to

her if Joey had his way. She could expect about as much mercy from him as her

victims had received from her. She made up her mind that she'd make him shoot

her before she would submit to his savage ministrations.

Two of the robed men took hold of her while the other two picked up Modred.

The

men carrying Modred preceded them back up the steps and out the cell door.

Joey

followed them, his pistol aimed at her back. And suddenly she realized

exactly

what he planned to do, what he'd been ordered to do, and she knew that she'd

been meant to be a part of it right from the start. She went with them

meekly,

as if resigned to her fate, and when they reached a bend-in' the corridor,

she

summoned up all her remaining strength and shoved herself hard into the robed

figure on her right, slamming him into the corridor wall, twisting out his

grasp

as the impact stunned him, and immediately whipping the other man around and

sending him staggering into Joey. The gun went off as both men fell, but she

was

already leaping over the two men and running back down the corridor as fast

as

she could, stumbling and gasping for breath.

Behind her, Joey shoved aside the body of the hooded man who'd taken his

bullet

and got up, furious. She already had gone around a bend in the corridor, so

there was no opportunity to take a shot. The man who'd been slammed against

the

wall started to give chase, but Joey stopped him.

"Never mind her," he said. "I'll settle with her later." He put away his gun

and

gestured at Modred. "She'll have to wait. We have to take care of him first.

Go

on."

* * *

The Great Hall of the castle throbbed with deafening music, and illusory

bolts

of jagged lightning stabbed down from the roiling thunderheads conjured up by

the band's effects adept. A synthesizer with thaumaturgically etched chips did

a

waddling sort of dance across the stage, emitting a mixture of rising power

chords and screams that sounded like a chorus of the damned as the lead

singer

flailed at it with a long black whip. Bodies dressed in all sorts of

outlandish

renaissance punk and neo-medieval costumes collided and rebounded on the

dance

floor. Wyrdrune had young women press themselves up against him on several

occasions, and Kira had angrily shoved away at least half a dozen men who had

tried to paw her. The air was filled with the heady fumes of opium and

hashish,

as well as some of the newer, far more potent, thaumagenetic hybrids.

"This is crazy!" Kira shouted into Wyrdrune's ear. "We're not going to find