"There are a few things about you I wouldn't have expected, either," she said. "But I think I understand what you mean. I wouldn't have thought we'd wind up together like this. It just sort of sneaked up on us. But maybe that's just the way it happens."

"Maybe," he said. "But what if it's not? Wouldn't you want to know?"

She licked her lips and shook her head. "No," she said softly, shaking her head again. "No, if something could make me feel that way when I didn't really feel that way, no, I don't think I'd want to know." She sighed and looked away. "I mean, I would, and then I wouldn't. I wouldn't want it not to be real and I'd want to know if it wasn't, but at the same time I wouldn't want to know that we'd been had that way. Hell, I'm all mixed up now." She paused, thinking. "Anyway, how does anybody ever know for sure?"

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"The only way we're going to find out is to just go with it," she said. "And that's all anyone can ever really do, isn't it? Just take a chance. Hell, warlock, don't you think it's worth it? I'll take a chance if you will."

He started to say something, then stopped. He picked up

the stones from the bed and put them back into the pouch. "I'd better go see Merlin right away."

She stared at him. "You're leaving now?"

"Yes, I think I'd better."

"I don't believe it. You're really worried about this, aren't you?"

"Aren't yo«?"

She shook her head and shrugged. "I don't know. All I know is that something really nice happened between us, and it's as if you're trying to find excuses for it."

"All / know," he said, "is that the fact that I'm worried about this means I care enough about what happened to want it to be real. And for somebody as hard-nosed and streetwise as you just to accept it at face value and not want to know for sure seems out of character to me, and that worries me too."

She frowned. "That was a very nice thing you said. Sort of."

He sighed. "I'll see you later. Don't go out, okay?"

He closed the door.

She stood there, unclothed, hands on her hips, staring after him. "I've got to be crazy," she said to herself, "falling for a guy like that. Maybe it really is the stones." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Now he's got me doing it. I need a drink."

She reached for the half-empty bottle of Scotch.

And the lights went out.

Merlin lived hi a large, gabled dinosaur of a Victorian mansion on Beacon Hill, with mullioned windows and carved cornices; heavy, arched, iron-reinforced wooden doors that looked as if they had been taken off some Norman barbican; balconies and gingerbread moldings and shingles that looked as if they had been designed by Hieronymus Bosch. The house perched like some giant bat on a promon-

tory, a biblical rendition of a demon by Dore—dark, foreboding, and ominous.

Incongruously the lawn in front of it was peopled by ceramic gnomes, three-foot-high statuettes painted in bright enamel colors wearing tall, pointed caps in green and red and blue, holding lanterns, sitting on mushrooms, waving cheerily at passersby or scowling with their arms folded across their chests. There were dozens of them standing on the grass, crouching in the garden, hunkering down by the front steps, hiding in the bushes.

As Wyrdrune opened the black wrought-iron gate and started up the walk, he thought he caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye, and he turned quickly, but it was just one of the ceramic gnomes standing in a jaunty pose and grinning like an idiot, holding one finger up in the air, as if emphasizing a point he was making in a speech. Wyrdrune made a face and turned away, then thought he heard a slight movement and spun around again. He frowned. He could have sworn the gnome had only been holding up one finger before. Now he was holding up two, making a V for victory, only the back of the hand was facing out, which made it not a V for victory, but another old British gesture of altogether different significance.

Wyrdrune stared hard at the ceramic gnome for a moment, then turned and continued up the walk. He heard a rustling behind him and spun around again, but this time the gnome was gone. He glanced around at the other figures on the lawn, all of which seemed to be looking right at him, faces frozen into expressions of ceramic imbecility.

Scowling, he walked up the front steps and approached the heavy, arched, wooden front door. There was a huge, ornately carved iron knocker on the door, a demonic visage of some sort, and the knocker itself was the distended, lower part of the demon's jaw. Wyrdrune grabbed it and swung it hard three times against the knocker plate. As he released it, the eyes on the iron knocker opened wide and stared at him.

"Who is it?" said the knocker.

Wyrdrune backed off from it a pace. "It's me, Wyrd-rune," he said. "Karpinsky."

"Oh, it's you," the knocker said. "Well, I suppose you'd better come in, then."

The door opened by itself with a loud, protracted creak, and Wyrdrune entered the dark hall. The door closed behind him and bolted itself. Two small fixtures mounted on either side of the door blazed up, illuminating the foyer. He stood on a carpet runner that led across the foyer to a wide, carpeted stairway. The stairway branched off to the left and right from the landing, leading to the upper floors. To the left of the foyer was an arched entry to the living room; to the right, through a pair of open wooden doors, was the library.

It was difficult at first to tell one from the other, because both rooms were filled with books, arranged in floor-to-ceil-ing mahogany bookshelves, but after a moment Wyrdrune realized that the room to the right was the living room because it had a large fireplace with a flagstoned chimney, a long couch, and several upholstered chairs placed around a long coffee table, while the room to the left held, in addition to all the bookshelves, a writing desk, a leather reading chair, a table, and a sideboard with an old gasogene, a bottle of whiskey, and a glass decanter. It was obviously a library and a study, a place where Merlin spent much of his time.

As he stood there wondering which way to go, Merlin came down the stairs, followed by a large, round-topped, iron-banded wooden chest, the sort of chest a pirate might have buried his treasure in. The chest was floating down the stairs about three paces behind him. He saw that Merlin had changed into a dark blue brocade smoking jacket and matching carpet slippers. He was still wearing the same woolen slacks and smoking his ever-present pipe. At the moment it was sending out clouds of strong Turkish tobacco, emitting an odor

reminiscent of burning peat. Wyrdrune wrinkled his nose, but he knew the smell would probably change momentarily, and sure enough, it did, to a gentle whiff of chestnuts roasting.

"I was just up in the attic, looking through some of my old things," Merlin said, gesturing at the chest floating in midair behind him. "I gather you're here because the little buggers have returned to you. I didn't miss them until I got home and opened up my briefcase. I take it you brought them with you?"

"Yes, sir," Wyrdrune said, reaching into his pocket for the pouch. "I've got them right here. I guess you didn't have a chance to put a holding spell on them."

"What do you take me for," said Merlin irritably, "some doddering, absentminded, old tree-hugger?" He always referred to the Druids as tree-huggers. He had little regard for them and was contemptuous of the fact that legends alleged him to have been one. He had even less regard for trees, which was, perhaps, understandable. "Of course I put a holding spell on them," he said. "The trouble is, it didn't seem to work."

Wyrdrune swallowed hard. If Merlin couldn't hold them, then who could? Merlin seemed to read his thoughts.

"It really is rather annoying," he said. "If / can't bind the bloody things, then we may have a serious problem on our hands. I've spent the entire afternoon and evening going through most of my old books and records, all to no avail. I've looked through everything except the scrolls and message stones in this old chest. Maybe there's something in there that could give us a clue. I haven't looked through any of this stuff since Arthur's time."

"Since King Arthur's time?" said Wyrdrune with disbelief, staring at the chest. Merlin almost never talked about those days.

"Yes," said Merlin sourly. "I had a premonition that there could be trouble with Le Fay and that young delinquent,

Modred, so I took the trouble to safeguard my most important talismans and records in the crystal cave." He snorted. "Astonishing that they all survived, all things considered. I found all manner of horrors above them when I came back and excavated them. At one time or another, a housing development was built over the site, and before that, a stadium of some sort—I found several concrete slabs covered with those modern runes you call graffiti, something about 'West Ham United' and 'Footballers Forever' or some such nonsense, obviously a later perversion of the old Roman circuses, which were considerable perversions in themselves...."

As he rattled on, he went into the living room, followed by the floating chest. He waved absently at the fireplace and ignited several large logs stacked on the grate, which erupted into a considerable conflagration. He waved absently again at the coffee table, and several stacks of books and papers went flying to the floor, as if swept off the table by an invisible hand. Then he gestured with waggling fingers in the general direction of the library, from which, as if suspended from an invisible conveyor belt, a train of heavy, leather-bound books with gilt lettering on the covers started to float into the living room. He sat down in a large, bat-wing wooden chair with deep purple velvet cushions and started to pull the books out of the air as they danced past him, opening them, rifling the first couple of pages, grunting and shaking his head and tossing them away with apparent unconcern. As he drew the books aside, they went spinning across the living room in a wide arc, through the archway and across the foyer, into the library, and back into their proper places on the shelves.

"I was vaguely conscious in a torpid sort of way while I was trapped inside that tree, sticky with sap and tickled by acorns, which several generations of disrespectful squirrels insisted on storing in a cache they'd gnawed out right be-

heath my nose. Detestable, lousy, yammering creatures. I followed the so-called progress of the ages. In their time, Lancelot and the rest of those young braggarts could be rather trying, but I wonder what they would have made of the likes of Richard III, Cromwell, Henry Morgan, Beau Brummel, Disraeli, Bernadette Devlin, and Maggie Thatcher, to name only a few. I watched the empire rise and crumble, haul itself up out of the ashes of the German bombing, and go all to pieces once again before the inevitable Collapse. I thought Le Fay's enchantment would last for a millennium or so, but the bitch laid a proper corker on me, and it took much longer than I thought."

He shook his head, grumbling as he scanned the books, then stopped for a moment and looked off into the distance. "More was lost with Avalon than I can ever say," he said wistfully. "The world forgot the old ways and grew up an orphan, unsupervised and neglected like an unwanted bastard child. I tried to set men back on the proper course, but sometimes I wonder if it's not too late. There's virtue in simplicity, but men have enshrined the complex and the burdensome, and the new beliefs die hard. I've had to learn to compromise. There was a time when I didn't even know the meaning of the word."

He glanced at Wyrdrune and sighed. "I must sound like a babbling, senile old woman," he said.

"No, sir, not at all," said Wyrdrune. "I love to hear you talk about the old days. The truly old days, that is, not the pre-Coliapse years that everyone seems to be so fascinated by today. Frankly I don't understand it."

"Don't you?" Merlin said. He snorted through his beard. "It's quite simple, really. The past always seems infinitely more attractive than the present or the future. The present is a constant struggle for survival, and the future is either a hoped-for dream or a dreaded nightmare, depending on one's disposition. But the past... it always represents secur-

ity, no matter how dismal it may have been. One thinks back upon the past like an old soldier remembers well-fought battles of his youth or an old woman whose children have all grown thinks back upon the hopes and dreams of girlhood. The past always represents a simpler time, hopes for a future brighter than the one that came to pass, and one remembers it not necessarily the way it was but the way it seems to be, seen through the gauzy filter of advancing years." He shrugged and grimaced wryly. "If I were to be truly honest, I'd have to admit that Camelot had its drawbacks too. It was a glorious time, perhaps, but it could have done with indoor plumbing, central heating, and deodorant soap."

He grunted, snapping himself out of his reverie. "See what happens when you start rummaging through old things in the attic? You start to daydream, and the next thing you know, you're getting all wistful and maudlin, like some old grandmother who's found her trousseau buried in a trunk beneath a pile of old socks." He bent down over the books again and finally found what he was looking for. "Ah, here we are," he said, stabbing his forefinger down at the open book. "Away with you," he said, waving his hand in a gesture of dismissal, and all the other books trooped obediently back into the library.

"Forget the damned spell I used to safeguard this old relic," he said, indicating the chest. "I had to look it up."

He gazed hard at the chest, raised his right hand, and muttered several phrases rapidly in an ancient Celtic dialect. Nothing happened. Merlin raised his eyebrows and grunted, then repeated the spell, again with no apparent result. He frowned and gave the chest a kick. The lid sprang open.

"Must've been stuck," said Merlin grumpily. "Now, let's see what we have in here that might put us on the right track."

He raised his arms over his head, and the contents of the old chest rose up, as if borne up by an invisible fountain—

papyrus scrolls encased in gold and silver tubes; clay tablets incised with cuneiform; Egyptian cartouches, amulets, and scarabs; cylinder seals carved from semiprecious stones; fragments of stone bearing inscriptions from Sumerian temples; and ancient syllabaries engraved on ivory and carved into alabaster and obsidian. The artifacts all swirled in arabesques above the chest, then came down and neatly arranged themselves, spread out on the coffee table, as the lid of the chest slammed down.

Merlin waved his hands in front of his face, coughing from the dust that came up from inside the chest. He reached into the pocket of his smoking jacket, took out a handkerchief, and blew his nose loudly, then wadded up the hanky and stuck it back into his pocket.

"Now, then," he said, "let's have those stones of yours."

Wyrdrune handed him the leather pouch, and Merlin shook the rune stones out into his hand. He held one of them up close to his face and squinted at the runes carved into it, then bent down over the coffee table and started scanning the artifacts arranged there, humming softly to himself.

"The devil of it is," he said, "it seems to me that there's something uncomfortably familiar about all this, as if I've encountered it before somewhere, long ago, only I can't quite recall what... hello! What have we here?"

He picked up an irregular fragment of sleek obsidian about the size of a dinner plate, bearing an inscription written in some long-forgotten language. The characters that had been incised into the stone were filled with gold, so that the message stood out bright and sharp against the jet-black stone.

Merlin examined the stone fragment intently, frowning, comparing the gold-filled characters with the runes cut into the three gemstones. They were unquestionably similar. His eyes seemed to glaze over and, as if in a trance, he started to recite:

"Three stones, three keys to lock the spell, Three jewels to guard the Gates of Hell. Three to bind them, three in one, Three to hide them from the sun. Three to hold them, three to keep, Three to watch the sleepless sleep."

Wyrdrune stared at him, fascinated, as the glazed look in Merlin's eyes went away and he seemed to focus once more on the fragment of obsidian with the gold characters inscribed on it. His lips moved soundlessly for a moment, and his gaze traveled from the ancient inscription to the rune-stones.

"Yes," he said, as if speaking to himself. "Yes, I remember now! The number three, six lines to the incantation, the number three occurring nine times in the spell... multiples of three... the living triangle. There are five small triangles in a pentagram, containing fifteen points... five multiplied by three, and the five larger triangles that make up a pentagram, each adding three more points for a total of fifteen... again five multiplied by three, for a total of ten triangles in the pentagram, thirty points... ten multiplied by three... the ten triangles of the pentagram multiplied by the six lines of the incantation and the nine recurrences of the number three equal three hundred and sixty, the degrees of the eternal circle... of course! Of course!"

"What is it?" said Wyrdrune.

Merlin slowly sat back in his chair. "An enchantment from the dawn of time," he said. "An incantation containing the most powerful symbols of thaumaturgy—the living triangle, the warding pentagram, and the eternal circle—as indicated by the strongest of the ancient chains of numerology. A binding spell of incalculable power." He picked up the runestones. "And these must be the keys. The three-in-one, the living triangle. And the warding pentagram, from

ny

which these stones must have been taken, is the lock. And the eternal circle is the prison."

He looked at Wyrdrune with alarm. "For the binding spell to be secure, the keys must be inside the lock, the multiples of three, the living triangle within the pentagram. Only now the keys have been removed and the eternal circle can be broken."

"But... I don't understand. What does that all mean?" said Wyrdrune.

Merlin sat silent for a long moment. "A catastrophe that will make the Collapse seem insignificant. Indeed, the Collapse prepared the way for it."

"For whatT said Wyrdrune.

"The release of the Dark Ones," Merlin said. "And as unbelievable as it may seem, of all people, Karpinsky, you are the one who holds the key."

CHAPTER Eight

She was lying naked on a cold stone floor, in the middle of a large chamber. She could see little of her surroundings. The only light came from several braziers standing near her, illuminating the large room dimly, throwing garish, dancing shadows on the walls.

She crouched on the floor, waiting for her eyes to become accustomed to the dim light, her mind racing. A moment ago, or at least it seemed as if it had been a moment ago, she had been in their hotel room. Wyrdrune hadn't been gone a minute when she felt an icy blast of wind and everything suddenly went black. She felt dizzy, disoriented. She had been with Wyrdrune long enough to know what being magically teleported felt like, only this was worse, the effects magnified, as if she had been transported a much greater distance.

She felt the strong blast of icy wind again. It blew briefly through the shadowy chamber, and she raised a hand to her face and shut her eyes against it as it blew past her, then, just as abruptly as it had started, it was gone.

"Stand up, girl."

120

The deep voice echoed in the darkened chamber. A dark figure sat on a large chair placed on a dais before her. She stood and faced him, not making any attempt to cover her nakedness. She felt confused and frightened, but she was determined not to show it.

"Your body is well made," the man in the darkness said. "You would bear many strong sons. But you should not stand unclothed in the presence of a king."

The man in the shadows raised his hand, and suddenly she was dressed in a long, loose-flowing gown of black velvet embroidered intricately with gold thread.

"Better," he said.

"Who are you?" she said, feeling^afraid, but summoning up her nerve. "What am I doing here? And why are you hiding in the dark?"

Two braziers standing on either side of the dais blazed up suddenly, illuminating him. He sat casually on the gem-encrusted throne, wearing an elegant, dark, custom-tailored suit with a generous amount of lace at the throat and cuffs. A long black kaffiyeh was held in place on his head by a gold circlet with a cobra on it. The blood ruby glowed softly in his forehead.

"I am Rashid Ilderim Al'Hassan," he said, "and I do not hide from such as you. You have stolen something that belongs to me. I want it back."

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't exactly have anything on me when I arrived."

"Where are the runestones?"

"Drop dead."

The jewel set in his forehead blazed, and a bright bolt of light shot out from it, striking her right between the eyes. She cried out and fell to her knees, bringing her hands up to her face.

"The last woman who spoke to me in such a manner amused my retainers for three weeks before she died," he said. "It would serve you well to remember whom you are

addressing. Obviously, since you do not have the rune-stones, your young warlock companion does. Where has he gone with them?"

"I don't know," she said.

The jewel in Rashid's forehead blazed again, and this time a bright, sustained beam lanced out from it, striking her and bathing her in its searing, incandescent aura. Her scream echoed off the walls. After a moment that seemed like hours, the beam was cut off, and she collapsed to the floor, holding herself in agony.

"I can bring you pain that is a hundred times worse," said Al'Hassan.

"And if I tell you what you want to know," she said, gasping, "I suppose you'll just pat me on the head and let me go, right?"

"Perhaps, if it amuses me," he said. "But, on the other hand, there are many ways to die. The choice is yours."

"I don't think so," she said, breathing heavily. "You'll have to come up with a better offer."

Al'Hassan smiled in spite of himself. "You are not what I expected," he said, getting up and descending the steps of the dais to the floor, approaching her. "You are afraid, yet you find courage in your pride. I find that a worthy attribute." He stood over her. "I might consider making a place for you in my harem if you were to cooperate."

"That's a better offer?" she said. "I think I'll pass. I could never marry a man who wears more jewelry than I do."

Al'Hassan bent down and lifted her easily with just one hand, holding her off the floor by the throat, choking her. "You insolent little guttersnipe," he said. "I could—" The breath whistled out of him as she suddenly struck out with her foot, kicking him hard in the solar plexus. He doubled over, releasing her, and she followed up the kick with a hard right cross to his jaw. He staggered back and fell. Kira turned and ran, but before she could get ten yards, she was again bathed in the burning radiance of the beam from Ra-

shid's "third eye," and she felt her feet leaving the floor as she rose up into the air, writhing and gasping with pain.

She floated higher, almost to the ceiling of the presence chamber, as Al'Hassan stood beneath her, the blinding beam of force shooting out from the brightly glowing gem set in his forehead. The pain was unbelievable. It felt as if her skin were being torn off. She screamed.

He held her high in midair for a moment, then cut the beam off and allowed her to fall to the black marble floor. She landed hard, like a sack dropped from a height, and lay on the floor, stunned, whimpering, unable to move.

"I could have your hands cut off for that," Al'Hassan said coolly. He wiped the blood away from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at it, unable to believe she had actually struck him.

"Yeah," Kira gasped, "I had you figured for a freak."

He grasped her by the hair, pulling her head back sharply, turning her face up to him. "No doubt you think yourself clever," he said. "Yet you do not even begin to comprehend what you have done. You have meddled in something far greater than you could ever imagine. Something that makes your life of very little consequence."

He yanked her by the hair and pulled her to her feet. She swung at him with all her might, but her fist stopped inches from his face, as if it had struck an invisible wall. Suddenly, she couldn't move.

Al'Hassan smiled. "You will not catch me by surprise a second time," he said. She stood immobile, frozen like a statue in the act of trying to strike him. He stroked her cheek with his forefinger. "There is a primitive rage in you I find rather appealing. Submissive women bore me."

Her vocal cords were paralyzed.

He ran his hand along her jawline, smiling at the expression of loathing in her eyes. "What, nothing to say?" He touched her lips gently. "You will speak soon enough. I may

decide to keep you, after all. Wild creatures are always the most difficult to tame. And half the reward is in the effort."

As he got off at his floor, the blond man came out of the elevator right behind him, and Wyrdrune suddenly felt the point of a sharp knife against his side, just over his kidney.

"Don't make a sound. Not even a whisper."

A strong hand on the back of his neck, fingers pinching hard just below the base of the skull, propelled him forward, the knife point urging him on.

The blond man pushed him toward the stairway exit, through the door, and face up against the wall on the landing. He pressed him hard against the wall and quickly frisked him.

"What do you—" Wyrdrune began, but the point of the knife pressed against him only slightly, yet enough to shut him up at once.

"Not a word, young warlock. Don't even blink your eyes unless I tell you to." He lifted the leather pouch containing the runestones out of Wyrdrune^s pocket. "Now turn around slowly, spread your arms, and press your hands flat against the wall behind you. Pretend you're crucified."

Stunned, Wyrdrune did as he was told, turning around slowly, putting his back to the wall and placing the palms of his hands flat against the wall behind him, arms spread out slightly.

He had barely even noticed the man before, just one of several people who had gotten on the elevator with him in the lobby. Now he saw that he was blond and bearded, of average height and weight, dressed in a conservative, well-tailored suit with just a touch of lace at the throat and cuffs. He wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses, and at first glance he looked for all the world like a well-groomed accountant or lawyer, someone who would never really stand out in a crowd. But then, on closer examination, one noticed the

eyes behind the tinted glasses. They were cold, alert, and predatory.

He placed the point of his knife in the hollow of Wyrd-rune's throat, just over the trachea. "Believe it or not, I've probably saved your life just now," he said. "There's a man waiting for you in your room, a rather unpleasant gentleman named Mustafa Sharif. Does the name mean anything to you? Shake your head yes or no."

Slowly, all too aware of the knife at his throat, Wyrdrune shook his head from side to side. It took him a moment to realize the full implication of what the man said. If there was someone in their room, then what about Kira?

"Sharif works for Sheik Al'Hassan," the blond man said. Seeing Wyrdrune's eyes widen, he nodded. "I see you know that name. Now listen carefully. If you want to come out of this alive, you'll do exactly as I say. Agreed?"

Wyrdrune nodded.

"Good," the man said. "We're going to walk together down the hallway to your room. You're going to knock on the door, say that you forgot your key, and ask to be let in. Then you will quickly stand aside, away from the door, and press yourself up against the wall without making another sound. And you will do absolutely nothing else, whatever happens. Understand?"

Wyrdrune swallowed hard and nodded.

"Good. Come on, then."

They went out of the stairwell and down the hall together, the man holding on to Wyrdrune's arm, keeping the knife pressed against his side. They stopped at the door to Wyrdrune's room. The blond man glanced at him and nodded. Wyrdrune stepped up to the door, knocked three times, and said loudly, "Kira? Kira, it's me. Let me in, I forgot my key."

In a moment mere was the soft click of the dead bolt being drawn back, the knob started to turn, and Wyrdrune

immediately stepped aside and flattened himself against the wall.

The corridor was empty. The blond man had disappeared.

As Wyrdrune glanced wildly around him, there were three soft coughing sounds, coming in rapid succession from inside the room, and splinters flew from the door as three holes appeared in the corridor wall opposite the doorway. There was the sound of something heavy hitting the door and falling. A moment later there was the sound of something being dragged across the floor, and then the door opened and the blond man said, "Inside, quickly!"

He pulled Wyrdrune into the room and closed the door. A man's body lay sprawled facedown on the floor, staining the carpet with blood. There were red streaks on the carpet where the blond man had dragged the body away from the door and red splashes and smears on the inside of the door where Sharif had been thrown against it by the impact of the bullets and then slid down to the floor. Wyrdrune stared at the corpse wide-eyed, his stomach heaving.

"My God, you killed him!"

"I should hope so," the blond man said. In his gloved right hand he held a small black semiautomatic pistol with a short silencer screwed into the barrel. Crazily it struck Wyrdrune that the gun seemed very small to have done such damage.

"But how—how did you—" And then he realized there was only one way the man could have disappeared from the corridor and reappeared inside the room behind Mustafa Sharif as he was opening the door. "You're an adept!"

"I have some skill," the blond man said.

"Kira... where's KiraT

"I imagine she's with Al'Hassan," the blond man said. "She may be dead by now, but I think he'll keep her alive as long as he does not have these." He reached into his breast pocket and took out the pouch containing the runestones. He

tossed the pouch to Wyrdrune. "Open it," he said, gesturing at Wyrdrune with the pistol.

Wyrdrune loosened the drawstring on the pouch and shook the runestones out into his hand.

"Let me see them," the blond man said. He gestured with his pistol. "Carefully," he said. "No sudden moves."

Very conscious of the pistol aimed right between his eyes, Wyrdrune slowly held his hand out, the runestones resting in his open palm.

The blond man glanced down at them very briefly, not taking his gaze off Wyrdrune for more than a second.

"A number of people have gone to great lengths to obtain those gems," he said. "I'd guess they're worth a couple of hundred thousand, but that kind of money means nothing to a man like Al'Hassan. They must be worth a great deal more to an adept who knows then- use." He gestured with the pistol. "Put them back in the pouch, please."

Wyrdrune complied.

"Now put the pouch down on the bed, clasp your hands on top of your head so I can see them, and step back." Wyrdrune did as he was told, and the blond man stepped up to the bed, picked up the pouch, and replaced it in his inside jacket pocket without taking his eyes off him for a moment.

"What is their use?" the blond man said.

"I don't know," said Wyrdrune.

"I don't believe you."

"Look, mister, I don't know who you are—"

"I'm the man who just saved your life," the blond man said, "which is ironic, considering that I was hired to kill you. However, my client recently suffered a fatal accident, for which you should probably thank the late Mr. Sharif. That was a fortunate turn of events for you, but I've incurred considerable losses as a result of this commission, and I intend to make good on them, one way or another. You're going to help me. Now, I'm going to ask you one more time, what is the thaumaturgic purpose of these gems?"

Wyrdrune hesitated, desperately trying to think of a way out of the situation. But there was no way out that he could see. Even if he could think clearly, there was no way to cast a spell faster than the blond man could squeeze the trigger. He was a professional, and he wouldn't be distracted.

"Even if I knew, you'd only kill me if I told you," Wyrdrune said.

"I suspect you'd tell me, anyway, if I shot out your kneecaps, but I don't think that will be necessary. We're in a position to help each other. You'd like to have your lady back and come out of this in one piece, perhaps even with some money in your pocket. And I would like to make good on my losses and pay off a personal debt to AFHassan. The runestones can help us both achieve our respective goals. Besides, you can't afford to do without my help. You're a hopeless amateur. Alone, you haven't got a chance against a man like Al'Hassan."

"You're asking me to trust you?"

"Have you any choice?"

Someone hammered on the door. "Police! Open up and stand back from the door!"

"Catch," the blond man said, tossing his gun to Wyrdrune. Instinctively Wyrdrune caught it.

The door was kicked in.'

"Freeze! Drop the gun!"

The cops crouched low, their arms extended, aiming their pistols at him.

"Drop the gun, I said! Drop it right now!"

Wyrdrune dropped the gun on the floor and quickly raised his hands. "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"

The blond man had disappeared. Wyrdrune stared at the cops, then his gaze traveled down to the gun on the floor and over at the body of Mustafa Sharif. He felt sick.

"Wait," he said, "it's not how it looks. I can explain—"

They grabbed him and threw him facedown on the bed.

He felt his arms wrenched up behind him, and steel bracelets snapped over his wrists.

"No, wait! You don't understand—"

"Shut your mouth!"

He was yanked brutally to his feet and turned around.

And suddenly everything went absolutely still.

The policeman who had pulled him to his feet and spun him around stood holding him by the arm with his mouth open, staring at him, frozen like a statue. A uniformed policeman stood behind him, holding a gun pointed at him, utterly motionless. Another cop, his gun also out, was frozen in the act of looking at the dead body on the floor. Several people stood outside, looking in through the open doorway. They, too, were frozen into immobility.

"I knew I could trust you to get in trouble," Merlin said.

Wyrdrune spun around to see the old mage sitting casually in an armchair with his legs crossed, smoking his pipe. He took it out of his mouth and tamped the tobacco down with his forefinger. Then he snapped his fingers, and a tiny flame seemed to shoot out of his thumb. He used it to light the pipe, puffing out a cloud of smoke that smelled like pork roasting, then he blew his thumb out.

"Boy, am I glad you see you!" said Wyrdrune.

Merlin grunted. "I imagine so. You get in over your head more often than a drunken Irishman stumbling through a peat bog. I've never seen anything like it. Turn around."

Wyrdrune turned, and Merlin gestured absently, as if shooing away a fly, and the handcuffs sprang open and fell to the floor.

"First arson, then grand theft, and now murder," Merlin said. "You seem to be piling up quite a list of accomplishments."

"I didn't shoot that man, Professor, I swear it," Wyrdrune said.

"I didn't really think you did," Merlin said, getting up out of the chair. "You're the sort who couldn't hit the broad side

of a barn if you were standing in the hayloft." He glanced down at the dead body. "What happened here?" *

"I was jumped as I was getting off the elevator," Wyrd-rune said. "I don't know who he was. I never saw him before. He said he was hired to kill me. He's an adept. He's the one who shot that man—Sharif, that's what he said his name was. He said he worked for Sheik Al'Hassan. He—"

"Wait a moment," Merlin said. "Slow down, you're not making any sense. First of all, let's close the door before we attract an audience." He waved his right hand, as if in a gesture of dismissal, and the door slammed shut.

Wyrdrune sidled past one of the motionless policemen. He glanced uneasily at the immobile figure, standing there like a statue. He stepped up close to him and passed his hand in front of his face.

"You sure they can't hear us?" he said. "This one's not even breathing. They're not dead, are they?"

"Of course not," said Merlin. "Now calm down and tell me how you managed to get yourself into this mess."

Wyrdrune took a deep breath and told Merlin what had happened from the moment he stepped off the elevator. "I never even had a chance to do anything," he said as he finished. "Things were happening so fast, I couldn't think straight, and the blond man didn't take his eyes off me for a second. When the police came, he threw his gun to me, and without thinking, I caught it. Then he teleported just as they broke down the door—"

"Leaving the police to find you with a gun in your hand and a dead body on the floor," said Merlin.

"And he also took the runestones," Wyrdrune said.

"Did he?" Merlin said. "Check your pockets."

Wyrdrune reached into his pocket and pulled out the leather pouch. "I might have known," he said with a wry grimace. "What happens now?"

"Well, obviously we're going to have to leave here before

anyone else arrives. However, first we should dispose of the body and the gun. It should help confuse the issue."

He gestured, mumbling under his breath, and the body disappeared. A moment later he had also disposed of the gun and all the bloodstains.

Wyrdrune glanced uneasily at the policemen. "Shouldn't you cloud their minds or something?" he said.

"Who do you think I am, The Shadow? There are limits to what even I can do, you know. I couldn't remove their memories of what happened here without risking damage to their mental faculties. It's a highly delicate process and I haven't got the time to attempt it. Besides, it's just as well. I'll remove your name from the hotel register, and that will complete the disposal of the evidence. They'll think you did it."

"Well, thanks a lot!"

"Don't be impertinent. You haven't got a position to think of. I do. I can't be seen to be involved in this. The press would have a field day, and there is far too much at stake for me to be concerned with the media and the police. I will require all my energies to deal with Al'Hassan."

"What do you mean?" said Wyrdrune. "You were his teacher. You're much more powerful than he is."

"Perhaps," said Merlin, "but Rashid has come a long way since he was my student, and there are powerful forces working through him. It will take all my strength to counteract their influence. I must have time to concentrate my powers."

"What about Kira?"

Merlin shook his head. "I can do nothing for her now. There is much more at stake than just her welfare. Besides, I don't think that Rashid will harm her. He'll probably try to use her as bait to bring you to him with the stones. Whatever you do, you mustn't let them fall into his hands. It will be up to you to help Kira. I can spare neither the energy nor the time."

"Up to me? But what can / do against a mage? I'm only a warlock, and if he's got you worried—"

"Even if you succeed in doing nothing but distracting him for just a while, it will help," said Merlin. "Besides, you're not as helpless as you think. Nor is Kira, for that matter. You have the runestones."

"But I don't know how to use them!"

"It makes no difference. They will use you," said Merlin. "You're growing stronger. You've noticed it yourself. That is the runestones' doing. They came back to you. For some reason that utterly escapes me, they've chosen you and your friend, Kira. There must yet be a third component to the triangle. Perhaps that's to be my role. I don't know. The runestones will make their choice in then- own time. Either way, my task has already been decided for me. My responsibility is clear. You'll have to bear your share."

"Professor, I don't even understand what you're talking about!" said Wyrdrune.

"Come here," said Merlin. He took him by the arm, mumbled quickly under his breath, and teleported them back to his home on Beacon Hill. "Now we can talk without fear of interruption," he said. "Sit down and listen carefully. Events are moving more quickly than I expected. If that man, Sharif, was able to trail you to Boston, then Rashid already must have surmised that you would try to contact me. I don't think he will move against me yet, but it's only a matter of time. Under ordinary circumstances Rashid would know better than to try to pit his powers against mine, but Rashid is not himself. He has been taken over by the Dark Ones. I wanted you to bring Kira here before anything could happen, but Rashid has been too quick for us. It's what I was afraid of. Now both of you are vulnerable, the more so because she doesn't understand what's happening to her. To both of you."

"What is happening to us?"

"You're changing," Merlin said. "I can't say how, for cer-

tain, but I can guess why. We're dealing with a chain of events that began during the first thaumaturgic age. I was born during its last gasp. I thought it would end with me, with the collapse of Arthur's realm, but I know now that when Avalon disappeared into the mists, it was only marking a period of transition, a change hi the natural balance of the world, the end of one cycle and the beginning of another.

"Long before the change began, there was a race of beings that has left behind only the barest traces of its presence— they can be found amid the rums of old Egypt and Mesopotamia, in the crumbling temples of the Incas and the Mayans, the stone idols of the Pacific Islands, and the carvings in the shrines of the Thugees, the cult of Kali.

"They were once worshiped as gods," Merlin continued, "but they were physical beings, much like yourself, only a different race. Among the Celts, they were called the Old Ones. They were the deities of ancient Egypt, the gods of Greece and Rome. Among some of the Arabic tribes, they were known as the Djinn. The people of old Russia romanticized them in then" legends as the Bogatyrs, and the Native American tribes of the Southwest knew them as Kachina.

"Study the mythology of almost any culture and you'll find signs of them in various incarnations: warriors who seemed to be immortal but who could be killed in battle; supernatural beings in human form who could become invisible, who could mate with mortals and transform themselves into various creatures, sometimes benevolent, sometimes terrible. Vampires, werewolves, witches, spirit beings, all these legends had their genesis with them. You know the legend that I'm the offspring of an incubus. And don't shake your head, Karpinsky, I know perfectly well how you students used to joke about it. It's not as much of a joke as you may think. I am a half-breed, the son of a human mother and a father who was of the old race. He was among the last of their kind. Or so I had believed."

"What happened to them?" Wyrdrune said.

"There was a war," said Merlin. "It happened long before I was born. The ancients called it the Ragnarok. The Gotter-dammerung. The Twilight of the Gods."

"The struggle between good and evil," Wyrdrune said. "The creation myth. Then it really happened?"

"Oh, it was real, all right, although it had little to do with creation, mythical or otherwise. It was a mage war, a battle between white magic and black. To call it a struggle between good and evil would be overly simplistic. Nature's forces are neither good nor evil. They are merely existential. Good and evil are merely expressions of differing philosophies; they do not exist in and of themselves. You see, contrary to popular belief, mere is no fundamental difference between white magic and black. Both make use of the same energies; the difference is one of application. I suppose you can say it's a difference of morality, which is entirely subjective. The question of morality was at the heart of what brought the war about. In all likelihood, the issues were probably more complex than that. There are no historical records of the conflict, after all. All I know of it is what I've dredged up from the recesses of my memory, from stories my mother told me in my childhood, and from legends passed on among the Druid priests, who embellished them no end until they were obfuscated into the myths. Myths which became, in their different ethnic interpretations, the basis for the folklore of so many nations.

"According to those stories," Merlin continued, "humans were the cause of it. Remember the legend of Prometheus, the god who was punished for bringing fire to mankind? It was a parable, but like many such stories, it may well have had some basis in fact. To the Old Ones, humans were an inferior race, little more than animals. They were useful for doing work, and if the stories I heard hi my childhood are to be believed, they were occasionally used for food, as well. They were also used hi rituals, for life energy is one method of utilizing thaumaturgic principles. When you cast a tele-

portation spell, for instance, it uses up more of your life energy than a less ambitious spell would, with the result that you feel tired. It takes some time for that energy to be replenished. The more powerful the spell, the more energy it requires, which is the price of magic. But whereas white magic utilizes energy in such a way that it might be replenished, black magic utilizes it in such a way that the energy source is often totally depleted. In other words, if your energy resource is another living being—a much more potent source than something which is either vegetable or mineral —that being is destroyed.

'The symbolism of the pentagram as protection against conjured demons originated with its use as part of a warding ritual designed to protect the thaumaturge from the energy-robbing consequences of his spells. Magic, like other natural forces such as electricity and water, follows the path of least resistance. Given a 'choice' between an energy resource that's thaumaturgically grounded by a warding spell and one that is outside the warded shielding, it will consume the unshielded resource. If it does not have that so-called 'choice,' it could dissipate, but there is every chance that it will consume whatever energy resource is most readily available, which is why careless practitioners of black magic were often destroyed by their own spells, or 'demons,' even within the boundaries of their warding pentagrams.

"The Old Ones were aware of this, of course," Merlin went on. "They were the masters of thaumaturgy, much as humans are the masters of technology, which in a sense follows the same principles as thaumaturgy, merely applying them in a different way. That's why the two can be compatible, within certain limitations. Wood used as a fuel or energy resource produces heat. A nuclear power plant follows the same principles; the difference is basically a matter of degree. Think of black magic as the nuclear energy of thaumaturgy. And its fuel, as it was practiced by the Old Ones, was human lives. An easily replenishable resource. The human

 

sacrifices of the Druids and the Aztecs, the ritual killings of the Thugs, such practices were really vestigial remnants of these thaumaturgic rites.

"But as time passed, according to the story, there arose a feeling among many of the Old Ones that it was wasteful, senseless, even cruel to use humans in such a fashion. They came to believe that the same results could be achieved through other resources or even through less wasteful application of human energy, application that did not totally deplete its energy resources and result in human death. It was, perhaps, not as expedient, but it possessed the virtues of conservation. This was the beginning of white magic, differentiated from the black by virtue of its approach and application. Of course, this meant that white magic took a bit more trouble. It's always more difficult to utilize resources in a manner that conserves them rather than to expend them greedily without any concern for conservation. And the case for immediate reward weighs heavily in the balance. There were those among the Old Ones who were unwilling to give up the power they controlled, and they used up humans by the thousands. It led to competition for the human resource. What happened to the Old Ones was, in a way, not unlike the environmental crisis brought about by humans, which led to the Collapse. Only, in their case it resulted in a war far more devastating than anything humans ever faced."

Merlin was silent for a moment, staring thoughtfully at the floor. "Perhaps it was a function of natural balance," he said finally. "Neither the Old Ones, nor humans, apparently, could accept that there was such a thing as a limit to growth. Nature knows better. Nature has its own way of imposing limits. And it displays a tendency toward draconian solutions."

"They all died?" said Wyrdrune.

"No, there were survivors," Merlin said, "although not very many. My father was one. There were more human

survivors, largely because there were more humans, and the Old Ones who survived were very much outnumbered. They soon learned to conceal what they were. They hid among the humans, interbred with them—to this day, humans with so-called paranormal gifts are bom who, if they had the means, could probably trace their ancestry back to one of the old race. But if they could, I suspect they'd guard the secret carefully. Some feelings run deep, remaining embedded in human racial memory—the instinctive prejudice against anyone who seems the least bit "different." Once the Old Ones became scattered and lost their power over humans, they were mercilessly hunted down. The hunt continued even after the game had long since disappeared and the reason for the hunt was no longer remembered clearly. The persecution of the Druids, the extermination of the Aztecs, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch-hunts, even in modern times, there still remain groups of Fundamentalist Christians who equate worship of nature and the quest for knowledge with Satanic evil. The old fears die hard."

"But if they're all gone," said Wyrdrune, "who are the Dark Ones?"

"I thought they were a legend," Merlin said. "A legend no one remembers anymore, unless one reads Dante or Milton or fabulists like Lovecraft and Hodgeson. The tradition they all drew on goes back to a very ancient story, one that hasn't been told in its original form since I was a small boy. The Dark Ones were among the most powerful survivors of the old race, the ones who would not give up the savage, old beliefs. In a sense they lost the war, but in another sense the victors did not win, because although they could subdue the Dark Ones, they did not have enough power to destroy them.

"According to legend, the surviving archmages of the white faction devised a spell to contain the Dark Ones for all time, a spell combining die most potent symbols of their art.

And to empower the incantation, they gave their lives, imbuing their own life energies into the symbols of the spell. I always thought it was a legend, nothing more, and yet you hold three of those symbols in that little leather pouch inside your pocket. So it seems that it was not a legend, after all. There is such a thing as hell. Rashid has found it."

CHAPTER

NINE

Riguzzo didn't much care for traveling by train, but he liked flying even less. He hated flying. It terrified him. He had heard too many stories about pilot adepts who had dropped their planes out of the sky. It took a lot out of a pilot to lift a heavy plane and hold it up all the way to its destination, which was why pilots were all fourth-level adepts who flew no more than once a week. Their flights were kept short—a transcontinental flight required several stops and several shifts of pilots—and their salaries were very high, but they aged quickly and spent much of their time recuperating from their flights. And even the best of them could drop a plane. Once he had almost been dropped himself. Cleary had given up trying to argue him into taking the shuttle flight to Boston and had resigned himself to making the trip by train. At least if something went wrong with the impulsion spells cast by the engineer adept, all the train would do was stop. Even so, Riguzzo had been a surly companion for the duration of the trip. Riguzzo didn't like to travel. What Riguzzo liked to do was walk. He did not trust magic users. Even when they had to take a squad car to go out on a

139

call, Riguzzo felt uneasy. It didn't help that the department called the cops who drove the cars the "flying squad." They wore embroidered patches on their shoulders that matched the insignia painted on the squad-car doors—a rolling wheel with wings sprouting from it. The officers on the flying squad were low-level adepts as well as cops, but they were recruited from among the top ten percent of those passing their first-level adept exams. A good many of them were graduate students, going to school part-time in pursuit of more advanced certification, so they were very careful. They rarely got into any accidents. Most of them were not interested in the police force as a career; the salary was too low and there was no status associated with the job. Besides, the department insisted on such mundane things as haircuts and uniforms—or at least conservative civilian clothing for the detectives. It frowned on flowing robes and amulets and shoulder-length hair. Riguzzo had heard that there were cops who were magicians, but he had never met any.

Crimes involving magic use were generally handled by the ITC's investigative branch, a sort of international police force, but Riguzzo did not feel that was the way to go. The ITC was big, and getting bigger every day, keeping files on all certified adepts, but as magic use proliferated, the functions of the ITC became more and more diverse and the bureaucracy became more and more unwieldy. It was inevitable that sooner or later the ITC would have to restrict its investigation of crimes involving magic use to the more serious offenses, or to offenses that involved more than just one local jurisdiction, leaving the rest .to the police. And the average cop was ill equipped to deal with an adept. Fortunately, so far there hadn't been any really serious crimes committed by adepts, at least no serious crimes in the way Riguzzo thought of them. There were the occasional thefts and larcenies, but the more ambitious crimes involving magic use occurred mainly on the corporate level. Thauma-turgic crime seemed to attract a better class of criminal. Ri-

guzzo shuddered to think what would happen if they were ever faced with a serial killer who was an adept. He could not imagine a worse nightmare.

Sooner or later things would have to change. The police would have to modernize and start to recruit more adepts, attracting them with competitive salaries and benefits, and that would probably spell the end for ordinary street cops like himself. He was glad he'd be retired long before that happened. His retirement was not far off.

On the train trip up from New York City, after Cleary had grown tired of trying to make conversation with a partner who would only grunt in reply, Riguzzo had given a great deal of thought to how he could keep the ITC out of his case. He could not think of anything to stall them off with any longer. More than just one jurisdiction was involved now, and apparently what had happened in Boston left no doubt that the perpetrators were adepts. He had thought that there might be no real evidence that the Boston incident had been connected to his case, but as he sat with Cleary in the office of the captain of the Back Bay precinct, he watched his chances of retaining control over the case receding rapidly.

"These are the two officers who responded to die call," said Captain McGarry, indicating two uniformed policemen whom he had summoned to his office. "Sergeant Benson and Officer O'Dwyer. Lieutenant Riguzzo and Sergeant Cleary have just come up from New York."

They shook hands.

"Benson," said McGarry, "why don't you fill these gentlemen in on what went down at the Copley?"

"Sure thing," said Benson. "We responded to a report from hotel security at the Copley Plaza. Seems a maid was making up a room when she heard something funny and stuck her head out in the hall. She saw three holes in the wall that hadn't been there a couple of minutes earlier, and three holes in the door of the room immediately next door, directly opposite the three holes in the wall. She heard

voices next door and called security on the room phone. Security at that hotel is sharp. They told her to stay put and immediately called it in instead of barging in themselves and taking a chance on bungling it. Not that we did much better," he added wryly.

"Hotel security did it right by the book," said Officer O'Dwyer. "They made the call, sent a couple of people up to cover the elevator entrance and the stairway exits on that floor, and then they didn't make a move until we got there."

"We were cruising only about a block away when the call came in," said Benson, "so we took it. We got there, couldn't have been more than a few minutes after those shots were fired. Whoever fired the shots was still inside. We went in, with a couple of the hotel security people serving as backup, and caught the suspect with the gun still in his hand and a dead body on the floor. Blood all over the place. The victim was an elderly male, shot three times in the back with a 10-mm semiautomatic pistol. He was apparently on his way to the door when he was shot from behind. There were bloodstains on the inside of the door and on the carpet, where the victim either crawled or was dragged away from the door. We were unable to establish the identity of the victim, because one moment I was slapping the cuffs on the perpetrator, and the next I was staring at an empty room. No perpetrator, no body, no blood. Even the gun was gone. Everything had just vanished suddenly. There were hotel security people covering the stairway exits and the elevator to make sure nobody came blundering into the scene while we were making the arrest, and it wasn't until we checked with them that we realized we had lost about three or four minutes. What's more, nobody came past them, either. The perpetrator must have hit us with a spell and teleported out. No question about it, he was an adept."

"What makes you think he's the suspect we've been looking for?" Riguzzo said, glancing at McGarry. McGarry passed it to Benson with a glance.

"We questioned the hotel employees," said Benson. "Nobody seemed to know anything about the victim. Nobody remembered even seeing him, but the perpetrator matched the description of the man the room was registered to. The man had checked in with a young woman. They registered as Mr. and Mrs. M. Karpinsky. We used an identigraph to create composite graphics of the suspects."

He opened a file folder he was holding and removed a printout, passing it to the two New York detectives. Ri-guzzo's heart sank. It was an almost perfect match of the composite drawing of the girl named Kira.

"Mrs. Karpinsky," Benson said unnecessarily. "Something about the face struck me as being familiar. I knew I'd seen it recently, so I checked it out against the recent bulletins back at the precinct, and sure enough, it matches with the sketch that we received over the zip-squeal from you people. The update correction that identified the suspect as a female, instead of a young male as originally reported, was what made it stick in my mind. Now here's what we came up with on the male suspect."

He removed another printout from the file folder. "Mr. Karpinsky," Benson said, "young male; late twenties to early thirties; long, curly blond hair; blue eyes; dimple in his chin. No match with your other suspect, but knowing that your suspect was an adept, as was the perpetrator, I had an idea, so I had another identigraph composite made. We took the same basic composite you have there and didn't change a thing about the facial features except to add some wrinkles here and there, a bigger nose, longer white hair..."

He handed the third printout to Riguzzo. "... and bingo," he said, "he was wearing a disguise when he pulled that job at Christie's. Seems like we've got your people here in Boston, Lieutenant."

With a feeling of resignation Riguzzo passed the printouts to Cleary. "Excellent work, Sergeant Benson," he said. He turned to McGarry. "Your people are very thorough."

McGarry smiled. "Wait. There's more." He glanced at Benson.

"Considering the perpetrator's age," said Benson, "the fact that he is an adept, and his presence in Boston, I thought it might be possible that Boston is his home base. After all, if he lifted the jewels in New York,, it doesn't necessarily follow that he would come to Boston to dispose of them. With all due respect, your market for that sort of thing is a lot better than ours. His age suggested that it couldn't have been too long since he had been to school, and we have the finest thaumaturgic college in the country right here in Cambridge. So I tackled the student records at the local college while O'Dwyer ran a check for priors based on the composites. And we both came up with the same name."

He opened the file folder again and handed Riguzzo a photograph and an arrest report.

"Melvin A. Karpinsky, arrested four years ago on a charge of arson, reduced to reckless endangerment and subsequently dismissed. He actually used his real name to register at the hotel, believe it or not. He was arrested in connection with a fire at a concert. Apparently he was providing some magical special effects for the band, and one of his spells went out of control. The band was technically responsible, both since they had posted a bond against the eventuality of damage to the hall and because they had hired an uncertified adept to provide public entertainment, so rather than face a lengthy suit, the promoters settled with the concert-hall owners, and since an investigation determined that the fire was accidental, the charges against Karpinsky were dropped. He was, however, expelled from school as a result..."

He reached into the folder again and handed Riguzzo a copy of Wyrdrune's academic transcript.

"... so technically he's not really an adept, since he never completed his coursework or stood for certification. His records indicate that he would be at the advanced graduate student level, which would make him—"

"A warlock," Cleary said, glancing at Riguzzo. "Pony said that the girl called him warlock."

Riguzzo rubbed his chin and nodded. "Looks like you guys have saved us a lot of legwork on this case," he said.

"I'm afraid it's not really your case anymore, Lieutenant," said McGarry. "I know how you feel. I imagine you'd like to hang on to this one. Frankly, so would I, but it's out of our hands. The ITC's got clear jurisdiction in this one. I had to call them in." Seeing the expression on Riguzzo's face, he added, "I'm sorry."

"No, you did what you had to do," said Riguzzo. He suddenly thought of his grandfather. Old Frank Riguzzo had also been on the police force, back during the Collapse. He had died at the age of ninety-seven, when Dominic was twelve years old. He was in a wheelchair, and his hands used to shake so badly, he sometimes needed help with eating, but he had been remarkably lucid right up to the end, when he had apparently fallen asleep in the middle of a Sunday spaghetti dinner. His head had fallen on his chest and he had started snoring, but the snoring had turned into a horrifying rattling sound, and before anyone could do anything, he'd died, right there at the dinner table. One moment he had been carrying on in his gruff manner about the old days, the next he was just dead.

He used to love to talk about the old days when he was on the force. It was all he ever talked about, an old man telling war stories, and nobody in the family ever used to listen to him except Dominic, who found the stories fascinating, even though he'd heard them all dozens of times. It got so he would ask for them by name.

"Poppi, tell about the subway fight," he'd say, and old Frank Riguzzo would launch into a gravel-voiced account of a firefight he'd been in with a gang of vicious derelicts down in the dark subway tunnels beneath the streets of the Lower East Side.

Cops weren't so much cops as they were soldiers then, the

last line of defense for the civilians trying to survive in a city gone berserk. They might as well have been in the army, only the army had far more important things to do, such as trying to put down small guerrilla wars in upstate New York or engaging mutinous National Guard battalions who had taken over towns out on Long Island. Dominic used to try to imagine what it must have been like during the Collapse, when everything just stopped and the world went crazy. Poppi had been a little crazy too.

Poppi had been there when it changed, when magic came back into the world. At first, said Poppi, they just heard the stories. It began in Europe first, then, very slowly, it had spread, but even so, it was a shock. The government was just trying to hold on—"like pissing in the wind," Poppi used to say—and then one day it suddenly had something to hold on with.

"He came to Washington with a delegation of apprentices," Poppi had said, recalling Merlin's arrival in America. "It seemed like he was everywhere, organizing and getting things under control, and Lord help anybody who gave him any grief. Anyone got in his way, why, he just killed 'em, magicked em' away, and never even broke a sweat."

Poppi always spoke about it with a kind of awe, as if he never really could believe it. He never learned to trust it, either, which was perhaps where Riguzzo got his bias. Magic scared his grandfather. He had seen what it could really do. But people had adapted. It seemed people could adapt to anything. In a remarkably short time, the world had changed, though in some ways it had not changed very much at all. Things didn't really look all that different from the way they looked in the old pre-Collapse tapes Riguzzo had seen in history class when he was still in school. The city still looked pretty much the same as it had in the old tapes; though it still showed signs of the violence during the Collapse, these were quickly disappearing. There wasn't nearly as much vehicular traffic and there were more bicycles than

before, people dressed very differently and the city was much cleaner and greener; but at first glance there was not a great deal of difference. Thaumaturgy had simply become a part of everyday life. Looking back on the Collapse from an historical perspective, it simply seemed as if the world had gone into a brief spasm when everything went haywire, not unlike the energy blackouts that had taken place with greater and greater frequency in the years just prior to the Collapse, and then everything went back to normal. Only it wasn't the same. It would never be the same again.

They were sitting there talking about some kid who took a few college courses and learned how to cast some magic spells, Riguzzo thought, and now some bureaucrat from ITC was going to come in and take over the case, a bureaucrat who just happened to be a sorcerer, and they were going to go back to New York to resume investigating burglaries and muggings. Just routine. Cleary saw nothing unusual about it, McGarry didn't, Benson and O'Dwyer seemed to take it right in stride, and yet, even though he had grown up in a world where magic was alive, Riguzzo still somehow saw it partly through the eyes of his old grandfather, dead these many years. He tried to picture Poppi as young Frank Riguzzo, a tough, street-combat-hardened cop, sitting in his flak vest in the old, bombed-out squad room down in Manhattan South, and wondered what Poppi would have said if the door had opened and a long-haired man wearing robes and amulets had suddenly walked ia, looking like some prophet from the Bible, and announced that he was taking over.

Why does it get to me like this? Riguzzo thought. Why can't I just accept it? It was as if, somehow, as a result of all those endless hours spent listening to his grandfather, Poppi had forged an imperishable link between the very different worlds in which they had grown up. In his own way, Poppi must have been a wizard too. Hft had made his experiences so vivid and alive that they had become Riguzzo's own ex-

periences, as if he himself had lived them. And Poppi's world seemed somehow more real to Riguzzo than his own, as if that world were the real world and his was just a dream.

"Lieutenant?" said McGarry, and Riguzzo realized he had been off somewhere. "Anything wrong?" McGarry said.

Riguzzo shook his head. "Sorry," he said. He grimaced. "Must be getting old. I drifted off there for a minute."

"What were you thinking about?" McGarry said. "For a minute there, you looked as if somebody'd just died."

Riguzzo snorted and compressed his lips into a tight grimace. "Yeah. We did."

"How's that?" said McGarry, frowning.

"I was just thinking," he said. "We're on the way out, you know. Cops like us. It's changing. I sometimes get the feeling like I'm an old cowboy on a trail drive, watching the railroad coming in."

McGarry's frown grew even deeper. "I don't understand."

"Never mind," Riguzzo said. "It was just a figure of speech. It's not important. Anyway, it seems we could've saved ourselves a trip if the ITC's going to take over the case."

"Only the ITC insisted that we get you up here," said McGarry. "Special Agent Morgan wanted to coordinate with you personally."

"Figures," Cleary said. "They couldn't be bothered to have someone in their New York office take a file dump and forward it. No, we've got to haul our asses all the way up here just to give some jerk a briefing, as if we didn't have anything else to do."

Someone cleared her throat. They looked up to see an attractive, young, dark-haired woman dressed in a well-tailored business suit and open-necked white shirt standing in the open doorway. McGarry raised his eyebrows.

"Excuse me," he said, annoyed that someone should simply open the door of his office and walk in unannounced. "Can I help you?"

"Yes, I'm the jerk," she said, holding up an open leather wallet containing her badge and her ID. "Special Agent Faye Morgan."

Cleary flushed. "Ooops," he said uncomfortably. "Nothing personal. It's been a long day."

"It's getting longer," she said, with a sidelong glance at him as she put away her badge. "Is it possible to get a cup of coffee around here?"

"I'll get it," O'Dwyer volunteered. "Anybody else?"

"I could do with some," Riguzzo said.

"Make it three," said Cleary.

"Captain?" said O'Dwyer.

"Sure, why not?" McGarry said. He quickly performed the introductions.

O'Dwyer left to get the coffees. Speical Agent Morgan looked around for a spare chair and didn't see one. Riguzzo started to get up to offer his, but she shook her head and made an impatient gesture with her hand, beckoning him back down. "No, no, sit," she said. "I'll just grab a corner of the desk here—that's if you don't mind, Captain McGarry?"

"Not at all," McGarry said, clearing away some papers to make room. She perched on the edge of his desk and crossed her legs. She had extremely nice legs, Riguzzo noticed. She did not look like a sorceress. He thought she looked more like a business executive, very crisp in her manner, cool, professional. A no-nonsense type. She noticed Riguzzo looking her over and raised her eyebrows.

"Did you expect me to come riding in on a broom, Lieutenant?"

"I guess I expected someone who looked more like a sorcerer," said Riguzzo. "And I figured an ITC investigator would be older."

"Does my being a woman pose a problem for you?"

"No."

"I find that I am much more effective if I do not advertise

the fact that I am an ITC investigator," she said. "Much like a plainclothes policeman. As for my age, I'm older than I look. And I'm good at my job."

"I'm sure you are," Riguzzo said, feeling slightly foolish.

"As for the reason why I had you 'haul your asses up here,' instead of merely having the New York office pick up your case file, I could easily have done that, but it would have been counterproductive. I did, in fact, have the New York branch forward your files while you were en route, but you've put in a considerable amount of time on this case, and I'm sure you could contribute a great deal more to it than just your notes. I'd like to work together with you on this, and unless you have any objections, I will arrange to have both of you placed on loan to the ITC for the duration. After all, it's your case, and I imagine you'd like to see it through."

Riguzzo was surprised by the unexpected and, as far as he knew, unprecedented request. "I'd like that very much," he said.

"Good, then it's settled. Now I'd appreciate it if you'd brief me on this case. I've had a chance to look over your reports, but I'd like to hear it from you."

O'Dwyer came back with a tray of coffee cups, a jar of creamer, and some packets of sugar. As they drank their coffee, Riguzzo brought her up to date. She sipped her coffee and listened without interrupting', taking no notes, but Riguzzo had the impression that she would not forget the smallest detail. When he was finished, she pursed her lips and sat silent for a moment, thinking.

"You think the deaths of the fences named Fats and Por-firio Rozetti are related, of course?"

Riguzzo nodded. "Yes, I do, but I don't have anything to back it up."

"And the fire at the penthouse on Fifth Avenue as well?"

"I don't know about that one, but I have a feeling."

She nodded. "I'm inclined to trust your intuition. You say

you weren't able to come up with anything at all on the tenant, John Roderick?"

"Only enough to tell me that John Roderick was an alias," said Riguzzo. "Beyond that, a couple of petty-cash accounts, some tax records, a post office box, that's really about it. He's simply disappeared, and we haven't got the faintest notion who he really was. We're pretty sure that he was not an art appraiser, unless he was doing a land-office business in rare paintings or something on the side."

"What he does on the side is kill people, Lieutenant," she said.

Riguzzo and Cleary both stared at her.

"The ITC's been after him for several years," she said, "but we don't know much more about him than you do. He's the worst kind of rogue adept. An anonymous one. We don't know how he came by his knowledge. Unauthorized instruction in the thaumaturgic arts is a felony crime, and one of the reasons we'd like to catch him so badly is so we can find out who taught him what he knows. Another reason is that he's highly dangerous. He's killed at least fifteen people that we know of, and there's no way of telling how many other homicides he may have been responsible for. He's known only by the magename, Morpheus."

"Morpheus?" said Cleary.

"The God of Dreams," said Speical Agent Morgan, with a slight grimace. "He puts people to sleep. Our data banks are programmed to red-flag every unexplained occurrence that might be of thaumaturgic origin until they can be checked out. The moment the New York City Fire Department determined that your penthouse fire was thaumaturgic arson, it showed up in our files. I had our New York office look into it. They confirmed that the fire originated thaumaturgically, and they were also able to recover the remains of some highly sophisticated electronic equipment that had been severely damaged in the fire. The equipment was destroyed, of course, but they were able to pick up the trace emanations of

what must have been a fortune in thaumaturgically etched and animated microprocessors. The trace emanations were very strong. They were able to reconstitute enough of the signature to determine that what they were looking at were the remains of Apollonius."

"Apollonius?" said Cleary.

"A sentient hyperdimensional matrix computer assembled by Yamako Industries and programmed by General Hyper-dynamics in Colorado Springs. It was hijacked while en route to Langley. That was five years ago. Since men we've compiled a record of over two hundred break-ins at various top-security data bases possessing state-of-the-art safeguard systems. The break-ins were detected, but the safeguard systems were unable to lock on to the intruder and trace the signal. In other words, they were aware that their data was being picked clean, but'there was nothing they could do about it. All of which suggests that there must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, more break-ins among various data bases possessing less sophisticated safeguard systems that went undetected. In all the known cases, the same signature trace emanations kept appearing each time, almost as if Apollonius were showing off, arrogantly leaving a sort of calling card. It wasn't until we were two years into the investigation that we were able to establish a connection between Apollonius and Morpheus. It became obvious that Morpheus was getting access to certain information that only could have come from data raided by Apollonius. It took a while for us to establish that pattern, but it was unquestionably there. So either Morpheus, was buying pirated data from whoever had stolen Apollonius, or he had Apollonius itself. It now appears that the latter was the case."

"How do you know that the man calling himself John Roderick was Morpheus?" Riguzzo said.

"I don't know for certain," she said, "but like you, I'm making some educated guesses. For one thing, the description you have of the man who called himself John Roderick

doesn't give either of us a great deal to go on, but it does match the descriptions that we have of Morpheus from several sources."

"That's not much," said Cleary. "The same description could fit hundreds of different people."

"True," she said, "but hundreds of different people don't own million-dollar penthouses with top-secret hyperdimen-sional matrix computers in them. And the fact that Morpheus has been able to avoid capture for so long suggests that he was doing much more than simply buying information from someone who was using Apollonius. It suggests that he was using Apollonius himself to stay ahead of us. He even tried to break into our own data base."

"This all sounds like pretty high-level stuff," said Cleary, frowning. "How does a character like this Morpheus fit into our snatch-and-grab case?"

Riguzzo almost smiled. That innocent face and manner of deary's. That slightly stupid look of puzzlement was the most powerful weapon hi the young detective's arsenal. It threw people off-guard, and they said things they never would have said to someone who seemed sharp and on top of things. He saw at once what his partner was trying to do. He was trying to get the ITC investigator to admit the possibility that it was much more than just another snatch-and-grab case, something they all knew already, but something that no one had yet come out and actually said, and he was trying to see if she would go so far as to admit the possibility that someone with great resources could be involved, someone wealthy enough to hire someone like this Morpheus. Someone like Sheik Al'Hassan.

But Special Agent Morgan wasn't going to play. She looked Cleary right in the eye and said, "We all know what's happening here, don't we? This may have started out as a simple snatch-and-grab case, but it's long since gone beyond mat. You know who clearly has an interest in this. I know who clearly has an interest in this. But you're not so much

concerned about that right now as you are concerned about whether or not there is a conflict of interest in my case. Isn't that right?"

"I'm not sure what you mean," said Cleary, still looking faintly stupid.

She smiled. "Then I'll spell it out for you, Sergeant, for the record and in front of witnesses, right, Captain McGarry?"

McGarry grunted, not quite sure what the conversation was about all of a sudden.

"For the record," Morgan said, "I want two things out of this case: I want to be able to close the books on it, and I want Morpheus. When and if the runestones are recovered, you can have them as evidence in your case. I have no vested interest there. When the two perpetrators are apprehended, you can have them too."

"Wait a minute," said McGarry, "what about our murder?"

"You have a body?" she said, looking at him with an arched eyebrow. "You have a murder weapon?"

"Well, no, but—"

"Then it seems to me that you don't have a case," she said.

"Wait a minute," Benson said. "We saw the body! I saw Karpinsky with the murder weapon in his hand! He hit us with a spell and made them disappear! I could testify to that, and hotel security could testify that we had lost—"

"And all this theoretical testimony would accomplish in a grand jury would be the removal of the case from your jurisdiction," Morgan said. "Gentlemen, it's an ITC case, no matter how you look at it, and I know that none of you are very happy about that, but that's the way it is. Unless Karpinsky were to confess, you'd probably never get him on a murder charge. We can get him on the snatch-and-grab, we can probably get him on conspiracy, we can get him on several counts of violation of the International Thaumaturgical Convention Covenants, but unless you had more concrete

evidence, he'd wind up walking on that murder charge. Assuming that he was the killer."

"What do you mean, assuming!" said McGarry. "Benson saw him standing over the body with the murder weapon in his hand!"

"Yes, but did Benson actually see him fire the murder weapon at the victim?" she said. "Doesn't it strike you that there's something incongruous about all this? If Karpinsky was able to dispose of the murder victim's body thaumatur-gically, why did he even need to bother with a gun? If he could do that, why not just murder the victim through the use of magic? For that matter, if he could do that, why not dispose of you as well?" she said, looking directly at Benson and O'Dwyer, who stood like specters at a wedding, like little boys standing in the mist of a discussion among adults and not quite sure whether they should participate or not or whether they even belonged there.

"You say he hit you with a spell. Well, if he was able to do that, why didn't he finish the job? Why didn't he simply get rid of the only witnesses who could testify against him? If he was able to think it all out so completely as to remember to magically erase his name from the hotel register —and if the desk clerk hadn't remembered the name as a result of an unfavorable impression he'd had of the girl, we might not even have that—then why didn't he get rid of everyone who saw him?"

"Well," said McGarry hesitantly, feeling a need to come to the defense of his men, yet realizing with a certain degree of discomfort mat the FTC agent was making some damn good points, "as I understand it, magic exacts a certain price in energy, isn't that right? Maybe that's why. Maybe he just didn't have the energy to do it. I mean, couldn't that be the explanation? Maybe that's why he used a gun instead of committing the murder magically, to save his energy?"

"Maybe," Morgan said. "It's certainly a possibility, but does it seem very likely to you that someone who's just

committed murder and been caught standing over the body with the murder weapon in his hand would worry very much about being tired from expending too much energy? Seems to me he'd worry a lot more about leaving any witnesses around. He'd get rid of them, and then he'd have all the time in the world to quit the scene and go somewhere to recuperate."

McGarry grunted and nodded, grudgingly conceding the point.

"Besides," Morgan continued, "hasn't it occurred to anyone that what we're talking about here involves some rather advanced thaumaturgical skill? We're not talking about something as simple as levitation and impulsion spells to drive a cab—we're talking about spells that would require the abilities of a fourth-level adept at the very least, and even that would be stretching it considerably. This kid's only a warlock. He's not even a first-level adept! You don't get that kind of advanced knowledge from any home-study course, gentlemen. If Karpinsky's only a warlock, then how is it that he's managing to cast spells as if he were a full-fledged wizard?"

No one had a ready answer to that.

"What do you propose?" Riguzzo said after a brief silence.

"First of all, I propose to find out why they came to Boston," she said. "I don't think they're local. They stole the runestones in New York, they tried to fence them in New York. Now all of a sudden they show up here. Why? What connection do they haye to Boston?"

"Karpinsky went to school here," Cleary said. "Maybe he's got contacts. Somebody he could hide out with until the heat's gone down."

"Then why check into a hotel?"

Cleary shrugged. "Maybe he wasn't sure of the contact? Maybe he needed to make a few calls?"

"Congratulations," she said wryly. "At least somebody's

thinking around here. Did anybody think to check on any calls that might have been made from that hotel room?"

McGarry looked sheepish. She picked up the phone and handed it to him. Feeling profoundly embarrassed, McGarry started to dial.

CHAPTER Ten

Rashid knew the exact moment that Mustafa ceased to live. Kira lay helpless on the bed beneath him, thrashing and straining against the invisible force which held her, her arms spread out, immobile, as if nailed down, her legs spread as if bound by unseen ropes. Rashid bent over her on the bed, smiling as he watched her struggle. The expression on his face was almost tender.

The opulently furnished bedroom was a shambles. She had been dragged there, kicking and screaming, by two huge shaven-headed men as large as bulls, who had held her as easily as if she were a child. They had shoved her into the room and locked the door behind her. She had fallen facedown on the carpet, weeping with rage and frustration, and in a fury she had destroyed the room, tearing down the tapestries, smashing the mirrors with a chair, demolishing everything in sight and then hurling the chair through the bedroom window. It had fallen with a shower of glass to a courtyard four stories below, frightening a group of women who were sunbathing around a swimming pool that had a fountain m it. They looked up at the broken window where

158

she stood, shouting down at them, screaming at them to help her, but none of them made a move. And then she heard the door opening behind her and she spun around as Rashid entered, dressed in a black satin gown, soft embroidered slippers on his feet.

She wrenched a piece of broken glass out of the window frame and brandished it before her, snarling at him. "You try to lay one hand on me, you son of a bitch, and I'll shove this right down your throat!"

Rashid seemed unconcerned about the damage to the room. He merely glanced around and said, "If I had known that you were going to be so abusive of my hospitality, I would have had the breakables removed."

She lunged at him, hoping to catch him off-guard, but he merely swept his arm out, and before she got to within five feet of him, she went flying back to land upon the bed. He made a gesture at her, palm down, as if pressing her down upon the bed, and she discovered that she couldn't move. She raised her head up off the bed, but she could go no farther; something was pinning her arms and legs down, holding her fast in an unbreakable grip.

"Let me go, damn youl"

He came up to the bed and stood at the foot of it, looking down at her as she struggled against the unseen force that held her. "You have an extraordinary tendency toward violence," he said in a mocking tone. "It seems to be your first response to any threatening situation. Has it ever occurred to you that such energies could easily be turned against you?"

"You go to hell," she said, staring up at him with defiance in her eyes. "I grew up on the streets. If you think rape is going to intimidate me—"

"Rape?" Rashid said, as if the idea amused him. He came around the side of the bed and sat down beside her. "Do you really think that I would need to resort to something as mundane as rape? There is much about you that I find attractive, but rape is not a function of sexual desire. It is a function of

control, an assault upon a woman's most intimate self, born of inadequacy and a need to dominate. And I neither suffer from inadequacy, nor do I have to resort to rape to dominate you."

He bent over her, placing one arm on either side of her, bringing his face close to hers.

"I could stop your heart from beating with a gesture," he said softly. "Or I could speak a word and it would leap out of your chest, still beating, while I held it in my hand and watched you die."

And in that moment, as he bent over her, three bullets slammed into Mustafa Sharif, tearing their way through his body, shredding organs, and pulverizing bone.

Rashid jerked as if struck and clutched at his heart, gasping. The force that held Kira to the bed suddenly disappeared, and she sat up quickly, lashing out at him, clawing at his face. He saw the move, but he wasn't quick enough to avoid her, and only by twisting his face aside at the last second did he avoid losing his eyes. Her fingernails left bloody tracks on his right cheek, just below his eye, and he struck out at her, catching her backhanded across the face and knocking her down onto the bed again.

He caught her wrists and held her down while she struggled against him, both of them breathing hard as they wrestled on the bed. The jewel set in Rashid's forehead began to glow.

"No!" Kira shouted.

The beam lanced out from the jewel and struck her in the forehead. She screamed, arching on the bed, thrashing like a fish out of water as he held her down.

The blood trickled down his face as Rashid stared down at her, teeth bared. "So," he said, breathing hard, "it seems that your young warlockJias prevailed over Mustafa, damn him for a bungling fool. Well, it is only the first move in the game."

His eyes burned into hers as she writhed on the bed,

bathed in the burning aura of the beam, her mouth open in a soundless scream. The pain was worse than anything that she had ever known.

"You feared something so trivial as rape," Rashid said. "As if I needed merely to possess your body when I could have your soul!"

His features swam before her, seeming to become transparent. His face appeared to shimmer like a ghostly mirage as it came closer, floating down toward her. The burning pain was suddenly replaced by a mind-numbing cold; freezing tendrils seemed to entwine themselves around her body, penetrating her.

"The violence in your nature is what will bind you to me," said Rashid, his voice echoing inside her mind. "Your baser instincts will form a bridge between your soul and mine. The harder you struggle, the more completely I will possess you."

She felt his presence in her mind like crystals of ice, chilling her and slowly melting, seeping through every fiber of her being and washing out her will, suffusing her with a pleasant warmth that slowly grew into the heat of passion.

It was as if she were floating somewhere between consciousness of her body and awareness of her astral state, and as she felt him pressing down against her, her arms involuntarily went around him and brought him closer. She felt his lips on hers, and she opened her mouth, receiving his tongue, feeling it touch hers. She wrapped her legs around him, unable to control herself, overcome by a fierce, animal desire to feel his flesh against hers, to have him deep inside her. She felt tears flowing down her cheeks. Rashid kissed them away and she lost herself.

"Concentrate," said Merlin, his finger placed over a line in a large, leather-bound book lying open before him on a lectern. Wyrdrune stood in the center of a pentagram drawn on the floor of Merlin's basement. The basement was dark

and damp, unfinished, with heating and plumbing pipes exposed to view, running just beneath the ceiling. He could hear the gentle hum of the water heater. All around him were old chests and wooden crates covered with cobwebs, stacked high, pushed to the side and cleared out of the way. The small basement windows had been painted over, so that no light penetrated. The only light came from candles, two of them placed on the lectern by the book Merlin studied, five others in brass candle holders placed around the pentagram, one at each point. Wyrdrune licked his lips nervously. He was sweating. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

"What if something goes wrong?" he said.

Merlin's face looked gaunt and drawn in the candlelight. "Don't think of something going wrong," he said, knitting his heavy eyebrows. "You insisted on this. I'll do my part, though it's against my better judgment. You must do yours. Remember, we only have one chance. Rashid will not be taken by surprise a second time."

"How can you be sure you'll find her?" Wyrdrune said.

"I can't be sure," said Merlin. "I'm counting on the spiritual link that the runestones have forged between you. It is they who will guide you through the ether, not me. I can only send you on the journey. It will be up to you to return safely. You must act quickly. If Rashid is present, he will not hesitate for long. We can count on at most a second or two of surprise to give you time to act. If you fail, I won't be able to help you. We will have lost the element of surprise, and Rashid will know I was behind this. I only hope that I've made the right decision. You remember the words that will complete the transference spell?"

Wyrdrune nodded.

"Place the stones down at your feet," said Merlin.

Wyrdrune reached into his-pocket and took out the small leather pouch containing the runestones. He placed them at his feet inside the pentagram.

"Are you ready?" Merlin said.

Wyrdrune swallowed hard and nodded.

"Remember, you will only have a moment. Do not hesitate for even one instant."

"Believe me, I won't," said Wyrdrune. He took a deep breath. "All right. Ready when you are, Professor."

Merlin looked down at the book open before him, one finger tracing out the words of the ancient spell as he began to speak it in a long-dead guttural tongue. His left hand was raised at his side, elbow bent at a right angle, forefinger and little finger extended, the other fingers bent, touching the palm, thumb placed across them. His voice sounded hollow in the dark basement. As he spoke, the candles began to gutter. Wyrdrune felt the beginnings of a cold breeze. His knees felt weak.

The breeze grew stronger as Merlin spoke the ancient spell, growing into a wind that circled around and around inside the pentagram, plucking at his clothes, taking on form and color, a whirlwind of bright "cobalt blue that seemed to flame as it spun around him, increasing in force and substance. The candles placed at the five points of the pentagram were snuffed, their flames seeming to be drawn into the funnel, igniting it as it coalesced around him, moving closer to him, enclosing him in a cocoon of swirling blue flame.

Merlin's voice rose in pitch as he concluded the spell, and as he read the last word, he shouted it in a hoarse scream, extending his left hand fully, forefinger and little finger pointing, and a bright red spark seemed to leap up off the page. It traveled up his right hand, coursing through his body and wreathing it in a red aura, making his beard bristle and his white hair stand on end. It traveled along his outstretched left arm, bridged the gap between his extended fingers, and flashed from his hand, leaping across the distance between them, a bright red bolt of pure thaumaturgic energy lancing out across the darkened basement toward the

weirdly glowing funnel of blue flame that enclosed Wyrd-rune, almost hiding him from sight. It struck the funnel and was caught in its circular momentum, drawn into the maelstrom. It veined the swirling blue funnel with streaks of crimson fire, and the sound of it was deafening as it spun around faster and faster, its hue changing to a vivid purple as it started to rise up off the floor like a tornado taking off. It seemed to collapse in upon itself, and there was,a bright flash of orange lightning, accompanied by a clap of thunder that blew out the black-painted glass of the basement windows. Wyrdrune was gone.

The borders of the pentagram had been blackened by the heat, and lying within them, naked and huddled on the floor, was Kira, her face buried in her arms. It was quiet in the basement, save for the sounds of Kira weeping.

She raised her head suddenly with a jerk, gasped, and looked around, not knowing where she was. Merlin hurried toward her.

"Where am I?" she said in a frightened voice. "Who are you?"

"You're safe," said Merlin, breathing hard and holding his hand out to her. "Get up quickly. Get up and get beyond the borders of the pentagram now, at once!"

Still dazed, she pushed herself up to her knees, looking all around her. "What happened? Where am I?"

Merlin grabbed her by the arm and yanked her to her feet. "Hurry," he said, pulling her along.

She stumbled, still disoriented, as he dragged her out beyond the borders of the pentagram.

Wyrdrune's vision cleared, and he found himself lying on a torn-up bed in a room that looked as if a war had been fought in it. A man wearing a black satin dressing gown stood with his back to him, pouring wine out of a decanter into a crystal goblet. At the moment of Wyrdrune's appearance he spun around, and at the sight of him, he dropped the

goblet. It fell to the floor and shattered, staining the carpet with wine.

Wyrdrune closed his eyes and quickly spoke the words that would complete the transference spell. There was the sucking sound of air being drawn into a vacuum, and he disappeared, leaving a singed outline of himself imprinted on the bed sheets. An instant later he reappeared in Merlin's basement, within the borders of the pentagram. He collapsed to his knees, holding himself and hacking with dry heaves.

"Get out\" shouted Merlin. "Get out of there!"

Wyrdrune started to stagger out of the pentagram, but Merlin shouted once again, "The milestones! Take them, quicklyl"

Wyrdrune turned, bent down and picked up the pouch, then lurched toward the borders of the pentagram. The moment he crossed over the line, he was struck by the concussion of displaced air as molecules whirling through the ether materialized within the borders of the pentagram, colliding with the molecules of air that had occupied that space and time. It struck him as a wall of force, knocking him off his feet and sending him flying to fall in a heap at Merlin's feet as shimmering points of light danced within the borders of the pentagram and a roaring like the death agonies of some giant beast filled the basement.

Merlin had taken off his jacket and wrapped it around Kira, and now she huddled against him, clutching him fearfully as she stared at the thing that had appeared inside the pentagram.

Wyrdrune looked back over his shoulder, and his bowels almost let go at the sight of the apparition that crouched on the space where he had been a moment earlier. It seemed transparent, with ionic fire coursing through it like an electrical storm as it rocked back on its haunches, threw back its mammoth head, and howled with rage. Its transparent claws raked the floor beneath it, striking sparks, and chunks of

concrete flew up into the air as it tried vainly to break the boundaries of the pentagram.

"Ambrosiusl" it screamed, its voice shaking the walls. "Damn you, Ambrosius! Where are you? Where are you? "

His right hand flat on the open book before him, Merlin extended his left arm toward the creature, fingers spread, energy crackling around them.

"Back, hell spawn!" he cried. "Back to your upstart of a master!"

Orange fire leapt from his outstretched fingers, slamming in a bolt of energy into the ravening creature trapped within the pentagram. It threw back its head and howled with pain as it became wreathed in orange fire, and then it seemed to fragment, a myriad of cracks forming in its transparent structure like fissures spreading through a block of ice. It shattered, falling apart into a thousand shards of spark-filled glass, showering to the floor and melting away into nothingness. The echoes of its howl reverberated through the room and died away into a silence permeated by the stench of ozone. Merlin sagged down against the lectern.

"My God," said Wyrdrune. "What was that thing?"

"Never mind," said Merlin weakly. "Help me upstairs."

Wyrdrune seemed to notice Kira for the first time. "Kira! Are you all right?"

She nodded mutely, taking Merlin by the arm. "Give me a hand with him," she said, her voice flat.

Together they helped the archmage up the stairs. The kitchen phone was ringing.

"I'll get it," Wyrdrune said.

"No, no, I'll answer it," said Merlin. "I think I know who it is." He reached out for the receiver, and Wyrdrune passed it to him. With a sigh Merlin took it and and held it to his ear.

"Yes, Mrs. Hofstedder," he said wearily, then flinched and held the receiver away from his ear. He rolled his eyes and put his ear back to the receiver. "No, Mrs. Hofstedder, I

don't have a dog.... Yes, I'm sure, Mrs. Hofstedder.... Yes, I know about the howling, I.... I know.... Yes, I know.... No, really, Mrs. Hofstedder, I promise you, I'm not... .I'm sorry it upset your cats, Mrs. Hofstedder, but ... that's terrible, all over your new quilt?.... Yes, I understand, I... Mrs. Hofstedder... Mrs. Hofstedder?.... Now there's no need for that sort of language, Mrs. Hofstedder, I—" He flinched and held the receiver away from his ear, then sighed and replaced the phone on its cradle. He shook his head. "There's just no talking to some people," he said. He glanced at Kira. "Are you all right, my dear?"

She gathered his tweed jacket around her and nodded. "Thank you," she said.

"We'll have to see about getting you some clothes," said Merlin. "If I could have my jacket back, please? Turn around, Karpinsky."

Wyrdrune obediently turned around, though he had already seen her naked, and Merlin made a pass with his hands. Kira suddenly felt herself dressed in a plaid skirt, a frilly white blouse, saddle shoes, and knee socks.

"There, that's better," Merlin said.

She glanced down at her new outfit and made a face. "It is?"

"What happens now?" said Wyrdrune

"Now the battle begins," said Merlin. "It will no longer be safe for you two to remain here. Rashid knows where you are now, and he will not hesitate to strike again the moment he recovers. And he'll recover soon. His power has grown greatly, and it will grow greater still. I must do what I can to counteract it. I only wish there was more time."

"What do you want us to do?" said Wyrdrune.

"I only wish I could tell you," Merlin said. "Your fate is not in my hands. The runestones will determine it. They have bonded themselves to you, for reasons I can only guess at. Rashid will have to destroy them to release the Dark

Ones, which means that he will have to destroy you. And me."

"Then we'll just have to kill him," Kira said.

Merlin raised his eyebrows. "Indeed," he said, "but that is far easier said than done. You have no conception of the powers that protect him. And you're not yet ready. If you attempt to move against him now, you'll surely fail. You are only two parts of the triangle. You must find the third before you can take on Rashid."

"I thought you were the third part," Wyrdrune said.

Merlin shook his head. "I think I would have felt it by now if I were," he said, "but the runestones have no link to me. I've been chosen for another purpose. It falls to me to be the stabilizing influence, to buy you time."

"Time to do what?' said Wyrdrune.

"When the time comes, you will know," said Merlin. "Listen to me. For centuries the Dark Ones have slept, but the power of magic in the world has grown, and now they have awakened. They have found their avatar: Rashid. With the runestones removed from the location of their tomb, the Dark Ones can reach out, through Rashid, and make their power felt. Rashid will have to make the climate favorable for them to escape. That is what I must work against. I must stop the encroaching force of their black magic, keep their strength from growing if I can, for if I can't, they may soon become strong enough to break free of their confinement. But as long as the runestones exist, there is a check to their power. The Old Ones have passed their mantle on to you, to the both of you, and to a thud whom you have yet to find. When the three elements of the triangle are all brought together, then you can stand against Rashid. Until then he'll stop at nothing to destroy the runestones and you along with them."

"I don't understand," said Kira. "If that's how it is, why didn't he kill me when he had the chance?"

"Perhaps because he hoped to get at Wyrdrune through

you," said Merlin. "Perhaps because he couldn't. I don't know. Rashid is no longer the same man I once knew. He's been taken over, possessed by the power of the Dark Ones. He is lost. He will only find freedom in death now. But even if Rashid is killed, that in itself would not defeat the powers behind him. However, with Rashid dead, you would be able to replace the runestones to where they belong, thus sealing up the Dark Ones once again."

"Can't they be destroyed?" said Kira.

Merlin sighed. "I don't know," he said. "Once they were a race of mages, long before my time, but who knows what they've become now? They have survived for centuries. Even the Old Ones, who entombed them, weren't able to destroy them utterly. And I am only one. I don't know how many of them there are."

"What would happen if they got out?" said Kira.

"I shudder to think of it," said Merlin. "They were never bound by the moral considerations of the white magicians. Black sorcery is not inherently more powerful than white, but it can easily become so because the accumulation of power, gathered through the rituals of black magic, is accomplished far more rapidly than power gained through the white way."

"You mean, like a shortcut?" Kira said.

"In a word, yes," said Merlin. "A shortcut. Taking life energy from another is far easier than using up your own. Just as it's easier to mine the resources of the earth with no regard to the damage done to the environment, so it's easier to mine the resources of power with no regard to human life. I ought to know. I've killed many times, taking the life energy of those I destroyed, telling myself that it was unavoidable, done for the greater good, but that's the most seductive danger of black magic. Learn it now, for you will surely experience it yourself. It's almost impossible to know where to draw the line. How far does one dare to go for the so-called 'greater good,' and how does one justify the arro-

gance of appointing oneself the arbiter of what is good and what is not?"

"You do what you have to to survive," said Kira.

Merlin smiled wryly. "Is that all there is to it, then?" he said ironically. "Beware the simplicity of such philosophy, my dear. That is the very thing the ones whom Rashid serves are doing. They, too, are doing what they feel they must do to survive. How far would you go to insure your pwn survival?"

"As far as I had to, I guess," she said. "I've had to learn how to survive the hard way. No one was looking out for me."

"I understand," said Merlin, "but if I were to tell you that in order to survive, you had to kill Karpinsky, here, and perhaps old Mrs. Hofstedder next door, as well, and maybe the family across the street, a man and wife and their three infant children, what then?"

"Seems to me in that case it wouldn't be a question of their lives or mine," she said. "It would be me or you."

"Ah," said Merlin, "but what if I had you entirely at my mercy? What if there was no way you could prevail against me, if it was only a question of their lives or yours?"

"I guess I'd die trying to kill you," she said.

Merlin smiled. "An easy thing to say." He held up his hand to forestall her comment. "And I do not impute your motives in saying it. I only wish to point out that confronting such a question theoretically and dealing with the reality of such a situation are two very different things. During my long sleep I witnessed... well, let's say I dreamed... innumerable cases of people who were very virtuous sending others to their deaths merely to preserve themselves. And in every case they either told themselves they had no choice, or they convinced themselves that they were acting for the greater good. Not an easy thing to do, perhaps, when you are sending children to the ovens or shooting the helpless inhabitants of some small Asian village, but it is an easier

thing to do than die. And it's easier to convince yourself you had no choice or that you have acted for the greater good than it is to live with the knowledge of your weakness and the glimpse of the darkness in your soul. Mine is as black as yours, believe me. It's the balance between light and dark mat keeps us sane. Too much of one and you're a martyr. Too much of the other and you become a beast." He sighed. "I pity poor Rashid. That was him we saw down there, you know. That was what he has become."

He came up to Wyrdrune and placed his hands on his shoulders.' "Perhaps that is where the Old Ones made their mistake," he said. "Perhaps they didn't destroy the darker ones among them because they were unable to. Instead they gave their own lives to protect those who would follow. Perhaps their blood flows in your veins," he said, then glanced at Kira. "And in yours as well. Maybe that's why they chose you. Or maybe it's because you're both still very young and you have not yet learned how complicated life can be. I don't envy you your coming education." He stepped back from them. "Go now. Find the one who will complete you. And seek strength in one another. Let the runestones guide you. I'll try to buy you time."

He gestured at them and spoke an ancient spell. They disappeared.

The unmarked car pulled up across the street from the large Victorian house on Beacon Hill and gently settled to the ground. Special Agent Morgan sat behind the wheel. She lit up a cigarette.

"I'll wait out here," she said.

Riguzzo raised his eyebrows. "You're not coming in?" he said.

"No," she said. "I think he would respond better to a couple of policemen than to an ITC investigator."

"Why?" said Cleary.

"Well, let's just say I don't think he'd be very glad to see me," she said. She seemed nervous.

"Something personal?" Riguzzo said.

"We've had our differences," she said. "It's been a while, but I don't want to antagonize him. He's an important man. Besides, he'd talk differently to you than he would to another adept."

"Any suggestions as to how to handle him?" said Cleary. "I mean, if you know the man..."

"Just be polite, low profile," she said. "It's a routine investigation, you're just following up leads, you know the drill. Just treat him as you would some corporate VIP back in New York."

"What if he should ask how come the ITC isn't investigating this, if it's a thaumaturgic case?" Riguzzo said.

"Good question," she said. "Tell him the ITC is looking into it, but they haven't officially stepped in yet. Karpinsky is not a certified adept, and there seems to be some question about jurisdiction as a result of that, purely a technicality. It's still your case and you're just following up a lead from the Boston PD. One of the things you're trying to determine is whether or not he's technically qualified as an adept. You'd just as soon turn the case over to the ITC, because you've got more than enough on your hands right now and you'd rather not deal with this one. See if that will prompt him. And pay attention to what he doesn't say and how he doesn't say it. Merlin has his own priorities, and he's never been a great respecter of authority. In other words, be deferential. Don't go leaning on your badge. He can be temperamental."

"Swell," said Cleary wryly. "We get on his nerves and he turns us into toadstools. I've heard some stories about this guy. You can bet I'll be polite."

"Maybe we should've called ahead," Riguzzo said.

"Da you normally call ahead and make appointments in such situations?" she said tensely.

"No, not usually."

"Then play it as you usually do," she said. "I'll wait for you out here."

They got out of the car and crossed the street, heading toward the big old house.

"What do you make of her?" said Cleary.

"I don't really know," Riguzzo said as they walked through the gate. "She doesn't throw her weight around like a lot of ITC types do, but she sure takes charge, all right. She seems competent enough."

"Seems kind of young," said Cleary.

"I thought of that," Riguzzo said. "It's hard to tell with an advanced adept, though. On the other hand, maybe that's the reason she kept us on the case. We don't know how experienced she is."

Something ran across their path and darted into the bushes. Instinctively deary's hand went into his jacket for his gun. "What was that?"

They heard a high-pitched giggle coming from the rustling bushes, and then all was still.

"Just take it easy," said Riguzzo, putting his hand on his partner's arm.

"This place gives me the creeps," said Cleary, looking around at all the ceramic gnomes placed on the overgrown lawn. "What are these things, a joke or what? Is that one there giving us the finger?"

"It's a lawn ornament, Al," Riguzzo said. "Will you relax, for chrissake?"

Cleary cast a jaundiced eye at the demonic face of the door knocker. "I don't think Christ has a lot to do with this," he said nervously.

Riguzzo raised his eyebrows. "You religious, Al?"

"Yeah, I'm a Catholic," he said. "Aren't you?"

"I don't know what the hell I am, tell you the truth," Riguzzo said.

Cleary grimaced. "Try being a Catholic," he said. "Espe-

cially these days. Feels like the whole world's a tuxedo and you're a pair of work shoes."

"I thought the church had modernized," Riguzzo said.

"Yeah, it's modernized," said Cleary. "Thaumaturgy's just an outgrowth of the power of God, and black magic is the work of the devil. The pope made that very clear. Only guys like Merlin will tell you that it's all the same thing, it's just what you do with it that counts. I tell you, I don't understand it. My father didn't understand it, my mother said no-venas every day, and my sister got disgusted and turned Jewish. I'm just waiting for the adepts to start their own religion. That'll really tear it. Instead of going to church on Sunday, you'll take a hike out to the woods, strip off your clothes, and dance around a tree."

"That's nothing new," Riguzzo said. He raised his hand to the door knocker. Cleary grabbed his arm.

"Wait a minute." He licked his lips.

"What's bothering you, Al?"

"Don't laugh, Dominic, okay?"

"I won't."

"I'm scared."

"Of Merlin?"

Cleary sighed. "I've been hearing stories about this guy since I was a kid," he said. "He's killed people, Dom. Made 'em disappear. Just like that. And nobody ever said anything. It's not as if anyone could do anything about it, know what I mean? This man is above the law. Word is he's not even exactly human."

"No one is above the law, Al," said Riguzzo gently. "And about those stories, those were the old days. There were a lot of stories, and most of them were probably exaggerated. This is now. This isn't some evil wizard's castle, Al. This man is a university professor."

He grabbed the knocker and swung it hard three times against the plate.

The eyes oo the door knocker's face opened wide. "What do you want?" it said.

"That's it, I'm leaving," Cleary said, turning around.

Riguzzo grabbed his arm. "Settle down, Al. It's okay. No big deal." Feeling a little uneasy, he turned to the door knocker and said, "Lieutenant Dominic Riguzzo and Sergeant Al Cleary, New York Police Department, to see Professor Ambrosius. We'd just like to ask a few questions, please."

The door swung open by itself. Riguzzo half expected it to creak, but it didn't. They entered and the door slammed shut behind them. Cleary jumped about a foot.

"I'm in the kitchen," a voice called out to them. "Straight down the hall and to the left."

As they approached the kitchen they smelled pork chops frying. Merlin was sitting at the kitchen table, a newspaper open before him. He got up as they came in and offered his hand.

"Good evening," he said pleasantly. "I'm Merlin Ambrosius. Please sit down. How may I help you, gentlemen?"

"We're sorry to interrupt your dinner, Professor," said Riguzzo, before he realized that the smell of frying pork chops seemed to be coming from Merlin's pipe. It caught him off-guard and he stood there, feeling confused.

"Everyone reacts that way," said Merlin, smiling at him. He took the pipe out of his mouth and stared at it. "I keep experimenting with the blend, but I can never get it quite right. I came close once, but though the taste was just about spot on, it would up smelling like a jockstrap and everyone complained about it. Can I offer you gentlemen some tea or coffee? Perhaps a glass of wine?"

"Please don't go to any trouble," said Riguzzo.

"No trouble at all," said Merlin. "I keep a pot on all the time." He snapped his fingers, and a steaming coffeepot appeared in the center of the table, along with two white ce-

ramie coffee mugs. The mugs had names painted on them in large black letters. One was labeled AL, the other DOMINIC. u Merlin pulled out chairs for them and sat down. "One lump or two?" he said. A cup appeared before him, and the coffeepot sprouted legs and walked across the table, tilting itself and pouring the steaming brew.

They sat down at the table and glanced at one another. "Uh, I'll take mine black," said Riguzzo.

"Me too," said Cleary.

"I like mine sweet," said Merlin. He waggled his index finger and two lumps of sugar rose up out of the bowl and floated gently into his coffee cup. He pointed his finger down at the cup and made circular, stirring motions. The coffee started to swirl around inside the cup.

"Now, then," Merlin said, "what does the New York Police Department want with me?"

"We'd like to ask you some questions about a young man who may have been a student of yours some years ago," Riguzzo said. Cleary sat bolt upright, hands flat on the table, staring into his coffee cup as if afraid that it would jump up and bite him. Riguzzo consulted his notepad, although he didn't need to. "His name is Melvin Karpinsky, also known as Wyrdrune?"

Merlin puffed, on his pipe. It now smelled like fried bananas. "Yes, I remember him. He was in several of my classes. He was expelled, as I recall. Unpleasant business."

"What kind of a young man was he?" said Riguzzo. "Was he a good student? Before he got expelled, I mean."

Cleary hadn't moved.

"He was impatient," Merlin said. "Somewhat headstrong, impulsive. He had promise, but he was in too much of a hurry. He might have made something of himself if he had been a bit more studious and methodical, but you know how some of these young people are. He thought he already knew all the answers. Frankly I'm not surprised to hear that he's in trouble."

"How do you know that he's in trouble, Professor?" said Riguzzo.

Merlin's eyes crinkled. "Because you're here, asking questions about nun, Lieutenant. Also because he called me."

"When was this?" Riguzzo said, although he already knew from the record of calls made from the hotel.

"Only the other day," said Merlin. "He called me at my office, at the school. He wanted to know if he could come and see me."

"In reference to what, did he say?"

"In reference to some jewels he said he had," said Merlin, surprising them. "Enchanted runestones of some sort. He wanted my help in trying to determine what their use was."

"And did you tell him?" said Riguzzo casually.

"I read the newspaper," Merlin said, "and I even watch television on occasion. It struck me as significant that he was seeking to consult me about some enchanted runestones of unknown properties so soon after some enchanted rune-stones of unknown properties were stolen in New York. It might have been only a coincidence, of course, but it didn't seem very likely to me that someone like Karpinsky would be in a position to purchase such stones. Also, I am not in the consulting business. I thought his call rather presumptuous, under the circumstances. I do not react very favorably to people who want something for nothing, especially when it's a former student who was expelled as a result of some trouble with the law. Please don't misunderstand, but I have no wish to be involved with the police and I have a position to consider, as I told him."