Nigel Findley - House of the Sun

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.)