CHAPTER 4
     SHANDOAH'S POOLS OF VISION
CHAPTER 5
     THE MLEMBE AND OLD WILL ROAD
CHAPTER 6
     THE INVISIBLE VILLAGE OF THE GREENS
CHAPTER 7
     POPPA GONZALA'S FLIGHT

CHAPTER 8
     THE DUNGEONS OF THE GREENEYED SORCERESS
CHAPTER 9
     WAR FOR THE GOSSAMER GLOBES
CHAPTER 10
     EVENINGMOOT

Beasly crouched behind the grandfather clock in the foyer of Castle Biltmore and listened breathlessly to his parents' fading footsteps as they left to attend the President's Ball. Peering out a silkendraped window he watched them disappear into the evening mist; and then, as the old contraption chimed the ninth hour, he dashed down a hall and through the parlor and into his stepfather's study, with mischief on his mind.

The light of the moons cast seven pale shadows on the bookshelves and busts that lined the western wall of the study. Beasly crept silently across the shaggy carpet to an alcove behind Master Biltmore's massive desk. There in the shimmering moonlight stood the magic oaken door that led to the tallest tower in the Kingdom in the Clouds--the globetower, strictly forbidden to any but the Master himself.

Here Beasly hesitated. His breath quickened and his tongue went dry, and his heart thumped with fright--for this was once the door of a sorcerer, and the secret chant that opened it was meant to be spoken by one man only. But Beasly had spied on his stepdad many a time, there being little else for a cloudbound lad such as he to do; and on a moonless night not three weeks before, hidden behind a suit of armor and silver mail, he had overheard Master Biltmore utter the strange cryptic words that threw open the enchanted door.

The words had taunted the boy ever since, daring him in the wee hours to steal into the forbidden tower and learn its dark secrets. But now that he stood before the door he wasn't so sure he could go through with it. Stepping back, Beasly stumbled and muttered and mumbled and stuttered; and then he cleared his throat and said shyly, "Ellindanal, d'an Alnamir, Garneldaal nar Eranoir."

The oaken door didn't open. It didn't stir nor budge. It simply vanished in a poof! Flummoxed, the little sneak stepped into the spiral staircase and began to climb. Up and around and up and around hunched like a burglar he went, until at last he reached the narrow landing that led into the visionchamber.

Pushing aside a heavy black drapery Beastly entered the small, round room. It was open to the sky through five tall, arching windows, and it had a smooth, rounded, obsidian black ceiling that was polished to a shine. A gleam of light in the middle of the floor caught Beasly's eye. He tiptoed across the persian rug and there beheld a delicate silver table wrought in the form of an upturned hand, upon whose cold still fingertips rested an exquisite vestige of the genius of the ancients--a crystal globe.

The crystal was a perfect sphere about the size of a human head. Its substance was so pure that the light of the stars reflected off its surface, forming a perfect map of the heavens on the ceiling, and so clear that the starlight prisms dancing within looked like the frayed edge of a rainbow.

Kneeling before the globe Beasly peered into its depths, and for a moment it seemed to go completely black; but soon threads of colored light began to play about, and a high pitched whine like the wail of an earthbound banshee came to his ears. Then the orb began to glow in vivid spasms of blue and green and magenta, which slowly intensified, until suddenly a maelstrom of colors burst forth, and satiny strands of every shade and hue were whipped about the vision chamber as if by a silent, unfelt wind.

At once Beasly began to feel odd, as if he were being spirited away, hurtling into the endlessness of sight itself. His will swiftly waning, the lad was compelled to press his forehead firmly against the globe's icy surface and to clinch it in his trembling fingers.

A wave of dizzy detachment swept across Beasly's brain. Then to his horror his eyes seemed to melt right into the globe, the very tissue of his eyes mingling with the swirling storm of colors, until the silksoft prisms suddenly exploded, and psychedelic threads of color and light began to warp and woof and weave themselves into a peacocktail tapestry of purple and blue and cyan. Beasly was being sucked into an overwhelming vision that seemed to dash away all reality and to fill the whole of space with its fiery images:

A frothy, churning, greengrey ocean stretched to the reddening horizon. Two figures were coming across the water from the east.

One was a sinister black snake so humongous that it started tidal waves with flicks of its tail, so hideous that it left a reeking yellow slime in its wake.

The other figure, dwarfed by the titanic serpent, was a wizened old man with flowing white hair and a bright blue cape. The old gaffer walked on water, as incredible as it may seem, by virtue of his nature; for he was a wizard, a form without mass, a mere shadow on the main.

Suddenly a looming black stoem swallowed the rising sun. Thunder drummed and lightning cracked the sky, and sheets of rain were hurled as if by furious gods against the unfeeling sea. The wizard was nearly lost amid the swirling waves and waterspouts; but the serpent simply laughed above the thunder and reared its giant head a dozen fathoms high. And then with its jaws gaping and its fangs dripping venom, the beast struck downward upon the helpless old man.

With the wizard hanging limply its mouth, the snake drew itself into a tight ring of coils and began turning the ocean into a wildly spinning whirlpool, spinning faster and faster in circling circles, until with a menacing vengeance it dashed its great leathery head into the center of the vortex and disappeared, fathom by fathom, coil by coil, ending with a flick of its scaly pointed tail.

And then all was silent. The sea became as smooth as glass, and it mirrored the rising sun and the clearing skies. A shadow wriggled into the depths and was gone.

Beasly awoke as if from a dream, his cheek pressed against the cold floor of the visionchamber. Looking up he saw the crystal globe glowing like hot embers of many hues. Sparks and bolts shot from its surface, spraying the tiny room with showers of vivid red and green and aqua. A vague, high pitched whine came gradually to Beasly's ears, and as it did the muddled image in the globe began to shrink, becoming a bright white dot that slowly faded and passed from sight.

Now fright gripped Beasly by the back of the neck and flung him towards the landing, and down and around and down and around and down the spiral stairs. But when he reached the magic oaken door, the lad could find no handle or bolt, nor lock and key; and the door's spell was such that none but the boldest would dare to test its weight. After a moment of blind panic Beasly remembered the secret chant.

"Ellindanal d'an Alnamir, Garneldaal n'ar Eranoir," he said in a choked and trembly voice. The door stood firm. He ran back upstairs to the window on the western wall of the chamber and to his dismay saw that two moons had already set. He must have lain asleep on the floor for hours! He leaned out the window to look northward but saw no sign of his parents' return.

Running back down to the door Beasly began to cry. He fell to his knees and imagined himself in a dungeon with peasant debtors, or tied to a maypole in the square of an earthbound village, or thrown down from the clouds like serving girls who disobeyed their masters. In desperation he fell against the door with his face buried in his arms.

Beasly hit the floor with a painful thud. Behind him the oaken door trembled and let out an inaudible laugh. He had passed right through it! Not daring to question his luck, the boy turned tail and ran as fast as he could through the parlor and down the hall and back to his bedroom in the right wing of Castle Biltmore.

Beasly couldn't have known the depth of his mischief. Even Master Biltmore didn't fully understand the nature of the globes. For the wizardry of the ancients had been forgotten in modern times by all but a few fey magicians, and even these were rank amateurs compared to their forebears.

Worse yet, the magicians of the Coastal Empires were all in guilds under the employ of greedy merchants and bankers and five star generals, so that the dwindling spark of wizardry was wasted on frivolity and deceit. Even so the crystal globes of the aristocracy and the more crudely wrought hearthstones of the masses, marshaled as they were under the Gossamer Globe of the Greeneyed Empress in the West, were potent enough to keep the whole islandstate of Dalondria under the sway of the cloistered few who still practiced the arts of make Believe--the Milkbloods who lived in the clouds.

And by using a crystal globe for anything but the commerce of the cloud dwellers, young Beasly had unknowingly broken the golden rule of his people.

As it was, the Empress and the Milkbloods soon realized that their network had been betrayed. Immediately Her Highness the Greeneyes let loose a tirade from atop Castle Galore so violent that it sent wicked green bolts and fiery red flames flying out of every hearthstone in the land and instantly summoned her far-flung spies and agents back home to the citadel; a tirade so vicious and malignant that the earth beneath her fortress rumbled in anger and sent forth from the bowels of darkness a piercing, bloodcurdling howl that echoed into the farthest reaches of the wilderness.

Poor Beasly! If only he'd known how coveted his stolen vision would become, dark and enigmatic though it was; if only he'd known how deeply he would become embroiled in the War for the Gossamer Globes; if only he'd known how deadly the guile and treachery aimed at his innocence would be, he would have locked himself away in his room forever before he dared to spy on the secrets that lay hidden in the visionchamber or to tickle the crystalline antenna of the wizardress who ruled his land.

But fate was gentle with the lad. Even before the last moon had set early the next morn Beasly was awakened by his stepdad and taken on a special trip. In the predawn mist the boy and Master Biltmore hiked to a special place at the very edge of the Kingdom in the Clouds, a place high above the placid waters of Lake Waldinmuck--a place suitable for fishing. Beasly had never heard of fishing from the clouds, which floated peacefully above the lake at a height greater than fifty tall men. But when he and the Master were met by none other than the Right Reverend President Howdy Doodle Goldfink at the misty morning fringe of the Kingdom in the Clouds, Beasly quickly forgot his doubts and began to happily learn the arts of baiting and casting and reeling.

When the boy had sufficiently mastered the basics of fishing the president gave hind a particularly juicy grasshopper to use for bait. Soon Beasly was wispflitting and puffhopping to his heart's content, dangling his chirping lure over the edge of the clouds without a care in the world. He gloated inside over his adventure of the night before, and over his courage and his cleverness. But just as pride was about to make him blush, Beasly Lemuel Biltmore II got his comeuppance. With a jerk so sudden it pulled the ill fated lad right out of his boots, Beasly was sent tumbling head over heels out of the clouds, plummeting wildly in a dizzy dream towards the waters of the lake.

Master Biltmore shook hands with the president; then, scheming over the benefits to be had from the death of his sole heir, Beasly's stepfather headed back towards Castle Biltmore to inform his lawyer and his wife of the awful tragedy.

But Beasly Biltmore wasn't gotten rid of so easily. As luck would have it he landed in deep water near a fisherman; and since he landed feet first he was spared the brunt of impact. His only injuries were two bruised feet and a sore bottom, though the pockets were ripped right off his pants and his shirt was torn to ribbons. The fisherman was quick to row over and pull the dazed and dripping boy to safety. But just as the fall of Beasly Biltmore was far from mere happenstance, so was his rescue--for the boatman was an oracle and a journalist and a keen surveyor, and he'd seen the lad's juicy bait hanging stupidly in the air. Recalling how undesirable cloud dwellers had occasionally been given their riddance by being tricked into fishing for crows, he had watched and waited, knowing that soon the unwary fisherman would be yanked by a hungry bird to a well planned drowning.

So it was that Beasly came to his senses..in the boat of an oracle, and a nameless one at that. The Oracle was silent as he rowed the dozen furlongs to the distant pebbly shore, silent and brooding. Beasly wondered if the unkempt stranger was capable of speech, and if he knew how to take a bath. The boy had never been out of the secure confines of the clouds, nor had he ever met a peasant who wasn't a butler, cook or maid; and as he was ferried ashore he began to realize that he was stranded in an unknown land with nothing more than the torn clothes on his back.

People would think him a barefooted urchin! A peasant boy! He might be sold as a slave, or shanghaied onto a filthy clipper, or sent into the sooty nooks of a diamond mine! The gravity of his plight settled cruelly on the displaced little pauper, and it left him numb.

The boat neared the shore. As it did the sun Linda peered up puffy eyed over the horizon. Rays of light began to fan across the aquablue waters, and the heavy mist that lay on the lake retreated in every direction like the adjournment of some ghostly conventicle. The boatman made one last mighty stroke and the vessel glided onto the shore with a gravelly swish. The Oracle hopped ashore, pulled the old wooden boat clear of the water, and then squatted a few feet away from the boy and began to scan the lake intently.

Beasly stepped gingerly to the grassy bank, and for the first time in his life stood with his feet planted firmly in the hollow earth! What had seemed vague and miniature from the clouds now looked so vibrant and tactile that the boy wondered if he hadn't fallen into another psychedelic vision like the one he'd seen the night before in the globetower. The vivid green foliage, the tangled surreal matrix of branch and trunk and vine, the sublime geometrical patternings of leaf and flower all struck his eyes as sharply as a slap on the bottom of a newborn babe.

Finally the dirty boatman spoke. "What be your name, lad?" he asked, mocking the olde language of the Milkbloods.

"B Beasly L. B B Biltmore, your scraggliness," answered Beasly.

"How many B's was that?"

"Just two. Beasly L. Biltmore, that's me."

"Oh."

The Oracle stroked his thick dark beard. He stared wincing at the boy, sizing him up like a horse at auction.

"I fell from the clouds. Can you help me get back there?" Beasly asked shyly.

"Possibly," returned the stranger, "but it will require much time and labor. Now follow me, and I will show you what you must do if you wish to return to the clouds."

At that the mysterious Oracle stood up and marched promptly into the woods, heading up a shallow gully that ran between two steep bluffs, with Beasly Biltmore stumbling not far behind. Beasly had never been near a wood, for the clouds could bear only the weight of a few lucky families and their papier mache palaces; and besides, the lad had never walked uphill in his entire life. And so as he stumbled and bumbled dumbly through the thicket, he soon lost sight of his woodwise companion.

Several times the boy shouted out, only to hear the trill of a bluebird in response. Guessing it to be a signal from the Oracle he followed the sound, barely able to pick his way along the secret twisted path that led to the stranger's lair. But he was oblivious to the twigwoven wreaths and the cleverly strewn stones that marked the trail for those keen enough to find them.

The Oracle, it seems, was an outlaw, as poets and prophets are apt to be, and so he hid his den, foxlike. He lived in a cave deep in the cliffs that overlooked Waldinmuck Lake from the north, and it proved to be quite a hike for the chubby little cloud dweller. When Beasly finally happened upon the granite ledge that led to the Oracle's retreat his feet were bruised and bleeding, and he was sweating and panting and rightly perturbed at his host, who stood there with his arms folded smugly and a wry smile on his lips.

"I thought you'd ditched me," said Beasly.

In silence the Oracle motioned to Beasly to follow and led him along the grey granite ledge, which grew narrower and narrower as it curved just out of sight around a bulge in the cliff. The ledge, after curving round the mountain for some forty of fifty feet, with a precipice of two hundred feet below and a hundred above opened up onto the broad, porchlike entrance to the Oracle's cave. From this sunwarmed perch the whole of Lake Waldinmuck was visible, and across the water to the southeast the tallest buildings of Yorkmere could be dimly seen. And out in the middle of the aquablue lake floated the Cloud Kingdom of the Eastern Empire, sporting bright banners and spires and fivestory steeples, and latticeworks galore.

Beasly's heart sank. He longed for the plush spongy feel of the clouds beneath his feet--the earth was so hard and full of brambles. He longed for the fresh, thin air of his papier mache kingdom--the forest smelled so dank and rich. But here he sat, marooned and hungry and all alone, except for the strange smelly man who had fished him out of the lake. Beasly sized up his newfound companion. The Oracle had wild brown hair that draped across his fathmic brow, and wild eyes that seemed full of some exotic wisdom, and an unkempt beard as tangled as a birdnest; and he wore torn, stained clothing that reeked of weeds and sweat.

"This is where I live," said the Oracle flatly.

The sound of voices within the cave startled Beasly; and stooping beneath the lowhung entranceway there suddenly emerged two of the queerest men the brat had ever seen. One was a tall, slender man with skin the color of cocoa; the other was an even taller man with broad shoulders and skin of an odd reddish hue. Both men had long black hair that tumbled about their shoulders; but the brown man's hair fell in long kinky locks, while the red man's was straight and shiny.

The Oracle put his hand on Beasly's shoulder and pushed him towards the strangers. Beasly recoiled with fear. He'd never seen a man of color in the clouds, and he feared that these must be demons or warlocks.

"Meet Truman Allabam, Prince of Mlembe; and Aleksar Akanoo, Prince of Shandoah," said the Oracle, and first the brown man and then the red man stepped forward and bowed.

"And this--this is Jonathan Beasly, a friend of mine, and a fine fisherman."

Puzzled by his new name Beasly stepped forward and bowed likewise. But he said nothing, for he had begun to believe that he was being kidnapped by hooligans or pirates, and he wanted to draw as little attention as possible while he planned an escape.

Now a third man emerged from the cave, and he was pink, like Beasly. He was shorter than the other men, but his arms were knotted with muscle, and his chest was as thick as a barrel. He had dark flashing eyes and auburn hair, and a sandy red beard that tickled his bellybutton. From his leather stockings to his feathered green cap he was the picture of a rapscallion, and his face beamed with the promise of tales of thievery and espionage.

"And I'm Homer Mugwump, Outlaw of the Outlands, rebel without no flaws, pure as spring snow and righteous as a thunderclap, stealer from the rich and giver to the poor (minus a reasonable percentage, of course), sworn enemy of the Greeneyes and . . ."

"Quiet, you fool," the Oracle snapped. "Save it for the tavern."

Beasly was sure now. He was trapped in a den of thieves with four outlaws. If only he could wake up and find himself still fishing with his stepdad and the kindly president!

Now the brown man spoke up. "How does this little 'Blood concern us?" he asked suspiciously.

"All in good time," replied the Oracle. "Jonathan hasn't met our comrade yet."

With that an old man in a strange blue cape came stooping out of the cave. He walked over to Beasly and put out his hand--but before the boy could shake it he jumped back in fright. For the hoary old geezer was the very same one he'd seen in the vision in the crystal globe! The wizard laughed, and his eyes danced like two skycrystal kaleidoscopes. Beasly began to feel clammy and dazed, as if he'd been conked on the noggin or poisoned with some exotic potion.

"And I'm the wizard Kristomarkus," chuckled the wizened old warlock. "Pleased to make your acquaintance, Jonathan Beasly." Like a tender grandfather the wizard reached out and took the lad by the hand. "Take heart, little man," he said, "you're aSout to go on an adventure the likes of which are made into fables and folklore. For I am Kristomarkus the Fair, and beneath my cloak I carry a Gossamer Globe!"

The wizard made a dramatic swoop with his cape and produced; from its inner folds a dark blue globe no larger than an apple which was fastened to a fine silver chain. The globe was made~of a dense, satiny fabric that seemed to glow dimly like the smiling midnight sky, and its make was such that all who beheld it were subtly drawn and charmed by its beauty. Indeed it was § rare moment when the wily warlock revealed the source of hit power; but Kristomarkus had gathered the four men with a grave purpose, and he had to win their respect--and their fear--if he was to carry off his plot.

He spoke with guile, and holding aloft the globe he said, "Behold the Eveningsky Gossamer Globe, one of only three in all the world. I have used it to quietly rule over the fringes of Panazhia, even as your Empress Zamelda Galore has used the Emeraldstone to lord over Dalondria; but never have I corrupted my power to extort jewels and gems, nor to plunge whole islands into debt, nor to plunder the weaker tribes of the Southerly Isles. While I have lived humbly with naught but this staff and small pack, the Greeneyed Empress has built herself a castle as tall as the mountains!"

"Just a moment," interrupted the Oracle. "We don't need to hear a litany of the sins of the Greeneyes. What we want to know is what you can do for us."

The wizard was taken aback, and his eyes flashed angrily. But he was yet a newcomer to the Dalondrians, and he dared not risk offending them. He let the Oracle continue.

"We have but one purpose--to destroy the power of Zamelda Galore. I sent for you to help us, not to lead us. We have suffered too long under the foot of the Greeneyes, and we welcome your help: But we do not wish to trade the dominion of the Emeraldstone for that of the Eveningsky Globe."

So said the Oracle, and Beasly saw the wildhaired fisherman in a new light. Rare was the man of sufficient wit to joust with a wizard, and rarer still one with the gall. Kristomarkus considered the frankness of the Oracle. In wisdom the two were equals; but the Oracle apparently had these agents of Dalondria's tribes already under some kind of sway. The wizard concluded that a noble gesture was needed to assuage their suspicions.

"My friends," he began in his most grandfatherly tone, "I understand your fear of me. So as a token of my intentions I grant you this, Oracle of the Waldinmuck."

To the surprise of all Kristomarkus let dangle the Gossamer Globe--and held it out to the Oracle! "Now if you'll but follow me on my journey to the castle of the Greeneyes, you will be the guardian of my powers."

Now it was the Oracle who was taken aback. If the truth be told, the nameless fisherman was quite shy and awkward. :Besides, he had his hermit work to do, what with tending the paths of the wilder beasts and keeping journals of the seasons and such. He sized up the wizard, measuring his brow and the furrows on his forehead. Somehow the whitehaired old gaffer seemed content in his wanderings, free of unseemly ambitions. The Oracle sensed a kinship with the hoary warlocks who had come from a faraway island with only enough gear to five off the land and yet was willing to give up the focus This powers.

"Kristomarkus the Fair," he said finally," I know your intentions already, for I have a power of my own--the power to see beyond the thin veil of the obvious. And as I am regrettably forced to remain here at my vigil, I propose a compromise."

Now the Oracle took the globe from the wizard andexamined it, turning it in his hand as gently as if it were a newborn kitten. It was connected by a tiny silver clasp shaped like a human hand to a delicate silver chain as fine as spidersilk.

"This I will do," he said after a pause; and turning slowly towards Beasly he ceremoniously placed the Eveningsky Globe around the astounded boy's neck! "To assure against trickery on either part, the boy Jonathan Beasly will carry the globe under this condition: that whosoever dares to remove it from his neck will do so under pain of death. As witness I hold Aleksar Akanoo to oath on the part of the Shandoans; and I hold Truman Allabam to oath on the part of the Mlembe; and Homer Mugwump on the part of the Greens in their Invisible Village."

Each of the three bowed in his turn, and said, "By my blood I swear my people to this oath."

"Now the warriors of three great tribes are sworn to slay he who dares to remove the globe from this boy's breast," continued the Oracle. "And you most of all, Jonathan Beasly; for you are now obliged to follow Kristomarkus into battle, and you will likely see more adventure in the coming cycle of moons than the heartiest warrior sees in a lifetime."

So said the Oracle, and then he chuckled at the disbelieving expression on the young boy's ashen face. The sun was still climbing in the eastern sky; yet in the hours since his stepdad had awakened him just before dawn, Beasly Lemuel Biltmore had traded his name and a life of blissful ease in the clouds for a dangerous and uncertain voyage into the midst of a battle between a wizard and a wizardress And to top it all off, he was now forced to carry around his frail pink neck a wizard's Gossamer Globe! How could things possibly be worse?

Kristomarkus seemed pleased by the Oracle's plan. "I assent to this, and I congratulate you on your wisdom," he said. "Perhaps you've gleaned some other insights as well?"

But i even as the wizard spoke a chill came into the air. Aleksar Akanoo was staring with his mouth agape at the eastern shore of the lake. Truman Allabam fell to his knees looking in the same direction, his eyes wide with awe. Then Beasly saw it. Approaching across the water was an ominous black form. As it grew nearer at a tremendous speed the snakelike undulations of its.enormous length became apparent, as did its massive black head and neck riding as tall as the treetops above the parting wave caps. The tall princes of the proudest tribes in lDalondria stood dumbstruck at the sight, and the grizzly bearded woodsman flinched and turned away. Beasly went cold in thy face and fainted flat on the granite floor.

"He has come," said the wizard gravely. "Gorthogorn the Mighty, Gorthogorn the Last, bane of all life and hope. He has come at the bidding of the Greeneyed Empress, though I fear she will trick her minions into thinking that I have brought him hereto wreak havoc on your island."

The Dalondrians eyed the wizard with suspicion; and coming half out of his swoon Beasly was vaguely reminded of his stolen vision off the night before.

With death in his eyes the wizard went on. "She knows I have come--I can feel it. She will send the serpent after me, for she covets my power above all things. Come, my friends, we must hurry. We may be lost before we've begun. Away! Awake! Arise! Grab your packs and follow me--already our time is nigh!"

One by one the confederates shook themselves free of paralyzing fear, and all except the Oracle ducked into the gloomy cave and emerged with heavily laden backpacks. The wizard grabbed up the limp little boy and set off with long powerful strides across the ledge and into the forest.

Packless, the Oracle came up close behind and grabbed Kristomarkus by the shoulder; but the wizard only slackened his pace.

"Where are you going?" the Oracle shouted brusquely. "We should hold a council."

"We must make haste," answered the wizard. "You must trust me in this. We are going to the Bank of Blote, as I have a withdrawal to make."

"But that . . . the middle of the Marketsquare?" stammered the Oracle. "The stronghold of the 'Bloods? But I must . . . my work . . ."

"Trust me," replied the wizard calmly over his shoulder, "I have friends there." And he left the Oracle standing mute in the woods.

Truman strode up beside Kristomarkus and said, "I, too, have business with the Bank of Blote. I think we should follow, if only for a while."

Aleksar Akanoo nodded and said from behind, "The Bank is well fortified but I will go there, even to face death."

Just then Beasly awoke from his swooning. Cradled in the wizard's arms, his mind went back to the mysterious vision of the night before, and he wondered if he should speak of it. As he watched the changing landscape of the lake's heavily logged eastern shore, the boy finally summoned up the courage to ask a single question of the tireless bluecaped wizard.

"W what was the creature we saw on the lake?" he asked meekly.

Kristomarkus glanced sternly at the lad. "I suppose you should know," he said, "for the stories of the beast and of your people are intertwined; and it seems now that his fate and yours may rest in the balance." Then he set the lad down, and placing his hand firmly on the back of Beasly's neck he set off towards the distant skyline of Yorkmere. And this is the lore of which he spoke:

There came a wind across the universe, and it made the planet egg Wobble. The wobble caused the golden sun Sarinda to strike the northerly island of Panazhia at a shallow angle, and soon great masses of ice came to cover all the northern lands. Most of the creatures there perished; but others retreated to the southern fringes of the island, along with most of the wandering tribes of man.

But one tribe remained in the north, where they lived for generations indoors without benefit of the sun. They were forced to invent weapons, and they began to eat the flesh of their fellow warmbloods; and somewhere in the Age of Ice they learned to drain their own blood and replace it with milk, which turned their skin as white as the snow and left their hearts cold and passionless. And there was one species that neither perished nor fled to the south--the serpents, who slithered by the thousands into deep underground cracks and caverns, where they slept halffrozen awaiting the thaw.

When the sun returned to health the Milkbloods made use of their tools and weapons to seek dominion over the peaceful tribes of the south. They made war and took slaves to carry their plunder, and soon they had taken for their own the most fertile and beautiful lands.

The serpents, too, felt the earth warming above them; but they awakened to a gnawing hunger, and in the fetid bowels of Panazhia they began an orgy of cannibalism that stained the surrounding ocean with redblack blood. For many years they fought and devoured each other, swimming beneath the earth in pools of blood and vomit and the decaying carrion of their own kind.

When only a few remained, the bloated, bloodthirsty serpents dragged their gigantic bodies back to the surface; but they now had only one appetite, and that was for each other. They hunted each other down and fought great battles, growing longer and fatter as the years went by, fat on the carnage of their kindred, until at last only two were left to fight.

Of that final battle little is known, for much of Panazhia was laid ruin. But the great beast Gorthogorn, whose full name traces every battle and every victim of his might, was victorious, and he slithered off weak and injured into the ocean to heal his festering wounds, the last of his line that would ever be.

When Kristomarkus had finished, Beasly longed to tell the wizard about his stolen vision and to ask him a thousand questions. But he could muster only one.

"Why has Gorthogorn come?" Beasly asked.

"He has come to do the bidding of the Greeneyed Empress," answered the wizard. "And I fear he will try to hunt down this globe, which she covets above all else."

Beasly gazed at the Gossamer Globe on his chest. He fingered it lightly, and it felt like a tightly wound ball of silk, not at all like a crystal globe or hearthstone. As he peered into its cobalt depths it seemed to emanate a life of its own, as if it were full of enough odysseys and elixirs and exotic creatures to people a whole universe.

And so it was--but that is a story that will await its time.

The remainder of the day was spent hiking along the southeastern shore of Waldinmuck Lake. At every turn the confederates expected to see the hideous beast Gorthog or so me sign of his passage; but whenever the marshy brush afforded a view of the lake the snake could be seen basking in the ~ fun beneath the Kingdom in the Clouds, floating in great coils ~ and frolicking lazily. For Gorthogorn awaited a meeting with the Right Reverend President Howdy Doodle Goldfink, sworn ambassador of the Greeneyed Empress Zamelda Galore. At the appointed hour the president was lowered from the clouds in a gilded basket, and the redbellied serpent raised his giant head a hundred feet above the surface to meet him.

"I welcome you in the name of The Coastal Empires of Dalondria," said the president, "and in the name of our beautiful Empress." Howdy Doodle spoke in a humble, innocent voice that reeked of sincerity, and he smiled so broadly that the rouge on his cheekbones formed two little red spots that bopped farcically up and down. But beneath his dignified manner was a man frightened out of his limited wits at the sight of the enormous black beast, with its flat diamond shaped head as large as a wagon and its scarred and slimy belly.

Without warning the serpent arched its massive neck like a cobra and flicked its leathery tongue at the suspended cage, which dangled there like a butterfly on a grizzly bear's nose. The fleshy forks of the snake's tongue were stronger than steel, and as they wrapped themselves sinisterly about the basket Howdy felt the putrid breath of the beast, breath so rank with venom and mile that it seemed to coat the president with a choking poisonous gas.

Gorthog lifted the cowering man up to his huge, livid red eye. ''Ssso, my little maggot," the serpent hissed in a rumbling gravelly voice as loud as an avalanche. "What iss the wish of my sisster? And why bass she called me here, so long banned and banished?"

President or not, Howdy Doodle Goldfink was so awed by the size of the snake that he couldn't speak, and. he nearly fainted flat on the floor, as Milkbloods are wont to do.

"Sspeak, you insignificant slug!" bellowed the beast. Gorthog drew the gilded cage closer to his pus yellowed eye, the narrow pupil as tall as a boy, the crimson iris a heartless, hypnotizing threat. The eyes of Gorthogorn had one further quality--they resembled in every respect those of a man, as did his thin sneery lips; so that the massive head of the monster looked for all the world like that of a giant, grossly deformed human being.

At length Howdy Doodle regained his well rehearsed composure long enough to speak.

"I speak for Zamelda Galore, your vastness. She is troubled by the discontent of the wildland tribes, and by visions of a wizard who will come from the east to incite a rebellion. She asks that you ravage the petty tribes of the Outlands into submission, and that you scour the lands for the scent of this wizard. If you can bring the wizard dead or alive to her in weltering Fornica you will be paid a bounty of a billion pieces of gold; and if you agree to intimidate the darkskins I will give you here and now an equal number of silver bits."

Gorthogorn released the basket and let it swing roughly back and forth. The serpent served kings and masters in every corner of the boundless ocean, and he'd heard many times of a wandering warlock who roamed Panazhia spreading mischief and revolution and toppling ancient empires. Many a time Gorthog had slathered up to the finest palaces, only to find them full of drunken peasants and slaves, whom he ate in lieu of the regular tribute. And once or twice he actually thought he'd caught the scent of the whitehaired wizard who puzzled whole armies with riddles and fireworks, and always disappeared into the weeds without a trace.

Now the beast became enraged, for he realized that the wizard, who seemed to live only in whispers and folktales, was threatening to upset the lucrative conspiracy he had long enjoyed with his sister the Greeneyes; for by feigning violent hatred for each other, and by waging puppet wars on tiny islands from sea to shining sea, Gorthogorn and Zamelda had managed over the years to slyly divide in half all the lands of the known world.

"Then feed me you worm!" hissed the snake, and his malice caused the hills around Lake Waldinmuck to tremble to their roots. A billion bits of silver were then funneled down his gullet, and he devoured them in a frenzy as a gutteral laugh erupted from his trickling belly. Then Gorthog heaved his great hulking body back into the lake, sending powerful waves into every cove and inlet; and with a menacing thrust of his lethal black coils he set out to the west to sow chaos and to seek out the scent of the secretive warlock.

Even from the cover of the sparse and dwindling Reston Wood the confederates heard the splash and the thunderous belch of Gorthogorn; and rushing to the lakefront they were just able to discern his dark slashing form disappearing into the west.

"The wizard has led us well," said Aleksar Akanoo, and Beasly, who had been chasing his captors through the woods all afternoon, suddenly saw the tall redman in all his princely glory. The brave Shandoan wore colorful feathers in his hair, and a leather vest that was frayed at the edges. His pants were also leather and were inlaid with tiny gemstones.

"I too am well pleased," added Truman Allabam, and he laughed heartily, which set the whole troupe to chuckling with relief.

But Beasly Biltmore did not laugh. The boy had been pondering his plight during the hike--his only hope lay ahead in the grand Marketsquare of Yorkmere, which had been rising in the distance to the south as the band of outlaws approached along the waterfront. There Beasly could escape into a crowd, or flag down a constable and explain who he was. But as the troupe neared the outskirts of the walled city of the Yorks, where the scrubby woods gave way to farmlands and footpaths and fallendown fences, the wizard stopped abruptly. Taking Beasly by the shoulder Kristomarkus began to speak.

"We cannot gain entrance to the city looking like this," he said with a broad sweep of his arm. "I must use the globe to cast a spell of disguise--unless you prefer to walk like sheep into a den of wolves."

This shook Beasly, because it could spoil his chance to escape. But now the woodsman Homer Mugwump, who had been silently eyeing the wizard all day, spoke up. "I for one am not willing to stroll into the Bank of Blote on the heels of a warlock," he said, "until I know something of his plans, and of his credentials. For I am pledged by my queen in the Northcross Cascades to march straight to the castle of the Greeneyes to demand that she free from her dungeons the King of Olde, Damakros the Forsaken, who is remembered only by the scribes in the invisible village of my people."

This stirred Truman Allabam to speak. "And I have vowed to infiltrate the castle of Zamelda Galore, and to steal if I can her Gossamer Globe, the Emeraldstone of which legends tell." He hung his head, for his was a desperate quest on behalf of a desperate people.

But Kristomarkus did have a plan, and a clever one at that. For the wizard had come to Dalondria incognito many times before, and he knew more than he let on. The elders of the Shandoans and the Mlembe and the hidden Greens also knew more than they let on. They had not sent their favorite sons to the meeting at the cave of the Oracle without having some foresight of the wizard's intentions--to do battle at last with the Greeneyed Sorceress, and to end her dominion forever by destroying the Emeraldgreen Gossamer Globe.

"Listen to me now!" the wizard said in a commanding tone. "Each of us will be charged with a mission in the mutiny to come, but none so grave as the one just spoken--to penetrate the very citadel of Zamelda Galore, and to wrest from her the focus of her powers."

But before Kristomarkus could ask the question, Aleksar Akanoo put his hand on Truman's shoulder and said, "I will go with my brother. And if my fondest dream comes true I will find her myself and chop off her head!"

Now the band turned to Homer Mugwump. The stubborn woodsman was still staring doubtfully at the wizard and at Jonathan Beasly. "Why has this young cloud dweller been chosen to carry the globe?" he asked, slowly folding his arms across his chest. "I have my suspicions, warlock. I was raised among Milkbloods, and I know their ways."

"But do you not trust the Oracle?" asked Kristomarkus, and his voice was as smooth as the silky Gossamer Globe that hung weightlessly around Beasly's pale, plump neck. Still Homer Beauregard Mugwump, Outlaw of the Outlands, the favorite son of the wild renegade Greens, stood defiantly before the troupe and shook his head.

"And what of the serpent?" he demanded. "Surely he will return to seek out the wizard--for one~reason or other."

Aleksar Akanoo turned to face the stocky woodsman and said, "If I have guessed rightly, the lizard will not be looking for three men such as we, but for the wizard and the globe. And so the boy and Kristomarkus must surely go another way--to the south, perhaps--while we pass through the Northcross Cascades on our way to the back door of the witch's castle."

"You have guessed well, my friend," answered Kristomarkus. "Jonathan Beasly and I will go south and muster the tribes such as we find there. For without the aid of the southwestern clans of Gonzalon, I fear we are lost. As for the beast Gorthog--well, I have played cat and mouse with him for many years. In this you must trust me."

As if to prove his point the wizard made a broad swoop of his velvety blue cape, and it began to glow with strange colors and mists; and the Eveningsky Globe around Beasly's neck began to vibrate and hum and to emanate a dim blue light that seemed as deep as the pearldomed midnight sky and as soft as a prism on a. curtain of silk. Swirls of mist and purple sparks danced between the globe and the wizard's outstretched cape, and he began to chant.

''Dzarjhan deldorath, lindenel I'an d'or, Verusilef ungornedel, dzarjhan Navrinor!" he cried, and from the globe a warm, dry wind began to blow like the breath of desert dunes. As it whipped the hair and clothing of the confederates it*b~gan to surround each of them with a faint blue mist that' grew brighter and brighter. And then two dark forms appeared before the bedazzled troupe, slowly taking the likenesses of two strapping animals that grew out of the satiny blue storm as if under the brush of some ethereal artist.

Suddenly a clap of thunder ripped through the air, and the sparks and mists and the warm blue wind retreated into the wizard's cape and vanished. To the astonishment of all, the garments of the five travelers had been transformed into the flowing robes of a band of foreign traders! And where before there had been four hefty backpacks, there now stood a sturdy mule that carried an ornate, diamond studded chest full of incense and statues and golden urns from faraway exotic isles. Beside the mule was a handsome jetblack panther with rippling muscles and bright, intelligent eyes. And each man felt beneath his robe a heavy sabre of ancient make, and a scabbard of handtooled leather.

"Behold, comrades, a wizardly spell!" exclaimed Kristomarkus proudly, as if he had expended a great deal of his powers in materializing the charade. "Now let us delay this quarrel until nightfall, when we will be safe in the catacombs of my associates in Yorkmire. We must not be late to our appointment at the Bank of Blote."

The band set out again, with Homer and the wizard up front, followed by an ever more bemused Beasly and the two princes. Aleksar and Truman were obliged to lead the animals, for they now played the parts of two colored servants in the group of foreign traders. Gradually the buildings of the marketsquare of the Yorks grew on the horizon, and the countryside gave way to cartpaths and cottages and mountainside castles. Once or twice they met a peasant or smith, whom Kristomarkus greeted in a foreign tongue; and each time Beasly wanted to cry out but was stayed by his fear of his lawless kidnappers.

By the time their shadows had begun to grow long, the troupe was less than half a league from the center of the city. They began to meet many wains and handcarts and wagontrains, and they were forced to compete for a piece of the roadway with brash horsemen and teamsters and heartless charioteers. Now the tall buildings could be seen full view up ahead, and they stood as high as trees, though of trees there were none, nor flower nor bush only short, stubbly grass was allowed to grow in the busy marketplace of the Yorks, and this was carefully trimmed and weeded by cropped uniformed workers.

Rising up from the center of the city was an ominous black building that dwarfed all the others. It was the Bank of Blote, and in its vaults and chambers were kept the paper riches of the Milkbloods. The hum and hubbub of commerce soon surrounded the band, who blended right in with the extravagantly costumed merchants and bankers and barristers of Yorkmere. Mere they saw all manner of booths and bins and scales and hucksters, and everywhere baubles and baskets and bits of precious metals were being offered for sale. Here and there were great pavilions where row upon row of haggard peasants labored to make dresses and bracelets and hats and rings, chairs and lounges and tables and lamps. Huge hourglasses parceled out the time, and bells were rung to pace the movements of the workers, who sat silently slumped over their chores as if in prayer, or perhaps in mourning. Around one corner was a great cart loaded with frilly boxes of perfume, around the next was a meeting of finely dressed barons and counts and dukes, or of ragged beggars and sooty twisted urchins.

The band turned a cobblestone corner, and suddenly the monolithic Bank of Blote stood looming above them, blocking out the sun and half of the sky. There were but a few windows in the bank, and these were high up on the topmost parapets of the perfectly square, block shaped obsidianblack structure, and were protected by heavy iron bars. The single door was cut deep into the eastern wall, where a forbidding flight of stairs narrowed up to the dark entranceway. Two files of the York Militia flanked the stairway, their grim faces as cold as the steeltipped spears and double edged scimitars they wielded in defense of the stronghold of the Milkbloods. Kristomarkus led the band to the base of the stairs, where a balding little man in a black suit sat at a wooden desk.

"We wish to see Mortimer Blote," the wizard announced in his newfound accent.

The little man surveyed the group, straightened the red kerchief around his pencilly neck, jotted down a few notes on a scroll and lightly waved his hand, indicating that the request had been denied.

"I said, we wish to see Mortimer Blote," repeated the wizard, and as he spoke he raised his arms and stretched out his velvetblue cape. "We have come from afar as emissaries, bringing a proposition that will surely interest your master. I would not want to be the one who cheated Master Blote out of his fortune."

The wizard hardened his gaze. Again the doorkeep straightened his red necktie, and his Adam's apple bobbed nervously up and down as he gulped his reply. "One moment, your elderliness," he said, running up the steps like a weasel with burnt whiskers.

Soon after a much larger man who also wore a black suit and a red necktie walked slowly down the stairs and welcomed the travelers into the bank. They were taken up a dozen more flights of stairs to a foyer in the topmost story of the bank, where after being led through a labyrinth of suites and hallways and vaults they came at last to the outer office of Mortimer Blote, the bank president. A pair of ornate mahogany doors into which the letters "M" and "B" had been meticulously carved stood closed at the threshold of the ominous office.

After a long wait, Beasly, Homer and Kristomarkus were shown into the office. While Aleksar Akanoo, Prince of Shadoah, and Truman Allabam, a Mlembe chieftain among chieftains, were obliged to sit on the floor outside the doorway, the wizard and the boy and the pinkskinned woodsman were ushered down a long goldtrimmed carpet to a dais where three tall cushiony chairs sat facing the desk of Mortimer Blote.

Blote's desk was as large as some folk's homes in the Outlands, and worth a thousand times as much, what with its pearl inlays and gilded trim and jeweled bevels, and the proud initials M. B. carved in the ancient redwood frontispiece. The man himself was larger than life; and there he sat, resting his feet on a footrest of ivory and primping his silk and feather pillows. He wore a black pinstriped suit with mink lapels and silklace trim, and a bright red neckerchief was tied about his neck. Mortimer Blote weighed more than six average men; folds of fat cascaded down his torso, and he had several chins. His face was so bloated as to erase the features, so that he looked for all the world like a giant flustered pig in a circus costume. His small black eyes nearly disappeared into his veiny flushed face, and his thin silver hair was matted down to his blubbery noggin with the finest imported hair oil.

The office was lit through a thin golden dome above, and a circlet of columns as tall as young pines surrounded the dome and the dais below. Heavily framed paintings of fat, sternlooking men in black suits with red ties covered the walls, men with names like Shylocke j Fellowrocker, Trumplip and Hearse--past presidents, perhaps, or wealthy directors--and below each face was an accounting of each man's wealth and power carved in square marble pedestals that stood out from the wall.

Kristomarkus was the first to speak. "Your blotedness," he began, overdoing his phony accent, "I am Haldavir, ambassador of the vast southern isle of Derth, sent to discuss matters of import between our nations."

Mortimer sat back in his throne and surveyed the impudent old man. "I have never heard of your island, nor have I seen it on any maps of our foreign holdings. It must be quite small and insignificant. Unless you can pay a tribute of earnestness to my mistress the Greeneyes, I'm afraid I can't help you. Shall we say, a thousand pieces of gold?" he said arrogantly.

"You have already extracted that sum ten thousand times over, Mortimer Blote. And you've not seen maps of our nation because it is boundless," replied Kristomarkus wryly. "But we have watched for many years as your magicians roamed the seas in search of plunder, and now we are here to make a withdrawal in recompense for what was lost."

The bank president now thought the old man to be mad, or under the influence of some elixir; but by his dress he was yet a man of means.

"I am sorry, sir," he said to the wizard seated below. "But if you have no more earnestness than that I'm afraid I'll have to refer you to one of my lesser agents. Perhaps you could arrange to have your riches lent out to peasants, at a reasonable rate of interest of course. You might triple your investment or acquire a parcel of slaves." Mortimer meant this last remark as a dismissal, but the disguised wizard did not move.

"That is not satisfactory," said the wizard calmly; and with an invisible malice he bent his gaze and his wizardly will on the fat banker, who recoiled in fright. Then with a gesture like a swooping hawk Kristomarkus leapt upon the desk, and with his arms above his head he said in a grave tone, "Take me to the vault, Mortimer. Do as I say!"

The banker seemed to struggle for a moment, in vain. Kristomarkus' eyes flashed angrily; then the wizard furrowed his forehead and widened his eyes, and from beneath his thickety white brows there came a sparkling mist of deepest blue that surrounded and subdued Mortimer Blote as surely as a vessel of apple squeezing or a pipefull of poppies'

The fat banker heaved his obesity off his throne and waddled briskly out the door. Kristomarkus took Beasly's hand and followed, with Homer, Aleksar and Truman close behind Not far from the president's office a secret passageway led down two flights of stairs to the thickly walled vaultroom of the Bank of Blote. Mortimer squeezed his way to the door and opened it with a key of jade and an incantation. Yet another hallway, this one lined with two more flanks of the York Militia, led to an iron door, which Blote opened by arranging a set of levers in a secret configuration. He heaved the great door Open and the five compatriots filed in.

The cavernous vault was the size and shape of an upsidedown pyramid, and it resembled an arena, with a dozen or so broad terraces narrowing down to the bottom floor, the rectar~ular gaming pit. The terraces were packed with desks and bureaus and cabinets and huge iron safeboxes, and hundreds of clerks and scriveners were busily hunched over heaps and mounds of paper. The lower terraces were full of imposing men in black suits with red neckerchiefs, who watched intently the strange drama being played out in the gaming pit below.

The band descended the terraces, awed by the size of the vault. They slowed to gaze at the gold and silver and diamonds heaped about; but Kristomarkus hurried the fat president on down towards the pit. When the troupe came near enou;gl' to see what was happening there, they stopped and found a crowded spot from which to watch, and Truman lifted Beasly onto his shoulders piggyback style so the boy could also see. Several of the men in black suits with red ties glanced severely at Mortimer and the unseemly entourage, especially at the darkskins.

On the floor of the gaming pit was a mosaic map of the Greeneyed Empress' half of the known world, with Dalondria situated in the center and the lesser isles set around the edges. Every border and boundary was marked by a bold black line. There on the east coast was Yorkmere, and on the west coast was the parish of Fornica; and scattered about the mountains and forests and plains of the island's dwindling interior, where dwelt the Shandoans and Mlembe, the Greens and Gonzalin, the exiled and the aged, were piles and piles of lumber and furs and minerals and crops. Around the edge of the pit wound a row of painted squares marked on the margins by crests and glyphs. Dressed in colorful armor stood the standard bearers, who moved piles of goods from square to square or changed beads on the abacuses at the bidding of the gamesmasters.

The players were all standing at a rail on the lowest terrace just a few feet above the pit; and behind them were hundreds of messengers and numbersmiths who scurried wildly from terrace to terrace and from clerk to clerk, tallying up profits and losses and speculating 04 the future course of the games. The players all wore black suits with red neckties, and they were all Milkbloods, though a few had features that resembled the colored tribes. They rolled their golden die in turns and spun roulette wheels; and by some indiscernible code they kept a tenuous order to the frenzied competition.

"What are they doing?" asked Beasly from his perch atop the blackman's shoulders.

"They are playing their game," answered Kristomarkus, "and their pawns are the people of the Outlands and the Southerly Isles."

Beasly had heard of these places, the savage interior wildlands and untame southern islets; but he knew as little about them as he did about the exotic fiefdoms of inner Panazhia, which is to say he knew only of the products that were taken there, the furs and perfumes and frankincense and jewels. His comrades knew quite well the people of the Outlands and the Southerlies and knew that the piles and squares on the mosaic map represented much more than goods and land. For the queer game of the haughty Milkbloods, while enriching a few lucky counts and barons and dukes and cloud dwellers, was slowly but surely sapping the life out of the forests of the wilderlands and threatening oblivion to the clans and tribes of darkskins and renegades.

After a short time Kristomarkus motioned to Tr;uman to set Beasly down. Then turning slowly on Mortimer Mote the wizard threw back his head and cried, "Awaken, ye sleepers! Arise!'

So shrill was his voice in that moment that everyone in the Vault, from the most arrogant trader to the meekest snivelling accountant, was seized with fright, and they all turned timidly towards the wizard. Kristomarkus lifted his arms and stretched out his cape, and it seemed as if he suddenly towered above the gaming pit like an eagle swooping on a shrew. Nodding to his confederates to follow, the maddened wizard strode right down to the middle of the gaming pit, his white hair and blue cape flowing behind. Putting his left hand on the Gossamer Globe around Beasly's neck the wizard threw back his right arm and hurled a whirlwind of red and yellow flames at the door to the Vault to keep the guardsmen at bay. The enchanted bank president was then made to wallow around on his belly like a pig, and Kristomarkus caused the writhing bankster to follow and erase the bold black boundarylines that checkered the map into biddingsquares for the players.

One outraged gamer, the velvet gloved Count Morenmore, threw down his die and yelled, "Who is this heathen to defile our temple? Upon him!" But not one of the pale Milkbloods moved. Indeed, the wizard glanced but once his way and the pompous merchant retreated quickly up the terraces. Aleksar, Homer and Truman drew forth their swords, and the garners and their companies of clerks and scriveners and numbersmiths were herded into a high corner of the arena.

Savoring the moment, Kristomarkus stepped boldly up to the platform of the gamesmasters at the northern end of the pit; and with a dramatic intensity he threw down their extravagant chairs and tables, strewing papers and fountain pens and piles of gold far across the floor.

"Awaken, Mortimer Blote, Arise!" cried the wizard, and the bankster suddenly came out of his trance. The astonished look on his fat flustered face set the Outlanders to laughing; but Mortimer was furious, and he charged at the wizard like a bear with a buttful of briars. With surprising grace Kristomarkus dodged his foe and tripped him, sending him bellyflopping awkwardly across the pit.

"Elmenduur Ellindole, harak! harak! Garneldole!" the wizard cried, and out of nowhere a warm whoosh of wind swept through the vaultroom. Papers were sent flying in every direction, cabinets and safeboxes flew open and emptied their leaflets and ledgers into the air, and the Vault was soon filled with a torrent of parchment and paper that swirled and eddied like feathers at a chickenhouse tornado. The wizard raised his cape high, and as he chanted every piece of paper made a dash straight for Mortimer, who was soon buried in a manhigh pile of deeds and contracts and mortgages. Kristomarkus held out his hand and wiggled a pinky, levitating the astounded banker bellyup on top of the pyre.

"Now, Mort, it is your turn to pay tribute," said the wizard. "A tribute to the victims of your success."

The paralyzed banker's eyes grew wide with fright, for he knew now that his empress in the west had been true in her visioning. If only he could get to his crystal globe to warn her! But Kristomarkus was a wily wizard, if not a bit lazy and cynical; and he had other things in mind. Spreading his arms like a bird its wings, the wizard caused a tornado of fire to fly from his breast, and it hovered threateningly above Mortimer Blote.

"Morty, my friend, methinks it would be wise if you'd but grant me one small favor. Swear an oath!" said the wizard, "An oath to forgive every debt your numbersmiths have connived on the Outlanders and on the Southerly Isles; an oath to release the lands of Dalondria from the false claims you have made; an oath to end for good this game of usury and hoard. For in your thirst for riches you have created an ugly plunder that poisons the very fringe of the heavens. Swear it, Mortimer! Swear it I say!"

This caused a din among the blacksuited Milkbloods above, and a few anonymous threats were hollered down to Blote. He paid them little heed, for the tail of the fiery tornado began to dance and play above the pyre until it singed the papers at its edge.

"I cannot!" whined the banker. "What will we do? Go live in the woods?"

"That would be a finer dwelling than your costliest palace, and would return a greater profit than your most lucrative swindle," retorted Aleksar Akanoo, and Homer and Truman raised their swords in agreement.

"But we have done nothing wrong," whimpered the banker. "If any have suffered it is only by their own weakness."

The tail of the flame licked the banker's red tie, and Kristomarkus raised his voice in anger. "You confuse iniquity with vanity, Mortimer Blote. Swear it now!" A shower of sparks flew from the flame suspended above the quivering banker, and wriggles of smoke began to surround him.

"I swear it! I swear it!" he cried, and the mightiest man in the parish, Mortimer Blote himself, began to blubber and wail like a baby.

"Say it again!" demanded the wizard.

"I swear it! I swear it!" cried the banker through his pitiful sobs.

Kristomarkus spat, and the tornado of fire vanished. Just as suddenly the great pile of papers began to wrinkle and rattle violently so that the bloated form of the bank president was rolled like a beached whale onto the goldstrewn floor of the gaming pit. All were silent. The Bloods were not accustomed to being toyed with by a sorcerer; in fact, their empire had been built on the power of a sorceress, and the thought of such power being used against them left them numb.

"You have chosen well," Kristomarkus told the banker. "And your word here is as binding as a contract in stone. But lest you or your cohorts here be tempted to back out, I fear I must put our understanding to paper." At that the quaking of the pile of papers became so violent that the sound was like a raging fire. The wizard held his arms straight out and curled his fingertips downward, and silent bolts of electricity began to strike the papers. Kristomarkus furrowed his brow, and by some miracle or illusion the runes and crests and figures that had been meticulously scripted onto the deeds and contracts and mortgages began to fall off like pepper off a plate! Soon every scroll and parchment was bare, except for the elaborate initials M. B. at the top of every page.

"See how fragile a kingdom of paper can be!" cried the wizard, and he grabbed up a struggling Beasly Biltmore and sped back up the terraces towards the door. The colored princes and Homer Mugwump (who was now quite convinced of the wizard's credentials) brandished their swords and followed. Kristomarkus blew out the whirlwind that still held the militiamen at bay, and the guards lunged into the vaultroom hungry for battle.

The wizard waved his wooden sword and yelled "Harak! Harak! Garnolindole!" and every~piece of gold and silver and every pointed diamorid and gem came hurtling from the piles and safeboxes below; and the mass of metal and rock roared like a river out the chamberdoor, a flood of freed hoard that hurled the guards to the ground and tossed them into walls and down corridors with all the force of a dambreak. For several chaotic moments the current of riches flowed greedily through the halls and out the double front doors, which it burst asunder with strength enough to scatter the facing files of the York Militia roughly down the obsidian stairs and into the dusty marketsquare.

Amid the confusion Kristomarkus led his band back through the maze of bureaus and halls. What opposition they met was handled skillfully by the practiced swords of the wildland princes. At the sundered entrance to the yet sturdy Bank of Blote the troupe met the redfaced remnant of redcoated Yorks, who now stood in defiance atop the piles of gold and silver and gems and jewels that covered the obsidian stair. Behind them gathered a growing horde of peasants and teamsters and workers mixed with smatterings of merchants and barristers and finely dressed cloud dwellers.

Now the wizard performed his tour de force, a feat of sorcery worthy of folklore and poetry. For in that moment Kristomarkus the Fair began to wave his arms in circles,. and he uttered an incantation that sent every last piece in the pile to shaking and clattering. Then the whole pile shot up into the air in the form of a net, capturing the helpless mercenaries and dangling them above the gasping crowd. The net was then swept as if on the hand of an invisible giant towards the lake, where it hovered mockingly above the shining waters.

"To the lake!" cried the wizard, and the throng of curious peasants stampeded to the lakefront, with Kristomarkus dragging a reluctant Beasly in the lead. When they arrived the lake was ablaze with ripples of sunset pink as the very last rays of the most horrible day in Beasly Biltmore's young life glimmered off the shiny net.

Just then a great wind came out of the east, a wind so strong that it seemed to push the sun right over the horizon, so that only the net high above the waterfront and the cloud kingdom in the distance were still lit by Sarinda's gold.

Kristomarkus held his hand aloft, and in it was a perfect diamond as large as an apple. "Behold!" he cried, and he heaved the great gem straight into the net; and then several things happened at once. The net was burst asunder, and the militiamen were baptized in the humbling waters of the Waldinmuck. The wind redoubled in a sudden blast that carried the gold and silver and gems and jewels high, high into the air, where they were borne on the four winds to every nook and cranny of Dalondria. The Kingdom in the Clouds was whipped roughly about, and the papier mache palaces of the Bloods were ripped and torn and sent like holiday confetti into the swirling skies.

The throng of peasants and workers and teamsters let out a hearty cheer, and they tossed their hats high into the reckless winds; but before they sounded the third hooray they were scattered by the sight of a company of guards streaming out of the Bank and descending on them with weapons drawn. The assault was led from behind by Mortimer Blots, who, having rallied the dozens of guards as they lay dazed on the floors of his precious Bank, had ordered every scribe and accountant and measly clerk to join in the attack on the impudent wizard and his thugs.

But all the banksters saw as they swarmed onto the lakefront were the heels and elbows of a thousand happy peasants, among wltom ran an old geez and a woodsman and two wildland Plirices' and a fighting, screaming little boy from the clouds. For even as the great diamond had left the wizard's hand, his power had waned, and in a wisp the panther and the mule and the colorful foreign robes had vanished.

Weak and numb, Kristomarkus led his wary band down alleys and stairwells, through sewers and over bridges, with the sounds of the Yorks fading behind them in blind pursuit.

That night every home and shed in the city was~s.ea~Fched, and a council was held between the shaken cloud dwellers and the directors of the Bank of Blote. No wizard was Found, and no conspiracy uncovered; but even as the forces of Zamelda Galore were being marshalled from the eastern capes of Yorkmere to the western mounts of Fornica, and even as the thralls of the Milkbloods were uncovering their stores of armaments, a revolution was whispering its way across the Outlands.

And in the Underground catacombs of the wizard's confederates, a keg of ale was drunk in celebration.

The next morning Howdy Doodle Goldfink was dispensed from the clouds in his gilded basket and ferried off to Yorkmere to survey the damage. Being a very important man worth several thousand peasants in the reckoning of the Bank of Blote, the president was continually surrounded by a buzzing entourage of aides and counselors, who made quite a display of themselves as they tugged and quarreled over his daily course.

As for Howdy--well, he just loved being the center of attention. Year after year the people of the Coastal Empires marveled at the fact that he had never once been seen, either in person or on a crystal globe or hearthstone, without a hearty smile on his face and a robust wave for his charges. So loved was the old fogey that even among the peasants and workers he was simply called "Howdy," a name so appropriate that a public relations man couldn't have dreamt up a better one.

Zamelda Galore had chosen the president wisely, for his charm and manner were so endearing to the good people of Dalondria that he was never blamed for his odours, and he often took credit for good weather. And as an added bonus he lacked the wits to question her schemery or to be of any danger, for he knew well that the minds of men are small and weak and open to enchantment.

And so it happened that the Right Reverend President and his lovely wife Narny Faye met with Mortimer Blote on the sunsplashed lakefront. The banker's report was numbing. In less time than it takes to bake a cake the bulk of the riches of the eastern cloud dwellers had been scattered with the winds. Gone were the deeds that entitled them to most of the easterly half of the islandstate, including the very best farmlands and hillsides and mineral rich peaks; gone were the mortgages on the shacks and shanties of the peasantry. And gone forever were thousands upon thousands of iron clad contracts that through the guile of the numbersmiths had indebted the peasants for generations to come.

It was with great trepidation that Howdy and Mortimer entered the ruptured bank and plodded up to the bankster's visionchamber, which lay hidden in the topmost western corner of the square black building. There Mortimer placed his hands on the icy globe and felt himself laid bare by its power. Soon the globe began to glow, and a green mist filled the room; and then the face of Zamelda Galore slowly materialized, looking as if she were peering through a fishbowl full of algae. The effect of Zamelda's visioning Emeraldstone made it appear as if she were covered with some poisonous green film; but in reality her skin was a pale, pasty white, whiter than the ass of a newborn. Her eyes were indeed green, though, green and menacing, and her thin pointed eyebrows arched high above them like the wings of a vulture. Her nose was short and pointed, and it turned up at the tip, having been altered ages ago by a magician of surgery. Her mouth was thin and sneery, and her teeth were pointed like jackals', and she painted her lips with sugary red gloss. Her high, pointy cheekbones gave way to deep, sallow cheeks, and her chin, which had once nearly touched the tip of her nose, came to a sharp, pimply point that poked out from her face like a boxer's jab.

"What has happened!" she screamed, and her voice was as sharp as the icy darts of a frigid north wind. "Tell me, you fools!"

"We have not found the wizard," said the banker, "but the president is with me, and he is ready to speak to the people. I think . . ."

"I don't give a tinker's dam what you think!" screeched the sorceress, and she let loose a short harangue that stood both men's hair on end. When she had finished her cursing and carrying on she spoke coldly to Howdy Doodle.

"I want you to make a speech," she said, "and this is what I want you to say." She then told the dimwitted president exactly what to say and do as a cowering scribe was brought in to record the script. For despite his charisma Howdy could not be trusted to speak in public unless he had a carefully worded script in front of him, it having been said by certain cynics that his foot spent more time in his mouth than did his silverplated spoons.

By the time the president had rehearsed the speech enough to satisfy the wizardress the sun was high in the sky, and the people had begun to creep out of their homes to see what was happening in the marketsquare. Rumors of rebellion and renegade wizards abounded, and the whole parish was soon abuzz with gossip about warlocks and darkskins and the giant serpent that had followed the rebels into the city.

Now the summonsbell was sounded from atop a high steeple, and soon the hills and valleys of the Yorks were alive with anticipation. By early afternoon every child and~granny was seated beside the fireplace, and every eye was trained on a hearthstone. pi

Meanwhile in weltering Fornica, in her globetower high above Castle Galore, the Greeneyed Empress opened a pair of redwood doors and stepped out onto an eastfacing balcony. Raising her arms high to spread out her flowing batskin cape, she began to chant the rhythmic spell that opened the dome of the fabled Tower of Bubel. Behind her, cradled in the delicate fingers of a golden table wrought in the form of an upturned hand, the Emeraldgreen Gossamer Globe began to glow and spark; and then bright green lightningbolts and dragontails began to flash between the witch's tower and the Tower of Bubel, which stood as tall as the castle in the center of the Fornican marketsquare.

All at once in an exploding flash of color the Tower of Bubel burst open its dome, and trillions upon trillions of tiny glass bubbles were sent flying into the sky, flying like a zillion shooting stars on their journeys to the far reaches of Dalondria. For several longdrawn minutes the maelstrom of red and blue and green and cyan spread into the sky, every bubble magically tinted with prismic lodestones and glimmering precious metals. Then the colored glass bubbles began to trinkle faster than the eye could see down chimneys and flues from the loneliest miningtown in northern Fornica to the liveliest hamlet in the south of Yorkmere, and as they burst in rapid succession onto a hundred thousand glowing translucent hearthstones, the face of the Right Reverend President Howdy Doodle Goldfink faded humbly into view. With his famous smile and a characteristic bob of the head the president greeted his subjects, and in a voice as sincere as a sister's kiss he began to read his speech.

"My fellow Dalondrians," he said as his head swayed with practiced sincerity, "we stand at the verge of a calamity, a calamity so calamitous that not one of you will be spared. An enemy has come among us, an evil warlock with hideous intent, a killer of babes and puppies who wishes to throw down our empire, which we have built for the benefit of all; and I fear that he will try to poison us from within.

"So I must ask of you a small favor. I ask this in the name of our forefathers, who built the armadas of olden days, and earned through their enterprise the just claims of the Milkbloods. I ash it in the name of the Bank of Blote, which services us all, and has kept the ship of state on a steady course in the seas of disaster and hostility, and made possible the plentitude we all enjoy.

"And so, my fellow Dalondrians, I simply ask that you faithfully fulfill the contracts that were destroyed in yesterday's Armed robbery, and also the mortgages, leases and loans; for we are in dire need of resources to fight this evil warlock and his humongous pet serpent, the monster Gorthogorn, from wthom our beautiful Greeneyed Empress has so long protected~hese shores. Do this not for the Bank merely, but for your children and your loved ones, and most of all for this, our exalted nation, the vast and magnanimous Coastal Empires of Dalondria"

Now a faint strain of patriotic music began to rise behind the president's masterful voice, and the waving glory of the islandstate's venerated flag began to fade into view behind him.

"To ensure that all is done within the laws of our land," continued the president, "the honorable Militia of Yorkmere and Fornica will be garrisoned at the estates of those who have surpassed the rank of count, whereto each head of a household will be required to pay a visit and divest three tithes of his holdings in tribute to the Empress. Hereby in Proclamation of the Coastal Empires I order that these tithes be paid on or before the tolling of the noonbells tomorrow, so that we may quickly bring our forces to bear on the diabolical sorcerer who has infiltrated the very heart of the fatherland. And furthermore I order that whatever steps become necessary in this crisis shall be made law by the word of the Greeneyed . . ."

But even as Howdy Doodle Goldfink spoke, and even as Zamelda Galore began to feel the invisible weight of suasion tipping in her favor, a cloaked old wizard in a deephewn cave placed his leathery jaundiced hand on a Gossamer Globe of eveningsky blue and sent a shudder of mischief through the webwork of hearthstones that peppered Dalondria; for at that moment in every den in every dale in every ham and hamlet, the hearthstones turned from green to aquablue, and the Right Reverend President was suddenly seen standing as naked as the day he was born, giving his speech with all the pomp of an emperor of olde!

Zamelda became furious at her own folly. In a flash she threw down her arms and dashed into her globetower, slamming the redwood doors behind her. In every hearthstone across the land the image of the naked president vanished, and the light in every stone turned into a bright white dot that slowly faded from sight.

Surprise gave way to mirth as laughter exploded like runaway fireworks from coast to coast, and soon a flight of gossip was spreading throughout the land that the Bank was now powerless and had no money even to pay the militiamen. At dawn's early lighf the next day a bold group of docksmen seized a schooner from one of Mortimer Blote's companies and ceremoniously dumped its cargo of exotic herbs and teas into Shallowford Bay, which was the principal harbor of the Yorks. And by that forenoon several peasants had been shot clean through by notched arrows with black shafts and feathered green quarrels as they went to pay the tax.

By nightfall a pregnant hush squatted brooding in the empty marketsquare. Whispered tales of a bluecaped warlock and a gang of darkskins soon gave way to rumors of a merry old Elf in a bright blue suit who had skipped and sung around the square, tossing out gold and diamonds to the children of the peasants. And the word out on the grapevine was that the laughing blue leprechaun had freed every indentured servant and debtor and slave from bondage, and that the kingdoms in the clouds were to be made into commons, and that the president's tax was nothing but a ruse perpetrated by Mortimer Blote to return to a few barons and counts and cloud dwellers their precious lost wealth.

No one slept that night, save babes in their mothers' arms. In the coastal parishes of Yorkmere and Fornica the joy of the day was quickly replaced by the heart emptying fear of war; and for the cloud dwellers and the milkblooded aristocracy the hours rang as cold and black as the deathbed of an impious man.

Deep in the catacombs that lay furtively beneath the city, Kristomarkus the Fair, with his velvetblue cape hidden away in his bulging backpack, and Aleksar Akanoo, whom the troupe now called simply Leks, and the brown prince Truman Allabam set off in the company of two renegade pinkskins on a dark and dangerous quest, a two pathed journey into the shadows of Castle Galore in the weltering hills of Fornica. For in the night as torchlight shadows wavered on the jagged mineralstained walls of a cavern deep beneath the basement of a gentleman leafleteer, the wizard had lain down his plan, and it called for the comrades to go their separate ways. Before the light of day, Kristomarkus and Beasly would head south out of Yorkmere and then go west, mustering the Mlembe and the Gonzalin as they went; while Homer, Leks and Truman marched north and then west, mustering the Shandoans and the Greens. But while the wizard would lead the four tribes in a bold and reckless southerly assault on the citadel of the Greeneyed Sorceress, to be launched in twelve day's time at the setting of the full moons, the three Outlanders would attempt to penetrate the castle and seek out the Emeraldgreen Gossamer Globe, and to steal it from under the nose of its mistress as she focused her power on the wizard's attack.

And in order to deceive the empress Kristomarkus bade his companions to~spread the word from coast to coast that the roads of the Milkbloods were to be avoided at all cost, especially the broad Imperial Road. For despite the misgivings of his friends, the insistent wizard promised to reopen long forgotten Old Will Road, a timeworn footpath that ran like its paved rival from the eastern mountains to the western shore; and though Old Will Road, long thought impassable, meandered on a southerly course all choked with thick forests and kudzu, while the Imperial Road shot straight across the heart of the island and could be traversed in seven day's time, the wizard was convinced that the scattered tribes and clans of the Outlands would be quickly crushed if they trespassed on the empress' cold stone highway.

At an hour they judged to be midnight the confederates hefted their backpacks and followed a line of everlit torches through the ancient caves, which led eventually to a dark and musty corridor where the torches stopped abruptly. Never had any of the Outlanders experienced a darkness as complete as that of the secretive bowel into which the wizard now led them. Only by following the sounds of his burglarsoft footfalls did the troupe manage to stay together, and it soon became apparent that they were slowly climbing a shallow grade towards the surface above. On and on into the gloomy darkness they marched, up and up they climbed, and each was heartened by the thought of again seeing the open countryside and of taking a draught of skywashed air.

But just as their hopes of any easy escape seemed right around the corner, a ghostly light began to emanate from the globe, which throbbed erratically, bathing the band in a series of eerily melding colors.

"What is it?" asked Beasly in a whisper.

"It is the will of the Greeneyes," answered the wizard solemnly. "The globe is showing both red and green, which means that even now she is communicating with Gorthogorn through the Crimsonflame Globe, which rests with the bones of my fallen cousin the Red Wizard in the belly of the beast. Now come, we must not tarry!"

Kristomarkus, it seems, understood what few had gleaned--that for age upon age the Crimsonflame had been carried deep in the belly of Gorthogorn the Mighty. For long before Kristomarkus ever took on the burden of the Eveningsky Globe, another of his line had possessed the bright red Crimsonflame Globe. This Red Warlock had become overly proud and intemperate, and in his ambition he had courted the loyalty of the great serpent; and after years of profiting unjustly the heartless lizard had devoured the wizard along with his crimsonred globe, never guessing the import of the shiny gem that still rested in his skeleton strewn gut.

Ever since that time Zamelda had been nurturing her secret alliance with Gorthog the Great, all the while offering him to her people as a relentless, ruthless enemy. In reality the conspiracy between the witch and the snake had, more than anything else, filled the endless coffers of Castle Galore with mountains of gold and diamonds and emeralds and rubies, and all manner of elixirs and spelldusts and deadly glowing firestones.

And so it happened that even as Kristomarkus and his followers were striding up the tunnel, Gorthogorn wash ;thering through the streets of Yorkmere in search of their scent.~The forked, leathery tongue of the serpent darted herertand there along the cobblestones, and his nostrils flared as he wound and contorted himself across the marketsquare and past the Bank of Blote and down to the waterfront. Children hid under their beds at the passing of the beast, and so did many of the bravest men in the parish; horses in their stables and dogs under porches and cats on the prowl all cowered and closed their eyes, paralyzed with fright at the mere presence of Gorthogorn the Mighty.

But he could find no scent of the wizard or the uncouth darkskins. Instead, a faint stirring awoke deep in his malevolent soul, and he felt himself being drawn hypnotically to the west, drawn by a force silent and invisible--the ethereal magnetism of the Gossamer Globes, which attracted each other out of kind, and whose potent suasion could be bent like a prism to the wiles of sorcery.

That is why the confederates had seen splatterings of red and green in the Eveningsky Globe, and why Kristomarkus now walked with a thoughtful stoop, his fuzzy white eyebrows all knotted and wrinkly and his lips all pursed and puckery. Upon reaching the brierpatch that hid the mouth of the catacombs the band paused to listen for any hint of the York Militia--but all they heard were the melancholy moans of an owl and the steady orchestrations of a meadowful of crickets. Leks led the way through the thick briers, and soon, scratched and itching, the five comrades stood at the base of an escarpment on the crest of a ridge, a moonlit, westfacing perch from which could be clearly seen the pockmarked cement roadway that ran out of Yorkmere.

A voice out of the darkness startled the band. `'So you have made it!" said the Oracle as he stepped quietly from behind a boulder. "And half the night still to travel."

Kristomarkus chuckled, then stepped up and shook the Oracle by the forearm. "And you have been spying on me," he said.

"And I'm hungry," said Beasly Biltmore.

With a heavy sigh the Oracle released the wizard's arm. "I know you must hurry," he said nervously. "But first spare a moment, and let me give you prescience of your journey." At that the odd fellow took from his shirtpocket a small bag of crumbled leaves, which he emptied onto his hands; and then blowing. a quick burst into his hands he scattered the leaves into shafts of moonlight. After a moment he closed his eyes and spoke..

"You leave behind you the parish of Yorkmire and the Cloud Kingdom of the Eastern Empire, born of fratricide and calamity. But you see there only the surface of things, a mere shadowpuppet play; for the power of this empire resided in scraps of paper that a kitten could tear to shreds. Behold! The kingdom was built of paper, for paper is all such a kingdom can bear! pi

"There is another Kingdom in the Clouds, and it floats above the weltering hills of Fornica, over the Lake of the Eye of the Greeneyed Sorceress. And the power of the Western Empire resides in bubblefine glass; for that is all such a kingdom can bear. It is a power as deadly as the Greeneyes herself, yet it rests in tiny bubbles of tinctured glass that a puppy could shatter with a sneeze!

"Remember this--when cows walk backwards, and you can't find the key to get out of the sewer, disaster will be nigh; and when the moons wax full, new leaders will step forth, and your very lives may be forfeit."

The Oracle had no sooner finished his soothsaying than he dashed into the thicket with an eerie shriek. The confederates shivered at the sound, for they knew that it came from his horror at his own vision. But nothing they could imagine filled them with dread to compare with the creeping black dominion of Zamelda Galore and her Milkblood thralls, which gave their hearts a deathless courage like elven steel.

"We must go quickly," said Kristomarkus, and they set out down the embankment in the pale moonlight until they reached the gully at the shoulder of the road. They would follow this road together for only a while--for less than a league to the west it forked, and there the wizard and the chubby young pinkskin would part company with the trio of rebel Outlanders.

The moment Beasly set foot on the roadway a flurry of fiery red serpent tongues leapt violently out of the Eveningsky Globe, which began to glow in shades of purple and magenta. The eyes of the wizard went grey.

"It is just as I feared," the wizard said grimly, and his trepidation was doubled on the others. "Gorthog is nearby, but exactly where I cannot say."

"Why don't you use the dadgum thing to find out?" asked Homer, still a bit suspicious of the wizard's intentions.

"Because that would reveal our whereabouts," replied Truman coolly.

"There is but one thing to do," Kristomarkus mused; and then he let go an unexpected laugh that set his eyes to dancing again. "We must run for our lives! Make for the parting of the ways as fast as you can! Away! Awake! Arise!"

And off he ran,~grabbing Beasly up in his winnowy old arms and looking as silly as the neurotic Yorks who were known to run in great circles around the city for no apparent reason. Leks and Homer and Truman followed close behind; but while the tall princes of Shandoah and Mlembe ran with smooth, graceful strides, the stocky woodsman had to strain and waddle just to keep up, and his muscleknotted legs soon began to ache and cramp.

On and on the comrades ran as perched in the wizard's cradling arms Beasly watched the countryside of northern Yorkmere speed by. Great farms and orchards he saw with tall barns and silos, and wagons laden with goods ready to embark for the marketsquare. Tanneries and canneries dotted the landscape, and here and there stood grand mills and manufactories that billowed acrid, opaque plumes into the night sky. As the hurried troupe left the city farther and farther behind, huge pitscars and stripmines began to deform the land, and whole forests were seen reduced to brush. In the lowlands marshes of sludge and muck spread to the horizon, and films of grease and oil burned on stagnant streams.

On and on they ran, until they came to a hilltop laid bare by traffic and loggers; and from its weathered peak the fork in the roadway came suddenly into view. Bent with weariness Kristomarkus stopped and set down his little friend. Leks and Truman were close behind, and though their breasts heaved they seemed ready and willing to run until the earth itself grew weary beneath their feet. And then came Homer Mugwump, panting and wheezing and crying "At last!" as he fell whitefaced to his knees.

But even as Homer spoke a rumbling growl was heard in the distance, and the Gossamer Globe began to shower Beasly with whistling red sparks; and there on the horizon, slathering madly over hill and dale, the confederates could barely make out the hulking form of Gorthogorn heading straight towards them up the road from Yorkmere.

"Into the brush!" cried Kristomarkus, and Homer, Leks and Truman scampered hysterically into the sparse forest that flanked the hill. Beasly Biltmore froze in terror; but the wizard patted him reassuringly on the shoulder, and placing his hand on the Eveningsky Globe he began to chant.

"Deldorran deldorath, Verusilef al Garn, Ekwinar! Lindole! Harak! Harak! Andar!" he sang, and then he stepped back from Beasly and raised his arms high into the air. As if from nowhere a handsome coalstreaked stallion leapt suddenly onto the road, and it shook its silvermaned head proudly and snorted, scraping its left front hoof boldly into the gravel.

"Behold Verusilef, the wizardsteed, as swift as vision!" laughed Kristomarkus, and he hopped heartily onto the great horse's broad back. Lifting the boy onto Verusilef before him, the wizard took off like a hurricane down the winding road.

But even the wizardsteed could not outrun a serpent the size of Gorthogorn the Mighty on open ground. With treecrushing thrusts of his gargantuan coils the snake slithered full of malice after the frantic hoofbeats he now heard in the distance. Deep within his wicked heart Gorthog felt an irresistible urge drawing him westward, and in the pit of his belly a searing flame licked at his skullstrewn entrails. Now his nostrils caught the scent of fleeing foes, and the moment he crested the weathertopped hill he saw ahead of him the lightningflash of the proud stallion's hooves and the fluttering blue cape of his enemy.

Crashing through fences, flocks and fields the beast came rampaging down on the wizard and his steed and the frightened boy from the clouds. In his rage he flattened whole stands of sturdy piney trees and oakses, and he left a row of migrants' shacks dashed and crumbled on top of their unlucky occupants. But Verusilef was charged with the spark of the moment. Taking staccato strides so long that he almost seemed to fly, the grey stallion streaked up to the fork in the road, and without slowing took the leftrunning path into the moondrenched west. Still the beast was close upon his heels, gaining by the second.

Kristomarkus yanked the Gossamer Globe from around Beasly's neck and held it aloft. The spiderfine silver necklace flapped in the breeze, and the globe seemed to melt like blue smoke into the pearldomed heavens. Then uttering an incantation the wizard caused a great mirror to form in the sky, and he turned it to just such an angle that his reflection would be aimed at Gorthogorn. Now soft prisms of light began to play between the globe and the mirror, and they were reflected like dancing starbeams onto the glaring red eyes of the serpent.

"Ssso you can.fly, old man," growled Gorthog; and sure enough, there above him he saw the bothersome blue warlock, galloping through the sky astride a silvermaned stallion. "But I can stretch my snout as high into the sssky as a furrow is long!" he hissed. With that the snake pulled himself into a tight ring of coil and flung himself like a spring high above the treetops until his gaping jaws reached their zenith and hovered like a leaping cobra's six hundred feet above the ground. But no matter how he strained and stretched, the wizard and the steed seemed just beyond his reach, until at last the faint sound of mocking laughter sent him into a frenzy of loops and leaps as he tried to snatch his quarry out of the sky with the steel grip of his leathery forked tongue.

"Maggots!" he grumbled, "Pipsqueak worms! You're not worthy to so much as garnish a meal for Gorthog the Great. But I shall devour you! I SHALL DEVOUR YOU!"

On and on Verusilef ran, and his hooves left no scent, for he was a vision, a shade, born of the imagination of Kristomarkus the. Fair. On and on they ran, leaving the enraged serpent behind, and distancing themselves on a weltering track from their lurking enemies in Yorkmere. On and on, until the road became a footpath and the forest thickened into a pale moonlightgreen canopy, and the sky descended like living slee.p on the weary riders.

As the steady hoofbeats of Verusilef put Beasly slowly to rest, he passed into a dream. And in his dream Schwas soaring through the air, being pulled aloft by the glowing Eveningsky Globe, like the boy who lassoed a shooting star. The gossamer fabric of the globe seemed to fray and frazzle like the soft edges of the universe; and forming in the silken warmth of its depths Beasly saw visions of armies and wizards and witches and wains, and cannons and catapults and fire. But of all that happened in his dream he could never recall, and he kept it to himself, just as he kept to himself his vision of the serpent devouring Kristomarkus on a stormy morning sea.

Lying flat on their stomachs in a hollow full of briers, Homer, Leks and Tru could just barely make out the flailing form of Gorthogorn through the trees in the distance. They heard the beast moan and growl as he struck again and again at the shrinking image in the sky, which slowly receded and was gone. A deafening silence followed; then the trio heard the unmistakeable sound of the snake approaching deliberately up the road.

Upon reaching the base of the weathertopped hill, Gorthog became deathfully still, and the sound of his malevolent voice sent a chill through the sparse fringe of the forest. "What is thisss I smell?" he hissed to himself. "Darkskins. And a pinkskin! What a fine potpourri."

Not one of the three moved, nor took so much as a breath. They heard the gravelly movements of the redbellied serpent on the road and then the crackling of treetrunks as he entered the wood. Lines of tall pines ready for harvest were felled like matchsticks, until not a hundred feet away the rebels could dimly discern the massive head of Gorthog swaying back and forth above the treetops scenting like a hound.

But there he wavered; and then he cocked his head as if to listen to some faint faraway beckoning; and after a moment he turned his lethal coils around and crashed off towards the west.

"Perhaps it is a trick," whispered Homer.

"I think not," answered Truman. "He has caught the scent of the wizard again. He will not return."

The trio pulled themselves out of the thorny hollow. Silently they crept up to the splintery clearing left by the passage of Gorthogorn the Mighty and with a sickly awe followed it back to the road. As far as they could tell from the markings up ahead at the fork in the road, Kristomarkus and Beasly had taken off into the sky astride the coalstreaked stallion, just eluding the vicious heavenward strikes of the earthshaking snake.

"Let us go quickly while it is still dark," said Leks Akanoo after several moments pause. "We are near the border of Shandoah, and the village of my people is but two day's walk from there. Many times have I trod this road on journeys of treaty, only to return scorned by the leaders of Yorkmire. I swore never to go back unless in search of vengeance; but now it seems we must avenge our fathers with petty espionage and womanly tricks."

"In my land women are considered most wise," replied Truman. "Perhaps their ways are sometimes better than rash male pride."

"Truly spoken," said Leks, "though I should like to see some day a land where women are thought wiser than men."

"In my land," interjected Homer Mugwump, "we keep our opinions about the sexes to ourselves, it being well known which is superior in argumentation."

The darkskins chuckled, and their mirth swept away the ominous memory of Gorthog.

"I wonder where the redskin wizard has gone," said Leks as he hefted his pack to leave.

"But he was a browomon!" retorted Truman, and his eyes opened wide at the mistake of the Shandoan prince.

"Are you both blind?" cried Homer. "He was as pale as I am!"

For such was the power of Kristomarkus the Fair, that whosoever beheld him did so in like image to their forefathers. For in fact his order of wizards transcended the false subdivisions of the tribes, who after years of intermarriage and nomadism were no longer so distinct; the Mlembe ranging in color from cocoa brown to a tawny beige, and the Shandoans from mahogany red to a copper terra cotta; the Gonzalin from chocolate bronze to a titian sienna, and the Greens from walnut toast to a pale coralline. Only the Milkbloods were truly distinctive, and then only because they replaced their blood with milk at the age of thirteen in order to take on the sallow white lactescence which in their vanity they deemed most lovely, and which they felt cleansed them of the savage passions of the hotblooded darkskins.

Shrugging their weary shoulders the three Outlanders set off northward on the road to Shandoah, pondering the magic of their wizardly leader. Had he really ascended into the sky like the gods of myth? And how could even a wizard hope to marshal the scattered tribes of the Outlands with a flabby little Milkblood to drag along besides? Or to march on Castle Galore with an army of farmers and hunters and gatherers of nuts and roots and berries? Were plowshares to be weilded against the tempered steel lances of the Imperial Guard, and sickles against scimitars? And what of the dragon Gorthogorn?

As the three~wildland princes marched northward, each in his own mind questioned the fate of his ancestral home and of his people. Each could not help but imagine the black dominion of Zamelda Galore, which now threatened to suck dry the lifeblood of Dalondria and cast her adrift into the endless night of oblivion.

Despite their misgivings the travelers were soon comforted by the green canopy of the dawnlit northern forest. Alder, linden and spruce they saw, and sprays of jasmine and laurel, and eyepleasing patches of moss and fern. Birdsong eased their hearts, and playful groups of squirrels scampered in the branches; for every living thing was awakened by the return of the Shandoan Prince Aleksar Akanoo.

The stone roads of the Yorks gradually gave way to the soft footpaths of the gentle Shandoans. Here and there were clearings where scented herbs and clover grew in profusion amid patches of well married corn and beans, or else furrows full of seed and sapling racer down to a quiet pond or glade. As Sarinda rose on the third morning out, the three comrades crested an azaleastrewn ridge and beheld the village of Shandoah in the wakening valley below.

As they descended into the valley the trio saw children emerging with hearty yawns from buckskin tents and earther~ halls, and women preparing meals beneath thatched pavilions, and men swaying lazily in hammocks made of hemp. The dwellings of the clans and families were spread out in a loose circle around a tall, broad councilmound which stood as high as five men and ran in like width for over a hundred feet. Some lived in skin huts near a spring or meadow, or in a pine carpeted clearing near a brook. Others had built long wooden halls roofed with moss and mud, which bordered on the common plots of corn and bean and okra. Leks pointed out where a young couple had set their honeymoon pavilion beside a lillyfishpond, and he showed his guests the lonely leanto of an aging herbmaster; and as they walked he explained their customs of burial, birth and marriage, and their rites of passage and distribution.

The passing of the three princes did not go unnoticed. Soon a buzz and rumor had spread, and from atop the councilmound an antlerhorn was blown. From every clan an elder now ascended the mound, and the people of the tribe gathered in circles around it. Up front sat the warriors and matrons and medicine men, and behind them young maidens and braves, and finally, leaving a respectful gap, sat the bloodless girls and the boys who had yet to pass their trials.

Leks, too, climbed to the top of the councilmound and bade his fellows follow; but at its crest stood an old man draped in feathers who held his hand up to halt to the tall Mlembe and the pinkskinned woodsman. He was Aldaan, Stargazer, chieftain of Shandoah, and when he spoke all were silent, even babes and sylvan creatures.

"None but redmen may enter here," he said, "save in times of war or peril."

"And such a time is at hand, father," replied Aleksar Akanoo. "These are the sons of our distant cousins to the south and west, and they come to lay before you their loyalty and their lives, if you will join them in war against the Greeneyes."

Aldaan scrutinized the strangers. "Very well," he said. "I welcome you in the name of my father's fathers, and offer you the blessings of our land." Placing one hand on the shoulder of Truman Allabam and the other on the shoulder of Homer Beauregard Mugwump, he led them to a low bench at the center of the councilmound, where they sat surrounded by the wise elders of Shandoah.

As Sarinda flooded the valley with morningflame, the council of elders sat and listened to the tale of the three rebels, from their secret meeting at the cave of the Oracle to the sack of the Bank of Blote, to the wizard's skyborne escape from Gorthogorn the Mighty. The people below were stirred by the descriptions of the velvetcaped Kristomarkus and the redbellied Gorthog; but the elders did not flinch, nor did they give pause to the tellers.

When at last the advice of the Oracle and the wizard had been weighed and the plan to steal the Gossamer Emeraldstone from Zamelda Galore told, the elders began a daylong debate over the role of the tribe in the war to come. They laid out patterns of red and yellow and blue and white corn, and they made intricate designs on the earth with similarly colored handfuls of sand. They passed a long feathered pipe between them that made Homer and Tru feel giddy. By the first starlook they had agreed to send a great army of warriors on the perilous way to weltering Fornica, led by a contingent of horsemen following their ancestral traderoutes to Old Will Road; and then on to do battle with the greeneyed witch whose forces had destroyed all but a tithe of their wooded homeland, and whose cavalries had slaughtered long ago the greater part of their line.

As the bloodred halo of sunset faded beneath the horizon and the midmoon peaked its brow up over the rim of hills in the east, Aldaan raised his hand and spoke to his patient people. "All Shandoah heed me now," he began in a firm and measured voice. "For many turns of the seven moons we have lain up the stores of war, that when the spirit awakened we would be prepared to defend our home against the Greeneyes. But now a great one has come out of the East, and prophecy calls him a distant cousin of

Shandoah; and his powers over wind and beast will be at the vanguard of what is to come. For in this time of creeping black nothingness we must live as the beaver, who waits not for the blessing of the land, but builds for himself a world to his liking.

"Rise up! Take courage! For tomorrow you will go west to seek redress in battle, that your children's children may again enjoy the bounty of the mother of us all. Arise! Awalien. Leave your women behind to tend the homeland, just as two poles of a tent, whereby one must stay to hold things still while the second is sharpened to a spearpoint to set wickedness aright."

And then a din arose from the people, and it became a rhythmic chant that lasted through the night. Fires were built that burned in great rings around the councilmound, wives lay with their husbands as if for the last time, fathers held their and she often locked herself in the spiraling globetower where dwelt the satiny green Emeraldstone. But she dared not use the Gossamer Globe without great care, not with the Blue Warlock lurking about.

It was in this lofty prison that she met with every magician and general and master of espionage in her command to plot out the final destruction of the Outlanders and the capture of the audacious sorcerer who dared to confront her in the very seat of her power. For more than anything else she now longed to posses the Eveningsky Globe, the one thing that could grant her complete dominion over the spreading oceans. And so even as Kristomarkus had led his band of rebels through the catacombs of Yorkmere, the Greeneyed Wizardress had been unleashing her two deadliest thralls on the burgeoning revolution. Of the first, Gorthog the Great, much has been said already. Though the second creature was not nearly as humongous as the redbellied serpent, in silent guile and icy black secrecy it far surpassed the stupid snake, and by its very nature sent a cold dart into the hearts of those few who beheld it verily.

Born of the consciencelessness of Zamelda Galore, this invisible arm of her far reaching thralldom was the very grip of greed; and indeed it was an arm, or a severed hand to be exact, which dragged behind it a maggotridden trail of sinew and muscle and bone. Its name was Mandelev the Invisible, and for generations it had acted as surely as if it were the severed hand of the Greeneyes herself, crushing the hopes of the lowly in its vicegrip and squeezing the last Earthing out of every pauper and stooge.

Zamelda took great pride in her mastery over this mindless spy. To any but those purest in sight and highest in thought the Hand was indeed invisible. By day or night it roamed the countryside at will, robbing debtors and killing poets and frolicking in every sort of natural and economic disaster. Many a peasant had foolishly sung the praises of the Greeneyed Empress, while under his nose her invisible right hand was putting the farm into mortgage and the family into generations of servitude. And many a banker or merchant had sent the Hand out to extract gold from a debtor or drought stricken farmer, who blindly praised Her Highness on his way to her prison.

Mandelev the Invisible she called it proudly, the long arm of the law, unseen slayer of sleeping lasses and dasher of poor mens' dreams. The hideous hand pulled itself along the ground with its three outside fingers in a grotesque, crablike threestep, steadying its course with its thumb and pointing its forefinger straight ahead like a blind man's cane. In this manner it felt its way about barns and basements and bedrooms and silos, stealing and killing and ravaging crops, and loosing flocks and herds, and sweeping up the dregs of failed enterprise to be ground into fodder. Measuring well over six feet from the top of its thumb to the tip of its pinky, Mandelev's grip was as strong as the clenching jaws of a dozen crocodiles, so that neither man nor beast could hope to escape death in its clutches. And even if it seemed a bit clumsy, the hand could gallop nearly as fast as a horse, alternating fingers and thumb, one two three one, kangaroolike in twentyfoot strides, thumpety thump, until at last it lunged on its victim and choked out its final gasp.

Mandelev had. been dragging its bloody entrails across Dalondria day and night since the very first rumors of the wizard from the East, passing through the western mounts and across the Outlandish Plains; and even now it was bearing down on Shandoah. For it was in the land of the ancient redskins that Zamelda expected the first seeds of dissent to sprout, and she wanted to send the ignorant savages an example of her might.

But even with Mandelev on the prowl and Gorthog on a rampage; and even with the ranks of thee Fornican Militia and the Imperial Guard at 'the ready and the York Militia calling all mercenaries to the Imperial Road; and even secured untouchable atop the globetower of Castle Galore, the wizardress was racked with doubts and uncertainties. For deep in her heart she feared that with the aid of the Blue Warlock the uncounted masses of savages and disloyal peasants would find a way to drag her from her cloister and chop off her head, or to dip her slowly in boiling tar, or impale her on a splintered spike of wood.

As she sat contemplating the revolt to come, a bead of sweat made its way down her forehead, and it slipped silently down her nose and dropped unheard into the thick carpet at her feet.

Homer, Leks and Truman watched the procession of warriors disappear into the hills. Aldaan raised his head in prayer on the mound above. After a heartrending pause the chieftain descended to.:where the travelers stood watching the now empty west. Al'daan passed his wrinkled hands across the shoulders of the three and without speaking led them on a northrunning path out of the village. A short walk later they found themselves at the foot of a tall rounded mountain whose face was dotted with smoothfalIing cliffs. The chieftain led them up an overgrown sidepath that ended at the base of a granite overhang; Frem a hidden cleft in the rock he drew out three oil tipped torches, which he lit with an awkward striking of flint. Handing them to the trio, he approached a huge boulder among the talus that littered the crumbly cliff. Ducking behind it he crawled on his stomach into a tight, damp tunnel.

Reluctantly the comrades followed.The tunnel ran in snakelike undulations deep into the mountainside. The three Outlanders had to drag their torches before them, for in many places it was only after a terrifying struggle that they managed to round a corner or slip beneath a suspended rock; and more than once Homer had to be yanked and pushed like a cork out of a particularly tight spot. One or the other often dragged his torch too long in the moist gravel and put it out, and once Homer and Truman both lost their flames at the same time.

Just when each had despaired of ever being freed from the maggothole the tunnel began to broaden, and soon they were walking along a mineralstained corridor that grew taller and wider as they went. They saw huge frozen droplets of every color hanging down from the ceiling in waxlike tapers, and below each of these was an equally bizarre squat of the same color and mass. Crickets they saw that were white as snow, and winged brown rats slept clinging to the walls and roof .

Aldaan led them on into the darkness, his keen eyes needing no torch to see. Now pools of crystal water were visible here and there, and trickling rivulets were heard echoing shyly in the gathering gloom. Once they had to cross a deep chasm on a long mossy logbridge with no rail, and several times the path hugged one wall or the other as a bottomless abyss loomed below. Finally Aldaan slackened his pace and stopped; for they had come to the pebbly shore of the Pools of Vision.

"Behold the last untainted water on all of Dalondria," he said, "whose purity grants clarity of vision: to those willing to see." Then the ruffled old chieftain gathered up--the torches--and to the dismay of all doused them in the water!

But dismay quickly gave way to wonder. For as their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness they began to discern dim shapes and patterns moving on the stone~,till surface of the Pools, at:ld, they soon realized that these were in fact the shades of men and'~omen and children and beasts; but none gave heed to the four visitors. Though Homer and Leks and Tru saw the mouths of the spirits moving in song and laughter, nothing was to be heard except the roar of perfect stillness.

"You have reached the window on the shadow world," --~' whispered Aldaan after a while. Now the astonished trio saw that cthe whole cavern was filled with strolling shades for whom no rules of gravity or mass seemed to apply. They could float out of walls or pass righ t through each other; and as the. eyes 0f the visitors grew ever more used to the darkness, they b--eecame 'aware that the whole mass of color and movement resembled a flickering fire!

"Behold the Frinndly Flame," said the chieftain, "the spark of the Evermind, before whom you now stand like newborn babes looking crosseyed into a mirror."

Aldaan reached into his buckskin britches and drew out three doeskin flasks, which he filled gently with water from the Pools. "These waters have great powers," he continued. "When drunk they give the power of foresight, which is both a curse and a blessing; and when dropped in the eyes they give the power of truesight, which destroys spellwork and wizardry, and frees the seer from deceitful visions and conjurations. Be frugal in its use, lest you fall under its control, or run short when need arises. And beware of its heat, which may burn in your belly or your eye, but which harms only those who are evil."

The ripples that Aldaan had sent in widening circles from the spot where he drew the frindle died down quickly. He handed a flask to each of the confederates, and he blessed them by dipping his fingers into the Pools of Vision and touching them each on the forehead.

"Take a drop from your flask and wet your eyes," he said, and they obliged him. "Now we must go."

Tucking the torches under his arm, Aldaan walked off alone into the darkness. Truman gasped at this, and Homer fell down to the ground feeling for the soft footworn path; but Leks stood silently waiting for the effect of the frindle to slowly seep into his vision. Retracing their steps they came at length to the narrowing tunnel that led back through the mountainside and into the open air; and though no one spoke it each in his heart knew somehow that having once seen the Frinndly Flame, they were all bound to be drawn back to its shores before many more passings of the moons.

Again the trio squirmed wormlike into the tunnel, and again Homer had to be pushed and prodded around the tight corners and under hanging boulders. This time the trip seemed shorter, and before long all three were standing beneath the granite overhang brushing the dirt and dust from their clothing. They shouldered their packs and made ready to leave. Suddenly a shriek rose from somewhere below.

"Aldaan!" cried Leks, and he bounded down the mountain towards the sound. Truman and Homer scurried after, but they could not keep up with the redman.

"Aleksar Akanoo can see the wind, and he feels the light of the stars," said Tru as he slowed down and held Homer by the arm. "Let us go warily and wait for a sound; for I fear some great evil is nearby."

Sure enough they soon heard another shriek, *nd shortly after a warcry rent the woods. "This way!" shouted Homer, and off they ran towards a clearing a short way below.

When they reached the clearing a horrible scene was taking place. Aldaan was struggling against a giant, bloody hand which crushed and squeezed the old chief while Leks stabbed wildly at its manthick fingers. The hand was straining to pull Aldaan deeper into its deathgrip as it flicked its first finger in powerful jabs that threw Leks onto his back like a flopping ragdoll.

Homer drew his sword and ran headlong at the creature, while Truman cleverly uncapped his flask and followed. Before Homer could make a lunge at the monster, it dropped Aldaan and seized Leks in its mighty fingers and threw him right on top of the charging woodsman. Quick as a cat Mandelev leapt again onto the chieftain; but this time it gripped him around the neck and torso and began to grind its fingers into his fragile ribs, crushing him as easily as a bear opening a melon.

Truman was now upon the back of the invisible hand, and he poured a fourthpart of his flask across the creature's knuckles. Mandelev threw Aldaan and writhed like a snake in a fire, sending Truman flying through the air in a somersault. Then it bounded off like a scalded dog, thumpety thump, fingers and thumb, one two three one, down the path and into the woods and off to who knows where.

Leks ran and threw himself beside~Aldaan; but the proud old chief was clearly drawing his last. "Mourn not, my sons," he moaned quietly. "I am called home to my makers. I have my peace." So passed Aldaan, Stargazer, shepherd of Shandoah.

"What sort of monster has done this?" cried Aleksar Akanoo, and he buried his face in the chieftain's breast.

"I don't know," said Truman. "But surely it was a demon of the Greeneyes sent to frighten us away from our cause. We must now be always vigilant, for I fear that but for the frindle we would have been unable to see this thing."

"And but for the frindle it might have killed us all," added Homer. "A drop of your wit saved us as surely as my name is Homer Beauregard Mugwump the Third."

Leks looked into the eyes of his companions. "You are good ones to have along. But I fear I must delay you--for it is my sworn duty to bear my father back home to the Burial Wood. I will i~pUerstand if you must go on."

"Shucks, we'll help you," said Homer, and the woodsman linked: elbows with Truman Allabam so that their arms made a seat on which to carry the fallen chief. Leks lifted the old man onto their arms and walked behind them, hugging the limp, tortured body into an upright position.

But the water from the Pools of Vision still lingered in their eyes; and to their amazement Aldaan seemed to stand up and walk like a shadow right out of his body, so that while the crushed corpse remained heavy on their arms, the grasped shade of Aldaan the Feathercrowned walked silent and proud back up the mountain and into the cave.

And though the three mourners were not there to see it, as the spirit of the chief entered into the tunnel it reached back with one hand and drew the granite boulder snug against the cliff, forever sealing the path to the Pools of Vision to any but the dead and the purest of heart; for a time of great peril was upon the world.

Verusilef ran until daybreak, picking his path like a Sightseeing shade through the tangled underbrush of the southernmost Reston Wood. At intervals Kristomarkus drew from beneath his cloak a bag of traildust, which he sprinkled to disguise his scent and direction. All through the day they rode, resting only briefly, and again through the night. As Sarinda rose lazily the next morn, the galloping charger and the bluecaped old wizard and the fat little boy from the clouds passed out of the land of Yorkmere and entered the forest of the noble tribe Mlembe.

No sooner had they crossed that timeweary border than their presence was relayed to the tribal elders on lowpitched drums made of ancient hollow logs, and a band of scouts was sent out to capture them. Before they knew it they were ambushed from the treetops by a dozen proud warriors, who took the old man and the sleepy boy gently from the horse's back and covered their eyes with black bands of cloth.

It was a day and a half's walk still to the center of the Mlembe bazaar. At every turn Beasly expected to hear the massive black hulk of Gorthog crashing through the trees; but for now the serpent was slathering madly across the hills and dales of the Eastern Empire, enraged by the burning dust that seared at his nostrils as he sniffed and snivelled for the wizard's scent.

On their third day out of the catacombs, as the noonday sun fell heavily on their shoulders, Kristomarkus and Beasly marched blindfolded into the village of the Mlembe. There seated on the ground beneath a circle of blossoming ghinkos they met with the wise priestess of the tribe, Maggie Mandelin.

"Why have you come unannounced into our land?" she asked Kristomarkus. "And why does a yellow warlock travel with a young Milkblood so far from shack or shore?"

"You see truly," returned the wizard, who was indeed jaundiced with age. "Do you not know the answer to your own question?"

"Perhaps," she replied. "But in these time one cannot be too careful, what with wizards and dragons about."

"Nor can one be too suspicious, when help comes unlooked for," said Kristomarkus.

"Make no claims you cannot keep," she snapped. "For to betray the trust of a priestess is punishable by death."

"And to tarry while serpents of legend hunt is punishable by the same," he retorted. "Now can't we go inside and speak freely?"

Maggie Mandelin stood and motioned her warriors away. "Follow me," she said curtly, and Kristomarkus took Beasly by the hand and strode off behind the ambrosiaskinned priestess. Her figure was lithe and lean, with round hips and shoulders and breasts. She wore a one piece cloak of red and yellow and green wrapped over her left shoulder and tied loosly at her waist. Her hair shone jet black, and the tight curls were cropped close to the scalp. Her beauty rivaled any nymph or riverdaughter, with cheekbones like the shoulders of high mountains framing her velvetsoft cheeks, and full lips presiding over a delicately cleft chin, and eyes like glowing chestnut gemstones.

The handsome priestess led them from the bazaar on a twisting southward trail that wound around pastures and mud houses and goatpens and fields. When they had cleared the outskirts of the village she headed across a broad meadow towards a hillock beside a small spring. There into the warm southern side of the hill a cave had been opened and carpeted with a bed of dried moss covered over with buffalo hides. Maggie drew back a flap and entered, motioning to the wizard to follow. Once inside the flap was sealed, and total darkness enveloped the trio.

"This is the womb of my vision," she said softly. "From here I can sense the very web of Spider Grandmother as she spins away eternities. The light of the black sun yields the purest sight. You yourself spoke of truesight, wizard. Perhaps you care for a drop of holy water?"

"Then if I am evil, my eyes will burn until I go blind," Kristomarkus returned.

"If your eyes burn, you were blind already," replied Maggie as she placed a drop of the water in her eye. A long silence ensued,

Beasly, who had become less suspicious of his wizardly captor, was chilled to the bone by mentions of dark suns and death. The black witch Mandelin seemed to the lad a frogfaced demoness an angel of the dark, and he fancied that she was secretly plotting to tear out his heart for a snack, or to make him a.iombie. If he ran he guessed he would be quickly hunted down and slain, and if he spoke unwisely he might be turned into a jackass by Kristomarkus. How he longed for a tweLve~course meal and a bubblebath in the clouds! One thing was for certain. The boy had to think of a way to escape the oppressive darkness of the black woman's lair.

"Your wizardliness, sir?" he finally peeped in a high and quivering voice. "I, um, gotta go, um . . ."

Kristomarkus laughed heartily at this, and Maggie let go a smirk. "Go on then," said the wizard, reaching up to open the flap. The sunlight streaming in nearly blinded the lad, and he winced tightly as he stumbled back onto the hillside. "Don't be long," the wizard said after him, "and be sure to go downhill."

As Beasly glanced back at Kristomarkus the glaring sun happened to strike the old trickster full on the forehead, and the image of his old face was burned in the youngster's mind. It was like the sunwrinkled face of some ancient mariner, full of flavor and character, with deeprunning crow's feet at the corners of the eyes, and floppy old jowls at the corners of the mouth, and dark dancing furrows across the domed brow. The eyes themselves were bright blue pools of summertime skycrystals, and they were covered by lazy slanted lids that seemed to droop under the weight of long snowy lashes. His nose was small and round like that of a portly woman, and his disarmingly youthful lips seemed always on the verge of tomfoolery. His cheeks were broad and square, and the pale yellow skin that stretched from cheekbone to jaw was pockmarked and wrinkled. His chin came to a round, unimposing point beneath a long,~thin goatee, and he had a wispy moustache that dangled from either side of his mouth like two long bands of frayed cotton.

But the most striking thing about the wizard was his broad bulging forehead, which protruded like a crownlet that circled above his temples and then joined in lumps and wrinkles with his melonshaped noggin. His temples were unusually dark and careworn, and his brow was deep and thoughtful, arched over by two bushy white eyebrows that danced up and down in time with his speech or his thought. His hair was thin and scraggly up front and atop, but it flowed in thick white curls about his shoulders, and random ponytails and silver braids ran halfway down his back.

With this image etched in his thoughts Beasly meandered down the hill and onto the meadow, where Verusilef stood grazing. But instead of looking out over the grass towards his home in the clouds, or towards the westerly destination of the wizard, he found himself looking back towards the mystical cave where Maggie Mandelin and Kristomarkus the Fair now dabbled in black magic and voodoo. Too frightened to run yet unwilling to go back inside, Beasly sat down at the base of the hillock and ruefully watched a passing school of clouds. From above he heard chants and songs and the strained pitch of debate, as trancelike the wizard and the priestess shared the knowledge they had gleaned from years of scrutinizing the invisible.

With the full effect of frindle seeping into his vision, Kristomarkus called Beasly back into the cave. As soon as the boy had been coaxed inside and the flap drawn tight, the Eveningsky Globe began to glow and hum, and a flourescent blue mist filled the dark burrow. Then to Beasly's complete obfuscation the globe itself seemed to unravel, sending satiny strands of gossamer spinning in animated patterns that soon took on vivid hues of red and green and magenta and cyan, until the whole burrow was brimming with a gossamer vision drawn from hidden scripts in the wizard's mind.

A dark cloud of billowing black smoke loomed above a sea of waving grass. The smoke and the grass were delicately connected by the thin plume of a tornado. The cloud of smoke and the spreading grasslands were both receding slowly from view, rolling backwards over the horizon with the languid majesty of the march of planets--but the tornado suspended between them seemed to stand perfectly still.

On the plain below there were cities burning, homes afire, masses fleeing in panic; whole forests were engulfed in flame, and the charred grasslands were turned into desert sand. And ever the black cloud puffed and billowed, looming larger and larger as the placid tornado sucked ceaselessly at the retreating earth.

Suddenly the plain gave way to a beach beside a dense jungle, and the jungle was ablaze like a raging inferno that choked even the relentless whirlwind. Masses of naked children were scurrying burnt out of the brush, aimless and crazed, fleeing into the sea. And as they dove charred and blistered into the wavecaps they were transformed into beautiful grey dolphins, who frolicked gratefully without care into the cobalt deep.

If they had bothered to look back they would have seen the land behind them sinking, sinking ever so slowly back into the handless sea, back to the salty womb for a second chance, as the tornado withered to a waterspout, and the rising mushroom of smoke was drawn genielike beneath the whelming brine.

Beasly awoke on the floor of the cave to the shrill sound of the wizard's whistle. Kristomarkus was summoning his steed Verusilef; for just as the gossamer vision had vanished, the Eveningsky Globe had burned suddenly purple, and darting red serpent tongues had filled the burrow. Gorthog was coming, drawn by the visioning globe.

"Listen to me, son," the wizard cried to Beasly. "Verusilef will carry you westward to the central Outlandish Plains. There you must find a herd of cattle, and you must lead it backwards across the plain and into the forest, following the remnants of Old Will Road back here to Mlembe. Do you understand, my boy? Now ride! Ride like a storm, little man, and do as I say!"

Just then the grey stallion thundered up the hillock, and Kristomarkus tossed Beasly onto him bareback. With Beasly clinging clenchfisted to the horse's silver mane Verusilef dashed off to the west, leaving his master behind.

Beasly had no idea how he would find a herd of cows, which he had only seen cut up into steaks, or how he would lead them backwards down the long untended Old Will Road; but by now he was under the grandfatherly spell of the bluecaped wizard; and though he knew it not, the Gossamer Globe around his neck would guide him and give him counsel.

As he neared the fringe of the forest, Beasly saw out of the corner of his eye the one thing in the world that he feared the most--Gorthogorn's black diamondshaped head crashing as big as a house through the treetops. The hungry lad closed his eyes and held on for dear life, hoping against hope that the serpent of legend would choose to dine on Mlembe warriors instead of chasing down the fleeing stallion.

Sure enough, the snake wavered and veered off to the south, and the globe slowly returned to a placid blue. Verusilef ran on through the afternoon and into the night, resting briefly at dawn; and Beasly gradually learned the tricky art of bareback riding by trial and error, so that he was soon able to sit high and survey the lands that stretched out before him. He had glimpsed little of the landscape through which the stallion had passed in darkness, and so his only hope of finding the wizard again was to find the faded remnants of Old Will Road, which issued forth from the pristine Mlembe bazaar.

Noon came and went, and then Beasly suddenly remembered the prophecy of the Oracle; for sure as shootin' on the bigskied open prairies that had slowly replaced the evergreen forest uncounted herds of cattle and buffalo and wild horses grazed, dotting the sea of grass from horizon to horizon. Seated there upon Verusilef, who stopped to graze and rest for a moment, Beasly Biltmore took a long, deep breath and felt for the first time in his life like a free man under the blue sky. He no longer felt like either a cloud dweller or an earthbound hostage; he felt like an adventurer, a wandering scoundrel, a hero in the title of some longago tale. .

"I will find a herd of cattle," he said to no one listening, "and I will lead it backwards down Old Will Road like a piper leading schoolgirls."

Forgetting for a while the peril being faced by the wizard and the Mlembe, Beasly prodded the charger into a trot and entered onto the great Outlandish Plains in search of a suitable herd. As the hot afternoon wore on his hunger increased its pang. Thoughts of cloudbound servingmaids carrying tray after tray of fruits and cakes and ices began to plague him, until he actually believed for a moment that on this desolate endless ocean of grass he smelled a crisp, sizzling steak.

The smell lingered, unlike any nostrilly hallucination; and to his surprise Beasly now saw a thin plume of smoke up ahead, towards which he rode as he began to salivate uncontrollably. The odor of cooking grew stronger, and soon the boy saw why. For there, sitting in the dust before a fire, was a comical little man in a ragged black suit roasting two fine pieces of tenderloin on the end of a walking stick. Behind him on a rock sat another fellow in a brown countryboy's suit all dusty and torn, with leather boots and a cowboy hat, sangin' and twangin' an old folk ditty on a battered "it tar.

Beasly rode up and greeted the men, but got no response. Instead the silly little cook tipped his black hat and twitched his black moustache and gestured to the boy to take a seat.

"My name is Beasly B . . . um, Jonathan Beasly," said Beasly Lemuel Biltmore the Second. "I've not eaten for two whole days."

The singer gave a nod and began playing "From Fornica to the Yorkmere Island;" but the little cook still gave no response. His hat was a dusty black tophat, and he wore a pinstripe suit that looked to have come from a garbage heap. The coat was far too small, despite the chap's girlish shoulders, and the baggy pants were far too large, being tied around his waist with a piece of rope. The shoes were also too large, and Beasly swore the soles were pitted with teethmarks. The cook turned the steaks one last time, then pulled them off the fire. Handing one to Beasly he winked and twitched his thick black moustache; then he cut the other in half and tossed a chunk to the singer, who kept humming the tune a cappella while they all lit into the meat like famished coyotes.

When they'd finished, Beasly explained his plight and asked the commoners if they knew how to make a herd of cattle walk backwards. Still silent, the little cook got up and dusted off his suit, then walked with a comical waddle towards a nearby cow. After stroking his chin and glancing around quizzically for a while, the stranger approached the cow from the front and tried, utterly without success, to push it backwards. Then he went around to the cow's hind end and pulled mightily on its tail; but he pulled so hard that he wound up falling roughly on his behind.. Next he stood beside the cow and pretended to walk backwards himself; but despite the little tramp's best pantomimes and moonwalks the stupid beast just stood there looking quite disinterested.

Beasly chuckled at the antics of the handsome hobo, and he'd nearly forgotten about his mission when Verusilef grew suddenly restless. The coalstreaked stallion reared up on his hint legs and shook his head wildly, then began to gallop in closing circles around a herd, all the while neighing so forcefully that he seemed to command the cows in some primal doolittlish tongue. No sooner had the wizardsteed rounded a hundred head into a tight group, than they all began to walk backwards towards the east! The funny hobo took a bow and tipped his hat as if he were responsible for the wizardry and waddled back to his campfire. Then Verusilef charged over to Beasly and nudged the boy in the chest whinnying softly--and bolted unrestrained to the southeast as fast as he could go!

"Wait!" shouted Beasly, too late. The lad could have munched down several more steaks, and he rather liked the company; but something seemed to tug at his heart, urging him to lead the herd back to Mlembe as Kristomarkus had asked, so off he went. The boy from the clouds walked all afternoon beside the wrongway cattle, until the amber plains behind him were tinged with sunset pink and lonely stands of oak and alder signaled that the forest fringe was close ahead. Mustering his courage, Beasly walked on into the gloaming dusk and the awaiting jaws of Gorthogorn; but as night fell and the woodlands began to grow dense and tangled he despaired of ever finding Old Will Road or his way back to the Mlembe village.

But just as he was about to sit down and cry Beasly noticed a spot in the distance that glowed like, lightningbug jam--and upon reaching it he realized that there was another just within sight up ahead! He followed the mysterious trail through the night, never guessing that the glowing spots were the magical droppings of Verusilef, who had found the overgrown remnant of Old Will Road on his way back through the lands of Mlembe to the beckoning Kristomarkus.

By the next morning's light Beasly was able to make out the faint hints that marked the stallion's path on the ancient roadway, and despite the tangled underbrush and a few wrong turns he was able to lead the backwards walking cattle on a smoothly curving route towards Mlembe. Again he marched all day and all night, and weary though he was through two more days and nights, so that by the afternoon of the forth day since leaving his wizardly kidnapper Beasly passed again into the refilm of Maggie Mandelin.

Little did he know the chaos and danger that awaited him, nor did he perceive the flickers of crimson and purple that welled up faintly in the globe around his neck. Even so it was a brave and noble lad who marched the final league into the deserted Mlembe village and witnessed the awful destruction that had been wreaked on the graceful tribe by Gorthogorn the Mighty. For every house and hut had been flattened, and every herd ravaged; and scattered about were the arms. and legs and heads of the proud warriors who had dared to defend their land, belched up by the beast to horrify any who would question his supremacy.

Beasly gagged on the smell of death and fell to his knees in a swoon of helplessness.

As Verusilef dashed off towards the Outlandish Plains with Beasly clinging clenchfisted to his mane, Kristomarkus ducked into the burrow of Maggie Mandelin and cleverly removed his velvet blue cape and his soft leather boots and his silver pantaloons. These he gave to Maggie; and while Gorthogorn was drawn momentarily to the west by the urgency of the globe, the priestess and the wizard in his longjohns ran like scared rabbits back towards the village.

The Mlembe had been scattered like seeds in the wind at the coming of the beast, leaving their homes and belongings and a few brave warriors behind. Maggie and the wizard hadn't a moment to lose as Gorthog wavered at the western edge of the broad meadow. At any moment the serpent might pick up the wizard's scent, and then no power on the planet--egg could stay him from attacking and devouring the Blue Warlock.

"We must lure him to the east, away from the boy and the village," said Kristomarkus.

"Then follow me," replied Maggie. "I have a...plan."

It is seldom that a wizard leaves himself in the hands of a mortal; but the princess Mandelin was a woman of high wit and principal, and so Kristomarkus ran on in his old gaffer's gait without question. Separated from his globe and feeling naked in his droopy longjohns, the wizard was as vulnerable as he had ever been.

Maggie led him down a southrunning path to the banks of the river Ebednezz,ar, where a large clearing had been made and a store of canoes hidden. "Take a boat and go quickly while you can," whispered the priestess. "My people will gather here over the next two days, as we have scattered our herds and arms throughout the forest to avoid detection."

"I will need no boat," returned the wizard as he pulled off his longjohns. "Now do as I say, for the very survival of Mlembe now rests on a ruse. Gather your people here until Gorthog has passed--theh "tnaIch every warrior you can spare to the west, down Old Will Road, to do battle in nine days' time at the setting of the fuU moons."

"But that road has been long unused," she exclaimed. " And we must save our herds if we are to save ourselves!"

"You must trust me in this," said Kristomarkus firmly. "Now take my clothing and scatter it in the woods to the east so that Gorth6g will be misled and frustrated."

The skinny old potbellied wizard handed her his clothes--and then he dove right into the swirling waters of the Ebednezzar! Maggie watched in amazement as the pale yellow arse and the flowing white hair of Kristomarkus the Fair drifted into the current; and as he frogstroked out of sight towards the south, he looked for all the world like a drowning white river rat being chased downstream by a pair of siamese turtles.

Already Maggie heard the sound of the serpent slothering down the path behind her, so she sprinted across the logbridge that spanned the river and ran headlong into the dense woodlands, tossing a longjohn here and a pantaloon there, and saving the great blue cape for last. In her wisdom she took the cape and climbed into the low hanging branches of a magnolia tree near a frightened buck; for she knew the habits of every woodland creature, and could detect a deertrail by scent alone. When the fleeing buck passed beneath her, she threw the velvety blue cape about its head, where it became entangled in its manypointed antlers.

The buck streaked wildly into the forest; but the more it tried to rid itself of the warlock's cape, the more entangled it became, so it ran and ran deeper and deeper into the forest like a lion gone mad. In all likelihood this saved the wizard's life; for if Gorthog was befuddled by the strange burning in his gut, which seemed to call him silently to the west, he was even more bemused by the dividing scent of his prey, which seemed to split in two near the village, and then into four or five directions just across the trickling river. When the serpent found pieces of the warlock's clothing spread about the forest he grew downright angry; and when he found a steady eastrunning scent he followed it savagely for the rest of the day and into the night. When at last the following morning the beast came upon the exhausted buck, he devoured it in a frenzy, cursing the treachery of the Blue Warlock.

By then Kristomarkus was ten leagues to the south, pulling himself tired and pruneskinned to the bank of the Ebednezzar, where he waited for a sign to summon Verusilef back from the Outlandish Plains. That evening the stallion arrived, for the subtle beckoning of a wizard knows no bounds of space or time. There they stayed for three nights and two days, heading back northward on the fourth day out to meet Beasly and the bewitched herd of cattle--and the wrath of Gorthogorn--back at the bazaar. For the serpent of legend had spent the meantime crashing about the eastern fringe of Mlembe and the western half of the Reston Wood in a vain attempt to rediscover the wizard's scent; and by the fourth morning the beast had begun to feel a faint urge pulling him back towards the village, an urge that grew stronger as the day wore on and was strengthened by a few whiffs of his wizardly quarry.

True to the vision of the Oracle at the exit from the catacombs of Yorkmere, cows had indeed walked backwards, and the quest of the wizard and the boy from the clouds was nearing a dark and dangerous hour.

But that is a tale that will await its time.

In the marketsquare of Yorkmere an army of ten thousand peasants and workers had been slowly assembling around the unpaid loyalists of the Militia, having been promised both loot and rank in exchange for fealty to the Empires. At the head of this army rode its commander, the Right Reverend President Howdy Doodle Goldfink, who in truth knew nothing of war except what he'd acted out in skits and picture shows. His poodle Fern danced about the scene gaily, staining the trouserlegs of the generals and showing off his trick of walking upright like a man. On the third day after the sack of the Bank Howdy called his troops to attention and had them raid every pantry and cellar in the city so that they would be well stocked for the march to Fornica, where the Empress hand angered the attack would come. But the people had all but depleted their stores in the chaotic days following the fall of the bank; for the markets had ceased, and the farmers and milkmen and butchers had all been halted by the rush to arms.

And few were left in all the parish who remembered still the art of living off the land.

By midday a paltry wagon train filled with half eaten loaves of bread and baskets of dried fruits and meats had been mustered. Though it held hardly enough to feed even the president and his staff of generals and their respective entourages on the weeklong march, they set out that afternoon in smart rank and file for the Imperial Road.

The Imperial Road was the handiwork of Zamelda Galore and her bureaucracies of Yorks and Forns, and it ran in an arrowstraight line right across the belly of the island, cleaving ancient forests and plains, and spanning mighty rivers, and blasting vulcanlike through the roots of mountains. It was paved with a concoction of slave bones and granite, running in places as wide as ten wains, and in others, such as near bridges and tunnels, as narrow as two; and at points there were storehouses and fortifications which in wilder days had been manned by brave cavalrymen but were now in disrepair.

Zamelda and her generals expected the tribes of the wildlands to gather on this highway as they were incited to revolt by the Blue Warlock. Any other route wound be hopeless, for travel between the coasts had long been outlawed and the traderoutes of old were all overgrown and forgotten. Only the Imperial Road stood firm; and though it lacked the glory of colonial times, it had remained for decades secured by the magic of the Greeneyes. Many famous raids had been made against the road, mostly by crazy bands of renegade redmen and blackskins; but each had been repelled easily, and massacres had been launched across the land in retalliation.

Howdy Doodle felt as proud as a peacock riding at the head of his great contingent, his white stallion decked in leather and his medallion covered uniform glinting in the sun. For two days he marched his troops down the Road, every step in time with the corps, of fife and drum, not a bootstrap intact and every head high, and every standard streaming with bold stars and crosses. But by the third evening there was no more food, and the troops became restless; so Howdy had a hundred cauldrons filled with springwater and placed on beds of hot coals. And then into each cauldron was placed a large stone! The Right Reverend President called his troops to attention, and taking an ivory bullhorn he ascended a banner decked platform and addressed them calmly.

"My fellow soldiers," he said in his most sincere and lilting voice, "it has come to my attention that there are rumors among you that there is some sort of shortage in our foodstuffs. I am here to assure you that no such shortage exists and that tonight you will all sleep with full bellies."

A cheer went up at this, and Howdy smiled his sincerest smile and raised his arms for silence. Then, his head bobbing kindly, he said, "Tonight you will savor the fine taste of a delicacy little known in Yorkmere but highly valued among kings and empresses the world over. It is stone soup, and if I do say so myself it is even better than my own dear mother's very best apple pie."

A rustle of disbelief spread through the ranks. Had the commander said stone soup? "Now lest you wonder how stone soup could be so delicious," continued the president, "rest assured that no detail has been overlooked in bringing you, my brothers in arms, this dietary delight. But if you feel that you need some hint of home in the soup, feel free to toss in some carrots or rabbit or vidalia onions; for I understand that each of you has a separate store of herbs and meats which you keep in some nook in your pack, or in your jacket pocket.

"The soup must cook for hours yet, so go on about your business, and be sure to make a contribution to the supper--for soon we will be on the plains, and then we can eat buffalo steaks morning noon and night!"

A grand hurrah arose, and every man dug into pack~pr pocket to spice the exotic delicacy so generously offered by the wise commander in chief. True to the word of the president of all the land, the stone soup was indeed delicious, and the hearts of the York Militia were haughty and high as they set out the next morn for the Outlandish Plains. As Homer, Leks and Truman carried the bloody, crumpled body of Aldaan into the center of the village, a great moan arose, and grief passed like an eclipse over all Shandoah. But a crescent of hope was born in the way Aleksar Akanoo ascended the councilmound and spoke to the elders and women and children.

"Hear me Shandoah!" he cried in a voice drenched with pride. "The Milkbloods have been clever in their plundering over the ages, and we have bowed to them in our shame and weakness. Few have risen in the name of our ancestors to demand retribution, fewer still since the Greeneyed Sorceress sent her hordes of magicians and soldiers to rape the wildlands. We have become like pets, amusing our masters with tricks and dances and filling their dramas with stooges and their sideshows with wrestlers. Now while our braves and warriors march into battle, I am obliged to sneak up to the witch's castle like a thief and you to sit here like corn in the field awaiting the victor.

"This cannot be!" he shouted, and a murmur passed among the listeners. "Aldaan is dead, killed by an apparition of the Greeneyes. We must honor his memory with a procession to the Burial Wood in the northwest; but we are no longer bound by his word to sit here like teepee poles, when we could be outwitting the stupid Yorks and sending our best poison darts into their pale flanks. So as soon as our father is laid to rest, you must fly to the south to intercept the Yorks, who will soon be far down the Imperial Road, and cause them what mischief you can. For I have seen the Frinodly Flame, and it has spoken to me, and I fear that the balance of all things teeters on the weight of a spider's eyelash!

"Rise up, proud Shandoans, and forget customs of old, and send the whitehairs and boys into battle; leave only the infirm and small children and girls, who can live like our forebears in the forest, and so carry our line into the uncertain future. Arise, for time is short! Arise, and follow the trail of tears, and let the death of our father be the rebirth of our pride! Arise, and carry only baskets and snares and flasks, for the forest will provide!"

A buzz shot through the throng, and a great bier was brought out, and the body of Aldaan laid upon it; and every Shandoan who was able vied for a piece of the bier's pine frame. Without pausing for sentiment or question nearly a thousand whitehairs and maidens and boys walked off into the northern wood behind their fallen chieftain. All day they marched, and through the night, and through another day and night as well; so that by the next morn the procession was passing as silently as a herd of fawns into the grove of giant hemlocks and redwoods and firs that marked the boundary of the Burial Wood.

The Burial Wood had been growing for over a thousand score in years, ever since the first Shandoans had migrated at the parting of the sea from Panazhia. For in that span all the great chieftains and warriors and medicine men of every family and clan had been buried in a single valley at the northeastern edge of the Northcross Cascades, a valley scoured bare by a southrunning glacier in the age of first ice. Since this was the very same age that had caused the seas to drop and the great sandbar to form, the Burial Wood had begun to grow at the moment the first chieftain was laid to rest. He was the chieftain Hopewell Silkencloud, he who led the tribe across the seabed to the newpromised land, only to die himself in the crossing. Bearing his body to the virgin valley the people had laid him to rest at the northern end beneath a redwood sapling. For age upon age this practice had endured, and as the wood had spread southward the valley had become a living monument to Shandoah, with stands of five hundred foot firs and hemlocks growing in sacred profusion.

But a thousand score in years is four times the span of even the oldest sekoya, so on the northern end of the valley there remained only wide rings of weathered grey stumps. Toward the middle of the valley the stumps gave way to stands of tall hollow spires, the gutted corpses of the great trees, which grew gradually taller as the wood ran south, until in its southern fifth the forest was green and lush and majestic. And at the southernmost fringe of the Burial Wood was a sparse grove of dwindling trees and saplings ringed with thickets of rose and azalea.

Where the saplings ended the bier was set down on a soft, mossy spot and a grave several feet deep was prepared. The body was then laid to rest and covered with ferns and garlands; and in a solemn file the grievers passed by the grave one by one, tossing in a handful of dirt, until Aldaan the Stargazer was covered over. And then Aleksar Akanoo brought forth a sapling, which he planted just above the chieftain's breast. Standing over the grave he spoke to his people, holding aloft a lock of Aldaan's long greyblack hair.

"Now those of you who will must follow the paths of our ancestors to the Imperial Road, choosing a leader from among you, and doing as I say--for in this hour you must call not on strength, but on swiftness and silence and skill. So gather as you go every poisonous weed and root and spider, and send the stealthy boys into the camp of the Yorks to poison the food and water. Lace their bedding with sumac and ivy, and drop black widows on them from the treetops.

"Now go! And let the wisest give up their best secrets of herblore, so that the very web of Spider Grandmother may be turned against our enemies! Go, and stay the army that even now is bearing down on your menfolk. For the battle will be hotter in days to come, and every advantage must be pressed." An elder named Delaria Banks was chosen to lead them, for she was well versed and knew the ways of the Yorks as well as she knew the way of the forest. In the fragrant forenoon the nine hundred women and boys and whitehairs set off grimly towards the southwest, picking their paths like shy does on a course for the Imperial Road.

Leks and Homer and Tru took a different course, climbing straight out of the valley and heading west along a saddle. As they looked back over their shoulders the Burial Wood appeared as a cresting wave of green, curving up slowly from the northern valley floor and bursting into a steep green wavecap in the south.

The three tightened their packstraps and lurched off with great strides into the heart of the forest. All day and all night they hiked, stopping only to munch on trailbread and fruit, so that by the early morn of the seventh day out of the catacombs they entered into the lands of the renegade Greens. There they were greeted quite suddenly by a ring of greenclad woodsmen, who recognized Homer and sent up Hearty cheer.

"Welcome to the land of my people," Homer said to his companions. "Here you may find that pinkskins can also live at peace with the forest, and that not all of us have milk running in our veins. My village is but a short walk away."

Just then a horrible scream rent the air, and a rustle was heard in the woods behind.

"The invisible hand!" hollered Truman as he bounded off towards the sound with his frindleflask drawn, leaping bush and log with fire in his heart. For the shrewd Mlembe warrior had come to realize that this gnarly severed hand was the incarnation of a Mlembe legend, a legend told to every child about an evil spirit that stalked the night, killing the wise and squeezing the heads off babies. Now he understood how the Greeneyes had visited so much illtimed misfortune on his people, depriving them over the generations of their poets and prophets and of the land that was their birthright.

He arrived too late. As Homer and Leks and the band of woodsmen came upon the scene they saw to their horror two young Shandoan maidens, who now lay crushed and dying on the soft forest floor.

"They followed to warn us," said Truman as he held them in his arms. "Those who tried to return to Shandoah have been killed by an unseen force. It is the work of the hand.'' i. ,,

"We must avenge this," said Leks as he bent down and lightly touched the cheeks of the blackhaired girls. "The trail of tears is stained with blood."

Two shallow graves were quickly dug, and the maidens were buried on a southfacing ridge beneath a thicket of laurel. The three confederates then followed the band of woodsmen back towards the village of the Greens--but they took no path, and they walked not in file, but spread out, so that no sign of their passing would betray the location of their sylvan hideaway. Just as Sarinda peaked in the noonday ether, they entered a pristine, needle covered glen which was surrounded by towering trees that licked the sky. Ferns as tall as men grew there, and a sweet hodgepodge of herbs and wildflowers of every kind and color.

"This is my village," said Homer wryly. But no house was to be seen, not even a wigwam or leanto, and there wasn't a soul in sight.

"I do not understand," said Leks. "Is this the stronghold of the Greens, upon which much of our hopes rest? This is no time for foolishness."

"But this is their village," Truman said slowly, and he marveled at the four hundred foot tall redwoods that ringed the clearing.

Homer chuckled, and then he drew a small antlerhorn from his pack and gave it three sharp blows. A bustle was heard from above, and to the surprise of the colored princes hundred of ropeladders were tossed slinking from the treetops to the forest floor, and thousands of greenclad woodsmen and womenfolk came scurrying down. From hundreds of burrows hidden about the glen thousands of children emerged, their greencapped heads popping up like brighteyed prairie dogs, until a legion of wildhaired Greens had assembled in and around the sheltering valley.

To the center of the clearing, atop a househigh fallen mosscovered sekoya, went five score of the wisest and most eloquent Greens, who held council for the rest. To this number went Homer Beauregard Mugwump to represent his family of followers. Standing before this assemblage were two men and a beautiful auburnhaired woman. One of the woodsmen told Leks and Truman that they were the McCrackys, their leaders, and that the mer~.were cousins named Jeffery and Jackson D., and that the woman was the matron Jennalyn. The fivescore council hummed in debate for the rest of the afternoon, calling first on Truman Allabam and then on Aleksar Akanoo to describe the deeds of the Blue Wizard and the might of the redbellied serpent, as scribes arid runners recorded the list of things and sent word of every tiff and tale to the curious onlookers.

By evening it had been agreed that twenty thousand Greens would fan out and march south across the Imperial Road, them. converge and follow the ancient paths of the redmen, which would lead them to the ford at Massacree Crik where Old Will Road ceased abruptly at its intersection with the great highway of the Bloods. Here they expected the tribes and nomads of the Outlands to bivouac but a day's march away from Castle Galore.

As the seventh moon peaked its brow over the rim of the world a silent feast was held, though no fires were lit nor meat cooked; for above all the Greens valued the secrecy of their woodland sanctuary. Few dreamt that in the battle to come the power of the invisible village would remain concealed--and then perhaps it would be the cohorts of the Greeneyes who would be forced to run and hide.

Savoring full bellies and the pleasant intoxication of the fragrant forest air, Leks and Tru were led up a hempladder and shown to a cool, comfortable flet built into the hollow center of one of the giant redwoods. The whole heighth of the tree was abuzz with the settling of hundreds of sleepers, and in the forest frogs gronked and crickets chirped and nightingales and whippoorwills sang.

And somewhere in the darkness lurked Mandelev, hoping for a chance to pinch off the head of some impudent rebel or child. But even Mandelev feared the burning frindle, and feared also the invisible ones who kept a constant vigil on the moonlit landscape below.

Before dawn the Greens came to life again, and great stores of bows and quivers and arrows with green feathered quarrels were brought forth from the burrows along with light packs of dried fruit and meat. Then the twenty thousand soldiers set off to the south, heading for the Imperial Road, or for the hidden meadows of their wild steeds.

The three McCrackys led Homer, Leks and Tru to the council log, upon which sat a wily Mlembe ranger dressed in leather carrying a fine wooden lyre inlaid with emeralds and rubies and gold. Down he hopped, though the log was twice as tall as he, and poking out his hand he greeted first Leks and then Tru with a hearty shake of the forearm.

"Thanks and praises," he said, "so happy to see you. And you a Mlembe priest, I hear? My mum was Mlembe, you know."

"You mustn't waste time," interrupted Jennalyn, who was the matron of the largest family of Greens and the spokeswoman of the village. "For you must now betray your futures on an impossible quest, scaling cliffs as high as a moon and spying on a sorceress who could kill you all with a whim and a wink. Go now with our blessings at your backs, and may luck be with you."

With that she kissed them each on the forehead, and Jeffery and Jackson D. shook them by the hand; and with the ranger Marli leading the way the four bold spies marched off dramatically into the forest, heading westward through the deepest canyons and the highest passes of the northern range.

Marli proved to be a flawless guide. Many a time he led the trio hopping across precipices like billygoats, or climbing vertical caverns behind waterfalls. For Marli was a seasoned ranger, well learned in the lay of the land in prarie or mount and accustomed to living by his wits. He had spent year after year alone in the wildlands, divining every secret passage to the west in the hopes of someday leading a mission of revenge against Zamelda Galore.

As the eighth day out of the catacombs passed into night, the three Outlanders were yet strong enough to march and climb and rappel without rest, putting leagues behind them with each new sunrise despite the rocky terrain. With each passing hour the peaks grew higher and the cliffs crumblier, and ice began to form in their whiskers and hair; but they pressed on, knowing that the battle was nigh. No sign of Mandelev was seen or heard, for Marli knew every trick of doubleback and trailruse, and the path on which he led his comrades was fraught with overhanging cliffs and deadend gorges. With but two days left until the wizard and his army of Outlanders were to march on Castle Galore, the four travellers crested a high pass and suddenly beheld below them the sheer walled ring of the Witchfang Mountains.

"See the teeth of the Greeneyes," said Marli reverently. "Sharp and white, like shark's teeth."

"I thought the Witchfang was impassable," Homer ventured to say. "Our best spies and mercenaries have been sent that way, and none have ever returned to explain their failure."

"Ah, but none have been Halftone Marli, now have they?" he replied a little whimsically.

"Besides," said Leks, "we have but two days to reach our end. We must pass over, or fail."

Silently they marched on, and the snowcapped crags of the fabled Witchfang grew and grew as the sun set far behind. A broad river had to be forded in the valley at the foot of the peaks, and in the steeprising cliffs and shoulders were foamy creeks and runoffs that crashed in torrents and falls; and every ridge or gully seemed to lead straight to the base of a hemlockhigh precipice, which Marli would climb like a slow deliberate spider before tossing down a tether of rope to his comrades.

On into the night they climbed, and the light of the moons guided their rappels and belays until just after midnight, when the seventh moon disappeared behind the threatening summits above. Then they found; a broad ledge where they slept until daybreak; and resuming the climb at first light, they reached the icy summit before the tilt of noon. There in the ringed crater below sat Castle Galore, the citadel of the Greeneyed Sorceress.

In the haze the castle of Zamelda Galore seemed a dull grayish green, and the half league of barren rocks and pits and geysers that lay between the four desperate spies and their destination seemed alive with an invisible malice. Here the hikers paused as Marli prepared to scout out a path alone--but not a word was spoken, and none dared look into the others' eyes.

Suddenly in the distance trumpets sounded, and for a moment the very earth beneath them seemed to rumble. Sparks and flames spewed up from inside the castle walls, and the sounds of great machines being drawn about were heard, and the voices of thousands of men filled the crater shaped valley with a forceful roar. The four Outlanders could barely discern a bustle through the acrid haze; for they were just in time to witness the Imperial Guard marching off to their war games, every man clad in thick steel armor and carrying a tempered steel lance and a double edged sabre, a force of fifty thousand infantrymen and cavalrymen and corporals and captains and generals.

In two dawns the battle would begin, and already Sarinda burned a deep mercurian red. Marli and Leks and Homer and Tru watched the legions of the Guard fan out into the valley like files of tiny ants; and as Marli scurried down a gravelly bank to scout out a trail, the hearts of the four spies grew cold and hard.

Krisomarkus rode into Mlembe and up to the clearing where he had dived buck naked into the Ebednezzar four days earlier. There he met with Maggie Mandelin, who gave him a handsome blue cape of the finest Mlembe craftsmanship and a chesthigh sword of druiden make. Nothing had been seen or heard of the gigantic serpent, but the pinkskinned boy had shown up that afternoon with a herd of cattle, and he was waiting in the village bazaar for the wizard's return.

And so Maggie and the wizard rode together on Verusilef into the center of the ravaged village, where they met Beasly and his herd of bassackward cattle. Kristomarkus made the cows march backwards into the surrounding forest, where they mingled with the scattered herds of the tribe; but to what purpose he would not say.

Then they waited. Maggie returned to the clearing by the river Ebednezzar, while Beasly and the wizard waited astride the stallion at the western edge of the bazaar, ready to flee towards the plains at the coming of Gorthogorn, whom the wizard now summoned with a bend of his will. The afternoon wore on, and the sky began to turn red and hazy. Just as Sarinda began to quicken her pace on her westerly march through the ether the Eveningsky Globe began to glow purple, and a rumble was heard in the distance.

"Now hang on tight, boy," said the wizard, "it's going to be a rough ride!"

After a few long moments the great head of Gorthog appeared malevolently above the treetops at the eastern edge of the village, and he swayed purposefully back and forth as his tongue darted. here and there and his nostrils snivelled and flared. But Kristomarkus didn't run or hide; instead he prodded Verusilef right out into the open! Taking the Gossamer Globe from around Beasly's neck and holding it aloft, the wizard cried out in a voice like a thousand preachers:

"Gorthogorn! You are a slug and a brainless worm, and you couldn't catch me if your worthless life depended on it! And your Greeneyed Mistress is a dogbeater and a pimplep~tsseJ sow!"

The snake was enraged. With one mighty thrust of hits lethal coils he lunged upon the wizard and the steed and the terrified boy from the clouds. But Kristomarkus was ready; he sent a thick poppylaced cloud of scalding purple smoke spewing into the face of the onrushing beast; and as Gorthogorn coughed and writhed Verusilef took a long running start and with a great effort leapt softly upon the black scaly back of the serpent.

Beasly couldn't believe his eyes! There he sat, his britches wet, on the very shoulders of Gorthogorn the Mighty!

Verusilef sprawled himself out across the hard black scales, and Kristomarkus leaned forward over Beasly, peering deep into the globe for any hint of things to come. But this was no time for pondering; so just as Gorthog was recovering from the purple smoke the wizard cast a mirror into the sky just in front of the serpent's nose, so that the reflections of the horse and the boy and the wizard were dangled before Gorthogorn like a carrot before a carthorse.

"Come and get me, you slimy leach!" shouted the wizard. "There is no food for you here! The brownskins have led their cattle to the west so you can't touch them! Ha! By now the whole herd is somewhere on the Outlandish Plains!"

Gorthogorn was groggy from the poison smoke; but when he saw the Blue Warlock flying through the air taunting him he let go a thunderous growl and slathered off madly to the west. Sure enough, the hoofprints of the Mlembe herd seemed to wind their way through the forest towards the setting sun. But a burning ulcer began to tear at his gut, and a bothersome itch gnawed at his spine, and it seemed that no matter how hard he tried the warlock stayed just out of reach.

On and on they went, the redbellied serpent following the tracks and the scent of the backward cattle, with the wizard and his steed and the boy from the clouds bouncing and straining and hanging on for dear life. Now a plot began to hatch in the wizard's mind; and while it seemed to be the last chance at saving the world from the ravages of Gorthog and the Greeneyes, it filled even Kristomarkus with dread. For it was a desperate plot indeed, and would require one more escape from the clutches of the beast. As the wizard watched the forest of the Mlembe pass by, he did not despair. In fact he chuckled at the thought of the stupid snake following the trail of the backwardswalking herd and unwittingly clearing a large swath in the tangled forest that followed precisely the path of Old Will Road.

Kristomarkus put his hands on the shoulders of Beasly sitting before him and stopped the lad from shaking. "You have done well, my little friend," he said soothingly. "Now you must trust me once more. When we reach the Outlandish Plains we will leave Old Will Road, whose ghost is still plain to see where the forest has not consumed it. There the beast will stop to feed, and there I must leave you. You must ride Verusilef alone into the west until you reach the dwellings of the Gonzalin, where you will show their leader all that you know. The Mlembe will come close behind, and other allies as well; for Old Will Road is clear again, and rumor travels as swiftly as the crow. So when the time comes, Beasly my boy, ride and don't look back!"

Soon the sun began the last tangent in her westward retreat, and the sky began to darken from Carolina blue through all the shades of a somber Picasso. As the daylight failed Gorthogorn entered onto the Plains and began to snatch up mouthfuls of stampeding cows and buffaloes, which he ate whole like bonbons. But wherever he crawled the wizard remained just beyond reach, and the ulcer in his belly and the itch on his spine began to intensify. When finally he could no longer take it he threw back his head in a rumbling hiss and began to roll over and over on his back like a moccasin tossed on embers.

Verusilef was thrown well clear of the snake, and Beasly landed atop the gossamer wizardsteed like an egg landing on a pillow. But Kristomarkus was no so lucky; he landed in a heap like a dead puppet right before the serpent's nose and had no chance to escape.

"Kristomarkus!" cried Beasly as the stallion leapt to his feet, and grabbing the boy by the scruff of the neck tossed him astride his back. As Verusilef dashed off to the west, the boy from the clouds strained his head to look around; and he saw the mighty black serpent take the wizard in his steely forked tongue and draw him struggling into his gaping jaws, with venom dripping from manhigh fangs and a lusty, clattery laugh belching forth from his silverstrewn belly.

"A billion pieces of gold!" hissed the monster. "A meal fit for a dragon!" And he slithered off merrily onto the plain, dining casually on the grazing herds and relishing in the rapture of the Blue Warlock's death.

But if the truth be known, Gorthog was a dragon only in his wildest dreams, and his troubles were closer than he suspected. For in the evening as he lounged in a stream cooling his coils and taking in huge draughts of water he began to feel rather ill; for digesting a wizard is no fun task. The next morning he was overcome by a stinging maelstrom of colors that swept through his brain, and he scrumpled off in a trance across the plain. That evening he fell into a deep and profound sleep, and in the dreamdays that followed he fell completely under the sway of the three warring Gossamer Globes, whose subtle reckonings are hidden from even the cleverest.

Beasly barely noticed the changing landscape as he was carried westward by the steed Verusilef. Instead his mind dwelled on the death of the wizard and on the vision he'd seen seven nights before in the globetower of Castle Biltmore. Had he seen into the future? Or had his stepfather's crystal been under the spell of the Eveningsky Gossamer Globe? And what would happen to the Outlanders now that Kristomarkus had been devoured by the serpent?

Blindly the boy rode on. Evening gave way to midnight blue as the moons marched in their procession through the starlitsky, bathing the eerie western mounts and mesas in a dull and colorless seven shadowed light. On all sides the horizon became a ring of great dark dreamcastles crowned with craggy irregular battlements and grotesquely distorted spires.

As dawn began to filter into the east Beasly saw that he was entering into a broad, steep walled valley about which were scattered dozens of tall, slender rock formations that resembled pagan totem poles, or the hulks of towering, long dead trees. Astride Verusilef in this vast and desolate land the boy began to long for the companionship of the wizard and the renegade woodsman and the two tall darkskins; but Kristomarkus was dead, and the others were off on a mission to the very doorstep of Zamelda Galore, a mission likely to end in torture--or worse.

Now doubt began to weigh heavily on the boy's mind. As best as he could figure the war was already hopelessly lost, for with the wizard now but a trinket in the belly of Gorthog the army of wildland rebels was without a leader. The very thought of Gorthog the Great sent a pale chill across Beasly's face, and all of a sudden the slender rock formations became sinister reminders of the serpent's presence in Dalondria, so that every spire that peeked up over the horizon became for a moment the great head and neck of the beast, drooling and ready to pounce.

"I must go on," he said to himself, and he repeated it again and again. "I must--for I am hungry, and surely these allies of the wizard will feed a hungry boy."

Morning passed, and the sun became so hot that by early afternoon the distance had become a swimming mirage, a blur, as if some noxious gas were pouring out of vents in the earth ahead. But while Verusilef charged on unremitting through the heat, Beasly was soon panting and sweating, and his tongue became swollen and parched. This the stallion understood, and so redoubling his pace Verusilef dashed into the west in search of an oasis or trickling spring.

Evening came early, aided by a veil of high clouds in the west. Refreshed, Beasly marvelled at the exotic grassless landscape, at the trees with no leaves, and the bushes with no roots, and at the dusty whirlwinds that were swept here and there by the stirring heat of the sun. For two more nights and days he rode, stopping only for brief respites wherever there was a smidgen of water, until late in the afternoon bf~the~enth day since leaving the catacombs Beasly noticed a shyer, magnificent cliff in the distance to the southwest. Verusilef veered towards it, charging over the sandy plain in great galloping strides. With every passing league the giant cliff seemed to grow another thousand feet out of the horizon, until at last its entire face came into view.

There at its base, barely discernible in the fading twilight was a city that seemed to have been carved right into the stone! Though the height of the rock city was less than a fifth of the northfacing cliff, it was yet a work of art and wonder that far surpassed in scope and handiwork of the Tower of Bubel or the Bank of Blote, and rivaled even the gemladen gables of Castle Galore. Upon reaching the city Verusilef let out a great neigh; but no answer came down from the many windows and doors and catwalks and terraces that dotted the massive cliff.

"Hullo!" hollered Beasly, and again there came no response. "It's me, Beasly Bilt . . . uh, Jonathan Beasly!"

A voice from the desert startled the boy.

"Hullo to you," it said.

Beasly turned his head, and standing there behind him was a short, darkhaired old man dressed in a cowhide poncho and wearing a broadbrimmed black hat with a feather in it.

"I am Poppa Gonzala, leader of these lands," he said. "Why does one so young and pale come this way alone, what with war in the wind, and blood in the sky?" Poppa Gonzala made a broad gesture towards the west. Beasly turned his head, and sure enough the sky burned a dull blood red as the halo of the sun faded into the abyss.

"Then you know of the war already?" asked Beasly, perplexed.

"Indeed I do," answered Poppa, "and I may have news for the messenger as well." Just then a huge black crow landed on the old medicine man's shoulder, and for a long while the man and the crow stared trancelike into each others' eyes. Poppa nodded his head and muttered in an ancient tongue.

"My friend here tells me that you come from the land of the Milkbloods in the east," he finally said, "and that the serpent has devoured our ally the wizard; this last is grievous news, if it is true. But oft the eye deceives, and more readily even than the heart."

"How do you know these things?" Beasly asked. "For I have ridden three whole days to tell you what Kristomarkus . . ."

"So that is his name," interrupted the old man. "I know much of the goings on in Dalondria, little one. For my eyes are keened by frindle from the pools of vision of my cousins in Shandoah, and I can read the eyes of the crows. Or have you not Unheard of the Crowmasters? You met one not eleven days ago, when he saved you from drowning in the waters .of Lake Waldinmuck. You would be dead, my son, were it not (or the vision of the Oracle--dead at the hands of your~own people, Jonathan Beasly."

Poppa Gonzala helped Beasly off the stallion and led him to a ropeladder in a cleft at the base of the cliff. Poppa scurried up the ladder like a squirrel, followed by an awkward, trembling Beasly; for the first ledges and landings were some fifty feet high, and the first row of windows and doors was fifty feet above that. When finally the boy came panting over the ledge he found himself in a narrow courtyard from which nearly all of the stone city could be seen. Rising some two hundred feet more up the face of the cliff were row upon row of square windows and doorstoops, and wooden footladders were placed here and there along the gently curving terraces that followed the crags and clefts of the overhanging wall.

"But where are your people?" asked Beasly shyly.

"They are scattered in every direction," Poppa answered. "For the Gonzalin are a great and varied tribe, and our allies are many. Even now my people are moving to join their cousins and comrades on Old Will Road, and others are fortifying the ford at Massacree Crik while our swiftest runners are ferreting out every gypsy clan and outlaw hideout across the land to call the summons of war. We have waited over many generations as the Greeneyes built her empire of puppets, and we have endured all manner of oppression and deceit as she carried off our goods and laid waste our lands. Quietly we have suffered, so that our strength would be unseen in its growth, and our revenge all the more sweet."

Beasly saw a light in the old man's eyes, as if they were peering into a raging fire; and for a moment a blue wisp of fire seemed to appear and lick at Poppa's forehead.

"Why do you hate the Milkbloods so?" Beasly asked softly. "And don't you hate me, too, if I am one of them?" For despite his youthful innocence, by now Beasly had a fair notion of the ways of the world, and of the source of the wealth of the Coastal Empires.

"I understand, Jonathan Beasly. You still fear that you are a hostage, don't you?" said Poppa. "And that we will somehow use you to barter with the Greeneyes. Fear not, little man. Your people have disavowed you. We accept you, open armed. And have you not made a choice in your heart as well?"

Beasly strolled over to the edge of the stonehewn courtyard and gazed into the blueing heavens. In less than a year he would have undergone the rite of passage of the Milkbloods; but now things looked very different.

"It is time that you learned much more, my son," said Poppa after a long pause. "Come here and drink of holy waters, and let me tell you the story of Dalondria."

Beasly drank from the flask that was offered without question. Immediately his mouth and throat and stomach began to burn; then his head began to feel light, and a bright flame seemed to ignite behind his eyelids. A parade of soft colors like a butterfly wing kaleidoscope passed before his eyes, and he felt sick to his stomach. Then he lost his balance. Poppa Gonzala caught the boy from behind and laid him down gently on the cold stone floor as the Gossamer Eveningsky Globe began to hum and throb; and sitting down crosslegged the old medicine man took Beasly's head in his lap, and stroking the lad's temples he began to speak:

"The first people of Dalondria were Shandoan, and they came across a sandbar from Panazhia when the ice came and the sea parted, hoping for warmer days and fertile lands in the newpromised world. For age upon age they lived here undefiled, scattered about in clans and villages and nations. But after a score times a thousand years a new tribe began to appear from the east, a tribe of redhairs and brownhairs and yellowhairs, bearded men who came across the sea from the house of the rising sun. The first of these were good men, humble refugees like the Shandoans; but they were soon followed by wicked, cunning men, who came in great schooners with weapons and plagues, and lay claims upon the land.

"The Shandoans believed that the land belonged to Spider Grandmother, the Creator, and not to men or nations. But so many of the invaders came that the clans were forced ever westward, and were herded and slaughtered alongside the buffalo, kitty corner from the Bank, until they were reduced to less than a tithe of their former numbers. And then the invaders carried Mlembe slaves to Dalondria from the great southern sisterisland of Panazhia, so that soon there were more Mlembe than there were Shandoans; though this aspect of history is poorly remembered, owing to the nature of the crime, and to the continued forms of dominion practiced by the Milkbloods.

"But on the southern sisterisland of Dalondria a different course of events took place. There the invaders were of darker hair and skin less pink, and they began to intermarry with the southern Shandoans, and they mixed religions and cultures. And this people became the Gonzalin, cousins of both the Shandoans and the bearded invaders.

"And before your great great great grandfathers were born, Jonathan Beasly, a sorceress rose to power, and she used her magic to usurp the king called Damakros. Since then she has united the Milkbloods into two Coastal Empires, and sent her armies of peasants and Pinkertons and robber barons to pillage the divided tribes of the Outlands and to rape the weaker clans of the southerlies. For five hundred years the Milkbloods have laid waste the land for wood and precious metals, and made conquest on the smaller islands of the world. Only now, my son, the weak have become stronger, have multiplied their numbers and their knowledge, and stand ready to defy the Bloods and their heartless Greeneyed Empress. For the mightly have become weak and fat in their lavishness, and they are running out of lands to plunder."

Suddenly a black winged form eclipsed the sky as a giant crow swooped and landed on Beasly's chest. Beasly gazed into its depthless black eyes; and then, as the hum of the globe around his neck subsided, he saw in the crow's eyes yet other visions, visions of the marching Mlembe on Old Will Road, and the York Militia camped beside the Imperial Road, and of Homer, Leks and Truman in a mighty green forest.

Now another crow landed beside the first, and in its eyes Beasly saw Castle Galore astir with the muster of the Imperial Guard, and he saw Gorthogorn writhing in an icy northern lake, and he saw a grotesque, bloody hand dragging itself through the woods in pursuit of an army of greenclad renegade outlaws.

And then, his mind numb and his eyes atingle, Beasly passed into a deep, soothing sleep. But he dreamt no more, for the residue of the frindlewater was blackest oblivion.

Poppa Gonzala carried the boy into the city of stone and laid him down in a hammock. Then the old man walked into the courtyard and raised his arms high into the air, calling out a list of names in the language of his ancestors. A dozen giant crows came and took hold of his clothing, and they carried him off to the south, over barren lands and lonely mountains, and into the realm of the Isles of Gonzalon. As the seven moons rose silently over the still sea Poppa Gonzala bade the crows to land at the northernmost islets and atolls, where the Gonzalin had been gathering for war.

At each island he made two trips, one to the poppasanta and one to the conquista; for each island had two rulers, one a priest and the other a warrior, whose powers varied from generation to generation, and between whom there existed a constant tension. At each island he spread the call to arms, to sail on Fornica, and so come to join the legion of the Outlands marching on Castle Galore. Despite the demands of the turncoat conquistas the call was answered almost to the last man; for these southern peoples had no love for their Milkblood cousins, nor for the Greeneyed Empress. And their reverence for Poppa Gonzala far outweighed their fear of the conquistas.

As a test Poppa offered frindle to each of poppasantas and conquistas. But the holy priests refused the test, fearing some incursion on the righteousness of their chants and rites--and the conquistas simply laughed at the offer, for each in his heart of hearts recognized the wickedness of his power, born as it was of death and plunder, and learned from the cruel and greedy Bloods.

Only one ruler, who was of blood mixed in both the priestly and warrior classes, drank of the frindle gladly. For he was the offspring of the great Bow liver Simon, the goodman whose grave begat the tyranny of the dark ages of the southerlies. Thus the young prince Gayaverre earned the love of Poppa Gonzala and of all the crowmasters and visionaries in the vanguard of impending revolution.

As it defiled slowly down the Imperial Road the ad hoc army of Commander in Chief Howdy Doodle Goldfink had nearly doubled in size. The offer of rank and booty to any who would fight under the banner of the Greeneyed Empress had spread just as quickly as the rumors of a Bluecaped Elf who danced a jig around the York Militia while tossing coins to the peasants; but while most were heartened by the tale of the generous elf, a few of the more cynical and greedy among the peasantry flocked to the Road to await the call of Commander Doodle.

And so as Sarinda lit the sixth morn of their westward march, the mighty Yorks broke camp and fell into file behind their great leader, who rode proudly at the fore smiling and singing his favorite tune.

"I've got spurs that jingo jangle jingo, As I go riding merrily to war," he sang innocently as the rouge spots on his cheeks bounced in time to his song. To his troops, Howdy seemed the picture of confidence, a man without fear. But to some of the exiles and outlaws who had joined the marchers, the president's song was a mocking reminder that the man who leads the march is inevitably at the rear of the battle. And to certain of Howdy's own henchmen and advisors the song was proof only of his stupidity, and of the fact that he had never been any closer to war than his grandma's whiskers (unlike his pet Fern, who had been in some messy dogfights with the neighborhood's most vicious pugs and toy poodles).

At noon the militia stopped to munch on some of the cold steaks they had carried from the Outlandish Plains. Howdy chose to take his lunchbreak reviewing the new additions to his swollen column of troops, who looked for the most part like they had been dragged across half of Dalondria by wild horses. In the hopes of impressing his Greeneyed Empress, and of keeping up the appearance of military discipline, Commander Doodle extended the lunch and ordered that each of the new troops have a bowl placed over his head in order to cut his hair to a uniform length. While this did indeed improve the looks df. the proud Yorks, it set the march nearly three hours behind schedule; and so as the afternoon faded into evening, and the men began to anticipate their supper, Howdy sent out the order to march on until the rising of the midmoon, which was still several hours away.

By nightfall the corps had reached the fringe of the Delgalon Wood, as the Milkbloods called the dwindling southern end of the once great forest of the Northcross Cascades. Here giant redwoods and oakses and ancient hemlocks and sekoyas stubbornly overarched the Imperial Road, forming an increasingly thicker canopy that in places blocked out the stars completely. In the dank and silent darkness beneath the gnarled tangle of the great trees the more superstitous Yorks fancied that they heard rustlings and owls. And one fearful young soldier even reported having seen a greyhaired old woman peering down at him from the treetops! This last report soon spread from the rearmost stragglers right on up to the entourage of the Commander. While the tale evoked hearty laughter among the troops, they were nonetheless relieved to hear Commander Doodle order the torches to be brought out and distributed among the men. Soon a dozen score of oil soaked torches were lit at the head of the great column of men and then passed back; and though the rearguard grumbled that only a few torches had reached them, the corps was soon on the move again.

Now flickering torchlight shadows began to play about the canopy like dancing phantoms; and as they fell upon the road below, the passing troops were reminded that the Imperial Road, which had been slowly worn down through the generations, contained fragments of skeletons and skulls, which protruded here and there like ghastly memorials to the slaves and coolies who had fallen during its construction. Even Howdy cringed at the sight of the exposed bones, and especially at the fleshless upturned faces of those who as they toiled to build the massive slab must have collapsed onto their backs, only to watch in horror as the.pavers and graders crushed them heartlessly into the advancing mortar.

For a moment, the Right Reverend President felt a glimmer of some odd and repressed emotion out of his past. But Howdy Doodle Goldfink was a man of firm resolve, and so he threw out his~chest and straightened his back and began to repeat the lullaby~that Narny Faye often used to lull him to sleep.

"Peace from war and power from death, peace from war and power from death," he said over and over, and his heart became as calm as the heart of a babe in its mother's arms. Evening passed and night settled in. The troops, who hours before had been longing for an end to the march, now began to dread the appearance of the fourth moon. Sure enough the moons began to rise, and each in its turn made its way towards the~to~ of the sky, until even in the depths of the Delgalon Wood the midmoon eased into sight.

Just about that time the column reached a clearing, where Commander Doodle ordered his troops to halt and set up camp. The clearing was just large enough to accommodate about a fifth of the men, so that by the time the president and his entourage had set up their tents and groomed their horses there was only room for the officers of the Militia and a few lucky corporals to bed down on the soft forest floor. After a quick meal of cold steak and coffee, the rank and file were obliged to sleep on the hard, bumpy Imperial Road.

Night passed slowly. The sounds of animals rustling in the trees and bushes kept many an itchy soldier from sleep, and the eerie calls of hoot owls, which had supposedly disappeared from these parts long ago, seemed hauntingly human.

At daybreak Howdy rose and left his tent, roused his generals and advisors, and went in search of his young bugler. But much to his dismay the Commander found that he couldn't awaken the lad, who seemed to be under the influence of some of Zamelda's strongest sleeping poppies. Howdy then tried to rouse the troop himself with a sharp blow on the boy's bugle; but only a few of the Yorks responded, and many of these seemed to sway and swagger like drunken sailors as they struggled out of their bedrolls. At this the Right Reverend President and Commander in Chief became angry, and he stalked back towards his generals and began admonishing them to help wake the obviously soused troops and restore some discipline. A large cauldron of coffee was brewed to help the men shake off their hangovers; and as its scent wafted through the camp, Howdy ordered that a tall soapbox be placed in the center of the men so that he could make a speech.

Notwithstanding his timely stone soup speech, Howdy Doodle Goldfink was quite unaccustomed to speaking without a script. His Empress had always told him what to say and how to say it, and had often berated him mercilessly when he committed an unfortunate slip of the tongue. So as he stepped up onto the soapbox, Howdy relished the chance to speak freely to his charges.

"My fellow militiamen," he said warmly, "in but two days time we will reach our sister parish in the west, and there we shall enter into a glorious battle to crush the impudent savages who have foolishly chosen to follow the evil rebel warlock from the uncivilized lands of Panazhia. You must all realize how fortunate you are to represent the Eastern Empire in this most righteous and patriotic cause, uh . . . well, since we have almost all the weapons in Yorkmere."

Here Howdy faltered, for he noticed that most of his men were still in their bedrolls, and those who had risen were by and large either staggering towards the coffee, or were doubled over like drunks spitting in barrels. "Of course," he continued, "we must all be prepared for battle, as I'm sure you understand. And spirits of any kind can only impair . . . and, well . . ."

By now a hubbub had surrounded the coffee, where the generals and their staffs were trying to pull rank and dip the first cups. Howdy tried his best to ignore the commotion, and he turned instead towards the men who still lay sleeping on the Imperial Road.

"And so, my comrades in arms, with regards to whatever spirits or potions you may have chosen to carry with you, I ask that you just say . . ."

Howdy's attention returned abruptly to the cauldron, where his proudest general had polished off a tall cup of coffee, let out a yelp, and fallen unceremoniously onto his back. This made Commander Doodle furious, and he hopped off his soapbox and began trying to awaken the troops by kicking them in the ribs.

"Get up you ninnies!" he hollered. "I command it in the name of the Empress! Get up or I'll . . . she'll . . . I'll . . ." His threat was cut short by the sound of dull thuds coming from the cauldron of coffee, where several dozen troops had apparently passed out despite their morning brew.

"What's the matter with you?" he shouted. "You fools, you're all stone drunk! And at this hour of the morning. Why, we'll be late for the war!"

Howdy was startled by the appearance of a large black widow spider dangling inches from his face out of the treetops. Flailing with his hands he turned to run, only to trip over one of his sleeping troops, whom he recognized as the young bugler.

"Get up, boy, and blow this dang thing!" Howdy pleaded. When the bugler didn't respond Howdy gave him a swift kick, at which point a second redmarked spider crawled out of the bedroll and across the bugler's face, and into the hollow eye socket of a skull in the Road nearby.

"What in tarnation's going on?" Howdy screeched. "What's the matter with you men?"

A sudden voice startled the president from behind.

"They're dead," it said, and Howdy wheeled around to behold a greyhaired old woman dressed in buckskins and holding a small basket of woven grass. "Would you care for some toadstools to flavor your coffee?"

The old woman held out her basket and began to approach the Commander, who stumbled backwards for a moment and then high tailed it for his horse, which he mounted with a leap.

"Peace from war and power from death, peace from war and power from death," he repeated reassuringly as he spurred the horse across the bodies of his men and onto the open road.

And then the Right Reverend President of all Dalondria sped off horrified back east, followed only by the soft sound of a hundred children stifling their laughter in the treetops.

From their perch just below the crest of the Witchfang, Homer, Leks and Tru could barely discern the great dome of the Tower of Bubel that stood miles behind Castle Galore in the center of the marketsquare; and off to its right the Cloud Kingdom of Fornica floated calmly above the Lake of the Eye. As they waited for Marli to return from his scouting, the trio gazed grimly at the league of acid pits and scalding geysers that covered the floor of the giant crater that formed the inner ring of the mountains. And though the three had great faith in the skill and guile of their friend Marli, each knew in his heart that he was more likely to meet with death than glory in the hours to come.

When Marli finally returned the sun Sarinda had long ago dipped below the western rim of the mounts, so that the castle and the surrounding mire were lit only by vague sunset colors reflecting off the clouds. But just as the four were silently preparing to began their treacherous nightlong hike to the foot of the castle, they were suddenly aware of a stirring in the valley below. Little did they realize that the Greeneyes had learned of the death of Kristomarkus in the jaws of Gorthogorn; and she was about to send a gossamer vision out across the land.

From their vantage point Marli and the three tribesmen could just make out a flicker as Zamelda opened the redwood doors at the top of her globetower; but when she spread out her flowing black cape and began to chant her mezmerous visioning spell, and the Emeraldgreen Gossamer Globe began to glow and spark, they knew right away what the flashes of light coming from the highest tower in the castle meant. They watched with astonishment as bright green bolts of lightning and vivid green dragontails began to flash between the witch's tower and the Tower of Bubel, growing in intensity like~an approaching thunderstorm.

Just as dark faded into purple the lightningbolts and dragontails subsided, and the crater fell under the gloaming shadow of night; and then in an exploding flash of light the dome of the Tower burst open, and zillions of tinctured glass bubbles went flying out in every direction like infinite radiations from a~common base. As the bubbles sped silently overhead on their journeys to the thousands of hearthstones that peppered Dalondria, Marli and Leks and Homer and Tru were nearly blinded by the awesome maelstrom of red and green and magenta and~cyan, which continued unabated for some time before it began to slacken and die out.

The four men stood quietly for a moment after the bedazzlement stopped. They had no way of knowing what words and images had been conveyed by the magically tinted bubbles, nor of the reason behind Zamelda's decision to tickle the sky with her spell; but they knew that something must have happened to free her from her fear of the wizard Kristomarkus. For his last intervention in her visioning, in which the Reverend President Howdy Doodle Goldfink had appeared as naked as a jaybird before the whole of Dalondria, had done more damage to her Coastal Empires in a few short seconds than any enemy had managed over all the ages.

"We must go quickly, while she is busy with her Make Believe," said Marli, and he hopped off the ledge and scampered down a gravel gully with the three Outland rebels following in close succession.

Even as the spies set out on the last leg of their hopeless quest, thousands upon thousands of translucent hearthstones were set to glowing, and trillions upon trillions of prismic lodestone bubbles began swooping down chimneys and flues from the furthest capehouse in Yorkmere to the rowdiest stripmining town in the remotes of Fornica. Every eye in the Coastal Empires was trained on the show that Zamelda had concocted, and every ear strained to hear her soothing voice.

Now Zamelda Galore was nothing if not shrewd; and so the message that she sent was not one of gloating over the death of Kristomarkus, nor of retribution against her defeated enemies, but rather one of reconciliation. As her face faded into view in every den in every dale in every ham and hamlet, the Greeneyed Empress made quite a show of her benevolence and mercy, promising that no harm would come to those who had taken up arms against her. And to top off her victory speech, Zamelda concluded with a long pictureshow portraying all the kind and generous things she had done for her people, like building them the mightiest army on land or sea and rewarding their beloved counts and dukes and barons with cartloads of gold and diamonds and firestones from the Southerly Isles. She graciously gave Howdy Doodle Goldfink credit for dismantling the ugly poorhouses and schools and orphanages to make room for more warehouses, all the while selflessly distributing the proceeds to the deserving gentry, from whom they would surely trickle down to every man, woman and child in Dalondria. All this and more she~pa raded before her thralldom, complete with her flawless narration, and rousing patriotic music, and an occasional subliminal for her latest line of cosmetics.

But alas! If the quality of her production was picture perfect, the timing was downright awful. For the show coincided with another sundown story, a story told by an old man in a poncho to a boy from the clouds, around whose sun reddened neck dangled the Gossamer Eveningsky Globe. Even as Zamelda'.s kindliest voice was commemorating the many details . A, her warmth and generosity, and even as the strains of the national anthem were stirring the hearts of the proud and patriotic, the visions in thousands upon thousands of hearthstones and crystals were crackling and fading, only to be replaced by scenes from the tale of Poppa Gonzala.

Little did she realize that across the land the image of her cold green eyes was turning to aquablue; and little did she realize that even as she narrated scenes of her kindness and reveled in her magnanimity, folks from coast to coast were being treated to an animated history of deceit and greed and murder.

"Who can forget that it was I, I who gave the red man his lands?" she stated proudly, while Dalondria watched her Milkblood armies cruelly murdering thousands of Shandoans and stealing away their homeland.

"And who can forget that it was I, I who freed the black man from his bondage!" she boasted, while the nation watched her Milkblood thralls whipping and chaining and lynching the Mlembe into submission.

"And who can forget that it was I, I who taught the brown man to govern," she bragged, while folks in every time zone watched her spies assassinating southern kings to install her tyrants and stealing great crops to bring to her markets in the north.

For such was the power of the Eveningsky Globe, that even in the absence of its master it visited calamity and confoundation on its enemies. And such was the wisdom of Poppa Gonzala, that he alone understood fully the heart of the GreeneYes. whom he pitied more than he despised.

An eerie silence fell upon the valley of the Witchfang as Marli led his comrades towards the foot of the five sided castle. Over the years the wily buffalo soldier had learned much about the refuge of Zamelda Galore, devoting his every hour to a relentless search for a way to penetrate her defenses until he knew the grotesque landscape that surrounded the castle as well as the back of his own hand. Through years of careful espionage he had learned to pick his way between the bubbling acid pits, and he knew how to time the eruptions of the searing geysers and poisonous fumaroles; and so he was able to lead his charges with some degree of confidence. But as the greengrey castle began to loom larger and larger, the four men each had to fight a growing sense of doom.

The night passed as slowly as flowing pine tar. Unbeknownst to the four Outlanders, a great tiz was taking place inside the castle as the Empress learned of the latest betrayal of her visioning, and of the disappearance of Howdy Doodle and the York Militia somewhere in the Delgalon Wood. For despite her far reaching powers Zamelda was prone to bouts of paranoia; and so after her usual tirade she ordered that her baths be doubled to two an hour, lest some germ infect her, and she recalled most of her guards to double the watch inside the castle, lest some intruder try to poison her meal.

Dawn came, and the rebels found themselves in the shadows of Castle Galore. Marli was puzzled by the lack of guards in the towers and on the parapets of the structure. He feared that he was walking into a trap as he cautiously skirted the northern battlements; but not a sound was heard and no guards were seen. Near the northermost point of the castle, the men approached a sewer that flowed out from beneath its walls which was known to pass through the witch's dungeon as drinking water for her prisoners; but it was blocked by a heavy iron gate that was anchored deep into the mortar, with neither hinge to lift nor bolt to break nor lock to pick.

Homer harrumphed and put his hand on Marli's shoulder. "I suppose if you could get us through that, you might could squeeze a Biltmore through the eye of a needle, eh?" he said.

Marli hushed the smartalec woodsman and pulled his comrades into a tight huddle. "This is a magic gate, not at all what it seems," he whispered. "It's spell is meant to hold the prisoners of the Sorceress inside, not to keep us out! But to pass through it without alerting our hostess will require, for a moment at least, that your hearts be as pure as frindlewater. For Zamelda does not believe that any heart is pure. She lives by finding a little piece of wickedness in every man, even in the best of men--and every turn of her magic depends on that tiny bit of wickedness."

Leks and Truman and Homer each felt a chill like a pale fire in the back of his neck. For each held in his heart a measure of evil, and so feared that the moment he tried to pass through the gate the wrath of Zamelda would fall full force on the foursome.

"Now listen to me, and do as I do," whispered Marli as he pulled a small wooden box from his pack. Inside were four dried flowers of red and gold and green, which gave off an odor like freshly cut christmaspines. "These are frindle flowers," he said a bit more loudly. "They have the power to purify your heart, but only if you believe in them. Now take their spirits into your breasts, and follow me."

Marli gave a flower to Truman, and one to Homer, and one to Leks; and passing his hands over each flower he sang an incantation that set it afire. Then he blew sharply on his own flower and drew a breath of the lingering smoke into his lungs, indicating to his fellows to do the same.

And then he danced across the trickling sewage and right through the iron grate!

First Truman, and then Leks, and lastly Homer breathed in the smoke, improvised a dance, and passed terrified through the gate; but not a sound was heard once they were inside, save the telltale beating of their hearts, which heaved three gloomy christmaspine sighs.

"Where's Marli?" asked Truman after his eyes had adjusted to the darkness.

"There's only one way he could have gone," answered Leks. Taking out his flask of frindle he set a drop in both his eyes and gave a drop to each of his friends. Then he sloshed through the muck into the depths of Zamelda's dungeon with Homer and Truman close behind. As the frindlewater began to take effect the three could dimly make out the dark, dank cells that lined the sewer. In each cell was a man, or a pile of bones, or perhaps both, though the condition of the prisoners was so pitiful that one could hardly tell the difference between man and corpse and skeleton. The iron gatework that held the captives showed no sign of a lock, for each cell was built permanently into the mortar.

After following the sewer for over a furlong, the trio had found no trace of Marli. Here and there they saw footlong rats, and pale worms writhed everywhere in the slowly flowing sewage; and twice they saw thin, knotty arms shoot out from behind the iron bars to snatch up a worm or leech. After a while Leks reckoned that they were nearing the center of the great pentagonal castle; and sure enough a dim light soon came into view up ahead. Grimly the Outlanders approached the end of the tunnel, where they found Marli waiting with his frindleflask drawn.

"Stay back and be quiet," he whispered, and he cocked his head as if to listen for some sound coming from the expansive cavern ahead. After a moment he motioned to his confederates to follow him into the great dungeon, which stood as high at its center as an ancient hemlock, and around whose five walls were stacked thousands of cubical cages just large enough to hold a seated man. In places the cages were stacked eight or ten high, so that the poor souls on the bottom were obliged to live covered in the excrement of theirifellows; and in other corners were men buried up to their necks in the muck, where cancers and slimy crawly things ate at them from inside and out.

On the opposite end of the dungeon a pale light flickered, and voices could be vaguely heard. Marli led the rebels silently towards the light,~stopping behind a huge stone pillar which afforded a view seldom seen by any man--a view of the inner sanctum of the Greeneyes. For here in her vast prisons Zamelda employed the most brilliant and nefarious of her magicians, whose necromancy and experimence revealed the hidden engine of her powers.

Their eyes keened by frindle, the four Outland rebels peered at the western wall of the dungeon in awe. Rising twelve stories high, and stretching three or four times that distance in breadth, stood a honeycomb of perfectly square cubicles, each exactly the same in size, and each opening onto the dungeon. Here cloaked magicians endeavored to reduce waste back to its edible components, or to extract sunbeams back out of cucumbers, or to make gold out of lead. Others worked more closely with the prisoners, hoping to discover which parts of the brain must be removed in order to cure revolutionaries and deep thinkers, or finding ways to implant frivolous needs and desires, or attempting to place the half brains of the stupid and docile into the bisected skulls of the overly brave or intelligent. Still others worked to make the voice of the Empress addictive, or to develop great basilisks capable of sinking whole islands, or to improve tortures and poisons.

In one corner were several magicians whose projects dealt with the refraction and multiplication of prisms, which they manipulated with charged magnets; next to these were a dozen magicians whose expertise allowed them to mesmerize and obfuscate whole crowds at a time. And at the top of the grid of cubicles worked the most exalted of Zamelda's sorcerers, the Glassmasters, wizards of Make Believe, whose arts could make men believe anything under the sun--though this required a subtle admixture of potions, optical illusions, charmed speech, and alchemy, and often left the subjects no more alive than zombies.

Marli pointed towards the topmost cubicles and whispered to his comrades. "The King is held there, on top. Wait for me here, and keep your weapons handy."

Taking his pack in his teeth, Marli skulked across the damp dungeon floor on his hands and knees and approached the honeycomb from around a dark corner at the far right side. Like a spider he climbed the sheer walls of the cubicles, wedging his bloody knuckles into the gaps and crevices that separated the structure from the wall of the dungeon.

Upon reaching the top, Marli tiptoed his~way to a point just above the cubicle that held the King, where he pulled a coil of hemprope from his pack. He tied one end of the rope to an iron support and sent the other end slinking silently to the floor below. Taking the rope in his hand, Marli turned his back to the dungeon and leapt off the edge of the cubicle, grasping the rope lust in time so that he was flung feetfirst into the laboratory of the Glassmaster like an apeman swinging on a vine.

"Death and dread!" he cried as his compatriots watched wideeyed from below. With the speed of a cat he grabbed the helpless nagician in charge and flung him screaming to the floor. Immediately an alarm was sounded; but before the first of Zamelda's guards could reach the dungeon, Marli heaved the frail limp body of Damakros across his shoulder and shimmied down the rope. The Outlanders sprinted from behind the great stone pillar to Marli's aid. Truman lifted King Danf~kros from the browomon's shoulder and cradled him in his arms.

"To the gate! Take him back through the gate!" cried Marli as dozens of saber wielding guards began to descend from above.

Truman turned and ran back towards the fetid tunnel and the magic iron grate, while Leks and Homer drew two ancient druiden swords from their scabbards, and Marli pulled an obsidian scimitar from his. In a flash they were engulfed in battle.

"Stand back to back!" Marli screamed, "and don't let them get in between us!"

Swords flashed like lightningbolts, and blood began to pool at the feet of the dour handed rebels.

"Death to Zamelda!" cried Homer as he hewed the head clean off of one of the guards.

"Long live Damakros!" cried Marli as he severed a forearm.

"To the revolution!" cried Leks as he skewered the heart of the captain.

The dungeon floor was soon littered with a dozen writhing guardsmen as the thrusts and parries of the Outlanders whizzed like buzzsaws through the foul air. The onslaught continued unabated, and finally took its inevitable toll. First Leks took a blow that gouged out his eye, then Homer was gashed across the scalp by a spikehammer, and Marli had his foot hewn by the battleaxe of a falling guard. But just as defeat was imminent, a bright green explosion burst in the midst of the fray, and a hideous shrieking laugh rent the air.

"Who dares it!" screeched a voice so shrill that it shook the very foundation of Castle Galore. "Who dares to trespass here, even in my sewers? You fools!"

Cowering in the blood and filth, the three spies slowly raised their eyes toward the top of the cubicles; and there, with her batskin cape outstretched and her green eyes casting a malevolent glow, hovered the bloodfreezing form of the Greeneyed Sorceress Zamelda Galore.

"Ah, my sweets," she said, and her voice was suddenly smooth and lilting. "What delicious deaths I've been preparing for you!"

In the meantime Truman had reached the iron gate. In his arms the King weighed no more than a child, and seemed barely able to understand what was happening.

"Sire," whispered Truman as he tried to prop the old man up on his feet. 'iWe must hurry." But the King gave no response.

The sound of footsteps at the far end of the tunnel startled the proud Mlembe prince. A dark form was slowly making its way toward the gate, and Truman heard the sound of a sword being drawn from its sheath. Taking the frindleflask from around his neck, Tru forced a hearty draught down the throat of the King, who stumbled, shook his head, and righted himself; then Damakros stood tall for the first time in a hundred years, and a light long dead returned to his eyes.

"Quickly, follow me," whispered Truman as he faced the gate and took his last swig of the chaste water. Then he bumped headlong into the grate, which reverberated like a gong! He couldn't pass through!

"Who goes there?" came a voice from the darkness. The footsteps ceased, and the air became as tense as the high string on a harp. Truman cast a fearful glance at the King beside him and then drew his ancient wooden sword from its scabbard. Sticking close to the tunnel wall he skulked into the gloom, measuring each step with all the stealth of a stalking panther, until not ten feet away his frindlekeen eyes could just make out the shallow breathing of his foe.

Like a great black cat Truman leapt forward, and with a mighty stroke his sword met his opponent's and burst it asunder. Before the guard could even scream the swift Outland spy thrust the sword of the ancient druids clean through the poor fellow's greatcoat of silver mail and deep into his heart. The guard gasped and quivered and fell dead to the floor.

But when Truman turned back towards the grate, the King was gone! Before he could question his lord's escape, his attention was turned back towards the dungeon, where a great commotion could be heard as his companions battled the onslaught of the Imperial Guard.

As quickly as he could Tru ripped the leather boots and pantaloons and the greatcoat of silver mail from the corpse of his victim and put them on himself. But when he tried to place his druiden sword in the guardsman's sheath, it resisted with the strength of a thousand men, so that he had to wear his own scabbard, which he tucked under the folds of his coat as best he could.

Lastly Truman reached down and pulled the crested steel helmet gently from the dead man, whose face he could barely suffer himself to look upon. As the helm slipped off the head of his foe, Tru was struck with horror. For instead of the thick red blood of a man, a pale, thin milk was gurgling from the mouth and nose of the guardsman, whose skin was so pale and pasty that he seemed to have been dead for years. The Mlembe prince was puzzled--even Jonathan Beasly had skin of a pinkish hue, being still a mite too young to undergo the Milkblood rite of passage--but the face of the dead guard had the features of a Mlembe warrior, with full lips and a broad nose and high handsome cheekbones. For the first time in his life Truman realized that not all Milkbloods were pinkskins, and that a man's enemies could be determined by deed and deed alone.

With a heavy heart Truman twisted his long kinky locks into a bun on top of his head and pulled the helmet on. He glanced one last time at the man's face, only to notice something even more grotesque than the sallow skin and pale milky blood of his victim. For while one of the guard's eyes was chestnut brown, like his own, the other eye was a bulging clear glass orb that stretched and distorted the socket, and gave the dead man's gaze a chilling, indescribable duality.

Truman could hear the battle in the dungeon raging to a fevered pitch. But something seemed to draw him to the empty eye of his fallen foe, and he reached his hand gingerly down and pulled it from its swollen socket. To his dismay the clear glass orb popped out quite easily; but it was still attached to something, and so Tru gave it an extra tug, which to his disgust brought a surge of stringy milkwhite tissue and gelatinous grey brainmatter oozing from the hole.

In a flash he realized that this was not a true Blood he'd slain, but an innocent captive zombie! The knowledge that he'd killed one of his own people, an innocent victim of Zamelda's perverse necromancy, filled Truman Allabam with hatred and resolve. Like a man possessed he turned and ran back towards the dungeon; but just as he reached the end of the tunnel a great explosion shook the castle to its roots, and a flash of green lit the cavernous dungeon from top to bottom, and a horrible shrieking laughter rent the air.

It was the Greeneyes herself! His comrades were doomed!

With his heart in his throat Truman stalked through the shadows towards the sound of Zamelda's laughter, feeling so vulnerable and out of place that he might as well have had a sixfoot lion's tail protruding from beneath his greatcoat. When he reached the stone pillar where minutes before he'd stood with his three friends, hopelessness descended on his heart like an endless winter. For there stood Marli, Leks and Homer, dazed and bleeding, surrounded by a circle of guards; and dominating the scene from atop the honeycomb of cubicles floated the hideous form of Zamelda Galore.

"What a shame we don't have more time to spend together," she said with mock sincerity. "One should savor one's death, don't you agree?"

By now Truman had snuck into the circle of guardsmen. As he stood trembling he scanned the wall for some glint of hope--but every sorcerer and magician in the employ of the Greeneyes had come to the edge of a cubicle to watch the drama unfolding below, and with each moment's passing a dozen more guards appeared.

"Let's start with . . . you!" screamed the witch, pointing her crooked daggerlike green fingernail at Homer B~e~u,F`egard Mugwump, who stood silently transfixed by her cold heartless stare. Zamelda raised her arms and laughed, and hi frigid wind began to whip about her flowing batwing cape. At once Homer was lifted like a ragdoll ten feet into the air, and the wind cruelly ripped the clothes off his back; and then a flurry of green sparks and bolts began to flash between Zamelda and the dungeon floor, growing louder and brighter, until a violent kaboom ripped through the air.

When the acrid smoke disappeared, Leks and Marli gasped. For there on the filthy floor, just below the eerily suspended figure of their friend, sat a manhigh cauldron filled to the brim with seething boiling molten lava. Homer began to writhe and moan as the intense heat rose like fiery tongues licking at his feet and legs.

"So, you dare to tempt me, fool," whispered the witch as she held out her arms like a puppeteer and began to slowly, deliberately lower the horrified woodsman towards the molten conflagration. She let go a snicker, and then a horrible screeling laugh erupted from her gut as she wiggled and wagged her hands, sending Homer into an insanely comical jester like dance.

Slowly the woodsman was inched towards the searing lava, his arms wrapped in anguish about his head as he tried to stifle the hideous screams that he knew would gratify his murderer, sinking slowly as excruciating flames leapt up to ignite his beard and hair, until at last, his hands falling limply from his face, he slipped beneath the gurgling surface and was gone.

Now Zamelda raised her cape again, and it was Aleksar Akanoo who rose puppetlike into the air and had his clothing ripped away by a cold, icy wind. The wizardress snapped her fingers, and a cat o' nine tails materialized in her hand.

"Foul animal," she hissed as her eyes rolled back in her head. She drew back the nine pronged whip, and as she cast it slowly forwards Leks could clearly see the prongs metamorphose into nine drooling, writhing, sabre fanged vipers that flicked their tongues and licked at his body from head to toe. With incredible speed Zamelda reached the whip behind her and flicked it cracking at Leks' midriff, where the vipers gnashed and ripped great strips of skin from his chest and stomach. Again and again she drew back the whip and lashed the Shandoan prince, who gritted his teeth and made not a sound; again and again,~as his organs and entrails began to spill out of great holes in his belly; ripping and tearing again and again, until all that rem aired was a skeleton that twitched and trembled and fell to the dungeon floor in a heap.

"And now for you, halfbreed," she whispered at Marli. "You L have smelled before." Zamelda's nostrils flared, and a wicked, Insanely vengeful countenance came over her face. Her gaze suddenly shifted to Truman, who had unknowingly donned the red plumed helmet of one of the witch's most fearsome thrails--a zombie executioner.

"You there, chop off his head!" she screeched.

Truman knew that resisting the sorceress would be foolhardy, and that he was the last and only hope of stealing away the focus of her powers, the Gossamer Emeraldstone Globe.

Without hesitation Truman drew his ancient druiden sword, and brandishing it high above his head he swung with all his speed and might and hewed the head of his friend cleanly from its shoulders, replacing the sword in its scabbard so quickly that not even Zamelda suspected the peril this weapon held for one such as she.

Marli's body crumpled to the floor. But his head remained floating in thin air, and his eyes still shone with life! The wizardress shrieked with glee.

"You won't get off that easily!" she laughed, and all at once the disembodied head of Hightone Marli zoomed up to where the witch stood and came to rest floating nose to nose with her. "Tortures of the body are nothing," she hissed menacingly, "compared to tortures of the mind."

But her gloating smile quickly faded as Marli shook his long kinky locks--and began to sing! Zamelda reached out to grab the singing head of the brownmon but found she couldn't suffer herself to touch it! Then, just as he finished a chorus, the floating head of Marli the Unvanquished started to laugh uncontrollably, and then to spin, spinning around faster and faster, until, with his dreadlocks whipping about like a medusa on a merry go round, Marli's head exploded, splattering his hair and blood and brains onto the unbelieving face of the Greeneyed Witch.

Zamelda reeled backwards and let loose a squeal so horrid that it curdled the milky blood of dozens of her guards, who fell dead to the ground.

"I'm poisoned! He's killed me! I'm melting!" she screamed as she frantically tried to wipe globs of Marli's brain from her face and eyes. For the first time in ages the sorceress turned tail and scampered faster than a hunted fox back out the dungeon door and up a broad stair, and through foyers and parlors and dark mirrored chambers, until she reached the sunken ivory bathtub in her lavish boudoir.

Now normally Zamelda bathed herself in the warm blood of virgins, who were picked from the broods of the peasantry in their twelfth year. Only the most chaste and lovely maidens could be so honored; and since the wizardress paid handsome sums for them, dozens of pretty young volunteers could always be found lurking with their fathers outside the great drawbridge at the southern tip of the castle. But now, fearing contamination through some bloodborne germ or poison, she ordered her bathboys to fill the tub with fresh mother's milk, which was also kept in good supply; and there she spent the following hours scouring and soaking and rinsing like a woman possessed.

Truman had meanwhile taken advantage of the commotion to find his way to the main hall of Castle Galore, which buzzed with the comings and goings of Zamelda's generals and strategists; and from there to the double steel doors that overlooked the drawbridge below at the well fortified entrance to the lair of the Greeneyes. Here he took up a post beside several hundred guardsmen, who seemed quick to defer to him, owing to the red plumed helm of the executioner.

Fearing discovery at any moment Truman's mind began to race, and the deaths of his three good friends began to weigh heavily on his heart. He had no idea how he'd find the witch's Gossamer Globe, much less how he'd manage to steal it from under her nose. But he had to try, and the knowledge that he'd already killed two of his brothers filled him with a dread resolve. As evening descended on the castle, rumors began to spread that the battle would commence by morning, and it was said that a forgotten King of Olde had somehow escaped from the dungeons during the fracas that morning. From outside the castle the sound of great catapults and basilisks being moved about could be heard, and the dull rumble of tens of thousands of troops being positioned on the gently rolling hills was measured by the deliberate thump! thump! thump! of Zamelda's war drums.

As he stood straight backed against the cold marble wall of the witch's entrance hall, Truman began to imagine the green hills and the warm perfume of his homeland; and though he knew he'd never see Mlembe again, he still held hope for his people and for the new days to come.

Little did he know that the wizard Kristomarkus had been devoured by Gorthogorn, or that the divided tribes of the Outlands were even now converging on the castle without a leader, or a strategy, or an adequate store of arms. Little did he know that already the lords of Shandoah and Mlembe and the Greens and Gonzalin had begun to quarrel over the course of the battle to come. And little did he know that the wisest among the varied people of Dalondria now placed their last desperate hopes on his ill fated quest to steal from the Empress her Emeraldgreen Gossamer Globe.

Beasly awoke with a start to the sounds of horses and men and clanking armor. He rose from his hammock and headed towards the terrace, all the while trying to shake off the effects of the frindle he'd drunk the night before. But no matter how hard he tried his mind remained stubbornly suspended in a state somewhere between waking and dreaming. He soon realized that he could scarcely distinguish between the reality of his westward ride and the vivid dreamy visions he'd seen as he listened to the tales of his new mentor; and as he absentmindedly fingered the Gossamer Globe hanging from his sunburnt neck the visions began to pass through his thoughts again, and his heart began to thump with fright--for great peril lurked just around the bend.

Upon reaching the terrace'Beasly was greeted by a jubilant Poppa Gonzala, who stood proudly surveying the scene below. There on the sunbaked plain stretching halfway to the horizon was an army the likes of which had not been seen since the bearded conquerors had come nearly five centuries before. In their wisdom the Gonzalin had long lain up stores of weapons and armor left by the greedy and wasteful invaders, so that now, as they came together to begin the daylong trek to Castle Galore, they looked for all the world like the second coming of the seaborne gods of the rising sun, what with their proud armored stallions and gold plated helms, and chestpieces of silver inlaid with jewels.

Poppa smiled broadly and put his hand on Beasly's shoulder. "Tonight we'll camp in the foothills of Fornica," he said softly, "and hold council with the leaders of our allies. And you, young man, will ride at the fore so that all may see the Eveningsky Globe and be heartened. And tomorrow, for the same reason, Jonathan Beasly, it is you who must lead the charge on Castle Galore; for your friend the wizard ordained that none should dare to take the globe from your neck, on pain of death. And I think that he was wise. For whosoever would attempt to use it against the Greeneyes would surely fail, and divide our confederation irreparably."

"But what of the serpent? And the sorceress.7'.' Beasly asked shyly. "What chance do I stand against them?" ~

Poppa's face grew as cold and hard as the city carved into the cliff behind them. "You must have faith, my son," he said solemnly. "You must believe that innocence is more powerful than ambition, and that purity of heart can overcome many evils."

Poppa's eyes closed, and he heaved a quick sigh. Then he looked to the sky and called out the names of twelve ancestors, and he raised his thick old arms above his shoulders. After a moment twelve great crows swooped down, and taking his leather boots and poncho and pantaloons in their steely talons they whooshed off to the north, speeding higher and higher into the azure yonders, parting the ether in unison with mighty thrusts of their pinions, until they passed out of sight far above the receding horizon.

Beasly gulped, and his legs turned to rubber. On the plain below an army of two thousand score became perfectly silent. A day of reckoning was at hand.

As the Imperial Road neared Fornica it made a broad sweeping southward curve that took it around the forests of the Northcross, across the southern foothills and farmlands of the parish, and then right into the heart of Castle Galore. Just over a day's march from the city and the castle of the Empress, the Imperial Road crossed the remnant of Old Will Road at a place called Massacree Crik, where in olden days many great battles had been fought between the armies of the Milkbloods and wildland renegades. It was here at Massacree Crib that the armies of the Outlands began to come together in the days leading up to the full moons. First came the proud and stealthy Shandoans, led by the elder Stallioncharge, now numbering seven times a thousand warriors. They were soon followed by the mighty barefooted Mlembe, led by the priestess Maggie Mandelin, nearly eighteen times a thousand in number. Lastly came the wildhaired Greens from the northern forests, over twenty thousand in number, led by the statesman Pinky Woodrose.

And in between the armies of the great tribes there came a flood of the forgotten people of the Outlands, innumerable clans of halfbreeds and hillbillies and okies and elders, of exiled philosophers and ascetics; the feeble minded and the touched, dwarfs and giants and halflimbs, artists and actors; and sprinkled among the misfits were thousands of bold and independent renegades, the Willders and the Rangers, men and women of great strength and stealth and stamina who roamed the Outlands hunting and trapping and swapping stories of derring do. For three long days Dalondria emptied her refugees onto the humble floodplain of Massacree Crik, where tribal leaders and wisemen representing every shade and hue stepped forward to debate the' strategy they would use against the Empress. In the end.they agreed on nothing, except that an ambush should be~prepared to slow the march of the Yorks, who could approach up the Road at any instant behind their great commander Howdy Doodle Goldfink.

And so as the sun rose on the eve of battle, a small contingent was sent to wait in ambush a short distance to the east, while the main corps filed onto the Imperial Road and headed westward, three score times a thousand strong, poorly armed and leaderless, fueled more by hatred than by hope.

The handful of stragglers who volunteered to wait for the Yorks watched glumly as their compatriots disappeared into the rolling hills. Numbering less than a thousand, they made their way eastward, settling by midmorning on either side of the Road on two steep, rocky hillocks, where they hurriedly began to prepare their charade; for their only chance of slowing the great and mighty Commander in Chief lay in deceit. They set lines of flashpowder across the road, and wedged long levers beneath the largest boulders, and spread themselves out thinly along the hillocks with their pitiful store of bows and slings and noisemakers. Each man in his fear glanced over his shoulder and plotted an escape, then crouched down quietly behind a tree, stump or boulder to grimly await the army of the Eastern Empire.

The morning wore on, and the heat of the sun began to bake the cracked earth. The distant horizon seemed to quiver miragelike, and dusty whirlwinds began to play about the landscape. As noontime neared the lookouts suddenly whistled in warning, and every heart began to beat apace; and off to the east, where the Imperial Road could be seen winding in patchy ribbons, every eye strained to make out the advancing party of the Yorks. Soon slings were readied and bows drawn, and the tension of imminent battle began to weigh heavily on the undisciplined Outlanders.

One by one the cowards among them slipped away and hightailed it northward, sprinting blindly towards some dark and personal hiding place in the dwindling forests of inner Dalondria. But the better part of the contingent remained in place, less afraid of death than failure, itching for a chance to avenge the suffering and destruction wrought by the magic of the Greeneyes.

The air became perfectly still. Gradually the shuffle of feet became louder and louder, until not a furlong away the tips of upraised lances came bobbing into view. But just as the ambush was poised to come crashing down on the road below, the singing of children came wafting up to the straining ears of the Outlanders and muffled laughter dashed away the tension of the moment. For filing casually between the hillocks came not an army of stern and steely soldiers, but a handful of whitehaired old redskins leading a band of buckskin clad mothers and boys! And each and every one was laden down with swords and shields and spears and arrows, with bows and slings and helmets and armor, enough to outfit a whole battalion!

With a roar the hidden Outlanders leapt from their haunches and descended gleefully on the startled Shandoans, gladly relieving them of their burdens. Then they all continued westward in a festive mood, content for the time being in the knowledge that Zamelda's plan to crush the rebels between two armies had been foiled.

As he sped northward Poppa surveyed the countryside for signs of Zamelda's trickery--an ambush, perhaps, or a giant boobytrap--and for signs of the great beast Gorthogorn; but the only things moving across the foothills were a few jackrabbits and late fleeing peasants. For as the dawn of battle neared, the outlying farms and ranches had been quickly deserted in favor of the well fortified mountainside castles of the Fornican gentry, save for a few stubborn oldtimers who insisted on riding out the storm in their trusty front porch rocking chairs. Not a few young and rebellious lads had slipped away in the dead of night to make for the Imperial Road, there to join with the rebels in defiance of the Empress; and even among those who fled to the safety of the castles there were some who secretly prayed for the defeat of their queen.

As he neared the spires of Castle Galore, Poppa began to glean Zamelda's plan of battle. For the whole of the Fornican Militia, seventy thousand strong, was camped out at her doorstep, spread strategically across the great grassy Fields of Ambrielle that ran down from the sole gap in the sheerwalled Witchfang Mountains--the southfacing Alnamir Gate, where the Imperial Road came to a dead end at the lair of its builder. And behind the gate, on the barren knolls and gullies of Zamelda's spacious courtyards, were camped the regiments of the deadly Imperial Guard, ready to storm across the drawbridge of the impregnable castle at her bidding.

In her pride and paranoia the sorceress was willing to leave the whole city of Fornica unguarded; for she was certain that the weak and stupid Outlanders would make straight for her castle and her precious Gossamer Globe, whose power she valued above all else. Besides, deep in her cold bloodless heart she despised the petty and docile peasantry, whose blind faith girded her power. Peasants were replaceable--and once the foolish savages had been exterminated there would be no shortage of those willing to trade their freedom for a hovel and hearthstone beneath her watchful green eyes.

Poppa shook his head and sighed. But just as he was about to head back east to scout out the whereabouts of the serpent Gorthogorn, a tiny figure moving aimlessly beneath the northeastern wall of the five sided castle caught his eye. Against his better judgment Poppa circled down to investigate; and as he neared the greengrey wall his heart leapt into his throat--for there wandering around right under the nose of the wizardress was the long forgotten King of Olde, Damakros himself! Suddenly an alarm was sounded from the gargoyle lined parapet just above the stupefied King. Poppa shouted in an ancient tongue, and two of the mighty crows released him from their talons and swooped down upon Damakros. Taking the frail old King by his arms they raced beneath a hail of fire and arrows back towards the south, while Poppa sped again eastward in search of Gorthog the Great, hoping against hope that the titanic beast had abandoned his secret greeneyed mistress for some other chance at conquest or plunder.

Afternoon wore on. From her sanctuary in the darkened summit of the castle's tallest tower Zamelda trained her Gossamer Globe on a mirror in the southern sky and peered down hatefully on her enemies. There she saw two armies converging at a bend in the Imperial Road, one a ragged band of darkskins and renegades, and the other a ridiculous column of brownskinned Gonzalin dressed for Hallow's Eve in the gaily colored armor of their conquering ancestors. Zamelda chuckled and chortled, and then let go a wicked howling guffaw.

"So that is the best they can do," she snorted gleefully. "They've lost their wizard, the poor dearies, and now they want to play with me. Ha!"

Suddenly her laughter ceased, and her ashen white face contorted into a hideous grimace. "Vermin! Rodents! So you dare to come knocking at my front door, do you?" She stomped her foot, and the redwood doors behind her burst violently open, and a green bolt shot from between her glaring eyes and thundered into the southern sky, where it smashed into the magically suspended mirror with such force that it shook the ground beneath the wavering feet of the startled rebels, who were soon deluged by millions of shards of redhot glass shrapnel that whistled earthward and tore sizzling into their flesh.

"A mere appetizer, my pretties," hissed the witch; and pointing~her thin, knotty finger at the green cloud of smoke that hung on the horizon where the mirror had been she caused a swirl of wind to slowly form the smoke into script. Cowering on the ground, their wounds singed and stinging, with the putrid smell of burning flesh filling the air, the Outlanders raised their eyes skyward and beheld her malevolent message as it began to dissipate in horrible slithery billows--all it said was, SURRENDER.

Slowly the Outlanders picked themselves up and tried to pluck up some courage. Soon a buzz was spreading,from~the vanguard to the rearmost stragglers that among all the princes and seasoned warriors of the Shandoans and the Mlembe and the Greens and Gonzalin, only the tanskinned boy Jonathan Beasly had remained tall and proud throughout Zamelda's blitzkreig. Indeed the boy had not flinched, nor had the steed Verusilef, engrossed as they both were in the nethering spell of the Eveningsky Globe, which hummed and seethed with increasing fervor as it approached its sisterglobe atop Castle Galore.

Beasly's apparent courage heartened the humble Outlanders, who now numbered nearly five score times a thousand with the addition of the Gonzalin. The two converging armies raised a cheer to their boy leader, who sat staring trancelike to the north, oblivious to the goings on around him. In his detachment the lad raised his right hand to the sky to silence the rebels; and a murmur passed among them, and every eye peered again skyward; and after a moment, approaching from the north, the frail dangling form of King Damakros came into view and quickly swooped down to an awkward landing beside the stallion Verusilef.

At first no one recognized the King. For five generations he had been thought dead, killed by the assassins of the Red Wizard of Panazhia--for that was the story promulgated by his grieving bride Zamelda to the great great great grandfathers of all Dalondria. In fact the Greeneyed Sorceress had seduced the old King and married him, and then fed him a poisoned kumquat on their honeymoon, secreting him away to her western dungeons as she began to subtly enslave the islandstate to her domineering whims. Only a handful of wisemen and philosophers had gleaned the truth at the time; but over the generations their protests had faded, until only the scribes of the renegade Greens retained any hope of returning Dalondria to the mythical innocence of her youth.

Like wildfire the tale of the reborn King was relayed throughout the ranks, and the fire of rebellion was rekindled in the hearts of the angry Outlanders. Two tall Mlembe warriors lifted old Damakros onto the back of Verusilef behind Beasly, and a hundred thousand voices sent up three cheers for their long lost leader. As Beasly prodded the stallion northward the contingent lurched onto the Imperial Road and made for their destination in the foothills ahead.

To the west the reddening sun Sarinda began her plummet into the sea, while in the east a great bank of clouds appeared on the horizon. King Damakros put his arms around the boy and closed his eyes; for after a hundred years of imprisonment he was convinced that the wonderful drama unfolding before him was just a happy dream. Beasly, too, could scarcely believe what was happening as he felt himself falling deeper and deeper under the spell of the Eveningsky Globe, which pummeled.his brain with whispered images and visions. Beasly closed his~eyes, and the wizened old arms around his chest brought forth a tear in remembrance of his short lived friendship with Kristomarkus the Fair.

The two sleepers rode on into dusk, leading the rebels closer and closer to the thumping wardrums of Castle Galore as the glow of seven full moons began to enhance upon the clouds in the east.

By morning the battle would begin.

No one slept that night, not even babies and sylvan creatures. On the grassy fields that stretched for half a league between the Fornican Militia and the camp of the frightened Outlanders spies were sent out from both sides to ferret out their foe's plan of battle. But while the generals of Fornica and the Imperial Guard had drawn up intricate strategies and contingency plans, which were locked away in thick steel safeboxes inside the pentagonal castle, the Outlanders spent the night quarreling over lines and arrows and X's and O's which they scratched in the dirt with sticks; so that neither side was able to glean even a hint of the others' intentions. And while the stern and steely faces of the well disciplined and mercenary Forns showed no signs of the stress of imminent battle, the rebels for the most part sat brooding around their campfires growing downcast and disconcerted.

Towards morning the Outlanders were shaken by the sudden resumption of the war drums, and the sharpeyed Shandoan lookouts in the trees above reported movement among the troops of Fornica. From the distant castle a great clang was heard, followed by the scratchy rumble of gigantic gears turning slowly as the drawbridge of the Alnamir Gate was lowered. Thump! Thump! Thump! said the drums, followed by a mighty DOOM! as the heavy drawbridge struck ground across the quartz spiked canyon at the sole entry to the witch's lair.

Now the lookouts reported hulking catapults and basilisks being dragged across the bridge, and soon a throbbing glow emanating from Zamelda's globetower began to bathe the immense castle in an eerie green light that danced among the tall northern peaks and the shorter southern crags of the ringed Witchfang. The worried rebels began to finger their pitiful weapons, their bows and arrows and spears and axes, their slings and scythes, hoes and hatchets, sickles, harrows, pitchforks and pikes. Only the Gonzalin were outfitted properly for war, but their gear were more fit for an antiquary than for a battle with the Milkbloods. Just as despair again sat ready to dash their waning hopes, the boy Jonathan Beasly leapt up from his dreamy phantasmagoria and onto Verusilef, and turning the handsome charger southward he pointed silently down the Imperial Road. The Outlandish army, fearing a predawn ambush at the hands of the wily Howdy Doodle Goldfink, hesitated for a moment and then scrambled for some semblance of military order.

The Shandoan lookouts were the first to make out the column of soldiers approaching over the thinly wooded foothills. For a moment the whole Outlandish army seemed on the verge of panic, ready to flee like a frightened herd; but soon the air was full of childrens' voices, and from the oncoming column the secret hoots and whistles of the wildland tribes were quickly returned. Still fearing a ruse the confederates held their ground, their weapons poised for an onslaught as the sound of shuffling feet and metal clanking on metal drew nearer. Hearts raced, and breath was stilled; and then a sigh of relief passed among the rebels as the oncoming contingent came into view.

With whoops and hollers, the Outlanders descended on their comrades and the handsome cache of newfound weapons, which were quickly distributed to the most poorly armed. The stern Shandoan warriors were astonished to see hundreds of their wives and sons and "ramps and grannies amid the triumphant ambush party; and as the tale of the defeat of Howdy Doodle's York Militia at the hands of the women and children and whitehairs spread throughout the corps, a new resolve lifted the spirits of the wildlanders, and they raised their weapons to the wakening sky in salute to the brave Shandoans.

Already the light of Sarinda filtered slowly into the eastern sky as the seven setting moons dangled in the west like the pearl necklace of a goddess. Across the Fields of Ambrielle the war drums had been silenced, and the fiery green glow throbbing in Zamelda's globetower subsided to an occasional flicker. Without a word passing between them the confederates moved slowly onto the open ground and began to form themselves into a long, thick line over a thousand men across and nearly a hundred deep. Towards the front were massed the armored footsoldiers of the Gonzalin, while the rear was taken up by the horsemen of the Shandoans and the Greens. To the flanks went many tall Mlembe warriors with their brightly painted shields and their spears as tall as two men.

Huddled behind the rebels in the shelter of the thinning forest, the Shandoan elders and women readied themselves to care for the wounded, gathering roots and herbs and springwater, and fashioning bandages from their clothing. King Damakros was propped up beneath a tree on a hilltop nearby where he could watch the battle unfold,.and towards which the Outlanders could look for strength.

Beasly stood beside the King and gazed out across the fields. The Eveningsky Globe around his neck had grown peculiarly still, and the barrage of visions that had numbed his senses suddenly ceased.

"Jonathan Lemuel Beasly the First," he said aloud, and his thoughts went back to the morning thirteen days before when he'd been plucked by the Oracle from the cold waters of Lake Waldinmuck. Where was the Oracle now, he wondered, and whatever became of the three kind princes from the Wilderness?

As dawn neared the boy from the clouds looked out over the fields before him and imagined the carnage that was about to take place. Then he bent down to shake the hand of Damakros and whistled for Verusilef. Climbing atop the proud steed, Beasly set his jaw and threw back his shoulders; and then the brave little man prodded the stallion down the hill and onto the field and straight to the fore of the rebel army.

A great cheer arose from the Outlanders that built to a crescendo of whoops and war cries just as Sarinda peeked up over the horizon and lit the eastern sky from behind a veil of purple gray clouds. In the distance the morning mist hovered about Castle Galore and the crater of the Witchfang like a shroud. As if beckoned by gravity herself the rebels began to inch northward over the swaying grass.

Verusilef gradually quickened his pace. Barely visible in the shadow of the Alnamir Gate the Fornicans stood ready. On came the Outlanders, slowly building momentum, covering furlong after furlong in their bold advance; but the Forns stood solidly in silent formation, their weapons at their sides, rudely ignoring the customs and manners of warfare. Soon the rebels had drawn to within two furlongs of the looming Alnamir Gate, which stood seductively opened behind the steely eyed lines of the Fornican Militia. With their foes now in full view the Outlanders redoubled their war cries and broke into a sprint, their weapons brandished for battle; but still the Forns stood unmoved.

Suddenly an explosion booming from behind the gate rocked the landscape, and missiles came whistling into the midst of the rebels, bursting with such force that dozens of unlucky souls were flung high into the air like charred puppets as fragments of redhot metal went tearing and wriggling deep into their flesh. Immediately five huge fireballs were set aflame behind the Forns and catapulted onto the dismayed Outlanders, and a hail of thick barbed arrows came whizzing from hundreds of longbows hidden in the crags and cliffs of the Witchfang.

With the smell of burnt flesh and powder stinging in their nostrils the rebels resumed their charge undaunted. As if in answer the Forns finally drew their weapons and released their banner, and with the sign of the Spinning Cross unfurled above them they came crashing down on the advancing tribes amid a thunderous volley of shrapnel.

The two armies collided in a maelstrom of swinging metal as broadswords met sickles and pitchforks and pikes.'l~o~ the frontline went the swiftest and bravest of the Gonzahn, their ancient helms and gauntlets pitted against the mighty Forns in complete steel, their bronze shields against cold steel blades. But the hatred of four and twenty generations burned in the hearts of the sons of Gonzalon, who in their frenzied onslaught drove a wedge deep into the vanguard of the Fornicans, with hundreds of screaming Shandoans and Greens and Mlembe fresh at their heels. Unfettered by breastplate or mail the confederates flew into their foes with naked vengeance, unfazed by the guts and limbs that soon lay heaped amid the fallen writhing in the throes of death.

On the flanks the Forns attempted to move around and encircle the rebels; but here the tall and sinewy warriors of Mlembe were able to drive their slower foes aside with thrusts of their long, obsidian tipped spears, while smaller and quicker warriors darted in and out delivering fatal thrusts through cracks and vents in the militiamen's armor. Behind the frenzied footsoldiers rode the horsemen of Shandoah and the Greens, shoring up breaks in the line, or galloping in to hew at the helms of the Forns, or to fight back the onrushing companies that tried in vain to outflank the rebels.

Through the morning the battle pitched and raged, staining the golden fields with blood and brains and vomit and filling the air with the wailed agony of death and the howled ecstasy of murder. Inch by inch the fiery wildlanders pushed back the Forns, driving a wedge of honed flailing hatchets and sharpened sabres deep into the heart of the Militia, which could not overcome with superior discipline and weaponry the pent up fury of the rebels.

Beasly watched in horror as the blood of the quiet forest dwellers seeped slowly into the earth as if at the altar of a heartless god. The stallion Verusilef danced and reared amid the fighting to keep the young man out of harm's way; but Jonathan felt the tinge of blood on his tongue, and his fists began to clench in anger, and his jaw tightened into a grimace, until at last he could take it no more.

Beasly leapt from his mount and yanked a heavy steel broadsword from the hand of a fallen Forn. With a great effort he climbed back onto Verusilef, and prodding the wizardsteed towards the center of the fray he began to fight with every ounce of strength. A rush of energy swept through the soldiers of the Outlands at the sight of the fearless little cloud dweller, and .in. a surge like a crashing seawave they drove their wedge closer and closer to the gaping Alnamir Gate, every inch of soil bought at the price of another life. On and on they charged, until the gate was but a stone's throw away, and the rearguards of the Fornican Militia were driven screaming over the edge of the quartz spiked gorge.

"Take the drawbridge!" wailed a voice frown the fracas,~and a chorus of warcries rent the air.

"Death to the Greeneyes!" howled another, and the stinging rebel swords surged on.

"For our fathers' fathers!" roared a third, and the blood of the retreating Forns gushed like rain onto the reddened grass.

The bulk of the Forns were soon pinned against the sheer walls of the Witchfang; but just as an Outlandish victory seemed to dangle in the breeze, a wicked green tongue came lashing out of the Eveningsky Globe, and a piercing shriek of laughter shook the ground; and crashing out from hundreds of tunnels hidden in the hillsides behind the rebels came swarming the dour handed Imperial Guard.

"We've been buffaloed!" thought Beasly as he sat dazed, bleeding profusely from a bilbo blow to the forehead. In an instant the Outlanders were being routed, driven like pigs to slaughter before the fabled guardsmen, driven wholesale into great pits of boiling tar that were suddenly opened in the ground, or into the skeleton strewn gorge. Those who could fled back towards the terrified Shandoans at the edge of the distant wood, only to be hunted down from behind by hordes of cavalrymen who now rushed in a torrent across the drawbridge at a signal from the Empress. Others stood and fought to the last, crying out the names of their children with their final breaths, until less than two thirds of the Outlandish army remained alive in a broken huddle before the Alnamir Gate, surrounded by the grimfaced Forns and Guardsmen as the battle ebbed towards defeat. Verusilef wheeled and reared in a vain attempt to protect Beasly and the bloodstained Gossamer Gobe; but the frightened little man was quickly found out and dragged from the stallion's back kicking and screaming towards the castle.

And there on the drawbridge, silhouetted through the gate, stood the gloating, beckoning form of the Greeneyed Sorceress herself.

"Come, my handsome little one," she cooed reassuringly. "I see you've brought me a gift."

Beasly grew faint and dropped to the ground. Two Guardsmen plucked him up roughly by the ears and began dragging him towards the hideous witch.

On the Fields of Ambrielle the fighting stopped abruptly as Beasly was set before Zamelda on his knees. She bent down and yanked his bowed head up by the hair, exposing the globe. Her nostrils flared and her fingers trembled as she pictured anew her dominion, the first of her line ever to hold two Gossamer Globes.

Like a child holding a baby chick she cuddled the orb in her cupped hands and giggled. But when she tried to pull it from around Beasly's neck it let out a thick blue smoke that drove her reeling backwards, coughing and wheezing and half blind. Infuriated, she drew the folds of her cape over her nose and eyes and tried again to rip the bloody globe from around his neck; but this time it showered her with hot purple sparks that bounced off her batskinned cape with a sound like tinkling laughter.

"So you want to do this the hard way!" she screeched. "I should have know you were the sorcerer's apprentice, you impudent brat." Turning towards the castle Zamelda snapped her fingers, and a short red feather was sent flying straight through her steel front doors and into the red plume of her favorite executioner.

"If we can't remove the globe," she said gently, "we'll just have to chop off that handsome little head of yours, now won't we?" Like a tender nursemaid the wizardress ran her cold, knotty hands across Beasly's cheeks and neck, caressing the gushing wound on his forehead and bringing a taste of his blood to her quivering lips.

"Now come, my precious," she sighed lovingly. "We could make this easy ." She lowered herself slowly into a crouch, until she was eye-to-eye with the trembling young man from the clouds. In her most motherly fashion she reached once more for the Eveningsky Globe, as innocently as if she weTe just straightening his neckerchief; again she cuddled the soft silk gossamer orb in her hands and tried to inch the spiderfine necklace over his head. But just as the: delicate chain seemed ready to slide easily over his tangled brown hair, a bolt of white lightning came flying from the globe and, knocked her spread-eagled to the ground.

"Off with his head! Off with his head!" she screeled as she drew herself up and stood hovering over the lad like a hawk over its prey. Behind her now stood the ominous form of a zombie executioner, squeezing the hilt of his sword as the red plume on his helmet danced in the breeze. Groveling on his knees Beasly bowed low and hung his head. Dirty sweat stung at his eyes, and the globe dangling under his chin was now encrus-ted with dark dried blood.

Zamelda stepped back from the little rebel and surveyed the quieted carnage on the fields below. The vanquished Outlanders stood bunched like sheep, surrounded and outnumbered, every eye tr~,ined on the ill-fated young cloud dweller. She savored the moment, and a wry, menacing smile passed across her face. Moc'king the grace of the olden days she curtsied the tall, ar'mbl:ed executioner; and then, wringing her hands in anticipation, she nodded gaily to her zombil~ thrall. ':' ~esmerized, the executioner stepped up beside Beasly and too!c.his stance, Every fiber in his body Twas compelled to draw foyth the ancient wooden sword of the druids and hew the head off the brownhaired lad; but some unseen 'power stayed. him, and he dropped his arms to his sides instead and slowly turned"to face the angry wizardress, who blamed th,e apprentice ~easly' for her zombie's failure.

Beasly whimpered with fright, his neck as taut as a high wire. When the sword failed to fall the lacl blinked incredulously; and after a moment's pause he raised his head haltingly to look upon the oddly familiar man who had spared his life. Shivering with anger, Zamelda stalked over to Truman and reached out to heft the old oaken sword from its scabbard; but the moment her pale, knotty hand touched the hilt, it flared up like burning pine tar! Fuming, the sorceress threw up her hands, ready to hurl the full force of her power at the innocent little rebel and dash him into oblivion. But even as her wrath boiled to a fevered fury a sudden burst of bright red serpent tongues and fiery red dragon tails flew sizzling out of the Eveningsky Globe, and a distant rumble eased into earshot.

"Gorthog! Gorthog is coming!" cried a voice from the Outlanders, who stampeded frantically towards the cover of the woods behind them, breaking out from the circle of Forns and Guards like a surging wave over a dam. Zamelda grabbed Beasly up by the arm and dragged him kicking and screaming across the drawbridge, cursing her folly; for she should have guessed that the silent tug of war between the wizard's blue orb and her precious Emeraldstone would tickle the belly of the beast and subtly beckon him hither. The avarice of the moment had consumed her, and Beasly's dribbling blood had hidden the red tinges creeping into the Eveningsky Globe. With Beasly in tow the witch ran to fetch her Gossamer Globe; she had handled Gorthog before, and the billion gold pieces she owed him would calm whatever insanity might have been caused by the ingestion of the wizard.

On the fields below the Outlanders cowered at the edge of the wood, clinging to the false security of numbers as the rumble of the serpent grew nearer. The Forns and the Imperial Guard drew themselves grudgingly into tight formations flanking the Alnamir Gate, and a red carpet was unrolled to welcome the titanic beast.

In the marketsquare of Fornica a lone bell tolled as the Fields of Ambrielle embraced the fallen beneath a pall of waving grass." The e hopes of the Outlanders were at an end.

Slothering and drooling and humming stupidly to himself, Gorthogorn thundered across the foothills of Fornica on his way to collect the biggest bounty of his career as a dragon. For five days and nights the snake had been blindly rampaging across the lakelands of the north, taking in great draughts of their icy waters in a dazed attempt to cool the burning ulcer that had tormented him ever since the day he devoured the wizard.. The days and nights had been obscured by dreams and visions that seemed to bubble up from the depths of his skullstrewn entrails, and wherever he went he had been hounded by the fleeting shadow of the wizard's laugh; but on this, the sixth morning after his coup, the serpent had awakened to an irrepressible urge to pay a visit to his secret mistress in the west.

And so it was that with a few effortless thrusts of his massive coils Gorthogorn the Mighty burst onto the Fields of Ambrielle and Hunkered gracelessly up to the impenetrable Alnamir Gate, where his greeneyed cohort stood waiting.

"So, my friend," she said coyly, "you have succeeded handsomely. Perhaps now I could interest you in a little-dessert?"

At that she pushed a pale Jonathan Beasly before her, the globe around his neck throbbing in swirls of purple and green and cyan. Beasly's eyelids fluttered, and his eyes rolled back in his head; but Zamelda held him firmly by the scruff of the neck while the leathery tongue of Gorthog danced cobralike up and down his body, wrapping its slimy forks about his arms and legs and covering him with a putrid bile.

"All I want is the stone," she continued, gesturing to the Eveningsky Globe. "If you'll just bite off his head so I can get it, you can suck out his juices like a crawdad. He's quite young and tender, you know. And apprentice to the Blue Warlock!"

Gorthog eyed the Empress suspiciously. '~First things firssst," he hissed. "The gold."

Without hesitation Zamelda stepped aside and waved her hand lightly, and ten great cauldrons were quickly rolled across the creaking drawbridge and set before the serpent. Gorthog's thin lips sneered, and his pus yellowed eyes with their huge diamond shaped pupils winced haughtily. One by one he drew the cauldrons into his gaping jaws and swallowed them whole, giggling all the while as the gold trickled down his gut.

"Now, sisster," he grumbled between burps, "you wish me to slurp down this little wizard, eh? Wizards give me indigestion. And besides, I've two whole armies to snack on."

Zamelda smiled, and she took a few sultry steps across the drawbridge, cooing to the snake hypnotically in a motherly serpentine language he'd not heard since his days as an egg. Like a sleepy pup~full of hot chocolate the beast laid his massive head to the ground and smiled. Zamelda approached him and began caressing his eyelids, which slowly closed as he let out a peaceful sigh.

"Sleep, my love," whispered the witch, "sleep, sleeeep, my precious."

Gorthog yawned, and his lips moved silently. Zamelda snapped her fingers, and Beasly walked zombielike to her side.

"Now, my handsome dragon," she cooed, "open wide,.open wide." The serpent's jaws inched apart, and two rows of jagged, razorsharp teeth came into view. Taking Beasly by the shoulders, Zamelda wrestled him to within inches of the beast's slimy lips; then she kicked the lad lightly on the bottom and his head slipped easily into the blackness of the serpent's mouth

Beasly swooned again; but just as the witch was about to bring the jaws of Gorthogorn down on the quivering boy's neck, a shower of purple and magenta sparks came flashing out of the Eveningsky Globe, and the beast was awakened.

With a shriek Zamelda snatched Beasly up by the hair and ran like a scalded dog back across the drawbridge. Gorthog made a lunge at her backside; but his head was too fat to fit through the tall narrow arch of the Alnamir Gate, so that only his tongue and his snout came thrusting into the courtyard of the sorceress, who fell askance onto her bony derriere. Gorthogorn flailed and thrust with all his might, crushing and scattering thousands of soldiers from their positions flanking the gate; but even he was not strong enough to break through the ingenious masonry of the lone entrance to Castle Galore. Again and again the giant snake poked his swollen head into the hole, cracking huge chunks of mortar from its edges and shaking the wall above as his tongue darted madly about and he spat streams of creamy venom onto the ground.

"Trick me, will you," he roared. "I'll have it all, harlot! I'll have it all!"

By now the Outlanders had begun to creep back onto the fields, astonished at the fey behavior of the redbellied serpent. The Forns and the Imperial Guard, regrouped in the shadows of the Witchfang, made ready to do battle. But every eye was turned to the thrusting length of Gorthogorn as he tried vainly to penetrate the Alnamir Gate, growing ever more frenzied as his stabs and lurches were stayed over and over by the impregnable arch of stone.

Then Gorthog suddenly pulled away from the gate and raised himself high into the air, bellowing wildly and dashing his head against the towering stone wall. He flopped violently to the ground and rolled back and forth before the castle like a snake possessed, wailing pitifully in a voice that seemed almost human. He curled his head around and began lunging at his own midriff with horrible lashes of his manhigh fangs, tearing great rents in his scarred belly that vomited a bloody ooze full of coins and bones.

And then to the amazement of all a tiny splinter of wood came protruding from a gash in the serpent's hide and began sawing its way out as the beast went stiff and began to sob and gurgle; and first a hand, and then an arm and shoulder came hacking out, followed by a blood nmatted old head and torso; and then Verusilef came thundering out of the hills and galloped to the snake's side as the dripping form of Kristomarkus the Fair came popping out of the belly of the halved beast, brandishing the oaken sword of the ancient druids and crying to the Outlanders to renew the fight.

In a flash the battle was resumed. On the Fields of Ambrielle the rebels flew into their foes with renewed vigor, growing bolder and more fearless as they sensed the tide of battle turning, while on the drawbridge of the Alnamir Gate Zamelda and Kristomarkus stood not a hundred feet apart, eyeing each other maliciously in a volatile wizardly standoff.

"Leave this place while you still can, cousin," shouted the witch over the din of battle. "You have no powers here." As if to prove her point she lifted Beasly up by the hair and tickled the dangling Eveningsky Globe, at the same time spreading open her batwing cape to reveal the glimmering green Emeraldstone around her neck.

"You underestimate me," replied the wizard, his purplish cloak and pantaloons still dripping with the gory viscera of Gorthog. "Behold, witch!" With a dramatic swoop of his arms the wizard reached into the folds of his cape and drew forth the lost red Gossamer Globe of his fallen cousin, the fiery Crimsonflame of the Red Wizard, rescued from the bowels of the dead serpent. All three globes were now seething and sparking and throbbing with color, sending out crackling bolts of electricity and pulsing prismic auroral sprays. With each passing moment the psychedelic maelstrom intensified, filling the sky with purple and aqua firestorms and swirling tornadoes of magenta and cyan that bathed the swarming fields in surreal dancing clouds of pastel light.

But while Kristomarkus struggled to master the feral Crimsonflame, his mind still veiled and drowsy from six days of suffocating sleep deep within the serpent, Zamelda was nearing the peak of her powers as she harnessed the Eveningsky Globe to her will and marshalled every haint and gremlin that lurked in the stone and mortar of Castle Galore.

"Flee for your life, warlock," she sneered, "and leave the savages to me."

As she spoke, the sorceress was slyly fingering her precious Emeraldstone, causing the tongue of the dead beast Gorthogorn to slide up silently behind her dazed adversary. Too late the wizard felt a scratchy fork wrap around his ankle; before he could cast a counterspell he was being slowly drawn towards the blithering lips of the redbellied corpse.

Zamelda shrieked with glee, and her joyous wrath passed like a banshee across the Fields of Ambrielle, filling the Outlanders with dread and driving her forces on with a renewed lust for blood. Kristomarkus yanked his druiden sword from its scabbard and began hacking at the tongue of the beast; but before he could sever it he was attacked from behind by an invisible force that flung the oaken sword high into the air and threw the wizard roughly to the ground.

"Squeeze him, my pet!" screeched the sorceress. "Break his neck! Crush his bones! The globe--I want the globe!" Drunk with ecstasy, Zamelda began dancing and giggling like a girl in a diamond mine as Mandelev the Invisible wrassled the wizened old warlock onto his back.

Beasly shivered and covered his eyes. The Eveningsky Globe was humming and churning against his chest. If he could only use it to help Kristomarkus! A sting welled up in his eye, and he winced to fight it back.

All of a sudden the back of Beasly's eyelids lit up in a gossamer vision. Where the wizard had been fighting valiantly against an invisible adversary the little man from the clouds now saw the huge dismembered hand groping and grappling; and where the zombie executioner had stood a few feet to his left, he now saw his friend Truman Allabam, the Mlembe prince! Beasly took heart, and as his eyelids fluttered open he surrendered himself to the wordless voice of the globe.

"Kristomarkus!" cried the lad as he ripped the Eveningsky Globe from around his neck and hurled it across the drawbridge towards the struggling wizard. The glowing blue orb bounced and rolled, and then it wavered in the middle of the bridge like a steel ball between two magnets.

The Emeraldstone around Zamelda's pale, pimply neck began to crackle as bolts of green lightning and volleys of green fireworks danced beneath the stone arch of the Alnamir Gate. With a wave of her hand the wizardress flung Beasly at the feet of her executioner, while her bulging green eyes trained their gaze on the burning blue orb and began to draw it back towards the castle.

But before the globe had moved a foot, Zamelda's concentration was broken by the sound of the hulking corpse of Gorthog as it wriggled and gagged and vomited up the redcaped remains of the long dead Red Wizard. Freed from the grip of the snake's forked tongue, Kristomarkus lurched forwards and toppled across the grasping fingers of the invisible hand in a vain attempt to reach his lost blue globe. But Mandelev was too quick; and grasping the wizard by the feet the foul beast yanked him so harm that the Crimsonflame Globe popped loose from his clutches, bounced once onto the drawbridge, and then plummeted into the dark abyss of the Alnamir gorge.

A thousand feet the Crimsonflame fell, until it was sundered on the quartz spikes in the depths of the chasm below and burst like an exploding star, shooting a fireborn strand of scarlet unraveling furiously into the sky as far as the mind could see. Still struggling against the invisible brute the powerless ,w,.izard reached out for the end of the wooden drawbridge and eyed the Eveningsky Globe not sixty feet away; but his strength was gone, and his will was swiftly waning.

"You old fool!" chortled Zamelda as she put her hands on her hips and took a few steps onto the bridge. "Where are all your allies now?"

Choked with laughter, the Greeneyed Empress stomped her feet and grabbed her belly, hooting and howling with delight; and then she began to rock back and forth as her guffaws grew louder and louder, spreading her murderous mirth across the battleground below, where the Fields of Ambrielle were soon filled with the bloodthirsty warcries of the maddened Forns and the dourhanded Imperial Guard.

"It's mine, all mine!" she snorted, spreading out her arms and throwing back her head to gaze haughtily at the impotent gods above.

But her eyes met the sky just in time to glimpse the swooping form of Poppa Gonzala the Crowmaster as he drew back the fabled sword of the ancient druids and lopped off her head as cleanly as a guillotine.

"Nooooooooo!" she screamed as her precious green Gossamer Globe went unraveling into the sky and her head bounced undaintily onto the edge of the drawbridge. "This cannot be! I forbid it! Nooooooooo!"

But the Greeneyed Sorceress was not to be dispatched so easily. For even as Kristomarkus felt the grip of Mandelev loosening, and even as the Eveningsky Globe began to inch its way back towards the exhausted wizard, the milkspewing body of the beheaded witch crept jerkily over to the gearbox of the drawbridge and began to slowly turn the great wooden handle that raised it.

"Hurry!" her head cried, "Faster! Faster!,' The bridge creaked and groaned, and then bit by bit it was lifted higher and higher off the ground, until the blue globe teetered once again and started to roll lazily back towards the milky oozing head of the Empress.

"I'll have it yet!" she moaned as the bridge was drawn up over the brink of the gorge, "and none left to defy me!"

Gradually the globe gained momentum, rolling faster and faster Awards the crazed witch; but just as it was about to reach her Be.asly leapt up from his swooning, and running full tilt he scooped up the globe like a shortstop and began climbing towards the far end of the slowly rising bridge.

"Climb, boy! Climb!" shouted Truman as he drew forth his sword and approached the hideous disembodied sorceress, ready to skewer her head like a shish kebob. Tossing his helm to the ground the tall Mlembe prince circled his quarry and stood defiantly before her. Zamelda's nostrils flared, and her.eyes narrowed; but just as the tip of Truman's sword tickled Her chin she sent a burst of violent green flames careening out of her eyes that turned his stolen armor into a searing redhot shroud of torture.

In an instant the brave prince was a mass of quivering, melting flesh. His face contorted in agony, Truman glanced up at the still rising bridge, where Beasly was clawing and straining and rapidly losing his grip. With his last ounce of strength the dying Mlembe prince staggered into the headless body of the witch and threw himself headfirst into the huge grinding gears; and the gears pulled them both down and crushed them like a vice, then creaked to an eerie halt.

With one last great effort Beasly pulled himself up to the top of the bridge, where he came face to face with the black abyss of the Aloamir Gorge. Below him stretched the bloodstained Fields of Ambrielle, where the battle raged unabated; and there at the edge of the dark precipice on his hands and knees was Kristomarkus the Fair, struggling to regain his senses.

Suddenly a calm, soothing voice came wafting up from behind the young cloud dweller, a voice out of his past.

"Beasly, son," it said reassuringly, "come down from there before you get hurt."

Turning to face the voice, Beasly was shocked to see at the base of the drawbridge the beautiful face of his mother where seconds before the head of the witch had been!

"Won't you come down, son? I've baked you some cupcakes," it sighed. "And I'm so tired, so very, very tired."

Beasly blinked and shook his head. "You're not my mother," he said sharply.

"Come on down, dear," the voice continued. "I'd hate to see you falling. I know how dizzy you get. Falling."

"I'm not gonna fall," replied the lad. "And I'm not . . . dizzy.~'

"Of course you're not," whispered the voice. "You're a big boy now.

Beasly furrowed his brow and turned his gaze back towards the gorge. From his perch atop the half drawn bridge to the far edge of the gaping chasm was a leap of forty or fifty feet; and if he missed he'd fall a thousand feet onto the bloodied spikes of quartz below.

"Chocolate cupcakes?" he asked shyly.

"With double fudge icing," returned the voice. "And when you're done, you can go puff hopping with the president's poodle!" Beasly felt himself being drawn back to happier days in the Kingdom in the Clouds, when all his meals were covered in honey, and his baths were warm and bubbly, and he could spend the day playing hide and seek with President Doodle's fluffy white poodle.

"Come on down now," his mother said again. "Come give us a big hug."

Beasly loosened his grip, and his feet slipped an inch or two down the rough sandy planks of the bridge, sending a few loose pebbles tinkling to the ground. But just as he was turning to slide on his rump down the incline, Beasly heard the staccato pounding of hooves coming from behind; and in a flash the lightfooted steed Verusilef vaulted across the gorge and onto the edge of the bridge, with Kristomarkus clinging firmly to his mane.

Letting loose a thunderous warcry the wizard bent down and plucked up the lad and set him astride the stallion; then drawing forth his sword Kristomarkus hewed the great chains that held the bridge suspended in two. With a resounding thud the drawbridge struck ground, and Verusilef leapt nimbly aside.

Leaving the hideous shrieks of Zamelda behind, the wizard grabbed up the Eveningsky Globe, and holding it aloft he crashed furiously back into the fray, spreading visions of marauding hordes and flying leviathans before him. Like ships before a storm the regiments of the Fornican Militia were scattered, and they fled dismayed towards the walled estates of their liegelords, throwing off their uniforms as they went. Not so the grim soldiers of the Imperial Guard, who held to their formations and retreated smartly towards the castle. With the sheer walls of the Witchfang looming at their backs the tarheeled guardsmen fought on valiantly, giving ground bit by bit as the teeming Outlanders tried again and again to outflank and surround them. As the two armies inched closer and closer to the Alnamir Gate the fighting grew ever more intense, until the rearmost guards could feel the cool breath of the gorge on the backs of their necks, and the frontline wavered across heaps and piles of the dead and dying. Horrible screams filled the air on the flanks as combatants fell coupled into the abyss, and the moans rising all about melted into a hellish dirge.

All at once a clap of thunder came ripping across the drawbridge, a peal that rent the air so violently that all who yet stood upon the Fields of Ambrielle were dashed to the ground and paralyzed; and then a voice rang out, and all eyes were turned towards the stone arch of the Alnamir Gate. And there on the bridge stood Poppa Gonzala and Kristomarkus on either side of Damakros the Forgotten, propping him up by the arms as the bewildered old King held forth the ranting head of the Greeneyed Empress skewered on a sword.

"Fight you fools!" she screeled madly, "It's a trick! Don't believe your eyes! Fight! I command you! Fight!"

Now a murmur was passing among the Imperial Guard that this truly was the King, and the Outlanders were quick to lay down their arms and bow to their saviors. And then Jonathan Beasly came riding across the field astride Verusilef, and the rebels and the guardsmen parted to let him pass over the bridge, where he dismounted and went to the great gears, and drew out the fabled druiden sword from the scabbard of his friend Truman Allabam; and then he fell to the ground weeping.

In the west Sarinda was quickening her descent into the sea, while a warm moist breeze carried a bank of darkening clouds in from the east. All about the Fields of Ambrielle the women of Shandoah and Fornica had already begun to tend the wounded, and a lone bell from the Fornican marketsquare tolled the eventide.

Stepping onto the bridge, a tall lieutenant from the Imperial Guard bowed down low and doffed his helm, laying his sword down at the feet of the King; and then the rest of the guards bowed likewise and laid their arms to the ground.

"Hail to the King!" they cried in unison. "Hail to King Damakros!"

And then the guards parted and let the triumphant throng of Outlanders stream across the drawbridge and into the castle, where they emptied the dungeon of its wraithlike prisoners, and toppled statues of the witch and her Milkblood thralls, and stomped on the seals and crests and symbols of the Greeneyes, and snatched up all the loot they could carry.

The raving head of Zamelda was then placed in a gilded birdcage beside the corpse. of Gorthog and her own crumpled batcaped body. And as the last hints of the daylight sky fled beneath the western horizon, the guardsmen and the rebels and a flock of Fornican peasants joined together and built a pyre as grand as a pyramid, which burned through the night as one by one the bodies of the fallen were bathed and blessed and given over to the flames.

So it was that the War for the Gossamer Globes came to an end, and the reigns of Zamelda Galore and Gorthogorn the Mighty were overturned; and so it was that a new age came upon the world, though none could say what pains might accompany its birth, nor how long would be the labor.

Sarinda rose somber the morning after battle, muted by a grey overcast sky. The pyre had burned down to a mound of hot ash and embers.

To the astonishment of all, the remains of the Greeneyes and the corpse of Gorthogorn were nowhere to be seen, having disappeared in the night as if they'd never existed at all! In their place before the Alnamir Gate sat only the gilded cage, whose lock had not been tampered with, and a pair of old pamphlets, one bearing the mark of the Red Wizard on its cover and the other the mark of the Oracle. It was argued in ages hence that the pamphlets had been swallowed whole, one by Gorthog and the other by Zamelda, because of the secret wisdom each held; and that this wisdom had been suppressed because it would empower every common Joe or Charlie to defy the might of the redbellied serpent or the magic of the greeneyed sorceress. But how the pamphlets came to rest unmarred on the Fields of Ambrielle was never fully explained, nor was the disappearance of the corpses.

Soon the Fields were abuzz with rumors that the witch was back inside the castle mesmerizing the King, and that the dragon had slithered off to the east to plunder the unprotected Outlands; but these were quickly swept away by the mood of the day as minstrels began strumming their lyres and singing the praises of the wildlanders and the smells of a feast began to fill the air. Flasks of wine were passed about, and men who the day before had flirted with death were now seen dancing with each other and pinching one another's cheeks like a bunch of giddy sch40Lgirls. A few of the more soused and daring warriors made friendly raids on the cellars of the Fornican gentry, inviting one and all to come join in the revelry, until even a few officers of the:Fornican Militia were seen toasting the return of the King.

By noon a humongous feast had been prepared, and a table five hundred feet long was set for the King and Kristomarkus and all the heroes of the War for the Gossamer Globes. To the table went Jonathan Beasly, who sat proudly beside his wizardly mentor with Maggie Mandelin and Poppa Gonzala , StaJlioncharge the elder and the matron Delaria, Jackson and Jeffery D. McCracky; Marten, Malkim, Gayaverre and Mendez, Garanamo, Linnin, Shavez and Highli; and hundreds more who in times past may have been bitter enemies, but who for this one purpose were counted as brothers. Bread was broken and n instrels sang, and plates heaped with red herring and blackeyed peas were passed about. Steaks and spuds and pumpkin pies aplenty were shared, and bushels of nuts and berries and veggies to boot. And to top it all off, cakes the size of heifers all covered with red rose icing.

Before the last belch was offered to the gods, a final toast was drunk to the fallen; and as glasses tinkled and flasks were squeezed the eastern rains finally came. Falling gently through the afternoon they cleansed the fields of blood and gore and dragonstench. With the rains came also haggard groups of elders and brats and womenfolk from the four corners of Dalondria, and peasants from faraway Yorkmere, and even an occasional count or baron, until as far as the eye could see the Fields of Ambrielle were swarming with tents and teepees and children playing rain games.

Evening approached. From the castle a summons was sent to all the learned and the wise, and to the leaders of the four tribes--for there was much yet to be decided, and the feeble King needed all the counsel he could get. One by one those keenest in thought crossed the drawbridge and entered the towering citadel. At dusk the bridge was blocked, and the Eveningmoot began.

All through the night the debate raged, and on through the next day and night as well. King Damakros had little to say, falling asleep in his chair more times than could be counted; but whenever the deliberations reached an impasse both sides were quietly explained to him by Kristomarkus or Poppa Gonzala, and ayes and nays were counted, so that his befuddled old brain needn't make a decision until it was all but made for him. For such was the talent of Damakros the Forsaken, that through dickering and compromise he could avoid the folly of his own shortcomings by synthesizing those of his fellows.

Jonathan Beasly was obliged to sit out the moot amid the growing legion of curious pilgrims who flocked to the castle from every nook and cranny in the land. Among them were gypsies and beggars and barons and dukes, all hoping to share somehow in the spoils, or at least to be spared from the guillotine, which for the time being was in use as a melon slicer.

As for Beasly--well, he just yearned for a coconut bubblebath in the clouds, and to stop blushing schoolgirls from embarrassing him with their smiles and giggles. Except for the attention of every girl in Dalondria, Beasly would have enjoyed being a hero; and if the truth be known, there was actually one pretty petunia whose blush had filled the little rebel with hot pins and needles and caused a lump to rise up in his throat.

On the second morning the moot was ended, and the rains having ceased in the night a fanfare was blown from atop the Alnamir Gate to gather the masses for a speech. Soon a great tussle descended on the field before the gate, and several unlucky peasants were budged right over the edge of the gorge by their and bushels of nuts and berries and veggies to boot. And to top it all off, cakes the size of heifers all covered with red rose icing. pushy comrades, until a garrison of the Imperial Guard had to be called out to quell the exuberance. Then another fracas broke out at the rear of the crowd as none other than the Right Reverend President Howdy Doodle Goldfink made a starcrossed entrance aboard a golden chariot; but before the old ham could steal the scene, Kristomarkus ordered the guards to clear a path for Howdy and his poodle and his lovely wife Narny Faye, who rolled up to the gate smiling and waving like the guests of honor.

Finally the King was led to a dais at the end of the drawbridge, and propping himself up between two redcoated guardsmen he began shakily to read his speech, while Poppa and the wizard stood behind and prompted him with lines. "My fellow Dalondrians," he said absently, "You have been called here today to, uh-oh my--yes, to hear the following Edicts, which having been agreed upon by a majority of your learned peers, now carry the full force of law. Yes, that's it."

"And may I say," he added in an aside, "that most of 'em are just as right as Old Man Odom." At this those close enough to hear the gaffer's voice laughed heartily; and as his words were passed back through the mob a wave of chuckles rose and fell.

"Now where--oh yes, the Edicts," he continued, pleased at his warm reception. "And furthermore, the Coastal Empires having been dissolved, and the Bank of Blote having been foreclosed upon, and whatnot, I hereby free you all of your debts and encumbrances."

A great hooray rose up and passed quickly to the back of the throng, while Damakros waved and doddered and clapped his hands for Howdy Doodle, who was taking a bow for something or other.

"And by dint of their great courage and skill," he bellowed more confidently than before, "the warriors of the Outlands are hereby granted, uh, hmmm--oh yes, how nice, are hereby granted the title of knight, and all the honors and privileges thereof."

Again the mob cheered, most of all those in the rear, who by virtue of the translation now believed their sons and husbands to be dukes and earls. As the morning wore on five more edicts were read to the approving masses, who cheered loudly at every turn. For the kingdoms in the clouds were to be turned into commons, and lowered close enough to the waters of Lake Waldinmuck in the east, and to the Lake of the Eye in the west, to be accessible by ropeladders and suitable for somersaults and bellyflops. Castle Galore was to be converted into a park for the amusement of lads and lassies, and the Tower of Bubel would become a place of learning, whereby the peoples of Dalondria could perhaps be lifted out of their ignorance by simply gazing at their beloved hearthstones.

As for the Eveningsky Globe, the moot determined that Damakros himself would have a grand globetower built to house it--a tower high enough that the silken blue orb would float suspended in air so high and thin and rarified that the slightest attempt to remove it would cause it to unravel into the ether and be lost forever. At first Kristomarkus seemed to wince and smirk, as if he had other plans for the lone remaining Gossamer Globe; but in the excitement of the day only Jonathan Beasly gleaned the wizard's intentions, having been under the spell of the globe himself, and privy to its seductive charm.

The last edict of the King granted a conditional clemency to the Milkbloods, who had feared that the wrath of the Outlands would erupt into a guillotine party the likes of which had not been seen since the fall of the royal lines of Panazhia. The moot had decided instead to force the cloud dwellers and castle lords, the bankers, barristers, counts and barons to spend one cycle of moons planting trees across the land and redistributing their illgotten hoards among the needy~peasants and wildlanders. The Seventh Edict,"as it would later be called, enraged many a sly shrew and shylock among the more pasty and sallow Milkbloods, who never touched dirt, and would sooner have killed their own grandchildren than give up their precious luxuries to a gang of darkskinned brutes. In the days that followed two dozen or so of these unrepentant Bloods disappeared without a trace, though it was never known whether they absconded at night in gold laden schooners or were dispatched by their own vengeful servants and vassals.

When the King finished his speech the throng gave one last cheer, throwing their hats full of confetti high into the air and dancing around like drunken fools. On the Fields of Ambrielle a holiday was consecrated, and the wine flowed like a river surging over its banks, and footraces and wrassling matches were held, and maidens were married off among the tribes as a symbol of ' `the solidarity of the Outlandish Alliance.

Then a grand parade came rolling across the drawbridge from the castle, with Kristomarkus riding honored at the front and Jonathan Beasly behind him carrying the Eveningsky Globe on a pillow, and King Damakros at the rear in a gilded carriage. Across the fields they rode, past the marketsquare of Fornica, and westward to the sea, with tens of thousands of revelers streaming in behind them. When at last they reached the western shore the wizard was surprised with the gift off actable massed schooner, which he boarded graciously, bowing~ll the while to his generous benefactors as he peered into the crowd for some sign of his friend Beasly.

But alas! The little man had given the old warlock the slip, and was even now presenting the Gossamer Eveningsky Globe to King Damakros of Dalondria, while a contingent of sailors from the Imperial Guard untied the handsome schooner and quickly set sail, leaving behind an uproarious outpouring of gratitude from the cheering mob.

Eventually the crowds dispersed and headed back to their camps, and the King's carriage was re:adied to leave. But as the crow's nest of the proud ship slipped silently beneath the horizon, Beasly felt a twinge of shame. Climbing into the carriage he buried his head in the chest of Damakros and began to cry.

"There, there, my boy," the King said softly. "You will see him again some day ."

"But what am I to do now?" Beasly sobbed. " All I ever wanted was to go home."

"And so you shall," said the King. Drawing a silver medallion from his pocket Damakros ceremoniously kissed the lad once on each cheek; and pinning the medallion on Beasly's chest he said, "I hearby declare you, Jonathan Lemuel Beasly, the first Warden of the Cloud Commons of Yorkmere, and grant you a lifetime deed to one acre of c1oud there to do with as you see fit."

Beasly blinked and fingered the cool medallion. "And. ..and my mother?"

"She'll be waiting for you--along with your father, in due time, of course."

"Oh," said Beasly a little sadly.

"As for your stepfather," continued the King, "Master Biltmore will become my personal garl:lener--he could use a few years to reacquaint himself with the dust."

Beasly felt a hot flash pass across his face:."But I don't. ..I"

Beasly gasped, and his mind reeledl. He wondered what more .could possibly happen as he tried vainly to picture his father's .face. The carriage rolled on, past the f~lrms and fields of Fornica, past the castle--dotted mountains and the high city walls, the Kingdom in the Clouds and the Tower of Bubel.

When the King and Warden Beasly finally reached the Fields of Ambrielle a celebration was taking place that dwarfed any bash since Holy Mo came down from the hills. Drunken orgies and fisticuffs were breaking out in every dale, and "piles of loot were being loaded onto rickety conestogas, and near the Alnamir Gate a great cauldron of gold had been melted do~n and poured over a poor young heifer to make an in~;tant statue. A line of guardsmen came out and escorted the carriage across the drawbridge to where a t~lble had been set in the candlelit courtyard amid sprays of chandelier lillies. Here Beasly and the King dined and exchanged farewells with Poppa Gonzala and Maggie Mandelin, and Stallioncharge and Jennalyn McCracky; and joining the f~te fashionably late were the Right Reverend President Howdy Doodle Goldfink and his lovely wife Narny Faye.

After the dinner a little negotiation was due; for Howdy Doodle's presidency had to be somehow taken back without hurting his feelings, a trick made all the more delicate by the presence of Narny Faye, who was most ambitious, and quite accustomed to the top rungs of the social lattice. The King wisely began by naming Howdy to the post of Ambassador of Goodwill, and Narny to the post of Headmistress of the Committee to End Unseemly Fun.

The presidency itself had been abolished by the Eveningmoot and replaced with the position of Secretary to Small Islands and Fruitbaskets, while the vice presidency had been upgraded to the position of Master of Ceremonies and Funeral Processions; which left both the presidency and the vice presidency vacant, in a manner of speaking. And so the presidency was handed over to Howdy's beloved white poodle Fern, who like all dogs saw only in black and white, while the vice presidency was given to Narny's handsome pet parakeet, with the explanation that the people of Dalondria would wish to have the titles kept in the Goldfink family name.

To cinch the deal Howdy was given a small marionette's theatre in the marketsquare of Fornica, where he could pursue his new ambassadorship through the clever exploits of a troupe of puppets, and where Narny Faye could hold fashion shows and china swaps and committee functions for the high minded.

Beasly couldn't sleep at all that night, tossing and turning like a skilletfull of scrambled eggs. The next morning he was given a fine leopard appaloosa pony and sent haply on his way back east, with standing invitations to return as he wished to the secretive dwellings of the Greens, or the stone city of the Gonzalin, or the beautiful Mlembe bazaar.

Joining the caravan of Outlanders and Yorks as they streamed onto the Imperial Road, the young man from the clouds prodded his steed into a trot, straightened his back, and began to whistle an old folk tune, snivelling only a tad as he dreamt of his next bubblebath in the clouds and of his mum's warm bosom.

Where the road split at the crossing of Massacree Crik, Beasly took the southward course, Old Will Road, and so passed again through the sculpted desert of the Gonzalin, and across the Outlandish Plains, and into the lush forests of Mlembe. And when at last he came within view of Lake Waldinmuck, he found a softrunning path that skirted the northern shore, and becoming less and less distinct wound its way among the bluffs and foothills of the Reston Wood. Here he searched in vain for the cave of the Oracle. Finding instead the woodsman's waterlogged old fishing boat, Beasly gave his pony a pat, hopped into the craft, and began rowing towards the Commons in the Clouds, which floated peaceably above the center of the lake like the mirage of some mad windmill chaser.

And so it was that Jonathan Lemuel Beasly made it back safe and sound to his home in the clouds, where he prospered for many years practicing law in the shadow of the Revolution, before the subsequent outbreak, naturally, of the Second Civil War.

Copyright 2005 by Preston Coleman