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Dylan broke out into another smile over the chessboard. "Then you're in luck," he said, "as I hear tell I'm very difficult! Though not, perhaps, in the manner that you intended."

The jacket he was wearing wasn't new, but then again, that didn't say anything about him -- lots of people wore used clothing for some reason or other. The T-shirt was, though. Dylan had sat down too quickly for Johnny to get a good read on anything else he was wearing -- his pants, his shoes, any of this might have helped inform the greater picture of Dylan Rasmussen. As it stood he was a torso, a pair of spidery hands and a pale, smiling face with lavender eyes that tracked always up and to the right in thought.

"I used to like puzzles." Dylan moved one of his knights finally. He looked to be clearing out for a castling. "Logic puzzles, generally -- like the Zebra Puzzle, Einstein's Riddle, whatever you call it. The kind that took being methodical. My least favorites were the 'lateral thinking' puzzles, which were all wordplay and, I suppose, luck -- or intuition, if I believed in intuition, which I don't. No matter how hard I thought half of them confounded me. I suppose I preferred the ones that took being analytical," he dug his nails into the cement of the table, "to the ones that took being clever."

"Is anyone a Christie person?" Dylan arched a pale eyebrow at Johnny. "I don't mean, 'does anyone like Christie,' because obviously they do, but Christie mysteries are always unsolvable -- the same way Conan Doyle's are, really, though at least he lays the clues, albeit not in any way that a reader could follow. I thought the whole purpose of Christie was to sit back and enjoy," he moved his bishop again, now to where it threatened Johnny's knight, "which, of course, I've never been the best at. But yes, I like Clue. Game and film. Communism was only a red herring."

It would be easy to move the knight, of course, or to block the bishop's path -- but was that what Dylan was expecting him to do? What was Dylan expecting him to do? They were reaching the phase of the game where they didn't just play the game, they played the other player. Of course, mathematical chess players played the game and they played the board and the odds -- but the odds shifted depending on the other's temperament. Dylan Rasmussen's temperament was yet a mystery, when it came to chess. Which, of course, was possibly a clue as to his temperament otherwise, wasn't it?

"My favorite game is Kill Doctor Lucky," said Dylan. "It does what it says on the tin."

Dylan left the bishop alone threatening the knight and chose to free up his other rook with his pawn. "Couldn't be too good," he said affably. "Everyone does want to kill him. No, it requires killing Doctor Lucky before the other players do, and not in the 'sight' of any other player on the board -- and without any other player using a card to block your doing so. It's a little entertaining. People always compare it to a reverse Clue, is why I brought it up, but Clue is an entirely mathematical game of keeping track of variables," he said, "and Kill Doctor Lucky is like any other board game. I admit I love Clue, but I've rarely got any chance of beating my dad at it."

He brought his hand up to his mouth a little absently, like he was going to bite nails that weren't there, then seemed to remember and pulled it down again. It wasn't cold out, but he'd made no move to take off his jacket. "So, tell me, am I Christie or Clue here?"

"I don't know," said Dylan. "You consider the possibility you're looking in the wrong genre?"

On that note he lowered his left hand to the board carefully, like it was a mechanical pincer -- he was left-handed, it was becoming clear -- selected the bishop in place threatening the knight, and took the knight swiftly. He knuckled the white knight between his fingers and set it on his side of the table, just by the edge of the board. The bishop's positioning threatened a pawn on Johnny's side of the board, but it would be easily captured by its corresponding white bishop: either option removed a defender from the king's way, unfortunately.

"Hmm. Well, let's see, I was thinking --" Dylan moved a piece, his other bishop, "-- check."

So it was. From most of the way across the board the black bishop had slid to take one of the white pawns and threaten the white king such that only the white queen currently stood in a position to protect it, by taking the checking bishop -- which, of course, would force the queen into play much faster than otherwise, which was likely Dylan Rasmussen's gambit in sacrificing both of his bishops so quickly. Or was it, really? It was difficult to say. Alternately Johnny could move the king one step aside, but the bishop currently threatened a knight, too.

It was right about then that the startled screams and snorts from further into the park arose, and the chess players who'd been playing the other tables went running past Johnny and Dylan's table in their hurry to get out of the city park.

Some people were frozen and gawking. Dylan for his part just turned his head. In the grassy field, where a girls' soccer game had been taking place, a bronze-colored bull was rampaging -- it had already trampled some people under its feet, and it had another caught oddly on its horns. More people were running, but some of the highschoolers involved in the game were trying to rescue their teammates from the creature, one had even fruitlessly bounced a soccer ball off its head. It didn't make any sense. It did not make one single bit of sense. It was the kind of thing a person expected to see in Destiny City if a person was, say, tripping acid. But then again -- so was all the evening news here nowadays.

Johnny's opponent didn't look frightened. Standing up, he looked grim -- very, very grim. "******** me sideways. Why does this always happen to me." Both of these things were given as flat and conversational statements.

The bull went on rampaging. Girls' soccer teams were comprised, apparently, of rather valiant individuals. Dylan didn't look at Johnny. "Stand up and walk around the table behind me. Then stay behind me and don't run until I run. Running might get its attention. Do you understand me?"

He was starting to -- shed something? Something black was pooling around his feet? "Do you understand me?" he repeated, voice low.

Dylan said nothing. He was shedding black, or black was raining on Dylan, one of the two, some kind of shadows, or tar -- no, not shadows or tar, leaves. Leaves or petals. They settled on him and knitted together and shifted. Then they weren't exactly petals any more and he wasn't exactly Dylan any more, he glanced back at Johnny -- he was dressed in black and firelight-orange, puffed sleeves, a doublet, like some kind of fairytale prince from a twilight kingdom. He had an adorned black bow in his hand and from somewhere he'd pulled a black arrow; instead of making some remark about any of this, though, he looked back at the bull and notched an arrow to his bow, drew the bowstring back.

At the strain of pulling back his bowstring his hands started to shake, uncontrollably. The archer gritted his teeth and tried to steady them.

He fired and missed. He shook his head and reached over his shoulder and drew another arrow, from seemingly nowhere again -- drew back -- his hands were shaking much more than could be attributed to muscle weakness -- and fired, and cursed softly; this time the arrow had hit one of the soccer players struggling with the bull. Instead of screaming or bleeding, though, she merely sat down in place with the arrow sticking out of her leg and blinked, like she'd been stunned. He drew another arrow. Another miss -- and another arrow -- and another miss, his hands were quivering and the bull was a moving target -- until he narrowed his eyes in obvious frustration and lowered the bow again. The bull still hadn't noticed them. This was, nominally, a good thing, but the fact remained that a statue come to life was catching soccer players by the chest with its horns and pulling out their hearts, or whatever else it was that it was pulling out of their chests, and tossing them up in the air so it could catch them in its hungry bronze mouth. This was surreal. This wasn't even Escher. This was Dali.

The archer finally glanced at Johnny again. "You ever have nightmares, John?"

It was, of all things, possibly the strangest thing to say at a time like this.

"Nightmares. Not the normal kind -- lately, have you been feeling that your nightmares have been getting worse? More vivid? More real? Destiny City, what about Destiny City, have you felt like it's changed lately," he fired at the bull again, "like all it is is death and crime and sightings of the impossible on the news, like maybe something you might know if you knew the one piece that helped you put the whole mystery together -- but that's missing? Does it drive you a little crazy sometimes? Can you just not put your finger on it? Do you want to know?"

His hair was pale, he was paler -- but his eyes were chromatic enough. They stared into Johnny's.

"I know you do," he said. "Do you want to help those girls?"

His hands shook. However he was used to fighting, it wasn't working now.

"Well, you will," he said. "I'm sorry. This will all make a great deal of sense to you in a moment."

And with that he loosed another shot, and someone tapped Johnny on the shoulder; when Johnny turned to look, there was a mirror with someone reflected in it. The reflection seized him by the shoulders and pulled him in, and the mirror swallowed him up as surely as if it were liquid.

That broke Alexandros's momentary grimness; he smiled back at Laocoon, a little wild-eyed with relief and adrenaline and God only knew what else. But most staggeringly, relief. The bull was momentarily forgotten. He began, "I --"

But it was like the wind had been knocked out of him. He staggered immediately and caught himself on Laocoon's shoulder with his free hand, blinking a number of times. It was the blink of a student trying not to fall asleep in lecture hall. He planted his feet diagonally to one another and did his best to stay upright; the Prince had never been the type to show overt weakness when he could help it, so he had to be dead on his feet. His fingers dug into Laocoon's shoulder through the cloth of his shirt. (He had always been the type to touch people, had the Crown Prince, the memory came vividly -- not with purpose, but absently, like he was taking the measure of their skin and frame and hair. He'd laid his hand on Laocoon's shoulder the first day they'd met, when he'd assessed him for a place in his Cavaliers.)

"Mirrors," he managed, eyes closed for a moment, "are a dreadful way to travel. Very taxing. Have you started eating bricks for breakfast, Laocoon?"

A few seconds later he roused himself a bit and seemed to shake off the sleepiness. He still looked haggard, though. He looked a bit like hell. "Anyway, you don't know the half of it," he said. "Monsters love me here. Can't get enough of me. I suppose it's my naturally winning personality."

Alexandros looked at Laocoon, then at the bull, then nodded to the bull.

"Go forth and conquer," he said. "Cavalier."

While Laocoon advanced on the bull Alexandros followed him at a slower pace, taking the soccer field in long, unhurried strides as he drew another arrow for Kore and notched it. The bull had begun to notice them by now, as it jerked its head up from where it was menacing a girl with a ponytail to bellow angrily at Laocoon, whose flamboyant form posed more of an obvious threat to it than the soccer players. Bulls were strong, deadly if you got in the way of their horns, but not very good at changing direction quickly. This would be a peculiar sort of bullfight. It wouldn't be a good idea for the two of them to cluster together, that was for certain.

As if thinking the same thing the Prince fanned out away from him, taking slow sideways step by step in an effort not to draw the bull's attention to him. He succeeded: the bull bellowed again at Laocoon and shook its head while he trained the arrow's tip on it and then, very slowly, started to draw back the bowstring. His aim would be better at this range. But his aim had always been excellent; something was clearly wrong with him.

He couldn't defeat the creature with Kore alone, anyway. Kore was not a deadly weapon. The bull snorted and then charged at Laocoon.