Alastair nodded his thanks. He switched back on full auto, then scrambled around the left side of his cabinet.

A silhouette appeared before him, moving across his line of vision. Alastair aimed, then swung his barrel up as the firelight revealed the man’s white, white hair.

It was Doc . . . and it wasn’t. Alastair watched as his friend aimed without looking and put a bullet into the brain of a man directly behind him. Doc’s arm swung around and the gun fired again, taking down a sniper Alastair hadn’t even seen, but Doc never looked at the man he killed.

His face in the firelight was smiling, serene, perfect. His eyes did not blink.

Alastair shuddered. Doc was with the gods of blood and fire now.

Men ran down the hill. Gaby counted six of them. Two tripped, one after another, and rolled a good thirty yards. One got up and began limping; the other lay still.

She shot the one who ran toward the trucks. He, too, fell and did not move. She felt the knot in her stomach tighten again.

The other men were headed toward the trees. They waved and shouted at the men coming out of the forest, directing them to run.

There were two more gunshots from the top of the hill, then silence. Cabinets continued to burn. Gaby watched the last of the men move, reach the trees and disappear.

Joseph waited beside her. “It is a bad thing to be clumsy,” he said. “I feel I have not helped much. Perhaps I should go up and see what has happened.”

“Okay.”

“Will you be—”

“Just go, dammit.”

He began his long, lumbering walk up the hill.

They descended the hill toward her in a slow, single line.

Joseph carried Doc like a baby. She could see Doc jerk and twitch.

Alastair was next. He was talking to Jean-Pierre. But as they got closer Gaby realized that the thin man wasn’t Jean-Pierre, but an older gentleman with glasses.

Harris came next. He staggered under the weight of the tarpaulin-wrapped mass he carried, but his face was fixed, his eyes unseeing.

Noriko brought up the rear. She wouldn’t look up.

Gaby tried to make sense of it as Joseph reached the trucks. Where was Jean-Pierre? Then she saw the expression on Harris’ face, on the faces of the others, and she knew. Her vision blurred under tears.

The old man, handsome in spite of his leanness, animated in spite of his grimness, was talking. “I’m sorry about your friend. I know his family. Fine people. We can’t wait.”

“One bell of our time is so precious?” Alastair asked, anger in his voice. “One bell?”

“A bell might be death for us all.”

They passed Gaby. Alastair got to the rear of the truck and lowered the tailgate. Joseph set Doc down in the truck bed.

Harris didn’t look at Gaby as he passed. He walked to the back and gently placed his precious cargo down beside Doc.

Alastair said, “Joseph, can you drive this?”

“I can.”

“Drive. Back to the airfield. Forget about the other car.” Alastair swung up into the rear of the truck. Harris and Noriko followed suit and lifted the tailgate.

Gaby, numb, got into the passenger side of the cab. Joseph was already in the driver’s seat. “What happened?” she asked.

He told her.

Alastair inserted the hypodermic into Doc’s vein and drove the plunger home. He withdrew the needle and set it aside.

Doc gave one final twitch, then heaved a sigh and ­relaxed. His eyes closed. His breathing slowed and ­became more regular.

Alastair silently cursed the gods that had brought him here.

With the forests of Cretanis disappearing behind them, one of their number, a good friend, was dead. One had left his mind in the land of the gods and was now drugged into a stupor. The rest were numbed by grief. And if what their new ally had hinted at was true, they needed more strength for what lay ahead.

He drew shut the drapes over Doc’s bunk on the Frog Prince and went forward. Turbulence made the footing unsteady.

The others were arrayed in the lounge—except for Noriko, who flew the plane on its westward course, and Jean-Pierre, whose body now lay in the cargo compartment under most of the ice from the galley.

Someone had thoughtfully set out Jean-Pierre’s decanters of spirits and several glasses, most of which were now in use. Alastair took a clean one, poured it full of uisge, and sat down to glare at Caster Roundcap. “Now,” he said. “Your story.”

The solemn old man cleared his throat and, in a clear voice and lilting accent, began.

“Forty years ago, I met a man. His name was Theo MacAllister. An odd-looking fellow; he was bald. I asked him if it was from an accident and he said no, just a characteristic of his family. And he’d laugh as though it were a grim joke.

“He was an inventor. He made a pocket knife with a can-opener as one of the blades. Earned a fortune from it and some other devices. And he was a prophet.”

Alastair stirred. “What did he prophesy?”

“He predicted the Colonial War between Castilia and the League of Ardree, a year before the first sign of trouble. He predicted the World Crisis decades before anyone else.

“And the most interesting thing was this: He was completely immune to iron poisoning.” The old man waited for some show of surprise from the others; he saw none. That seemed to satisfy him. He nodded, patted down his pockets, and brought out a pipe and a pouch full of tobacco.

“Anyway . . . He was prone to fits of loneliness. One time when he was in his cups I helped him home. He told me where he was from. The grim world. Of course I did not believe him. I didn’t believe there was a grim world, much less that he was one of her sons. But he was able to convince me. Such conviction in his stories, such truth in his predictions.

“I began to search for other signs of grimworlders. Theo’s history gave me thoughts on what to look for. I found stories. I found living men and women, some of whom would admit to remembering the grim world. Some of them never did, but I could often see through their deceptions.” He finished packing the bowl of his pipe, struck a match, puffed until he could draw smoke to his satisfaction.

“I am a historian, an arcanologist, by trade—my father’s trade, and his mother’s before him—and made the study of the grim world my hobby. From the clues I could draw from the grimworlders I met, I developed some theories about the two worlds.”

“He’s dead,” Harris said.

Caster froze. The others did, too. The poor young man’s mind wasn’t even here. He had to be reliving the events on the hill, the death of the Acadian prince.

Harris continued, “Theo MacAllister. I remember him from the Changeling’s lists. Angus Powrie killed him years ago.”

“Oh, how sad.” Caster shook his head. “I tried to track him down a few years ago and could not. His children said he’d vanished. I knew then something very bad was in the wind.”

Alastair asked, “What theories?”

“I have little proof for any of this,” Caster said. “A little evidence and a growing conviction based on things I’ve heard.

“First, I’m certain that there is a grim world. I think she is a sister to our fair world. Perhaps they were one world once, and developed into twins in their infancy.

“Second, I believe it is possible, though rare, to move from the grim world to here. By extension, it is likely that one can go the other way. I’d never heard of it ­being done . . . unless Angus Powrie’s hints about Duncan Blackletter are true. I’d believe anything of Blackletter from the years I knew him.”

Alastair gave him a hard look. “You’re a friend of his?”

“Oh, no. Never that. When I knew him, he was just a quiet deviser, an old, retired student trying to reconstruct forgotten rituals, living in Novimagos. He saw my early papers on the grim world and wrote letters of praise. We corresponded, exchanged ideas . . . And then one day I heard he was dead, and learned that he deserved to be. A pity I find that the story of his death is erroneous.”