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 the 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, there 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 the 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.)
What of the circle around the Dancers, then? There was nothing to keep in, so it must serve to keep something out. A kind of magical bullet-proof vest—coverage for the shamans, in case the entities that came through managed to defeat the circle intended to constrain them.
Well, fuck that noise, that's what I say.
The entities weren't coming through the rip in reality, but they would come. I was convinced of that. The Dancers had opened a portal, a fistula, between our world and another. The damage was done. Any moment, one or more of bug-boy's entities—my "cosmic nasties"—would slither or leap or bound through that gap, and then the drek would drop into the pot. The islands of Hawai'i would suffer the torments of hell ...
So were the Dancers—the slots who'd brought this whole drekky situation about—going to get away unscathed? Were they going to stay, safe and secure, inside their protective circle, while the cosmic nasties headed off on their rampage?
Not if I had anything to fragging say about it, chummer, let me tell you that.
I felt my lips pull back from my teeth in a terrible smile as I brought up both my weapons, bringing them to bear on the Dancers. Grenade first, just to let them know that hell was coming for them. My right finger tightened on the trigger .. .
And every fragging muscle in my body froze. Every one. My breath was stilled, I think my heart stopped. Just as before, on the tarmac at Kaiao Field, I was magically paralyzed.
God damn you, Harlech! I tried to scream, but the words were confined to my own mind.
At my left side a figure appeared. Just appeared—one moment nothing, the next moment there, blink, just like that. Not Quinn Harlech. A Polynesian man, wearing the same uniform as the other Dancers—loincloth, woven-grass headdress, and that was it. Except for a nasty smile.
I knew him, the fragger. I'd seen him before, wearing more or less the same retro-drek. Standing at the left hand of King Kamehameha V in the throne room of the Iolani Palace. I knew that scrawny, withered, nut-brown body, now glistening with sweat. King Kamehameha's kahuna, his magical advisor. Did Gordon Ho know how close to him the treachery had been? Well, if he didn't, it was a fragging cinch I wouldn't be telling him.
The world was already starting to tunnel down around me as my brain cried out for the oxygen my heart wasn't sending it. What a fragging lousy way to go: this close, and then stopped in my tracks by an old rat-frag of a shaman, who just hung out invisibly until I wandered into his little ambush. What a drekky way out, asphyxiating with all my muscles frozen . . .
Muscles? How did this magic drek work, anyway? Did it block the motor nerves, or did it freeze the muscles themselves? Only one way to find out. And hell, it had worked in an ancient book I'd read once ...
With my left arm—my cybernetic replacement arm—I lashed out with all the boosted strength of pseudomyomer fibers, servo-motors, and cyber-actuators. Not a muscle moved—just the technological replacement for muscles.
My left hand, and the assault rifle it was holding, moved so quickly it was blur. The barrel smashed into the old kahuna's throat with a horrible crunching sound, still accelerating out and up. And fragged if it didn't tear his goddamned head clean off! The kahuna's body went one way, his head went another, and my own body went a third, flung off its feet by the violence of my motion. I hit the ground hard, driving from my lungs what little stale air they sti
ll contained. I gasped in an agonizing breath ...
Repeat that. I gasped in agonizing breath! The pain I felt was like a benediction. Only living men feel pain.
As the kahuna had died, so had his spell. I was free again. I could breathe, I could move.
For a few long seconds I lay there, relishing—wallowing in—the sensations of breathing. Then a sudden change in the vibration humming through the ground reminded me that my only chance of continuing to breathe—and slim chance it was—lay in my own hands. With a snarl, I forced myself up to my hands and knees, then to an unsteady crouch.
The Dance had reached its frenetic crescendo. Two of the Dancers seemed to be down—fainted or dead, I had no way of telling—but the others were still leaping around as if they were having convulsions. Fifty meters away, at ground zero, the rent in the fabric of .. . well, of everything . . . had opened wider. I could feel cold radiating onto my face. (Okay, I know cold doesn't radiate. But frag it, that's precisely how it felt ...) Something filled the gate, started to emerge through it. Something ...
I forced myself to look away. My God . . . My brain couldn't comprehend what my eyes had seen ... not quite. I was right on the terrible brink of comprehension, and I had the unshakable conviction that if I ever did comprehend, then in that instant I'd go incurably insane.
I didn't have to look at ground zero, anyway. My real targets were much closer than that.
I brought the grenade-pistol to bear, aiming carefully over the open sights. The circle surrounding the Dancers was divided into quadrants by small but elaborate cairns built out of white stones, carved wooden sculptures, and chunks of bone. The nearest of the four cairns was less than thirty meters away from me. I checked my aim and squeezed the trigger.
The grenade hit it dead center and detonated. No pussy smoke this time; the second magazine I'd grabbed were frags. I heard the almost subliminal whisper of splinters cutting through the air around me. The cairn was already blown to drek, but what the hell? I had five more grenades. I pumped another one into the wreckage just for good measure.
I'd breached the Dancers' protective circle. Somehow I knew that, I could feel it. And they knew it, too. They stopped in midconvulsion and they stared—some at me, most at the gate, but all with the same expression of mind-numbed terror. They stared.
Until I cut them down with a single long, hosing burst from my HVAR. They went down like tenpins, sprawling, slumping, spraying blood and tissue. I laughed then, an irrational, insane sound in my own ears. Well, that's one way to tell the dancers from the dance . . .
My job wasn't done yet. I turned toward the gate, keeping my eyes averted from the rent in space, and I pumped out the four grenades remaining in the magazine. As before, I was aiming not at what was inside the protective circle, but at the circle itself. The minigrenades exploded among the white stones, ash, flour, and carved and feathered fetishes, blowing them to hell.
Something slammed into my back, driving me to the ground. Sharp lava rock slashed my face and hands. I raised my head, blood already running into my eyes and blurring my vision.
It was one of those big rock hound-things that had knocked me down. It hadn't stopped to so much as sniff me or lift a leg on me. It and a dozen or more of its fellows were hightailing it toward the gate. If before they'd moved about as nippily as a glacier, now they were malang up for it. Huge, bounding strides ate up the distance.
On their heels, quite literally, came the wild tumult of guardian spirits that had been kept out by the Dancers' magical barriers. Like a wailing, screaming pack of lost souls, they flooded in above me. Not toward the gate, I saw quickly—toward what was left of the kahunas I'd cut down. As the hounds (or whatever they were) loped on toward the gate, the guardian spirits fell on the corpses and not-quite-corpses and tore them to bloody shreds, gibbering and yelping with unholy glee.
Hounds were converging on the gate from all directions.
For the first time I heard the sound they made—a hideous, unnatural baying that pierced my ears and turned my blood to ice. Onward, inward they charged. Their bulk hid from me the horror of the thing that was emerging from the gate.
I thought they'd hurl themselves headlong at the thing, like attack dogs going for an intruder's throat. No way, chummer, that would have been too predictable. They skidded to a stop, all of them, forming a solid ring around the gate. Shoulder to stone shoulder they crouched. Then, simultaneously, they raised their blocky muzzles to the sky and they howled.
It cut through me, that sound, reached deep down into my soul and touched every remnant of despair, loneliness, and abandonment I've ever felt—touched them and roused them to life again. I would have cried—would have burst into tears, never to stop again—but my soul hurt so much I couldn't cry. I thought I was dying, then. How could a pitiful human feel so much desperation and not die?
Yet somehow I didn't. Somehow, my heart kept pumping, my blood kept flowing. I lay there on the rocky ground, watching as the great hounds howled at the gate.
And it changed, the gate did. It shivered and shimmered, losing resolution. Lightning flashed and cracked, but now within the infinite depth of the gate. Actinic light strobed, throwing the hounds into sharp contrast, black on blinding white. From within the gate, something screamed, adding its own cry of despair to the howling of the hounds.
With a final sky-splitting crash, the gate collapsed in upon itself. The crystal-fire air shimmered, and I saw a shock wave—a perfectly hemispherical wave-front—spreading out from the center. As in all those old flatfilms of nuke tests, the shock wave expanded toward me, the air before it compressed to such density that it was opaque.
The shock wave touched me, and everything stopped.
Epilogue
And, yet again, I came back to what we laughingly call consciousness in a hospital bed, staring blankly at a featureless white ceiling. The same damn thing over and over again ...
I took a breath and moaned aloud at the pain it caused me. I felt as if a troll with combat boots had stomped—with precise and loving care—on every important part of my anatomy, and several parts I wouldn't previously have classed as important. I hurt. All of me, all over. Deep down, and out the other side. (Except for my left arm, of course, but even it sent my brain its own weird analog of "pain" signals.)
Only living men feel pain, I tried reassuring myself. It didn't work worth squat. Lying there hurting, I couldn't help but envy the dead.
I guess I drifted off then for a while, because the next time I was aware of my own existence the ceiling lights were out. The only illumination came from the direction of the foot of my bed. A cold, blue-white wash of light. Moonlight?
I tried sitting up, quickly giving up on that as a bad job. Instead, I had to satisfy myself with rolling my head on the pillow so I could cast a corner-eyed look down the length of my body.
Yep, moonlight. Somebody had neglected to close the shutters over my window, and I could see straight out into the night. The full moon rode high among the clouds, like a ghostly galleon sailing through an archipelago of surrealistic islands.
Full moon? I tried to remember what phase the moon had been when Gordon Ho and I had stood watching the Thor attack from the window of New Foster Tower. I found I couldn't recall details—of that night, or of just about anything else, for that matter. Some part of me knew that this should disturb me, but at the moment I didn't have the energy to give a frag. I was pretty sure the moon had been new or close to it even though I couldn't pin it down exactly.
Which meant I'd been out of it for two weeks'? Remembering the last time I'd woken up in a hospital after a protracted unconsciousness, I quickly ran a kind of mental inventory of my body. Did anything feel strange, numb or—worse—absent?
No, I realized after a nasty moment, letting myself relax back into the bed with relief. Everything felt just about right . .. which meant it hurt like frag. If I had lost something and the docs had replaced it with chrome—as had happened to me the last tim
e—they wouldn't have gone to the effort of perfectly replicating posttrauma pain, would they?
I rolled my head again for another look at the moon. Good old moon, I thought foggily. Thank whatever gods there be that you remain unchanged, at least. We can frag up our own world all we want, but at least we can't jack with you ... not bad enough that we can notice it, at least.
I closed my eyes, and for some unmeasured time I listened to the soft soughing of the air-conditioning. When I opened my eyes again, it was day. I blinked, and it was night again. Like my blurring of memory, I knew that should have worried me, but again I couldn't generate a sense of outrage or concern. All in its own good time, thank you very much.
Again the man in the moon did his Peeping-Tom act in my window, and I listened to the sighing of the ventilation. That was all I could hear—artificial wind inside, real wind stirring the palm trees outside. No explosions, no gunfire, no screams. The gate had to be closed, then. I couldn't imagine that any night could be this peaceful if that rent in reality hadn't been sewn back up.
"The gate is closed."
The soft voice from somewhere to my right fragging near Stopped my heart then and there. I let out a yelp and jumped like someone had jolted me with a cattle prod. When I'd gotten my heart rate back under the five hundred mark, I turned my head to the right and scowled at the silhouette—black on deeper black—of a seated figure. "I didn't think I spoke aloud," I said accusingly.
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