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other.
But if he succeeded . . .  Ah, if he succeeded.
If he made contact and nursed away the
secrets . . .  Man’s knowledge would be
extended dramatically. He would become the mightiest of living
mages. His fame would course with the wind. Jasmine would have
everything she quarreled about sacrificing. If he made contact.
    He would, by damn! Neither fear nor the infirmity of age would
stay him now. A few months and he would have the last key.
    Bomanz had lived his lies so long he often lied to himself. Even
in his honest moments he never confessed his most powerful motive,
his intellectual affair with the Lady. It was she who had intrigued
him from the beginning, she whom he was trying to contact, she who
made the literature endlessly fascinating. Of all the lords of the
Domination she was the most shadowed, the most surrounded by myth,
the least encumbered by historical fact. Some scholars called her
the greatest beauty ever to have lived, claiming that simply to
have seen her was to have fallen into her thrall. Some called her
the true motive force of the Domination. A few admitted that their
documentaries were really little more than romantic fantasies.
Others admitted nothing while demonstrably embellishing. Bomanz had
become perpetually bemused while still a student.
    Back in his attic, he spread his silken chart. His day had not
been a complete waste. He had located a previously unknown menhir
and had identified the spells it anchored. And he had found the
TelleKurre site. That would buy the mutton and beans.
    He glared at the chart, as if pure will might conjure the
information he needed.
    There were two diagrams. The upper was a five-pointed star
within a slightly larger circle. Such had been the shape of the
Barrowland when newly constructed. The star had stood a fathom
above the surrounding terrain, retained by limestone walls. The
circle represented the outer bank of a moat, the earth from which
had been used to build the barrows, the star, and a pentagon within
the star. Today the moat was little more than boggy ground.
Besand’s predecessors had been unable to keep up with
Nature.
    Within the star, drawn off the points where the arms met, was a
pentagon another fathom high. It, too, had been retained, but the
walls had fallen and become overgrown. Central to the pentagon, on
a north-south axis, lay the Great Barrow where the Dominator
slept.
    At the points of his chart star, clockwise from the top, Bomanz
had penned the odd numbers from one to nine. Accompanying each was
a name: Soulcatcher, Shapeshifter. Nightcrawler, Stormbringer,
Bonegnasher. The occupants of the five outer barrows had been
identified. The five inner points were numbered evenly, beginning
at the right foot of the arm of the star pointing northward. At
four was the Howler, at eight the Limper. The graves of three of
the Ten Who Were Taken remained unidentified.
    “Who’s in that damned six spot?” Bomanz
muttered. He slammed a fist against the table.
“Dammit!” Four years and he was no closer to that name.
The mask concealing that identity was the one remaining substantial
barrier. Everything else was plain technical application, a matter
of negating wardspells, then of contacting the great one in the
central mound.
    The wizards of the White Rose had left volumes bragging about
their performances of their art, but not one word of where their
victims lay. Such was human nature. Besand bragged about the fish
he caught, the bait he used, and seldom produced the veritable
piscine trophy.
    Below his star chart Bomanz had drawn a second portraying the
central mound. It was a rectangle on a north-south axis surrounded
by and filled with ranks of symbols. Outside each corner was a
representation of a menhir which, on the Barrowland, was a
twelve-foot pillar topped by a two-faced owl’s head. One face
glared inward, the other out. The menhirs formed the corner posts
anchoring the first line of spells warding the Great Barrow.
    Along the