They were on Road B before Varia continued the narrative she'd begun. "After I dropped out the window," she said, "Vulkan and I went in the front entrance together. Reception was full of corpses-voitar and a rakutu. No humans. Their faces were distorted; they looked terrible. Then I went upstairs, Vulkan with me. He told me where you were." She half grinned at Macurdy, riding beside her. "He broke down the door to Kurqosz's office. Kurqosz and his circle were in a side room, dead. They looked even worse than the voitar in reception. Their faces were more than distorted; they were dark and swollen, as if their blood vessels had ruptured. Their bodies looked boneless.

"Then Vulkan broke down the door to another side room, and there you were, with a dead rakutu. I almost died myself, before I saw your aura and realized you were alive."

Her expression changed. "You were the only one, you and the ylvin women. Everyone else had either died or left. The other women helped me get you over a horse. Then they headed west, toward ylvin lines."

Macurdy nodded slowly. "The dead rakutu must have shared in the hive mind. Did you find Tsulgax?" "No. Apparently he left with the others." Macurdy grunted. He couldn't imagine Tsulgax abandoning Kurqosz's body.

A few hours earlier, not many miles south of the clearing, an entire cohort of Kullvordi rode through forest.

General Jeremid had been unwilling to assume that the voitik command center was unassailable. Even if the place really did have sorcerous defenses, it seemed to him it might be susceptible to surprise attack-a swift strike followed by an equally swift disappearance. So he'd left with his cohort, riding cross-country through the forest, planning to scout the place. Unless he found reason not to, he'd hit it. Raise all the hell he could, then run. Or if things went right… Who knew?

Again the sky was weird and beautiful with northern lights, a rare sight for Rude Landers. Two nights in a row now, he thought, and wondered what it meant.

Then something changed. The night took on a deeply ominous air. Evil, dangerous. Jeremid ordered a halt, and sent his bird to scout the place again. While he waited, he took his mittens off and shoved them in his pockets, then raised his earflaps. When the bird returned, it reported that everything in the clearing-everything but the sky- looked the same, but felt very very bad. In the vicinity, the northern lights had disappeared, hidden by thick serpents of cloud, writhing and twining in the sky. Like nothing he'd seen before, even in his species' hive mind.

"Sorcery is in use," the bird finished. "Big sorcery." Its voice was subdued. Ordinarily the great raven was self-assured, even haughty. Now it sat huddled and ruffled on a packhorse, utterly demoralized.

Jeremid ordered his men to make camp. Then, leaving Colonel Tarlok in charge, he called a young officer to him, a young hillsman known as a daredevil. Like Jeremid when he'd been young. "Bring the best squad in your platoon," Jeremid told him. "You and I are going to examine the place ourselves."

They'd hardly left before something else happened. Nothing they could see or hear, but something happened. Jeremid felt it, and the others did too; he saw it in their eyes. But they rode on.

At the clearing's edge they stopped. There was no undergrowth there-cattle had grazed the bordering woods for decades-but night and the trees hid the patrol. The sky had stopped writhing. Now it brooded, flickered, pulsed, its clouds slowly roiling. They seemed too dense, too heavy to stay aloft. In the distance, soldiers emerged from the house, then from the stable, mounted their horses and left hurriedly. Neither in ranks nor singly, but in clusters, riding east on Road B.

Then nothing more. Jeremid had the patrol dismount, and they continued to wait. They saw no one else. After a while the lieutenant suggested he be allowed to ride in and see what he could find. Jeremid shook his head without looking at him. His gaze was intent, his senses acutely attuned to the scene in front of them. "We wait," he said. "Something's going to happen."

The air remained heavy with energy, and a towering, breath-suppressing sense of threat. But for a long hour, perhaps two, nothing happened, except that the sense of threat thickened. They watched mesmerized, almost unable to move.

Suddenly lightnings erupted from the clouds, monstrous blinding lightnings whose overlapping crashes drove the Kullvordi to their knees. The discharges continued for perhaps a minute, then subsided into spasmodic cracklings, and ceased. The air smelled strongly of ozone.

When Jeremid's vision recovered and he could think again, the opening held no building at all. Not one. There weren't even rubble piles. Whatever was left, if anything was, was scattered.

Slowly he got to his feet. Their horses had fled. "Lieutenant," he said quietly, "it's time to walk." Then they started back westward to the cohort. It seemed to Jeremid the war was over, though how it had happened, he had no idea. Except that sorcery had been behind it. Well before they'd walked the three miles back to the cohort, the sky had cleared. High in the ionosphere, the aurora still danced its stately dance.

As Macurdy, Vulkan and Varia traveled east on B, they heard great thunders to the west, brief but intense. Then the sense of threat dissipated, and in a surprisingly short time the sky was reclaimed by the aurora. Macurdy's headache died, and his mental processes regained their sharpness.

Before dawn they encountered scouts of an east ylvin guerrilla force. Their sergeant directed them to his captain. Over the weeks, the captain's command had accumulated heavy losses, and its two companies were down to eighty men. Two hours earlier they'd come upon an invader supply train, abandoned. Only its voitik commander remained with it, dead but apparently unwounded, his face a grotesque and blotchy grimace.

The ylf had no idea what might have happened. He only knew that he, his men and their horses, had been overdue for a rest. After selecting sixteen sleighs of food and fodder, he'd set fire to the rest, and was taking his loot to an old woods road he knew of. Macurdy and his companions were welcome to share.

Meanwhile his great raven notified Blue Wing where Macurdy could be found.

The woods road took them to an old forest burn, where there was lots of dense young growth for cover, and deadwood for fuel. There the ylver began erecting more effective shelters than they had previously. Sentries were posted, and a mounted patrol sent out. It was time, their captain said, to catch up on some serious eating and sleeping, but not to go slack on security.

The guerrillas were as impressed with Varia as with Vulkan. She was not only beautiful. She wore the rich fur robe and other expensive travel clothes that Quaie had provided. She'd gotten them from the storeroom before she left the manor house.

The captain gave his guests the best lodging available-an old hay shed, in a grove of young white pine just outside the burn. It had enough roof left, that inside, most of the dirt floor was bare of snow. It held no hay, but the captain had captured hay delivered for bedding.

By that time it was daylight. Over a hot bed of coals, Macurdy and Varia toasted hithik bread, spread it with captured hithik lard, and ate it with fresh, half-roasted hithik horse meat. Vulkan and Blue Wing preferred their meat raw. When they'd finished, Macurdy put chunks of pine stump on the fire, and watched flames begin to lick over them. He felt spent, used up, and almost fell asleep, but got to his feet instead. He still had things to do before he let go.