Hope so. We've got a ride ahead of us."

"So I heard. Gods bless you, Dragonmaster."

"You too. I'm going to take a walk. That OK?"

The man smiled. "The Dragonmaster persists in asking permission for those things which she could well order."

"Yeah . . . well ..." She shrugged and went off down the street.

The moonlight was a rain of silver, the shadows like pitch. Her boots made hard, brittle sounds on the frozen streets. Unlike modern cities, Kingsbury slept during the dark hours, and the only inhabitants who were awake were those who guarded the king, those who guarded the Hall and the fortifications of the hill, and those who, like Alouzon, guarded the entire land.

Guardian of Gryylth. And what else? Guardian of Vaylle? She wanted desperately to talk to Silbakor, to pry some further information out of its recalcitrant mouth, but even if the Dragon had been willing to speak, it was far away from her, locked in an elemental battle of existence with its equal and opposite.