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dragon drove Caradoc back among the coral and rock. She saw the devil light streaming from the old mage’s open mouth, his open eyes, the smooth white moonstone in his staff’s head.
    The water had burned her as she pinned the renegade wizard’s body to the rocks with a harpoon. She had pulled the crystal spike from the dragon Centhwevir’s skull, freeing Centhwevir of the demon. She’d torn away from Caradoc’s neck the silver bottle containing the jewels that imprisoned the captive wizards’ souls. But Folcalor had rushed forth out of Caradoc’s body, leaving the wizard’s emptied corpse to be devoured by fish.
    Later, when they’d returned the souls of the wizards to their bodies again, they’d found among the jewels in the bottle a topaz that they’d assumed contained Cara-doc’s soul. This they had smashed—as they’d smashed that of the Icerider boy Summer, whose body had been killed in the fighting—to release the soul into the next world.
    Now, as she tried vainly to call John’s image in the fire, all she saw was that underwater darkness, that blue-black world near the Sea-wights’ abyss. The whale-mages had closed the demon gate by piling rocks before it. Closing her eyes and letting her mind drift, Jenny did not know whether what she saw was in truth a scrying or only the pictures in her imagination.
    But she smelled the cold salt strangeness of the deep sea and heard the movements of the water around theblack columns of rock where Caradoc had been pinned. Like vast moving shadows she saw the whalemages above her, and far below, silver stealthy shapes whose eyes flared with green light.
    *  *  *
    “A knight went out on errantry,
Sing the wind and the rain…”
    The song seemed to come from a great way off. Children singing, he thought, as Ian had sung to Adric when they were small. Thin frail voices down a long corridor of darkness.
    “A knight went out on errantry
In shining silver panoply,
And none could match his gallantry,
Sing the wind and the rain…”
    The air in the room changed. He smelled sulfur and scalded blood.
    “Sing the wind and the rain.”
    She was there, in the shadows near the western wall.
    John drew breath, queasy with fear.
    He knew he was asleep. The quality of the candlelight and the way the darkness in the work shed vibrated with colors unknown to waking sight told him this, along with the fact that he felt only vaguely cold although he could see his breath. Looking hard at the shadows he couldn’t see her. Things that appeared one moment to be her turned out the next to be only pale shapes in the plaster, or shadows thrown by an engine’s pulleyedwheel. It was worse than seeing her, because he couldn’t imagine what form she wore.
    “You said you wanted aught done, an’ all.” It took him everything he could muster to speak. “What is it you want, that you’ll kill half me people to get?”
    Her chuckle was like a torturer’s little silver hook slipped down a victim’s throat. “My darling, I’d kill half your people for the amusement of hearing you weep for them. You know that.”
    He made no answer. Droplets of blood began to ooze from the coarse plaster wall, glistening in the five candles’ light. The smell of it went through his head like a copper knife.
    “It isn’t much that I want,” she purred in time. “I’m not an ogre.” She spoke, he saw now, out of a running wound that opened in the wall. The voice came out with a clotted trickle of blood, nearly black in the flickering shadows. He wanted to look away but couldn’t.
    “But there are things a man can do, and places a man can ride, that the Hellspawned cannot. The world is differently constituted than you think, Aversin.”
    Still he said nothing. Storm wind had been howling around the Hold walls, and he could not imagine that it had ceased to do so, but the work shed was silent as if it had been plunged to the center of the earth.
    “When you passed through the burning mirror