But then this was a war without precedent. Even the most crackpot prophets, the kind who 
annually predicted Armageddon, didn't know how to interpret the shaking of America's 
entrails. They knew something of consequence was afoot, and had Jaffe still been in the 
Dead Letter Room in the Omaha Post Office he would have discovered countless letters 
flying back and forth, filled with theories and suppositions. None, however-even from 
correspondents who'd known in some oblique fashion about the Shoal .and the Art-came 
close to the truth.
  Not only was the combat without precedent, but its nature developed as the weeks went 
by. The combatants had left the Mision de Santa Catrina with only a rudimentary 
understanding of their new condition and the powers that went with it. They soon explored 
and learned to exploit those powers, however, as the necessity of conflict threw their 
invention into overdrive. As he'd sworn, Fletcher willed an army from the fantasy lives 
of the ordinary men and women he met as he pursued Jaffe across the country, never giving 
him time to concentrate his will and use the Art he had access to. He dubbed these 
visionary soldiers hallucigenia, after an enigmatic species whose fossil remains recorded 
their existence five hundred and thirty million years previously. A family which, like 
the fantasies now named for them, bore no antecedents. These soldiers had lives barely 
longer than that of butterflies. They soon lost their particularity, becoming smoky and 
vague. But gossamer as they were, they several times carried the day against the Jaff and 
his legions, the terata, primal fears which Randolph now had the power to call forth from 
his victims, and make solid for a time. The terata were no less fleeting than the 
battalions shaped against them. In that, as in everything else, the Jaff and Good Man 
Fletcher were equally matched.
  So it proceeded, in feints and counterfeints, pincer movements and sweeps, the 
intention of each army to slaughter the leader of the other. It was not a war the natural 
world took kindly to. Fears and fantasies were not supposed to take physical form. Their 
arena was the mind. Now they were solid, their combat raging across Arizona and Colorado, 
and into Kansas and Illinois, the order of things undone in countless ways by its 
passage. Crops were slow to show their shoots, preferring to stay in the earth rather 
than risk their tender heads when creatures in defiance of all natural law were abroad. 
Flocks of migrating birds, avoiding the paths of haunted thunderheads, came late to their 
resting grounds, or lost their way entirely and perished. There was in every state a 
trail of stampedes and gorings, the panicked response of animals who sensed the scale of 
the conflict being waged to extinction around them. Stallions set their sights on cattle 
and boulders, and gutted themselves mounting cars. Dogs and cats turned savage overnight, 
and were shot or gassed for the crime. Fish in quiet rivers tried to take to the land, 
knowing there was ambition in the air, and perished aspiring.
  Fear in front and bedlam behind, the conflict ground to a halt in Wyoming, where the 
armies, too equally matched for anything but a war of attrition, fought each other to a 
complete standstill. It was the end of the beginning, or near it. The sheer scale of the 
energies required by Good Man Fletcher and the Jaff to create and lead these armies (no 
warlords these, by any stretch of the definition; they were merely men in hate with each 
other) had taken a terrible toll. Weakened to the point of near collapse they punched on 
like boxers who'd been battered into a stupor, but who fought because they knew no other 
sport. Neither would be satisfied until the other was dead.
  On the night of July 16th the Jaff broke from the field of battle, shedding the 
remnants of his army as he made a dash for the southwest. His intended destination was 
the Baja. Knowing that the war against Fletcher could not be won under present 
conditions, he wanted access to the third vial of the Nuncio, with which he might 
re-invest his much diminished power.
  Ravaged as he was, Fletcher gave chase. Two nights later, with a spurt of agility that 
would have impressed his much-missed Raul, he overtook the Jaff in Utah.
  There they met, in a confrontation as brutal as it was inconclusive. Fuelled by a 
passion for each other's destruction which had long ago escalated beyond the issue of the 
Art and its possessing, and was now as devoted and as intimate as love, they fought for 
five nights. Again, neither triumphed. They beat and tore at each other, dark matched 
with bright, until they were barely coherent. When the Wind took them they lacked all 
power to resist it. What little strength remained they used to prevent one another from 
making a break for the Mission, and the sustenance there. The Wind carried them over the 
border into California, dropping them closer to the earth with every mile they covered. 
South-southeast over Fresno, and towards Bakersfield they travelled, until- on Friday, 
July 27th, 1971, their powers so depleted they could no longer keep themselves aloft-they 
fell in Ventura County, on the wooded edge of a town called Palomo Grove, during a minor 
electrical storm which brought not so much as a flicker to the roving searchlights and 
illuminated billboards of nearby Hollywood.
  
  
  PART TWO:
  THE LEAGUE OF VIRGINS
  
  I
  The girls went down to the water twice. The first time was the day after the rainstorm 
that had broken over Ventura County, shedding more water on the small town of Palomo 
Grove in a single night than its inhabitants might have reasonably expected in a year. 
The downpour, however monsoonal, had not mellowed the heat. With what Me wind there was 
coming off the desert, the town baked in the high nineties. Children who'd exhausted 
themselves playing in the heat through the morning wailed away the afternoon indoors. 
Dogs cursed their coats; birds declined to make music. Old folks took to their beds. 
Adulterers did the same, dressed in sweat. Those unfortunates with tasks to per-form that 
couldn't be delayed until evening, when (God wiling) the temperature dropped, went about 
their labors with their eyes to the shimmering sidewalks, every step a trial, every 
breath sticky in their lungs.
  But the four girls were used to heat; it was at their age the condition of the blood. 
Between them, they had seventy years' life on the planet, though when Arleen turned 
nineteen the following Tuesday, it would be seventy-one. Today she felt her age; that 
vital few months that separated her from her closest friend, Joyce, and even further from 
Carolyn and Trudi, whose mere seventeen was an age away for a mature woman like herself. 
She had much to tell on the subject of experience that day, as they sauntered through the 
empty streets of Palomo Grove. It was good to be out on a day like this, without being 
ogled by the men in the town-they knew them all by name-whose wives had taken to sleeping 
in the spare room; or their sexual banter being overheard by one of their mothers' 
friends. They wandered, like Amazons in shorts, through a town taken by some invisible 
fire which blistered the air and turned brick into mirage but did not kill. It merely 
laid the inhabitants stricken beside their open fridges.
  "Is it love?" Joyce asked Arleen.
  The older girl had a swift answer.
  "Hell no," she said. "You are so dumb sometimes."
  "I just thought...with you talking about him that way."
  "What do you mean: that way?"
  "Talking about his eyes and stuff."