Tim Powers - Declare

The djinn were eating the men in the sky, and Hale, sharing their identity because he had aligned himself with their peculiar frequency, was doing it with them, in them.

Jesus, why didn’t I hang on to the stone?

He forced his hands and his lungs to stop moving in step with the rhythm, and horror had already made a staccato chaos of his heartbeat.

And then he sagged with sudden weight and was standing again beside the jeep in the muddy gorge, in the icy wind; interrupted screams crashed in on his ears, and some of the screams were echoing down from the sky, and dark drops that must have been blood were pattering onto the jeep fender and onto his hands. Choppy bursts of full-automatic gunfire still plowed the air, but the muzzle flashes were pointed into the sky now-and then the steaming breath was crushed from his chest as he was again tugged upward with frightening physical force.

Automatically his fists again pounded the telegraph-key rhythms onto the wet fender, and the breath in his throat choked out the resumed beat in a series of grudged coughs.

With a dizzying flutter his heartbeat fell into the same cadence, and the bigger perspective was at once his again, and this time he was aware of another man participating in the alien indulgence-but the music that defined this one was in a different key or octave, and he knew it was the kind of man called a woman.

A thought of Hale’s flickered across his subsumed awareness-it was Elena. She too was evading the doom of the men by aligning her frequency with the djinn, as they had both done in Paris.

And now she too was sharing in the consumption of the resisting bodies that spun through the air over the snowfields of Ararat’s peak. Helplessly surrendering to the transcendent wills of the fallen angels, the sparks that were Hale and Elena moved in concert with the angels as the bodies were torn apart-and the two frail sparks had no choice but to concede that it was only in wide-flying dismemberment that the men, in death, achieved something like coherent meaning.

Not all of the men in the gorge had been taken up into the sky-some had been killed and left to lie in the mud, and Hale was aware of three-squared that bent and unbent their autistic shapes to move down toward the plain, out of the mountain; but even the geometric patterns they formed as they moved were without conscious meaning, and along with the will of the skies he ignored them.

He found himself looking upward instead.

The highest of the moon-silvered clouds formed sweeping stairways to lattices and balconies among the stars, and the music was complete and comprehensible now with the base line of infrared radiation in the earth and the skirling arpeggios of the solar wind and ionized particles scattering in the vast halls of the upper atmosphere-the dance was eternal, defiant and endlessly fascinating, fast as a horizon-spanning arc of lightning and as slow as the shifting of the basalt-footed continents.

The knot of identity that was consciously Hale had to be careful not to flex away with the angels into the sky or into the stony heart of the mountain-he was diminishing as he held back from these seven-league steps-and after some period of time he realized that he was alone and small and discrete, and that he was Andrew Hale, Captain Andrew Hale of the fugitive SOE, twenty-six years old and…profoundly unhappy.

He was kneeling in the mud beside the shredded rear tire of the jeep, and the magnesium flare had gone out, leaving the gorge in darkness. Only the whistle of frigid wind against high stone cliffs intruded now on the mountain silence, and as Hale got shakily to his feet he knew that there would be no use in calling out to his SAS companions-they had either been killed in the ambush, or taken up alive into the sky, or had fled down the path.

Then he heard a scuffle only a few yards away, and a moment later a shrill neigh and the wet clop of hooves in the mud-apparently at least one of the horses had survived, and someone had succeeded in mounting it.

Hale had lurched quickly backward at the unexpected noise, and now Elena’s voice called harshly, in French, “Who is there?”

Hale was ashamed to speak, after the horror of their shared experience, but he made himself croak, “Elena-it’s me, Andrew.”

“Ach! Stay away from me- cannibale.”

He glimpsed a rushing shape in the darkness and then the horse had galloped past him, its hooves thudding away down the invisible slope.

He wanted to shout the plural down after her- cannibales! -but he could only despairingly agree with her assessment of him. His earlier question rang in his head again- Where is the blood? -and he knew that the blood was on his hands…on his very lips, morally if not literally.

Elena had apparently taken the only remaining horse, but the other jeep was still here; and when Hale limped stiffly across the mud to it, he could make it out clearly enough to know from its stance that its tires were still inflated. Feeling immensely old and bad and sad, Hale climbed wearily into the driver’s seat and forced his frozen fingers to press the starter-and when the engine roared into hot life, he clanked the gear-shift sideways into reverse and, hunching around in the seat to peer downhill through the steaming plume of his breath, began inching the vehicle back down.

After a few yards he realized that his panting had become sobbing.

Surely some of the SAS men had survived-they would know the jeep by its sound, and then they would recognize him in the dimness, if they looked closely. McNally is dead, Hale told himself, but the other four might still be alive-they’d have had a moment to dive for cover between the blaze of the flare and the start of the gunfire-they wouldn’t know that I-participated in the deaths, some of the deaths, helplessly-

But he remembered the sustained full-automatic fire that had raked the jeeps, and he quailed. It had to have been Russians who had ambushed them-but how had Russians known to be waiting there, beside the south wall? Had the SAS men been observed planting the stone, or had they been betrayed by someone in the West?

After no less than an hour of rocking down the slope in reverse, frequently braking and shifting to low gear to climb back up when the right side of the jeep seemed to be tilting into the gorge, Hale found a wider clearing in which he was able to turn the jeep around and drive forward; and he switched on the one remaining headlamp as he drove, peering through the shattered windscreen at the surface of the mud track ahead.

And soon he saw the upright shapes of three men in the headlamp glare, plodding and limping down the rutted path. Two wore the dark windbreakers the SAS men had been wearing, and one had on the turban and baggy trousers of a Kurd. None of them turned around at the sound of the engine or the illumination of the headlamp.

His heart thumping, Hale slowed the jeep a few yards behind them. The Sten gun was long gone, but he fumbled the chunky.45 revolver out of his shoulder holster-and then he called hoarsely through the broken windscreen, “Get in the vehicle! I’ll drive us down.”

They had ignored the light and the engine noise, but Hale’s voice seemed to galvanize them. The man in Kurdish clothing dove forward in a flailing cartwheel that carried him right off the path, and though the two SAS men stayed on the road, they were clearly insane-one began semaphoring wildly, hopping to use alternate legs as well as his arms and head, and the other turned toward the headlamps and dug his fingers into his face and tugged outward, as if trying to pull his head apart.

When Hale shifted the gearbox into neutral and ratcheted up the brake, intending to step out and try to grab them, they both went bounding away into the darkness, leaping high into the air at every step; to Hale they appeared to be trying to fly. In seconds they were lost to his sight.