Part 5 (1/2)

The flames vanished with a look from the Dragon. In the moonlight, Alouzon saw men moving through the boulders. Dythragor grabbed her wrist.

”Listen, Suzanne,” he said. ”You've got to believe me or you'll get killed. These people want to murder us. I'll protect you, but you've got to stay behind me.”

She stared at him. It was all senseless. ”Murder us? But ... why?”

He did not answer. Already, a dozen figures were slipping into the clearing. She saw the glitter of spears and swords. For an instant, the Dremords hesitated at the sight of the Dragon, then advanced.

Dythragor drew his sword, and Alouzon knew instinctively that there was no room for acrobatics. It was going to be standing fast and slugging it out. It bothered her that she knew that.

The Dremords came en ma.s.se, trying to force Dythragor back against the rocks with their s.h.i.+elds. Alouzon stayed behind him, moving back as he did, and she sensed that he was searching frantically for an opening in the s.h.i.+eld wall.

A stone s.h.i.+fted beneath one of the Dremords, and he lurched slightly to one side. His s.h.i.+eld moved, exposing an arm.

Dythragor sprang. ”Gryylth!” He crashed into the gap and hacked at the men. Two dropped immediately, but the others broke and reformed.

51.Alouzon looked around. Dythragor's momentum had carried him away from her. There were Dremords behind her now, and two more stepped in front, isolating her.

Her hand tightened on the Dragonsword. They wanted to kill her. But there had been others who had wanted to kill her, who had very nearly succeeded. These were swords, not M-ls. Her odds had actually improved.

I'm not afraid.

The warmth surged up her arm. The Dremords seemed nonplussed by her presence and gave most of their attention to Dythragor. He was trying to get back to her, but as he turned, they tripped him with a spear.

”Suzanne!”

As he fell, his head struck a s.h.i.+eld with a hollow thud. His armor saved him from a vicious cut to the shoulder, but he could not get his sword up in time to stop the return swing.

It was aimed directly at his neck.

Alouzon was moving before she knew it. Her sword interrupted the Dremord's stroke with a sharp clang, and the man grunted as she kicked him away.

Two others closed on her, but the Dragonsword guided her. She backed slightly to let a spear reach short, parried it into the ground, and broke the shaft with a sharp blow from her foot. A sword came at her, but she used her steel cuff to batter it away, knocking the weapon from the Dremord's hand. She spun, and the flat of her foot found the side of a man's head.

”d.a.m.n you, Braithwaite, move your a.s.s!”

Dythragor came to himself in time to block another blow to his head. ”Back to back,” he called. ”We can hold them.”

Another Dremord appeared, and she slashed without thinking as she scrambled toward Dythragor. Confronted by two skilled warriors, the rest of the Dremords broke and ran.

Alouzon and Dythragor leaned on one another, panting, wary of another attack, but the disordered sounds faded, and they were left alone with the bodies of the slain. Dythragor seemed to relax.

52.But Alouzon realized that her sword was dripping crimson, and she remembered the quick strike that she had unleashed into something that had yielded beneath her blade. She turned. Behind her lay a dead Dremord, his throat opened from one side to the other. His blood pooled among the stones, running down among the moon-silvered rocks.

The Dragonsword was warm in her hand, but she faced Dythragor with a pale, damaged look in her eyes. ”I'm no better than they were,” she said hoa.r.s.ely. She was not referring to the Dremords.

* CHAPTER 4 *

The Dragonsword's hot power faded quickly, leaving Alouzon s.h.i.+vering with a sick horror in her belly. The corpse of the Dremord was that of a young man, scarcely older than those she had known during the demonstrations of the 60s, the resemblance furthered by his long, dark hair and by the headband he wore to keep it out of his face.

And she had killed him.

She felt as though she had been raped, used; as if the power unleashed in that frantic, blinding instant had taken her and made her murder against her will. But she could not blame the Dragonsword. It had been her hand upon the hilt. ”I could have disarmed him,” she muttered. She stared into the flames of the meager, heatless fire as though searching for the alternatives she had lost. ”I could have. I know it.”

She had said much the same thing of the Guardsmen who had marched across the campus of Kent State. They had, she felt, no right to be there, no more right than she had to be in Gryylth. They had been pressed, but they had not been forced to shoot. No, they had made that decision themselves, perhaps when, their backs against the chain-link fence that surrounded the football practice field, they had looked out at the distant and scattered lines of student protesters and realized that, hot and tired and frustrated though they were, they would have to brave the abuse again.

Everyone's back had been against a wall then, not just 53.54..

55.the National Guard's. By 1970, after a decade of abuse, both internal and external, the country had been exhausted. The war protests had turned sour, the disagreements over traditional and modern values had become more hostile and touched with threat, and the once altruistic and virile civil rights movement had degenerated into b.i.t.c.hy and arrogant militancy.

Disillusion was a wave that swept through everything, shattering belief, leaching away at ideals. And on a campus in Ohio, frantic hopes that pointed in opposite directions clashed. And there were casualties.

Alouzon Dragonmaster, once Suzanne h.e.l.ling, sat as far as she could from the blood, fingering her version of an M-l, pa.s.sing the night in a cloud of self-loathing. She tried to sort through what had happened to her-her physical change, the Dragon's words, the fight-but her train of thought stopped cold at the memory of the oil-smooth sword stroke that had opened the Dremord's throat. Her dreams that night were confused melanges of horror in which it was her hand that leveled the rifle, her eye that drew a bead on the long-haired student in jeans and a western s.h.i.+rt.

And yet, floating in the background was a golden radiance that flowed through the visions and turned them, in spite of the M-ls and the screams, into something like a hope. It did not have to be this way. Not forever. There was death, but death was not inevitable.

She awoke at dawn, strangely comfortable in her new body, with the absurd feeling that, if there was any answer to the killings, any answer to what had become of her life, she would find it here in Gryylth, and she would find it beating with a fertile life that bespoke only wholeness. It was here. Somewhere.

As the morning grew, she again mounted the Dragon with Dythragor, and for a few minutes, at least, the young corpse was made distant. Below her, Gryylth unfolded, turning and tipping as the Dragon banked and altered its course, a green pleasant land of mountains, rolling hills, and wide, fertile fields. The moonlight had made it seem cold, but in the warm light of the sun it glowed with verdancy, and clear streams glittered like silver threads worked into a background of deepest emerald.

”Where are we going, Dythragor?”

”To Kingsbury,” he said. ”Seat of King Vorya, ruler of this land.”

He had said little to her since the fight. She sensed that her presence in Gryylth was an annoyance to him, and that he was angry with the Dragon for having brought her. But after his swaggering and posturing, she was almost glad to be an irritant. If Dythragor, a veteran of Korea and a supporter of Vietnam, was playing soldier in Gryylth, she would be more than happy to resume her own old role and give him a dose of conscience.

King Vorya. Another version of Dythragor? ”He's the ruler? I thought you-”

”I'm the protector, Suzanne.” She almost winced at the name. She was Alouzon. And then she realized how far she had fallen under the spell of Gryylth.

”I can't be here all the time,” Dythragor explained. ' 'I have to give lectures in medieval archaeology at UCLA.” He threw back his head and roared.

Silbakor flew on. Alouzon saw villages surrounded by farmlands: fold, fallow, and plow. She saw stone roads that crossed the land, running ruler-straight from horizon to horizon. The mountains rose and fell in the distance. In all, Gryylth seemed a pre-industrial paradise, a textbook example of heroic feudalism, but . . .

She squinted against the stiS wind of the Dragon's pa.s.sage. For all its sharp-edged clarity, there was something lacking to Gryylth. Perhaps it was a question of solidity . . . but it was not solidity exactly. She decided that Gryylth reminded her of a set for a motion picture, with impressive-looking landscapes that were nothing more than the creations of a good special effects department. There was a shallowness to what she saw, a distance that provoked only muted feelings and emotions. She might have been watching a doc.u.mentary on television.

But her hands had been spattered with blood. That was real. And about that her feelings were not muted.

Silbakor began to descend. Below was a flat-topped 5$hill, almost a plateau, its sides cloaked by trees. Its wide, triangular top was occupied by a walled town made up of stout, timbered buildings with stone foundations and a scattering of wattle-and-daub huts. The whole affair might have covered some eighteen acres and was surrounded, at the perimeter of the plateau, by wood and stone defenses. Near the center stood a large hall.

”Kingsbury,” said Dythragor. ”Fairly impressive, eh?”

Something niggled at her memory. ”That looks familiar,” she said. ”WhereVe I seen that before?”

He grimaced at her, shook his head. ”When we set down, you'd best keep your mouth shut and stay behind me.”

”Not another attack?” She was not sure that she could draw her sword again.