Part 28 (2/2)

Kyria looked worried. ”I am just glad that there are two lanes in each direction,” she said. ”It is hard enough to divert these drivers.” A Porsche whined by close enough that even the sorceress jumped. The car pa.s.sed, and she mopped her forehead, thoroughly wilted.

”And they're all smoking dope, too, right?” said Alouzon.

”Aye. And that makes it far worse.”

No sidewalk now, but broad lawns. The way wound on past Beverly Glen, where a tall gate announced the entrance to Bel Air estates.

Kyria stopped before the gate, and as the columns pa.s.sed her by, Alouzon saw the soft shake of her head. Helen was dead. The hag was gone. Bel Air lay far in the past, but the sorceress still had a few memories left of her old home, and at least some of them were good.

Kyria bent her head quickly as though to hide tears. How many times had she driven up Beverly Glen, proud of her success and her triumphs, and spun her car into the circular driveway in front of her house? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Alouzon could not guess. But she understood Kyria's feelings, for she herself had felt something similar when, closing the door of Suzanne's apartment for the last time, she had allowed Manda and Wykla to go on ahead so that she could bid, in private, a last farewell to a lifetime.

Kyria stayed at the corner of Sunset and Beverly Glen for a long time. Alouzon was about to turn around and go to her, but with a quick clatter of hooves, Santhe appeared, and after a moment, Kyria lifted her eyes, smiled at the man she had chosen, reached out. Santhe took her hand and kissed it. Together, they rode off into the darkness that lay to the west.

When she had ridden into MacArthur Park, Alouzon had determined to pace herself and to take things calmly, but she was shaking with strain by the time the army reached Hilgard, and the sight of the large sign on the corner made her want to cry. Even at night, the letters, carved in stone, stood out in deep relief. UCLA A turn to the south. ”Keep to the right now,” she ordered, trying to suppress the tremor in her voice. ”The entrance I want to use is just past Comstock . . . I mean ... uh ...” Curious glances from the men and women. ”Never mind. Just keep right. I'll tell you where to cut in.”

There was not much farther to go, and a good thing that was, because even now the sky to the east was beginning to lighten. Silent once again save for the clop of hooves and the creak of wagon wheels, the columns entered the campus. The gra.s.s of the Sculpture Garden cus.h.i.+oned foot fall and hoof fall, and the trickle of the fountains was a welcome relief after the dinning noise of traffic and aircraft.

Bunche Hall. The concrete underpa.s.s resounded with the movement of warriors, healers, and harpers; and more than one looked up at the pile of gla.s.s and concrete above them as though afraid that the slender supports would not prove adequate to the load.

Haines Hall appeared on the right as the columns tramped along the street that bordered d.i.c.kson Court. The flagpole at the center of the old campus held the Stars and Stripes aloft in the glare of floodlights, and beyond the glare, swimming up out of the darkness, was Kinsey Hall.

”Keep them moving, Kyria,” said Alouzon, and she dropped to the ground, handed Jia's reins to one of Cvinthil's guards, and ran for the north door of the hall.

She crossed the lawn, bounded up the steps. The door was locked.

”s.h.i.+t!”

Kyria appeared a moment later and laid her hands on the lock. With an audible snap, the latch opened. She bowed. ”Forgive me for not following orders, Alouzon. I suspected this might be the case.”

Alouzon shook her head. ”I can't keep track of everything, Kyria. I can't even remember that doors in L.A. get locked. How the h.e.l.l am I supposed to handle being a G.o.d?”

Kyria shrugged softly. ”And how was Marrha supposed to handle being a woman, or pregnant? And Wykla? What did you tell them in those days after their transformation?”

' 'I told them that they couldn't fight it, so they just had to go with it.”

Kyria nodded. '' Exactly.''

”Yeah ...” Alouzon looked back across the lawn. She saw nothing. No horses, no columns of marching pikemen, no harpers and healers in bright Vayllen livery. Nothing. ”You're right . . . but ...”

But Kyria had turned back to the invisible army, and Alouzon, recalling the imminence of sunrise, took the stairs to the second floor two at a time and burst out of the north stairwell hoping that no professors had decided to get an early start on their work this morning. But the office was deserted. The door was as she had left it hours-days-before.

With a murmured thank-you to the Grail, Alouzon entered, darted down the inner corridor and swung the door open. The gate was still there, s.h.i.+mmering with the glow of plexed dimensions, but the clock on one of the solid walls said 6:00.

She ran back downstairs. The lawn, while still appearing vacant at first, filled with men and women and horses and wagons as she crossed towards Haines Hall. The columns had broken up into smaller teams that were separating the supplies into easily carried bundles; and the wagons, designed to break down for travel by s.h.i.+p, were quickly disa.s.sembled into sections that could pa.s.s through the doors and stairwells of the hall.

The first group entered the pa.s.sage between the worlds at 6:15. More followed quickly. Men and women, already worn out with the night's exertions, puffed up the stairs carrying wheels and boards and supplies. Under the care of the priestesses of Vaylle, horses climbed docilely in threes and fours and threaded single file through the inner corridor of the archaeology office.

Marrha and Karthin stood at the north door, directing the steady stream up to Wykla, who took over at the foot of the stairs to the second floor. Manda had stationed herself in the corridor outside the office, Dindrane at the mouth of the gate. Kyria was everywhere, reinforcing the s.h.i.+elds when the campus security trucks drove by, quickening the steps of the fatigued warriors with encouraging words, darting in and out of the gate to see that the lines were moving steadily along the interdimensional pa.s.sage.

By 6:40, the lawn was almost empty. Santhe and the Second Wartroop, acting as a rear guard, were just a.s.sembling their horses in preparation for the pa.s.sage, and the First Wartroop was climbing the stairs. Alouzon ran a hand back through her sweat-soaked hair. Almost finished. And sunrise was a good twenty minutes away. There was plenty of time for- A howl like the blast of a klaxon suddenly rang across the lawn, answered immediately by chorus of eager yelps. Glowing eyes flashed out of the bushes and paths of d.i.c.kson Court, and milling shapes appeared in the dark pa.s.sage between Royce and Haines Halls: leprous yellow bodies, mouths that glowed as with the phosphor of rotten corpses.

* CHAPTER 21 *

Alouzon was already running down the stairs. With most of the army either in transit or already in Gryylth, the hounds could not have appeared at a worse time. But what added a weight of sickness to her worry was the thought that, with this many hounds suddenly materializing, the Specter could not be far away.

The beasts milled briefly and then, in spite of Kyria's s.h.i.+elds, charged directly at the warriors left on the lawn between the halls. Alouzon estimated their number at well over fifty, and they were ma.s.sive creatures: a few were actually the same size as the Gryylthan war horses.

Santhe was barking orders to his men. ”Mount! Defensive line!”

Marrha, with Karthin at her side, descended the steps two at a time. ”Fighting retreat, Santhe,” she shouted as they reached their horses. ”We have no time for a battle!”

Santhe's blond curls bounced as he looked up. ”Aye,” he said. ”Ever the wiser in a fight.” He brandished his sword. ”Fighting retreat,” he called, ”as the captain orders.”

Alouzon summoned Jia with a whistle and rode to help. The wartroops dropped many of the first wave of hounds instantly, but these beasts were large and determined, and by sheer weight of numbers they broke through the line. Most wheeled immediately and set upon the warriors from behind, thereby blocking the planned retreat, but several bolted for Kinsey Hall.

Alouzon severed the spine of a hound that was gathering itself for a spring onto Marrha's back, then helped her deal with the three that were snapping at her from the front. She caught a glimpse of a determined smile from the captain and heard a quick ”Hail, Dragonmaster,'' but she was already turning Jia back towards the hall to intercept the hounds heading for the door.

She need not have bothered. When the hounds were halfway up the stairs, they were met by a brilliant burst of violet light, and what was left of them smoked and cartwheeled down the brick steps, leaving nothing more behind than a thin smear of black ash.

Kyria had appeared at the north door, and the cl.u.s.ter of stars at her shoulder scintillated in the light of the approaching dawn as she gathered double handfuls of the night, held them to her breast until they glowed with violet intensity, and flung them at the hounds. Flat-trajectoried and quick, the bolts drove straight into the ma.s.sed cl.u.s.ters of the beasts, and where the energy did not incinerate them on the spot, it tumbled them over the lawn like bowling pins.

But though Kyria could help, she dared not intervene magically when the hounds closed in on the members of the' wartroops. Backing steadily towards the steps of the building, the warriors had to do most of their own fighting.

Alouzon plunged into the thick of the pack, feeling a sense of angry release as she hacked glowing flesh and smashed the Dragonsword's pommel into ranks of needle teeth. These hounds, she knew well, were but symbols of the war she had protested, emblems of all wars and all suffering. At other times, in other conflicts, they stayed out of sight, dragging down the wounded and the innocent invisibly. But in creating Vaylle and Broceliande, she had made them real, visible, physical.

The Hounds of War. The Hounds of h.e.l.l. The craven, b.e.s.t.i.a.l things that made battles and killing what they were. Alouzon slew them without qualm.

If I'm gonna be some kind of G.o.d, this kind of s.h.i.+t is gonna end. You hear that?

Jia took a vicious bite in his left shoulder that, placed a few inches farther back, would have severed Alouzon's leg. She felled the hound, but Jia was left limping in pain: the phosphor, saturating the wound, burned its way in slowly.

”Easy boy,” she said as she battered away another beast. ”We'll get you out of here in one piece.”

Time was growing short. Moment by moment, the sun was nearing the horizon, and in another few minutes the pa.s.sageway into Gryylth would dissolve. Under the direction of Santhe and Marrha, the wartroops were keeping the hounds at bay while backing towards the hall, but the glowing beasts were numerous and strong, and there was a good chance that they would follow the warriors into the gate and so continue the battle in the darkness and void between the Worlds.

A flash of incandescent light. Alouzon looked up to see a campus security truck pull down the street that bordered d.i.c.kson Court. It stopped, its tires clawing at the asphalt, and a searchlight stabbed out at the carnage on the lawn.

Faced with battle, Kyria had allowed the s.h.i.+elds to dissipate, and Alouzon knew what the officers in the truck were seeing: writhing, dying beasts that looked like nightmares come to life, and, locked in battle with them, sword-wielding warriors and a sorceress who dispensed seething globes of magic like so many water balloons.

The truck spun a quick U-turn and vanished into the darkness, Alouzon could image what the radio operator at the security office was hearing, what, in fact, the Los Angeles Police Department would hear in another minute.

Cursing, she hacked more furiously, leaning down from her saddle to scythe a hound's legs out from under it as it ran at Jia's wounded shoulder. Up at the top of the steps, Kyria was placing her bolts with care. The ranks of the hounds were thinning, but not fast enough.

With the hounds still snapping and biting at them, the First and Second Wartroops had reached the base of the stairs. Here was the worst prospect: a fighting retreat up a long flight of brick and stone steps, with a door at the top that would allow the pa.s.sage of only one warrior at a time. And by Alouzon's watch, barely ten minutes remained before the gate would disappear.

Alouzon galloped onto the carca.s.s-strewn lawn that lay behind the hounds, slas.h.i.+ng at hindquarters so as to distract the beasts. Kyria continued with her bolts.

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