The house had been carefully renovated, its white, porticoed facade almost painfully clean against the grubbiness around it. Two guards lounged on the stairs, and snapped to alertness as the agents approached. Everard fed them money and a story about being a visitor who had news that would surely interest the great wizard. “Tell him, ‘Man from tomorrow.’ ’Tis a password. Got it?”

“It makes not sense,” complained the guard.

“Passwords need not make sense,” said Everard with hauteur.

The Jute clanked off, shaking his head dolefully. All these newfangled notions!

“Are you sure this is wise?” asked Whitcomb. “He’ll be on the alert now, you know.”

“I also know a VIP isn’t going to waste time on just any stranger. This business is urgent, man! So far, he hasn’t accomplished anything permanent, not even enough to become a lasting legend. But if Hengist should make a genuine union with the Britons…”

The guard returned, grunted something, and led them up the stairs and across the peristyle. Beyond was the atrium, a good-sized room where modern bearskin rugs jarred with chipped marble and faded mosaics. A man stood waiting before a rude wooden couch. As they entered, he raised his hand, and Everard saw the slim barrel of a thirtieth-century blast-ray.

“Keep your hands in sight and well away from your sides,” said the man gently. “Otherwise I shall belike have to smite you with a thunderbolt.”

Whitcomb sucked in a sharp, dismayed breath, but Everard had been rather expecting this. Even so, there was a cold knot in his stomach.

The wizard Stane was a small man, dressed in a fine embroidered tunic which must have come from some British villa. His body was lithe, his head large, with a face of rather engaging ugliness under a shock of black hair. A grin of tension bent his lips.

“Search them, Eadgar,” he ordered. “Take out aught they may bear in their clothing.”

The Jute’s frisking was clumsy, but he found the stunners and tossed them to the floor. “Thou mayst go,” said Stane.

“Is there no danger from them, my lord?” asked the soldier.

Stane grinned wider. “With this in my hand? Nay, go.” Eadgar shambled out.

At least we still have sword and ax, thought Everard. But they’re not much use with that thing looking at us.

“So you come from tomorrow,” murmured Stane. A sudden film of sweat glistened on his forehead. “I wondered about that. Speak you the later English tongue?”

Whitcomb opened his mouth, but Everard, improvising with his life at wager, beat him to the draw. “What tongue mean you?”

“Thus-wise.” Stane broke into an English which had a peculiar accent but was recognizable to twentieth-century ears: “Ih want know where an’ when y’re from, what y’r ’tentions ’r, an’ all else. Gimme d’ facts ’r Ih’ll burn y’ doon.”

Everard shook his head. “Nay,” he answered in Jutish. “I understand you not.” Whitcomb threw him a glance and then subsided, ready to follow the American’s lead. Everard’s mind raced; under the brassiness of desperation, he knew that death waited for his first mistake. “In our day we talked thus…” And he reeled off a paragraph of Mexican-Spanish chatter, garbling it as much as he dared.