"I'll do that," Gerin told them. Fighting was all they wanted, he realized; had he set them against Biton or against the Elabonian gods, they would have entered that fray with as much ferocity as this one. He shivered. If this fight should be won, he'd do what he could either to restore those wards under Biton's shrine or to form some arrangement between the monsters' gods and those who lived on the surface of the earth.

This is the way to the Gradi gods: he cast his thought toward Baivers. As Mavrix had, the Elabonian god picked up his mind and carried it along with his own over a plane of being no mortal could reach without divine aid. From his place as a small cyst on Baivers' vaster consciousness, the Fox sensed the underground powers following where the god of ale and barley led.

The route felt different this time: no sea of wine, no equally turbulent sea of sensuality. Gerin wondered if he was perceiving the same «places» through a different god's sensorium, or if Baivers had simply chosen a different path. Amber waves of grain were certainly more sedate than wine and polymorphous fornication.

Whatever the truth, whatever the route, in the end they reached the snow-covered forest of conifers to which Mavrix had brought him. "Too bleak for barley," Baivers said, in a tone of condemnation and abhorrence. "This is what they want to make my land into, is it?" The monsters' gods said nothing at all. They stared, hungrily, every which way at once, as if looking for rivals to massacre.

A path led through the woods, as it had before. Baivers started down it, the underground powers at his heels. The wolves of the divine Gradihome stared out from the trees at the strange gods who dared walk it. A couple of monsters sprang at the wolves. Maybe that was blood on the snow when they were done, maybe ichor. It looked like blood to Gerin.

"Who comes to Gradihome?" As he had during Gerin's visit with Mavrix, the fierce god named Lavtrig stood in a clearing as Voldar's first sentinel against attack.

Baivers pointed a finger. Through the snow under Lavtrig's feet burst shoots of green. The Gradi god stared at them in something like horror. Mavrix had joked by setting flowers blooming in this grim land. Baivers used fertility as a weapon.

Lavtrig thundered toward him, stamping the shoots flat as he came. He raised a great club, plainly intending to smash the Elabonian god out of existence. Baivers pointed at the club. It turned into leaves and blew away on a sudden warm breeze. Lavtrig roared with rage. He drew from a sheath a bronze sword with a gleaming edge. Over metal Baivers had no power.

The monsters' god that was all thews and claws and teeth sprang out from the pack and onto Lavtrig. Lavtrig smote him. He smote back. "Good battle!" he shouted joyously.

Gerin sent a thought toward Baivers: "Shall the rest of us go on? He seems to have found what he wanted."

Go on they did; Lavtrig, though not defeated, was far too busy to block their path. More wolves stared out at Baivers and the underground powers as they pushed along the path. The wolves, though, no longer stayed to fight, but fled through the pine woods, wailing the alarm in all directions.

"They summon the rest of the Gradi gods," Baivers said.

He sounded worried to Gerin. If the monsters' gods shared his concern, they gave no sign of it. "We want those gods," they said in ragged chorus. "We will chew their flesh; we will gnaw their bones."

When they reached the next clearing, there stood Stribog, the father of all storms. He shouted in what might have been wrath and might have been fear at having his place in Gradihome assailed once more. Giving his foes no chance to enter the clearing, he flung a blast of chilly rain into their faces.

Baivers spread his arms wide. "I thank you for your gift of water," he told the Gradi god, "and shall turn it into blessed barley."

Stribog shouted again, this time in obvious fury. "Go back!" he roared wetly. "You and your band are doomed. Flee while you may." The rain changed to sleet, then to hail that pounded the unwelcome visitors like bullets from a sling.

The monsters' god who glowed stepped forward from among his fellows. That glow had been pale and wan; Gerin had associated it with the pallid gleam of fireflies and molds and certain mushrooms. All at once, though, its nature changed. It grew red as fire, red as the vents through which lava spilled out of some mountains and over the land. The glow grew hot as fire, too.

"Light," the other underground powers crooned. "Precious light!" To them, Gerin realized, any source of illumination, whether from decay or an underground vent for molten rock, was precious and potent.

Their light-bearing god sent a blast of fiery heat back at Stribog, melting hail, sizzling sleet into steam, sending the snow under the weather god's liquid feet boiling up as steam. Stribog roared in anger and pain and fought back with whips of winter. He rushed forward to bluster at the monsters' god, making steam rise up from his shining skin as snow and ice threatened to douse his flame. The underground power in turn redoubled his own effort.

Again, Gerin said, "The rest of us can push on, I think," and again Baivers and the monsters' gods did push ahead through the clearing. Like Lavtrig before him, Stribog was far too busy to prevent their passage. As they found the next path, the Fox warned, "Up ahead is the clearing where Nothing dwells. Watch out for him-he's dangerous."

Baivers, sensibly, stopped at the edge of the next clearing. Gerin let out a tiny mental sigh. He didn't know if he would be able to tell whether Nothing had been playing his tricks this time. He'd managed when Mavrix came this way, but who could guess whether the Gradi god was able to learn new tricks?

His old ones were quite bad enough. A couple of the underground powers, maybe filled with contempt for Baivers' cowardice, maybe just looking for a fight wherever they could find one, sprang out into the clearing with ferocious roars, staring all about them in search of a foe.

They sprang out, they roared… and they were gone.

It was not merely that they vanished. It was as if they had never been. Gerin needed a distinct mental effort to recall that they had been part of the ravening pack of gods accompanying Baivers here.

As for Baivers, he said, "You were right, mortal. This power is not to be despised."

"Mavrix didn't beat him," Gerin answered. "He managed to distract him, and that proved enough to get him by."

"Mavrix is full of distractions," Baivers answered. "Distraction is all he's good for. Sometimes I think distraction is all he is."

Behind the Elabonian deity, the monsters' gods were milling around and muttering among themselves. After a moment, one of them, in the shape of a monster but perfectly, light-drinkingly black, stepped past Baivers and out to the very edge of the clearing. "Nothing!" he called in a voice that sounded as if it was echoing and reechoing down the corridors of a cave.

"I am here," Nothing answered, his own voice quiet and flat. "I am everywhere, but I am here most of all."

"Give me back my comrades," the monsters' god said.

"It cannot be," Nothing said.

"Give them back, or you shall not be," the monsters' god warned.

"It cannot be," Nothing repeated.

"It can," the underground power answered, "for I am Darkness." He raised his hands, and the clearing was plunged into blackness as absolute as that Gerin had known when the monsters' gods met his summons below Biton's shrine. Darkness went on, "No one will know whether you are here or not, Nothing. No one will care. When you cannot be found, no one will miss you."

"Or you," Nothing returned, and for a moment black shifted to gray, or rather to the shade of complete and utter neutrality for which gray is the closest earthly approximation.