House of the Sun s-17

by Nigel D Findley

  Pohaku laughed harshly. "It took them fragging long enough, too, haole. But now we're going to see some real action."

  I nodded slowly. "You know I'm trying to figure a way out of this," I said after a long moment. "Why don't you just cack me now and get it over with?"

  He snorted. "I take my gun off-line and she drops me." He inclined his head toward Kono.

  And vice versa. I thought grimly. The only one with any real freedom of action was Akaku'akanene herself. So why wasn't the shaman doing something? Couldn't she cast some kind of spell, blow the gun out of his hand, and drop the fragger in his tracks?

  Then, no, I realized. He had to have some kind of magical protection, some antispell barrier or something-maybe spell-locked to him, or even Quickened so it was part of his aura. So Akaku'akanene was as immobilized in all of this as we were.

  Downslope, I could feel the waves of magic spun off by the Dance. My stomach knotted and churned; my bowels felt like they were full of ice water. Frag it, I had to do something. I had to gamble. Maybe if I dropped Pohaku-and managed not to get Akaku'akanene geeked in the process- the shaman could shield me from the guardian spirits while I made a run for the Dancers… I took a deep, energizing breath, locating my assault rifle precisely in my peripheral vision. I wouldn't have much time to do it right. I tensed…

  And that's when it hurtled into my field of view. A nene-a fragging goose. Honking and flapping, it soared in from Akaku'akanene's right, seemingly straight for her head.

  Pohaku reacted instinctively, bringing up an elbow to protect his face. His right elbow, the elbow of his gun hand. The hold-out pistol came off-line.

  Time seemed to flick into slow-motion mode. As I dived for my assault rifle, I saw the goose as it hurtled in.

  Pohaku's reaction was an instant late, and the big bird's clawed feet tore at his face. He yelled in pain and alarm, rearing back from the threat to his eyes.

  And then everything seemed to happen at once. The instant the barrel of Pohaku's hold-out was away from Akaku'akanene's head, the shaman drove an elbow up and back. The bony joint sank deep into the bodyguard's throat, knocking him back and off balance. Almost simultaneously a single shot rang out as Kono-who'd had the same idea as me-drilled a round into Pohaku's ten-ring. And then the Ares HVAR was in my hands, barrel coming up, laser sighting dot tracking onto the stumbling Pohaku's torso. I clamped down on the trigger; the rifle didn't so much stutter as scream on autofire. The stream of bullets did Pohaku like a chain-saw.

  And then it was over. Of the three of us, only Akaku'akanene seemed unshaken by what had just happened. She brushed at her baggy clothing as if to rid it of some offending dust. Then she looked at me with those dark, glittering eyes and said quietly, "Go."

  Like frag I'll go, I almost said. Then I saw the two guardian spirits that had been circling us. They were hurtling in, almost like the goose that had already vanished back into me shadows that spawned it. Akaku'akanene must have dropped her magical shield in the excitement. Instinct brought up the assault rifle again, even though intellect told me it was useless.

  Akaku'akanene had seen the spirits, too… and she was smiling. One of them shot by me so close I could feel the heat of its passage. The other made an equally close approach to Kono, who flinched away and almost capped off a reflex round into it. Both totally ignored us as they fell on the mangled body of Pohaku, gleefully completing me dismemberment my long autofire burst had begun.

  As time snapped back to normal, realization went click in me back of my brain. Okay, so that was why the guardian spirits didn't leave us alone even after Akaku'akanene had told them we wanted to stop the Dance. They'd sensed that somebody in me group had wanted to protect the Dance- Pohaku, to be precise. Maybe the spirits couldn't identify just which one of us was the enemy of the pattern (perhaps the antispell barrier that had protected the gillette had confused them). Or maybe the conflict between Akaku'akanene's reasurances and their own perceptions had decided them not to take any chances and geek us all, just in case. Whatever the case, I seemed to be in the clear.

  In a manner of speaking, of course.

  Again, I acted before I had a chance to paralyze myself with second thoughts. I flashed Alana Kono my best frag-the-world smile, and I took off down that scree slope at a dead run, toward the Dance half a klick away.

  Bad move, chummer, real bad move. I'd made it maybe 100 of those 500 meters when I put a foot wrong, turned an ankle, and did a classic one-and-a-half-gainer to land on my neck and shoulder. My injured shoulder, of course. I did what anyone would do in that situation-I screamed bloody blue murder, as I did this graceful skidding roll down the loose scree slope. After what seemed like a frag of a long time, I came to rest upside down against a car-sized boulder.

  Well, okay, maybe it turned out not to be such a bad move after all. Apparently what gods there be look out for babies, drunks, and overconfident drekheads. An instant after I fetched up against the backside of that boulder, fire washed over it from the front in a great roaring, flickering sheet. I tried to curl up so tight I vanished into my own belly button as the heat-pulse washed over me, crisping my hair and tightening my skin.

  It was over in less than a second, almost like the wash of a single fireball. I popped up and risked a look over the top of my smoking boulder.

  I must have attracted the attention of at least one of the Dancers, that was for fragging sure. The Dance continued, but one of the loincloth-clad kahunas had pulled out and was glaring out toward me over the intervening territory. Obviously, he'd cut loose with some nasty fireball-like spell. (An unpleasant thought struck me then: Were the Dancers able to draw energy from me site of power that was Haleakala? If so, all the guidelines I'd learned about the limits on just how much juice a mage can cast without keeling over had just gone right out the window.)

  Well, frag it, now he'd attracted my attention, too. I brought the HVAR to bear and hosed off a short ripping burst. (Burning the entire clip in the progress. Man, that puppy fired fast!) I didn't dunk I'd hit him-he probably had some kind of magical barrier up-but reflex made him hunker down… which is the purpose of suppression fire anyway. I ducked down into the blast-shadow of my boulder again.

  Again, not a moment too soon. Something-some things, to be precise-spattered off the other side of the boulder. The impacts were hard enough to be bullets, but the sound they made weren't quite right. Shrapnel of some kind cascaded over the top and down my side of the boulder, and some went down my collar. Cold, wet… ice chips. The fragger was firing high-velocity icicles at me, or some damn thing. Then and mere I decided that yes, maybe I was a magophobe after all.

  This was not going to be easy. I looked back upslope for Alana Kono. A second gun would make all the difference down here. Maybe we could each take turns giving covering fire while the other leapfrogged forward.

  No luck on that score, I saw immediately. I'd been shielded from the super-fireball by my boulder. Kono hadn't been so lucky. She was down in a huddled heap, unmoving. Sullen flames licked over her body, sending a twisted totem of greasy smoke up toward the clouds. Frag it to hell…

  The almost subliminal vibration-the low, cosmic thrumming-I'd felt from the rock underfoot (now underass) changed its timbre, almost as though its frequency had been kicked up an octave. My bowels knotted again, and my vision blurred as the vibration conducted through my hoop, up my spine, and into my skull. Once more I could feel the magic that was being worked 400 meters away from my boulder, sense the almost limitless power that was being harnessed. Not so many minutes ago Akaku'akanene had told me the Dancers were far along with their ritual. Now, I didn't need any shaman to tell me that the ritual was approaching its climax.

  I had to do something, and I had to do it right fragging now! What was it both Akaku'akanene and bug-boy had told me? That I was woven into this all-fired important pattern they were yammering about? And that I had influence, that events would revolve around me (or some such drek)? Well, now was the time to check
out if they were telling the truth or feeding me a line of kanike.

  Crouching there, with my back against a fire-scorched and ice-spattered boulder, I took the HVAR in my left hand, settling the stock up against my ribs under my arm. In my right, I took the grenade-pistol I'd requisitioned from my dead benefactor aboard the Merlin. (Daisho, I thought, suddenly recalling my friend Argent. He'd have approved of my weapon load-out, I realized. Put the autofire weapon-the one that can hose down an area in a hurry-in the off hand, the one with which you have less accuracy. Let the enhanced strength of the cyberlimb handle the recoil. Put the single-shot weapon in the hand I normally shoot with.)

  I forced those thoughts aside. They were just ways my brain was trying to put off the moment when it might get itself blown to bits. I made sure both weapons were loaded and locked, safeties off. And I burst from cover like a pop-up target on a combat range.

  The kahuna was waiting for me. The moment I came up and around my rock, he started a kind of shuffling dance, and I could see a nimbus of power building up around him. With the same supernatural clarity of vision I'd enjoyed earlier, I saw him smile nastily, baring his teeth.

  Well, let him chew on this. I cut loose with a grenade from the pistol launcher, shooting from the hip. The recoil was grotesque, and the thing that had already gone gruntch in my shoulder definitely made its presence known. Even with that much kick the mini-grenade flew slowly enough that I could track its trajectory, could see it arcing down under the effects of gravity. The shot was going to fall short, but the concussion and splinters might still give the shaman something to think about other than geeking me.

  The grenade did fall short. Or, at least, it would have if it hadn't struck some invisible barrier between me and the shaman, about five meters in front of my loinclothed antagonist. The grenade detonated, filling the area with a cloud of thick, viscous smoke. Ah, frag… I almost threw the launcher aside in terminal frustration. I'd picked up a weapon loaded with a full clip of fragging smoke grenades! If I thought I was going to live more than a few seconds more, I'd probably have felt humiliation for my stupidity. I hadn't even checked the fragging load!

  What was that old joke? Death's better than failure, because you have to live with failure. Odds were, I wouldn't be having that problem. I cut loose with a short burst from the HVAR as I sprinted forward, knowing the bullets would deflect off the same invisible barrier that had stopped the grenade. But what other fragging choice did I have? Just stand there and wait for the shaman's spell to lash out through the thick cloud of smoke and smite me dead?

  Wait one fragging tick… Through the thick cloud of smoke?

  That's when it hit me. I couldn't see the shaman for the smoke. And if I couldn't see him, he couldn't see me. And- last step in the logical progression that might just save my sorry hoop-magic works on line-of-sight. You can't zap what you can't see…

  I think I whooped with a terrible kind of glee as I brought the grenade-pistol up again and continued pumping round after round into the invisible barrier in front of the kahuna until the weapon clicked empty. The shaman caught on quickly to what I was doing. A witch-wind whipped up out of nowhere, lashing across the jagged rocks. But smoke grenades don't just burst in a cloud of smoke and that's it. No, they continue to pour the stuff out for some few seconds after they've detonated. The shaman's tame wind might blow away the smoke that was already there, but half a dozen grenades were lying on the ground between him and me, still gouting great viscous clouds of the stuff.

  While I was pumping the grenade-pistol empty, I was still making my best time across the open space, my long legs eating up the distance. I kept my main focus on the smoke cloud-and, indirectly, the doubtless-pissed kahuna behind it-but I couldn't help but notice what was going on around me.

  Which was, to my unschooled mind, a close approximation of Hell preparing to break loose in a big way. The tempo of the Dance had picked up, from that of a stately gavotte to something that looked like a chip-head jiving to shag rock while suffering from Saint Vitus' dance. The Dancers were moving counterclockwise in a circle twenty meters in diameter. Around them the air shimmered with power, as though each molecule burned with its own faint witch-light.

  As I ran, still I managed to note for the first time that the pyrotechnic effects weren't centered on the Dancers' circle, as I'd assumed. No, not by a good margin. The fire-fan-the plume of light and infrared I'd first spotted on the Merlin's FLIR display-originated from a spot offset from the Dance's center by a good fifty meters. There was the real center of the power. The Dancers were within the margins of its nimbus, but the real ground zero (as it were) was outside the circle.

  It was there-at that "ground zero"-that the really freaky things were happening. There, the air glowed with such intensity-not brilliance, as such, but intensity… and there is a difference-that it could almost have been solid: gases chilled to the point where they crystallized, and then the resulting crystal lit from within. Above ground zero the roiling, turbulent cloud deck bulged downward, as though the center of the glow were a partial vacuum, drawing air and clouds into itself. Static discharges lashed from point to point within the cloud deck, and from the clouds to the ground. They flashed through and among the dozens of guardian spirits that still swirled in their approach-avoidance display around the Dance and around ground zero itself. My ears were filled with the howling and wailing and gibbering of those spirits, with the titanic whipcracks of me static discharges, with the low-pitched, fundamental thrumming that conducted itself as well through the rocks as it did through the air.

  Bright though the light ahead was, the static discharges were infinitely brighter still. Each time they flashed, they froze movement in the crater like the strobe light of a photographer. They froze my limbs, they froze the pattern of the drifting smoke, they froze the motions of the Dancers…

  And they froze the motions of the boulders around me. For the boulders were moving-slowly, lumberingly. I couldn't spare them any attention, but my peripheral vision did pick up details. They had been boulders, I knew that. But-and here was one detail-they didn't look like inanimate rocks anymore. No, they looked like great beasts-like titanic hounds, crossed with the rocks of the earth in some kind of unholy breeding experiment. I could feel their eyes on me sometimes, and I felt the intensity of their hatred. Yet I could also feel that the hatred wasn't directed at me. I was irrelevant to them, I knew, just another feature of their environment, like me crashed Merlin or the clouds overhead. All of their attention was focused on the Dance, and on the crystal-fire air at ground zero. Slowly, they moved, but inexorably. They'd reach their goal sometime-I knew that, deep in my gut. What would they do when they got there? You got me, chummer.

  And would they make it in time?

  Time was again flowing like summer-weight oil in a deep freeze. I was hauling hoop over the broken rock. I'd already covered more than four hundred meters, leaving me maybe fifty more before I hit the smoke cloud. I was running as fast as I'd ever run in my life.

  But I still had time and attention to spare to see that something had changed at ground zero. Something was there, in the midst of the crystal-fire air.

  Or, more precisely, something wasn't there. If the crystal-fire air were a cloud deck, I'd say the clouds had parted to show the black sky beyond, dotted with stars. Except that the lights I could see, mere in the center of the crystal-fire air, weren't stars-stars don't shift and blink like that. And the darkness-it had the infinite sense of depth that you see in the night sky, but I knew, knew, it was bounded with the crystal-fire. Maybe I was looking into the infinite depths of a sky, I thought suddenly.

  But it wasn't the sky of this world. And there were things_ moving in it.

  I thought I was going mad.

  My time sense pulled another shift on me, and suddenly I was plunging at full sprint through the thinning smoke cloud. I kept my legs driving, but I brought up the barrel of the HVAR.

  There was the shaman, right in front of me
. He'd moved forward since I'd last seen him, right up to the edge of his magical antiprojectile barrier. Bad move. A freak gust of wind had blown the smoke back toward him, engulfing him. In the instant before I plowed full-on into him, I saw his eyes-puffy, red, watering-bug wide open. He opened his mouth-maybe to cast a spell, maybe to yell "fuck," I'd never know.

  My shoulder went into his lower chest-my injured shoulder, frag it all-and I bowled him clean off his feet. As he went over backward, I stroked him reflexively across the side of the headbone with the empty grenade-pistol. And then-insult to injury-I blew his guts wide open with a burst from me HVAR as I staggered on.

  The circling, churning mass of guardian spirits was behind me. That meant I was inside the magical barrier that was keeping them from getting to the Dancers. I was also through the antiprojectile barrier the downed kahuna had put up to protect himself. That meant…

  I think I grinned as I slapped new magazines into both the HVAR and the grenade-pistol.

  There were the Dancers, twenty-five meters away from me, no more. If they even knew I was there, they couldn't divert one iota of attention from what they were doing. For the first time I saw the patterns traced out on the ground- sketched with ash or flour, and with white rocks arranged in complex shapes, dotted throughout with wood, bone, and feather fetishers-and I understood a little better what was going on.

  The Dancers themselves were within something that had to be a protective pattern of some kind, a circle twenty-five meters in diameter circumscribing their movements. And then, offset from the Dance, was another protective circle- smaller, but much more complex'… and, I sensed somehow, much more powerful. The crystal-fire air, the region of darkness, the "stars," the things-they were all within that second circle.

  So what did that mean? Circles can keep things in, or they can keep things out-that's about the extent of my understanding of conjuring. The smaller, more complex circle had to be intended to bind bug-boy's "entities" when they came through what I'd started thinking of as the "gate"-the rent the Dance had made in reality. (And, if I was to take bug-boy's and Akaku'akanene's warnings at face value, it wouldn't be enough to do the job.)