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Yael Dragwyla and Rich Ransdell First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 6,200 words


http://polaris93.livejournal.com/

The Eris War

Volume II: The Dragon from the Isles

Book 1: Independence Day

Chapter 7: Eve of Destruction


Clearly – so far, anyway – not all of the Los Angeles Basin had gone up in smoke. We were watching
a news broadcast from Pasadena, which was still apparently untouched by the fires. The broadcast, relayed
to Channel 93 in Santa Barbara via a series of line-of-sight links from Cal Tech to Mount Wilson and so on
to Santa Barbara, gave no hint of less than optimal conditions in its immediate vicinity.
Now the scene on the screen split into two: above, to the left, was the commentator; below and to the
right was a tallish man of fifty or so in late stages of pattern baldness, dressed in gray slacks and a white
shirt whose long sleeves had been rolled back above the elbows. He wore a garish tie with a Hawaiian
motif; the tie’s biliously green pineapples, Prussian-blue-and-bright-yellow parrots, and pretty brown girls
wearing grass skirts and leis and little else almost overloaded the set’s color tuning. Intensely bright lights
glared down on him, reflecting off his pale, bald head and the rims of his spectacles. Perhaps because of
the hot lights, large blobs of sweat kept forming on his forehead, so high and broad it reminded me of the
White Cliffs of Dover; he dabbed ineffectively at them again and again with a vast, limp handkerchief he
had wadded up in his left hand. In the meantime, his right hand darted with virtuoso skill back and forth
over a keyboard controlling a tremendous array of equipment that took up most of the room in which he
stood. Beside him, another, somewhat younger man worked at another console, attentively watching a
screen before him, his slender brown fingers racing across his keyboard, shaking his head every so often to
clear his vision from the dazzle induced by the glaring overheads.
“Yes, Ms. Conlin. All ready here,” said the older man.
Day of the Dragons
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 2 of 9

“Dr. Adams, could you tell us something about the massive earthquakes that have struck America’s
West Coast beginning at about 4:30 a.m. this morning?”
“Yes, of course, as much as we can tell about them at this time. – I don’t mean to be vague. It’s just
that we have data coming in continuously, and our picture of the current situation changes from minute to
minute as that data is analyzed and our models of the situation are updated accordingly.
“Also, as you surely must know by now, we ourselves were hit by a large earthquake about 6:30 a.m.
this morning, and by several aftershocks since (although, since this building is mounted on a foundation
floating on a bed of silicon oil, which acts as a very effective shock-absorber, it hasn’t been nearly as bad in
here as it has for people in this general area). We’ve had a lot of knocked-over equipment and other
problems we’ve had to deal with, too, which has taken time and effort away from the task of analyzing data
coming in from our instruments –”
“How many earthquakes have hit the West Coast since 4:30 a.m. this morning, do you know?”
“Large and small, down to about 3.5 on the Richter Scale, perhaps a hundred or more. In addition,
hundreds more have struck in Alaska, Siberia, parts of China, and other parts of the Pacific Rim. I’d say
there’ve been about ten truly large ones, including the initial earthquake that struck Washington State,
which may have measured as much as 10.5 on the Richter Scale, or even more; the great quake that struck
San Francisco, California, about an hour later, which measured perhaps as much as 8.7; the earthquake that
struck the Portland, Oregon area at about 4:45 a.m., leveling that city, which probably measured around
8.8; and several others averaging around 7.1 or so, including the ones that struck Los Angeles, California,
Las Vegas, Nevada, Boise, Idaho (we do not yet have complete data on that one, but hope to soon), and
several other areas.”
“When did these other quakes occur, Dr. Adams? – That is, the ones for which you haven’t yet
mentioned a time.”
“The one in the region of Boise, Idaho took place at about 5 a.m. this morning, not long before the
quake that has hit San Francisco. The one in the Los Angeles area took place at about 5:45 or 6 a.m. And
of course there have been numerous aftershocks in all the areas hit by these quakes, many of which have
been respectably powerful themselves.
“The interesting thing about the timing of these quakes, by the way, is that they seemed to have
occurred too soon after the one in Washington –”
“ ‘Too soon,’ doctor?”
“Yes, ma’am. You see, most of the earthquakes that have occurred this morning, following the
catastrophe in Washington State, are in completely different tectonic systems or sub-systems from one
another. That is, for example, Washington State is part of the North American plate, while San Francisco is
on the Pacific Plate. Of course, a seismic catastrophe as great as the one that took place in Washington
State this morning will transmit tremendous force laterally through the plate upon which that area stands,
and will therefore put stress on any adjoining plates. Eventually, those stresses will relieve themselves in
the form of earthquakes, but that process often takes years, even centuries, to produce results in the form of
earthquakes in areas not on the plate where the original event took place.
“Obviously this hasn’t been the case today. The earthquakes that have taken place as far from the
original event in Washington State as Los Angeles, California, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Denver,
Colorado, and so on followed on the original event with virtually no intervening time – on a geological
scale, at any rate – between the former and the latter.”
“Why do you think that has happened, Doctor?”
“Well, we have some ideas – here, young man, bring that camera around where you can see the screen
here in front of me. . . . Good.” Now only the back of Dr. Adams’ head and his right arm could be seen;
the camera had moved around to take in a view of the screen of the computer at which he had been working
all this time, shooting from behind him and to one side.
“Here, look: here is a cutaway model of the earth,” he said. On his computer screen there was
displayed a globe of the earth, with a gigantic wedge cut away to show its interior, all the way to the core.
“See, here at the surface, here is Washington State and the Cascade Mountains, at the top –” Using his
mouse, he moved a wedge-shaped white cursor until it touched a point at the top of the globe, where a great
plume of fire spurted up toward the heavens from a stylized rendition of a volcano. “Now, see here? The
force goes both sideways and straight down –” Tapping some keys, he caused dotted red lines to appear on
the screen, radiating away from the bottom of the volcano toward the core as well as to each side, below the
earth’s surface. “What we think happened . . . ah, yes, there you go . . . what we think happened,“ he said,
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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tapping the keys again; the red line reached a point about halfway between the surface and the core, and as
it did, more dotted red lines leaped back up from that point, going in all directions, “— is that (ah! Here we
are . . .) the wave length of the shockwaves from the eruption in Washington State were such that some
layer of the earth’s mantle, perhaps two thousand miles up from the center of the earth, was opaque to
them, and reflected them back upward in exactly the same way that a mirror reflects light.
“However, unlike the mirror in, say, your bathroom or bedroom, this ‘mirror,’ if you will, this
reflective layer of the earth’s mantle is convex, rather than flat. So rather than going straight back to their
original source, as you can see from the diagram, here, the reflected shockwaves radiated out toward other
areas of the earth, most notably the Pacific Basin, Oregon and California, Idaho and Montana . . . and upon
reaching a certain distance just below the surface, these set off quakes in areas that were at all seismically
unstable. Which much of the West happens to be, as I’m sure every Californian knows,“ he said, chuckling
grimly.
“Let me see if I get this straight, Doctor. The shockwaves from the initial . . . blast in Washington
State radiated downward toward the earth’s mantle, many hundreds of miles below the earth’s surface, hit a
layer that wouldn’t transmit them any further, and bounced back toward the surface, but at angles from the
original shockwaves, because of the convex curvature of the earth. And when they hit the underside of
other . . . tectonic plates? . . . they set off earthquakes wherever there was . . . seismic instability, as you
would say. So the only factor that would have delayed those secondary quakes was the amount of time it
took them to reach the mantle and be reflected back toward the surface. Do I have that right?”
“Indeed you do, young lady! I’m impressed! How much science have you studied?”
“I took a Bachelor’s Degree in planetary sciences at Duke University before switching to journalism,”
she said, smiling. “Graduated with a GPA of about 3.0.”
“What made you switch to journalism?” he asked her, as if forgetting all about the horrific events
going on in the world around them. “I’d say science took a great loss because of it.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said, seemingly as oblivious as he to just why they were having this
conversation, “but I believe that science gained something, because my scientific education has enabled
me to present the most difficult scientific concepts to the public in a way that makes them both intelligible
and relevant. I’d like to believe that a lot of youngsters growing up today, watching programs such as this
one, will become interested in the sciences and perhaps even be inspired to become scientists themselves,
and that certainly can’t be a loss, now, can it?”
“No, indeed,” he said, laughing. “You certainly have me there.
“At any rate,” he said, finally returning the conversation to the real world, “so far that is what we think
happened this morning. Generally, the timing of the secondary quakes seem to have been proportional to
their distance from the original event, but there have been some exceptions. Those exceptions seem to
prove the rule, that is, show that the physical and chemical makeup of the material through which those
shockwaves have had to pass from the mantle to other areas of the earth’s surface have determined how
long it would take the shockwaves to reach their destinations, and the sort of force with which they would
strike those areas.
“ There is one other theory, though, that might account for our too-early quakes.”
“And that is?”
“Basically the same model as the one I just described, except that rather than the shockwaves from the
Pacific Northwest triggering those quakes here in the West this morning, it may have been shockwaves
from the asteroid strike in the Gulf of Maine late last night and the monstrous quakes it generated along our
East Coast that did it. In either case, the underlying mechanism is much the same, only the direction and
timing of the initial shocks differing from one scenario to the other.”
“Well, thank you, Dr. Adams. Is it all right if we break for news about what’s been happening in the
rest of the country and return to you later? As you know, we’ve suffered a number of strikes against our
cities since late last night, including the asteroid strike off the New England coast as well as military strikes
employing matériel up to and including thermonuclear bombs, and our audience will want to know about
those. But I’d like to come back and talk with you some more later, if you don’t mind.”
“Certainly, Ms. Conlin. We’ll be here throughout the day.”
“Again, Dr. Adams, thank you. – Oh, I see that Peter Margolis has more news for us on the San
Francisco earthquake. So we’ll switch over now to Peter . . . ”
Ms. Conlin and Dr. Adams vanished, to be replaced by a short, stocky, redheaded man standing behind
a broad desk. Jerking nervously at his charcoal-gray, red-flecked power-tie, he said, “Thank you, Linda.
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Peter Margolis of CNN News, with some more live coverage of the events
now taking place in and around San Francisco, California. We now turn you over to Alan Dulane,
reporting live from San Francisco’s Presidio and Golden Gate Park, where refugees from the earthquake
and fire that have nearly destroyed that great city have been congregating all morning, ever since the first
quake hit that city at 5:30 a.m. or so. Alan?”
“Ready when you are, Peter.” Again the screen split, with Margolis above and to the left, and another
man, a tall, graying man in his early fifties or so dressed in a short-sleeved blue shirt and gray slacks that
might have been pressed and cleaned when he first put them on but were now soot-streaked, sweat-stained,
and heavily wrinkled, below and to the right: Alan Dulane. A third man stood to the right of and slightly
behind Dulane, so that most of his body was off-camera or obscured by Dulane’s left shoulder and arm.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Alan Dulane, reporting from San Francisco.”
The split in the screen disappeared, and with it, Peter Margolis. Now the scene shifted so that the man
flanking Dulane took up the center of field. “— bringing you Anson Relay, founder and, er, head of the
First Church of Nhee-Ghee,” Dulane was saying.
“— tell us why you think your home has been left completely undamaged by the earthquake and fire
that have ravaged this city this morning, when nothing remains of neighboring structures save jumbled
piles of charred rubble, Dr. Relay?” Dulane said, extending the hand-mike he was holding toward his
interviewee.
Relay, a very well-preserved man of late middle age, was dressed in a black, short-sleeved tunic, loose
black pants, and soft black boots secured at his ankles with some sort of black, wrap-around bindings.
Accepting the microphone from Dulane, he frowned and said, “I really have no idea, Mr. Dulane. I just
called my wife – she’s back up there at the house – and she said some things fell off the walls and shelves,
books and knick-knacks and whatnot, but nothing was really damaged.”*

* In fact, as I learned some years later from Anson Relay himself, that wasn’t the case: at the time,
Persephone Relay, Anson’s wife, was at the other end of Golden Gate Park, training in tae kwan do
with people from her own dojo, and Anson hadn’t a clue as to what had happened to their house as a
result of the quake, but he knew that it couldn’t have been good. He’d had been feeding a line of
bulldada to Dulane partly in an unsuccessful attempt at trying to get the reporter to stop pestering him,
and partly because he had become very tried of the way the mainstream media supported the Leftist
powers-that-be of the time, and savored every victory over them he could get, however minor. As it
turned out, Zel and Leonor Ramos, his and Persephone’s neighbors and close friends, had already,
unknown to Anson at the time, raided the Relays’ house for whatever was truly worth salvaging and,
along with the Relays’ animals as well as the Ramos’s own possessions and menagerie, loaded them
up in their huge converted school bus in preparation for heading down to Golden Gate Park to find the
Relays and head for the marina where the Ramos’s boat was parked. It was on that boat that the
Relays and the Ramoses took off from San Francisco around mid-day of that same day, heading north
to Bodega Bay, where they tied up not long before San Francisco was destroyed by a 25-megaton
thermonuclear missile from the Soviet Union. As Anson told me, Dulane wanted some short, simple
human interest material for his viewers, and since good news tends to drive reporters away, Anson
figured his best strategy for getting rid of Dulane was to manufacture some and feed it to him, which
he did.

“That’s amazing!”
Using his free hand to toy with a large, ornate, inverted pentagram of silver that dangled by a chain
around his neck, Relay said, “All I can figure is that probably the shockwaves passing by our house have so
far cancelled one another out.” Giving a huge shrug, he added, grinning and gesturing toward the ground,
“Maybe somebody down there likes us. Who knows what he can do?”
Relay and the wincing reporter were standing on a vast, familiar-seeming expanse of greensward.
“Hey, that’s Golden Gate Park again, isn’t it?” I asked Cathy.
“It sure is,” she told me. “What in the world is Mr. Relay doing there? I’d think he’d be out casting
spells or something to make things turn out okay.”
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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“And there’s Dale Seago again,” I said.


Sure enough, Dulane was now turning to Seago, who was standing nearby. “Mr. Seago, do you, er,
know Reverend Relay?”
“Sure. For quite a few years now.”
“Is he, uh, one of your students?”
“Sort of,” Relay supplied, before Seago could say anything. “My own area of interest is jiu-jitsu, but
one of the ryu of Dale’s school does have to do with jiu-jitsu, and there are a number of other areas of
overlapping interest. I like to come down here and train with him and his students sometime – I’ve learned
a lot from him as well as Hyashi Soke.”
“That’s –?”
“The Grand Master of the Kagemushakan Budo,” Seago supplied. “He comes quite frequently to the
Bay Area from Japan to work with students in this area.”
“He . . . teaches people not in your . . . school?” the reporter asked Seago, glancing over at Relay as he
did so.
Seago, wearing a strange smile, glanced at Relay, who told the reporter, “Soke doesn’t seem to mind.
The last two times he’s been here, I’ve joined Dale’s people at the dojo, training with him, and he didn’t
object.”
“What’s your, ah, Grand Master like, Mr. Seago?”
Again Seago glanced at Relay, who grinned back. Then Seago said, shrugging, “To do justice to him,
I’d have to go into a great deal of history, going all the way back to 9th-century Japan up to the present, and
it would take hours and hours. Let’s just say he’s a very great man.
“I suppose I can tell you, though, that if you met him on the street, he’d look like an ordinary sort of
fellow. Remember what Ms. Wednesday Addams said about psycho killers?”
“Er, who? I mean, what?”
“Psycho killers dress just like everybody else. The characters you see on cop shows wearing black
outfits and masks, carrying all sorts of fancy ninja gear, aren’t authentic ninjas, you know. They’re just
there to distract you so you won’t see the real ninjas, who are out there in the crowd, looking like ordinary
guys.”
“Er. That’s . . . very interesting . . . – By the way, Dale – may I call you ‘Dale’?” asked Dulane,
turning back to Seago.
Coming closer, so that he could share the hand-mike Relay held, Seago said, “Sure. Why not?
Everybody else does. No need to stand on ceremony.”
“Well, then, Dale, earlier you told us that you worked for Wells Fargo Bank as a security officer.”
“That’s correct.”
“What sort of condition do you suppose your branch is in right now?”
“That’s a bit ghoulish, isn’t it, Dulane?” Relay suddenly snapped at the reporter, bringing the
conversation back to Ground Zero at warp speed before Dulane had a chance to change the subject.
Dulane, who had undoubtedly been warned by his superiors to keep the conversation as light as possible in
order “not to panic the viewers,” visibly paled as Relay continued, in a tone of purest hydrochloric acid:
“Between the earthquake, the fire, and the looters – not to mention the police, fire department, and national
guard, who are all working their tuchis off trying to bring all this chaos under some sort of control – I
would imagine that, like about 98% of the rest of this city by now, it’s in no shape at all worth speaking
of.”
The reporter stared at him. Once more, Seago and Relay exchanged glances, then Relay continued,
“Look, fella, I came down here this morning to work out with the Seagos and their students, and stayed
down here to see what help I could be once the quake had hit. I imagine that pretty soon one of those nice
police officers or paramedics you can see over there –” he gestured toward a group of tents in the midst of
a gigantic, milling throng of people that lay some distance east of where he, Dale Seago, and the reporter
stood “— are going to come over here and assign us some task or another to help out. God knows they
need all the help they can get. So was there anything more you wanted to know from either of us?”
“Uh . . . I just, I just, well, I imagine our television audience is wondering . . . uh, how do you suppose
your home up on California Street escaped the general destruction that has prevailed here in San
Francisco?” the shaken reporter asked him.
“You already asked me that, son, and as I told you, I truly don’t know. Luck, maybe. Or the grace of
the Gods. It’s an older house, not like Dale’s, and by anyone’s reckoning it should have been a pile of
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burning rubble by now. It isn’t, for which I am damned grateful.* Beyond that, your guess is as good as
mine. Or anyone else’s. – Well, there you are. Dale,” he said, turning to Seago, “Captain Scott’s waving at
us, I think he wants us to come over and do something to help, don’t you?”

*See previous footnote.

“I’d say so, yes. Uh, Mr. Dulane, nice talking with you, but we’ve really got to go now. My wife and
most of my students are already over there helping, I see, and we really ought to join them now.” Before
the reporter could say or do anything else, Seago and Relay, both grinning, were making for the tents which
could just be seen at the right of the screen.
“So much for that,” Cathy said, waving the remote again. The channels rolled by once more, stopping
at Channel 39.
This time we were looking up at a hillside whose terraced slopes were covered with the tumbled
remains of smashed homes, automobiles, and other debris. Next to a large green-and-blue van on the side
of which was the legend “KSFT” stood a reporter and a group of some dozen people or so whom she was
interviewing.
Nervously running a freckled hand through her pixie-cut hair, which was so fair it was virtually white,
the reporter was asking one of the members of the group, toward whom she was extending a microphone,
“Ms. Amesworth, what were you and your students doing when the quake – that is, quakes, there seem to
have been several here in Berkeley this morning – struck this area?”
The woman to whom she was speaking, an older woman with short red hair that was shot with gray but
must once have been a fiery copper, brushed ineffectively at her dirt- and soot-stained olive-gray smock,
sighed, then said, “I’ve been teaching a class on herbs the last few weeks, and we had all gathered in the
herb-garden behind my . . . home . . .” She paused, glancing up the slope at the shattered remains of what
had been houses, sheds, automobiles, and all the other accoutrements of modern, upper-middle class,
American West Coast suburbia. For a moment, tears glistened in her eyes, but, gathering herself together
with what must have been a will of steel, she turned back to the reporter and said, “When the first
earthquake struck, about 6:30 a.m., I think, I was showing my people, here, how to lay out comfrey and
some of the other herbs we’d harvested at sunrise this morning – the best time to do so, you know.”
Suddenly her hands started to tremble. But, taking a deep, shuddering breath to steady herself, she got her
emotions under control again and continued: “At first, I had no idea what it was. It didn’t feel like the
quakes we get here all the time, which shake the house and rumble on and die away, or even like the big
quake we had in 1990, which made me a little seasick, truth to tell,” she said, a hard-won smile
momentarily gracing her features. “No, this one felt as if something enormous had struck . . . well, the
planet itself, and was shoving it as hard as it could in one direction.” Pointing toward the south to illustrate,
she continued, “I would have fallen, except that I was holding on to this stone pillar set in my garden –
more for decoration than anything, but when Will, my late husband, brought the thing home in a truck from
some flea market, years ago, we dug a huge hole for it about five feet deep and six wide, filled it with
cement, and set the pillar down in the wet cement before it dried. The pillar’s about three feet across and
made out of reinforced concrete itself, and capped with a gigantic gargoyle, which named ‘Gaylord,’ after a
really nasty acquaintance of ours,” she said, an impish grin looking out of the grim, set lines of her face for
an instant, giving a hint of the stunningly lovely young woman she must have been in her youth. “At any
rate, once the concrete we’d set it in had dried for a day or two, short of about a ton of dynamite I don’t
think there’s any way that thing could ever be taken down. In fact, one of Will’s friends came over one
night, drunk as a lord, and on a dare threw a grenade he’d somehow gotten hold of at Gaylord The
Gargoyle. The grenade – it was live, by the way – the grenade hit Gaylord, bounced off, and fell on a slope
so that it rolled right down to the base of the pillar, where it detonated. All that happened, besides nearly
deafening us and scaring the neighbors half out of their wits (and getting called on later by members of the
local constabulary, but that’s another story), was that a chip of concrete about as wide and long as the palm
of my hand and about an eighth of an inch thick was knocked off the pillar about an inch or so above the
ground. No, I’d say Gaylord’s in to stay until Judgment Day.
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“So there I was, holding on to the pillar for support, because I was learning over to see how well Anne
McDougal, here —” Smiling, she turned and gestured at one of the others with her, a young woman with
long, strawberry-blond hair braided into a coronet and a heavily freckled face. “— was doing sorting out
the herbs before taking them over to the drying baskets, and that’s when the first earthquake here hit.
“I threw both arms around the pillar and held on as tightly as I could until it was over – it lasted about
two minutes, maybe more, I’m not sure – and then finally realized we’d been hit by an earthquake. At that
point, Jerry Martin, another of my students —” gesturing at another of the group, this one a dark-haired,
blue-eyed man in his early twenties, who looked both pleased and embarrassed – “called out, ‘Lie flat,
everybody! There’s nothing to fall on us out here, and we’re on the most stable part of the hill! Let’s stay
here until we’re sure it’s over!’ You know how it is, in the middle of a crisis, when you’re totally at sea as
to what is happening, and then someone speaks up who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about?
Well, that was Jerry. Thank God he did, too, because that garden was the stablest part of the hill my home .
. . sat on, and if we’d left it, gone into the house or anywhere else on the hill, I don’t know what would have
happened when the first aftershock hit, only about two minutes after the end of the first shock!
“The walls around my garden held up pretty well – they’re solid rock, built like one of the rock walls
around fields in many parts of England, low and wide, the rocks firmly mortared together. But outside
those walls . . .” Again she looked up the hill, and this time, the tears began to flow freely. Turning back
to the reporter, she said, “As you can see, virtually every structure that stood on this hill is gone, smashed
to bits, most of them tumbled down the sides of this hill with everything they contained. My home . . . my
home is gone . . . Everything I had there in it is gone.” Gulping back a sob, she added, “We’re lucky,
though. At least we’re alive, my students and I, and none of us is badly hurt. When the second shock had
finished, we got up and made our way out to the street that ran in front of my home, and followed it down
the hill until we got to that schoolyard over there, the one with the playing field.” Now, her finger aimed in
the direction of the camera, she pointed at something well behind it. “We stayed there for about an hour,
during which more shocks hit. We were well away from anything that could fall on us – as you can see,
that school over there is now just a pile of rubble, but we weren’t anywhere near it, ourselves, and were in
no danger – and we remained there until the last of the . . . debris had fallen down this hill . . .” Looking up
the hill again, toward the top, where her home had apparently stood, she said, “Fortunately, I’m insured,
and as it happened, all the things that counted the most, the irreplaceable things that no insurance can cover
– back-up copies of CDs and ZIP disks containing chapters from my latest books and articles, important
documents such as my passport, negatives and extra copies of photographs of my children and relatives,
that sort of thing – were all in safety-deposit boxes or other safe storage. Will, my late husband, once told
me I was just being paranoid when I started doing that, keeping back-up copies of everything in safe
storage, but paranoid or not, it certainly has turned out to have been the right thing to do, hasn’t it? – Poor
Will . . .”
“Er, Ms. Amesworth, to what do you credit yours and your students’ fantastic good luck here this
morning?”
“Why, what do you mean, young lady?”
“I –”
“I think, Laura, she’s heard all those stories,” Jerry interjected grimly. Startled, Ms. Amesworth turned
to stare at him, as did the reporter. “Ms. Ballard,” he said to the reporter, “We were just lucky, okay? The
Grace of God, and all that.”
“I—”
“Who is she?” Cathy asked me, intrigued.
“Don’t you recognize her? That’s Laura York Amesworth! You know – she’s the one who writes
those ‘Twilight World’ novels.”
“Oh, of course! Hey, have you heard those rumors about her, Rich?”
“What rumors?”
“The ones that say that she’s the high priestess of a Wiccan coven there in Berkeley. You know she
and Wolf Warren were lovers after her first marriage fell apart, before she married Will Green –”
“The guy my old buddy Gary Cziller collaborated with on A Plethora of Wizards all those years ago?
But her last name’s ‘Amesworth’, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, long story. According to the scuttlebutt going around at The Fashionable Elf Bookstore, she
and Green never really lived together – she bought him a house of his own, because he snored loud enough
to wake the dead, and there were a few other problems.”
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“She bought him a house?”


“Will Green was never all that . . . together. Remember what Gary told us about him? Green was an
expert numismatist – he knew everything about coins, and all about gold and other precious metals, and got
hired as a consultant on matters connected with such things a number of times. But he always went
through the money fast, and it was often a long time between jobs.”
“That’s right, he was one of the experts that worked on that thing for the Mormons, you know, proving
that that ‘New Revelation’ business was a fraud from end to end, wasn’t he? Gary told me that. He said
Green used to come to Santa Barbara a lot, because there are lots of conferences here on metallurgy and
numismatics – for some reason it’s a Mecca for people in those fields. Whenever Green came to town,
he’d take a side-trip down to Westwood and drop in and visit with Gary. He was in town right after they
wound up that deal with the Mormons, and told Gary all the dirty details.”
“Such as?” Cathy leered.
“Such as fraudulent aging of documents and fake gold coins, and why are you so eager to hear about it,
hunh, darlin’?” I asked her, grinning. “– Anyway, Gary told me that Laura and Green did have two
children, a son and a daughter, who must both be in their thirties now. And now, come to think of it, Gary
told me that Laura got Green his own place when the kids were about 10 and 13 years old, respectively, and
that’s the way things remained until Green died. Gary said he had a stroke and died at home while he was
taking a nap. Laura had planned to come by later that evening with their daughter for something, and that’s
when they found him, fallen off the couch where he’d gone to sleep. He must’ve been dead about an hour
or so when they got there.”
“That’s sad.”
“Well . . . sort of. Green had a lot of problems, and was never a very happy man. Laura . . . well, she
was Gary’s friend, but from what even Gary told me, Green was the classic hen-pecked husband,
overshadowed by a wife far stronger-willed and more intelligent than he. Laura has had her own problems,
too, and they compounded rather nastily. It wasn’t a very happy life for Green.”
“I don’t really feel all that sorry for him, if you want the truth,” Cathy told me with a disgusted moue.
“According to some of the other stories I’ve heard about him, the man was an absolutely unrepentant
pederast whose favorite targets were little boys under the age of ten. I think Ms. Amesworth’s well shut of
him, and so is everybody else.”
“Where’d you hear that, darlin’?”
“Lucy Ross. Remember when she went up to Norwescon several years ago? Well, Will Green was
there, too – and he had to be physically restrained from going after two little boys – two different little
boys, at two different times – who had made it abundantly clear they didn’t want anything to do with him.
Lucy said the first one, who was about six years old, would you believe, screamed and screamed and Green
still wouldn’t stop trying to paw the boy until the boy’s mother and two security people came over and the
mother hit Green over the head with this big urn that was standing there – yeah, snicker, Rich, but it
couldn’t have been very funny as far as that little boy and his mother were concerned!”
“You said two boys. What happened with the other one?”
“Oh, he was about 8, Lucy said. His parents came from San Francisco, and they’d enrolled him in that
Kagemushakan dojo there – I thought the name ‘Seago’ sounded familiar, and now I remember where I’d
heard it before, it was from Lucy – in the Seagos’ self-protection class for young children.”
“I think I see where this is going,” I said, trying hard to stifle my laughter.
“You’re way ahead of me, I’m sure. Anyway, Lucy said Green had to be carried out of the room
because the kid kicked him in the slats so hard he couldn’t get a breath for quite a while after that,” Cathy
told me, not trying to stifle hers at all. Grinning ferociously, she added, “Lucy said that according to the
mother, the Seagos never teach the kids to do anything violent, mostly they teach them how to evade a
pursuer, get away when someone catches hold of them, that sort of thing, but they do show the older ones a
few moves they can use if things get rough. They caution them never to use those moves on anyone unless
they really need to. Lucy said the little boy – his name was Tom, I think she said – she said that when the
security people and the boy’s mother asked him what happened, he yelled at the top of his lungs, ‘That big
clown tried to give me a French kiss! He was gonna try to fuck me in the ass! So I kicked him in the
balls!’ Lucy said you could have heard that kid for blocks. Anyway, Green left Norwescon with his libido
tucked between his legs. He called a cab to take him to Sea-Tac and took the first plane he could get out of
Sea-Tac headed for San Francisco, and after that he sort of hid out in his apartment as much as he could.”
Day of the Dragons
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 9 of 9

“That kinda jibes with some things I’ve heard about him over the years,” I admitted, with a grin of my
own. “— Okay, we know the Bay Area is toast. Let’s see what’s going on in the rest of the world, shall
we?”
“Might as well,” Cathy sighed. “If we aren’t vaporized by the Bomb in the next few days, then we’d
better know what’s going on – if we have to leave here, we’d better have some idea of where to go and
what we’ll need when we get there,.” She aimed the remote and hit the button, and again the channels
rolled.

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