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Let thehed as the blood poured into me II will

make it all the simpler But ere they, these ancient ones, these creatures with countenances washed as clean as her own?

The vision shifted This ti And for one moment I wanted to listen, to try to detach froine it, voices from all over, from the mountains of India, from the streets of Alexandria, from the tiny hamlets near and far

But another vision was co

Marius Marius was cli up out of a bloodstained pit of broken ice with Pandora and Santino to aid hied shelf of a base half of Marius's face; he looked angry, bitter, eyes dull, his long yellow hairiron stairs, Pandora and Santino in his wake It was like a pipe through which they ascended When Pandora tried to help hihly

Wind Bitter cold Marius's house lay open to the elelass were shattered into dangerous fragments; rare and beautiful tropical fish were frozen on the sand floor of a great ruined tank Snow blanketed the furnishings and lay heaped against the bookshelves, against the statues, against the racks of records and tapes The birds were dead in their cages The green plants were dripping with icicles Marius stared at the dead fish in the in of ice in the bottoreat dead stalks of seaweed that lay alass

Even as I watched, I saw hi; the bruises seeain its natural shape His leg was e he stared at the tiny blue and silver fish He looked up at the sky, at the white wind that obliterated the stars completely He brushed the flakes of dried blood from his face and hair

Thousands of pages had been scattered about by the wind- pages of parchhtly into the ruined parlor There Marius took up the brass poker for a walking stick, and stared out through the ruptured wall at the starving wolves howling in their pen No food for them since he, theirI heard Santino speak to Marius, try to tell hio, they were expected, that a woman waited for them in the redwood forest, a woin until they had co? Marius understood but he didn't answer He was listening to the wolves To the wolves

The snow and the wolves I dreamed of wolves I felt myself drift away, back into my own mind, into my own drea over the newly fallen snow

I sawthem-a pack of wolves that had coe two hundred years ago I saw myself, the mortal man, so close to death that I could smell it But I had cut down the wolves one by one Ah, such coarse youthful vigor, the pure luxury of thoughtless irresistible life! Or so it seemed At the time it had been s slain But now all I could do was re the mountains, my mountains, my father's land

I opened o and forced me back a pace For the first tiht, but in a real place and a place that had once, for all purposes, been mine "Yes," she whispered "Look around you " I knew it by the air, by the sain, I saw the broken battleh above, and the tower

"This is my father's house!" I whispered "This is the castle in which I was born "

Stillness The snow shining white over the old floor This had been the great hall, wherestood God, to see it in ruins; to know that it had been desolate for so long Soft as earth the old stones see table fashioned in the ti hearth, and there the front door

The snoas not falling now I looked up and I saw the stars The tower had its round shape still, soaring hundreds of feet above the broken roof, though all the rest was as a fractured shell My father's house

Lightly she stepped away fro slowly in a circle, her head back, as if she were dancing